By
Phil Leckman
Arlo
Up High in the Night
(Sub Pop)
Grade: B+
Whatever happened to alternative rock? Recent years have seen this once-ubiquitous moniker fade to obscurity, torn to shreds by a horde of market-driven subgenres and sub-subgenres - rap-rock, rap-metal, ska-funk-metal and so on.
The original meaning of alternative - honest, no-nonsense rock 'n' roll - has been forgotten, buried beneath white pancake makeup, stadium rock shows and pre-fabricated, "edgy" cartoon characters like Marilyn Manson, Limp Bizkit and the Insane Clown Posse.
Perhaps this is why Up High in the Night is such a breath of fresh air. The members of Arlo are regular guys in T-shirts, not dolled-up hair-salon casualties. Singer-guitarists Nate Greely and Sean Spillane are just parts of the band, not histrionic, celebrity pinups. And Arlo's sound - a tuneful mix of buzzing guitar chords, unpolished singing and rough-hewn rock 'n' roll rhythms - recalls the days when "alternative" was more than a fading marketing scheme.
Tracks like "Sittin' on the Aces," a grungy ode to confusion, stress and wasting time, mix seamlessly with pop numbers like the shimmering "Shutterbug," a tuneful love poem to a photo bug complete with Beach Boy-style falsettos on the chorus.
Sub-pop built its name on this kind of unpretentious, "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" rock back in the early '90s, so it is heartening to see that they're still with it. At a time when style-over-substance spectacles rule rock and the top five "alternative" acts increasingly resemble either underwear models or junkie circus performers, we need bands like Arlo to remind us what rock - for rock's sake - is all about.
