La Dispute: Savior to Hipsters?

Where has all the good independent, underground music gone? Believe me, there’s no one more annoyed with these constant scathing reviews than myself. I have to listen to all of this garbage and then think about it after it mercifully ends long enough to put words onto paper. The latest turkey here is La Dispute, a band that hails from the upper middle class of middle of nowhere Michigan. Bored and rich, these kids in their skinny jeans and mop-top heads attempt to pull a cross between Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Linkin Park. Lazy angst is rolled up into loud thrashing guitars, as if they’re trying to beat over our heads just how intense they are. Jordan Dreyer, lead vocalist, hasn’t the chops needed to screech and yell his way through a song only to later pass it off as singing. Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Karen O takes her sweet side and turns it into a guttural, sexual rousing, which works on different levels to engage our mind. La Dispute doesn’t have the first clue as to what that would mean, so they just scream and shout at the world, and this Jordan kid’s voice is so thin in many of their songs that it teeters on sounding like a pre-pubescent boy doing his best impression of dad. 

La Dispute has a myriad of different recordings, a lot of which can be found on their bandcamp page. They claim in their profile that they strive to make music that is “both artistically, technically, and emotionally engaging,” which, I’m sorry, but if you slow your stuff down and can’t keep an acoustic guitar in time with the rest of the music as is the case with their Christmas jam “First Snow in Grand Rapids,” you can have your artistry and emotion, but please Lord don’t claim to be technical at anything. This band is clueless in every which way, thinking that if they claim they have rock, blues, and spoken word influences, maybe they’ll rise above the rest of the pack. La Dispute, you are utterly see through, and it is depressing to see you sully such honorable and reputable artistic genres. Just because you talk half wailing like you’re holding your hand in a bucket of ice cold water over silly, wispy drum beats doesn’t mean you get to call it “spoken word.” You can rhyme, but it ain’t poetry.

Do me a favor, dear reader. Visit the page ladispute.bandcamp.com. If any of those people in that top banner speaks to you, and if you think that looks like a hipster good time, then this band is for you. For the rest of you? Please follow me on the never ending quest for something better.

*I would love to hear some actual good music from our great Mitten State. Much of the best music of recent days has come from Michigan, and I know there’s more to be discovered. If you know of a band that you think isn’t getting the attention they need because loud, obnoxious people are standing in the way, then please, please, please get ahold of me. I’d love to hear what you have.

Written by :

Phil Sieb