I meant to get to this post a while ago, as the stench of 2016 (the year of shocking deaths and depressing Facebook posts) was still in the air. As I read the outpourings of appreciation for David Bowie, Prince, George Michael, Glenn Frey, Leonard Cohen, George Martin, Merle Haggard, Alan Rickman, Carrie Fisher and other people who were important to my people, it occurred to me that it usually takes a hero’s death to bring people to their keyboards to write out what they appreciated about that person. It’s disappointing that the artist can’t receive any of it, and that for those discovering these artists for the first time, it was just as the artist died. Boo.

That’s why I decided to fire up this ancient blog and start a new series called “Praise Your Music Heroes Before They Die.” I plan on gushing without reservation (ok, maybe a little reservation) on the bands that are important to me — before they’ve gone and kicked the bucket in headline-grabbing rock-star fashion. This way, if you’re not already familiar, you can start getting into them while they’re, you know, actually doing things (1).

But here’s the bigger picture: If someone reading one of my diatribes is inspired to gush about one of their own favorite artists, then someone else, and so on, then the act of writing out our appreciation for great artists will extend beyond the event of them dying. And that will be cool.

Now on to the Libertines.

My first entry is on probably my most treasured music hero. The Libertines are a London indie group consisting of dual singer/guitarists Pete Doherty and Carl Barat, drummer Gary Powell, and bassist John Hassall. I found them in college, reading about them in Rolling Stone while sitting on a friend’s couch with a chinchilla. Something struck a chord, and I grabbed their I Get Along EP at a Tower Records the next day. They blew a refreshing blast of unpretentious, foreign indie rock into my universe, which at the time was crowded with overproduced emo bands, metal-ish aggro rock, and punk bands that swung dangerously close to being cute. Hey, it was NorCal.

Today, the Libs continue to take up valuable real estate on my phone — and trust me, storage on that device is at a premium when baby pictures are in the mix. Even the Zombies and the Beatles suffered deletions to make space. Not them.

Here’s why:

They’re rough … but fun rough. I don’t mean sucky. I mean too busy having a good time to worry about acoustics.
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First of all, I love indie. I love it like a 15-year-old boy loves Megan Fox, sans anything involving posters on ceilings. So before you get up in my face with loud, defensive, aggravated comments about how great it is — I know, I know. Mellow.

But again like our halter-wearing temptress, there are a lot of seemingly reasonable people who HATE indie. And when you start to talk to these people about their hatred (once they get past the asinine jabs about hipster jeans, beards and technical guitar skills, like those even matter), you start to realize they may actually be on to something. Because even though indie is awesome, it’s only really awesome if it’s done right. And sometimes, you just have to take a loved one by the collar and tell them when they’re not doing something right. Right?

Here are some of the things indie musicians do that piss off people who otherwise have good taste in music. (Subtext: if you hate indie because the only style of music you like is speed metal or radio country, then this list, and my entire blog, will probably mean nothing to you.)

1. Whine a lot more than necessary. Most people understand that songwriting is about expressing emotions, so like-minded listeners can identify when their parents get divorced and they’re shuttled back and forth like a fake ID at a sorority house. But those alleged “genuine” emotions shouldn’t cause stool to run soft in the bowel, and those “genuine” lyrics shouldn’t have to become ironic Facebook status updates. Despite the majority of indie songwriters who express their inner ingénue at an appropriate level, a lot of them tend to dwell on the idea of adult male vulnerability, riding it like the bow of the Titanic until people in the crowd are considering dialing a hotline. The result: indie rock that is backed only by overdramatic 14-year-old girls and moms who are just glad their kid isn’t listening to Insane Clown Posse. And the woe in my heart bleeds like yesterday’s undercooked pot roast.

2. Sing like the deaf. Okay, part of being vulnerable and “real” is not having an overtly superior singing style. No one expects to be empathizing with Bono, or relating on a personal level to Axl Rose. (Yikes.) Still, there are a couple of fundamentals that are just part of singing — like pitch control, and not making the audience laugh out loud. So when the biggest Clap Your Hands Say Yeah single sounds like Joe Assface got up on karaoke night and ran a schoolbus over the solfege scale, it’s tough to hold the contempt in check. It’s even worse when it’s a cover of a song people are already familiar with, like Clem Snide’s abhorrent version of Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” or Ben Gibbard’s cringe-inducing take on Bjork’s “All is Full of Love.” I don’t care how cute his own songs are, taking on Bjork’s most well-heard single with his northern-accented po-boy whimper is like climbing Mount St. Helens in a T-shirt and Converse low-tops. When the tone that comes across is “this didn’t sound like it did in my head, but oh well,” something is probably lost.
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The human brain is weird, sometimes things just don’t add up. Why, for example, can somebody like peanut butter but hate peanuts? Or try to squeeze through the last quarter-second of a yellow light, but get annoyed when the guy behind them does it? It baffles.

As you may have gleamed from the title, this baffledom extends to none other than the Cold War Kids. I’ve had several run-ins with this OC band (like, as in their music) since they began their steady ascent to popularity a few years ago, and despite a damning heap of evidence suggesting I should like them (a lot), it just seems to be one of those things, and I have no idea why.

To demonstrate the depth of this conundrum (which I’m sure is shattering your world as you read this), here is a list of everything the Cold War Kids have going for them, in my modest opinion:

1. Nathan Willett’s voice is unique, loud and completely amazing.

2. Their sense of melody is pretty much genius.

3. Their choices in instrumentation aren’t obvious, and provide just what each song needs.
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