Awesome controlled rant by Neil Kulkarni about Peace, the "guitar music" resurgence, and the odd phenomenon of rave reviews that takes the form of a preemptive defense

So many quoteables...

"Don't be fooled by the protectors of Peace that to hate them is to look back. It's not the likes of me or you, but groups like Peace that do nothing but look back, that have relegated the now to an endless slavish deference to an ancient past, the flattening down of edges to make the past ever-more palatable, the breaking down of rock to a smooth paste, spread thin"

"No accident that Peace appeal back to those 90s because it was those 90s where apologetics became the internal bloodstream, and arrogance thus became the blaring facade, of what was served up as alternative/independent".

(My own thoughts on Peace - and also Savages - over at the other place)

Neil's angle of attack reminded me of a great line in Paul Morley's recent Stones-at-Glastonbury column, which argued that the spectacle of Jagger's Viagra Swagger on the main stage this summer might actually  have more integrity and cool than the other headliners, Arctic Monkeys and Mumford & Sons, for all their lack of liver spots:  


"For better or worse, [The Stones] are old men playing young music, not young people playing old music. The Monkeys and the Mumfords are the dutiful archivists; the Stones are the bloody archive."

^^^^^^^

While we're on this topic, I note with fascination and disorientation that the Top Ten of the UK Singles Chart contains not one, not two, but four different kinds of retro-dance:

*  disco time travel: Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" at #1

* drum & bass coated with pop gloss: Rudimental's "Waiting All Night" at #2

* house (80s-90s model with a lick of digital polish) : Duke Dumont's "Need U (100%)" at #9, on the way down from being #1

* 2step revival : Disclosure's "You & Me" straight in at #10. (And "White Noise", which peaked at #2, is still hanging on at #24)