EVERY GENRE PROJECT - July 31 - Stomp and Holler

Genre of the Day - Stomp and Holler

Album of the Day - Caamp by Caamp (2016)

Todays’ genre might be the most important litmus test I’ve encountered yet in writing this column. I consider myself a porous music listener, ready and willing to absorb whatever new sounds comes my way—hence, why I began this project! Even with some of the most avant-garde and experimental genres that have crossed my path, this year has helped me come to the thesis that with concentration, context, and an open mind, any listener can appreciate any musical genre over the course of an album and encounter new questions and answers about the nature of music itself. While many of these genres have been fresh to my open ears, today’s is a familiar blast from the past.

That’s not necessarily a good thing. Today’s genre was dominant in my hometown and on indie radio during some of my most formative years, and it simply never resonated with me. It was a sound that prompted me and my sister to lunge for the dial. Stomp and holler is a term applied to a particular strain of indie folk that emerged in the early 2010s as both an alternative and parallel to the raucous synth grandeur buzzing among indie rock-pop championed by acts like MGMT, Empire of the Sun, and Neon Trees. Emerging into the bleak economic wasteland of the late 2000s, many indie urban millennial artists instead looked for comfort in golden-hued Americana, bluegrass, and folk. Groups like The Lumineers, Mumford & Sons, and The Head and the Heart led that charge through foot-stomp percussion, rapid and tricky driving guitar and banjo melodies, and build-ups from feather-soft, sepia-toned choruses to massive, howled choruses breaking like dams, with occasional horn blare-flair. Though aesthetically, musically, and stylistically polar in almost every aspect, stomp-and-holler wielded the malaise-beating power of catchy poptimism and live music settings similarly to wild-abandon dance-pop peers. The stomping is made to capture the joy of some far-flung, pine-tree shaded festival on every listen, just as EDM’s four-on-the-floor is an instant trip to the dance floor.

Music is often a rosy-colored affair; we remember the songs we loved growing up more than we grumble over the ones we didn't. Probing the reasonings behind the latter is a curious exercise. It’s hard to say why stomp and holler touched such a nerve for me and my sister at that time. The answer probably lies in overplay fatigue on traffic-stymied drives home from school. At some point in my childhood around 2012, my mom made a switch to oscillating solely between the two alternative radio stations in Denver, 93.3 and 97.3. Thanks to that timing, I heard stomp and holler hits like “Ho Hey” and “Little Lion Man” more times than I’ve heard any song in my personal library. With ubiquity, the music itself became cloying, corny, and bland to my ears. Its aesthetic seemed the zenith of faux-rustic, beer-thumping hipsterism that defined the life of young adults swarming my hometown of Denver. Though I wasn’t aware at the time, my sister and I were far from the sole dissidents. Still: why did any of this annoy me as a kid? I don’t consider myself a hater by nature. Maybe I was just tweephobic. Furthermore, it’s each generation’s right to scoff at the previous one’s taste. 

Denver hipster archetype.

Stomp-and-holler waned in popularity by the late 2010s, but it is now seeing what seems a premature revival as individual acts like Noah Kahan have risen to fame. I don't have enough experience with Noah Kahan to state if my musical palette has matured to accept the taste of stomp-and-holler, but today’s album listen is a trial run, at least. Can the Ohio band Caamp’s hollers in my ears stomp their way into my heart with my considerably more voracious musical appetite now compared to my younger years? It’s hard to say. This album is free of the genre’s stomping that may be the most cornball-abrasive touch to my younger self, though every other hallmark is intact. Lead singer Taylor Meier’s whisky-hoarse voice is a warm, if weathered, outstretched hand on the beleaguered vignettes of “All the Debts I Owe.” The genre’s typically overly brash use of the banjo is made more endearing with the starry-eyed enthusiasm of “See the World.” When the songs are sparer and relax into a flickering slower tempo that allows him to wield his full vocal power, their folksy melancholy is more resonant on “So Long, Honey.” Still, the simplistic and even ham-fisted lyrics of certain tunes like “Ohio,” a home-state ode that could be about anywhere, and “Vagabond[‘s]” “My heart does beat like a Cherokee drum” still make me raise an eyebrow. As much as neurological patterns prompt us to treasure the beloved music of our youth, I’d wager they also make us tire more easily of sounds that were familiar but not quite fond.