‘Dated’ versus ‘Old Skool’

// February 18th, 2011 // Uncategorized

Jeff and Megadeth 2006

Jeff and Megadeth 2006!

This topic is pretty confusing for a lot of people, and rightly so as these terms are often used interchangeably…but according to us (TLA) they shouldn’t be! Therefore I wanted to give you all my (our) viewpoint on it and hopefully add some definition to this area because people sometimes get confused as to what we are doing here with TLA. So here we go a defining dated versus ‘old skool’…

First, let’s define what TLA means by ‘old skool’. By ‘old skool’ we mean REAL hard rock. The kind of hard rock that has no era. The kind that could be dropped in today and would fit. Granted it would probably be a little different than it was when it was released given the influencing forces in music at any given time, but all in all it would be the same.  Bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zepplin, the Who, old Rush, etc. In other words the kind of hard rock that was being created when hard rock and heavy metal meant pretty much the same thing: hard, heavy, and timeless.

We look at dated versus ‘old skool’ when writing. The main features we are looking for when defining whether or not something is dated versus whether it’s ‘old skool’ are a few of these kinds of items:

  • Are there new/modern elements in the song? These must exist, and be quite prevalent. Otherwise the song will be dated.
  • Could the song be dropped into an era (80’s, 90’s, 70’s, etc)  and fit perfectly?  Does it sound just like the music of that time? If so, it’s not ‘old skool’ but clearly dated.
  • Is the song off doing something new and exciting to the point of experimental? If so, it’s probably not rooted in ‘old skool’ rock. Could even be jazz…you never know…
  • Is it heavy?  If so (and we wrote it), it’s probably hard rock. It may even be metal or have metal tendencies (think ‘Habitat for Insanity’), which is awesome!
  • There’s probably more…but that’s all I got for now =P  And it’s good enough to make a quick distinction.

TLA’s philosophy when writing is to hit the target of ‘real’ rock. We strive (very hard, I might add) to add the newer elements of rock, try to define our sound to be as unique as possible, and to keep the songs fresh and with a good deal of “TLA flavor”.

We are not trying to recreate or do what has been done before; not at all. We are trying to stay true to the hard rock genre, keeping the songs as close to what we define as the genre’s true nature as we can. So when people say that TLA has an ‘old skool’ sound,  we feel these kinds of comments are pointing at that…the ‘trueness to form’ as mentioned…albeit painting everything we do with the same brush.  So in the end, TLA can probably be described in a sentence or less as:

‘old skool’ Canadian Hard Rock that’s original, new and fresh, with a ton of great melody.

There. That was easy right?  Anyways, I hope this week’s installment helped clear things up for some folks. If not, well, we’ll have more tunes coming soon so you can probably figure out what we are doing for yourself.

Keep it heavy…and Up Yur Act!

–JL

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