XL Cover Story: ACL Festival 2005

Today's leaders of Britpop are more joiners than invaders

Photo from HIGH ROAD TOURING Bloc Party hails from England, but listen to their sound and you could mistake them for a Brooklyn band. Bloc Party performs Saturday at 7:30 p.m. on the AMD Stage.   » More ACL Festival.

The simplest answer is to both questions is: "yes and no."

As music critic Michael Corcoran indicates elsewhere, most of the British invasions pushed against American music. The Beatles took American rockabilly, R&B and whatever mutant strain of hiccuping country that Buddy Holly came up with, refined it with what one critic called "highfalutin' European melodicism" and pretty much changed history.

Duran Duran and their eyeliner'd pals (Culture Club, the immortal Kajagoogoo, Human League and so many more) pushed against Journey and Styx on one end and the Clash at the other. For a while there, especially if you were ever a 12-year-old girl, they were more interesting than either American option.

Britpop pushed against grunge and pushed hard. It was mod versus rockers all over again, with Oasis' Beatles-worship, Blur's modernist dreams and Pulp's jaw-dropping wit against the hair, guitar noise and flappin' flannel of the Nirvanas and the Mudhoneys.

Someone coined the phrase "Cool Britannia" and suddenly Oasis was shaking hands with Tony Blair. But all things that go up must crash to Earth. Everyone made at least one lousy album -- Oasis has made about three so far -- starting around the time Sen. Bob Dole lost the presidential election and, by 1999, Britpop was as dead as disco.

Which is to say it wasn't dead at all, but merely sleeping. Coldplay and Radiohead were hailed as a second wave of Britpop, but their ambitions seem global. Maybe it's the singer's American actress wife, but it seems easy to see Coldplay existing in Los Angeles, Chicago or Berlin. It's impossible to see Pulp able to breathe outside of London; for all of its fame, Oasis could only have come from rough-and-tumble world of Manchester.

But Bloc Party, the British band with the most buzz at this year's Austin City Limits Festival ... man, Bloc Party could be from Brooklyn. Drawing on the same well of post-punk dance rock (Joy Division, the Cure's dance period, late model Echo and the Bunnymen) as a whole mess of American bands, Bloc Party's music doesn't seem that far afield from, say, Yanks such as Interpol and the Bravery, the latter of whom are here.

Flickering guitars, plenty of synths coloring in between the spare rhythms, keening vocals, tunes that aren't quite as indelible as they should be: Bloc Party is one of many, and the many aren't necessarily British. For example, it's mighty hard to see cool Britains such as Oasis releasing a remix album, as Bloc Party have this month. On the flip side, the Killers, one of last year's ACL buzz acts, do the Britpop sound as well as anyone who sings "God Save the Queen." (The real one, not the Sex Pistols' version.)

Now, of course, there are plenty of British bands at ACL this year, some with more guitars than keyboards, some with more keyboards than guitars. Aqualung's ballads are as much piano as anything, while the Doves keep the Manchester guitar band tradition alive (Stone Roses, we'll never forget you). Futureheads seem to be in the same boat as Bloc Party, as Yanks who listen to the Gang of Four too much. Keane is one of many bands tagged as a Coldplay Jr.

And then there's Franz Ferdinand, who have garnered comparisons to everything from the Clash at their most stadium-friendly to Bowie at his heaviest.

But do these groups feel like a movement? Do they feel like a bands that could not have come from anywhere but Britain? No and no. They're not pushing against anything American, not responding with a sound of their own that puts American bands in their place.

In fact, the current heirs to the Britpop-as-response idea might be in the exploding grime scene. With grime artists such as Dizzee Rascal, M.I.A., Lady Sovereign and others, Britain has finally developed its own response to American hip-hop. With impossible spare beats, minimal-at-most melodies and various patois that Yank ears find hard to decode, the grime moment feels as thrilling as Oasis' "Wonderwall" or Pulp's "Common People." Perhaps needless to note, there's no British grime at ACL fest, but there's always next year.

There will always be British bands, and they will always be taking a run at our charts, our hearts and our women (or, as the case may be, men). Sometimes, they'll feel like an invasion, a movement, a pop moment to cherish. But sometimes, a British band is just a British band.