THE DECLAIMERS.

Rock music has rarely encouraged clarity. The most celebrated rock artists of the nineties were proud obscurantists: Beck's songs sounded like Dadaist poems; Nirvana's Kurt Cobain substituted fragments for stories; and Pavement's Stephen Malkmus, a John Ashbery fan, wrote lyrics that were easy to hear but hard to unpack. Rock, during that decade, was a long afternoon of boys staring at one another's shoes and hiding behind noise. The effect was sometimes disappointing, but it made strategic sense. Hip-hop had taken over the franchise for rhymed, metered, sonically aggressive verse and become omnipresent. When the other guy is making a killing on burgers, it pays to sell ...