All the “best song of the 1970s” stuff got me thinking about how, really, the best music of the 1970s is being written today. I’m gonna go way out on a limb here and guess that most people in the US aren’t very familiar with lots of music scenes from places like Sweden, the UK, Norway, etc. and so prolly a lot of what I’m writing about and linking here will be news to most people. Hopefully it’s welcome and good news, as opposed to a Notice of Eviction kind of news.
Anyway, I’ll start off by noting that Sweden has a lot of terrific musicians, many of whom play in various kinds of death and/or black metal bands. They wear corpse paint makeup and lots of leather and they act all scary and shit and play unbelievably loud and dense music that’s meant to conjure up thoughts of demons and bad stuff and death, etc.
For most of these people, the theatrics are part of the music, inseparable from each other and all in good fun.
Which is why it shouldn’t come as much a shock to find that a lot of them fucking REVERE certain bands and styles from by-gone eras, like Sir Lord Baltimore, say, or Deep Purple or James Brown or whoever. And because so many of these people are such talented musicians, they manage to recreate, or rather evoke the sounds they admire with surprising success when they try.
Audrey Horne features members of Enslaved, Sahg and Gorgoroth, but they play straight up late-'70s style arena-bordering-on-prog rock.
Then there’s Withcraft, also from Sweden. And there’s Graveyard. And Free Fall, a band that draws more on punk rock and Motörhead than on arena rock and the Eagles.
But it’s not just guys from Sweden.
I’m a huge fan of doom metal, so imagine my face-splitting grin the first time I heard this band from San Francisco, Orchid:
They do Sabbath better than Sabbath does Sabbath! (Ok, maybe… I’ll withhold final judgement until the new Sabbath comes out next month. 
)
They’ve been around for a few years now, and I’ve linked to them before, but Aussie rockers Airbourne do AC/DC better than AC/DC.
Stand Up For Rock And Rock
Blackjack (live at Wacken)
Another band from Sweden, has successfully combined AC/DC with Judas Priest: Bullet
Bite The Bullet
Back On The Road
Even emo/prog/space punks Coheed & Cambria seem to be catching the vibe; the first track from their soon-to-be-released new album is unashamedly '70s: The Hard Sell. Tell me that doesn’t remind you of the first time you listened to The Wall; I won’t believe you, but you can go ahead and tell me that.
There’s also retro-heavy acts like, well, The Heavy, that are playing around with R&B conventions from the 1970s. Short Change Hero and How You Like Me Now? are great tunes from these UK rockers.
The conventions and trappings of the great music of the '70s has been studied, dissected, analyzed and revamped, often with great success, by the musicians of today, often, IMO, with better results than some of the bands they are emulating.
Soon we’ll start to see the same sort of thing happen with the '80s various genres and styles. In metal, we’ve already gone thru one stint of this, with the neo-thrash revival from a few years back.
I don’t wanna hog all the good bands, tho. I’m sure there’s at least one other person who’s been digging the retro revival stuff in one form or another, aye?
Tell us about them.
) the band that most accurately channels Roky is The Black Angels.
