Someone must have written a tiresome book, or smug radio documentary, on the guitar riff. Tracing it from its initial appearance in crackly blues recordings by Robert Johnson and the like, through how those early blues recordings influenced Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry and then how their brutally fingered and overdriven, rudimentary sex honks were purloined by The Stones, The Beatles, The Kinks, then Cream, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC etc etc, iron on patch, pentatonic ad nauseam.
The riff is the guitarist's equivalent of Elvis' hip thrust. It's all about something primal, rhythmic and - ultimately - sexual. Even guitarists whose riffs were deliberately more androgynous: Mick Ronson, Tom Verlaine, Johnny Marr even, understood that they were messing with rudiments of sound and rhythm wired directly to the darker and more instinctive parts of the human psyche.
Or maybe they were just hatching memorable musical phrases that would serve as a fine framework for hit records? For convenience sake (mine) we'll just stick that argument up here, out of reach, for the moment.
For the most part, from 1957 until punk spewed all over Rick Wakeman's cape, the guitar riff had as much to do with testosterone as it did six strings - and mostly a rampant, Lear Jet-transported testosterone that all too frequently heralded shameless misogyny.
Do I have to provide examples? Listen to Sticky Fingers or read Hammer Of The Gods. I know, it was a different time and rock music was supposed to come home to visit your mother and then have its wicked way with her - and preferably a daughter or three - while no one was looking.
It's no wonder, then, that the guitar riff has been looking so ashamed in our more enlightened times - shunned by anyone with a brain somewhere on the nervous network that is also attached to human sex parts.
But are these more enlightened times? Recent calls for research into the effect that easy access to internet pornography is having on male minds suggests otherwise - that access doesn't equal enlightenment.
So, anyway, the lead track of Future Of The Left's new EP (available today) opens with a guitar riff so monstrous, so forged in the crucible of AC/DC at their most brilliantly dumb, that it manages to simultaneously outsnot The Beastie Boys' No Sleep Till Brooklyn and reclaim the guitar riff from four decades worth of swaggering, foot-on-monitor misogynists.
That the song is called The Male Gaze is probably a coincidence (in light of all of my guff about testosterone and pornography above). Falkous' lyrics take some deciphering - their cryptic poetry is one of the facets of this band that keeps them unique and fascinating.
But it's the urgency of sound, here, that makes The Male Gaze so compulsive. Future Of The Left have never sounded better. This - and its sister tracks on the Love Songs For Our Husbands EP - would be stand out tracks on their previous Welsh Music Prize winning album The Plot Against Common Sense.
Some of the credit should go to Charlie Francis' excellent capturing of their unbridled power - and the fine-sounding rooms at Monnow Valley studios.
What is it, though, that makes each subsequent Future Of The Left release more vital than the last, when the majority of bands peter out the moment the dream sours?
Maybe it's the fact that they're now in ultimate control of their own destiny (this is the first release on their Prescriptions label - partially funded by a PledgeMusic campaign). Maybe it's the 'new' line-up perfecting its sonic telemetry. Maybe it's the fact that - when you have the raw, combined brainpower of Falkous, Watkins, Ruzicka and Egglestone - wrestling with the duplicities, contradictions, injustices and perversions of contemporary life, there is always going to be something to fan the creative flames.
I don't know precisely what continues to fire Future Of The Left, but they've never burnt brighter or more fiercely. This is a furnace blast of a pop song - fired by a riff like a napalm strike on rock's past.
