28 posts tagged “indie”
Hello.
Is this thing on? Test....test.
So it's been a while. I used to keep up with this whole daily MP3 thing on this here little Vox blog, but it's been *checks archives* just over a year since I actually did anything here. In fact, I was 27 when I stopped this. Now I'm 29.
A lot has happened and I'm not going to tell you about any of it. This is not the place for me to do that, and no one is here to read it anyways (if anyone is here to read this at all).
But I'm going to try it again. As a refresher: this is a pseudo-daily excercise in sharing music. One song a day, plus one to two paragraphs of commentary. New music, old music, long time favorites and fresh discoveries. Novelties, gems, guilty pleasures. Whatever. No promises, I may skip days or disappear completely (again). So we'll see where this goes.
To start off, here is a song by my favorite band from Bellingham. I only know one band from Bellingham (other than Death Cab For Cutie, who got their start there), but still. I can't imagine liking another one better than I Love You Avalanche. It's a solo-ish project that I saw opening for a Northen California band called the Americas last year. Everything I've heard from her/them is super lo-fi, covered in tape hiss and room noise, but the sweetness of the songs shines through, and the layers of vocals are perfectly wispy and tender. This song in particular kills me. It gets stuck in my head from time to time, and I find myself needing to listen to it regularly. The lyrics, the wavery vocal melody in the bridge, the Major lift into the chorus, the overlapping counterpoints towards the end....it's like this song came forth as a fully formed ideal of the solo female folk song. It's also a perfect song for my life at the moment, all about friendship and loss, exciting and bittersweet, painful and exhilirating all at once. I hope you love it as much as I do.
Is this thing on? Test....test.
So it's been a while. I used to keep up with this whole daily MP3 thing on this here little Vox blog, but it's been *checks archives* just over a year since I actually did anything here. In fact, I was 27 when I stopped this. Now I'm 29.
A lot has happened and I'm not going to tell you about any of it. This is not the place for me to do that, and no one is here to read it anyways (if anyone is here to read this at all).
But I'm going to try it again. As a refresher: this is a pseudo-daily excercise in sharing music. One song a day, plus one to two paragraphs of commentary. New music, old music, long time favorites and fresh discoveries. Novelties, gems, guilty pleasures. Whatever. No promises, I may skip days or disappear completely (again). So we'll see where this goes.
To start off, here is a song by my favorite band from Bellingham. I only know one band from Bellingham (other than Death Cab For Cutie, who got their start there), but still. I can't imagine liking another one better than I Love You Avalanche. It's a solo-ish project that I saw opening for a Northen California band called the Americas last year. Everything I've heard from her/them is super lo-fi, covered in tape hiss and room noise, but the sweetness of the songs shines through, and the layers of vocals are perfectly wispy and tender. This song in particular kills me. It gets stuck in my head from time to time, and I find myself needing to listen to it regularly. The lyrics, the wavery vocal melody in the bridge, the Major lift into the chorus, the overlapping counterpoints towards the end....it's like this song came forth as a fully formed ideal of the solo female folk song. It's also a perfect song for my life at the moment, all about friendship and loss, exciting and bittersweet, painful and exhilirating all at once. I hope you love it as much as I do.
Not sparse enough to be ambient, too many live instruments for techno, too loopy for post rock, not loud enough to be shoegazer/dreampop...where exactly does Seefeel fit?
"Through You," from their first full-length, Quique, rides all of these genre lines pretty closely. There's plenty of guitar here, though it's all blurred and smeared and pushed way back in the mix, and it's pretty definitively non-rock guitar. There's a percussive element that could either be a heavily processed drum machine or drummer in a distant room. It builds slowly and steadily, but doesn't end much louder or more forceful than it began.
It's easy to see the lines of influence in retrospect, but sort of hard to see how they all wound up together. From the minimalism and pattern layering of 20th Century composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley, to the insistent post-techno ryhthms of early Aphex Twin and, to the rich textures of everyone from Brian Eno to Kevin Shields, Seefeel was sort of a summation of a certain line of progress in the hitory of recorded music, where the focus was on feel, atmosphere, and tone rather than harmony, melody and rhythm. You can hear their own influence echoing today, rippling outward from the experimental territory they occupied, into deeper abstraction, and into more meditative rock/pop areas.
"Through You," from their first full-length, Quique, rides all of these genre lines pretty closely. There's plenty of guitar here, though it's all blurred and smeared and pushed way back in the mix, and it's pretty definitively non-rock guitar. There's a percussive element that could either be a heavily processed drum machine or drummer in a distant room. It builds slowly and steadily, but doesn't end much louder or more forceful than it began.
It's easy to see the lines of influence in retrospect, but sort of hard to see how they all wound up together. From the minimalism and pattern layering of 20th Century composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley, to the insistent post-techno ryhthms of early Aphex Twin and, to the rich textures of everyone from Brian Eno to Kevin Shields, Seefeel was sort of a summation of a certain line of progress in the hitory of recorded music, where the focus was on feel, atmosphere, and tone rather than harmony, melody and rhythm. You can hear their own influence echoing today, rippling outward from the experimental territory they occupied, into deeper abstraction, and into more meditative rock/pop areas.
Even their own liner notes can't resist making the inevitable Joy Division comparison. Well, the liner notes to the recent re-release of most of their catalog on Domino Records. At one point, Scottish post-punk band Josef K was a footnote in the history of independent music from the British Isles, and I guess they still kind of are. The Entomology disc that collects much of their music has brought some attention, and some well-placed press, but don't expect them to reunite for a million-selling comeback album and stadium tour anytime soon.
About that Joy Division comparison though...is it really that apt? Sure, there's a definite dark and gloomy edge, and the deep vocals of frontman Paul Haig are in the right ballpark, but I'd probably place them a little closer to Echo & the Bunnymen. Either way, that's good company to be in, I suppose. Though of course, both of those groups were together longer and released more material (and Echo & the Bunnymen are still releasing material these days). But neither holds the distinction of recording two albums in a single year (and discarding one of them, at that).
About that Joy Division comparison though...is it really that apt? Sure, there's a definite dark and gloomy edge, and the deep vocals of frontman Paul Haig are in the right ballpark, but I'd probably place them a little closer to Echo & the Bunnymen. Either way, that's good company to be in, I suppose. Though of course, both of those groups were together longer and released more material (and Echo & the Bunnymen are still releasing material these days). But neither holds the distinction of recording two albums in a single year (and discarding one of them, at that).
Like their countrymen Disco Inferno, Hood has toiled in relative obscurity for most of the 90s and 00s, making music that combines savory pop with experimental material that some might consider unpalatable. Which is a shame really, since it's actually just an acquired taste.
This track is an outtake that was only released on The Hood Tapes, a tour-only CD they sold during their 2004 tour in support of Outside Closer, their most recent album. I'm not sure where the sample that forms the backbone of the track originated, but it's my guess that it wasn't safe to release a song based on an obvious uncleared sample. I could be wrong though. It's a track that could fit right in on any of their recent material, with heavily processed acoustic instruments joining hands with completely synthetic material. Their original sound was more organic, a lo-fi approach to the shoegazer sound by way of cheap equipment and less-than-ideal recording cisrcumstances, like re-imagining Loveless as recorded by early Pavement. By 2001, on their album Cold House (featuring Doseone and Why? from Anticon as collaborators) they had embraced everything from sequenced drums to DSP effects, taking their moody indie pop into IDM territory, where this track is leaning toward.
This track is an outtake that was only released on The Hood Tapes, a tour-only CD they sold during their 2004 tour in support of Outside Closer, their most recent album. I'm not sure where the sample that forms the backbone of the track originated, but it's my guess that it wasn't safe to release a song based on an obvious uncleared sample. I could be wrong though. It's a track that could fit right in on any of their recent material, with heavily processed acoustic instruments joining hands with completely synthetic material. Their original sound was more organic, a lo-fi approach to the shoegazer sound by way of cheap equipment and less-than-ideal recording cisrcumstances, like re-imagining Loveless as recorded by early Pavement. By 2001, on their album Cold House (featuring Doseone and Why? from Anticon as collaborators) they had embraced everything from sequenced drums to DSP effects, taking their moody indie pop into IDM territory, where this track is leaning toward.
I think Disco Inferno is one of the best band names ever, especially since it belongs to a band that is completely undanceable and challenging on all levels, practically the opposite of all that actual disco music championed.
Disco Inferno is one of those bands that never really caught many people's attention, but made their mark nonetheless. They were difficult enough to repel casual listeners, yet had enough pop savvy to draw in those with an ear for the unusual. Equal parts nostalgic and futurist, they had a relatively brief career, featuring 3 full length albums and a smattering of EPs, starting from early-80s Manchester mimicry (in 1989) and ending with an odd fusion of experimental techniques and pop structure.
"Even The Sea Sides Against Us" comes from the 1994 album D.I. Go Pop (misleadingly titled, of course). Showcasing their love of sound collage, a loop of crowd noise and waves crashing against the shore fills the role of a percussion instrument, leaving bass, echoing guitar, vocals, and glittery keyboard fragments to flesh out the rest. The noise blurs and obscures in the same way that My Bloody Valentine's guitars do, with a roaring cascade of frequencies that mask other elements. The result is indistinct, yet lyrically more comprehensible than MBV. Many of Disco Inferno's techniques have been borrowed from other sources (MBV, hip hop, musique concrete and electronic music), and most have been re-borrowed by the handful of artists who have drawn inspiration from their pursuit of a singular vision.
Disco Inferno is one of those bands that never really caught many people's attention, but made their mark nonetheless. They were difficult enough to repel casual listeners, yet had enough pop savvy to draw in those with an ear for the unusual. Equal parts nostalgic and futurist, they had a relatively brief career, featuring 3 full length albums and a smattering of EPs, starting from early-80s Manchester mimicry (in 1989) and ending with an odd fusion of experimental techniques and pop structure.
"Even The Sea Sides Against Us" comes from the 1994 album D.I. Go Pop (misleadingly titled, of course). Showcasing their love of sound collage, a loop of crowd noise and waves crashing against the shore fills the role of a percussion instrument, leaving bass, echoing guitar, vocals, and glittery keyboard fragments to flesh out the rest. The noise blurs and obscures in the same way that My Bloody Valentine's guitars do, with a roaring cascade of frequencies that mask other elements. The result is indistinct, yet lyrically more comprehensible than MBV. Many of Disco Inferno's techniques have been borrowed from other sources (MBV, hip hop, musique concrete and electronic music), and most have been re-borrowed by the handful of artists who have drawn inspiration from their pursuit of a singular vision.
Most remixes tackle the raw material of a single song, sometimes adding some additional elements of the remix producers creation, but generally keeping some relation to the original structure. But this remix by Sientific American gathers fragments from several tracks on the 1999 Red Stars Theory album Life in a Bubble Can Be Beautiful, and reassembles them as something entirely new, yet recognizable. It sounds like something the band could perform live, with the exception of a few stutter edits.
Red Stars Theory was an Pacific Northwest indie rock supergroup of sorts, featuring 764-Hero bassist James Bertram and Modest Mouse drummer Jeremiah Green, and a rotating cast of assorted other musicians. They made a lethargic and deliberate version of indie rock that bordered on post-rock, indebted as much to Mogwai and Tortoise as to their local contemporaries. This remix by Sientific American, a longtime fixture of the Seattle electronic scene, comes from the B-side of the Naima 7" single (yes, it's a John Coltrane cover) from 2000.
Red Stars Theory was an Pacific Northwest indie rock supergroup of sorts, featuring 764-Hero bassist James Bertram and Modest Mouse drummer Jeremiah Green, and a rotating cast of assorted other musicians. They made a lethargic and deliberate version of indie rock that bordered on post-rock, indebted as much to Mogwai and Tortoise as to their local contemporaries. This remix by Sientific American, a longtime fixture of the Seattle electronic scene, comes from the B-side of the Naima 7" single (yes, it's a John Coltrane cover) from 2000.
So there I am, at Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco during the 2002 Noise Pop festival, watching the Dismemberment Plan go absolutely apeshit on stage while an entire room full of jaded indie kids lets go of their inhibitions and bounces and spasms along with them. I'd interviewed Travis Morrison earlier that evening, followed that up with another interview with Chris Walla (whose band Death Cab For Cutie was headlining that night), and was basically just living the unpaid-writer-for-a-tiny-regional-music-magazine dream when they launch into "The Ice of Boston," from their 2nd album, The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified. And of course, they have a tradition of inviting the crowd up on stage to dance during this song, and seeing as I'm totally in the rock and roll moment, I decide, why not?
Well, why not is because the security of Bimbo's 365 Club doesn't see eye to eye with the band when it comes to matters of audience participation, and after about 60 seconds of band-audience dancing, several burly security guards come to clear away the dozen or so of us who hopped up on stage. Most manage to hop back down into the crowd, but me and one other guy get pulled backstage, ushered through a hallway, and pushed out into the alley behind the club, with a perfunctory "Have a nice night. Don't come back."
The head of security makes sure to mention to the doorman that the two of us are not to be let back in, when the other guy mentions that there's no posted rule about getting on stage. Turns out that this is the one night that the club neglected to post their rules against stage-diving, flash photography, recording devices, etc., and after a quick exchange, they grudgingly let us back in on a technicality. By this point, the song is finished and Morrison is sarcastically thanking security for saving him from the hordes of spaghetti-strapped girls who invaded the stage.
So that's my security thwarting, small potatoes, stage-climbing "Ice of Boston" story. Hope you enjoy.
Well, why not is because the security of Bimbo's 365 Club doesn't see eye to eye with the band when it comes to matters of audience participation, and after about 60 seconds of band-audience dancing, several burly security guards come to clear away the dozen or so of us who hopped up on stage. Most manage to hop back down into the crowd, but me and one other guy get pulled backstage, ushered through a hallway, and pushed out into the alley behind the club, with a perfunctory "Have a nice night. Don't come back."
The head of security makes sure to mention to the doorman that the two of us are not to be let back in, when the other guy mentions that there's no posted rule about getting on stage. Turns out that this is the one night that the club neglected to post their rules against stage-diving, flash photography, recording devices, etc., and after a quick exchange, they grudgingly let us back in on a technicality. By this point, the song is finished and Morrison is sarcastically thanking security for saving him from the hordes of spaghetti-strapped girls who invaded the stage.
So that's my security thwarting, small potatoes, stage-climbing "Ice of Boston" story. Hope you enjoy.
Rites of Spring take their name from Igor Stravinsky's 1913 ballet that famously caused a riot upon its premiere. The standard story in that case is that the music was too shocking, too unconventional, and too harsh a break with tradition for the listening public at the time. The uncompromising modernism of that piece was undoubtedly riot-worthy at the time, though it has since been given the stamp of approval from that most conventional of American institutions, the Walt Disney Corporation, in the animated film Fantasia (1940). A mere 27 years caused that much shift in opinion.
But I'm not here to talk about that piece today, just the group whose name it inspired. Parallels can be drawn, for sure. Rites of Spring (the band) broke from the traditions of their own community, the Washington DC hardcore scene of the early 80s, with an inward focused lyrical approach that eschewed the political posturing of their peers. That approach would lead to them being labeled the first emo band, though that scene wouldn't really begin to develop into a movement until years later. And of course, in a relatively quick succession, emo became the pop flavor du jour, evolving from a raw yet soft-edged splinter of hardcore punk to a paint-by-numbers, radio-friendly pop format with few vestiges of the original sound.
Meanwhile, the band had a typically (for DC hardcore) abbreviated lifespan, freeing Brendan Canty and Guy Picciotto to join Minor Threat founder Ian KacKaye in that most atypical of punk bands, Fugazi, in 1987.
But I'm not here to talk about that piece today, just the group whose name it inspired. Parallels can be drawn, for sure. Rites of Spring (the band) broke from the traditions of their own community, the Washington DC hardcore scene of the early 80s, with an inward focused lyrical approach that eschewed the political posturing of their peers. That approach would lead to them being labeled the first emo band, though that scene wouldn't really begin to develop into a movement until years later. And of course, in a relatively quick succession, emo became the pop flavor du jour, evolving from a raw yet soft-edged splinter of hardcore punk to a paint-by-numbers, radio-friendly pop format with few vestiges of the original sound.
Meanwhile, the band had a typically (for DC hardcore) abbreviated lifespan, freeing Brendan Canty and Guy Picciotto to join Minor Threat founder Ian KacKaye in that most atypical of punk bands, Fugazi, in 1987.
A restrained, instrumental moment from one of the all time greats, Fugazi. How many bands can you name that quit at the top of their game, without releasing a single bad album or compromising a single ideal, from creative and economic control to admission prices? I can't think of a single one, off the top of my head. Even if you don't like their music, you pretty much have to respect them as an example of what the music industry could be in a more idealistic world. (For further reading on that topic, see the chapter devoted to them in Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life).
This track from In On The Kill Taker is fittingly titled, with a bass-driven groove propelling a melody that's more tender than your typical Fugazi track. Though they excel at tight, razor sharp punk rock, their softer moments can be equally impressive, spotlighting musical influences beyond what their classification would normally bely.
This track from In On The Kill Taker is fittingly titled, with a bass-driven groove propelling a melody that's more tender than your typical Fugazi track. Though they excel at tight, razor sharp punk rock, their softer moments can be equally impressive, spotlighting musical influences beyond what their classification would normally bely.
I just saw this band for the third time last night (after an interval of probably about 2 years or so) and was reminded of exactly why they're one of the most amazing unheard bands around right now. Spastic, jazz-influenced drumming, dense layered guitar (courtesy of one guitar and one looping pedal), unpolished vocals that sometimes delve into screamo territory...It's complex and cathartic all at once, a mixture that very few bands can perfect.
The Americas hail from Chico, CA, and although their drummer plays for the moderately well known Santa Rosa band The Velvet Teen, they have nevertheless slipped under the radar for the past few years. Hopefully they won't stay there forever. Fans of bands like Battles, From Monument To Masses or Lightning Bolt should take note.
The Americas hail from Chico, CA, and although their drummer plays for the moderately well known Santa Rosa band The Velvet Teen, they have nevertheless slipped under the radar for the past few years. Hopefully they won't stay there forever. Fans of bands like Battles, From Monument To Masses or Lightning Bolt should take note.
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