10.
In Albuquerque, NM, in 1997, a small band called Flake Music recorded a full-length LP titled When You Land Here, It’s Time to Return. Despite receiving almost no mention in any publication, the record put forward a repertoire of remarkably innovative takes on pop conventions.
The sound can be compared to Weezer in its calmer stages, or a more carefree Built to Spill, but it’s the lead singer’s kind, boyish yet confident voice that brings it all together.
This singer, a young man named James Mercer, would later start a side project called the Shins. So excited was Mercer about this side project that he replaced all of its original members with the former members of Flake Music – each and every one of them.
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9.
someone still loves you boris yeltsin – broom Pitchfork Media has done a lot of good for indie music. It essentially “made” shining indie successes such as Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. However, they’ve also brushed aside more than their share of promising bands.
Cold War Kids overcame their poor Pitchfork review and became relatively popular, garnering some radio play and mainstream media attention. A small lo-fi pop band from Springfield, Missouri had it a bit harder.
Pitchfork claimed Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin’s debut album, Broom, re-released by PolyVinyl Records in 2005 after its initial recording in 2004, was too derisive of established pop paradigms. While it’s true that the sound begs a comparison to the Shins, Weezer, Belle and Sebastian, or Of Montreal, it’s a mix of the old that comes out sounding sparklingly new.
It’s catchy in a way I haven’t heard before. It’s none too self-serious, but it gets stuck in your head and refuses to leave. It’s okay, though, because it’s a tenant I don’t mind putting up with.
Despite their hard times since the Pitchfork review, the band is still recording, releasing their follow-up, the equally as pleasing Pershing, in 2008.
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8.
built to spill – keep it like a secret Not terribly many people have heard of Built to Spill – almost as few as can name the capital of Idaho. Both are kept like well-guarded secrets.
The capitol of Idaho is Boise, where Built to Spill hails from, and the fact is, Doug Martsch’s voice is about as traditionally beautiful as his facial hair (a big fat bushy beard.)
It’s his guitar work that convinces you to give the band a shot, and after a while you start to understand why he does what he does with his vocals. It all works in a way that eludes description. It’s an odd concoction, born of the Nirvana era, sounding, as I would put it, like “grunge-pop”; pop melodies played on highly distorted electric rock instruments.
In an era where guitar heroes are few and far between, Martsch reminds you what it sounds like to rock. And rock he does. As a matter of fact, both Issac Brock of Modest Mouse and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie have cited Martsch’s work as a direct influence.
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7.
modest mouse – the moon and antarctica In 1993, in Issaquah, Washington, Issac Brock started an alternative rock band called Modest Mouse, after an obscure passage from an obscure Virginia Woolf piece.
Allusive is a good adjective to describe Modest Mouse. Others would be dark, poetic, oddly sobering yet reassuring at the same time. Brock tells stories of the world’s inherent despair, with flashes of acceptance or optimism, over his distinct guitar hooks that make me reminisce about the Pixies.
The Moon and Antarctica is Modest Mouse’s masterpiece. It’s dark, depressing, and heavy, and it will always have a place in my heart. Whenever life’s troubles bring me down, this album speaks volumes to me about the way the world works. The band came into its own with this brilliant work, and it should be on every CD rack from Issaquah to Tokyo.
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6.
neutral milk hotel – in the aeroplane over the sea In an era when alternative meant electric guitar, an in-your-face style and standard 4-piece rock bands, an obscure folk band from Louisiana released their second of two full-length albums that, in its context of time, can be described as completely alien.
It was a band called Neutral Milk Hotel, and this second album, called In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, that was their masterpiece.
Between the simple one-acoustic-guitar folk chord progressions and the lush, full horn sections, accordion craft, and musical saw (yes, musical saw), is the birth of a paradigm. If you were to trace the rebirth of folk in popular music back to its roots, you would find this album.
It’s a sort of concept album, based around chief lyricist and composer Jeff Magnum’s recurring nightmares about the holocaust, and he pulls it off in the most heart-wrenching way imaginable (The only girl I’ve ever loved / was born with roses in her eyes / but then they buried her alive one evening 1945, with just her sister at her side / and only weeks before the guns all came and rained on everyone … and it’s so sad to see / the world agree / that they’d rather see their faces filled with flies / when I’d want to see white roses in her eyes).
His vocals are not beautiful in any traditional sense, but that just makes it strike home even harder, and the crashing drums mixed with the pure beauty of the folk masterpieces he composes work in a way that calls to mind the realization that the world was never as kind a place as we’d like to think.
This album was the birth of modern folk music.
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5.
arctic monkeys – whatever people say i am, that’s what i’m not Between the early 1990s and the early 2000s, alternative rock split off into two different disciplines: indie and pop-punk. The latter became more mainstream, as it was easier for the media to comprehend as “alternative,” and it gained nearly a monopoly on radio play of rock music, but in the process ceased to resemble the principle or sound of the classics of the golden age of punk rock. Indie retained its integrity a little better, but in the process ceased to have the testes that alternative rock used to have.
The line between the two styles was divisive and definite. That is, at least, until Arctic Monkeys, a true punk band out of Sheffield, England, came onto the scene.
We all miss the Clash and the Ramones, and from their sound, I’d venture a guess that these jumpy Brits miss them, too. The drums are punchy and masterful. The guitar and vocals are angry but never depressed, like a drunken football fan after a match between England and France.
That’s a good way to describe this type of punk – drunken. This jumpy, drunken punk was absent from the scene for too long, and now that it’s back, the Clash would be truly proud.
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4.
pixies – doolittle The 1980s saw its fair share of trends. In a time when neon was king and you weren’t a man unless you had a mullet or a studded belt, a band from Boston tossed off its shackles of time and recorded an album from a couple decades in the future.
Anyone who’s seen Fight Club has heard “Where Is My Mind?”, a track not featured on this album. But it’s the mix of punk, classic rock, beauty, and rage behind tracks like “Hey,” “Debaser,” or “I Bleed” that makes this band the creators of modern indie rock.
You wouldn’t guess 80s from just listening to their music, or even from looking at their photograph, and this is the way I like it. It’s a band without an era, and they gave birth to an era. Nirvana, Modest Mouse, and just about any other rock band with any backbone owes what they know to the Pixies.
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3.
arcade fire – funeral “Emo,” as a term, at the time of the release of this album, was essentially an insult. Nobody wanted to look emo or talk emo or listen to emo music. But it was a mix of truly emo kids residing in Montreal, QC, who would record one of the most emotionally powerful and moving albums of all time.
Singing in a mix of mostly English and partly French are husband and wife vocalists Win Butler and Regine Chassagne, the former a former Texan, the latter a Haitian.
The band uses any instrument you wouldn’t think of offhand, and a few you would, but it sounds like the instruments they chose were built to be played in their songs. Sounding at times like David Byrne and a times like the London Philharmonic, they grab you by the heart and drag you down an icy Canada street by the light of turn-of-the-century gas street lamps, and it’s done in a more sincere way than any album that comes to mind.
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2.
clap your hands say yeah – clap your hands say yeah The term “indie” itself is rather indefinable. Some take it to mean disjointed from the mainstream, but this excludes bands like the Strokes or the White Stripes. Some call it a genre, but how can bands like Beirut and !!! possibly be in the same genre? Some say it means anything with a completely new sound, but then bands like the Pipettes are at a loss.
One thing is certain, though: whatever indie is, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are indie. Their eponymous debut was recorded in an apartment in Brooklyn and put onto compact disc on a tiny scale by the band itself. They sold out of their original pressing and used the profits to press more. Without ever signing to a record label, they were named the Hot Band of 2005 by Rolling Stone Magazine.
It’s vocalist Alec Ounsworth’s vocal style that separates CYHSY from similar lo-fi rock-pop concoctions. He deliberately cracks his voice in a squeal/wail that sounds like David Byrne going through puberty, and it works perfectly. Some call it butchering music, but it’s worked, and I can’t stop listening. It’s a perfect album, with every track good enough for the radio play it will rarely, if ever, get.
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1.
belle and sebastian – if you’re feeling sinister In 1996, in Glasgow, Scotland, amidst the era of brit-pop and stadium rock revival in the UK, a group of college students recorded two albums as a school project, and released 1,000 copies of each on the school’s record label.
One was called Tigermilk, the other, If You’re Feeling Sinister. Both are amazing, but Sinister takes the cake as the pinnacle and father of twee pop (a label the band rejects, but hell, who are they kidding?).
Lead vocalist and composer Stuart Murdoch’s soft, carefree voice tells tales of childhood troubles, told largely from the perspective of secondary school aged young men and women, dealing with the problems of the real world.
Their sound is disjointed from their lyrics (She was into S&M and bible studies / not everyone’s cup of tea, she would have meant to me / not everyone’s cup of tea she would have meant to no one) but it works amazingly. It’s a cross-section of life as an adolescent, and it’s something that anyone who speaks a language can relate to.
The band rejected fame, often refusing interviews and TV appearances that would have made them world famous, for better or for worse. Nonetheless, they are recognized the world over by those few who know their importance. They deserve the fame they don’t have, but they’ll go down in history as the true masters of their genre.
anthony frederick albert
Friday, May 23rd
