5 posts tagged “indie rock”
Dear lords, Emily Haines is hot. What the hell is it with me and indie-rock girls? Actually, that's an easy one to answer: I missed out on the whole New Wave scene, but I'm immersed to my neck in its little cousin, the contemporary indie-rock scene. I missed the sound on its first go-around, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to revel in it the second time around!
Starsailor is one of those bands that have drawn lots of critical praise but have generally been rather overlooked by folks--and I really don't know why that is. Though generally classified these days as "indie rock," Starsailor produces the kind of good ol'-fashioned rock exemplified by Marshall Crenshaw, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and many other '80s-era straight-up rock bands. Their music is warm and friendly, and--so I think, at least--should appeal to everyone from the most diehard classic rock fans to the most jaded indie rocker. Yet, for some reason, they just don't seem to be generating the buzz I believe they deserve.
I literally cannot express in words--any words, in any language--how much I love the Pulsars. I have to make up new words to describe them: montogrifforous, omnipopulastic, palladonic, robotastic, mechanosome....
I always love it when friends introduce me to music that I end up falling in love with. A fella by the name of Jason Rohm, whom we all called Junior a'cause of his initials bein' JR, introduced me to the Pulsars, and I will gladly take a bullet for that guy in return. We both worked as ad-designers at the Uniontown Herald-Standard, a newspaper now only a year or so away from being defunct. We worked in a windowless room rilled with the toxic emissions of the gigantic photographic processors that developed the negatives of the newspaper pages and and, even worse, had to suffer sonic torture in the form of either endless oldies or country music--because those were the only two radio stations we could pick up in our Zyklon-B-filled bunker. I like oldies, and I like a lot of country...but the oldies station played the exact same twenty songs on endless repeat every night, and the country station only played garbage like Toby Keith and fuckin'...I don't even know their names--those redneck jackasses in cowboy hats who claim to be country these days (note: fuck them). So JR and I would bring in CDs to play on our computers, and massive, noise-cancelling headphones to blow out the sussurus of bad country and coughing all around us.
One night, JR brought in this selftitled CD by the Pulsars. Now, Junior mostly listened to godawful punk and that pathetic punkified "ska" exemplified by shitheads like Reel Big Fish and The Mighty Mighty Asstones, so when he said, "Pegritz, you really need to listen to this CD--you'll flip," I thought he was tricking me. But he said he'd picked it up for fifty cents at a Record Exchange and really liked it...but, more importantly, he thought I would like it even more.
So I gave it a listen.
And startled everyone in the office maybe, like, five times by shouting out "THAT'S MY MOTHERFUCKING JAM!" or "THIS IS THE COLLEST SHIT I'VE EVER HEARD!" whenever an awesome song came on. And there isn't a single non-awesome song on this entire album.
I'll write more about who the Pulsars are and why they're so great later, but for the moment, let's just focus on the song linked above: "Tunnel Song." If you live in Pittsburgh, you can find hundreds of Pulsars CDs at the Record Exchanges and other used-record shops because Almo Sounds, the label that released it, sent a hundred billion of them to Pittsburgh radio stations and DJs simply because of this particular songs, which opens with, "Pittsburgh's got a real cool tunnel / Pittsburgh's got a tunnel through a mountain." I advise you, if you do not have this CD and you live in Pittsburgh, get it--it'll be the best fitty cents you'll ever spend.
The song is pure early '80s New Wave mixed with a little bit of modern production. Let's see what we got here....Driving disco-beat/Gang-of-Four drums? Check. Throbbing FM-synthesis bassline? Check. Simple but awesome guitar chords? Chickity-Check. And vocals about how fucking cool tunnels are? Oh, HELL YEAH, check! This is one of those songs that revel in its stupid, nerdy, angular, awkward simplicity--much like something by Wall of Voodoo or Flying Lizards, but less goofy. The lyrics of this song are so simple as to be childish, but that's what makes them so great. We're not talking about "For What It's Worth" or "The Times They Are A-Changin'" here--this is a song about how cool tunnels are...and only post-punk/New Wave could ever truly take such subject matter, wrap it up in an awesome dance beat and robotic bassline and epic guitars and make it sound like a statement about the fate of the entire universe. This song is so catchy the CDC has cultures of it growing in their highest-level contain labs....
Which is why it's a criminal shame that the Pulsars are almost completely unknown save to New Wave fanatics like me. This is a band that demands the love of all those who lived through the '80s or wish they had. And guess what? You can get this CD for as little as ONE FRIGGIN' PENNY at the Amazon.com link above! Seriously. Stop screwing around and just go buy this album. Now. Do it now--you can open up the link in another tab while the song is playing. Jesus christ, quit fucking around and DO IT ALREADY!
99% of what is called "Indie Rock" is complete bullshit. Some of it is, nonetheless, very listenable and, at times, even interesting bullshit...but there's a level of pomposity and snarkiness-for-the-sake-of-snarkiness-alone inherent in the genre--and, more notably, in its critics (I'm looking at my arch-nemesis, Pitchfork.com, here)--that makes the entire effot and its hipster devotees seem like that bunch of perfectly-understood but self-misunderstood geeks in highschool who think that the art and literature they consume are The Best Things In The World simply because no one else gets into it (even though, most of the time, other people would love it, too, if only they knew it was around).
Death Cab For Cutie were, for a time, the very apotheosis of indie rock. They were mopey gods who could do no wrong. That's about the extent of what I know about them. Honestly. For years, I thought they were a piss-poor emo band (as all emo bands are) because of their ridiculous name...but then I heard this one particular song, "Lightness," from their Transatlanticism album. And I was sold.
But only on Transatlanticism. Of course, as I'm an insane music collector, I went out and scrounged up every disk and/or MP3 of their work to date that I could find...and I discovered that, really, Transatlanticism is their only truly great album. The production is great on all their work, and previous albums such as their first album Something About Planes and later work We Have The Facts And We're Voting Yes (not linked because, really, you don't need them) are...well, they're okay--they're all very listenable, friendly, warm and welcoming albums full of songs that all sound exactly the same to me, but there's nothing special about them. You can hear scads of potential in them, though. Death Cab's first three bands are chock full of "If only..." moments. If only they focused a little more on catchy melodies here....If only they reigned back Ben Gibbard's whininess and focused on making their songs a little more diverse....
Well, they did so on Transatlanticism, and "Lightness" is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the standout track on the album.
The song is almost spooky in its minimalism--drums (in 6/8-time!), droning synths, piano, vocals and gentle guitar accents. The lyrics are occasionally idiotic ("Your brain is the dam and I am the fish who can't reach the core"?! What the fuck?) but occasionally sublime ("Instincts are misleading--you shouldn't think what you're feeling. They don't tell you what you know you should want"), and those moments of sublimity are horripilificating. The song truly sounds lonely, but not in a cartoonish sense: it truly feels lost. The melody feels exhausted, too. All in all, the song is full a prime example of how "space" in music--i.e., not crowding every second with piles of notes--can make for a much more powerful piece of music; see Pink Floyd's "Us and Them" for another excellent example. The song is stripped-down yet still very enveloping--the droning bass synth and atmospheric sample loops create a cool, dark fog in which the other instruments, and Gibbard's crystal-clear voice, pass like the lights of slow-moving cars.
The first time I heard this song was at a club, and it was great to dance to (slowly, because I was pretty goddamn drunk by the time it came on)...but this song is really meant for intimate home-listening: just you, your media player, and four walls (and maybe some light) to contain you along with the music. There's definitely a lightness to the song--the lightness of mystery; the spinny helium-headed feeling that any good ethereal melody will produce.
Death Cab For Cutie never again wrote an album as great as Transatlanticism...but their later works--especially their latest album, 2008's Narrow Stairs--are all a lot better than the stuff that came before Transatlanticism. And I think a big reason for that is that the band "broke out" of the confines of the indie rock genre cage by becoming Super-Popular. Now, most of the time, becoming Super-Popular will ruin a band because once you've taken a Major Label's dick in your mouth you have to focus on sales raher than music and, as a result, your music is going to suffer. But in the case of Death Cab, I think the sudden exposure of their breakthrough proved a good thing for them AND for the indie rock world, in that it showed that the only real difference between "indie" rock and regular rock is the word "indie." Good music is good music, whether it's underground or on the front page of Rolling Stone. Sometimes working to genre expectations, as Death Cab clearly was in their first three albums, can be just as confining as writing for a Major Label A&R agent's sales forecast. At least Death Cab had the ability to break out of one set of chains without immediately trading them for another. Kudos, guys. That's a hard thing to do, and I give you a lot of credit for you. It actually made you a better band.
But still, nothing's as great as "Lightness." I could listen to this song a thousand times in a row (and have).
