Serving Notice

[douglas martini]

and i think if you're going to do weird shit like stir gravel in your driveway or record running microwaves and turn it into some crazy drone [points at self], it should at the very least be somewhat melodic [or as melodic as you can make that sorta thing, i guess] within the context of the song, and not just doing weird shit for the sake of it. but i guess something like that will always be tossed off as "art for art's sake."

paragraph detracted. i realized that the reason i started putting noise in my own songs in the first place is because noise makes nearly everything sound more exciting.

[elpollodiablo]

Or bewildering and ponderous, depending on who you are

[alistarr*]

i can't believe all you all talking about how much indie sucks lately and it's in a real rut. if you can't find any indie to get excited about right now then that's your fault for not caring enough to look for it properly, not indie's fault for attracting pretenders by the bucketload in lamentable addition to the great artists who're still there, old and new. i guess what i'm saying is that there is still just as much awesomeness, as salkin red's post righteously attempts to convey.

none of which has anything to do with field recordings anyway.

[jebreject]

There's plenty of great underground music. Indie, as a genre, though?

[elpollodiablo]

i can't believe all you all talking about how much indie sucks lately and it's in a real rut. if you can't find any indie to get excited about right now then that's your fault for not caring enough to look for it properly, not indie's fault for attracting pretenders by the bucketload in lamentable addition to the great artists who're still there, old and new. i guess what i'm saying is that there is still just as much awesomeness, as salkin red's post righteously attempts to convey.

none of which has anything to do with field recordings anyway.

I would refer you to my sig file

[alistarr*]

There's plenty of great underground music. Indie, as a genre, though?

oh yeah, because this is a new problem.

[Andrew_TSKS]

seriously, dude, what's some stuff that qualifies as indie rock that you're really into right now? make some recommendations!

[Salkin Red]

Well, Future Of The Left I've mentioned before, the new De Rosa record will, no doubt, be awesome. I'm pretty sure the new Notwist will at least be a bit more than decent, Malcolm Middleton is on top his  game lately (as is Aidan Moffat, but 'I guess that singing beer bottle openers and spoken word albums don't really ualify as "indie rock"), that Dawn Landes record is also pretty damn ace (although, again, you might argue that it's more folk than indie but then again you'd be worng if you did so), the new Motorpsycho record is the best thing they've released in years and years (there's no rule that indie bands have to be new to b exciting, see also the Dinosaur Jr reunion record), the last Stars record is way brilliant, and ever so on.
So where does that lead us? I guess that all in all "indie" as a label for a genre is pretty useless. And that it really depends on your percepetion whether we are living at a bad time for that music, whatever it is.

[Andrew_TSKS]

interesting. i would not in the least bit consider future of the left an indie rock band. to me they're punk rock, or at least postpunk, if anything. wouldn't consider dinosaur jr indie rock either, though i have a hard time defining that genre that they come from, the whole post-hardcore mid-80s noisy guitar stuff. i realize that it's exactly what lou barlow was referencing when he wrote "gimme indie rock", but to me none of that stuff has ever been indie rock. maybe alternative rock? my friend eric calls it "proto-grunge", but i'm uncomfortable with that label myself.

everything else you mentioned there, i haven't heard. except stars--i heard "set yourself on fire" years ago, and it wasn't bad, but it wasn't compelling enough to bring me back for a second listen. which tends to be my problem with indie rock in general these days. it's pleasant and inoffensive but not the least bit exciting. mediocre just isn't good enough for me, though.

i'll have to listen to notwist, de rosa, motorpsycho and malcolm middleton before i'll be qualified to comment on any of them.

[Salkin Red]

But so here we are, hating on indie rock (even my favorite Mailorder is blogging it: http://www.normanrecords.com/blog/?p=125) and I'm getting more and more lost what it's supposed to be, music-wise. So Dinosaur isn't indie but Sebadoh would be? Mind, I'm not trying to fire up the discussion or anything, I'm just baffled that there seems to ba a general sentiment at the moment that says: "This thing that I can't really define isn't what it used to be." (Apparently, sometimes combined with "And in case a band is good it's probably not part of that thing")
Maybe "indie" is a more strict qualifier in the US than it is in Europe, though?

[Salkin Red]

(Also, to make matters even more confusing, the Future Of The Left record is in the "indie" section of my local punk rock store, whereas, for instance, all Promise Ring records are still filed as "hardcore". And you need to be from the Lookout!-school of music (or german) to actually be filed as punk rock.
Random as this may seem it does influence the way I shop for things and, so, the way I think about categories.

[alex]

I sort of wonder whether the dividing line in this discussion is not so much between people who like 'indie' stuff that came out in the recent past and those who do not, but between those who operate under a definition of indie roughly as 'guitar-based music that lacks energy and interesting ideas', and those who, well, don't. (Just from this thread, it would seem that the former definition is more popular in the US then in Europe.) To me, 'indie' is basically the catch-all term for any kind of music that deals in or remains close to the pop song format, minus the kind of stuff that is played (or sounds like it was made in the sole hope of being played) on a top40 radio station. Future of the Left and Dinosaur Jr. are very, very, very much indie to me. And I obviously don't think indie is in a particularly bad shape at the moment, then.

[elpollodiablo]

Maybe you European cats just haven't gotten sick of it yet

Just throwin that out there

[alex]

Maybe our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can have good indie music when there's not evidence of that in their local scenes. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the US, the music scene has been gone now for 15 years and nothing's replaced it. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these music scenes are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to their soul classics or antipathy to indie bands or anti-indie sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

edited for repetition, and then for more accurate personalised parody

[alex]

That didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped, but whatever. edit: At least the basic message should get through, which is that you Americans are too ignorant to realise that you should be embracing indie music, and everything will be good.

[ellaguru]

Gotta say I find distinctions in genre not to be not at all useful in terms of pretty much anything I want from music. Feel free to disregard my earlier defense of current indie music, as I have no interest in finding out if any of the stuff I want to defend is indie or not.

[Salkin Red]

But still, maybe the US-folks are really missing something (speaking of missing something: the The National record = Awesome!) that was never here in the first place? Or the other way around?

[elpollodiablo]

I'm gonna apologize for baiting you guys, cuz like I said upthread I don't really even have any business being in this discussion. The music probably hasn't really changed that much, I just think it's boring as shit now. Not you, it's me, etc, etc. I love you but I've chosen soul records.

[Andrew_TSKS]

first of all, yes, sebadoh would fit under my definition of indie rock, while dinosaur jr wouldn't. in case you haven't noticed, those two bands sound very, very different.

second of all, i'm directly contrasting a scene that in the 1990s produced bands like unrest, seam, velocity girl, pavement, sebadoh, superchunk, yo la tengo, etc. with a scene that now seems most adept at producing unexciting crap like tapes n' tapes, the arcade fire, the decemberists, the shins, the wrens, the national, yawn yawn yawn. none of that stuff is particularly offensive, and i like some of the songs by some of those bands, but they are just UNEXCITING. they don't keep my interest, i don't think of their music when it's not playing, and when i hear people say anything particularly positive about said bands, i always wonder where their enthusiasm comes from. truth to tell, i'm even starting to cool off on the new pornographers (although i think this may be because their most recent album just wasn't up to snuff). i just don't hear anything that gets me enthusiastic from the indie rock scene anymore. these days i'm a lot more excited about emo and alt-rock bands. and by the way, the promise ring? emo band. which, granted, makes them halfway between hardcore and indie rock, but they're definitely closer to indie than future of the left, no matter what any euro record store might think.

[lastclearchance]

N.B.: This is phrased as questions to Andrew but I welcome anyone's answers/theories.

This is sort of a subject-changing question to ask, but what did the folks in the "1990s scene bands" do before they formed bands/while they were in bands? How did they support themselves/were they college educated/did they come to these musical locales (for lack of a better way of describing the geographical spaces in which the scenes grew), and if so when? The answers to these questions have been sort of key for me in formulating an understanding of current bands, especially those who identify as Brooklyn bands. Also would you include Band of Horses in your "yawn list" and if so is there a reason worth noting that they didn't spring immediately to mind (as they would have, for example, for me)?

[Sing The Children Over]

Just as an addon to the above. What's meant by a scene anyhow? Is it a group of people who go tot eh same shows? or listen to the same music? or try to form a community based around love of that music? Are you part of the scene if you don't go to the shows but listen to the music and dress "indie"?

Curious. Always thrown the words about but never actually thought about what the combination of "indie" and "scene" meant.

Also, is indie what we used to call alternative?

[Almanzo]

"Indie Rock" is a very specific genre of music that existed in the nineties. It no longer exists and it's silly to talk about "indie" as though it is in fact still a genre. Joanna Newsome, Carissa's Weird Band of Horses, the Decemberists, Earth, Why?, Jens Lekman, LCD Soundsystem, and the Animal Collective are not a genre.

[Almanzo]

first of all, yes, sebadoh would fit under my definition of indie rock, while dinosaur jr wouldn't. in case you haven't noticed, those two bands sound very, very different.

second of all, i'm directly contrasting a scene that in the 1990s produced bands like unrest, seam, velocity girl, pavement, sebadoh, superchunk, yo la tengo, etc. with a scene that now seems most adept at producing unexciting crap like tapes n' tapes, the arcade fire, the decemberists, the shins, the wrens, the national, yawn yawn yawn. none of that stuff is particularly offensive, and i like some of the songs by some of those bands, but they are just UNEXCITING. they don't keep my interest, i don't think of their music when it's not playing, and when i hear people say anything particularly positive about said bands, i always wonder where their enthusiasm comes from.

I agree with this a hundred percent, and I always just come back to the punk/post-punk ETHOS if nothing else is what was driving that first wave of indie rock. I mean, the feeling and vibe and drive behind something like Unrest or Beat Happening is light years away from that of something like the National or the Shins. I'm fond of calling modern independent music "lifestyle music" - it's basically tame, polite mainstream middle-class music that springs from and supports middle-class values and priorities that just happens to be on a smaller-than-big-three label.

truth to tell, i'm even starting to cool off on the new pornographers (although i think this may be because their most recent album just wasn't up to snuff). i just don't hear anything that gets me enthusiastic from the indie rock scene anymore.

The fact that the New Pornos have been anything more than a one-off meeting of the minds project, MUCH LESS a band with, what, four full-lengths now?, is a major head-scratcher for me. That first record is brilliant, and I think all of the rest have been slop. You don't see the Corn Sisters on their fifth album. Deluxxe Folk Implosion is not releasing a DVD boxed set later this year. Jale is not on year 11 of a sprawling career.

All I listen to these days is Bob Lind and Judee Sill and Husker Du. I have no heart or stomach for the stuff that is out there right now sustaining careers, making lifestyles, and paying bills. It should be harder than it is for bands like The National.

[jebreject]

I always just come back to the punk/post-punk ETHOS if nothing else is what was driving that first wave of indie rock. I mean, the feeling and vibe and drive behind something like Unrest or Beat Happening is light years away from that of something like the National or the Shins.

qfmft

Also, Andrew and Almanzo agreeing? WTF! And me, too? OMG

[jebreject]

And I think here we've finally hit on the dividing line. Indie rock, to people like me, and Andrew, and Almanzo, apparently, carries inside it the spirit of punk rock, and that's what makes it special. Now, clearly I don't have a problem with music that doesn't have that spirit, but it's a little disheartening to have all these bands that are purportedly carrying on this tradition, and really it's complete separate from it. I mean, not that it's really any different than any other genre that's found itself suddenly marketable.