Indie

What a difference 25 years can make. In 1992, the American alt-rock movement arguably reached its zenith: It had become big enough to earn major-label attention, but hadn’t yet been corrupted by its exposure to the mainstream. The gods of grunge were walking the earth but so were the power-poppers, sadcore kings, lo-fi upstarts, and others. A quarter-century later, some of them have departed this earthly plane, but most of them are still active and making music that’s a far cry from the sounds that helped them ascend to the top of the alt-rock heap back in the early ‘90s.When Pavement were putting the lo-fi movement on the map with 1992’s Slanted and Enchanted, it would have been tough to predict that Stephen Malkmus would one day unleash an 11-minute cover of a Grateful Dead tune. The hooky pop perfection of The Lemonheads’ “It’s A Shame About Ray” doesn’t exactly set you up for Evan Dando’s take on country-folk troubadour Townes Van Zandt’s doomy “Waiting Around to Die.” Nor could you draw a straight line from Chris Cornell’s wailing on Soundgarden’s post-metal monster “Rusty Cage” to the epic, romantic balladry of his 2017 single “The Promise” (the track that sadly proved to be his swan song). The latest output from the likes of The Afghan Whigs (pictured) and Mark Lanegan is a complete 180 from the sounds of their salad days, but there’s an undeniable artistic maturation at work there.The alt-rock class of ‘92 might seem different from what you remember (if you’re even old enough to remember), but they’re still at it today, and they’ve still got something to say. Here’s a snapshot of what some of them have been up to lately, paired with tracks from a quarter-century ago.

While little on this playlist would otherwise be deemed "folk," everything here retains that genres elegant simplicity—all shot through a moody ambient soundscape. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver is the absolute king of this sparse, lonely sound, ever-enhancing it through velvety guitars, samples, and fragmented beats, while his cohort James Blake creates such fragile atmospheres from a whole different angle: bass music and hip-hop. But they blend seamlessly together (just see their "I Need a Forest Fire" collaboration), alongside Radiohead (who can lift you into a dream-like state like no other), Daughter (whose hushed electro-folk is absolutely gut-wrenching), and a few of their most notable IDM and ambient influences.

As evidenced by the diverse vibes of her spectacular first three albums, Angel Olsen has excellent taste. Her sense of sound and space is preternatural. This “Sounds of the Summer” playlist for Jagjaguwar offers a unique window into her thinking, collecting a mix of breezy tracks that have inspired her. “Starlight” by Pure X is a hazy beach jam featuring shiny, tremolo-soaked guitars, while the Rolling Stones’ classic “Moonlight Mile” gives a sense of the composed pensiveness that lazy vacation days necessitate. The playlist takes a romantic, serious turn with Donny Hathaway’s “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know,” pointing toward the sentimental reflection that has always haunted Olsen’s music.

Time to set aside popular jams like Merriweather Post Pavilion and Tomboy and instead wander into the outer limits of the Animal Collective galaxy. It’s there that you’ll find some of the foursome’s most innovative solo stabs, side projects, and remixes. A personal fave is Jane, Noah Lennox’s short-lived band with Scott Mou. The duo’s Berserker album, from 2005, is nothing less than a pot of slowly bubbling brain juice. Nearly as absorbing are the string of records Dave Portner and Black Dice’s Eric Copeland released under their Terrestrial Tones moniker. Not surprisingly, this playlist contains lengthy stretches of psychedelic drift-n-moan, though don’t be surprised by the occasional mutant dance groove or blast of static. Unpredictability has always been the name of the game for Panda Bear, Avey Tare, Deakin, and Geologist.

Arcade Fire’s two guiding principles of late can be boiled down to “we are cool and clever” and “the world is bad.” Their new Spotify mix, currently titled “Infinite Playlist — Start Making Money,” integrates these two ideas pretty thoroughly. With this new feature—surely to be received as a marketing ploy of some sort—the band wants us to know how cool they are by recommending some cool music that they like, but they also want to give us “everything now” in a form that we cannot possibly consume or comprehend: a playlist of (almost) “infinite content.”For one, Arcade Fire keep changing the title of this playlist. At one point it was called “Infinite Playlist — Greatest Hits of 2004” (even though its songs weren’t from that year). At another point it was “Songs For Reading The Morning Paper,” and then “Infinite Playlist — Disco Is Not A Bad Word.” Perhaps by the time you read this, a new tweet from the band will have signified yet another title—or maybe they will have deleted the playlist entirely. Either way, this 541-track-long (at the time of this article’s publication) playlist contains entire albums by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kate Bush, The Modern Lovers, Aphex Twin, Lou Reed, Charles Mingus, Wu-Tang Clan, Arthur Russell, and more (i.e., Very Cool musicians who make Very Cool music). Perhaps the keys to unraveling all the secrets of Arcade Fire’s latest album Everything Now—and also, maybe, our own society—can be found in this playlist, and I hope that whatever person has 36 hours to spare won’t hesitate to let us know what those secrets are. The problem is, much like their recent album, Arcade Fire buries any potentially nuanced point about our culture and its discontents under a suffocating blanket of irony and distance. Arcade Fire are indeed very cool and smart. Setting Metallica’s Master of Puppets between Neil Young’s Live Rust and The Louvin Brothers’ Satan Is Real is truly a masterful postmodern playlist move, and hopefully one that will allow us to simultaneously extrapolate important comments about our culture and critique ourselves as listeners in a meaningful way. Except that it probably won’t, because Arcade Fire get the wires crossed again, setting out to critique our culture’s “infinite content” by submitting an unlistenable playlist. In the end, Arcade Fire do the music a disservice by keeping the focus on Arcade Fire and overwhelming the good ideas that the playlist contains.

Kevin Parker told The Guardian last year that he didn’t think there was such a thing as an Australian psych scene. It seemed an oddly Trumpian (i.e., easily disproven) thing for the Tame Impala mastermind to say, given the amount of evidence to the contrary oozing out of Oz in recent years.Then again, musicians are always wary of convenient labels from the media; being lumped together with a bunch of other bands whom they may not know personally, and who play music that may only be tangentially related to their own bag. From Parker’s perspective, the only community that he can see the links in is the one he helped foster in Perth, which eventually yielded a series of bands and projects with overlapping memberships, who all share a taste for brain-melting acid rock, florid Syd Barrett songcraft, headphone-ready atmospheres, and the hard, Angus Young-like edge that’s fundamental to Aussie rock.Though Tame Impala and Pond have risen the highest in terms of international profiles, they keep close ties to the likes of Mink Mussel Creek, The Growl, and GUM. Over in Melbourne, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have their own posse of like-minded travelers, such as The Murlocs, Pipe-eye, and The Babe Rainbow. Elsewhere on the continent, there are more clusters of eager young freaks, as well as institutions that support their activities, like the Sydney Psych Fest.Whether all this glorious Technicolor weirdness constitutes a scene is up for debate, but it most definitely is a “thing.” What matters is the abundance of inventive music that transforms the gnarliest of ‘60s/’70s psych-pop and rock elements into something vivid and vital—that’s certainly the case for Pond’s giddy new album, The Weather. Here’s a selection of songs by young Australian bands who may not constitute a scene per se, but who share an eagerness to take you on a trip.

On their latest release, Philly indie-rock rebels Beach Slang adopt a new sound—and a new name. The self-titled EP from “Quiet Slang” sees frontman James Alex stripping down a couple of Beach Slang’s raucous anthems into acoustic elegies, alongside faithfully hushed covers of Big Star’s “Thirteen” and The Replacements’ “Androgynous.” For his Dowsers playlist, he extends the quiet-is-the-new-loud concept to spotlight other mellow favorites.

This playlists/post was originally supposed to highlight the Shoegaze Love Songs station from Pandora, as that’s a pretty great concept. Shoegaze, a genre of rock that sprang up from the UK in the late ‘80s and sought to negotiate the distance between Phil Spector’s wall of sound and the Velvet Underground’s columns of noise, may have ostensibly made love as its central lyrical focus, but it was a opaque, narcotic and disheveled take on the subject. Saying that shoegaze bands made love songs is like saying that Master P made rap songs about starting small businesses. It’s true, but it misses the point. Still, it’s interesting to look at it from that perspective, and it would’ve been the subject of this blog post if not for the fact that Pandora is a radio service and the user is unable to view tracklisting. For a high-concept, edutainment that seems like an achilles heel. But we love shoegaze, and we hope you do (or will) as well. Here’s a good beginners guide from Ella Fraser-Thoms at the Guardian.

Mere minutes before sitting down to write this post, Dais Records announced its plan to drop reissues of Psychic TV’s Pagan Day and Allegory & Self—stone-cold classics of ’80s psychedelia—in July. This is exactly the kind of record nerd–salivating news I’ve come to expect from label co-founders Ryan Martin and Gibby Miller (who started the operation in 2007). On what feels like a weekly basis nowadays, they revive some long-forgotten synth/ambient masterpiece or a vintage industrial jam that’s exquisitely dark and dreary. If you’ve never soaked up Annie Anxiety’s Soul Possession, a fringe art-pop album from the post-punk era, prepare to have your skull cap unscrewed and brain turned upside down. (Seriously—“Turkey Girl” manages to sound like outsider hip-hop recorded inside an intestinal tract.) Same goes for Hunting Lodge’s Will. It may have been forged in the raging fires of Michigan’s ’80s industrial scene, yet its hell-encrusted hypnotism, stuttering bass thuds, and minimalist dread is so damn prescient, it may as well have been recorded yesterday.Dais isn’t just an archival label, however. In the spring of 2017, the pair unleashed The Gag File, American noise artist Aaron Dilloway’s highly anticipated follow-up to 2011’s Modern Jester. Easily a contender for experimental album of the year, it employs murky, surrealist electronics and violently contorted samples to capture the fear and loathing suffusing our Trumplandia nightmare. In addition to Dilloway, the Dais catalog features churning brutality from hardcore-troublemakers-turned-EBM-fist-pumpers Youth Code, and Sightings, the most important noise-rock band of the 21st century.But not everything Dais puts out seeks to obliterate eardrums: on top of their taste for the ugly and abrasive, they have a deep love for the beautiful and sublime. To date, they’ve released two albums from Scout Paré-Phillips (pictured), a gothic singer/songwriter whose imposingly austere sound falls somewhere between folk music and art rock. At first blush, Drab Majesty’s gauzy and undulating darkwave feels worlds removed from Paré-Phillips’ guitar-driven theater, but when you sit down and spend some quality time with the former’s Careless and The Demonstration, it becomes apparent both explorers share a love for intricate songwriting with lyrics balancing the cryptic with the emotional. Quite honestly, most modern darkwave artists don’t even come close to touching Drab Majesty in terms of compositional originality. Then again, most modern experimental labels don’t even come close to touching Dais in terms of quality, so it’s a perfect fit.

Elvis Costello famously opined that once rock ‘n’ roll dropped the “‘n’ roll” part of the equation and just became popularly known as “rock,” something vital was lost—all “the sex and swing,” as he put it. A similar observation could be made about indie rock, which has, over time, largely shed the “rock” half of the term and is know just casually referred to as “indie.” For old-school underground denizens, that minor semantic shift is indicative of a greater identity crisis: A sound that, 30 years ago, represented an abrasive affront to and stern ideological rebuke of mainstream pop has become so diluted, sanitized, and co-opted that many of its modern-day adherents are pretty much indistinguishable (musically and beard-wise) from the ‘80s dad-rockers that indie rock initially set out to overthrow. However, seen from a different angle, indie rock’s evolution into “indie” isn’t so much indicative of what the genre has lost as what it’s gained: an explosion of aesthetics that has opened up wide swaths of the underground for artists other than scruffy, wool-toqued white dudes with guitars and fuzzboxes.At this point, indie has become so sonically eclectic that finding commonality among the countless artists huddled under its umbrella requires some Cliff Claven-in-Final Jeopardy logic. But amid the buzzing, infinitely-tunnelled ant farm that the underground has become, the 100 artists in our Best of 2018 indie revue rise above by exuding a certain fearlessness, be it a willingness to lay their eccentricities, vulnerabilities and peculiar curiosities bare; a burning need to speak truth to power; or an unfettered eagerness to blow it all up—expectations, traditional song structures, the world itself.That restless spirit manifested itself in all sorts of wonderful ways this past year. It’s in the ripped-off-BandAid lyricism of Snail Mail and the rousing motorik protest-punk of IDLES. It’s Jeff Rosenstock racing through the most epic, exhilarating song ever about paralyzing ennui (“USA”). It’s U.S. Girls reminding us that the problem with American politics goes way deeper than 45 on “M.A.H.” It’s Khruangbin turning Middle Eastern surf-funk into the new psychedelia on “Maria También” and Beijing duo Gong Gong Gong administering hypno-therapy via primitive drone blues on “Siren.” It’s Let’s Eat Grandma setting out to make a bright synth-pop record and ending up with the dark prog album that Lorde has yet to grace us with. It’s Father John Misty stepping out of his head and showing us his heart on “Just Dumb Enough to Try.”It’s former Dirty Beaches drifter Alex Zhang Hungtai closing his latest record with a 20-minute church-organ-summoned slow-motion apocalypse. It’s Sandro Perri opening his with a 24-minute electro koan (“In Another Life”). It’s Zeal & Ardor welding chain-gang chants with heavy-metal muscle to forge a modern soul music. It’s former Pipette Gwenno using her blissed-out psych-pop reveries to resuscitate the lost language of Cornish. It’s the reformed Daughters rendering their brutal industrial post-punk with heavenly grandeur on “Satan in the Wait.” It’s Deafheaven making arena rock for burning hockey rinks (“Honeycomb”). It’s MorMor turning a bedroom beatmaking exercise into a personal exorcism on “Heaven’s Only Wishful.” It’s lapsed hardcore crew Fucked Up dropping some E and stepping onto dancefloor on “Dose Your Dreams” (and going ‘til the break of dawn with their promising New Order-esque offshoot Jade Hairpins).It’s Kaia Kater and Odetta Hartman uprooting folk music from the earth and letting it drift into the great beyond. It’s nêhiyawak addressing Indigenous cultural erasure through spoken-word poetry and scabrous shoegaze on “page.” It’s Tommy and the Commies making the passing of Pete Shelley a little easier to take with the Buzzcockerific “Devices.” It’s the traditionally sardonic Stephen Malkmus delivering a poignant state-of-the-union on “Middle America.” It’s the outsized swagger and ardor of nouveau gender-agnostic glam phenoms like Hubert Lenoir, Ezra Furman, Art D’Ecco, and Christine and the Queens. It’s Kurt Vile achieving peak Kurt Viledom on the nine eternally zen minutes of “Bassackwards.” It’s Japanese tricksters CHAI making manic roller-derby disco like an old issue of Grand Royal come to life. It’s surly survivors like Mudhoney and Jon Spencer proving there’s no expiration date on good ol’ punk-spewed haterade. And there’s something equally special to be savored in the other 70 tracks featured here.Sure, “indie” may no longer represent the ideological badge of honor it once was. But from a pure aesthetic-exploration standpoint, its defining value—independence—has never felt truer.