Fluxblog 530: indie music, 2008-2010
17 classics by Bat for Lashes, Animal Collective, Vampire Weekend, Grizzly Bear, Phoenix, Spoon, St. Vincent, Caribou, Neko Case, and more.
I was listening to one of my old playlists, THE NEW INDIE 2008-2010, and thinking about how enough time has passed that it’s obvious this is undoubtedly one of the peak eras for indie/alt music. This time lines up with when I’d become a firmly established critic – I was regularly contributing to the Associated Press and Pitchfork at this point – and also probably the worst and most angst-ridden period of my life. I now personally connect this music with a strange mix of turbulent emotions and a sense of professional pride.
If you haven’t heard THE NEW INDIE 2008-2010, check it out. The rest of this issue collects posts about songs from this era from my archives. All song links go to YouTube videos.
[Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
My Blonde Curls Slice Through Your Heart
Bat For Lashes “Siren Song”
There are two ways to be emotionally devastated by this song: You can either relate to the character singing the song, and identify with the self-loathing that comes out of the conflict of wanting true love and affection despite a restlessness that makes it impossible to commit for long, or you could see yourself as this woman’s victim, and imagine this horrible bait-and-switch scenario as a bleak romantic inevitability for yourself. For me, it is the latter, and the thing that guts me most is that this isn’t some manipulative, creepy, sociopath thing — she feels sincere, sweet, genuine love for this man, but cannot stop herself from being selfish or self-destructive. To a certain extent, this is self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps on both sides — one person convinced that they can’t control their impulses no matter how unhappy it makes them, and the other no doubt feeling as though they’re just not good enough and unwilling to fully buy into this whole “it’s not you, it’s me” line, no matter how many times she swears that she is evil.
[August 13th, 2009]
I Keep No Company
Deerhunter “Helicopter”
The liner notes of Halcyon Digest preface the lyrics of “Helicopter” with an excerpt written by Dennis Cooper that provides context for the words. Basically, the song is about a young gay Russian boy named Dima who fell into pornography and prostitution, and eventually was sold into sexual slavery to an organized crime figure. His ultimate fate is unknown, but one account had him dying after being pushed out of a helicopter over a remote forest in northern Russia. Anyway, it’s very hard to unlearn that context — suddenly every line of the song becomes unbearably sad, even the bits that were already painfully melancholy. The music is gorgeous, one of the most brilliantly crafted pieces of Bradford Cox’s career to date, and it perfectly conveys this feeling of frailty and powerlessness, and total doom. When Cox sings “now they are through with me,” it’s sweet and fragile and utterly devoid of hope. It’s terminal passivity.
[October 18th, 2010]
Coming Through The Eye Of The Storm
The Kills “Last Day Of Magic”
The Kills specialize in conveying romance and desperation, and perhaps no other song in their catalog does that trick as well as “Last Day Of Magic.” It’s the sound of real-life drama playing out simultaneously in one’s head as a story; at least on some level it’s about an inability to shake off the expectations built into us by fiction. It’s not a critique of narrative, though — the Kills embrace artifice, and shun the mundane. In their world, there’s nothing worse than a lack of drama, and a life without romance is no life at all.
[May 2nd, 2008]
Stop Daydreaming, Dude
Animal Collective “What Would I Want? Sky”
The first three minutes of “What Would I Want? Sky” is a clattering big-beat reverie that simulates the feeling of drifting off into thought while the world is a busy mess all around you. The second half of the song reckons with that state, with Avey Tare questioning his emotions and attempting to snap himself out of a melancholy haze. It’s not a song about sadness, though — it’s about attention and awareness, and a desire for focused thought in a head full of distractions. The shift from one section to the next doesn’t usher in a sense of clarity, but the song takes on a firmer shape while retaining an ethereal density. The vocal arrangement mirrors the lyrical content nicely, as Avey’s confident, straightforward performance cuts through a Grateful Dead sample that seems to scroll through the track on a horizontal line and a harmony part from Panda Bear that gently floats upward on vertical trajectory. The unlikely harmony seems to be part of the point: It’s extremely difficult to get our minds to be entirely focused, but we can at least try to keep our thoughts balanced, and to have them work together rather than dissolve into a distracting cacophony of emotions, concepts, and digressions.
[November 30th, 2009]
A Pair Of Mirrors That Are Facing One Another
Vampire Weekend “White Sky”
“White Sky” is a stroll through uptown Manhattan, taking in the art and architecture that is available to everyone while quietly pondering the barriers between the public domain and the private property of the powerful and wealthy. The tension is faint, but it’s there: You walk through this area, always dimly aware of the immense luxury just out of view, and all the places where you don’t belong that share a border with the common culture. The boundaries are at once glaringly obvious and weirdly invisible; security guards and doormen are merely a second line of defense after the sheer banality of class stratification.
Resentment is usually mitigated by aspiration — you can get a contact high off the big money and high culture; you can dream of ways of insinuating yourself into this world. In the final verse of the song, Ezra Koenig’s protagonist pictures herself in this context:
look up at the buildings
imagine who might live there
imagining your Wolfords in a ball upon the sink there
I love that last line; it’s so specific and loaded with implication. You can read this a few ways, but it makes the most sense to me if she’s only just a visitor, her access granted by personal connection and sexual availability. It sounds cynical, but it doesn’t have to be. There are certainly worse ways of attaining social mobility.
[June 3rd, 2010]
The Jaws Of Defeat
Marnie Stern “Ruler”
“What I need now is a gut feeling to let me know.” Oh, tell me about it, Marnie. I know exactly how you feel. Especially right now.
Even the most relaxed moments of “Ruler” feel extremely urgent, in part because there’s always some bit of pulsating treble that implies the crackle of electricity, or some bit of anxiety in the back of your mind that keeps you from being still. The piece alternates between rapid-fire thoughts on the verses and a bolder, calmer chorus, and builds speed and intensity until it hits a bridge that seems to distill every feeling of panic and negativity into a concentrated dose, as if to flush out the toxins before moving on to a triumphant conclusion.
The beauty of this song — and really, most of Marnie Stern’s work — is how her arrangements feel out all sides of urgency and emotional overload, and she teeters on the brink of giddy excitement and mind-melting terror when faced with an uncertain future. Even still, her optimism consistently trumps her angst, and so more than anything, the music seems incredibly heroic as she storms into the unknown.
[September 9th, 2008]
I Still Remember The Day I Knew
Dum Dum Girls “Rest Of Our Lives”
“Rest Of Our Lives” is one of the best love songs I’ve heard in the past few years. It’s drowsy and dreamy, and sung mostly in sighs even as it hits its swooning peaks in the choruses. It’s basically a song about finding exactly the love that you had always dreamed of, and hoping to hold on to that comfort and stability forever. It’s a ’60s girl group pastiche, but there is not the faintest trace of irony or cynicism in the music, the melody, or the lyrics. It’s just aching, beautiful sincerity, and a sound that feels like innocence and true love. “Rest Of Our Lives” is almost overwhelming in its sweetness, but it’s not cloying, or just some girl bragging about her perfect relationship. To borrow some words from Sonic Youth, it feels like a wish coming true. It feels like angels dreaming of you.
[March 30th, 2010]
Everyone Looks Alive And Waiting
Dirty Projectors “Cannibal Resource”
Like many of the greatest album-opening tracks of all time, “Cannibal Resource” has the effect of making the listener feel as though they are passing through a portal and entering a new world. The distinct aesthetic of the band is quickly established, with each element of their style introduced in a way that is more inviting than confrontational. They are not holding anything back, but it is clear that this is meant to be ingratiating and pleasurable. Whereas previous Dirty Projectors music often reveled in its own strangeness, the music on Bitte Orca is matter-of-fact about its quirks and deliberately beautiful. This is incredibly confident art — thoughtful, considered, extremely controlled — but it is not sterile or overworked. Every moment of “Cannibal Resource” is flawless in its execution; every rhythmic shift, harmony, and guitar tone precisely calibrated to evoke color, optimism, and graceful movement. It sounds like a new world opening up around you, or perhaps more accurately, finding a new way of thinking about and seeing the world you already know. Every moment of the song feels like a personal revelation, and the moment when everything around you suddenly seems invested with a wonderful new meaning.
[June 10th, 2009]
Ink Up The Wound For A Crude Tattoo
Wild Beasts “Bed of Nails”
“Sensual” is a very tacky word, but in the very best way, it is appropriate for describing Wild Beasts’ third album Smother. The band’s previous records were more obvious in their charms, but this album is very subtle in its pleasures. It lures you in, it gradually seduces you with its luxurious, wonderfully complex melodies, rhythms and textures. Even more so than Two Dancers, Smother is a feast of elegantly crafted sounds. It feels wrong to try to pick this music apart on a technical level — this is such delicate, evocative stuff that it’d be a shame to spoil the magic.
As on the last two Wild Beasts records, the most striking element of the band is the contrast of singers Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming. This time around, Fleming’s voice conveys patient lust and vulnerability — he mainly sings about being broken and lost, and needing someone to fill a void within himself. Thorpe, the more flamboyant and operatic of the two, is the aggressor. He’s still obsessed with the grotesque aspects of masculinity and the primal, violent aspects of sex.
In “Bed of Nails,” the album’s finest song, he splits the difference between he and Fleming’s lyrical concerns and arrives at the thematic center of the record. Thorpe makes two allusions in this song: First, to Shakespeare’s mad, beautiful Ophelia, and then to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I’m especially fond of how he works in the latter. As the song reaches its climax, he characterizes the love between these two broken people as Frankenstein’s monster, i.e., when they come together, this awkward, strange creature comes to life.
[May 16th, 2011]
Bear My Body Aloft
Owen Pallett “Midnight Directives”
I listened to Owen Pallett’s new album Heartland at least five times through before ever coming across the phrase “ultra-violent farmer.” I appreciate Pallett’s sci-fi meta-fiction conceit, but at least early on, I find it difficult to pay much attention to his lyrical games when his arrangements are so dazzling on a purely musical level. “Midnight Directives” is an agile, flamboyant tune that builds from a hum to a symphonic sweep without losing an essential lightness. Pallett is working with a broad palette, but he’s a deliberate, decisive arranger, and he employs sound in a gestural manner that reminds me of the way great cartoonists imply a lot of information in simple, well-placed lines. Even without the high concept, this is incredibly ambitious pop music that deftly avoids the typical traps of symphonic indie music. [January 19th, 2010]
This is a brilliant composition, the sort of piece that is urgent in tone, yet reveals itself upon repeated listening. The melody swoops and soars, but its a rather chilly sort of bombast — it’s a drama of intense thought, not physicality. I find myself often rewinding and going back over that final climax in the vocal section, just before the instrumental resolution: “For a man can be bought, and a man can be sold / and the price of a hundred thousand unwatered souls…” In context, that bit sounds defiant, thrilling, and terrifying all at once. [July 15th, 2010]
Codes and Clues
St. Vincent “Just The Same But Brand New”
…and then, suddenly, you snap out of it. You’re still the same person, but everything in your head has shifted. You’re either new, or normal again. Same difference, maybe. You’re exactly like yourself, but as seen through someone else’s eyes. They forgive your flaws in ways that you cannot, and are far more generous in their estimation of your strengths. You’re skeptical, just a little bit, but willing to believe that they are right about you. It takes this enormous weight off of your shoulders, and with feet firmly on the ground, you nevertheless feel as though you’re light enough to just float away. You’re still the same, and the problems haven’t gone away, but you’re calm and assured. It’ll be okay.
[August 6th, 2009]
Far Too Many Years Of Her Life
Caribou “Odessa”
Dan Snaith’s style shifts considerably from album to album, but somehow he manages to have a consistent, identifiable core aesthetic. However, it’s not easy to explain what that aesthetic is — it’s something intuitive about his tones and song structures, and the way he balances an icy exterior with a subtle warmth. Andorra, his previous album as Caribou, was mostly spaced-out harmonic psychedelia, but this time around he has gone deep into an apparent Arthur Russell fixation. It’s in his voice, which has taken on a similar soft, sensitive affectation (you may also hear a bit of Erlend Øye in there), but more importantly, it’s in the music, which has absorbed the atmosphere and grooves of Russell’s disco work. It’s not a total clone of Russell’s music. Snaith’s compositions include a lot of modern and classic house influences along with elements of freestyle, ambient music, and psychedelia, but there’s a similar sense that the songs are musical microclimates cut off from their surroundings. “Odessa” layers its rhythms and textures into a careful lattice of sound, rich in detail but abundant with negative space. It feels like a very specific space — either a particular time and place, or state of mind. I get a bit of déjà vu just listening to it.
[March 15th, 2010]
A Glacier’s Patience
Neko Case “This Tornado Loves You”
A lot of women have beautiful voices and many of them can sing with great authority, but still, there’s something extraordinary and distinct about Neko Case’s voice and the way it can convey even the smallest, sweet emotion with an assertiveness on par with the forces of nature. Her boldness lends itself to a variety of styles, but whether she’s the vocal equivalent of a fuzz pedal in Carl Newman’s New Pornographers tunes or singing a quiet ballad, she invests lyrics with an emphatic earthiness that makes them seem like immutable facts: This is how I feel; this is how things are. It’s hard to imagine her singing anything at all and having it come out feeling like a lie.
In other words, Neko Case sounds like a tornado that loves you.
In this song, Case’s voice is accompanied by guitar parts that seem to hover and spin like wind storms in the distance. We sense a form, but know there’s no solid thing there, only pressure and chaos that could spin out and destroy us if we’re not lucky. Maybe it’s like being in the eye of a storm, or it could be the solace of feeling a brisk wind when you could just as easily get hit with devastating gust. As much as the song can feel enormous and intimidating, there is also a sense of lucidity and grace to the sound of it all, not unlike what can be felt in many of the best songs by 10,000 Maniacs. Natalie Merchant may be considered horribly unfashionable now, but despite her occasionally prissy vibe, she’s really one of the few singers I’ve heard that shares many of Neko’s most remarkable qualities, and can communicate a similar balance of the gentle and the mighty.
[March 6th, 2009]
Times That We Met Before We Met
Spoon “The Mystery Zone”
What is a mystery zone?
1. It’s a liminal state. Neither here nor there, but on the threshold of something new. Everything is uncertain, opportunities abound. It’s exciting and terrifying.
2. It’s the period of time before you really get to know someone, but you’re aware of each other’s existence. You had no idea you’d be significant to one another. It’s back when all there was to it was attraction, curiosity, and possibility.
3. It’s everything that goes on in everyone else’s life when you’re not around, or when you’re lost in your own head.
4. It’s an alternate universe version of your life in which you made totally different choices.
5. It is the realm of the “information troll”.
6. It’s the moment before physical impact. What will it feel like?
7. It’s before you kiss someone, before you have sex with them. It’s all of the things you can’t know about a person just by talking to them, and everything you can glean by touching them.
8. It’s anywhere except for where you are or where you have been.
9. It’s the love you’ve never received, and the love you’ve never given.
10. It is whatever happens next.
[March 2nd, 2010]
This Love Is For Gentlemen Only
Phoenix “Lisztomania”
Maybe you’ve heard this song before?
The lyrics to “Lisztomania” are entirely inscrutable as a whole, but there are enough phrases that ring out and demand identification that it’s hard to listen without trying to make sense of every line. Obviously, English is not Thomas Mars’ first language, but previous Phoenix songs were rarely so cryptic — if anything, he erred on the side of directness and simplicity. It could be that as his life has become more public, he has opted to obscure his self-expression somewhat with strange imagery, random asides, and allusions to things that have no obvious connection to the apparent theme of the song. Usually songwriters start out this way and become increasingly open, so it’s odd to find someone move in the opposite direction.
Here’s a possibility: Maybe he just doesn’t care what the words are because he knows that with a song like this, it barely matters. It’s all in the sound, and especially the spring in the beat, the shuffle of the guitar, the plinking of the piano, and the keening of the melody. Romantic joy, romantic confusion, romantic angst, romantic foolishness. It can be whatever we want it to be, as long as the romance is there, and oh God, it is.
[May 28th, 2009]
The Designs We Know
Grizzly Bear “Cheerleader”
The first several times I heard this song, I misheard the lyrics slightly, and the result is that I’m making the song mean something to me that it’s not actually saying. That’s fair game, though, especially when I’m responding to the melody and the sound of the chords more than anything else. The phrase I’ve inserted into the song is “I shouldn’t make it matter,” which is actually the opposite of what they are singing, but precisely what I need to keep in mind, particularly when in the sort of mellow emotional drift suggested by the arrangement. I need to keep reminding myself that while it is perfectly reasonable and totally human to have feelings of petty resentment, jealousy, and disdain, it is foolish and self-destructive to dwell on them, and to make those feelings matter more than what is actually good, meaningful, and relevant. The sound of “Cheerleader” fits into this sort of minor, blindingly obvious epiphany — there is tension, but it slowly dissipates, shifting from shrugging resignation to a sense of calm and security.
[July 1st, 2009]
Suburban Sprawl
Tune-Yards “Fiya”
What if my own skin makes my skin crawl?
What if my own flesh is suburban sprawl?
What happened between us makes sense
If I am nothing, you’re all
If I’m nothing at all
Those lyrics resonate with me so deeply that it can be hard for me to listen when Merrill Garbus sings it. I know so many songs, and almost none of them express this feeling, and it’s a feeling that is so common. For a long time, I just figured “Fiya” was a rare and special song. But now it seems more like a song that should be common but is not because the music industry has done such a great job of keeping anyone remotely fat out of the spotlight. The few fat people who do make it through are either the type of people who possess a superhuman level of confidence – not exactly common among fat people – or are like me, and do everything they possibly can in life to misdirect your attention and not address this fact of their existence.
But here’s Merrill Garbus actually singing about it, and all the deep-rooted shame and insecurity that goes with it, and the way people – even good, kind people – will (often unknowingly) reduce your value and humanity because you are fat. She’s giving voice to the feeling that bothers me the most: The notion that someone could only want you out of convenience, and that every good thing about you can be cancelled out by your fatness. She’s singing about the cynicism and fear that grows inside you, the entirely justifiable suspicion that everyone you meet thinks you are disgusting unless they prove otherwise. And even then, can you really trust them? But all of that is really just the outside layer of the song. The core of it is a gnawing feeling of loneliness and yearning for affection. It’s disappointment, and resignation to the belief that you’ll never get what you need the way you are.
[January 5th, 2019]
So glad to see all these capsules resurrected and given new life; I am surprised at how much of your vivid writing I remember from fluxblog dot org days, when I paid careful attention to each new installment. And Marnie Stern! Thank you for recollecting that guitar sound to me.