Even as the term indie rock has lost much of its meaning in the 21st century, some of its ethos remain. Number one is be real. Number two, if you want to gain admission to our exclusive club, you better be real and wear our clothes, speak our lingo, and work our shitty jobs. Number three, if you’re not going to be real, you better be really fucking good, like Animal Collective meats Radiohead produced by Outkast with cameos from Kanye and Kelly Clarkson good.
The problem with Lana Del Rey, is not that she is a pre-fab pop star. The problem is the bungled marketing of this pre-fab pop star. To readers of Stereogum and Pitchfork and indie rock blogs and zines country wide, authenticity still means something. Lana Del Rey, if you haven’t noticed, comes off as less than authentic. This truth became uncomfortably evident when Pitchfork first interviewed Del Rey and revealed her past name and career (Lizzy Grant), and the involvement of lawyers and music biz professionals in shaping her career to date.
Do you remember what happened when the Columbia-educated, world-pop influenced Vampire Weekend first broke? There was a literal shitstorm. We sneered, “How dare these well off young men appropriate musical styles of less affluent young men! How dare they act and dress like Ivy Leaguers! We may have some money, too, but do you see us wearing nice clothes? We were thrift store clothes, because that’s the way we’re supposed to look. You and your preppy looks are ruining it for all of us middle to upper middle class musicians. How dare you!”
Lana Del Rey, like Vampire Weekend before her, got past our cultural guard and gained entry into our indie rock clubhouse, exposing uncomfortable truths and shaking our own notion of identity.
We still like to think that musicians that break on these websites did it the right way. We like to believe that they worked their arses off, playing hundreds of shows in sweaty clubs to crowds of ten, and then they were just noticed one day. We like to believe that they don’t have their content pushed by an army of under paid publicists. (I can attest to the army of publicists, receiving 500+ emails a week). And, most importantly, we like to believe, us, the cultural class, have a role in the making of unknown artists. We listened and tweeted and shared and if it wasn’t for us, they would still be just be another internet musician. Their success had nothing to do with the PR firm feeding links to tastemakers. We are the tastemakers!
In contrast, to viewers of American Idol, a show that attempts to manufacture pop stars (With varying degrees of success) authenticity isn’t even a consideration. The singers go to camp to have their looks redefined. They don’t write their own material. Presentation is as important content. The whole point is to transform a struggling artist into a known commodity.
Now, let’s do a thought experiment. What if Lana Del Rey had came through the Idol ranks and not Pitchfork? What if leading up to her first album, she released a clever DIY video, like the one for “Video Games,” embedded above? The indie-rocking, cultural class would have been all over this mainstream pop musician with a keen sense of aesthetics. They would have pondered in amazement, “How can this mainstreamer could be so in tune with our culture?”
Instead, by trying to break through Pitchfork and Stereogum first, we had a backlash. We had to answer questions we’d rather ignore. What, you mean Lana Del Rey is some invention of the music biz? You mean she used to record under a different name and used to have a different face and smaller lips? You mean she may have used her womanly charms to make her first album on the cheap? You mean her womanly charms were surgically enhanced?
If Del Rey had broken the accepted mainstream way, and not by co-opting our culture, all of the secondary issues would have been moot. Of course a major label would help their new signee look better. Of course they would manage her name, image, and appearances. And, instead of celebrating her high profile failure on Saturday Night Live, we would have sympathized with her with encouragement, “You’ll get ‘em next time Lana! Hang in there, girl!”
As it stands, there is nowhere for Lana Del Rey to go from here. The early reviews of her debut album under her new name are in, and they haven’t been too kind. She’s all but destined to be a cultural footnote of 2011 and 2012.
As for us, that was a close one, wasn’t it? We saw through her shaky image. We did not let a major label force feed us culture we didn’t want. If Lana Del Rey had succeeded in breaking through our barrier there would have been more Lana Del Reys, and then we would have needed to find a new clubhouse.
Oh, screw you, music biz. We have a fond saying in these parts, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, won’t get fooled again.” Or, something like that.
I’m not going to lie. Mark Lanegan could release an album of Katy Perry covers and I’d not only listen to it, but I’d probably put down cash money for it, too. Now, that’s not to say quality doesn’t matter when it comes to the output of the one time Screaming Trees frontman. Rather, his voice is so captivating — Deep, smoky, lonesome, and in the case of “Gravedigger’s Song,” from his soon to be released album, Blues Funeral, down right scary — He can be paired with the twee voice of Isobel Campbell, the boozy and amoral sounds of his gutter brother, Greg Dulli, or be backed by throbbing electronics, and be equally as gripping. Yes, “Gravedigger’s Song,” may be more electronic than one may have expected from Lanegan, but when the finished work is so eerie and bleak, and it provides such a striking complement to those well-worn pipes, it’s difficult to argue that it would have been better any other way.
The fuzz pop of San Francisco’s Terry Malts is equally indebted to the flapping, mop tops and punk rock of The Ramones and the disaffected stares of UK shoegazers. Yet, if one were to choose, pogo or pout, shout or sulk, songs like “Nauseous,” should make the choice easy — Make yourself a pit, do the pizza man dance and the gorilla dance, too. There will be time enough for introspection once the music’s done.
Look for Terry Malt’s debut full length, Killing Time, February 21st on Slumberland Records.
—
After a few detours, and some unlikely help from beat-maker Aesop Rock, Allyson Baker and her San Francisco band, Dirty Ghosts are on the cusp of releasing their debut record, Metal Moon. Neither metal, nor necessarily a nod to Television’s Marquee Moon, tracks like “Ropes That Way,” feature a more modern take on guitar rock with programmed beats and a punk rock past reduced to short, pointed bursts of sound. And while some may draw connections to acts like The Kills or Sleigh Bells, the clean production and even cleaner melody, suggest Dirty Ghosts have bigger designs on their minds.
To hear Cloud Nothings’ Dylan Baldi tell it, the title of the band’s third album, Attack on Memory, is meant to be an attack on the memory of what people thought his band was.” Of course, with a title that vague, this attack on memory could be attached to any manner of things we’d rather forget. For example, it could be an attack on your memory of all those shitty emo bands that claimed to be influenced by Fugazi, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Jawbreaker, but were really no more than a shitty emo band. It could be an attack on the memory of the time you bought tickets to see the Decemberists to impress a girl with bangs.
For let’s face it, ever since artists like The Decemberists, The Arcade Fire, and Sufjan Stevens become the embodiment of indie rock mid way through the last decade, indie rock has had a difficult time reconciling itself with the rock half of its name. If you identify yourself with the indie rock crowd and admit to wanting to make a rock record, you have no choice but to qualify your intentions with lines like, “We wanted to make a fun record,” or, “We needed a diversion,” and “It’s nothing at all like Jet.” And, if you’re not careful with your pre-release press and don’t drop the right references (The Wipers=Right, The James Gang=Wrong) you’re all but resigning yourself to a steady string of sixes and sevens from the internet’s preeminent taste-maker.
Smartly, Baldi picked the right influences in bands like Fugazi, The Wipers, Sunny Day Real Estate, Nirvana, and The Pixies; Picked the right producer in Steve Albini, a man who has made his reputation on superior sound and staying out of the way; And, he brought the rest of his band along. That last point may not mean much if you haven’t seen the Cloud Nothings in a live setting, but if you have, or you’ve seen Cloud Nothings’ drummer Jayson Gerycz in some of his other bands, (Wombs, Total Babes and Swindlella) then you know he’s not only one of the fiercest and most talented time-keepers in town, but also what an under used asset he had been up to this point. Not any more.
Those decisions all come together and deliver the goods on songs like opening track, “No Future/No Past,” and “No Sentiment,” numbers sure to recall The Pixies at their dynamic, corrosive, and melodic best. They have the moaning vocals and minor keys, the soft/loud/soft dynamics (The type Nirvana made all the rage), and Gerycz’s forceful work behind the kit. Imagine a whirling dervish, or a man with four arms, or maybe eight arms, and those would be eight wild arms each with the strength of eight arms. He gives Cloud Nothings both the right type of kick to execute made for the mosh pit, melodic punk (“Stay Useless”) and the precision needed to carry out a near nine-minute excursion into early emo and space rock (“Wasted Days.”)
Meanwhile, the instrumental track, “Separation,” features rapid, angular guitars from Baldi and fellow guitarist, Joe Bayer, and Gerycz going ape shit on tom, snare, cymbal, and everything else within striking distance. The word angular to describe a guitar sound may have gone out of fashion when angular became shorthand for sounds like Sunny Day Real Estate, and by extension, sounds like a shit band trying to be Sunny Day Real Estate, but here, the term and the song work exceedingly well.
Surprisingly, for all the work on Attack on Memory meant to distance the band from its own past, it ends with the two tracks (“Our Plans” and “Cut You”) that provide the clearest bridge to their past incarnation as a basement pop band. Strip away the bigger sound, and these are your familiar, strum a few chords and soothe the broken heart, pop songs. Still, even as the album lingers with an attack on Attack on Memory instead of driving the point home, the message remains clear enough: That band you used to know, the one with the quaint, lo-fi pop songs is now a riveting, rock act, ready to leave its old digs behind for their rightfully earned place on the big stage. 8 out of 10 on The Rockometer.
The Heartless Bastards’ Erika Wennestrom has always had a voice, a wonderfully deep and robust voice, bluesy, billowing and full of nuance, one that has often earned comparisons to some Rock ‘N’ Roll’s greatest leading ladies like Grace Slick and Janis Joplin. It wasn’t until the band’s 2009 release, The Mountain, however, that the songwriting and musicianship began to provide the proper compliment. This new potency can be heard on “Parted Ways,” the first single from their forthcoming album, Arrows. Wennestrom wows, as always, along side a mid-tempo, country flavored jam, similar to something from Wilco’s early career. Then the tempo begins to stomp and the guitars begin to blaze way and it becomes something much more than a barroom rocker. It becomes stunning.
Let’s say I didn’t spend the past year collecting all of the 12″ singles released following Grinderman’s 2010 album, Grinderman 2, I’d be all over this upcoming remix collection on Anti- Records featuring collaborations and reinterpretations featuring Robert Fripp, Josh Homme, A Place to Bury Strangers, Cat’s Eyes and Factory Floor. Hell, I’ll still be all over Grinderman 2 RMX on the strength of the previously unreleased version of “Bellringer Blues,” featured above, and wonderfully twisted, tortured, and hacked to shit by Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Yeah, it’s that good. We’re talking, rare remix that betters an original, good.
Have you heard Cleveland’s Cloud Nothings have a new album out next Tuesday? It was produced by Steve Albini. You may have heard of him. Maybe you read the interview where the Cloud Nothings’ Dylan Baldi dished on Albini’s Scrabble playing ways. It’s also a rockier and edgier sound for a band who’ve made their name by playing carefree, lo-fi pop. Maybe you heard the first two tracks (“Stay Useless” and “No Future/No Past”) released from the forthcoming Attack on Memory. Or, maybe you’ve heard the album stream. That’s out there, too. While they haven’t reached the everywhere, every channel hype of The Black Keys, I have a hard time recalling the last Cleveland band to receive so much pre-release hype. Another banger like “No Sentiment,” certainly won’t derail that hype train.
A contemporary of Jay Reatard, Digital Leather’s Shawn Foree has had releases on Fat Possum, Goner Records, Jay Reatard’s Shattered Records, and now he’s moving on to FDH Music for his next full length, Modern Problems, due out on February 14th. The first track released for that set, “Young Doctors in Love” provides a tempting peak into Foree’s brand of synth-punk. In addition to the thin, electronic beats and distorted guitars, there’s a hint of honky-tonk, as if The Kings of Leon were a living room band, not an arena act, and weren’t a such a bunch of pricks. That’s a big if, I know. Still, “Young Doctor’s in Love” is one rad jam.
Brooklyn garage punks, XRay Eyeballs also have a new full length due out in the near future with Splendor Squalor dropping February 28th on Kanine Records. Lead single, “X,” finds the quartet further refining their sound with the inclusion of dreamy, ’80s synths and a bass line borrowed from the play book of New Order’s Peter Hook.
Bears aren’t the only Cleveland band spreading the sound of sunshine pop this winter. The Lighthouse and the Whaler offer similarly bright sounds on “Pioneers.” There’s bells and brilliantly colored guitars and warm, shimmery keyboards. It would be pop-perfect for an automobile advert featuring carefree thirty-somethings doing those things carefree thirty-somethings do as they showcase their affordable, environmentally sensible, yet stylish new car. This isn’t a dig. Rather, “Pioneers,” is the type of track that could boost both the band’s profile and their bank accounts.
2012 looks to be a busy year for The Lighthouse and the Whaler. There’s the EP, Pioneers, the source of todays’ jam, and a full length both due out in the coming months. Plus, there’s the tours. The Lighthouse and the Whaler are always on tour.
