hipster trash

Number 7: Belle and Sebastian-If You’re Feeling Sinister

Belle and Sebastian have a very unique sound. In 1996, it was uncommon to hear bands experimenting with harmonicas and psychedelic sounds like 65-67 Beatles or Beach Boys. It was even more uncommon to hear those bands come out of Scotland. Of course, since Belle and Sebastian made If You’re Feeling Sinister, Scotland has produced a lot of great indie acts like Franz Ferdinand, Travis, and Mogwai, but in 1996, Belle and Sebastian were the only truly notable indie acts working out of Glasgow.

Perhaps that’s what makes If You’re Feeling Sinister such a unique sounding album. Unlike the strong independent communities in places like Athens, LA, and Seattle, there weren’t very many bands for Belle and Sebastian to draw from. Without a local reference for what it meant to be a good indie band, Stuart Murdoch and his band of Scottish dreamers had to forge their own sound, anchored by Murdoch’s excellent lyrics and upbeat acoustic guitars.

Belle and Sebastian have more than a little Bob Dylan in their musical lineage, as well as some Nick Drake, but they’re arguably more like an acoustic Smiths. Murdoch has a Morrissey-esque wit about him, but also has a very tender, vulnerable side. The first song on the album doesn’t really grab the listener, but “Seeing Other People” isn’t bad. “Me and the Major” is a rollicking song made for dancing, complete with great harmonica action and a quick drumbeat. “Like Dylan In The Movies” has good harmonies that make for a haunting chorus and “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” is remarkably bouncy for a song with such an ominous title. The album’s high point is definitely the title track, a five and a half minute epic, which pulls together all the themes of the album, from childhood and adolescence and growing up, to living as an outsider in an unfamiliar world. The end of the album continues to impress (even if Mayfly has the same melody as “She Bangs The Drums” by the Stone Roses).

Belle and Sebastian have made a lot of good songs on a lot of great albums in the past 16 years, but If You’re Feeling Sinister stands out as a highlight in their catalogue. It’s their most unified album, has some of their best songs, and is the best showcase for their introspective, wistful pop music. It doesn’t try to confine itself as an “indie album”, or a “folk album”. Belle and Sebastian struck musical gold on If You’re Feeling Sinister.

I heartily recommend If You’re Feeling Sinister. It’s got a sound that is at once both intimately familiar and strangely esoteric. Stuart Murdoch is a great singer and lyricist and he surrounds himself with good musicians who know exactly how much to give any particular song. The result is a finely-crafted pop-folk masterpiece.

Number 6: Pavement-Slanted and Enchanted

Once again, it’s a lo-fi album on Amazon’s list. Other than Spiderland, basically every album so far can be considered lo-fi or having lo-fi elements. However, like Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand, Slanted and Enchanted doesn’t let the low-fidelity and occasionally spotty production values impede its many charms.

Some people say that Slanted and Enchanted is the best indie album of the 90’s and it’s not hard to hear why. Pavement blends fun, rock music with deep, introspective lyrics and epitomize the best of 90’s independent. Singer Stephen Malkmus is one of the best examples of the lazy, half-talking singers of his style. His style is half-way between Lou Reed and Thurston Moore and works really well with the music he’s crafted with Pavement.

The music moves between Velvet Underground art-rock and the 80’s alternative bands like Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and The Fall. “Summer Babe (Winter Version)” does ‘cool slacker’ so well that I’m surprised it wasn’t on the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack. “Trigger Cut/wounded-kite At :17” continues that general feeling until “No Life Singed Her” cuts into a faster punk style. Generally, the songs range from “great” to “classic”. That isn’t to say there aren’t a few duds. “Conduit for Sale!” is more annoying than anything else and both “Chesley’s Little Wrists” and “Two States” are basically throwaways. Still, the second half of the album contains the beautiful, fragile “Here” and the cool “Our Singer”.

Really, that sort of defines Pavement. To take nothing away from amazing bands like Neutral Milk Hotel and Guided By Voices, Pavement were probably the coolest band of the 90’s. Although Malkmus’ lyrics are deep and can border on the depressive, they’re also witty and clever. The instrumentation strikes the right balance between sloppy and skilled to the point where you know that Pavement are talented musicians; they just prefer to keep it simple. The songs are usually pretty short, but have a lot of substance crammed into them.

I seriously recommend Slanted and Enchanted. It’s a masterpiece as far as American Alternative music goes and incorporates so many ideas and techniques that are staples for indie musicians today. Although it has a handful of mediocre songs, the album as a whole flows really well and most of the individual songs are amazing. If you like the weird stuff that Americans were making in the 80s, you’ll love Pavement and even if you don’t like most alternative offerings, you’re likely to find a few songs you’ll like on Slanted and Enchanted.

Number 5: Unrest-Imperial F.F.R.R.

The misconception a lot of people have about indie acts is that the artists hate pop music. Sure, “pop” has a lot of meanings and recently it has taken on certain meanings that relate to overproduction and hip-hop elements that not everyone likes, but at its core, pop music really is just standard scales and chord progressions. That is why pop songs are so catchy, because they use progressions that we are conditioned to like and that sound good together.

I bring this up because Imperial F.F.R.R has some really poppy moments. The fact that the guitars are mixed loudly and are fast may try to obscure this fact, but songs like “Cherry Come On” and “Suki” are pure pop-punk (in the actual meaning of being both punk and pop, not the modern construct of using it to dismiss bands that are punk, but that you don’t like i.e. Green Day or Blink-182). There are also a handful of really strong ballads like “Isabel” and “June”.

Outside of those four songs, however, stuff gets a little weird. There are songs like “Champion Nines”, which is three and a half minutes of an instrumental funk groove with lots of chimes and cowbells. There’s “Imperial” which is eight minutes of repetitive bass and guitar riffs that sound kind of like the “songs” I recorded on my guitar when I was 13 (this is not a good thing. I was not good at songwriting at 13). “Firecracker” is basically a three minute guitar loop with sirens and generic “city sounds” at the end.

“I Do Believe That You Are Blushing” is probably the most interesting song on the album, although not the best, because it foreshadows the post-punk revival that was going to happen in the late 90s/early 2000s. The focus on bass and expressive drumming is pretty interesting and and the double-tracked vocals have a few cool moments of pseudo-harmony.

Imperial F.F.R.R is probably the most “mixed bag” of the albums I’ve done so far. I really like about half of it and dislike the other half. The songs that concentrate on being good songs are great. The ones that are exercises in looping and don’t have much emotion generally aren’t. It’s a pretty varied album, so I recommend parts of it to everyone, but I don’t think a lot of people will walk away from listening to it liking every single song.

On a side note, I think it’s interesting that the top 5 (looking ahead, actually top 7) albums on the list are from the 90’s. Only one album in the top 10 (Surfer Rose by The Pixies, from 1988) isn’t from the 90s. It’s not until the 13th place that an album from the 2000’s appears (Sufjan Stevens’ Michigan) The 90’s had pretty awful popular music, but I’ll concede that the independent scenes were pretty good. However, I find it pretty hard to believe that the 2000’s (a decade where independent music exploded through the internet and self-publishing) appears so little towards the top. Even harder to believe is the omission of classic alternative/indie acts like The Smiths (who spent their entire career on Rough Trade Records) and The Cure (who released their music through Fiction Records before it was bought by Polydor/Universal). I may have to make my own list at the end of this project (something like 33 Albums Ignored By Amazon).

Number 4: Liz Phair-Exile in Guyville

I am really torn about Exile in Guyville. There are some stretches of it that I like (the first half of the 18-song album is pretty interesting, for example), and then bursts of insipid, quite boring pseudo-sociology. The main problem stems from the fact that Liz Phair, despite her obvious musical and lyrical talent, would rather write a feminist doctrine than an actual musical album.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree with a lot of the ideas that Liz Phair is advocating. I think some of her wordplay is clever (“6”1”, the first song on the album is particularly amusing, using height as a metaphor for social roles) and there are some straight-up great songs like “Never Said”, “Glory”, and “Stratford-On-Guy”. There’s also a lot of cultural significance in her work, given that she opened the door for her female alternative contemporaries like Alanis Morissette and later singers like Avril Lavigne (say what you will about Lavigne, but her first two albums were pretty good, punk-flecked alternative).

Unfortunately, aside from some of the songs I’ve listed, most of the songs fall apart into mediocre music with controversial feminist lyrics. The focus shifts from the music to a rallying cry of sex-positive, modern feminism with lyrics that claim “I want to be your blowjob queen…I just want your fresh, young jimmy, jamming, slamming, ramming in me” and “I only ask because I’m a real cunt in spring, you can rent me by the hour”.

The music is pretty standard, decent but not great indie fare. Phair frames Exile in Guyville as a response to The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. I don’t hear the similarities (few do, actually, but whatever), but it’s pretty obvious that the music on Exile in Guyville owes a lot to singer-songwriters of the 60s and 70s, garnished with a bit of early 70s roots rock and some Violent Femmes-style punk. It’s definitely not hard to listen to, but it’s also not particularly groundbreaking or innovative. The best moments on the album come when the lyrics are clever; the worst when they’re preachy. The music compliments the good songs and helps drag down the bad ones, but feels kind of superfluous either way.

Recommending this album or not is sort of a difficult question. It’s undoubtedly important as a cultural statement. Liz Phair isn’t mild mannered and can be the “angry feminist” that conservatives love to hate, but she can also be vulnerable, singing about how she wants a boyfriend, “the kind of guy who tries to win you over”. Her portrait of a contemporary, 20something woman is complex and layered, which makes it a success even when she’s falling back on using words like “cunt” to be shocking. Unfortunately, the rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to the message.

I have finished Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, but unfortunately it’s not an easy album to write about because you have to talk about the way she uses language, which means you need to talk about her feminism, and it’s hard to critique Liz Phair’s music without seeming like a misogynistic douchebag so I’m still kind of working on that. Expect it in the next few days.

However, as a lighthearted break to the album work, I proudly present Part 1 in the possibly ongoing series 

How To Form A Hipster Band And Get Hipster Famous Part 1: The Name

In which I detail how to form a Hipster Band and get Hipster Famous.

Being in a Hipster Band is not REALLY about the music. Think of it this way. Regular bands are like Safeway or QFC. Decent prices, good deals, self-check out which is excellent when you are buying things that you don’t want to be judged on (condoms, 2 liter bottles of Refreshe cola for 89 cents, a Cosmo magazine, whatever). Generally pretty good, yeah? Now think of a Hipster band as the Whole Foods or PCC of the music world. Food is not much better, but you FEEL better when you go there, like you’ve corrected some kind of problem in society, and your enlightened state will benefit you and the world around you.

Hipster bands are like that. The music is not really that important. It’s the feeling of superiority and credibility that you give to your fans, so before you go rushing to the store to pick up a guitar or some bagpipes, you need to market yourself. Don’t whore yourself out Coldplay-style to every shoe company that wants your music. Just talk up your band (and by talk up, I mean drop a reference to your super sweet indie collective every chance you get) to your cool friends, but preferably their cooler friends first.

You want your fans to feel smart and superior, so the first and most important thing is to find a good name. There are a few ways to go about this. The first method is the Porn Star route. Start with a color (something ironic. If you’re a hardcore punk band, pick pink. If you’re a super happy band, go with black or grey). Then move on to an animal (either something laughable, like a Platypus, or something kind of odd like a Jellyfish or Tardigrade). Finally end with a noun that works as a metaphor for a band (see: Mechanism, Joint Stock Company, the Chicago Cubs, whatever). Put them together and get an awesome ironic band name like Black Platypus Mechanism or the Ultraviolet Jellyfish Stock Corp or the Oranje (alternate languages are a plus) Tardigrade Chicago Cubs.

The Porn Star Method is rooted in absurdity, but the second method (Pretentious Liberal Arts Student) is rooted in being a giant douchebag about your Philosophy 101 class. There’s a bit more flexibility in this method, which is nice. First, pick a historical figure or important philosopher/author/playwright (not Shakespeare) and pair him/her with a vaguely philosophical word like Conundrum or Quandary. Add a definite article or possessive in the front to taste, resulting in names like The Kierkegaard Conundrum, Faulkner’s Folly or The Locke-Hobbes Dichotomy.

Finally, the last, most simple method (Fuck Articles) utilizes taking a normal noun and adding or subtracting a definite or indefinite article in order to be unique and special. Consider the following guidelines. If your noun is plural, remove the “The” and be really petty about people saying it right (For example, if your band name is Jellybabies, correct everyone who calls you The Jellybabies in a pretentious, snotty tone). If your noun is singular, use a “The” if you want to be strong and ballsy or an “A” if you want to be mysterious. Hint: if it sounds like it could be an actual 70s/80s band, use the other option. Ideas for this method are things like A Lamp, The Plush Turtle, and Featherpillows.

Hopefully one of these suggestions helps you name your first band, so you can brag about it to all your cool friends (and their cooler friends) before you even start writing songs. Next time, I’ll be talking about how to attract good bandmates for your band so you can go roll in the deck Hipster cred.

Number 3: Slint-Spiderland

My favorite thing about Spiderland is the way guitar tones are employed to evoke different moods in a song. That might be a strange thing to pick out of an album, but it’s easily the most noticeable thing about Slint’s sophomore album. Sometimes, the guitar is light and almost jingly. Other times, it gets a very dark, Metallica-y sound, before changing to a distorted set of power chords.

Actually, the instrumentation in general is very strong on Spiderland. The bass and drums form a really tight rhythm section and the guitar always adds flavor without dominating the song. The vocals are probably the weakest musical aspect of the album. Singer Brian McMahan seems to have two competing vocal styles. The first is a mumbled whisper that is more talking than singing, and often gets buried in the mix, making the lyrics even harder to understand. The other is a loud, slightly off-key style that reminds a listener of the emotional hardcore style of McMahan’s first band, Squirrel Bait.

Spiderland is a bit of a slog, really, to listen to. Within a song, the mood might change a little bit a few different times, but each song subscribes to a similar formula. The overwhelming feeling of the album is a downbeat, grinding drone. Individual snippets might tend towards anger or melancholia, but rarely happiness or joy. To call Slint “Goth” would be incorrect, but they certainly fit the Gothic stereotype of a very bleak, unhappy sound.

There are only six songs on Spiderland, the shortest of which is still over 5 minutes long. The relatively few songs and relatively long length might contribute to my lukewarm reviewing of the album. “Breadcrumb Trail” and “Good Morning Captain” bookend the album and are my favorite tracks, along with the instrumental “For Dinner…”, but I don’t really love any of the songs on Spiderland. The sameness of the album is kind of off-putting and doesn’t endear me to it all.

Individually, the songs aren’t bad, and the musicality is quite good. Something just doesn’t work for me with Spiderland. I don’t hate it, or even dislike it, but my feelings on it are decidedly average. I can’t really recommend it to most listeners, although a small section of listeners who like drone music will probably like it a lot. Despite a lot of good things going for it, Spiderland is bizarrely worth less as a whole than the sum of its parts.

Number 2: Neutral Milk Hotel-In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Were I putting together my own list of the best Indie albums of all time, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea would definitely be in the top three, so I was pleased to see it at number 2 on Amazon’s list. I love everything about it, the music, the lyrics, the production and performances. It’s an album that is endlessly satisfying and timeless in a way that most albums aren’t.

The first time I heard In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, I hated it. I got up through “King Of Carrot Flowers Parts 2&3”. Once Jeff Mangum started screaming “I love you Jesus Christ” over fuzzy guitars, my reaction was something along the lines of “what is this shit”, and then I turned it off. A friend of mine had recommended Neutral Milk Hotel, but I hated them initially and stopped trying to listen to them altogether. Every couple of months, I’d go to their first album, On Avery Island and give it a test, but I could barely make it through the first few songs.

However, those were the days when I listened to mostly 70’s hard rock bands. Like a lot of teenagers who first become aware of music through their parents, I was overwhelmed by the music my father listened to, KISS and Aerosmith, Rainbow and Black Sabbath. Of course I never could deny bands like The Beatles or The Doors, but my first experience with Neutral Milk Hotel fell squarely in my hard rock phase.

I’m glad I went back to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea after a few years away from it. It was around the time I got into The Mountain Goats, and I heard that they had a similar lo-fi, experimental sound to Neutral Milk Hotel, so I tentatively tried In The Aeroplane Over The Sea again.

It’s hard to describe the sound of the album. Neutral Milk Hotel are self-styled “fuzz-folk”, which is a decent way to describe them, but it doesn’t encompass the way they expanded their sound on this album. There are definitely folk elements, as well as their signature fuzzy guitar sound, but there are also a lot of horns and odd arrangements in general that give the album a very Sgt Pepper’s kind of feeling. “Holland, 1945” is so overdriven and fast that it might as well be punk music.

So too is it hard to describe the mood of the album. I believe that, fundamentally, indie rock is made for adults who haven’t forgotten how to be kids. Funeral by Arcade Fire (which I will cover later) is an excellent example of an album with such a mood. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, however, isn’t. It’s discordant and kind of angsty, but in a very measured, mature sort of way. The sophistication of the themes and lyrics (for those that aren’t familiar with it, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is a concept album about Anne Frank, sort of. It sounds pretentious but it actually works pretty well) contribute to the maturity of the album.

Taken as a collective, the album is breath-taking. There is a thematic flow that’s amazing to listen to start-to-finish, but it’s also a collection of really, really good songs. “King of Carrot Flowers pt 1” and the title track are really strong acoustic folky songs, “Two-Headed Boy” is great. “Fool” is an instrumental carried by horns that sounds like a funeral procession, while “Communist Daughter” is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. “Oh Comely” is an 8 minute acoustic epic. Every song on this album is great, taken individually or as part of a whole story.

I highly recommend this album to virtually everyone. It might take a few listens to like, and a few more to really see what all the fuss is about, but it’s such a rewarding experience as a listener that I really think everyone should give it a chance.

Number 1: Guided By Voices-Bee Thousand

I think throwing a Guided by Voices album at the very top of your Greatest Indie Rock Albums list is sort of trolling. Then again, a good music list should be controversial as hell, so I’ll take Amazon at face value here.

For those who aren’t familiar with Guided by Voices, their indie subgenre is lo-fi. Bee Thousand was recorded on a bunch of tape recorders and 4-tracks, which explains why it sounds so grainy. At one point in the first song, “Hardcore UFOs”, the guitar track completely cuts out and then stutters for a moment before resurfacing. Bee Thousand has 20 songs, but only a few run over 3 minutes and the entire album is only around 40 minutes long.

The thing I think is really cool about Bee Thousand is how it throws back to so many cool, early genres. Of course, the 90s in general (Bee Thousand is from 1994) were a throwback-type decade. Nirvana and a lot of other bands with the “Seattle sound” made their livings ripping off the Pixies and Sonic Youth and making it applicable to flannel-wearing teenagers. Robert Pollard, the singer of Guided by Voices, said that Bee Thousand was influenced by what he calls “The four P’s of rock: Pop, Punk, Progressive, and Psychadelic”.

I admit, I’m not really hearing the Prog aspect of it, but the blending of the pop, punk, and psychadelic elements gives the album a really cool British Invasion type sound, kind of like The Kinks. Because there are so many short songs in such a tight space, it’s hard to separate where one song ends and another begins, which means listening to the whole album start to finish gives a listener a unique experience of hearing the entire product. Even so, there are a handful of songs I really like, such as “Tractor Rape Chain”, “Gold Star for Robot Boy”, and “I Am A Scientist”. As is common with Lo-Fi music (in my opinion), Guided by Voices are at their best when they don’t sound “lo-fi”, but just sound like a dusty album found at a little record store in 1968.

Ultimately, I recommend this album. I don’t really think it should be at number 1 on the list, but I don’t know where I would place it anyway. I think Guided by Voices don’t have obvious spiritual successors in the way that Neutral Milk Hotel or Liz Phair do, meaning that they’re a little harder to get into for people who listen to more modern indie bands, but I still think Bee Thousand is worth a listen to anyone who likes lo-fi or indie music. Especially if you like British Invasion era stuff or early punk like MC5, Bee Thousand should definitely be heard.