Net Nuggets 28: Radio Free Indie, or: How I Learned to Stop Dancing and Love Indie

This toilet guppy has been going through a period of unprecedented, almost insolent optimism and enthusiasm lately. Those of you who
received the annual winter compilation CD will have heard a two-and-a-half-year staring contest with the abyss condensed into one utterly bleak, unlistenable CD (for which I do apologise), vomited out, leaving yours truly purified at last! (I win, Abyss!)

Worry not; like anything else it probably won't last, but the days of this being a downer death trip blog may just be a thing of the past. And as the best music is usually somehow negative (sorrowful, aggressive, perverted, or trying desperately to clamber to the top that is transcendence), that means the future of this blog hangs by a thin thread indeed. There's still music to post before I call it quits, however, and since today is Sunday—that grey day of nothing I used to find so heavy as a child—I'm grabbing the opportunity to share some of the self-indulgent, misery-guts music that's left in the ol' iTunes library…

Indie's a mixed bag. The flashes of brilliance—and they are brilliant—are almost swept away by an insufferable tide of collegiate, sensitive artiste blandness or knowing trendiness. It's enough to make you hate the guitar. And singer-songwriters. And the middle class. And suburbia. And institutions of education. And hipsters (if one didn't already hate them so). And hairdos. It makes you want to do extreme sports, or commit a heinous crime that would make even your own mother spit you in the face.

But it's not all navel gazing mediocrity or overly cerebral, sexless wankery with all the passion of a bong-hugging slacker—although you might be forgiven for thinking so from perusing websites such as Pitchfork (Rolling Stone for the noughties' discerning, computer literate hipster) or Internet radio station Daytrotter. But for every dozen or so Sufjan Stevenses, there's a Devendra Banhart; for every ten Pavements there's a Blonde Redhead, so don't lose heart!

Over at Daytrotter, there are so many sessions by so many artists to download, all for free, that navigating it is an autist's dream come true. Naturally, Toilet Guppies has only listened to a fraction of the sessions, but that doesn't stop me from compiling a best-of primer.

The problem with indie becomes apparent at times during this sampler, but that's due to indie overload more than the quality of the songs, which all bear the Toilet Guppies stamp of approval. And worry not, I've sorted away the trite campfire songs (so that you wouldn't have to—you're welcome). So, rock out to Black Lips, grieve to Spoon, dance to High Places, dream to Elvis Perkins, whistle to Grizzly Bear, and (try not to) weep to Will Oldham. Terrific stuff.

WARNING: You may still want to go listen to something like this afterwards, just to regain your equilibrium, libido, sense of humour and overall lust for life… In the meantime, fold your brittle, little self into a foetal position and indulge:

V/A: Contemporary Indie for Dummies—Daytrotter Sessions [.zip]:

1. Jana Hunter: «Pinnacle»
2. Marissa Nadler: «Salutations in the Dark»
3. Grizzly Bear: «Shift»
4. Department Of Eagles: «1997»
5. Deerhunter: «Heatherwood»
6. Spoon: «The Ghost of You Lingers»
7. The Dodos: «Horny Hippies»
8. The Walkmen: «Yellow Kid»
9. High Places: «From Stardust to Sentience»
10. Elvis Perkins: «Good Friday»
11. The Cave Singers: «Seeds of Night»
12. Bonnie «Prince» Billy: «The Sun Highlights the Lack in Each»
13. Rodriguez: «Sugar Man»
14. Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson: «There Will Be Mud»
15. Akron/Family: «The Land»
16. The Entrance Band: «Lookout!»
17. Black Lips: «Take My Heart»

All tracks are in 128 kbps (Daytrotter download standard). Hundreds, if not thousands more mp3s are freely available over at the gracious Daytrotter site.

The Turner Music Prize 2007, vol. 4

OK, let's stop messing about with this 2007 business and get this blog started right. I've saved some of the best for last:

TURNER MUSIC PRIZE 2007, Vol. 4 [.zip file]
[Download disabled.]


1. Mark Lanegan: «Man in the Long Black Coat»

There are no mistakes in life, some people say
It is true, sometimes you can see it that way
But people don’t live or die, people just float
She went with the man in the long, black coat

Mark Lanegan’s vocals could lend authority to just about any subject, so lived does his voice sound. Add to that the words of Bob Dylan, and you can’t possibly go wrong: «Feel the pulse and vibration and the rumbling force / Somebody is out there, beating on a dead horse.»
From I'm Not There

2. The Angels Of Light: «Sometimes I Dream I'm Hurting You»
A quick glance at the title and you know what you’re in for. Nothing half-arsed with Michael Gira. This song showcases both why he soars miles above practically all other artists toying with words and music, and why he will never break through commercially. His unique perspective takes you from the gently picked melody to the desperate prayer for deliverance that propels both song and listener until it explodes in trance-like abandonment to music and self-obliteration: «COMEANDTAKEMECOMEANDTAKEMECOMEANDTAKEMECOME
ANDTAKEME!»
From We Are Him

3. Radiohead: «Weird Fishes/Arpeggi»
Not to denigrate their more experimental stuff, but with this song Radiohead finally seem to manage a balance between beauty and originality, their individuality something that just manifests itself now (rather than being forced) in a perfect slice of pop rock. «Hit the bottom and escape»…
From In Rainbows

4. Einstürzende Neubauten: «Die Wellen»

What should I do with you, waves, you who can never decide
whether you’re the first or the last?
You think you can define the coast with your constant wish-wash,
grind it down with your coming and going.
And yet no one knows how long the coastline really is,
where land stops, where land begins, and you’re forever changing
the line, length, lay, with the moon and unpredictable.

Consistent alone is your inconsistency.

Ultimately victorious since, as so often evoked, this wears away
the stones, grinds the sand down as fine as needed for
hourglasses and egg-timers, as required for calibrating time,
for telling the difference between hard and soft.

Victorious also because, never tiring, you win the contest who of us
will be the first to fall asleep, or you, being the ocean still,
because you never sleep.

Although colourless yourself, you seem blue
when the sky is gently mirrored on your surface, the ideal course
for being strolled upon by the carpenter’s son, the most changeable element.

And inversely, when you are wild and loud and your breakers thunder,
I listen between the peaks of your rollers, and from the highest waves,
from breaking spume, a thousand voices break away, mine,
yesterday’s ones that I didn’t know, that otherwise just whisper,
and all the others too, and in their midst the Nazarene.
Over and over again those stupendous five final words:
Why have you left me?

I hold my own, shout at each single wave:
Are you staying?
Are you staying?
Are you staying, or what?

From Alles Wieder Offen

5. Spoon: «The Ghost of You Lingers»
To call this a «song» is stretching it a bit, but that’s no reason to dismiss it as just a piece of indulgent studio experimentation. Sometimes a combination of lyrics and sounds come along at en eerily apt time to, well, haunt you. This may not be a song, but it's the inside of an idea, a sentiment, a hope.
From Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

6. LCD Soundsystem: «All My Friends»
In passing from youth into adulthood, whether you're cultivating hope for the future or indulging in a nostalgia for the past, in LCD
Soundsystem's «All My Friends» at least you've put resentment behind you. Encouraged by nostalgia to love them and permitted by hope to let go of them, the bitterness towards some of the people you used to know is replaced by a warmth towards all the people you now feel blessed and lucky to once have known, regardless of what subsequently transpired. When James Murphy repeats his mantra «Where are your friends tonight?», it’s a question out of curiosity and gratitude, not an accusation arising from disappointment and bitterness. But then, in seven-and-a-half minutes it's over…
From Sound of Silver

7. Animal Collective: «Safer»
A showcase for Avey Tare’s sense of urgency and flight of fantasy, dig the way this piece morphs from fear into love, like a story going from
the empty present back into a golden past…
From «Peacebone» single

8. The Soulsavers: «Kingdoms of Rain»
OK, so it may sound like some American motivational speaker’s mantra, but the title of the album this song’s culled from says everything: it's not how far you fall, it's the way you land. The voice that makes your knees go wobbly and your eardrums quiver with masochistic enjoyment here is that of Mark Lanegan, who the Soulsavers happen to be covering on this very same track, adding soft textures and careful details to the sparse original arrangement (the key point beginning at the 2:14 mark).
From It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way You Land

9. PJ Harvey: «Grow Grow Grow»
Arguably PJ Harvey’s most accomplished (or at least original) album, I could never listen to White Chalk. Not because it isn’t good, but because it’s too good. Unbearably, almost impossibly bleak, Harvey would’ve had to stare into some serious abyss making this one. But like Mark in «Peep Show» says, «I'm looking into the abyss… I don't like the look of the abyss!»
From White Chalk

10. Devendra Banhart: «I Remember»
I think the most beautiful things happen to be ugly things; most people find beauty in the mediocre. But then Devendra Banhart comes along and proves to us all that beauty is simply the beautiful. Trust Banhart to craft a melody to perfectly convey a tristesse that doesn’t wallow. This song’s atmosphere is a lesson; there is such a thing as blues without self-pity! A pure sadness, within which the sweetness that sprouted into bitterness remains intact. You realise that loss is never total, which works against the bitterness…
From Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon

11. Flight Of The Conchords: «I'm Not Crying»
«I’m Not Crying» is exactly what you need when you are, in fact, crying. Only, of course you’re not.
From «The Distant Future» EP


12. Marissa Nadler: «Bird on Your Grave»
Nadler may come across a little precious, but she doesn’t pussyfoot around. Unlike most contemporary folk females, she eschews faux-childlike naïvety; and unlike so many young performers, she actually manages to convincingly convey the sorrow contained within her songs. (As opposed to composing songs that pretend to be world-weary and -wise—like a Bob Dylan composing «Blowin' in the Wind» and «The Times They Are a-Changin'» at 22-23, straining to make his voice sound like that of a hardened 60 year-old labourer, making up politically correct words that sound good but which are only based on ideas lifted out of a couple of books.) Greg Weeks’ disharmonic guitar keeps Nadler’s perfect singing from infecting the song with too much prettiness. With lyrics such as these, the music can't be too agreeable.
From Songs III: Bird on the Water

13. Elvis Perkins: «While You Were Sleeping»
Lullaby or funeral march? The Dylan-derivative lyrics are overly poetic and, it seems to me, either meaningless or dense beyond interpretation. Yet obscured beneath the kind of lofty imagery that Leonard Cohen was the last writer in the history of literature to get away with, you'll find some tender essence well worth indulging in. Besides, who can resist the Tex-Mex charms? «Uh-oh…»
From Ash Wednesday

14. Fire On Fire: «Hangman»
«You got to have a friend!» Ain't that the truth… And some days, this
song is it.
From «Fire on Fire» EP

15. José González: «Down the Line»
Quite literally nothing wrong with this track. González comes in and says what it is he wants to say, then quits—all with beautiful melody, infectious rhythm and a coda like a lifebuoy.
From In Our Nature

The Turner Music Prize 2007, vol. 1

It's a bit late, I know, but 2007 was such a doozie in terms of music that now that we're done with 2008, a revisit is well in order. Some of the most exciting bands and artists currently working in music unleashed tunes in 2007. So brace yerself; volume one has, as Lord Percy said to Sir Blackadder's crossdressing man-servant Kate, «balls!»

TURNER MUSIC PRIZE 2007, Vol. 1 [.zip file]
[Download disabled.]

1. of Montreal: «The Past Is a Grotesque Animal»

Only the beloved, so it seems to the lover… can in this world bring about what our human limitations deny, a total blending of two beings, a continuity between two discontinuous creatures. Hence love spells suffering for us in so far as it is a quest for the impossible… Through the beloved appears … full and limitless being unconfined within the trammels of separate personalities, continuity of being, glimpsed as a deliverance through the person of the beloved. There is something absurd and horribly commixed about this conception, yet beyond the absurdity, the confusion and the suffering there lies a miraculous truth. There is nothing really illusory in the truth of love; the beloved being is indeed equated for the lover—and only for him no doubt, but what of that?—with the truth of existence.

—Georges Bataille
From Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

2. Fuck Buttons: «Bright Tomorrow»
The Fuck Buttons’ debut 7-inch (no, I’m not referring to some cherry-poppin' man-bits) is what chill-out ambient should sound like. And that band name alone merits inclusion on any end-of-year list…
From «Bright Tomorrow» 7”

3. Spoon: «Don't You Evah» (Diplo mix)
This track seems minimalistic, but it's its seeming minimalism that allows you to notice all the details and changes going on, undermining this «simplicity». Rich and subtle all at once—and a little skewed—house music rarely sounded this good. It's even got a trace of human emotion! (Who said you can't dance to tristesse?)
From «Don't You Evah» digital single

4. GhostHustler: «Busy Busy Busy»
This is just sweaty, dirty, smelly rock’n’roll masquerading as electro—krumping at the Fight Club—all attitude and sexed belligerence—the sound of a demented spazz breakdancing—on psychoactive drugs. Glorious!
Not from any album (yet), this is one of those one-hit blog wonders.

5. Von Südenfed: «Fledermaus Can't Get It»
2007—what a year for testes! The fucker’s downstairs in the basement on this one. Mouse On Mars team up with Mark E. Smith for a track that’s as ruinous to virtue as any piece of music in human history. Twisted, pissed off and gagging for it (sometimes on it, by the sound of things), this track is pure hedonism—one of the saviours or redeemers of electronic music (justifying the genre's very existence with its
technology-defying human weakness) and the aural equivalent to rotten street speed (which, incidentally, is probably exactly what Fledermaus is referring to when he drones on that «I can't get it now, but I can get it»).
From Tromatic Reflexxions

6. The Fall: «Fall Sound»
… and they just keep coming. You can smell this song. «D-r-r-r-r-r-r-r! / You’ve just woken up to Fall sound-uh!» After driving his entire band and manager to mutiny on tour, «’80s reprobate» Mark E. Smith apparently just assembled some fresh meat along the way and, unruffled, stopped over in studios to seemingly effortlessly record monuments to attitude. Like this track, where he baits the former backing band he considered «TLC»—traitors, liars and cunts («thieving, lying cunts,» by some accounts). With a set of new and unfamiliar musicians behind him, Smith sticks it to his old band by giving us all a much-needed vitamin shot of that «F-f-f-fall sound-uh!». But then, as the man himself says, «If it's me and yer granny on bongos, it's the Fall.» Bless him. The world needs Mark E. Smith. 30 years into his career and at the age of 50, he still doesn’t let us down: «It’s a scream for help that’s desperate / But it’s tough luck!»
From Reformation Post TLC
7. Grinderman: «When My Love Comes Down»
The aural equivalent to libido, up and down, half of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds a.k.a. Grinderman’s «debut» album has several cool tracks on it, the obvious future pop culture reference being the driving, driven «No Pussy Blues». But «When My Love Comes Down» is the
embodiment of the frightfulness and terror of lust/love, and is probably the coolest love song lyric from the hand of Mr. Cave: «Your skin is like the falling snow / Your hair is like the rising sun / Your tongue is like a Kalashnikov / Or some other foreign gun»… (Reminds me of someone I used to know…)
From Grinderman

8. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: «Isis»
For fear of sounding like a bloody misery-guts, this is the kind of track that makes you want to dance, except no dance floor DJ will ever play it, either because a) it's not the kind of instantly recognisable hit self-conscious people need in order to dare venture onto the dance floor, or b) it's not the feelgood (or at the very least emotionally neutral) type of music DJs tend to believe are the only pieces of music fit to move your feet to. It’s an emotionally retarded situation that's emblematic of our times.
From «Is Is» EP

9. The Vandelles: «Lovely Weather»
They’re trying too hard to be cool when cool has to be effortless, but the glorious noise of this track is redeeming, and then some. And it doesn't hurt that the overall vibe is so damn sultry…
From «The Vandelles» EP10. Times New Viking: «Teenage Lust!»
«I don’t want to die in the city alone.» Quite reasonable, really.
From Times New Viking Present the Paisley Reich

11. Black Lips: «I Saw a Ghost (Lean)»
As Todd Killings once wrote of Black Lips, they're

… just not right for this world. … Seriously slurred swashbucklers living out the ultimate teenage dream, yet breaking through another layer of remarkable idiocy, transcribed through hallucinations, exasperation, and perfectly casual dick fumbling. … How the Black Lips manage to walk through the perfumed garden of life is a miracle of modern bullshit, but a miracle nonetheless. Their validity is overwhelming and so refreshing, it almost makes me dizzy, and the way they can find their way through the mundane darkness of modern music and discover their own notes and chords between the lines is unparalleled by their peers. … These boys have tapped into a very secret well that everyone wants to drink from. Too bad it's got weird bent rainbows and chunks of shit floating in it.

From Good Bad Not Evil

12. The Warlocks: «So Paranoid»
A band that struggles with pooling enough talent and whatever je ne sais quois it is that great bands have (wait a minute, did I just use that expression?!), the Warlocks occasionally come up with an utterly hypnotising doozie. This one perfectly captures that woe-is-me Desolation Of The Soul experienced by those of us who wish we were
merely «so, so, so paranoid,» yet know only too well that it’s just that we’re not buying into the lies that people so readily tell themselves and each other… Thank you, Warlocks.
From Heavy Deavy Skull Lover

13. Sonic Youth: «I'm Not There»
Originally recorded in 1967 by Bob Dylan and the Band, this song was never released until it came out on the soundtrack to that pretentious Dylan biopic that takes its title from this obscure song. Dylan was probably still woozy from a motorcycle accident when he wrote this one; the lyric seems confused, and perhaps the reason it took 40 years to release is that it’s a little «unfinished». I use quotation marks, not because I want to be pretentious, but because it seems to me the lyrics work better that way; a song may seem more sincere when it’s not covered up in the usual literary decoys employed by Dylan in his sometimes evasive, often overly clever lyrics. But I digress—this is Sonic Youth’s version, and Thurston Moore never sang so well, his weary drawl drawing in the essence of the words.
From I'm Not There

14. Arctic Monkeys: «505»
From Favourite Worst Nightmare