Best Coast

Daniel, I think you should join Fleet Foxes

i cannot grow a beard that majestic.

also, i am too old to be in a band. even the fleet foxes.

one is never to old to play acoustic guitar & have a beard, as patchy or unmajestic as it may be

patchy it would be.

anyway, nothing wrong with a lo-fi aesthetic filled with reverb. done well, i still appreciate it. besides, does that really characterize best coast's sound? its more 60s-girl group/surf rock homage, to me.

if you buy an electric instead of an acoustic, you can start a lo-fi band, forgo the beard completely, *and* save money on production costs by using a cassette deck instead of a modern studio

ksh, there are days where, if i could give up my law practice for a gig with a band, i would.

of course, i'd have to be able to play even passably.

not in indie rock you wouldn't -- buy a guitar, learn a handful of chords, and start singing the first thing that comes to mind. send the demo to a blog. you will be featured on Stereogum in a month's time

xxxp yeah that's getting at the problem--a lot of bands are trying to explicitly give themselves a "retro" aesthetic through recording techniques. i think it rarely works well. it's not really a problem with the second vivian girls record because a) the songwriting is going in a completely different direction and b) i'd characterize their production more as just "noisy" than anything

wait, you're saying . . .

I COULD BE FEATURED ON STEREOGUM?!?

within a week's time, if you're very lucky & willing to eventually have your lo-fi tunes featured in a KFC commercial

xpost to cad

sure. one of the problems with indie rock, and with any genre, really, occurs when a band assumes certain signifiers (lo-fi production, a certain guitar sound) w/o its being an "essential" part of their sound. it's the difference between a band's putting on ill-fitting clothes b/c tradition or current trends present those clothes to you as an option & having a certain aesthetic as an inherent, "essential" part of one's aesthetic

things are more nuanced than that, but that's the best way i can think to describe it right now

having a certain aesthetic as an inherent, "essential" part of one's aesthetic

switch that first "aesthetic" for "sound or production choice"

The true test is whether the songs hold up despite the lo-fi aesthetic. I'd argue that "When I'm With You," the stuff on the DDG album, etc. are sturdy enough to withstand any production approach. Same as the Shrimper acts from a decade ago; as we now know, the Mountain Goats' songwriting lends itself to boombox production or lush 4AD-sponsored studio craft.

And I happen to like a minimal, low-tech approach anyway. If I haven't gotten sick of it since playing early Beat Happening on the radio in 1985, it's not going to happen now.

it's just another production option for an artist. there's nothing inherently wrong with it at all.

there's a band called Grass Widow, too? fuck, i've fallen asleep

it's not really that complicated ppl are just sick of fucking reverb and fake lo-fi production that you don't even need to have in 2010

― call all destroyer, Saturday, May 1, 2010 12:45 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

maybe i just like lo fi more than most but it's hard for me to relate to people who are all "i can't tell if i like this song because its LOFI and REVERB and SUMMER and i hate all those things because they're so trendy right now." are people just really picky about production or

i am pretty picky abt production so

this really isn't about trendiness--it's about laziness, and bands choosing production techniques that cover up poor musicianship, singing, and songwriting and then saying it's an aesthetic choice. i'm not saying this is happening intentionally, but i do think it is happening.

since there's no way to judge why an artist is making a particular production choice--unless you ask them, and even then "intentional fallacy" yada yada--i just try to judge them on the final product & whether it sucks or not

ppl are just sick of fucking reverb and fake lo-fi production

by "ppl," i assume you mean ILM posters who still maintain some sort of an interest in indie rock, b/c most indie kids probably don't care & the majority of the population doesn't know that Japandroids or No Age exist

(No Age isn't even a great example -- a lot of the Losing Feeling EP doesn't even sound lo-fi)

it seems some people are pretty sick of lo-fi production at this point, and now any band regardless of how good they are will just get this knee-jerk "I AM SO FED UP WITH THIS SHIT" as if people have lost all ability to discern good from bad and are so repulsed by the ubiquity of the production style it's like their way of rebelling against it by just complaining and shitting on every instance of it. i think best coast's best songs pull it off beautifully, reverb et al all perfectly complementary to the style and overall vibe imo.

lol ksh you accused "ppl" of indie guilt and i am saying it is much more likely that "ppl" are not into this particular aesthetic

the problem with best coast was as soon as the youtube video started i was like "oh, it's this again"--i mean it wasn't offensive as a song or anything, i can't even really remember it atm, and i am NOT saying i hate all or even most of the stuff we're talking about, but like, it just seems like more of the same to me at this point.

but i'm really only arguing this because ksh thought it was a good opportunity to be all lol indie guilt as if he wasn't starting new threads about wilco 6 months ago

i think best coast transcends "oh, it's this again" by not being one of these ppl

this really isn't about trendiness--it's about laziness, and bands choosing production techniques that cover up poor musicianship, singing, and songwriting and then saying it's an aesthetic choice. i'm not saying this is happening intentionally, but i do think it is happening.

― call all destroyer, Saturday, May 1, 2010 2:42 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark

i totally get that for someone who actually dislikes and has to, like, overcome the production it would be a nuisance. but if you're already into or unaffected by low fidelity, wouldn't you just listen to the actual song and respond to its melodies/chords/performance isntead of making such a big deal out of the use of reverb?

ksh do you still like indie rock?

i've seen you blaspheme its name in a few threads recently

xxp i respond to all components of the song at once--when i'm with you is a decent song that i would probably like more if it didn't sound the way it did

i totally think some of the hatred for these bands is due to lol indie guilt, but i'm not denying that your reaction, cad, is a legitimate one either

ksh do you still like indie rock?

― passion of the wein (samosa gibreel), Saturday, May 1, 2010 3:12 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i've seen you blaspheme its name in a few threads recently

― passion of the wein (samosa gibreel), Saturday, May 1, 2010 3:13 PM (3 minutes ago)

just bought the new Caribou this week. i am still on board w/ indie rock. when i criticize it, i do it from the perspective of someone who still cares about it a lot

i'm super excited for the new Sleigh Bells

i wouldn't write this in as indie, unless you're just saying indie is all underground rock and pop music, and this trend is more on the 60s garage pop revival axis than actual indie pop. this is pretty distinctly not indie pop, in my mind at least. very possible that i am totally wrong, though.

i'm using indie as the almost impossible to define umbrella term it's become

not sure what difference it makes, but it makes more sense to me to not treat this as indie. like to my mother indie rock is when she asks me "is this david bowie?" and i say no and she says "hm, could've sworn it was david bowie." i play guitar in a 50's pop band, we do mostly covers but recently have written some original material, and i wd probably be really upset if someone called us an indie pop band not because i dislike indie pop (which i don't) but because it's not twee or weird or affected or whatever. same with best coast, the songs are so clear, simple and straightforward, if it weren't for the recording (which still isn't an indie signifier to my mind) you definitely wouldn't id it as indie.

fair enough, but i bet you if your band were to release a record it'd be covered by indie publications & your audience would be primarily indie kids. right?

really, this is all about the definition of the term "indie," which is a whole fuckin can of worms it's probably not a good idea to open. even after reading a million ILM threads & being part of the indie subculture, i still don't feel comfortable putting out a definition

xp praps, or 60+ year olds. hipsters are definitely shifting away from indie (as identifiable to someone who doesn't subscribe to pitchfork rss) but i suppose now if we just call everything indie it's still a big thing? yer right this is all pretty unrelated to best coast though.

hipsters are definitely shifting away from indie

when you say this, do you mean that "hipsters" are focusing on music that isn't clearly influenced by the Sonic Youth/Dinosaur Jr/Pavement sort of line of bands?

(as a sidenote, i was asking ppl what good indie records have come out this year over here -- A bunch of 2¢: Rolling Indie Thread 2010 -- and i'd be interested in hearing from you, samosa, if you think any good indie records have come out this year that the two ppl who already responded so far didn't list)

i'm not a big indie guy, but this year i like white hinterland and vampire weekend alot.

oh, and titus andronicus.

thanks, i'll look into the White Hinterland.

what do you mostly listen to?

I saw Best Coast on Tuesday night in London. Her voice is really great - it seemed stronger and more varied than on record. They had the drummer from Vivian Girls backing them, who was in a terrible mood and seemed to be having a great deal of trouble. The other guitarist (who I think was in The For Carnation) is a lot of fun to watch - he's got long black hair, was dressed like an 80s metalhead, and somehow manages to shred these little runs on his long necked guitar. I really liked them. If they know what's good for them they'll get an album out in time for Summer, because that's kind of what they're all about.

The opening band was called Yuck and even though they all looked about 18 they played an incredible approximation of Dinosaur Jr./Built to Spill with a dash of Lemonheads. It was an appealing throwback. I would have bought some music if they had some for sale.

wow, one of the chicks from the vivian girls is destructively petulant? i'm shocked

Yuck used to be, the frankly awful, Cajun Dance Party. So yeah, they must be 19ish.

Smirking hard@ J0rdan.

I was at the London gig on Tuesday as well - Yuck were pretty good. I figured them as Dinosaur Jr + Pavement + a bit of shoegaze. There was another band before them, something about Philadelphia something or other. They were very energetic but not all that good.

I thought the drummer looked like the Vivian Girls drummer, which makes sense if it actually was the Vivian Girls drummer. They had to replace the bass drum halfway through although it sounded alright to me. I picked up the 7" but I was hoping to buy When I'm With You cos that song is awesome, I guess it's sold out now.

Didn’t The xx also dominate 2009 EOY lists(?) Guess I don’t remember. I’m sure Whiney knew what he was doing with his zinger, but I’ve also never rarely understood with those bands had to do with each other… now I get the concept anyway.

*really understood (I “rarely” understand anything!)

The xx was #7 on the 2009 P&J (right behind Grizzly Bear). So yeah, we probably could've made it GAPDYX.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090228101636/http://hypem.com//

I argued as early as 2007 iirc that the dominant “problem” with Pitchfork was the decimal ranking system, applied across genres. I intuited that it would be “bad for music” over time. That it would create a musical landscape that would privilege “good recordings” over “interesting creations”. That it would celebrate music that was pacifying rather than music that was revolutionizing. That it would naturally skew white and male and straight and upper-middle class. That Pitchfork’s influence had grown to such a point that prospective collaborators (publicists, for example) would just bluntly ask “what’s your Pitchfork score on your latest release?” when assessing if they should work with an emerging artist.

I furthermore said that bands were going to change the way they made music. They would start making creative decisions that would favour Pitchfork’s metric. I’d seen friends tell me about their next record and I’d feel Pitchfork’s influence in them. I tracked these decisions within myself and my own creation. I mean… Deerhunter’s arc seems to me to be the best example of this, I guess

I know I already invoked Nabisco in this thread, but this 2009 piece by him is an interesting look at the cultural status of indie at that time and how it got to that point:
https://pitchfork.com/features/article/7704-the-decade-in-indie/

Deerhunter is interesting in this context because Cox seems to have basically stopped making music, after being so active for years… (unless he’s doing stuff I haven’t heard about)

was abt to say he did that record with cate le bon but... that was apparently in 2019

looks like he played a solo show for the first time in years a few months ago but deerhunter seem to have quietly broken up. not a band i ever quite understood the hype around

Fading Frontier is all time for me

have seen them live a few times, too noisey for me

there was a time when it seemed like my local venue booked every bnm artist they could (and that was a lot) and... I guess I went to all the shows

p4k was such a monolith

the most important reason GAPDY took off is because it's fun to say

every one of the GAPDY bands are leagues better than Best Coast too

someone mentioned the 10 year cycle of being considered kind of lame about 10 years after the peak which is true (with a nostalgia boost at 20 years) but the one problem they will have, as compared to I don't know disco or hair metal or grunge or pop punk or nu metal, these bands weren't really that popular in real world terms compared to and of those genres, it was more than they dominated the conversations about music in a certain media/Internet/social media niche

sorry for the typos

Cryptograms + Fluorescent Grey is a perfect double vinyl album imo, one of the best of this century

I liked Microcastle (especially) and everything else, sure; the dissonance that I felt around their peak-popularity (Halcyon Digest, great title in retrospect) was that it felt as if some decisions were made to make the music more blog-friendly, and... blogs were friendlier.

I don't exactly understand what nabisco's thesis is in that P4k piece but it is always such a pleasure to read his writing, thanks for the link jaymc

the one problem they will have, as compared to I don't know disco or hair metal or grunge or pop punk or nu metal, these bands weren't really that popular in real world terms compared to and of those genres, it was more than they dominated the conversations about music in a certain media/Internet/social media niche

I think this is exactly right

it really seems like much of that music was specifically based around a scene that was very much of the moment, perhaps even more about the social aspect than other music scenes were. this doesn't NOT describe the scenes swirling around disco, hair metal, etc, but i think a lot of the PFM indie of the time just also doesn't stand up to scrutiny thru the nostalgia lens, a lot of it disappeared into vapor because it was pushed to prominence by that particular niche, and you really had to be there. i didn't have to be there for zeppelin or sabbath or abba, but maybe for the GAPDY groups the subsequent generations aren't going to understand it at all? idk i also know that doesn't strictly describe GAPDY, it happens to all scenes. UMS otm obv.

That is probably true to some extent but to another (larger) extent the opposite is true, in that so much of this was consumed by many through platforms that did nothing to build/maintain scenes or communities. So much of the audience was instantly accessed through content aggregators, mp3 blogs, BNM. A good chunk of the initial enthusiasm for band A could come from an audience with little additional buy in. Next week there would be something else coming out of the hose. Coming in the gap between the end of CDs and the return of vinyl it also meant that even if you played something a lot one week it was so easy to forget it even existed a week later. When I visit my parents house I still find all the CDs i bought when I was a teenager but I'm sure a good chunk of stuff I listened to in my 20s has been totally deleted from my memory when I lost an iPod shuffle in Spain in 2011.

i think that goes hand in hand a bit with the era being ephemeral, something that existed as an in-person scene but which was didn't exist as widely in terms of physical media (not a minor thing; that does lend itself to music not being memory-holed.) so it winds up feeling so much further back in time, maybe.

all my MP3s from that era i downloaded and burned onto a bunch of MP3 CDRs and then lost the whole damn thing. def had some GAPDY-era stuff on there. i think in fact it was primarily all that (plus a decent chunk of revived lost albums posted on MP3 blogspots that have now been properly reissued.)

Something that might not be relevant but still might be interesting: I observed and it’s been confirmed by many others that across the board, sales of physical media at shows have spiked immensely over the past decade. A colleague of mine said he thinks it’s because “people are going to record stores less, seeing a merch table is an exciting thing”

xp It was also right before Spotify destabilized the role of indie music as status symbol for a certain type of educated consumer who knew which blogs to follow. I find it harder to look back on that stuff and see something with an enduring cultural significance when it feels like it was so quickly swallowed up.

the most important reason GAPDY took off is because it's fun to say

This is why I got no support for my acronym YPDGA