overlooked 90's groups

were Kangaroo Kourt from Houston?

Anastasia Screamed

Dead Horse were a fucking awesome live band, the're overlooked?

Cherubs were a cool band

speaking of noisy/heavy texas psyche on trance syndicate, THE CHERUBS. never loved the band, but this song, "CARJACK FAIRY" is another of my alltime 90s favorites. absolutely pulverizing, but in the hypnotic, mush-brained way i love best:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8TqL1SMPyA

"i can't steal this car alone..."

recently covered by red fang, and so maybe due for a reappraisal?

xp grandavis

Freedom Fighters - My Scientist Friends

super raging but yet poppy at the same time noise punk....they were from Mpls were actually on AmRep right at the time that everyone stopped caring about AmRep, love that band and it's much harder to find/more obscure spinoff Capital! Capital!

both HIGHLY recommended

Just listened to Dead Horse on youtube, maybe they should be forgotten

Yeah, good Cherubs song above. Can't even remember the names of the songs I like, just one of those bands I would play on radio shows in the 90s. That Pain Teens clip above reminded me that they existed!

Speaking of AmRep, here's a track from one-hit-wonder Manchester, UK outfit The Powers That Be, released as a picture-disc single as part of the label's loss-leader "Research and Development Series". Love this song to death, though it's arguably kind of goofy/affected. As far as I know, the band never released anything else, save a compilation track that i've never heard. IT'S A CRUDE SOUND:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A8G-Z2n9cg

^ remarkably shitty sound. not sure what i did wrong, but i ripped it years ago when i was just beginning to understand life.

I <3 Dead Horse. Horsecore!

Paging through my 90s scrapbook, here's the baby-crushing "Throats to Hit" by Honolulu-via-Ellay grunge-pop act Chokebore. First appeared on one of those "R&D Series" singles, then comped on the tour promo EP from which this tube is apparently sourced. Never heard anything else by the band I particularly cared for, but this, the A side to their debut single, just kills me. Much poppier than almost anything else on AmRep, almost Pixies-like on the incredible chorus. So great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SQ-DdI3i5k

ha, I just realized I was confusing Dead Horse with Distorted Pony...

Okay, so maybe I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here, but I was always fascinated by Love 666, another late-to-the-party AmRep band that got overlooked when the Halo of Flies cred was long gone and the hipsters had drifted. Bizzare combination of aggressive ineptitude, raw noise, cute & indie-ish (but junkie blurred) boy-girl vocals, pop hooks, heavy riffs, MBV worship and neil young ache. All recorded like your head was in the kick drum. I don't know that they they ever really got it "right", but no one else sounded anything like them. Heavy Trux. "You Sold Me Out" was their label debut:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6n-AdRlDB4

Superconductor - "Shaved Temple"
King Black Acid and the Womb Star Orchestra - "Alone On Mars"
The Kent 3 - "Mad About the Boy"
The Fall-Outs - "Zombie"
Pain Teens - "It Will"
Cherubs - "Carjack Fairy"
The Powers That Be - "Crude Sound"
Chokebore - "Throats to Hit"

^ this is actually a fairly accurate "how i spent the 1990s" playlist. fill out with blurry, yearning commercial indie pop like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB_f0IrNJTs

The Dambuilders - "Slo-Mo Kikaida"

Just looking at the top of the thread - Rollerskate Skinny was the first gig I went to. With the Drop Nineteens. RS were good! Just here to lol at sleeve's DN mainly tho.

I really liked a band called Laguna Meth somewhere around 1996.

http://soundcloud.com/staybeautiful-generation/laguna-meth-nuclear-snowcone

Apparently they released a debut album about eleven years later.

Going over all this stuff, I'm again struck by the massive differences between what I thought of as American "indie rock culture" in the early-mid 90s and what the term "indie" came to mean in the late 90s and new century. That early-to-mid 90s stuff, growing out of the post-hardcore 80s punk underground, seemed defined as much as anything by a will to transgress, a stance of deliberate and sometimes extreme opposition to "mainstream" "normalcy". It was built by evil-minded labels like Amphetamine Reptile, Touch & Go and the early-noisy Sub Pop as by kinder gentler purveyors of guitar pop like Matador, K and Slumberland.

You couldn't clearly separate indie from punk at that point. Bands like the Jesus Lizard, Melvins and Shellac were leading, scene-defining lights, and the legacy of the harsh, experimental noise music once made by the likes of Sonic Youth and the Butthole Surfers remained an important part of the genre's DNA, even when those acts "went commercial". Even pop-oriented and relatively rock-traditional bands like Dinosaur Jr. and the Flaming Lips claimed to be punk. Indie rock took tips from industrial culture and "urban primitivism", from Re-Search publications and Survival Research Laboratories. It decorated itself with scabrous underground comics and embittered ranting (Steven Jesse Bernstein, Answer Me!, Your Flesh).

All that extremity and transgression, the belligerent violence and alienation, the hard fucking rock, seemed to fall away towards the end of the 90s. It didn't disappear, but American indie somehow managed to redefine itself as absent or even as a rejection of those qualities. Whatever Wolf Eyes and Lightning Bolt were, they were suddenly and emphatically not indie. Like how Built to Spill were basically Dinosaur Jr. without the self-loathing and punk outbursts. It's as much a truism that bad times produce angry music as that bad times cause people to crave a pleasant escape. Where American indie is concerned, the latter impulse seems to have won the day. The relatively affluent and optimistic Clinton years bred an indie culture that championed harsh, oppositional, punk-inflected noise music. 9/11 and Bush Jr.'s catastrophically dystopian new century produced an American indie culture in love with Sufjan Stevens and The Shins.

^ the contenderizer news bulletin. issued every 3-6 months. contents juggled, but dependably consistent. count on it.

On the other hand, you had bands like Pavement and Yo La Tengo emerging or gaining popularity in the early 90s and I can see why folks were attracted to such bands amongst all the sub-grunge noise backwash that was what a lot of the scene yr describing turned into.

yeah, i think it's a good point that the successes and sins of "grunge" maybe killed off the transgressive/punk indie i loved so much. at least killed it as indie, as something acceptable within indie culture.

and yeah, the massive wave of second and thirdhand noise-punk cribsheet rockers that got signed to labels like noiseville and amrep towards the end got really, really boring.

When I was listening to this music in the early 90's I thought of it as 'underground'. I didn't hear the term indie until the 2000's and I had fell out of touch with underground rock.

i've heard that several times on ILX. the phrase was familiar to me when sebadoh released the "gimme indie rock!" parody/diss single in '91, but maybe it was more common in some areas/scenes than others?

^ specifically bashing sonic youth, pussy galore and dinosaur jr. as purveyors of played-out, cash-grabbing "indie rock"

Yeah and there was that song She's an indie rocker, but I guess being more into the avant side of the 90's and less the grunge rockin side, I never thought of music as indie.

The 'underground' for me was the whole Siltbreeze axis, the bands that never got any coverage in the UK music weeklies.

I guess it doesn't help that I lived in a small town and didn't know anyone who liked the same music as me, so I got my information from zines or mail order catalogs. I didn't meet other like minded people until I loved to austin in 98 and even then the people who like this music were called 'Mods' not indie rockers.

moved to austin I mean

Ha, Mods is a curious term there, how did that get traction?

I think it was everyone's hair cut

Many it was the people who hung out with The Prima Donnas and a few other bands whose names I forget. Guys who dressed like they were in the Make Up.

The relatively affluent and optimistic Clinton years bred an indie culture that championed harsh, oppositional, punk-inflected noise music. 9/11 and Bush Jr.'s catastrophically dystopian new century produced an American indie culture in love with Sufjan Stevens and The Shins.

I quite like this theory. Does it hold up under further scrutiny? It certainly would explain my experience with indie the past 20 years.

Oh, and The Dambuilders were frickin' AWESOME. I saw them a number of times around Boston and Joan's violin-as-guitar really set them apart. Their last album was a let down but everything up until then is excellent.

For me the end of the Clinton years and what happened to indie, groups like built to spill, emo, and the whole nu twee drove me away from the scene, to look into soul, disco, post punk, and other older musics. I've never really returned to indie.

Dadamah

makes me think about how open to personal or in-group interpretation phrases like "indie", "alternative" and "underground" are. the phrase "indie rock" was attractive to me because it did such a good job of describing my feelings about music and culture. it captured the quasi-political intensity of my devotion to the ideal of "independence". this independence was predicated on punk's rejection of commerce and bourgeois complacency (yeah, i know), but it extended out into a cultural and aesthetic radicalism that rejected traditional punk's genre formalism and demands for ideological purity. as i saw it, indie rock was the punk of impurity, of bastardization, of intermixing and the absurd. relative to american hardcore's extreme orthodoxy, it seemed hugely liberating.

in my personal lexicon, something might just happen to be "underground" by dint of being as-yet undiscovered, and everything was arguably an "alternative" so something else, so those terms were of little use to me. to be independent by choice, as a matter of principle: that was something special. it seldom occurred to me that the gnarly, fucked-up indie rock i so dearly loved was really just another consumer commodity, a niche product aimed predominantly at moderately affluent young people with disposable income to burn, not much different really, than metal or hardcore. i clung to the myth of independence even as the butthole surfers and sonic youth sold piles of records, stickers and t-shirts, got positive reviews in the rolling stone, even showed up on MTV.

then came nirvana, and that was the end of that

really just another consumer commodity, a niche product aimed predominantly at moderately affluent young people with disposable income to burn

That strikes me as a sour spin.

it is, and i regret that to some extent. but it's a realization that struck me deeply and sourly at a certain point in my life, given that i'd invested a lot in the idea of my own "independence" without ever really demanding that i make the appropriate sacrifices on its behalf. that is, relative to the engines of american culture and capital, i wasn't nearly as independent as my record collection had led me to believe. i still see value in the myth of independence (not meaning myth as something false, but rather as something believed in).

i guess i get to be independent in mind, even if i'm still just a wage slave. ask deej and max.

A lof of the 90's underground was very diy, cassettes and cheap cds. What part of it was affluent? matador?

Dadamah, yes Tim, excellent choice, as would be many other little known kiwi bands from the era.

Contenderizer - I was thinking more of the idea that rebelling in the Clinton years when things were comfortable was safe vs. when things felt completely unsafe post-9/11, indie rock became that safe haven. Very broad generalization but it's an interesting idea.

I mean indie rock become safe music.

becAme. Can't get a proper thought typed up tonight.

A lof of the 90's underground was very diy, cassettes and cheap cds. What part of it was affluent? matador?

i meant "affluent" in the "realization that i am an affluent american" sense. like, if you have money to burn on cassette tapes, weed and gg allin shows, you probably aren't all that poor.

Damn. Y'all really suck at this. How about Dream Warriors, Kool Keith a.k.a. Dr Octagon, Atari Teenage Riot, Arto Lindsay, Son of Bazerk and P.M. Dawn?

those are not overlooked

well dr octagon, ATR and PM Dawn are def not overlooked

Smile
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPVmVfoI9hs

The Swirlies?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1M3DIX9f78

Self? Are they overlooked?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-MqPaxj4Bg