overlooked 90's groups

(tho brainiac was more new wave and 6fs were more straight up postpunk)

Gogogoairheart was really into early Rough Trade and Factory bands.

gotcha, and i agree, but so were unrest, another band that GGGA seemed to extend. brainiac weren't terribly "retro" to my mind, though they were strongly influenced by new wave, and their sound was very similar to kill me tomorrow's, with a comparably glammy take on dystopian futurism.

we can draw a line between the pasts observed by different eras, but everything responds to a past of some kind, right? the greasy fingerprints of 70s rockers like the stooges, black sabbath and blue cheer were all over the noisy, scuzzy indie punk that grunge rose out of. the velvet underground loomed similarly large over K-recs style lo fi. move ahead a few years, and it's not the 60s/70s but the 70s/80s that are being channeled. just saying that there's a difference between taking a few cues from something and being a "revivalist".

i mean, the flaming lips started out as a 70s classic rock record collection run through a drug-damaged punk filter, much like dinosaur jr. and with a similarly strong debt to neil young (another big grunge-era influence). but in the long run, i wouldn't call them revivalists, though those elements stayed in place.

Yeah, but I think that some of that newer generation of groups really were explicitly revivalist. Did you ever hear Satisfact or Nick Forte's groups Computer Cougar and Beautiful Skin? GGGA were a little looser about it.

Also, the midwest no wave groups that predated that stuff a bit - Couch, Duotron, Scissor Girls, etc.

Gravitar and ST 37 have turned into two of my favourite bands on the strength of their 90s stuff; Laddio Bolocko is great too, though for some reason I'm not sure if any of these count.

...Oh yeah Space Streakings is rad too, tho completely diff't than anything else I've mentioned in this thread thus far

― John Nestle Harding (loves laboured breathing), Thursday, March 15, 2012 9:50 PM (16-20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, what counts and what doesn't is a weird question. i don't really think of laddio bollocko as "overlooked" per se. more as a taste acquired by few. they've got a small but very dedicated and vocal following, and are basically still active as the psychic paramount. same might maybe said for gravitar, st 37 and space streakings (???), but even among psyche/drone & skin graft fan circles, they aren't much discussed. still, i don't think that they were ever destined to be loved by more than a handful of folks. unlike SUPERCONDUCTOR and THE KENT 3, bands that deserve to be heard and loved by every man, woman and child on earth.

i will say that this particular song, "stack collison with heap" by st 37, is absolutely fantastic, goofy vocals included, and criminally overlooked:

http://youtu.be/1W3RHgmDcDo

unfortunately, it's from 2002, after their period of designated greatness, so fuggit

Also, the midwest no wave groups that predated that stuff a bit - Couch, Duotron, Scissor Girls, etc.

yeah, exactly! don't know couch, but spent time w both duotron and scissor girls. i think they help build the case that there wasn't any sudden dip towards revivalism in the way strong 80s influences began to show up in 90s indie & punk, but rather a progression of novel-seeming reference points through various bands and scenes. i mean, something had to give after the 70s scuzzrock well ran dry. (dry or not, the scandinavians did pick up that dropped ball and run a few more yards with it in an explicitly revivalist fashion in the late 90s/early 00s: turbonegro, hellacopters, gluecifer, etc.)

leading to more commercial stuff like the darkness and the ark

Space Streakings

mentioned by john nestle harding up there. japanese noise punk hip hop noise noise. an "interesting" band who were probably insane live, but who live or die in my mind by one song: "YOUNGMAN II". might as well be the death set, but way better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjagElyU9kk

god, i listened to a LOT of this shit

the case that there wasn't any sudden dip towards revivalism in the way strong 80s influences began to show up in 90s indie & punk, but rather a progression of novel-seeming reference points through various bands and scenes.

That's certainly reasonable. I think I felt the shift acutely because I'm 44 now and all those bands were slightly younger. It was not my generation that was doing that revival!

There's something to be said, also, about revivalist-oriented bands being concerned with explicit stylistic signifiers in a way that, I didn't think, indie rock - no matter how rooted it may have been in older musics - did before. If you look at a record like the Rapture's Mirror, everything about it is a signifier from the Marquee Moon-style cover on.

Now that I think about it, you could say that about the Mummies too, but there seemed to be something central about the new revivalism and I think its lasting presence has borne that out.

hey, i'm 44 too! cheers. anyway, i get what you're saying and don't want to be an argumentative dick, but i got the same feeling from stuff like halo of flies, mudhoney, and green river. like everything was supposed to be a refracted, punk-lensed throwback to heavy 70s guitar god shit. song titles like "biker rock loser", blues & primitive rock structures, funhouse-aping cover on pussy galore's right now. the huge 70s rawk & boogie/blooze stamp on urge overkill. motorbooty magazine's p-funk worship, reflected in their house band, big chief. screaming trees (late 60s/early 70s acid rock), soundgarden & jane's addiction(zep), GBV with their who worship and hippieish lyrical fancies, butthole surfers (entirely their own thing, but came on like freedom rock burnouts, covered "american woman" and "sweat leaf" early on). hell, even pop-tatari boredoms wore a big, hairy 70s influence. plus just the styles. so many bands dressed like they were either in motorhead or refugees from a bad acid version of woodstock. i suspect this was more prominent/apparent in the backwards/woods pacific northwest than elsewhere in the country, where the 70s love was less "ironic", but it was everywhere at the time. or so it seemed to me...

mummies refer to a garage rock tradition that's been active and reverently revivalist at least since the early 80s. ime, it goes back as far as the milkshakes and nomads in 1981, but bands like DMZ were digging more or less the same ditch in the late 70s.

LOL I just realized Dream Warriors are those dudes who sampled that Quincy Jones song that was used in Austin Powers.. I suppose yeah, that was somewhat overlooked...

dream warriors had a huge hit w "my definition". figured that post had to be a joke.

Yeah, I think the fact that it was, as you say, a "refracted, punk-lensed throwback" is what made it seem more like something new than that Rapture record. I'm interested in postmodernism taken to the extreme that everything else gets shut out. The Japanese probably did it to the biggest extreme with heavy '70s guitar rock - High Rise and such.

Ha, I'm looking at the official High Rise web site:

"The concept is composed with heavy, radical sound and rock'n'roll ideological formation."

Mummies!

The Couch you guys are talking about are Midwestern no wave? Bcz I have an album by Couch called Fantasy from 99/2000 (released in the States by Matador!) But they were an instrumental band from Germany...

Also: I'm sure that ST 37 still had great songs well into the 00s. The only one of their albums I gave heavy rotation to was Glare, mostly bcz that one is SO. DAMN. BOSS. Definitely deserved to be heard more people in '95...

o shit I have a split with ST37 and Vocokesh, I should listen to the ST37 side.

"man, i fucking loved swirlies for a good couple years but listening to them lately it's just very sloppy and almost kinda involves the same posturing you see in dubstep today in vein that it's just noise for noise sake, like they're trying to impress us. would be fun in a live setting but via record it doesn't allot to a very compelling listening."

I'm not sure I get this. Would this not be true with any noisy record? It's not like you'd see Swirlies at No Fun fest, they at least have relatively straight forward and very melodic songs, why would they be picked on specifically in the context of the point made here? I can think of plenty of respected bands that devolve into noise or have little tape noise detours peppered throughout an album. In my opinion tricks like that along with songs that vary in tempo, mood, and length give an album glue and better hold interest.

When you pull the focus on melody out of the equation, that's when you put on a noise record and stroke your chin and fabricate quantifiers to how good it is at convincing you that it is cool.

I gravitate to early 90s groups for the punk approach they all seemed to have whether they were being twee, or grungy, or shoegazing. It is so refreshing compared to the magazine ad looking, hi-fi, everything is accessorized, fussed over indie that dominates today.

I'm 44 as well, that definitely has a lot to do with our perspective on rock over the past decades. It'd be interesting if a 20-something chimed in on 90s vs 00s indie.

And in the spirit of this thread, I'll just list my fave neglected 90s bands:
Compulsion
China Drum
Strangelove
Bike (kiwi goodness!)
Tiger
Adorable

I'll be 39 shortly -- I've forgotten about so many of these bands, and so many I still listen to now. One I didn't see mentioned above was The Nightblooms. I don't remember caring much for the second record, but that first one and the singles around and preceding it (ie. "Crystal Eyes") were great. I still play that record, not sure who else listened to them then or now.

Nightblooms, yes!! Debut was psych-shoegaze, totally brilliant. Debut dropped the shoegaze and didn't work for me at all.

Nightblooms trivia: there's a one-sided live vinyl album from their shoegaze period. It's worth hearing. I haven't checked to see if it's available for download anywhere...

Personally, I think that Shatterhand from their 2nd album is the best thing they ever did (it's in the same vein as the epic "1000 Years" from the debut) even if it's not exactly shoegaze. Nightblooms, like a lot of the other shoegazers, had good pop chops at heart. Plus, Shatterhand has, like, a fake beginning, a fake ending, a talkbox-assisted guitar solo that Brian May wishes he had thought of, and about a thousand other cool details.

The post-Nightblooms band, Safe Home, had some good songs but I missed the loudness.

I've looked for a download of that live record every so often and have never found it. It's been for sale on the internet by the same guy in the Netherlands for years (Gemm and now Discogs) but the shipping cost on top of the cost of the record itself is just too much. I definitely want to hear that though.

The Couch you guys are talking about are Midwestern no wave? Bcz I have an album by Couch called Fantasy from 99/2000 (released in the States by Matador!) But they were an instrumental band from Germany...

Right, there was a Couch from Michigan with, I think, the guy who ran Bulb Records and Marlon Magas.

I'm 25

Hmmm, always interesting when threads like this come up and I find out that various bands are still extant. Jennyanykind. Another group that started all indie shoegazey and then went in a totally different direction...like swampy folk blues or something like that. Their major label Revelator was pretty great, and they remained worth hearing to the end. Except apparently they're back together, at least as of last year:

http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/jennyanykinds-holland-brothers-reunite-after-the-major-label-wringer/Content?oid=2550053

Their best album probably, I Need You, is a very weird mix of like roots folk and dub, or something like that. They're seriously underrated, like many people on this list.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCfFVV7xQeQ

Compulsion
China Drum
Strangelove
Bike (kiwi goodness!)
Tiger
Adorable

as i said earlier in this thread (8 f*cking years ago - damn .. ) i love compulsion.
whether they are loved or not makes no difference given that the bands guitarist had the last laugh by becoming one of the worlds most in demand (and hated on ilm) producers.
as for the others, well, last week i dug out the tiger album and tried it again.
sorry, but i got to the middle of track 2 and hit the eject. not worthy.
still, i reckon its time to have another spin of adorable, as they were indeed ace.

after a night's sleep, i realize that i was being a bit of an argumentative dick re: tim's invocation of the "new revivalism". though influence and reference have long been important part of pop music, i do agree that a backwards-looking, fealty-proclaiming revivalist trend did kick off in the late 90s and has continued into the 00s. signposts: sudden popularity of "real rock" bands like the strokes/stripes/hives etc, emergence of garage rock into the mainstream (same thing), electroclash's 80s fixation and contemporaneous bands like interpol and the rapture (as tim mentioned), new weird america's hippie worship branching out into a soft 70s revival, etc. so yeah, point taken.

i don't, however, see kill me tomorrow and gogogo airheart as revivalists themselves. rather i put them in a lineage of past-influenced but non-revivalist indie rock that was simply making its way through the 80s. hair-thin distinction, i suppose...

i dug out the tiger album and tried it again. sorry, but i got to the middle of track 2 and hit the eject. not worthy.

I don't blame you, they are decidedly an acquired taste. The vocals put most people off straight away but they work for me ('course I love Mark E Smith's voice, too!).

And when we get to reminisce about forgotten 00s bands, Polak, which was the successor to Adorable, will be on my list.

I'd agree about Kill Me Tomorrow, but I think Gogogo Airheart was really geared toward period specificity.

that first post on this thread reminds me of dudes i knew in philly who LOVED rollerskate skinny. they were the only people i knew who loved them. and the dudes i knew in philly were space-pop dudes mostly. one guy was in this band ad astra and some of them ended up playing with the lilies guy. the only other rollerskate fan i knew was my friend jim who played some shows with them and who also ended up playing guitar in st. johnny. so, 90's memories all around!

and now i'm reminded that i have some rollerskate skinny ten inches at the store that nobody will buy and i should play them. maybe i'd like them!

I will buy the 10"s if they aren't super expensive! I need to look into them. I remember seeing them in NYC a few months ago and the price to content was way too disproportionate. Are they just a few tracks each?

I LOVE the Lilys side of that Ad Astra/Lilys split record so much, it is such refreshing beautiful springtime music to me. And I was just listening to the first St. Johnny record this morning, I'm a big fan of theirs as well. Really didn't like their last record because they were shamelessly trying to be Pavement or something.

i've never actually heard a st. johnny record. i remember them being pretty miserable during the whole major label thing. saw them open for elastica at the khyber pass in philly and they were really good though. they brought it. i felt bad for jim. he's such an awesome guitarist.

Yeah the first two albums are very enjoyable to me, would have liked to see them play around that time.

i've never actually heard a st. johnny record. i remember them being pretty miserable during the whole major label thing. saw them open for elastica at the khyber pass in philly and they were really good though. they brought it. i felt bad for jim. he's such an awesome guitarist.

― scott seward, Saturday, March 17, 2012 3:01 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah the first two albums are very enjoyable to me, would have liked to see them play around that time.

i love the one st johnny album i have (speed is dreaming), but i much prefer bills follow on stuff under the name of grand mal.

I will second Grifters.

Or is that a first?

Is Catherine Wheel overlooked?

Soul Hat

Hey Scott, speaking of the Khyber, do you know this blog, archiving "local Philly bands and bands playing in Philly", many recorded at the Khyber in the early 90s, like Straitjacket Fits, Mike Rep, Pavement w Gary Young, GBV (Pollard w Cobra Verde, I think), Helios Creed, V3, etc
http://freedomhasnobounds.com/?p=1631

Whatever happened to Babe The Blue Ox? They had the tunes! And the voices, when it was hard to find either in indie rock, much less both in one band

(maybe it wasn't that hard, but I was jaded)

Is Catherine Wheel overlooked?

judging by their presence in used cd bins, i would venture to guess that they have been giving a thorough look-over

been given, rather

what about 90s australian band glide?