The Top 50 Greatest Landfill Indie Songs of All Time (2020)

Incomplete list of actually-good UK guitar indie bands who began in the 00's:

Clearlake, Late Of The Pier, The Chap, My Computer, Youthmovies, Working For A Nuclear Free City, Electrelane, British Sea Power, Electric Soft Parade (their new album that came out 3 days ago = they've still got it!), The Cooper Temple Clause, Engineers, The Display Team, iLiKETRAiNS, Silvery, Field Music...

It wasn't all landfill around 'ere!

McLusky & 80s Matchbox are the two others that spring to mind. I think of Clearlake and Electrelane as being very late 90s but this is probably just an artefact of abandoning the UK in 2002.

Wild Beasts, Dutch Uncles, Esben & The Witch

I thought of McLusky but decided they weren't indie so much as noise-rock, underground, punk etc. Splitting hairs I know

Clearlake and Electrelane both began in 2000/01 I think - yeah, Electrelane's first single released in January '00 haha

Ahhhh ofc NickB

it IS notable though that most of these good bands are from either London, Brighton or up north. Landfill is very Midlands/Home Counties, discuss etc

I'll reluctantly allow Los Campesinos! if we're extending the Welsh any favours

Also Long Blondes and Clor are very much non-landfill

Wales are in this if Scotland are (which they are)

oh fuck, you've reminded me - Lapsus Linguae!! aaargh how could I forget haha

it IS notable though that most of these good bands are from either London, Brighton or up north. Landfill is very Midlands/Home Counties, discuss etc

― imago, Monday, 22 May 2023 07:54 (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this theory blown to bits by taking stock of just how very very many of these terrible bands are also from London, albeit like, certain parts of it (cough Shoreditch) i bet

It's also just generally bullshit. There were loads of great bands around here at that time, it's just none of them made it into the press. Plus most of your list I would say is bad and boring indie music! British Sea Power as a counter-example to landfill indie, really?

also early 2000s = sappy mawkish singer-songwriter stuff like Turin Brakes, there was plenty of that about.

Long Blondes were landfill-genre but far better than their contemporaries, love them

Babyshambles is fascinating to me only for being Shaggs-adjacent in their complete ineptitude, their rhythm section was always making the worst decisions and then executing these decisions poorly, it’s kind of amazing

I voted Larrikin Love because they somehow were proto- the next decade of landfill in a prescient way and I like their lyrics

Also obv I’m not going to listen to all these songs but I did listen to the Joe Lean song and it’s totally fine?

Is joe lean meant to be a reference to Jolene

It's also just generally bullshit. There were loads of great bands around here at that time, it's just none of them made it into the press. Plus most of your list I would say is bad and boring indie music! British Sea Power as a counter-example to landfill indie, really?

― emil.y, Monday, 22 May 2023 13:43 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

NAME NAMES

Landfill indie, btw:

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

;)

I mean, to me that just sounds like dreary uninspired guitar music, so yeah? It is indie that I would throw into a landfill. Full disclosure: I only listened to the first four minutes before giving up, maybe something incredible happens during the next ten minutes?

I fast forwarded and can report nothing happened.

There's literally an extended noise jam at the end! PROGGE

Anyway the other bands I suggested are better and more exciting honest. Except the ones I crossed out lol

At what stage did Landfill Indie because a catch-all term for almost the entire decade of British indue as opposed to merely the likes of Milburn etc

The Display Team fall into my 'I love Cardiacs but can't find a way into their descendants' category. Iirc they were good at ABC I guess.

My Computer excellent as hell but I file them in the Max Tundra/Cursor Miner part of my mind

Late of the Pier fantastic but I have a weakness for most of the more d̷o̷n̷'̷t̷s̷a̷y̷n̷e̷w̷r̷a̷v̷e̷a̷g̷a̷i̷n̷ dance-oriented such bands of this period. Intimacy is Bloc Party's best!

Turin Brakes (and earlier mention of Athlete) could initiate New Acoustic Movement/non-Coldplay/Travis/Keane "post-Britpop" names nuggets poll if one hasn't been done.

suspect that the only reason any of this stuff sounded exciting to anyone is *that* was the depressing sound of indie from approx 1998-2002. I even prefer the landfill, it's that shit and dull.

Starsailor, Alfie, Terris, Haven - one noun wonders, supplanted by plurialised noun wonders with definite articles*. I disagree though, I think this period was better than landfill. For one it's leading names were generally better (Doves, Badly Drawn Boy, that there the Cold Play). Would not be surprised if that was just me though.

*Really the other side to this (in the sense of bands they would share compilations with) was JJ72, Muse, Idlewild, Feeder, My Vitriol, the phoenix-risen Ash - bands that could get equal NME and Kerrang! coverage. And then lol there's Stereophonics who sort of fit into all these categories in some way.

early Elbow are defensible is my bedwetter indie challops

Tried and failed to get into early Elbow, surprisingly.

*Really the other side to this (in the sense of bands they would share compilations with) was JJ72, Muse, Idlewild, Feeder, My Vitriol, the phoenix-risen Ash - bands that could get equal NME and Kerrang! coverage.

― you can see me from westbury white horse, Monday, 22 May 2023 16:18 (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the Oceansize/Aereogramme axis of this clearly its pinnacle, altho both bands began juuuust before 2000

I got the Display Team to play my local club in Hertfordshire back when they were called Mumrah. Had no idea they were known outside of the local gig circuit. Anyway, they were a lot of fun and lovely chaps

But yes, let's not call all British rock c2000-2010 "indie Landfill". It is a genre with a specific sound

So is 'landfill' defined as acts working in a genre that's already been creatively strip-mined therefore nothing worthwhile can ever happen in it again? Because every genre/style is around 90% derivative and somewhat pointless, with the possible exception of classical/orchestral music. Probably there too though.

It was said upthread, but it's also about the push that these acts got - majors & 'independent' subsidiaries pressing thousands of CDs for the Next Big Thing acts that will invariably end up in landfill sites. I would say imagine the musical equivalent of the ET game but that's much more fun than these bands.

xp really but my understanding of it has always been that it's that gut from around 2004-09 when a huge number of post-Libertines/Strokes/FF-sounding bands were all signed up to majors or indies big enough to be majors, get rapid Radio 1 play almost from the word go, prominently appear at all the big festivals and get on the right magazine covers, but were ultimately proven to be only useful for a few hits, if that. The idea that it is landfill has some similar conjurations to 'manufactured' here - the idea that a sound had grotesquely saturated: these groups formed, got major mainstream exposure, and then were then all dropped after their 'use' expired, 'landfill' in charity shops, but also landfill in that the majority of these bands' discographies is probably worthless. Which is incredibly cruel on some of these bands, but the name has stuck.

OTM and (xp) OTM.

So was this stuff ever dubbed ‘landfill’ before the print version of the NME started being given away for free back in 2016? Or did the demise of this stuff lead to the demise of the NME?

I'd never heard the term until the mid-2010s. But the NME did ultimately suffer from the bubble bursting. Those bands were recognisably 'NME bands' whereas the only new groups I can think of that came later with that term attached were like Temples, Swim Deep, Superfood - bands of varying success but whose media vehicles were uniformly subtler than the landfill groups (or so I'd say anyway).

ach, nae! young knives do not belong in the landfill

It appears that every non-significant band of the times has been retrospectively branded landfill

tbf only in retaliation for me being rude to the entire Midlands

My Vitriol had potential, but they vanished into the ether so quickly. I don’t recall them getting any kind of traction on modern rock or college radio in North America, but Q had an article on them every month for at least half a year (2002?)

My Vitriol are such a weird one to me. I seem to know several people who think they were amazing and still yearn for a second album. At a friend's stag do about ten years ago, I met another friend of his who said they were his favourite band. I don't remember them being that good at all.

I only remember them by name. Weren't they more of a Kerrang-style band?

I was thinking maybe slade were partial progenitors of the sound, but noddy has a voice, there's the violin, and they had some degree of idiosyncrasy that the landfill studiously avoids. i get the "hear my song" urge, but i don't get the "hear my enervated "1015 on a saturday night" half-ska plod with attempted motown horns borrowed from a madness record but that sound like grimethorpe colliery brass band on a rainy bank holiday monday" urge. pork pie hat. dick van dyke. guys with weller-cuts talking slightly racist, slightly homophobic, about "proper music". how do you shoehorn a dave gilmour guitar solo into "doing the lambeth walk"? avvin it laaarge. three lions on his shirt. makes my blood boil.

and any excuse to post this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClcwKgxu2wk

lol yes. that's more a Stone Roses zing, but ofc the Stone Roses underpin a lot of this (the mellower end of it at least)

i voted for the hounds of love cover

i like it

I've been thinking about this and it's like UK indie music with all the last vestiges of punk/post-punk removed so you're left with a bunch of incurious hacks who are fully onboard with the Beatles/Stones/Zep classic rock/ proper music canon.

all my pals at uni were massively into this stuff and we went out every other week to an indie disco for it. I liked my pals as people and I liked the ritual of getting ready with them in various flats but wow was this stuff hard to enjoy even when full of booze with likeable people. I took up smoking because it meant I had an excuse to go outside when the worst of it was happening.

that said, I can never truly hate "She's So Lovely" purely because it is featured in the greatest British movie of all time, which is Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging