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

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

I forgot how much landfill is in that film, bend it like beckham predates this shit so the sountrack is way better

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.

― Maggot Bairn (Tom D.), Tuesday, 23 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Judging from that British Sea Power thing at least the Stones and Zep loved the Blues and really wanted to get that sound right. Those guys show no desire to do even that.

It's like trying to make a sound that's nice to keep in the background as you revise for your exams.

Fascinating how bad it is.

There's a lot on this list I'm not really familiar with. I do like the Zutons a lot. But the one band that really stands out for me is Guillemots, who I find truly special and any chance to back them, I'll take. Frontman Fyfe Dangerfield released a series of broadcasts in 2018 on his Channels May Change website called Birdwatcher, which consists of amazing new songs embedded within soundscapes and strange character storytelling, which is one of my very favourite music/art things ever.

Yeah I think he's a true, underappreciated talent who I suspect was a bit too clever for the time or even for his own good. Lumping Guillemots in with the other cheeky chappie landfill droogs feels unfair

Landfill does not discriminate. Anyone can fall in. Anything.

Gaze into the landfill and the landfill gazes back...

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.

Libertines at least were I think v much into trying to emulate punk. It's just the version of '77 these bands suscribe to is a very decadent, rock mag revision of the moment, amounting to "every ten years a new batch of bands has to come along and play simple guitar music to remind ppl of the power of ROCK".

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

that's definitely a fair bit of this stuff, but plenty of it (i'd even say probably most of it?) is just worse takes on the post-punk revival that was big at the time.

noisey have also cast the net so wide here that there isn't that much consistency in the list, it's just nearly all the less notable uk indie acts from the 00s + arctic monkeys thrown in for some reason

& yeah the less post-punk end of this stuff was still mostly at least vaguely into punk

Yeah I just cued up the first four tracks on this list and half of them are def trying for punk more than they are boomer rock.

I always thought that throughout the 2005-2015 period (probably starting earlier and perhaps ending later) the world was swamped with bands who mostly took (all the wrong) cues from the Clash and the Jam. Comparisons to either of those acts might be the quickest way to make me lose my interest in any band I don't know.

did not know abt the guillemot guy's birdwatcher things - listening now & enjoying - thank you valentjn.
clash/jam - yup no worse a turn off
"incurious" nails it

See, I became properly obsessed with 70s/80s new wave and post punk around that time by way of the SReynolds book, but I never heard the link between these bands and that stuff at all. Not even the Libertines or the Strokes - LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture, yes very much so, but not those mid-brand outfits.

To me it was just the long long tail of the Britpop era and the Gallagher brothers' proclamations about "rock-'n'-roll" endlessly recycling itself with diminishing returns.

90s Britpop was always accused of pastiching and romanticising the 60s and 70s, but landfill felt stultifyingly present-based, neither looking forward nor back, just staying in its own little spot with barely any room for experimentation or innovation. It was self-referential

Scouting for Girls weren't 'indie' enough but they were VILE