rolling punk/non-indie underground 2012

<3 ed schrader's music beat

did you go matt?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twh5HfW9T20

has anyone heard the new fnu ronnies lp yet?

only heard the one track

http://soundcloud.com/load-records/fnu-ronnies-saddle-up

omg albini recorded screaming females??

Yep, "Ugly" out April 3.

i did got to ed schader's music beat they were pretty pummeling! (but kinda poppy at the same time!)

yeah they are weirdly equal parts noize abrasion and hummable accessibility, almost like some 80s LA new wave theater type band with the theatrical starkness and artpop

yow, psyched for new FNU ronnies & screaming females. can't watch the ESMB clip here, but will check it out when i get home. feeling super out of the new music loop here in tacoma. boo.

Anyone in the Bay Area should check out this new noise fest that's coming up called The Dissonance Party. The lineup is rad so far. Should be a great time!

confirmed acts so far:

Riververb (San Diego)
Pulsating Cyst (LA)
Kawaiietly Please (Santa Cruz)
Shortwave Surfers (Oak)
Darph/nadeR (Santa Rosa)
Das Blut (SF)
Nuclear Death Wish (Oak)
Xome (Sac)
Medicine Cabinet (Tracy)
Toe Ring (ex members of Chrome Genie) (New York)
Moe Staiano (Oak)
Lektricman (Oak)
Rubber Cement (SF)
Torn By Teeth (Inland Empire)
Liver Cancer (Sac)

this thread is funny because the tectonic plates of indie are shifting is this shit is becoming one of the major landmasses of indie

i dont think that's anymore true now than in like, 2007 or 2008

lol @ ex members of Chrome Genie -- that's like one guy

game changer

http://soundcloud.com/pj-crittenden/fast-songs-by-ryan-from

Puerto Rico Flowers is breaking up:

Puerto Rico Flowers are playing their FINAL show April 20th @ The Archeron in Brooklyn New York w/ Rosenkopt & York Factory Complaint.

this thread is funny because the tectonic plates of indie are shifting is this shit is becoming one of the major landmasses of indie

― caulk the wagon and float it, Tuesday, March 13, 2012 9:35 PM (Yesterday)

yeah when I see child abuse or nu sensae or tinsel teeth on the front page of pitchfork I'll start to believe this

if you'd actually deny good, hardworkings bands the chance to reach bigger audiences, sell more tickets & albums just because yr like "ooh indie rock has cooties" that's profoundly stupid.

but i guess i dunno i'm from the 90s when bands like Cows or Jesus Lizard could sell out big clubs and shit so

it would be awesome if those bands got more attention! I'm saying it's not likely to happen.

but I guess I dunno I'm from the 80s when you couldn't say the words "butthole surfers" on mtv

not from the 2010s, when you can't print "pissed jeans" in the new york times

I mean, I know of a prominent noise rock label that was told last year they couldn't do a SXSW showcase because that type of music "didn't have a place here", and this was after years and years of hosting successful showcases

so it's not just some too cool for school fuck indie attitude on my part, from what I can see the engines that drive the indie media machine are just not that into pushing these types of bands

ok i agree w/that, ultimately i just don't think this type of stuff appeals to the hongro in ppl

Man, that's strange. They let small-stakes dudes from my town set up showcases, seemed like they let anyone who wanted to do it (and could find a venue) set up a showcase.

i think caulk meant like iceage, the men, total control, cloud nothings, and not the kind of bands you mentioned edward

i really want to like the Men more than i do, same w/cloud nothings

I still wouldn't call iceage, the men et al "major landmasses of indie"

boots on the ground perspective: 3 of the 4 bands you mentioned played PVD in the past 6 months and those shows weren't even in legit spots, while major indie acts are booking at the 1000 capacity clubs

this thread is funny because the tectonic plates of indie are shifting is this shit is becoming one of the major landmasses of indie

― caulk the wagon and float it, Tuesday, March 13, 2012 6:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dont think that's anymore true now than in like, 2007 or 2008

― flopson, Tuesday, March 13, 2012 9:18 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, assume caulk is/was referring not to the tiny little noise bands izzy mentioned, but to the kind of stuff generally discussed in this thread (pissed jeans, for instance). and i agree that it's one of the major landmasses in indie. but i disagree that this is the result of any recent "becoming". indie rock and noisy punk shit have been closely related since the 80s, since indie came into being. that relationship waxes and wanes, comes in and out of focus, but it's never ceased to exist.

yeah - like wasn't Jesus Lizard and that Albini stuff a major part of what constituted indie when that term first started being used?

british ppl have established that indie rock started with the release of oasis's "definitely maybe" iirc

i also disagree that it is a major indie landfill or that it's only now becoming so. like to me this thread isn't about a certain aesthetic that is or isn't absorbed by indie but the shitty bands i like that probably won't ever be

yeah, but you like iceage, the men, ty segall, circle pit, sic alps, labels like ss, etc. lot of that stuff exists at the intersection of punk & indie (in my mind, anyway), which makes the thread title kind of funny.

yeah i definitely like all that shit, just that's what the "non-indie underground" means to me

embrace the indie

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/148/435569060_f3cfdef76f.jpg

haha i totally embrace the indie, dude. i mean, part of the reason i didn't keep "pitchfork GTFO" from last years' title is because i don't share that attitude. i was just saying that i feel like there will always be wonderful punk bands who are shitty enough that no one will care about them & so no matter how much of it is absorbed by indie media there will always be something to keep this thread going

oh yeah, troo

I always assumed "P4K gtfo" or whatever was more or less a joke anyway, if ppl are that scared of their cooties then they probably shouldn't post on a board with like half its writers

anyway talking of indie media this is my reviews column for The Quietus which went up yesterday, which I'm mainly linking to cos it has reviews of good shit that I didn't get round to yakking about itt http://thequietus.com/articles/08258-noel-gardner-straight-hedge-punk-hardcore

yeah pitchfork gtfo was a joek bros, you indie types are so earnest

being as old as mr contenderizer I agree w/ his take on indie starting out as a broad umbrella term. in the 80s it just meant bands on independent labels getting college radio airplay, which could be anything from black flag to yo la tengo. the distinction was mainly economic/distribution related, similar to the way any weird bands used to get thrown in a bin called "imports" at the record store no matter where they were from.

if I think about the evolution of the term, the roots go back to late 70s punk bands flirting with major labels - after the labels figured out they didn't know how to sell it and the punk scene discovered it could thrive without big capital requirements, they moved down separate paths. punk got extreme and unmarketable as hardcore emerged. then hardcore bands discovered pot and started getting weird (black flag, dinosaur, husker du, butthole surfers). what I dismissively called "jangle rock" was getting big as well (REM and their progeny - tho in truth I do like a lot of that stuff), a wing of the underground more influenced by the velvets 3rd album and 60s folk rock than the stooges and no wave.

by the mid 80s major labels started coopting the scene. I know that's a loaded term but eh, sympathies are sympathies. husker du signing to warners in 85 was the big turning point, once they went over the wall many followed. this excerpt from wikipedia sums up the cycle for the next 25+ years:

Flip Your Wig became the first album released on an independent record label to top the CMJ album chart, and at year's end, both New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig ranked in the top ten of the Village Voice annual Pazz & Jop critics' poll.

During the recordings sessions for Flip Your Wig major label Warner Bros. Records approached Hüsker Dü and offered the group a recording contract. The band felt it had hit a sales ceiling that it could break through only with the help of a major label. The promise of retaining complete creative control over its music convinced the band to sign with the label.[13] Mould also cites the distribution problems with SST as a reason for the move, mentioning that there would sometimes be no records to sign when the band would show up for promotional events.[14] Hüsker Dü was not expected to sell a large amount of records. Rather, Warner Bros. valued the group for its grassroots fanbase and its "hip" status, and by keeping the overhead low the label anticipated the band would turn a profit.

things got strange in the post-nirvana 90s as major labels snapped up anybody with indie cred, and this was when indie became a code word in certain circles for "biding your time until a major signs you". bands with no hopes of getting signed in the 80s (the wall keeping the rabble out was huge + insurmountable) were suddenly commercially viable. a lot of indie labels were now major label fronts, the same way huge beer companies started putting out pseudomicrobrews. I guess I could've saved a lot of typing and just posted this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwzxH1c3yk0

then the alternative/grunge wave crashed and the scene limped back to its basements and warehouses, and that's when things started getting interesting again to me. indie nowadays is a loaded term with a patina of aspirational baggage. from an 80s perspective pissed jeans and bon iver and sic alps are all indie bands. but if I was headed out to a pissed jeans show and a casual music fan asked me where I was going, I'd be doing a disservice by replying "going to see some indie band". cause they'd probably expect deer tick or arcade fire. you know, that jangle rock stuff. now beat it kid, grandpa's leg is asleep.

"going to see some indie band"

otm...

pissed jeans zinged in indie beef

i love calling pissed jeans and oneida "indie bands". and calling the arcade fire "a pig's rectum".

pig's rectum zinged in arcade fire beef

^ delicious if cooked the right way

lol

Bastard Noise was just added to the lineup of the Dissonance Party in San Francisco. If you haven't seen them before, they are a PUNISHING live act.

OTM on history of "indie" semantics: I distinctly remember one critic friend describing a band's sound as "indie rock" circa '00, and me replying that indie isn't a sound but a DIY business ethos--she was younger and from Portland. Not long after another Minneapolis friend put out the K-Tel Gimme Indie Rock compilation (about a third of which I'd consider punk), and I had to admit that the term had gained some general currency as a replacement for "college rock." Then it narrowed further as a bunch of bands came along sounding like Pavement and dressing like the D.C. Embassy kids (fashions brought to New York by Jonathan Fire*Eater, I reckon), so "indie" in the '00s came to mean '90s-hipster (read: ex-punk) fashions and '00s Strokes-y guitars.

I'd stuck to "punk" so stubbornly as an umbrella term for the whole independent music culture that I remember interviewing Mark Robinson circa '93 and asking him if Unrest was punk and him saying that word meant nothing to him. We used "underground pop" a lot in the early '90s to demarcate from the commercial ambitions of "alternative rock" and the perceived narrowness of "punk," and I still stuck to "indie" as a business description until critics started using it to describe bands on major labels. Now "independent" works just fine. By the mid-'00s my old '90s bandmate informed me he was into punk rock and disdained anything "indie," so I can see where the exclusive embrace of "punk" comes from.

But many punks (I'm thinking of another influential Minneapolis acquaintance) took it to ridiculous extremes: Suddenly anything that came out on Dischord after Marginal Man was indie-rock-not-punk by definition. When I saw Fugazi in 1990 at Turner Hall in Madison, WI, it was very much a punk show: same venue, cost, poster-style, slam-dancing, fashions, and by and large crowd as the one seeing Black Flag or Naked Raygun in '85. To me alternative, indie, undie, local-music, whatever scenes of the '90s were largely just the old punk crowd expanded by demographics (more kids every year) and embracing rap and metal more freely.

The revelation for me of getting into these threads and hardcore and Maximumrocknroll Radio over the past year has been to discover just how much great punk I've missed, partly because of my own prejudices, partly because traditional new-music outlets have ignored so much punk, and partly because so much punk has ignored traditional new-music outlets right back.

bastard noise hit and miss in my experience, you might want to also mention them here: rolling NOISE thread 2012

speaking of MRR, their review of the new FNU ronnies sounds like it was written by somebody thawed out after being cryogenically frozen in the 80s

http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/425667_10150680427351505_309957811504_8997503_472967158_n.jpg

lol, nice

new Slices is up on the label's bandcamp: http://ironlungpv.bandcamp.com/album/slices-still-cruising-lp

it's way grungier than the first album which I *think* they make work - speeds up in the second half but I get a Sub Pop-circa-1989 kinda vibe from it on first play

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZa4lNTySX8

new skoal kodiak video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MztEjjCPLbA#!

that video is basically how I imagine minneapolis, ppl getting drunk, cars crashing in the snow, plows flipping over

my band was going to play a show with skoal kodiak last year but their drummer threw out his back and they had to cancel their tour. I was bummed.