rolling punk/non-indie underground 2012

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.

ooh too band edward, they are quite a force of nature live.

people in mpls are way better drunk driving in snow than that

btw, another bunch of (former) locals Clipd Beaks have a new album out on Bandcamp:

http://clipdbeaks.bandcamp.com/

(was recorded around the time of their excellent album To Realize)

if it sounds like the set they played live a week or so back, it's kinda a different sound for them.

yea heard nothing but good things about SK live show

and not to speak ill of them, because i like the records but frankly i would say that they are one of those bands that's not going to ever be totally captured on a record IMO

that's ok I'm sure they'll make more money from playing shows to big crowds than they ever will from record sales

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldR83aCcATM

cute!

...drummer

that's members of the hunches in high school

http://teenagelobotomies.blogspot.com/2010/05/marvelous-darlings-singles.html

the Slices album is pretty cool
the new Broken Water single is AWESOME

Looking forward to last year's Royal Headache album finally getting a US release.

great band^

happened upon a group on bandcamp called fake limbs. they're from chicago.

http://fakelimbs.bandcamp.com/album/man-feelings

also, that slices album is the shit.

i dunno where else to post this but new merchandise
http://katorgaworks.bigcartel.com/product/merchandise-children-of-desire-lp

ha i kind of feel like that fake limbs album is designed for me - local dudes, love the band name, album name, album cover, song titles. the songs could be a little better but i like it.

they kinda sound like rye coalition before they went totally led zep

dang they opened for bottomless pit here last week :( wish i had known

chris thomson from the monorchid/skull kontrol/ignition/red-eyed legends has a new band called coffin pricks
http://soundcloud.com/coffin-pricks

ooooh interested

sounds pretty good, maybe a little more straight-ahead than his other bands but i always like to hear him singing. i think he posted on ilx once to correct my spelling of his last name

man i'd like to see bottomless pit again

I love Chris Thomson, but the Red-Eyed Legends sounded kinda lifeless to me when I listened to it, which was not something I would have ever imagined from a CT record. Maybe my memory is harsh. Coffin Pricks sound alright so far ...

yeah i could never get into REL as much as skull kontrol or the monorchid

yeah i saw red-eyed legends too and they didn't do much for me

I think maybe they just weren't good. Whereas Skull Kontrol, The Monorchid, and Circus Lupus were great.

feel like his bands always start out strong and then fade pretty quickly, maybe that's why he's in a new band every couple of years?

Yeah, maybe so. Don't know much about the dude at all, just like the records from those bands. Liked the first Skull Kontrol a lot better than the second though, so perhaps true overall.

I know a bunch of folks who weren't into Red Eyed Legneds much I always liked seeing them and dig the records, though I am admitedly biased.

Heard some of the Coffin Pricks stuff and I really like, though again I'm pretty much a sucker for any CT thing

<3 skull kontrol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G4ltm_EP4I

That whole record rules. Played the hell out of it when I had a radio show. Plus, it's got Rick Froberg on it!