99% of indie pop is good- you just havent heard most of it yet

I do not care if braindead indiepop fans do that david (free jazz threads only ever get 5-20 replies anyway). I have heard indiepop and most of it has nothing going for it.

Doesn't that approach kind of miss the point? I should really stay out of this.

-fh

I arranged their first live show, they are really nice 15 year olds
you can get their 7" from www.benno.com or maybe www.normanrecords.com
or maybe www.roughtrade.com

You´ll like it if you like the likes of Fat tulips, Talulah gosh, Twa toots...

(Plus i know one of their members so I'm loath to do my usual sight-unseen slagging)

I am curious about the Baskervilles.

It has been a quiet start of 2004 for indiepop.

The Architecture in Helsinki album is coming out in Europe and USA in April. It's really nice.

the magic whispers cd is great, kinda like a modern update of hunky dory but with two girls singing. the pipas ep is fantastic. new brunettes album is out soon.

And Orlando is hot, even though they are only a pretend indie band.

i've heard the lp, courtesy of melbournian friend, and is one of my favourites of last year. and they made it into peel's festive fifty with that song about the owl (or something). remind me a lot of bearsuit and hyper kinako if that helps, like the indiepop version of melt banana - little bitty pop songs.

oh, here we go, festive fifty 2003: (http://infoman16.tripod.com/festive50/festiv03.htm)

5- Bearsuit - Itsuko got married
(A-side of limited edition single)
29- Architecture In Helsinki - The owls go
(from Fingers Crossed)
44- Hyper-Kinako - Tokyo Invention Registration Office
(B-side of Car And Kettle) (Demo)

andy

He was invited to write for the fourth album too, but he neglected to get anything put together. I think the two of them are on a similar wavelength, though, so it shouldn't affect the style much. Besides, it isn't as of non-Bid material has never been featured on a Scarlet's Well album. If Dickon even writes anything, that is.

But at the same time, I can see what you mean. The subject matter is so outlandish that it'd be easy for it to fall into self-parody without some careful rules set into place.

Comes out the middle of the next month, but you can get it early from their website now.

Is that about a certain ringtone on a phone?

I think The Pipettes should do a song called Wing'd Defenestration (Song For Sweety The Chick).

(Do you know, I've never heard the Pipettes, I would have done but I went to see Vichy instead along with a TRAMP and a drunk - oh that drunk was me looking in the mirror, oh well).

xpost

The complementary ILM thread: "99% of indiepop is crap" is where most of the deep thinking that maybe was where Nitsuh's essay developed from, but its tone is a little cantankerous, so I thought I'd bring this one back first.

Anyway, thank god for filesharing networks or else the recommendation to check out Blueboys 'If Wishes Were Horses" would have driven the ebay prices way out of my budget.

(that said, im fairly certain im the guy he's singing about. or at least i was two years ago, im better now. hopefully.)

btw you should have put a My Favorite song on the mix tape!

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GM65ZGED

emma's house

And yet I object to using the term "indie pop" to describe what is essentially a quite narrow category of music that might more aptly be called "twee pop." As much as the terms "indie pop" and "indie rock" often overlap, I still have a sense of what "indie pop" means when it's used: in a contemporary context, it's bands like Belle & Sebastian, Stars, Of Montreal, etc. It's not Interpol, Xiu Xiu, or the Hold Steady.

What we actually mean when we use these terms ... that's something I could have written several other pages on. Hopefully some of my thinking about that made it through onto the page: the way that the indiepop model was just what "indie" meant for much of the 80s; the way bands like the Swirlies or Versus or Unrest could kind of float between those notions in the 90s; the way ideas from indie's pop side, punk-rock side, and ambitious-professional side have split off from one another at various points and then basically rejoined to create the mainstream-indie we still have today.

I don't know whether it's a good or a bad thing for people to make big distinctions about this stuff. I like the fact that loads of people can enjoy something like the All-Girl Summer Fun Band without thinking of it as a genre exercise or part of a specific history. But it also seems like the pop part of indie is getting blurred out of people's official histories and grand narratives, and in the process I think a lot of context is getting lost, context that's useful for getting at a lot of bands and a lot of ideas. More importantly, I really do think there are certain listening mindsets, certain tricks and ways of understanding things, that make indiepop so lovable to its fans, and that a lot of the scene can be accessed as a genre -- i.e., turning on to a way of thinking/hearing that makes big chunks of the stuff make sense.

Pete: sweet, Wolfie and Rocketship albums are two of my favorite recommendations on there. And Wolfie relates strongly to that last sentence: I, and some other people I know, hear total wonderfulness in this band; people who don't go for it seem to just hear a regular, lousy band. This is unusual: they don't think it's super-godawful, or fakey, or too-weird (as people often will with bands you think sound "special"), but rather just cruddy, plain, and irritating, unremarkable. There's some kind of "trick" there, surely, some way-of-hearing thing? (And with that first Wolfie the best I can figure is that people think they're trying to be cute, whereas actually they're kinda trying to be AC/DC -- they're all adorable on their own!)

The Feelings were pretty alright: I was just listening to Dearling Darling the other day!

Ha! I can see why they stuck... thanks!

You're welcome. There are some good things on those tapes but if you emerge from listening to them and find yourself agreeing with the thread title, you're made from stronger stuff than I am.

I have a high tolerance for messy experimental throwaway if there's at least something to grab onto. Could just be atmosphere, or the extra-musical context of the tape aesthetic. The lows emphasize the highs along the journey, too. It all contributes to an audio ransom note of pop experiments with punk spirit.

pinefox I'm sorry to have passed over your post above!

You're probably right. I remember 2004-06 the trend in indie circles was bombast and post-rock/emo melodrama with elaborate post-twee instrumentation. Classic indie-pop was all about the ingredients of punk with a pop approach, so it would make sense that this would come back when there was a need for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction. But the 80s revival was certainly extremely popular too so yeah that focus got mixed in.