the landfill that time forgot: crap uk bands of 00s/10s

An act beloved of 6 Music are returning after 15 years.

Can you guess who it is?

Join @steve_lamacq on Tuesday from 4pm to find out. pic.twitter.com/2gHHmUFOHT

— BBC Radio 6 Music (@BBC6Music) August 28, 2020

it's Arab Strap, wish they weren't doing this on this fucking show.

in the interests of science I am going to listen to this top 50 landfill classics playlist today. I think I know about 7 or 8 of these songs and of those I kind of like 1 of them, so my hopes are not particularly high

someone is not happy :

https://www.nme.com/features/landfill-indie-snobbery-2741199

oh wow Mark Beaumont still has a "job"

"unstable new formulas of electro-ladrock" is one for the ages lol

there is a delicious irony in almost every line of that piece that i could manage to read before the curling of my toes hurt but apart from a dude my age using the phrase "ageing bitterness" maybe the best thing is a defence of INDIEEEE decrying other people's snobbishness

fuck me i might need to poll this

i might need to poll this

bright, intense fission of reactionary anti-glamour, pristine melody, societal cohesion and dangerous sex

i would like to apologise to Mr Beaumont who i now realise is 3 years younger than me and hence understandably defensive when people are mean about the skiffle bands of his late middle age

Mark Beaumont has read the title of the article and scrolled down the list without reading any of the blurbs. I mean I basically did the same at first, but if I were being paid to write an opinion piece about it I would probably read it in full before coming to a conclusion.

it's funny cos he whines about snobbery then writes some really snobbish shit about The Fratellis and Scouting for Girls

Who exactly he is writing for here? I'm not sure what the demographic is here but I'm pretty sure that no one under the age of 30 even remotely cares about any of these bands.

yeah i was gonna say it's probably had more attention from people taking the piss than anybody invested in their student disco years, altho it has to be said that some people invest v heavily in their student disco years, they're just unlikely to be reading nme.com in 2020 you'd guess

there may be a smidgen of a point in there somewhere, as a person who listened to a fair amount of what could be termed shit indie music in my teens/early 20s and still has a lot of fondness for it, there is a narcissism of small differences with my disdain for pretty much all of this landfill era stuff. in my case it's probably because most of these bands just weren't being derivative of music I liked, or I would probably have liked them more, god knows I seem to have endless patience for bands shouting over recycled hardcore punk riffs ad infinitum.

maybe there are some people for whom that kind of guitar strumming I can only describe as "jaunty" does the same for them, and who I am I to deny them?

I've made it almost half way through the list, and I actually liked songs by Pete & The Pirates, the Rifles and the Paddingtons so far. most of the rest was really kind of just bland rather than actively upsetting tbh. iirc I liked a couple of Young Knives songs at the time just not that one.

ok but whoever it's aimed at the mark beaumont piggybacks off (and extends) the combination amused and offended buzz the vice piece received: unmoored from nme lo! these two decades and counting, internet-nauts still angling for that sweet sweet hate-dopamine* see the response(s) taking story to day like 5, and click thru anyway (maybe a handful will stick with what they see! seems unlikely but even monetary readership boosts are better than drip-drip-drip readship dips)

*(this would NEVER be me)

Also really this is howling about loss of influence - Vice is transparently anachronistic and past-it but is still more culturally relevant than NME has been for 10-15 years now.

Mark Beaumont's previous column contained a paragraph in which he warned the kids about a return to the days of Turin Brakes and Starsailor, which says a lot his cultural reference points. (Also once again, who is it aimed at?)

tbf a return to the days of starsailor wd probably be bad

the great stool-rock revival of 2020

NME banked and pushed on this brand of landfill lad-rock so they owe a lot to these lame bands, but defending them 20 years later is kind of sad.

Vice should respond with an article where a Grandad enlists the relative merits of each Pokémon.

Also way to miss the point, as I understand it the Vice article is sort of celebrating these songs.

yes, as Camaraderie noted

NME banked and pushed on this brand of landfill lad-rock so they owe a lot to these lame bands, but defending them 20 years later is kind of sad.

If Mark Beaumont is writing for the blog version of NME regularly, and wasn't just hauled out to grump for clicks, I'd assume he's the only person working for the site who was old enough to read it in the McNicholas era, let alone have worked there

Definitely the first instance I have read of landfill-scoffery being a class thing

I just checked on Twitter and Beaumont's tweet promoting this article has barely had any attention at all - positive or negative. Bleak.

Encouraging morelike

Don't throw the litter out with the landfill

there is a delicious irony in almost every line of that piece that i could manage to read before the curling of my toes hurt

― A Short Film About Scampoes (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, September 1, 2020 7:49 AM

Perfect

I didn't get into Florence and the Machine, but do they really belong here? I haven't heard a lot of their stuff, but I thought they made some respectable music.

that was the problem iirc

if the UK music industry churned out 90 aspirational kate bush / tori amos imitators every year then Florence would qualify as landfill. as it is she was perfectly acceptable 2nd-tier high-school drama kid music, with two very good remixes

england must have at least one barefoot mystic posh person nagging the charts at all times

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rz65JbHUSdY/T0U4td2vYeI/AAAAAAAAAIo/u5zWHExgHy0/s1600/Kula+Shaker+ks4.jpg

Who is the current one? Taylor Swift?

Florence is both way too popular and with too much personality to be landfill. There's a distinct moment of commercial bubble bursting to the landfill moment.

Ummm yeah, these songs all pretty much suck. They’re not out-and-out bad, just really mediocre. “For Lovers” would be a decent song if it didn’t have that goddamn “This is for lovers. Runnin’ away.” chorus repeated over and over and over again. They couldn’t change it up a little bit? Fucking heroin addicts. But as far as bad landfill indie songs go, none of these are as bad as “Fever” by Starsailor.

This is just incredible

A brief history. In the wake of The Strokes and the New York invasion of 2001, Britain’s moribund post-Britpop guitar scene came alive with brilliant, inventive new music. Geysers of originality and vitality burst from every corner of our slanty-fringed isles.

In Glasgow Franz Ferdinand strutted out the suave art pop of the New Scottish Gentry. In Leicester Kasabian concocted unstable new formulas of electro-ladrock. In the North East The Futureheads and Maxïmo Park battled for pseud-rock supremacy. In Yorkshire The Cribs were revitalising garage punk, The Long Blondes were reinventing retro chic and Kaiser Chiefs’ Britpop revivalism led to Leeds being officially announced 2005’s UK City Of Brilliant.

I did like the long blondes

(It's not that much crazier than The Killers getting adoring write-ups in Rolling Stone in 2020, though.)(and ILM)

"Suddenly, nobody noticed"

“Take Me Out” winning single of the year in the Pazz and Jop poll was kind of a big deal at the time.

This is just incredible

A brief history. In the wake of The Strokes and the New York invasion of 2001, Britain’s moribund post-Britpop guitar scene came alive with brilliant, inventive new music. Geysers of originality and vitality burst from every corner of our slanty-fringed isles.
In Glasgow Franz Ferdinand strutted out the suave art pop of the New Scottish Gentry. In Leicester Kasabian concocted unstable new formulas of electro-ladrock. In the North East The Futureheads and Maxïmo Park battled for pseud-rock supremacy. In Yorkshire The Cribs were revitalising garage punk, The Long Blondes were reinventing retro chic and Kaiser Chiefs’ Britpop revivalism led to Leeds being officially announced 2005’s UK City Of Brilliant.

― Donald Trump Also Sucks, Of Course (milo z), Monday, 7 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

In 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union and in 2019 it's voters handed the Conservative and Unionist Party an 80 seat majority in the House of Commons on the back of the slogan "Get Brexit Done".

this is a well-turned phrase for a poorly wrought activity: "unstable new formulas of electro-ladrock"

It's interesting looking at the results of the recent ILM 00s album poll and the distinct lack of UK guitar bands who originated in the 00s (so no Radiohead, Portishead, PJ or SFA), with three notable exceptions:

Broadcast (3 albums), The xx (1) and Life Without Buildings (1).

I doubt any of these would have been written about extensively in the NME, and obviously shared nothing in common with the likes of Kasabian/Kaiser Chiefs etc.

If we take ILM as the bastion of good musical taste (which I believe it is), it suggests a real nadir in the 00s for UK guitar music, relying on one band to make 60% of the noteworthy guitar albums of the decade from new acts (and The xx's album came out 4.5 months shy of the decade ending.).

Or maybe, more interestingly, there was an enormous divergence between albums that got rave magazine reviews and those that were of strong artistic merit. In previous decades these two categories would have been much more in line with each other.

Looking beyond the top 100, The Clientele have two albums in the 101-149 range, and there is Frightened Rabbit at 141. Hilariously, the only two "NME bands" in ILM's top 149 are Bloc Party at #146 and Franz Ferdinand at #149, one spot behind Broadcast's 4th best album of the decade.

Needless to say, I find this stuff fascinating.

fwiw Broadcast also formed in the 90s, although their 1st album came out in 2000, they'd already released a compilation LP of singles in 1997

tbf to the NME they did write about Broadcast at that time, it's almost certainly where I first heard of them, I can't say whether they did during the 00s/landfill era because I'd stopped reading it by then

I think all you can extrapolate from that is that ILM doesn't skew towards indie rock at all. My personal ballot for the 00's poll contained several new UK guitar-based albums, such as by Clearlake, Late Of The Pier, The Chap, My Computer, Youthmovies and Working For A Nuclear Free City, but all of these bands were fairly unfashionable both on ILX and in the UK music press. I'd argue it wasn't a dark time for UK guitar music but it was perhaps a dark time for UK music journalism, or at least, mainstream UK music journalism.

me = landfill indieprog

Clearlake's Cedars definitely a glum classic

That's fascinating, see I've never heard of any of those bands but I bet they're much better (obviously) than the NME/XFM rubbish that was shoved down our ears during the 00s.

It's interesting to me as to why journalists turned away from actively promoting interesting/boundary-breaking groups during that decade, when previously they would have extolled MBV and Radiohead (for example) in the 90s or The Chameleons/Orange Juice in the 80s.

Perhaps those media outlets were becoming more corporatised and needed to sell an "image" of what UK music was to survive, rather than promoting weird/risky stuff?

And interesting point re ILM's non-indie rock-skewing, but then I'd point to the fact there are more albums by veteran UK guitar groups (ie PJ, SFA, Radiohead) in the poll than there are by new artists in the same vein. I doubt you would get that sort of result in any other decade.

What was this universe where Late of the Pier were not fashionable? They were hyped so hard, they had their first NME cover before their album even came out! There was a huge amount of hype around the whole ~Nu Rave~ thing, as the NME was trying to fashion it - but I think that the NME had lost cultural relevance in terms of driving (or even documenting) youth movements by that point.

What was the other big band from that scene? Ach, my senile brain cannot remember. They had a single called Golden Skans or something like that. The teenagers I knew around that time loved them.