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

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

Comparisons to either of those acts might be the quickest way to make me lose my interest in any band I don't know.

A mix of the Clash and the Jam with the swagger of Oasis

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.

Probably true but I'm sure they all doff their hats to the Beatles and shite canonical boomer rock in general.

... Clash, Pistols, Jam.

Does anyone know the name of the band, maybe five-six years ago, who did a video presentation saying that when they were growing up everyone was listening to shit like busted and mcfly whereas these special lads were listening to proper music like the arctic monkeys. Had me laughing in a depressed 'oh no we're at this stage' way but I've never been able to find it since.

Not even the Libertines or the Strokes - LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture, yes very much so, but not those mid-brand outfits.

the libertines are definitely the sort to not really draw on much past the clash/the jam, but the strokes were pretty obviously heavily influenced by television

could probably plot most of this stuff on a spectrum from garage rock revival to post-punk revival because most of it ended up somewhere in-between

I just don't hear the Television / Strokes connection beyond they are NY bands with guitars

i always heard the libertines specifically as like a third rate knockoff of the jam. like they played the songs that the jam ditched because they realized the material was drab. libertines had zero quality control, so why not toss out any old shit, as long as it was mildly reminiscent of something "cool" right?

also took personal offense when any of these bands were considered similar to/influenced by television. that's like saying the doors influenced x, on account of them both being la bands. just lazy.

(although i was amused by the marquee moon shoutout in the mystery jets song on this list)

Ray Manzarek did produce X’s first album (which included a Doors cover).

and mick jones produced the libertines. what's your point?

My point is that ppl didn't say that solely "on account of them both being L.A. bands"; there was more to it. (X also later covered another Doors song, again with Manzarek producing; and Robbie Krieger played on some of their reunion stuff. I think it's safe to conclude there's an affinity there!)

FWIW, I don't hear much Television in the Strokes... but if Richard Lloyd had produced their debut, and they had covered "Prove It" (which actually may have sounded cool!)...

apparently casablancas actually denied having even heard television before he wrote is this it, but the comparison is all about the guitars - the interplay, some of the tones, the solos. obviously all streamlined in comparison to television though - like if you got them to make a power-pop record

i don't really think the strokes sound that much like most of the other 'garage rock revival' bands at all, way too new wave compared to all those. not that any of these uk acts really picked up on that though

tbh i always thought the first strokes record -musically anyway- sounded a lot closer to three imaginary boys than any of the og nyc punk/new wave they were likened to.

The Libertines repeatedly, catastrophically failed at tunes. As boring as I find the Strokes I can appreciate what people hear in Hard to Explain or Last Nite, but any melodic warmth the Libertines may have had was snuffed out by the sloppy playing, indifferent production, the presence of Doherty's horrible singing. A few tracks - e.g. Can't Stand Me Now - might have become pop in someone else's hands but in the Libertines its all in lowercase and dirgey.

This is one of the many, many reasons there are to hate on Fuck Forever. The song is nothing but a title, and Doherty thinks that's enough to go on for an 'anthem'. Sadly, so did so many others. The lazy Beatles security cliches of All Around the World seem Olympian in comparison.

The Libertines repeatedly, catastrophically failed at tunes. As boring as I find the Strokes I can appreciate what people hear in Hard to Explain or Last Nite, but any melodic warmth the Libertines may have had was snuffed out by the sloppy playing, indifferent production, the presence of Doherty's horrible singing. A few tracks - e.g. Can't Stand Me Now - might have become pop in someone else's hands but in the Libertines its all in lowercase and dirgey.

― you can see me from westbury white horse

The only Libertines songs that sound listenable to me now are the few that Bernard Butler produced. Songs like What A Waster and Don't Look Back Into The Sun sound so polished and so much more competent than anything on the albums. Bernard admitted he ended up playing a bunch of the guitar parts on them. When they re-recorded I Get Along for the album, they seemed to deliberately sound much worse than the single/Bernard version just so it would fit with how bad the album sounded.

I still like the first Libertines album, I agree that it sounds like they were deliberately going for that shambolic sound, "might have become pop in someone else's hands" is what they were aiming for, the romance of indie groups where part of their appeal to people is that you have these songs that could be in the canon of universally acclaimed classic pop songs alongside but recorded in a self-sabotaging way where everything sounds like it's on the verge of falling apart. I think Doherty used to talk about Television Personalities in interviews, and I think they were maybe trying to sound like them but weren't really good enough?

Maybe a not entirely successful attempt to combine the ladishness, communal aspect of the Jam with the eeriness and frailty of the TVPs

"don't look back into the sun" is easily the best libertines song yeah. "can't stand me now" is also decent but pretty much just a rehash of that

Xposts yeah Bernard's productions I like, Mick Jones' less so.

I always found both these bands to sound very flimsy-sounding and uncreative. I've no problem with rock qua rock, but if you're going to shout about rock music then you've got to, you know, rock, right?

Whereas for the Strokes and the Libertines "rock" seemed to mean just sounding like some pretty okay local band.

There was very little about this music that was transportational or exceptional - it just felt very "tools of the trade" or something

And it's not like I don't get what soref is saying either - I'm a huge fan of new wave / post punk / slightly shambolic pop-rock in general - I even played in a band and wrote songs in that vein - but these guys just didn't really have that weirdness that made bands like Television Personalities so appealing.

What's quite amusing is that I really really like Ought/Cola - that is until my housemate heard me playing the Cola album and remarked on how much it sounded like the Strokes, which I guess it does, but there's something more poetic and anti-rockstar about those lads which I really like

Ok having said that I think there's a fair bit of Punk and Post Punk worship amongst these bands I will state categorically that none of them were trying to sound like Television Personalities (more's the pity).

it's still weird to me that the strokes were sold as like 'garage rock revival', 'a return to rock', etc. when they're so composed and streamlined - you can hardly imagine them rocking out or anything at all. i don't think that's a bad thing just a weird disconnect

the relatively lo-fi production on the first two albums does just kinda suck though, it sounds so small. i at least love the weird production tricks like the drums that sound like a drum machine, the guitars that sound like synths, etc.

they never really managed to do that early sound justice with the production on any of the later albums either. i love comedown machine but that just settles for doing something different.

I really liked that EP of covers by Diff'rent Strokes called "This Isn't It" which really played on that drum machiney sound

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0iwgwBPSX0

I'd actually pay money to hear a band like Plone or Pluxus cover a bunch of landfill indie hits

Strokes were good and garagey on The Modern Age single, and not since then.

by far the best garage rock revival act was the exploding hearts though

Ok having said that I think there's a fair bit of Punk and Post Punk worship amongst these bands I will state categorically that none of them were trying to sound like Television Personalities (more's the pity).

― Daniel_Rf

The Futureheads literally covered the TVPs (not sure if it ever made it to a record, but they did it live a lot).

I still like the first Libertines album, I agree that it sounds like they were deliberately going for that shambolic sound, "might have become pop in someone else's hands" is what they were aiming for, the romance of indie groups where part of their appeal to people is that you have these songs that could be in the canon of universally acclaimed classic pop songs alongside but recorded in a self-sabotaging way where everything sounds like it's on the verge of falling apart. I think Doherty used to talk about Television Personalities in interviews, and I think they were maybe trying to sound like them but weren't really good enough?

Yeah I think part of my problem is I don't think they were good at this either - aside from the few tracks I was thinking of (including the Butler stuff, tho DLBITTS gets on my wick) I don't think their songs are even up to that 'pop in someone else's hands' potential. They profiled a supposedly platonic 'Rock' which apparently is any old pub band playing any old music.

you can be a fully functioning american ILxor for 20 years, committed to paying attention to emerging developments in "rock music" or pop music at large, and go through those 20 years never having heard any of this music except for Arctic Monkeys. And what this tell me is that from 1963 until, what, the britpop late 90s?, there were always anglophiles, probly in most metropolitan areas, who foreswore american music in favor of, like Slade and the Move, to the class of 77, to Depeche Mode/Smiths/Cure, to Spacemen 3/Cocteaus/MBV to finally Oasis and Britpop. You guys should feel free to set me straight if the following is not so, but it seems to me that landfill indie does not have a significant american constituency along the lines of the previous 40 years of British imports. And I don't think certain americans liking Amy Winehouse/Adele or Stormzy/Dave is the same thing…

could it be that each of the english movements beloved to Anglophiles prior to britpop pushed music forward, and britpop was conservative, in ways reminiscent of the various interests that kept the american classic rock complex going for so long? which is to say that the conservative nature of britpop ended the anglophile tendency I've described above…

I interviewed the Razorlight guy 20 years ago, and man was he the dim, self-involved pretty boy you would imagine many post Oasis rock singers to be… on the other hand, I spent an afternoon with Carl Barat in and around South St Seaport around the time of Dirty Pretty Things debut, and I felt like the guys fucking therapist after a while… I was obliged to ask him about Pete Doherty, and I was prepared for him to not want to address the subject, being that english music journos wanted to talk about little else at the time, and then I would say "OK, just tell me a little bit about him and then we'll move on to other shit," but no no no, he was going on and on about him, PTSD-style… I really really liked the guy and enjoyed talking with him, obviously re: other subjects…I was told by a publicist once that English musicians tend to enjoy talking with american journos far far more than English writers, because the latter had fleet st in their blood, constantly needling the guys for dirt…

I remember ages ago on the noize board someone suggested that anglophilia was dying and the kind of american who would have gone for that in previous generations would now be an anime nerd

i liked the libertines, up the bracket title track freakin rocks

it’s a great album.

yes

is it though

no

No

no

it's not, no

^ wow, rare sighting of ilx quasi-consensus

Xp re: Anglophila dying out in the late 90’s / early 00’s. Oddly that coincides with the widespread uptake of the internet so you could see what we’re actually like.

It's been a while since I listened to Up The Bracket, but just looking at the track-listing now there's some really poor songs on there. Boys In The Band, The Boy Looked At Johnny, Begging and Radio America are filler. Nothing really came close to the quality of What A Waster which I was obsessed with when it came out.

no way the chorus of “the boy looked at Johnny” is the greatest thing ever

“New York city’s very pretty in the nighttime but oh don’t you miss soho where everybody goes lye lye lye, lye lye lye, lye lye lye”

this thread is not for me

Just had a go at listening to Up The Bracket and it's kind of confounding just how popular this band was.

Granted, I agree, the songs could possibly be great in other people's hands, but the production and just overall sonic choices are terrible. Drums (especially open hi hats) drowning almost everything out save for the gross buzzy cackhanded guitarwork, sloppy harmonies, inaudible bass. All the frequencies are upper mid-range fighting over each other, despite a very narrow sound palette. It confirms my suspicions at the time that I was better off boosting the bands playing at my local venue than these hacks

Xp re: Anglophila dying out in the late 90’s / early 00’s. Oddly that coincides with the widespread uptake of the internet so you could see what we’re actually like.

― Agnes, Agatha, Germaine and Jack (Willl)

i blame jk rowling personally

pvmic