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I plunged head first into the time machine of sound an iPod can offer this afternoon. I'm currently feeling very jolly and singing along to Idlewild's 100 Broken Windows. Like most albums released around 2000 it tails off a bit towards the end but it is firmly - and this is where we get geeky - second wave indie.
First wave indie is the stuff on the fringes of Britpop which frequently gave way to second wave. Compare Blur's Parklife to Think Tank and Embrace's The Good Will Out to If You've Never Been and you'll begin to understand the distinction. It's a distinction which my good friend J and I would debate endlessly throughout University. A debate which alienated a lot more people around us than it drew in, but thems the breaks if you insist on the minutiae of indie music.
For me, second wave is where it's at. Second wave brought the world Elbow's Asleep in the Back, Mull Historical Society's Loss, Idlewild's 100 Broken Windows, Feeder's Echo Park, Tom McRae's Tom McRae and Just Like Blood, British Sea Power's The Decline of British Sea Power, Electric Soft Parade's Holes in the Wall, Easyworld's Better Ways to Self Destruct, Coldplay's Parachutes (an awesome album no matter what you think of their later offerings) and, I think he can just sneak in, Damien Rice's O. This is the music that made me. This and many, many more artists: Aqualung, Athlete, Snow Patrol, The Stereophonics, Starsailor, Travis, Turin Brakes....
There are many other bands on my iPod which I cannot bring myself to listen to again for fear of discovering they were terrible and 1999-2004 was not the golden age I remember it as; namely: Semisonic, Goldrush, Wilt, My Vitriol, Train.
The part where the progression of indie gets confusing is when it went mainstream circa 2004/2005. I remember very clearly the actual change occurring - we had been going to the University Student Union's indie night for over a year, and one week it was really, really busy - not the usual 30 or so people we danced with every week. A few weeks later they moved it to a larger venue. That was when indie went mainstream, and it was as sudden as that.
Mainstream did what mainstream always does and churned out a load of below par bands which all sat somewhere on the spectrum of 'inoffensive enough' to 'I will kill you if you release another single'. You know who I'm talking about: Kaiser Chiefs, Jet, The Zutons, The Strokes, The Kooks, Keane, The Doves, The Killers, The Automatic. The list goes on and on, as a general guide, if they wore matching suits or have 'The' in their name, they are probably the second wave indie hangers-on. [On an unrelated note, I've just found I've got a My Chemical Romance track on my iPod, I honestly don't know how that happened. I'm appalled]
It was around this time that Q magazine completely lost its way and stopped making good recommendations or even caring enough to listen to new bands. Indie going mainstream killed many. And I'm not just talking music press, many bands which had promising first and second album started churning out class A crap, to name but a few: Tom McRae, Snow Patrol, Travis, Coldplay, Feeder [although the downturn in the quality of their music was, in my opinion, largely due to the dynamic being broken by Jon Lee's death], David Gray, Starsailor, Toploader [an unpopular choice, I know, I maintain Onka's Big Moka is a nice little album], Turin Brakes, Stereophonics. Interestingly, at least to me, terrible albums afflicted the less well known as well as the high profile bands. It seems that mainstreaming of a genre filters through all bands collected under that banner. Basically, 2004/2005 saw a pandemic of good bands gone bad. A distressing time for all music lovers; a dark time.
I'm not actually sure where we are in terms of indie now. The resurgence of pop has certainly sidelined indie somewhat. Personally I find it harder to find new bands these days as the majority of new, non-mainstream music promotion seems to happen online and the proliferation of music blogs, myspace music pages, youtube and a thousand other sites leaves me feeling a bit cold. The majority of the music I've come to post the '04/'05 quality-music-massacre has been through recommendations of friends and, slightly shamefully, Amazon. The sad thing, for me at least, is I find it much harder to reel of the names of the 'modern' bands I like. With a struggle, and frequent checks on my iPod I managed to populate the following list: Cary Brothers, Cold War Kids, Beirut, Patrick Wolf, First Aid Kit, Greg Laswell, Josh Ritter, Jacob Golden, Yeasayer and Regina Spektor.
Unfortunately there have been more dead ends than success stories for me with new[er] music. I fell in lust with many bands (Editors, Bloc Party, Rufus Wainwright, Razorlight, Gorillaz, Cherry Ghost, The Magic Numbers) only to eventually find myself sitting alone on my bed, listening to an album or albums devoid of any sort deeper emotional content with which I could truly connect and take them into my heart. They were, if you'll pardon the clumsy simile, merely distracting one night stands on the road to a spinster wasteland of music failure. Oh yes.
In fact, the most rewarding 'new' discoveries I've made since The Death of Second Wave Indie have come from going to bands with huge back catalogues or capsule collections of intensely beautiful, original compositions. We're talking Bright Eyes, Daniel Johnston, Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Simon and Garfunkel, Belle and Sebastian, The Beach Boys and many, many more.
The question we will end on is the one that plagues me. Day and night I shake my fists to the sky and implore the gods to tell me: where now for indie?! I am cautiously predicting third wave indie which manages to integrate urban and folk influences and emerges triumphant. There is hope, I'm sure. Just the other day I heard a very nice track by Los Campesinos!; The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future. Give it a listen.
Oh, and recommend me some music. Or argue with me about first wave versus second wave. Or...something.
First wave indie is the stuff on the fringes of Britpop which frequently gave way to second wave. Compare Blur's Parklife to Think Tank and Embrace's The Good Will Out to If You've Never Been and you'll begin to understand the distinction. It's a distinction which my good friend J and I would debate endlessly throughout University. A debate which alienated a lot more people around us than it drew in, but thems the breaks if you insist on the minutiae of indie music.
For me, second wave is where it's at. Second wave brought the world Elbow's Asleep in the Back, Mull Historical Society's Loss, Idlewild's 100 Broken Windows, Feeder's Echo Park, Tom McRae's Tom McRae and Just Like Blood, British Sea Power's The Decline of British Sea Power, Electric Soft Parade's Holes in the Wall, Easyworld's Better Ways to Self Destruct, Coldplay's Parachutes (an awesome album no matter what you think of their later offerings) and, I think he can just sneak in, Damien Rice's O. This is the music that made me. This and many, many more artists: Aqualung, Athlete, Snow Patrol, The Stereophonics, Starsailor, Travis, Turin Brakes....
There are many other bands on my iPod which I cannot bring myself to listen to again for fear of discovering they were terrible and 1999-2004 was not the golden age I remember it as; namely: Semisonic, Goldrush, Wilt, My Vitriol, Train.
The part where the progression of indie gets confusing is when it went mainstream circa 2004/2005. I remember very clearly the actual change occurring - we had been going to the University Student Union's indie night for over a year, and one week it was really, really busy - not the usual 30 or so people we danced with every week. A few weeks later they moved it to a larger venue. That was when indie went mainstream, and it was as sudden as that.
Mainstream did what mainstream always does and churned out a load of below par bands which all sat somewhere on the spectrum of 'inoffensive enough' to 'I will kill you if you release another single'. You know who I'm talking about: Kaiser Chiefs, Jet, The Zutons, The Strokes, The Kooks, Keane, The Doves, The Killers, The Automatic. The list goes on and on, as a general guide, if they wore matching suits or have 'The' in their name, they are probably the second wave indie hangers-on. [On an unrelated note, I've just found I've got a My Chemical Romance track on my iPod, I honestly don't know how that happened. I'm appalled]
It was around this time that Q magazine completely lost its way and stopped making good recommendations or even caring enough to listen to new bands. Indie going mainstream killed many. And I'm not just talking music press, many bands which had promising first and second album started churning out class A crap, to name but a few: Tom McRae, Snow Patrol, Travis, Coldplay, Feeder [although the downturn in the quality of their music was, in my opinion, largely due to the dynamic being broken by Jon Lee's death], David Gray, Starsailor, Toploader [an unpopular choice, I know, I maintain Onka's Big Moka is a nice little album], Turin Brakes, Stereophonics. Interestingly, at least to me, terrible albums afflicted the less well known as well as the high profile bands. It seems that mainstreaming of a genre filters through all bands collected under that banner. Basically, 2004/2005 saw a pandemic of good bands gone bad. A distressing time for all music lovers; a dark time.
I'm not actually sure where we are in terms of indie now. The resurgence of pop has certainly sidelined indie somewhat. Personally I find it harder to find new bands these days as the majority of new, non-mainstream music promotion seems to happen online and the proliferation of music blogs, myspace music pages, youtube and a thousand other sites leaves me feeling a bit cold. The majority of the music I've come to post the '04/'05 quality-music-massacre has been through recommendations of friends and, slightly shamefully, Amazon. The sad thing, for me at least, is I find it much harder to reel of the names of the 'modern' bands I like. With a struggle, and frequent checks on my iPod I managed to populate the following list: Cary Brothers, Cold War Kids, Beirut, Patrick Wolf, First Aid Kit, Greg Laswell, Josh Ritter, Jacob Golden, Yeasayer and Regina Spektor.
Unfortunately there have been more dead ends than success stories for me with new[er] music. I fell in lust with many bands (Editors, Bloc Party, Rufus Wainwright, Razorlight, Gorillaz, Cherry Ghost, The Magic Numbers) only to eventually find myself sitting alone on my bed, listening to an album or albums devoid of any sort deeper emotional content with which I could truly connect and take them into my heart. They were, if you'll pardon the clumsy simile, merely distracting one night stands on the road to a spinster wasteland of music failure. Oh yes.
In fact, the most rewarding 'new' discoveries I've made since The Death of Second Wave Indie have come from going to bands with huge back catalogues or capsule collections of intensely beautiful, original compositions. We're talking Bright Eyes, Daniel Johnston, Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Simon and Garfunkel, Belle and Sebastian, The Beach Boys and many, many more.
The question we will end on is the one that plagues me. Day and night I shake my fists to the sky and implore the gods to tell me: where now for indie?! I am cautiously predicting third wave indie which manages to integrate urban and folk influences and emerges triumphant. There is hope, I'm sure. Just the other day I heard a very nice track by Los Campesinos!; The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future. Give it a listen.
Oh, and recommend me some music. Or argue with me about first wave versus second wave. Or...something.
