I've Been Feeling Sinister: Indie Pop's Bizarre Affair with Existentialism

Is this you?

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”

-Albert Camus, The Stranger

“There’s a tombstone right in front of you and everyone I know”

-Vampire Weekend, “Don’t Lie”

This article primarily exists to explore one of popular music’s most disturbing oxymorons. The moniker "indie-pop" speaks far more to the public consciousness than a literal reading of two impossibly ambiguous words shoved together. Sweet, earnest, cute, pretty, it’s music for modern teenagers to fall in love with. It may be a bit off-color, a bit off-key, but it never strays far from that pop anchor. It’s music to tap your foot to, music to smile to, music to feel good about. The question is, then, why is some of the most life-affirming, inspiring music so depressing in content. More specifically, why does indie pop seem so especially fixated on death. 

Daniel's 2013 in Review

My Very Favorite Albums of A.D. 2013

20. Mikal Cronin - MCII

MCII is a starkly straightforward guitar album. It won’t make you think. It won’t make you wince. It’s not going to rearrange your definition of rock and roll. It won’t change you. But it will make you want to take a walk. It might get you looking out a window for longer than you even realize. I woke up the other day with a tune in my head. It was early in the morning, earlier than I normally get up at least. It killed me for about 20 minutes (including a failed attempt at googling fragments of lyrics). Then, I realized it was “Weight,” the first track from this record. I sat down in a chair with some headphones and put it on. 40 minutes later the album was over, and I had barely moved at all. It’s been a while since I’ve started a day so fresh. Mikal Cronin’s music is so god-damned everyday, but it’s the most spectacular kind of everyday I can picture, a no-holds barred assault of perfectly timed pop-music cheap shots that will wind you (the crowd goes wild!) and make you feel proud to be everyday human you are. 

Artist of the Day: Julia Holter

When I heard Julia Holter’s “Horns Surrounding Me” on the radio (yes, I’m privileged enough to have a local indie station) a month or so ago, I felt sure I’d heard it before. That’s kind of strange, considering that song sounds like almost nothing else. The hook was brave, the song jarring and intense. It wasn’t just hinting at envelope-pushing like so much exciting new music, it was pushing with full force. The track is high point of tension Holter’s new album, Loud City Song, if tension is measured traditionally, with eerie note choices and discord. The rest of the record is... well, actually, it’s pretty difficult to make any kind of general statement about the rest of the record, except that it’s great. It’s riveting from start to finish, even if it starts slow and finishes with a formless 7 minute number. It’s defiant in form, but also classically excellent; there’s so much variation packed into this little bundle of sound, it feels like a feature film, with emotional highs and lows to boot. 

Artist of the Day: Pretty & Nice

I saw it again! A glitch in the matrix! A fold in consensus reality! A hole in the music-press net we’re told is impermeable! So, who cut it? Maybe let’s not think about it yet. I just listened to this record by a Boston band called Pretty & Nice that I’d never heard mention of before. It’s called Golden Rules for Golden People. It came out in April. I stumbled on it by chance, and it’s one of the best things I’ve heard all year. 

Artist of the Day: Wooden Shjips

When someone mentions the San Francisco psychedelic scene, it’s easy to think: Ty Segall. I mean, the guy is basically a scene all to himself. Releasing about a million albums a year, he does his best to flood the market. Spend all your time soaking in Ty’s seemingly endless material, though, and you’ll certainly miss out on some of the best the Bay Area has to offer. Wooden Shjips, with their most recent release, Back to Land, really took me by surprise. When I heard San Francisco garage, I heard fuzzy bang-up guitars and big melodies. This band is something else. 

Artist of the Day: Cut Copy

Attention early-teenaged children of parents who met at raves: I sense imminent danger. You risk being the first generation who will, when the music blasting through your poster-lined bedroom walls is interrupted by your parents knock gingerly on the door, face a chilling amount of enthusiasm from the folks. For them, it’s a miracle, a godsend. This 4/4 floor-thumping music is not the cliche “jibber-jabber,” it’s not “just noise.” In fact, it seems that these days they DO “make ‘em like they used to.” Scared yet? 

Artist of the Day: Mutual Benefit

To all those broken-hearted that their Falls will be presumably unenhanced by a new slow-leaf-falling, mountain-road-drifting Fleet Foxes album, don’t give up hope! They’re not the only ones that can do it, and who knows, maybe they’re not even the ones that can do it best. Hailing from smack-dab on the other end of I-90, Boston’s Mutual Benefit are making a good argument for themselves with a debut mesmerizingly humble in light of its utter beauty. 

Artist of the Day: Cults

I listened to the whole of Cults’ new album, Static, for the first time while flipping through used material in Richmond’s Plan 9 Music. As a foraging soundtrack, it was perfect. It was also unmistakable. I spent much of the summer of 2011 drowned in the bubbling bright wash of the band’s self-titled debut. It’s not really something I listen to anymore, because I left it back in a different period of my life, and when Madelin Follin’s distinctively pretty squeal hit my ears I was almost taken aback. 

Album Review: Ty Segall - Sleeper

Album Rating: B

Ty Segall has been one of rock’s most lovable characters in recent years. Seeing him live will reinvigorate your faith in music’s unifying powers. Reading an interview will get you bummed about not being able to hang out with him. It all comes down to one simple fact: Ty Segall is music lovers. Like Kurt Cobain before him, he’s got no intention of deifying himself or putting himself up on a pedestal. Instead, he’s reverent. His music is a celebration, in itself, of the heroes of rock and roll that have come before. Again like Cobain, his tricks are the delicate hand of his pop-smithing and the vicious primalism of his style. He’s got the ears and he’s got the chops. After putting out just an obscene amount of material in 2012, including the excellent Twins and Slaughterhouse, Ty’s taken a step back this year with Sleeper and made a tough choice: to chill out, surrendering the thick safety net of punky ferocity.

Artist of the Day: Oneohtrix Point Never

I like to celebrate heroic and time-honored American tradition of making art without any financial ambition. Brooklyn-based producer Daniel Lopatin’s latest outing as Oneohtrix Point Never, R Plus 7, shares a lot of characteristics with some of the coolest of electro-pop’s contemporary cool. The record floats in a crowd populated by the likes of Grimes, Doldrums, and any number of other tinny, kinda edgy pop melodists. The difference is, this is not pop. Not by a long shot. 

Lopatin’s first release on the chronically progressive Warp label (home to Boards of Canada and Aphex twin, among others), R is a conceptually spastic, head-twisting oeuvre that screams composition as opposed to collection of songs. In fact, it’s impossible to separate any track from the whole without losing something from the narrative. Lopatin does an excellent job of setting the scene. The sounds he chooses, clinky old-fashioned chorus pads, rising tides of tonal fuzz, and general sonic bedlam, evoke a world at once crowded and incredibly lonely. Think of the city on a rainy day — 8 million people and they’re all inside. 

Even though there aren’t any hits, so to speak, on the record, he clearly understands how to put together a song. “Still Life,” jarring as it is, has a clear climax, a clear structure, and it’s clearly gripping. 

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Album Review: Joanna Gruesome - Weird Sister

Album Rating: A-

Joanna Gruesome’s Facebook page describe’s the band’s sound as “C86 noise punk blah blah blah.” Gee! What an undersell. There are a million and one bands putting music out into the hopefully-infinite capacity of the internet that I might call C86 noise punk blah blah blah bands. A quick listen through the band’s first LP, Weird Sister, kicks ‘em right off the list. Scratch. A quick listen through the band’s first LP’s first track should do the trick. Lord knows I love a good cannonball of an opener (no pun intended - this girl-fronted punk band doesn’t even really sound like the Breeders. Imagine!), and “Anti Parent Cowboy Killers” might even eclipse the one-two explosion of “Master of My Craft/Borrowed Time” from Parquet Courts’ recent Light Up Gold. 

Artist of the Day: Arcade Fire

I have to say, watching Arcade Fire’s sultry dancehall performance after SNL debuted their new season was a pretty odd for me. I mean, Arcade Fire, SNL, what, is it 2010 and I’m a Junior in high school again? I can’t speak for the quality of the SNL episode. I wasn’t all that interested. My peers and I stopped watching the show because it sort of just stopped being funny. Arcade Fire never stopped being good, and their taking 3 years to produce a new record could only mean the best things. When someone told me about “Reflektor” (the song) I really did go off like a kid. James Murphy produced? Bowie sings?! So I went all in.

Artist of the Day: Julianna Barwick

I believe Julianna Barwick may be a vessel dispatched from on high by something greater than us - God or the universal subconscious or Ancient Aliens or whatever floats your metaphysical boat. With her latest record, Nepenthe, she continues the subtle subtraction of variables from previous releases that change (quite fascinatingly) the mood of her sound infinitely. The Magic Place may have been human, almost whimsical. Nepenthe, though, feels like the language of the world itself, entirely independent of us. 

Artist of the Day: Clair Morgan

Standing on stage with his cream-colored Rickenbacker at Richmond’s Gallery 5 on Friday, Clair Morgan didn’t strike me as much more than a little bearded guy with a cream-colored Rickenbacker. Then I saw his fingers move, and it was like a Greek myth where the gods bestow some absurd power upon a seemingly arbitrary appendage for the gifted to use in support of good or evil. Don’t worry, I can confirm that Clair Morgan is on the side of good. 

Album Review: King Krule - 6 Feet Beneath the Moon

Album Rating: B-

There’s no way around it - 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, the debut record from London’s Archy Marshall, better known as King Krule, is a disappointment. I type this with a sort of passive forlorn look on my face. You know, like I’m let down but I know I shouldn’t be? There haven’t been a lot of releases recently that have, erhm, appointed? But I wanted a game-changer. I felt like this record was going to be a game-changer. It’s not. 

Artist of the Day: The Dismemberment Plan

I live in a cultural wasteland known to most graduates of 6th grade geography as the “Mid-Atlantic.” Actually, I live in the middlest of this middleness. When considering the music contribution good old VA’s made to America and the world, I find myself overwhelmed with visions of vast swaths of land, unpopulated, empty, zilch, nothing. Cultureless. Then I think of DC’s Dismemberment Plan. I’ve taken to talking about the D-Plan at a missionary-esque level. My main area of study is their 1999 record, Emergency & I, which has, since it came to me, become as good as family. My main tagline for newcomers who may not have seen the light is that “it’s the best album to come out within a 200 mile radius of Richmond.” They think and think and then nod and say “You’re probably right,” unless they’re into Clipse or something.

The band’s new album, Uncanny Valley, is slated for an October 15th release, and I’m excited. They dropped a single, “Waiting,” recently. At first, I wasn’t sure. My honest to God first impression was Sugar Ray meets Vampire Weekend. That may sound like a dream combination to some, but you see, the Dismemberment Plan have spoiled me. The mind learns from experience, and so mine expects a lot when it hears the band’s name - enlightenment, understanding, humor, pain, genius. The song’s most accurate adjective is peppy. The band remain virtuosos individually, most notably drummer Joe Easley, who’s always been the fuel and continues here pumping. Singer Travis Morrison is in good form too, and doesn’t sound like he’s aged, his voice characteristically free-flowing, though not hyper-kinetically splattering “Girl O’Clock”-style. 

The Dismemberment Plan’s music, in the past, has been about hurting. It’s been about loss and confusion. It’s been really beautiful. If “Waiting” is any indication, though, with it’s almost 20 second long crescendo section and cutesy beach-side embellishments, they may just be coming to terms. That’s beautiful in its own way, right? Like I said, I’m excited. 

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Artist Spotlight: Lil Huffy

Harrisonburg’s Lil Huffy are getting in on that grand tradition of physical music with the release of their recent 6-track, Old Volvo, on tape. Volvo, which I’ve written about here before, is an ambitious and rewarding lo-fi noise-pop kind of exercise, but startlingly sober when compared to the overwrought, overthought, overly breathy shoegaze redux that’s in vogue at the moment. The band have a knack for layering, and their songwriting hints at serious potential for a kinetic live show. And fancy that, we're in luck!

Artist of the Day: Dawn of Midi

What exactly is the Dawn of Midi’s Dysnomia? Like what kind of music is this? I know, I’m supposed to tell you that. Sorry. They got me. And good for them. It’s sort of jazz, like sort of scary, uneasy, what-was-that-behind-me at night jazz. The whole nine song record is a continuous flow of intensively rhythmic themes. If the instruments weren’t acoustic, it’d sound like something out of repertoire of a very nervous DJ, like the Haxan Cloak except things seem to actually happen in the plot of the music. Even more disconcerting than label-lessness is the albums deeply inhuman sound. Dysnomia sounds like industrial music made without machines, leaving us to wonder (chillingly) what’s keeping everything so precise, flawless. 

Artist of the Day: The Love Language

I was walking down Grace St. in Richmond on my way to the First Fridays art walk last week when I heard the Love Language’s lush music wafting from Strange Matter’s dank, musky door like the first hints of a change of season. I was struck by how full it sounded, and I checked the poster outside so I could take down their name. I’m glad I did. The Raleigh band’s latest record, Ruby Red, is a true indie gem. On the surface, they’re a composite of tried-and-true genre tropes, with ecstatic vocals a la Win Butler or the younger, more excitable National, and a cinematic sense of production, scope, and purpose. But every time you think they’ll turn left, though, they turn right. This sense of comfort and unpredictability at once is confusing as it is wonderful. 

Artist of the Day: King Krule

Archie Marshall is about 3 months younger than me, and that makes me feel pretty bad, you know, in a "what have I done?" kind of way. Under his stage name, King Krule (we probably got Donkey Kong 64 around the same time, too), Marshall has been showing the rest of Brit rock and, hell, the world, that life and vivacity is still a viable option in modern guitar music. I don’t think you can quite say his project’s “broken” yet, but it won’t be long. I mean to say there’s no chance King Krule’s music won’t make it big, and in the most deserving way imaginable, so if you aren’t familiar with Marshall’s splintery oboe of a voice yet, get on it.