Indie Trends 2010: Sprawling Largesse
By Chris Polley
Ah, the age-old question: does size matter? We’re often told, either bluntly or subtly, that if we want to call ourselves Ah-merr-cans, then hell yes the bigger the better. But indie isn’t really about being Ah-merr-can. It started out as and still purports itself as being more about exuding the waifiest, most apathetic aura from the most unclassifiable fringe group possible, and in that sense, it has often been implied that the less pro-gear, pro-attitude you are, the more indie you are. However, over the past decade, as is constantly beaten over our heads every time we log onto the internet, indie is getting bolder, brighter, and, to be frank, a whole crapload more humongous. The democratization of indie has made it so the agglomeration of mp3 blogs and DIY music web sites (looks awkwardly at self) can make indie look huge, even when it’s still basically nowhere to be found on MTV or the Top 40 airwaves. And because of the fuss is made from the bottom up, you might have seen each of these artists perform recently on The Late Show with David Letterman, but you better believe they still represent the underclass of music. They’re big enough to merit feature stories in Rolling Stone, sure, but this is the first time the peasants have been able to sound large enough to matter, dammit.
Therefore, in this entry in the Indie Trends series, we focus on the new dissipation in music critics (the hipper-than-thou ones anyway) using words like “bloated” or “masturbatory” and instead embracing attributes more positively described by phrases such as “ambitious and dense” or “kitchen sink aesthetic”. Let us be clear before we put the spotlight on the three albums of note in this categorization, though: these records are not epic. They are not cinematic, they are not post-rock, and most importantly, indie wants to make sure you know they are not self-congratulatory. They are just BIG, people. They’ve made themselves big, whether they’ve been around for years or weeks, and they’re ready to shout it from the rooftops to make sure we hear them, see them, and love indie for what it has become: a monster.
The funny thing is that despite my tone, I really like all three of these albums. So take my hypocritical ramblings with a grain of salt, because while I hate that this is what a great indie artist has to do in order to get the respect they deserve, but I’m immensely glad they are where they are now. Because while not all music should be as dramatic and climactic as what’s covered below, each record below makes its own argument for why it has earned the right to be brash and loud enough to make more than the average group of slackers turn their heads and howl.
Broken Social Scene are discussed first in this trifecta not just because their album was released first in this past month of May 2010, but also because they have been in the largesse game the longest. They’ve definitely been in it since their breakthrough 2003 release You Forgot It In People, but even before that they wore the post-rock tag proudly and meandered with multi-instrumental gusto through semi-instrumental movements and long-winded passages before they firmly built the collective upon the anthemic rock foundation it has successfully utilized through three records now, including this month’s Forgiveness Rock Record. And the one thing that this album shows that the other two discussed below do not is that it’s clear these boys have practiced the sprawling thing for quite some time. Their sound feels lived in and joyous as much as it does hyperbolic and melodramatic, a balanced equation that if their masterful aforementioned 2003 LP failed to do one thing, it’s that. One might argue that the Canadian outfit injected that sense of playfulness into their ginormous palate of too many guitars and too many singers with their follow-up self-titled album in 2005, but I am not one of those people. The sophomore effort in question had its high points, that’s for sure, but overall it felt lost and hazy in a clustercuss of cumbersome ideas and half-fleshed-out fiery power riffs. It didn’t come off as profoundly significant and left-field as You Forgot or as effortlessly light and inviting as Forgiveness does.
There are many arguments one could present as to why this band, out of all the ones that have not held as strongly vital in the “bigness” department, has been able to come back in 2010, five years after their last release, and still have (if even just a notable fraction of) the magic they had when they tore up the indie scene in the throes of a time in which indie was stretching its legs and seeing where else it could go besides the corners of dorm rooms and geeky 30-somethings’ basements. The main argument that I will present before we move on to our next record of note is that Broken Social Scene are more aware of the effect of time than your average artist with energy bursting inside them. I’m sure this has partly to do with the fact that they have approximately eleventy-billion members at any given time, so they have to be beyond patient, but I think this is not a talent that can simply be attributed to some tangible or easily explainable characteristic of an artist. It’s something that either comes natural to a group of musicians or doesn’t. And they’ve got it. They know how to flow blissfully from song to song without it sounding like an aimless never ending journey (like they used to do, albeit ridiculously well) or a shock attack of explosion after explosion of sound, tiring the listener out. No, while Forgiveness doesn’t pack the wallop of emotion that You Forgot did, what it does do with equal success that amazes me with every listen is that it knows how to pace itself and both lull and wow. This is exactly what an indie band who aspires to be all about the sprawling largesse needs to learn before they go out and just try to be as trippy as possible or as powerful as possible.
And The National is a band that obviously at some point decided “Hey, we should be big” and for the most part, followed suit with bands like BSS and very meticulously took notes and applied it to their already existing style. You see, everyone who praises and attempts to tell the story of Brooklyn by-way-of Cincinatti’s The National inevitably talks about how the band “kept plugging away” or “was determined for success” for multiple albums before they finally broke into the “indie mainstream” (I’ve actually seen this oxymoronic phrase printed on more than one occasion in legitimate publications) with their 2007 release The Boxer. The fact remains, however, that after two very mediocre and quiet, brooding records, they put out an album called Alligator in 2005, which went way over the top, toward the other end of the spectrum, including some ungodly guitar screeching and curiously listenable but ultimately disconcerting screaming vocals. Sure, the band always wanted to be big, but they just didn’t know in what direction. Should we be as sad as we can? Should we be as angry as we can? These are the simple questions a band asks itself when they want to stand out from the crowd. The National didn’t fully realize that they didn’t need these fundamentally flawed reductive impetuses for their music until they wrote the songs that were collected together for The Boxer.
So how do you follow up a band finally self-actualizing on a universally revered (except for a couple voices who still called the band boring, even with their incisive lyricism and bellowing instrumentation) LP? Well, you try to have lightning strike twice of course. Now this is always going to be a catch-22 and I am no different from your average joe indie fan that has that insatiable desire to hear their favorite band put out a new record that is both fresh enough to merit several engaging and wildly satisfying initial listens, but also familiar enough to stay true to that which made the artist’s previous album good in the first place, and to remain a long-term fixture in the listener’s collection like their previous album as well. Does this happen with the long-awaited follow-up High Violet? We started this rumination with an age-old question and so we shall interject in its mid-section to offer up an age-old answer: yes and no. There are certainly songs that contain the same electric theatrical magic from the best songs on The Boxer, to be sure, but they very plainly do not add up enough to in any terms make High Violet as memorable, eye-opening, or intimate. And that last part is what’s key to succeeding in being a BIG artist with a BIG record. Yes, you want it to sound large and in charge, but ultimately, it’s how it connects to the listener’s heart that seals the deal or makes it spoil. Man when I first saw “Terrible Love” performed live on Jimmy Fallon I thought for sure they were going to outdo themselves with this one, but really, they’ve just set themselves on the same path as Broken Social Scene, with a post-breakthrough record that basically has no chance of living up to the hype that is by no means bad or even mediocre, but hopefully if we remove ourselves from The National for long enough, they’ll come back and knock our socks off all over again.
Then again, instead of waiting we could just find the next big thing, which is another game indie likes to play so much it’s almost sickening. But sometimes it pans out and succeeds so uproariously that you just wag your pointer finger at indie, clicking your jaw and saying, “oh you!” Thus is the situation that birthed the sudden notoriety of Janelle Monae, an artist that indie has welcomed and basically adopted despite her debut album being on a subsidiary of Atlantic Records and her lead single featuring Big Boi of Outkast. But even as that dreaded phrase “indie mainstream” immediately comes to mind again, I can’t help but ignore it because this woman is basically everything everybody’s been waiting for in music forever and ever amen. Her elaborate looooong-player The ArchAndroid, featuring three suites centering on the concept of an android messiah rising through the ranks of the fictional city Metropolis, isn’t all that’s big either. Just seeing her for a total of five seconds on screen is enough to make you throw your hands down and claim that no musician has ever been as BIG as Jonelle Monae already is. And her record’s only been out for two weeks! Seriously though, google her performance on Letterman (three big artists, all featured prominently on late night television in the past month – coincidence?) and tell me your jaw does not unhinge itself and drop to the floor.
This is as far, honestly, as I can get to properly describing (notice how I did little to no actual “describing”) the force that is Monae, at least her persona. She is a pop star bowing down to all sub-sects of music, bowing down to all classes of people, and telling us not to worship her, but asking if she can eject from her bow and start the most insane and energy-expending dance part of all time. There’s gold everywhere, lights spinning, and speakers ready to be set to ‘BLARE’ and all she needs is your permission. You say the word and suddenly you’re transported, maybe not to the made-up city and story more suitable for some pretentious prog-rock band, but at least to a very fictional world that is a cornucopia of escape and delight. Every song on The ArchAndroid hypnotizes and seizures so smoothly with its soul underbelly, rock ethic, and jazz spirit that it literally becomes genre-less (a term that I absolutely hated until I heard this album).
Yet, as you come to the eighteenth track’s end, you cannot help but feel immensely worn out. And so it turns out even the artist that grabs you so hard by the balls the first time you hear a bar of their music, it is always proved that largesse is something that is nearly impossible to perfect. Could she in the future? Of course. So could The National again. While I used the lightning metaphor, bigness that doesn’t exhaust or annoy does exist and it’s not something that is earned by sheer luck. Even Broken Social Scene, a band that I hardly see any wrong in, needs to still take it easy on the mellow and spacious angle of largesse. It’s a balance that comes very rarely, and as long as it remains an indie trend, sometimes that perfection will be attained, and it’s something that can be intensely effective when it does, more so than any other fad or pattern in the scene, because as Monae is deservedly proving: not just the little guys want to be big.
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