Indie Trends: Minimalism (January 2010)

Indie Trends January 2010: Minimalism

By Chris Polley

Welcome to Indie Trends, the new monthly AudioSuede column that focuses on emerging patterns in the indie music scene.

Whether we like to admit it or not, music on labels not owned (or only partly owned) by gigantic heartless corporations also tend to ebb and flow through varying tides of unconscious populism, just like Top 40 artists. It’s a sad fact that the world which we hold so true to because it’s “alternative” or “counterculture” is actually just a smaller scale mirror to a larger force, but just like we all finally remove the collective stick from our posterior apertures when we realize bohemia is a place hippies made up to escape reality, we must come to terms with our chosen place in the zeitgeist of this nebulous art called music. So every four weeks or so, I will do my best to ruminate on what seems to be on the pulse of the bloggers, the college radio stations, and the general indie music ether to determine its benefits and detriments to this morbidly wide spectrum of music we know by no other name than “indie”.

What shall be my tangible instruments of measure for such an intangible task? Well, in this world of indie, there are many options: the myriad songs that get posted on web sites that ooze with a certain kind of distant and flaccid “listen now!” refrain, or maybe the concerts we attend to see music performed in a live setting in order to feel just a little more alive than we possibly could while hearing the songs through tiny white earbuds, tinny laptop computer speakers, or if you’re truly indie, a goddamn vinyl record player.

But either digging through Hype Machine (both figurative and literal) or going out to your local rock club is going to give you a headache. There’s simply too much to wade through. As I am typing this sentence, there are approximately four hundred different MP3s being plunked into Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, or custom platforms, and there are nearly five hundred different bills, each with at least three artists performing, underway in various people’s hometowns*. Thus, I am left with no choice other than to look at the one indie element to which reductive reasoning can be successfully applied: full-length records.

Sure, there are countless records being released every week, but unlike concerts and single track uploads, indie has held on to the record format for the very reason that inspired this column: no matter how many records are self-released or put out for public consumption by labels small and big, there are habitually only a handful of records per month that seem to matter to the indie gods.

I will admit that despite my long-held placement in the world of indie, deciding what these albums are on a monthly basis will be largely arbitrary, but with the help of you, the reader, hopefully we can take each month’s column and its accompanying topic with a grain of salt. And maybe you can even contribute to the conversation to put me in my place and remind me that hey, reducing indie to trends and patterns is very un-indie. That or remind me of albums that seemed to have “mattered” lately that have yet to be discussed on AudioSuede, because if there’s one thing we here at AudioSuede don’t want to do, it’s not give credence to an album that has emotional resonance not just with you, but with the indie masses. We are the collective unconscious and if we don’t work together to keep our unconscious in check, who knows what might happen. A band you like might stray from the indie path, like, I dunno, Vampire Weekend might use AutoTune in a song on their new record.

So, after that verbose introduction, let’s at least begin a dialogue on this month’s theme of minimalism.

For the sake of variety, albums already reviewed on AudioSuede will be ignored, and for the sake of brevity, only a few albums will be covered in each entry. Also, I may skip past fluke indie records that get talked about too much everywhere, thereby making them considerably less indie. Please forgive me if I do this and you think terms like “Soweto” still matter. Basically, I may end up altering your perception of what is happening to indie in order to find a connection between a few records. This may ultimately make me a monster, but I’m willing to distort things a little to get my point across. That may also be un-indie, but then again, isn’t being un-indie inherently indie?

Philosophical pretentions aside, if you are anyone that knows anything about indie, then you probably heard or read about the following three records in the past month: The Magnetic Fields’ Realism, Four Tet’s There Is Love In You, and Retribution Gospel Choir’s 2. All in some way come from staple indie artists that have or have had positive buzz words attached to them such as “reliable”, “prolific”, and/or “revolutionary”. Let us begin first with the band that has surely has had all three of these terms used in music reviews or personal online journal entries (Same thing? Discuss.): The Magnetic Fields.

Stephin Merritt and co.’s ninth album, Realism, is basically the record that helped fuel the concept for this column. Merritt is a smart man who likes making records that have different aesthetic themes to them (the last one, Distortion, was, well, distortion-happy), but likes keeping the songs basically the same: mid-tempo monotone-rock with sardonic lyrics about love and loss. I say he’s smart because he can get away with this gimmick on basically every album, to the point of having just a slight variation on the cover art for his past three records, and still wind up with an entertaining listen each time. By focusing this time on minimalist realism (if you couldn’t guess already from the title), he’s able to strip away the ever-evolving mess of computer alterations and effects and use simple yet ornate acoustic arrangements to back his half-joking contemplations on the human heart. Tracks like “You Must Be Out Of Your Mind” and “Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree” employ the trend not for any real reason, but because it’s something Merritt hasn’t focused on yet and it sounds both pretty and yet also raw (like each of Merritt’s gimmicks do, to give the Magnetic Fields name more cohesion than just the singer’s trademark voice). And really, it’s okay, because while the album doesn’t necessarily stand out or grab you with mind-blowing originality, it’s serviceable in several ear-pleasing ways, and often without the stigma that the term “serviceable” usually comes along with.

Similarly, Kieran Hebden’s new effort under the Four Tet moniker also serves the listener without over-extending itself. The big difference here though, other than the congenital differences between indie pop and indie electronica, is that Hebden cares less about musing on love than infusing his music with it. There Is Love In You is quiet and sparse, like all good minimalist records, but it projects emotion rather than paucity, at least for the most part. Openers “Angel Echoes” and “Love Cry” vibrate with gentle fragmented samples that somehow sound warm and intimate, like if the sleek settings of indie-approved sci-fi films were meant to convey romantic instead of anti-establishment notions. Unfortunately, while those sci-fi films have characters for us to latch onto, There Is Love In You, while enjoyable in bursts, can become merely a set of background tones if listened to in a single sitting. Then again, if you’re indie, you’re supposed to be patient, especially if you’re indie like me and are particularly fond of instrumental music, but even I couldn’t stay completely dedicated to Hebden’s brand of minimalism here, though I do whole-heartedly recommend those first two tracks to get your eclectic electronica fix.

Lastly, we come to a record that should have certainly stayed within the confines of the minimalist trend: 2 by Alan Sparhawk’s (of beloved uber-minimalist trio Low) Retribution Gospel Choir. It was to be simple, especially for us Minnesotans familiar with the native Sparhawk tradition. Slow rhythms, a single delicate guitar that is sometimes allowed distortion when completely necessary and humble yet yearning vocals. When Sparhawk started up this new band, he stayed within the boundaries while also enriching the classic minimalist approach with a more sturdy rock sound. But it was still modest rock music that pawed instead of clawed, even as its blues center ballooned the spectrum of sound. It still sounded like a barren Minnesotan winter day, and it was supposed to stay that way. Until the man put an intimidating glacier on his band’s album cover and hired Avril Lavigne’s producer, that is. Now that the man who made minimalism an indie term, rather than just something that neo-classical subset indies knew, has broken free from those constraints, all bets should be off. The songs “Hide It Away” and “Poor Man’s Daughter” have skeletal evidence of a once-minimal sound, but their ceiling-shattering layered production and explosive dynamics suggest the work of Godzilla (not iguana) proportions. Then again, this kind of maximalist minimalism doesn’t make it any better than the two aforementioned records, either. In fact, it seems like Sparhawk has reacted against his roots so harshly that after about half the record pounds you into submission, it starts becoming cartoonish and almost grotesque. Yes, it is a more immediately pleasurable listen, but ultimately it lacks both the steadiness of Realism and the authenticity of There Is Love In You.

Keep an eye on minimalism in indie, because it’s always been nibbled at here and there, but never over-consumed. By definition it is a musical attribute that can be both refreshing and boring, and so far, an indie record that matters has yet to perfect imbuing it in full-length format. Luckily, it’s not the only trend we’ll see as the year goes on, so keep an ear in the air for any other trends that may pop up during 2010, and I hope you follow along with me as we journey through the indie music identity in awe, disgust, and a healthy dose of self-loathing.

*Statistics made up, obviously.