Indie Trends: Not Quite Brooklyn (March 2010)

Indie Trends March 2010: Not Quite Brooklyn
by Chris Polley

Let’s not kid ourselves: there is a center to the indie universe. This is no different from any other self-obsessed fad of decades past where nobodies in Midwestern hellholes aspired to “get away”. But when they said or thought that life-changing phrase, they always only had one of two particular cities in mind. If their hopes and dreams revolved around cinema stardom and/or warm beaches, everybody that hated their parents either wished they could move to or did move to Los Angeles. On the flipside, if their desires revolved more around cultural capital and stylistic prowess, they opted for the more cosmopolitan, the more suffocating New York City. Obviously, if we’re talking about indie, Los Angeles is seen as the armpit of the mainstream world, and thus, we stay away. So we set our sights on the city that isn’t necessarily “underground” but because of its largesse and sprawl contains more innumerable countercultural hotspots than one could handle in a mere visit or vacation. No, this was a city that demanded not be explored, but lived in and eternally breathed. And when you’re in a city that’s so big it’s separated, segregated, and gentrified into five distinct boroughs, eventually a subculture as powerful and noticeable as hipsterdom will need to claim one of those boroughs in particular to convene in and call home. And so, with its vibrant history and literary scenery, that locale quickly became Brooklyn.

But then something funny happened. It became cliche to be a Brooklyn hipster. Wearing skinny jeans while standing in line for Animal Collective tickets in Williamsburg made you about as unique as someone wearing a puka shell necklace while standing in line for Dave Matthews tickets in Indiana. And if you’re indie, the last thing you want to be labeled as is cliche. So once you “find yourself” you might do something as simple as pack up and move to Queens, or you might freak out entirely, getting married and starting a family in the suburbs. At least that cliche is on purpose, right? Now, let’s turn the tables a bit. This might not be that threatening to an indie listener’s self-actualization (or lack thereof), but it can often mean life or death for indie musicians. If you were a Brooklyn band that sounded like My Bloody Valentine two years ago, you were probably doing all right, maybe even starting to consider quitting those pesky day jobs. But in 2010? You better hope you’re either a Brooklyn band with some kind of influence outside the city of brownstones and go there or you better not be actually from Brooklyn. This is tricky because you also don’t want to be a band from, say, Minneapolis (Craig Finn of Lifter Puller obviously knew this when he booked it to Brooklyn to start The Hold Steady) or even worse…Omaha. So in this month’s Indie Trends, we will be focusing on how the three big indie releases of March 2010 all have one curious trait in common: they all have ties to Brooklyn and thus can still fit in with the old indie cliche, but never so much so that they become ignored and tossed aside like any number of the borough’s burgeoning artists.

Let us start with the curious case of Liars (LA; Brooklyn; Berlin; LA). This helpful geographical parenthetical, like the others below, points out that the band neither truly started in Brooklyn nor do they currently reside there today. However, after the two core members met in college during their initial LA days, the band made their big break as part of the NYC dance-punk (remember when that was a genre?) scene with their attention-getting debut They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top. Of course, for those of us in the know, the band’s relationship with angular guitars and snotty yelping ended there. In one of the most scene-challenging decisions of all time, they recorded and released the witch hunt-themed record They Were Wrong, So We Drowned (with venerable Brooklyn band-producing institution Dave Sitek). Upon receiving some of both the highest and lowest accolades of any indie band ever (this was one of those “all texture, no melody” indie records that divides the spectrum of hipsters as often as it galvanizes them), Liars relocated to Berlin, Germany in an attempt to leave behind its Brooklyn-ness. They largely succeeded with two krautrock-inspired records, one artsier (Drum’s Not Dead, my personal favorite Liars record) and one more rock and roll (the self-titled Liars, which came and went with little fanfare).

Largely displaced from the scene at that point, the band did something radical yet expected to regain their status as the experimental buzz band of the decade: they went back to their roots in LA to record their latest release, Sisterworld. Sounding like a halfway point between the aggressiveness of They Were Wrong and the mellowness of Drum’s Not Dead, the band seems not so much interested in cultivating yet another new sound, but to come to some kind of identity conclusion. Taking cues from what are clearly the band’s two most distinguished and passionate records, they are trying to find a middle ground but still sound like a band that refuses to settle. Songs like “The Overachievers” and “Too Much, Too Much” sound both meticulous and energized, helping to prove that the band can still hint at their Brooklyn days while managing to inject new life. On the other hand, the record often feels bloated with their have-cake-and-eat-it-too mentality, with fairweather meanderings like “Drip” and “Drop Dead”. These are the kinds of semi-Brooklyn, semi-Berlin mixtures that end up feeling more like lost B-sides from a bygone era. In this sense, coming back to LA seems more like a choice made my restless default rather than an inspired search for home. The band is undeniably strangely talented though, so I hope that maybe with future efforts they are able to continue their search and maybe their next choice for living (even if it is to stay in LA this time) will sound a little less drab.

Taking a less complicated look on the concept of home is Titus Andronicus (New Jersey), who are, by all accounts, a new band. Yes, they made their first splash in 2008 with their first proper long-player The Airing Of Grievances, but their recent scene explosion with their sophomore effort The Monitor has been beyond surprising, at least for me. The first of many reasons for my surprise is that with a slight tweak on their big big sound, they could be an Omaha band. Now every music critic and their mother has pointed out that lead singer Patrick Stickles sounds like Conor Oberst, aka the former indie metropolis’s poster boy. But even more than this is the band’s other distinguishably Saddle Creek birthmarks: the rousing throat-shredding often sounds more like Cursive’s Tim Kasher more than it does Bright Eyes or even Desaparecidos, plus the anthemic twang of Rilo Kiley, who were hilariously so bored with their Hollywood background that they booked it to Omaha to have a hipper and more tight-knit place to call home. But this is not to say that TA is completely devoid of originality or true talent. In fact, among the three albums talked about today, it’s probably the one I enjoy the most, even if it is something I can only take in small doses. It’s got enough vivacity and crusty sweat to be declared a true rock record, which is something in this day and age of computer-aided beats. But of course this is also the reason I can only take it in small doses: Brooklyn music has, over the past few years, not acclimated us to something so raucous.

So then what does Titus Andronicus have to do with the Brooklyn cliche? Well, you see, from what I can tell from my Midwestern perspective, New Jersey is often seen as the seedy underbelly of New York. Speak up if I’m talking out of my ass, because I’m only basing my assumptions on seeing comedians make fun of the Garden State and/or from my recent addiction to watching The Sopranos on DVD, but it seems to me that if you want to be associated with NYC but don’t want the uppity snobbishness to drown you, then New Jersey is your almost-Brooklyn. In fact, it might even be the new Brooklyn someday if it keeps playing its cards right. And with a band like Titus Andronicus, all bombast without any pompous orchestration (if you want strings, you better settle for the fiddle in “A Pot In Which To Piss”), incredibly bloated and angsty without sounding over-privileged (like the eyeball-bulging “No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future”), New Jersey might just succeed at this. It’s already got easy geography on its side; in fact that only thing it might have against is Jersey Shore, but even the trashiness of those cultural icons is fading fast. It’s too bad that so much of The Monitor also sounds forgettable because there are no real respites allowed during its listen, save for the overly languid bits like “Four Score And Seven”. But if it were timed correctly and the kinks were worked out, the brash bar-room rock of bands like TA just might take over the gentle harmonizing of the Grizzly Bears of the world.

Not until that very band’s own bassist, Chris Taylor, is done producing bands to make them sound like his and give Brooklyn more of a cohesive vision, anyway. The Morning Benders (San Francisco; Brooklyn) are a transplant job from the West coast whose first release, 2008’s Talking Through Tin Cans, was named best of the year by iTunes, but barely made a dent in the indieverse until they charged down the door with Taylor’s help in the past few weeks with their follow-up Big Echo. The similarities are undeniable, sometimes even sounding more like another band Taylor has produced, his Grizzly Bear cohort’s alter ego Department of Eagles (“Wet Cement”). The guitars are reverbed through vintage amps, the fragile vocals are slight yet precise, and the rhythms are equal parts modern indie and 50s pop, so the story should end there quite easily, yes? Well, kinda. Not only does it sound like Taylor (and well yes, I suppose The Morning Benders themselves are equally complicit) is adding them to a nebulous roster of Brooklyn bands with delicate melodies and airy atmospherics, but it sounds like he’s doing it without the artfulness of his own band but with double the accessibility. Before I go further, I should offer full disclosure that I do not enjoy Grizzly Bear, save for their singles “Knife” and “Two Weeks.” But while that bias exists, I can (depending on my mood) admit that they are good musicians and concede that their music is obtusely unique, even if I think it’s terribly boring.

That said, The Morning Benders don’t seem content with being obtuse. Conversely, they don’t like being boring, so they amp up all their songs, rarely letting a second go by without percussion or bright chords. Some critics have described this technique as them imbuing their “California origins” into the mix. This is just a pretentious way of saying they make the sound summery instead of chilly. It also makes for an album full of Brooklyn cliches without any of the Brooklyn nuances. On the surface, this makes me enjoy Big Echo immensely, especially on a first listen. “Cold War (Nice Clean Fight)” is a shimmering short jam full of blissful harmonies and an off-kilter vibe. But it’s one of the only examples on the record. Almost everything else is ignorable in a way that if you were to press play while working, you wouldn’t lift your head until the next record came on, though you might have been bobbing it to the beat the whole time. This, in many ways, is the exact opposite of what Brooklyn needs to do if they want to stay the center of the indie universe. Luckily, many other artists, some with more success than others, are offering other viable alternatives to this central locale, suggesting that maybe a more nomadic nature fits indie’s repertoire better than getting stale in a gentrified city.