The Natural, The Spacious, and The Human: One Story of the Last Three Years in Indie (An Essay)
By; Christian Hagen
This indie scene, or whatever we’re meant to call it now that Paste has presented the term “indie” with its early death certificate, is as fascinating and fluctuating as the Earth and stars themselves. The music of the previously unheralded minority, the outsiders breaking in through the cracks in the armor of what was popular and clean-cut, then growing in the crevices, gestating, evolving like a bacteria, short-lived but with the power and purpose to either destroy or renew the very concepts that make up the foundations of modern music.
Indie has taken many forms over several decades. Eighties hardcore punk bands like Black Flag took the indie mindset of promotion and distribution and showcased the success of the repressed even in the stifling Reagan era. The Pixies took pop rock and turned it sideways, examining the possibilities, experimenting with the best places to throw in a crash or a shout and temper those with seething, almost anxious lakes of noise. Sonic Youth gave that noise poetry. Nirvana made that noise anthemic. Pavement brought it back to the garage and made it fun again. As it continued to evolve, the new millennium brought terror and anger back into the scene, as bands like At the Drive-In and even The Strokes growled and howled, albeit in very different ways, through the stresses of a new era of politics and religion and war. And things have grown from there, growing and shrinking and withering and blooming in sometimes unpredictable cycles. Along the way, milestones marked where we’d been and sprang us forward to await what was next.
Whether alternative, hardcore, punk, goth, garage, or whatever else it may have been called, indie has survived in one form or another since the beginning of music, and certainly rock and roll.
Perhaps it’s because of this that we often take the indie milestones of today for granted. The wild branches of the indie tree have grown so sprawling that to trace the path to the twigs that extend to their current ends seems reductive; after all, with the internet, why hang on one branch at a time when you can stretch yourself across several at once? Thus the impact and transformative properties of indie rock are often either ignored or examined with a sense of almost annoyance, as though, to continue the tree metaphor, it’s surprising that all these branches, no matter how they twist or rise, are all made up of the same wood.
All of this is to say: Sometimes, it’s exciting, as a fan and certainly as a critic, to find connections, to trace the path that certain areas of the scene are taking. It seems I’ve found a new stone to mark this time in history.
In 2008, after several years in which bands like The White Stripes and The Black Keys were rejuvenating blues and people like Conor Oberst and Jenny Lewis were reinventing country, Fleet Foxes came seemingly out of nothingness and revived the fields of folk and bluegrass. With their self-titled debut album, they reversed the long trend of bands like Radiohead, Wilco, and TV on the Radio and, rather than finding inspiration and some caution in the world of electronics and computers, retreated back into the natural world of the past. In the opening “Sun Rises,” which begins with a chorus of old-timey harmonizing, the woods were brought to life, the mountains and streams of God’s landscape tumbling into view at the crack of dawn as man stood naked in awe of its beauty. And as that song ended and the sing-song “White Winter Hymnal” broke, we ran through the fields to explore what lives we could make for ourselves.
Fleet Foxes made the raw possibilities of dirt and sky feel new again, the American folk styles recalling days of greater peace and understanding with the land. Lyrically, it explored a very human, emotional relationship with nature. And even when the lyrics occasionally bespoke modern trials, the music was always drenched in the sun, wind, snow, and rain of times past. This was indie’s new answer to the electronic age, to auto-tune and the return of disco-rap anthems and the fear on the lips of all too many modern singers curled under the weight of progress. In the same year that Vampire Weekend bleached the indie-rock community and made it frivolous, Fleet Foxes grounded us in our humanity by reminding us of our humility.
However, this naturalistic approach would inevitably be balanced, as nature itself, on all sides by different worlds of understanding and awe. So it was that in 2009, another animal-affiliated group by the name of Grizzly Bear took to the stars with Veckatimest. Coming from two albums of quiet, heady music that sounded like men staring at the ground and wondering why life continued to survive, Veckatimest seemed like those same men finally looking up and wondering wide-mouthed at the grand universe that surrounded them. Much like Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear’s lyrics never stray far from the personal, the human, but, again like Fleet Foxes, the music was much larger, much more spacious. Yet while Fleet Foxes’ music was often packed full and stretched to breaking with all the items of the world they could cram into their field of view, Grizzly Bear’s folk approach featured vacuums, pockets between burning stars and spinning globes.
Like the Fleet Foxes album, the first song defines this style. Throughout “Southern Point,” there are several moments where the momentum seems to drop, as though they’d reached the edge of the landscape and had fallen off, only to land somewhere even grander, making music that was alternately mysteriously calm and bombastic. It is not surprising, then when the bridge of the otherwise radio-friendly “Two Weeks” drops its driving drum pattern and pulls the volume, and the energy, of the whole production into a brief, simple piano refrain, before releasing bravely back into an explosion of sounds, the chorus thundering into view as the listener is left stunned.
If Fleet Foxes are the woods, then Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest occupies the space above and between the woods and the city, that last step separating the fields from the roads.
But with these two alone, the path seems unfinished, as though the world of man was never able to build itself an infrastructure upon which to base its own mystery and reverence. But, as if on cue, in the early part of 2010, another band has come along and blossomed in the next bloom on the tree.
Hailing from one of the largest cities in the world, and clearly inspired by the steps provided by Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear, Local Natives have found their wide-mouthed awe not in the creations of nature but in the ingenuity of man. They have cast off the naturalism of the folk genre, retaining only the sense for melody and harmony and the power of the rollicking drums. In place of these classic ideals and styles, they’ve taken the elements of modern rock and roll which best suit their ends, still hardly the electronic soothsayers of synth powerhouses like Animal Collective or LCD Soundsystem, but rather the raw inspiration of guitar, bass, and drum, with the occasional keyboard or piano to round out the equation, the steel of the strings and the thunder of the snare emulating the tools of a building empire, skyscrapers in pieces to be assembled to tower over mountains.
However, for all the differences they have from their most recent counterparts, Local Natives carry many similarities. Aside from the animal interest (the name of their debut album: Gorilla Manor), they, like Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear before them, sing of humanity, of the personal, while their music feels much grander. Like the others, look at the opening track of their album. “Wide Eyes” is to the present what “Sun Rises” is to the past and “Southern Point” is to the world beyond our own. As Kelcey Ayer sings of “evil…on their tongues” and the fear of a dark potential future, the guitar soars, appearing and fading like spotlights or planes creeping by in the night sky, while the drums simmer like the bustling streets of a wild urban chorus of noise. Each song carries the grandiose musical ideas of their predecessors while bouncing off and attempting to break through the walls that surround them.
In short, if Fleet Foxes are the woods, and Grizzly Bear is space, then Local Natives is the city, the man-made present of concrete and asphalt and blood and sweat and graffiti and mass production and the prospects and hope afforded by technological advancement, the drudgery and the beauty of modern human city life.
It seems too calculated or pointed to be truly coincidental, but Fleet Foxes, Veckatimest, and Gorilla Manor all carry another strange similarity: The first and second tracks of each work in perfect tandem as a signature, defining the band’s stylistic intentions while marking clearly where the indie scene has landed, and as a catchy yet still artistically impressive, single, respectively. I don’t believe that these are premeditated similarities, but considering the way I’ve chosen to trace this path, it’s strangely fitting.
“Airplanes,” the second track on Local Natives’ album, is much like “White Winter Hymnal” and “Two Weeks” in several ways. It begins slowly, calmly building to an unexpected burst of harmony and instrumentation which catches the listener off guard. Later on, it pulls back into softness, before, very much like “Two Weeks,” it rises to an even grander conclusion.
Were one to trace this path of the indie scene, to the reintegration of folk and its eventual dissection and absorption by modern rock, I think they would clearly find, as I have, the connection of these three albums, and their landmarks along the roads of indie music. What will the next step be? Perhaps the core. Perhaps the internet. Perhaps the soul. Wherever is there is art left to be inspired, people shall go.
And whatever will become of the “indie” tree, it certainly will not die. Its name may be changed, it’s leaves may turn color, but the tree will thrive as long as there are those who wish to eat from its fruit and as long as there is a sun to shine light on the worlds and words of people often ignored or unseen by the eye of the greater populace.