The City Veins

The other night WAS a lot of fun!  Stalking Horses and The Surge were both great bands to play with.  Very different from us, but great fun and excellent at what they do.  I know it seems premature to say that about The Surge since it was their first show, but there is something very compelling about their brand of Indie-pop.  I enjoyed the melodies and songwriting of both The Surge and Stalking Horses. 

While we were all waiting for the show to start (everytime we play there is a good 2 hours when we are at the club before anyone else is there) the lead singer from the Surge (forgot name) said to me,” I really liked your post the other day, but if that is true you’re going to hate our band.”  Two things have happened as a result of this statement:

1)  My emphatic surprise that people outside of our band read our blog.

2)  The sense that I need to clarify my position about Indie music.

Normally I would not necessarily feel inclined to clarify my position on anything unless I was bored because, frankly, who cares what I think about anything.  But in this case I think this band would like to be part of the DC Indie scene (as opposed to running around looking for a record deal or playing radio-friendly pop rock) so I don’t want these mystery people who read our blog to be mis-informed.

I love Indie music.  It’s an awful descriptive, but aside from that it is all I listen to.  One of Indie music’s greatest strengths is that it tells you very little about what you are going to hear.  It is designed as a counter-weight to mainstream music; you are defined as an Indie band by your business status, not by what you sound like.  While that makes it crappy as a descriptive it remains a very liberating scene.  Indie bands traditionally draw from a wide range of well-defined genres, mixing in a wonderful vegan sloppy-joe of goodness.  Melody seems to be derived from almost any of the instruments, with no one instrument becoming more important than the others.  If you take an Arcade Fire song, you could hum along with the bass just as easily as you could the guitar, the vocals, or pumping your fist to the pulse.  Indie songwriters are writing great melodies, much better than the re-tread crap of major labe music.  Or at least that is my assessment.

I (and I think Spencer) was pointing out that there seems to be only a scant few Indie bands that are drawing iunfluence from harder, more aggressive rock of the past.  My sense of Indie stems from Q and Not U, Fugazi, Beauty Pill, and other bands that were aggressive, inventive, and powerful.  There are a good number of bands that draw from a number of diverse influences quite well, but not from the bands I just mentioned.  Furthermore, it seems that alot of the bands that are getting very large within the Indie scene sound very similar, as if ”Indie” is becoming a descriptive term.  I was just pointing out that I think there is a trend towards falling into convention, and the drums seem to be the most visible example.

I admit that my sense of the Indie “scene” is extremely limited.  So much so, in fact, that I feel somewhat guilty about having a strong opinion about it.  But as I’ve started paying more and more attention to Indie blogs in the last month, I’ve started to sense that the scene is becoming a bit limited in scope.  Or maybe it’s just that Radiohead keeps kicking everybody’s ass at it, so everyone else is giving up on being as creative as possible.  But, in my opinion, it would be best if the Indie scene didn’t become guilty of the same limitations to which the majors have fallen victim.  And, since the scene is built on opinions, the flow of information, reviews, and transparency, that shouldn’t be a problem.  Or the scene can be run in a gestapo-esque was by a few bloggers with big and loud opinions about what is objectively good and bad, without the type of knowledge of music that Charles has prescribed as mandatory in past posts.