SOME WICKED: Dashiell Brown's Blog

This is the cover of their new album Yeah I Know which seems to invoke the image of some new Sonic Youth-ers, and it’s a spot-on way to advertise their fresh, raw sound that’ll wake you up like a strong cup o’ joe.  Also fresh is the format of the cd, which is actually not a jewel case, but a pamphlet, with lots of Wonder Years-inspired retro suburban photos of a bygone era (apparently they are pictures of the band members’ parents.) And, thanks to an exciting mix of fuzz-soaked indie lo-fi goodness, their music is as fresh and punchy as the pictures included in their book.

They immediately sound as if they’re channeling the rawness of The Strokes and the grit of The Black Lips with a bit of indie-fied Sebadoh, Superchunk and Pavement thrown in for good measure, but for anyone who’s been kind of over The Strokes (like me) will want to pick this up for a fresh spin on a now been-there-done-that idea. Yes, they are clearly driven by the best of the garage-rockers.  Jogging through the tracks as I usually do when previewing a new album, I dug just about every one, especially since I have a penchant for good quality garage rock outfits (yeah I know…quality garage-rock is perhaps an oxymoron…) Any way you take it, Darlings is an exciting new band fer sure. Out now on Famous Class.

Here’s their myspace.

Listen to them this Thursday on The New Spin. Also streaming online, listen to the latest editon of The New Spin.

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Intermission…

As I sit here during the intermission, I think about the twinkling lights and how we all probably have xmas on the brain, but this whole festive setup is the complete antithesis to rock n’ roll. But that’s fine because Julie Doiron is not exactly a rock n’ roll act, but an indie rock act, and there’s a huge difference—this goes back to what differentiates the two and what indie rock is to begin with.

Indie rock, arguably stemming from the twee or C-86 movement that broke out in response to the explosive, violent punk scene in the late 70’s/early 80’s in England and New York, contrary to balls-out rock n’ roll, is marked by a hushed, introspective, somewhat disheveled, lo-fi sound that I would argue Daniel Johnston is largely responsible for starting (though he had nothing to do with the twee movement, but he was writing his first songs in the late 70’s as well.) Twee’s specific hero seems to be Dan Treacy who broke out his unique sound in ’77, breaking away from a seemingly-obnoxious punk stance, and turning inwards as a vehicle for inspiration. (Read a more in-depth article about Twee here, which I am largely borrowing from for the history.) Inevitably, as more punks and garage-rockers began championing each other for the stage, and as their initial goal of self-expression unconsciously transformed into the goal of fame and glory, rock divided into different camps with different intentions, but the same goal: liberation. You could sell records to liberate yourself from your hum-drum existence, become famous and break out of the mundane once and for all, or you could find your heart and express and thus liberate yourself by rejecting all notions of being a rock-star to begin with: Julie Doiron is of course in the latter category, and this is what her show was all about: self-expression, love, and liberation. 

And so the indie counterculture began, generally with middle-class white kids at the helm, who realized they didn’t have to be flashy to be noticed. Just how most countercultures form, when the hegemony of the day is questioned, new cues are sought out, and for indie rockers, they drew their influence from 60’s bands like the Phil Spector-produced girl groups, jangle, and ballads, and one strain of this music molded to a signature sound known as “twee”, or what you might know as a very child-like indie pop; for me, Kimya Dawson and the Juno soundtrack particularly come to mind. But when people say indie, or the classic indie sound, i think they’re usually referring to Pavement, Sebadoh, Built to Spill, and then a whole laundry list of bands that came afterwards. Pavement sticks in my mind as the first real indie band, but it’s just my opinion, and that was an American band. It’s got to be made clear that this whole thing started overseas in England first. There are of course other pioneer indie bands which I’m sure I just never knew about and don’t know about now. Can’t know everything, eh? Hmmm…which is better: to know everything or know nothing? discuss.

Another much steelier and bold (and grating and annoying) genre also grew out of the divide betwee indie roots and punkrock, of course: it goes by the name of EMO, which stands for emotional. I for one can’t stand EMO, it gets on my nerves, rubs me the wrong way. So many of the kids love it, though, for a million reasons I can understand and that’s a whole separate essay, or 500 essays. I’ll write about it sometime. I would argue, though, that EMO was inevitable–here you have these kids who are “trapped” just like the middle-class kids that made up the twee movement, though you’re in the 90’s now, and Kurt Cobain and Green Day become your heroes, ever since Dookie came out (my least favorite Green Day album by far), and you had all these underground, indie artists go “mainstream” by signing to major record labels and you saw it all on MTV, every day, and thus, MTV purported, the music revolution. NIN’s “closer” was seen on the screen a million times. Nirvana. Pearl Jam. Stone Temple Pilots. Sonic Youth. Primus. Jane’s Addiciton. The Pixies. Tool. Even Ministry flipped to the norm. Indie became the new hegemony, the exact opposite of the quiet, comtemplative roots it initially stood for, for millions of kids watching the tube. 120 minutes, my favorite show on MTV in the early 90’s, is where I first learned of all these underground bands to begin with. And it was on from 12 P.M. – 2 A.M. once a week, every Sunday night. That is underground. And that is the show where you’d see Portishead’s video for the first time, Social Distortion, Bad Religion, The Breeders, Ministry, Soundgarden, Primus, even Pearl Jam’s video “Alive”, which was totally unknown at the time it came out. Of course, I was in high school and couldn’t stay up until 2am on a Monday morning, for chrissake. That’s how underground Pearl Jam’s video was, from their debut album Ten. Simultaneously, I had a subscription to a highly underground little zine called New Route, which had an article about Pavement and their new album Slanted and Enchanted. I was on two paths, and once again, as I have usually done my whole life, I took the one less traveled by.

and then tragedy struck: “me, you, and everyone we know” watched “Jeremy” play on repeat, day in and day out, ad nauseum. “Smells like Teen Spirit.” Blind Melon. The Flaming Lips and their “Vaseline.” Beavis and Butthead. Aeon Flux. The music/culture revolution had begun, and once again, as indie evolved into a new strain called “grunge”, the media advertised the hell out of it, and indie flipped overnight into its new unprecedented hegemonic role as father of the new counterculture. And just as with any revolution, once a revolution takes over, new followers arise forming a new majority, and new dissenters arise, forming a new minority, and the cycle starts over again, and new metaphors are created for the same ideas that began the revolution in the first place. A New World Order then must staunch anything that opposes it, and MTV in a single blow destroyed all their dissenters and what their whole station was about in the first place. Or did it? What did MTV do with their new-found success? They created a nightmare which they are still trying to climb out of: T.R.L.: The Real World became The Real Lie.

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