Illustration by Scott Starrett
I have no idea what made us forget about indie rock’s most prescient element, or if there ever was a time where fuzz “went away,” but it seems dead set to be the genre’s freshest twist, despite the decades old approach to it. Indie rock never went through a period of suck, but it goes through dull periods. Until this year, acts like Arcade Fire, Spoon, and The New Pornographers were dormant, and truthfully, so was the pop bombast of their works.
Meanwhile, the only thing keeping indie rock seemingly alive from the feelings of a derivative nature is the efforts of an equally derivative but much older practice. The fuzz of My Bloody Valentine and The Velvet Underground are in the indie rock primer, but Loveless is nearly two decades old. There has to be a new transfer.
But fuzz isn’t merely the cause of this. The Vivian Girls, who made my personal favorite album of 2009, Everything Goes Wrong, seem to have cracked the puzzle to endlessly catchy music exploring the themes of youth and adulthood all at once. Songs like “Walking Alone at Night” get at the root of youth alienation in ways that only simple two minute songs can, by simply addressing paranoia, loneliness, boredom, and fear all at once while rocking hard.
I know my opinion here is hardly the most sentient, but this has saved the medium of indie from the esoteric. I like the efforts of a Dan Bejar, of Destroyer fame, who has an overly complicated picture in his head, but the biggest trouble with stories like that is that ultimately, only the narrator really knows what’s going on. The Vivian Girls’ genius has nothing to do with their storytelling, because the story is easy to figure out.
At first, I thought I couldn’t explain why more noise makes my music better. It seems massively silly, just like how the sound of spinning needles suddenly makes vinyl an infinitely better experience than FLAC tracks or MP3 and how music geeks whinge about the lossy forms of media. It’s only one part of a medium, which practically makes it like film grain.
But then I noticed the direction of modern pop music. More and more often, the idea of the computer studio creating the musical form is a thought that seems inhuman. The mechanical creates the medium, allows the CDs, and now rules the landscape with applications like iTunes. Perhaps this is why we are drawn to the natural. Fuzz is a mechanical invention, but one with a live human variable.
The strongest case for the great counter balance fuzzy rock and angelic pop can create comes from the newest release by the Dum Dum Girls called I Will Be. This Sub Pop release only runs roughly 27 minutes and unleashes pop mastery, the cute vocals of Dee Dee swarm over the cacophony of ferocity through the run time. And then it knows when it has peaked, and slows it down for its closing work, “Baby Don’t Go.” Music has the trouble of operating on a medium of time. A label doesn’t feel that a band is good without a 45 minute effort, but rarely does this time get utilized.
If the style of the Dum Dum Girls and the Vivian Girls stays, however, then nothing will be wasted.
