Indie Rock:D
Indie rock takes its name from "independent," which describes both the do-it-yourself attitudes of its bands and the small, lower-budget nature of the labels that release the music. The biggest indie labels might strike distribution deals with major corporate labels, but their decision-making processes remain autonomous. As such, indie rock is free to explore sounds, emotions, and lyrical subjects that don't appeal to large, mainstream audiences — profit isn't as much of a concern as personal taste (though the labels do, after all, want to stay in business). It's very much rooted in the sound and sensibility of American underground and alternative rock of the '80s, albeit with a few differences that account for the changes in underground rock since then. In the sense that the term is most widely used, indie rock truly separated itself from alternative rock around the time that Nirvana hit the mainstream. Mainstream tastes gradually reshaped alternative into a new form of serious-minded hard rock, in the process making it more predictable and testosterone-driven. Indie rock was a reaction against that phenomenon; not all strains of alternative rock crossed over in Nirvana's wake, and not all of them wanted to, either. Yet while indie rock definitely shares the punk community's concerns about commercialism, it isn't as particular about whether bands remain independent or "sell out"; the general assumption is that it's virtually impossible to make indie rock's varying musical approaches compatible with mainstream tastes in the first place. There are almost as many reasons for that incompatibility as there are indie-rock bands, but following are some of the most common: the music may be too whimsical and innocent; too weird; too sensitive and melancholy; too soft and delicate; too dreamy and hypnotic; too personal and intimately revealing in its lyrics; too low-fidelity and low-budget in its production; too angular in its melodies and riffs; too raw, skronky and abrasive; wrapped in too many sheets of Sonic Youth/Dinosaur Jr./Pixies/Jesus & Mary Chain-style guitar noise; too oblique and fractured in its song structures; too influenced by experimental or otherwise unpopular musical styles. Regardless of the specifics, it's rock made by and for outsiders — much like alternative once was, except that thanks to its crossover, indie rock has a far greater wariness of excess testosterone. It's certainly not that indie rock is never visceral or powerful; it's just rarely — if ever — macho about it. As the '90s wore on, indie rock developed quite a few substyles and close cousins (indie pop, dream pop, noise-pop, lo-fi, math rock, post-rock, space rock, sadcore, and emo among them), all of which seemed poised to remain strictly underground phenomena.
Indie Pop
Indie rock's more melodic, less noisy, and relatively angst-free counterpart, Indie Pop reflects the underground's softer, sweeter side, with a greater emphasis on harmonies, arrangements, and songcraft. Encompassing everything from the lush orchestration of chamber pop to the primitive simplicity of twee pop, its focus is nevertheless more on the songs than on the sound, and although both indie pop and indie rock embrace the D.I.Y. spirit of punk, the former rejects punk's nihilistic attitude and abrasive sonic approach.
Chamber Pop
Drawing heavily from the lush, orchestrated work of performers including Brian Wilson, Burt Bacharach, and Lee Hazlewood, Chamber Pop arose largely as a reaction to the lo-fi aesthetic dominant throughout much of the 1990s alternative music community. Inspired in part by the lounge-music revival but with a complete absence of irony or kitsch, chamber pop placed a renewed emphasis on melody and production, as artists layered their baroque, ornate songs with richly textured orchestral strings and horns, all the while virtually denying the very existence of grunge, electronica, and other concurrent musical movements.
Noise Pop
A subgenre of alternative/indie rock, noise pop is just what it says — pop music wrapped in barbed-wire kisses of feedback, dissonance, and abrasion. It occupies the halfway point between bubblegum and the avant-garde, a collision between conventional pop songcraft and the sonic assault of white noise. Noise pop often has a hazy, narcotic feel, as melodies drift through the swirling guitar textures. But it can also be bright and lively, or angular and challenging. Noise pop's earliest roots lie in the Velvet Underground's experiments with feedback, distortion, and drones. Its most recognizable forebears, however, are American alternative rock bands like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr., who wedded rock song structures to thick sheets of guitar distortion. The first proper noise pop band was the Jesus & Mary Chain, whose groundbreaking 1986 debut Psychocandy pretty much birthed the style. Yo La Tengo, perhaps the most prolific and long-lived noise-pop band, debuted around the same time. In the late '80s, noise pop was the chief inspiration for the British shoegazing movement, which made the lyrics more introspective and the melodies more fragile. All through the '90s, noise pop continued to enjoy an important and influential presence on the indie rock scene.
Lo-Fi
During the late '80s and early '90s, lo fidelity became not only a description of the recording quality of a particular album, but it also became a genre onto itself. Throughout rock & roll's history, recordings were made cheaply and quickly, often on substandard equipment. In that sense, the earliest rock & roll records, most of the garage rock of the '60s, and much of the punk rock of the late '70s could be tagged as Lo-Fi. However, the term came to refer to a breed of underground indie rockers that recorded their material at home on four-track machines. Most of this music grew out of the American underground of the '80s, including bands like R.E.M., as well as a handful of British post-punk bands and New Zealand bands like the Chills and the Clean. Often, these lo-fi bands fluctuated from simple pop and rock songs to free-form song structures to pure noise and arty experimentalism. Even when the groups kept the songs relatively straightforward, the thin quality of the recordings, the layers of tape distortion and hiss, as well as the tendency toward abstract, obtuse lyrics made the music sound different and left of center. Initially, lo-fi recordings were traded on homemade tapes, but several indie labels — most notably K Records, which was run by Calvin Johnson, who led the lo-fi band Beat Happening — released albums on vinyl. Several groups in the late '80s, like Pussy Galore, Beat Happening, and Royal Trux earned small cult followings within the American underground. By 1992, groups like Sebadoh and Pavement had become popular cult acts in America and Britain with their willfully noisy, chaotic recordings. A few years later, Liz Phair and Beck helped break the lo-fi aesthetic into the mainstream, albeit in a more streamlined fashion.
C-86
In 1986, the British music weekly NME issued a cassette dubbed C-86, which included a number of bands — McCarthy, the Wedding Present, Primal Scream, the Pastels, and the Bodines among them — influenced in equal measure by the jangly guitar pop of the Smiths, the three-chord naivete of the Ramones, and the nostalgic sweetness of the girl group era. Also dubbed "anorak pop" and "shambling" by the British press, the C-86 movement was itself short-lived, but it influenced hordes of upcoming bands on both sides of the Atlantic who absorbed the scene's key lessons of simplicity and honesty to stunning effect, resulting in music — given the universal label of "twee pop" — whose hallmarks included boy-girl harmonies, lovelorn lyrics, infectious melodies, and simple, unaffected performances.
Space Rock
The term space rock was originally coined back in the '70s to describe the cosmic flights of bands like Pink Floyd and Hawkwind. Today, however, space rock refers to a new generation of alternative/indie bands that draw from psychedelic rock, ambient music, and — more often than not — experimental and avant-garde influences. Space rock is nearly always slow, hypnotic, and otherworldly; it typically favors lengthy, mind-bending sonic explorations over conventional song structures, and vocals sometimes play second fiddle to the shimmering instrumental textures. Some space rock groups are explicitly drug-inspired, which makes sense given the typically narcotic effect of the style's foundation: washes of heavily reverbed guitar, minimal drumming, and gentle, languid vocals. Space rock's most obvious antecedent was, of course, prog-rock, but in its latter-day incarnation, it was also inspired by Krautrock, classical minimalism, and the noise-pop of the Jesus & Mary Chain. The first of the new space rock bands was Britain's drone-heavy, ultra-minimalist Spacemen 3, whose notorious "taking drugs to make music to take drugs to" credo subsequently influenced most of the like-minded bands in their wake. A few of the bands involved in Britain's shoegazer movement had ties to space rock, particularly the early work of the Verve, and the most experimental bands — like My Bloody Valentine — went on to influence the space rock revival. In 1991, Spacemen 3 split into two groups, Spectrum and Spiritualized; the latter took the opposite musical approach from its parent group, fleshing out the space rock sound into lush, caressing, orchestrated epics that made them arguably the style's most popular band. Most subsequent space rockers took either the minimalist or maximalist approach, occasionally mixing in elements of post-rock (Flying Saucer Attack, Godspeed You Black Emperor!) or indie pop (Quickspace).
Neo-Psychedelia
Neo-psychedelia covers a diverse array of artists from the end of the punk era to the present day, all of whom drew from the equally diverse original sounds of '60s psychedelia. Whether they played trippy psychedelic pop (à la the Beatles, early Pink Floyd, and countless others), jangly Byrds-influenced guitar rock, distortion-drenched free-form jams, or mind-bending sonic experiments, these groups looked to psychedelia as a wellspring of evocative, unusual sounds, and either updated or unabashedly copied the original artists' approaches. Some neo-psychedelia was explicitly druggy, while for others it was simply a logical complement to their bizarre lyrics or left-of-center outlooks. Neo-psychedelia has occasionally hit the pop mainstream — Prince's mid-'80s work, for example, and some of Lenny Kravitz's retro-worshipping output in the '90s. But for the most part, it has been chiefly the domain of alternative and indie-rock bands. Neo-psychedelia first appeared on the British post-punk scene at the end of the '70s, with major figures including the Teardrop Explodes, Echo & the Bunnymen, and the Soft Boys. Aside from the early-'80s Paisley Underground movement and the Elephant 6 collective of the late '90s, most subsequent neo-psychedelia came from isolated eccentrics and revivalists, not cohesive scenes. Some of the biggest included the jangly, dreamy Australian band the Church; Nick Saloman's Bevis Frond, which mixed melodic songcraft with loud power-trio jamming; the droning, druggy haze of Spacemen 3; the quirky college rock of ex-Soft Boy Robyn Hitchcock; the utter weirdness of Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips; and the eclectic Britpop of Wales' Super Furry Animals.
Shoegaze
Shoegaze is a genre of late '80s and early '90s British indie rock, named after the bands' motionless performing style, where they stood on stage and stared at the floor while they played. But shoegaze wasn't about visuals — it was about pure sound. The sound of the music was overwhelmingly loud, with long, droning riffs, waves of distortion, and cascades of feedback. Vocals and melodies disappeared into the walls of guitars, creating a wash of sound where no instrument was distinguishable from the other. Most shoegaze groups worked off the template My Bloody Valentine established with their early EPs and their first full-length album, Isn't Anything, but Dinosaur Jr., the Jesus & Mary Chain, and the Cocteau Twins were also major influences. Bands that followed — most notably Ride, Lush, Chapterhouse, and the Boo Radleys — added their own stylistic flourishes. Ride veered close to '60s psychedelia, while Lush alternated between straight pop and the dream pop of the Cocteau Twins. Almost none of the shoegazers were dynamic performers or interesting interviews, which prevented them from breaking through into the crucial U.S. market. In 1992 — after the groups had dominated the British music press and indie charts for about three years — the shoegaze groups were swept aside by the twin tides of American grunge and Suede, the band to initiate the wave of Britpop that ruled British music during the mid-'90s. Some shoegazers broke up within a few years (Chapterhouse, Ride), while other groups — such as the Boo Radleys and Lush — evolved with the times and were able to sustain careers into the late '90s.
Ambient Pop
Ambient Pop combines elements of the two distinct styles which lend the blissed-out genre its name — while the music possesses a shape and form common to conventional pop, its electronic textures and atmospheres mirror the hypnotic, meditative qualities of ambient. The mesmerizing lock-groove melodies of Krautrock are a clear influence as well, although ambient pop is typically much less abrasive. Essentially an extension of the dream pop that emerged in the wake of the shoegazer movement, it's set apart from its antecedents by its absorption of contemporary electronic idioms, including sampling, although for the most part live instruments continue to define the sound.
Dream Pop
Dream Pop is an atmospheric subgenre of alternative rock that relies on sonic textures as much as melody. Dream pop often features breathy vocals and processed, echo-laden guitars and synthesizers. Though the Cocteau Twins, with their indecipherable vocals and languid soundscapes, are frequently seen as the leaders of dream pop, the genre has more stylistic diversity than their slow, electronic textures. Dream pop also encompasses the post-Velvet Underground guitar rock of Galaxie 500, as well as the loud, shimmering feedback of My Bloody Valentine. It is all tied together by a reliance on sonic texture, both in terms of instruments and vocals.
Post-Rock/Experimental
Post-rock was the dominant form of experimental rock during the '90s, a loose movement that drew from greatly varied influences and nearly always combined standard rock instrumentation with electronics. Post-rock brought together a host of mostly experimental genres — Kraut-rock, ambient, prog-rock, space rock, math rock, tape music, minimalist classical, British IDM, jazz (both avant-garde and cool), and dub reggae, to name the most prevalent — with results that were largely based in rock, but didn't rock per se. Post-rock was hypnotic and often droning (especially the guitar-oriented bands), and the brighter-sounding groups were still cool and cerebral — overall, the antithesis of rock's visceral power. In fact, post-rock was something of a reaction against rock, particularly the mainstream's co-opting of alternative rock; much post-rock was united by a sense that rock & roll had lost its capacity for real rebellion, that it would never break away from tired formulas or empty, macho posturing. Thus, post-rock rejected (or subverted) any elements it associated with rock tradition. It was far more concerned with pure sound and texture than melodic hooks or song structure; it was also usually instrumental, and if it did employ vocals, they were often incidental to the overall effect. The musical foundation for post-rock crystallized in 1991, with the release of two very different landmarks: Talk Talk's Laughing Stock and Slint's Spiderland. Laughing Stock was the culmination of Talk Talk's move away from synth-pop toward a moody, delicate fusion of ambient, jazz, and minimalist chamber music; Spiderland, meanwhile, was full of deliberate, bass-driven grooves, mumbled poetry, oblique structures, and extreme volume shifts. While those two albums would influence many future post-rock bands, the term itself didn't appear until critic Simon Reynolds coined it as a way to describe the Talk Talk-inspired ambient experiments of Bark Psychosis. The term was later applied to everything from unclassifiable iconoclasts (Gastr del Sol, Cul de Sac, Main) to more tuneful indie-rock experimenters like Stereolab, Laika, and the Sea and Cake (not to mention a raft of Slint imitators). Post-rock came into its own as a recognizable trend with the Chicago band Tortoise's second album, 1996's Millions Now Living Will Never Die, perhaps the farthest-reaching fusion of post-rock's myriad touchstones. Suddenly there was a way for critics to classify artists as diverse as Labradford, Trans Am, Ui, Flying Saucer Attack, Mogwai, Jim O'Rourke, and their predecessors (though most hated the label). Post-rock quickly became an accepted, challenging cousin of indie rock, centered around the Thrill Jockey, Kranky, Drag City, and Too Pure labels. Ironically, by the end of the decade, post-rock had itself acquired a reputation for sameness; some found the style's dispassionate intellectuality boring, while others felt that its formerly radical fusions had become predictable, partly because many artists were offering only slight variations on their original ideas. However, even as the backlash set in, a newer wave of bands (the Dirty Three, Rachel's, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Sigur Rós) gained wider recognition for their distinctive sounds, suggesting that the style wasn't exhausted after all.
Power Pop [混水摸鱼的 :D ]
Power Pop is a cross between the crunching hard rock of the Who and the sweet melodicism of the Beatles and Beach Boys, with the ringing guitars of the Byrds thrown in for good measure. Although several bands of the early '70s — most notably the Raspberries, Big Star, and Badfinger — established the sound of power pop, it wasn't until the late '70s that a whole group of like-minded bands emerged. Most of these groups modeled themselves on the Raspberries (which isn't entirely surprising, since they were the only power-pop band of their era to have hit singles), or they went directly back to the source and based their sound on stacks of British Invasion records. What tied all of these bands together was their love of the three-minute pop single. Power-pop bands happened to emerge around the same time of punk, so they were swept along with the new wave because their brief, catchy songs fit into the post-punk aesthetic. Out of these bands, Cheap Trick, the Knack, the Romantics, and Dwight Twilley had the biggest hits, but the Shoes, the Records, the Nerves, and 20/20, among many others, became cult favorites. During the early '80s, power pop died away as a hip movement, and nearly all of the bands broke up. However, in the late '80s, a new breed of power pop began to form. The new bands, who were primarily influenced by Big Star, blended traditional power pop with alternative rock sensibilities and sounds; in the process, groups like Teenage Fanclub, Material Issue, and the Posies became critical and cult favorites. While these bands gained the attention of hip circles, many of the original power-pop groups began recording new material and releasing it on independent labels. In the early '90s, the Yellow Pills compilation series gathered together highlights from these re-activated power poppers, as well as new artists that worked in a traditional power-pop vein. Throughout the early and mid-'90s, this group of independent, grass-roots power-pop bands gained a small but dedicated cult following in the United States.
Noise-Rock [混水摸鱼的 :D ]
Noise-Rock is an outgrowth of punk rock, specifically the sort of punk that expressed youthful angst and exuberance through the glorious racket of amateurishly played electric guitars. Noise-rock, like its forerunner no wave, aims to be more abrasive, sometimes for comic effect and sometimes to make a statement, but always concentrating on the sheer power of the sound. While most noise-rock bands concentrate on the ear-shattering sounds that can be produced by distorted electric guitars, some also use electronic instrumentation, whether as percussion or to add to the overall cacophony. Some groups are more concerned than others about integrating their sonic explorations into song structures; pioneers Sonic Youth helped bring noise-rock to a wider alternative-rock audience when they began to incorporate melody into their droning sheets of sound. Sonic Youth produced a bevy of imitators, but not all noise-rock resembles their music — '80s bands like the Swans and Big Black took a much darker, more threatening approach, and the Touch & Go label became a center for crazed, shock-oriented takes on the style in the late '80s and '90s. A certain theatrical sub-style of noise-rock, often described as "scuzz-rock" or with similar terms, uses the guitar noise to help create a dirty, decadent, repulsive atmosphere (bands like this include Royal Trux, Pussy Galore, the Dwarves, and the Butthole Surfers).
No Wave [混水摸鱼的 :D ]
No Wave was a short-lived, avant-garde offshoot of '70s punk, based almost entirely in New York City's Lower East Side from about 1978-1982. Like the post-punk movement that was primarily centered in Britain, no wave drew from the artier side of punk — but where British post-punk was mostly cold and despairing, no wave was harsh, abrasive, and aggressively confrontational. Most no wave bands were fascinated by the pure noise that could be produced by an electric guitar, making it an important component of their music (and oftentimes the central focus). Unlike punk, melody was as unimportant as instrumental technique, as most no wavers concentrated on producing an atonal, dissonant (yet often rhythmic) racket. With its assaultive artiness and theatrical angst, no wave was as much performance art as it was music. Two of no wave's central figures were vocalist/guitarist Lydia Lunch and saxophonist James Chance, who performed together in Teenage Jesus and the Jerks; Lunch went on to a long solo career, and Chance formed an innovative no wave/funk outfit called the Contortions. The defining no wave recording is the 1978 Brian Eno-produced compilation No New York, which features material from Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus, DNA (featuring avant-garde guitarist Arto Lindsay), and Mars. Although none of the no wave performers ever really broke out to wider audiences (Lunch's prolific, collaboration-heavy solo output brought her the closest), Sonic Youth fused no wave's distorted cacophony with the more meditative noise explorations of guitarist/avant-garde composer Glenn Branca, and became underground legends after adding more melodic structure to the sound.
