Charm City Indie Rock Smackdown

The Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop poll, the definitive year-end music list compiled by surveys of critics all over the country, hasn’t come out yet. However, when it does, based on a completely unscientific survey of stuff I read and people I know, I’ll be surprised if the album Civilian, by the Baltimore band Wye Oak, doesn’t appear on that list somewhere.

That is to say, people seem to like this record quite a lot. I bought a copy after watching their performance on Late Night.

Most of the time, network TV performances from bands I like don’t do a lot for me. Sometimes things just don’t sound right. Or the clarity of the mix reveals that the singers can’t quite hit the notes they’re aiming for- much harder to look past in a recording, even a live one, than a concert. Or the performance reveals the limitations of the source material. Wye Oak’s performance, by contrast, benefits from a perfectly constructed song and Jenn Wasner’s powerful and skillfully deployed voice. And of course Andy Stack’s ability to play two instruments at the same time.*

Unfortunately, I must say I haven’t been able to get into the album the way I figured I would after seeing this performance. None of the other songs strike me as being as structurally perfect as “Holy, Holy,” and even with that song, the live version makes the album version sound a little tame. But that’s OK, that’s not really what I wanted to talk about anyway. Thinking about this album a while back, it struck me how much Wye Oak reminded me of another indie rock band from Baltimore, fronted by a woman gifted with a naturally beautiful alto-range voice, that recently put out an NPR-beloved album graced with a perfectly structured song.

Lower Dens, featuring former Houstonians Jana Hunter and Will Adams.

Obviously this isn’t an NBC-caliber performance video (or maybe it is, har har!), but I hope you’ll excuse that. The things that I love about seeing this song are the same things I love about the Wye Oak performance: the vocal performance, and the way the structure of the song transmits itself through the musicians.

However, while there are certain superficial properties shared between Wye Oak and Lower Dens, their music doesn’t sound very much alike. Civilian is light on guitar and drums; instead, the band uses keyboards and overdubs of Wasner’s voice to create rich, lush, glowing combinations of sounds. It’s a very warm and pleasant-sounding record, oriented around melody expressed vocally. That is to say, the aesthetic is “pop:” pretty songs, sung in a pretty way. (That’s a reductive way to put it, but as anyone who has performed in public can tell you, it’s a lot harder than it sounds!)

Lower Dens’ Twin-Hand Movement, on the other hand, is driven by thudding drums and twangy guitar. Both Hunter’s voice and the guitar are frequently masked by reverb and distortion. At times, the record is murky, dissonant, or just plain harsh. This isn’t to say the record’s not good. It’s very good. But its aesthetic is bohemian: it uses sounds that aren’t inherently pleasing to create compositions that are meaningful or striking- even beautiful, but not in the same way that Wye Oak’s songs are.

So even though Lower Dens and Wye Oak are playing the same kind of music, narrowly defined- “indie rock-” they’re doing it with aesthetics that are almost diametrically opposed. This isn’t even limited to the music itself; you can see it the song titles: the elevated “Holy, Holy” vs. the subversively gross “A Dog’s Dick.**” You can even see it in the way that the artists are marketed. Take a look at these press photos of the two bands, both used on Stereogum:

It’s dangerous to read too much into the apparent opposition here. It of course does not translate to any kind of relationship between the people in the bands. What’s interesting to me is that fact that two bands from the same city, playing the same kind of music at the same time, could end up artistically opposed in this way, however that may have happened. I think one of the defining characteristics of “indie rock,” at least to the extent that that phrase means anything anymore, is its ability to encompass both music that’s basically sub-mainstream pop and music that is underground for artistic reasons.

I started wondering if it there were other Janus-faced pairs of bands out there, where one had a “pop” and one a “weird” aesthetic.

Superchunk and Polvo, from Chapel Hill
Jawbox and Shudder to Think, From D.C.
The Sea and Cake and Tortoise, from Chicago
Silkworm and Shellac, from (Montana by way of) Chicago
Rocket from the Crypt and Drive Like Jehu, from San Diego
Sleater-Kinney and Unwound, from Olympia
Bright Eyes and Cursive, from Omaha
Parts & Labor and Pterodactyl, from Brooklyn

It occurs to me that a lot of the truly great bands of indie rock are capable to embodying both sides at the same time, or switching between them: Mission of Burma. The Melvins. The Pixies. Sonic Youth and Pavement are among the most skilled at this. I once saw the band Sebadoh described somewhere (the Atlanta alt-weekly Creative Loafing perhaps) as “is-it-punk/is-it-pop,” which I’d say is getting at the same thing. I think you could make an argument that some of the modern bands that have been consistently well-received in the indie rock world do this; I’m thinking specifically of Deerhunter and the Animal Collective. Women are another example, although they sit more on the “weird” side.

I think you could use this idea to construct a definition of the notoriously slippery idea of “indie rock” that’s about as good as any: rock music that sits somewhere on the continuum between pop and bohemian aesthetics, while- importantly- taking account of both of them. At least, that’s more or less how I’ve always thought of it.

Bonus Lower Dens!

* Aside for guitar nerds: check out Wasner’s fingering. If I recall correctly, she plays this song tuned to D#-G#-C#-G#-B#-F, which is a half step up from D-G-C-G-B-E, which is a variation on a tuning called Taro Patch, which is used in Hawaiian slack-key guitar. The hell?
** True, Twin-Hand Movement does have a song called “Holy Water,” but it also has a song called “Two Cocks Waving Wildly at Each Other Across a Vast Open Space, a Dark Icy Tundra,” so I think on balance my characterization is justified, much as this entire post is justified by the opportunity to type the name of that song.