Deep Voices #17
horses band indie rock album
Deep Voices #17 on Apple Music
Last week it was chilly for about 12 minutes, so I immediately wanted to listen to dispassionate indie rock. I’ve largely fulfilled that desire by repeatedly playing Yo La Tengo’s “Everyday.” A mesmerizingly deconstructed song, it starts with a long drone and a few rumbles before it begins, barely, to stride. The cymbal is used like a gong, the vocals are a rhythmic whisper, and the guitar slithers across the open expanse. The drone never disappears, like a flatline on a EKG that never got turned off.
I’m not including Yo La Tengo on this mix because they’re pretty popular. But I am including a few songs that mimic the cold emotion of “Everyday.” I love songs like this. It’s like they play a trick on you. On its surface, the music feels detached, but that brittle shell betrays its calculated depth. I usually look for that feeling in genres other than straight ahead rock or folk, but ’tis the season. This week’s mix includes its fair share of typical weirdo stuff, but there’s also multiple songs featuring people singing and playing guitar. For once.
Playlist notes:
Elysia Crampton embodies the feeling I’m describing, though she’s not an indie rock artist. She makes a recurring type of song that is cold, the keys set to a high frequency that jabs you in the gut, while someone speaks dramatically in a slow pace. On “Crest,” Fanny Pankara Chuquimia talks about the twilight while sad piano chords clang. My favorite version of this type of track was when she recorded as E+E. “Fire Gut” starts with a sparkling crinkle and a woman quietly singing Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” The music video is a homemade shoot of a monster truck rally, sparks flying everywhere. The whole thing is totally devastating. I’m almost not sure why, to be honest. But nothing feels more desperately futile than watching six ton trucks backflip while you hear the words “I can’t make your heart feel something it won’t.”
For the life of me I could not remember the name of the band Posse. I could picture their album cover and typed in “horses band indie rock album” into Google and eventually scrolled enough that it turned up. That album, Horse Blanket, features “Keep Me Awake,” a spare track with a loping pace and an almost countryish vocal performance. You could see the band performing in the back of a bar in a Jim Jarmusch movie while bad decisions are confidently made.
The last four tracks here are all folk, or at least folk adjacent. Bridget St John and Sibylle Baier’s tracks are from the late ’60s and early ’70s and are about as moody as the genre gets. Which, for me, means as good. Though Baier’s album was recorded in the ’70s, it wasn’t released until 2006. Both her and St John are names who should have more attention—both have rich voices which need little accompaniment. But where Baier’s voice is light and wispy, St John’s is a fog, though a nice one to be stuck in.
Thanksgiving and Wicca Phase Springs Eternal are indie/emo/whatever guys who have messed around in other genres but are at their rawest here. Thanksgiving, also known as Adrian Orange, once released an ambitious afrobeat album, which was cool, if maybe unnecessary. It seems wrong to commission that many horns if you can create such heavy emotions while mumbling over your guitar, as evidenced by “Don’t Be Afraid.” Wicca Phase I have written about before with stranger context, but even without knowing he’s nominally a goth rapper, hearing him acoustic is powerful. This barren acoustic take on one of his strongest songs, “Secret Boy,” shows off his sweetly citric voice. Many people find it an acquired taste. I have acquired it.