The Indie Starter Thread

[WBL]

I envision this thread as a place to help people get started into music elitism. A place where wannabe hipsters come and learn what they should think is cool. And hopefully a place to get good music.

Each post should contain an album that anyone who's just starting into music should listen to.

Pavement - Slanted & Enchanted

One of the classic indie albums of all time. Here's a summary:

Two smart young college guys with a bunch of catchy, cryptic songs and a taste for peculiar sonics go into a studio with a showboating older drummer and come out with one of the definitive indie-rock albums. Beneath its coils of raw distortion and screaming-for-the-hell-of-it, Pavement's first full-length disc gets over on the strength of stellar songwriting and ingenious melodicism. Sometimes Steve Malkmus's sly, evocative word-games reveal genuine emotion ("Here"), and sometimes they just pay tribute to his favorite bands ("Conduit For Sale!" is a nod to the Fall), but these songs are unconventional in a way that set the convention for bands that came after them. --Douglas Wolk

[Skummy]

Good call, definitely the best Pavement album in my opinion, and you can't be an indie elitist without Pavement.

But for something completely different:

Scott Walker - Tilt

For a start, Scott Walker is one of the elitist names to drop. From being part of a cooler-than-they-deserved-to-be pop group, The Walker Brothers, in the '60s and '70s, to his early solo work covering the likes of Jacques Brel while beginning to write his own fragmented, beatnik-inspired tales of forlorn love, he's always been slightly on the edge of popular culture, threatening to hurl himself one way or the other, from the bleak and surreal "The Electrician" and frantic almost no-wave "Fat Mama Kick" of The Walker Brothers' final album "Nite Flights", which still now sit rather unsteadily next to crooning songs of girl meets boy. While by the '80s, "Climate Of Hunter" cemented him as a member of the avant-garde, it did very little to prepare anyone for what was to come next....

...which brings me on to the album in question. Tilt was released in 1995, an evocative mix of industrial music, 20th century neo-classical, and experimental performance art, and I challenge anyone to find anything that sounds anything like it, from that period or any other. It takes Walker's trademark lovelorn ballads and throws them through so many filters that they come out sounding nothing like a '60s pop star at all, to the extent that the lyrics, despite being the driving force of every song on this album, become utterly inpenetrable - if it wasn't for the fact that Walker is the second-greatest pop singer of all time (after Roy Orbison), this might be rendered entirely unlistenable, but his vocals offer his abstract cut-up technique lyrics a gravitas that otherwise would be lost. That's not to say the music isn't incredible too, it really is, and utterly unlike anything I've ever heard - not even later work by Walker himself. And what makes this album all the more phenomenal is that it was, in its entirety, recorded with no samples, no studio effects, and not even a guide track.

This is one of the greatest albums ever recorded, and everyone should own it. As simple as that.

Stand-out track: "The Cockfighter", in which Walker's vocals sound nightmarish and tormented as he filters references to Nazi war trials through fragments of verse, set to psychotic rhythms as influenced by Nine Inch Nails as they are by Penderecki. Genuinely unsettling, in the best possible way.

[John Stones' Paint Trophy]

On a Scott Walker tangent, while Tilt is pretty outstanding, I'd say Scott 4 is the best place to start if you're looking to get into his stuff. It's a lot more accessible than Tilt, while probably not being the better album.

[Skummy]

Scott 4 is infinitely more accessible, and one of his best albums - certainly the best of that period - but sometimes I think it helps to just fling yourself head-first into something, rather than try and ease yourself in gently. Tilt, with no knowledge of what came before or after, can be borderline terrifying - and that's fucking brilliant, any music that can elicit that kind of powerful emotional response is good in my books, and personally for me the only other acts that have managed it have been SunnO))) performing live, Aphex Twin live, and Karlheinz Stockhausen's piece for four string quartets and helicopters.

Basically, I wholeheartedly endorse Scott 4 as the fantastic piece of work that it undoubtedly is (as well as the source of half the ideas on the Last Shadow Puppets' album), but it falls victim to the same problem a lot of his earlier work does in that if you don't approach it from the right direction, on first listen some of it can sound like MOR crooner dross, whereas it can actually be improved, in my opinion, by having a working knowledge of his more avant-garde output.

In summary; if you want an easy introduction to Scott Walker, can't go wrong with Scott 4. If you don't, then Tilt and anything he's released since >_>

[Cactus Drags]

I hate the pretentiouss indy-toff nonsense conversations, but Tilt sounds fun as hell, and I'm probably going to steal the Pavement album too.

[ROC]

Iron and Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days

This is the perfect album of good "indie folk". Admittedly, this and Creek Drank The Cradle are probably interchangeable with Creek being slightly better, but Sam Beam's a very wonderful songwriter. The songs are pleasant and it's a very chill out sort of record. I'd recommend this a bit first, as a few of my other suggestions (something like Sufjan Stevens) may be too I guess "noisy" to really start out with. As Sufjan's albums (namely Illinois) tend to be filled with tons of different instruments, this is more the sedated "man and his guitar" sound which if you like, then moving on to something like Sufjan's Illinois might be easier, as there's trace elements of that sound with added layers of noise to it.

Yeah, I'm gonna get "elitist shun" points since most of my favorite indie rock comes from 2000 onward.

[Tarheels.]

Neutral Milk Hotel- In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

It's an absolutely brilliant album. It flows together so perfectly that anybody who's looking to get into indie music should always check out. Neutral Milk Hotel helped inspire the bands that are revered as the indie darlings today such as The Decemberists and The Shins. Not to mention the fact that the closing of the album is one of the best I've ever heard. It's a completely moving album and won't leave you disappointed.

and on another note if you check out Pavement then you should check out some of Stephen Malkmus. The singer of Pavement and he usually has a different backing band for each album. The latest one is Real Emotional Trash by Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks. But yeah, check out Malkmus if you enjoy Pavement.

[METALMAN]

Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks do Hopscotch Willie, don't they? I really like that song.

In Our Bedroom After The War - Stars

Perhaps not their best album but nevertheless very good. I chose this as it is in my opinion the easiest one to get into. Personal favourites are "My Favourite Book" and "Midnight Coward", though you can't really go wrong with any of the songs.

[Cactus Drags]

Stars are great, good live show too. I think a couple of the members have appeared with Broken Social Scene as well, and there's a link with Emily Haines if I remember rightly.