indie Archives - Page 11 of 12

How Craigslist and a Merle Haggard Wallet Inspired One of the Year’s Best Indie-Rock EPs

Mar 142017

Clever Girls’ debut EP Loose Tooth is only 14 minutes long, but there’s a whole lot of living packed into those 14 minutes.

Frontwoman Diane Jean first met bassist Winfield Holt and drummer Rob Slater in 2015 via a Craigslist ad (she was conscripted to sing harmonies for Slater’s other band 1881, who we also love). Jean had just left Boston for the tiny town of Waitsfield, Vermont, wanting to get away from stressful city life. As she sings in “We Tried,” “I tried the city it swallowed me up / And my friends up and die when they take too much / I tried the city but I had enough.” Continue reading »

Hear an Epic Post-Rock Song About ‘Game of Thrones’ Fandom

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Mar 072017

In the era of so-called “peak TV,” no show has been peek-ier than Game of Thrones. So it’s no surprise that the show has inspired its own musical tributes, from zany covers of the theme song to YouTube to artists like Sigur Rós and Mastodon cameoing in the show itself.

Now, a Vermont rock band called The Mountain Says No has recorded their own Game of Thrones song titled, appropriately enough, “Game of Thrones.” But to make it even more meta, it’s really a tribute to the fandom surrounding shows like Game of Thrones and how a share love of a show can bring people together in real life (Breaking Bad gets a shoutout too). Continue reading »

This Music Video Hauntingly Depicts Depression Taking Over

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Feb 222017

Tyler Daniel Bean describes his first music video’s concept succinctly: “When you try to make a video about what happens when depression takes over the house and you decide the best way to show it is by dancing around in your underwear for 9 hours and then cutting it down to the length of a song.”

Like certain David Lynch films, the video for “Willow II” gives a series of everyday scenes – a man making coffee, eating breakfast, aforementioned underwear dancing – an ominous tone once you notice the protagonist’s empty stare. He appears to be living in a picturesque forest-cabin setting without noticing or engaging. As the images progressively get less mundane – his bandmates begin rocking out around him, most notably – his blank gaze remains the same.

Like the record it comes from, On Days Soon To Pass (one of our favorite albums of 2016), the “Willow II” video explores Bean’s struggles with depression. In this case, the video concept came from a metaphor he learned in therapy: Continue reading »

Who Should Win the NPR Tiny Desk Contest

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Feb 152017

Last weekend, Fantastic Negrito won his first Grammy Award for “Best Contemporary Blues Album.” It’s a safe bet that few Grammy voters would have ever heard of him had he not won another award two years prior: the NPR Tiny Desk Contest. And if the future is just, last year’s winner, the wonderful violinist Gaelynn Lea, will soon be collecting Grammy statues of her own.

Fantastic Negrito hails from California, and Lea from Minnesota. So as this year’s contest continues, we think it’s time for the Northeast to – to quote Lea’s winning song – linger in the sun. To aid in that effort, out of dozens of locally-made videos, we’ve picked our favorite Vermont entries in the 2017 contest.

The only real rules for a Tiny Desk Contest video are that the song has to be an original and a desk should somehow figure in (it doesn’t even need to be tiny). But many of the state’s finest musicians went beyond the bare minimum, one dragging a not-so-tiny desk to a mountain summit, another finding a tiny church to match the desk. The songs span from folk to prog, soul to punk to classical piano. There’s also a song about dinosaurs, and a special celebrity entrant: Officer Clemmons from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood!

So read on to discover our dozen-plus favorite Vermont entries. Then head to the Tiny Desk Contest website to browse other entries from Vermont and beyond. Our favorite non-Vermont find: this bizarre David Lynch fever-dream masked performer. Continue reading »

Vermont’s Latest Breakout Henry Jamison Gently Electrifies Gordon Lightfoot Cover

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Feb 102017

Phish and Grace Potter. For years those two have stood as the tentpoles of Vermont’s breakout musicians. But in recent years, a number of great local artists have begun nipping at their heels. Artists like Madaila, Kat Wright, and The DuPont Brothers are touring and getting attention on the national scene and show few signs of slowing down.

The latest of these is Henry Jamison, who last year earned plaudits from the likes of Consequence of Sound and Vice for his wonderful EP The Rains (home to our sixth favorite song of 2016). Now, to promote his current tour, he’s released a new song. This one’s a cover of another great songwriter: Gordon Lightfoot and his classic “If You Could Read My Mind.” Continue reading »

America’s Best High School Band Grows Up (And Wishes You’d Stop Focusing on Their Age)

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Feb 082017

The Snaz are sick of backhanded compliments. Whenever someone has written about them the past few years, the first thing mentioned is inevitably the band members’ young age (mid-teens when their first EP came out in 2014, if you must know). Though well-meaning, the constant youth focus could carry the unspoken implication, “They’ve very good…for people so young.” But they’re very good, period. Also, they’re not even that young these days.

“The band isn’t just a bunch of kids anymore,” singer Dharma Ramirez says. “We’re all like 18 and half living on our own. There’s a sense of independence and all the confusion that comes along with that.”

The Snaz just released their third album, Sensitive Man and their maturity shows. Ramirez says this album found her for the first time addressing topics outside of her own world. She sings about police brutality on “Gary” and small-town peers settling down and starting families before they’ve seen anything of the world on “Holly Mae.” Continue reading »

Ghost Weapons Takes on Tragedy with Post-Punk Passion

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Jan 272017

Post-punk music has a long history of addressing sorrow – after all, two of the most iconic songs of the genre are titled “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “Boys Don’t Cry.” On his new two-song EP Two Tragedies In The Key of F, Vermont songwriter Gary Peters aka. Ghost Weapons continues the tradition. But rather than addressing the malaise of the human condition broadly, he uses the loud, anthemic music to help deal with personal tragedies far closer to home.

The first song, “Auroras,” addresses his father’s recent death after a battle with multiple sclerosis. He calls it “a song to help the healing, and a remembrance of a good man whom I had a difficult relationship with.” In an email, he elaborates on the song’s most provocative line: “What if science has it wrong?”

“This is sort of my constant struggle with the scientific and the spiritual,” Peters says, “wanting to believe in something, yet not subscribing to any religion and having a strong background in science (I studied geology in college). The line is really me asking, what if there is some sort of afterlife/energy where we all end up? After having regrets about missing out on so many good years with my Dad…just sort of holding onto a flickering hope that our paths will cross again in some way.” Continue reading »

Exploring the Lo-Fi Sprawl of Mysterious Bandcamp Artist mouselion

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Jan 172017

The other day, I stumbled upon a new two-song EP by an artist I’d never heard of: mouselion. The name turns out to be an apt moniker, as his lo-fi rock songs creep in like a mouse but tend to build to lion’s roars. Quiet dirges explode into a storm of feedback, while loud rockers can abruptly collapse into barely-there whispers. Like Kurt Vile or even Bonnie “Prince” Billy, mouselion contains multitudes.

mouselion is also outrageously prolific, releasing four albums and three EPs in 2016 alone. And judging by how long it took him to drop 2017’s first EP (ten days), this year could be equally productive. It’s lot of music for someone who appears to have no online presence beyond an anonymous Bandcamp page. Continue reading »

The Dream of the ’90s Is Alive in Apartment 3, Your New Favorite Lo-Fi Slacker Band

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Jan 102017

Apartment 3’s stated influences are a mix of beloved ’90s indie-rock bands (Pavement, Pixies) and current artists that also model themselves after said beloved ’90s indie-rock bands (Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall). So you know where these guys are coming from. But though their lineage is straightforward, this Vermont quartet beautifully executes the lo-fi crunch of their forefathers. The ten tracks on their self-titled debut album, just released on indie label Section Sign Records (which also released one of 2016’s best albums, Violet Ultraviolet’s Pop City), are blissfully fuzzed-out garage rock perfect for headbanging through clouds of weed smoke.

“Slacker” was the semi-derogatory label given this music in the ’90s – and the band itself embraces the term – but the washed-out vibes can’t hide serious songwriting. Beneath the haze, the catchy gems bring in beachy “woo-ooo” backing vocals and wonderfully whacked-out guitar solos, showing that slacker needn’t mean half-assed. Recorded in a bedroom recording studio (in, we assume, some building’s apartment #3), Apartment 3 is a great new addition to a laid-back-punk genre that never quite hit the mainstream but never went out of style either. Listen to the album below. Continue reading »

The Best Vermont Songs of 2016

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Jan 062017

When I launched this blog last month, I kicked things off with The Best Vermont Albums of 2016. I said after that I’d move on to what’s next, not just what already happened. Which I will, I swear (and I have a bit, highlighting great new material from Vultures of Cult (R.I.P.), The New Line, and 1881). But first, one final retrospective.

When putting together the Best Albums list, I realized many of my favorite 2016 songs were not on proper albums. They were from EPs, singles, preview tracks from 2017 albums, covers, or other one-offs. So, for one last look back, we’re counting down our favorite Vermont-made songs of the past year. Then onto 2017. Promise. Continue reading »