emerging trends in indie music

04/10/2006 02:31:00 PM

With the essential look and sound of the prototypical indie act a fixture on MTV and the original indie scene reduced to a glib post-modern cliche of ironic detachment by mid-90s films like Reality Bites, the underground music scene has been looking both outward and back in time to find new and inventive ways to break the sonic mold. One development from this has been the ongoing absorption of dance music's motifs, sonic palettes and song structures, which first manifested in revivalist dance punk and has now matured into a vibrant indie dance scene (check out bands like MSTRKRFT and Justice), spawned a new indietronic aesthetic (exemplified by Lali Puna and Postal Service), and even coaxed more adventurous indie kids to explore the cutting edge of Europe?s still-thriving electronic music scene, minimal techno and electro (from labels like Kompakt and artists like Ellen Allien).

Always celebrating the obscure and marginal, the indie underground is revitalizing antecedent forms, from post punk (Gang Of Four) to heavy metal (the diversity of which is typified by Priestess and Orthrelm which offer not only a quasi-nostalgic familiarity to many scenesters but also alternatively political or angry worldviews as opposed to indie's archetypal self-absorption and gen-x ennui. This expansion of the sonic and stylistic palette has further broken the scene open to new influences and musical worldviews, from folk acts like Decemberists to soul from Jamie Lidell to post-Woodstock psychedelia (check out scene favorites like Animal Collective and Dungen), hip-hop (like the inventive Spankrock, UK grime star here, and mashup heroes Hollertronix), and esoteric genres like Krautrock (see Can. There is even a solid community of artists twisting the radio-friendly pop aesthetic for the indie audience (such as Islands), injecting the often twee indiepop (check out Of Montreal) sound with new life.

No longer simply the domain of thrift-store flannels and distorted guitars, indie rock (here are two bands defining the scene, Bloc Party and Broken Social Scene ) has exploded the limitations of what rock music is, was, and can be, channeling everything from Americana, black music, dance music, disco, noise, psychedelia and punk into a heady polyglot mix emblematic of the enduring importance of the scene itself, even as the discernable boundaries of that entity blur and bleed into all manner of related and disparate music communities. As the music industry continues to adapt to the realities of the current market, and so-called Long Tail of micro-niches continues to assert itself, these disparate sounds will come to be seen as the antecedent to a simultaneous expansion of the cultural palette and the transformation of the simple subcultural scenes of the past into something as dynamic and hard to pin down as the indie underground today.

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