An East African Girl and Her White Troubadours
I was a lonely, dreamy, occasionally silly girl.
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Posts Tagged: indie rock
Swinging Modern Sounds #95: Omnidirectional
If you love this album as much as I think you’re going to, make sure to tell a friend.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #88: Music for the Masses
The interview, like the project Iso Omena, is both funny and revealing.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #80: I Just Don’t Want to Wait Around Anymore
Mulcahy’s Possum is, like the animal titularly referred to, a sly and imaginative affair…
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Albums of Our Lives: Mister Loveless’s Grow Up
These golden years, precious and ephemeral, are falling in pieces at your feet everywhere you turn, and part of you thinks, let them. You almost wish, despite yourself, for this all to just go faster.
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Ian Svenonius’s “Principles of Modernism”
[T]he most essential thing is actually a kind of worldview, a mindset—or maybe it’s an ideology.
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Albums of Our Lives: The Front Bottoms’ The Front Bottoms
When I first heard Brian Sella’s sweet, pathetic voice sing these words, they seared a sense of guilt into me.
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Albums of Our Lives: Modest Mouse’s The Lonesome Crowded West
How Isaac Brock sings it, it’s nearly cheerful, almost an anthem: I’m trying / I’m trying to / drink away the part of the day that I cannot sleep away.
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Songs of Our Lives: Stereolab’s “Pause”
“Pause,” like the nostalgia it references, possesses the qualities of ceremony. My ceremony: I played and replayed this song that year, transforming past into present into past over and over.
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The Rumpus Interview With Jeremy Earl
Jeremy Earl discusses his latest album, City Sun Eater in the River of Light, the fruitful tension of city vs. country, finding beauty in the darkness of today’s world, and the enduring good vibes of the Grateful Dead.
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Sound & Vision: Tim Barnes
Internationally recognized percussionist, composer, sound designer, and audio archivist Tim Barnes talks with Allyson McCabe about how his musical career has developed and changed, and what he’s up to now.
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Albums of Our Lives: Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City
Could the idea of a god be reconciled with the things I saw around me? This question obsessed me in my last month in Cambodia.
...moreRivers Cuomo Does Fetty Wap
Apparently, the Weezer frontman has been really digging hip-hop’s Top 40 lately. His recent covers testify to the fact: he’s posted a version of Rae Sremmurd’s “Come Get Her,” and, most recently, Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen.” A new Weezer album is due out this spring; any bets on some covers making it in? Watch the videos […]
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Albums of Our Lives: Guided by Voices’s Alien Lanes
For me, Bob Pollard became a messiah of the creative life, urging me forward for many years to come, in my new, somewhat shabby but inspired career.
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Albums of Our Lives: The National’s High Violet
I wanted to feel sheltered under the cathedral of his voice, to feel, always, the way his songs made me feel.
...moreBelieve in Baltimore
Members of Baltimore indie bands Future Islands, Lower Dens, Celebration, The Bridge, and Mt. Royal got together with Believe in Music at the Living Classrooms Foundation and WTMD to help local middle school students give voice to their experience of this year’s riots. The project took lyrics and melodies written by individual students and combined […]
...moreThis Week in Posivibes: Dave Monks
The frontman of Tokyo Police Club released the debut of his solo project June 16th on Dine Alone Records. The EP, All Signs Point to Yes, has been receiving some serious positivity from the indie rock press that previously hailed the Toronto-based Tokyo Police Club, such as calling the solo project “a glimmering little folk-pop […]
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Albums of Our Lives: Les Savy Fav’s Go Forth
It’s one of those records I’ve glued to a pedestal, like people do with torrid weekend affairs or their favorite dish at Denny’s.
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Sound Takes: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit
Like a whip-crack into my ears, [Barnett’s] songs reverberate through my head.
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Albums of Our Lives: Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm
We could hear the muffled roar of the show booming through the walls of the historic building. We were drunk, pretending to be music writers. We were giddy with our trespass.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #61: Songs for the Alliterative at Heart
Michael Hearst has come a long way from the guy who played plastic wind instruments on Seventh Avenue, to an admirably creative and original adulthood.
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The Rumpus Interview with Stacey D’Erasmo
Novelist Stacey D’Erasmo sits down to discuss her latest book, Wonderland, indie rock’s lack of a net, the appeal of visual artists, and what it means to put your entire self in your work.
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The Rumpus Interview with Stephen Malkmus
Stephen Malkmus—founding member, lead singer, guitarist, and main songwriter of Pavement, one of the most critically and publicly adored bands in indie rock history—talks about his recent years with the Jicks, writing riffs, and not dwelling on the past.
...moreSwinging Modern Sounds #49: Divided by a Common Tongue
Rick Moody interviews Belle & Sebastian’s Stevie Jackson about his solo album, misinterpreting songs, and the band’s rough early days.
...moreYeah Yeah Yeahs Release Surprisingly Literary Music Video
Regardless of your level of enamoration with indie-rock mainstays the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, if you’re a Rumpus reader, you’ll probably dig the video for their new single “Sacrilege.” It unfolds like a short story, with a perfectly deployed reverse timeline and undertones of dark classics like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Watch it—watch it twice!
...moreRace, Class, and Indie Rock Music
No teenager wants to listen to their parents’ music. For Martin Douglas, that music was hip-hop, so he gravitated toward the world of grunge and indie rock. The only problem: that world is very white, and Douglas is black. In an astute essay titled “The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show” after a […]
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