Indie | Rock That Font

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It’s rare these days that an album grips me so completely as Bon Iver’s recent eponymous release. It’s an album in that classical, 60′s-era sense — every song is necessary and complete. Songwriter Justin Vernon has created a unified work that both touches on and transcends folk, soul, rock and chamber music. Maybe it’s Vernon’s work with Kanye West, maybe it’s his preoccupation with Bruce Hornsby, but Bon Iver, Bon Iver aims for the grand statement and wins; all the while managing to maintain that intimate scale that Vernon created on his debut, For Emma.
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Dean Wareham, the frontman for Luna, spent well over a decade perfecting his craft before he recorded the dream pop masterpiece Penthouse. A New-Zealand-born New Yorker, Wareham began his career in earnest with the seminal Galaxie 500, a three-piece that predated and prefigured the shoegaze movement. But Wareham had ambitions beyond their modest, but enviable, success. Luna was his next project and three records in, he and his bandmates hit creative gold with their paean to New York and moody nightlife, though not much gold apparently in the way of record sales. Regardless, it was a critical success and Rolling Stone put it in their top 100 albums of the 90s.
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Anthemic is a word that is thrown around a lot when describing rock music, but there is no doubt that The Hold Steady’s latest effort, Heaven is Whenever, qualifies for this special adjective.

While the band is now based in Brooklyn, vocalist Craig Finn grew up in Minnesota — and echoes of Minnesotan influences such as The Replacements and Hüsker Dü are certainly found on this record. However, the band has most definitely carved their own path of punk-derived catchiness, with Finn’s narrative ramblings garnering most of the well-deserved attention. It’s hard not to sing along to songs like “The Sweet Part of the City,” “The Weekenders” and “Touchless.” Infectious and anthemic indeed.
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Before having heard a note of the Arcade Fire’s latest album, I knew that I wanted to write about it. The cover art was immediately arresting and I knew it would be a great excuse to discuss hand-drawn fonts. Not that I hadn’t thought about discussing them already: Dinosaur Jr’s Bug, Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted and The Pixies’ Come On Pilgrim are some old favorites of mine, both in terms of cover and content. Any one of them would have been a proper jumping off place. But, somehow it makes sense to start with this summer’s particular gem.

After having lived with The Suburbs for a couple months, I can firmly place it in my short list of favorite long players of the year, with its themes of isolation and suburban despair and the sleeve-worn musical influences that bubble to the surface. Not, possibly, as immediately accessible as either of Arcade Fire’s previous offerings, my appreciation of this current collection of songs was a slow burn, with a couple of false starts in there. In the end, it was the noise-soaked melodies that won me over, not necessarily the darker ideas of suburban ennui and apocalyptic sprawl.
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Leeds’ The Wedding Present recently wrapped up a North American tour to celebrate the 21st anniversary of Bizarro, their first full-length for RCA (released in October of 1989). Full of fast, jangly, mostly three-chord progressions — it laid a dynamic and melodic foundation that David Gedge would perfect on the masterpiece that is 1991′s Seamonsters. Recorded in under ten days with Steve Albini, Seamonsters’ success within indie circles allowed the band to then experiment with their release format. In 1992, they put out a series of impressive 7″ singles rather presumptuously titled, The Hit Parade. From Wikipedia:
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