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Islands – “Heartbeat”
(from Vapours)
I know I linked to this article last week, but it bears repeating:
More importantly, those years saw indie types paying more attention to things outside the indie world– this website’s coverage, for instance, widened significantly– and indie, in its thieving magpie way, started seizing at things, assimilating them. People embraced house acts, got excited about the possibility of “dance punk,” dabbled with underground rap. At first, plenty of folks derided these trends as faddish, embarrassing, or somehow even elitist, like the people who went for them were trying to fool someone. But as far as I can tell, things changed. You can see it just visually: Neon t-shirts and skinny pants and fashion and “hipster”ism– the stuff some indie kids recoiled from when new electro came along– won out. Daft Punk and M.I.A. have big old parking spots reserved for them in the indie world. All sorts of new things wound up getting absorbed into indie’s sensibility, because indie is a superb thief: It gets into things and then picks up their trappings. Electro, minimal techno, French house, the production on hip-hop and R&B singles– at this point you probably don’t think twice when an indie act grabs something from these genres; you don’t think twice about whether the result is “indie” or not. It’s assimilated, just another option.
Now, I have no idea if Nitsuh Abebe was listening to an advance copy of Islands’ Vapours when he was writing this, but he might as well have been. Nick Thorburn is a notably eclectic songwriter, whose own style of indie rock is as influenced by twee-folk and progressive rock as it is by calypso and dancehall (which is not even touching on his many forays into hip-hop, whether in collaboration with rappers like Busdriver or Subtitle, or as an idiosyncratic side-project like Reefer or Th’ Corn Gangg). The result is almost always unexpected and weirdly appealing. But now we’ve reached a point where he can release a song like “Heartbeat” that mixes the cloudy keyboard timbre of Elton John’s “Daniel” with a double-tracked lead vocal that borrows heavily from contemporary auto-tuned R&B, and rather than coming across as something startling or bewildering, it sounds comfortable, pleasant. It feels safe. I could totally imagine hearing this on a TV show. And that’s not an insult; it’s a solid tune. It’s just a prime example of indie assimilation bringing about new syntheses of taste, where things will go from here is anybody’s guess.
Islands – Vapours
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Islands – “Heartbeat”
(from Vapours)
I know I linked to this article last week, but it bears repeating:
Now, I have no idea if Nitsuh Abebe was listening to an advance copy of Islands’ Vapours when he was writing this, but he might as well have been. Nick Thorburn is a notably eclectic songwriter, whose own style of indie rock is as influenced by twee-folk and progressive rock as it is by calypso and dancehall (which is not even touching on his many forays into hip-hop, whether in collaboration with rappers like Busdriver or Subtitle, or as an idiosyncratic side-project like Reefer or Th’ Corn Gangg). The result is almost always unexpected and weirdly appealing. But now we’ve reached a point where he can release a song like “Heartbeat” that mixes the cloudy keyboard timbre of Elton John’s “Daniel” with a double-tracked lead vocal that borrows heavily from contemporary auto-tuned R&B, and rather than coming across as something startling or bewildering, it sounds comfortable, pleasant. It feels safe. I could totally imagine hearing this on a TV show. And that’s not an insult; it’s a solid tune. It’s just a prime example of indie assimilation bringing about new syntheses of taste, where things will go from here is anybody’s guess.