Saint Motel's perky indie pop sounds suspiciously like it might be used to advertise a Target summer sale, but it's poppy and fun and maybe we don't have to think about this stuff quite so much and are allowed to just dance occasionally. Great Good Fine OK take this sound in more of a dreampop, indie-electro, MGMT direction. Falsetto abounds.
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Dream-pop-rockers Cryogeyser return to the Rebel Lounge with their spaced-out, depressive guitar jams; juxtaposed against the sweet, clear vocals of lead singer Shawn Marom. Starling frontwoman Kasha Willett's reedy, slightly nasal voice soars over the heavy, distorted guitar chords and lugubrious basslines of the band, clear descendants of shoegaze pioneers like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine.
Marquee millennial indie-rock outfit Clap Your Hands Say Yeah visit the Crescent Ballroom to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their critically-acclaimed, self-titled debut album. The band's four-on-the-floor drum-machine beats, noodly synth lines and lead singer Alec Ounsworth's warbly vocals now feel like relics of the Pitchfork Age, but so what? None of us is getting any younger. Babehoven open the show, featuring the sort of moody-sadgirl-indie-mumbling which is doubtless becoming familiar to regular readers of HarperQuest: Nights!
Spanish sweetie-pie indie-rock duo Hinds, despite a relatively thin discography, made a splash in the mid-2010s with their Euro-pop spin on indie rock; several albums later they're still going strong, forgoing complexity for a messy aesthetic that blends the energy of garage rock forebears like The Sonics with the Casiotone club instrumentation of an Ibiza discotheque.
Austinites Mamalarky perform indie rock with a decidedly chillwave influence; there's more than a hint of Steely Dan to be found here in the instrumentation underlying lead singer Livvy Bennett's fuzzed-out vocals.
The main creative force behind The Hollies and later member of the supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash, Graham Nash's influence on harmonic, Laurel Canyon-style soft rock has been immense. Nash's brand of sensitive, save-the-whales pop music remains polarizing, less now for perceived challenging political and social content than for its increasingly shopworn 20th-century naiveté, but this Harper still has a soft spot for three-part harmony and an acoustic guitar.
Cherry Glazerr alum Sasami Ashworth shares some of the indie sensibilities of her former band, but her solo project SASAMI ditches the lo-fi garage trappings in favor of a modern, electronic, girl-pop sound. A talented multi-instrumentalist, Ashworth delivers her emotionally raw lyrics in a rich mezzo-soprano that ranges from ironically detached to delicate and tremulous. When she sings "I'm such a cancer," one hopes she's comparing herself to the disease rather than indulging in her generation's weakness for astrology, an observation that encapsulates my crochety opinion of the pop cohort to which she belongs. Like Ashworth, Jia Pet's music draws heavily from Asian pop-idol aesthetics but skews more heavily toward break-beat, hyperpop and electronic sounds.
Los Angeles indie-pop band Dummy take their name from the celebrated Portishead album and aren't afraid to wear such influences on their sleeve, but they're more than shoegaze revivalists, interpolating psych-rock, glitch music, and vaporwave to create a thoroughly modern pop-rock aesthetic. "Making music shouldn't be fun" has served as the band's long-running mantra, and...
English duo King Hannah's wry, singer-songwriter aesthetic evokes contemporaries like Phoebe Bridgers, Courtney Barnett, and Sharon van Etten (a featured collaborator on the band's second album), but their titles and lyrics make clear that they trace their influences to slice-of-life Americana observers like Neil Young and, yes, John Prine. There's a strange menace lurking behind...
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