Honeymooners – Repeater
Genre: Lo-fi Rock, Indie Rock, Indie Pop
Similar artists: The Strokes, Pavement, Built to Spill, Stone Roses
If want to build a successful club of any sort, start by turning away customers at the door. Don’t worry about how many people actually get in. The fewer the better. And, make sure that the ones who do get in dress, speak and act in a distinctive way.
Follow my advice and business will be booming soon enough. Cool indie-rock is in many ways that kind of club. Sure, you could argue that all that bands like The Strokes and Pavement did was quote from the old guidebooks on being a rockstar. But, besides having good tunes, their arrogance also made them enviable.
Years later, people are still being inspired by their style as well as their music. They’re creating their own exclusive clubs. Honeymooners sound like those kinds of people, and, although I’ve never laid eyes on the band, I can assume that they also wear shades in the dark. Repeater is a great walk through the recent history of guitar indie.
Dead Venus – Human Nature
Genre: Indie Folk, Progressive Rock, Art Rock
It’s difficult to always ignore just how good some rock bands got. Sure, in many ways, rock was a bastardised version of rhythm and blues, where, eventually, dancing was substituted for fist-pumping, crowd surfing or pogoing.
Frankly, we like these things. But, while I don’t often dust off my copy of Tales of topographic oceans, I feel it’s important to recognize those group’s ambitions, as well as the fact that they fulfilled their goal of taking rock music away from pop art and towards something closer resembling classical music.
It takes a serious desire to create serious art that, ultimately, leads towards something worth writing a history book about. Dead Venus is one of the groups focused on creating a complex, challenging, yet a rewarding body of work. Human Nature is a prog-rock tune constructed with the same attention that a classical composer might write their tunes.
