Greetings from NAP headquarters, where, on a semi-regular basis, we’ll be exalting the musical underdog and championing the artistic downtrodden. Our raison d’être is straightforward: There’s music made today — probably in a basement or garage on your block — that rivals anything in rock & roll’s top-heavy canon. We hold no truck with those who lament the good ol’ days, be they classic rock dinosaurs, aging punkers or New Wave riders. Nothing new under the sun? Find a new sun, friend, and bask in the audio light.
Jonathan Poneman, Sub Pop’s big kahuna, knows of what we speak. From Grunge Ground Zero to Eclectic Central, Poneman’s label has weathered the WHICH PART OF WE HAVE NO MONEY DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? T-shirt days and post-Nirvana hangover to emerge as one of the most well-rounded labels in all of Rockville. Now home to the post-apocalyptic howl of Wolf Eyes (a band that makes Bleach sound like Bach), the Constantines’ shard-like art-punk, the quiet glory of Low, the Shins’ effervescent pop and the hushed Southern folk of Iron & Wine, Sub Pop’s success mirrors the music business’ Time Before Accountants, when aesthetics and prestige were equal partners on the bottom line with dollars and cents.
“It was always a question of how much pain would I have to endure to save [Sub Pop], not whether it could even be saved,” Poneman tells us via e-mail from Seattle. “I think it was always our interest to get to a place where the label could be culturally reactive and interesting without succumbing to easy stereotyping.”
The formula is working. While the Recording Industry Association of America wrings its hands over the latest drop in CD sales — eight percent in 2005 — Poneman says Sub Pop is “trending slightly upward” (enough to spring for the staff’s holiday in New Zealand this year). He credits the Shins with turning things around.
“[Their] music was — and remains — fresh, evocative and expansive when much of what was happening in our neck of the woods, musically speaking, seemed stale and inconsequential,” Poneman writes.
The early 2006 releases reflect Sub Pop’s cast-a-wide-net approach. On Tuesday, Jan. 24, Rilo Kiley’s multi-instrumentalist Blake Sennett and his band the Elected deliver the aptly titled Sun, Sun, Sun, the audio equivalent of a sparkling June day at Hermosa Beach — imagine a more reserved Freddie Mercury fronting a poppier Beachwood Sparks and you’re on the same beach towel. February 7 sees the release of Kelly Stoltz’ Below the Branches, a lo-fi bedroom concoction of equal parts Syd Barrett, Carl Wilson, Arthur-era Kinks and Warhol-banana-period Velvet Underground. In March, original Sub Poppers Mudhoney issue Under a Billion Stars; after almost two decades and a stint in Reprise Records purgatory since the band’s debut, Mudhoney’s endearingly snotty sludge remains intact.
“The band’s gestalt is unbroken,” Poneman insists.
But the pick of the Sub Pop litter is the debut from Band of Horses, formed from the orchestral-pop ashes of Portland’s Carissa’s Weird by South Carolina-native Ben Bridwell and Matt Brooke. Everything All the Time (out March 21) features transcendent, reverb-drenched rawk book-ending delicate, reverb-drenched country vignettes. It’s the kind of music you want playing when you depart this mortal coil for wherever the hell you’re bound.
Poneman writes that he loves the record “for very similar reasons to why I thought the Shins were initially so refreshing. Both bands have this hypnotic quality in their music … that takes the listener to a whole other place.”
But can Band of Horses duplicate the Shins’ modest success? Poneman is too experienced to dabble in prognostication, but he is convinced there are more “musical-cultural-social breakthroughs” for those “living on the indie-boho-alt side of the tracks.”
“They won’t be overtly Nirvana-esque,” he writes, “but the conditions are perfect to be broadsided by something truly sublime.”
Don’t be surprised if it bears the Sub Pop imprint.
TIP JAR:
Worth blowing the rent money on: East River Pipe, aka F.M. Cornog, emerges from his bedroom studio with an exploration of survival-through-chemistry on What Are You On? (Merge/Jan. 24), a John Lennon and Burt Bacharach meet Brian Wilson and Daniel Johnston on a home studio adventure featuring song-of-the-year candidate “You Got Played, Little Girl” … Scott McCaughey’s Minus 5 returns with The Gun Album (Yep Roc/Feb. 7); joining him this go-round are the usual suspects from Wilco, the Decembrists’ Colin Meloy, Kelly Hogan, Peter Buck, Ken Stringfellow and John Wesley Harding — it’s pop-tacular stuff, often in the vein of the gooey goodness of Wilco’s Summerteeth … Town & Country drops its John Fahey-on-Quaaludes acoustic-guitar folk drone for a hmong harp, kalimba, shakuhachi and raga feel on Up Above (Thrill Jockey/Jan. 24), successfully conjuring the hallucinatory aura of its namesake, Paul Bowles’ novel Up Above the World … Guided By Voices Godfather Bob Pollard issues his first official solo release since retiring GBV; From a Compound Eye (coming from Merge Jan. 24) is more Alien Lanes than Isolation Drills, as the 26 songs on a single disc suggest.
This article appears in Jan 18-23, 2006.
