In the eighties, music fans who didn’t want to preen with
the new wavers, pout with the hair metalists, or snooze with Lionel Ritchie
really had to do their research. Groups like Black Flag, Throwing Muses, and
The Feelies weren’t exactly playing alongside Mötley Crüe on MTV at 4PM, though
you might catch them if you stayed up past Midnight on Sundays. You might also
read about them in photocopied fanzines or get lectured about them from the Doc
Martened blowhard at your local hole-in-the-wall record shop.
In the Internet era, this kind of happenstance is less a
prerequisite to discovering great underground groups, so from one point of
view, Andrew Earles’s Gimme Indie Rock:
500 Essential American Underground Rock Albums 1981-1996 is about twenty
years too late. Arriving in 2014, however, it still serves a definite function
as a valuable tour of one of the least-eulogized roads of Rock history. More
practically it’s a distillation of The Trouser
Press Record Guide that hones a fifteen-year flood of small-label albums
down to the must haves… or, at least, Earles’ idea of the must-haves. As is the
case with any “best of” guide created by one person, the selection is highly
subjective even as the writer reveals he chose some albums he didn’t like
because of their historical importance. Taking that under consideration it
isn’t unreasonable to wonder where certain artists (no Spinanes, no Velocity
Girl, no Grant Lee Buffalo) or select albums (no Pony Express Record, no The
Real Ramona, no The Stars Are Insane)
are. Still I can’t say there are a ton of glaring omissions from Gimme Indie Rock.
As a writer, Earle certainly seems to have been influenced
by The Trouser Press Record Guide (which he name-checks in his introduction)
with his tendency to write about ecstatic music clinically rather than ecstatically.
That kind of writing isn’t generally my cup of tea, but even Earle can’t hold
back his awe from time to time, as when he uses more visceral terms to describe
Team Dresch’s Personal Best, which
“will knock unprepared listeners against the wall”. He is not fucking kidding.
