THU., NOVEMBER 13, 2008
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C86 Revival
by Douglas Wolk
Young alt-rock buffs who lean toward tuneful, guitar-focused, Anglocentric pop songs are likely to see a peculiar description thrown around to describe bands from Belle & Sebastian to CaUSE Co-MOTION!: "C86." It's not an abbreviation, exactly — it's actually the name for an accidental genre that's been around for more than 20 years now.
The original C86 was a cassette compilation put together by the British weekly music newspaper New Musical Express in 1986, as a sort of "state of independent British music" report. (Five years earlier, NME had released C81, an all-over-the-place tape that featured artists as disparate as Essential Logic, James Blood Ulmer and Robert Wyatt.) C86, though, wasn't a survey, exactly — it was more like a polemic, and a pretty convincing one. The 22 bands it featured were mostly virtual unknowns; they were almost all guitar-driven, favored simple rhythms, wryly sardonic lyrics and Brill Building melodies, and raced through their songs like somebody was chasing them. It wasn't totally homogenous — there were stylistic outliers like the wild-eyed Big Flame and the wobbly, daffy Stump — but there was practically no sign on C86 that, say, British hip-hop or club music, or even synth-pop, existed. Only Primal Scream and the Wedding Present went on to have substantial commercial success (although a few other bands, notably the Pastels and the ridiculous and frequently hilarious Half Man Half Biscuit, have soldiered on ever since).
Only six of the 22 actual C86 tracks are available on eMusic right now — for you trainspotters, those would be the Mighty Lemon Drops' "Happy Head," A Witness's "Sharpened Sticks," Miaow's "Sport Most Royal," Half Man Half Biscuit's "I Hate Nerys Hughes," the Servants' "Transparent" and the Wedding Present's "This Boy Can Wait." (eMusic also has contemporary albums from Close Lobsters, the Pastels, Stump and Edinburgh's exquisitely airy, tambourine-smacking Shop Assistants, whose "I Don't Want to Be Friends With You" is one of the most awesome little singles of its era.)
But C86 was a hell of an album, and it constructed a genre out of thin air; all of a sudden, a bunch of bands who were staking out their own territory in the post-new wave landscape seemed to have something in common, and "indie-pop" — literally just music in the popular song form by artists unaffiliated with major labels — took on a specific meaning. By the time C86 was reissued as an LP the next year, it had lit the fuse for an entire generation of sensitive young Brits with sensitive young guitars. (In retrospect, the frail and fainting attitude staked out by the C86 bands was a bright idea: it meant that the slightest suggestion of anger or vehemence or punk rock could signify far more than it could coming from a more conventionally macho rock 'n' roll band.) The entire Sarah Records contingent, for instance, owed a lot to C86. Before long, the aesthetic spread overseas: Washington, DC's Velocity Girl, for instance, named themselves after the brief Primal Scream song that opened the compilation.
C86 as a sound has never entirely gone away, but a handful of likeminded bands have been popping up over the last couple of years.
Brooklyn's Crystal Stilts, for instance, would have fit right in on the original compilation, from Brad Hargett's flat (in both emotion and pitch) croon to the cavernous echo that makes their strum-and-bash hooks glow as if they're radiating from the bottom of an ocean. Having released their debut EP through eMusic Selects this spring, they've got a full-length album, Alight of Night, coming out via U.S. indie-pop's ground zero, Slumberland Records. Their fellow New Yorkers The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are a little speedier, a little angrier and just as mock-fragile and Anglophilic. The title of their single "Kurt Cobain's Cardigan" says a lot about them, although their best song to date is probably "This Love Is Fucking Right!" (It might be an answer song to the Field Mice's "This Love Is Not Wrong," but they get extra points for pronouncing "right" so it sounds like "rad.")
If first-wave indie-pop has had a single figurehead over the past two decades, it's probably singer/songwriter/research economist Amelia Fletcher, who wasn't actually on C86 but might as well have been. Her first band, Talulah Gosh, played breathy, heads-in-the-clouds little tunelets at hardcore velocity, and their influence still ripples through the international pop underground. (The Softies recorded a memorable cover of their kiss-off "I Can't Get No Satisfaction (Thank God).") Fletcher's second and best-known group, Heavenly (check out their P.U.N.K. Girl EP for starters), has acolytes of its own — the fabulous Reykjavik-based band Dyrdiin's self-titled 2006 debut takes a page from their book, translates it into Icelandic, and doubles the sha-la-la factor.
Fletcher's influence is all over the Vivian Girls' recent self-titled debut album, too. Named after weirdo artist Henry Darger's 15,000-page epic, the NYC trio zips through ten songs in under 22 minutes of deadpan girl-group harmonies and headlong snare drum abuse. And, as with their forbears, they milk the contrast between their sunny tunefulness and bitter nihilism for all it's worth. (It's worth noting that they contributed backing vocals to neo-hardcore band Fucked Up's The Chemistry of Common Life.) The record's cleverest gesture is "No," a perky 79-second indie-pop anthem that reduces the personal and political elements of its genre's lyrics to its title's monosyllable. That's the legacy of C86 that two decades' worth of bands have picked up on as much as its stripped-down, dashed-off sound: the trick of making a negation sound like a party.
The original C86 was a cassette compilation put together by the British weekly music newspaper New Musical Express in 1986, as a sort of "state of independent British music" report. (Five years earlier, NME had released C81, an all-over-the-place tape that featured artists as disparate as Essential Logic, James Blood Ulmer and Robert Wyatt.) C86, though, wasn't a survey, exactly — it was more like a polemic, and a pretty convincing one. The 22 bands it featured were mostly virtual unknowns; they were almost all guitar-driven, favored simple rhythms, wryly sardonic lyrics and Brill Building melodies, and raced through their songs like somebody was chasing them. It wasn't totally homogenous — there were stylistic outliers like the wild-eyed Big Flame and the wobbly, daffy Stump — but there was practically no sign on C86 that, say, British hip-hop or club music, or even synth-pop, existed. Only Primal Scream and the Wedding Present went on to have substantial commercial success (although a few other bands, notably the Pastels and the ridiculous and frequently hilarious Half Man Half Biscuit, have soldiered on ever since).
Only six of the 22 actual C86 tracks are available on eMusic right now — for you trainspotters, those would be the Mighty Lemon Drops' "Happy Head," A Witness's "Sharpened Sticks," Miaow's "Sport Most Royal," Half Man Half Biscuit's "I Hate Nerys Hughes," the Servants' "Transparent" and the Wedding Present's "This Boy Can Wait." (eMusic also has contemporary albums from Close Lobsters, the Pastels, Stump and Edinburgh's exquisitely airy, tambourine-smacking Shop Assistants, whose "I Don't Want to Be Friends With You" is one of the most awesome little singles of its era.)
But C86 was a hell of an album, and it constructed a genre out of thin air; all of a sudden, a bunch of bands who were staking out their own territory in the post-new wave landscape seemed to have something in common, and "indie-pop" — literally just music in the popular song form by artists unaffiliated with major labels — took on a specific meaning. By the time C86 was reissued as an LP the next year, it had lit the fuse for an entire generation of sensitive young Brits with sensitive young guitars. (In retrospect, the frail and fainting attitude staked out by the C86 bands was a bright idea: it meant that the slightest suggestion of anger or vehemence or punk rock could signify far more than it could coming from a more conventionally macho rock 'n' roll band.) The entire Sarah Records contingent, for instance, owed a lot to C86. Before long, the aesthetic spread overseas: Washington, DC's Velocity Girl, for instance, named themselves after the brief Primal Scream song that opened the compilation.
C86 as a sound has never entirely gone away, but a handful of likeminded bands have been popping up over the last couple of years.
Brooklyn's Crystal Stilts, for instance, would have fit right in on the original compilation, from Brad Hargett's flat (in both emotion and pitch) croon to the cavernous echo that makes their strum-and-bash hooks glow as if they're radiating from the bottom of an ocean. Having released their debut EP through eMusic Selects this spring, they've got a full-length album, Alight of Night, coming out via U.S. indie-pop's ground zero, Slumberland Records. Their fellow New Yorkers The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are a little speedier, a little angrier and just as mock-fragile and Anglophilic. The title of their single "Kurt Cobain's Cardigan" says a lot about them, although their best song to date is probably "This Love Is Fucking Right!" (It might be an answer song to the Field Mice's "This Love Is Not Wrong," but they get extra points for pronouncing "right" so it sounds like "rad.")
If first-wave indie-pop has had a single figurehead over the past two decades, it's probably singer/songwriter/research economist Amelia Fletcher, who wasn't actually on C86 but might as well have been. Her first band, Talulah Gosh, played breathy, heads-in-the-clouds little tunelets at hardcore velocity, and their influence still ripples through the international pop underground. (The Softies recorded a memorable cover of their kiss-off "I Can't Get No Satisfaction (Thank God).") Fletcher's second and best-known group, Heavenly (check out their P.U.N.K. Girl EP for starters), has acolytes of its own — the fabulous Reykjavik-based band Dyrdiin's self-titled 2006 debut takes a page from their book, translates it into Icelandic, and doubles the sha-la-la factor.
Fletcher's influence is all over the Vivian Girls' recent self-titled debut album, too. Named after weirdo artist Henry Darger's 15,000-page epic, the NYC trio zips through ten songs in under 22 minutes of deadpan girl-group harmonies and headlong snare drum abuse. And, as with their forbears, they milk the contrast between their sunny tunefulness and bitter nihilism for all it's worth. (It's worth noting that they contributed backing vocals to neo-hardcore band Fucked Up's The Chemistry of Common Life.) The record's cleverest gesture is "No," a perky 79-second indie-pop anthem that reduces the personal and political elements of its genre's lyrics to its title's monosyllable. That's the legacy of C86 that two decades' worth of bands have picked up on as much as its stripped-down, dashed-off sound: the trick of making a negation sound like a party.
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