Badlittlekitten

Thanks for the comments.

Out of interest what would top your list?

__________________
'Said do you feel it? Do you feel it when you TOUCH ME?. THERE'S A FIRE! THERE'S A FIRE!' The Stooges. Dirt.

https://soundcloud.com/bad-little-kittens
My Top 100 LPs
My Top 52 Indie Tracks Of The 21st Century (incomplete)

Flume

Glad to see this post active again!

__________________
''I must know - How can someone so young sing words so sad''

''Won't you stop and remember me
at any convenient time.''

LastFM

Badlittlekitten

34
Of Montreal - A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger
Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
2007
In which the Athens oddballs prove they're not completely smart arse and glib. The bubbly bass and slapstick synths should give me further tooth decay. Yet this track is a joy, grounded by the very real pain of frontman Kevin Barnes, recently separated from his wife and in a deep depression. The patheticness of self loathing is neatly summed up in the first verse:

I spent the winter on the verge of a total breakdown, while living in Norway. I felt the darkness of the black metal bands, but being such a fawn of a man I didn't burn down any churches. Just slept too much, just slept.

This track is like a warm blanket full of snuggly Beatles harmonies. I wouldn't wish pain on anyone but it inspires the best art, no?

__________________
'Said do you feel it? Do you feel it when you TOUCH ME?. THERE'S A FIRE! THERE'S A FIRE!' The Stooges. Dirt.

https://soundcloud.com/bad-little-kittens
My Top 100 LPs
My Top 52 Indie Tracks Of The 21st Century (incomplete)

Badlittlekitten

33
Twin Sister - Lady Daydream
Colour Your Life (EP)
2010
Nice but standard dream pop type fair until about a minute in when a guitar twangs itself from the mists, and an effected slap bass transports you back to the 80s. For the moment vocalist Andrea Estella does her best Bjork/Newsom impression and purrs "Just because I lose, don't make me a loser . . ." And the punchline, ". . . yet". The 'yet' said as late possible, for cruel comic effect.

__________________
'Said do you feel it? Do you feel it when you TOUCH ME?. THERE'S A FIRE! THERE'S A FIRE!' The Stooges. Dirt.

https://soundcloud.com/bad-little-kittens
My Top 100 LPs
My Top 52 Indie Tracks Of The 21st Century (incomplete)

Badlittlekitten

32
Wolfman Feat. Peter Doherty
For Lovers
2004
'For Lovers' was released around the time that Doherty went A.W.O.L after his release from prison, for robbing his ex Libertine band mates house for crack money. Wolfman is someone I know almost nothing about, except that he was one of Doherty’s dodgy drug buddies. The sense of doomed romance that made the Libertines great is nicely distilled into these wistful three minutes and I suspect that Doherty played a part in writing this. Pete, for once, doesn’t sound like a drunken baby, and sings his crying heart out over gorgeous descending piano chords and misty strings. The moment is the entire second verse where Pete ruminates,

I’m running away with you, from yesterday’s news. Leave it all behind, help me back to my mind. I paid the penalty, hear the jailor rattling the key. But the key was mine, I keep a spare one every time.

It’s sung with heart rending sincerity, the voice of a breaking man that wants to play his get out of jail card. ‘For Lovers’ doesn’t reach the heights of true greatness for its chorus is too plain and uninventive. The promise of something magic squandered, just like the Libertines themselves.

__________________
'Said do you feel it? Do you feel it when you TOUCH ME?. THERE'S A FIRE! THERE'S A FIRE!' The Stooges. Dirt.

https://soundcloud.com/bad-little-kittens
My Top 100 LPs
My Top 52 Indie Tracks Of The 21st Century (incomplete)

Badlittlekitten

31
Man Man - Van Helsing Boom Box
Six Demon Bag
2006
Man Man are a quirky Philly quartet I know little about. Six Demon Bag was an album I dismissed as an irrelevant and tiresome comedy album. Thankfully I played it again the other day and have gained a new appreciation of its rich acoustic tones. The mishmash of woodwind, barrel house piano, choppy woodblock percussion, sea shanties, the brothers Grim and the singers weary, weather torn Tom Waits style vocals all conjure up a feeling of a mystical past of camp fires and old pubs full of bearded pipe puffing fishermen. This is the one track that I’ve liked from the beginning and it’s still my favourite. The lamenting “Aahhh, Aaahhh”’s at the start of the track hint at something much different from Man Man’s usual kookiness. The lines “I want to sleep for weeks like a dog at her feet, though I know it wont work out in the long run” confirm it. And when frontman Honus Honus sings, "I learn how to speak a forgotten language. I fall in the sea but forget how to swim", you sense a man that's returning to a lonely life, searching for them elusive, supposedly plentiful fish, and drowning. And then we get one of the best choruses on this entire list:

When anything that's anything becomes nothing that's everything
and nothing is the only thing you ever seem to have.

That there is is pure poetry as far s I'm concerned, a man throwing in the towel, content with misery. The words are backed with a twangy, spidery guitar figure and rag and bone tip-a-tap percussion, and I could listen to it forever, though I know it won't work out in the long run.

__________________
'Said do you feel it? Do you feel it when you TOUCH ME?. THERE'S A FIRE! THERE'S A FIRE!' The Stooges. Dirt.

https://soundcloud.com/bad-little-kittens
My Top 100 LPs
My Top 52 Indie Tracks Of The 21st Century (incomplete)

Badlittlekitten

30
Gang Gang Dance - Vacuum
Saint Dymphna
2008
The only instrumental track in this list, and if you want to get picky you can argue that Gang Gang Dance are not indie at all. And you’d have a solid point with your furious mass debating. But this soaring, swooning, untangling beauty of a thing, with its drifting synths and crumbling rhythm, would have been a nice fit for My Bloddy Valentines Loveless album or even one of the more ambient works of Eno. This track is like audio nourishment of the mind for me, medicinal and meditative. Here’s saying hello from the highest of peaks, before the fluffiest of clouds.

__________________
'Said do you feel it? Do you feel it when you TOUCH ME?. THERE'S A FIRE! THERE'S A FIRE!' The Stooges. Dirt.

https://soundcloud.com/bad-little-kittens
My Top 100 LPs
My Top 52 Indie Tracks Of The 21st Century (incomplete)

Badlittlekitten

29
Broadcast - Before We Begin
Haha Sound
2003
Although I’ve used this list to try and defy this fact; creativity in rock has reached its lowest point in the 21st Century. Far too much late 60s/late 70s revivalism, as well as a loss of maverick ideas and forward thinking in favour of career safety and conformity. Some of the century's best bands – Animal Collective, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti and Broadcast – have brought a freshness in sound and influence, and created their own distinct worlds with their music, inviting us to traverse and sample these strange waves. Broadcast’s world is a paradoxical one; a world of retroism and futurism, the coming technological age as sounded through a old transistor radio. Their restless analog syths and grainy cinematic soundscapes recall Joe Meek and 60s psych legends The United State Of America. 'Before We Begin' is perhaps their best pop moment. Trish Keenan’s vocals, as ever, are the embodiment of foggy psychedelia and whimsy, rolling the words from her tongue like candy cotton balls. Her intonation on the chorus (“wait you may wiiin. . . .before we begin . . . again”) is especially exquisite and it’s all backed with a tough, crisp offbeat rhythm. Keenan’s death at the beginning of the year was truly a sad loss in a world of chancers and false idols. But you can hear her here in 'Before We Begin', shimmering through the thunderclaps of percussion like a ray of sunshine from that strange, better world. The lines “here again, at the end, before the beginning” and “here they hide, on one side. And me on the other” now contain a gravitas that can make me weep.

__________________
'Said do you feel it? Do you feel it when you TOUCH ME?. THERE'S A FIRE! THERE'S A FIRE!' The Stooges. Dirt.

https://soundcloud.com/bad-little-kittens
My Top 100 LPs
My Top 52 Indie Tracks Of The 21st Century (incomplete)

wavverton

this is a great thred, can not wait to go through all of these.

starrynight

Me neither.

Most of these tracks overall I think lean towards an emo sound, or indie that is about the mood/feel/sound of the music rather than that with much happening on the surface of the music.