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http://sweepingthenation.blogspot.com/ - It may be white lower middle class schmindie hipster shit, but hey, it's British
It often feels that the last decade has scene a growing chasm between the “mainstream” and “underground” music scenes in Britain and it also often feels that Tim Ten Yen – who writes pop songs but moves in underground indie circles - is a man caught between these two camps, lacking the major ...
Indie Music
Tim Burton
One big feature of this decade has been African music. No, not Vampire Weekend and young white boys with highly-strung guitars. Actual music from Africa, by African people. Maybe I was too trapped in a hermetically-sealed indie world to notice before, but it seems that the last ten years have ...
Indie Music
Ali Farka Toure
Vampire Weekend
Eurovision entries seldom seem to crop-up in year-end lists, never mind decade-end ones, and that’s usually for a good reason. Whilst the contest isn’t quite the car-crash viewing everyone supposes it is – the X Factor has cornered the car-crash market much more successfully, I think you’ll ...
Indie Music
Divine
SebastiAn
I was relatively late in discovering The National, having only found out about them after their most recent full length effort, 2007’s Boxer. Before this I would admit to being pretty naïve musically, my favourite band having been Kings Of Leon (in my defence they hadn’t at this point composed a ...
Indie Music
Picking a song from your local music scene in a list such as this is a risky business, but I genuinely believe this deserves to be here on it's own merit. At six minutes long, the fact that it made the daytime playlist on Radio 1 should be pretty astonishing, but from start to finish this is a ...
Indie Music
Maybeshewill
I guess now, everyone has their myspace story. Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Kate Nash BLAH BLAH BLAH. Yes, I first heard Nash on myspace and I fell in love a bit, but when I first heard Town Bike and their only song, Ride Of Ya Life, on Myspace, I fell in love a lot. You know how every band’s ...
Indie Music
Arctic Monkeys
Lily Allen
Kate Nash
Despite starting them with The Unutterable and Are You Missing Winner – albums with undeniably flashes of brilliance, yet hardly considered solid efforts even by the hardiest MES aficionados – the 2000s have seen the strongest rebirth(s) of the Fall and their most inspired music since forever. ...
Indie Music
UK anti-folkers Sergeant Buzfuz wormed their way into the 6 Music schedules with a series of satirical ditties about corruption in the Catholic church. Whilst their lyrical content seemed to hail from a completely different century, protesting about Papal orgies, the suppression of information ...
Indie Music
To be honest I feel a bit of a fraud writing this induction. I'm sure that every hip groovy person reading this will own a least one Nick Cave album, I don't. I do own this song, but only from iTunes. I can't even pretend to know all of his back catalogue and yet here I am writing the entry that ...
Indie Music
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Nick Cave
Kat Flint’s 2006 debut was a quiet masterpiece of songs about the everyday world we find ourselves in, made in a living room with borrowed favours and a car boot orchestra of children’s toy instruments. Its opener, Fearsome Crowd, is a four minute poem to London life – its mundanity, the ...
Indie Music
Katrine Ottosen
The Coral debuted in 2002 with a melting-pot of an album, bowled along on waves of retro-rummaging and sea-shanty-imbued psychedelia. Second single ‘Dreaming of You’ is perfectly structured pop that shines like a diamond dug out of a Merseybeat time-capsule, but remains sufficiently scratched ...
Indie Music
The Coral
Were it not for the band being wonderfully prolific, drawing a line between "old Johnny Foreigner" and "new Johnny Foreigner" would be sort of a ridiculous endeavor. After all, we're talking about a relatively young band that played its first gigs only four years ago. But facts are facts and ...
Indie Music
It feels ridiculous to say it now, but early reports concerning the debut (and presumably sole) album by Neon Neon could easily have suggested a project ready to deliver horrific results. Gruff Rhys has produced two wonderful solo LPs over the past decade, proof that he is at his best when in ...
Indie Music
If I say woodblocks and Auto-Tune, you'll probably cry for all the wrong reasons. See also: it sounds like being on a night bus at three in the morning, standing alone in a Tube station, sitting at a computer after you get in and your eyes drying with insomnia and screendeath or driving back up ...
Indie Music
Any band that emerges from Sheffield will always have to face up to the Pulp comparisons, regardless of what their sound is, and The Long Blondes where no exception. Initially grouped in with bands like The Cribs and The Kaiser Chiefs in the media concocted "New Yorkshire" scene, The Long ...
Indie Music
The Long Blondes
The Horrors’ pantomime-Cramps shtick and ropey 2007 debut had seen them sniffily dismissed and quietly filed away under overhyped, overstyled and over. So in a decade that’s been low on musical surprises, the slew of positive reviews garnered by their second album took place against a ...
Indie Music
Whilst thinking about tracks to nominate for this list, I did try to consider any major leaps or bounds which occurred in musical styles throughout the decade. The more I thought about this, the more I came to the conclusion that the main noughties trend which appeared to be without precedent ...
Indie Music
Those people who've actually listened to more than a couple of tracks of Half Man Half Biscuit's output will already know that they're deserving of far more than the "novelty band" tag they're often given by people who know them as nothing more than the purveyors of Trumpton Riots or All I Want ...
Indie Music
It starts with a curious, squelchy, electronic noise (my spell check has recognised 'squelchy' as a word, so that must be what it is): I am utterly unable to suggest what sort of instrument may have made it, but it sounds like some electronic toy from the past gone wrong or part of a tune from ...
