An Alternative History of "Pop" Music: Part 2, 1982 -

[Johnny Foreigner]

Bugger, I have missed the most interesting years.
Anyroad, in 2003, Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, or D.A.F. for short, released Fünfzehn Neue DAF Lieder, their first album since 1986.

D.A.F. - Kinderzimmer

They were pioneers of German industrial music / EBM, best known for their hit single, 'Der Mussolini'  (Do the Mussolini!).

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

The Essex Green - The Late Great Cassiopia



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlRsXlH9aDQ

The Essex Green are an indie-pop group from Brooklyn, New York. This is the second track on their second album, which is titled The Long Goodbye.

[Gregory Torso]

Xiu Xiu - Sad Pony Guerilla Girl



It feels like a cop-out to describe a band as 'uncategorisable' but Xiu Xiu have always been pretty difficult to define. Noisy, vulnerable, pretentious, theatrical, dark, sarcastic, who knows. It's all inside the head of Jamie Stewart, the only constant member, and maybe it is all doom and misery, or maybe he's having a laugh, most likely it's his own personal therapy. Recommended if you enjoy the experience of saying 'wait a minute what the fuck am I listening to?'

This song is a much more subdued representation of their usual programmed beats, noise, synths, pipes and howling - it's a re-recorded acoustic version of an older song.

The band name comes from the film Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl which is about a young girl sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution to live with a Tibetan horse herder and it is mega depressing.

[Gregory Torso]

oops made a glitch

[Johnny Foreigner]

I'm sorry, I was just typing this when another post appeared. If you'll allow me some more German stuff: And One's studio album, Aggressor, also came out in 2003. Its first track is simply titled 'Kein Anfang' and the last one is aptly called 'Kein Ende'.

And One - Kein Anfang



Fronted by Steve Naghavi since 1989, And One have gained quite a cult following. Their mix of dark new wave, electronic body music and slow synth-pop makes them accessible to audiences who would not normally describe themselves as goths. Speaking from personal experience, they are a magnificent live act with a powerful, elegantly robotic stage presence.

[Gregory Torso]

Swiss Dot - Watched You Misbehave



In the early 2000s I used to order 7"s and CDRs from a place in Scotland called Boa Melody Bar which was run by a lady called Gayle (who also made her own music under the name Electroscope). This was in the early days of having internet and way before Paypal, still sending cheques in envelopes, but her catalogues were full of tiny obscure magical things that I couldn't help but want to immediately buy. This CD by Swiss Dot was one of those things, and as far as I can find out, the only thing they ever did. They don't even have a Discogs page. There is one page about them on the net which says -

"With their balance of synthetic beats and charming sincerity, the group evokes the catchy rhythms of '80s legends New Order and The Wake, the pop melodies of Saint Etienne, and the contemporary edge of Ladytron. SWISS DOT's sound has been described as "upbeat tragic" because their songs are dance hits with emotional depth - tales of heartache and regret set to a thumping bass and haunting melodies."

So there you go with that. Hardly likely to set anyone's world on fire, but I was charmed by it enough to remember it many years later. Just another tiny blip catching me as it passes by in the seemingly endless search for all the forgotten, ignored music that falls through the cracks.

[Johnny Foreigner]

Love it. Thank you very much.

[jamiefairlie]

Yeah, love that Swiss Dot tune.

[jamiefairlie]

Death Cab For Cutie - Title and Registration

https://youtu.be/8O-a90Rb_TA



Taken from their fifth album "Transatlanticism"

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

Death Cab For Cutie

Speaking of whom...

The Postal Service - Sleeping In

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3eb5g9NH30

The Postal Service were an American indie-pop supergroup consisting of singer Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie, producer Jimmy Tamborello, and Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis on background vocals. The band released their only album, Give Up, in 2003 on Sub Pop Records. Their name was chosen due to the way in which they produced their songs. Due to conflicting schedules, Tamborello wrote and performed instrumental tracks and then sent the DATs through the United States Postal Service to Gibbard, who then edited the song as he saw fit (adding his vocals along the way) and sent them back to Tamborello.

[daf]

Kate Rusby ‎– The Blind Harper



Featured on the album 'Underneath The Stars' - released in August 2003

Kate Rusby was born into a family of musicians in 1973 in Penistone, West Riding of Yorkshire, England. After learning to play the guitar, the fiddle and the piano, as well as to sing, she played in many local folk festivals as a child and adolescent.



1995 saw the release of her breakthrough album, 'Kate Rusby & Kathryn Roberts', a collaboration with her friend and fellow Barnsley folk singer Kathryn Roberts. In 1997, with the help of her family, Rusby recorded and released her first solo album, Hourglass.

[Astronaut Omens]

Bilal (featuring Zap Mama and Common)- Sorrow, Tears and Blood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyUoATMYrfA
One of the more out-there jammier numbers on R and B singer Bilal's unreleased and much bootlegged "Love for Sale" album, which Interscope records decided to shelve for, in Bilal's words being "kind of dark and not really sexy". This is a cover of a Fela Kuti song which starts in a recognisable progressive, socially conscious funk mode but then turns into something else when the classical-style singing crops up around two and half minutes in.

[Astronaut Omens]

Madlib-Slim's Return
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apN0AXjJxQE

I've already mentioned Gene Harriss's's 60's jazz tune "Book of Slim", here is the super-scratchy remix of it by Madlib aka Otis Jackson, Jr.,  from his album of Blue Note-themed music, some of which leans heavily on sampling old records, some of which are more like covers.

[Brundle-Fly]

Easy Love - Louie Austen. Released on Kitty-Yo in 2003.



I used to love this dude. A more agreeable Tony Christie, if that's a feasible proposition?

Louie Austen, born 19th September 1946 in Vienna, Austria, is an entertainer from another generation. An Austrian vocalist, who worked for years in Las Vegas on the track of his idols, the famous rat pack (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin & Sammy Davis Jr.). Back in Vienna in 1999 he met the producers Mario Neugebauer and Patrick Pulsinger from Cheap Records and Louie turned from jazz crooner to electro crooner. Ever since then he´s been electrotaining people with his surrealistic fusion of his incredible & unique voice and modern club sounds. In early 2007 Louie even founded his own label LA Music, Louie Austen Music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZjiFlo9oJs

[jamiefairlie]

For Against - Outside A Heart

https://youtu.be/PCOMLKXaBKM



Taken from sixth album, "Coalesced", their first in six years.

[The Culture Bunker]

Fair dos to Luke Steele, they had a good sound and were ahead of everyone else, especially in their home country, when everyone else was clanking around in the garage trying to be the Strokes. But god damn he has an annoying face, annoying persona and keeps coming back again and again in the last 20 years, getting lauded by the press for yet another costly half-conceived release.

I got took along to see them play Sheffield around 2003/04 time and thought it was one of the worst gigs I'd ever been to - pretty glad we'd gotten in for free (a friend was reviewing it). Maybe they were on the arse end of a long tour and were knackered, but there was just nothing about them that raised any feeling beyond tedium. I was certainly given something by them (a single or album, I can't say) but I guess for me, it got filed away in the memory bin along with a lot of the indie landfill of the time.

I remember the NME hyping them up something chronic back then but had no idea the frontman had managed to keep at it.

[famethrowa]

I remember the NME hyping them up something chronic back then but had no idea the frontman had managed to keep at it.

He seems to be a hype magnet, someone in the industry is convinced he's a bankable genius and he keeps getting company money shovelled at him for years. I don't know why.

[Astronaut Omens]

Min Hui Fen - River of Sorrow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aJsHpF_xvA


Not very Pop, but from an LP I've listened to a lot from the 2000s. This is a recording by a Chinese traditional musician who plays the ehru, a two stringed violin-style instrument. It was mentioned way back when by TBC in this thread alongside lots of other good stuff.

[jamiefairlie]

Camera Obscura - Suspended From Class

https://youtu.be/wCuFvVv-tLY



Opening track to their third album "Underachievers Please Try Harder". It reached number 30 on Peel's final Festive Fifty.

[Astronaut Omens]

Halcali- Tandem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTVeAHo4LdM

Not that Alternative in Japan, where this was a top 5 hit, but it's stuck in my head this evening, and, like the previous entry is another one I heard off this here community (in a hip-hop thread, though this bubblegum song is really not very hip-hop at all) Halcali were a Tokyo based pop-rap duo, and this is their debut single, also known as the theme to the anime series Ga-Ra-Ku-Ta: Mr. Stain on Junk Alley.

[Astronaut Omens]

Four Tet- Spirit Fingers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JqGhLnBCCc

Seemingly produced by an orchestra of plucked string and percussion instruments playing a minor key sea shanty having their work digitally meddled with, this track is made by London-based producer Keiran Hebden. Musicians don't always like been pigeonholed by journalists, but for me Hebden's work has been more distinctive (and therefore more enjoyable) the closer he's got to making the 'folktronica' he was said to making.

[Astronaut Omens]

....which, (because of it's sampled folky strumming) reminds me of another artist whose career, after an amazing and distinctive debut, is marked by a struggle to find a sound of his own. I really like this DJ Shadow track, and I wish he'd have a go at doing a bit more stuff like this.
DJ Shadow- You Can't Go Home Again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfqqwrQH6FI

[DrGreggles]

Grandaddy - Lost on Yer Merry Way
[Lytle] {V2 Records}
(Taken from the album Sumday)



Taken from Sumday, Grandaddy's third album, Lost on Yer Merry Way is a song that Jason Lytle wrote in an attempt to create something like "Plastic Ono Band era John Lennon".
He failed (at least to my ears), but produced something any good in its own right instead.
Its length (6+ minutes) probably prevented this from being a single, but El Caminos in the West, I'm on Standby and Now It's On all made it in or around the Top 40 and the album proved to be their most successful.

[daf]

The Lounge Brigade – The Real Slim Shady



Featured on the album 'Chocolate On The Inside: The Lounge Tribute To Eminem' released in 2003

[jamiefairlie]

I Am Kloot - The Same Deep Water As Me

https://youtu.be/Sde_YVRW9wI



Formed in Hyde in 1998 by guitarist John Bramwell. They released debut single "Titanic" in 1999. This is taken from second album "I Am Kloot".

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

Belle & Sebastian – If She Wants Me



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayjep-LOxM8

I'm pretty sure I didn't exclusively listen to fey indie–pop in 2003, but my choices for that year suggest that I did. Oh well.

Eyebrows were raised when B&S announced that their sixth studio album, Dear Catastrophe Waitress, was to be produced by Sir Trevor of Horn, but in the end it made perfect sense. The band wanted to make a bright 'n' shiny commercial pop album, so who better to help them achieve that than eclectic hitmeister Trev? He didn't radically alter their sound, he just spruced it up a bit.

This song is a lovely, summery, shimmery soul thing: B&S by way of Curtis Mayfield. 

[Brundle-Fly]

Freak Flag Fly - Headland. Released on Touchy Feely in 2003





Nice bit of unashamed early '00's indie rock pop. It has one of those 'quiet bits you could drive a bus through'. (as Andrew Collings used to say)

Headland are an Indie band from London, England. Under the radar knob tweakers have put together some pretty tasty tracks, digging through there record collections, mixing and matching bits to make songs equally esoteric and engaging.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ztfk-4II_74

[DrGreggles]

Belle & Sebastian – If She Wants Me

(crosses off list)

[jamiefairlie]

Killing Joke - Seeing Red

https://youtu.be/_eM-tae0o_s



Returning with a bang with their first entry from me since 1986. It's from their self-titled eleventh album. I couldn't really get on board with their 90s output but this is sharp and crisp.

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

(crosses off list)

Not a fan?