Settling on even the best 15 indie rock records proved quite the task. Stairway? Copyright ©2020 Designtechnica Corporation. Few album openers are as exquisite as “Purple Haze”. Are you sure you want to delete this comment? hen was the last time you listened to an old album from start to finish? That’s before you even get on to the song about buying and shooting heroin that David Bowie heard on a test pressing and called “the future of music”. It can be found in every song on this brilliant 27-track compilation. Want an ad-free experience?Subscribe to Independent Premium. It’s staggering to listen back to this album and remember Dizzee was just 18 years old when he released it. Kind of Blue is unrepeatably cool. Check out the singles and albums out now for this week's, Celeste sings original song on this year's John Lewis Christmas advert, Sophie Ellis-Bextor: 'When everything is so heavy, people seek escapism', McFly: 'We were never cool - why would we try now? Undeniable. Disheartened by the media obsession with his personal life and the fans clamouring for the same old shit, In Utero is pure, undiluted rage. What does the genre even mean anymore? Consequently we can end up believing we have solid opinions on records we may never have given our honest and sustained attention. CH, It’s easy to knock these white, male, middle-class proggers, with their spaceship full of technology and their monolithic ambitions. Enlisting the hottest producers around – Pete Rock, DJ Premier, Q-Tip, LES and Large Professor – was a move that Complex blamed for “ruining hip hop”, while still praising Nas’s record, because it had a lasting impact on the use of multiple producers on rap albums. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. RO, Curtis Mayfield had been spinning golden soul music from doo-wop roots with The Impressions for more than a decade before releasing his first solo album, which contains some of his greatest songs. Indie music tends to be less FM dial and more college radio, falling somewhere between garage rock and pop. “GO AWAYYYYYYYYYYY” Cobain screams on “Scentless Apprentice”, capturing the essence of Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume: Story of a Murderer and using it as a metaphor for his disgust at the music industry, and the press. Many touted Bright Eyes’ frontman Conor Oberst as the Dylan of the indie generation and for good reason. The familiar quality of human sweetness and melancholy in Ralf Hutter’s voice is subsumed into the machine as rhythms interlock and bloom in side two’s mini-symphony that begins with the title track. This 2004 record is inventive and playful, with nods to jazz and plenty of nuance. Here they are: There’s not a dull track on this near-perfect debut from Montreal quartet Wolf Parade. Due to the sheer scale of this comment community, we are not able to give each post the same level of attention, but we have preserved this area in the interests of open debate. The product of a Canadian supergroup, this album is layered and full of surprises. Hopefully you can still feel the electricity of invention in The Beatles’ Revolver, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Nas’s Illmatic. This is a great place to hear where they came from. HB, The answer to whether Robyn could follow up the brilliance of her self-titled 2005 album came in a burst of releases in 2010, the EPs Body Talk Pt 1, Pt 2 and Pt 3, and this 15-track effort, essentially a compilation album. Glitter ball magic. ', Jess Glynne enters Christmas Number 1 race with festive cover, This week's new releases: Billie Eilish, AC/DC, more. Its sonic appeal has a lot to do with the lo-fi production and warm instrumentation, often comprised of a low thrumming bass, tight snares and doo-wop harmonies.