Path of No Resistance: Pacific Northwest Indie Rock Before and After the Gold Rush
The suckerest bet in the music writing racket is trying to neatly summarize a regional music scene. But due to certain quirks of history and provincial character, it’s actually pretty convenient to talk about the past 20-ish years of Pacific Northwest indie rock, in terms of what it declined to be.
Still, it’s telling that the folks who made this list chose to exclude the “grunge” era from the tally, because most of the bands did back then, too. For many years, that word could scarcely be spoken aloud in the PNW without being shrouded by air quotes (real or implied) or followed by a telltale “…or whatever.” It wasn’t just that musicians chafed at the term’s aesthetic limitations; it was that they didn’t want anyone in earshot to think they subscribed to the “media”-created bullshit on any level.
The massive overexposure of a few Seattle bands had a long psychological fallout—the aftershocks continue even now, in the era of the perpetual anniversary. But it also yielded certain tendencies in the generation of musicians that followed. The most demonstrable was a withdrawal from bigness. Seattle’s commercial heyday was defined by a complicated relationship to showbiz (Sub Pop’s tongue-in-cheek “World Domination” shtick, Kurt Cobain’s “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” T-shirt), and a penchant for classic rock but punk-adjacent anthems. In general, the bands who came after seemed less interested in exploring the ironic intersection of underground and mainstream than in carving out a livable space under the radar.
As with sensibility, so, too, with sound: Instrumental interplay and transparent complexity started to creep over the dense walls of stacked-up power chords that had generated so many hits a few years before. The center of gravity shifted from garage to bedroom. Vocals grew more pleasingly idiosyncratic. Interlocking—as opposed to overwhelming—guitar work became foundational to the music of Sleater-Kinney, Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, the Shins, and several other bands represented here. But one record really set the stage for all of them.
The shadow Nevermind of post-boom NW indie rock was unquestionably Built to Spill’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love, which came out September 13, 1994—not so very long after a certain tragic event—and soon became the North Star to a great many bands that came along after. The songs were exuberant and melodic, but they were also, somehow, intensely private. Even the artwork—a white and gray cloud floating over a muted palette of cream and yellow—was a masterpiece of understatement. You might not even see it the first time, but when you caught it at just the right moment, just the right angle, you could recognize the solitary statement that you had been let in on, and you treasured it all the more.
My favorite bands on this list—Unwound, Beat Happening, Pedro the Lion, Sleater-Kinney, the Softies, Bratmobile, the Posies, Quasi, Death Cab, Bikini Kill—were energized by the well-kept secrecy of their greatness. That’s not to suggest they weren’t also ambitious for whatever performing artists are ambitious for. No one would argue that Bikini Kill weren’t rightfully eager to make their voice heard. Or that Neko Case wasn’t born to sing on the mainstage. Or that the Decemberists are especially demure. But they all sounded great in clubs, bars, and basements, too. It’s worth remembering that the top-selling record on this list, Give Up by the Postal Service, began its life as an extremely low-budget side project that no one, least of all its creators, expected very much from. The circle of people who appreciated this music was initially very small, and far removed from the rest of what was going on in the world—not unlike the Pacific Northwest itself.
As the music industry entered its long decline, a lot of people began to argue that the real fault lies with the bands—pardon me, the artists—who no longer seem to have a hunger for conquest and dominion. These people are flummoxed by the idea that any band would ever settle for less than a mass audience. But when I listen back to the music on this list, I’m reminded of a relatively short period during which mass-ness had been authoritatively debunked as a worthwhile goal. The albums on this list offer a good snapshot of the before, during, and after of this interregnum (let’s say roughly 1994-2001, between There’s Nothing Wrong with Love and Oh, Inverted World) when the music of this region sounded like an invitation to a private affair that you felt lucky to receive. There’s something to be said for the aesthetic and spiritual differences between setting out to conquer the world and holding still so the world knows where to find you.
Sean Nelson is a writer, musician, and actor who lives in Seattle, where he works as Arts & Music Editor for The Stranger, America’s Hometown Newspaper. He appears on two of the records on this list, but he isn’t saying which ones.
Listen to selections from the 50 Best Indie Rock Albums of the Pacific Northwest on Apple Music and Spotify.
Gaze: Mitsumeru
Vancouver trio Gaze began as the project of singer-guitarist Miko Hoffman and singer-bassist Megan Mallett, and they were soon joined by indie pop icon Rose Melberg on drums. Their first record, Mitsumeru, was recorded at Dub Narcotic studios and features 14 soul-spilling pop songs in the vein of Talulah Gosh or Melberg’s earlier project, Tiger Trap.
Gaze are largely obscure outside the K Records canon, but they represent the purest of intentions: to create a band with a strong aesthetic in their message. As seen most poignantly on Mitsumeru, Gaze spend a great deal of time standing up against jerks of the male variety: “Next time I see you, I hope you understand/Why I’ll act different while watching your dumb band,” Hoffman taunts on “Any Way.” On “Jelly Bean,” she spells it out further: “You think you have me figured out/But I’m sick of hearing/Your theories and your musings/On what’s best for me.” Gaze’s bold, distinctly feminist attitude aligns them well with the likes of Sleater-Kinney and Bratmobile. Melberg has continued to make music with PUPS, Knife Pleats, and under her own name, but Gaze remain a particularly charming and compelling project in her catalog. –Quinn Moreland
Listen: Gaze, “Jelly Bean”
Excuse 17: Such Friends Are Dangerous
Excuse 17 sat in the dead center of the early-’90s Olympia, Washington venn diagram formed by riot grrrl, queercore, Kill Rock Stars, and Evergreen State College. By the time Carrie Brownstein, Becca Albee, and CJ Phillips released the band’s self-titled debut album in 1994, via Chainsaw Records (a Portland queer zine turned label), riot grrrl’s first wave was already ebbing. Their second and final album, 1995’s Such Friends Are Dangerous, reinvigorated feminist punk with a sound simultaneously harder and more melodic than Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. In a setup similar to the one Sleater-Kinney would adopt, Brownstein and Albee both sang and played guitar, scattering hardcore howls amid catchy pop hooks.
Such Friends’ centerpiece, “This Is Not Your Wedding Song,” is a bitter rejoinder to an ex who's trying to hide her true self under a bridal gown. “I won’t cry at your wedding,” Brownstein screams in the chorus. But in between those electric jolts, crunching guitars lead her back to the deadpan deconstruction of a person she can see right through. Other songs brim with the biting sarcasm of smart women fed up with condescension. “I asked what time it was/Not how to make a watch,” Albee sneers at a proto-mansplainer on “Watchmaker.” Excuse 17 were more than just Carrie Brownstein juvenalia, but their music brims with all the elements that would come to define her career: intelligence, dark humor, and indelible riffs. –Judy Berman
Listen: Excuse 17, “This Is Not Your Wedding Song”
Damien Jurado: Maraqopa
For his 10th record, Seattle’s Damien Jurado built a gently stirring song cycle about a man who drops out of his familiar life and finds a strange new spot in the wilderness called Maraqopa. The tracks that comprise his discovery are as spacious and beautiful as his surroundings, with Jurado drawing just as much from sprawling psych-folk as mid-century pop. These elements might doom another record to feeling busy or scattershot, but Jurado delicately unites them—particularly on the twinkly, doo-wop-leaning “Working Titles,” which manages to feel tense even in its tender gracefulness. Throughout, Jurado grants Maraqopa plenty of breathing room, inviting listeners to lean in closer and catch each of his careful details, such as the hazy keys that float under the driving electric guitar solo of “Nothing Is the News.” Elsewhere, on the gently drifting “Everyone a Star,” Jurado’s open spaces are fully inhabitable, offering urban and rural listeners alike a yawning, lovely decadence. –Allison Hussey
Listen: Damien Jurado, “Working Titles”
Youth Lagoon: The Year of Hibernation
The Year of Hibernation is a particular kind of bedroom album. It’s not quite the sparse, intimate affair of Elliott Smith’s early records, but it’s also a far cry from the maxed-out noisescapes of Mount Eerie. It lands somewhere in the middle: a fuzzy, psychedelic tour through the active mind of Trevor Powers, a then-22-year-old San Diegoan transplanted to Boise, Idaho.
Arriving two years before Powers’ dense, meandering breakthrough Wondrous Bughouse, The Year of Hibernation is a quiet, charming introduction. Powers’ vocals are airy and fragile, like a recorder played through a flanger pedal; they give the album an unsettled yet confident feel. As he whispers on “17,” “It’s just me in my room/With my eyes closed,” but his debut is more than that: It’s the sound of a songwriter trying to get out of his own head by taking residency in yours. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen: Youth Lagoon, “17”
The Spinanes: Arches and Aisles
Scott Plouf, the drummer of the Spinanes, left the group after 1996’s Strand, which means 1998’s Arches and Aisles could be seen as a Rebecca Gates solo album. After its release, she retired the band’s name; she'd later cut a couple of solo records before concentrating mostly on art.
Still, Arches and Aisles feels like a Spinanes album, holding true to the duo’s tradition of carefully sculpted, understated pop. Though its two predecessors celebrated some semblance of amateurism—Manos had a twitchy vitality, and even Strand’s quietest moments had palpable tension—Arches and Aisles rolls easy, luxuriating in its contoured textures and constructed melodies. Even when the tempo rushes or the volume increases, there’s elegance. Gates' allegiance to DIY aesthetics gives the record a hushed, kinetic energy while also illustrating how indie started its slow transition from necessity to lifestyle during the course of the ’90s. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Listen: The Spinanes, “Kid in Candy”
The Posies: Frosting on the Beater
Despite their affable demeanor, the Posies knew how to throw shade. In the three years between their 1990 major-label debut, Dear 23, and its razor-sharp follow-up, Frosting on the Beater, grunge had grown from a regional sound to a national phenomenon, turning the power-pop revivalists’ native Seattle into a media circus. But while the band couldn’t resist taking shots at their city’s suddenly very crowded bandwagon (on the cutting single “Flavor of the Month”), they weren’t above cribbing some moves from the grunge playbook.
With Hole/Dinosaur Jr. producer Don Fleming at the helm, the band adopted a heavier, testier edge on Frosting on the Beater. It made Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer’s harmonies feel that much sweeter in contrast—especially on the striking, psych-tinged opener “Dream All Day,” the closest they ever came to capturing the alternative-nation zeitgeist. The album was essentially a Big Star release for the Singles soundtrack generation, and its songs still feel timeless despite production and provocation that’s decidedly of its time. –Evan Rytlewski
Listen: The Posies, “Dream All Day”
Quasi: Featuring “Birds”
Quasi consisted of organist Sam Coomes and Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss; for extra Portland points, Minders and Spinanes bassist (and one-time Elliott Smith girlfriend) Joanna Bolme often joined then. But it was Coomes’ use of the wheezing, heaving Rock-Si-Chord, an odd electronic instrument invented in the late ’60s to imitate the sound of a harpsichord, that distinguished the band. It was somewhere between Theremin and squeezebox, part melodeon and part congested chest cough, and Coomes could be heard applying it liberally over his friends’ records as well, from Heatmiser to Built to Spill.
It was a quintessentially Portland sound, ingratiating but slightly harsh, and on Featuring “Birds” it painted over the acidic curl of lyrics that picked apart the personal shortcomings of Coomes and Weiss. The two had dated for awhile and decided to work through their failing relationship the way any two musicians in an incestuous, too-cozy scene might: out in the open, on record. Their pained, sardonic brand of cheeriness was never so focused and bright as it was here, and their frank and intimate lyrics were never more affecting than when they sang to each other: “You turn me on/And it’s hard to turn me on.” –Jayson Greene
Listen: Quasi, “It's Hard to Turn Me On”
White Lung: Sorry
The Pacific Northwest has long sowed the seeds of punk, from the Kingsmen bashing out “Louie Louie” in 1963 to Wipers fusing anger and dread in the early ’80s. The region has served as home to Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, and other powerful, female-fronted bands. Both legacies continue in White Lung.
The British Columbia band’s second album, Sorry (released on the BC punk label Deranged) caught ears in 2012 with its modern, anthemic take on melodic hardcore. “Wipe that look from your face/I’ll drop you back from where you came,” singer Mish Way rages on opener “Take the Mirror,” atop the textbook galloping punk drumbeat. What follows is equally brutal. At only 19 minutes, Sorry’s 10 fast-and-furious missives are economical to a degree that make former labelmates Fucked Up sound like prog rock, and they’re powerful enough to make Courtney Love smile and Greg Sage tip his hat. –Ben Scheim
Listen: White Lung, “Take the Mirror”
Tiny Vipers: Life on Earth
The sky darkens, the air grows cold, the rain forces you inside; on an afternoon like this, you might bask in the comfort of solitude, in the reassurance that introspection can afford. Life on Earth, the second album by the Seattle-based Tiny Vipers, is heavy with this feeling. Singer-songwriter Jesy Fortino is a sculptor of depressive moods and oblique words; with just spacious acoustic guitar fingerpicking, an austere warble, and ample negative space, she chisels out unlikely melodies of extreme minimalism. The Life on Earth highlights “Development” and “Dreamer” are proof of just how strong you can remain while the world is disappearing around you. They are testaments to the power of things that are not physically there—friends who become ghosts, emotions unspoken. “A lot of the content is a mystery to me,” she’s said of these songs. “I’m not trying to get a point across. I’m just trying to put the pieces together to make the song approach a feeling. There’s a lot of uncertainty.” –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Tiny Vipers, “Dreamer”
Lync: These Are Not Fall Colors
In 1994, the Olympia-based trio Lync released These Are Not Fall Colors, their one and only studio album. Co-produced by Calvin Johnson and released on his K Records, it feels out of step with the label’s significantly less dark output; to hear music similar to Lync’s, you’d have to look to Tumwater, the next town over, where Unwound were also excavating emotional turmoil from scraping feedback. This was the Northwest in the mid-’90s, after all. Anguish was plentiful.
These Are Not Fall Colors unspools like a collection of song sketches, half-formed ideas that members Sam Jayne, James Bertram, and Dave Schneider pummeled into working shape. Bertram’s bass sounds like it’s being piped through a wet cardboard box, and his and Jayne’s lyrics are repetitive sentence fragments, endlessly spiraling toward a nonexistent conclusion. It all hangs together beautifully. Album opener “B” begins mid-sentence: “And you’ve proved once again/In the bubble that you only need your own air to breathe/And a knife in the bubble says/It’s not killing unless the killing is serial.” Jayne and Bertram repeat slight variations of this until the song fades away. It’s a shame that These Are Not Fall Colors is currently out of print, but it makes sense, too; an album this insular was designed to be discovered and passed around covertly, forever a hidden gem. –Sam Hockley-Smith
Listen: Lync, “B”
Pretty Girls Make Graves: The New Romance
Formed out of the Washington bands the Hookers and Murder City Devils, Pretty Girls Make Graves transferred the collage approach to their songs, too; every instrument on their second album, The New Romance, drops into the record from a different angle, forming post-hardcore songs that have the topology of bone fractures. The album was recorded by Phil Ek, who also produced Keep It Like a Secret by Built to Spill and Leaves Turn Inside You by Unwound; as on those recordings, he emphasizes the space around the musicians as much as the performance itself. The New Romance is a severe and claustrophobic recording; the room in which the band is playing sounds small and narrow, and the guitar and organ on the title track combine and collapse into each other. “We got it, we set the motion/Now we have it in our hands,” Andrea Zollo sings on the title track, her tense, glassy voice hovering somewhere over the turbulence of her band—as if suspended in an atmosphere of amplified dread. –Brad Nelson
Listen: Pretty Girls Make Graves, “The New Romance”
Milk Music: Cruise Your Illusion
So many rock‘n’roll anthems are built from positive feelings—love, sex, determination—but some of the best thrive on darkness. Olympia’s Milk Music live in an undeniably liberal state—one that legalized weed in the three years since they’ve released an album—so it makes sense that frontman Alex Coxen finds his liberation in angry catharsis. “[People are] afraid to be negative, or they think it’s a bad thing,” he said. “You have to harness that energy.”
Milk Music does that throughout Cruise Your Illusion—an album stuffed with anthemic rock ’n’ roll, and one that Coxen described as “propaganda to be wild.” While guitarist Charles Waring deserves comparisons to J Mascis or even Neil Young, Coxen wails like no one’s watching. His lyrics can seem insular at times, like when he sings about not being able to hit a high note or when, on “New Lease on Love,” he notes, “It must look silly from the outside/Talkin’ to myself with such style.” But then he goes broader, lamenting people for hiding from that “wild feeling” and proclaiming, “Don’t fuck with me, man/I’m illegal and free” (“Illegal and Free”). Cruise Your Illusion is excellent driving music, both in its guitar heroics and its infectious confidence—both no surprise coming from a band who described their own album as “the best fucking record ever made.” –Evan Minsker
Listen: Milk Music, “New Lease on Love”
The Softies: It’s Love
In the underground as in the mainstream, loudness and aggression often get conflated with bucking the norms. The defiantly gentle guitar-pop miniatures of the Softies showed that winsome and quiet moments could be every bit as unorthodox—if not more so—than the familiar ’90s angst and distortion. The duo of Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia released three remarkable albums on K Records from 1995 to 2000, and there’s no better place to start than with their immaculate debut, It’s Love, a gossamer set of lovesick guitar-and-voice tracks that’s as dazzling yet delicate as a spiderweb in sunlight—with a sly cover of Talulah Gosh’s “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction (Thank God)” to boot.
The Softies ended up as something of a passing phase in longer careers that also included (for Melberg) the noisier California indie-pop bands Tiger Trap and Go Sailor and (for Sbragia) Portland’s All Girl Summer Fun Band. That’s only fitting, since their music implicitly argues for the undervalued and ephemeral; so, too, is the fact that they shared a handful of shows with a then-up-and-comer named Elliott Smith. Happily, the Softies reunited in 2012 for their first shows in more than a decade; they’re a high point along a continuum of artists, from the Marine Girls to Frankie Cosmos, who understand that quiet and vulnerability can be truly radical gestures. –Marc Hogan
Listen: The Softies, “It's Love”
Gun Outfit: Possession Sound
Gun Outfit are a contemporary rock band of rare grace. Their sound has been remarkably cinematic across their four full-length records since 2009, ready to play on 16mm film. Though it was released via the L.A. label Post Present Medium, Possession Sound was the crown jewel of the Olympia underground scene when it came out six years ago—not least because Gun Outfit were carrying on the proud local tradition of playing rock‘n’roll with no bass player, à la Sleater-Kinney and Beat Happening, giving their music a feeling of being suspended in air.
Possession Sound is the name of a body of water in Washington, and the record shares a depth, a meditative vastness. Inspired by jukebox country and classic blues, the band’s punk roots play out in its slightly lopsided beats, the off-kilter drawl of Carrie Keith and Dylan Sharp’s dueling vocals, and the dark, mystical, ripping grooves. From the slowly unfurling kaleidoscope of “Phaedra” to the poetic melancholy of the sad-cowboy duet “Wide Awake,” Possession Sound exudes personality. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Gun Outfit, “Phaedra”
Pedro the Lion: Control
By 2002, the Seattle-based Pedro the Lion had become a kind of chamber emo band, their guitars and drums symphonically compressed into economy to convey emotional terror. Their third album, Control, describes divorce, infidelity, and the general evil of capitalism through slow, accumulating details. “The friction and skin/The trembling sigh,” David Bazan sings in “Rapture,” a song in which his characters experience sexual confusion of a religious order.
Bazan’s baritone is sober and crisp, and his delivery has an almost metronomic rhythm; every syllable is pronounced as if it contains a complete unit of meaning. Around this, Bazan and bassist Casey Foubert build songs that have the integrity of architectural forms; it’s as if the different motel rooms that make up the landscape of the record are assembling around Bazan’s voice. Control is form and content meeting at their most oblique angle, forming a scene in which people are moving very little and nothing really happens, but their feelings twist angrily in the air around them. –Brad Nelson
Listen: Pedro the Lion, “Rapture”
Mirah: You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This
You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This is a subtle examination of what happens when the life you imagine leading smashes up against reality. Released in 2000, the album came at an interesting time for the Northwest music scene: Beat Happening had carved out a space for the bleeding edges of innocent nostalgia, and the Olympia-based Mirah took that one step further, stitching together blown-out drums and twinkling, intimate guitar. She was joined by producer/multi-instrumentalist Phil Elverum, then just a year away from releasing his career-defining album with the Microphones, The Glow Pt 2.
On first listen, You Think It’s Like This sounds a little twee, but Mirah pushes it past typical singer/songwriter fare by uniting quaint ideas about love with covert explorations of sex and healing. On “La Familia” she sings in a voice that sounds like she’s still just waking up: “And here’s a question that’s been tested/Tell me, if we sleep together, would it make it any better?” Clearly, she already knows the answer. You Think It’s Like This is an album about perception, how one thing can seem like something else, and how sincerity can be subversive. –Sam Hockley-Smith
Listen: Mirah, “La Familia”
The Decemberists: Picaresque
The title of the Decemberists’ third album comes from the Spanish word picaro, which means “rogue.” While there are certainly many moments of lighthearted, Rushmore-brand grandiosity in Picaresque—the jangly “The Sporting Life,” the nearly nine-minute epic “Mariner’s Revenge Song”—a deep sadness lies within the Portland band’s typical theatricality. “The Engine Driver” practices repetitive acts as a means of erasing the memory of a lover: “I’ve written pages upon pages/Trying to rid you from my bones.” “The Bagman’s Gambit” deals with a romance that is interrupted by politics; the protagonist of “Eli, the Barrow Boy” dies heartbroken. As its title suggests, the Chris Walla-produced record’s reference points occasionally span towards exotic (“The Infanta”) but the Decemberists always return to a romanticism for the Pacific Northwest. Picaresque is the quintessential Decemberists album: It's the band at their most extravagant, their most defining. –Quinn Moreland
Listen: The Decemberists, “The Infanta”
Band of Horses: Everything All the Time
Band of Horses’ Everything All the Time was, in some ways, ahead of its time. It forecasted the second half of the decade’s turn toward woodsy Americana from the likes of Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes. But it’s also a record loyal to the mid-Aughts indie rock scene it came from; the grinding riff of “Wicked Gil” nods to Interpol’s fashionable post-punk, the heavier songs borrow post-Funeral drama, and My Morning Jacket’s trademark buckets of reverb drench Ben Bridwell’s countrified howl.
What’s remarkable about Everything All the Time, even more than its timely indie inception, is how huge it still sounds. It’s the kind of record in which every syllable is a sing-along, even if you don’t know all the words. (Is he warbling, “Shaking asshole, where’s the remote?” Does it matter?) Tracks like “The Funeral” and “Monsters” pack a powerful grind and a soaring ambition that seems to guarantee the band’s future trajectory of signing to the majors, soundtracking car commercials, and getting bigger and better with each record. Even if only the first two of those predictions came true, Everything All the Time is great enough to place Band of Horses in a lineage of a few other scraggly Seattle bands who, for a short time, had the superpower of merging the past, present, and future. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen: Band of Horses, “Monsters”
The Halo Benders: The Rebels Not In
The Halo Benders were the rare supergroup that delivered on their promise. By the release of The Rebels Not In, the band’s third and final album, what had begun as a casual jam between Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson and Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch had become an accomplished, tight outfit in its own right. Here, Johnson’s summer-bummer stoicism crashes into Martsch’s elastic, soaring optimism in a way that doesn’t so much mend their differences as it does take advantage of the vast chasm between them. There’s never been a more Johnson-esque lyric than his half-sung, “Check out Zeus, wears a noose, chased a lot of wild goose/Born to fail, yet set full sail, chased a lot of scornful tail” (“Devil City Destiny”). And the echoed, almost dubbed-out guitar squall of “Virginia Reel Around the Fountain” is a definitive Martsch moment.
Each of the three Halo Benders LPs are worth some time, but this is the one where everything feels exactly right. Johnson handles the bulk of the vocals and Martsch tackles large swaths of the instrumentation, seamlessly flowing ‘roided-out surf rock into glittering guitar solos. The Rebels Not In is the antithesis of a Big Deal record: It’s just two dudes in peak form, making stellar music together because they feel like it. –Sam Hockley-Smith
Listen: The Halo Benders, “Devil City Destiny”
The Microphones: It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water
It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water was Phil Elverum’s second album under the Microphones moniker. Though its sound is rough and temperamental, the 11 tracks began to establish the cosmic mythology that would become the focus of the band's landmark album, The Glow Pt. 2. Each song—including a carefully chosen cover of “Sand” by Eric’s Trip—finds Elverum struggling to connect, lost in a fog, drifting out to sea. Seasons change, distance grows, instruments cut out suddenly, and the cold ocean swells; all of this is distinctly Pacific Northwestern, distinctly Elverum-esque.
Present throughout is a sense of kinship, closeness, and warmth that serves as a beacon of hope. In the album’s 11-minute opus, “The Glow,” the eponymous element speaks to Elverum, who describes the result as: “I started to glow/And it felt like/Being pulled out by the tide.” It Was Hot finds Elverum submitting to his smallness and focusing on the ephemeral, two concepts that have since made his career. –Quinn Moreland
Listen: The Microphones, “The Glow”
Heatmiser: Mic City Sons
By 1996, the breakup of Heatmiser was looming. Elliott Smith and Neil Gust’s rock band had played their first shows in Portland just four years prior, but they were straining under the weight of Smith’s burgeoning solo career; he had just released Roman Candle and his self-titled album, and would soon assume his rightful place in indie history with Either/Or. So Heatmiser’s third and final record, Mic City Sons, marks a special place in Smith’s timeline.
It was a grand exit for Heatmiser: The quartet was fueled by Virgin Records money, which allowed them to rent a home and record with producers Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock, who worked with Smith on his solo records. Smith wanted to move away from Heatmiser’s rock sound and towards the lighter pop of his solo fare. The band was split over this change, but the surrounding tension did not make its way into Mic City Sons. Instead, there is an obvious, visionary tug-of-war between Smith’s guitar melancholy and Gust’s upbeat melodies. It’s a glorious, complicated swan song. –Quinn Moreland
Listen: Heatmiser, “Get Lucky”
Beck: One Foot in the Grave
Beck is as L.A. an artist as they come, but 1994’s One Foot in the Grave is 100% Pacific Northwest. Not only was it cut in Olympia by K Records kingpin Calvin Johnson and released on his label, but its performers were a who’s-who of local scenesters from the era: Johnson, James Bertram of 764-Hero, Scott Plouf of Built to Spill, Sam Jayne of Love is Laughter, and Chris Ballew of the Presidents of the United States of America.
The tunes are connected to the anti-folk Beck was making at the time, but the production style and performances lean heavily to K’s aesthetic and the vibe of Olympia: dull, thudding kickdrums (“I Get Lonesome”), sweetly off-key vocals (“See Water”), and just plain shitty-sounding guitars (“Girl Dreams”). It all adds up to a ramshackle, charming product befitting its origins. As Beck’s last independently released record before he found wider fame, there’s a gentle, naive sweetness to One Foot in the Grave that the musician has rarely channeled since. –Ben Scheim
Listen: Beck, “Girl Dreams”
Bratmobile: Pottymouth
Bratmobile’s debut album is a master class on mixing righteous messages with riotous spirit, and it’s indelibly associated with the riot grrrl scene it helped lead. Though the trio was based in both Olympia and Washington, D.C., their Pacific Northwest cred is undeniable: Lead vocalist Allison Wolfe and drummer Molly Neuman both attended the University of Oregon and, with guitarist Erin Smith, played at Olympia’s landmark International Pop Underground Convention.
Pottymouth, the only album the trio recorded before their first breakup in 1994, doesn’t just cuss out the disproportionately male hipsterati; it’s also too much fun to ignore. Whether scrambling genders on a Runaways cover (“Cherry Bomb”), telling off lusty creeps with red eyes (“Love Thing”), or, yes, disavowing dudebro one-up-manship (“Cool Schmool”), their surfy post-B-52’s blitzkriegs drew attention to huge, inequitable messes while dancing straight through them. Their influence as pioneering indie-rock women is broad, from the Coathangers to Potty Mouth, and just as Wolfe prophesied: “Hip kids know just where to go/I’m the one who tells them so,” Wolfe deadpans on the deliciously ramshackle closer, “Queenie.” It’s still wise to heed her. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Bratmobile, “Cool Schmool”
Death Cab for Cutie: We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes
In Greg Kot’s Ripped, Death Cab for Cutie attribute their slow-build success to (paraphrasing here) being allowed to suck privately in the beginning. While they were expressing relief over not having to undergo the kind of white-hot internet scrutiny that meets developing bands these days, they also had the good fortune to emerge out of the sleepy college town of Bellingham, Washington, rather than Seattle or Olympia.
In the same manner that the burgeoning group faintly touched on the sound of their more sizable peers (Built to Spill, Modest Mouse), the songs on their second album, We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes, are always adjacent to something, verging on catharsis they never reach. Its narrator remains close enough to know how far he is from the action: searching for a job, driving an hour to see a girlfriend in the big city, getting invited to the wedding and being seated at the “What the hell is he doing here?” table. As these deceptively intricate, deeply relatable slices of urban young adulthood steadily found an audience, the word-of-mouth buzz grew around Death Cab while they lived in a place so tiny, the neighbors asked these guys to turn it down. “It’s so appropriate, the way we amplify the sound,” Ben Gibbard sings on “The Employment Pages.” It’s very appropriate. –Ian Cohen
Listen: Death Cab for Cutie, “The Employment Pages”
The Shins: Chutes Too Narrow
When Princess Amidala told the guy from “Scrubs” about the life-changing power of the Shins, it’s safe to assume no one’s life changed more than James Mercer’s. Formerly, he was the bandleader of an introverted group of indie-pop hobbits bred in Albuquerque and based in Portland; post-Garden State, he became the unlikely mascot for an indie-rock cottage industry.
Chutes Too Narrow was made while Mercer attempted to shield himself from the glare, and each of his 10 songs treats immaculate hooks like the next one might provide an escape hatch from the limelight. “Kissing the Lipless” is a coasting thrill ride that seems to terrify the mousey architect who built it, and the verses of “Saint Simon” lead you gently by the wrist down stairstep minor chord progressions before disintegrating into a wordless major-key chorale, a kind of card-trick harmonic flourish that never loses its power. The Shins aren’t an outwardly spectacular band; they don’t have blinding charisma or a dramatic back story. But Chutes Too Narrow remains paean to the amount of joy you can wring from something as simple and unsexy as craft. –Jayson Greene
Listen: The Shins, “Kissing the Lipless”
The Thermals: The Body, the Blood, the Machine
The Portland pop-punks’ third album rapidly unpacks the most famous imagery of the Old Testament, stacking Sunday school tropes like Babel only to kick them back into the dust. Plagues of locusts descend, wives crumble into pillars of salt, animals march in mated pairs onto a big-ass boat that will sail over flooded plains. It’s the true miracle that the Thermals’ derision is never sanctimonious, never cloying or snotty; rather, The Body, the Blood, the Machine is an insurgent kind of spirituality in itself, an inclusive rally against the thin solace of conformity and incuriosity.
Singer Hutch Harris had yelped grave, politicized observations before this—on the group’s more brash preceding album, Fuckin A, he demanded “Pray for a new state/Pray for assassination”—but his cynicism was newly anthemic on The Body, freshly singalong as it scavenged dystopian new worlds. “So give us what we’re asking for/Cause either way we’re gonna take it/Our power doesn’t run on nothing/We need the land you’re standing on,” he sneers on “Power Doesn’t Run on Nothing,” over discordantly plucky bass from Kathy Foster, nodding darkly to manifest destiny and intellectual enslavement alike. There were a few moments of levity—in “Here’s Your Future,” God’s advice to Noah is the hilariously reductive “It’s gonna rain”—but the album scarcely lets up as a jarring, breakneck prophecy. By the time the rapture descends, a full 38 minutes later (“I Hold the Sound”), the Thermals drip off into squalling feedback and distortion, utterly spent—and fully deserving a day of rest. –Stacey Anderson
Listen: The Thermals, “Here’s Your Future”
The Exploding Hearts: Guitar Romantic
At the Guitar Romantic release show in Portland, the room was pretty much empty—just the opening bands and their significant others showed up. No records got sold. According to guitarist Terry Six, this was typical of an Exploding Hearts show in their hometown, where they weren’t exactly loved. Still, Guitar Romantic is a Stumptown album through-and-through: It was recorded in one of its basements, and frontman Adam Cox met the garage-rock journeyman King Louie Bankston on its streets. The song “Jailbird” is partially inspired by Oaks Amusement Park—the park where two members of the band worked and hit on girls, not in that order.
Guitar Romantic remains a power-pop classic. It packs howl-along melodies that beg to be blasted—upbeat tracks about heartbreak, agony, and sniffing glue. (Loosely, this was also the Ramones’ formula—gleeful songs about fucked-up situations.) The band’s greatest weapon was Terry Six, who murdered the guitar parts of Guitar Romantic; then 20 years old, he knocked out the album’s biggest moments, from the fill that follows the bridge of “Sleeping Aides & Razor Blades” to the massive outro of “Rumours in Town." Unlike so many rock bands that surfaced in the early 2000s, Exploding Hearts sounded like they were having fun. A 2003 car accident stopped everything—a devastating end to a band in their prime. Still, over a decade later, Guitar Romantic’s appeal endures. –Evan Minsker
__Listen: __The Exploding Hearts, “Sleeping Aides & Razor Blades”
Neko Case: Furnace Room Lullaby
Violence pulses through Furnace Room Lullaby, something Neko Case accentuates with a still, lifeless pose on the album’s cover. Despite these dark undertones, the album doesn’t feel bleak, partially due to the vitality of her interplay with her Boyfriends, a loose collective who jam like a roadhouse band and give the album an earthy kick absent on her other albums. Many of those musicians are Seattle transplants like Case herself, attracted to the vibrant scene left there in the wake of grunge, and Furnace Room Lullaby is so compelling because it exists at a crossroads of styles and eras.
Case clearly loves creepy old murder ballads and jukejoint waltzes, but this is hardly traditional: There’s a wry remove to her storytelling and a nerviness to the arrangements that owe an allegiance to punk, from the hyperactive rockabilly rave-up “Mood to Burn Bridges” to the manic barnburner “Whip the Blankets.” But what’s striking about Furnace Room Lullaby is how the slower numbers showcase her finesse with country customs. On “Porchlight,” Case sways between a dreamy falsetto and an earthy lower register, creating a bittersweet reverie; the spell is matched in “South Tacoma Way,” a southern lament transplanted to the Northwest in which the cadence of Case’s delivery says as much as her sad words. Furnace Room Lullaby is a record that feels out of time, in the best possible sense: It exists in a netherworld, a place where the past and present blur, where only deeply bruised emotions matter. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Listen: Neko Case & Her Boyfriends, “Porchlight”
Dead Moon: In the Graveyard
This is a scorched rock‘n’roll record that sounded like the South, came from Portland, and was only popular in Europe. Dead Moon were the devotedly D.I.Y. and lovably eccentric husband-and-wife duo of Fred and Toody Cole, plus their late drummer, Andrew Loomis, and they were always understood better abroad.
Their country-punk records have become spiritual music for freaks the world over, starting with the blistering night music of their self-released debut and its wailing classic rock melodies ripped from the 1970s. In the Graveyard flies in many directions, from the sinister ripper “Out on a Wire” to their not-slightly-absurdist cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love”—and throughout, they cast a spell remarkably similar to the latter. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Dead Moon, “Out on a Wire”
Unwound: Leaves Turn Inside You
How do you invent space? In 2000, the Olympia post-hardcore band Unwound literally built it—as a recording studio called MagRecOne—in order to record their final album, Leaves Turn Inside You. Today, it still feels less like hearing a collection of songs, more like inhaling their smoke and sifting through their wreckage. The album opens with a two-minute synth drone, and ends with a sample of Dixieland jazz; in between, the songs swell and contract like jellyfish, their structures similarly transparent and porous.
On previous Unwound records, the guitars offered the dimension and melodic range of sheet metal. Here they glow and echo, lending shape and depth to the space around them, like objects accenting a room; “Terminus,” a standout track, starts as a knotted punk song, melts into a river of strings, and then abruptly shifts into a nervous, unrelated instrumental. Voices on Leaves sound as if they’re testing the limits of the compositions instead of carrying melodic ideas, as if they’re wandering through dark and trying to feel for a wall. On their swan song, Unwound discovered that the way to invent space was to create a room and then make it feel haunted. –Brad Nelson
Listen: Unwound, “Terminus”
Wipers: Youth of America
Youth of America is one of the greatest records ever made about feeling displaced and disillusioned—as illustrated on the highlight track, “When It’s Over,” which opens with a long, massive build of dystopic urgency. Frontman Greg Sage weaves a narrative about life on the road, and not the romantic “anything’s possible” sort of bohemia; he’s alone, unsure, and uneasy about what waits for him at each pit stop. The songs are longer, which means sturdy melodies like the one in “When It’s Over” can find added power in repetition—a tactic seemingly borrowed from psychedelic and krautrock records. It also gives Sage an opportunity to press his point home on “Youth of America”—he urges kids not to ignore what’s happening around them, but to “Feel it now...now...now...WOO.” That can’t be condensed in a 2.5-minute pop song; Wipers revisit that idea, in a variety of ways, for a full 10 minutes.
Structurally and thematically, Youth of America is an album that challenges one of the biggest tropes in punk. Forget “no future”—what about the present? Things are fucked, actively, right now, and nothing’s changing. “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” utters a quiet, sullen Sage during the simmering middle stretch of the album’s rowdy title track. Somehow, we’re still there 35 years later. Wipers’ call to action—to “rectify this now!”—seems to become more necessary with each passing day. –Evan Minsker
Listen: Wipers, “Youth of America”
The Postal Service: Give Up
“The thing that gave me the confidence to do [another tour] was knowing that in the time since we last played, hundreds of thousands of people—dare I say millions—bought the record,” Ben Gibbard said after the Postal Service’s 2013 reunion tour. “Doing those shows, I realized people were in the palm of our hands.” It’s not the kind of boasting one would expect from the mild-mannered guy who dreamed only of being “The winter coat/Buttoned and zipped straight to the throat/With the collar up/So you won't catch a cold” (“Brand New Colony”). But he wasn’t wrong about his group’s impact.
Released on Sub Pop in 2003, a few months before Death Cab for Cutie’s commercial breakthrough, Give Up touched a nerve. Gibbard’s lone collaborative album with Jimmy Tamborello (aka Dntel) was hardly the first merging of indie rock and electronic music, but it was the one that spread like fire. Emotive, stripped-down covers followed, from Sub Pop labelmates the Shins and Iron & Wine, and later, Bright Eyes recruited Tamborello to help him essentially remake the record whole on Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. Throughout Give Up, it’s easy to facepalm at some of Gibbard’s sappier lyrics; “I want life in every word,” he admits in “Clark Gable,” “To the extent that it’s absurd.” But his shameless romanticism is part of what makes Give Up so undeniable: It’s an album of simple dreams, a rainy day collection of love songs, written like no one was listening. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen: The Postal Service, “Clark Gable”
The New Pornographers: Twin Cinema
Power-pop reemerged in the ’90s, and the term was an oxymoron 99.9% of the time. Real-deal pop is seven-figure warfare, juggernaut vocalists and their highly skilled songwriters formulating foolproof, shock-and-awe media domination—and you’re gonna argue that Fountains of Wayne and Semisonic have more juice than Max Martin just because they play guitars? The New Pornographers had done well by the genre on their two previous albums, but they redefined it in 2005, once they started acting less like a trio of cerebral Vancouver singer-songwriters and more like a Swedish brain trust.
On Twin Cinema, Dan Bejar, A.C. Newman, and Neko Case engage in melodic brinkmanship, maxing out everything. “Sing Me Spanish Techno” is their brassiest anthem and none-too-subtle pop culture critique; “Three or Four” is actually funky. Bejar has never been more straightforward and earnest than on “Streets of Fire,” and Case’s country weepers reveal themselves as Vegas-ready power ballads (“These Are Fables”). Meanwhile, Kurt Dahle contributes tremendous drumming, pushed obscenely high in the mix. The megawatt exuberance of Twin Cinema didn’t just make good on the premise of power-pop, it earned the titles of Mass Romantic and Electric Version more than those records did. –Ian Cohen
Listen: The New Pornographers, “Sing Me Spanish Techno”
Sleater-Kinney: All Hands on the Bad One
All Hands on the Bad One was Sleater-Kinney’s most broadly accessible album to date, the knife handed handle-first to an unsuspecting populace. Capping an intense run of five albums released in six years, and riding a wave of critical acclaim and regularly sexist astonishment at their watertight punk musicianship and empowered lyricism, the Olympia trio had been encouraged by music industry experts to sand down their rough edges to cross over to the mainstream.
The trio's response was on wax and succinct–“Was I born to accommodate?/I’m so good at playing dead” (“Youth Decay”)—and serves one highlight of an album rife with passionate social criticism and dry humor, from their jabbing at expat fetishism (“Male Model”) to lamenting society’s notion of death as spectacle (“Was It a Lie?”), all atop their most melodic and nuanced rock hooks yet. On the tour de force “#1 Must Have,” singer Corin Tucker decries rape at concerts with a soul-shattering wail, riding Janet Weiss’ crashing drum rolls and Carrie Brownstein’s anchoring, beseeching guitar. “Culture is what we make it/Yes it is,” Tucker howls. “Now is the time/To invent!” Hearing Sleater-Kinney refuse to acquiesce still feels like being on the right side of history. –Stacey Anderson
Listen: Sleater-Kinney, “#1 Must Have”
Japandroids: Celebration Rock
“We yell like hell to the heavens!” Japandroids’ singer/guitarist Brian King and drummer David Prowse do just that at the end of “The Nights of Wine and Roses,” the first track from their second album, Celebration Rock. The Vancouver duo’s 2009 debut, Post-Nothing, had already set a winning template through its fervently simple, Replacements-by-way-of-Constantines anthems exploding with youth, plural pronouns, and whoa-oh-ohs built for crowd scream-alongs.
Still, it was a shock how Celebration Rock refined those basic elements into something grandiose enough to support the quasi-religious imagery, whether in the victory gallop of “Fire’s Highway” or the lighters-aloft tenderness of the finale “Continuous Thunder.” It all peaks in the moment when the band that almost quit before its first album lives up to their windswept rockstar theatrics, the camaraderie-clinching “The House That Heaven Built,” which headbangs again toward the abyss: “If they try to slow you down/Tell them all to go to hell!” Japandroids used to worry about dying, but here, they sound immortal. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Japandroids, “Continuous Thunder”
Destroyer: Streethawk: A Seduction
To be an independent musician in the Pacific Northwest is to resist: Sure, there might be more opportunities in New York or Los Angeles or Toronto, but if you’re in it for “opportunities,” why not just get a real job? The area’s relative isolation can breed brilliance along with resentment, cynicism, and the occasional self-defeating streak. Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, who has lived in Vancouver for most of his adult life, knows all these well, and they’re on full display on Streethawk: A Seduction. It’s a quasi-concept album about an aging rock star; a haunted tribute to the life, death, and desires of Ian Curtis; a meta-narrative about the pitfalls of bad art and selling out; and why it is part of any artist’s job to stay vigilant in the face of a commercial society built to champion bloat and affected sorrow.
Through all this, Streethawk takes the side of creative virtue; “stay critical or die” is one of its many mottos. But Bejar isn’t preaching some kind of stonefaced indie doctrine here—he understands the temptations of popular culture, and much of the album’s drama comes from him doing battle with his own ethics. Musically, Streethawk’s piano-heavy odes to early ’70s rock—with some Pavement shamble replacing that era’s bluesy swagger—are anything but obscure, and the whole thing crests when he yelps, “There’s a rumor going around even Destroyers have a price!” right before a distorted guitar splashes down, satisfying our basest rock’n’roll instincts. These are anthems for those who are wary of anthems. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: Destroyer, “The Sublimation Hour”
Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes
Fleet Foxes spawned dozens of folk-pop imitators in their wake, but none of the band’s knockoffs ever matched the refined, lush decadence of their self-titled debut LP. The Seattle group marries thick, rootsy instrumental layers and howling harmonies, with mandolin and banjo licks embellishing, creating backdrops as green and gorgeous as the forestry that covers their home. With Robin Pecknold’s gentle voice and poetic lyricism, Fleet Foxes blooms as a warm, inviting record that’s cozy without being cloying: “White Winter Hymnal” and “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” offer enchanting folk-pop melodies, and “Blue Ridge Mountains” and “Your Protector” offer fascinating, simmering tension. –Allison Hussey
Listen: Fleet Foxes, “White Winter Hymnal”
Built to Spill: Keep It Like a Secret
Going into their fourth album, Keep It Like a Secret, Built to Spill already had two masterpieces under their belt: the candy-sweet There’s Nothing Wrong With Love and the spaced-out, major-label curveball Perfect From Now On. But rather than reinvent themselves again, for their second Warner Bros. outing, the Boise rockers split the difference between Nothing Wrong’s puppy-dog pop and Perfect’s compositional gymnastics, limiting their jamming to mostly swift, controlled bursts. (The closing track “Broken Chairs” is the walloping exemption.)
Lyrically, frontman Doug Martsch let his Charlie Brown pessimism run rampant, yet he offsets his downbeat quips with genuinely comforting reassurances that we all feel overwhelmed and off-balance sometimes, finding solace in shared misery on the gorgeously somber “Else.” And although Martsch has often written about how the insecurities of youth trail us into adulthood, he’s never done so more movingly than on “Carry the Zero,” six minutes of tough love packaged in a hug. “Count your blemishes,” Martsch sings, in his most tearjerking line. “You can’t—they’re all gone.” In other words, all jokes aside, it really does get better. –Evan Rytlewski
Listen: Built to Spill, “Carry the Zero”
The Shins: Oh, Inverted World
By 2001, indie had stopped signifying “independent,” a DIY sensibility that existed outside of the mainstream. Instead, “indie” came to define an aesthetic somewhere just left of center—an idea with ugly, misshapen roots sculpted into something refined and tasteful, something that proudly belonged to a tradition. No other album represents this shift better than the Shins’ 2001 debut. Subsequent albums would prove guitarist/vocalist James Mercer was the band’s undisputed leader but, at the time of its release, Oh, Inverted World seemed like the work of a collective, a group that excelled in delicately woven interplay.
R.E.M. is clearly the band’s lodestar—all the Shins' guitars jangle, their melodies wind—but where the Athens, Georgia quartet luxuriated in Southern murk, Oh, Inverted World is defined by its clean lines: You don’t get lost in atmosphere, you follow the contours. With its clarion guitars and intertwined hooks, “Know Your Onion!” harkens back to the pioneering power pop of the Flamin’ Groovies—a candied rush countered by “New Slang,” which finds gentle comfort within its lonely acoustic strums. “Caring Is Creepy” splits the difference between two, offering ringing melodies colored by warm melancholy—a combination that suggests a lingering nostalgia tempered by an unspoken realization that things are better in the present. These exquisitely mixed emotions that help define Oh, Inverted World as the moment when indie became gentrified. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Listen: The Shins, “Caring Is Creepy”
Beat Happening: Jamboree
Beat Happening is the ground zero of Pacific Northwest indie rock, the first band who followed the rock lineage of the Kingsmen and the Sonics and turned their idiosyncratic sensibility into an ethos. Calvin Johnson, Heather Lewis, and Bret Lunsford first released the group’s self-titled album in 1985, but 1988’s Jamboree is where their primitive fuzz and winking asides coalesce into a defiant rallying call.
Beat Happening’s willful naïveté led to the group being tagged “twee”—and it’s true, the legions of groups who followed Beat Happening cribbed their childlike imagery—but Jamboree doesn't feel cutesy in the slightest. Stark and visceral, the album moves at a rapid clip, so three-minute songs—like “Indian Summer,” a melancholy sketch that’s the album's best-known song and emotional epicenter—play as considered epics. As raw as Jamboree sounds—and it’s a record that celebrates its cacophony in how the beats plod, the guitars flare and the vocals veer toward a flatline—all this amateurism is a deliberate affect, the work of a band creating their own dreamy, nervy world fueled by innocence and cynicism. These are the very elements that came to define the indie rock of the Pacific Northwest as a whole. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Listen: Beat Happening, “Indian Summer”
Bikini Kill: Pussy Whipped
There’s only one track on Pussy Whipped that exceeds three minutes, the album closer “For Tammy Rae.” For the rest of the record’s 11 songs, Bikini Kill fling swooping shrieks and howls, blistering guitar riffs, and chugging rhythm sections at warp speed. Kathleen Hanna’s lyrics are fantastically blunt, wasting no time in telling the world her terms; “Lil’ Red” launches with, “These are my tits, yeah/And this is my ass/And these are my legs/Watch them walk fucking away.”
Later, Bikini Kill deliver the unimpeachable riot grrrl anthem that is “Rebel Girl,” which taps into the power of friendship between women over fuzzy but furious power chords. “That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood,” Hanna hollers. "I got news for you/She is!" Pussy Whipped revels in the frustrations of being female, flipping internal seething into aggressive catharsis, all the while propelling the riot grrrl movement into the public eye with a ferocity that could not be ignored. –Allison Hussey
Listen: Bikini Kill, “Lil’ Red”
Death Cab for Cutie: Transatlanticism
Aspiring producers should study as gospel every knob twirl of “Tiny Vessels”—except, perhaps, the kind Ben Gibbard is singing about with flimsy bravado, followed shortly with the world’s least romantic description of a hickey: “Then tiny vessels oozed into your neck/And formed the bruises/That you said you didn’t want to fade.” It’s a testament to Chris Walla, Transatlanticism’s producer (and Death Cab for Cutie’s then-guitarist), that this fairly grotesque narrative is rendered gorgeous by the plush wall of guitars and reverb behind it—a small ache, singularly glamorous to the young, transformed into halting first steps toward intimacy.
The rest of Transatlanticism follows suit; the Bellingham, Washington group’s fourth and best album savors the scant moments of closeness inside a long-distance relationship, from the detritus inside a glove compartment to lurid, overdue peeks of skin through a ripped dress. As Gibbard grows increasingly withdrawn, flailing across the emotional and physical divide for which the album is named, Walla pushed the band into broader pop palettes, deftly expanding on the sentimental multitudes with a sonic loyalty that verges on literal; firework-like bursts of guitars dissipate under Gibbard’s high, choral keen of “So this is the new year/And I don’t feel any different” (“The New Year”), and delicate, refracted strums of guitar bolster Gibbard as he whispers, “And when I see you/I really see you upside down” (“A Lack of Color”). The autumnal angst was universal enough to be exported to the telegenic malcontents of “The O.C.,” and shortly thereafter to any listener whose own turmoil felt equally, irrepressibly grandiose. –Stacey Anderson
Listen: Death Cab for Cutie, “Tiny Vessels”
Modest Mouse: The Moon & Antarctica
Modest Mouse’s earliest albums were made for road trips—the songs take place in parking lots, cars, trains, and trucks, spinning their wheels for minutes at a time, only capable of horizontal motion. In Isaac Brock’s neck of the woods, you got left behind, got stuck, or just kept pushing forward, anywhere.
Conversely, The Moon and Antarctica is a head-trip album in which Modest Mouse upgraded from 2D to interactive. Abetted by Brian Deck’s richly layered, percussive production, Modest Mouse conjured a Dark Side of the Moonshine, an endlessly explorable multiverse of backwoods psychedelia with Brock's lyrics serving as a tome of Metaphysical Spirituality for the Cynic: “The universe is shaped exactly like the earth/If you go straight long enough/You’ll end up where you were” (“Third Planet”); “The one thing you taught me about human beings was this/They ain’t made of nothing but water and shit” (“What People Are Made Of”). Their ensuing popularity led to a motor vehicle pitchmen gig and the most subversive ad campaign of the 21st century: a family piles into a minivan as “Gravity Rides Everything” frames the purchase as a grim admission of impending mortality. In a rare moment of positivity, Brock proclaims that he’s not the dark center of the universe, but we’re still the butt of a pitch-black cosmic joke. –Ian Cohen
Listen: Modest Mouse, “Third Planet”
Elliott Smith: XO
Released five months after his hushed, hunched performance at the 1998 Oscars, XO saw Elliott Smith running with his unlikely new fame. It marked his solo major-label debut and, unlike previous DIY efforts, the album delivers famous recording studios and sidemen, string sections, and psychedelic tangents. Then in his late 20s, Smith was trying to make his own one-man White Album, filled with McCartney pianos, Harrison guitars, Lennon bloodletting, and even some playful Ringo oom-pah.
The record was largely written in New York City and made in Los Angeles—though two songs were recorded in his longtime home of Portland—and it’s got the vaulted ambition to match. But his Oregonian heart is still on full display: he’s fragile but strong, bitter but alive. The emotional core of these songs still have that third-rail intensity—dangerous, mysterious, angry, hurt. The frolicking juke joint piano on “Baby Britain” makes its searing takedown sneakily effective: “For someone half as smart/You’d be a work of art.” And there’s a strange sort of hope embedded in these sad songs’ layered intricacies, their tragedies given lift by the loving attention to detail. Smith himself sums this feeling up best in yet another notebook-ready couplet: “You only live a day/But it’s brilliant anyway” (“Independence Day”). The record’s sonic embellishments don’t weaken Smith’s whispering intimacy as much as they hold up his studied songwriting; there is no mistaking the man behind XO for just another white dude with an acoustic guitar. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: Elliott Smith, “Independence Day”
Sunny Day Real Estate: Diary
The title would later be ridiculed as a symbol of emo’s inward focus, but Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary, their 1994 debut on Sub Pop, can be read in various ways: in the form of punk rock evolving away from its original designs into more dynamic and insecure space, or as a display of spiralling interplay between four talented musicians from Seattle: singer/guitarist Jeremy Enigk, guitarist Dan Hoerner, bassist Nate Mendel, and drummer William Goldsmith.
That Sunny Day Real Estate broke up while putting together their second record, and never recorded in this exact lineup again, gives Diary the character of a happy accident. Enigk blew out his voice just before recording the album; on successive efforts, he gradually regenerated his range, but on Diary it’s reduced to a burned whine. “Running behind/Which one will I face?” he sings painfully in “Song About an Angel” as the band builds a vortex around him. His struggle to access notes and the half-mutated scream it produces is a fluke, one that helped spur on the many second-wave emo acts to follow. –Brad Nelson
Listen: Sunny Day Real Estate, “Song About an Angel”
Built to Spill: There’s Nothing Wrong With Love
Built to Spill made the 500 or so miles between Boise and Seattle seem like nothing. With their breakthrough second album, Doug Martsch and co. helped usher in a new Pacific Northwest sound: indie rock. Though the genre term is something of a catch-all these days, Martsch’s signature (though certainly J Mascis-indebted) guitar tone on There’s Nothing Wrong With Love quickly became an ideal, and it remains one.
However, the album’s significance lies in more than just its wiry, distorted jangle. Rife with both childlike curiosity and casual small-town ennui, Martsch’s most personal work to date documents a cluster of little lives that leave deceptively detailed impressions. Recorded in Seattle for the then-new local label Up, the album also marked a breakthrough for producer Phil Ek, who’d assisted go-to grunge producer Jack Endino previously but would go on to guide a number of iconic rock records himself. –Jillian Mapes
Listen: Built to Spill, “Big Dipper”
Modest Mouse: The Lonesome Crowded West
Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock is a true Pacific Northwesterner; he writes grimy, frank tales of blue collar lives housed in “trailers with no class” while wearing his cynicism on his plaid sleeve. On their second full-length, The Lonesome Crowded West, the Portland band fuses punk, indie rock, and twitchy disco grooves; producer Calvin Johnson gives ample attention to Brock’s lispy yelp, and pushes the band’s undersung rhythm section into the spotlight. As Brock howls his angsty agenda—”I’m trying to drink away the part of the day/That I cannot sleep away” (“Polar Opposites”)—drummer Jeremy Green and bassist Eric Judy’s rocksteady back line provides the perfect counterpoint for Brock’s snarl.
Better still is the album's centerpiece, the epic, 11-minute “Trucker’s Atlas,” an enrapturing meditation on travel, displacement, and the lonely roads of the American West. Driven by Green's loose, tribal drumming and a biting Brock guitar melody, it's not the record's most concise or perfect moment, but it’s a neat summation of The Lonesome Crowded West—wide open, spread out, and with an open-faced tone that speculates on possibility and pessimism in the same breath. His shout of “How far does your road go?” makes clear: He is uncertain if the promised land is near, or if is just another parking lot to cross. –Ben Scheim
Listen: Modest Mouse, “Trucker’s Atlas”
The Microphones: The Glow, Pt. 2
Phil Elverum’s music carries a powerful sense of place. The Microphones mastermind (born Phil Elvrum) has emphasized geography in the names he’s chosen for his projects, whether adding an “e” to his surname to match the spelling of a Norwegian town or adopting the musical alias Mount Eerie after a distinctively shaped mountain in his Anacortes, Washington hometown. When he was recording his 2001 tour de force The Glow Pt. 2, he was living in Olympia, Washington, close to the studios of K Record, which also released the double album.
In imaginativeness and unpredictability, both in the production’s expansive take on K Records-style intimacy and in the free-flowing yet hard-hitting lyrics, The Glow Pt. 2 certainly can be considered a force of nature. But ultimately, the style-shifting, lo-fi psych-pop here exists in its own world, by design; as Elverum told Pitchfork at the time of a 2008 reissue, “All of my recording projects have been with that intention of constructing an alternate reality.” In that sense, this idiosyncratic album is human most of all, like the heartbeat that’s the central image of the tumultuous title track and the last sound heard on the LP. The Glow Pt. 2 is the passionate work of an auteur, a voice in the wilderness. –Marc Hogan
Listen: The Microphones, “The Glow Pt. 2”
Sleater-Kinney: Dig Me Out
After Sleater-Kinney released their excellent second album, Call the Doctor, it hardly seemed like any part of their sound needed work. Adding a virtuoso drummer to a band that already united the Olympia riot grrrl scene’s strongest singer, Corin Tucker, with its most accomplished guitarist, Carrie Brownstein, would’ve seemed like overkill. But when Janet Weiss joined the trio before they recorded their third album, Dig Me Out, she turned out to be the ingredient no one realized Sleater-Kinney was missing.
In her memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Brownstein recalls that when she and Tucker wrote songs together, “Corin could make the mess and I could figure out what it meant and what significance it held.” Weiss’ percussion brought Tucker’s heart and Brownstein’s brain together in a single body flinging itself, at full force, against the limitations of our flawed world. Dig Me Out’s title track is a prayer for escape from precisely this prison: “Dig me out/Dig me in/Out of my body/Out of my skin,” Tucker pleads, her wail as strong as it is pliant. Alternating between the naked riff worship of “Words and Guitar,” the fiery longing of “Buy Her Candy,” and openly feminist statements like “Little Babies,” Sleater-Kinney conjure a rock‘n’roll universe where the roles of star and fan transcend gender. On Call the Doctor, they said they wanted to be our Joey Ramone. Dig Me Out made us want to be someone else’s Sleater-Kinney. –Judy Berman
Listen: Sleater-Kinney, “Buy Her Candy”
Elliott Smith: Either/Or
Elliott Smith recorded most of his debut album, Roman Candle, in a dilapidated basement, pressing his guitar strings to a tape recorder. By 1995, he had graduated to his friend Leslie’s house; the resulting self-titled album sold zilch and got picked up by almost zero college radio stations–but Fugazi heard it, and so did John Doe, who brought this agonizingly shy kid on tour. There was something in the air.
On Either/Or, that something became the beginning of Elliott Smith’s Big Nothing, the flowering of his songwriting genius and the first real statement to his hometown of Portland and beyond that he might not just be good, but brilliant like few in his generation. His finger-picking was so delicate that his little Le Domino acoustic guitar became harp-like—try replicating even the first few chord changes of “Angeles,” and immediately grasp how deep and kaleidoscopic his understanding of the instrument was. Here, he raised his voice from a whisper to something just slightly braver: On “Ballad of Big Nothing,” the chord progression curdles from major to minor like a recurring stomach cramp while he sings about doing “whatever you want to, whenever you want to” with the quavery conviction of a punch thrown with a clammy fist.
On “Between the Bars,” Smith wrote one of his first real standards, a song so potent, bare, and tightly packed—a metaphor about love and addiction that never once tips its hand—that cover artists will be dipping into its well water for decades to come. “Say Yes” is a feeble, embarrassed sunbeam of an almost-love ballad, one he would bashfully play live amid many shouted requests. In these shows, by all accounts, you could hear a penny drop; Smith was at his most incandescent. –Jayson Greene
