Revenge of the Indie Rockers

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  After years in which mainstream rock was dominated by burly bands from Limp Bizkit to Creed, drowning in testosterone, the indie kids who speak for the world's video-store clerks, sandwich-shop waitresses and back-packing college students are taking over.

   In the last year, bands that were once staples of independent-music connoisseurs and college-radio programmers, such as Modest Mouse, the White Stripes and Franz Ferdinand, released albums that sold more than a million copies. Last month, longtime underground favorite Death Cab for Cutie released its fifth studio album, "Plans," and it debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200. Its 90,000 first-week sales "woke everybody up," says the band's 28-year-old A&R representative at Atlantic Records, Sam Riback. "This isn't just the next `priority' at the label; this is the real deal."

   In October, Scottish quartet Franz Ferdinand will release its highly anticipated second album, "You Could Have It So Much Better" (Epic). The Arcade Fire, a percussion-heavy Canadian septet, has sold more than 200,000 copies of its debut album, "Funeral," on North Carolina indie Merge Records. The band's music has been championed by U2, David Bowie and David Letterman, and in recent months Arcade Fire has carried the day at the Coachella and Lollapalooza festivals with giddily anarchic performances. And Bright Eyes, a vehicle for the songs of Conor Oberst, has been playing sold-out shows in theaters around the world touring behind two albums released simultaneously last January on Omaha-based indie label Saddle Creek, "Digital Ash in a Digital Urn" and "I'm Wide Awake It's Morning."

   The indie-rock surge has been ushered in by an Internet community of music connoisseurs who trade MP3 files and gather to talk music and champion favored bands on blogs and Web sites such as Myspace.com, and write for e-zines such as Pitchforkmedia.com.

   "The Internet's role is important because there aren't as many gatekeepers," said Atlantic's Riback. "You can put the music on a Web Site, or on Myspace or the blogosphere and let the fans find it, talk about it and analyze it before radio or MTV even knows it exists. The fans get it first, and that gives them a sense of ownership."

   The laptop culture accounts for Death Cab for Cutie's growing audience, says the band's guitarist and producer, Chris Walla.

"This is the golden age of the Internet, the place we'll be telling our grandchildren about 25 years from now," he said. "We're halfway through this transition where the Internet has flattened the playing field and put indie bands on an equal plain with major label bands."

   It also doesn't hurt that a generation of tastemakers raised on the underground rock of the '80s and early '90s has ascended to power in record companies, movie studios, radio stations, magazines and television.

   Portland indie-rockers the Shins are a favorite of director Zach Braff, who used the band's music on the soundtrack for his acclaimed 2004 movie "Garden State" and had the character played by actress Natalie Portman give them a shout-out on screen. In the prime-time television teen soap opera "The O.C.," the lead actor is a young music fanatic named Seth Cohen (played by actor Adam Brody). In the show, the charmingly earnest Cohen name-drops bands such as Bright Eyes and has a Death Cab for Cutie poster hanging in his bedroom.

   "The idea that an indie-rock kid can be made into a TV idol, a heartthrob, is hilarious and gratifying to people in our world," said Josh Rosenfeld, the 32-year-old co-owner of Seattle-based Barsuk Records, which originally signed Death Cab for Cutie to a record deal in 1998.

   When Death Cab for Cutie signed with Atlantic last year after recording four albums for Barsuk, it retained Walla as its producer rather than hiring a high-profile outsider. The major-label deal allowed for a more leisurely recording pace and a fatter budget. But the $200,000 spent to make "Plans" is still barely one-tenth of the budget for Kanye West's "Late Registration," which came out the same week and debuted at No. 1.

   "We were absolutely given creative control," Walla said. "When (Atlantic) tried to suggest things, we were ultimately able to say `no.'"

   The label initially wanted an engineer who had mixed Matchbox 20's hit albums to work on "Plans," but the band insisted on doing the job itself. It turned over one song mix to Chris Shaw, whose work for the band Sloan impressed them.

   "I'm not interested in manufacturing a record," Walla said. "More and more in the computer age it's the manufacturing factor in records that I hear. For the first time in recorded music history there are people in the process of making a record who are purely technical and don't have any creative skill. You can have a guy who just runs Pro Tools. He may like music, but he doesn't have to know anything about music. He's a computer guy. I think that can go so wrong: Just building songs in perfect little chunks and tuning all the vocals and lining up all (the) drums. That's not what I want when I make a record. I want to be spending time with people and getting performances. I want blood. I want grit. I'm not a gritty producer either, but I want to be able to hear that the sounds came from a voice or a pair of hands."

   That passion underlines Death Cab's music, but it's not about blood and grit. It's more akin to a headlong dive into an ocean, a kind of beautiful drowning. The voice of Ben Gibbard has a choirboy's transparency as he shares his most intimate secrets. When Walla peels back the shimmering layers of sound that enfold most of "Plans" to focus on Gibbard's voice and guitar on "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," it's easy to see why the Seth Cohens of the world believe in this band so ardently.

  "Love of mine, someday you will die," Gibbard sings, "But I'll be close behind and I'll follow you into the dark."

   "No other band has ever given me chills like Death Cab," writes one believer on the band's Myspace.com site, where the first single from "Plans," "Soul Meets Body," has been played more than 400,000 times in recent weeks. "You make my heart hurt."

© 2005, Chicago Tribune.

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