Remember when we all knew what indie meant? Indie was what John Peel played. It was music that was recorded, manufactured and distributed independent of the major labels. In practice, that tended to be music played by young white people, usually more in hope than expectation of either competence or success. As the years passed it came to be applied particularly to a kind of whey-faced, solipsistic music, played on guitars by people who were either too clever by half or too wimpy by half.
By dusk, what had not long before looked like the seventh circle of hell had transformed
These days, though, indie means whatever you want it to mean. Entirely mainstream soft pop acts with massive worldwide hits on major labels – such as Glass Animals – are classed as indie. Big rock bands with crowds of pint-tossing geezers get called indie. Indie now seems to mean ‘any band with a guitarist that we can’t easily fit into another genre’.
Personal Trainer, from the Netherlands, are unmistakably an indie band, in the old sense of the phrase. They are signed to an independent label – the excellent Bella Union – and they make music old Peel listeners would feel completely at home listening to. Their first album bore the unmistakable mark of a group of musicians who had listened to an awful lot of stuff by the US band Pavement – the whimsy and irony and spindliness – along with a faux-naive, wide-eyed sunniness that owed a great deal to the British ‘indiepop’ explosion of the mid-1980s and its descendants down the decades.
At a low-key gig launching their second album, Still Willing, in a sauna-like backroom in fashionable Dalston, though, Personal Trainer revealed themselves to be rather more than that.
They began with the new album’s opening track, ‘Upper Ferntree Gully’, which meandered for nearly eight minutes, and – yes – did contain sections that still sounded like a group of musicians who had listened an awful lot to Pavement, but then ended with a section of death-metal blastbeats, roaring guitars and screaming.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in