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As hardcore-fetishism and macho-posturing permeated the mainstream during the infant years of the 1990s, indie-rock loyalists shifted directions. Responding to the shrill noise of populist rock which saw formerly underground palettes converted into mindless pop, slowcore emerged as a wholly underground counterpoint. A rather odd one at that, since unlike so many genres which dictate literal qualities of the sound and influences, slowcore is defined by something much less tangible. I mean sure, people have tried to lock it down to some describable traits; RYM (the music ranking site operated by its highly musically-literate user base) defines it by:
“downbeat melodies, slower tempos and minimalist arrangements”
Which is all well and good, but then how is Talk Talk’s moody and minimalist Laughing Stock not slowcore? It’s a wording that fails to capture what is obvious from the start. Laughing Stock isn’t slowcore because it doesn't feel like slowcore. It lacks the defeatism and aching, youthful pain that defined the works of Codeine, Low, and Galaxie 500. Slowcore is a feeling that expresses itself in sombre slow burns with minimalist arrangements, or sometimes, not at all minimalist arrangements. Its wide-reaching arms encompass an exceptional breadth of music as its limited goals are redefined with unlimited methods.
For your ease of discovery, this guide has split the genre into six different routes, each starting with a genre-defining album that represents, to our mind, those six incredibly varied “sects” best. From there we recommend three more albums for each “sect” that we call “further reading”, each of which expands upon the genres excursions into that particular space. Start with a single genre space you're interested in, or begin by listening to the six central albums across all six spaces - whichever you want.
Even before Galaxie 500 (the most well-known progenitor of slowcore) had morphed dream-pop into the sparse and minimalistic image of slowcore, artists like Cowboy Junkies and American Music Club were turning folk, country, Americana, and singer/songwriter palettes into what would eventually also be called slowcore, pushing the works of artists like Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen into further and sparser corners. Folk and Americana’s frank honesty and finger-picked guitar would become key to the genre as a whole, and their fusion into slowcore would be one of the genre’s biggest subgenres.
Red House Painters – Down Colorful Hill
Red House Painters have, in some ways, begun to fall into the shadow of frontman Mark Kozelek as he continues to tear up the indie press as the sole member of his new project Sun Kil Moon. A press presence that has been both astoundingly good and astoundingly bad, but before Benji, and before he told War On Drugs to “suck his cock”, he fronted one of the most important indie bands of the 90s, one that never really made it beyond the record shop floor.
Their debut album Down Colorful Hill is like the conceptual delivery of the entire American folk songwriter pantheon, as if James Taylor and Nick Drake were let loose onto the unsuspecting 90s with an electric guitar and a burning passion for the heartland. Kozelek speaks with his trademark unfurling monotone, a voice that seems to keep hinting and hinting at something that never comes, a deeply ingrained longing for something beyond words. The band behind Mark is what makes the work seem so much more infinite and substantial though. They lumber and snarl with their best twisted impression of the American rock canon all played at a third the speed, slowing-down and reverbing-out folk rock to the point of dreamscapes and panic.
Lingering like shadows in ghost towns, and between ideas of America’s broken unions, the band’s trademark silver print album covers would become as iconic as the music, codifying a visual presence to the sounds themselves. Sonic and visual work that would solidify underground music’s notions of American degradation and rot through the aged iconography of its Midwest. The stark black and white cover of Down Colorful Hill is particularly arresting, with the smattering of blood just above newly changed sheets; history lingering over our safest places.
Further Reading:
Cat Power – Moon Pix
Unlike many of her slowcore contemporaries, Cat Power (aka Charlyn Marie Marshall) did not write songs in service of her sonic world; her voice and her lyrics were the advertised event. Nothing about her music felt like it was bending to the stylings and musical quality of an in-vogue style. She was a singer/songwriter first, and the maudlin sounds of slowcore simply played into her sprawling epics as she manipulated surreal lyrics into arresting songs filled with feeling.
Her career would be extensive and reinvigorating to both slowcore and the world of singer/songwriters, pushing all the way to her collaboration with Lana Del Ray in 2018. Her voice and place within the indie rock canon is uncontestable, and her legacy feels more necessary in 2018 than ever before. Of course, an attentive reader knows that when legacy is overstated, the music can often be lacking, but Moon Pix is in no way subservient to its place in the pantheon, shaking off all identity as the guitar’s lumbering melody slides in the opening notes of ‘American Flag’.
Songs: Ohia – Didn’t It Rain
“No matter how dark the storm gets overhead / They say someone's watching from the calm at the edge / What about us when we're down here in it?”
Jason Molina, who sadly passed away in 2013, was a songwriter consumed with great truths and great oblivion. He sang songs that were rich and empathetic, but unflinching in their rendering of the American dream in it all it’s bare grimness. He sang about workers and the Midwest’s expansive loneliness in the form of burning empty planes. It was cowboy despondency in the ranks of Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson, just turned towards those 90’s indie aesthetics. The songs were built with as much thundering maximalism and melodic complexity as it had bare minimalism. With subsequent albums, his work would grow into a more alt-country direction, emphasizing a forward urgency and gaining his place in indie history with follow up album Magnolia Electric Co. For me though, there is no greater pleasure than the empty hallowed pastures where Jason Molina sat at the edge of a storm.
Nina Nastasia – Dogs
Nina Nastasia has begun to gain a more prominent place in the pantheon as a new generation are picking up the slowcore sound. Together, they have turned on the established canon and set about rewriting it beyond the token inclusion of Cat Power, unveiling the rich and significant contributions of women to what was often viewed as a boys-only club. Listening to Dogs though, it’s hard to believe there was ever a time where we didn’t talk about this. The steely melodic minimalism of ‘Oblivion’ and the lifeless chants of Nina griping you with icebound hands, or the subtle warmth of ‘Judy’s In The Sandbox’ arresting the ears with bare strings and pleading coos; time has found the value in Nina’s subtlety and sideways aesthetic approach to slowcore, deconstructed and wily, tearing apart the genre’s simplistic trappings like only a true songwriter could.
Alongside the reinvention of folk into this new genre, there was Galaxie 500, a group that would single-handedly change dream-pop forever and incorporate into slowcore its trademark repetition and dreamy detachment. Their work would not necessarily directly inform the dream pop/slowcore which was to follow, but their spirit and artistic ruthlessness loomed large over that space. The ideas they helped plant would bring new fruit over and over throughout slowcore’s lifetime.
Galaxie 500 – On Fire
Despite being the second ever slowcore band, Galaxie 500 aren’t much of one. Their repetitive, dreamy caterwauling bears very little resemblance to the work that followed them, but then slowcore is more a spirit than a genre, isn’t it? And On Fire is definitely the song of a spirit. A summer-baked ghost playing into an endlessly looping fractal of Dean Wareham’s tinny voice and ouroboros guitar melodies. Which, despite those descriptions’ generally negative tone, are testaments to its stature as the genre’s first true masterpiece; it remains to this day the great sonic revolution that both started and perfected a movement.
Repetitive to the point of transcendence, the never-ending “dum dum dum dum” tempo and tepid strumming feels like dream pop in hibernation and the inevitable conclusion of 80’s dream pop, which had been slowing down the genre’s tonality and sonics to a crawl. The album is invention and innovation by relentlessness, pushing already lingering ideas to an absurdist zenith. The sounds of On Fire would eventually stand as the blueprint for the minimalist construction of slowcore itself, but its exact sounds and tonality would mostly fade. Later flirtations with dream pop in slowcore would stem more from the sonics of groups like Cocteau Twin and Slowdive, while the hyper-tinny, reverb-drenched style of Galaxie 500, which had started with their debut album in 1988, would also end with the band’s final masterpiece and swan song album This Is Our Music, released in 1990 just before breaking up.
Further Reading:
Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions – Bavarian Fruit Bread
The side project of Hope Sandoval (of Mazzy Star fame) and Colm O'Ciosoig (of My Bloody Valentine fame) is a warm and sedated expansion of both Hope’s yearning songwriting and Colm’s work with dreamscapes. The combination achieved a fragility and minimalistic nature that neither has ever managed to strike apart from each other; songs continue to beat and push like Mazzy Star, but the molasses-like texture keeps the swings and kicks moving in slow motion. Witness ‘Butterfly Mornings’ and ‘On The Low’, barn burners in a pulled-back incense smoke kind of way. Together, the two would predict an entirely new kind of Julie London by way of dream pop songwriting that could still sum up the Tumblr generation and its iconic performers (Cigarettes After Sex and Lana Del Ray).
Lisa Germano – Geek The Girl
Geek The Girl flirts with dream-pop in a purely schizophrenic way, blasting out dream-pop effects or ballads among the interlocking and unpredictable hall-of-mirrors that constitute the album’s body. I’m gonna admit it, including it here is a mildly cheap move to slot her somewhere into this facile sorting methodology, but it also serves more truth to the album’s non-dream pop moments than any other sorting. As Germano coos over woodwinds and brittle guitar lines, it achieves a dream-like and hazy quality of pain and biting anguish regardless of whether or not any directly “dream-pop” element is occurring at any point. Different to the warmth and spacious arrangements that we usually associate with dream-pop, it’s dreamy in another way, like your head going light when you’ve banged your knee, or the world turning as you stand up too quickly.
Trespassers William – Different Stars
There are only so many ways in which a writer can dance around the idea that an album sounds like crying into your bedsheets. “The dreamy guitar playing evokes such a maudlin scene that it necessitates an earnest reaction.” See that sentence right there? That’s coded language, a dog whistle. A sly hint and winking nod to the knowing audience that this album sounds like crying into your bedsheets. A quality that demands smallness and reclusion, hiding from the world’s eye. Different Stars is a solitary trip through the fog, Anna-Lynne Williams sailing voice pushing over dark dream-pop waters, played only at fragile volumes and careful times. That was definitely a dog-whistle.
Unspecific to any clear overarching thread, this section hopes to capture the albums which represent slowcore in its purest form; albums which evoke no other genre, or at least very few. If you are trying to dive headfirst into slowcore without any pretense, or without any real understanding of what slowcore is, this section might be helpful.
Low – I Could Live In Hope
Low are the slowcore band. They have defined its core audience and sound for almost two decades, releasing celebrated masterwork after celebrated masterwork. Of their twelve core albums, I’d say nine or possibly even ten could be considered slowcore essentials, and are at the very least highly celebrated within that community. I Could Live In Hope is their debut album though, released in 1994 after just a single EP. It arrived without pretense and without much of a defined canonical sound for this new genre; what slowcore sounded like really depended on where you lived. In California, it was probably heavily influenced by Americana and roots music like Red House Painters, and American Music Club, but if you based yourself out of an indie-rock hub like Chicago, it was probably heavily inspired by the post-rock and indie-rock in your scene.
Low were from Duluth, Minnesota though, birthplace of Bob Dylan and not a whole lot more. A city where making slowcore wasn’t much of anything, since no one was doing it. No folk, no punk, no indie rock, just space. I Could Live In Hope is slowcore distillate, pure and unimpaired. Pulling from Galaxie 500’s sparse strumming and effect-heavy production as well as Codeine’s looming dread, the end result is unmistakably singular. Plodding and doomy, but also disaffected and beautiful, it never overstepped its volume into something that could be called post-rock, and never sounded too removed or pretty that it could be called dream pop.
The 9-minute centerpiece of ‘Lullaby’ was like a tower above the plains, a grain solo on fire, a signal to the coasts that something had arrived, and that something was coming.
Further Reading:
Bedhead – Transaction de Novo
When people call slowcore sleepy or boring, they are referring to the aptly named Bedhead, a band who sound like they just woke up and can’t be bothered to play their songs in the right time because the headache hasn’t cleared up yet. It’s a dismissive way to characterize the band’s sound, but beneath cruelty there is love. The incredibly minimal structures and layering the group worked with remain as one of my favorites from the genre, making evocative use of mixes that make other slowcore groups look maximalistic. Their third and final album, Transaction de Novo would be released right before the group's separation and partial reformation into The New Year, a group who despite embodying everything great about Bedhead, could never replicate the singular aloof tonality of this album. A group of five guys playing their heart out so bare-chestedly that it sounds like they just want to fuck off to breakfast.
Carissa’s Wierd – Songs About Leaving
Despite Carissa’s Wierd’s flirtations with lo-fi production techniques and chamber pop, their music was as straightforward as any slowcore could be. The hushed strumming patterns and disaffected vocal style along with a general fondness for classical instruments played underneath sparse rock band conventions, it was all by the playbook to a T. Songs About Leaving would probably represent the last canonical entry into slowcore’s golden age (c. 1994-2002), and for that reason it becomes less interesting in concept than it is in execution. Their intent was to play close to the core ideas and emphasize strong songwriting over sonic reinvention, so the albums pleasures remain within the album itself. Though there is an interesting connection to the daughter band Band of Horses, who of course grew into an internationally successful indie crossover hit – the group’s lead songwriter and percussionist would be the core team behind Band of Horses debut album – Carissa’s Wierd’s fortunate ties to such a successful band, however, does nothing to diminish the merit of what themselves did. To close out an era is an achievement too.
Sophia – Fixed Water
Compared to the giants above him, Sophia often feels like a bit of a footnote to the wider world of slowcore, a quiet presence in the background for genre purists or completionists only. I’m not of a like mind. Instead, I find him to be one of the most gripping presences in the genre, deploying absolute rippers and launching devastating shells into the heart of his albums. Songs like ‘Another Friend’ seem to come from nowhere among the leisurely delicacy of his albums, so soft and considered, until he gets you into that place of comfort so that he can crack you open and spill into you the most miserable and claustrophobic moments of his life.
As Slowcore’s momentum was picking up throughout the mid and late 90s, post-rock and indie rock were also approaching their peak. Albums like Young Team, Perfect From Now On, and Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space were not only setting the indie press on fire, but deeply influencing the sounds of their cousin genre. From the genre’s very roots in post-rock pre-cursors Codeine and post-rock progenitors Slint, the two worlds have been deeply linked, and have often become indistinguishable. Where does one really start and where does it really end? In this section I guess.
Codeine – Frigid Stars
Codeine’s debut album in 1990 was a fire setting alight, the sounds of post-rock and slowcore combusting simultaneously and casting light far into the distance. The sharp quiet-to-loud dynamics that would define Slint’s second album one year later, and Mogwai’s Young Team almost seven years later, were blatantly obvious on songs like ‘Pickup Song’ and ‘Cigarette Machine’, and the repetitive, toneless guitar strumming which would define slowcore like Bedhead and Low were already fully formed on songs like ‘D’ and ‘New Year’s’. It was an album that was perhaps too prescient for its own good as it so often falls into the background of albums built onto its back, its charms too subtle and its sound too easily replicable in its genius simplicity.
To go back and hear this album with the ears of an unsuspecting resident of the early 90s would be like tuning into alien signals beaming-in intergalactic technology though. Sounds which would eventually become commonplace as they were decoded and meticulously replicated, but astounding in their mystery regardless of time. The monotone pleads of Stephen Immerwahr and the frigid guitar tones of John Engle may have lost their novelty, but they have never lost their bite.
Further Reading:
Duster – Stratosphere
One of the oddities of Internet music discussion is the way certain albums gain new lives far and away from the little lives they lead outside of it. The amount of times I have seen Duster’s Stratosphere in far off corners of the Internet, or buried into lists of recommendations or favorites, never fails to surprise me. Stratosphere is a masterpiece, let me be clear, but subtle indie masterpieces aren’t often the albums you see popping up on forums. What can anyone really say about The Replacement’s Let It Be that wasn’t obvious to begin with? Duster have an another-worldly quality to them though, a little piece of the kind of magic that kept Neutral Milk Hotel persisting into perpetual discussion. A quality of transcendence hidden in plain sight, as Duster blend space rock psychedelia into heavenly sombre slowcore ballads. It defies logic and demands deification.
The For Carnation – The For Carnation
After recording Slint’s masterpiece Spiderland, Brian McMahan would check himself into a mental hospital, ending his band before it could even really begin, a complete exit from the motions of an entirely new genre and style of expression which he had created. It would be five years before Brian’s songs would re-emerge in the form of his new group, The For Carnation, and it would be another four years after that for the group’s second, and final, album to arrive. That record, self-titled, was nothing like the post-rock opus Brian had left behind, or anything like the growing complexity of post-rock as it was in 2000. Instead, the album followed in fellow post-rock pioneer Mark Hollis’ footsteps; it set out a last statement of misery and detachment in the most non-existent and spars terms possible, and boiled down Brian’s songwriting to bile and sulfur, all bubbling hate and sinew.
Hood – Rustic Houses, Forlorn Valleys
Solidifying Hood’s flirtations with bonafide post-rock on their previous album Silent 88, their sixth and first truly essential album - Rustic Houses, Forlorn Valleys - also served as an important meeting place between indie rock experiments and slowcore. Hood, who had always been rock-focused experimentalists, incorporated their Talk Talk and Bark Psychosis post-rock obsessions into minimalist and repetitive slow burns worthy of the most diehard slowcore purists. Their desire to exist within the more demanding and challenging world of post-rock sonics made their placement within slowcore feel incidental, a secondary consideration to their dynamic woodwind and brass melodies, pushing elements of chaotic noise into the generally sparse and ambient textures. Like many an English band, they cater to sensibility on a surface level, while slyly stuffing the message with perversity and wry disinterest; the 12-minute rise of ‘Diesel Pioneers’ acts like a sharply dressed and written letter whose contents are simply a verbose version of ‘go fuck yourself’.
Low – Double Negative
By far the most recent release included in this guide, and our very own Album of the Year for 2018, Low’s latest work is definitely too close to see, but even considering the blinders of distance it is quite possibly their best work to date, and that can’t be understated. It's quite an idea for a band who were already seen as both genre visionaries and master craftsmen to have just put out their best record 24 years after their debut, but then Swans did it 31 years after theirs, so who’s counting?
Maybe it’s not their best. I mean, I’m not really sure how someone could compare this to I Could Live In Hope or Things We Lost in the Fire; it seems like an immensely pointless task of comparing apples to oranges, or pecans to pelicans. But it’s not so different from Low’s previous work that it’s unrecognizable. Strangely enough, it feels quite the opposite, it’s strangeness and conflict the most obvious possible extension from the band’s past. Double Negative is different than Low’s past efforts in only one genuinely fundamental way – it feels like a comment on the moment we are living in, both on our existence as it stands, and the sonics of that world we have drawn, trading the band’s trademark timelessness in for a more direct contact through it’s abstracted and distorted forms.
Incorporating the new sounds of post-industrial and glitch which have dominated the experimental scenes during the late 10’s, Lows slow-burning songs have been converted into carpet bombs of noise and distortion, pushing contemporary subtexts into a demanding and arresting work. The only natural reinvention of Low’s work into the claustrophobic conversation of 2018.
Further Reading:
Mark Kozlelek & Jimmy Lavalle – Perils From The Sea
By 2013 Mark Kozelek had finished honing in on the lyrical style he would release to the wider world on his next solo album Benji, something that would eventually become synonymous with his name, and remain consistent throughout the next five years – a rambling careening style of non-sequiturs and bizarrely effective brick-wall storytelling which seem to evoke feelings far beyond the confines of the narrative. Songs like ‘Gustavo’, which meander a benign relationship between Mark and a day laborer he hired, simply relays the events of the relationship, but oddly pulls at ideas of purpose, class, meaning, and nihilism anyhow.
Where Perils From The Sea has always excelled, in my mind, over Mark’s other post-Red House Painters output is the removal of Americana and folk from the music’s composition and sonics. Jimmy Lavalle (aka The Album Leaf) instead supplants these rambling heartland stories onto chopped & screwed folk music, a folktronica reinterpretation that matches Mark Kozelek’s own deconstruction of the genre on a lyrical front. It presents Mark’s pale-faced stories in a way that doesn’t feel disingenuous to his disinterest in conventional songwriting, instead presenting it outright.
Hood – Cold House
After a career now spanning over a decade and a discography of unlistenable size, Hood made their first breakthrough project with Cold House. Incorporating the rising sounds of indietronica before Dntel, Notwist, or múm broke through, and attaching themselves to the sounds of rap experimentalists cLOUDDEAD before they would reveal themselves to be essential parts of hip-hop’s story, it was an uncanonical canonizing of trends that were going to be dominating indie press conversations for years to come. All from a group who still thought of themselves as a slowcore band at heart.
The sounds of the album itself are often a bit stark and unconnected, pillowing out synthetic washes over slowcore songs that feel underbaked and over-rapped on, but the desire to like it never really fades. Its creativity and prescience stand over its own foibles, lending the album an electricity that cuts through the noise, even on repeated listens. The sound of “We spit in the pond to give the fish something to pray on” being chanted over exasperated pianos on ‘Branches Bare’ never feels anything short of awe-inducing.
Karate – Unsolved
On the big list of awful crossover ideas, somewhere between post-rock twee pop and avant-garde Europop, slowcore jazz is written. The very notion is so pretentious and eye-rolling it makes you wanna melt into the air around you ignoring whatever beret wearing tool was currently selling you on the idea. But much like all ill fated crossovers ideas, there’s an annoying asterisk to note. Karate’s Unsolved is not an unfortunate stain, or embarrassing sidenote – its bizarre combination of melodic reductionism and instrumental improvisation that somehow manages to find odd links between the disparate places it touches, connections that give the genres energy and power so late into both’s existence. Jazz’s compositional skittishness blends right into slowcore’s aversion to eye contact, and the two find life within their new restrictions.
Not defined by anything more than the timing of its release, this section hopes to emphasize slowcore that is happening right now, though certain trends do emerge despite the label’s unspecificity. An emphasis on retro-sonics combined with melodramatic tonality and ostentatious 2010’s songwriting defines a great deal of music released under the slowcore labeled these days.
Giles Corey – Giles Corey
Alongside Giles Corey’s (aka Daniel Barrett’s) day-job of fronting Have A Nice Life, know for its disturbingly devoted cult audience and fatalistic tonality, he has found the time to become a purveyor of slowcore’s most frightening sounds. Being the subtle man that he is, you might just barely detect Corey’s spooky motivations as you begin the album by clicking play on ‘The Haunting Presence’. And as the spacious and echoey horror movie piano gives way to static and pleading screams, you may begin to think to yourself, “I think this Giles Corey is perhaps upset and a tad despondent”. By ‘No One Is Ever Going To Want Me’, you might find that you’ve begun to cry, or at least started to feel deeply uncomfortable in the skin you inhabit.
Giles Corey is not the cataclysmic sound of Have A Nice Life, nor is it the kind of patient perfectionism that you might expect from slowcore in general; instead it is a messy unleashing, working within crackly recordings and emotional upheaval instead of considered simplicity. It accidentally achieves a quality that made it highly indicative of the more lo-fi and emotional centric design of modern slowcore, predicting an almost full decade of spilling, unpretentious slowcore that was to come.
Further Reading:
Julien Baker – Sprained Ankle
The rising indie-star behind both an exceedingly popular solo project, and the supergroup tearing up the NPR charts, boygenius, Julien Baker is in fact, yes, a slowcore artist. Drawing heavily from artists like Cat Power, Low, and Nina Nastasia while infusing a bit of modern melodrama and narrative thrust, Baker has recreated the idea of slowcore within the populist indie sphere of the 2010s, drawing up a new blueprint of minimalistic songwriting which was perhaps not that original, but still unwieldy in it’s earnestness and sincerity. Appealing to those without the patience for the genre in its purest form, while simultaneously maintaining enough of its trappings to be reverent to its own roots. That is, of course, the madlib description of every indie artist that NPR latches onto, but hey, Baker is actually pretty great.
Good Night & Good Morning – Narrowing Type
If slowcore throughout the 90s was accused of being a whimper played out for an album’s length, I wonder what the world would have made of Good Night & Good Morning back then, with the full embrace of ambient textures and snail-like tempos and the way Ryan Bewer spins himself like thin layers of cotton overtop. The vocals are like quiet defeated whimpers, wringing out every drop of blood possible from the album's bone-dry greyness. It’s a completely removed presentation, hiding out in waves of melancholy, incapable of touching the world - haunting and present but removed in all ways but the heart. Narrowing Type is like the final moments of life itself; still and drained, but the life remains.
S – I'm Not As Good At It As You
Formerly a member of Carissa’s Weird, S (aka Jennifer Hays) began her solo career in 2001, but wouldn’t find her singular voice until 2010 with the release of I’m Not As Good At It As You. A songwriting tour-de-force which kickstarted the re-emergence of classic slowcore sonics as a tool of expression for formerly excluded indie demographics, it furthered her expressions of femininity in the face of a traditionally sadboi centric genre. The album pushed the formula by further emphasizing harmony and melodic release over repetition while still maintaining that minimalistic style, an interpretative bent that allowed space for artists like Julien Baker the space to make something so old sound so modern. The album was, and remains to this day, incredibly unheralded in its time, receiving almost no reviews from significant publications, or receiving any significant play from stations like NPR or KEXP, places that would eventually champion the group of artists who lived in its wake.
