In 1907, the Irish novelist James Joyce was living in Trieste, Italy, then part of a ramshackle and dilapidated Austro-Hungarian Empire on its last legs under one of the final ruling Habsburg monarchs, Franz Joseph I.
Never one to keep a steady job, Joyce was at the time giving lessons in English to an Italian businessman named Ettore Schmitz, who also happened to write (unsuccessful) novels of agonized, psychological despair under the pen name of Italo Svevo. Despairing of his artistic irrelevancy, Svevo handed off his two novels to Joyce, with whom he’d become quite close, and Joyce gave him portions of Dubliners to read in return.
Joyce read Svevo’s novels quickly and came back to him with news: His novels were brilliant, and he was a neglected genius.
To speed things up a bit, Svevo was reinvigorated by Joyce’s praise and returned to writing, going on to produce his best-known work Zeno’s Conscience, which is regarded today as a classic of Italian modernism. Joyce later passed Svevo’s books to his well-known critic friends in France and the writer was, slowly but surely, established in the canon—which is, despite his friendship with the 20th century’s most illustrious novelist, the main reason Svevo is remembered today.
Tragically, Svevo was killed in an automobile accident in 1928 while working on the sequel to Zeno. But before his untimely death, a discouraged artist whose work had real merit was able to feel the joy of recognition and understanding from a friend whose opinion he held in the highest esteem—moving him to write again and to produce, ultimately, his greatest work; this mattered more to Svevo, I suspect, than landing in the history books.
So, what does any of this have to do with music? Well, with this animating spirit in mind, the spirit of Italo Svevo, I’ve decided to write about five bands whose songs have to varying degrees made up the soundtrack to different moments of my life. Each one of them is in my view pitifully underrecognized with respect to their talent, dedication, and output. Some of them I’ve discovered through word-of-mouth, some through the algorithm, and some by pure chance; but all of them are basically unknown, if not (like Svevo, once) completely irrelevant. The genres broadly represented include country, indie rock and one that I don’t quite feel comfortable classifying.
To approximate level of fame, I will use the Spotify count of monthly listeners.
And if you find that any of these artists move you with their esoteric creations, maybe you can find a way to kick them a few dollars for the privilege.
Clearance — 332 monthly listeners
I start with a band whose sound lands close to home, for me: From the loopy slacker vocals down to the commercially-averse cynicism and carefully graffitied album cover, Clearance give the unmistakable impression of a Pavement clone—and hey, that’s just fine by me. As Picasso once said, “Good artists copy,” etc. And Pavement was one of the first bands to seriously kindle my love of “difficult” music (i.e. wacky guitar tunings, narrative directionless-ness, and oblique lyricism).
That said—“Flowers in Epoxy,” my favorite Clearance track, doesn’t fit squarely into any Pavement album that I can think of—an EP, maybe. But which? Watery, Domestic? Or Major Leagues?
My point is that even in copying from your idols (or, to use the language of T.S. Eliot, “develop[ing] and procur[ing]” the substance of the past) you can’t help but transmute it into something completely different; as you make each one of a thousand little creative decisions you inexorably impart tiny pieces of yourself, and what might have begun as imitation or homage takes on its own distinctive “thing”-ness. The weight of all those necessary decisions exerts such a force that, in the end, it can’t help but end up becoming something else, indelibly defined by your own creative impressions.
Even Pavement—now so firmly entrenched in the music canon that, last summer, a “Stephen Malkmus” gag made it into one of the highest-grossing films of all time—were written off by some after their first album as mere imitators.
“It’s just The Fall in 1985, isn’t it?” said prickly Fall front man Mark E. Smith of Pavement’s now-classic Slanted and Enchanted. “They haven’t got an original idea in their heads.” That was, of course, enormously uncharitable and narcissistic to boot; such is the anxiety of influence, and Pavement’s evident love of The Fall’s catalogue, that it must have stung. And yet, five years after their debut, they would go on to own those similarities, covering one of the band’s best on the BBC. And thus you can draw a tenuous, looping line of cultural influence straight from Mark E. Smith nodding off in a Salford pub with poetry in his ears to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
That’s all to say that Clearance, with their poetical, perfunctory discussions of the malaise of consumer culture (resplendent on “You’ve Been Pre-Approved,” another bop), shouldn’t dwell negatively on favorable comparisons.
Status: inactive
Indispensable album: Rapid Rewards (2015)
One great song: Flowers in Epoxy
For fans of: Pavement, Speedy Ortiz
Nonlocal Forecast — 713 monthly listeners
Electronic, sort of proggy, with a bit of improvisational jazz sprinkled in, Nonlocal Forecast has proven a little too… unique for some of my friends. But if NF is challenging, it’s also intensely melodic (hang in there for the guitar solo around 3:00).
The other-worldly, maximalist sound and funky digital artwork combine to render Nonlocal Forecast sort of like a jammy sonic opera from an Earth-cult society of the deep future. This record remains unclassifiable to me and, ultimately—delightfully—unknowable.
Status: active
Indispensable album: Bubble Universe! (2019)
One great song: Celestial Nervous System
For fans of: ???
Farmer Not So John — 131 monthly listeners
Farmer Not So John embody the kind of mawkish euphoria that comes to one at the end of a boozy night, staggering homewards and watching the dust motes fade in and out of a streetlamp’s glow while the mosquitos and gnats do whirly-birds.
Apparently, Farmer were once a well-liked Nashville band that played shows in bars and honkytonks around town. If you’ve been in one of these Southern cities during festival season you know their like, probably having walked into any number of random bars in the middle of the day—if only to escape the heat!—to proceed to witness a six- or seven-piece country band amble onstage and lay down a shambolic, melancholy beauty the likes of which you might never hear again.
You don’t know the names of anyone on stage, nor those of their songs. That moment right there, fleeting and quickly ended, is the most intimately you will ever know them and their music. And they will likely never know a wider audience than the grateful souls in that bar. It’s sort of tragic in its way, but one beautiful time of an afternoon.
Status: inactive
Indispensable album: Farmer Not So John (1997)
One great song: Every Street in Nashville
For fans of: Lucero, Slobberbone, Uncle Tupelo
Beeef — 8,049 monthly listeners
At over eight-thousand monthly listeners on Spotify, Beeef are basically the Michael Jackson of this list. And look! An honest-to-God music video.
The Allston band were introduced to me by my mentor at the college radio station where I served a short and fairly undistinguished tenure (though I did succeed in getting “Heckler Spray” played over the airwaves from a vinyl pressing which I found in the radio archive; I had meant for the DJ to play something completely different, possibly “Box Elder,” but he mixed the sides up—live radio, folks!).
Beeef excel at indie rock which is distinctly suburban in tone and outlook—sort of carrying the emblem of music that looks and sounds like sprinklers, a cold bottle of beer, dogs barking, etc. in the way that the Beach Boys stood for, well, beaches and surfing.
Diligent songsmiths, Beeef are energetic and proactive in getting new shit out onto the airwaves, and they don’t disappoint. They wear Allston, Mass. on their sleeves. Of all the acts on this list, they are probably the most prolific, and perhaps stand the best chance of eventually “popping” (however that looks nowadays for an indie band).
Unlike some of the others on this list, if you’re based in New York City or Boston (or in between) you could probably catch Beeef at a show for $20 or less.
Status: active
Indispensable album: Beeef (2017)
One great song: Dogshit Paradise
For fans of: Real Estate
Kill County — 194 monthly listeners
With Kill County, we arrive at the band I deem to most embody the spirit of Svevo.
When I first heard their 2019 record Everything Must Die, I listened to it front-to-back probably half a dozen times thinking these guys were on a Thirty Tigers-or-adjacent label and that the algorithm must’ve kicked me over because I was listening to lots of such music at the time.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Though Everything Must Die was indeed freshly pressed at the time I discovered it, it seemed that no one was listening beyond me and my buddy Jack. Then and now, we are astonished that these dudes don’t have a larger audience. Kill County is unknown, period. Their closest brush with fame, if you can call it that, appears to be a set they did for Nebraska PBS about a decade ago. They trade in the sort of traditionally rooted, deeply felt, pop-averse country music of the likes of Sturgill Simpson or Colter Wall, readymade for a popular account like Gems on VHS who specialize in high-quality field recordings of little-known acts working in folk and country.
Like much of my favorite music in these genres, Kill County’s songs are jaundiced, jaded, and yet more than a little amused: “Boss’s letting me go, putting me on the shelf,” sings Josh James, whose vocal stylings on EMD might be my favorite of the last decade of country music. “I like to say that it ain’t my fault, but I work for myself.”
“Darling, I swear that I ain’t lazy. This shit ain’t worth what I pay me.”
If their POV is disillusioned, it’s still charming and always distinctive, steeped in the history of the places and the people they call their own in Texas, Nebraska, and Michigan—a little bit of everywhere and anywhere, USA, but combining to make a kind of full-fledged, composite middle American perspective. The songs themselves are rich in a quiet kind of ironic humor that I place in the canon alongside writers like Portis and Twain.
If I have any claim to unearthing a Svevo in the creative hinterlands of internet modernity, it’s Kill County.
Status: active?
Indispensable album: Everything Must Die (2019)
One great song: Everything Must Die, Devil If You Do, Borderland Dreams, No Surrender, Sartre’s Blues, Oblivion Blues
For fans of: Colter Wall, Sturgill Simpson, Townes Van Zandt, Norman Blake
Thanks for reading McBrodie.
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- Brendan