It's tough to be indie when your song is part of a Lacoste ad campaign.
But indie it-girl Leslie Feist, who is once again Toronto-based after an extended sojourn in Paris, still pulls off the indie label, even if her song Mushaboom is the soundtrack for Lacoste's Essential men's cologne.
Or take the ever-combustible Montreal group Arcade Fire, still indie even after opening for U2, appearing on Saturday Night Live and debuting at No. 2 on Billboard's album chart in the United States earlier this year with its second album Neon Bible.
Can Arcade Fire even be called indie any more in the alternative, shun-too-much-attention sense? Neon Bible was the biggest release so far for the band's small North Carolina record label Merge, with 92,000 copies sold in its first week in the U.S. alone. That's close to a third of total U.S. sales for Arcade Fire's 2004 first album Funeral, as reported by Billboard magazine.
Neon Bible and Feist's new album, The Reminder, another international hit, seem to be leading the Canadian indie wave from strength to strength internationally, particularly if you include the continuing global interest surrounding Toronto's Broken Social Scene, Montreal's the Dears and Vancouver's the New Pornographers (who have a new, heavily promoted album due in the coming weeks on the major U.S. indie label Matador), to name just a handful.
But look closely at the articles and reviews about these bands for the indie cognoscenti on the Pitchfork Media website and other influential sources outside Canada. They mention the fact less and less that these bands are from this or that Canadian city. After all the attention on “CANADA!” in the foreign press in recent years, with Arcade Fire's Funeral and Broken Social Scene's pivotal 2002 You Forgot It In People helping to lead the charge, things have matured.
Now the talk of particular Canadian spots has been superseded by interest in the orbit of musicians and fans around specific bands. Or the discussion is about a Canadian band's musical links, such as how the Montreal band the Besnard Lakes shares its affinity for the music of Beach Boy Brian Wilson with others, such as indie star Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) of the American group Animal Collective.
Chicago-based Pitchfork's senior news editor Amy Phillips says whether a band's from Toronto or Montreal isn't the be-all and end-all. “We'd check out a band because they collaborated with people from other bands we were fans of, or were produced by someone we trusted, or were recommended by someone.”
So don't start declaring Montreal or Vancouver hot spots past their peak like Athens, Ga., or Seattle. It's more complicated than that.
“As a label that works with a lot of Canadian bands – we have nine – I think we're actually trying to get past the whole Canada thing,” says Chris Swanson, co-founder of a trio of U.S.-based indie labels, including Secretly Canadian. It's a tongue-in-cheek name that has less to do with any philosophy and more to do with Chris and his brother (also a co-founder) growing up close to Canada in Fargo, N.D.
“Don't get me wrong. There is an amazing number of incredible bands coming out of Canada right now. And I don't think it's any less fertile right now than it was three years ago,” Swanson says. “But because it got so much hype, you want to make sure the quality of the band is able to stand on its own, more so than where they are from.”
He adds that the best Canadian bands “aren't just hip, and they don't just have hip friends, or come from hip communities. They are making incredible art, and that's what we care about. … There are just a lot of great musical cities in the world, and Canada has a bunch of them.”
