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Now the talk of particular Canadian spots has been superseded by interest in the orbit of musicians and fans around specific bands.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.”
Montreal's the Besnard Lakes is on their roster, for instance, and its album The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse was recently nominated to the short list of the second annual Polaris Music Prize, a critics' award for best Canadian album of the year.
“When we met the Besnard Lakes, my partner Darius [Van Arman] went up to Montreal to watch them play, and there was just a great vibe in the room,” Swanson explains. “People loved them. A lot of people were there. We already knew we wanted to work with this band.”
But, a Canadian place name can still count. Malajube, a francophone band with a spectral and yet humanistic sound (arguably a Montreal quality), has been able to use its Montreal base to draw interest from the U.S. and even to break into English Canada.
“For Malajube, it helped. [Being from Montreal] doesn't do the whole job for you, but it opens the door and gives you a first chance. A lot of media, a lot of people have been more curious,” says Eli Bissonnette, who runs Malajube's label Dare to Care Records.
The trick, however, remains a particularly indie-style word of mouth, largely Internet and blog-based. Arcade Fire's Funeral and Broken Social Scene's You Forgot It In People will forever be associated with Web buzz after rave reviews on Pitchfork. Meanwhile, the New Pornographers' upcoming album is currently featured on New York record store Other Music's web page, a coup for any band. And for Malajube, a surprising boost came when the video for the band's song Montréal -40°C was featured on YouTube's home page.
“They had 400,000 clicks in a few days,” Bissonnette says about the rush of people clicking to watch the clip on the video-sharing web service.
But for a stellar act like Feist, it's no longer a matter of luck, Lacoste notwithstanding. On Feist's 2004 Let It Die, each phase of marketing evolved as the album reached new audiences. First, the indie crowd was targeted, then the followers, “all the way to the soccer moms,” as an insider at Feist's label Arts & Crafts described it. With the new album The Reminder, “we were able to target a much broader audience from day one.” And, of course, once you've got the soccer moms, you've got the world.
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