Indie Basement (6/20): the week in classic indie, alternative & college rock

Welcome to the first Indie Basement of summer 2025, which also happens to fall on the 30th anniversary of my moving to New York City. It’s pretty much the same as it was on June 20, 1995, with a mayor nobody liked, soaring temperatures, and bands making their US debuts at Mercury Lounge. Enough playing Remember When, we’ve got new albums to review, specifically the latest from Tropical Fuck Storm, U.S. Girls, Tan Cologne, and Liam Finn.

For this week’s Indie Basement Classic, I chose a record I was definitely listening to on my Sony Discman the summer I moved here, sweating in a studio apartment that had malfunctioning AC.

Over in Notable Releases, Andrew reviews the latest from Yaya Bey, S.G. Goodman, and more.

Other Basement-friendly news from this week: we got new album announcements from Sloan and Nation of Language; and Devo, The B-52s and Lene Lovich are ignoring their retirement announcements by going on tour together.

Head below for this week’s reviews…

ALBUM OF THE WEEK #1: Tropical Fuck Storm – Fairyland Codex (Fire)
More vivid apocalyptic visions from Australia’s hopeful doomsayers

“It’s the Golden Age of Arseholes.” Has any band captured the insanity of the last decade in such vivid, poetic, hallucinatory detail better than Australia’s Tropical Fuck Storm? Formed in 2017 by Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin of The Drones, with Lauren Hammel (High Tension) and Erica Dunn (Mod Con), the band have been reporting from the edge of the apocalypse — a surreal “future now” that’s only slightly removed from our actual reality. That lyric is from “Goon Show,” one of many awesomely phantasmagoric songs on TFS’ fourth album. “I’ve seen the cellphone footage and it’s raining cats and dogma,” Liddiard continues. “You can rob a bank, but you don’t really rob the bank.”

Tropical Fuck Storm avoid specifics — names are rarely mentioned — but they always nail the mood. Living in the Australian bush outside Melbourne, where the barren terrain is home to all manner of weird and deadly wildlife, perhaps gives the band their uniquely Darwinian perspective: viewing the current climate as just the latest natural disaster the Earth must weather before eventually hitting the reset button. “Don’t you worry about money, don’t you worry about being alone,” Liddiard sings — backed by Kitschin and Dunn’s harmonies — on the contemplative, brooding ballad “Stepping on a Rake.” “Don’t worry about what’s coming, some things are not worth knowing.”

The interplay between Liddiard’s gruff, distinctly Aussie howl and Kitschin and Dunn’s sweet harmonies — often in call-and-response form — is also at the core of what makes Tropical Fuck Storm so unique. Liddiard calls it like he sees it: a world on the brink, its inhabitants doing what they must to survive. Kitschin and Dunn offer some flicker of faith in humanity. Dunn and Liddiard also have a near-telekinetic guitar interplay, with performances that are wildly unhinged and skronky but somehow land back in the pocket, never going overboard. Fairyland Codex mixes Grand Guignol psych-rock and funk (“Irukandji Syndrome,” “Goon Show,” “Bloodsport”) with surprisingly tender moments, like the title track — a perfect example of TFS’ balance of dystopia and hope: “A village in hell is waiting for you… if you choose.”

Fairyland Codex by TFS

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ALBUM OF THE WEEK #2: U.S. Girls – Scratch It (4AD)
Meg Remy goes Nashville but in her own wonderful own way on U.S. Girls’ latest

If you never thought U.S. Girls might make an album tracked live to 2″ tape in Nashville with a band of shit-hot session musicians, neither did Meg Remy. But when she agreed to play Arkansas’ Ecliptic Festival in 2023 and realized she couldn’t afford to bring her Toronto band with her for the one-off show, she called her friend, Nashville-based guitarist Dillon Watson, and asked if he could put a band together. He said no problem. She sent the songs to him and headed to Music City to rehearse. Meg was so enamored by the experience and the arrangements that she was convinced to try recording the Nashville way with these musicians. The result is an album unlike anything in the U.S. Girls catalog — but also one that, when you hear it, makes you wonder why she hasn’t tried this before. Her powerful, expressive voice is a natural fit for these songs of betrayal, shame, and loss, surrounded by an impressive group of ringers.

Scratch It opens with two songs that use pop icons as framing devices for very personal themes: breakup anthem “James Said” has Meg taking James Brown’s advice about dancing until you feel better, which leads directly into “Dear Patti,” a song about guilt delivered as a letter to Patti Smith (“Patti, sorry I didn’t get to hear you play / I was making sure my kids didn’t fall in the lake”). A more recent musician, the late Power Trip frontman Riley Gale, serves as partial inspiration for the album’s centerpiece, the 12-minute quiet storm epic “Bookends,” which examines grief and how we process it on both a macro and micro level. It weaves together elements of John Carey’s nonfiction collection Eyewitness to History and Power Trip’s “Crossbreaker.” It’s awesome — set against a country-soul waltz backing featuring legendary harmonica player Charlie McCoy, who adds this track to a résumé that also includes George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” and Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou.”

There are also a couple of wonderful covers — Alex Lukashevsky’s “Firefly on the Fourth of July” and “The Clearing” by Micah Blue Smaldone (she also covered his song “Time” on 2018’s In a Poem Unlimited) — and the album ends with the searing diss track “Fruit,” where she lays into an unnamed fellow musician: “Man, if you don’t plant with the moon in mind / You will surely suffer shallow roots / When harvest time comes the picker will find… you got no fruit.” Scratch It incorporates U.S. Girls’ usual palette — soul, disco, funk, ’60s Motown and girl groups — but played with the Nashville band, everything crackles with new energy. It’s also an album that bears new fruit with repeat listens. Remy rarely repeats herself, record to record, but she had such a good experience making Scratch It, the next album is already underway with the same group of players.

Scratch It by U.S. Girls

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Tan Cologne – Unknown Beyond (Labrador)
Third album from this dreamy duo maintains their impeccably chill nu age Taos vibes

Dreampop duo Tan Cologne couldn’t come from anywhere but Taos, New Mexico; the town’s new age magic crystals vibe emits from their records like the aurora borealis. What they lack in pop hooks they make up for with their own brand of Pure Moods guitar rock that recalls early Verve, Acetone and Cocteau Twins’ most ambient moments. Unknown Beyond is Tan Cologne’s third album and doesn’t mess with their formula one bit, but the reverb-soaked guitars, flowing bass, lazy river tempos and spectral harmonies make for a perfect soundtrack to staring up at the desert sky.

Here’s what Tan Cologne’s Lauren Green and Marissa Macias say: “We looked for signs and signals during the recording process,” the band says. “If we saw a shooting star, imagined a fire burning on a hill, or remembered an old satellite dish in someone’s yard, we explored that lyrically. Those visual guides became our pathways to the album. They were the signs to move forward.”

Exactly.

Unknown Beyond by Tan Cologne

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Liam Finn – Hyperverse (Occasional Music)
Pandemic lockdown sessions of Twitch inspired the latest from this talented nepo baby pop wunderkind

Liam Finn became a bit of a sensation in the late ’00s — not because of his nepo baby status (his dad is Neil Finn of Crowded House and Split Enz) — but through his one-man-band solo performances that showcased not just his melodic talents, but also his multi-instrumental, loop pedal wizardry. As his career went on, he adopted more of a traditional band format, but during the pandemic he returned to those roots with Hyperverse, a series of livestream performances on Twitch where he created new songs live using those same loop pedals.

“I wanted to see what would happen if I let people watch what would normally be incredibly solitary and intimate,” Liam says. Twitch’s chat function offered an added bonus: fans could give feedback in real time. Finn says the process felt like having a roster of “faceless, ageless, genderless producers.”

Those performances became the basis for the new album Hyperverse, which Finn calls “a composite of almost everything I’ve ever made as a musician.” Everything, in this case, includes warm and fuzzy ’90s-style indie rock, pie-eyed psych, and quirky pop — all shot through with the undeniable songwriting talent running through his DNA.

Hyperverse by Liam Finn

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INDIE BASEMENT CLASSIC: Elastica – Elastica (Deceptive / DGC, 1995)
Elastica were the glue to early britpop and the coolest band of them all. Still are.

As mentioned in this column’s intro, today is my 30th NYC anniversary and among the few CDs I brought with me on that day, along with Tricky’s debut album and Radiohead’s The Bends, was the debut album by Elastica. Here’s the review from my list of Best Britpop Albums of 1995:

Led by Justine Frischmann — who had been an early member of Suede and for much of the ’90s was one half of Britpop’s #1 Power Couple with Blur’s Damon Albarn — Elastica were a breath of fresh air when they released “Stutter,” their 1993 debut single that mixed punk, new wave and heaps of attitude. If you weren’t paying attention then, you certainly were by the time of their third single, “Connection,” that borrowed (and later paid for) its riff from Wire’s “Three Girl Rhumba.” When the song kicks in at the 20 second mark, you’ve got one of 1994’s most undeniable hooks. The band were not shy about paying homage to bands they loved: “Line Up” also borrowed heavily from Wire, and “Waking Up” tipped its hat to The Stranglers’ “No More Heroes.” The wait for their debut album seemed like forever, and when it was finally released in March of 1995 it became the fastest selling UK album since Oasis’ Definitely Maybe the year before and held onto the title till Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not in 2006. More than half of Elastica‘s songs had already seen release on singles (including some b-sides) which made it a little disappointing for fans at the time, but it now just sounds like a start-to-finish classic.

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