Intimate Relaytions: Gayngs and indie rock’s R&B boom

June 2010 — By Bryan Reed on June 28, 2010 at 7:31 pm

Over the past decade, defining the term “indie rock” has become increasingly troublesome. No longer just the ragged, quirky and nervous guitar-rock of yesteryear (though it certainly is still that), indie rock is something of a blanket term for anything perceived to be quirky or different. It’s not all rock, as the popularity of M.I.A. can attest, nor is it about obscurity, as chart-toppers such as MGMT and the Kings of Leon prove.

But whatever it is, and however we define it, indie rock seems to have maintained one constant: It is the opposite of commercial pop. If commercial pop is slick and manufactured, indie is rougher and more authentic.

But for something so defined by what it’s not, indie rock of late is starting to sound an awful lot like commercial pop. It’s defying its own parameters once again.

The debut album from Gayngs, a jumbo-sized collaborative gathering of indie-music luminaries, is ostensibly an indie rock band. And at moments it sounds like one –textured and imperfect. But mostly, it’s slick and schmaltzy. The singers croon against backdrops of reverbed harmonies and dense production.

From its origin, bandleader Ryan Olson and friends from the electro-pop outfit Solid Gold set out to capture the soft-rocking R&B of 10cc’s 1975 hit “I’m Not In Love.” Eventually, the project expanded to include members of experimental folk-rockers Megafaun; Ivan Howard, front man of indie-rock popsmiths The Rosebuds; soulful, woodsy songwriter Justin Vernon of Bon Iver; underground rapper P.O.S.; and a legion of overqualified sidemen.

The album, “Relayted,” is recorded entirely at a woozily slow (and clearly premeditated) 69 beats per minute. It sounds nothing like any of its contributors’ primary outlets. It sounds like commercial pop, all the way down to the Auto-Tune.

Of course, if you’ve been paying attention, Auto-Tune in indie rock isn’t entirely new. Imogen Heap used the vocoder tool to cast herself in spectral harmony on her 2005 single, “Hide And Seek.” Bon Iver did likewise on “Woods” from 2009’s “Blood Bank” EP. Also in 2009, Discovery, a side project shared between two bona-fide indie-rockers – Vampire Weekend’s Rotsam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot’s Wes Miles – released an album’s worth of synthesizer-driven, R&B-inspired and heavily Auto-Tuned pop songs.

Of course, in a world where artists float through increasingly porous stylistic borders, there’s bound to be cross-pollination. But it’s still noteworthy that megastars like Kanye West and Lady Gaga are sharing page space with blog-famous acts like Animal Collective and The xx. But this is the world we live in. Jay-Z rocks out at Grizzly Bear shows and his wife’s sister Solange covers the Dirty Projectors.

On the opposite end, Chaz Bundick, a 20-something from Columbia, S.C., who records as Toro Y Moi, outshone a deluge of similar acts on his full-length debut, “Causers of This,” simply by turning up his mainstream pop influences. Yes, his hazy laptop-pop arrangements are more insular and confined than any Top 40 hit, but Bundick’s attention to the smooth melodies and strong hooks of mid-’90s pop and R&B makes his album a standout.

Ultimately, it’s less a tectonic shift than an acknowledgement of where we are as a society. With geographic, cultural and societal borders eliminated by the ubiquity of information at our fingertips, it seems we’re all coming to realize that music can’t be antithetical to itself, so the wall between indie and mainstream crumbles. All it takes is a band like Gayngs to show us that it’s all “relayted,” after all.

Gayngs – “The Gaudy Side of Town”