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"Indie rock" has come to encompass pop, R&B, and even overt major-label acts without much pushback. Meanwhile, alternative rock stations are defined by their heavy rotation of the Neighbourhood, Imagine Dragons, Walk the Moon, and numerous other synth-heavy projects that resemble aged boybands after an H&M spending spree. The guitar is seen as antithesis of youth culture rather than the embodiment of it, unless it’s within the perpetual arrested development of the Warped Tour. In light of this state of affairs, producer Will Yip has presumably charted a phenomenally self-defeating career plan.
At the age of 18, he turned down the Ivy League for the sole purpose of taking a class with producer Phil Nicolo at Temple University, often known as Philly’s commuter school. As part of the Butcher Brothers duo, Nicolo had worked with Sting, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, and Aerosmith, as well as '90s alt-rock staples Urge Overkill and Luscious Jackson, but his 21st century output includes a still-unreleased Lauryn Hill project and a Queen tribute from Keane. After sweeping floors as an intern and working his way up, Yip went out of pocket to rent a storage room to record local punk bands and developed a reputation of working with rock music that rarely gets much mainstream press. And now he’s taken out a very "stressful" five-year loan to partner in Conshohocken, Penn.’s Studio 4, a venue that has seen Rock and Roll Hall of Famers pass through its doors, but is still firmly situated suburban Philadelphia. Oh, and he’s going to start his own label.
And yet, Yip has emerged as an Albini-like figure in a burgeoning community of successful, young rock acts—opinionated former punk musician transitions into production and engineering, becomes a muse for bigger bands and a mentor for obscure ones, and provides both an invariably top-notch sounding rock record and more credibility than they entered the studio with. This past week, the 29 year old officially launched his Memory Music imprint with Tigers Jaw’s Studio 4 Acoustic Session, recorded in front of about 50 people during a 2014 sitdown tour. Named after the opener from Title Fight’s Hyperview, one of Yip’s most celebrated projects, Memory Music is a joint venture where distribution and packaging is handled by Run For Cover, a likewise ascendant Boston-based label home to many of the bands produced by Yip.
Nearly every band Yip works with should be either relegated to the margins or slip through the cracks. The likes of Title Fight, Balance and Composure, Citizen, and Tigers Jaw are unapologetic rock bands—guitars, bass, drums, strident vocals, and plaintive lyrics about feelings and big religious issues. There’s no Will Yip "sound" either—he doesn’t have a signature like the dry, sternum-shattering punch of Steve Albini, Dave Fridmann’s redlining maximalism, or Ben Allen’s saturated low-end. These bands do not really comprise a scene, nor is it a sound or even a demographic. It is certainly a wave and Yip is guiding what can best described as "new alternative rock." Not in the sense that "indie rock" has become a substitute for "alt rock," which is to say, pop mass-marketed as counterculture, a meaningless catch-all that allows people to signify their meaningful engagement with music. Rather, many of the bands Yip works with, and those in their immediate vicinity, are the continuation of alt-rock’s sonic ideals.
This cuts both ways. Bands such as Whirr draw from the more turbulent, expansive deep cuts from Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream and Hum’s thick brew of shoegaze, emo and metal. Balance and Composure takes after Nirvana, but the sleek radio rock of Nevermind or the proto-emo of Foo Fighters’ The Colour and the Shape. Some of them are just newfangled grunge-pop bands, like Seahaven and Superheaven and Citizen, though their most recent LP Everybody Is Going to Heaven strives to be Jesus Lizard for people who weren’t even born when it came out. Circa Survive is accepted in emo circles, but have more than a little bit of Tool’s mainstream-prog tendencies. Yip also has lent his touch to bands who evoke the asceticism of D.C. hardcore while putting a more religious and novelistic spin on it, such as mewithoutYou and La Dispute. And there’s sweeter, more jangly acts who stick both hands into Buzz Bin such as Pity Sex, Adventures, and Tigers Jaw.
And if they all come across like bands who operate and sound like they’ve missed the past 15 or so years, the upshot is that they’ve reached the kind of audience which we’re constantly told doesn’t exist anymore—these are young listeners who truly care about rock music, buy albums, buy merch, and ensure that all-ages shows stay packed and raucous across the country. These bands tend to chart surprisingly high on Billboard—When Tigers Jaw’s Charmer dropped in 2014, it debuted at #49 on Billboard, ahead of critically acclaimed mainstays Fucked Up and Parquet Courts. mewithoutYou’s recently released Pale Horses sits right between Ariana Grande and Rae Sremmurd.
But these kids eventually grow up and Yip’s produced three records in the past year which are emblematic of the unmistakable and likely necessary shift happening within this realm. On last year’s Keep You, Pianos Become the Teeth’s torrential screamo gave way to burnished, reverberating ambience typical of Scottish post-rock acts like Mogwai or the Twilight Sad. In May, Turnover released their sophomore LP Peripheral Vision, a collection of wistful dream-pop songs they still had to workshop while on tour with New Found Glory.
And then there’s Hyperview, Title Fight’s impressive and very divisive third proper LP. The Kingstown, Penn. band have been a functioning unit since their mid-teens and have generated an enormous amount of goodwill due to their inexhaustible work ethic, as well as Shed, a roaring assault of melodic East Coast punk rock. Their 2012 album Floral Green surprised the hardcore community simply by integrating effects pedals and touches of shoegaze. Consequently, Hyperview is a highly-produced guitar album—there’s screaming on maybe one track, and the vocals are mostly buried under layers of swooning, lush guitar jangle.
All three of those albums found a still-young band at a similar point in their trajectory. Pianos, Title Fight, and Turnover had built up their reputation to the point where there’s legitimate risk in leaving behind their abrasive, non-indie formative stages. This last part is important—for those who discovered My Bloody Valentine or the Smiths or Galaxie 500 in high school, it’s hard to hear Hyperview or Peripheral Vision as challenging, innovative records. But the sources must be considered—Title Fight have been together since their mid-teens in 2003 and none have reached the age of 25. Turnover is technically a "veteran band" even though half of them are still full-time college students and, according to Yip, they now draw inspiration from older bands like the Cure and Joy Division.
As Yip’s reputation within the punk community grew, his ambition did as well. "The second I started working at Studio 4, I had this idea of Chess Records, of Motown Records," labels where the studio became a figurative band member, Yip explains over the phone at Studio 4, where he more or less lives now. This process began with Off the Board: A Studio 4 Family, a 2013 compilation comprised of 15 original songs intended to raise funds for his down payment. The fundraising aspect didn’t really pan out, as the record cost Yip about five months of studio time, along with the pressing and distribution costs. Nonetheless, it generated enough positive press and excitement amongst the bands involved for Yip to move forward.
But as Yip and his partners shift towards the mainstream, there’s the attendant concerns about perception and mainstream indie credibility that weren’t present before. A prime example is a laudatory FADER profile in which Run For Cover label head Jeff Casazza stated, "I never wanted to be a 29-year-old guy putting out records for young kids...I can’t relate to that stuff anymore." Despite its positive tone, the piece seemed to be a subliminal shot at Man Overboard, Hostage Calm, Tigers Jaw, Modern Baseball, Citizen, i.e., the pop-punk and emo acts that built RFC and went unmentioned.
Meanwhile, after jumping from SideOneDummy to ANTI-, Title Fight is now labelmates with Tom Waits and Neko Case. This was reflected in Hyperview’s ambitious album rollout—the band premiered a song in FADER, another in Vogue, and showed off their collection of vintage hardcore T-shirts to GQ. The intersection of fashion and punk is hardly worth getting worked up about, especially after 2013’s Met Gala—Meredith Graves discussed Louis Vuitton duffle bags in Elle without causing much of a stir, but Title Fight were viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility. It’s seen as a betrayal.
And so it’s difficult to say whether Memory Music will end up being Yip’s exit strategy from "new alternative rock" or a means of solidifying the scene. Tigers Jaw and Circa Survive’s Anthony Green are already set in the release schedule, but Yip can’t be forthcoming about what else he has planned. He stresses that he’s not at liberty to reveal the formative bands he’s been working with, but Yip describes one of his projects as "the next Bruno Mars" and that he’s open to working with more hip-hop acts. Even if Yip has done quite well as the sonic architect of "new alternative rock," it’s worth remembering that the first time around, alt-rock had eventually lost favor as more diverse and ambitious polyglots became prominent. And eventually, alt-rock transitioned into nu-metal.
But if he does draw the ire of the hardcore, pop-punk contingent...well, he’ll be no different than most of the bands he’s produced. The name of Memory Music was taken from the first song on Title Fight’s Hyperview—Yip appreciated the sheer sound of the word "memory" ("fuck man, fucking memory, it just touches my heart"), but also the resonance in its title. In describing Title Fight’s evolution, he hopes to have found his own philosophy—"They don’t hold a scene over them, or a sound over them. They never cared about what they’re supposed to sound like."