Let’s get retro wth Flashion Backward, a feature that’s the spiritual cousin of Flashion Forward. Here, we rifle through our treasure trove of interviews to fish out a vintage gem–the better to explore the strange vortex in which fashion and musicians meet. Today we’re checking out The Age of Rockets to see what revelatory nuggets of wisdom we can extract from this UI clip.

Orchestral/electro indie rockers The Age of Rockets seem to have to the whole hipster nerd boys and girls thing going for them–they’re all Converse, fluttery layers of vintage clothing with odd button arrangements, pasty skin and dark hair. These are the peeps with whom one enjoys imbibing the champagne of beers, right? Wrong!

Don’t be fooled by their awesomely blended organic electro musical creations that surely reveal wise and kind souls, because really? The Age of Rockets crew up so hard there’s gotta be at least once where they talk smack about you and your friends. (We still can’t help but like their plaid, though).

Join me on my latest intrepid venture into sonic style with Flashion Forward! Each week we pluck a recently added interview from our warehouse of current clips and try to read between the artist’s sartorial lines. Today, we’re beaming up to planet Loney Dear.

And what a strange and wonderful land it is: musical polymath Emil Svanängen of Sweden managed to create a genuinely unique aural terrain in the…wait for it…basement of his parents’ home, giving unemployed geniuses (and their folks) everywhere hope that they, too, will produce the next great novel, symphony or work of art while wallowing in the glories of free food, laundry and cable.

Loney Dear’s music–hammering, ecstatic, delicate, steely, soulful and engineered with an exactitude rivaled only by particularly rigorous car manufacturers auf Deutschland–sounds like Emil looks, in all of his blond, vintage T-shirt glory.

He appears to be some kind of happy cross between a stern Viking and a naughty, adolescent Cupid without the sobering influence of Venus. Ivory-skinned and cherubic, with eminently pinchable cheeks, he seems like your bad-influence bestie, your secretly sweet (but outwardly tough guy) boy (or girl) friend, the lab partner you cheated off of in Bio and the drinking buddy who always makes you stay ’til last call, rolled into one adorable, dance-along package.

Check out Emil’s impish take on the dubious talent of techno creators and the invariably great music their often lackluster sequencing abilities produce.

Welcome to Flashion Backwards, a new UI feature that’s the spiritual cousin of our recently debuted Flashion Forward. Here, we rifle through our treasure trove of interviews to fish out a vintage gem–the better to explore the strange vortex in which fashion and musicians meet.

Fashion and music often make strange bedfellows and while we won’t dare attempt to penetrate the existential mystery that is heinous rock dude’s inexplicable ability to bed every model west of the Volga River, we will take our greasy paws and grapple with more prosaic perplexities — such as trying to figure out WTF it is that these zany musicians are strapping onto their carcasses these days and what it implies about their musical POA. Sometimes, like sex, it’s better the second time around.

Here’s this week’s stylish blast from the past for your aesthetic cogitation. Today, we’re revisiting balmier days with a sunny artist who’s prone to the occasional flash of thunder. When UI caught up with uber-earnest singer-songwriter Juliana Hatfield, she was perched in a basic black cotton scoop-neck on a hot pink soft shaggy throw and looked every inch the Boston indie rocker she is.

(CHECK OUT MORE FLASHION BACKWARDS)

It’s the second installment of breaking down indie myths. One of the most common is that once a band becomes popular, they are no longer talented. Maybe they sold out, or compromised their sound. Any band who has been popular from the beginning must be talentless hacks that pander to the stupid masses.

Ask any hipster what they think about a very popular band and they will get visibly angry at worst, or laugh and pretend to like them ironically. No self respecting hipster can say they earnestly like the Pussycat Dolls unless they can construe their work as “societal commentary.” Just say the word Nickelback and see indie rockers become visibly angry. No, really! Look here, here, and here:

(After the jump, that is)

Efterklang got ThePerryTrain ‘a wonderin…

I used to feel like finding an indie rocker without a moustache was as unlikely as finding The Chupacabra or Bigfoot.  Yet, in the same week the most convincing evidence of the existence of two of these three unlikely creatures has been discovered.  Some cops down in Cuero, Texas turned on their dashboard cam and got footage of what appears to be a hairless wolf-pig creature, the infamous goat-sucker vampire-dog: The Chupacabra.

Also, some hunters in Georgia claim to have discovered the dead body of Bigfoot and have pictures and DNA evidence to prove it.  I’m sure it’s only a coincidence that these guys run a Bigfoot tour company, the redneck equivalent of an African Safari.

Also, on a not completely unrelated note, my Dad believes that there’s a passage in the Bible that references the existence of aliens.

Now, I’ve heard tales of seeing them in the shadowy corner of a lower east side vegan restaurant.  The story is always the same.  A blur of tight pants, shrouded with a hoodie, quietly curses UniversalMusic while reading the latest Michael Azerrad book.  “I swear I saw him!  There was no hair on his upper lip!  NO HAIR!!!  There was no ironic OR un-ironic moustache!”  But nobody ever has a cameraphone fast enough to catch this creature before they skitter out of sight leaving the observer questioning what they saw, re-living the moment over and over in their head, wondering whether to tell their friends.  “Will they believe me?  They’ll think I’m crazy.  I know what I saw.”

Well, if this evidence of Chupacabras and Sasquatches means anything its that maybe one day these quietly sarcastic creatures will emerge from hiding and show themselves to the world.  Until then it is up to us to decide whether this hairless beast truly exists.

In honor of all the love we’ve been getting from 10 Links A Day, who were gracious enough to let us guest blog on their site this week, not to mention the awesome write up that Tilzy.tv gave us yesterday, I’ve decided to eschew my normal pessimistic outlook for one day and do an actual, honest to goodness, blog on the positive tip. Somewhere in hell, the Devil is wearing a parka right now.

Yesterday I posted a quick blog pimping our ongoing collaboration with 10 Links a Day, as well as bemoaning the fact that yours truly, The Shark, was not asked to be the inaugural guest blogger. Well, quicker than I could put on a pair of clean underwear after hitting the “publish” button (remember, I often blog immediately after waking up in yesterday’s underwear), 10 Links responded to my post with the following:

Honestly, when I complained about not being the guest blogger, I was just being a bit whiny. I wasn’t prepared to post 10 links of anything that I think you should visit. I go to like 8 websites a day, and half of them are either running or bowling related, cynically mean, or just flat out weird. You don’t want me guiding you around the web, I’d just send you links to dancing hamsters and hilariously awful David Lee Roth isolated vocals. (By the way, if you haven’t heard Running With The Devil – vocals only yet, PLEASE click that link. You’ll thank me later).

But now that I’ve been formally invited by 10 Links a Day, I can’t turn them down., they’re our new friends They’ve got me under the gun, and the pressure’s on full blast. I feel like Keanu Reeves in Speed – trying to get 30 some-odd innocent strangers off a bus while keeping it above 50mph, when all I really wanna do is bang Sandra Bullock before she goes and ruins her career by doing Miss Congeniality and Miss Congeniality 2. Except, of course, instead of a packed, speeding city bus loaded with C4, I’m on a stationary dining room chair alone in my apartment, there’s no bomb, no Dennis Hopper calling the shots, and the only thing Sandra Bullock is doing is frustrating me by not having any good nipple slips available on Mr. Skin.

It’ll take me a few more days (weeks) to cultivate my 10 Links, but right now, I want to share with you another list – My Top 5 Reasons to Love Indie, because let’s face it, if you’re reading this, you’re probably an indie rock fan, but do you really know WHY you love indie so much? Neither do I, but I’m really good at bullshitting – hey, how do you think I got this job? Qualifications? Ha! – so without further ado, here’s The Shark’s

5 Reasons to Love Indie

1. No bullshit major label censoring. Here’s a deep, dark secret that you can use against me – I worked for MTV Networks for 5 years, and dealt with tons of high profile, major label acts (yes, even Nickelback *shudder*). When we interviewed bands, we weren’t allowed to ask certain types of questions that were deemed “controversial,” even if they were laughably playful and innocent. Bands and artists were so well media trained that they painfully censored themselves to maintain their well-manicured image to the public. Ugh. You’d never hear a major label act talk about race like Del The Funky Homosapien
   
2. Indie artists, for the most part, embrace the internet. Sure, it’s not cool to illegally download anyone’s songs, but most indie artists won’t sue you for it, they’ll just kindly ask you to support them by coming out to their shows.
   
   Hell, if you still feel guilty, you can buy them a beer after the show. Which leads me to my next point…
3. Accessibility – Do me a favor, the next time you go to an indie show, hang out around the bar afterward. I’ll bet you my left nut that at least one or two band members will eventually sidle up to you and have a drink. That’s what I love about indie bands – they’re fucking down to earth. I know firsthand from interviewing them for Uncensored Interview that most indie bands are cool as shit, and love bullshitting with the fans, knocking a few back, even partying afterward. Unless you’re a 21 year old Double D groupie, you ain’t partying with Fall Out Boy after their Roseland gig, hombre.
4. The Fashion and The Fans – Sure, I knock tight jeans, Beatles hairstyles, and wildly ungroomed facial hair all the time, and unless I lose a bet where the other option is the death of my firstborn son, you’ll never see me sporting any of those in my lifetime. But at the same time it’s refreshing to go to a rock show and not be surrounded by dirty Nirvana and Pantera t-shirts, emo-rific haircuts, and 13 year old girls in black eyeliner with their parents standing awkwardly behind them. There’s something intrinsically cool about an indie rock crowd, whether they’re wearing skintight jeans and hoodies, sporting glasses and Into The Wild facial hair, or dressed like the band Stillwater from Almost Famous:
   
5. The Music – Let’s face it, major labels have been chasing the indie mystique for years, trying to create bands that look and sound somewhat indie, while keeping the music slick and polished. It hasn’t worked – you can’t recreate indie without the trials and tribulations of being indie. Indie music sounds like it does naturally, be it because of haggard equipment, old school production techniques, or just rush recording on the cheap. It can’t be faked. I’ll take a band like The Kills over The Strokes any day. This is why music is heading away from the major labels and back towards the basements, garages, and living rooms of aspiring artists and fans today – because bands like The Whigs, The Oaks, and Ungdomskulen are making great, balls-out fucking rock music that takes chances, while the majors are churning out another bland Daughtry album.

Dunno if you caught indie rock princess Feist on the Colbert Report last night, but here’s video of the interview which our lawyer will probably tell me to take down in about, oh, 2 hours or so:

Fast forward to 1:40 into the clip, when Colbert asks Feist what an “indie rocker” is. Mother fucker, that’s our question! That no good Daily Show castoff totally ripped us off! Don’t answer it, Leslie! Don’t answer a query so brazenly ripped from the Uncensored Interview playbook. Stephen Colbert, YOU are now officially on notice: