Slumberland 20th Anniversary Show

Last month I saw the Pains of Being Pure at Heart play to a packed Black Cat in DC and their stage banter was full of all the wide-eyed indie pop ebullience their debut record so gloriously captures. “We’re so excited to be playing in DC, home of our label, Slumberland Records,” keyboardist Peggy Wang proclaimed towards the end of the set. “Some of our favorite bands are from here. Like Velocity Girl!” When a few scattered hands offered up unenthusiastic applause, I couldn’t help but assume that they were some of the few in the room without Xs on them. Were this a few years ago, I would have been upset with this tepid a recognition of what I considered to be a legendary local band. What gives, DC? Velocity Girl! Indie pop icons! Hometown heroes! But I no longer harbor these sorts of expectations.

Before I moved to DC a little over four years ago, I had always pictured it a mythical place where the streets were paved with Repeater (1990) jewel cases, DIY ethos was something you drank in with the tap water, and the chance of bumping shopping carts with Henry Rollins lingered around every corner aisle at the neighborhood Whole Foods. DC’s musical history seemed so potent and important that I figured its distinct values and iconic sound would still be manifest in the city’s current musical landscape.

And I was wrong. Aside from a few refreshing exceptions, the local scene doesn’t possess the unified principles and inventiveness that I’d always associated with DC; nobody talks about the “DC sound” anymore…because there isn’t one. Q and Not U, perhaps the last great hope for DC music this side of Wale, not to mention one of my favorite bands throughout most of high school, broke up a month after I moved here, as if some of the city’s most iconic landmarks—in a cheesy and heavy-handed dream sequence loaded with personification and metonymy—had stooped down to say to me in an unwelcoming, portentous tone, “Sorry, you arrived to this party a little too late.”

But Dischord isn’t the only label that looms large in the city’s history of independent music; the distinctive noise-pop of Slumberland Records once served as a warmer, fuzzier and decidedly more be-cardigan’d foil to the fury of DC hardcore. Mike Shulman, of such bands as Black Tambourine and Whorl, co-founded Slumberland in 1989 influenced by the dreamy pop of UK labels like Creation and Sarah Records, as well as by the DIY ethos of Olympia’s K Records clan. When Slumberland put out releases in the early ‘90s from DC acts like Velocity Girl, Lilys, and Lorelei, the scene was both tight-knit and short-lived: almost all the players performed with multiple bands and few of the bands’ catalogues contained more than one or two full-lengths. By 1992, Slumberland and Schulman relocated to Berkeley, and, aside from a few periods of inactivity, the label has operated from there ever since.

The word Slumberland has, in the past year or so, seen a huge resurgence in the indie lexicon, owing mostly to the fact that, after a hiatus that lasted nearly five years, the label has recently released a couple of well-received records from hyped acts like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Cause Co-Motion!, and Crystal Stilts. Less directly, or perhaps more tellingly, Slumberland’s cropped up—often alongside equally commodified and frequently misused epithets like “C86” and “lo-fi” (have they picked Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2009 yet?)—as shorthand for “sounds like Vivian Girls.” This is the cultural landscape in which the label celebrated its 20th anniversary this month via a few commemorative shows featuring bands from the label’s past and present alike.

Though the bill didn’t boast any of the label’s older marquee names (I’m sure a few people in attendance would have hyperventilated at the very prospect of a Black Tambourine or Rocketship reunion), it did include three artists from Slumberland’s early years: the Shulman-helmed Nord Express delivered dreamy melodies buried under tidal waves of distortion; Lorelei, who even treated the crowd to a handful of new songs, were equal parts indie pop and Dischord-inspired; and the Ropers played an energetic set of hook-driven power pop received enthusiastically by the somewhat aged crowd. Around the stage stood a smattering of men who looked kind of like Frank Black does now. As they sang along to every word of these bands’ sets, I gazed wistfully at their bald spots and shapeless, oversized t-shirts—envious of the sort of first-hand nostalgia they enjoyed—emblematic of a DC infinitely cooler than the one I knew.

The bands representing Slumberland’s current roster weren’t as consistent. Brown Recluse, as pleasant as they were forgettable, specialized in an overtly Belle & Sebastian-influenced brand of indie pap (complete with a sort of superfluous trumpet player and a bassist with a Stevie Jackson haircut, poor guy). Recent signees Pants Yell! played a bouncy and enjoyable set heavy on cuts from their latest album, Received Pronunciation. Frankie Rose & the Outs were perhaps the most pleasant surprise of the night, entrancing the audience with ethereal harmonies, particularly during their performance of a track that Rose wrote before she was kicked out of the Vivian Girls, “Where Do You Run To?” Though they’re relatively new to Slumberland, Crystal Stilts were given the suspect honor of top billing, and they proved as dubiously underwhelming, especially for headliners. There was nothing extraordinarily bad about their set of drone-vocaled jangle pop, but it wasn’t memorable enough to serve as the sort of feel-good, celebratory finale that befits a night of blissed-out commemoration and local appreciation. If Crystal Stilts’ set, chock full of new songs that sounded indistinguishable from their old ones, was meant to symbolize the future of the label, it left me feeling more bummed out than ever that I hadn’t been around during Slumberland’s first wave. It’s a shame the Pains of Being Pure at Heart (who did headline the Slumberland Anniversary show in New York the following night) weren’t available, because I think they would have ended the festivities on an appropriately exuberant note. Given their recent and well-deserved popularity, at least the crowd wouldn’t have been so sparse.

Like so many small, localized scenes that have been posthumously glorified (or, depending upon your perspective, overblown) into significant movements in the history of indie rock, Slumberland’s relation to its hometown of DC is not a vitally resonant influence but a brief, self-contained moment, like handprints in a sidewalk that’s long since dried. Being at the anniversary show left me feeling sentimental about something I wasn’t even a part of, something I wish had not been so fleeting, something I’m sure I always have overestimated the coolness of and always will, simply because I wasn’t there. The Internet has done a lot to wipe out the intimacy of local scenes in favor of something more distanced and detached; still, the Internet—effervescent little minx that she is—has made it possible for a tiny outfit like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart to find a humungous national audience and to sell out the same venue that an entire bill of Slumberland veterans could only half fill. I live to hope this new wave of Slumberland records doesn’t render the label’s original releases obsolete, that “Slumberland” the adjective will never be seen as more relevant than the indie rock treasure trove that is the Slumberland back catalogue. So, if I may be granted a closing sentence of curmudgeonliness: Kids, press pause on that damn Keyboard Cat video, go put on a Henry’s Dress record, and prepare to get your mind all expanded-like.