Somewhere in America: Great Bands From Off the Beaten Path

Location: Boise, Idaho

Estimated Population: 205,671

Boise is a lot bigger than most people realize, and it's now home to the increasingly diverse Treefort Festival, but even a fruitful and growing arts scene doesn't change the fact that most bands still aren't going to make it out there on tour. Built To Spill, for their part, function as godfathers to the fledgling scene. Since their 1993 debut, they've been the torch bearers for a fiery brand of guitar driven indie rock that defined the underground music scene in the Northwest for years. Without Doug Martsch's rubbery guitar lines and idiosyncratic melodies, Natalie Portman never would have had the Shins, Yuck would sound even more like Pavement, and you'd probably have never heard of fellow Boisean Trevor Powers' project Youth Lagoon.

Location: Nevada City, California

Estimated Population: 3,068

Privacy seems to be the motivating factor for Joanna Newsom's continued residence outside of her birthplace of Nevada City, CA. Firmly entrenched in the part of California that everyone drives through as fast as they can to get to Sacremento (ick), or pretty much anywhere else, Nevada City is home to just over 3,000 people and little else–a prime location for a figure as notoriously private as Newsom. Here she's free to set about work on her labyrinthine compositions and plink away at her harp without outside interference or the fear of distraction or creepy stalkers. She's even gone so far as to ensure that the description of the exterior of her house was held out of a profile in the New York Times. I guess that's an advantage to staying off the grid, she's able to practice her own weirdness in peace.

Location: Brattleboro, Vermont

Estimated Population: 12,046

What Brattleboro, Vermont lacks in population, it makes up for in post-hippie charm. Refugees from a host of nearby art schools have long taken up residence in the city's modest downtown. While splitting his time between his parents Brattleboro home and a nearby loft that had been converted into a recording studio, Kyle Thomas recorded his debut King Tuff effort Was Dead. Long lost to the annals of time and exorbitant eBay auctions, the record finally saw rerelease this year on SoCal's esteemed Burger Records. Thomas's music never seemed to fit Brattleboro's highminded art ideals in the same way that Tune-Yards, the city's other recent notable export, managed to. That being said, Was Dead is a pretty piece of garage pop and a highlight among Burger Records vast catalog of similar sounding records. Driven on glamrock smarts and a precocious knack for lead guitar hooks, Was Dead was something like a lost artifact in a world where such mystery is nearly impossible. Recent successes have driven Thomas out to the coast, but despite stylistic inconsistencies, the heart of Was Dead,and King Tuff on the whole, lies in the sprawling squalor of Brattleboro's art scene.

Location: Olympia, Washington

Estimated Population: 47,698

If you take a trip to Washington, no matter the reason, you're probably going to Seattle. Business trip, family vacation, or tour stop, you're more likely to end up in the far Northeast of the state than the capital, which lies just about an hour drive to the south. But largely due to the work of Beat Happening's primary songwriter Calvin Johnson, Olympia is home to a disproportionally large number of bands itself. In 1982, Johnson founded K Records, which (along with his work in Beat Happening) managed to kickstart the whole American wing of twee. K was, and is to this day, a reminder of the DIY ethos that punk embodied in the first place, though its own rebellion was against punk aesthetics. Johnson's charmingly inept work as Beat Happening, and to this day under a variety of other monikers including his birth name, was a cutesy and sarcastic middle finger to the macho aspects of hardcore. Years later, a whole host of bands in Seattle made their way to major labels by appearing not to care. The difference in Johnson's case was that he actually didn't. It's hard to imagine that being possible anywhere but Olympia.

Location: Rochester, New York

Estimated Population: 210,565

In a lot of ways, Rochester, NY is just a really cold college town. Though it boasts a population well into six digits, much of the city is centered around the series of schools at its center. As such, it's not a place that traditionally exports a ton of music. Michael Rheinheimer, the main man behind Rochester band Attic Abasement isn't a college kid, nor does he make music that might suggest it. His three records to date sound like perverse cousins to the work of Bill Callahan or David Berman–gasping, wry compositions poking at existence. These aren't trendy tunes by any means, but that's part of the beauty of working in these climates. Without fellow travelers to poke and prod you, your art is free to become whatever it will. For Rheinheimer, it's classic sounding indie rock, well crafted, and nostalgic only in the sense that his songwriting clout is comparable to the forerunners of the genre.

Location: West Palm Beach, FL

Estimated Population: 101,043

West Palm Beach, FL is home to over 100,000 people, but like all populous beach-bordering areas of Florida, geriatric snowbirds make up a large slice of that otherwise substantial number. As such, it comes as a bit of a surprise whenever you hear about bands emerging from that corner of the state. Even Surfer Blood, the area's most notable recent export, seems descendant of the same ideal that brings those northerners down in the winter–dark thoughts are lifted by buoyant riffs and chipper woodblock percussion. Cop City Chill Pillars, however, proves that there's at least a few weirdos that call the city home. The experimental punks run closer to Devo's highwire rhythmic play or the Residents commitment to bizarro punk theater than the beachy tunes that rule the day. Imagine all the old people they'd freak out in some random beach bar.

Location: Eau Claire, WI

Estimated Population: 63,902

Where would Justin Vernon be if not for his home state? Though the mythical cabin in the woods that birthed his debut was located outside of his hometown of Eau Claire, the dude is practically the physical embodiment of small town Wisconsin at this point. Wispy snowswept vocals and the bitter clang of a resonator acoustic guitar made up the majority of For Emma, Forever Ago, but the critical masses grew attached to its creation narrative. As the story is most often related, a post-breakup Vernon made his way to a cottage out in the Wisconsin wilderness with naught more than recording equipment and the barest necessities for his winter survival. Critics heard that voice and guitar, but they paid more attention to the desolation, the crackling fire and the bitter cold that they thought they could hear between the lines. Vernon proved his merit as a songwriter, but it was the unique sense of place that turned someone who might have otherwise been just another bearded folky into a Kanye collaborator.

YOU STILL LIKE BON IVER?

YOU STILL LIKE BON IVER?

Location: Dayton, Ohio

Estimated Population: 141,527

Alongside the Breeders, another notable band of Daytonites, Guided By Voices almost became synonymous with the eastern Ohio city. Robert Pollard's guitar lines are working class and soaked in cheap beer–generally descendant from the legion of classic rock-aping bar bands that populate the town. With a couple of landmark '90s indie rock acts, you might think that Dayton would have ended up on the map, or at least on the general touring circuit, but as the sixth most populous city in Ohio, bands are far more likely to stop elsewhere. Pollard wasn't born from a scene, but straight out of classic rock radio and dingy bars.

Location: Fredericksburg, Virginia

Estimated Population: 25,691

It's stands to reason that a man, even one only 22 years old, from America's self-proclaimed "most historic city" would make music steeped in hundreds of years of the region's recent music. Though Daniel Bachman's instrumentals have recent antecedents in the Jack Rose's Atlantic coast ragas, his brand of rootsy psychedelia blows back through Basho, Fahey, and Jones straight into the familiar ache of classic Appalachian folk music. But Bachman silences any critics that might bark about a lack of innovation by blending all of these disparate players into one distinct postmodern cocktail of bleary-eyed guitar virtuosity. History runs through the town's blood and Bachman's, but he's looking forward as often as he's looking back.

Location: Lexington, KY

Estimated Population: 305,489

As often as smaller cities produce little bands that could, they use their relative reclusitivity to harbor darkness. With a place like Lexington, it's a little more like hiding in plain sight. Mike Connelly, the main man behind the Lexington-based noise project Hair Police and a former member of Wolf Eyes, certainly has learned this over the course of his past few records. Cheaper rent and less established venues can have their perks, and people are often more open to the absurd. Hair Police's recent effort Mercurial Rites is probably the most terrifying thing you can put in your ears in 2013—or at least this side of the Haxan Cloak. It's hard to imagine the chain-rattling, oozing electronics emerging from anywhere but the seedy underbelly of a Kentucky town. The climate is always ripe in New York for noise like this, but Hair Police manages to be even more demented than their cousins in Wolf Eyes, an astounding feat no doubt the product of their surroundings.

Location: Anacortes, Washington

Estimated Population: 15,928

When Phil Elverum of The Microphones and Mount Eerie went to Europe on tour for his 2009 album Wind's Poem, he learned that Europeans' grasp of rural Washington's geography can be pretty shaky. Though he chuckles at the repeated question of whether or not his hometown, Anacortes, is anywhere near Twin Peaks, the comparison to David Lynch's surreal idyllicism makes more sense than he might realize. Like Lynch, Elverum is deeply concerned with his locale and the nature that surrounds it. Even when he made his way down to Olympia to record with his old pal Calvin Johnson for a famed string of Microphones records, his lyrics turned again to his home and the bizarre allure of the place. It took "Between Two Mysteries," a Twin Peaks-referencing track off of Wind's Poem, before the connection clicked with a lot of people, but Elverum, like Lynch, has always been concerned with the curious power of the Pacific Northwest, imbuing it in his songs with a similar sense of wonder to Lynch's most esteemed works.

Location: Austin, Minnesota

Estimated Population: 24,718

Maus is missing. Or at least he's hard to pinpoint. Though the Austin, Minnesota native has fallen off the map since his 2011 album We Must Become The Pitiless Censors of Ourselves he's been making his brand of philosophically engaged deconstructivist pop from sheltered outposts of uncool for nearly ten years. Maus's academic career seems to be his preeminent concern at this juncture, but rest assured that whatever small college town he ends up in, he'll eventually someday send out more siren calls of glammed up post-OMD synth pop.

Location: La Grange, Georgia

Estimated Population: 29,588

Rachel Evans, the driving force behind Motion Sickness of Time Travel, makes music that mirrors her surroundings. She lives with her husband Grant (an ambient composer in his own right and frequent collaborator) in the outside of La Grange, Georgia, where both attended college. Even living in downtown La Grange, a town with less than 30,000 residents, seems like it might provide the kind of baseline loneliness and romanticism that marks Evans's compositions, but the Evanses took up residence in the middle of the woods by a lake outside of town. Evans' songs are totemic tapestries of synthesizer and narcotized vocals, tracks that reflect her idyllic surroundings and reclusive nature by virtue of their cool float. While sound and surrounding might just be the result of concurrent paths—a relaxed person choosing to live in a laid back area—there's no denying the symmetry.

Location: Tampa, Florida

Estimated Population: 346,037

Considering that the Tampa Metropolitan area boasts almost 3 million people, you might expect a bit more culture to break out on a national level, but I can say, from personal experience, that most of the music relegated to Tampa proper is of the Death Metal or pop punk variety. While that's all well and good, man cannot survive on corpsepaint alone, and there seems a disproportionately tiny number of notable indie rock acts in the area. Merchandise has slowly been kicking out the jams for the last several years, bringing an emotive version of Spacemen 3's emotive psychedelic post-punk to the masses, but they've largely eschewed the local scene. Save for a handful of performances at a local record store, they've mostly kept under the radar while in the Bay Area, taking to abandoned townie bars and secret storage spaces for the majority of their shows. That certainly doesn't diminish their accomplishments so much as demonstrate their disdain for the music scene in their hometown, a sentiment echoed in early interviews.

Location: Readsboro, Vermont

Estimated Population: 763

The project that brought Nick Zammuto to notability, the Books, started in the only place that it could. Built on idiosyncratic vocal samples and repurposed percussion, Zammuto's collaboration with cellist Paul de Jong had a suitable home in New York City–they're pretty open to boundary pushing there. But as that project dissolved and Zammuto began plotting his kinetic art-pop solo effort, he retreated to rural Vermont, a move that helped to capture the nervous energy of that breakup on last year's debut effort. Though that debut proved to be a more populist distillation of the techniques Zammuto exploited in his previous project, his new home spelled accessible new grooves, and now as he's hard at work on his next LP. We can only hope that his tiny woodshed studio proves just as fruitful going forward.