It’s hard to know exactly when it happened, but at some point in the early 2000s there was a seismic shift in the indie rock aesthetic. For 25 years the influence of the Velvet Underground had loomed so large over the underground that nearly every band – from Mission of Burma to Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo to Pavement – had to go through the Velvets to find themselves, and as recently as the late ‘90s it didn’t appear that fuzzy guitars, deadpan vocals and outsider sentiments were in any danger of relinquishing their hold on the music made for and listened to by those ideologically opposed to Top 40 radio. But with the advent of peer-to-peer trading networks, independent music began to change, slowly but perceptibly, and a new generation of bands began to spring up that looked to ...