#tullycraft

Every Scene Needs A Center

Artist: Tullycraft

Release: 2007

The Coroner's Gambit

Artist: The Mountain Goats

Released - 28th Jan 2013

Highest UK Chart Position - Did not chart

Spotify streams to date: 57,529

First heard - Fortuna Pop! website, 2013

“Twee” is perhaps the most contested and/or reviled word in the world of indiepop. Say it to fans and many of them will become defensive or angry. You might even make someone who likes the Sea Urchins mad - imagine that! For others, well, it’s just what it’s called, it’s tweepop, ultimately it’s no biggie. I don’t know if Tullycraft were the first band to “reclaim” the word for themselves but certainly they’ve made a career out of being an unapologetic embodiment of Twee, in all its wonders, contradictions and irritations. Some would claim that they were long past their prime by 2013 (the reviews for the Lost In Light Rotation album are almost uniformly “they have nothing new to offer” , as if that wasn’t the point): I would beg to differ. Lost In Light Rotation is my favourite Tullycraft song and it’s a good pick for this list as it deals with fandom, a thing that grows from a love of music but can become something else entirely.

One of indie music’s great enticements is “here’s this great thing that no one else knows about! It can be yours and you can feel special!”. Sean Tollefson’s dismissive line about people who “never took the time to learn the slang that we speak or the slogans on the T-shirts” understands this - it’s about learning those things and belonging to something, but also, it’s about knowing that you’re a better person for it. In my experience, people who like indiepop are generally extremely nice and welcoming and they exhibit not the least bit of snobbery around would-be fans (there aren’t enough of us to turn anyone away tbh). But an enticement of any scene is to feel like yr in the know and, in such a tiny and excruciatingly nerdy one as Twee (I may as well say it, this is Tullycraft after all), that hard won knowledge is the privilege of a tiny number of people, making it a super-exclusive club. It may be entirely irrelevant in the real world, but it’s perhaps the only thing we have in the face of everyone calling us a bunch of girly pricks (an insult we’d wear with pride, but an insult all the same).