During my most voracious period of music consumption (hell, my entire 20s/the '90s basically), I was attuned to all of these microgenres (I'll do a piece on RoMo next) and reading NME, The Face, Melody Maker, Select, Q, etc. constantly.
TNWONW consisted of British bands aping the sounds of late '70s NYC (Blondie, Talking Heads) and late '70s post-punk (Wire, The Stranglers) with a post-Grunge twist. Some of these bands were one-hit wonders (in the UK) but most were no-hit wonders.
I saw These Animal Men live at the 7th St. Entry in Minneapolis (1995); it was all about the Keith Richards moptops. This is better than I remember:
S*M*A*S*H (OK, you've got to admit that's a great band name) never came to the U.S. but I still bought their LP (did they have anything else?) Hmm, they were a bit too noisy for me after all. They never became the new Clash they so obviously wanted to be.
This microgenre ran out of steam before it started, but two of the artists escaped on lifeboats and sailed in to Britpop's safe and open arms. Both had a poppier edge and were female-fronted. Once again, women save another musical genre from oblivion:
Echobelly - A British woman of Indian heritage sounding like the lovechild of Debbie Harry and Morrissey
and the most famous refugee-turned-Britpop stars, Elastica. Their first single/video relishes in the bare-bones, punky minimalism of the white backdrop, but we know they wanted to be glossy stars. TNWONW was dead already.
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