If you're like me, you hunt music most of the time. Additional albums from bands you love is good. Finding some old "classics" you missed out on can be good too. But the most exciting thing for me is hearing a band that reminds me of why I bother looking. NEW music. It's often something that sounds exactly like a lot of things, but also like nothing else.

The last example that jumps to mind is hearing the song Here's Your Future. The patronizing and dismissive tone of even the positive reviews for that record piss me the fuck off. TBTBTM is a shield of pure fire. The Onion gave their record a perfect score, but then said dumb shit like "massively catchy melodies sugarcoating the biting sarcasm." Such a simplistic and bad representation of the music. It's more bracing and vigorous than it is "catchy." Why do they do that, because the band goofs around in music videos? The vitality and momentum of this album is singular. Few records ever knocked me out so immediately. And after I listened for a while, I found that there are several tracks that are even better than the opener. "Returning to the Fold" is the kind of genuinely powerful non-believer's Christian song Win Butler wishes (YOU HEARD ME) he could write.

Alright, digression. So I'm not talking about the moment you first discovered indie rock as something potentially amazing(hearing Silence Kit after checking out CR from the library). But maybe one of them could be the moment you became sure that you loved it. I'm talking about the kind of thing that might happen every 6 months or every year, when you discover something that really leaps out at you. It doesn't necessarily mean you find a new favorite (although it often does).

Other moments that really floored me, from various points in my life - hearing Suicide Invoice for the first time (Hot Snakes).

Hearing "No Action" from This Year's Model for the first time.

Hearing "Ever Overpsyched" on a Chavez record. Part of my learning that more dangerous-sounding bands were not my enemy.

Grandaddy's "The Sophtware Slump."


BIGGER ONES:

Hearing "The Glow pt. 2" (song specifically) and thinking how trivial and empty most claims about "getting goosebumps" from a song are.

Okkervil River's "So Come Back I am Waiting" - Jesus Christ.

"Drop" by Red House Painters.


(this is mostly "indie" style music moments if you will, and not necessarily formative ones)

is this limited to indie rock? cuz today i had an epiphany, discovering Gorecki and his Symphony No.3 Sorrowful Songs, particularly the third movement, "Lento—Cantabile semplice". I was reading a book while having it play in the background for the first time. and after a bit, i had to drop my book because i became intrigued by what i was hearing and i ended up stting up and devoting all of my attention to it. it is amazing!

sorry for not having any rock epiphany to share at the moment

I know what you're talking about.
Like hearing Andrew Bird's "Sovay" for the first time made me teary eyed. Not because of the lyrics, or anything, just the whistling after the chorus moved me.

I think I understand what you mean. I think music is at its most powerful when you either smile or cry (or something to that effect). These are more or less self-reflective if anything but here are a few 'epiphanies':

-Driving down a dirt road in the thickest fog I've ever seen and passing my house to finish 'Feeling Yourself Disintegrate' by the Flaming Lips.

-Listening to William Basinkski's Disintegration Loops and having such minimal sound completely overtake my thoughts.

What are the odds that they both include 'disintegrate'?

Oh, also when reading an article recently about September 11th while listening to the track 9/11 ('Ghost') off Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, when Mangum says,

"And one day in New York City baby
A girl fell from the sky
From the top of a burning apartment building"

That was a bit spooky.

Listening to all of the The Glow Pt 2 by the Microphones with just one other person, while cooking dinner on a fire, camping in an isolated location here in Australia. Hearing the cracks and hisses and various weird sonic effects on the record become indistinguishable from the crackle of the campfire and the wind in the pitch-black trees around the camp. One of the few records I could reasonably stand to listen to 'in nature' really.

And then when the heartbeat finally trails off at the end of 'My Warm Blood' you've never heard quiet like it.

Eek, I can't remember my last, exactly:

Maybe...listening to Discovery by Daft Punk and getting to track 4 "Crescendolls" and realizing that there weren't just good songs on the album...it was actually an incredible, incomparable album and modern masterpiece.

In the past: getting all the way to track 10 on The Meadowlands by The Wrens, and hearing the vocals breakthrough the fuzz and the singer say "Shot-rock splitter to God: Carry me home", which means nothing, but sounds as close to catharsis as I've ever heard in music.

i know its not indie but on the downward spiral when it transitions from a warm place to eraser i was like 12 and the university in the town i lived was on thanksgiving break and im walking across a field on campus and its completely deserted and the moon is rising above the trees and its blood red and huge and i see it right on the part of eraser where its buzzing and it sounds like someone blowing thru a straw i was just like holy shit i never forgot the way it made me feel the isolation and the red moon rising above the trees just fit the song.

I remember having one the summer of 2006 when I was walking in the field near my house, listening to Animal Collective's "Who Could Win a Rabbit" and finding a piece of corn from 2 years prior sitting there.