Lyrical Dissonance/Indie

Indie

• "A Song About An Anglerfish" is an incredibly upbeat, energetic tune about the narrator dealing with his crushing despair by using an anglerfish as his role model, which has no objective reason to be happy but "has no frickin' idea what else to be" because the anglerfish has only ever known darkness and loneliness and thus has nothing else to compare it to.

Because you can't hate the night if you've lived your whole life without light
And you can't hate the dish if you've only ever eaten fish
And you can't feel alone if it's all you've ever known

• "Bonecracker", by Shocore, is probably the most light and cheerful hip-hop song about threats of assault and battery that you'll ever hear.
• Poet Shel Silverstein wrote an album of catchy little tunes whose melodies sound like the typical happy, upbeat children's songs. But being Shel Silverstein... well... His most famous is "You're Always Welcome at Our House", where you'll be invited in, killed in an assortment of interesting and gruesome ways, and your body stuffed into the nearest convenient space. The best rendition being Marisa Berenson on The Muppet Show; who sang while flouncing around in a poofy cute-lolita dress (which added a dissonance all its own).
• 'Me And You Versus The World' by Space is a nice happy little song about a couple of losers who fall in love...and then they try to rob a shop, murder a man by hitting him over the head with a tin of baked beans, and end up getting shot dead. And 'Avenging Angels' takes on a darker tone once you realise it's about dead loved ones.
• The title track from the little-known Australian CD Our Stolen Children by Peter Van de Voord is as justifiably angry as you'd expect, but the music is far more laid-back than the lyrics.
• The Naked and Famous' Punching In A Dream sounds like an incredibly anthemic ballad of sorts, until you realise the lyrics are about a girl starting to become unclear what's real and what's her nightmares...
• Foster The People's "Pumped Up Kicks" is a mellow, danceable song about a kid finding his father's gun and deciding to go on a killing spree. The cheerful whistling that kicks in towards the end of the song definitely adds to the lyrical dissonance.
  • Adding to the irony, the songwriter specifically said that the kid is shooting hipsters...exactly the sort of people who love the song.

Indie Folk

• The entire album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel definitely applies to this trope. On first listen, it's clean folk music. Then you put the pieces together and you realize it's an entire album about Anne Frank.
• The Bright Eyes song "At the Bottom of Everything" has a happy-go-lucky folk tune and is sung rather joyously, but the introduction informs the listener that it's a story about a plane full of people that are plummeting to their deaths and who all simultaneously realize that their lives and goals were meaningless.
  • And what makes it worse is that it's an Author Tract about how most Americans actually live; the people in the song have the realization of their meaningless lives only because it's too late.
• The Vandaveer song "Marianne, you've done it now" is a soft, folksy and catchy song about a gruesomely murdered singer.
• The song "Last Run" by Gwen Knighton, while not necessarily upbeat, is definitely dissonant. It combines ballad-style singing and harp-playing with lyrics about a goblin woman whose family abandoned her because of her species change leading a group of folks to hack into a corporation's computers and steal data from them. (Although this is a song about Shadowrun, mind you, which is sort of Schizo-Tech)

Indie Pop

• Belle and Sebastian often have wistful songs to wistful music, but "Stay Loose" is almost ridiculously singable, though the lyrics are about the fragile relationship between a boy with depression and a girl who won't discuss anything serious. With creepy results.

"The lights are out in the house tonight
Gonna creep around, gonna creep into your head..."

• • Also, one of their most serene instrumentals (from the Storytelling soundtrack), complete with lovely violin, is called "Fuck This Shit". Title Dissonance?
  • In I Could Be Dreaming, a cheerful song about murdering a girl's abusive SO:

"Do you want to do it now? Outside the butcher's with a knife and a bike chain... la da da."

• "We Will Become Silhouettes" by The Postal Service is a bubbly, cheerful, upbeat tune, typical of TPS. It's about being blown up by an atomic bomb that causes the victims' cells to "divide at an alarming rate" until their bodies explode, leaving only the eponymous Hiroshima lovers-style silhouettes. The video features bandmembers Ben Gibbard, Jimmy Tamberello and Jenny Lewis in kooky early-70s styles bicycling around a spookily empty suburban neighborhood on a bright happy sunny day.
• You wouldn't tell just by listening to the music (it's all Foreign Sounding Gibberish), but if the music video is any indication, The Real Tuesday Weld's cheery song "Bathtime in Clerkenwell" is about Nazis taking over England.
  • Bah, those birds were much too cute to represent Nazis. Even though they were wearing Nazi symbols.
  • A majority of The Real Tuesday Weld's songs can fall into this. They all start off reminiscent of Older songs with happy-go-lucky tunes, then they all turn out to be around breakup (See: Kix). They're so upbeat you don't realize you're singing along to talking about how Drugs and Whores are more meaningful to you than your Ex.
• One of the best examples of this is Heavenly's song "Me and My Madness". A relaxed, enjoyable melody is paired with lyrics like "Cut my hair/And then I cut my skin/Hurt myself instead of hurting him".
• The band The Boy Least Likely To is a master at this, combining delicate, sweet pop melodies and twee instrumentation with dark themes.
  • "I Box Up All the Butterflies" sounds incredibly cheerful, and happy, and sweet, until you listen to the lyrics and realize that the singer spends his summers ripping up all the flowers, killing the birds and bees, and tearing all the butterflies apart before pinning them and packing them away.
• "Foundations" by Kate Nash, a cheery sounding song about a woman who can't bring herself to leave a bad relationship that is turning worse. Although the last verse does seem to imply she'll leave someday...
• "Sweet Tangerine" by the Hush Sound is an upbeat pop/rock song about a stalker creeping into his ex-lover's bedroom.
• "Your Arms Around Me" by Jens Lekman sounds like a really pretty love song (and was in fact used during the love scene in the movie Whip It). But if you listen to the lyrics, they tell a story about the singer accidentally cutting off his fingertip after being startled by a lover while slicing an avocado. Complete with him noticing blood spray. Yeah. (And, on some morbid level, it sort of is a love song—said lover takes him to the ER, and they have a tender moment.)
• Many songs by They Might Be Giants often contain cheerful, upbeat tunes, but the lyrics can be downright depressing at times. This is especially true in a lot of their early work.
• "Greatest Hits" by Mystery Jets is a snappy, upbeat song which Name Drops a ton of classic indie rock albums. It becomes apparent rather quickly that the reason for all the name drops is because the song is about the narrator and his ex-girlfriend are acrimoniously splitting their record collection post-split.

Indie Rock

• The Born Ruffians song "Hummingbird" has very upbeat instrumentals and it's sung in a very quick and playful way. But the lyrics are about a girl who plans on committing suicide.
• The Cheer Up Charlie Daniels song "Ice Cold Razor Blades" has a peppy, upbeat tune you might hear at a resort or spa. The lyrics are about a woman's throat being slit, and the murderer wanting to do more. Including cutting her lips from her mouth.
• The Decemberists' song "Sons and Daughters" is Squee-level happy, in mood and most of the lyrics. However, a few phrases scattered around the song as well as the repeated last line make it clear that it's being sung in a bomb shelter, presumably to cheer up the survivors.
  • Alternatively, it's about a family fleeing a war-torn country to a new land, but in the distant past, with the references to aluminum and cinnamon being a Genius Bonus, as both were once considered precious commodities
  • Alternatively the song's about a group of settlers escaping a war and arriving on a new land, doomed to failure because they have no idea what they're doing.

"We're make our home on the water /we'll build our walls Characteristics aluminum/ we'll fill our mouths with Side_Effects cinnamon."

• • While another of their songs, "O Valencia!" sounds rather upbeat, the chorus mentions the blood of the singer's lover being 'still warm on the ground' and burning the city down. The last verse has the lover being shot in the singer's arms, 'and an oath of love was your dying cry.'
  • "O Valencia!" was played unironically in the trailer for the romantic comedy Leap Year. Dying lovers, blood on the ground, and Amy Addams acting cute.
  • Their song "You'll Not Feel the Drowning" sounds like pretty, soothing lullaby, complete with a beautiful instrumental in the middle, but it's about a pirate about to drown a girl he kidnapped.^[1]

Go to sleep now, little ugly
Go to sleep now, you little fool
Forty-winking in the belfry
You'll not feel the drowning
You'll not feel the drowning

• • "The Rake's Song" is way, way too catchy and upbeat for a song about the titular widowed rake murdering his three children so he could continue enjoying his life unattached, and saying proudly that he regrets nothing.
  • "The Chimbley Sweep" has a lively, catchy tune, and lyrics which are about the hard life of a boy who, going by the last verse, may be either a literal chimney sweep or using the term as an Unusual Euphemism for a child prostitute, but either way there are clearly some unpleasant shenanigans going on.
  • "July, July!" is a lively, cheerful song which, before the end of the first verse, veers suddenly into Gorn about how "your uncle was a crooked French Canadian and he was gut-shot running gin".
  • The Decemberists love this trope. "Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)" is an upbeat and adorable sounding duet between a woman and her husband, who is a soldier recently killed in the Civil War asking his widow to make a grave for him. Some of the lyrics are pretty gruesome, too:

But oh, did you see all the dead of Manassas
All the bellies and the bones and the bile

• • How about "Culling of the Fold"? A catchy, highly hummable tune. The chorus goes "Dash her on the paving stones, it may break your heart to break her bones, but someone's got to do the culling of the folds." As for the verses.. It gets worse.
    • The song is actually so graphic that Jenny asked that it be left off of albums; it can be purchased separately on iTunes, but you won't be getting it on a disc anytime soon.
  • "We Both Go Down Together" has a catchy, upbeat violin melody and tells the story of an aristocrat who's in love with a lower class girl, a match his family won't accept. His method of escaping his family's disapproval? A suicide pact by jumping off the "cliffs of Dover". (Of course, for the additional punch, the lyrics can be interpreted that his love is obsessive and he's preying on the girl.)
  • The dénoument to their "folk opera", The Hazards of Love, is entitled The Hazards of Love 4: The Drowned. It's a hauntingly beautiful love song where the characters decide in their last moments before their boat sinks and they drown together to cement their love via 'marriage'. "And with this long last rush of air we'll speak our vows in starry whisper / and as the waves came crashing down he closed his eyes and softly kissed her".
  • The King Is Dead provides a number of these, but probably the best is "Calamity Song", an uplifting country-folk-Americana tune about the end of the world (It starts "Had a dream/You and me at the war at the end-time...", and proceeds to rhyme that with "As scores of innocents died").
• The Delgados' joyous anti-anthem "All You Need Is Hate."

Hate is all around find it in your heart in every waking sound
On your way to school, work or church you'll find that it's the only rule
Build a different world, hate will help you find what you've been looking for
Hate is everywhere, inside your mother's heart and you will find it there

• • Also, "Woke From Dreaming" is a beautiful little tune, about an abducted girl strangling her kidnapper.
• Another Canadian band called McKenna is an Irish rock band known for their rousing songs about drinking and songs that were written while drunk (like all Irish rock bands). Two songs in particular are quite happy in tune but sad in lyrics, however. The song "Guinness For Two" sounds like a love song, especially when heard in concert. The song, however, is about the death of a loved one (possibly a girlfriend) and how the narrator will have to drink by himself. It does end on a hopeful note, though, with the lyrics "Though I miss you like burning/I don't wish your returning/for you have gone on to joy evermore./And I'll follow you soon/for a life is a tune/and together we'll sing the encore". The other song is a little more obvious, as it's title is "The Accident Song". Just listening to it absentmindedly, it sounds like the narrator is trying to get home to his sweetheart. However, a closer listen reveals that he is traveling by the scene of a fatal accident and that he is thankful he can see his girlfriend and other loved ones, unlike the people in the car.
• The indie-rock band Beulah made liberal use of this. For instance, the song "Popular Mechanics for Lovers" features upbeat, jangly guitars and lyrics lamenting the fact that the narrator had been passed over for a girl's affection by another man. It doesn't hurt that rather than the song title, the actual lyrics in the song are "Popular Mechanics for Broken Hearts could help me now".
• A lot of songs by The Indelicates are like this. "Flesh" is a pretty, soothing song about rape, plastic surgery, stripping, and feminist bitterness, and includes the c-word. Bonus points for dissonance within the lyrics:

Strip me and dissect me,
milk my tears and tap my bile
Hey doc can you take my skin
and melt it into plastic
Beauty isn’t truth, it’s just youth,
and it’s adaptive and it’s elastic…
And I love you, whoever you are, yeah, I love you.
Hey girls, we’re all the same, aren’t we

• About half of the songs by Jeremy Messersmith fit this trope. Almost all of his songs, are sweet, gentle tunes about topics like drinking away the pain of a breakup, sex ruining friendships, and resigning yourself to an unfulfilling life.
• The Reign of Kindo song "Breathe Again" is a very soothing soft rock song... until you listen closely and realize three verses in that it's about a father who takes revenge on a man who broke into his house on Christmas Eve and stole the presents. It's hard to relax to a song when the singer swears that he "won't stop tearing him limb from limb [so] he'll never breathe again". It ends with him dumping the thief's body in the river and gaining immense relief from the murder.
• Pretty much all of The Wombats' repertoire. "School Uniforms" is about a lost childhood love, "Backfire at the Disco" is about a date gone wrong, "My First Wedding" is about a man attending the marriage of a girl he loves to another man, and "Here Comes the Anxiety" is about how his own self-doubt and loathing sabotage his relationships. And they're all pretty dancable.
• Jim O'Rourke's "Halfway to a Threeway" is a parody of intimate love ballads, by being concerned with a man ready to involve his (literally) braindead girlfriend in a threesome with another woman.
• Animal Collective's "Graze" starts off with a voice gently singing how awesome it is to wake up on a beautiful morning like this one. Then it slowly builds to a climax, but when it hits in all its joyous panfluting majesty, it's accompanied by lyrics as "Why do you have to go? / I'm in the dark unknown / And you're staying home".
• The Eels' "Mr. E's Beautiful Blues".
  • "Last Stop: This Town" is also very cheery-sounding and danceable for being about taking a final trip around the neighborhood you grew up in after you've died (although in the context of the album it's on, it kind of is a positive song).
  • Eels seem to use this trope a lot in general, mostly in the happy melody/bleak lyrics variety. Then there's "What Is This Note?", a noisy, angry-sounding punk-speed love song.
  • "Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)" is yet another song that uses this trope; a song that sounds like a musician's house party opens with the line "Do you know what it's like to fall on the floor, cry your guts out til you got no more" and "Do you know what it's like to care too much about someone that you're never gonna get to touch"
    • Although the song is more about how both your good and bad experiences affirm your life, and an upbeat accompaniment would probably fit in that respect.
  • He goes for the sad music/happy lyrics version of this trope on "Things The Grandchildren Should Know" - sadly beautiful acoustic guitars with plenty of weeping lap-steel, balanced against triumphant, if realistic, lyrics.

I knew true love and I knew passion
And the difference between the two
And I had some regrets
But if I had to do it all again
Well, it's something I'd like to do

• The band Islands loves this trope. Examples include "Pieces of You" (a bouncy, upbeat tune where the title is very literal), "Volcanoes" (a rather blissful-sounding song about the end of the world), and "Humans" (another bouncy tune about the survivors of some disaster dying off).
  • "Rough Gem"

The world beat you for the something nice
You worked hard, died poor
You mined what you died for
Diamonds di di di di di uh

• "Masterpiece" by Meg and Dia has an upbeat, catchy, bouncy melody, and the sisters' sweet soprano voices lend an innocent quality to the song. Then you listen a little closer...

I am no masterpiece where innocence is painted green
Isn't it strange to think that you created all of me?
Done by the hands of a broken artist
You painted black where my naked heart is
I finally know what wrong is
Now I finally know that you bleed for nothing
Carved like a stone with your hands still shaking
On display through a soul still breaking
Aren't you proud you're the one that made me?

• • Not to mention "Cardigan Weather", which is about the narrator's boyfriend cheating on her, so she sews him into her mattress and hooks up with other guys on top of it.

A mattress for a coffin suits you very fine...

• • "Monster" has a suprisingly upbeat tune for a song about child abuse, rape, and suicide.

Monster. How should I feel?
Turn the sheets down, murder ears wth pillow lace
There's bathtubs, filled with glow flies
Bathe in kerosene
Their words tattooed in his veins.

• Elliott Smith's song "Memory Lane", is a horribly depressing song set to a cheerful, folky tune in a major key. As if that wasn't bad enough, his voice sounds so perversely hopeful while he's singing it.("Isolation pushes past self hatred, guilt and shame to a place where suffering is just a game.")
  • Any of Elliott Smith's more upbeat sounding songs, in general. See Also: "Say Yes," "Baby Britain."
• "My Slow Descent into Alcoholism" by The New Pornographers has one of the most cheery and upbeat tunes ever. The lyrics, however, stick closely to the title.
• "Now She Knows She's Wrong" by Jellyfish is a cheery song set to vibraphone, harpsichord, and other happy instrumentation about a woman grieving after finding out her husband of twenty years was cheating on her. The final minute is particularly disturbing for having the entire band sing the chorus in a "We Are the World"-style harmony.
  • Jellyfish's "Bedspring Kiss" also qualifies, being a lounge, jazz-styled piece about a character, Jimmy, killing a prostitute in a drug-induced rage.
• David Ford's "Have Yourself a Bitter Little Christmas" rather gives it away in the title; the jaunty banjo, mandolin and glockenspiel accompaniment would make for a great Christmas song if it weren't about leaving your wife on Christmas day.
• The Faint, especially tracks off of Danse Macabre, if you just listen to the backing it's a pretty cool new-wave dance band. The lyrics and some of the track names (Agenda Suicide for example) are much less upbeat (Working yourself to death? Never reaching your dreams because of work? Super-happy!)
• The majority of the music made by Get Set Go. A review for their CD Sunshine, Joy and Happiness says it best:

(Reviewer) Blythe Tellefsen: "Get Set Go continues with this CD to combine "pop" sound (albeit with the unusual and haunting addition of a cello) with lyrics that usually remain just at the edge of a suicide note."

• Most of Motion City Soundtrack's music is lively and upbeat. Most of it also references chronic depression, struggles with alcoholism, and/or an inability to relate to people.
• Shiny Toy Guns' "When They Came For Us" is a rather cheery number about the loss of one's innocence in a war: "When they took the beach that day / They stole the children, took them away / And I miss everyone, but most of all, the little ones, and their shiny toy guns /" The title is also a possible reference to the Holocaust.
• "PDA" by Interpol has this written throughout the song. It's a cheery song about a psychopathic rapist/killer running a hotel who goes to jail after raping one of his tenants
• Regina Spektor's song "Two Birds" could also count. It may sound upbeat, even cute, until you realize it's describing a relationship wherein one person seems to be afraid of commitment and continuously lies/makes excuses. What's more heartbreaking is that the other is oblivious to the lies and promises to never leave the other. The only thing keeping it from being a total downer is the last line, "One tries to fly away, and the other..." which implies that he might "fly away" too, but the outcome is never known.
  • Regina Spektor seems to use this trope a lot in her songs. "Buildings" almost seems cheery until you realize it's talking about a husband with a wife suffering from possible depression (and an alcoholic as well) and she keeps promising to change, as the husband believes that if they can make 'buildings so tall these days' then she can overcome her problems. And "That Time" is a cheery song that talks about cute, normal things like reading only the backs of cereal boxes and deciding to kiss anywhere except the mouth... and also has a human tooth found on Delancey, a pigeon being eaten by a cat, a friend overdosing twice, and the narrator taking them to the ER while their hallucinating over drugs as well.
  • Flyin' is a fun and catchy beat... and then the lyrics take a tailspin from cute and quirky to realization that she's talking about a student who was taken advantage of by a teacher.
    • THEN you can add the popular interpretation that 'flyin' outta my window' is about drug use, and suddenly you realize that the teacher doped her up in the story when she refused, and became addicted to drugs.
• Tindersticks, occasionally. "Snowy in F# minor" is one of the more obvious examples.
• Why, hello there, Death Cab for Cutie. Ever wonder why Ben Gibbard is sometimes called the master of this? Well, there's:
  • "No Sunlight", a beach-pop tune about the loss of innocence. Oh, and also the nuclear apocalypse.
  • "The Sound of Settling", which is a indie-pop Crowd Song about crippling shyness.
    • The dissonance is heightened in this even more upbeat cover by The Shins.
  • "You Can Do Better Than Me" sounds fairly upbeat and cheery, until you realize that the lyrics are about about someone who feels as though their relationship is falling apart, but their lack of self-esteem means that they're willing to cling to the relationship.
  • "Underneath the Sycamore", an upbeat tune that begins with the character in the song dying in a terrible car crash! The song goes on to say that that the character finds their peace "underneath the sycamore" aka six feet under in a graveyard. Cheery!
  • And all of this, mind you, is merely scratching the surface. Suffice it to say that a good description of the band's style is "The songwriter writes melancholy ballads. The band sets them to whatever music sounds cool--which is usually rather upbeat."
• Amanda Palmer's "Oasis" is an upbeat, absurdly catchy song, which in the narrator happily tells the audience how she was raped, got pregnant, had an abortion, and got backstabbed by her close friend who told about it to everyone at school.
• the Mountain Goats' "No Children", a fast paced, major keyed song about a horrible relationship compared to drowning, complete with the chorus "I hope you die-I hope we both die!"

1. ↑ Or, well, something like that. The song is also based on The Tempest, so we're pretty sure that one of the characters is Caliban. Other than that, not much is clear.