The Brooklyn buzz: Aidan Smith visits the capital of rock cool

"Let's see," says Roan, pointing from the window of his apartment, "Eleanor Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces lives right over there with her boyfriend out of Franz Ferdinand, and further down the street Hercules and the Love Affair have a studio and Yeasayer have their base. Oh, and there's that gypsy guy… I forget his name. Last night I had dinner with my good friend Patrick Wimberly, the drummer in Chairlift, and the night before I went to Glasslands, which is a great venue, and then this bar called Daddy's where some other friends from Ratatat were DJ-ing. You've not heard of them? Check out their MySpace page. So, yeah, there's a bunch of us here." Brooklyn is the centre of the pop universe. A few years ago, thanks mainly to Franz Ferdinand, whose Alex Kapranos is "the boyfriend", we may have entertained the delirious notion that Glasgow was the hip, hot, happening place. Most likely, the title was shared around. As of this moment, though, Brooklyn is way out on its own. Every week in the NME, another terrifyingly trendy Brooklyn band strike a pose, give good quote and start a small fire. "It's every day over here," says Busy Gangnes of Telepathe, who have just released their debut album. "There are so many groups getting their stuff together all of the time that it's impossible to keep track." Last year, the aforementioned Yeasayer announced themselves with a thrilling performance on Later… with Jools Holland and Chairlift soundtracked the launch of the new iPod Nano – while TV on the Radio, whose David Sitek is No 1 in the NME's Future 50 list of movers and groovers, finally went overground. But it was MGMT who really blazed the Brooklyn trail in 2008, when they scored the feelgood hit of the summer with 'Kids' at T in the Park and festivals right across Europe. Now the next wave are hitching on to their neo-hippy batwing sleeves. Alongside Telepathe and Amazing Baby, School of Seven Bells, Vivian Girls and Tigercity will be heading out of their Brooklyn brownstones to make the hoped-for breakthrough in 2009. There's more where they came from: High Places, Apache Beat, Boy Crisis, Creaky Boards – oh, and probably three skinny lads and a chick drummer who are still arguing over a name but will have drawn up their group's manifesto in a midtown vegan cafe by the time it takes me to complete this paragraph. So how come Brooklyn? "New York has always drawn artists from everywhere," explains Gangnes, who originally headed east from Los Angeles with dreams of becoming a dancer. "But if you think of New York as being Manhattan – and back then I did – then you very quickly can't afford to live there. Rents are three times higher than here." Roan, who pitched up from Massachusetts, concurs. "Brooklyn is a dumping ground for college students, all these cats in their mid-20s trying to figure out what to do with their lives – perfect band material," he says. And Bill Gillim of Tigercity, who also drifted in from Massachusetts, adds: "There are no bands in Manhattan. Only trust-fund kids can afford to live there, If they did form bands… well, they'd be different to ours." But the pre-eminence of Brooklyn, and especially the hipster enclave of Williamsburg, as a hotbed of talent can't just be down to money, or a lack of it. Gangnes again: "Politics comes into it. Those tough eight years under George Bush inspired us to be creative, although he's not taking any credit. In Brooklyn there are tons of venues and a huge audience for live music. And it's an audience that craves experimentalism. An act like Animal Collective really opened people's ears to a new sound and that's given other groups the confidence to be bold and different and even a bit weird." So who are these weird bands? Telepathe are an avant-garde electronic girl double-act, which right away sets them apart. And Tigercity worship Darryl Hall & John Oates, which, in a Brooklyn context, probably makes them weirder still. "You guys would probably call them soft-rock but in America we know that music as yacht-rock," says Gillim. "It was big when I was a kid and – mainly because it was always playing at the orthodontist when I was having my braces fixed – I thought I hated it. "I thought I liked sad-guy emo and I had the dyed black hair and the clumpy shoes, but then I started investigating the roots of Scritti Politti and Gang of Four in soul music and stopped thinking of Chic as this cheesy weddings band. Brooklyn is a great place for freeing your mind like that and the music community is really supportive." Tigercity have just finished recording their debut album and Gillim reveals they've now shed some of their yacht-rock smoothness. Hopefully not too much, though, because they'd be the best suited to cover 'Brooklyn (Owes the Charmer Under Me)', the old Steely Dan number which could be an anthem for this centre of excellence. Benjamin Curtis used to be a neo-prog rocker with Secret Machines until he fell under the spell of Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, identical twin sisters from On! Air! Library!, and now their floaty, shoegazing harmonies have been married to Krautrock rhythms to create School of Seven Bells. In band photos Curtis can resemble the bloke out of The Corrs alongside so much raven-haired beauty, but why should he care? "I've done it with a bunch of guys but touring is entirely more pleasant now," he says. Curtis reveals that School of Seven Bells are anti-rock – there's too much of it; he's allergic to the whole blues tradition – and maybe such provocativeness could only come out of Brooklyn. "When I moved here from Oklahoma, I worked in a coffee shop in Bedford Avenue and the TV on the Radio guys were in another cafe a few blocks away and we could all go to these unlicensed gigs in abandoned warehouses and the music was really raw and cool and different," he recalls. "Every band has to start at the bottom of the bill, but over in Manhattan a famous old venue like the Mercury Lounge has a restrictive door policy which keeps you there. In Brooklyn, you can play downstairs at the Charleston and they don't care if the room is empty. You can go crazy for 45 minutes and grow as a band in your own way and to hell with convention. That's what School of Seven Bells are about." That's what Vivian Girls are about, too, with the trio's Kickball Katy, once of New Jersey, scoffing at comparisons with girl-groups like the Shop Assistants ("We've never heard of them, or the Flatmates") and expressing dissatisfaction at their debut album's merging of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound with the Jesus and Mary Chain's fence of fuzz. "We want to get even louder," she says. So who will be the next MGMT? Maybe Amazing Baby, who toured with their friends last year and elected to do their first photo-shoot nude. But, according to Will Roan, they've since ditched the "hippy stuff", and a couple of glamorous female members whose contribution was "less than musical". The key influences on the just-recorded first album will be Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. There isn't really a definitive Amazing Baby sound, so pinning down a Brooklyn sound is tricky, and it will become virtually impossible if the scene starts to fragment. "Brooklyn's already over-saturated with bands," says Busy Gangnes. "When artists move into an area it becomes trendy and then it gets expensive so the artists have to go someplace else. I'll be on my way soon." Where's next? Which city fancies being the coolest place on earth? Who wants George Bush? • School of Seven Bells play Captain's Rest, Glasgow, February 24 and with Bat For Lashes at Queen Margaret Union, Glasgow, April 8 www.schoolofsevenbells.com, www.myspace.com/theamazingbaby, www.myspace.com/telepathe, www.myspace.com/viviangirlsnyc, www.myspace.com/tigercity