Bands that associate themselves with small-town homes.

Portishead.
Aberfeldy.

if you have to ask "who"? then you're not from knoxville, which they totally ruled from the 1980s thru to the early 90s. they wrote songs about the longbranch (bar), songs about fort sanders... songs about everything that happened in knoxville. "rich kids sittin around snortin dad's coke - tellin ethiopian jokes" (admittedly that's not an exclusively knoxville topic)

i've just looked and shockingly, they have a greatest hits for sale on iTunes!

Depressing band, depressing place

)

when i die put my bones in an empty street to remind me of how it used to be
don’t write my name on a stone bring a Coleman lantern and a radio
Cleveland game and two fishing poles and watch with me from the shore
ghostly steel and iron ore ships coming home
where i am paralyzed by the emptiness(x4)
clearly iron age beasts you can tell by the rust and the chains
and by the oil that they bleed the crew and crows fly the skulls and bones
they fly the colors of their homes i fly the cross of the blue factory flame
stitched with heavy sulpher thread/threat
they ain’t proud colors but they’re true colors of my home
where i am paralyzed by the emptiness (x4)
every mile for ten thousand miles and every year for a thousand years
every night for a thousand more i hear them calling
they never say to come home (x2)
where i am paralyzed by the emptiness(x4)

Like the Gossip do this in a different way from the Ocean Blue, isofar as the Gossip left (right?) and seem to be giving a form of encouragement to small-town freaks that hey, you know, you're alright, and you can harness your energy to get yourself where you want to be. Whereas the Ocean Blue seem like they might spend time eating apple crumb desserts with elderly Mennonite ladies and then going for long walks by the lake. And XTC's rurality seems more historical.

I quite like the "before Olympia was cool" model, really, since it pretty successfully pulled off the indie(pop) idea that kids anywhere can create their own fun and cool and actually have it be public and meaningful.

I think that Malkmus played up the Stockton angle (all the while living in Virginia, NYC, Idaho and Portland) as a ruse.

The only musical/lyrical references to Stockton I can think of are:

+ Let's Feed Them To The (Linden) Lions -- a condemnation of Stockton btw
+ The Dave Brubeck tribute on Crooked Rain
+ and then this:
"Lost
In the foothills on my bike:
A trick enduro
Say goodnight
To the last psychedelic band
From Sacto, Northern Cal"
...and even then Malkmus claims Sacramento, not Stockton.

But yeah, I'm not convinced that the band ever implied that living in Stockton was cool.

This is sorta like what REM did: I used to love going to Athens in high school and eating at the Grill and reading the WWII-era poster on the wall that read "Silence Means Security" and remembering that line of "Begin the Begin" and thinking how self-consciously embedded in Athens that era of the band was. And yet it's just a poster in the Grill, it's not the essence of the Olde South, whatever that is (and like a military brat like Stipey would have grasped that).

Same with Pavement--lyrical allusions to California stuff (Dividing California in two w/ "Two States", pictures of Spiral at an A's game on the inside of S&E, lyrical stuff on CR CR) as band material--because as we all know, there's NOTHIN TO SING BOUT.

That's Fenway Park dude.

"Isn't it great to exist at this point in time?
Where the produce is rotten but no one is forgotten
On strawberry Philadelphia Drive
Children in the sprinkler, junkies on the corner
The smell of fried foods and pure hot tar
Man, you needn't travel far to feel completely alive
On strawberry Philadelphia Drive
On a hazy day in 19 something and 5"

Misfits - Lodi
Monster Magnet - Red Bank

I think K managed to retain this feel until riot grrrl and IPU blew the scene wide open in 1991.