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Without [music] Life Would Be An Error
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Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
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it's on spotify, too
I've been enjoying this Poliça tune, "Wedding", but I'm finding that for the most part their music is actually pretty boring and the vocalist is dedicated to making really questionable decisions regarding stylized expression and effects modulation. Even on "Wedding" it sounds like she's trying to emulate the clipped enunciation of someone born hearing-impaired and I just don't understand what doing so is contributing to the performance.
On the topic of willfully unintelligible vocals, Boyfrndz announced a new LP dropping in May. Cool stuff if you like reverb-drenched everything and chaotic percussion; sort of a split between newer Tera Melos and older Mars Volta. This from their last record, which showcased a continued effort to make their music more melodic and accessible.
I think this is a good set by them:
Just to go meta:
http://newnations.bandcamp.com
I suppose the Book thread is similarly languorous, but it still surprises me. Other than the Hesher/Metal thread, music discussion seems to be the domain of chat and year-end lists.
Anyway, I was trying to think about @flamebroiledchicken's question about "indie revivalism" vs. contemporary music that attempts to innovate within the framework of its historical precedents. In some respects I think the rate at which contemporary (internet) culture consumes content and acclimates to divergences from previous norms, as well as a pervasive hyperbole proclaiming the uniquity of that which isn't, has inured us against a true awareness of how consistently weird and progressive music of all origins tends to be.
But it's also true that the breadth of available content that the average person can consume is so great that we're acclimating because we're more aware of what's been appropriated, what's being quoted, what's been transposed; very few mysteries remain in the realm of hip-hop samples, and "mash-ups" have practically become little more than the quaint novelties of a generation learning how to use Logic.
Consider CLPPNG — in the context of 30+ years of hip-hop it's firmly outré, with its often hook-free narrative structures, layers of atonal noise, and aesthetic objectives regarding found sound and permissible modulations. Yet all of those qualities have been explored within and without hip-hop over the past century+, and the more aware a listener is of influences ranging from Bomb Squad Productions to Anti-Pop Consortium to goshdarn Ornette Coleman, the less likely we are to recognize that something like CLPPNG could actually be a part of some progressive movement towards a new form of music.
CLPPNG — "Get Up" :
flamebroiled did, however, qualify that the question was more specifically about "guitar rock", which is perhaps more heavily burdened by history, as even when we assert that there's a bit of "90's revivalism" today, that music was effectively a "revival" of music from the 70's and 80's, when there was arguably the greatest amount of progression away from the blues origins of "guitar rock".
To consider what might be innovative in today's guitar-based music, it may help to look at what was innovative in our recent past. From the 90's I think of something like Talk Talk's Laughingstock (1991). In a certain conceptual sense it's akin to CLPPNG, both in terms of how it uses certain "rules" to define compositional development (like "polyrhythmic metrical diminishment", a process by which some instruments progressively excise a beat from sequential measures), and in the way it uses aural signifiers suggestive of more traditional musics, but always in a way that's confrontational. And, unlike a lot of guitar-based music that strives to adhere to formal objectives, it's also heavily improvised and the recordings represent a single live take, sans splicing.
Talk Talk — "After The Flood" :
Of course, going back to opening paragraph, it's easy enough to deconstruct and demystify an album like Laughingstock by thinking of it in terms of its diverse precedents, whether that be the spacious burbling jams of CAN's Future Days or the rigorously mathematical constructions of Steve Reich. And perhaps more pertinently its relationship to any notion of "guitar rock" is loose at best, even if it technically makes use of electric guitar.
(Tangentially: As a progenitor of what came to be known as post-rock, it's interesting that many later groups in the genre — like Godspeed, You Black Emperor!, Mogwai, and Explosions in the Sky — each sought to lesson or excluded entirely the involvement of vocals, which is probably the most distinct aspect of Talk Talk's sound.)
These days guitar-based music that isn't easily reduced to a given common point of reference is often maximalist and avoiding those easily discerned points of reference by overwhelming the senses. Though they seem to have broken up already, Postmadonna is a decent example of how such a style can approach pop ideals and possibly suggest where other bands may pick up from.
Postmadonna — "Whose Absinthe is This?" :
But as with anything else, I imagine that most listeners familiar with Postmadonna would probably be familiar with that which came before, like the entirety of the Kinsella bros catalog and Upsilon Acrux — so who was actually progressive?
TL;DR — Ain't nothin' new under the sun.
Though I should say that there's nothing wrong with being part of a scene or subgenre at all. Some of my favorite music from recent years has come out of the Philadelphia indie/punk scene. And the mere mention of the words "post-hardcore" is enough to merit my attention. But there is a special place in my heart for those artists who are uniquely themselves.
Sometimes this conflicts with #2, which is versatility. The National for example are totally singular but I wouldn't blame you for complaining that most of their songs sound pretty similar. Personally I think they have a knack for finding infinite surprising nooks and crannies in their basic core sound, but that just goes how subjective of a judgment this really is and how many exceptions there are. That being said, I do find myself getting bored with a deluge of records that have one or two catchy songs and a bunch of similar sounding but less interesting songs. So I really do appreciate it when a band comes along that has a sense for variety. This probably goes back to The Beatles for me but in more recent times I could name Chance the Rapper or Modest Mouse or even Bjork again as acts who are trying different things from song to song.
All talk aside, I'm not super knowledgeable about electronic music but this sounds like nothing I've heard before:
These ladies are awesome. They're twin sisters and I think latino - they're listed on alt latino, anyway.
Oya is, according to rap genius, "yoruba mythology the goddess of the wind, owner of the underworld and cemeteries."
there's a french bridge, which (roughly) translates to
Ah , you're the one and only
You who speaks to my heart
Ah , you're the one and only
But leaving without me
You who leaves without me
this is another very cool song of theirs, the drop isn't until the last minute or so but it's worth the wait imo
yeah it's a little unfortunate how quick people are to say that music from a certain decade (like the 00's!) sucks given that more music comes out each year than any one person will listen to in their lifetime
Argument: Limp Bizkit.
I find the current retread towards 80s moan pop is unfortunate, but I know there are people who love that stuff.
Beautiful thing about music is that there is always something good coming out. I was a little behind when I got Aesop Rocks Zero Dark Thirty but that's a good little album.
Mostly due to Wes Borland being a semi-creative guitarist
maybe i'm streaming terrible dj right now if i am its here
Great stuff if you like Klaus Schulze or maybe Tangerine Dream. The spacey ambience is mixed with some cool church organ-sounding progressions.
This album is cool, thanks for the recommendation. Their influences are indeed pretty blatant, but they combine them well (it helps that I like Talking Heads and all of the bands you listed).
I've long been torn between the late 60s/early 70s and the late 80s/early 90s. The former era saw a beautiful explosion of progressive and psychedelic music and the birth of heavy metal, as well as a lot of awesome jazz/rock fusion. The latter was, in my view, the peak of metal and hip-hop, and the time when electronic music really came to fruition; a far larger portion of the music I listen to comes from this era than any other.
That said, as impossible as it really is to answer that question, I think a lot of my favorite records are from like '85 - '96.
To:
oh man this is good
If I had to pick, I'd overlap with you and argue for the mid-80s through early 90s. It was the era before the major labels and big money got their greedy hands on what was happening in the underground. So you had lots and lots of weird, experimental, progressive shit happening on independent labels. Punk had quickly morphed into multiple strains including post-punk, hardcore, early emo, grunge. You had the no wave/noise/industrial folks experimenting with just how abrasive and atonal you could make music (stuff like Swans, Big Black, early Sonic Youth). On the metal side you had hair metal but also the birth of black metal, death metal, thrash and speed metal as well as metal/punk hybrids like Discharge (who became a genre unto themselves) and Motorhead. You had the whole goth/dream-pop/shoegaze thing going on in the UK. You had the jangly, literary "college rock" of bands like REM, which was basically the blueprint for what came to be known as "indie rock". You had folks like New Order and Depeche Mode playing around with the pop sounds of new wave but making not-quite-pop music with them. In the world of hip-hop, this was the end of the "My name is X and I'm here to say" party era, when NWA and Public Enemy opened the floodgates for Nas, Pac, BIG, and the Wu-Tang to take it to the next level. I don't know much about electronic music, but my understanding is that this was the origin point for house music in Chicago, techno in Detroit, and trance in Germany.
The 80s get such a bad rap because of all the hair metal and cheesy new wave but it was an incredibly fertile time for underground music.
ETA: I recognize that my taste as well as my knowledge of music history is shaped by critics and tastemakers who have cultivated the idea of a particular canon, one which over-prioritizes guitar rock at the expense of lots of stuff like country music, folk, contemporary classical or symphonic music, jazz, regional phenomena like reggae or flamenco or calypso or stuff that just gets filed under "world music", and all sorts of other great music.
In undergrad my audio engineering professors, who had worked extensively in the 80's, loved to talk about how much what people hate about the period is actually a distaste for misuse of early digital technology and the many deleterious consequences of cocaine abuse. In particular, the cocaine high apparently alters perception of high frequency such that you greatly prefer high frequency sound over all else, so a lot of records in the 80's have these brittle mixes that accentuate the "false" qualities of the then new digital reverbs, sampled brass, and synthesized basslines.
To their ears the music itself was often impeccable, composed and performed by professionals with a great understanding of music, its history, and a desire to progress — they were just let down by cultural excess and premature efforts to use technology that even today is still kinda suspect (I'm looking at you sample brass).
what other bands fall under the banner of "90's DC emo"? I know the 80's stuff like Rites of Spring and Dag Nasty but don't really know anything from the 90's there.
I'd say I'm too young to really know how any of it was categorized as "emo" in contrast to what eventually became the prevailing notion of "emo", but it was what it was I guess; fits Cattle Drums pretty well though.
Universal Order of Armageddon was super rad (and from that 90's scene):
and Zona Mexicana was another (contemporary, I should say) band from upstate New York and sort of a precursor to Cattle Drums:
those bands are from the 80s :P
it's cool, I was just wondering if there was a big movement/scene that I wasn't already familiar with
Still, seems like things didn't really get tagged "emo" until the 90's, I guess when bands like Braid came along. Maybe you'd know better though?
edit - one of my goals in life is to eventually find a hip-hop album I love as much Mobb Deep's The Infamous. I've probably listened to that album a couple of hundred times by now and it has yet to get stale.
Is that a good enough non-answer?
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
I'm not really an expert on things or history, tbh. Not sure how things were branded in the 80s/90s.
Anyways, speaking of emo, the first half of 2016 is ridiculous with new releases. Drops from Tiny Moving Parts, The Hotelier, Signals Midwest, Tancred and Into It. Over It., TWIABP as well as the Snowing reunion. So stoked.
Billy Idol had a pretty great voice. Maybe he still does.
Mndsgn is kinda like what Dudley Perkins could have been if whatshisname wasn't so grating (I can't remember what Dudley's emcee name was).
I've been on a major IIOI buzz lately
Seen Evan perform three times now and each time has been an absolute joy