Do you have a band that people don't know about, that thinks deserve a lot more attention? Post it here. Be thorough.
Future of the Left
Grizzly Bear
Brian Jonestown Massacre
Count Zero
Opeth
The Living End
Why?
Mew
For me, I'm starting with Future of the Left
The way I describe them to most people is this: back in the early 2000s, the whole indie rock aesthetic got started, and no one was too caught up in the hilarious cliches or irritating attitudes of effeminate frontliners crooning catchily over who the fuck knows what. McClusky was the opposite of that. They were pissed off, and released a few albums and caught a lot of attention. They broke up, sadly, but a Mr. Falcous, guitarist, and a Mr. Egglestone, drummer, teamed up with a Mr. Mathias, keyboardist of Jarcrew. They formed Future of the Left, and started writing songs and touring around England. They hooked onto Ted Leo and Against Me! to tour the US (which is where I first heard them), after releasing their debut, Curses!, followed by Travels With Myself and Another. They're currently touring Europe.
I love this band to death. A lot of heavy McClusky fans got pissed off that Falcous softened up, and even used synth on some of the songs. They got a bit more melodic and a bit less intense with their second album, while adding layers of complexity. But they are an incredibly tight, wildly inventive, unpredictably funny, and very energetic band. They're almost primal in the way that they use rhythm to drive their songs along: Kelson's bass playing, Falco's singing and guitaring/keyboarding, and Jack's simple yet perfect power drumming combine to really draw you into their crazy, indie rock / punk, hilarious world.
Their lyricism runs from very simple to rather deep, from the incredibly frustrated over who the fuck knows what to wildly funny for who the fuck knows what reason. But undearneath it all is their devotion to being tight, inventive players who put everything out there. It's very raw and masculine, and at the same time very detailed, catchy, and attention-grabbing. I always come back to the way they mix rhythm, though. A song that doesn't go much of anywhere suddenly becomes wildly interesting. I love the crazy world I get into when I listen to them.
Examples:
[youtube]1_XbYz9J4W0[/youtube]
[youtube]tAwliet2vqo[/youtube]
Curses is a fantastic album, varied and intense with only a few low points. Travels With Myself And Another is, in my mind, much more accessible, and much more chordy. It's different, but I got used to it and I'm really into it now. Some wonderful tunes, a few bad ones. Last Night I Saved Her From Vampires isn't just a novelty for heavy fans; although their musicianship clearly diminishes when intoxicated, you get a sense for their energy very clearly. I also have a few singles hidden away, which are gems, if anyone wants them. I'm a bit biased, because I'm practically engaged to Kelson and he is one of my favorite people on the planet (he did pushups over his bass guitar during the last song of his set). Their humor is a bit out there, but great (since the Orpheum has a balcony and a floor, Falco had us do cries, with one floor starting, the other ending: "TED! - LEO!" "AGAINST! - ME!" "PRINCE - RULES!" "KELSON IS - WELL HUNG!")
Just listen to this shit, please. hocuspocus;
Im trying to get friends into Grizzly Bear
I still have not listened to the album you recommended. SORRY.
I'll get to this later. I already have at least one in mind.
I tell everyone 'bout the Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Quote from: coz on September 13, 2009, 09:33:46 PM
I tell everyone 'bout the Brian Jonestown Massacre.
I was just going to post this.
No tour until 2010 though.
I generally get positive reactions when I bring them up and have people listen to them for the first time.
Okay okay I'm doing this.
Count Zero
I don't know about you guys, but I think Boston is the new Seattle, in the sense that more and more great music seems to be coming from there every day. Count Zero is a great example of that.
I think I should preface this by saying that I got into this band after hearing "Sail Your Ship By" as a bonus track in Guitar Hero. It makes sense that a lot of bands found in the bonus tracks of that game are great, since almost all of them are local Boston bands. But I digress. The fact of the matter is, even if you hate Guitar Hero, you should still give these guys a shot.
Their debut album, Affluenza, I have not listened to. It was intended to be a commercial success, but flopped. From what I understand, it's really nothing special, either. But, the failure of their commercial sound was exactly what they needed in order to become something new and brilliant.
The following album, Robots Anonymous, is my personal favorite album of theirs. It's clear that they were trying to target a specific audience, and that I am a part of that audience. Although the tracks flow straight from one to the next, it it seems that they're a bit all over the place. This might be a bit of a turnoff for some, and those people will prefer their next album. The album begins relatively straightforward, then dives into the delightfully weird, then to the just plain odd, but comes back together in the wonderfully written "Cure Of A Kiss."
Their most recent, but not really that recent, album, Little Minds, is less on the weird side but still has its fair share of oddities. It's definitely easier to listen to, and the album I would recommend listening to first if you're interested in getting into this band.
The most striking thing about this band is their ability to write songs with odd rhythms and melodies, and manage to be catchy at the same time.
[spoiler=VIDEOS!][youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKbk6TvHYxE[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otu7UW05P1c[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9W7AQcGpzQ[/youtube][/spoiler]
Count Zero is absolutely underrated and pretty damn great, if I say so myself. I would recommend them to just about anyone who likes experimental/indie music.
Don't they sing "Radium Eyes" from Guitar Hero 2 akudood;
At my school: Opeth
Everyone's like "lol opeth sux bro i've nvr listend 2 them so they suk. listen 2 lamb of gawd dood"
Quote from: Hïro on September 15, 2009, 08:38:31 PM
Don't they sing "Radium Eyes" from Guitar Hero 2 akudood;
Yes they sung that too. Not one of their better songs, IMO.
Add the Flying Burrito Brothers to this list. Forty years ago, they beautifully fused elements of hippie rock'n'roll into raw country and made an amazing album called the Gilded Palace of Sin. To date, it has sold less than 500,000 copies.
oh and i used to always try to get everyone into mother love bone and still would, but i forget about them a lot because i rarely listen to them lately
...One more thing. It might help to add info on the list. Maybe the genre, and a suggested song? IE, "The Brian Jonestown Massacre / Psychedelic / Going To Hell".
Miike Snow
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKT-kJfUz4[/youtube]
Quote from: GUOB on September 15, 2009, 10:10:43 PM
Miike Snow
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKT-kJfUz4[/youtube]
My local alternative station plays this song.
Also I added some videos to the Count Zero post.
The Mountain Goats giggle;
also almost everything i have so i could have more concerts to go
Quote from: Man of Popsicle on September 15, 2009, 10:12:06 PM
My local alternative station plays this song.
I love them so much. I saw them in concert too it's kind of a big deal
Why?
I really hated their stuff when I first heard it, but the lyrics are so ingenious that I kept listening. Now I can't stop listening, it takes a little bit for their music to grow on you, but once it does you can't stop listening to it. The lyrics are just insane, Yoni Wolf is brillant.
The Living End
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prjVGQWNyE4[/youtube]
That song should be enough for anybody to like them. If not, I got plenty more.
Wrench those guys sound a lot like greenday lol
Quote from: GUOB on September 16, 2009, 11:26:53 AM
Wrench those guys sound a lot like greenday lol
They are a really sweet Australian band. Green Day is actually the reason they became big. They toured with them one year.
Quote from: Cookie on September 16, 2009, 08:39:36 AM
Why?
I really hated their stuff when I first heard it, but the lyrics are so ingenious that I kept listening. Now I can't stop listening, it takes a little bit for their music to grow on you, but once it does you can't stop listening to it. The lyrics are just insane, Yoni Wolf is brillant.
I listened to Alopecia first and it just instantly clicked with me and I loved it. giggle;
I like The Living End. I do not like Green Day. Just saying.
Quote from: Cookie on September 16, 2009, 08:39:36 AM
Why?
I really hated their stuff when I first heard it, but the lyrics are so ingenious that I kept listening. Now I can't stop listening, it takes a little bit for their music to grow on you, but once it does you can't stop listening to it. The lyrics are just insane, Yoni Wolf is brillant.
They're going to be in Boston soon. giggle;
Quote from: JMV on September 16, 2009, 02:14:34 PM
They're going to be in Boston soon. giggle;
With Mount Eerie? I'm very jealous. I saw them in Philadelphia right after Alopecia released.
Quote from: Placebo Headwound on September 16, 2009, 11:44:21 AM
I listened to Alopecia first and it just instantly clicked with me and I loved it. giggle;
I heard about them from a friend when they were releasing Oaklandazulasylum. But My Alopecia is my favorite album of theirs. Hopefully the new one will be great.
I want people to get into Mew with me. They're a Danish alt. rock band that is amazing because, even though they definitely have their own identifiable sound, none of their albums really sound the same because they incorporate so many different styles into their default indie shoegaze style. I love all their different styles so far, even the "pretentious art rock," as they themselves call it.
Artsy Mew:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk39bWWTlRU[/youtube]
Normal (at least I think so) Mew:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIIMmUTfAo4[/youtube]
More shoegazy than usual Mew:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6RSCstdRiw[/youtube]
More hard alternative Mew:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl1bUqNKdfY[/youtube]
Kaz I really like those guys.
I will have to check them out.
To introduce something probably little known: Le Loup (so pissed it's 18+)
[youtube]rl2xHn5Suq8[/youtube]
[youtube]Ll6vQCd17q8[/youtube]
Indie. Electronic. Folk. And a whole lot of other shit, like dark matter surrounding a galaxy or something else equally astronomical and massive. A guy asked for musicians on craigslist, got together, and they did this. The result is impressive.
It feels...echoey. It's folky, banjoey, but they really know how to build and create this wild and beautiful textures and feelings. Sometimes their approach is a bit too artsy. They put lines together beautifully, and then add in their weirder side to this...bucolic, lonely instrumentation and somehow it makes sense! They create these mesmerizing cycles, and they add in and subtract parts in a way that's really compelling; "Canto I" is just an introducting and cycling through of all these beautiful things, connected by a spoken narrative. It's definitely late-night music, but I just love it so much.
Stream of consciousness while listening to their debut album: Their lyrics are huge and encompassing, ironic in the smallness and quietness that they use. Sometimes they strip down to textures, but they still manage to be mesmerizing ("Planes Like Vultures"). They can draw you along, and then create something so strange, introduce parts and it won't make sense and it'll seem strange and then it'll start to fit together. It's not like the kind of Arcade Fire make everything more fucking intense and keep it simple while making it more interlocking and more raw and beautiful, but just throw more things with this beautiful accuracy, and it'll go from being passively mesmerizing to being actively fascinating. Sonic beauty, they always come back to. The cuts just float in and float out, but you get caught up in the cloud of what they're doing. They can be slightly dancey, and their parts are never complicated, but they just fit together strangely and beautifully. In every song, they approach this strange growth and change from different angles, adding things. I feel taken to all the different places they're traveling they describe when I listen to them, drawn along with their growth and resolution with themself. Every song is so different, beautiful in its own relation to itself. They're short cuts, but plentiful, and in that way we get so many different pictures.
The music looks like...a group of people wandering through a strangely lit night, sharing stories from their past and having these lucid, unbelievable experieces against a backdrop of sheer normality, like an earthly angel with dirty wings walking through the bush. It's distant, it's close. It doesn't make a lot of sense sometimes, and doesn't bring you along some times, like others. But like...oh god, like I love they places they take me. I feel like I'm walking along with them (them being whoever these wild people you get pictures on in their wild dreams, much larger than anything you could ever imagine), in bare feet clutching at a slightly eroded, but still vital earth. Flatness, visibility, but these mountains of the soul? Or something. Nicely. Gosh.
Um, they're not tight. Or they're just tight enough. They don't have to be.
The electrical / dancey textures somehow fit in with all of this, create the dull golden light that I'm walking through...we share and tell stories as we wonder about what it means, unreal yet very real experiences that are somehow important fitting together in this strange travel we're taking. The (storm) is so chaotic and tonal, so real and yet what the fuck is going on? You know?
Man, music like this just reduces everyone to a human being and takes look at everything together. Not in a John Lennon imagine sort of way, but a very quiet and real and transportive sort of way. Even in walking along this dusty, sunset way I see so many places and experiences which somehow wrap up together into this one place. It all fits together with "We Are Gods! We Are Wolves," jesus christ. The tonalities, the lyrics, the way it fits and develops is just perfect. It fades in and out of itself, human and distant, beautiful and far, building and growing on its own strange maxims and place in the world. By god, this is good shit. Why can't I see these guys live? This could be religious.
I wonder about the artists themselves. Loose, maybe a bit too artsy for their own good. But they lead you in so well, tell stories so well. The whole debut album is like the strangest most fascinating kind of storytelling. They're not fantastic musicians, but the way they craft song is only the result of so many artistic and creative minds merging together to create such development. The lines change and merge even as they're consistent and beepy, like we're floating. We're floating now. Gosh.
In some ways I distance myself from these songs as song. They're pictures, stories, having such building. Sometimes I have to come back from my strange satellite and notice some repetition and pacing issues, the often muddy sound, occasional lack of real creativity, the lack of real unity in songs. But these are such wonderful stories, I get drawn away. I'm a sucker for...love. Love is shaped like cities burning, you know.
"You'll be dressed in sea-swollen air, and look to the rest but colours grow there..." I mean, how is that not evocative and beautiful? Even in its artsyness, it's just so intense. Definitely headphone music. But like, I'm just swept along with it in all cases. I just respect all the emotions they make.
In somewhat short: awesome, sonically beautiful, intersecting and creating and evocative.
In short: For fuck's sake Kaz, get into this and Radicalface and A.A. Bondy
God damn Pqqu how do you write so much
Quote from: Kaz on September 16, 2009, 03:00:56 PM
I want people to get into Mew with me. They're a Danish alt. rock band that is amazing because, even though they definitely have their own identifiable sound, none of their albums really sound the same because they incorporate so many different styles into their default indie shoegaze style. I love all their different styles so far, even the "pretentious art rock," as they themselves call it.
Well, I'll say this much: I
loved No More Stories. hocuspocus;
weezer doodthing;
Quote from: Hïro on October 03, 2009, 09:15:44 AM
God damn Pqqu how do you write so much
I TAKE MUSICAL DRUGS
PQQU, thank you so much for (through this thread) introducing me to Le Loup. so amazing
I just plugged back into Spacemen 3 again recently.
They're one of those bands you put on in the background for some ambient noise, but end up abandoning what you're doing to focus on the music.
There's not a whole lot there, but that minimalist droney approach really captures what they're about, and they're usually about translating drug experiences into audio form.
Their greatest album, "The perfect prescription" mirrors the highs and lows of a trip. It's unsettling, disorienting, occasionally melodic, and governed largely by an invisible drone, which keeps things low and generally sluggish.
There's no lyrical genius, or catchy melodic lines, but a perpetual consistency that echoes in every track, which all seem to bleed into each other.
Scoop it up fool.
You guys need to listen to The Protomen. baddood;
They're a band that's made a rock opera based on Megaman. Sounds silly, but they take several creative liberties to turn it into their own story. And don't just think it's a gimmick, because the music itself is pretty damned good.
They just released a new album last month, and it's great. It starts off with an apocalyptic western theme and halfway through it turns into awesome 80's inspired synth-rock.
SONGS!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcDoZnN8ac[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncVTPuU7CBY&feature=related[/youtube]
The second album is definitely better than the first. The first has a more raw, straight-up rock sound with a bit of 8-bit influence while the second is more polished and overall just better. giggle;
Thief I was just thinking of posting The Protomen when I clicked on this thread. thumbup;
Also another awesome point for posting a video of The Hounds. It's my favorite song from them.
Quote from: Placebo Headwound on October 05, 2009, 08:08:12 AM
You guys need to listen to The Protomen. baddood;
They're a band that's made a rock opera based on Megaman. Sounds silly, but they take several creative liberties to turn it into their own story. And don't just think it's a gimmick, because the music itself is pretty damned good.
They just released a new album last month, and it's great. It starts off with an apocalyptic western theme and halfway through it turns into awesome 80's inspired synth-rock.
The second album is definitely better than the first. The first has a more raw, straight-up rock sound with a bit of 8-bit influence while the second is more polished and overall just better. giggle;
YES
Quote from: Man of Popsicle on October 05, 2009, 09:57:13 AM
Thief I was just thinking of posting The Protomen when I clicked on this thread. thumbup;
Also another awesome point for posting a video of The Hounds. It's my favorite song from them.
Wily has the best voice of all the characters. They seriously should have given him more lines. :(
I wish people had gotten into the Rock N Roll Soldiers before they ran out of funds
talbot tagora. they sound like satan
Quote from: YPR on October 05, 2009, 08:22:21 PM
I wish people had gotten into the Rock N Roll Soldiers before they ran out of funds
They are so cheesy that they rule. I remembering buying so many musicians to kill. one of the first cds i bought lol, also waiting for the longest time for their never happened second album.
The singer is in his own band right now, more electro rock thing. http://www.myspace.com/babymnstr
Quote from: burzumfan420 on October 06, 2009, 10:47:03 PM
They are so cheesy that they rule.
Exactly, it's just faced paced generic rock with no real message and yet I love it.
Quote from: burzumfan420 on October 06, 2009, 10:47:03 PM
The singer is in his own band right now, more electro rock thing. http://www.myspace.com/babymnstr
Sounds a little weird for them but I guess I'll just check it out for old time's sake
Quote from: YPR on October 05, 2009, 08:22:21 PM
I wish people had gotten into the Rock N Roll Soldiers before they ran out of funds
i love how fast-paced their dorky lyricism is
EVERYBODY IS A BITCH
their newer stuff sounded a bit more matured lyrically and pretty good imo. but they are on indefinte hiatus since they lack duckets.
Everyone here should check out Snowing they are some nu emo band that only has an EP released on their myspace for free and the sound is like a throwback to 90s emo
watched every youtube on this thread and the only one I could stomach was the protomen, which were just alright,
but kudos cjlubdoods;
Just downloaded a couple Mew CD's, a Future From The Left CD, and the second Protomen CD.
POST MORE AWESOME STUFF FOR ME GUYS
Quote from: GUOB on October 27, 2009, 10:48:38 AM
Just downloaded a couple Mew CD's, a Future From The Left CD, and the second Protomen CD.
POST MORE AWESOME STUFF FOR ME GUYS
WHICH FOTL
Travels With Myself
I love it <3