I am at once super glad for you and annoyed because I envy your position and am just bored and upset right now. It's complicated. Have a great time for me and tell me how it was.
I suggest The Moon and Antarctica and Animals respectively, although it has been years since I have listened to either.
Also worth noting, but probably something you picked up on: Modest Mouse are a lot stranger and darker (and more technically proficient) than they seem at first glance.
I am at once super glad for you and annoyed because I envy your position and am just bored and upset right now. It's complicated. Have a great time for me and tell me how it was.
im sad to hear that :( i hope it will cheer you up to hear the album is p sick. undeniably afx but at the same time something new, if not quite as game changing as some of the stuff he's put out then certainly something i enjoyed a lot and want to hear again. particularly the track that sounded like a gloriously fucked up 80s action film soundtrack. it's p solidly uptempo dancier stuff which i liked but was also disappointed... idk, that he hadn't written another Alberto balsalm or sth.
there's a nice minimalist piano track to end it tho
I am listening to Impossible King Live's Datboonbaat cassette, and it is some of the best collage/soundscape/variably harsh noise that I have heard in a long time. It's like if The Body Lovers' self-titled and Merzbow's Batztoutai with Material Gadgets (or maybe 1930) had a baby.
"Like it does with women’s bodies, popular culture permits a narrow range of acceptable beauty in women’s voices. There’s a reason Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons has room to sing flat on a live television performance but Beyoncé is expected to catapult through multiple key changes with perfect tone and pitch. There’s a reason Lana Del Rey bore the undiluted resentment of her audience when she failed to sing charismatically on Saturday Night Live. There is a reason Britney Spears’ isolated, untreated vocals score listens in the millions every time they’re leaked and the guttural quality of Shakira’s voice is as hotly debated in YouTube comments as her sexual attractiveness. As an object of beauty for public consumption, a woman’s pleasantness must permeate the senses.
The pressure doesn’t just constrict the blockbusters. Even under the “indie” umbrella, where artists support ad campaigns for Levi’s instead of Pepsi, audiences and critics expect women to adhere to a certain standard of vocal beauty. “Only the fact that the singer’s rather limited voice wears thin at times keeps I Never Learn from being an unqualified masterpiece,” Jim DeRogatis wrote recently about Swedish songwriter Lykke Li’s third album. I can’t recall a man making a similar comment about Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, or Dylan Baldi of Cloud Nothings, or Jeff Mangum, or Jack White. Their limits contribute to their charm. They have never experienced their voices as obstacles to creating masterpieces."
“Only the fact that the singer’s rather limited voice wears thin at times keeps I Never Learn from being an unqualified masterpiece,” Jim DeRogatis wrote recently about Swedish songwriter Lykke Li’s third album. I can’t recall a man making a similar comment about Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, or Dylan Baldi of Cloud Nothings, or Jeff Mangum, or Jack White.
well obviously someone hasn't been taking to men with good taste
“Only the fact that the singer’s rather limited voice wears thin at times keeps I Never Learn from being an unqualified masterpiece,” Jim DeRogatis wrote recently about Swedish songwriter Lykke Li’s third album. I can’t recall a man making a similar comment about Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, or Dylan Baldi of Cloud Nothings, or Jeff Mangum, or Jack White.
well obviously someone hasn't been taking to men with good taste
I've actually heard that same complaint lodged about all of the aforementioned, so the suggestion that this is some kind of sexist conspiracy is kind of ridiculous. For the record, I quite like Neutral Milk Hotel and The Decemberists most of the time, while nothing I have heard by Cloud Nothings or Lykke Li offends me and The White Stripes were pretty good for what they were... and all of them have strange voices, especially Colin Meloy.
^ Their later records suffer more for it, methinks.
I quite like Cloud Nothings. Yes, they're heavily indebted to early Wire and The Wipers, but I wish that more punk-oriented bands would use them as their source instead of Warped Tour stuff that is just regurgitating The Ramones for the 1000th time.
The only genres that I can see never gaining full respectability or commercial appeal on a broad basis are genres too abrasive or alienating to capture the imagination of people who think of music in purely political terms: Harsh noise, isolationist drone, breakcore, certain forms of extreme metal and sound collage. Stuff that confuses or scares people and can't easily be made palatable.
Of course, extreme music of a certain tenor can have a primal appeal on a popular level and become insurrectionary without being easily co-opted, but then it becomes a hipster badge and a commodity by association. But even then, who the hell would want to go to a Swans concert solely to look cool? All that mass swaying would probably be exhausting if you're not into it.
Warped Tour stuff that is just regurgitating The Ramones for the 1000th time
there are lots of complaints one could lob at the Warped Tour crowd but from what i've heard "sounding like The Ramones" isn't one of them.
for one thing they consistently sound infinitely better than The Ramones.
It's true that most of those bands are technically better than The Ramones, but that's not why I like the first couple of Ramones albums. I like those albums because they're basically a turbo-charged early Beach Boys, which I'd imagine is different from why a lot of other people like them.
At any rate, even if those bands don't follow the exact sound of The Ramones, they certainly follow the blueprint that they established for pop-punk. It's a blueprint that doesn't leave much room for growth, which is why most Warped Tour bands are so boring, even if they are technically decent.
I can only listen to The Ramones in relatively controlled doses before I've had my fill of them for a while, but I don't get the feeling of boredom from them that I do from most Warped Tour bands.
Warped Tour stuff that is just regurgitating The Ramones for the 1000th time
there are lots of complaints one could lob at the Warped Tour crowd but from what i've heard "sounding like The Ramones" isn't one of them.
for one thing they consistently sound infinitely better than The Ramones.
Honestly, I prefer my sadsack music to have some bite, or more bite, but loathing bands that are that earnest on average is sort of like kicking a small dog: Tempting, but generally excessive and mean.
I don't get the comparison myself.
The Ramones were competent, but extremely repetitive.
^ Post-hardcore is more common among that set now.
^^ All of that is true. I admit that I still think of blink-182 and their cohorts when I think of "Warped Tour", because that was what was popular when I liked that kind of thing as an adolescent.
I realize that Naney's sister is into that stuff, and she's around the age I was when I liked it, so his conception of "Warped Tour" is more up-to-date than mine is. I apologize for the misunderstanding I caused with that.
I kind of think that some of The Ramones' earliest songs paved the way for shoegaze and noise rock, particularly "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend". The guitars really do sound like tuned buzzsaws, and the reverb on everything makes the production feel hazy and warm and weirdly luminous. It's almost like a fever dream of pop music.
And then it became a formula. And then it stopped being weird and started being boring.
I remember liking Dookie and that one Offspring album enough back in 1994-1995 to consider buying them. Green Day went on to more interesting things, but I haven't heard from the Offspring in years.
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i wanted to like it, but i did not
Rum Sodomy and the Lash: The Pogues The last song is the saddest thing ever :(
there's a nice minimalist piano track to end it tho
also i got an Official Aphex Twin Plastic Bag™
are you ready for some incredibly sick jams
AOTY?
maybe
i can guarantee that she is infinitely cooler than any of the bands/people listed in the paragraph i just quoted
for one thing they consistently sound infinitely better than The Ramones.
the ramones sound like they were in a coma
ay. oh. let's go (take a nap).
There were a few nice deathcore and metalcore bands though, i was actually kinda tempted to tag along to see Thy Art Is Murder and Every Time I Die
So there.
also American Edit is one of like four good mashup albums.
and green day is so punk that they pick fights with justin beiber