07:08 am - Indie bands I still like.
I mentioned in my previous entry about my current taste in music leaning towards things I would have automatically considered shit five years ago. However, I only realise this when I stop and think about it. Most of the time it's hard to remember that I was an indie fan in a big way.
I read an opinion on the internet (I read a lot of things on the internet) that Weezer was the only band to retroactively entirely destroy their credibility. I started thinking about the Manic Street Preachers. Their first three albums were good. Their fourth album was a bit sell-out-ish, but okay. Then they released This is My Truth... which instantly rendered everything they had previously done completely shit by association.
Then I started thinking: well, what bands did I like back then that I still like? In lieu of a 'new albums this week' post (since it's that time of year again where I'm short on money and no-one wants to donate) I present an exploratory rediscovery of bands I used to like to whom it is still worth listening.
In no particular order:-
Longpigs
You wouldn't think it, knowing that I still only have their final albums (Mobile Home), but I love Longpigs. Does anyone know/remember to what book their name is a reference? Featuring Richard Hawley (later of Pulp and his own solo project) on guitar and Simon Stafford (later of Joe Strummer's Mescaleros until Strummer's death), the band was like the inverse reciprocal of a supergroup. If you fed early Travis (who, no, I never liked) were fed into 'not-shit-making' machine, they would emerge from the other end as this group. And even that makes them sound worse than they actually are. Crispin Hunt is arguably a classically better vocalist than Gruff Rhys, and is certainly a classically better vocalist than Aidan Moffat, but he shares with them the quality of imperfection that really makes it that much more emotive.
Super Furry Animals
I only have Fuzzy Logic, Radiator and Guerrilla on my computer... I should really get the other CDs I have on here. Anyway, Super Furry Animals are better than the bands that influenced them. The bands that influenced them had a brand of psychedelic rock which was inextricably tied to the cultural context in which it was conceived. SFA's brand of psychedelic rock has aged really well. They were also (at least, beginning with their second album) pretty experimental with electronics, a counter to their countrymen the Stereophonics' (who, no, I never liked) bullshit assertions that music can only be entertaining if it's possible to play it on a single guitar under a bare lightbulb and still have people enjoy it (almost an exact quote! Kelly Jones, no-one enjoys your music under any circumstances. Go fuck yourself with a 12-string. Preferably one that has machine-heads down both sides of the headstock.)
Guided By Voices
The laws of statistics state that the more things you have, the more likely some of it is to be shit. The probability that some of it is shit tends to 1 as the number tends to infinity. An exception is made for music: an artist can reach a level of being prolific that some of their stuff is guaranteed to be shit. I don't know exactly what that level is, but it's certainly less than 100 songs. So, really, it's not Robert Pollard's fault that some of their stuff is shit; it's just obeying a basic Law of Nature. That doesn't prevent a lot of it from being great, by any means. I think my favourite songs are 'Things I Will Keep' (though this might be because I keep mishearing "it will most certainly bring peace" as "it almost certain will bring geese") and 'Game of Pricks'. Whatever you think of The Strokes (who, no, I never liked) it can't be denied that the bands by whom they were influenced (The Velvet Underground and Guided By Voices, mainly) were awesome.
There are more, but I can't be bothered writing about them. I've been avoiding doing such for 11 hours now.
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
thegooseking's journal