Don't judge me, but I've been stuck in an early 2000's alt rock phase for some time. I've listened to bands like the Wonder Years, Taking Back Sunday, The Used, Joyce Manor, Rise Against, A Day To Remember, etc. Does anyone have more modern rock bands they've enjoyed recently?

 

I recently grabbed a last minute Promise Ring cd for a dollar before a cross country road trip. Enjoyed it!

 

My cooler friends listened to them and others like LeTigre, Mountain Goats and Get Up Kids. But I must have been elsewhere, musically speaking.

 

There's a lot of alt-rock music I missed in early 00's, made apparent by the fact I don't know any of the bands you've listed haha. 

 

 

I saw the Get-Up Kids before they were famous.  I went to the same school as their bass player Jim Suptic and saw them play in a coffee shop in the fall of 1996. Here is what he (and the rest of the band, who all dressed like grandpas) looked like then: http://kcomposite.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/20110729-013831.jpg 

 

I thought they were god-awful.  I didn't realize then that I was witnessing the birth of emo/screamo.  I now work with a guy in a screamo band and have had to go see them 2-3 times.  20 years have gone by and it's still crap. 

 

Ugh...screamo.

 

The musical expression of suburban angst, what could possibly be worse.

 

Even worse than West Coast "mall" punk.

 

"My mom didn't pick me up, and I'm so bummed out. Gonna give the finger to my teacher. Gonna start a revolution...."

Emo/Screamo seems to be the province of white people with absolutely zero affinity for the blues.  Like, you could crank the hardest James Brown thing over a 100,000 watt sound system and they'd just space out and maybe think about crossword puzzles or something. 

G.G. Allin pisses on them

Praise The Lord:

I re-listened to all of the White Stripes albums this month for the first time in about seven or eight years.  I was prepared to declare this to be= their single best song:

 

...until I made the mistake of looking it up online and seeing that it's a cover!

I think the White Stripes record with the most distinctive sound is White Blood Cells. Their earlier albums featured a lot of old blues covers as well as originals that sound like old blues songs. And after White Blood Cells, they went back in that direction again. I don't think Jack White accomplished such a unique sound again until he came out with his latest solo album, Lazaretto — the title track is so distinctly him.

Don't judge me, but I've been stuck in an early 2000's alt rock phase for some time. I've listened to bands like the Wonder Years, Taking Back Sunday, The Used, Joyce Manor, Rise Against, A Day To Remember, etc. Does anyone have more modern rock bands they've enjoyed recently?

 

I recently grabbed a last minute Promise Ring cd for a dollar before a cross country road trip. Enjoyed it!

 

My cooler friends listened to them and others like LeTigre, Mountain Goats and Get Up Kids. But I must have been elsewhere, musically speaking.

 

There's a lot of alt-rock music I missed in early 00's, made apparent by the fact I don't know any of the bands you've listed haha. 

 

 

I saw the Get-Up Kids before they were famous.  I went to the same school as their bass player Jim Suptic and saw them play in a coffee shop in the fall of 1996. Here is what he (and the rest of the band, who all dressed like grandpas) looked like then: http://kcomposite.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/20110729-013831.jpg 

 

I thought they were god-awful.  I didn't realize then that I was witnessing the birth of emo/screamo.  I now work with a guy in a screamo band and have had to go see them 2-3 times.  20 years have gone by and it's still crap. 

 

Ugh...screamo.

 

The musical expression of suburban angst, what could possibly be worse.

 

Even worse than West Coast "mall" punk.

 

"My mom didn't pick me up, and I'm so bummed out. Gonna give the finger to my teacher. Gonna start a revolution...."

 

Ah, the musical equivalent of "antifa".  :)

 

...until I made the mistake of looking it up online and seeing that it's a cover!

 

 

Dusty's actually historically underrated in the US, though certainly not in the UK.

 

...until I made the mistake of looking it up online and seeing that it's a cover!

 

 

Dusty's actually historically underrated in the US, though certainly not in the UK.

 

 

According to Wikipedia her version of the song (of course, not even written by her, and apparently the second or third version to be recorded) hit #3 in the UK in 1964 but did not even chart in the United Sates.  It appears that most of the young adults in this crowd in England know the song like how American kids know Neil Diamond songs:

 

Plus, it is amazing to see and hear just how bad Jack White's technique is on guitar.  I think he's holding the neck with his thumb in a really dumb way that slows him down.  Plus, he totally botches a chord in the outro of that live version in the way you'd hear somebody botch something who has only been playing for six months. 

 

Also, Meg White's position on the drum stool is the root of a lot of her problems.  She's sitting so high on the thing she's constantly having to put weight on her heals to avoid slipping off the thing.  Although I was friends with a girl who played drums who looked like a Jewish Meg White who was probably the same height and similarly looked like she was about to slip off the stool and into the drums.  Also was not very good technically, but unfortunately did not have a spirited sound like the sometimes-celebrated White. 

 

One thing you never hear Meg White do is play on a closed hi-hat.  It's like she doesn't even know what to do with the thing and I don't think even hits the pedal.  There's no doubt that if you subtract the hi-hat from a drum set it opens everything up.  There are actually a number of female drummers who have done this, most notably Mo Tucker of the Velvet Underground and less well-known but as significantly "Christine Dollrod" of Detroit's Demolition Dollrods. 

 

 

 

 

...until I made the mistake of looking it up online and seeing that it's a cover!

 

 

Dusty's actually historically underrated in the US, though certainly not in the UK.

 

she's only underrated by people whose musical vocabulary starts only in the 90's :wink:

 

 

...until I made the mistake of looking it up online and seeing that it's a cover!

 

 

Dusty's actually historically underrated in the US, though certainly not in the UK.

 

she's only underrated by people whose musical vocabulary starts only in the 90's :wink:

 

 

LOL, by Americans she is.  Even with older memories.  Many people who recall the "Bay City Rollers" probably think that's their song there.

Here was the highlight from last Sunday's rebroadcast of "Casey's Top 40 from the 80s":

 

^Kasem was the voice of Teletraan-1, the Autobots' computer. I like the idea of that being used to try and teach the rural-personality Autobots such as Ironhide and Bumblebee to rap. Then Blaster busts in and does it for real.

 

2017 is the 10-year anniversary of the last White Stripes album, Icky Thump.  Perhaps the last real rock & roll band with any mystique and in 20 years Jack White might be the last rock guy still drawing a decent crowd. That album was all over the place but had fresh moments that were 100x better than pretty much that has happened since:

 

In 2007 the White Stripes were pretty damn big so it's impressive that they put out a record this sloppy and obnoxious. 

 

That track is horrible!  Dear God... their music is so hit or miss!

 

That track is horrible!  Dear God... their music is so hit or miss!

 

 

I'm glad you liked it.  Unfortunately a lot of "good" guitar players are afraid to play a sloppy slide guitar which is something Mr. White quite obviously relishes in doing.

 

Also, the layout of that song jumps over to a bridge-type space at various points which gives it a weird swirling effect and makes it hard to predict how it's going to land back on the root.  One of the tough things about slide guitar in open tunings is that its clichés become obvious pretty much the first time you attempt it so it's pretty tough to keep things interesting for more than one song or even within a single one. 

 

 

 

One thing you can do to make it less banal is to play fingerstyle on the unwound strings while adding a finger back 2-3 frets up from the slide on your fretting hand. That way it doesn't sound like Keith Richards in open-G, wasted, just screwing around live.

One thing you can do to make it less banal is to play fingerstyle on the unwound strings while adding a finger back 2-3 frets up from the slide on your fretting hand. That way it doesn't sound like Keith Richards in open-G, wasted, just screwing around live.

 

Yeah I don't get why Keith Richards can't pay full attention to the task at hand while playing in front of 60,000 people.  Instead he likes to make funny eye contact with Ron Wood.  That said, you can't really lead a band with the Keith Richards tuning for an entire set without another guitarist playing a standard-tuned guitar.  A standard-tuned guitar doesn't fatigue an audience the way any sort of unusual guitar setup does -- any sort of unusual or open tuning, Drop D, a resonator guitar, slide, etc.  A standard-tuned guitar is as versatile as all of the other guitar setups combined.  Plus you can play a slide on standard tuning, of course.  You only get the A shape and the D7, but you can do a lot with that. 

 

The Black Crowes didn't bother trying to hide their Stones rip-off in the least.  They had the Keith tuning going, plus the entire band dressed like Keith Richards.  It was like a band comprised of 5 guys dressed like Slash. 

 

 

 

how did I miss Ella Fitzgerald's 100th birthday on Tuesday? :| (she died at 79, and glad to have had the fortune to hear her in 1983)

The Afghan Whigs have announced tour dates for 2017, including Thursday Sept 28 at Bogart's:

http://www.citybeat.com/music/music-feature/article/20859894/the-afghan-whigs-announce-cincinnati-show-at-bogarts-this-fall

 

 

 

What should be the official song of the Kentucky Derby:

somebody found video of most of a show of the cure's first club tour of the usa:

 

 

https://youtu.be/szQjujMwaw8

Ha.  They sort of look and sound like the English Beat or any of those other English acts from that time, but obviously the whole thing is much more of a downer! 

It's funny, last night I was thinking about the great 80's alt bands, the Cure in particular. I loved that era. Yet one thing they all seem to have in common was a lack of progression. Contrast to seminal 60's bands like the Who, Beach Boys, Beatles, Rolling Stones, etc. who experienced major musical evolution and radical departure from their roots. I would add The Cure and Morrissey firmly in the camp of artists that evolved very little - if at all. Even REM with their longstanding success, I feel their evolution was more in production values than anything else. 

Well at least REM did cover a pretty wide range within their "sound", throughout their recordings.  There were a few totally anomalous singles like "Stand" and of course the much-maligned Shiny Happy People:

 

I always liked this video because it's one of those "shot in a local college AV studio" videos, which are a genre unto themselves.  Never happens anymore.  All of the new videos since about 2009 have been handheld DSLR videos where they try to make things look cinematic.  There was that brief period of time where low-budget videos embraced being shot on video. 

 

It also seems like REM, in particular, has been totally forgotten by younger people.  They were pretty damn big for about five years.  I doubt most people under age 25 have heard of the band or know any of their songs. 

 

 

MTV LOVED them once hair metal was over.

I suppose REM did conjure up a power pop phase (what's the frequency Kenneth) that was a sonic departure. Their swan songs were interesting. "At my most beautiful" was pure 60s psych pop but by then they were already losing commercial status.

I suppose REM did conjure up a power pop phase (what's the frequency Kenneth) that was a sonic departure. Their swan songs were interesting. "At my most beautiful" was pure 60s psych pop but by then they were already losing commercial status.

 

I was one of their earlier fans, "Radio Free Europe" era, but Stipe came down with S** Don't Stink syndrome, realizing anything he did would be popular.  This also afflicted Prince and the later Beatles.  Shiny Happy People is one of my least favorite songs of all time.

MTV LOVED them once hair metal was over.

 

Yeah there seemed to be some attempt to make Michael Stipe THE voice of a generation.  Maybe he was one of those guys who came across as being a bit of a pretentious prick who actually wasn't. I watched a pretty recent interview of him and another guy in the band and they were pretty relaxed and didn't seem to need attention anymore. 

 

Wild shot, but anyone going to Rock on the Range this weekend?  I'll be there starting Friday night.  And I'm going to be facing decision-making agony regarding whether I stay for the entire Metallica performance Sunday and then drive back to Akron for a hearing on Monday morning.

late rem has the, well, not saddest, but most elegiac pop hit song ever made -- it always hits right in the feels.

 

and the video is awesome, lots of very recognizable shots around athens -- the swimming pool is the best western pool:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wild shot, but anyone going to Rock on the Range this weekend?  I'll be there starting Friday night.  And I'm going to be facing decision-making agony regarding whether I stay for the entire Metallica performance Sunday and then drive back to Akron for a hearing on Monday morning.

 

Well, Soundgarden isn't playing. 

Pretty shocked by Chris Cornell's death. I saw Soundgarden less than two weeks ago.

 

^ that was really sad news, just leaves you speechless

 

 

shabazz palaces -- coming to columbus 8/30, i'm going to see them in brooklyn

 

 

Whenever I'm driving around I'm always struck at how prevalent "classic rock" and 80s-format stations still are. In the middle of nowhere you'll pretty much only find country, Jesus, and classic rock. How has the rock and pop from the 70s and 80s managed to be so impervious to changes in musical tastes? I know a lot of music played on stations falls out of favor for a while and then gets picked up again down the road, but I swear there's 50-ish songs that have been played nonstop on the radio for 35 or more years now.

With the massive conglomerates that own the radio stations they feel that is all there needs to be is the easy answer.  Otherwise, its hard to keep up with new artists and the 25-45yr olds tastes in music.  Most are working and therefore don't have time to listen to music?

  It seemed to change in 2001. Rage against the machine was mainly banned from the airwaves.  Any aggressive or protesting type music was taken off playlists. I remember NIN being absolutely huge in the late 90s with those stickers on the backs of everyone's cars.  I don't know that commercial alt stations are very prevalent except in largest of cities.  Its very rare anymore to see bamd stickers on the backs of cars except for metallica or maybe sabbath.

  Since Cleveland doesn't have a major rock station playing new music, that is a reason why new bands do not feel obligated to stop in Cleveland anymore.  What made Cleveland huge for music was the marketing muscle of radio stations to promote concerts of national touring acts.  That doesn't happen anymore unless its a country station.  It could be because there are no djs in the stations or it could be the djs that are there are old and fat, and just there to collect a paycheck.

Cleveland doesn't have a rock station that plays new rock music?! That's crazy. I never noticed; I don't listen to the radio anymore. It's the 'birth place of Rock and Roll.'

Whenever I'm driving around I'm always struck at how prevalent "classic rock" and 80s-format stations still are. In the middle of nowhere you'll pretty much only find country, Jesus, and classic rock. How has the rock and pop from the 70s and 80s managed to be so impervious to changes in musical tastes?

 

Radio is in a sad state. It's a demographic problem, at its heart. Those older listeners aren't actively seeking out new music or shuffling through thousands of songs on their latest mobile devices. They have their favorites, they are not very tech savvy, so they listen to Hotel California for the millionth time. 

 

The stations do nothing to change this, they are simply lazy, reactive and trying to hold onto their current listeners. 

Those "Classic Rock" stations do still have a lot of strip joint ads aimed at 20s. You'd be surprised at how well those stations do with young people.

The rock stations unknowingly killed off the hard rock genre in the late 90s when they couldn't find something beyond nu-metal.  Like a broken record or scratched CD, the rock stations just keep rehashing nu-metal with new nu-metal acts.  Some people might wave their hand ans say it's because rock reached some sort of logical conclusion or it's a spent force or something like that.  But the problem is that the fleeting audiences that filled arenas in the 80s and 90s moved to other genres.  The real rockers were still there, but without all of the money coming in, the record companies only invested in repeats of existing successful bands.  So all of the energy that was out there never had any money thrown at it and the guys gave up and got real jobs. 

 

When you listened to the rock stations in the 80s and 90s, there was a huge array of older rock and the new stuff coming out was heading in different directions.  Nu metal was different because it all kept trying to hit the same spot, and that spot was a fool's errand to begin with. 

 

The rise of college radio and alternative rock in the late 80s and 90s was very much a general effort to move away from blues-based rock & roll while not disrespecting the blues or early rock & roll.  The nu-metal guys don't even know who Muddy Waters was or even The Doors or Neil Young or any of those. 

 

Mumble rap and all of the recent pop with finger snapping in place of snare drums is conspicuously disrespectful of all other music, and for that reason is not music. 

Afghan Whigs have been on the nice roll since getting back together. Do To The Beast was good and In Spades is even better. I was surprise to hear the full album on Youtube.

 

I guess this is how kids listen to albums (if they even listen to full albums). Fire up the app, turn up the jams on their tinny smartphone speakers. Rock out.

 

 

 

The rise of college radio and alternative rock in the late 80s and 90s was very much a general effort to move away from blues-based rock & roll while not disrespecting the blues or early rock & roll.  The nu-metal guys don't even know who Muddy Waters was or even The Doors or Neil Young or any of those. 

 

 

 

The nu-metal bands are always talking about how important Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and old Metallica are to them while sounding absolutely nothing like those bands whatsoever. What those bands really like is rap but can't say it out loud. They can't admit it even though their sound is almost 100% rap since rap, nu-country and nu-metal are all ONE sound. Many people like rap a lot (as do I when we're talking pre-1997/subdivided beats) and I don't feel it would hurt the nu-metal bands' reputation to admit that they are just rap. I would respect them more if they stopped lying to people. THERE IS NO IRON MAIDEN IN YOUR SOUND... ZERO.

I wonder how long stations like Warm 98 will stick with the slogan "80s, 90s, and now" ... totally skipping over the decade of the 2000s.

^I don't think they want to pass up Nickelback, Avril and other Canadians for much longer.

WRRM and WGRR were the bane of my existence when I lived in Cincinnati. I have a conspiracy theory that Bob & Marianne and Chris & Janeen are actually the same people, since their morning shows are exactly the same.

I remember I had a manual labor job about 10 years ago where they played WGRR constantly. What I noticed after a few weeks was that they didn't play a single song that hadn't been prominently featured in major motion pictures and TV. So it was a radio station for people that didn't actually like music but rather TV.

Arcade Fire has new music.  I kind of like this different "world music" direction at first listen, but this song is a near rip-off of some lame song from the early 80s I can't remember.  There was some song where a male singer keeps saying something like "mmm way-o-way  mmmm way-o-way".  I honestly can't remember who sang it but it was sort of similar to that lame stuff Paul Simon was putting out in the 80s. 

 

Ooh-ooh I remembered it!  Rusted Root!  And look how similar the damn video is!!!

 

Correction, the song was actually from 1995.  I'm not sure if that makes it suck more or less!

 

 

I feel like that Rusted Root song found its way into a bunch of movies in the late 90s, I remember hearing it everywhere for a short period.

Arcade Fire's album The Suburbs was widely known in urban planning circles, as it was basically a concept album about growing up in the suburbs and the death and decay that many suburbs are facing now (i.e. "Sometimes I wonder if the World's so small/That we can never get away from the sprawl", "Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains").

 

Reflektor's title track is a very clear reference to the era of smartphones and the faux personal connections we get from them ("We're still connected, but are we even friends? / We fell in love when I was nineteen / And I was staring at a screen").

 

The new album's title Everything Now and their upcoming "Infinite Content Tour" seem to indicate a continuation of those themes.

I feel like that Rusted Root song found its way into a bunch of movies in the late 90s, I remember hearing it everywhere for a short period.

 

Dear Lord.  What a horrifically overplayed song. 

 

I didn't like the "suburbs" concept.  Seemed trite.  I think they could have changed the album title and the lyrics of that song slightly and it could have been more mysterious like their earlier records.  I think they won a lot of new fans on their 2010(?) SNL performance that year which unfortunately has been taken off Youtube.  But then the appearance they had two or three years later for "Reflektor" was totally Spinal Tap with the girl getting in some sort of alien pod.  I mean, it was laughable.  I thought that song was decent but there was like no self-awareness.  I get the sense with that band that Butler doesn't let his wife in the spotlight more than she is because she's prone to totally bad ideas like that and who wants to have that argument?

 

The thing that's funny is that any band with a female member gets way more female fans.  Think the White Stripes, Smashing Pumpkins, or The Pixies.  I saw a really great interview of Kim Deal from around 2004 where she rolled her eyes at all of the girls that come up after the shows wanting her autograph and saying how "inspired" they are by her. 

 

Now with cheap music videos, I think a lot more bands with one woman in them are getting lots more clicks and notoriety.  They guys want to check out the girls and the girls want to be "inspired", or whatever.  Look at festival lineups now and a heckuvalotof groups have at least one female in them. 

 

 

Damn, I love Arcade Fire and that Rusted Root song, and just about everything Paul Simon has ever released. Guess we have different tastes in music, JMeck.