Musicians that I have particularly liked in the past several years:
Sufjan Stevens
—everything I’ve heard by him
Sparks
—basically everything I’ve heard, which consists mostly in songs from Hello Young Lovers
The Chap
—Fun and Interesting being my favorite song by them
Leonard Cohen
—Particular faves include The Captain and First We Take Manhattan
The Shaggs
—everything I’ve heard by them
The album Largo.
—Especially “Gimme a Stone” and “Freedom Ride”
They Might Be Giants
—Basically everything, though with a fairly strong preference for Linell songs over Flansburgh songs. (Love every track on Linell’s State Songs. Flansburgh’s other band–not so much.)
The Postal Service
Bishop Allen
The Residents
—can do no wrong
That’s all I can remember right now.
Based on this, what relatively recent music should I have been giving a listen to lately?
I can’t give you any specific recommendations (although I love Sufjan Stevens…I just can’t think of anybody you might like because you love Sufjan Stevens, too**), but I highly recommend the Pandora site if you’re not familiar with it. You can create a “radio station” based on any or all of the musicians you’ve listed, and they will populate the stations with those bands plus other bands that the Music Genome Project has determined to be similar.
As a test, I created a Sufjan Stevens station, and some of the other bands they included were Iron & Wine, The Shins, Andrew Bird, Anthallo, and Fleet Foxes.
**Edit: I take that back. St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark) has a similar vibe to the instrumentalization of her music (lots of instruments unusual in rock music) and a good hand at writing great melodies. Sufjan Stevens was originally recommended to me based on my love of Neutral Milk Hotel, so you might give them a listen, too.
I suspect you would like Arcade Fire. It’s not exactly a cutting edge recommendation (their first album came out in 2004), but they are a phenomenal band. Here’s one off their newest album, The Suburbs.
If you like Postal Service (pretty much the only band I recognize from your list), you might like other “indietronica” bands like MGMT, Two Door Cinema Club, Owl City and Phoenix. Possibly Bloc Party and Yeah Yeah Yeahs (I think it’s three “yeahs”).
Cake isn’t a particularly new band, but they have sort of a similar sound to They Might Be Giants, IMHO
Hmm, I was going to recommend Andrew Bird based on the mention of Sufjan Stevens, and I love Iron & Wine (who did a great album together with Calexico) (and I used to like The Shins, too, but I lost track of them) so maybe there’s something to this thing…
I have two recommendations that are not particularly in line with any of your stated tastes, but what the heck right? You seem to like good music, and Animal Collectivemakes good music so does TV on the Radio.
TV on the Radio The Wrong Way Staring at the Sun Hours Golden Age Will Do
Very different bands, neither much like what you said you like but both *really *worth a shot.
I’ll second Iron & Wine, Calexico, The Mountain Goats, Bonnie Prince Billy, Bloc Party (a seriously underrated band) and Fleet Foxes. You might also like the now defunct Nickle Creek which is technically bluegrass, but don’t let that scare you off!
The Decemberists were great up until their last album which I didn’t care for, same with The Shins, and Arcade Fire (though each band has at least one album that is on my desert island list). In a similar vein to this list, you might like Grizzly Bear. Good stuff there too.
Lastly, and I don’t know if you will like them or not, but The Blackheart Procession is a band that does beautiful music that is so much less well known than they deserve to be.
Before making some recommendations, I’ve highlighted the bands from your list I’ve spent significant time with:
Recommendations that might or might not be a stretch:
Definitely Andrew Bird as others have said.
Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Broken Social Scene’s eponymous album
Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca
The Notwist, The Devil, You + Me
A good one-off album is Tapes ‘n’ Tapes The Loon.
I was also going to challenge you on The Residents doing no wrong. They’ve released an awful lot of albums! Which I stopped buying around 1985…
Thanks for the recommendations, sorry it’s taken so long for me to get around to responding.
I’ve only just now added all the recommended bands to a list in Spotify. (Almost all of them were there! Only one missing is Arcade Fire.) Will now just have the thing playing on shuffle in the background and the hope is that songs will strike me.
Oh, good call. If you like New Pornographers check out the solo acts that make up the group. AC Newman, Nico Case and Destroyer (Dan Bejar). They all make different types of music as solo performers than they do together as NP, but there is a striking similarity. Bejar is the most radically different being more of a folk-y Bob Dylan type, Case is an alt-country performer as a solo act, and AC Newman is very pop-y (in a good way, much more like NP than the other two).
(I know I know, VU signer).