Musical Recommendations by Similar Artists

Cafe Society
1

I am currently in the process of expanding my musical and have shored it up with artists I love but have little of in the past few weeks, but I have also been doing a bit of spring cleaning, as well.

The past couple years, most of the music I listened to, for lack of a better term, was hippie chick music. Lots of female fronted alt-rock, folk, and similar acts . . . artists like K’s Choice, Tegan and Sara, Vienna Teng, Regina Spektor, and Charlotte Martin. Now while I still like that kind of music and consider most of those to still be favorite artists, I’ve been moving away from their kind of music on the whole and have been diversifying a bit.

I’ve mostly been moving back towards the harder rock that I listened to before this but have also discovered a taste for the electronic, industrial, and gothic end of that spectrum and little bits and pieces of other genres, like dark cabaret, shoegaze, and punk. I’d like to find more in those and other genres but my problem is that most of the music recommendation sites I’ve used either give me artists I’m already familiar with or ones that I’ve listened to briefly and decided that they’re really not my cup of tea. And some of the recommendations just don’t make any kind of sense, so I turn to you.

I would like some recommendations for:

Alt-Rock in the vein of Live
**Britpop **in the vein of Placebo
Downtempo in the vein of Sarah Fimm
**EBM **in the vein of **Covenant **and And One
**Punk in the vein of Bad Religion and Iggy Pop **
**Shoegaze **in the vein of **Curve **and Cocteau Twins
**Rock **in the vein of **Wolfmother **and **The White Stripes **
**Synthpop **in the vein of Depeche Mode and Wolfsheim
**Rap **in the vein of **Northern State and The Beastie Boys **
Progressive Rock in the vein of **Tool and A Perfect Circle **
Industrial in the vein of Nine Inch Nails, VAST, and Rammstein
Goth Rock in the vein of Lacuna Coil, The Birthday Massacre, The Romanovs, and **Type O Negative **
Dark Cabaret in the vein of The Dresden Dolls, The Bastard Fairies, Pretty Balanced, and Rasputina
Female Singer-Songwriters in the vein of Thea Gilmore, Imogen Heap, Amanda Ghost, Lennon, and PJ Harvey

2

Our tastes seem to be pretty different, but I do think I have two you might like.

Porcupine Tree and Riverside would both seem to fit your tastes. (Well, maybe.)

As for prog, you might want to check out what Inside/Out (label) has to offer. (For some reason the website redirects to the .de domain.) Their music is pretty hard to find around here, but I’ve been able to get most everything I want from Amazon or even iTunes.

3

Porcupine Tree was actually one of the bands I had bookmarked to check out later due to a last.fm recommendation and I listened to Trains before checking out *Out of Myself *by Riverside. Both seem pretty good, though I think I prefer the former somewhat more.

Do you have any specific album recommendations?

4

I have no recommendations as I’m not overly familiar with most of the bands you’ve named but I was interested to see that you consider Placebo to be a Britpop band. It’s hard to define what a Britpop band is but I would never categorise Placebo as such.

5

I mostly put them there because they’re alt-rock like Live but otherwise have nothing in common with them so I didn’t want to include them in a similar grouping. Britpop was the only other genre I could really pigeonhole them in.

6

It seems I messed up my links. The Porcupine Tree link was supposed to go to Amazon’s listing for “Deadwing”. (Don’t write them off without listening to a sample of Lazarus). I also like “Fear of a Blank Planet”. Those are the only two I’ve heard.

The Riverside was supposed to go to “Second Life Syndrome” which I like a little bit more than “Out of Myself”, the only other I’ve heard.

Both of these bands and the (messed up) link to Inside/Out Music are based on your mention of Tool and (Maynard’s other band) A Perfect Circle. Inside/Out is a label that specializes in progressive rock. (Yeah, it still exists.)

7

Thanks. I’m going to look into* Fear of Black Planet* and Second Life Syndrome.

8

haha its fear of a BLANK planet. although it is a reference to fear of a black planet by public enemy. Here’s some recommendations of bands in a genre that you haven’t apparently touched on yet:
Umphrey’s McGee and Phish (good jam music)
Supertramp (Crime of the century and Even in the quietest moments are great)
Sublime (just cause theyre just so fun)

9

I already have some Umphrey’s McGee and like them (I’ll be seeing them at Bonnaroo, actually) but don’t really care for Phish or jam music in general. Nor Sublime and ska-punk, really. Some songs here and there but both genres leave me cold on the whole.

Will look into Supertramp, though. Crime of the Century looks like the best place to start of those two.

10

Using my free bump.

Anyone else got any recs?

11

As far as punk goes, what Bad Religion are you into? They’ve had a pretty extensive career and are not quite the same band they started out as. There have been quite a few threads in the past on essential punk albums, so you can check those out at your leisure. I will point you towards my recent Best modern punk albums, as the general taste here tends to run towards old fogeyness. Also, you should check out Social Distortion (I don’t think they were mentioned there).