What new-to-you band has really caught your ear and gotten stuck in your head over the last six months or year? I’m not talking about your flavor of the day here. I want to know what band has you trapped in their web, and you can’t seem to wriggle free.
I’ve been unable to get away from The Smiths for the last several months. Absolutely gorgeous music. Coming in second would probably be The New Pornographers, a canadian pop/rock band fronted by Carl “A.C.” Newman with the wonderful Neko Case singing about half the songs.
Love the Smiths, love the New Pornographers. You should definitely get some of Neko Case’s solo albums. Blacklisted is my personal favorite of hers (and one of my favorite albums from anyone). I think it’s damn near flawless, and I can listen to it from beginning to end without ever getting bored.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre. I liked the Dandy Warhols and saw Dig! I then checked out the BJM and fell in love. I cannot get this rocking goodness away from me. Not only are their albums amazing, they offer them for free on their website. They’ve grown on me fairly quickly.
The Olivia Tremor ControlAfter checking out Neutral Milk Hotel, I wondered what the rest of the Elephant 6 collective was up to. With album titles like Music from the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk as Cubist Castle and ten tracks in a row named Green Typewriters, they’d better be good enough to live up to their pretentiousness; luckily, they are. This isn’t the Beatles, but it’s as close as I’ve heard to a modern take on Revolver-Peppers era pop.
The most current would be K’s Choice, a Belgian sibling pop/rock act. A friend on livejournal sent me Not an Addict and Everything for Free via yousendit a month or so ago and I liked them well enough at the time but listened to them again on Thursday and downloaded about thirty more songs and listened to them for the next few hours on autoloop. I’m really loving them.
The week before that, it was Vienna Teng, an Adult Contemporary singer/songwriter and pianist. I specially like Life on Fire and The Tower. I was also grooving to the alt-rock of PJ Harvey (Death is Not the End, Down By the Water, and Naked Cousin) and Jack Off Jill (Angels Fuck Devils Kiss, I Touch Myself, and Nazi Halo) during the same time but to a lesser extent.
And for the months before that, it was mostly the alt-pop of Imogen Heap (everything of hers) and Frou Frou (Let Go) and the synth-pop of Wolfsheim (Approaching Light Speed, Heroin She Said, Kein Züruck, and Künstliche Welten) and Beborn Beton (Angel, Another World, Deeper than the Usual Feeling, and Spawn) that I had discovered thanks to some friends here on the board.
I’m once again falling in love with the Derek Trucks Band, not that I ever stopped. The most recent band I’ve gotten REALLY into is R.E.M. Automatic for the People is an incredible album. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Radiohead, as I’ve been re-staggered by the brilliance of OK Computer.
Zero 7. Every time I catch myself humming a song, or stop to listen to the inner soundtrack to my life that my brain insists on playing, if it isn’t a radio ad jingle then it’s them.
They’re one of those bands that makes excellent background music for almost any activity (thus why they’re constantly stuck in my head), but if you really give a good listen, they’re a really freakin’ good band.
Flavor of the day (month more accurately), and quickly moving up in playlist priority, is TV on the Radio.
I’ve listened to a spin or two of one of their albums at a friend’s house, and I liked what I heard. Further investigation is warranted.
R.E.M. is damn close to, if not at, the top of my list of all-time favorite bands. One of the things I enjoy most about them is how each of their first 8 or 10 albums is thematically distinct from all the others, yet the quality of the music was shockingly well maintained. I haven’t gotten that into their last three albums very much (Up, Reveal, and Around The Sun.) But I absolutely love everything from Chronic Town through New Adventures in Hi-fi. Marley23, if you ever become a total R.E.M. geek like I am, you might find their biography interesting.
I LOVE the opening theme for Cowboy Bebop, that they did. Do they do the rest of the music for that show? And is the rest of their stuff anything like “Tank”? I’d love to get some, if that’s a good representation of their sound.
Second vote for Brian Jonestown Massacre, also enjoying Modest Mouse lately. Me First and the Gimme Gimme’s is very fun in a terrifyingly “we can turn ANYTHING into a frantic Ska song” kinda way. The band that’s been stuck in my CD player recently (except for when I give copies to my friends and then make a new copy) has been a bunch of songs by Control Machete. I watched “Land of the Dead” followed closely by “Amores Perros” and just had to IMDB the soundtracks to find out what that cool vato rap stuff was. The rest, to coin a phrase, is history. I like Spanish rap because it incorporates that annoying stupid polka baseline found in 98% of all mariachi music into the rap sound in a really funny and subversive way, and also because I don’t speak Spanish well enough to get annoyed at what are probably as banal and mindlessly rhyparographic lyrics as are found in most rap/hip hop songs. Also, one track samples Herb Alpert’s “Lonely Bull,” which I’ve liked since I was a kid. High recommendations for this band…
The Smiths are the greatest band of all time; that just needs to be said.
As for me, who pretty much knows everything about music, it’s tough discovering new things that I don’t already know about, so I’m always delighted when it happens. Such a case occurred last night, when I heard an incredible record that I just couldn’t get over - it sounded like the type of album that latter-day Lou Reed should have been making for the past 10 years or so instead of choosing to sink deeper and deeper into irrelevancy and self-parody. It was growly-voiced, steeped in whiskey and cigarrettes and the past 40 years of rock-n-roll glory, and the songs were just killing it. The more uptempo songs even hinted at late-seventies NYC street shit; Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine.
It turned out to be the new Crooked Fingers album, Dignity and Shame, and it’s miles and miles beyond what Eric Bachmann was doing in Archers of Loaf back in the nineties.
Not a new band, but I picked up Clare Quilty’s Face the Strange just recently, and it’s very cool. Think dance-pop meets post-grunge with an intelligent lyricist.
Gong – Pink Floyd with more jazz, trippyness and consistency. The Soft Machine (first three albums) – On the frontier between jazz and rock, with an exceptionally unique sound (Bass, Keyboard and Drummer/Singer).
I guess Architecture in Helsinki’s sophmore release, but that was really a month or two back when I really got into it. Recently, I have hit a wall with music, and can find nothing worthwhile to listen to.
Oh, except for Jolie Holland. My stars, I don’t know what it is, but is infectious and haunting and beautiful in a barebones way. If you google, there should be some higher qaulity MP3s off of her label. Not jazz, not blues, not Billy Holliday, not folk, not singer songwriter, not indie, not anything, but all of that and more.
I was going to start a thread to alert all Canadian Dopers to run out and buy Colin James’ latest cd, “Limelight,” because it’s so damned good. He’s left the Big Band sound behind and gone back to his roots, rocking blues, and I don’t think he’s eversounded better. Just - go buy it.
We keep coming back to The Killers - “Hot Fuss,” too. Jim and I loved 80s music, and these guys have borrowed heavily from the 80s sounds.
