Random Music Thoughts

[MalaCloudy Black]

Kinda cute. I had no idea he and Tom DeLonge are on speaking terms again. 

[Naitch]

Listening through some Theory of a Deadman to see if they have any good songs and it continues to astound how misogynistic most of these songs actually are.

[GA!]

5 hours ago, Naitch said:

Listening through some Theory of a Deadman to see if they have any good songs and it continues to astound how misogynistic most of these songs actually are.

I saw them when they supported (I think?) Alter Bridge. They have a song about how much their girlfriend is a bitch. Pal, I think the one who's the 'bitch' is the one who wrote a song about it.

[VerbalPuke]

For all you synth fans, this is fucking really killer cold wave from....I forget where. I think Norway maybe. Either way, it's a good listen. 

[Malenko]

Iceland actually. Good stuff.

[VerbalPuke]

Just now, Malenko said:

Iceland actually. Good stuff.

You're familiar then already? Nice! Actually, you know of anything similar? 

[MalaCloudy Black]

Watching this dude do a reaction video to a live performance of the Rollins Band's "Liar", performed live at Reading in 1994. I was familiar with the song, but this was the first time I saw this particular live performance of it.

Anyway, weird thought occurs to me: is it me or does it almost sound like it could be a doom metal song? Or maybe like a stoner doom/stoner metal song. 

I always did like the later Black Flag albums that tended toward a slower, "doomier" sound. I wonder how much of that was whose influence. Rollins? Ginn?

[Malenko]

11 minutes ago, CLDY said:

Watching this dude do a reaction video to a live performance of the Rollins Band's "Liar", performed live at Reading in 1994. I was familiar with the song, but this was the first time I saw this particular live performance of it.

Anyway, weird thought occurs to me: is it me or does it almost sound like it could be a doom metal song? Or maybe like a stoner doom/stoner metal song. 

I always did like the later Black Flag albums that tended toward a slower, "doomier" sound. I wonder how much of that was whose influence. Rollins? Ginn?

It was always something they all liked. If you listen to their other bands/side projects, all of them did different stuff.

They changed a bit every album but the thing is, it may look like it was a quick and sudden change of styles if you jump straight from Damaged to, say, Slip it In, but Family Man was obviously on another level already. If you listen to Ginn's work outside of Black Flag you can tell how much of an influence he had n it (well, he wrote most of their songs, so that's obvious, but I mean, specifically this album considering he was a huge fan of the whole psychedelic rock movement). 

Rollins obviously liked slower songs as well as you noticed listening to Rollins Band. My War is similar to what Rollins would do after Black Flag but obviously at the time coming straight from a classic hardcore album like Damaged it just wasn't possible to do what he did with Rollins Band later on.

Even Dukowski was into sludge. I've read somewhere they kicked him out because they were moving in a new direction sound wise, but that doesn't make sense to me because if you listen to his band Wurm, it's fuckin' sludge, and he was also into psychedelia. All of them were. I don't doubt they kicked him out because of the music they wanted to do, but I think they picked Kira because she was a better musician or rather she was better at what they wanted their bassist to do, not because Dukowski didn't like it. 

Black Flag was never your typical hardcore punk band.

[MalaCloudy Black]

Yeah, that’s one of the things I have to say I didn’t like about them at first but it grew on me. I used to prefer Damaged and the Keith Morris EP, that sort of thing, but as I’ve gotten more and more into sludge and stuff of that ilk I find myself preferring My War, Slip It In, etc. 

Saint Vitus was also on SST IIRC, you can sort of tell how they almost influence each other at times. Their version of “Thirsty & Miserable” is still a favorite of mine. 
 

Guess I know what I’m listening to today..

[RPS]

  

It is still so terrible that SOPHIE died and I have been listening to her music constantly the last few weeks. 

There is something so visceral and amazing about SOPHIE's production. I love the song Koi by Le1f. SOPHIE ramps up the intensity of the song, constantly building up to the drop. But the drop never comes. And every time you feel like you are getting close or directly after she changes directions she amps up the whirling as if your brain is supposed to believe the song is off the rails and going to slam directly into a wall.

It reminded me of an actual car - the whirling like the sounds of tires screeching against the surface. I thought that was kind of bonkers, but I remembered SOPHIE did actually produce a song called VROOM, VROOM ... so probably. The structure of the two songs is pretty similar. SOPHIE changes direction several times in the song and it always feels like two seconds away from morphing into something insane. 

 

[MalaCloudy Black]

Do you think there's ever been any extensive research or writing done about the connection between fans of metal and fans of folk music / folk-country, etc? It was just something I was thinking about while looking at the poster for this fall's Mutants of the Monster fest, which is largely extreme metal acts, but some southern rock acts and a fairly well-known modern folk singer as the headline act one night. I would think southern rock has to be a common trend between the two groups as well, surely. In fact, Black Oak Arkansas seems like a fairly good bridge between southern rock and some of the heavier, more experimental metal that came about in later years. Okay. I think I've basically answered my own question at this point.

[Colly]

Isn't it essentially that people who like guitar music like guitar music?

[MalaCloudy Black]

I think it's only really here in the past few years I've grown to have any appreciation of Linkin Park. As a teenager and a younger adult, they didn't really tickle my pickle and I admittedly did the whole haughty elitist metalhead dipshit routine about "blah blah blah nu-metal blah blah blah false metal" or whatever. But they're really not nearly as bad a band as people try to portray them as. 

[Roster Depth Sicko No. 2]

You can't trust people, they like Coldplay.

Linkin Park are great and always have been.

[GhostMachine]

5 hours ago, Bad News Jericode said:

You can't trust people, they like Coldplay.

Linkin Park are great and always have been.

The ONLY Coldplay songs I like are Viva La Vida and the one they did with the Chainsmokers. 

Complete agreement about Linkin Park. 

[VerbalPuke]

 

On 13/07/2021 at 13:33, CLDY said:

Do you think there's ever been any extensive research or writing done about the connection between fans of metal and fans of folk music / folk-country, etc? It was just something I was thinking about while looking at the poster for this fall's Mutants of the Monster fest, which is largely extreme metal acts, but some southern rock acts and a fairly well-known modern folk singer as the headline act one night. I would think southern rock has to be a common trend between the two groups as well, surely. In fact, Black Oak Arkansas seems like a fairly good bridge between southern rock and some of the heavier, more experimental metal that came about in later years. Okay. I think I've basically answered my own question at this point.

Also to your point, I think Pantera is probably a good modern bridge in that respect, doesn't seem too crazy to picture a dude rocking out to Mouth for War and then listening to Charlie Daniels band ya know? 

[RPS]

I have a question. 

Why was it called nu metal? 

When I listen to "nu metal" it is clearly just pop metal. I get that "pop" is a derisive term, but it is clear that that Linkin Park/Limp Bizkit/KORN were just looking at what was popular in mainstream music and were just trying to replicate that in sound.

[MalaCloudy Black]

That's a good question so I poked around for a minute, and apparently the producer of Korn's first album, Ross Robinson, coined the term. Or so the legend goes, anyway, he supposedly coined it during production of that album and later he rejected the term because according to him, a lot of the newer nu-metal bands didn't "expand" on the sound he helped create.

[GA!]

I mean, okay, Limp Bizkit I have to defend a little bit (you're all wrong), but the heavyweights of the nu-metal genre like SOAD, Korn, Deftones, Linkin Park stood the test of time. You can hear their influence in today's music way more than the tenured 'proper' metal bands that usually play a mid-afternoon slot at Bloodstock and are maybe big in Finland. Nu-metal is derided in the same way the 2000s indie wave in British music is called 'landfill' . Executives looked at signing the next big thing with zero quality control; bands who should've never got beyond the pub circuit. Was the world really clamouring for Spineshank or Trapt?

[gunnar hendershow]

Yeah the nu-metal wave came on the heels of the big era of corporate alt rock in the mid-90s. When the sound that exploded in the early 90s with grunge became overwhelmingly sterile, while still trying to "keep its edge". It was a lot of, as GA pointed out, record labels flailing around trying to find the next big thing. So for nu-metal I think people were already prepared to discard all of it right away since it looked and felt like the exact same thing that came before it. You look and there was a similar reaction to pop-punk. In hip-hop the same thing started to happen with the shiny suit era and then really became pronounced with Lil Jon and co, or "crunk".

Basically there was this massive backlash against record labels appearing to dictate what would be big next. Where the popular acts in rock, metal, industrial, and hip-hop all seemingly exploded from underground scenes for the first half of the 90s the second half and on all felt like they were handpicked by record labels. And labels would put all this backing on these debut efforts from unproven acts when in the past you had 1, 2, or maybe 3 LPs or EPs produced on independent labels to really build up a buzz.

You also had, at least in my teenage experience, the privilege of the internet to find a ton of actually obscure or forgotten acts across all kinds of music during the 00s. So you have to hold that up against what the "mainstream" supposedly is. And it's overall a really weird dichotomy and I think it's fair to say a lot in the mainstream was deservingly derided because of how sterile so much of it sounded. But many of us were then extremely lazy in tossing absolutely all of it in the bin without a second thought. I understand the anger and the disillusionment because the record labels did steal back what fans had felt they took back to their side in the early 90s, the power to actually make something big. But it was still perhaps misguided to immediately treat it all as simply "corporate punk or corporate metal or corporate hip-hop".