Battles - Mirrored
I find it difficult to describe exactly what it is about rock bands that aren't straightforward, especially without using the word "quirky". Quirk-rock, how's that for a genre name? Anyway, what are some words and phrases I can use for Battles? Experimental. Keyboards. Maths? Odd sounds. Off-kilter. A drummer who is a machine in a man's body and yet wears a collared shirt to play gigs (Mike Portnoy and Danny Carey wear vests, but then the old jazz drummers wore full suits back in the day.) If it's a successful experiment does that mean it's not an experiment anymore? This is not beautiful music to shed a tear to late at night, but it is jolly good fun to listen to, especially with others.
Between the Buried and Me - Colors
I've quoted it before and I'll quote it again, but BTBAM are the "thinking person's hardcore band". Hardcore because it has harsh vocals, thinking person's because the musicians are on a level with Dream Theater. It is so difficult to find a band whose members are virtuosic but who write songs that are actually listenable. Dream Theater don't always manage it, and neither do BTBAM. I'm not entirely sure what it is that doesn't work, particularly what makes the songs cheesy a lot of the time. It might be something to do with the fact that the virtuosity comes from playing fast and tight in odd time signatures but the chord progressions are simple and common? But what the hec, Colors is still a masterpiece, one many consider to be BTBAM's magnum opus. Personally I think Alaska and The Great Misdirect give it a run for its money, but Colors works best as cohesive whole that just happens to be broken down into tracks (the intention, apparently). While there are plenty of jaw-dropping moments and a good deal of genre-splicing (even including some polka) along the way - Ants of the Sky is a mid-record highlight - for me it all builds to the spectacular finale of White Walls, particularly the guitar and drum work in the last two minutes. I often like to skip back to and listen to that bit a few extra times after a listen-through.
Christian Scott - Anthem
I visited this album later on, having started with 2010's Yesterday You Said Tomorrow, and while this trumpeter gets better and more original as he goes along, I do wonder whether his incorporation of rock and hip hop into his jazz is all that 'out there'. Maybe that's just because he did (and up until recently, does) it so seamlessly, all the more impressive for this being only his second major release after 2006's more traditional Rewind That (which included a So What cover, for example). Not a few of the songs are commenced and propelled with some confident and atmosphere-building piano, and I often find myself humming these piano lines when out and about. Where hip hop beats may originate in jazz, Scott's compositions have brought it full circle.
The Cinematic Orchestra - Ma Fleur
While admittedly very different, particularly less 'jazz', than what came before, this is actually an incredibly beautiful piece of work which still manages to provide the nu-jazz outfit's trademark of stunning guest vocal tracks next to gorgeous instrumentals. This album is responsible for their biggest (only?) hit, To Build a Home, which I generally skip as it sounds far too much like Coldplay to me. Whenever I think Ma Fleur is Every Day and 'Movie Camera's inferior, I put it on and happily realise how wrong I am.
The Dillinger Escape Plan - Ire Works
It's amazing to me how such a loud and brutal band can make something so infectious and still sound like themselves. Even when they incorporate pretty piano in final track Mouth of Ghosts it still sounds uncompromising, but note they did it much more smoothly here than they incorporated strings into their final record Dissociation. Perhaps it's no accident that the album starts with the then more traditional noisy side of TDEP but then gets more song-like as it progresses. The centrepiece of the record, if not the band's entire career, is demented pop song Milk Lizard which is to my mind just the most perfect distillation of great noise and clever songwriting. And oh-my-giddy-aunt that ending.
Machine Head - The Blackening
An incredible return to form, with not a hint of nu-metal in sight.
Minus the Bear - Planet of Ice
Less raw and interesting than the early material, perhaps, which I think most proper fans of MTB prefer, this was my entry point to the math-rock progenitors and I was blown away. Great song follows great song, which was apparent both on first listen and many later. It has a great flow as an album and the slick production does it no harm.
Oceansize - Frames
I'm unsure whether this or 2005's Everyone Into Position counts as the English progressive rock band's magnum opus, but Frames is probably the more homogenous and consistent of the two. It's more epic too, with only 2 of the 9 (including bonus track Voorhees as my CD does) songs coming in short of 7 minutes and 3 of them clocking in at over two minutes, but the songwriting is intricate and mature and the musicianship deceptively complex.
The Pineapple Thief - What we have sown
Without wishing to sound like a hipster, at this point, even six albums in, Bruce Soord's pop-prog TPT were still pretty underground, playing the back rooms of pubs and whatnot. I have a theory that since this is when I got into this band/artist (I think it's more collaborative now than it started out as) the back catalogue 'was what it was' and could be taken at face value. Then once I became a fan I got all judgey (sic), not liking 2008's Tightly Unwound at all. Technically WWHS is not really a studio album, consisting of the epic What Have we Sown? plus a few tracks left off previous albums, but it works surprisingly well nevertheless.
Porcupine Tree - Fear of a Blank Planet
Where most of progressive rock band Porcupine Tree consists of whatever main man Steven Wilson shits out that morning (I exaggerate, most of it works), this is arguably the closest he got to a piece of work that is good all the way through. Some of the lyrics, inspired as they are by Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park (not his best work) come off as teenage bedroom (they're supposed to be about that surely not a literal representation?) and musically there is occasionally the odd bit of meandering nonsense but overall FOABP contains some of Porcupine Tree's best riffs and melodies as well as incredible contributions from drum legend Gavin Harrison and second guitarist / backing vocalist John Wesley.
Radiohead - In Rainbows
I think I resisted this for a while as I thought it was a bit sparse and simple, but it's deceptive at worst, genius at best, and I quickly got over it. The album also manages to easily transcend its honesty box sales model which at the time I thought was done better by Nine Inch Nails a year later with releasing albums for actual free but in retrospect was a good experiment to see a big popular band try. But anyway, the music. The music is a masterclass in creating great beauty out of simple guitar and piano and subtle changes. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi and Jigsaw rank as two of my favourite Radiohead songs ever, although admittedly the latter with its romantic-comedy-ending-lyrics served as a soundtrack to aspiring to 'meet someone' throughout a lot of my 20s. I did try to learn them on guitar back when I was trying to learn guitar. (Turns out guitar is way too subtle for me to have succeeded with. I stuck with simple button-pressing piano that someone else tunes and hitting stuff with sticks, thanks very much.)
This Will Destroy You - This Will Destroy You
Post-rock has become a bit of an intellectual thing, with actual proper literary books being written about it. Having read a couple I am given to realise that I have been mostly into the modern post-rock bands that came later rather than the pioneers (even Sigur Ros get only a passing mention), although a) I do now enjoy Bark Psychosis' Hex and Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden / Laughing Stock very very much indeed, and b) Godspeed You! Black Emperor. That is all. Honestly, I'd be hard pressed to say what makes TWDY stand out from the pack - but perhaps it's about no single element being original rather than the blend of quiet/loud, pretty/heavy, music/noise, and all those other genre characteristics, being expertly done.
Thrice - The Alchemy Index Volumes I & II
I haven't much to add here over what I said in my few sentences about volumes III & IV in my Best of 2008 blog post. Except to say I & II are Fire & Water, and sound like it, and are probably the better two of the four.
Oh, was that 12 albums? Whoopsy. There were also three of Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's best solo records released in 2007 - The Apocalypse Inside of an Orange (which I would be tempted to classify as one of his "jazz" albums), Se Dice Bisonte, No Bufalo, and Calibration. I've included some in the playlist below but, alas, the only stuff on Spotify is what's on the 2011 compilation album Telesterion. (Porcupine Tree's FOABP (see above) isn't on Spotify either.)
Tiger Army - Music From Regions Beyond
I'm not sure how well this fourth album from Nick 13's psychobilly (punk with acoustic bass?) trio was received by the fanbase at the time, it being more melodic rock than the earlier punk sounds. Had I been in there at the time I would perhaps have, tediously, thought the same thing but with the benefit of hindsight (while friends and acquaintances were listening to Tiger Army at the turn of the century, I only got around to giving them the time of day relatively recently) this is in fact an incredibly well-written, high quality, and dare I say it, mature, album with some of the band's best (or at least most catchy) songs. And I think this was the last time AFI's Davey Havok provided guest vocals on a Tiger Army record (Nick 13 had done background vocals on AFI's records right up until 2009's Crash Love).
A playlist
- Battles - Leyendecker
- Between the Buried and Me - White Walls
- Biffy Clyro - The Conversation Is ...
- Bjork - Wanderlust (a great track anyway, but forever associated with a trip to Salzburg with my Dad, where the video was playing in an art gallery up the side of a cliff)
- Blackfield - Miss U
- Christian Scott - The Uprising
- The Cinematic Orchestra - Child Song
- The Dillinger Escape Plan - Milk Lizard
- Hell is for Heroes - Between Us
- Hella - There's no 666 in Outer Space
- Machine Head - Halo
- Manic Street Preachers (feat. Nina Persson from The Cardigans) - Your Love Alone is not Enough
- Minus the Bear - Ice Monster
- Nine Inch Nails - The Great Destroyer
- Oceansize - Commemorative 9/11 T-Shirt (sans the "9/11" bit on Spotify for some reason. Wikipedia suggests it refers to the time signature of the song)
- Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - Boiling Death Request a Body to Rest its Head on (featuring John Frusciante)
- ORL - Calibration (The 11 minute 11 second 11th track Las Lagrimas de Arakuine (The Tears of...), which is basically drummer Thomas Pridgen going mental with some lush guitar and strings layered in, is actually my favourite track, but it ain't on Spotify. I very much enjoy what this writer had so say about it: https://musicpoetic.
wordpress.com/tag/lagrimas- arakuine/) - ORL (again) - Coma Pony (ties with Spared from the Insult list for my fave track from TAIOAO, which isn't on Spotify)
- The Pineapple Thief - West Winds (the epic Pink Floyd Echoes-like almost-title track is probably the crowning achievement of this album, but far too long to put on a playlist)
- Porcupine Tree - Way Out of Here (not on Spotify)
- Puscifer - Momma Sed (I like no other track on this album, unusually for a Maynard James Keenan record)
- Radiohead - Jigsaw Falling into Place
- This Will Destroy You - A Three-Legged Workhouse
- Thrice - Digital Sea
- Thursday - Ladies and Gentlemen: My Brother, the Failure (does include a pretty cheesy emo bridge, though)
- Tiger Army - Pain
