1975 all over again

[NicholasVanWotsisface]

is it just me or is it really dull at the moment, not just not enough new music, but the new music is dull also?

Is this what it felt like in 1975?

I see festivals on the telly and there are crowds and crowds going mad for some very average music indeed. I was only 4 in 75 but I have seen footage of ELP and the like playing huge concerts

If so where is the new new wave?

Cos it ain't where I am looking

[Bastian]

is it just me or is it really dull at the moment, not just not enough new music, but the new music is dull also?

Is this what it felt like in 1975?

I see festivals on the telly and there are crowds and crowds going mad for some very average music indeed. I was only 4 in 75 but I have seen footage of ELP and the like playing huge concerts

If so where is the new new wave?

Cos it ain't where I am looking

Not if you were into krautrock.

But yeah, there doesn't seem to be much of a new wave of anything around other than all this disposable electro shit which gets boring after a couple of listens for the most part.

These days i find myself listening to more new metal than indie.

There is great music out there, but most of the time you got to go and find it yourself as alternative radio(at least in Ireland) is dead. People would argue that one simply needs to tune into alternative online stations instead, but that's not much good to me at work or in the car.

Festivals just look awful these days. There used to be these teeny smash hit type festivals, but now all the big festivals look like that. Big outdoor events are difficult to enjoy when there's a bunch of poser twats standing infront of you painting their faces, chatting, fucking around on their phone etc or bascially doing anything but actually watch the event on stage that they apparently paid to go and see. Or was it just to put flowers in the hair and post the event on facebook?

[NicholasVanWotsisface]

There are, of course, exceptions to the dullness, as there were in the 70s, maybe I am not expressing myself well enough, it is just that the mainstream is pretty dull and the mainstream alternative is pretty dull, but the alternative alternative is pretty dull. I just want something that sounds like nothing else. I don't care if I don't like it. I just want something else. a none of the above, a not just a different serving suggestion.

I wonder if you have touched on why we have ended up here, the alternative is the mainstream, as showcased by the festivals. When there is no alternative from the alternative what is the alternative?

Is this what it felt like in 1975?

[Shadowplayer]

I'm not sure about this myself; I think the good stuff is out there to find - looking at my albums of the year lists from 2014, whilst the ordering would be might be different now, there's still a great quantity of interesting, alternative music here.

2014 top 25

1. The Twilight Sad Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave
2. Mogwai Rave Tapes
3. Warpaint Warpaint
4. Caribou Our Love
5. Post War Glamour Girls Pink Fur
6. Goat Commune
7. East India Youth Total Strife Forever
8. Interpol El Pintor
9. The War on Drugs Lost in the Dream
10. Alvvays Alvvays
11. Thee Silver mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything
12. Sun Kil Moon Benji
13. Dry the River Alarms in the Heart
14. Mark Lanegan Band Phantom Radio
15. King Creosote From Scotland With Love
16. Aphex Twin Syro
17. Maximo Park Too Much Information
18. Swans To Be Kind
19. Drive By Truckers English Oceans
20. Bombay Bicycle Club So Long See You Tomorrow
21. The Advisory Circle From Out Here
22. Withered Hand New Gods
23. Owl John Owl John
24. Protomartyr Under Colour of Official Right
25. Adrian Crowley Some Blue Morning

Then again, how much of this is different from everything else I don't know - from that list only, Silver mt Zion, The Advisory Circle, Goat (maybe?), but then isn't everything derivative of something else - even BSP on The Decline didn't have a style without ancestry.

[Blackout]

It's you. Sorry, but it is. I really don't mean this in an insulting way; we all go through phases of disillusionment with music whereby we convince ourselves there's nothing worth listening to and it becomes self-perpetuating. I was convinced, for example, in the mid 90s that there was no good new music around at all - 1995 was my "1975" - but am now aware of plenty of music eg early post-rock and underground US indie such as the Elephant6 lot, that never made it past the dreary Britpop that filled the airwaves. By the turn of the century I had started to open up to new music again and I remember having conversations just like this on the Chameleons forum with people who were having their "1975" then.

I'm putting 1975 in inverted commas there because 1975 gets terribly bad press - there was plenty going on outside of the mainstream then, too. Not just the now feted Krautrock but - off the top of my head - the UK music-as-art scene eg the COUM Transmissions lot; the nascent breakbeat scene in New York from which hip hop would evolve; the proto-punk end of the pub rock scene both in the UK and further afield (eg Radio Birdman and the Australian underground) and don't forget both Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and Eno's Discreet Music came out that year. The general public may well have been listening to the Bay City Rollers but then they were generally listening to drivel in 1977, 1969, 1981, or any other year regarded as an important one too.

If you consider "festivals" equals "the bits of Glastonbury they put on the telly" then yeah maybe it doesn't look that great, though there were a couple of decent sets on. Fuck that shit, go to a more interesting one, of which there are many for all tastes. This is the next one on my agenda and there won't be any TV-friendly indie rock pop - http://wasistdas.co.uk/toristdas/ - though if you specifically use "festival" in the sense of "people camping in a field near music" then http://www.supernormalfestival.co.uk/ or http://www.arctangent.co.uk/ (I'm going to the latter myself) for example are unlikely to feature the contents of daytime radio (even 6Music) anytime soon. For something a bit more musically mainstream without resorting to obvious commercial lowest common denominators there are the fantastic Midlands twins of Lunar and Moseley (the latter's appellation of "folk festival" being a bit of a red herring when you actually look at the line-up).

More generally.... of course there's good stuff out there. There always is, as per my first paragraph. I have certainly pretty much had my fill of "indie" these days (though there are still a few decent bands breaking through alongside my more established favourites). It's only to be expected when we have lived with it for 30 odd years. So go somewhere else. I'm personally finding a lot of enjoyment in quite brutal noise at one end and neo-classical at the other, along with various drone stuff and other variants of instrumental / experimental, the developing scene of shoegaze / black metal crossover. It tends to be live experiences that "blow me away" as opposed to records but then it always has been. I've seen Youtube footage of some of the best gigs I've been to, it's rarely representative.

I appreciate not everyone is able to spend as much time in front of live music as I am, but just as I have trusted promoters and festival organisations whom I know are going to stick exciting new things in front of me, music obsessive friends who don't get to many gigs have found trusted podcasts etc that fulfil their new music needs. I'm sure there are people on this forum who could recommend some good ones. Records wise, my 2014 list has a lot in common with Shadowplayer's above (as well as a lot that isn't) though I didn't consider 2014 a great year for albums overall, I think I've bought more in 2015 and it's barely halfway through. And as for "originality" - I subscribe firmly to the idea that all music is descended /evolved from things that have gone before, it's just what you do with it. Probably the most "original" new band vaguely in the mainstream that I've heard (and that I like) in the past year or two would be Young Fathers, but only because their obvious influences (the soulful end of indie rock, the angry literate end of hip hop, the industrial end of post-rock, god only knows what else) haven't really been blended in those proportions before. The Olafur Arnalds / Nils Frahm / Erased Tapes label in general axis whereby modern classical music meets electronic post-rock with even a bit of techno thrown in. And I'm certain people with different personal taste to me could raise other examples from within theirs.

None of this will work at all, however, if you don't really think it will. I'm not really sure what you'd do about that.


PS Shadowplayer: Goat is extremely derivative of West African music. Doesn't mean it's not good, obviously, though personally I was a little disappointed that the second album was basically the first album over again...

[pomfob]

...or to sum up that excellent piece from Blackout...music is only dull if you let it be that way.

...and to sum up what I just wrote...The Fall are always there for you.

[Shadowplayer]

Pretty much agree with all of that too Blackout, though I think what I meant with Goat was that they are derivative of something completely different to everyone else, so still comparatively (within the sphere of band based music that might get on the radio) have a "different" sound. Probably also helped that I hadn't heard World Music when listening to Commune, so it seemed fresher at the time.

[TheAlex]

I bet there's more new music than ever, definitely in terms of accessibility. I occasionally spend an hour randomly listening to new stuff on blogs or browsing around Spotify and I discover some gems, although the album has dropped off for me in the last year or two - there's no full album that I'd rank up there with my favourites.

I agree with most of what Blackout says, particularly about festivals. I've wanted to go to ArcTangent for the last 2 or 3 years, but haven't got around to it yet. Sounds from the Other City in Salford was one of the best festivals I've been to in recent years. £20 for 1 day, lots of venues and good bands I hadn't heard of before.

I joined a Spotify playlist swap on another forum recently and it's resulted in one of my favourite bands of the last few years. They haven't had enough plays to register (less than 1000) so there's probably no way I would have heard them otherwise. Would anyone be up for doing that here? One of us posts a playlist (something like 8 songs, maximum of 1 hour 15 mins), whoever wants to get involved posts a review of the playlist, and one of the reviewers gets to post the next playlist, until we've cycled through everyone who wants to take part. And then if it hasn't been too painful and anyone wants to carry on, we could...

the developing scene of shoegaze / black metal crossover.

Who would you recommend? I've just searched the genre on last.fm and the bands I've listened to that come up are Alcest and Deafheaven. I'd imagine those two are on the lighter side - I prefer the former and don't like any of the shouty/screamo stuff. I'm listening to Falloch at the moment and they're okay. I should probably check one or two of these bands out live.

[Blackout]

You've got Alcest and Deafheaven coming at it from the metal side, as well as Mount Eerie coming at it from the other side (on the sort-of-trilogy of Wind's Poem/Clear Moon/Ocean Roar, IMO one of the greatest musical works of the century). There was an absolutely incredible Polish band called Thaw who played Primavera this year. I've also been enjoying Falloch and there are some great one person acts including (Dutchman) Cold Body Radiation and (Yorkshirewoman) Darkher. But if I am being honest it's something of which I've barely scratched the surface myself and it's really easy to get lost down an internet rabbit hole full of quite bad things. I personally am also completely turned off by most sorts of metal/screamo style vocals, which has always been a barrier with a lot of black metal where I like the music, it being not really anything to do with metal ("metal" in my head still means wankers in various unsightly denim/leather/spandex combos twiddling endless guitar solos and headbanging and all that fucking horrible Rockist bollocks). So I'm not really much help here, but the very fact that I'm enjoying something contemporary and new to me about which I know very little and still have plenty to discover pretty much proves my point that music is alive and well in 2015.

[pomfob]

Thaw are more doom than black metal, I'd say. And they may well have been gazing at their shoes, how could you tell through all that smoke? Excellent stuff though.

The best bet for finding out about the weirder end of metal is doing a search on YouTube. If you bang 'shoegaze black metal' in, then dozens of bands should appear. Most will be pretty awful, however. If you're feeling up to it, try 'depressive black metal'...when you thought a genre couldn't get any bleaker...

[avocetboy]

One of us posts a playlist (something like 8 songs, maximum of 1 hour 15 mins), whoever wants to get involved posts a review of the playlist, and one of the reviewers gets to post the next playlist, until we've cycled through everyone who wants to take part. And then if it hasn't been too painful and anyone wants to carry on, we could...

Sounds like a good idea TheAlex. Must admit that my tastes are now pretty much determined by whatever 6music plays, as I seem to listen to little else, apart from some of the stuff that my eight year old listens to on Smash Hits TV, so there is a danger that Meghan Trainor could find her way on to my playlist

[TheAlex]

So I'm not really much help here, but the very fact that I'm enjoying something contemporary and new to me about which I know very little and still have plenty to discover pretty much proves my point that music is alive and well in 2015.

That's a lot of help - plenty to keep me going - thanks! It turns out I've listened to Wind's Poem but forgotten about it. It's annoying when I really like a band, forget about them, discover them again 2 years later by which time I've missed them live. Not Mount Eerie in particular - I don't even know if they've played in the UK.

The best bet for finding out about the weirder end of metal is doing a search on YouTube.

Good idea, though I'll try to avoid the really bleak stuff!

Sounds like a good idea TheAlex. Must admit that my tastes are now pretty much determined by whatever 6music plays, as I seem to listen to little else, apart from some of the stuff that my eight year old listens to on Smash Hits TV, so there is a danger that Meghan Trainor could find her way on to my playlist

Sounds good to me - I barely listen to any radio at all and I'm often shocked when certain bands become big and friends tell me its due to radio (sometimes 6Music) play. The amount of talking on 6Music started to distract me when I was working - I'm sure there didn't used to be that much. It's a shame because I enjoy a lot of what they play.

I think I'll set up a collaborative playlist that anyone who wants to can add a couple of tracks to.

[NicholasVanWotsisface]

Maybe it is me

I am certainly in said musical rut and heading backwards rather than forwards (Tom Waits, Neil Young etc)
So the consensus is I need to work harder as the synthindie that I am being spoonfed is dull
Though if you have to work that hard to find the good stuff then perhaps it is time for a punk style shake up (as I am sure you could work hard and turn up things like the New York Dolls in the 70s)
As the people who are looking are people who want to find new things, rather than a step change that just makes everything mainstream or not more interesting.

So my end of term report probably would read
Nicholas has the interest but lacks the effort to see that interest come to any sort of fruition.
Could do Better.
D-

Which his how most of my reports read, as I recall

[Shadowplayer]

I joined a Spotify playlist swap on another forum recently and it's resulted in one of my favourite bands of the last few years. They haven't had enough plays to register (less than 1000) so there's probably no way I would have heard them otherwise. Would anyone be up for doing that here? One of us posts a playlist (something like 8 songs, maximum of 1 hour 15 mins), whoever wants to get involved posts a review of the playlist, and one of the reviewers gets to post the next playlist, until we've cycled through everyone who wants to take part. And then if it hasn't been too painful and anyone wants to carry on, we could...

I'd definitely be up for this if there's enough fellow forumites, TheAlex - perhaps even a physical mixtape /cd swap as well, if we can organise it. King Creosote's AETC forum did one recently and it seemed to work very well: http://www.alteregotradingcompany.org/hub/index.php?topic=1103.60

[RadioResistance]

I'll second that. I'm always up for exposure to new music! Sad to say there haven't been in new-to-me bands/artists in my rotation in quite a while.