XTC! That song wasn't that obscure, the video was pretty poplar on MTV, when MTV played videos! I feel like the mayor of simpleton all the time.
Mitch Chief Editor
Joined: Mar 27, 2001
Posts: 124
Location: Milford
Posted:
Thu Feb 14, 2008 12:21 pm
Man, I wore that record out. Love XTC! Thanks for the vid link Gene. That said, here's someone demonstrating Colin Moulding's bass line. Freakin' genius.
XTC seemed to have a alt-college-radio cult following in America the 80's, but musicians were hip to them. This was their most popular one, and my favorite. When I heard more from them, like "Making Plans For Nigel" and such, I decided they weren't my cup of tea, as far as buying the record back then, anyway. Being more mature in my music now, I'd be curious to hear their "Oranges And Lemons" album now, though... Maybe they ARE more than "the British R.E.M."...
I've always had an affinity for those jangley-sounding arpeggioing guitars. In the era I was learning to play, starting in the late 70's, nearly all the other kids were cranking with distortion pedals in their garages, trying to emulate the heros of the recent past where this was definitely the dominant me-too guitar sound. I was something of a black sheep not with the crowd in this regard, where I evolved to really prefer CLEAN guitars jangling out those wonderfully complex arpeggiated lines (really a more mid-60's British invasion kind of sound). I'm happy that there definitely were artists beyond the Beatles and Byrds and other electrified-folk bands of San Francisco that picked this up and evolved it further past the 1970's. Bands like Tom Petty, R.E.M, Midnight Oil, Hootie and the Blowfish, Gin Blossoms and Counting Crows really "got it", and sorta saw my way of thinking in that regard. (It was affirming to me somehow that I wasn't "alone" on this!...)
The sound I'm trying to describe is a combination of gear and playing style. Most often, when detecting this sound, it's not coincidental that a Richenbacker guitar is just about always "near the scene of the crime"... The amp and its settings are tricky; This is not the same thing as a pure clean sound (boring), or even a pop country "twang" (formulatic and tiresome). "Jangle" is something else. You know it when you hear it...
And as I say, playing STYLE is a big component. It takes a lighter hand to arpeggio slow strokes across strings just so, rhythmically (often in triples, 3/4, within beats), as opposed to caveman-bashing out power chords. Hey, that's fun too, but I think fuzzy power chords got pretty routine-sounding for a while, there, and guitars are capable of doing other things!...
Broken down, it kind of is a compromise between chording and linear riffs; A rhythm/lead playing style, if you will. Maybe I'm just a guy that can't make up his mind...
Going on and on with this topic, I can't resist sticking in this other jangle-pop song by a recent Americana band that is very critically acclaimed and also has a big cult following amongst musicians (but not very popular, mysteriously...)! About the only bad thing I can say about this song is, at 2:20, it's short and over way too soon!... Happy jangling!... :
Well, I can't let a mention of The Jayhawks go by without mentioning some local favorites of mine (personal friends of The Jayhawks, btw), The Wrenfields from Dearborn. Here's links to a couple of their videos on their webpage. Great people.
I haven't thought about the 80's band The Call in years. Mostly a one or two hit wonder, they were one of those U2-like bands of the time (like The Alarm and later Midnight Oil), which did soaring songs of both optimism and social commentary. They weren't such a bad little band, really!...
Here's "Let The Day Begin". This one shows a bunch of strangers in a video montage, but I couldn't find the studio version of this song any other way...:
(I found, by accident, that Rod Stewart did a later cover of this song, too, which was just dreadful!...)
The one I ended up dinking with on acoustic guitar one evening, though, was this one, "The Walls Came Down". I love big riff-centered songs like this, but I determined it's just too obscure for my audience, and I'm not sure there's really enough unrepetative stuff going on in it for my tastes. I like the studio cut, though!...:
Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker's "Shadow of a Doubt (A Complex Kid)" was off of the 1979 (one of my favorite years in rock and roll!...) album "Damn The Torpedoes". My tastes in music at the time were a lot more hard-edge, so I just thought it was okay then, but I have a greater appreciation for this album now. And, as mentioned, I have a soft spot for those jangley guitars!...
This particular cut wasn't put on the dreaded "list" of songs classic rock radio gathers and plays the crap out of over the decades (completely zapping them of all their coolness...), so, it actually sounds pretty good to hear it again. The bass line acting as the counterpoint riff resolves SO nice; It feels really good, over and over again! And, the lyrical subject matter has to do with head games young people play in human courtship (and we've ALL been there!...). Great writing!
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Gene Groupie
Joined: Nov 15, 2007
Posts: 76
Posted:
Wed Apr 16, 2008 10:08 am
I had this one come to mind lately, but it's one of those songs that are named differently than what the dominant lyrical hook is. (Why songwriters do this, I have no idea; It's difficult enough to get audience attention as it is, and then they "hide" their song with this trick, making it even harder on themselves!...) It's also a one-hit wonder, making it even more obscure and hard-to-find...
Anyway, I finally figured out it's by a band called Local H, and it's called "Bound For The Floor" (not "Pathetic", as you'd think...). It was put out in 1996, at the tail end of the grunge era, so that sound still wasn't tiresome to many at his time (YET)...
Grunge was notorious for using those unresolved-sounding progressions and chords, and use of intentional dissonance (to amplify the "angst", if you will...). This can be done wrong, for sure, but this is a case of it being done very right, and I love those weird jazz chords like ninths and suspended fourths going on, here. Sure it's "wrong", but it's one of those things where if you get pummelled over the head with it enough times, you come around to the band's way of thinking this it DOES sound pretty darn cool!... It's not for everybody, but I dig it!... :
I live near the border, so radio stations around me sometimes spill over from Canada. Canadians have something of a "thing" with pedistalling bands from their native land; It has something to do with their confusion of a strong national identity (which isn't as strong as how Americans feel about their country), which is perceived as something of a problem there... Anyway, it's clear that there is a "buy Canadian" movement when it comes to much of their entertainment, rather than leaning on the U.S. for it all, like making of their own television shows for specially Canadian audiences, and such. They resent being completely artistically "consumed" by the monster country next door, and fight for some individual unique voice to be heard in it all, which one can certainly understand, I suppose...
The 90's saw a real surge in this as far as rock music, and decided that there were more bands that deserved a promotional push beyond the great ones of the past, like the Guess Who, Bruce Cockburn, Triumph and Rush. They even concocted an award equivilant to the Grammy's, where this specific subset of rock music was glorified and rewarded. Yeah, it sometimes can mean that some sub-standard art creeps in just because it happens to come out of Canada, but every once in a while, there's some real gems that come up, and the lucky right-place-right-time break is just fine, since it can allow a good band some exposure completely around the traditional big corporate machine channels.
One example is Our Lady Peace. This one rings in my head occasionally. "Starseed" is one of my fave songs that just ROCKS!...:
The Tragically Hip is a band with a big cult following in Canada. They have a great sound, and their lyrics are really profound and for the thinker, but the lead singer's voice bugs me sometimes... Anyway, this one is called "Poets" (which was hard for me to search-find, because I always mis-heard the main lyrical hook to be "Don't tell me what the BOYS are doin'"!). VERY cool song:
And, of course, this topic wouldn't be complete without bringing up the Barenaked Ladies! They are great pop rockers, but have one foot in the quirky/clever area, so nerdy white guys that think too much, like me, really like them... They always inject a little humor in their delivery, which "works" gloriously for them; It's almost as if they are in on the joke that they are a bunch of nerdy white Canadian boys "posing" in a rock and roll band!... I have the compliation CD I play in the car a lot. They have a pile of hits, but this one seems to CRANK best; "Too Little Too Late"!:
Joined: Mar 30, 2002
Posts: 79
Location: Flint, MI
Posted:
Tue Jun 03, 2008 8:27 am
Songs in the Key of Life is a great album.
Mitch Chief Editor
Joined: Mar 27, 2001
Posts: 124
Location: Milford
Posted:
Sat Jun 07, 2008 9:55 am
Rick wrote:
Songs in the Key of Life is a great album.
Definitely a classic, must have. "Innervisions" too.
Gene Groupie
Joined: Nov 15, 2007
Posts: 76
Posted:
Tue Jun 17, 2008 8:10 am
Rock instrumentals!
This is a pretty rare thing tried in rock, when in the process of composing, it is discovered that the piece really is so strong all by itself that, musically, words can't improve, or can even harm, what there already is sitting there as-is.
The best ones have a quality of "pace" in the arrangement, where slight variations are introduced throughout, and the listener doesn't get bored with the same passage spinning around and around. This is mandadory for a POP song especially, where there has to be some catchiness on a pretty constant basis for the short attention span for the masses... There are quite a few "jam bands" that have these meadering, long jazz-like jams (like Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead, Phish, Sanata, etc.), but that's not what I'm quite talking about. The instrumental SONG, in the truest sense of the word, as opposed to a jam, is a rare thing probably because it is just so darn hard to do successfully!...
One that sticks in my head sometimes is the prog rock one-hit wonder by a Dutch prog rock band of the early 70's, Focus, called "Hocus Pocus". This song has a very ahead-of-its-time quality to it. The use of jazz chords in the progression blows my mind (which many hack tablature writers don't seem to be hearing at all, but that's the primary cool thing about it!...)! This video has the studio version, and it gives a video montage of the stop-action animation art in a recent movie by Nick Park, a rising animator whose style of humor is very distinctly British and droll. That's completely unrelated to the song, of course, but it gives ya something interesting to look at while the song plays!...:
The tail-end of the 80's hair band era brought on a short era of what I call a "virtuoso" period, which peaked at about 1991. Guitar players seemed to be getting fancier and faster, and pushing the limits with this. Players like Eric Johnson, Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai, Michael Angelo, (and I'll even include Stevie Ray Vaughn in this group, I suppose) and a suite of others, had a nice day in the sun. All this could only be taken so far, of course, and it was inevitable that it was to come crashing down. And, as the pendelum of this started to swing the other way, the age of grunge and "unplugged" was dawning, which was seen as less pretentious and hence refreshing, and by 1993, it became pretty hard times for these players... (Good thing, too; I personally grew tired of these guys about the time everyone else did, and was ready for something new as well...) Anyway, my favorite one of these guys was Joe Satriani. His compositions sounded like good, arranged pieces as opposed to sounding like a flimsy excuse to wank, and had good compositional pace, a few key changes, and just a very good awareness of what makes songs cool. He had a few good instrumentals (one reason being he couldn't sing all that great), but his "Satch Boogie" had a good sampling of his signature things, so I'll list that one here. This clip is interlaced with some interview of him, but it is entertaining, too...:
Of the heavy metal bands of the 80's, there were a lot of mediocre ones and a few out-and-out bad ones... As far as the STRICTLY heavy metal bands of this period, The Scorpions, to me, were just a little bit better and a little bit smarter, and are my personal favorite of the bunch. This cut was considered a tacked-on filler cut on the end of the Lovedrive album, but the audience response of it was so surprising, that this has become one of the staple songs they do for their shows all the time now. It DOES have something goin' on!.... It's "Coast To Coast":
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