Good major Label Rock/Metal albums from Late 90's-2008?

I think that the bridge that existed in the 90s between grassroots indie and more careerist or populist metal and hard rock has just kind of gone away

I imagine plenty of bands would be happy to cross that bridge if major-labels would build it. Why haven't they?

I'd guess it's because they think what's left of the rock record-buying public wants to hear something else.

. . . would (re-)build it.

Part of the reason Nirvana blew up was because they rocked hard enough to appeal to Metallica/GNR fans.

And had the savvy to leave all their nasty weird distorto stuff on the albums and make sure the singles were the ones with hueg hooks (well Geffen probably ensured that but y'know).

People have talked a little about Torche bridging this gap but I've seen no real evidence to indicate that they actually want to.

Is Roadrunner still indie? Because whatever you think of their product, they occupy a huge niche of the mainstream rock/metal market. I mean, there's a lot of crap, but I've gone on record liking records by Soulfly, Theory of a Deadman, Cradle of Filth, and the Resident Evil soundtrack, at least to an extent. Probably as much as I like '70s/'80s major label second stringers like Blue Oyster Cult and Accept. Someone, not me, should write a book about the Roadrunner effect and I will happily check it out from the library, as soon as I'm done reading about Black Liberation Theology.

which should totally be a band name, btw

maybe if max cavalera got together with vernon reid

it's hard to predict the future, but i just can't imagine people someday raving about too many 90's/00's major label obscurities the way i can rave about a zillion forgotten 60's/70's rock bands. but who knows? not to say that there wasn't tons of crud put out in the 70's. there was. but even a lot of the crud often had one moment or two of virtue. will people feel that way about third rate grunge and pop punk and nu-metal someday? will it be at all collectable? so much of it feels so disposable to me. disposable at birth too. not just now.

It only takes one album to change things around (Ex. A: Nevermind). Maybe something from the emerging nu-90s revivalism (e.g., No Age, HEALTH, Abe Vigoda, Times New Viking) will be catchy enough to capture the wider public imagination. (n.1) I'd say this stuff is too noisy and abrasive to do that, but I guess you could have said the same thing about Nirvana just before Smells Like Teen Spirit changed rock radio overnight.

______________________________
(n.1) BTW, isn't this right? Eighties revivalism (nu-Nu Wave) is near-dead. Nineties revivalism (nu-lo-fi/noise) is on the near horizon.

I dunno. Timbaland still seems pretty healthy.

And Scott, I can imagine some 2030 hipster being thrilled to dig up the Another Animal CD and finding something valuable there.

if only the cover...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51IZrsi825L._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Why is it that there are so few good major-label rock records nowadays?

Splintering in listener demographics is one contributing reason. The obvious push in marketing consumer goods -- and that's how much of the industry has always viewed their product -- is to precisely identify the tastes of specific niches and pitch narrowcasted groups to them. The Internet and mass communication/marketing has made this easier to do than in the mid-70's.

If you're going to winnow through listeners to find small slices which are profitable, at some point it's not profitable for majors because their overhead is too big. It's left to indies.

However, because making music has elements of serendipity and unpredictable human magic to it, there will always be groups which issue records that stomp all over narrowcast genre lines and wind up being bought by the truckload. When that happens there is a real tendency to dismiss them as not being part of the original genre, of being lesser for some reason. For the sake of this discussion, hard rock and all those groups who don't measure up to the various standards of racial purity/taste.

Whether or not there are many less "good" bands from major labels fluctuates. I recall that in the early Eighties I tended to bemoan the lack of good major label stuff (Jeezus, how could Atlantic screw up Blackfoot?!) in contrast to much of the not infrequently dire homemade punk rock I bought out of boredom and devoted a fanzine too.

At the same time I was buying every NWOBHM record I could get from labels like Neat, Mausoleum, Rondolet and Carrerre (?!). I might have stupidly insisted that Demon's The Unexpected Guest, Samson's Head On or Vardis's 100 MPH were among the top five records of the year.

I think that the bridge that existed in the 90s between grassroots indie and more careerist or populist metal and hard rock has just kind of gone away

I imagine plenty of bands would be happy to cross that bridge if major-labels would build it. Why haven't they?

I'd guess it's because they think what's left of the rock record-buying public wants to hear something else.

-- Daniel, Esq., Monday, July 14, 2008 11:57 AM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

I think it's more like the 90s gold rush was a very particular moment in time, and it's over and can't be brought back. Pre-90s (or mid-80s, maybe), there wasn't an established indie label circuit, so a lot of interesting/weird rock bands ended up at major labels that would never ever get signed today. And then came the 90s gold rush with majors throwing money at a huge variety of alt-rock bands, many of whom invariably had no real commercial potential, but achieved some decent mid-level success anyway. Now there seems to be more of a ritualized system -- I'm sure every time a band gets a big indie buzz some A&Rs come calling, but more often than not that band either declines and stays indie, or they go to a major and sell the same/slightly more than before, or have a fluke hit like Modest Mouse and raise their profile a bit without really crossing over big time. But more often than not, the rock bands getting signed and played on the radio were never on the indie circuit to begin with, never got written up on Pitchfork or even heard of Pitchfork, just go straight to the majors and the summmer festival gigs.

Who were the bands in that "90s gold rush"? You mean Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and -- to a lesser extent, I guess -- Alice in Chains?

I mean the dozens (hundreds?) of bands that got grabbed up by majors in the wake of those bands from, say, '92 to '96, most of whom didn't get any exposure more notable than a video on 120 Minutes or a spot on a DGC sampler.

this thread is getting ridiculously far away from HARD ROCK/METAL

If you look at the thread title, the word "hard" is not up there. And the thread starts with discussion of a fucking Foo Fighters album, for crissakes -- give or take, like, Radiohead, I don't think there are very many major label acts mentioned on this thread who rock less hard than the Foos do.

Other than emo/pop punk bands like My Chemical Romance, I don't know what the last indie band that crossed over to alt rock and active rock radio, since the White Stripes like 5 years ago

I dunno, Finger Eleven or somebody maybe? Or maybe not. But why would emo/pop-punk bands not count, anyway? I tend to hate them, too, but why would '90s pop-grunge bands be more legit, by definition? (Actually, on some other thread a few months ago -- something to do with how metal and alt and hard rock were supposedly more distinguishable 15 years ago than they are now -- I checked the Billboard charts, and it turns out that there's actually more crossover between commercial alt rock and active rock stations these days than one might think. I guess if you create arbitrary rules like "emo/pop-punk bands don't count" that might overrule the crossover, but I don't know know why you should.)

Or...okay, maybe Finger Eleven were never "indie" in the Pitchfork sense (or maybe any sense, for that matter.) How about the Hives (so far unmentioned on this thread, though they deserve to be, and often really good)? Did they hit before or after White Stripes? (MGMT and Vampire Weekend and Ting Tings are all indie x-overs to commercial alt-rock this year -- and I'm sure there are more -- but I would be surprised if any of them get active rock play.)

yeah, Hives hit at the same time as the Stripes, and only had 3 modern rock hits (2 of which were just barely blips on mainstream/active rock). Finger Eleven and other Wind Up bands aren't really considered indie by anybody.

and I only meant not counting emo and pop punk bands because they kind of fall outside of the hard rock/active rock market as something completely different, usually not charting there unless they're huge on modern (although "Welcome To The Black Parade" seemed to do pretty well on active stations).

I thought the White Stripes were the only one from that "garage-rock revival" class (White Stripes, Hives, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, maybe The Vines) to get any real rock radio airplay.

(xp)

What about Jet (whose album was actually pretty good, too)? (Or do they also not count, for some reason?)

most of those bands had 1 or 2 hits, then kinda fell off the radar of mainstream radio after 2002, meanwhile White Stripes have continued to have hits pretty consistently since then.

xhuxk define "count" here -- are you talking about the thread's big picture of major label rock bands, or my specific claim about bands who crossed over from indie to mainstream in the past 5 years? because Jet were never on an indie label, at least in the U.S.

I just meant "count as being from the garage-rock revival class that Daniel mentioned." (It might be worth remembering, though, that most of the '90s grunge bands who hit had never done notable earlier stuff on indies either -- Nirvana and Soundgarden and I guess Everclear did, and people who later wound up in Pearl Jam, but Alice in Chains and Stone Temple Pilots sure didn't, not to mention all the bubblegrungers who followed in their wake. So it's always been more an exception than a rule.) (Green Day and Offspring and Rancid were called up from the indie farm clubs later, but the pop-punk bands who followed in their wake genrally were not. So I'm not sure how much has actually changed.)

I dunno, it's hard to pinpoint statistically how much has changed. But I get the feeling that today whoever would have a moderately successful indie debut today, on the level of Smashing Pumpkins or Nirvana or Sound Garden back then, would be a lot less likely to sign to a major and go multi-platinum. It seems like the bands that do well on indies now either stay indie forever, or sign and then get only incrementally more popular without really "blowing up" or crossing over big time. Even a band like Death Cab For Cutie, who went platinum and have been on the Modern Rock top 10 for months now, don't really seem that big to me.

Yeah, I guess they (Jet) were part of that group. I just remember the White Stripes-BRMC-The Hives and maybe The Vines as forming an (evil!) axis for that garage-rock revival class.

But I get the feeling that today whoever would have a moderately successful indie debut today, on the level of Smashing Pumpkins or Nirvana or Sound Garden back then, would be a lot less likely to sign to a major and go multi-platinum.

Maybe 'cause there are new ways to make money in music, e.g., indie bands marketing their songs to TV shows. But I think it goes beyond that: There's a sound that's big on commercial rock-radio this decade (maybe it's a holdover from the late 90s) that doesn't mesh with indie rock (which is either too-mannered or too-noisy in a non nu-metal way, I guesss).

By way of example: I've been casually listening to HEALTH's song, Triceratops, today. It's a cool, noisy song. But that kind of noise, I'd guess, isn't what would wind up on commercial rock radio. There's a certain type of aggression and lyrics and vibe that's in those rock radio songs, and I don't think HEALTH works in that vein. They could reshape the vein, I guess, if one of their songs can break through.

I dunno, it's hard to pinpoint statistically how much has changed. But I get the feeling that today whoever would have a moderately successful indie debut today, on the level of Smashing Pumpkins or Nirvana or Sound Garden back then, would be a lot less likely to sign to a major and go multi-platinum. It seems like the bands that do well on indies now either stay indie forever, or sign and then get only incrementally more popular without really "blowing up" or crossing over big time. Even a band like Death Cab For Cutie, who went platinum and have been on the Modern Rock top 10 for months now, don't really seem that big to me.

-- some dude, Monday, July 14, 2008 12:15 PM (17 minutes ago)

how old are you?

26. why do you ask?

Steve's trying to make me feel old, is all.

How big are Death Cab in the states? Most people dont know them here.

A lot bigger. A band who chart pretty high and get a lot of radio play

porcupine tree's "in absentia" was the first thing that came to mind. On Lava, which was (is?) an Atlantic imprint.

Death Cab are fucking huge now, by any measure I use (which is "any band I used to pay $5 for that I now have to pay almost ten times as much to see, guaranteeing that I will not see them ever again")

are coldplay the biggest rock band in the world right now? as in: record sales, concert sales, etc.

Isn't Radiohead bigger? And U2, for concerts?

I don't think coldplay has hit the U2 level yet, but I think they've probably surpassed Radiohead.

going by wikipedia, x&y by coldplay sold, like, 11 million copies worldwide, and the last U2 album sold about half that. and the new coldplay album looks like it will hit those numbers as well.

their new one is the second fastest selling album in U.K. history! they don't say what the first fastest was.

"The album was highly successful around the world in its first week of release, when it debuted at #1 in 36 countries[22]. In the United Kingdom the album sold 302,000 copies after 3 days of release, making it the second fastest selling album in UK history. It also became the best selling release in iTunes history. In its second week it sold another 198,000 getting a platinum certification for those sales.[23] The album debuted with sales of 41,041[24] in Australia and was certified platinum. In Japan it sold almost 40,000 copies in its first week and a further 40,000 in its second week. In the US the album debuted at #1 with 721,000 copies sold. This almost equals previous album X&Y's first week sales of 737,000.[25]"

if you can sell a million records in a week, you are about as huge as huge gets these days.

WOW! Eye-opening! Depressing!

(not that depressing; Coldplay is bland, but okay sometimes).

i'm no fan, but i thought they actually sounded okay when i saw them on the daily show. i think they played all new stuff and it sounded more interesting to me than their other stuff. still can't really get into whatshisface's voice though.

the fastest selling uk album was Oasis - Be Here Now

Yeah, Coldplay catch too much grief for what they do. The biggest strike against them -- just like with Oasis, BTW -- is that they fancy themselves as the biggest, best band in the world, which is just asking for trouble. OTOH, they are a big band. And rich.

(xp)

people still want that BIG ROCK ALBUM feeling. that anthemic rush. which is why it makes sense that U2 and oasis and coldplay and radiohead are the last really big bands (or of the last decade or whatever). they are BIG ROCK MOMENT holdovers.

Yep. I'm waiting for JOURNEY to re-emerge from the ashes (with Steve Perry).

it's one of the reasons a band like bon jovi could sneak back into the fold. there are job openings for anthem rockers.(and why country fans who are also rock fans make superstars out of anthemic rockers like Rascal Flatts.)

Honestly, I think a few good "anthem" or "stadium" rock bands are good to have around. Without them, we'd have no Mr. Roboto.

(Seriously, being 40 and having grown up in the 80s, I have a soft spot for "anthem rockers," especially ones with that Journey wall-of-harmony vocal sound).

And Puddle Of Mudd and P.O.D. ain't satisfying that need for me, unfortunately.