Bands you keep trying to like but can't get into

I used to think of "college rock" as idk Violent Femmes or 10,000 Maniacs (REM def fits) and mentally categorized Husker Du and Sonic Youth as American "indie rock" or "postpunk", although all those terms have been defined so many ways that who really knows. xp yes exactly!

I distinctly remember hearing CVB's "Where the Hell Is Bill?" in summer camp, and being all..."??" I knew about punk, but had no context for this new kind of straight-faced / sarcastic music. (Sorry for the digression; but to the point of the thread, I never got into most of those bands, either.)

thanks everybody for your thoughts re: replacements. i guess i'm a semi-disaffected 80s kid, but i think maybe i was just a tad too young to truly "get it" (born in '81). funny that bands like husker du, minutemen, etc. were mentioned as i've never really been able to get into that stuff either. still like r.e.m. tho, so idk what my problem is.

2.5g of thc sounds awesome right about now. "i wanna be sedated" and whathaveyou.

2.5g is the next door you find after successfully completing a 2.5 mg 420 unlock

a thick plume of weed smoke seeps out from under the bedroom door

the neighborhood understands he keeps trying to like bands that he can't get into

I'm 1980 and grew up on 90s grunge and alt-rock, but there are tons of indie/alt bands from the eighties and early nineties, many aforementioned, who just don't sound appealing to my ears at all.

things like Dino Jr, Husker Du, most Sonic Youth and others just sound ugly in a not-a-good-way

Can you name names? I'm not sure if people are classifying "college rock" as leaning more post-punk or more so poor man's REM

I like a few random '80s postpunky bands, like Das Damen - but I almost think of them as a '90s indie-rock band avant la lettre (and not just b/c Lyle Hysen later worked at Matador).

I think this whole discussion leads to the bigger idea of: does music requires context to appreciate? I mean, the answer is 'sometimes' and 'sometimes context enhances the experience'. I was in college when I got into the Replacements and therefore love them, they certainly reflected a specific set of feelings from the era. But does their whole shtick really require that? I would think their perspective in "16 Blue", "Answering Machine" and "Here Comes A Regular" are still quite relevant.

On one level, it's not a surprise that people tend to be into music that comes out when they're teens / young adults. On the other hand, I have thought a lot about how just because you like a particular band, artist, genre, etc. doesn't necessarily mean you'll like a "similar" or "related" band/artist, even if all the right elements seem to be in place. Art obviously isn't reducible to a set of stylistic elements!

Gerald McBB otm. I was in college then too, which certainly, um, colors my experience. I was also in college when a certain other colorful person from Minneapolis was quite big, which also is part of my relationship to that artist and so...sorry, ma, lost my train of thought.

Black Flag and skateboard videos exposed me to the other SST stuff of the late 80s era like Sonic Youth and Dino Jr. and firehose. Anything other than this and hip hop was terrible, especially "college rock" which to me meant the stuff on pre-Nirvana 120 minutes - the Cure, Smiths, New Order, which were all too british or gothy or quirky or effete or new-wavey. REM was cool for some reason though.

I think I expected more out of it and it didn't fit my loud fast rules vibe - I remember thinking the Smiths were going to be AWESOME based on the cover of Meat is Murder and I was so pissed when I first heard them. The Dinosaur Jr cover of "Just Like Heaven" was kind of a chink in the armor, and I really got into a lot of that stuff when I was older and less narrow minded and doctrinaire.

https://youtu.be/CUPalblwNq4

Huh?

Just an instance of SST rocker Thurston's attitude about effete British college rockers JAMC.

There were a couple of digs at gothy British bands in the Confusion Is Next book.

Autechre. My fling with these guys is firmly in the past! I forever respect their pace of production and their originality-quotient, but the problem for me is in that imo they are lacking in both the physical and spiritual/emotional departments. That’s the 3 departments of a human that music can (or not) address: the physical, the mental, and the spiritual-emotional. Maybe that’s four but whatever, I have made my point.

The mental is the physical is the spiritual, maaaan.

Oh I've never liked Autechre. I liked Dael (the first track on Tri Repetae) on first listen as a teenager, but I never subsequently enjoyed them. I always chalked it up to "the sound of FM synthesis" and "the sound of Max/MSP"-- there's nothing compositionally uninteresting about it, I just don't get immersed, it has the sonic world of a hospital hallway. (Similarly, I adore "Rifts" by Oneohtrix Point Never but haven't fallen in love with anything since.)

Funny, the only Oneohtrix I like is Replica, but I like that one a lot

Incredible String Band - read so many rapturous takes on these guys (eg Rob Young, Joe Boyd bio) and every time I put the music on I last a couple of minutes at best

Incredible String Band is def for this thread. I like them but their sound is you either get it or don't. They are so doing their own thing.

so true, I have really tried with them and LOVE some isolated tracks but have never clicked with a whole album

Same tbh. I do want to try again, though, to their credit.

exactly! there's a great bootleg series (6 volumes) called "God's Holiday" that has some really cool stuff, Wee Tam and Bug Huge are the ones I usually go back to

"Big Huge"

I like the guy with the high pitched voice’s songs better

My favourite ISB related things are the two COB albums that Clive Palmer made after leaving them early on - those records really knock me sideways emotionally (especially Spirit Of Love). Deep hippy folk stuff that's every bit as pure and joyful as Vashti Bunyan. Never quite made the same connection with ISB though

My horrified revulsion towards ISB is documented

‘Bands lj should like but doesn’t for some strange reason he will expound on at length itt’ should be a thread.

I mean I did that and everyone hated it

:(

If you’re referring to the ‘thread to diss hyped releases’, I’m an obvious fan.

LJ likes Blur and landfill indie he should not be liking ISB.

My favourite ISB related things are the two COB albums that Clive Palmer made after leaving them early on - those records really knock me sideways emotionally (especially Spirit Of Love)

I'll check that out.

Nah I got into it on an ISB thread! Not really the done thing

I think context is a huge thing with the Replacements. There's a whole vocabulary and mythos that surrounds them, and any discussion/thread about them. I usually find that helps me to get into something but it's a barrier here.

I can still remember the day I clicked with ISB after several abortive attempts; it was like a whole new vista opening up. It's cliched but 'A Very Cellular Song' was what done it.

bit of a soppy post: my dad used to sing ISB songs to us as lullabies so hearing the originals of eg the minotaur song or cellular don't sound at all right

I've noticed this phenomenon. Seems cool to me. I actually recall a euthanasia documentary wherein a group gathers to deliver their friend into the afterlife with ISB songs, post-barbiturate administration. ISB roolz.

Thanks for the C.O.B. tip. Will investigate.

With Autechre, it's always hard for me to explain how it is I feel about them. Actually agree with "sound of a hospital hallway" but there can be something fascinating in the sterility and coldness?

Not enough grime and human misery to match my experience of Montreal hospitals.

lol

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i do not associate autechre with hospital hallways or sterility and coldness. they are wayyyyy too fonky for that

Yeah, that's what I don't really get out of it.

for me even at their furthest out they have an undeniable sense of groove, always some rhythmic pocket their spiderwebs of percussion are weaving around, always the product of two people who seem to really love both boom bap and acid, and each album is like here is the latest unrecognizable collision/evolution of that

I enjoy the first two Autechre albums, for sure, and appreciate up through (but not including) Confield.

Autechre remind me of that Flying Lotus tweet, paraphrased: "I spent 10% of my time using Ableton to realize my ideas, and 90% of my time fighting Ableton to make it actually sound good". I appreciate the craft of what they're doing from Confield onward, but wish that the sound world wasn't so "sounding like Max/MSP" all the time.

I listened to the entire NTS collection and it was stuffed with interesting ideas, I was interested in it but never immersed. I was sitting there wishing there was some outboard device with the specific intention of replicating something like the Nord Modular but using analog circuitry-- could such a thing be designed to interface with what Max/MSP does? Something that would rely on outboard sound generation? idk.

All in all I find it more rewarding to listen to random Buchla improvisations on Youtube-- effectively the same deal, but sonically far more enriched.

Also, too-- I think of RDJ's "return to analog" Analord series, and how, although it was uneven, it functioned as an excellent "reset" and made me appreciate Syro that much more. I'd love to hear Autechre do something like that? but they seem generally to be in the business of doing their own thing ha

that pretty much sums up my take on Autechre as well, thanks!

great post, fgti

i still enjoy their new work a bunch, but i get where you're coming from for sure. it does seem hard to imagine autechre doing a Analord style "reset", not because they're incapable of it but because their MO very much seems to be iteration toward...the omniaudiosphere, or something

omniaudiosphere = automated generative always morphing endless, etc

i find their project kind of fascinating and they seem to be doubled-down on it when almost all of their IDM peers have reinvented themselves many times over. so i'm cool with seeing how far they can push it, at the expense of a new direction