The XX

I don't know if I'm saying this in the right way

yeah i know, but one seems charming to me and one doesn't

i dunno. i don't even LOVE the YMGs the more i listen.

anyway it's not my job to be a rock critic thank god.

actually i'm gonna listen to The XX again, i kinda want to like this, it sounds good on paper.

plus they are from england and seem like they are trying to be a cool band with pretty decent aesthetics and i had to discourage UK from at least trying.

the fact that ppl keep saying them in the same breath as dubstep makes me read all this sub-frequency spacey stuff that maybe isn't them. Aping YMG is pretty risky since Colossolol Youth is pretty unique sounding.

they didn't ape shit, they didn't know YMG until people started saying "hey you sound like YMG"

^i totally believe that. like one time i wrote a guitar riff for practice and it ended up being "uncle tom's cabin" by warrant : (

I don't really buy that, ppl would have said it to them in london after a couple of songs and it would have been self-conscious by then

i dunno, are Young Marble Giants like a way bigger deal in the UK? cuz like i'm a total nerdbait and i dont own any YMG....

if the ppl going to see them were younger kids and shit i could see them having gone a while without it...they probably played for awhile before they got press coverage

Yeah, in the UK YMG are pretty standard issue "obscure stuff I like" for indie fans

The reissue of Collosal Youth a couple of years ago was pretty big and got a lot of mainstream coverage.

YMG are almost totally unknown/forgotten by anyone under the age of 30 who is not a massive indie music geek/Plan B reader type.

What are the chances that a bunch of teenagers who grew up listening to, like, Dubstep and Missy Elliott, had never even heard of YMG, let alone actually heard them to ape them? Pretty fucking good, I'd say.

yeah that's what my gut would say.

plus when you're writing stuff it's so weird the shit that can happen.

like my last band had this riff that we wrote, had had for like a year that was EXACTLY this bloc party riff. someone didn't point it out to me until after our CD was out, i hadn't really checked out bloc party

Yeah, in the UK YMG are pretty standard issue "obscure stuff I like" for indie fans

I'm not sure about this, I mean yeah maybe among hardcore music geek indie fans, but I doubt your average NME reader has any idea who they were.

guys do you not remember the young marble giants reissue being inescapable? number one christmas present record that year iirc

number of times i heard it in woolworths

etc

i thought they were all 20. it's not that far a stretch of the imagination that they'd know who Young Marble Giants are, perhaps they downloaded it from one of those "blogs" the "youth" are all using these days.

okay, so this band are like two years younger than me but grew up in London instead of rural Ireland and yet me and my friends at school (when Missy Elliott was mainly what I listened to fyi) knew who YMG were. I think you are totally underestimating the shit that twenty year olds have heard did you know we grew up with soulseek yeah?

it's kind of irrelevant tbh given that they don't actually sound like young marble giants

i'd never heard of YMG before i saw the xx being compared to them.

(ps fuck you "rio natsume")

that is blatantly untrue xp

i dunno about anyone else but i first heard about ymgs like a million years ago when hole covered them.

the "they sound like dubstep" angle is bizarre too - they sound nothing like dubstep, though they're dubstep fans

There's a fuck of a lot more to do in London than in rural Ireland, you know? WHo the heck has time to muck about on Soulseek when there's warehouse parties in Dalston to go to?

x-post I was gonna say "let's get The Lex in here and ask him if he knows who YMG is..." ha ha.

it's kind of irrelevant tbh given that they don't actually sound like young marble giants

― thomp, Tuesday, September 15, 2009 11:55 AM (43 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

they very much do

lol @ the idea they sound anything like missy elliot or dubstep, tho

i was actually familiar w/the hole cover but for over a decade had actually assumed it was a hole original!

deej they grew up listening to missy elliott, aaliyah, mariah, dubstep, hence kate mentioning that. the press release ill-advisedly trumpets these as "influences", which...they don't sound like any of those people at all, you can just tell they've listened to them.

yeah, but I think the coverage of them linking them with this dubstep sound world does actually enhance the experience of listening to them, it makes the guitar on Crystallise remind me of the Burial/4tet track wolf cub and in that context I like it a bit more than I would prolly.

There's a fuck of a lot more to do in London than in rural Ireland, you know?

I trust you're speaking from experience.

1) they don't sound anything like YMG to my ears

2) I never said that they sounded LIKE Missy Elliott or Dubstep. However, if that's what they grew up listening to, then they're perfectly entitled to list them as "influences"

Missy, Aaliyah and Dubstep yeah, but for some reason I have a real problem with Mariah being mentioned?

well, take it up with them! they're the ones talking about mariah. you can vaguely hear it in the way the voices are layered, and something about the way they phrase their lyrics.

aw i'm sorry "lex pretend". well done on being ignorant about Young Marble Giants though.

they don't sound much like ymg no, just like they don't sound much like missy elliot, or much like dubstep. i just hate that rock critic romantic shit where young people couldn't possibly be aware of any music made prior to 2003

haha, its just that the other influences actually make sense to me beyond "hey they just like them" a little, but I honestly can't hear Mariah at all. (the missy song I think of most is pass the dutch btw)

I mean, I grew up listening to a load of dodgy goth because I was a teenager in the 80s, so sure, that's part of mine own "influences" but I'd be surprised if you could listen to any song I've written and say "that sounds like Bauhaus" despite the fact that being a Bauhaus fan was hugely important in my process of growing up and artistic development.

think of late mariah. layered vox and subtle, bassy production. "breakdown"!!!!

the missy this kinda-sorta reminds me of is early missy, with tons of space, before she started bellowing.

You know, any indie fan in england over the last five or so years would have heard mention of a few dozen "seminal" post punk bands in write ups for Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand etc and sometimes they look them up inbetween going to raves in Dalston (aren't these kids from south-west London?). I doubt pretty heavily that these kids only listen to RnB and Dubstep and were all "hey, we should form an indie band." So I'm gonna take it as given that they have a pretty similar frame of reference as I do having grown up with pretty much the same indie stuff as well as pop stuff.

uh i am in my twenties and grew up in london a massive music geek, with a circle of music geek friends, and while i probably read the words "young marble giants" in a music mag a few times, no-one i knew ever talked about them. I have to this day never heard anything by them. You are more special than you think you are, plaxico!

IKR, you are sounding more and more like The Onion's Area Man who can NOT believe that his girlfriend has NEVER seen Appocalypse Now.

i think i always assumed young marble giants sounded like throwing muses?

I remember walking into a julian graves a couple days after the reissue came out (they have this fancy licorice that I totally love) and Salad Days was on the sound system and the teenage goth who was working there had the cd left on the counter.

you can just tell they've listened to them.

― lex pretend, Tuesday, September 15, 2009 11:57 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no you cant, unless you read the press release

i dont pretend to know to what extent they consciously, unconsciously or simply did not cop their style from YMG's but in terms of approach to songwriting & performing, the entire understated minimalism of it is 999x closer to YMGs than any attempts to legitimize themselves by pretending that they're direct descendants of mainstream R&B

IKR, you are sounding more and more like The Onion's Area Man who can NOT believe that his girlfriend has NEVER seen Appocalypse Now.

― girls just wanna have mixtapes (Masonic Boom), Tuesday, September 15, 2009 6:09 PM (3 minutes ago)

only if the girlfriend made kinda surreal war movies. I'm not trying to put on like YMG are this totally FM friendly band that everyone knows, it just reminds me of when Bloc Party had never heard of Gang of Four, I find it hard to swallow that even if they didn't cop straight off that they sounded like this band (who even if a few of you don't think they sound like, a lot of other ppl do) that nobody would have pointed out the similarity or brought YMG to their attention off the back of it BEFORE they released an album and got massively hyped.

you can just tell they've listened to them.

― lex pretend, Tuesday, September 15, 2009 11:57 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no you cant, unless you read the press release

― BiG HoOs is the one claim!!! (deej), Tuesday, September 15, 2009 6:13 PM (3 minutes ago)

I DO think that they sound more interesting in the context of having Burial and Timbaland as influences than Young Marble giants, but deej otmfm pretty much.

*TOUTED as influences

yeah i dunno, at the end of the day it's hard to say unless you're in that person's head...i guess it's either good or not at the end of the day.

plus lots of times stuff gets kind of put out there by the press, like all those bands that were supposed to sound like joy division but sounded way more like echo and the bunnymen IMO

I'd kinda guess that the people who are being all gobsmacked open-mouthed and doubting their stated influences have never actually been in a band, or written music, or had the experience of how "listening to and wanting to sound like X" can actually lead to "sounding like Y instead."

This is part of the nebulous problem with this idea of "influence" - that it doesn't always work as straightforwardly as casual music critics would like it to.

Part of the amazingness and creativity of music is when you start out aiming to sound like one thing, and end up sounding like something totally different.

I could see how you could refuse to believe it would happen if you've never experienced it, but it still seems a ridiculous (and slightly arrogant) thing to insist that a band MUST be influenced by a band they'd never heard of.

you can hear it in retrospect if you actually pay attention to how they're using their voices and instruments, rather than just what they sound like.

xps

k8 otm

kate has it right, and I don't know why this is being so strenuously debated. my own stance on this record is similar to m@tt h3lg3son's, and I will keep an open mind towards them

oh jesus guys -- i dont care if they took from the bible & jesus, im talking about what influences are readily evident.

& no, theres basically nothing in these vocal performances that makes me go "Hey this is missy elliot x dubstep!!"