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

my dad had Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs on tape and we used to listen to them in the car, just fun, weird music, not at all impenetrable.

I'm a big Waits fan but I get why he grates on people

I am strictly "only the early stuff" with Pere Ubu, up to and including Modern Dance is A+ but yeah the guy is such a dick that I have zero interest in anything after (even tho I saw them in 1987, he was a dick then too)

Wire's 154 is def something I can't get into aside from Map Ref, so yeah that's a fair call

waits is pretty accessible with his tunes and even arrangements it's the "character" stuff that is bothersome. i know that's part of the fun for fans & i'm not anti-theatre but the drunken hobo with a heart of gold thing is just boring when it's not offensive. my favourite song is "i don't wanna grow up" which may be another character song but feels less overly-mediated than the others

with wire i find 154 a lot more approachable than pink flag, it seems to have actual feelings. mostly cold alienated abstracted feelings but also a real sense of sadness and regret over that distance. i listened to it over and over during a family crisis in early 2020 and i'd never really been into wire before. pink flag never made me feel much more than "i see what they did there" or "this one is pretty catchy i suppose" and that was all i knew from them for years

I can't really imagine listening to Wire for 'feelings' tbh.

what do you listen to music for

Define what you mean by feelings maybe?

I mean, "154" has more traditionally emotional lyrics (for the most part) than "Pink Flag" but maybe that's not what you're referring to.

I'm thinking more in terms of emotions than feelings there, which is maybe not what you're driving at.

this is just asking me to walk into the false dichotomy of intellect vs emotion so i'll concede that satisfaction/pleasure/interest in conceptual cleverness is also feelings. what i meant was that album made wire seem more like people trying to processes their own shit rather than some kind of moving-target trickster act. maybe preferring the former is missing the point of the band

what's the difference between emotions and feelings? is feelings broader

shitft

LOL you can tell I haven't exactly thought this through this early in the morning! But, the lyrics on "154" seem more personal and the music (possibly) more emotional, though some might say overwrought. It's not really whether or not it's the point of the band, it's just that it's never really been what they do - well, not if Colin Newman has anything to do with it.

why do these arty rock acts always inspire the most "listen to it until you like it", which could apply to almost any unfamiliar sort of music? i used to get the sense that it was almost a duty to be into these artists, they separated real music fans from poseurs, and if you didn't like it you just didn't get it (whereas music disliked by these fans is just bad, no question of not getting it, of course they do). in fact i remember some vocal fall/beefheart fans totally writing off jazz (they wouldn't be so eager to do so now i hope) and i'd be accused of snobbery/pretension/"just pretending to like" (the same stuff they'd been accused of) if i parroted their own lines back to them in that case

yeah

i kind of regret my specific examples there, it's because i looked up to a certain crowd for too long & since then became reflexively bitter about some of the music they liked, i should probably get over that (not necessarily liking the music, just not resenting it). i don't think anyone is faking their love for [band] or anything. but i still have to defend actually liking pop or r&b to people IRL way more than i'd like to & it's way too tempting to try to out-avant them instead, because it usually works. it's a dirty trick though

there was a revelatory moment for me when I was about 17 and realised that music was not anywhere near as important to most people as it was to me (remember telling friends about this and their response was "yeah, obviously, how did you not know that?" which was fair enough) but I always have to keep repeating this to myself when, for example, I come across a comment on YouTube saying "this is great, not like all the shit music today" and am tempted to tell them to fuck off, this seems to happen roughly every 24 hours.

I’ve seen several mentions of Tom Waits in the thread but I don’t get what makes it so hard. He has soft songs and hard songs, sincere songs and pretentious songs, cool songs and pathetic songs, artsy songs and stupid songs… maybe I drink too much wine but I can’t imagine not liking at least one song of his.

see, this is precisely my problem with Tom Waits. he tries to bridge too much, never quite engaging concretely with either side of the dichotomy. and in doing so, his characterisation becomes flat & strangely circumspect, the sincerity of his narratives lost within the garb of self-awareness that packages things a little too tightly. I don't think this is strictly an impediment to enjoying his music, I just think people might be gradually put off by the highly conditioned nature of his songwriting.

a notable exception is of course his first album, which I still appreciate for its many unrefined moods.

Tom Waits is almost entirely play acting and theatrics, and I can see how this might ring inauthentic to some listeners.

I know this because I bought into his schtick wholeheartedly as a younger, more naive music fan. In the pre/early internet days, I fell for a lot of these kinds of illusions from artists and bands wholesale. My suspension of belief worked on a high level. Black metal was made by quasi-mythological beings who lived in burnt-out churches, Boards of Canada lived in the woods and survived on a strict diet of psychedelics, and Tom Waits spent most of his life drinking bourbon and hopping trains across America. It didn't occur to me that this was mostly pantomime.

So I remember feeling disillusioned to read interviews with Waits where he admitted as such - that "Tom Waits" is as much a character made up of various touchstones and influences as well as a real person who lives an otherwise normal lifestyle as a recording artist. Of course I've come full circle on this and have come to appreciate everything he does all over again in more recent times.

I've just playgraded a copy of A Love Supreme that's come into the shop* and I figured this would be a great opportunity to finally tackle this one after a dozen attempts in my lifetime, but nope, it's still an unpleasant cacophony.

*crackles all the way through but only really annoying and noticeable in the quiet bits. VG- I think? Or should that be a G?

Is this your feeling towards Coltrane in general or just the more cacophonous end of his recordings? I see A Love Supreme as more or less the midpoint between the more melodic vs more "free" ends of his discography.

Yeah the more melodic Coltrane stuff I can get with. Blue Train came into the shop as well and I dug that, and I've enjoyed Favourite Things in the past, but every time I take a run at Love Supreme I can't make head nor tail of it. I can't seem to find anything to hang onto.

I have the same barrier with some of the more abrasive electronic music that gets some hype. The harsher end of Aphex Twin definitely. I tried with the Simona Zamboli album that got love on the techno* albums thread but I had the same problem where my brain just turns it all to noise and mush.

there is dissonance but cacophony implies more than that and it's a clearly structured composition, he's always playing on/with the themes, you can hear every instrument clearly. i'd understand the complaint more if it was about om (which is wonderful cacophony)

i never hated it but did take me longer to come around to than most coltrane, it's not as wild as the free stuff or as straightforwardly hooky as the earlier stuff (although it is tuneful throughout), now i love it so much i can't imagine why i ever didn't or why not everyone does

the harsher end of aphex twin can fuck off imo. but i do like autechre so i'm not consistently anti-abrasion. but i struggle to like noisy stuff if i can't find a conceptual hook or if i dislike what i (maybe erroneously) perceive to be driving it

by "the harsher end of Aphex" are we talking about Ventolin, Come To Daddy (Pappy Mix), the stuff on Classics? I don't think of much of his stuff as excessively harsh really

You sure it wasn't a mislabelled copy of Ascension?xp

Seriously, as Left says, it all comes together as a single composition. As with classical music, it helps to pick out the main themes and follow how they are developed.

idk what NotEnough meant re:AFX but I was thinking specifically of the drill n bass tracks on drukqs, ventolin also qualifies though. I think the trollish spirit puts me off as much as / more than the noise itself (but then I do like SAWII which could also be seen as trollish in its way so idk)

I'm not denying that Coltrane knew what he was doing and that everything in ALS is carefully composed. I'm talking more about what my brain does to it; that whatever the structure is, its not something that I can quite grasp. And that's okay! I'm old enough that I don't get fomo over not "getting" a canonical album. Maybe I'll take another run at it in five years time and it'll click.

And I think this is partially what this thread is about, right? Having to sit down and study an album/artist, rather than just listening and responding emotionally.

And yes, re Aphex, the drill n bass on drukqs is exactly what I had in mind.

i didnt really get coltrane until i read that deleted pitchfork review. helped me understand how much he inspired drum-n-bass.

If you really want to sit down and study it, Lewis Porter's article "John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme': Jazz Improvisation as Composition", from the Aug 1985 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, is good. DM if you can't find it.xp

drill & bass, Aphex or otherwise, just draws me in straight away, I understand that other people find it difficult to listen to but cannot really grasp why that is.

A Love Supreme for me is a little bit like the Stairway of the Coltrane catalog. An undeniably great but played out masterwork, and one that I don't think best captures my favorite elements of his playing in spite of how memorable it is.

However if it's too cacophonous for you, you are probably fairly sensitive to dissonance and I doubt you'll do better with later works.

There's an entire book on A Love Supreme by Ashley Kahn that looks into the context and the recording in detail without too much music theory, if that is useful.

Try Crescent, recorded a few months before ALS. If I had to pick just one Coltrane album, that might be it. It's extraordinarily beautiful, especially the ballad "Wise One."

crescent trained me to appreciate ALS I think

I've been listening to his final album, Expression, and I mostly have to appreciate the textures rather than follow the structure in any more than an elementary way.

that album is frustrating/upsetting bc he was starting to go somewhere new

He could have gone anywhere: electric, "spiritual", maybe even Third Stream compositions.

hendrix collab

As much I'd love to hear it, I reckon the Hendrix collaboration is best left in the imagination.

I doubt Coltrane's and Hendrix's paths would ever have crossed. Coltrane was as pure an acoustic jazz player as ever existed; there's not even a record of him ever playing with an organ trio. Alice didn't even plug in until after his death.

We wanted Hendrix and Coltrane, we got Henry Vestine and Albert Ayler on bagpipes.

I doubt Coltrane's and Hendrix's paths would ever have crossed. Coltrane was as pure an acoustic jazz player as ever existed; there's not even a record of him ever playing with an organ trio. Alice didn't even plug in until after his death.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Friday, July 9, 2021 12:49 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Coltrane sat in with Sonny Sharrock at least once (Sharrock said it felt like a massive industrial fan had been turned on behind him; he turned around, and it was Trane), and experimented with a prototype Varitone electronic saxophone setup shortly before his death:

https://i.imgur.com/xddM9dm.jpeg

we got Henry Vestine and Albert Ayler on bagpipes.

LOL. Sadly not at the same time.

If Miles had died on the same day Coltrane did, he wouldn't have recorded with electric instruments either. We'd be saying, "Miles was too traditional to have gone electric".

At the same time! on "Untitled Duet" on Ayler's Last Album.

it's pointless to speculate on alternate history, but coltrane's last recordings were his most wild and adventurous of all. i don't think it would be likely that he'd ignore electronics. if anything i'd expect him to do something much, much more wild and extreme than anything miles davis did

At the same time! on "Untitled Duet" on Ayler's Last Album.

Oh right, I knew Henry Vestine had played with him but I didn't know Albert was on bagpipes at the time.

While I'm here, Albert Ayler.

I like Waits’ the heart of Saturday night but not really anything else. It’s all I need from him.

^^^ That'd be Rain Dogs for me. I like bits and pieces of other Tom Waits records.

I don't really see how one could like Rain Dogs but not Swordfish or Franks Wild Years. They sound of a piece to me and I can happily listen to those three on shuffle no probs