Bands you've never heard

Actually, it was more like, "Yeah, he's alright, I guess." Maybe that doesn't count.

--Hurting (Hurtingchief@yahoo.com), October 6th, 2004.

Jeez...if Dave Matthews is no good, maybe somebody should start a thread explaining why...

"I never heard them and I don't like them" is the best way to go in these cases.

Group 2: The Black Keys, The Black Dice, The Black Eyes

I have the exact same aversion. Are any of those ill black bands worth checking out?

the NEXT pixies reunion... (dave lovering r.i.p.)

– big star

fleetwood mac
steely dan
g_pd_

third / sisters lovers is great

–fleetwood mac
–steely dan

well, i've heard some fleetwood mac obviously.

We all know about the indie bands who made it good. But what about the ones who didn't quite get there? Record Collector magazine's new Modern Collectables LP explores some of the great lost bands of the late eighties and early nineties, launching with a special reunion gig at Corsica Studios in Elephant & Castle on TODAY featuring four of the bands from the compilation. If you're in London come along.

'Small Town Scenery' celebrates lost indie bands from the 1985-1995 period who gigged hard, recorded demos but never released any music on vinyl. "If you love the Stone Roses, The Las, backwards guitars, My Bloody Valentine and the best song that The Cure never recorded then you should buy this album," says Ian Shirley, who compiled the LP and looks after Record Collector’s ongoing vinyl series.

All of the bands share one thing in common - they never got a record deal even though some got close to the Holy Grail. "We were on the brink of making it and getting a deal with Food back then but they signed Blur instead!" states Damian Jones guitarist with Blindman's Rainbow, "after that it all fell apart!" Scat Apache lost a nailed-on deal when one of the duo decided that he just didn't fancy a career in music after all. Another band called Triple Blind played in front of 17 million people in the background on an episode of EastEnders because The Levellers didn't fancy it! The fee they received paid for the recording of their Stone Roses inspired track 'Stoke'. The other bands on the LP are Final Hour, Moloko (not that one!), Just For Kicks, Maureen and Kevin Paradise Showband, The Colour Mary, Colour Sound, Blue Velvet, Bellis, Pretty Green and Knocking Shop. 'Small Town Scenery' comes in a stunning fine art gatefold sleeve with liner notes that tell the story of all the bands.

Nick Cave. Love the whole idea of him... hardly ever play his albums.
― mike t-diva (mike t-diva), miércoles 6 de octubre de 2004 0:10 (11 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hey, this is me too! I love him in theory but in practice I don't really listen to him ever.

I don't think I've ever heard Daft Punk? Not knowingly, anyway.

OK I've heard "Get Lucky"

Check out Daft Punk's new single "Get Lucky" if you get the chance. Sound of the summer.

aww dang it

the only “Get Lucky” you’ll ever need:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSUIygIaS_k

Frank Ocean
Sufjan Stevens
Ween

I’ve been meaning to check out the former, at least.

Manic Street Preachers, as I was recently reminded

They would be a prime candidate for ‘bands I once heard but that I don’t remember anything substantial about’.

I was once going to start a thread called "Imagine Imagine Dragons" where people like me who have never heard Imagine Dragons could describe what we think they sound like.

I've definitely never heard Imagine Dragons. But that's largely true of any act that just started/became popular in the past decade.

I think I've maybe heard one Animal Collective song. Unless they've done something so ubiquitously popular that it couldn't have failed to seep into my consciousness.

I knew that sounded familiar.

This is the thread where we never listen to Imagine Dragons

I think I may have inadvertently heard ‘Thunder’, which I deeply regret to this day.

I imagine Imagine Dragons as some kind of cross between Cluster and Coldplay, bet they're not though. PS I've never heard them

Wasn't there a top 40 band with Owls in the name a little while back? Hooting Owls, something like that? Oh, wait...Owl City, maybe? Never heard them.

Owls of Ga'Hootie

owl city from owatonna mn, also childhood home of har mar superstar

In terms of older acts I've never heard, I'd wager that a disproportionate number of them are solo dudes whose names have never jumped out at me enough to elicit my musical interest. John Fahey? Burt Jansch? John Prine? They could all be great, I have no idea because I've never heard them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd_UcjMusUA

Bert Jansch is great, in and out of Pentangle. Do wish I'd seen him more than once. He did seem to play Whelans a lot in the mid 90s but I only saw him at the Arts Festival over here playing with Bernard Butler.
Acoustic guitar virtuoso.
John Renbourn is connected and about equally good.

Davy Graham was a contemporary who is also seriously worth checking out.
All of them largely known for partial reinvention of the acoustic guitar in terms of playing.

Peter Walker who used to play for Timothy Leary is also pretty interesting

John prine I meant to get more into,. I have a 2cd compilation of his which is pretty good and was got around the turn of the millenium. Need to check out more of teh early stuff.

& John Fahey I should know by now but don't. Should have seen him towards the end but I think I was barred from teh venue.

I imagine Imagine Dragons as some kind of cross between Cluster and Coldplay, bet they're not though. PS I've never heard them

― my shear modulus is weakening (Matt #2),

Not even close, they sound like a commercial for televised sporting events or "rugged" SUV's or something.
I read a review once that described their sound as "excitement wallpaper", that pretty much nailed it.

I hate Maresn3st because now I want to watch all of Larnell's videos.

Henry Cow

(to my knowledge)

Henry Cow is art that I don't get.
Fred Frith solo is another matter entirely.

I don't think I've heard Guided By Voices.

Re: Imagine Dragons et al, I just assume that every new pop dude band sounds like (the band named) fun. Lots of 'WHOA-OH-OHHHH' ing.

Oh, I thought of a good one earlier: it's entirely possible that I've never heard Slayer.

xp One of those things is actually true, can you guess which?

@Old Lunch I went through a huge deep Led Zeppelin deep dive in jr. HS so I learned about D.Graham/Jantsch via Jimmy Page's plagiarism of both in "White Summer/Black Mountainside", which turned into full appreciation.

i had a minor revelation about gentle giant the other day in as much as i only just realised that the bass player was the same ray shulman that went on to produce the sundays, the sugarcubes, ar kane, cranes, bang bang machine etc. wtf who knew?

― o shit the sheriff (NickB), Monday, September 19, 2022 2:18 PM

whoa mind blown! he even worked on the trashcan sinatras second album! "proggers who went new wave" would be a fun list thread.

and yes! very enthusiastic fist bumps to my fellow comsats and slovs travelers.

First time I came across Shulman's name was indeed thru the first Sugarcubes singles and AR Kane.

I have the first and third Comsat LPs, need to find the second!

big co-sign there-- it's easily their best!

OK I've listened to "Pictures of Matchstick Men" now. It's not bad, nice little psych-pop tune.

Dalek was so much the splendor ov galactic backpacker hip hop---and then they met Faust---my ancient Voice take follows:

October 5th, 2004 4:50 PM Issue 40

Faust vs. Dalek
Derbe Respecte, Alder
Staubgold

Not so long ago, a young Jersey trio of prodigious mad hiphopologists, Dalek,
undertook a European tour. How they suffered! Until rescued by an old German
kombo of legendary mad progologists, Faust. Transcription of (ob)session
follows:
Facedown bass-clown chews through plaster cast appeal and last appeals.
Artillery fire falls like fossils, into single phylum. Spinal columns of beats
stack, driven home, bent high; remixing bricks, carpets, and windows. In some
crumbling rumble's scratch, soundbeast crawls on. Barrel tongues roll years.
Inventory takes itself, junkyard ripples like hide riding a horsefly:
Groovation gathers. A thin blue flame suspends, not unlike the aural aura of organist
Larry Young, but he died long ago. Miles and Jimi never played together, but
he played with them both. It is also not unlike the gas-jet flame Miles's
autobio claimed to be his earliest memory, seen across a field of whitest stove
top. Atmosphere waits out the needle of such a tiny thrill. But its point has
been made. And if the listener's ear-hole cherry should regrow itself, sealing
feeling? Well. CDs last a while. This one will be waiting.

.

anybody who hasn't listened to Faust should go check out Faust Tapes, Faust IV, and So Far right now. or at least "Rainy Day Sunshine Girl."

there about 100 bands my Britpop-loving friends were obsessed with for six weeks each between 1995 and 1997 that I've never heard a second of.

As famous as Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel are, I've never knowingly heard anything by 70s-era Genesis.

first album and Punkt too

I like some of their later stuff too but those albums are all amazing in their own way

I did once hear Beach House but I remember nothing of them and their name prevents me from returning

A band I was in released a 3” CDR of Frank Zappa covers after realizing that none of us had heard Zappa before. We picked the songs with the dumbest lyrics and looked at the tabs and recorded covers without ever listening to the real song. We still have never heard any Zappa and intend to keep it that way.

^People who have figured out how to live

Did any Zappa fans comment on the results?

For some reason I often find myself listening to artist solo careers before hearing the band that made them famous. For example Gene Clarke before The Byrds, Donald Fagen before Steely Dan, Destroyer before The New Pornographers, Mount Eerie before Microphones.

This phenomenon aside, artists I don't remember if I ever listened to but that are still on my radar include Cabaret Voltaire and Scott Walker. Famous ones that I'm not interested in giving a proper album listen include the Stooges / Iggy, R.E.M, Yo la Tengo, Nico, the Kinks, CCR...

xpost
Yeah there were couple friends that told us our covers sucked and which Zappa albums were essential listening, haha.

Just realized some of the connections in xpost Indexed's never-heard toppermost:
Howlin' Wolf is one of the best mostly electric blues artists.
Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band were often tagged as Howlin' Wolf meets Ornette Coleman, way before Ornette plugged in.
Janis Joplin, especially with Big Brother, was what was much later tagged as mutant blues (as was CB), with a yowling vibrato that could shiver the timbers of any melody line without breaking it, like Ornette.
She and he both came from Texas, like
The 13th Floor Elevators, who, legend has it, once asked her to sing for them, when Roky was in Rusk, I think. What might have been!

basically the only Bill Callahan I know is Smog's _Julius Caesar_, which I had on a tape copied from a friend back in the mid-late 90s

i gather his style has changed slightly since then

Never heard a note of anything he's been involved in.

If you've never heard Pavement, I'm not surprised you haven't heard Smog!

The combination of ILM and Spotify means when a thread or comment catches my attention, I go right to Spotify to sample the artists top tracks, then over to Rateyourmusic and/or Allmusic for an album or comp recommendation. I've discovered so many great artists that way!

Famous ones that I'm not interested in giving a proper album listen include the Stooges / Iggy, R.E.M, Yo la Tengo, Nico, the Kinks, CCR...

I'm not fanatic about any of these but they each made a pretty great album or two.

yeah big oof re:the kinks + ccr i'm all for smashing the canon, but jeez not like that!

They all deserve a listen; even saying you're interested in Scott Walker but turning your nose up at Nico seems odd.

Mount Eerie before Microphones

Huh... I don't know anything about this guy

Under both The Microphones and Mount Eerie, "Elverum has been instrumental in shaping the landscape of current indie rock."(54) Isabel Zacharias claimed that Elverum, "to a pocket of Pacific Northwesterners, is more folkloric deity than musician" with his releases under The Microphones propelling him to "indie-god status".(55)

!! Is there a particular one of the "40-plus albums" I should check out by this indie-god?

it's the cliche go-to, but i like the glow pt 2. i found the album mount eerie pretty fun too. haven't listened to that stuff in ages, but i remember it very hit and miss, with the 'hits' making everything worth your time.

They all deserve a listen; even saying you're interested in Scott Walker but turning your nose up at Nico seems odd.

Was Scott Walker an unrepentant loudmouth racist too?

xp Thanks, checking out The Glow Pt. 2 (I see it's one of those good ol' "released on Sept. 11, 2001" albums)

xp granted; I have no idea if that was the reason.

Smog here as well

there are a bunch already mentioned on this thread in the category of “never heard; never want to”. Or maybe for some: “I’ll get around to it”.

One thing a lot seem to have in common is feeling certain they wouldn’t resonate without cultural context and/or after hearing decades of bands influenced by their music.

!! Is there a particular one of the "40-plus albums" I should check out by this indie-god?

― Obviously Five Beliebers (morrisp)

My entry point was "The Microphones in 2020", with the accompanying video.