Aging rock act on new album: This time we wanted to go back to the basics

^^Page has said in recent years that he and Bonham were discussing a back to basics approach for the obviously never realized first 80s Zep album.

the 1980 europe tour was a "back to basics" tour! (and it was terrible.)

^^Page has said in recent years that he and Bonham were discussing a back to basics approach for the obviously never realized first 80s Zep album.

― ...some of y'all too woke to function (C. Grisso/McCain),

Totally understandable plan after soldiering through a 5th take of the synth soufflé of carouselambra

Let’s not start saying things we’re bound to regret later on.

I feel like Presence kind of fills this whole for LZ with its couple of throwbacks. But I don’t think they would be cheesy enough to announce it as such.

― calstars, Thursday, March 8, 2018 6:09 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Presence is the way it is because the band was nearly dead, exhausted from drugs and death and injury, Plant literally singing from a wheelchair, Page smacked out of his gourd. It's also an intensely weird and gloomy album and hard for me to say "back to basics" a) because what the hell is basics for such an omnivorous band and b) it literally starts with perhaps the apex of their Wagnerian epics "Achilles Last Stand"

let's not forget "this is my most personal record yet"

And the "maturity album" (which might be a bit weird for an ageing rock act...)

The maturity back to basics most personal album is a narrow category.

feel like Weezer are always half assing this look now with the "White Album" "Green Album" "Black Album" always hearkening back to their one good record that everyone liked

Sea Change was the first album to come to mind

"...we felt we really trusted our instincts with this one"
" (noted instrumentalist) wasn't into overdubs"
"...many of the songs were first or second takes...there's something honest in that approach"

Also, wondering about artists with a very strong and long back catalog but who NEVER did the "back to basic" move

Ryuichi Sakamoto perhaps. I don't think Todd Rundgren ever really made a "return to 70s" record though I think maybe Liars could qualify. XTC always moved forward - Wasp Star is kind of an exception here but that one doesn't really sound like any XTC album before it either. Autechre straight up said they would never ever do this, mainly because it's impossible given the way they work

yeah, I thought about the Basement Tapes but how was it wasn't really a return to bacics, was it ? It wasn't Dylan going back to his folk songs alone with his guitar...

― AlXTC from Paris

as good an explanation as any for why the "basement tapes" don't suck but every single "back to basics" record it inspired does

Helps when you record with an act that is essentially Rock Band: 1857

whatever their flaws I find it tough to imagine Radiohead claiming a new record as a "back to basics" type deal

helps too that basement tapes was a bunch of stoners having fun without the intention to release that stuff

Oh that's definitely going to happen one day. (xp)

the basement tapes are a bunch of funky, cryptic little goofs, dylan going back to the "basics" would have been serious folk songs

They Might be Giants seem to do this a lot. I feel like Flood is mentioned in every press release they do - ah, we're back to that studio, we're using the same producer, we're writing the songs the same way where it's just the two of us, etc. etc. It's a bit odd since their songwriting never really changed much but kinda shrewd I guess, you gotta make a living. In fact I suspect a lot of this is just that, stuff you just say because you're anxious that you don't sell the amount of units that you used to. I wonder how many of these albums actually do sound like something they would have put out 20-30 years ago. Maybe the last few OMD records.

Yeah and that Stipe quote about Monster - they weren't claiming it was like Murmur or anything. I don't think any REM album really is a "back-to-basics" move like that (not that I listened to the last couple)

Also, wondering about artists with a very strong and long back catalog but who NEVER did the "back to basic" move

Leonard Cohen never went back, other than going from sketch-like songs/production on Ten New Songs and Dear Heather into more fully realized ones once he returned to touring.

Ryuichi Sakamoto perhaps

He literally has an album called "Back To The Basics".

I liked the recent acoustic Robyn Hitchcock album that was designed to be in the style of the 60’s folk albums he grew up listening to, but not necessarily like anything he’d made earlier.

Speaking of the Fabs on the roof, the actual set is so weird innit? Get Back FOUR times, nothing off the first 10 albums..

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-beatles/1969/apple-corps-rooftop-london-england-53d6f3ad.html

Sea Change was the first album to come to mind

which previous era of heavily-orchestrated songs recorded in a big expensive studio was Beck reverting to here

He literally has an album called "Back To The Basics".

that just refers to the fact that it's solo piano, part of his stripped-back modern classical phase. it's not really a "return" to anything in his catalogue

Yes, but a lot of these aren't returns to anything - how many of these bands have ever recorded anything as four guys in a room with no overdubs blah blah blah?

Jarvis Cocker's 'Further Complications' is one of these, annoyingly so as he'd never made that sort of music before. IMO it's the worst album he's made, solo or in a group.

Leonard Cohen never went back, other than going from sketch-like songs/production on Ten New Songs and Dear Heather into more fully realized ones once he returned to touring.

Recent Songs was intentionally a back-to-basics acoustic record after the full Spector sound of Ladies' Man.

Sea Change was the first album to come to mind

which previous era of heavily-orchestrated songs recorded in a big expensive studio was Beck reverting to here

I guess I meant the pivot to "personal" material and a turn away from his shtickier side but maybe not the best example

Mgmt might qualify for this. By the bands own admission the new songs are meant to make people dance again, more in line with their earlier hits. But then not sure how much the album is back to basics

There’s a difference to me between returning to the style that people liked more and going ‘back to basics’ which is a much more authenticity based move

back to basics shd only be used when ppl go back to, like, gregorian chants.

Or do they come back to computers after going "natural" ?
Maybe Depeche Mode would be an example of this

surely the electronic version of this is : 'we dug out all our old analogue equipment/modular synths for this album ... '

Not following a "natural" release, but... 'All You Need is Now' certainly makes this move, down to making sure there's the "Girls on Film" one, "The Chauffeur" one, etc... a wholly unnecessary self-flagellation for the fan uproar over 'Red Carpet Massacre'.

Dylan's "back to basics" was incontrovertibly the World Gone Wrong / Good As I Been to You double - obscure folk standards, Dylan + guitar, recorded in his garage. Laid the foundation for Time Out of Mind - "Love and Theft" - Modern Times so, time well spent.

Time wasted actually listening to the fuckers though.

I love them

yah me too

i think it's mostly marketing. on the contrary i can't think of many albums who were promoting as being daring and experimental. the music industry is inherently conservative (hence reliance on the btb trope)

Iirc some Radiohead members said this twice. Once when recording Hail to the Thief (something about recording it in California in a few days and releasing it without overthinking it like their past records) and another for In Rainbows (something about going back to a rock band dynamic)... cant find the quotes though.

Yorke told MTV: "The last two studio records were a real headache. We had spent so much time looking at computers and grids, we were like, that's enough, we can't do that any more. This time, we used computers, but they had to actually be in the room with all the gear. So everything was about performance, like staging a play."[12]

The Guess Who in 1972: they weren't really an aging rock act, but Bachman was gone and their best stuff was behind them. Rockin' from that year definitely fits this thread. The Guess Who had had pop hits, had a social-concern hit ("Share the Land"), and had dabbled in psychedelia (sometimes brilliantly--"No Sugar Tonight"--sometimes laughably) by that point, and clearly they wanted to align themselves with that Sha Na Na/Elvis and Chuck Berry on the radio again/American Graffiti/Richard Nader '50s revival thing happening. The album had a doo-wop style medley that included "Sea of Love," other throwback-sounding stuff, and "Heartbroken Bopper" (which I heard on the radio today), seemingly about a John Milner-type high school burnout. (Also more social concern with "Guns, Guns, Guns" and "Big Smoke Factory.") I'd love to dig up interviews from that time; I guarantee Cummings would have been piling on the back-to-basics platitudes in every one of them. I think Rockin' was probably the second LP I ever walked up to the cash and bought myself, after the Partridge Family's debut.

"The Rockin' album…best GW time of my entire GW time…we started getting drum sounds about noon on Monday, and we turned in the finished, mixed masters about 3 p.m. on Friday."

who the hell thinks "No Sugar Tonight" is psychedelic???

Me! Not so much sound--I mean, it doesn't exactly swirl--but certainly subject matter...it's not actually about coffee, I don't think. And it does rely heavily on atmospherics. It gets its own page on the Trippy Me website--I mean, how much more psychedelic does it get than that? Call it a Western-Canadian prairie-head version of psychedelia, if you will. We do things differently up here.

hmmm, i guess things are more psychedelic here 400 miles south of Winnepeg, we had Crow and The Litter back then

Even Bruce Gilbert, interview from 1999:

I thought it would be an interesting and amusing thing to see if Wire were actually put in a position where we would have to play for a quarter of an hour or something. What would it do now? The curiosity factor is still there. I think for everybody, but, apparently, not for Robert. I don't play guitar anymore, but I still have a curiosity about what would happen if the four of us got back to basics. What would happen if four people got into a room with limited means--limited musical ability--what would they do?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=bOELnR2vb-8

15 seconds in

haha, love it

Nice find, kurt.

http://www.vulture.com/2018/10/st-vincent-on-masseducation.html

One of the great things about being such good friends with somebody is we didn’t talk about what we were gonna do. Thomas is a genius, so it’s not like he had to sit and practice the songs. He would listen to it one time and then go, “Okay, I got it.” He was at the grand piano in a big room, and I was on a couch, kind of sitting and kind of in a fetal position, in front of a mic. No headphones, just two people in a room discovering the songs. None of my attention was bifurcated on a guitar part. I got to live in the moment. Everything that I’d written and all the stories were right there in my chest.