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

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.

very nice

i wonder if, after the singularity, various AI bots will eventually come around to a "back to the basics" approach as well.

Just four bots in a chatroom, jamming.

"We tried to take it back to when music was real: when the robots were imitating humans, not just other robots."

that's more or less the concept of the latest 0PN record

after the singularity robot musicians will be cycling from three-chord basics to sprawling prog epics hundreds of thousands of times a second, it's gonna be lit

Categorizing that St. Vincent quote as merely a “back to basics” thing seems to diminish what she’s actually talking about.

Rob Halford:
https://www.bandwagon.asia/articles/judas-priest-s-rob-halford-on-the-band-s-legacy-babymetal-returning-to-singapore-and-more

Over the course of the past five decades, has the band changed the way it works in the studio?

The one really unusual, well, not really unusual... but it's definitely something we had not done in a long time was actually being in the studio together, playing as a band. As time went on, technology has made it such that you can build a record piece by piece and layer one thing over another so you don't need the entire band there for a session. But we decided to go back to our roots and earlier style of recording and did it as one unit.

haha now that one's otm!

xp I think it's all just good fun?

morrisp yeah it’s not a pure example of this phenomenon I just giggled at the appearance of “x people in a room”

I really want to go back to the sound this thread had when it first started, the roots of the idea, just strip away all the extra stuff, I don't want to say raw, but there was an immediacy in those first couple months and we've gotten away from that, I think it'd be cool to see what could happen if we

Just 4 Ilxors in a room jamming

lol

Yeah sorry if I sounded bitchy

No worries! I'm listening to MassEducation right now tbh

Just a hint of back to basics and being a real band from both John and Ringo at the very start of this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG85fF-CZBI

haha, indeed! although Let it Be is their real back to basics album...

yup. "no overdubs, maaan".

was Let it Be the first "back to basics" rock album?

maybe Dylan got there first

There had been 'back-to-basics' albums before that but maybe not with the 'four guys in a room' narrative - except The Band s/t was kind of 'four guys in a room'.

I always think of the Beach Boys' "Wild Honey" as being an early back-to-basics album ... but it's the Beach Boys so it's debatable how much conceptualizing was actually involved.

The Band was more a back-to-basics group from the get-go. It's not like they had much to come back from after the first album

Yes, but the 2nd album was, you know what, why don't us four five guys just get together and play and record in Sammy Davis Jr's poolhouse a room?

sure. I think this is a philosophical difference though. Like, to me, for a band to have one of these moments they have to have slipped away from their original sound into big production/artiness or whatever and then make the "back to basics" move.

Oh yes, I agree, but it could be deciding not to record in expensive studios and instead to woodshed in Sammy Davis Jr's woodshed, er, poolhouse, for instance - and I think that definitely influenced other musicians and bands at the time.

John Wesley Hardin, Let it Be, Beggars Banquet

wrt John Wesley Harding, there was no overdubbing on any Dylan record until 1969 (or so he claims) because, by his own admission, he didn't know what it was or that it was possible. He'd listen to something like Sgt. Pepper and assume it was all cut live, because that's just how records are made.