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

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/devendra-banhart-gets-back-to-basics-on-new-album-121546/

― President Keyes, Friday, November 16, 2018 12:01 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Back to the basics of never writing a single memorable song.

and being a creepazoid

"return to form" is distinct from "back to the basics" anyway - the former can just mean they're back to being good again, while the latter taps into the whole "four people in a room" trope.

exactly

and I stand corrected re: The Next Day, I don't remember any of that in the press release. Reviews seemed tepid at best.

I know this isn’t the thread for it, but allow me to tip my cap to another fun (and frequent) cliché:

“This group is an open forum for anything,” the Men’s Nick Chiericozzi told Pitchfork in a 2012 interview. At the time, the singer/guitarist was speaking to the stylistic eclecticism of the band’s third album, Open Your Heart, the record where the Brooklyn quartet first embraced the idea that the most punk thing a punk band can do is not sound “punk.” They had added a permanent lap steel player; before long, they were making records in the woods and hiring horn sections.

^^That reminds me of something Corin Tucker (iirc) said about Sleater-Kinney embracing Classic Rock because she got bored listening to Modern Rock radio during commutes, so she switched to the Classic Rock station and started hearing all these Zep, Rush, Yes etc. songs that were long and had interesting time signatures that "...felt more Punk Rock [in their daring]...than the new stuff so-called 'Modern/Punk' station."

The Kooks (yes, they still exist) have a new album out.

https://musicfeeds.com.au/features/the-kooks/

"... I think this album, it was just time to go back to four guys in a room, just loving playing music together. I think you can hear that."

Embrace had a new album out, I imagine most of you were unaware of that though.

http://theseventhhex.com/post/169341912015/embrace-interview

"The studio dynamic was much more relaxed this time around and we went back to a much simpler palette."

"Completing this album felt like quintessential Embrace really - it’s just five guys in a room doing what they love."

What is the Sleater Kinney album that sounds most like Zep/Yes/Rush?

The Woods

Though that's a bit overblown, SK always sounds like themselves

I like SK just fine, but that’s like asking which of an art major’s sketches looks most like Rembrandt etc

Oh, I do have a copy of The Woods somewhere. It was OK.

Bob Mould on the new Interpol:

When I heard “The Rover,” which they led with, I was knocked out by it. It just sounded perfect. It brought back all of the urgency. They’re sort of a precise band, but I like when it frays a little bit. The record had a lot of precision but a lot of frayed edges, too. I was like, “Yes, this sounds like a band, in a room, making a record.”

From U2: A Musical Biography
David Kootnikoff · 2010

Larry wanted to return to basics and go back to working with just four guys in a room.

I like to imagine that's from the chapter on the 'Pop' album. "Shut up Larry, we've told you we're not doing that"

Sadly not. It's from the post-Pop 'All That You Can't Leave Behind' chapter entitled A Sort of Homecoming

The Kooks (yes, they still exist)

For the new record, we wanted to go back to the sound of just four guys in a room.

Not playing instruments or singing; we really got back to the bare guts of that raw sound we had before we started a band. Dave was mostly doing Words With Friends and Buddy was just zonked on the sofa, those are his snores on "Gift of Pride" and "Darken the Light."

I can't remember what Andy was doing. Shoot, you know ... he might have left the room actually before we started recording. It was a great session though, and it was incredible to get to work with a producer like Tony.

the fifth Beatle was the Room

a band, in a room, making a record
^^the heart, the soul

when you think about it, all records are made in rooms

what if it's a live album recorded at an outdoor venue?

space is a room

the place, iirc

all records are made in rooms, but not all records are made by four guys in a room, together, learning how to be a band again

As I said it upthread, most of these guys have never recorded that way - well, at least not as a professional band - so they're not really going back to anything.

someone mentioned Stipe but i was gonna say there's at least a couple R.E.M. records that qualify for this, right?

― alpine static, Wednesday, March 7, 2018 9:24 PM (nine months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Accelerate" was supposed to be REM's "back to basics, four guys in a room" record, wasn't it?

And it's easily the worst sounding album they ever put out. Even if I had any desire to listen to it, I don't think I could get more than two songs in as the bad mastering is torture.

Seems to me the issue with the "four guys in a room" type records is, it rarely seems like "four guys in a practice pad writing like their lives depending on it" and more often like "four guys in a room who want to do like two takes maximum because I'll punch a puppy if I have to look at your stupid face for one minute longer than I have to"

Which I believe was the original title of St Anger

https://thequietus.com/articles/25902-fennesz-agroa-stripped-back-album

Fennesz' new album, due in March, sees him go back to basics.

"It was all done on headphones, which was rather a frustrating situation at first but later on it felt like back in the day when I produced my first records in the 1990s," Fennesz says. "I used very minimal equipment. I didn't even have the courage to plug in all the gear and instruments which were at my disposal. I just used what was to hand."

He could have used the sample trigger software a friend developed in the 90s, called Back To Basics

http://www.wizardmaster.com/bludgeonsoft/btb/index.html

Former bedroom artists whose greatest successes are in the past trying to move back into shitty apartments where it all started

Fennesz' last album was one of his best though

https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/3125

And then there's Rainbow Mirror, the seven-LP, three-hour Prurient album that came out in December, which he said is more about the process of recording. [...] It was inspired by the very first Prurient show, back in Madison, Wisconsin in 1997, when Fernow performed as part of a trio in a public park, siphoning electricity from the city.

"Rainbow Mirror is a concept piece, like, an environmental piece," he said. "The idea of a three-man station, where each guy has their own setup that's crude and primitive. Rudimentary electronics that sounded familiar, but put together in an uncomfortable way. I wanted to get back to a group idea, but with actual restraint, and limitations, in a way that has maybe come from techno. I wanted to reference the very first show and doing something live as a unit. The way it's put together in this unsequenced, raw, live uncontrolled way [...] When I did this show 20 years ago, what made it good at all was that it was on the verge of failing.

fuckin A+ getting Prurient itt

Just three guys in a park, jamming with our trusty ol' synths, using a hacked streetlamp for juice. Just like the early Delta Bluesmen did, maaan.

https://pitchfork.com/news/the-black-keys-announce-new-album-lets-rock-share-new-song-eagle-birds-listen/

“When we’re together we are the Black Keys, that’s where that real magic is, and always has been since we were 16,” Auerbach said in statement. “The record is like a homage to electric guitar,” Carney added. “We took a simple approach and trimmed all the fat like we used to.”

bonus, the album is called "Let's Rock"

bonus, the album is called "Let's Rock"

ha ha ha ah ah

lol thought of this thread when I saw blurb about this album

i wonder if he actually said "a homage"

like out loud

and if he said "oh-Mage" or "Home-edge"

oh-Mage is not back-to-basics enough

wow Let's Rock 10/10

speaking of pitchfork

Sunn O)))
Life Metal

BEST NEW MUSIC
BY: GRAYSON HAVER CURRINEXPERIMENTALMETAL

The titanic drone metal duo returns with Steve Albini for an enormous, meticulous, back-to-basics album that shows just how compelling those basics can be.

oh wait, this thread is for artists saying that, not critics. my bad

I saw this black keys thing coming like 15 years ago

I'll never forget seeing them open for somebody in 2002 and thinking "well these guys will obviously never get anywhere with this dated BluesHammer schtick. It's 2002 already!"

I shall now get back to my basics by saying Great thread! Hadn't seen it before!
Get back was getting back to being clever cheeky monkey 60s Beatles with a taste for Southern sounds, including lifting from Chuck Berry=="Here come ol Flattop, he come groovin' up slowly," a direct rip, but then they put their own thing with it of course, also got Billy Preston or whomever playing electric piano, which wasn't touch-sensitive back in the day, so wisely not getting *that* back.
Dylan's "back to basics" in terms of sheer regression to an imaginary (in-terms of-Boy-Dylan-Folk-to-Punk-Laureate) past was Self Portrait, which he says in Chronicles was a fuck-you to the people who expected him to top himself with yet another Godhead masterpiece every time, and always did seem like escapism (understandable enough in the charred dawn of the 70s). But yeah Good As I Been and WGW were back to basics in a good way (it can be good).
Most of Eric Clapton's solo career is or comes from getting back to the basics, via three things, according to him: Music From Big Pink, new boss Rolling Stone crowning him "master of the blues cliché," when he stopped playing, Bruce and Baker kept going (this was an arena show). So he ditched Cream, as mentioned above hitched a ride with Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, as did George Harrison, Duane Allman, and maybe all of pre-Derek and the Dominos, who were not so very basic except very loud and intense and EC sacrificing his poor voice ("The doctors tell me I was born with a undersized diaphragm") to Harrison's perfidious or perhaps wised-up wife on the altar of Sincerity. After that, all roots, except when he recorded with guitar synthesizer and a few other brief detours. Even was quoted by Creem I think as saying he wished he'd never left Mayall's Bluesbreakers and started Cream.
Blind Faith was more basics than intended in that the label got greedy or maybe afraid of back to Baker's antics or EC's heroin etc. and put it out before they'd quite finished it, which adds to the relatively spare-room/halfway house atmosphere. Good of its kind, if you can stand it.