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

Yeah, although that wasn't just going back to roots, it was what you could do with them: a fairly slow set, kicking off with a dirge ffs---but so intense in its way, in layers and segments of genres, subgenres, within as well as among tracks---psychedelic in its way, expanding and contracting thee lines around things (I don't love it, but I think I understand it).

Understand its influence, for better and worse.

Perhaps, though "square one" for RHCP wasn't those particular four guys (and he doesn't say "THESE four guys in a room together..."). This ties into it being such a weirdly vacant-feeling quote, as if it's somehow missing every fourth or fifth word.

not unlike Kiedis’ lyrics amirite

and while it pains me still, this is at least the third time that Frusciante has joined the band, and he pursues decidedly non-Chi-Pep musical interests during his interregna, so it plausibly does take the 3.1 musicians learning from scratch how to play together each time.

(None of this lessens the quote’s qualifications for starring itt obv!)

stop taking acid.

Also I really do think it's vanishingly rare for a huge band to track drums/bass/guitar live together these days (as RHCP does) , rather than layering them.

Related--not sure where else to put it...Saw a trailer for this tonight before the Neil Young film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YRb0qY5eKc

The whole back-to-basics thing started in '68, but this really accelerated it.

Geddy Lee was there and taking notes: "One day, God willing, I will honor Bo Diddley with 'The Temples of Syrinx.'"

getting back to basics is cool but i wanna get back to getting it together in the country

"One day, God willing, I will honor Bo Diddley with 'The Temples of Syrinx.'"

lol, but also…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDlK52SvJVY

WTF about the voice of Geddy Lee?

That's amazing, Tarfumes, had no idea--he really was taking notes. Hard to unhear that voice, but they do pretty well otherwise.

Mr. Bungle: https://thefoxoakland.com/events/mr-bungle-230523

Even in their last tours of the millennium they played songs from their very first demo, the self-produced, amateurish gem The Raging Wrath of The Easter Bunny (1986). The pull of returning to full-on metal was too strong to avoid and the idea arose to re-record that primal demo giving the music the much needed presentation and precision it deserved. Spruance, Patton & Dunn decided to go to the source, The Big Four of course, and hand-pick the two guys who could help them realize this body of work with the utmost brutality.

...

Because this was a musical homecoming of 35 years, the relearning and re-recording felt brand new and was able to be enjoyed objectively, not to mention reinvigorated by the likes of the masters Ian and Lombardo. Mr. Bungle maintained the rawness and severity of the original demo without too much embellishment preferring to let the music speak for itself in all of its teenage-angst glory.

actually turned out pretty well in their case

just as a 'hey it's the pandemic let's revisit our past' one off

This new Radiohead side project The Smile feels very aging rock act getting back to basics

Just four computers in a room

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]
― new noise, Saturday, March 10, 2018

Thing about the Mr Bungle revamp is that it was pre-pandemic — I caught the SF show of their first burst of dates about a month before lockdown.

i knew they'd played it live but i figured they hadn't planned to actually, like, record it until the world shut down...buuut my memory may be wrong on that one.

Art-pop department:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/apr/11/patrick-wolf-addiction-bankruptcy-hit-and-run-night-safari

This confidence in telling the story of his decade of disaster and recovery came from Wolf’s “thrill” at working alone with the same instruments he used on his first two albums. “I reconnected with my craft – it’s how I started when I was 14, just with my four-track,” he says.

"“But Here We Are” has a back-to-basics immediacy and intensity that was missing from the last few Foo Fighters albums. Though not terribly surprising for a group nearing its 30th year, they have sometimes seemed in the past decade to be grasping for gimmicks and overarching concepts to differentiate one record from the next: “Medicine at Midnight,” from 2021, was a forgettable foray into ’80s-inspired dance rock and funk grooves. (As a companion piece, they also released a cheeky collection of Bee Gees covers.) The songwriting on “Sonic Highways,” from 2014, was a bit stronger, but that album still felt yoked a little too tightly to its concept — recording each song in a different city and paying tribute to its musical history, as explored on the Grohl-directed documentary series of the same name."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/arts/music/foo-fighters-but-here-we-are-review.html

"We decided to make an album where none of us was ever in the room."

Be Here We Are Now

Entertain us

Then they brought in Antonoff, whose band, Bleachers, came up around the same time as the 1975, but who is better known for producing Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, and seemingly every other big name in pop. The safest thing for the 1975 to do, Antonoff said, would be to venture further into the esoteric; the surprising and brave thing would be to make a really good, straightforward album, as simple and as complex as a perfect slice of pizza. The band, with Antonoff, set rules in the studio. Everyone would play everything together, in real time, as much as possible. Healy wouldn’t do any of the backing vocals, so that the album would be replicable live. Everyone would play analog instruments, and, ideally, ones they didn’t normally play.

"Everyone switches up instruments" is another established idea, but different from the rest of what's listed – surprised to see that thrown in at the end. I wish bands wouldn't try to make albums "replicable live"... why not give your fans a different experience.

bands changing instruments is new jersey adjacent

Have there been any ironic or "meta" takes on the "back to basics" album... like done with a wink, and maybe a good deal of studio trickery to simulate/"comment on" the live-in-a-room approach?

I guess Royal Trux's Accelerator is one version of that concept... maybe also the last Fiery Furnaces album, in a way.

Cruising With Ruben & The Jets?

why not give your fans a different experience.

Alex Lifeson said he was disappointed when he saw Cream live because the solos weren’t the same ones from the records. This accounts for why Rush always (and inexplicably, imo) strove to make their shows sound as much like their recordings as possible. There were minor exceptions here and there, but that never made sense to me.

Sheesh, just put a boombox on the stage and play the record

co-signing this. never understood why anyone would want to see the band just recreate the record. working in music shops, it's a comment i heard a lot. definition of tedious imo.

On a bit of a Floyd revisit, this is the album that’s really doing it for me. Partly because it’s the one I listened to least during my adolescent Floyd phase so it sounds freshest to me of all their post-Meddle stuff. Gilmour’s playing is really great throughout, and it also has a stripped-down four-guys-in-a-room vibe compared to the grandiosity of most of the ‘70s albums.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Sunday, 4 June 2023 13:11 (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ironic, because didn't Gilmour play a lot of the bass on the records due to Waters' ineptitude on his chosen instrument?

He did but, like, Gilmour was one of the the guys in the room. Animals sounds much more lean than what surrounds it in their discography is all I mean. I’m sure that was intentional. (Famously feeling the impact of punk etc.)

I'm sure Waters could have played those basslines if he'd been bothered, he'd kind of lost interest in playing bass by that time is what I suspect.

lol this just made me reread the production process for The Wall and holy cow. Talk about the opposite of “four guys in a room.” Often not on the same continent.

As Hideous Lump pointed out on the Pink Floyd Animals thread, not only could Roger play the basslines on that album, but he’d already been playing those lines for years — much of that material had been in the band’s live sets since 1974. I’d be curious to know the source of “Gilmour actually played bass on those albums.”

Per the wiki page drawn from published credits, Waters only played bass on “Dogs.”

There was a story about Gilmour's amusement at Waters winning 'bassist of the year' in the NME poll one year - "That should have been me!"

The sound of four guys suing each other in a courtroom

Lol

One side-note about the recording of Animals was that the band had just finished building Britannia Row studio and basically started recording as soon as the paint was dry. IIRC from Nick Mason's book, even though two tracks were already familiar - the actual recording was somewhat of a techinical clusterfuck. Animals took just under a year to record, is that Floyd's idea of back to basics?

They recorded it all in one place and the only credited players are the band members (apart from, weirdly, a guitar part on one song only available on the 8-track release?), so by Floyd standards, yeah.

Gilmour played the same solo for 50 years and was hailed as a genius. Which is, I suppose, a form of genius.

Oh is this the Pink Floyd opinions channel? Excuse me

Pink Floyd certainly qualifies as an aging rock act, although they really didn't have any basics to get back to.

If only we had a thread for them

I don't think this is the thread for purists.

xxp Just four guys, and a set of Elektro-Mess-Technik plate reverberators, in a tiled echo chamber…