Bands you've never heard

Thanks for the recs! And, yes (heh heh), I love that Prog shit.

This is mine, still need to weed out some chaff. Ideally I'd like to stay stay around the 1k mark. I don't have NickB levels of storage space!

NickB thanks for the Ray Shulman factoid. Those are some great bands to work with. Makes me want to check out Gentle Giant.

ha, i think what prevented me from making the connection before is that none of them sound anything like gentle giant at all afaict

the band from which they emerged didn't sound much like gentle giant either. though it did teach them the value of a backbeat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfkNn7fvvfI

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.