There are certain bands whose audience seems to be comprised of more musicians than laypeople. I have largely escaped the hype on Black Pumas, but I can’t ignore that just about everyone I’ve seen talk about them plays an instrument. So when I found a copy of Chronicles of a Diamond for $2 at a closeout store, it was an easy gamble.
Few bands have had the run that The Flaming Lips had between The Soft Bulletin and The Terror. They managed to several albums of remarkably consistent quality while also sounding nothing alike, traversing from baroque symphonic rock to technicolor glam pop to dystopian psych freakout. While you could easily credit their entire body of work as one of the most singular and inventive careers in music, that period is one of my favorite runs of album in any discography.
I’ve lost track since. I said to some friends recently that I missed when The Flaming Lips were good. It’s maybe more accurate to say that I’ve been unable to keep up with the deluge of projects well enough to sort the inconsequential experiments from the proper albums. But out of this haze, American Head emerges with a seismic scope that combines the best parts of their disparate threads into one immense and gorgeous whole.
Few musical movements are as weird, wonderful, and influential as Krautrock, a collection of West German bands in the 1970s that pushed the boundaries of what music could actually do to its extremes. The movement had an incredible influence on post punk, progressive rock, new age, shoegaze, and the birth of post rock. The shape of modern, electronic leaning pop music can be traced back to Krautrock, specifically the synthpop pioneers Kraftwerk.
But perhaps no band in Krautrock was more influential than Cologne’s Can, whose sprawling jazz-and-funk jams, improvised vocals, psychedelic exploration, tape editing techniques, and ambient experimentation went on to define Krautrock and influence everyone from David Bowie to Radiohead to Joy Division to the Flaming Lips to Kanye West.
Among their monstrous catalog (they recorded ten albums between 1969 and 1979), most fans and critics agree that the pinnacle of their career was the trilogy of records featuring vocalist Damo Suzuki, which includes the criminally underrated Future Days, the seminal Ege Bamyasi, and this, the eldritch, immense Tago Mago.
While it’s difficult to distill the whole of Melvins’ eclectic essence into a single release, the Trilogy, released between 1999 and 2000, came pretty close to doing so between three records.
While The Maggot saw them indulging their most volcanic heavy metal instincts, The Bootlicker was almost a complete rejection of their metal influences, exploring elements of jazz, funk, and psychedelic. In fact, many refer to The Bootlicker as one of the band’s most “pop-oriented” albums. But given that we’re talking about Melvins, there’s still plenty of wonderful weirdness here.
In the early months of 1994, British band Bark Pscyhosis released their seminal debut album Hex.
Shortly after, music journalist Simon Reynolds wrote a piece reviewing the album, musing on its almost scientific experimentation. This review includes the first recorded instance of the term “post rock.”
I discovered all too recently that the Moody Blues weren’t the sort of schlocky, soulless dad rock that I had expected them to be.
Instead, they were charming pioneers that guided much of psychedelic pop’s shift to progressive rock—much closer to The Zombies and Pink Floyd than the Allman Brothers.
After being captured by the incredible Days of Future Passed and the otherworldly On the Threshold of a Dream, I had been searching for the album between them. Having now acquired it, it’s everything I had hoped for.
There are three words that are almost guaranteed to make me pay attention to a band: “Emma. Ruth. Rundle.”
Outside of her darkly beautiful doom-folk solo material, she also has a number of other projects, such as the post-metal-meets-Pink-Floyd of Red Sparowes, the psychedelic alt-folk of Nocturnes, and this, the dark, grooving, vibey Marriages (featuring Andrew Clinco, a.k.a. Deb Demure of Drab Majesty on drums).
2015’s Salome, to date the only full length from Marriages, combines all of my favorite parts of Rundle’s separate projects into a single work that is as gorgeous as it is crushing.
Sometimes, life feels like a random intersection of others lives. In 1969, there was just over three and a half billion people on the planet. And somehow, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones found one another and formed one of the most important bands in the whole scope of pop music history.
And they released this record, which would become one of the most influential albums of all time.
As a music buff, it’s a weird thing to dig deeper into a band you never gave much attention to, only to discover that they played such a pivotal role in the history of pop music.
And yet, here I am with the Moody Blues, who are often credited as the founders of progressive rock.
And while the previous two Moody records in my collection are undeniably prescient, The Seventh Sojourn finds them fighting to hold their own against a flood of contemporaries.
The hardest part of creating a groundbreaking masterpiece is what you do once it’s changed everything.
The Moody Blues were nobody special before the release of Days Of Future Passed. Then they released an album that transcended pop music and practically invented a whole new musical language (see: prog rock).
And then they continued their career? It’s one thing to carry on after a career-defining record several albums into your catalog. It’s quite another to practically start there. But listening to On The Threshold Of A Dream, their second post-Days offering, it feels like they weren’t too daunted by the task.