Listmeister Listens to Bands He Never Heard Of Before

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[Listmeister]

7. Coheed and Cambria
from thisispreston's Best Of All Time


Year Of The Black Rainbow by Coheed and Cambria

BEA Ranks: 98th of 2010; 560th of 2000s; 4,506th of All Time
Ranked highest by Moonpeople, 4th of All Time

Really amazing heavy-metal guitar work. My favorite thing about metal is the guitar work, and whoever is playing the guitar here --

Wait a minute. Let me do a little bit of research. Coheed and Cambria's guitars are Claudio Sanchez and Travis Stever. Sanchez wrote much of the music. He and Stever go back and forth being leads on guitars, sometimes, and here's where it gets amazing, they duel, approaching lethal notes-per-second ratios.

Even when they get balladic (like on 'Far'), the guitars and the vocals harmonize really well. The vocal range is dead-on with the notes of the guitars they are playing. Whether by design or accident, it blends into an awesome sound.

Listmeister Ranks: 31st of 2010s; 6th of 2010, out of 22.
TILLY AWARD!


I did something for this album that I hadn't done before in this "Bands I've Never Heard Of Before" quest. I went back and listened to another Coheed and Cambria album after the first one.



In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3 b...nd Cambria

I found this one also very enjoyable, but it relies more on piano than guitars. Also very good.

Listmeister ranks: 80th of 2000s; 10th of 2003, out of 16.

[Listmeister]

8. Between the Buried and Me
from Moonpeople's Best of All Time


The Great Misdirect by Between The Buried And Me

BEA Ranks 144th of 2009; 1,402nd of 2000s; 5,748th of All Time
Ranked highest by: Moonpeople, Best Of All Time

'Mirrors' starts out with some mellow, vaguely Tex-Mex-y guitars, then it explodes into full bore, choking-throated Heavy Metal with Obfuscation, the second track. This is followed by 'Disease, Injury, Madness', which starts out pleasantly mellow, and then the guitars come in, and then the choking throat again. (I'm sure there's a more technical term than 'choking-throat vocals', please enlighten me if you know what it is) Anyway, the album goes on like that.

'Desert of Song' lacks the closed-throat vocals, and is a really moving song.

It is hard for me to think of the choking-throat vocals as singing, at least by the narrowest definition of the word 'singing'. The vocalist (Tommy Giles Rogers) doesn't seem to be varying the pitch to produce a tune (which is what singing is). I know it's hard to do that within the closed-throat singing style of the genre, but other bands have managed it. On the other hand, the music produced by the rest of the band is wonderful, energized and varied. I could rank this album very highly if I could get past the vocals.

Listmeister ranks: 17th of 2009, out of 22

[Listmeister]

9. Minutemen
From BEA's Best of 1980s


Double Nickels On The Dime by Minutemen

BEA Ranks: 8th of 1984; 44th of 1980s; 346th of All Time
Ranked highest by: mfish15 and etch1017, Best Of All Time

From the very first sounds, a starting car, serious bass notes, pounding drums, you know you are in for a ride. This is a dense album, with 45 tracks in 74 minutes. (Average song length of 1:39). You have a punk intensity here, you also have some jazz mellowness on tracks like 'Cohesion' and 'It's Expected I'm Gone'.

From song to song, you don't know what you're going to get. A fun rock and roll piece (Corona, Dr. Wu)? A punk complaint about something (West Germany)? A Jazz Fusion piece (No Exchange, Love Dance, Cohesion), or something completely weird (You Need the Glory).

Actually, most of the songs fall under the Punk Complaint heading, or else they will start as one of the other things and turn into a Punk Complaint. Any individual one may be a valid concern, a point that needs to be made, but it seems that with the huge number of songs (and therefore, complaints), it gets wearying after awhile. The album seems a lot longer than it actually is. The ride turns out to be a road trip to Cleveland stuck in a car with a political activist, who, luckily, occasionally shuts up and lets you listen to the music.

Listmeister Ranks: 12th from 1984, out of 16.

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[Listmeister]

10. Pescado Rabioso
From BEA's Best of 1970s


Artaud by Pescado Rabioso

BEA Ranks: 21st of 1973; 173rd of 1970s; 727th of All Time
Ranked highest by juandelprado and Silverfake, Best Of All Time

Pescado Rabioso is an Argentinian rock band. Like a lot of pop music in the early 70's, you can hear a lot of Beatles influence going on. However, the sound is more guitar-heavy, and in fact, some of the best acoustic guitar I've ever heard.

The vocals are a soft baritone, pleasant to listen to. I don't know nearly enough Spanish to be able to follow what they're singing about. Overall the sound is fairly mellow.

Listmeister ranks: 22nd of 1973, out of 30.

[Listmeister]

11. Monks
From BEA's Best of the 1960s


Black Monk Time by Monks

BEA Ranks: 10th of 1966; 97th of 1960s; 981st of All Time.
Ranked highest by antisecurity, 6th of All Time

TILLY AWARD

This was a delightful discovery. The Monks (the The is optional) were an American rock band that came together in Germany, that is, the members of it were Americans, G.I.'s stationed in Germany.

This is not The Monkees. Or Thelonius Monk. Or Alvin and the Chipmunks, for that matter. It sounds like music from a parallel universe in which Punk happened 15 years earlier, started in 1962ish and had five years of Punk Music scene in which the music had time to evolve a little bit. The attitude is Punk, the music is on the border between Garage Band and Psychedelic.

That "five years of Punk music evolving" remark would place this right at the same spot in the timeline as The Minutemen, reviewed earlier. [WARNING: Both of these are bands who, until a week ago, I had never heard of, and my speculation about their genre is bound to be 80% wrong]. The difference is, the vocals do not conflict with the music. It's not like you want them to shut up so you can hear the music, their vocals are an important part of the music, which, by itself, is just garage-band plonking. There is just as much complaining here (well, maybe not as much -- the Minutemen were trying for a complaints-per-album-side record or something), but it never gets in the way of the sound.

I've never heard a 60s album that was so blatantly opposed to the Vietnam War. This came out in March, 1966, when Ballad of the Green Berets was number one for five weeks, so protesting Vietnam was a ballsy thing to do. It cost them. They recorded a couple of singles after that, but Black Monk Time was the only LP that ever saw the light of day.

Listmeister ranks: 13th of 1966 out of 18; 102nd of 1960s.

[Listmeister]

12. Steinski
From antisecurity's Best Of All Time


What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retros...y Steinski

BEA Ranks: 283rd of 2008; 2,489th of 2000s; 9,859th of All Time
Ranked highest by antisecurity: Best Of All Time

"Sampling" is the process by which bits of sound are pulled from other peoples records, news reports, TV shows, movies, whatever, and incorporated into your own record. This is what Steinski does.

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[Listmeister]

13. Father John Misty
From BEA's Best of 2017


Pure Comedy by Father John Misty

BEA Ranks: 10th of 2017; 469th of 2010s; 3963rd of All Time
Ranked highest by: Onlyhalfretarded, Best of 2010s

It's hard for me to put recent artists into historical context. Father John Misty sounds to my ears like a throwback to the singer-songwriter style of 1970ish-1985ish. Of course the "Guy with a musical instrument" genre has always been around, and probably always will.

"Another white guy in 2017 who takes himself so goddamn seriously" is a line from "Leaving LA". He knows he's being a bit pretentious, but he has a sense of humor about it. The truth is, he is a really good songwriter, and a really good singer. When he has something to say, he can craft a really good song about it. The humor in the lyrics is laughing gas, because he knows this is going to hurt a little bit. And then, what he has to say is, essentially, "Believing in anything is stupid." Including that thing YOU believe in. I don't have a lot of patience for this sort of nihilism.