GY!BE's album 'Yanqui U.X.O.' is one of the greatest instrumental records of all-time

Besides hip-hop, GYBE was the only music me and my stoner surfer brother-in-law could definitively agree on.

matt 43l93507, this had better live up to your declarations! ;-)

eliane radigue - trilogie de la mort

jean-francois laporte - mantra

henry jacobs vortex = electronic kabuki mambo

todd dockstader - electronic pieces

stuart dempster - in the great abbey of clement vi

tom dissevelt & kid baltan - popular electronics

sven vath 5 hour set at kristal club, bucharest, feb 2006

mort garson - plantasia

elian radique - e=a=b=a+b

When I worked the rock section in a suburban record store, I used to suggest the Deftones and Tool to people looking for, say, Limp Bizkit, my rationale being that it might incrementally improve their music taste, whereas they'd probably just sell back something like Marquee Moon or Fun House or etc.

Deftones were without question the best of that set of bands.

GYBE do nothing to me. They're one of those bands like Tortoise who seem to have introduced a lot of my friends to instrumental music, including jazz, but I've never thought they brought much to the table in and of themselves.

Well, yeah there clearly wasn't that much mileage IN it after all and good on them for returning to just being a good pop-not-BRITpop band (as they were anyway pre "Modern Life...") it sits a lot easier with me that stuff. "He always seems to have wanted to be treated like a serious artist, which in fact he is, by just writing a lot of quite good pop songs" is OTM. They're not the '90s fucking Beatles some people make them out to be but I DON'T MIND Blur.

Similarly, Mansun's shift from the ambitious glam-pop of AOTGL to the freakout splendour of Six was another attempt to break free from the 'top-down crap' to which you refer?

Mansun just took the piss from the very start I think, acting like one type of band to some people (a cheap "baggy" knock off) and something completely different to others. They didn't really straighten out to play nice with Britpop, which is admirable.

Besides, music that conforms to 'movements' or 'trends' can be just as stifling as 'studied' rock/pop.

Oh sure, you can always flip things around, it's exactly what a lot of the press said at the time about "shoegazing" you know all these bloody bands "sounding the same" and conforming, not dressing funny or being gobshites... what we really need is unique personalities, big riffs, frontmen who know what good rock/pop is SUPPOSED to be about... etc. Obviously some of the Madchester bands *did* have good frontmen (Ian Brown, Shaun Ryder) but their success always seemed less to do with the WOT THE NME SEZ GOES and more to do with being able to catch some of the real spirit of the times (dance and E culture exploding all over Britain).

Britpop was basically a conservative backlash against that AND any kind of musical/sexual/cultural experimentation. Pathetic. And no most bands weren't manufactured but it was a pretty obvious route to "success" and most bands just did exactly as required (to become rich & creamy in 1996).

Anyway Louis likes some Britpop more than I do, but less than Geir. Or something.

puzzles me, because so many moody chamber post-rock groups were suckage on record. If it were easy, you would think that one of Do Make Say Think, Explosions in the Sky, A Silver Mt. Zion, or (yes) Dirty Three would have succeeded at making an interesting record (yeah, I know ASMZ was Godspeed members...)

But comparing these bands live is more telling than debating their recorded output. Explosions in the Sky made me nod off on my feet. Sigur Ros, while OK on record, was one of the most boring shows I've ever seen, a kitten playing on a harpsichord would have been more interesting.

But Godspeed, both times I saw them, blew their opening act off the stage. Labradford, for instance, came across as bubblegum postrock, not because they lacked portentiousness, but because they couldn't do anything anywhere near as interesting without structure as Godspeed could do sawing through charts.

(Elvis Telecom, I seem to recall hearing that the progression of the charts they used was semi-random, as were the transition times, so you'd sometimes get quiet charts one after another. Not random enough for you?.)

Anyway, GYBE will always get credit from me for that creepy "towers are falling" number they recorded...in 2000.

The NME/Uncut-sponsored, man-on-the-street, blurvsoasisvssuede culture of Britpop may have been a little like that, but plenty of the bands regularly lumped in with that 'movement' (which I myself do not endorse as a movement per se) were NOT conservative (including both Blur and Suede), they were actually pretty vibrant, forward-thinking and interesting. I could name some more but I've already done so plenty of times here and gotten shot to pieces. You could say that a higher percentage of my music-taste falls within the mid-90's British spectrum (I prefer early and late 90's to be honest though) than most other ILXors, but I don't think of it as Britpop.

And when on earth have Mansun sounded 'baggy'? The last three minutes of Taxloss aside, that is. I love the fact that what I regard as the most complete musical statement of modern times is thought of by plenty others to be a piss-take... :-D

Or vice versa.

Labradford, for instance, came across as bubblegum postrock

!

Yeah cause all I hear in Labradford is Max Martin.

plenty of the bands regularly lumped in with that 'movement' (which I myself do not endorse as a movement per se) were NOT conservative (including both Blur and Suede), they were actually pretty vibrant, forward-thinking and interesting.

This, my friend, is where you and I are going to have to disagree!

Blur sensing the winds of change away from Baggy and suddenly going all Mod (if not quite as drab musically as the Paul Weller Scene years to come) and then all "Gor Blimey! Love a Duck London is SWINGING now eh?" and then obviously changing tack to ensure the didn't look like flaming idiots and still had a career afterwards...

Suede man "controversially" slapping his arse, mincing a bit, whilst his guitarist did out his best (admittedly not bad) Mick Ronson impression. And the predictable played out/smacked out/drugged out/classic rock'n'roll council estate mythologising of it all. They made some decent records but they were always deeply retro and never truly great because of that. They're no more of their time for throwing in the odd lyric about ecstasy pills than the Arctic f*cking Monkeys for singing about sending an e-mail.

Blur & Suede vibrant, forward-thinking and interesting? Compared to My Bloody Valentine? Aphex Twin? Trip Hop? DO me a favour.

I used to be like this. Watch the telly and saw some gymnasts and blurt out: "THAT IS SO EASY!" I kinda outgrew it. I mean,seriously, what does it matter if something's easy/difficult to make.

It's not that hard to knock out some decent tunes on a guitar/bass/drums and express yourself instead of regurgitating somebody elses ideas barely digested is it? You'd think so. Anyway my favourite "bands" as I've said before, from this sucktastic period (94-97?) were probably Kenickie, Pulp and dEUS whatever that says....

YA RLY. Ramones? FUCK THAT SHIT! DREAM THEATER!!!!

Blur & Suede vibrant, forward-thinking and interesting? Compared to My Bloody Valentine? Aphex Twin? Trip Hop? DO me a favour.

grr

have heard all of the artists mentioned. just because MBV and AT were finding new ways to create sound patterns and create brilliant, original art through the use of feedback layers and advanced programming (and TH through the twin uses of PHAT BEATZ and Beth Gibbons), does this exclude those using more conventional instrumentation/methods from being vibrant, forward-thinking or interesting?

I'll qualify my position on Suede. I only have, and have only heard, the album Dog Man Star of theirs. It is a brilliant, tuneful record, with some wonderfully inventive (yes, inventive) guitar work, especially on the songs Daddy's Speeding and The Asphalt World (my two favourite tracks). I gather that the album as a whole was by far their most ambitious, far-reaching, and in all probability best. I've never been tempted to get anything else by them.

As for Blur, I'm not even starting on Blur and 13, two of the most creative albums of the late-90's (the latter up there with Six and O* C******r, standing IMO alongside anything MBV or RDJames ever put out) and as for the dreaded 'trilogy', a good half of the songs on MLIR are still sonically interesting, unexpected detours from the 'For Tomorrow' pattern, Parklife has curveballs 'This Is A Low' and 'Trouble In The Message Centre' alongside some diamond pop songs, and The Great Escape is actually quite a dark, dissonant album, as revealed by multiple returns.

omg the 90's a&tj, i might puke

It's a metaphor, Ned!

And "bubblegum" has a pre-Britney history, as you well know.

If Tortoise is the Cream of post-rock, and Godspeed are the Pink Floyd, then Labradford were, at least at the time of that performance, the 1910 Fruitgum Company.

This I can agree with.

Godspeed are the Yes, and all their offshoot bands are post-GFTO Yes. :-D

No! I just don't get it from Blur or Suede is all, sorry.

Dog Man Star is /was pretty good yes, I'm not sure the guitar work is "inventive" but it's certainly highly impressive (I did say he's good upthread didn't I?) the only thing that bothered me about it is how conceptually crappy and half-formed a lot of the songs were (even if the album smoothed the flaws out a bit, maybe not for my ears today). Still they got even worse later on so I shouldn't complain.

And I don't think any album with "I Spy" on it can be 100% commercially compromised but I think they navigated the sewage filled waters of Britpop reasonably well considering. His'N'Hers did mostly have stronger tunes tho'

For what it's worth, inventiveness aside, I think Bernard Butler was a great guitarist and Graham Coxon has always just sounded like a classically-trained guitarist trying to sound like the people he likes... He lacked some sort of spark that made it sound different. Suede's b-sides up until when Bernard Butler left were the best records they made, in my opinion.

The problem to me, over Blur's 'curve balls' is that they're, as far as I can see, someone else's curve balls, just done again. The skill they have is in making that sound good, which a lot of great people do, but it's really not the same thing as say MBV/RDJ do, which is not to do it down in any way.

the thing with Pulp, is that to obtain my favourite songs of theirs, one must operate this simple procedure:

-collect every song they did over 5:30 in length

-get rid of 'Gloria' (and possibly 'FEELINGCALLEDLOVE' if there isn't enough room)

-add 'Dishes' and 'Lipgloss'

...and there you have what I'd honestly call the best of Pulp.

TH is that well-known mid-90's act Trip Hop, featuring Roberto Del Naja, Adrian Utley and Ronny Sighs.

----------------------------------------------------------------

ok, well whose curveballs were 13's, then?

I hadn't heard a lot of Wire, and some Stranglers (they're public domain via the radio) but I totally agree regarding Elastica, and everything you describe about Blur...

Where Radiohead do do escape this problem (which a lot of people accuse them of also, second hand ideas polished to a 'newness' by great/good production) is just the songwriting I guess. It communicates something, where Elastica, Blur, Suede are just a bit vacant emotionally really.

Have you heard the album 'Blur', btw? If not, get hold of 'Essex Dogs'. It's utterly out-there, and by a whisker my favourite Blur song ahead of 13's '1992', 'Battle' and 'Caramel'.

Mind you, was that the one that M.O.R. on it?.. Which was pretty much exactly the same as David Bowie's "Boys Keep Swinging".

For all that, I can't think of anything that Yuko and Hiro was obviously ripped off of... That's a great tune, despite the album being pretty shite.

I'm afraid as far as Radiohead are concerned I can't follow! I think it's a bunch of whinging dull pish! Sorry.