Working my way through some of these. This was a beautiful piece of music with sumptuous piano and drums particularly. lol @ wooden spoon
Botch - unlistenable non-singing audio-violence played on musical instruments != music. I had the misfortune to see early Einsturzende Neubauten once as a support act and they had more funk than this dirge.
A Forest - well ok, but it’s never more than accessible Joy Division-lite for the shoe-gazing masses in the pre-Smiths era.
Things got a bit more interesting with early Beck (I was a fan then) but then regressed with Gramatik.
Er, yes as I’d thought - as exemplified by the nonsense that goes “Woah oh oh oh, woah oh oh oh” and by the name of Savior. ugh
Freestyle Fellowship commit cardinal sin #1 of band names ie nominative determinism but even manage to fuck that up.
After that Typhoon are a step up and aren’t afraid to wear their Morrison (Van) on their sleeves but hardly break new ground. Unfortunately the trumpeter is unintentionally seriously out of time, which for this type of song is grating.
Sure Beach House have used the melody from a crap Billy Idol song (which weren’t?) but hey, there are only so many melodies to go round and what can a poor boy do 'cept sing in a rock n roll band? Boring and unaffecting.
Early Prince reminds me of when he first broke the UK, appearing naked on the cover of the NME, and this song didn’t help me forget that horror. No Purple Rain, that’s for sure.
The Pumpkins always had an insurmountable problem for me - Corgan’s over-wrought vocals never compensate for some pretty thin material - and is yet more evidence for Jalfrezi’s Rule Of Male Rock Singers, which states that they are all total prats (seriously, who else would want to get up and prance around like that?). Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn’t. In the Pumpkins’ case, it matters.
The cover of Cinnamon Girl is quite something, in managing to not only to destroy the affecting melody of the original but also in adding some of that mandatory growling. Tedious in extremis.
And so onto Metallica, one of the most overrated bands of all time and undisputed masters of the one chord dirge. Dispensing with melody is fine if you’re an avant garde musician replacing it with something else, otherwise just No. Horrendously bad.
BT = bloody terrible
