Aging rock act on new album: This time we wanted to go back to the basics

Seems like every other issue of RS features a legacy act describing their new album as a return to basics, or something similar. I feel like I've seen Dave Grohl and Bono do so recently but can't find the quotes. Hopefully this Muse statement, even if it is slightly anti-album, can serve as inspiration to get the thread rolling:

https://i.imgur.com/5T3KfOi.jpg

But in a radical twist, they have decided to lose the high concepts and release new songs individually weeks after recording them (...) "It reminds me of when the band first started..."

This thread should also have room for quotes in the spirit of "we went into the studio with 300 new songs and in the end only 14 made the cut"

i'm into this radical new idea of just focusing on one song at a time.

"..and release new songs individually weeks after recording them .."

didn't Ash try this approach for a while ?

here's Grohl on the latest Foo Fighters:

So we were like, ‘God, if we were to record again, how are we going switch it up?’ For us to switch it up right now (whistles) would be to go into the studio and make a record like a normal band. That kind of became the focus, it was like alright, now that we can sort of shed that other stuff and just write songs and record them in a studio as you do.”

https://www.alternativenation.net/dave-grohl-reveals-foo-fighters-will-switch-new-album-sonic-highways-dead/

wait, what were they doing before? not writing songs and recording them on the moon?

seattle grunge rocker rob halford will tell you that it isn't always so easy to go back to basics.

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/28685635_10156694694627137_7491661337674484406_n.jpg?oh=262fb34b4144f30bdf1ec04eae601257&oe=5B44A395

haha, I love that image

This is Wire since they came back for the 2nd time, isn't it?

Flagpole: This interview is about your new album, but since it hasn't been released yet, can you tell us something about it?

Michael Stipe: Well, it's a lot louder than the last three records. It's
very raw, and, uh, punk rock. It's kind of in-your-face.

Joe Strummer on Cut the Crap

"We wanted to strip it down, back to punk rock roots"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O12XU0KS8fU

Ha, that Grohl quote is priceless! Pure Spinal Tap.

I'm guessing mookieproof's Stipe qupte relates to Monster.

*quote, even.

Was searching for a Nick Cave quote, circa Nocturama and Grinderman, on writing and recording quickly. Fifth google result already bled into Pixies interviews:

https://dailycollegian.com/2017/09/a-conversation-with-the-pixies-joey-santiago/

DC: Your new record “Head Carrier” sonically builds off the new addition of Bassist Paz Lenchantin. I’m wondering what it was like to get into the studio with her? Did she contribute anything new to the Pixies sonically?

JS: Yes, of course she did. Her suggestions and her arrangement ideas. When we got into the studio with Paz, it was time to get back to basics, whatever that meant with us. We didn’t have to work hard at finding a new connection. When we start making music, it’s just making music. There’s no thought or pressure involved in it. If it’s good, it’s good. If it’s bad it’s bad. That was our only criterion.

Talking of Spinal Tap, here's Scouting For Girls on how people don't want to watch them play anymore because they're shit:

We’ve gone back to basics and we’re playing Academies and smaller venues, it’s all very intimate and we much prefer playing the smaller venues. We love being on the road and seeing the country.

By the way, in the same interview they actually do talk about going back to basics in the recording of their new album, they use the phrase back to basics twice in the same interview, but that's enough from Scouting For Girls.

i swear every single new U2 album has a quote from Bono that's akin to, "we just wanted to get back to the sound of four guys in a room playing."

https://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_250/MI0003/892/MI0003892592.jpg

came here to post about u2, beaten to the punch

I'm sure there is a Chris Frantz quote about getting back to basics before Little Creatures was released. Google (or my memory) is failing me.

U2 find it impossible to make an album that sounds like that, which is the funniest thing about it.

(xxxposts)

someone mentioned Stipe but i was gonna say there's at least a couple R.E.M. records that qualify for this, right?

"back to basics is the death of romance" --Stephin Merritt

bill wyman's bass is v cool

someone mentioned Stipe but i was gonna say there's at least a couple R.E.M. records that qualify for this, right?

― alpine static, Wednesday, March 7, 2018 9:24 PM (fifty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah that quote Mookieproof posted refers to Monster (as Turrican guessed) but I automatically assumed it was Accelerate...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6gKe9Fr2ok

go into the studio and make a record like a normal band
go into the studio and make a record like a normal band
go into the studio and make a record like a normal band
go into the studio and make a record like a normal band
go into the studio and make a record like a normal band
go into the studio and make a record like a normal band
go into the studio and make a record like a normal band

Ok I Googled "back to their roots" in Goog News and here's what I found:

Of Mice & Men go back to their roots on new material -
“I think what we’re doing right now, which is the most important thing that we can, is really just honing in on the elements of what makes our music sound like our music.”

25 YEARS AGO: BON JOVI RESTART THEIR CAREER WITH ‘KEEP THE FAITH’ -
“We needed to find ourselves individually,” he said. “The Bon Jovi situation was extremely successful, and I was very happy to be in a band of that stature, but there was almost nothing left to write about at that point — we were all just so tired and so burnt out. All we were writing about was bein’ on the road and bein’ in a hotel room and bein’ lonely and talkin’ to your girlfriend on the phone. They miss you and you miss them — that was what our lives were about at that time.
“So to actually take a step back and see what was happening in our lives gave us some more stuff to write about. Plus, all of a sudden I was working with people like Eric Clapton and Tony Levin from Peter Gabriel, and Jon was workin’ with Elton John and Jeff Beck, so workin’ with all these different artists gave us different influences, which we brought back to Bon Jovi. It made it fresh and brand-new, and we were excited to be with each other again."

Every huge artist has their "Keep the Faith"

Future historians will explain all culture - indeed, all of history - primarily through the lens of Bon Jovi's discography.

John F. Kennedy was the American presidency's "New Jersey."

"The Winter's Tale" is Shakespeare's "Keep the Faith."

The Ford Model T is the "Slippery When Wet" of cars.

Stonewall Jackson's famous flank march at the Battle of Chancellorsville was the Confederacy's "Have a Nice Day."

We needed to find ourselves individually
We needed to find ourselves individually
We needed to find ourselves individually
We needed to find ourselves individually
We needed to find ourselves individually

actually my favorite Bono-ism on this front is referring to Achtung Baby as "the sound of four men chopping down the Joshua Tree."

suck on that, eno

There's some serious g-droppin' goin' on in that Bon Jovi quote

also rofling at Puffin's history lesson through the lens of the BJ discography

Never said by Yes, Tangerine Dream, or Gentle Giant.

This thread should also have room for quotes in the spirit of "we went into the studio with 300 new songs and in the end only 14 made the cut"

ahah, I have always hated these comments.
Especially when you hear how shitty the remaining 14 tracks are, most of the times... makes you wonder what the other 286 sounded like !

Animal Collective: 'We wrote our new album as a rock band'

Asked how it differed from their previous albums, Weitz said: “We all moved back to Baltimore, the last few records we’ve written apart and by sending each other stuff. This time we all wanted to write in the same room together. We went back to our roots and we got a little practice space in this barn on Josh’s [Dibb – fellow band member] mum’s property and it was like being a garage band again.”

This one we wrote as a rock band in a room and we wanted to record it that way.”

and yeah, the original "back to basics" move was the Beatles' Get Back sessions, surely.
Or maybe the Stones' Beggars Banquet, actually.

^^ bonus points for "a barn" xpost

and yeah, the original "back to basics" move was the Beatles' Get Back sessions, surely.

― AlXTC from Paris

wasn't this inspired by the Basement Tapes?

While the band's two albums for Sony have been rockers, Ness says Social Distortion plans to turn it up a notch for its next studio effort.

"I'm about half way through writing the new album and on it I'm going to stray away a little bit from the country and blues influence and I'm digging back to that late '70s feel. It's a personal thing I gotta do. I just want a real hard-edged, stake-our-claim, back-to-our-roots record.

"It's like, 'Hey, you flannel-wearing, pony-tail, pierced-nose kid. I took beatings so you could dress the way you dress and we were doing this long before any of these other people were doing it,"' says Ness.

not an album but an early back-to-basics move: Elvis' 1968 comeback special

yeah, I thought about the Basement Tapes but how was it wasn't really a return to bacics, was it ? It wasn't Dylan going back to his folk songs alone with his guitar...

the unspoken truism here presumably being that layman's-terms descriptions of the recording process are fundamentally dull

like, I'm struggling to think of a plausible summary of one which wouldn't invoke some form of music biz cliche

suspect the audience that things like the OP are written for is now small and stubborn enough that if this kind of thing got excised from the 'big band with new album' narrative entirely they would be sore about it just because it's a thing that one expects to read

ouch sorry : but it wasn't really a return to bacics, was it ?

Some bands get back to basics differently than others.

"For us, we wanted to go back to our roots. So we said, yeah, let's go to a house like the Stones and Led Zeppelin used to do. Let's just do our own project and have some fun.

"So, we rented a house in Spain, a villa overlooking the sea, and that allowed us to make a really free sounding record. I mean, on Hysteria, I remember spending a month recording just one guitar riff. On Slang the emphasis was on the song, the inspiration for it, the vibe.

"We wanted it to have more the feel of classic albums by bands we liked, like the Stones or Zeppelin."

Also, wondering about artists with a very strong and long back catalog but who NEVER did the "back to basic" move : Prince (I'm not too sure about his 90s output) ? Bowie ? Stevie Wonder ?

yeah, I thought about the Basement Tapes but how was it wasn't really a return to bacics, was it ? It wasn't Dylan going back to his folk songs alone with his guitar...

― AlXTC from Paris

as good an explanation as any for why the "basement tapes" don't suck but every single "back to basics" record it inspired does

Wasn't Hours Bowie's Back to Basics?

I'm sure Bowie did this, he tried virtually everything else post-Scary Monsters.

Was Tin Machine not back to basics? I don't know, I try not to think about Tin Machine tbh.

Tin Machine is "let me try just being a member of a band," not "back to basics."

And how's life is right about the different styles of "back to basics." Renting a villa in Spain is not "basics."

Indeed the Grohl example is actually more on point. Not to be Cap'n Save-a-Dave, but I think they did do a fair amount of ridiculously luxurious home recording for a while - bringing a mobile rig to his house. There is a documentary n shit about them recording at home and then taking a dip with their kids an all, but at a very high level of pro quality, not grungey in the slightest. So for them, going to a studio might constitute "basics."

Globally famous bands do play club shows, but IME they rarely play at 1:15 AM to just their boy/girlfriends and the bar staff, for nothing but drink tickets. THAT would be a daring return to "basics."

He is looking forward to working with his group Tin Machine, which will get back to recording its second album when the tour ends later this year.

It's back to basics time, Bowie insists: "I need revitalisation, I needed to get small. I needed to do what I do best and that is be excited about music. That is when I do my best work, when I am excited about something unusual or obscure or out of the way."

Slam dunk.

"For the first time in a long time I'd actually taken the trouble to write the songs before we went into the studio," he says. "So I spent a lot of time crafting them in a very reactionary, old-fashioned, traditional way. I just wrote proper songs, applied myself to them and the lyric, and kept them extremely simple.

"When I went into the studio, I had positive ideas of how the songs were to sound which is unusual, especially for the '90s. Just about everything has been done in the studio in more of an experimental fashion, much like the middle to late '70s. The last time I wrote songs per se was the early '80s."

(several years later for Hours)

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/932737/Rush-gets-back-to-basics-with-Vapor-Trails-album.html

"We wanted to return to the basics with this album," Lifeson said.

"I spoke with Geddy about that and he was keen to the idea. It was a conscious effort to downplay the keyboards this time. We all agreed that an organic approach to the music would be a good thing this time around."

I like that within a few utterances of "back to basics" there is generally a delightful tautology, couched in humblebrag. We all felt compelled to start playing music again that was music played our way. The band got back together and we became a band again. The goal of making this album was to just put together a collection of songs, the best we could write and maybe the best we've ever written.

Also, wondering about artists with a very strong and long back catalog but who NEVER did the "back to basic" move : Prince (I'm not too sure about his 90s output) ? Bowie ? Stevie Wonder ?

And I'm guessing there's some acts who've pulled this stunt more than once.

some of these quotes are hilarious, good work guys

I think the Dylan Back to Basics album is John Wesley Harding, but probably he would be too cool to give that type of quote

I do seem to recall him saying something about how Basement Tapes is how recordings should be done, barefeet on a carpet with cats running around or smth

hmm oh well I guess then in the 90s he did release GAIBTY and World Gone Wrong:

“That’s why I recorded two LPs of old songs, so I could personally get back to the music that’s true for me.”

ahah ok for Bowie ! I'm not too familiar with his post "Scary Monsters" output either !
Like for the "we had 300 songs" quotes, I wonder if the acts who say these "back to basics" things really believe them or if they feel and know it's ridiculous/cliché/bullshit !

"We've been expanding our sound a lot in the last few records as far as using more atmospherics and more synthesizers in opening up the sound, which is great, but there is something about the very early Deftones records that is just very stripped-down and raw, just four guys in a room making a racket, and that is something that I miss.

"If I were to make a Deftones record right now, it would be just the drums, the bass, the vocal and the guitar and just us making the most obnoxious music we can make."

^I don't think this is the way it turned out for the subsequent Deftones album.

Luzier and the original band members - lead singer Jonathan Davis, guitarist James "Munky" Shaffer and bassist Reginald "Fieldy" Arvizu - worked with producer Ross Robinson on the CD, the group's ninth studio effort. Robinson oversaw Korn's early releases, including its self-titled 1994 debut and its 1996 pop breakthrough, "Life Is Peachy."

For the new album, Robinson stripped Korn's sound.

"When he got involved, I got excited," Luzier said. He and the band, along with the metal group Disturbed, will co-headline the Music as a Weapon V tour, which stops at the Ted Constant Convocation Center in Norfolk on Tuesday. "It was like a family reunion for them, because he started it all with them. He had the idea, 'Hey, let's get rid of all the fancy studio stuff. You guys are a little bit too comfortable.' He wanted to go back to where it all started, which is in a 12-by-13 room with no Pro Tools or electronics. He wanted to go back to just four guys in a room, jamming."

Also who's the next big act who will do it ! I guess T. Swift is very close...

“We’re not going to make bedroom Styx records, we’re going to do it right. The way it should be with five guys looking at each other and feeding off of that energy that can only be created by five guys in a room.

“Passing files around, yeah we’ve done that for various things, but it’s not the way to make a Styx record. That magic that’s lost now in most recordings is you don’t have that thing that happens when people rub against each other. We all know how to make great records and how to do that, and it costs money.”

"We are a band who have toured a lot and, even if I say it myself, we're pretty good at it, and we've always been pretty good at not only getting stuff translated onto stage but actually making it better, because inherently I think Simple Minds are a live band.

"For this album the approach to the recordings was like the early days. It was band-like, with everyone in the same room as opposed to lots of computers, and because the album was recorded almost in a live way it meant that the translation was much more immediate.

"We then used the computers to enhance it and stuff, but fundamentally it was four or five guys in a room playing, and that is what it is live."

"It's almost better than sex, this LP," he says with evident relish. "Instead of relying on the computer, we just got to be five guys in a room, just kicking ideas around. Hang on, hanging around with a bunch of five guys ain't better than sex! What am I talking about?"

i wish simple minds would get back to the basics of being a pretentious arty post punk band

xp: that's Stone Roses, btw.

I like how basically (ah!), the common evil is "the computer" (and overdubs etc in general).
Does it mean that acts that started with computers and a lot of production never get back to basicss ? Or do they come back to computers after going "natural" ?
Maybe Depeche Mode would be an example of this ?

was Cressa the fifth guy?

Yeah, poor 00s bands that started out trading protools files from opposite coasts, and then got blog buzz and had to figure out how to perform together in the same room

Re: the Beatles and Get Back -- decrepit, aging rocker George Harrison was something like 26 when they recorded it. (Although I guess the spirit of the thread is "a bit older than when they released their early stuff.")

https://www.guitarworld.com/features/interview-kirk-hammett-discusses-metallicas-death-magnetic

Metallica is like the phoenix rising from the ashes. We set everything on fire, and this is what has risen from it—St. Anger being the fire and Death Magnetic being the phoenix.

Since Dylan was in high school rock 'n' roll bands before becoming a folk singer, maybe going electric was his first back-to-basics move.

For Bowie, what about Pin Ups?

Dylan put out a couple of folk covers albums in the 90s, sort of a throwback to his debut record

And for someone his age, doing Sinatra homages is a return to basics of a sort

though he said in interviews that he did not like sinatra growing up and has only grown and appreciation for standards now

Or do they come back to computers after going "natural" ?
Maybe Depeche Mode would be an example of this

surely the electronic version of this is : 'we dug out all our old analogue equipment/modular synths for this album ... '

Flaming lips did this with embryonic

Also, see every band that records an album at Toerag Studios.

Isn't this every Rick Rubin-produced band, where he tries to get them to pretend they're the band that made the early work that everyone loves? That or stripping everything down to voice and guitar/piano.

Rick Rubin + Metallica:

"They'd fallen into a trap of using the studio more as an instrument and punching in parts to get the perfection they were looking for than they were getting through raw performance power. It was about getting them to not try ideas by editing them together with a machine, but to try playing them in different orders to see what they felt like. And they really ended up getting back to being a band.

"Anytime Lars would want to sit at the computer and try and write, I would insist that he and the band would all play together. (Laughs)

this is a good thing for bands to do
maybe not so good for the quality of music

Brimstead otm

Embryonic was actually good though, at least my memory says so (xposts)

Hmmmmm.

"....well, this time we decided we wanted a certain sound so we went to Chicago and recorded in Steve Albini's studio"

possible overlap with Rubin approach here

Toerag Studio/Liam Watson = UK version to Steve Albini

yeah I'm sure the Manics must have said something like that re: Journal for Plague Lovers (a very literal attempt to plumb their past) xp

Madness vs Toerag :

How did making this album compare to your previous album Oui Oui, Si Si, Ja Ja, Da Da?

“The album that really snapped us out of full-on 80s nostalgia was the Norton Folgate album, which was the album before Oui Oui, Si Si, Ja Ja, Da Da and we made that at this tiny studio in Hackney. It’s a great studio and such a good vibe so we went back, there’s something great about the whole band being in a room together which changes the atmosphere. This album is about the atmosphere and not technology. We tried to get away from computers and back to the songs.”

Four Guys In A Room is definitely a thing...

But Copeland says that was always the plan – to record an album like rock bands always did in the days before electronic files made worldwide collaboration as easy as hitting send on an email with a digital track attached.

“It was all recorded old-school, four guys in a room blasting away at each other,” he says. “And I think you can hear it on the tracks. I think there’s an X factor you get from mutual inspiration.”

It’s very similar to how he, Sting and Andy Summers recorded most of their songs in the Police in the ’70s and ’80s, he says.

four guys in a room blasting away at each other

No-one's recorded like that since 1962, of course.

Or, at least, none of these guys ever have.

Craig: We recorded it in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain. It was a wonderful setting. We couldn't help but make brilliant music. It united us as a band again. It allowed us to be who we are as a band. Sometimes, George tries to bring in other writers or we try new technology and we try this and that. But up in the mountains, our producer just stripped it all away and we got back to basics. It's how it worked when we were kids and it really worked brilliantly for us on this record.

Moss: Putting out a new album is really hard but we can't keep mucking out "I'll Tumble 4 Ya" in our 50s. The thing I like about the album is it's quite fresh. It was recorded well. It was done the old fashioned way—just four guys in a room just bashing it out. Nowadays, you've got computers and stuff. This was all played live, no programming or anything.

... back to basics, four guys in a room, bashing not blasting, no computers.

A critical part of these features comes in the preface, where the interviewer gets in on the hype and suggests that the new album might be the band's best since Some Girls.

i enjoy it when that kind of hype is used a bit misleadingly, like "this is their best album in twenty years" and then of course they released an album twenty years ago and...one other album in between that and the new one.

I like every Crazy Horse story that is them begging Neil NOT to go back to basics on this one.

"We'd been writing basically to computers for a while. So Nick came in, and he was like 'No computers, we're just going to jam, we're going to do it like a band.' And I'm like, 'This guy's outta here' in my head, because it's much more hard work. But you can really tell on the album that we worked hard on it. It's got a feel about it. It sounds like a band."

In fact, The Serenity of Suffering has been described as Korn's heaviest album in a while, and the band says the guitar work has a lot to do with it, as well as the tone.

http://wgnradio.com/2016/04/09/musician-bob-mould-is-getting-back-to-basics/

seems pretty clear what all these bands need to do is not record an album, but go hang out with daryl hall in his TV studio music barn and bash out shockingly good dad-rock covers of two of their old classics and one hall & oates track. pretty much foolproof afaict.

then spend 30 tightly edited minutes with Daryl as he repairs an old door.

I feel like Presence kind of fills this whole for LZ with its couple of throwbacks. But I don’t think they would be cheesy enough to announce it as such.

^^Page has said in recent years that he and Bonham were discussing a back to basics approach for the obviously never realized first 80s Zep album.

the 1980 europe tour was a "back to basics" tour! (and it was terrible.)

^^Page has said in recent years that he and Bonham were discussing a back to basics approach for the obviously never realized first 80s Zep album.

― ...some of y'all too woke to function (C. Grisso/McCain),

Totally understandable plan after soldiering through a 5th take of the synth soufflé of carouselambra

Let’s not start saying things we’re bound to regret later on.

I feel like Presence kind of fills this whole for LZ with its couple of throwbacks. But I don’t think they would be cheesy enough to announce it as such.

― calstars, Thursday, March 8, 2018 6:09 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Presence is the way it is because the band was nearly dead, exhausted from drugs and death and injury, Plant literally singing from a wheelchair, Page smacked out of his gourd. It's also an intensely weird and gloomy album and hard for me to say "back to basics" a) because what the hell is basics for such an omnivorous band and b) it literally starts with perhaps the apex of their Wagnerian epics "Achilles Last Stand"

let's not forget "this is my most personal record yet"

And the "maturity album" (which might be a bit weird for an ageing rock act...)

The maturity back to basics most personal album is a narrow category.

feel like Weezer are always half assing this look now with the "White Album" "Green Album" "Black Album" always hearkening back to their one good record that everyone liked

Sea Change was the first album to come to mind

"...we felt we really trusted our instincts with this one"
" (noted instrumentalist) wasn't into overdubs"
"...many of the songs were first or second takes...there's something honest in that approach"

Also, wondering about artists with a very strong and long back catalog but who NEVER did the "back to basic" move

Ryuichi Sakamoto perhaps. I don't think Todd Rundgren ever really made a "return to 70s" record though I think maybe Liars could qualify. XTC always moved forward - Wasp Star is kind of an exception here but that one doesn't really sound like any XTC album before it either. Autechre straight up said they would never ever do this, mainly because it's impossible given the way they work

yeah, I thought about the Basement Tapes but how was it wasn't really a return to bacics, was it ? It wasn't Dylan going back to his folk songs alone with his guitar...

― AlXTC from Paris

as good an explanation as any for why the "basement tapes" don't suck but every single "back to basics" record it inspired does

Helps when you record with an act that is essentially Rock Band: 1857

whatever their flaws I find it tough to imagine Radiohead claiming a new record as a "back to basics" type deal

helps too that basement tapes was a bunch of stoners having fun without the intention to release that stuff

Oh that's definitely going to happen one day. (xp)

the basement tapes are a bunch of funky, cryptic little goofs, dylan going back to the "basics" would have been serious folk songs

They Might be Giants seem to do this a lot. I feel like Flood is mentioned in every press release they do - ah, we're back to that studio, we're using the same producer, we're writing the songs the same way where it's just the two of us, etc. etc. It's a bit odd since their songwriting never really changed much but kinda shrewd I guess, you gotta make a living. In fact I suspect a lot of this is just that, stuff you just say because you're anxious that you don't sell the amount of units that you used to. I wonder how many of these albums actually do sound like something they would have put out 20-30 years ago. Maybe the last few OMD records.

Yeah and that Stipe quote about Monster - they weren't claiming it was like Murmur or anything. I don't think any REM album really is a "back-to-basics" move like that (not that I listened to the last couple)

Also, wondering about artists with a very strong and long back catalog but who NEVER did the "back to basic" move

Leonard Cohen never went back, other than going from sketch-like songs/production on Ten New Songs and Dear Heather into more fully realized ones once he returned to touring.

Ryuichi Sakamoto perhaps

He literally has an album called "Back To The Basics".

I liked the recent acoustic Robyn Hitchcock album that was designed to be in the style of the 60’s folk albums he grew up listening to, but not necessarily like anything he’d made earlier.

Speaking of the Fabs on the roof, the actual set is so weird innit? Get Back FOUR times, nothing off the first 10 albums..

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-beatles/1969/apple-corps-rooftop-london-england-53d6f3ad.html

Sea Change was the first album to come to mind

which previous era of heavily-orchestrated songs recorded in a big expensive studio was Beck reverting to here

He literally has an album called "Back To The Basics".

that just refers to the fact that it's solo piano, part of his stripped-back modern classical phase. it's not really a "return" to anything in his catalogue

Yes, but a lot of these aren't returns to anything - how many of these bands have ever recorded anything as four guys in a room with no overdubs blah blah blah?

Jarvis Cocker's 'Further Complications' is one of these, annoyingly so as he'd never made that sort of music before. IMO it's the worst album he's made, solo or in a group.

Leonard Cohen never went back, other than going from sketch-like songs/production on Ten New Songs and Dear Heather into more fully realized ones once he returned to touring.

Recent Songs was intentionally a back-to-basics acoustic record after the full Spector sound of Ladies' Man.

Sea Change was the first album to come to mind

which previous era of heavily-orchestrated songs recorded in a big expensive studio was Beck reverting to here

I guess I meant the pivot to "personal" material and a turn away from his shtickier side but maybe not the best example

Mgmt might qualify for this. By the bands own admission the new songs are meant to make people dance again, more in line with their earlier hits. But then not sure how much the album is back to basics

There’s a difference to me between returning to the style that people liked more and going ‘back to basics’ which is a much more authenticity based move

back to basics shd only be used when ppl go back to, like, gregorian chants.

Or do they come back to computers after going "natural" ?
Maybe Depeche Mode would be an example of this

surely the electronic version of this is : 'we dug out all our old analogue equipment/modular synths for this album ... '

Not following a "natural" release, but... 'All You Need is Now' certainly makes this move, down to making sure there's the "Girls on Film" one, "The Chauffeur" one, etc... a wholly unnecessary self-flagellation for the fan uproar over 'Red Carpet Massacre'.

Dylan's "back to basics" was incontrovertibly the World Gone Wrong / Good As I Been to You double - obscure folk standards, Dylan + guitar, recorded in his garage. Laid the foundation for Time Out of Mind - "Love and Theft" - Modern Times so, time well spent.

Time wasted actually listening to the fuckers though.

I love them

yah me too

i think it's mostly marketing. on the contrary i can't think of many albums who were promoting as being daring and experimental. the music industry is inherently conservative (hence reliance on the btb trope)

Iirc some Radiohead members said this twice. Once when recording Hail to the Thief (something about recording it in California in a few days and releasing it without overthinking it like their past records) and another for In Rainbows (something about going back to a rock band dynamic)... cant find the quotes though.

Yorke told MTV: "The last two studio records were a real headache. We had spent so much time looking at computers and grids, we were like, that's enough, we can't do that any more. This time, we used computers, but they had to actually be in the room with all the gear. So everything was about performance, like staging a play."[12]

The Guess Who in 1972: they weren't really an aging rock act, but Bachman was gone and their best stuff was behind them. Rockin' from that year definitely fits this thread. The Guess Who had had pop hits, had a social-concern hit ("Share the Land"), and had dabbled in psychedelia (sometimes brilliantly--"No Sugar Tonight"--sometimes laughably) by that point, and clearly they wanted to align themselves with that Sha Na Na/Elvis and Chuck Berry on the radio again/American Graffiti/Richard Nader '50s revival thing happening. The album had a doo-wop style medley that included "Sea of Love," other throwback-sounding stuff, and "Heartbroken Bopper" (which I heard on the radio today), seemingly about a John Milner-type high school burnout. (Also more social concern with "Guns, Guns, Guns" and "Big Smoke Factory.") I'd love to dig up interviews from that time; I guarantee Cummings would have been piling on the back-to-basics platitudes in every one of them. I think Rockin' was probably the second LP I ever walked up to the cash and bought myself, after the Partridge Family's debut.

"The Rockin' album…best GW time of my entire GW time…we started getting drum sounds about noon on Monday, and we turned in the finished, mixed masters about 3 p.m. on Friday."

who the hell thinks "No Sugar Tonight" is psychedelic???

Me! Not so much sound--I mean, it doesn't exactly swirl--but certainly subject matter...it's not actually about coffee, I don't think. And it does rely heavily on atmospherics. It gets its own page on the Trippy Me website--I mean, how much more psychedelic does it get than that? Call it a Western-Canadian prairie-head version of psychedelia, if you will. We do things differently up here.

hmmm, i guess things are more psychedelic here 400 miles south of Winnepeg, we had Crow and The Litter back then

Even Bruce Gilbert, interview from 1999:

I thought it would be an interesting and amusing thing to see if Wire were actually put in a position where we would have to play for a quarter of an hour or something. What would it do now? The curiosity factor is still there. I think for everybody, but, apparently, not for Robert. I don't play guitar anymore, but I still have a curiosity about what would happen if the four of us got back to basics. What would happen if four people got into a room with limited means--limited musical ability--what would they do?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=bOELnR2vb-8

15 seconds in

haha, love it

Nice find, kurt.

http://www.vulture.com/2018/10/st-vincent-on-masseducation.html

One of the great things about being such good friends with somebody is we didn’t talk about what we were gonna do. Thomas is a genius, so it’s not like he had to sit and practice the songs. He would listen to it one time and then go, “Okay, I got it.” He was at the grand piano in a big room, and I was on a couch, kind of sitting and kind of in a fetal position, in front of a mic. No headphones, just two people in a room discovering the songs. None of my attention was bifurcated on a guitar part. I got to live in the moment. Everything that I’d written and all the stories were right there in my chest.

very nice

i wonder if, after the singularity, various AI bots will eventually come around to a "back to the basics" approach as well.

Just four bots in a chatroom, jamming.

"We tried to take it back to when music was real: when the robots were imitating humans, not just other robots."

that's more or less the concept of the latest 0PN record

after the singularity robot musicians will be cycling from three-chord basics to sprawling prog epics hundreds of thousands of times a second, it's gonna be lit

Categorizing that St. Vincent quote as merely a “back to basics” thing seems to diminish what she’s actually talking about.

Rob Halford:
https://www.bandwagon.asia/articles/judas-priest-s-rob-halford-on-the-band-s-legacy-babymetal-returning-to-singapore-and-more

Over the course of the past five decades, has the band changed the way it works in the studio?

The one really unusual, well, not really unusual... but it's definitely something we had not done in a long time was actually being in the studio together, playing as a band. As time went on, technology has made it such that you can build a record piece by piece and layer one thing over another so you don't need the entire band there for a session. But we decided to go back to our roots and earlier style of recording and did it as one unit.

haha now that one's otm!

xp I think it's all just good fun?

morrisp yeah it’s not a pure example of this phenomenon I just giggled at the appearance of “x people in a room”

I really want to go back to the sound this thread had when it first started, the roots of the idea, just strip away all the extra stuff, I don't want to say raw, but there was an immediacy in those first couple months and we've gotten away from that, I think it'd be cool to see what could happen if we

Just 4 Ilxors in a room jamming

lol

Yeah sorry if I sounded bitchy

No worries! I'm listening to MassEducation right now tbh

Just a hint of back to basics and being a real band from both John and Ringo at the very start of this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG85fF-CZBI

haha, indeed! although Let it Be is their real back to basics album...

yup. "no overdubs, maaan".

was Let it Be the first "back to basics" rock album?

maybe Dylan got there first

There had been 'back-to-basics' albums before that but maybe not with the 'four guys in a room' narrative - except The Band s/t was kind of 'four guys in a room'.

I always think of the Beach Boys' "Wild Honey" as being an early back-to-basics album ... but it's the Beach Boys so it's debatable how much conceptualizing was actually involved.

The Band was more a back-to-basics group from the get-go. It's not like they had much to come back from after the first album

Yes, but the 2nd album was, you know what, why don't us four five guys just get together and play and record in Sammy Davis Jr's poolhouse a room?

sure. I think this is a philosophical difference though. Like, to me, for a band to have one of these moments they have to have slipped away from their original sound into big production/artiness or whatever and then make the "back to basics" move.

Oh yes, I agree, but it could be deciding not to record in expensive studios and instead to woodshed in Sammy Davis Jr's woodshed, er, poolhouse, for instance - and I think that definitely influenced other musicians and bands at the time.

John Wesley Hardin, Let it Be, Beggars Banquet

wrt John Wesley Harding, there was no overdubbing on any Dylan record until 1969 (or so he claims) because, by his own admission, he didn't know what it was or that it was possible. He'd listen to something like Sgt. Pepper and assume it was all cut live, because that's just how records are made.

I'm wondering if there's an overlap with the old Getting It Together In The Country thing.

or if there are any instances of the Getting It Together In The Country Thing also being the Big Production/Artiness thing at the same time

Maybe the first Traffic album or two? And Genesis' Tresspass (though the production isn't exactly big on that).

I always think of the Beach Boys' "Wild Honey" as being an early back-to-basics album

yeah, this is the archetype/template. They did it first and exemplify the arc of kids w raw talent going overboard w expensive studio musicians + arrangements and then reverting to a "stripped down" sound

Morrison Hotel

It was definitely in the air, '68/'69.

i kind of figured the start of this sort of thing was dylan's basement tapes - nobody wanted to make records that sounded like "wild honey"!

yeah there's a wider post-psychedelic impulse that comes up in a lot of late 60s rock records, even if they're not explicitly back to four guys in a room, and even when the albums feature tons of overdubs and production tricks. the white album is a case in point, since while it was after that that the "back to four guys" model seemed momentarily like a good idea, it's still considerably more austere and scratchy than the previous couple of albums. cover art may be shading my perceptions here.

I never really bought JWH/basement tapes as "back to basics", I don't think that thing applies in Dylan's case, they are really no more or less ornate than the stuff that came before

i feel like dylan was never part of the "60s" in the same way the beatles were, i don't think he saw himself as part of that

Wanting to play the *blues instead of that psychedelic shit was an regrettable attitude prevalent among musicians who'd been capering about in kaftans and beads months earlier.

(*or country rock)

JWH was after blonde though right? And blonde was pretty ornate in a electric keyboard fill kind of way

(xp) Zappa (but of course) poked fun at it in "200 Motels". Well, poked fun at Jeff Simmons anyway.

is there a hip-hop equivalent to this particular narrative?

maybe the run-up to Jay-Z's 4:44?

hip hop equivalent is rappers making albums/tapes with a single produce--like they did back the day

Diddy: "This goes out to all the mother fuckers that like 15-20 minute versions of a mother fucking record.“

https://partysan.net/global-music/dj-hell-the-dj-feat-p-diddy/

Speaking to Resident Advisor Matt Edwards aka Radio Slave said „I’m down with the 20 minute versions! I’m also into DJs playing the whole record! Most producers still make records with a start and an end… I actually wanted to do a 60-minute version and my friend Tom Gandey (Cagedbaby) recorded a lot of piano parts in Bordeaux, which I used in the last 10 minutes… So I guess I just let the track do its thing. I played about 25 minutes at Fabric and it definitely wasn’t boring!“

I never really bought JWH/basement tapes as "back to basics", I don't think that thing applies in Dylan's case, they are really no more or less ornate than the stuff that came before

i feel like dylan was never part of the "60s" in the same way the beatles were, i don't think he saw himself as part of that

― Greta Van Fleek (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

it's not about what the basement tapes _were_, it's about how they were _perceived_. dylan has always, always, been about the myth, which in this case is encoded right into the name of the recordings - what's more "back to basics" than jamming in a basement? i don't know if it happened or not, but the genesis of the "let it be" sessions sounds to me a lot like one or more of the beatles (probably not george) heard one of the "basement tapes" acetates and said 'that sounds amazing, we should do that'. (probably by this time they'd already _done_ it with the esher demos!)

Dylan does not fit here, at all

“back to basics” for dylan at that point in his career would have meant going back to solo guitar+harmonica

World Gone Wrong and Good As I Been to You were spun that way after the star-producer Under The Red Sky and Oh Mercy.

Dylan would later tell Jann Wenner, "That's really the way to do a recording—in a peaceful, relaxed setting—in somebody's basement. With the windows open ... and a dog lying on the floor."[19]

Dylan does not fit here, at all

― Οὖτις, Monday, November 12, 2018 1:56 PM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

According to Allen Ginsberg, Dylan had talked to him about his new approach, telling him "he was writing shorter lines, with every line meaning something. He wasn't just making up a line to go with a rhyme anymore; each line had to advance the story, bring the song forward. And from that time came some of his strong laconic ballads like 'The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.' There was no wasted language, no wasted breath. All the imagery was to be functional rather than ornamental."

he says NEW approach not return to an old approach

World Gone Wrong and Good As I Been to You were spun that way after the star-producer Under The Red Sky and Oh Mercy.

― ... (Eazy), Monday, November 12, 2018 1:59 PM (thirty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

these are way better examples wrt dylan

i don't know if it happened or not, but the genesis of the "let it be" sessions sounds to me a lot like one or more of the beatles (probably not george) heard one of the "basement tapes" acetates and said 'that sounds amazing, we should do that'. (probably by this time they'd already _done_ it with the esher demos!)

George was having a ball hanging out with Dylan and the Band in Woodstock in late '68, and wasn't too happy rejoining the Beatles for Let It Be a couple of months later, regardless of it being back-to-basics or whatever. I think he called it "back to the winter of our discontent."

i wonder if the back to basics approach on let it be was more pragmatic, i.e. everyone hated each other so much no one wanted to let the others go too far in any direction, so it sort of reverted back to a more simple approach

i.e. everyone hated each other so much no one wanted to let the others go too far in any direction, so it sort of reverted back to a more simple approach

I think Paul thought he could bring everyone back as a unit by cheerily cheerleading them through rehearsing, recording, and performing new material. He didn't realize that his cheery cheerleading was largely seen by the others as dictatorial, annoying, and destructive, despite a few obvious clues (Ringo quitting for two weeks because of Paul's criticisms of his playing on "Back in the U.S.S.R."; the fight with George over "Hey Jude"; John stomping in and shouting "I'm high as fuck, and this is how the intro should go!" after many excruciating takes of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da").

Multiple takes of “O bla di” is enough to make anyone addicted to heroin tbh

I think a central element of the back-to-basics album is press material where a band member says something along the lines of "back to basics", "four guys in a room", "real music", etc., rather than what it actually sounds like.

Yes, with the subtext that it's somehow more authentic.

been meaning to bump this thread for the new Interpol album:

We tend to go to the studio with the songs very much complete, for the most part. Maybe there's still some vocal moments where Paul's still figuring out our lyrics and so forth. But from hearing these rehearsal recordings, I think he could see, OK, here’s an opportunity that we could use two-inch tape to record this record.

We’ve always used two-inch tape to some capacity in making our records. We usually only do it with drums and maybe bass before moving into Pro Tools just for more expediency and ease.

But by doing two-inch tape and committing to that way of making a record, it sort of limits your options, but also it can be limiting you in a good way, where it’s going to be about you making a very in-the-moment kind of record.

So, you have to say what you want to say in one or two tracks.

It forces you to be less precious about . . . making the perfect record.

Consequently, I think where we came out . . . the record sounds like us playing together. It has a liveliness to it, an urgency to it, but it’s also kind of minimal throughout. There’s not tons of things in that record. It’s kind of a minimal, just an honest human kind of record, in that sense.

-It’s like —

It’s human.

-Old fashioned. No, I’m just kidding.

It’s old fashioned.

https://www.salon.com/2018/08/24/interpols-daniel-kessler-on-recording-marauder-on-tape-it-forces-you-to-be-less-precious/

?? 2 inch tape in a pro studio is at least 16 tracks and probably 24

Yes, but in pro-tools you can edit every microsecond of any take, while that's nearly impossible with tape, so you have to commit to playing good/right takes, and not having to fix it in the mix afterwards.

yes i know i have recorded albums on 2 inch tape

just saying there have been amazingly complex albums, hundreds of them, made on 2 inch tape

yeah I think mentioning two-inch tape in the context of these kinds of records is part of the whole thing, it's a signifier, same with "no protools / very little protools"

incidentally that album sounds like shit

The Interpol one? Yep, one of the worst-sounding records I’ve heard this year.

the equivalent for 90s nu-metal bands being interviewed in kerrang and metal hammer was always that the next album was going to be their "heaviest ever"

which usually involved a bit of "going back to basics"

incidentally that album sounds like shit

― wayne trotsky (Simon H.), Tuesday, November 13, 2018 2:54 PM (thirty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Interpol one? Yep, one of the worst-sounding records I’ve heard this year.

― michaellambert, Tuesday, November 13, 2018 3:07 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

boy y'all ain't kidding!

recorded on 2 inch tape
mastered in GarageBand

especially galling since the previous one sounded pretty great

yeah Marauder sounds awful, I really noticed it after watching this radio session of "If You Really Love Nothing." can anyone hear the bass on the album version?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q52YORZ3lrc

I mean this isn't a good song, but still. wtf guys

yes i know i have recorded albums on 2 inch tape

just saying there have been amazingly complex albums, hundreds of them, made on 2 inch tape

― Greta Van Fleek (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, November 13, 2018 2:12 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The original Pro Tools

https://www.hardwareworld.com/files/pi/lI/Z/10KA.jpg

Frankly I think the issue with the Interpol record is that it was recorded by Dave Fridmann - there’s nonrecording format that could have saved it.

lol true

I'm still dumbfounded why they haven't worked with Peter Katis more.

Also, wondering about artists with a very strong and long back catalog but who NEVER did the "back to basic" move : Prince (I'm not too sure about his 90s output) ? Bowie ? Stevie Wonder ?

― AlXTC from Paris, Thursday, March 8, 2018 6:35 AM (eight months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Musicology is Prince's.

The Next Day was Bowie's "return to form"

Tin Machine was his "I'm just a guy in a rock band" move

Tin Machine was his "I'm just a guy in a rock band" move

is that a move?

yes

examples?

Move like Bowie

see also Dogstar

Music legend Keanu Reeves finally got sick of his chart topping pop hits and went back to the basics of grunge

I guess maybe...Johnny Marr w/Modest Mouse?...but I feel like he'd slowly turned himself into a jobber anyway

Derek & the Dominoes but I still feel like that was more just a naming conceit I think most ppl think Layla is an Eric Clapton song

Mudcrutch

Dave Grohl seems to like the "guy in a rock band" move

a lotta "second bands" that might as well have been called solo projects are halfway one of those - Wings and Zwan come to mind (should have just called it Zwings tbh).

Tin Machine definitely distinct tho in that he was already a solo act and so the gesture of now appearing in a "band" is its own thing. D-12 I think notionally predated Eminem's solo career but it definitely felt a little like "he's a superstar by day, but here he'll be just a regular rapper who's part of a posse," with "My Band" existing to send up said premise.

but in terms of "back to basics" i think the new-band move is less about back to basics in sound and more a lifestyle thing centered on the artist's persona/narrative - "I was feeling trapped and overwhelmed by the identity of (band), it was going to my head, I had to get back in touch with how it was when I first started out and was just a guy like any other, playing in a band." that COULD come along with promises of a back-to-basics sound but it doesn't have to, and in the cases discussed so far it really didn't.

you could argue Clapton took this the furthest by becoming a sideman for Delaney & Bonnie

Primal Scream's "Give Out But Don't Give Up" is surely an archetypal example of this, especially as they later stripped it down even more and released it again because the original didn't quite capture the full essence of just-some-guys-playing-in-a-room. Here's Bobby G:

"This Original Memphis Sessions sounds like six guys playing in a room together, playing live, and the album sounds more cohesive – it’s all-of-a-piece. It sounds like a classic album, in that sense, where the mood is kinda like the same throughout every song. It sounds like it was recorded in the same place, during the same sessions, and, yeah, it’s more cohesive and all-of-a-piece."

I think what he's trying to say is it's more cohesive and all-of-a-piece.

Grinderman as Nick Cave's "just a guy in a rock band" move?

Grinderman is definitely the closest to Tin Machine for sure

Dave Grohl is a weird case because he literally just was a guy in a band

Dave Grohl is a singular case, being a bland Jimmy Fallon-esque meme factory whose product's mediocrity is covered by the fact that everyone seems to like him (i'm a skeptic on the supposed inherent likability of Grohl tbh) and he's everywhere.

No one is going to say "we're going back to the basics of being guys in a rock band because we know this album isn't going to sell as well as the previous ones so it doesn't make sense to spend millions on something that's going to sell as well as an album we only spent thousands on. Anyway, we need something to tour on so why spend a lot of time."

I was thinking about whether Sugar was a guy-in-a-band return to older sound move for Bob Mould when I instead found these URLols:

https://flagpole.com/music/music-features/2016/11/09/bob-mould-gets-back-to-basics

https://wgnradio.com/2016/04/09/musician-bob-mould-is-getting-back-to-basics/

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/arts/music/bob-moulds-advice-keep-it-simple-and-avoid-streaming-music-services.html

The term “taking it back to basics” tends to get overused. Any time a musician subtracts a couple bells and whistles from his sound, the spin immediately becomes that he wanted to strip it down, and stick to the essentials of the songs. With Paul Westerberg, now, as ever, there is no spin.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/devendra-banhart-gets-back-to-basics-on-new-album-121546/

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/yg-the-architect-of-fuck-donald-trump-is-getting-back-to-the-basics-706184/

Sugar is a good one!

Primal Scream's "Give Out But Don't Give Up" is surely an archetypal example of this

the credits for this album are three times as long as for screamadelica.

Just the sound of 83 guys in a room

uncomfortable with donald trump being named "the architect of fuck," by rolling stone no less

many xps but The Next Day wasn't so much a "return to form" for Bowie as simply a return after 10 years w/o an album.

https://slate.com/culture/2013/03/david-bowies-the-next-day-reviewed.html

The Next Day
David Bowie’s excellent new album is a return to his high ’70s form without being a retread.

By Geeta Dayal

amazed that bill wyman managed to refrain from naming that album pictured upthread 'back to bassics'

xp there's a difference between critics evaluating an album as a "return to form" vs. an album being promoted as a return to form. also, that subhed uses "return" as a qualitative judgment and not as a description of the music or Bowie's approach.

Primal Scream's "Give Out But Don't Give Up" is surely an archetypal example of this

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0brzps8

... just try to stop me watching (anything else but) this. I suppose I should watch it for more Boaby G material.

there's a difference between critics evaluating an album as a "return to form" vs. an album being promoted as a return to form

Not really. If the publicist writes the press release, the critics will fall in line. It's a subset of "their best since Some Girls" syndrome.

The return to 70s Bowie narrative was pretty big with that album. It wasn't just one critic.

Bowie invited it a bit himself w/that album cover.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/devendra-banhart-gets-back-to-basics-on-new-album-121546/

― President Keyes, Friday, November 16, 2018 12:01 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Back to the basics of never writing a single memorable song.

and being a creepazoid

"return to form" is distinct from "back to the basics" anyway - the former can just mean they're back to being good again, while the latter taps into the whole "four people in a room" trope.

exactly

and I stand corrected re: The Next Day, I don't remember any of that in the press release. Reviews seemed tepid at best.

I know this isn’t the thread for it, but allow me to tip my cap to another fun (and frequent) cliché:

“This group is an open forum for anything,” the Men’s Nick Chiericozzi told Pitchfork in a 2012 interview. At the time, the singer/guitarist was speaking to the stylistic eclecticism of the band’s third album, Open Your Heart, the record where the Brooklyn quartet first embraced the idea that the most punk thing a punk band can do is not sound “punk.” They had added a permanent lap steel player; before long, they were making records in the woods and hiring horn sections.

^^That reminds me of something Corin Tucker (iirc) said about Sleater-Kinney embracing Classic Rock because she got bored listening to Modern Rock radio during commutes, so she switched to the Classic Rock station and started hearing all these Zep, Rush, Yes etc. songs that were long and had interesting time signatures that "...felt more Punk Rock [in their daring]...than the new stuff so-called 'Modern/Punk' station."

The Kooks (yes, they still exist) have a new album out.

https://musicfeeds.com.au/features/the-kooks/

"... I think this album, it was just time to go back to four guys in a room, just loving playing music together. I think you can hear that."

Embrace had a new album out, I imagine most of you were unaware of that though.

http://theseventhhex.com/post/169341912015/embrace-interview

"The studio dynamic was much more relaxed this time around and we went back to a much simpler palette."

"Completing this album felt like quintessential Embrace really - it’s just five guys in a room doing what they love."

What is the Sleater Kinney album that sounds most like Zep/Yes/Rush?

The Woods

Though that's a bit overblown, SK always sounds like themselves

I like SK just fine, but that’s like asking which of an art major’s sketches looks most like Rembrandt etc

Oh, I do have a copy of The Woods somewhere. It was OK.

Bob Mould on the new Interpol:

When I heard “The Rover,” which they led with, I was knocked out by it. It just sounded perfect. It brought back all of the urgency. They’re sort of a precise band, but I like when it frays a little bit. The record had a lot of precision but a lot of frayed edges, too. I was like, “Yes, this sounds like a band, in a room, making a record.”

From U2: A Musical Biography
David Kootnikoff · 2010

Larry wanted to return to basics and go back to working with just four guys in a room.

I like to imagine that's from the chapter on the 'Pop' album. "Shut up Larry, we've told you we're not doing that"

Sadly not. It's from the post-Pop 'All That You Can't Leave Behind' chapter entitled A Sort of Homecoming

The Kooks (yes, they still exist)

For the new record, we wanted to go back to the sound of just four guys in a room.

Not playing instruments or singing; we really got back to the bare guts of that raw sound we had before we started a band. Dave was mostly doing Words With Friends and Buddy was just zonked on the sofa, those are his snores on "Gift of Pride" and "Darken the Light."

I can't remember what Andy was doing. Shoot, you know ... he might have left the room actually before we started recording. It was a great session though, and it was incredible to get to work with a producer like Tony.

the fifth Beatle was the Room

a band, in a room, making a record
^^the heart, the soul

when you think about it, all records are made in rooms

what if it's a live album recorded at an outdoor venue?

space is a room

the place, iirc

all records are made in rooms, but not all records are made by four guys in a room, together, learning how to be a band again

As I said it upthread, most of these guys have never recorded that way - well, at least not as a professional band - so they're not really going back to anything.

someone mentioned Stipe but i was gonna say there's at least a couple R.E.M. records that qualify for this, right?

― alpine static, Wednesday, March 7, 2018 9:24 PM (nine months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Accelerate" was supposed to be REM's "back to basics, four guys in a room" record, wasn't it?

And it's easily the worst sounding album they ever put out. Even if I had any desire to listen to it, I don't think I could get more than two songs in as the bad mastering is torture.

Seems to me the issue with the "four guys in a room" type records is, it rarely seems like "four guys in a practice pad writing like their lives depending on it" and more often like "four guys in a room who want to do like two takes maximum because I'll punch a puppy if I have to look at your stupid face for one minute longer than I have to"

Which I believe was the original title of St Anger

https://thequietus.com/articles/25902-fennesz-agroa-stripped-back-album

Fennesz' new album, due in March, sees him go back to basics.

"It was all done on headphones, which was rather a frustrating situation at first but later on it felt like back in the day when I produced my first records in the 1990s," Fennesz says. "I used very minimal equipment. I didn't even have the courage to plug in all the gear and instruments which were at my disposal. I just used what was to hand."

He could have used the sample trigger software a friend developed in the 90s, called Back To Basics

http://www.wizardmaster.com/bludgeonsoft/btb/index.html

Former bedroom artists whose greatest successes are in the past trying to move back into shitty apartments where it all started

Fennesz' last album was one of his best though

https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/3125

And then there's Rainbow Mirror, the seven-LP, three-hour Prurient album that came out in December, which he said is more about the process of recording. [...] It was inspired by the very first Prurient show, back in Madison, Wisconsin in 1997, when Fernow performed as part of a trio in a public park, siphoning electricity from the city.

"Rainbow Mirror is a concept piece, like, an environmental piece," he said. "The idea of a three-man station, where each guy has their own setup that's crude and primitive. Rudimentary electronics that sounded familiar, but put together in an uncomfortable way. I wanted to get back to a group idea, but with actual restraint, and limitations, in a way that has maybe come from techno. I wanted to reference the very first show and doing something live as a unit. The way it's put together in this unsequenced, raw, live uncontrolled way [...] When I did this show 20 years ago, what made it good at all was that it was on the verge of failing.

fuckin A+ getting Prurient itt

Just three guys in a park, jamming with our trusty ol' synths, using a hacked streetlamp for juice. Just like the early Delta Bluesmen did, maaan.

https://pitchfork.com/news/the-black-keys-announce-new-album-lets-rock-share-new-song-eagle-birds-listen/

“When we’re together we are the Black Keys, that’s where that real magic is, and always has been since we were 16,” Auerbach said in statement. “The record is like a homage to electric guitar,” Carney added. “We took a simple approach and trimmed all the fat like we used to.”

bonus, the album is called "Let's Rock"

bonus, the album is called "Let's Rock"

ha ha ha ah ah

lol thought of this thread when I saw blurb about this album

i wonder if he actually said "a homage"

like out loud

and if he said "oh-Mage" or "Home-edge"

oh-Mage is not back-to-basics enough

wow Let's Rock 10/10

speaking of pitchfork

Sunn O)))
Life Metal

BEST NEW MUSIC
BY: GRAYSON HAVER CURRINEXPERIMENTALMETAL

The titanic drone metal duo returns with Steve Albini for an enormous, meticulous, back-to-basics album that shows just how compelling those basics can be.

oh wait, this thread is for artists saying that, not critics. my bad

I saw this black keys thing coming like 15 years ago

I'll never forget seeing them open for somebody in 2002 and thinking "well these guys will obviously never get anywhere with this dated BluesHammer schtick. It's 2002 already!"

I shall now get back to my basics by saying Great thread! Hadn't seen it before!
Get back was getting back to being clever cheeky monkey 60s Beatles with a taste for Southern sounds, including lifting from Chuck Berry=="Here come ol Flattop, he come groovin' up slowly," a direct rip, but then they put their own thing with it of course, also got Billy Preston or whomever playing electric piano, which wasn't touch-sensitive back in the day, so wisely not getting *that* back.
Dylan's "back to basics" in terms of sheer regression to an imaginary (in-terms of-Boy-Dylan-Folk-to-Punk-Laureate) past was Self Portrait, which he says in Chronicles was a fuck-you to the people who expected him to top himself with yet another Godhead masterpiece every time, and always did seem like escapism (understandable enough in the charred dawn of the 70s). But yeah Good As I Been and WGW were back to basics in a good way (it can be good).
Most of Eric Clapton's solo career is or comes from getting back to the basics, via three things, according to him: Music From Big Pink, new boss Rolling Stone crowning him "master of the blues cliché," when he stopped playing, Bruce and Baker kept going (this was an arena show). So he ditched Cream, as mentioned above hitched a ride with Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, as did George Harrison, Duane Allman, and maybe all of pre-Derek and the Dominos, who were not so very basic except very loud and intense and EC sacrificing his poor voice ("The doctors tell me I was born with a undersized diaphragm") to Harrison's perfidious or perhaps wised-up wife on the altar of Sincerity. After that, all roots, except when he recorded with guitar synthesizer and a few other brief detours. Even was quoted by Creem I think as saying he wished he'd never left Mayall's Bluesbreakers and started Cream.
Blind Faith was more basics than intended in that the label got greedy or maybe afraid of back to Baker's antics or EC's heroin etc. and put it out before they'd quite finished it, which adds to the relatively spare-room/halfway house atmosphere. Good of its kind, if you can stand it.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jun/29/matt-goss-bros-apparently-im-eccentric-im-fine-with-that

Aging pop act on forthcoming gigs:
Q: What can people expect from the gig?
Matt Goss: A back-to-basics, down-and-dirty gig. No big production, a bit more rock’n’roll. I’m playing guitar, I’ll jump on the piano a couple of times. We’re grown men now. We just want to plug in and play.

From the same interview:
Q: What else is in the pipeline?
Matt: I’ve written the lyrics for an Upstairs, Downstairs stage musical, which has been one of the most cerebral projects of my life.

National treasure status beckons.

just thirty cast members in a room

we’re grown men now

https://www.bucksherald.co.uk/whats-on/entertainment/suede-s-mat-osman-on-rekindling-the-band-s-fire-and-working-on-their-next-album-ahead-of-bucks-festival-date-1-8976333?fbclid=IwAR0WL8bjdgzEo2Xntu0oOnp4BigsM8qFxn-2AfB6sF2615BQGtYly7SfcT0

"Last time it was very heavily structured and had orchestras and spoken word and stuff like that," says Mat. "As usual, I think the next one will be the complete opposite. I think the next one we're going to try and record pretty much live, just five of us in a room - spend a lot of time rehearsing, and then try and capture something a bit more straightforward rock'n'roll, that live feeling."

ahah a perfect one !

that live feeling

Fans who have followed the band since the beginning may think of Let's Rock as a return to form: stripped-down, chugging, blues-rock that recalls their early days playing in garages and basements in Akron, Ohio. They say shedding the layered production that has characterized their later work was a natural move.

"We got together in the studio and it was like it was already agreed upon, but we hadn't even spoken about it: It was just going to be a guitar and drums record," Auerbach says. "There's no keyboards, no other musicians, no outside producers, just the two of us. After so many years apart, that was the way that it had to be."

from Goss:

Luke’s been staying with me in Vegas while we rehearse and we’ve been mucking around together, just being brothers. We played Marco Polo in the pool the other day for the first time in decades, which was hilarious. Luke came along to my show that night and was sitting in the front row, still shouting “Marco!” I was like “Fuck off, I’m busy!”

That Suede drummer one is so perfect.

Mike Rutherford on Genesis' Duke:

There seem to be a lot more group compositions coming out at the moment. And Then There Were Three had more individual songs but this one is getting back to the basic stage of ideas being worked on jointly.

Albums like Pin Ups or World Gone Wrong are a separate category--not "back to basics" but "back to my original inspiration."

Add Paul McCartney's Run Devil Run and Jeff Lynne's The Long Wave to that list.

Where do ukulele solo albums fit? (I can't remember who else did this besides Eddie Vedder, but I know there was at least one more.)

Back to basics: John Mellencamp's Dance Naked was a response to the failure of the more musically ambitious Human Wheels.

With Leonard Cohen or the Ramones, the follow up to a Phil Spector production can't help but be a back to basics.

Where do ukulele solo albums fit? (I can't remember who else did this besides Eddie Vedder, but I know there was at least one more.)

Please assure me that this never happened.

Amanda Palmer, that's the one I was thinking of.

And somebody had a project to gather uke covers of every Beatles song.

Every Genesis song, now you'd be talking

i would love to hear "return of the giant hogweed" on uke

i really liked wang chung's version of "rain" from that uke project, it's my favorite version of one of my favorite beatles songs

here is a great resource on ukulele players

https://www.ukulelemusicinfo.com/blog/famous-ukulele-players/

please enjoy reading about great ukulele players such as "Taylor Swift", "Lou Barbow", and "Barrack Obama"

ach go on then

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBweqmLk6dU

don't know where else to post this but palmer appears fully nude on the cover of her latest album. saw it completely by chance on my most recent visit to barnes and noble. thought about lodging a complaint but it's not their fault, so i just took the cd and put it in the joe bonamassa section. sorry this has nothing to do with the topic of this thread whatsoever.

Wow. First time I understood the lyrics, I think.
(xpost)

so the lyrics aren't "kill the wabbit"?

Ha!

don't know where else to post this but palmer appears fully nude on the cover of her latest album. saw it completely by chance on my most recent visit to barnes and noble. thought about lodging a complaint but it's not their fault, so i just took the cd and put it in the joe bonamassa section. sorry this has nothing to do with the topic of this thread whatsoever.

― Totally different head. Totally. (Austin)

am now waiting for joe bonamassa to release an album with a nude photo of him on the cover so i can file it in the amanda palmer section

BONAMASSA: NO PEDALS, NO AMPS, NO PANTS!

BONAMASSA: Nothing On But Me Guitar!

BONAMASSA: I Named My Balls 'Blues' & 'Rock'

they're actually a good pairing, what with the overbearing everything and general insufferableness.

As the most commercially popular punk band in the history of the United States, Green Day have often admirably taken it on as their obligation to make Rock For Our Times, to heal — or, if the case requires, salt — our national wounds. It’s a tough gig. The Clash only had to make London Calling once; Green Day have been around for 34 years, six presidents, four or five stupid wars, a few global financial collapses, and 17 seasons of The Voice. That’s a lot of American shitpocalypse to churn through.

Sometimes the band has leapt into its role as generational spokespunks (2004’s landmark American Idiot); at other times, they’ve seemed to sort of slide there by default (2016’s Revolution Radio). Their latest album arrives at the dawn of an election year, but this time out, if you’re expecting the band to cater to our pain and spray-paint another blood-red Rorschach on the Washington Monument or tell you who to vote for in the New Hampshire primary, well, you’re going to have to get that advice from Paul Krugman or Bon Iver or whoever. If you’re just looking for some catchy pop-punk rock & roll tunes, they’ve written 10 of those, and most of them are real good.

The band heard on Father of All Motherfuckers (or Father of All…, as it’s being sold at the Safemart over in Cowardsville) sounds refreshingly, almost Kerplunk-ishly, unburdened by legacy or accrued stature. While the album’s title might reasonably describe the current occupant of the White House, Billie Joe Armstrong recently told Rolling Stone that the band specifically set out not to waste their time on a bunch of songs about Trump. Instead, they wrote a bunch of songs about being middle-aged rockers in love with their record collection. In some ways, Father of All… recalls 2000’s Warning, an album released at the nadir of alt-rock’s cultural reach in which they displayed their mastery of vintage rock songcraft. Like that record, this one seems uniquely minor for Green Day, both in design and execution, and in a good way.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQMje4tX0AgzgAI?format=jpg&name=small

They're really "managing expectations" hard with that press release, lol

oops tough to tell the difference

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/green-day-father-of-all-motherfuckers-review-948579/

an album released at the nadir of alt-rock’s cultural reach in which they displayed their mastery of vintage rock songcraft

hwæt

re: "vintage rock" - for the minute they were on in my lyft it sounded like green day recognizing that to kids queen, weezer and my chemical romance are all 'vintage rock' and there's not enough bandwidth to stake a brand on any further distinctions.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/giles-martin-reflects-on-final-abbey-road-recording-sessions-you-actually-wonder-if-the-beatles-could-have-sustained-themselves-161415239.html

“And I love the sound of the E Street Band playing completely live in the studio, in a way we’ve never done before, and with no overdubs. We made the album in only five days, and it turned out to be one of the greatest recording experiences I’ve ever had.”

 “We wanted to get back to what it was like to be in a band when we first started being in bands – remembering what it was like the first time you picked up a guitar, or the first time you sat behind a set of drums,” he says.

https://rockandrollglobe.com/pop/clem-burke-full-moon-empty-hearts/

choice quote

first time I picked up a guitar I held it the wrong way round and probably dropped it

The first time I picked up a guitar it didn't have strings on it.

Looking forward to a full record of someone violently strumming an out of tune acoustic guitar (all open strings because you don’t know how to fret notes yet).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTQEVXLAfc4

Looking forward to a full record of someone violently strumming an out of tune acoustic guitar (all open strings because you don’t know how to fret notes yet).

https://corwoodindustries.com/

Found this in The Wallflowers’ Wikipedia page:

When in the studio, the band were intent on using as little recording equipment as possible. Dylan explained: "If I could have had it my way I would not have seen a microphone or a cable anywhere."

Dylan goes unelectric!

Dylan unrecorded !

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81JmWMfPv2L._AC_SY450_.jpg

Great title, not great subtitle

Charlie Daniels not known for subt(it)lety

lol

lol that jake Dylan quote, it’s like yeah I know what you mean but it still sounds completely psychotic

lol that jake Dylan quote, it’s like yeah I know what you mean but it still sounds completely psychotic

Would rather read an interview with the engineer in charge of taping microphones to the ceiling out of his field of vision, or sneakily clipping one to the brim of his hat just before he starts singing...

The Wikipedia page says: However, finding a producer who was willing to work with them proved to be difficult. The band was intent on recording live and few producers were willing to produce that way. Paul Fox eventually stepped in and agreed to produce the album.

This was the band's first album, btw. It's kinda funny to read between the lines: "Yeah, Bob Dylan's kid wants to make a record, and record it 'live'... Sorry, I'm all booked up..."

The album also sounds kind of thin and shitty, if you listen to it.

Jakob [to engineer]: "OK, can we listen to that one back?"

engineer: "Yeah, absolutely."

Jakob: "...um...I'm not hearing anything...?"

engineer: "No, see, Jakob, this is exactly what you asked for: no mics. How do you like your new 'back to basics' sound? Also, I'm still on the clock."

the equivalent of this for nu metal bands that were covered in kerrang ! in the 1990s was always "this is our heaviest album yet".

In British literary circles a couple decades back, there was a joke about how one of the most unlikely book titles would be "My Struggle," by Martin Amis.

(Sorry to kill the joke with explanation, but the implication is that it was probably very easy for the sun of a massively successful author to get a book deal.)

I'm thinking that one could construct a similar joke about how the Wallflowers needed to pay their dues by touring in a decrepit minivan, playing in tiny clubs to nonexistent audiences, etc. etc. until finally a brave A&R guy decided to take a chance and give them a record deal.

erg, "son," not "sun." sorry

https://img.discogs.com/SFp5xjKhZFuN8UUg96Ou3FYDlpE=/fit-in/600x628/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-16254996-1606061803-7585.jpeg.jpg

Jansen/Barbieri/Karn - Playing In A Room With People

haha that is the ultimate back to basics title

'Despite a pair of duets with country icons Dolly Parton and Rodney Crowell, Jewel’s Picking Up the Pieces is mostly an intimate, back-to-basics album, focused on the same folksy introspection that made her debut Pieces of You a hit 20 years ago. It’s appropriate, then, that the new video for “Pretty Faced Fool” is simple and straightforward. In the clip above, Jewel strums the acoustic ballad in a recording studio, while Christmas lights glow in the background.' https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/watch-jewels-back-to-basics-pretty-faced-fool-video-169060/

Would prefer "we wanted to go back to the basics - an expensive analog mixing desk, a rotating cast of crack session players and cocaine by the ounce."

Anything recent fit that bill?

This is not recent, but see the second paragraph

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.today.com/today/amp/wbna5452205

This is a few years old, but it fits.

Haake tells Metal Hammer: “This album is recorded live. It’s the first time we’ve done that in 20, 25 years. It was time limitations that stopped us doing it before. And it’s been interesting.

“If you put it all together using computers then you often have to fix problems after the fact. I’ve gone back to records where I’ve not known every drum part. And once you do that you can start with drums and then just add layers of guitars and then bass and it all sounds perfect.

”Obzen and Koloss are great albums but, to me, they are a little too perfect. It didn’t really capture what we sounded like honestly.

“But where we recorded live you get to hear the push and pull, one person might be a little ahead and the other might be a little behind. If you kill that, you can kill the energy.”

Haake adds: “So for us it was just about going back to those albums that inspired us when we were growing up, that were important to us in our formative years, and all of those bands had that energy. The albums in the 80s and early 90s had the rawness that I’m talking about – that’s what we wanted to recapture.”

https://www.loudersound.com/news/meshuggah-recorded-violent-sleep-of-reason-live

Perfect

wow that truly has it all in terms of back to basics

*chef's kiss*

What's funny about that is that Obzen always sounded looser and "jammier" (and like they'd been listening to a whole fuckin' lot of Tool) than its immediate predecessors...which was why I didn't like it.

What's the least basic band that claimed to go back to basics?

Tom Jones: Getting Back To Basics On 'Spirit In The Room'

Not the first time Metal Hammer covered a band doing that:

Earlier, we referenced Metallica’s past as a key player in the burgeoning thrash-metal scene of the mid 80s. It’s a period they themselves were forced to revisit on Death Magnetic, under express instruction from their new producer, Rick Rubin.

“Rick kept telling us: ‘Think like you used to think in 1985. Approach it like you did in 1985. Listen to the same records you did in 1985.’ Everything was about transporting yourself back to 1985,” Lars divulges.

Rick, of course, was encouraging a back-to-basics approach. He wanted Metallica to simultaneously recapture the fire of their early days and dispel the painful memories of working with Bob Rock on St Anger.

https://www.loudersound.com/features/metallica-death-magnetic-album-interview-2008

Nicki Minaj Reveals Why She Went Back To Basics

Here's another Green Day one from some 2010 sessions that might not even have ended up on anything.

"It's just been songwriting right now. Instead of doing it later on, we decided to start doing stuff now. ... It's all back to the basics again. Just getting in a room together and start jamming," Armstrong said. "We set up all of our old gear, which was like an experiment. We set up all of our equipment from 1992, and we sat in a room. We got in, and I was like, 'Come on, guys, we're getting back in!' and I [start playing] and go, 'This sounds like sh--!' Everything sounded so bad."

"Me and [drummer] Tre [Cool] were looking at Billie going, 'Really, you've got to pull out that POS amp?' " bassist Mike Dirnt laughed. "I mean, it really sounded like crap."

green day "jamming" is up there with the worst music i can imagine

I'm just getting a kick out of "Me and [drummer] Tre [Cool]".

sounds like they needed some green that day

St Vincent on her new video and “dirt under the fingernails” album, which is like blues for 2021.

“This is just a performance video of me singing a song, dancing and just doing everything in a very practical way. It was going in the same spirit as the music where it’s just a performance. It’s not got heavy-heavy production, but we just did it in the room to capture a moment.”

"return to form"

Most basic band to go back to basics？

Probably AC/DC:

To anyone outside the hard rock tent, it’s laughable to hear that there once was a time when AC/DC yearned to get back to basics.

https://www.loudersound.com/features/ac-dc-the-final-salute-flick-of-the-switch-fly-on-the-wall

Was thinking ramones

I kinda disagree with that article's premise. When I ranked all of AC/DC's albums for Stereogum, there were plenty of titles below each of those. Here's what I said about them:

Fly On The Wall is the noisiest, nastiest-sounding AC/DC album. Like its predecessor, 1983’s Flick Of The Switch, it was produced by the Young brothers, recorded in Montreux, Switzerland between November 1984 and February 1985. But where Flick had a thick, meaty roar to the guitars, rumbling bass, and cleanly mixed, pounding drums, Fly is much more blown-out sounding. The guitars have a harsh, shearing-metal sound, and the drums are pushed through that ’80s gate that makes the snare sound like a battering ram striking a door and the cymbals crash like a shattering windshield. Cliff Williams’ bass is entirely absent, blended so thoroughly with the rhythm guitar that he might as well not be there. (The change in the band’s songwriting style in the post-Mutt Lange era, from aggressive but supple boogie to crashing hard rock riffs, really didn’t serve Williams well.)

This was the first AC/DC album since the Australian version of High Voltage not to feature Phil Rudd on drums. His replacement, Simon Wright, was barely 20 years old and a near-total unknown when he joined the group. His playing was as rock-steady as his predecessor’s, but the fluidity Rudd brought to the band was definitely missing; the drums on Fly slam where they should thwack.

Brian Johnson is even more tucked away in the mix than he was on Flick. This suits his performance well, though, because this was the first album on which his vocals started to suffer. You can only scream at full strength for so long without ripping your throat up, and from day one, Johnson was almost totally lacking in the subtlety and dynamics Bon Scott had brought to the group. Here, he’s hoarse, screechy, and frequently incomprehensible, so frankly, it’s a relief to hear him drowned out by the guitars.

There are several good songs on Fly On The Wall. The title track, “Sink The Pink,” and “Shake Your Foundations” all have bone-crunching riffs and shout-along choruses; each allows the band to work minor variations on their post-Back In Black style that keep them in tune with contemporary metal while still sounding very much like themselves. It’s more or less the same trick Ozzy Osbourne pulled on The Ultimate Sin. “Playing With Girls” is the fastest song on Fly, a high-stepping boogie-metal track. But it’s balanced out by “Danger,” a turgid ballad that was inexplicably the first single.

Fly On The Wall isn’t great. Three albums after what they had to know was their commercial peak, they were short on ideas, they’d lost their drummer, and Johnson’s voice wasn’t the powerful instrument it had been in 1980. Still, they were able to sell a million copies based on past glories and raw power, and honestly, there are times when its ugly, noisy mix is just the brain-scrubbing blast that’s required.

I actually ranked Flick of the Switch *above* Highway to Hell...

As soon as the tour in support of For Those About To Rock We Salute You wound down, AC/DC headed back to Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, where they’d recorded Back In Black, without producer “Mutt” Lange for the first time since 1979. They were handling this one themselves, and after the (artistically if not commercially) disappointing For Those About To Rock, it was the right decision.

Their shortest album, at 37:05, and sheathed in a cover that looks like a teenaged fan might have drawn it on his notebook during a boring class, Flick Of The Switch could easily have been another letdown. But it’s not. In fact, it’s a collection of 10 songs that fucking rock, some of them harder than any material the band had released to date with Brian Johnson up front.

The one thing that must be acknowledged is that lyrically, the record is pretty weak, with only one real exception. Johnson wrote some great stuff on Back In Black, but inspiration had apparently run dry by this point, because half these songs are seriously meaningless — strings of words that lead from verse to chorus without a single memorable line. The only song with any lyrical impact is “Bedlam In Belgium,” for the simple reason that it actually tells a story, albeit one that actually predated Johnson’s tenure with the band. The gig that turned into a riot was in Kontich, Belgium in October 1977, on the tour in support of Let There Be Rock, and you can read the full story, from someone who claims to have been there, right here.

Fortunately, the relatively weak lyrics are balanced out by some of the most ferocious riffing in the band’s ’80s catalog. AC/DC made a conscious effort to recapture the rawness of earlier albums here, and they pulled it off. Johnson is in the middle of the mix, on an equal plane with the Young brothers’ guitars and Phil Rudd’s drums (this would be his final album with the band until 1995, but it’s a hell of a sendoff), and the whole thing roars and slams from front to back. Some songs (“Deep In The Hole,” “Rising Power”) have the funky strut of “Back In Black,” while “Badlands” is stomping blues-rock, and “Landslide” and “Brain Shake” are as fast as classics like “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)” or “Whole Lotta Rosie.”

One more caveat, though. While it’s tough to make these kinds of accusations in the realm of blues-based hard rock, where everybody’s working with the same chords and scales, “Landslide” sounds distressingly similar to Ted Nugent’s “Motor City Madhouse.” It’s not just a similar riff; the whole fast-picking thing Angus is doing is exactly what Nugent did on his song, in 1975. It feels like straight-up thievery to me. But what the hell — they make it their own, and the song rocks. (And in possible karmic payback, it sure seems like Whitesnake lifted the riff from “Badlands” for the chorus melody to “Slow An’ Easy,” from 1984’s Slide It In.)

AC/DC didn’t need to make a brilliant album after For Those About to Rock We Salute You, but they did need to make one that proved they could still kick ass. They did.

Was thinking ramones

― calstars

That was my first idea too, but I couldn't find any mention of "back to basics" in Ramones in interviews. Lots of quotes of "compared to prog rock and disco, we took it back-to-basics", but nothing about themselves.

I don't think the Ramones ever did that, honestly. They always pretty much sounded like themselves, but they quite consciously moved "forward" (whatever that might mean in a given year) on every album.

Road To Ruin: Let's write some acoustic songs!
End of the Century: Let's work with Phil Spector!
Pleasant Dreams: Let's work with Graham Gouldman!
Subterranean Jungle: Let's make a catchy New Wave album!
Too Tough To Die: OK, this one was a "back to basics" move, with Tommy producing, but they still had that one Dave Stewart-produced song.
Animal Boy: Let's use (more) synthesizers!
Halfway To Sanity: Let's make a metal record!
Brain Drain: Let's work with Bill Laswell!

Yeah too tough 2 die is the one

The first sad subtext of this thread is how the passing of time pushes bands (and by extension, all people) to the repetition of a limited number of options in their creative repertoire. I guess the next move after the "back-to-basics" record is the "dealing with mortality" album; Dylan released his 24 years ago and is still around, presumably having dealt with it already.
The other sad subtext is how repetitive and uniform interviews with musicians are. The quotes in this thread are almost as tedious as interviews with athletes!

People shouldn’t be asked to discuss their work, imo.

They’ll either lie to you or they’ll be wrong

Just here for the team

Givin a hundred and ten percent

Just jammin in a room

there’s also the “covers album” phase.

The quotes in this thread are almost as tedious as interviews with athletes!

"Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read."

Dylan released his 24 years ago and is still around, presumably having dealt with it already.

Tom Jones:

My wife passed away [in 2016], God bless her, but I’m basically doing what she told me to do. To carry on and get back to reality. I was in America for 41 years. It was fine; it was great while I was there. Wonderful. Sunshine. Lovely. But let’s get back to reality, and that's what I'm doing.

Reality = Wales?

Just seen this one from 2020 with Andy Bell out of Erasure, talking about the band's then new album:

How would you describe it?

As going back to the beginning. Being a musician you go through the doldrums, especially after 35 years, because it’s like being on a hamster wheel. After a while you have to get off, take stock, then get back on and you have a fresh perspective. This album reminded me of what it felt like being a 15, 16-year-old and going out and being in the record shop and the excitement of waiting for something to come out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti6QV90X-Sk

“We wanted to make it feel as unproduced as possible, trying to make it sound like a band in a room.”

https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/the-war-on-drugs-i-dont-live-here-anymore-interview/

‘Survivor’ Is Going Back to Basics in Its 41st Season With a Stripped-Down Format and New Fans

Haven’t they already gone back to basics? I thought that was their whole schtick. It’s not like they ever had a kid A

That's about the show i think

GAYLE KING: Very nice. Joe Walsh`s first solo album in twenty years is called Analog Man. He joins us in Studio 57 live and in color. Hello, Joe Walsh.

JOE WALSH (Musician/Analog Man): Good morning.

JEFF GLOR: Hey, Joe.

GAYLE KING: So your first one in twenty years. Was it scary to do this after all this time?

JOE WALSH: It was kind of scary, yeah, but it`s a really good feeling.

GAYLE KING: Because?

JOE WALSH: Well, I`ve been sober eighteen years. And I-- I really opened up and let people see the real Joe--

GAYLE KING: Joe.

JOE WALSH: --now that I know who he is.

GAYLE KING: Yeah. Were you convinced, Joe, that because after being sober for eighteen years, that when you first get into sobriety, were you thinking I can`t do it without the drugs?

JOE WALSH: I didn`t-- I didn`t think I could do anything. I didn`t think I`d ever be funny again. I didn`t think I could play live in front of people, everything-- I-- I didn`t know how to do it. And I had to learn and you-- you measure that amount of time in years.

GAYLE KING: Mm-Hm.

JOE WALSH: But Analog Man is kind of, I am, back--

GAYLE KING: Mm-Hm. I`m back.

JOE WALSH: I`m not done yet. And it won`t be twenty years till the next one.

GAYLE KING: Next one.

JEFF GLOR: That is good to hear. As-- as Gayle was-- was jamming out this morning--

GAYLE KING: I`m back.

JEFF GLOR: --to the new disc.

GAYLE KING: Yes.

JEFF GLOR: Some of the lyrics are poignant, though, I mean in Analog Man, the whole-- the whole world is living in a digital dream. It`s not really there. It`s all on the screen. You`ve been thinking about these concepts for a while.

JOE WALSH: I have. I have. And what I am trying to do with Analog Man, it`s-- it`s a reality check. Through music I`m trying to say that we live on an analog planet, which we`re systematically trashing while we`re spending more and more time in the virtual world which doesn`t exist.

GAYLE KING: Yes.

JOE WALSH: It`s an illusion made by computers.

GAYLE KING: Yes.

JOE WALSH: What`s really happening is that we`re sitting in chairs while our bodies are waiting for our minds to come back.

GAYLE KING: Yes. You do say, Joe, that there`s nothing that beats a feeling of being in the room with a group of people, really talented people just doing what you love to do and that`s play music. That nothing replaces that.

JOE WALSH: Yeah. With the new digital technology, you can fix anything.

GAYLE KING: Anything.

JOE WALSH: And you can make everything perfect.

GAYLE KING: Is perfection bad in music?

JOE WALSH: It doesn`t sound good to me.

GAYLE KING: Uh-Huh. Uh-Huh.

JOE WALSH: All the mojo is gone. You get a human performance of guys playing together in a room and there`s magic in that. And it`s such a temptation to fix stuff that doesn`t need fixing because you can you know.

GAYLE KING: Yeah.

JOE WALSH: And every time you do that you lose a little bit of the magic that was there and that`s what we love about all the old records--

GAYLE KING: Yeah.

JOE WALSH: --that we all love.

GAYLE KING: Yeah.

GAYLE KING: I did a piece a while back on vinyl records. You talk about Vinyl as well in this disc.

JOE WALSH: Yeah.

JEFF GLOR: There are things you just don`t hear when you go down to CD or MP3.

JOE WALSH: Yeah.

JEFF GLOR: And-- and that-- and that that`s great. I mean you still listen to vinyl, I assume, quite a bit.

JOE WALSH: Every chance I get.

JEFF GLOR: Good.

Belew says he immediately wanted to go to Italy - "Hanging in the sun and eating pasta in Italy? Sounds terrible, doesn't it?" he says - but it took three summers for his schedule to match up with that of Copeland and Cosma.

When he arrived at Cosma's studio he was surprised to see all the gear set up as if an actual band was going to play there, able to see each other and talk as they worked on songs.

"I thought I'd just play over tracks they'd already prepared," he says.

But Copeland says that was always the plan - to record an album like rock bands always did in the days before electronic files made worldwide collaboration as easy as hitting send on an email with a digital track attached.

"It was all recorded old-school, four guys in a room blasting away at each other," he says. "And I think you can hear it on the tracks. I think there's an X factor you get from mutual inspiration."

Why did he think he had to travel to Italy, if he thought it would just be a digital collab thing?

in the days before electronic files made worldwide collaboration as easy as hitting send on an email with a digital track attached

I mean you still have to play the fucking thing, it's not quite as easy as that

Been posted before that one, though the bit about eating pasta in Italy is new.

eating pasta is pretty back to basics, key part of the narrative

xp: Sorry about that! I ctrl-f'd for Belew but not Copeland.

what was the first "back to basics" move?

the elvis 68 comeback special?

Reading that Walsh/King exchange is good for making you think you’re high.

what was the first "back to basics" move?

John Wesley Harding?

...although all the Dylan records had been "people in a room" up to that point.

He just used fewer people and less electric instrumentation.

An earlier candidate could be the Chess Records "Folksinger" albums, particularly the Muddy Waters one.

Really that was the only one. I confused the "Real Folk Blues" sets for original albums instead of the comps they are.

Geoff Downes of Yes on the new Yes album:

There’s a lot of acoustic piano on the album, there’s a lot of acoustic guitar. This makes it almost a sort of urbane feeling that Yes has gone back to its roots in some ways.

Yes, that piano and acoustic guitar band from way back when.

can't wait for the return of the Jerry Lee Lewis era of Yes

lol

Now there's a prog rocker in Vladivostok
Got every side by Jerry Lee
But for Tales from Topographic Oceans
That guy could well be me

Many of the big prog groups had a 50s pastiche (16th note piano pounding) song/segment: "I've Seen All Good People" or "Going For the One" by Yes, "Are You Ready Eddy?" by ELP, the climaxes of "Too Old to Rock and Roll" and "The Spirit of Radio"...

i don't think there's any (or very few) musicians of that generation that weren't seriously influenced or inspired to start music by early rock n' roll

Sure, Steve Howe's guitar style has at least as much rockabilly as jazz and classical in it.

Yeah, that generation can often be relatable on that level, it's true.

I saw "Yes" (the Steve Howe version) a few years ago and the highlight for me of the dya was a solo acoustic piece Howe played that wasn't even technically a Yes song, it was him solo.

definitely felt like a gumbo of styles including rock 'n roll which is why I enjoyed it so much. the rest was great too but that piece stuck out more to me

i don't know his solo career but i always thought a solo instrumental fingerstyle acoustic album from howe would have been great (which may exist i don't know)

So you're saying you wanted Steve Howe... to go back to the basics?

One guy in a room

definitely felt like a gumbo of styles including rock 'n roll which is why I enjoyed it so much. the rest was great too but that piece stuck out more to me

One guy in a room

Why did he think he had to travel to Italy, if he thought it would just be a digital collab thing?

underrated question

See paragraph three (though it isn’t a quote from a band)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-beatles-let-it-be-super-deluxe/

Duran Duran have a new album out.

Roger says: “Erol came in and said, ‘I want you to go back in a live room and play the way you used to play together’.

“He wanted the feel of our early 12in records, which he’d been playing in the clubs for years. So he’s kind of responsible for that beginning.

“He told us to forget technology for a little while and get in a room and play together. And that’s how we wrote this.”

Forget technology for a little while

*Chucks synthesizers out window, lands on an elderly lady walking the dog*

Excuse me, that elderly lady is one of Banarama.

and on and on and on it goes -

"The band’s two most recent albums, 2014’s They Want My Soul and 2017’s Hot Thoughts, were made with producer Dave Fridmann (Tame Impala, Lord Huron) in his Fredonia, New York, studio. During the Hot Thoughts tour, which wrapped up at the end of 2019, Daniel and his bandmates had a strong idea of what they wanted their next album to sound like. Daniel liked the electronic experimentations and rhythmic left turns of Hot Thoughts, “but it was a conscious decision after playing those songs live that we wanted the next one to be . . . I don’t know. I think every time you do an album, you’re reacting against the last one. We wanted to go back as much as we could to a record where it’s about a band playing in a room, playing rock and roll music, and playing off of each other. Just kind of more old school, where you figure out what the songs are going to be, hash them out over months, and then you hit ‘record.’”"

https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/keep-austin-spoon/

feel like spoon would be more self aware than to phrase it like that

lol I mean their whole aesthetic presents as “basic”

When I read this I thought “Britt was 100% aware of this thread when giving this interview”

It is hard to believe that bands can continue to be this clueless but this and the Oozing Sobriety thread (and others) suggest otherwise

Why is it clueless, though? I get it’s a cliché, but if it rings true to all these musicians, what is the criticism?

They could maybe try talking about in less clichéd terms? Any mention of rooms right out for a start.

Is there a thread on I Love Sports for athletes saying, “I’m just gonna give it 100% and leave it all on the field”?

They could maybe try talking about in less clichéd terms? Any mention of rooms right out for a start.

I think athletes talk that way so much, week to week, every game, that that’s transcended cliche.

The quotes in this thread are almost as tedious as interviews with athletes!

― Halfway there but for you, Sunday, 21 March 2021 00:08 (seven months ago) link

...but then again, this is one important way that records are made. And it's more pleasing to most rock listeners to heat a band talk about going back to a live sound than saying, "we decided on this record we would Pro Tools every individual sonic element until it sounded like digital static".

If so many professional musicians say the same thing on so many separate occasions, it must surely be true?

I'm sure for some bands like perhaps Duran Duran above, someone is the 'music' guy who puts together the tracks, sends to the vocalist who sends back the vocals and everything is just overdubbed and looped together - really no different technique wise than any hip hop or electronic music. They might have records that have never been played live together until they start rehearsing to tour. I'd say for some it is probably novel for them to get all back together and try to get that garage/basement vibe back.

Lots of Metal is made the same way that's why there are so many bands out there that get slagged for not being able to pull of their own records. They often literally cannot play what they have edited/sequenced together.

Is there a thread on I Love Sports for athletes saying, “I’m just gonna give it 100% and leave it all on the field”?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5uQBQzr8T0

:33

i feel like musicians probably don't read enough interviews with other aging rock musicians to realise how cliched the phrasing is

"We just want to go back to the sound of 5 players on a court"

xp OTM - or equally likely, they’re not pressed about trying to impress nerds like us who read lots of rock interviews.

I think there's a synth pop reversal of this thread premise - ie synth bands of the early eighties, as they push on into the nineties they go a bit rock and get out the guitars etc... and then at some point they decide to 'go back to basics', throw out their guitars and plug in the synthesisers again. I distinctly recall reading something along those lines in an interview with Phil Oakey in the 90s or 2000s.

I'm sure for some bands like perhaps Duran Duran above, someone is the 'music' guy who puts together the tracks, sends to the vocalist who sends back the vocals and everything is just overdubbed and looped together - really no different technique wise than any hip hop or electronic music. They might have records that have never been played live together until they start rehearsing to tour. I'd say for some it is probably novel for them to get all back together and try to get that garage/basement vibe back.

Lots of Metal is made the same way that's why there are so many bands out there that get slagged for not being able to pull of their own records. They often literally cannot play what they have edited/sequenced together.

Yes, this sounds about right. Nonetheless I'm suspicious about how back to basics a lot of these back to basics albums actually are if, for instance, back to basics means sounding like a Duran Duran 12" - granted that that might seem like a garage/basement vibe to Duran Duran.

I suspect a lot of these bands jam out the vibes in a live-ish fashion during the tracking phase, whereupon the producer gets to work editing it to fuck / comping the vocal takes together etc cause the band don't quite get that they're not exactly Led Zep when it comes to the musicianship.

Also they probably hardly ever see each other anymore and can't stand to be in the same room if they can possibly avoid it.

Yeah these proud statements of "just five guys in a room" aren't so much about the music, but about the marvel that these people can stay in one room for the duration of one song.

Just five guys in a zoom

I feel like a bunch of synthy and New Wavey early 80s bands started as four-piece rock bands with traditional rock instrumentation, so it IS more going back than "going a bit rock."

That feels reasonably close to true in the cases I'm thinking of - Duran, JD / New Order, Devo, T. Heads, Cure, Costello, Flock of Seagulls, etc. Pretty much have always had guitar / bass / drums along with keys. Am I missing something?

Just five guys in a zoom

_Just five guys in a zoom_

Lol

five guys in a room, one went out for a pee during the solo

... and never came back.

That gets to the point, though—as some of us have been experiencing in our non-musician lives since last year, there’s a big diff btw collaborating “in a room” and doing it remotely or in a mediated fashion.

xpost lol Tom

Is there a thread on I Love Sports for athletes saying, “I’m just gonna give it 100% and leave it all on the field”?

― juristic person (morrisp), Sunday, October 31, 2021 2:19 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

it's much more complex though, athletes are constantly on edge, there's not like 20,000 people screaming FUCK YOU to simon le bon if he flubs a note, everything a famous player says will be instant grist for the 24-hour ESPN news cycle, twitter, etc, so saying these things that are "safe" is really self-protection in many ways, and you can see the results usually when a player veers from that script which everytime they get put on blast on TV and the internet for the week they learn the lesson to double down on those cliches. no musician operates under anything like day-to-day, week-to-week pressure

and the heavy racial component to how athletes are perceived

you find an app you love in this world
just hang on tooth and nail
the Zuck is always at the door

xpost some of the shit people Tweet at athletes on twitter after a simple flubbed play would be enough to get them locked up if anybody actually enforced internet threats.

hell, there was one player (I forget who) where he was hurt and a late scratch and a lot of people harassed him for "hurting their fantasy teams"

it's actually an interesting contrast - famous musicians perform almost exclusively to people who admire and worship them while athletes spend a lot of their careers performing in front of a screaming mob of people who actively hate them and want them to fail

i think both these things are bound to warp the way you interact with the world in different ways

Your point though (and others above) seems to be that musicians deserve to be taken to task for using a mild cliche in interviews; that’s what I don’t get. I know it’s a little funny, but calling them “clueless,” saying they should “be more self-aware,” “I bet they don’t even really like each other” (etc.)… it all sounds a little Comic Book Store Guy.

They don’t owe us insightful remarks about the creative process (although some do deliver that).

Your point though (and others above) seems to be that musicians deserve to be taken to task for using a mild cliche in interviews; that’s what I don’t get. I know it’s a little funny, but calling them “clueless,” saying they should “be more self-aware,” “I bet they don’t even really like each other” (etc.)… it all sounds a little Comic Book Store Guy.

― juristic person (morrisp), Monday, November 1, 2021 10:26 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i never said this i don't really care if they use cliches or not

just saying professional athletes is a much different dynamic

though i don't think lightly ribbing some rock band about it is a big thing either

Kind of taking this a bit seriously? (xxp)

the interesting thing is opera - opera singers DO get booed for making mistakes, sometimes to the point where they walk-off mid performance. But outside of this, live performances are full of homers. part of it is "not being able to hear well at a loud concert", but if you go to a show where the vocalist just isn't singing well, often times they get cheered like they gave the performance of a lifetime. sure, there's a few documented instances like where Whitney Houston got booed, but usually those are egregious situations or situations where the singer has baggage that the fans are already incorporating into their feelings.

like the first time I saw Black Sabbath, Ozzy sounded abysmal. they had lowered keys of songs and something was up with his hearing, he could not find his note for just about any of the songs, so he was outright in a different key than his band.

he got roars and catcalls and OMG HE'S STILL GOT IT, people saying "wow Ozzy was on fire" and tbh he sounded like someone had set him on fire. even people listening to the youtube vids where you could hear more accurately in the sobering light of day.

xxp My point with the athlete example was that "giving 100%" probably feels as accurate to them as "four guys in a room" feels to musicians; these cliches seem to express something meaningful to these ppl who do things that I can't, artless as the expressions may sound to idle dude on couch (me).

People don't really expect athletes to speak anything other than cliches though, do they?

xxp My point with the athlete example was that "giving 100%" probably feels as accurate to them as "four guys in a room" feels to musicians; these cliches seem to express something meaningful to these ppl who do things that I can't, artless as the expressions may sound to idle dude on couch (me).

― juristic person (morrisp), Monday, November 1, 2021 10:39 AM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

no i'm saying it think it's largely a rote set of words they've learned over time are safe to say and prevent them from getting themselves in trouble so and they are largely just reciting them. i think a lot of musicians the four guys in a room thing actually has some nostalgia for a time when they were coming up, still liked each other, etc

it's like imagine having to do a press conference everytime you finish a guitar solo

I think there's a synth pop reversal of this thread premise - ie synth bands of the early eighties, as they push on into the nineties they go a bit rock and get out the guitars etc... and then at some point they decide to 'go back to basics', throw out their guitars and plug in the synthesisers again. I distinctly recall reading something along those lines in an interview with Phil Oakey in the 90s or 2000s.

― Zelda Zonk, Monday, November 1, 2021

well, Human League got a bit rock and got out the guitars in 1984.

xp Musicians often complain about having to do press for every album cycle, answer the same questions every time, etc.!

that happens every few years not every day, the equivalent would be having every concert you perform broken down in detail and hashed over for a few days, plus the music press is largely fawning

Also players have coached, owners, leagues, entire power structures that have direct control over them, in the extreme, you can see Colin Kaepernick who is still blacklisted from the NFL for his political views

Having to answer some dumb questions for Variety and Rolling Stone every 3 years isn't remotely the same

Are you guys just debating the strength of the metaphor? FWIW I agree that rockers saying rock marketing cliches in this case is not something they may be aware of, or would even care at all if it was pointed out to them.

Was gonna say - we're going much deeper into this analogy than the spirit in which I intended it

ILX in a nutshell

How about when novelists, who are (actual) wordsmiths and also only do interviews when they have a project to promote, say things like "I don't know where they story's going until the characters take me there," etc.

It means they are marketing savvy

xp Musicians often complain about having to do press for every album cycle, answer the same questions every time, etc.!

Perhaps they could avoid this by not performing old material every tour. I'm not suggesting "play the new album in full" shows, 'cause I hate those, but I've always kind of admired the radicalism of Fela Kuti, who would play songs for a while, then record them, and once they were on an album, he'd drop them and start playing new stuff. If bands, like (some) standup comedians, were presenting an entirely new hour of material every year, they'd probably get questions they'd find more interesting.

We are talking about albums of new material; the questions are just the same every interview. "What was it like to be back in the studio again?" etc.

"In writing my new novel, I was going back to one person in a room, just rocking out with a pencil and paper".

People don't really expect athletes to speak anything other than cliches though, do they?

― Des Weerelds Dool-om-berg ont-doold op Dool-in-bergh (Tom D.), Monday, November 1, 2021 11:43 AM bookmarkflaglink

there are definitely athletes who do, and unfortunately usually in the form of throwing a coach or a teammate under the bus, which leads to verbal arguments, sometimes fistfights, or being traded. which is why most athletes usually are told to just stfu

it's like imagine having to do a press conference everytime you finish a guitar solo

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, November 1, 2021 11:50 AM bookmarkflaglink

"hi, Mr. Hammett, Jake Stanislavsky from the Deerpointe Tattler. any reason you fucked up the solo to 'One' so badly tonight?"

"I'm still playing it."

"are you, though?"

In writing my new novel, I was going back to one person in a room, just rocking out with a pencil and paper"

None of that 24-track ballpoint pen shit

This really took a turn

How many threads must a man scroll down

We gotta get this back to basics... just a few guys in a thread, posting

real, authentic otms, no high-tech challops

It might be fun to start a thread of music journalist “so and so artist/band is BACK/sober/newly purposeful tropes”

+ “I’m not spiritually centered”

*now*

How about when novelists, who are (actual) wordsmiths and also only do interviews when they have a project to promote, say things like "I don't know where they story's going until the characters take me there," etc.

SCORPIONS have unveiled the cover artwork for their 19th studio album, "Rock Believer", which will be issued on February 25, 2022 (postponed from the previously announced February 11). The LP's first single, "Peacemaker" will arrive tomorrow (Thursday, November 4), with the accompanying music video following a day later.

During the pandemic the band retreated to the studio in their German hometown in Hanover and started working on new songs.

"The album was written and recorded in the SCORPIONS DNA with core [Rudolf] Schenker/[Klaus] Meine compositions," said singer Klaus Meine. "We recorded the album as a band live in one room, like we did in the '80s."

The new song is pretty good! They fired their drummer and got Mikkey Dee, formerly of Motörhead, and you can really hear the difference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ5cJMGl6-8

One interesting thing about "recording as a band live in one room" is that it only seems cool to people who had other options.

Like, yr old school Motown folx rarely crow about recording "in a room," because that's literally how you made records then. Ditto pretty much every jazz and classical musician ever.

No symphony orchestra in the history of ever has spoken about getting back to basics, you know, "just 80 musicians in a room."

i dunno, i find there's value to being the same room as musicians especially if that's what you're used to. doing stuff soloed or isolated always put me off on the wrong foot. i'm sure big bands get more used to it, but as a bass player i do watch the drummer's hands a lot, just little things

Not sure I believe the Scorpions recorded as a band live in one room in the 1980s - unless Billy Childish was in the band then.

It wouldn't surprise me at all. There is overdubs and vocals but I don't think doing basic tracks as a band is that rare

It's also not inherently low fi or backwards

Oh yeah, basic tracks, I was imagining Klaus was claiming the entire band was recorded live!

ooh yeah hell no was he doing vocals and stuff live with the band haha, i see what you mean how he said it

this entire interview: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/spoon-lucifer-on-the-sofa-interview-britt-daniel/

OMG

Posted over on The Wrens thread: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/nov/24/its-repulsive-to-me-the-bitter-feud-of-indie-rockers-the-wrens

Whelan says he hopes for an eventual return to the band’s punk-rock roots, with “just four of us standing in a basement”.

two people squatting in it

just four of us standing in a basement

Good idea. More bands could benefit from stand-up drummers.

I think we opened for them once in Trenton. It was fucking EMPTY, which was weird since they were supposedly a well-liked NJ band. Also IIRC they played a pretty spot-on cover of War Pigs. This was before I remember that song becoming one of the most played out covers of all time.

Just four people dapping in a silo

Brett Anderson says "Autofiction is our punk record. No whistles and bells. Just the five of us in a room with all the glitches and fuck-ups revealed; the band themselves exposed in all their primal mess."

The record was produced by long-time Suede collaborator Ed Buller, and comes 30 years after the release of their debut single 'The Drowners' in May 1992. “Autofiction has a natural freshness, it's where we want to be,” Anderson continues. The album was recorded with a back-to-basics approach, thrashed out by the five members in a Kings Cross rehearsal studio. “When we were rehearsing and writing this record it was this sheer, physical rush. That thing where you're hanging on for dear life,” adds bassist Mat Osman.

Textbook.

Thrashed out!

"This one is from our new album."

ilxor must have a "prototypical lifecycle/album cycle of every band" thread? (even successful jokes would still be owned by "into the unknown/back to the known" tho. imo).

Red Hot Chili Peppers have a new album out!

Interviewer: "And what did it feel like the first time you were all playing together again?"
Anthony Kiedis: “It felt humbling and going back to square one... to remember what it was to be four guys in a room together playing music and then we started writing new songs.”

what

when did ppl stop recording music primarily in rooms

lol, but c'mon that makes sense

('together' being the key word)

Which is more than Anthony Kiedis does in that interview.

just four guys, in a room, doing heroin

Writin' songs, playin' instruments

In Caaaaaalllllaaaaafooooooorrrrrnnnnniiiiiia

when did ppl stop recording music primarily in rooms

though it faintly pains me to defend Tony Flow, my understanding is that RHCP have continued to record in rooms (regardless of other bands’ practices), but he is acknowledging that one of the four guys had departed the band for the previous ten to fifteen years of recording, and thus not been in said rooms.

John Wesley Harding, Let it Be, Beggars Banquet
― niels

I've been looking at the origins of back-to-basics for something I've been working on, and I always assumed it began with The White Album, Beggars Banquet, and JWH. I was surprised, then, to read Jann Wenner's original review of The White Album, where he's bored with the whole idea, like it's yesterday's news:

"...in the past few months we have been deluged with talk of 'going back to rock and roll,' so much that the idea (first expressed in the pages of Rolling Stone) is now a tiresome one, because it is, like all other superficial changes in rock and roll styles, one that soon becomes faddish, over-used and tired-out."

Never got into Let It Be, but JWH,BB, and The Beatles/White Album are not just rehashed rootz.

xxp Perhaps, though "square one" for RHCP wasn't those particular four guys (and he doesn't say "THESE four guys in a room together..."). This ties into it being such a weirdly vacant-feeling quote, as if it's somehow missing every fourth or fifth word.

Always thought of Beach Boys, "Wild Honey", as being a precursor of "back to basics".

In a fresh way, yeah.

xpost Keidis also had his own book to do:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71WwOBbOEzL.jpg

Keep in mind that, if the back-to-roots idea had been in the air for 10 or 11 months before Nov 1968, that was already more than half of Rolling Stone's lifespan. Also Wenner might have wanted to get out in front of the next trend by saying, "we pioneered this, but we're already onto the next thing".

Always thought of Beach Boys, "Wild Honey", as being a precursor of "back to basics".

Well, in a weird way, it was in fact Smiley Smile.

Well, yes, I thought of that, in terms of being stripped back and home recorded, but there's far too much psychedelic era weirdness going on!

Keidis book Co-written with Larry Sloman, dubbed "Ratso" by the Rolling Thunder Review, when he was the Stone's rolling Rolling correspondent. They assigned him to taking Dylan's dog for walkies. He dubbed Berlin The Sgt. Pepper's of the 70s. Sample text on Amazon page looks disappointingly normie so far.

have to imagine a lot of pretty much forgotten bands reacting to Pepper et al with "yeah we're taking it back to rock and roll" in the press?

home recorded, but there's far too much psychedelic era weirdness going on! That was home to Brian, his sandbox being thee least of it.

JWH,BB, and The Beatles/White Album are not just rehashed rootz..

No, but I think it was a somewhat amorphous concept that meant different things in different contexts. For Sha Na Na, it meant an imitation--a pretty dire one--of 1957. With those three albums, I take it to mean something like, "Last year we were doing '2000 Light Years from Home,' now we want to play things that sound like 'Prodigal Son.'"

Also, blues rock was coming up, first Canned Heat album was released '67.

OMG, they were uneven----w Al Wilson and John Lee Hooker, and sometimes even without, could be quite good, but a Rolling Stone reviewer (Ed Ward?) said another album should have been titled Yassuh Boss.

That's around the time I started seeing the term "blooze," although Mayall and some other dealers had their high points from time to tim.

I love Canned Heat!

Yeah, they could be very good!

Future Blues is a peak w Al Wilson (also there's a Wilson compilation now), also Hooker n Heat is uneven, but the Hook keeps it going, and The Very Best of Canned Heat is good.

I enjoyed Robert Johnson’s back to basics phase

hooker and heat is totally badass

I guess Zeppelins back to basics record is presence? Not really tho. Good on them to never have reached that point

I've been looking at the origins of back-to-basics for something I've been working on, and I always assumed it began with The White Album, Beggars Banquet, and JWH.

It pretty much started with Music From Big Pink, which — along with bootlegs of The Basement Tapes — essentially forced all UK rock musicians to simultaneously stop taking acid. Two hugely successful bands (the Small Faces and Cream) broke up because of the Band, and every other remaining group tried to sound like the Band.

Yeah, although that wasn't just going back to roots, it was what you could do with them: a fairly slow set, kicking off with a dirge ffs---but so intense in its way, in layers and segments of genres, subgenres, within as well as among tracks---psychedelic in its way, expanding and contracting thee lines around things (I don't love it, but I think I understand it).

Understand its influence, for better and worse.

Perhaps, though "square one" for RHCP wasn't those particular four guys (and he doesn't say "THESE four guys in a room together..."). This ties into it being such a weirdly vacant-feeling quote, as if it's somehow missing every fourth or fifth word.

not unlike Kiedis’ lyrics amirite

and while it pains me still, this is at least the third time that Frusciante has joined the band, and he pursues decidedly non-Chi-Pep musical interests during his interregna, so it plausibly does take the 3.1 musicians learning from scratch how to play together each time.

(None of this lessens the quote’s qualifications for starring itt obv!)

stop taking acid.

Also I really do think it's vanishingly rare for a huge band to track drums/bass/guitar live together these days (as RHCP does) , rather than layering them.

Related--not sure where else to put it...Saw a trailer for this tonight before the Neil Young film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YRb0qY5eKc

The whole back-to-basics thing started in '68, but this really accelerated it.

Geddy Lee was there and taking notes: "One day, God willing, I will honor Bo Diddley with 'The Temples of Syrinx.'"

getting back to basics is cool but i wanna get back to getting it together in the country

"One day, God willing, I will honor Bo Diddley with 'The Temples of Syrinx.'"

lol, but also…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDlK52SvJVY

WTF about the voice of Geddy Lee?

That's amazing, Tarfumes, had no idea--he really was taking notes. Hard to unhear that voice, but they do pretty well otherwise.

Mr. Bungle: https://thefoxoakland.com/events/mr-bungle-230523

Even in their last tours of the millennium they played songs from their very first demo, the self-produced, amateurish gem The Raging Wrath of The Easter Bunny (1986). The pull of returning to full-on metal was too strong to avoid and the idea arose to re-record that primal demo giving the music the much needed presentation and precision it deserved. Spruance, Patton & Dunn decided to go to the source, The Big Four of course, and hand-pick the two guys who could help them realize this body of work with the utmost brutality.

...

Because this was a musical homecoming of 35 years, the relearning and re-recording felt brand new and was able to be enjoyed objectively, not to mention reinvigorated by the likes of the masters Ian and Lombardo. Mr. Bungle maintained the rawness and severity of the original demo without too much embellishment preferring to let the music speak for itself in all of its teenage-angst glory.

actually turned out pretty well in their case

just as a 'hey it's the pandemic let's revisit our past' one off

This new Radiohead side project The Smile feels very aging rock act getting back to basics

Just four computers in a room

Yorke told MTV: "The last two studio records were a real headache. We had spent so much time looking at computers and grids, we were like, that's enough, we can't do that any more. This time, we used computers, but they had to actually be in the room with all the gear. So everything was about performance, like staging a play."[12]
― new noise, Saturday, March 10, 2018

Thing about the Mr Bungle revamp is that it was pre-pandemic — I caught the SF show of their first burst of dates about a month before lockdown.

i knew they'd played it live but i figured they hadn't planned to actually, like, record it until the world shut down...buuut my memory may be wrong on that one.

Art-pop department:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/apr/11/patrick-wolf-addiction-bankruptcy-hit-and-run-night-safari

This confidence in telling the story of his decade of disaster and recovery came from Wolf’s “thrill” at working alone with the same instruments he used on his first two albums. “I reconnected with my craft – it’s how I started when I was 14, just with my four-track,” he says.

"“But Here We Are” has a back-to-basics immediacy and intensity that was missing from the last few Foo Fighters albums. Though not terribly surprising for a group nearing its 30th year, they have sometimes seemed in the past decade to be grasping for gimmicks and overarching concepts to differentiate one record from the next: “Medicine at Midnight,” from 2021, was a forgettable foray into ’80s-inspired dance rock and funk grooves. (As a companion piece, they also released a cheeky collection of Bee Gees covers.) The songwriting on “Sonic Highways,” from 2014, was a bit stronger, but that album still felt yoked a little too tightly to its concept — recording each song in a different city and paying tribute to its musical history, as explored on the Grohl-directed documentary series of the same name."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/arts/music/foo-fighters-but-here-we-are-review.html

"We decided to make an album where none of us was ever in the room."

Be Here We Are Now

Entertain us