Artists that are totally your thing, "on paper," which you nevertheless don't like at all

for me, Nick Drake, acoustic saddo slightly jazzy outsidery stuff yet I can't listen to it

Floating Points
Jesu

Sonic Youth sort of fits this bill for me, but "don't like at all" is way too strong.

Zappa

Captain Beefheart. I really like the idea of "fast 'n' bulbous"

sonic youth and pavement

Albert Ayler.

Mariah Carey

It actually frustrates me how little I can get into Dream Theater when I like every band that is ever cited as an influence on them.

hate to say it but Field Music is totally this

I love Mariah Carey

also I really love Sonic Youth

Agree on a lot of these - Floating Points, Ayler, Sonic Youth, Pavement, and Field Music too. All are basically artists I like, they just seem like stuff I would like a lot more than I actually do.

There are avant jazz guys I could say this about moreso than Ayler though -- Matthew Shipp and David S. Ware come to mind.

DJ Spooky, lol

It actually frustrates me how little I can get into Dream Theater when I like every band that is ever cited as an influence on them.

― No language just sound (Sund4r)

i don't want to be mean-spirited but do you think it's important for you to be into dream theater? i mean, maybe they're just really not as good as queensryche or rush or watchtower?

i feel like i should like gy!be or sigur ros more than i do. also spring heel jack's live record with a bunch of free jazz luminaries... it's very respectable in theory but i don't enjoy listening to it.

maybe the king of this for me is charles mingus though... i like some of his stuff (like cumbia and jazz fusion) but i listen to, like, mingus ah um, and i'm just like i don't know i'd rather listen to monk?

Return to Forever seems like a band I should enjoy given my love of 70s Miles, Yes, Weather Report, Mahavishnu AND pre-fusion Chick Corea, but their records just don't do it for me.

feel like there's already a thread on this somewhere.

Right now, Lana Del Rey and 1975. Just an overwhelming pile of meh.

This thread is somewhat similar: Bands you keep trying to like but can't get into

i hate to say this, but most contemporary jazz.

Jeff Mills & the vast majority of Autechre

this is made more ironic since the one review of my own music, on a split 12” released by “Mad Monkey Records” 20 years ago, compared my tracks to Jeff Mills meets Autechre

i don't want to be mean-spirited but do you think it's important for you to be into dream theater? i mean, maybe they're just really not as good as queensryche or rush or watchtower?

Idk important but a lot of people do seem to be getting something out of them. I'm not losing sleep over it but it does feel a little frustrating when some kid starts going on about them. I'm mostly just answering the question with an actual "at all" example.

I forget whether I posted this in the other thread but Stevie Nicks.

for me dream theater are the only band i have ever stopped liking, like i went through a phase where i liked them when i was younger but concluded their appeal was totally superficial and there was nothing of actual interest in their music... maybe there's something those kids are getting that i never got out of them, though!

I hate to say it, but Hüsker Dü. Ages ago, I bought New Day Rising, and it didn't click with me, so I bought Candy Apple Grey, and then Warehouse..

thing of it is, I like Sugar just fine.

xpost No, yr take is 100% correct. Dream Theater are the antichrist, boil them in stew.

Hüsker Dü meant so much to me at the time - especially Metal Circus, Eight Miles High, Zen Arcade, New Day Rising - but I don't feel as strongly about them today

This is where The Pretty Things "S.F. Sorrow" sits for me. I get the concept and all that, but I don't even think the idea was that great and the songs don't even register for me either.

Who cares about the concept? Two already mentioned for me, Albert Ayler and Autechre. And that's just the A's.

Angel Olsen

I don't care about the concept either. Just I put it on, the songs play, and I'm just like......

Ayler, I was warned it was inaccessible. So I tried it, thought it OK and not as unlistenable as all that.

Nick Cave. Just doesn't click

fka twigs

Flying Lotus too. I like jazz. I like IDM/avant-electronica. Just don't get it.

oh yeah, fka twigs is one of mine too

ditto that one. It's not even 'overrated' it's just ....

just can't stand her singing style

It's not even that, it's just that it's ... there

thread for 3776's post-idol art-pop/rock opus Saijiki [Started by ufo in December 2019, last updated one hour ago by the oxford book of chaos (Drugs A. Money) on I Love Music] 1 new answer

^^^this is a huge recent example of this for me

see also Palm and that last Julia Holter album - basically, show-offy information overloads in the service of weak or gimmicky songwriting seem to drive me to hatred

Funkadelic. I really like funk music, but there's something about the looseness of their arrangements and sound that's unappealing to me.

maybe I have a very narrow definition of 'funk' but sometimes I'm underwhelmed with how unfunky some Funkadelic stuff can be

Er, that's deliberate, they're not trying to be funky all the time.

... there's two parts to the name, after all.

Radiohead, bcs Thom's voice.

His voice is unbearable, true.

Speaking of unbearable voices: Joanna Newsom. Everything about her music is right up my alley except for this one key ingredient.

yeah I remember reading a lot about her and thinking I could probably handle it because I like a lot of artists with unusual voices but man, she is just something else

Btw, based on what I know of your tastes, I wouldn't have pegged Sonic Youth or Pavement as bands that are totally your thing even on paper, treesh.

XP

Oh man, the Blue Notebooks has been licensed to within an inch of its life by now, but when that first came out, that was the juice.
That said, maybe the spell only worked on people with a pretty limited knowledge of contemporary classical. i've heard a lot of complaints about how it sounds like a watered down version of <insert name of more seminal minimalist composer>.

https://www.discogs.com/GVSB-vs-GBV-8Rounds/release/2420862

A Christian a cappella group wouldn't call themselves that.

they'd be more likely to call themselves 'his name is alive' which is a bad name (for a band I really like)

Agreed!

A Christian a cappella group wouldn't call themselves that.

Possibly if they were serial killers who claimed Satan made them do it.

A Christian a capella singer named her blog that

https://www.vqronline.org/memoir-articles/2016/01/guided-voices

His

That's an essay, and the title was likely chosen (by the journal's editors?) as a catchy play on the band name.

Having been a member of Christian singing groups, i can tell you it is not even remotely outside the realm of possibility that a Christian singing group would name themselves that.

Half of them have Voices in the name already ffs

To me, and I expect to Robert Pollard, the phrase guided by voices suggests madness and schizophrenia - granted though that hearing voices, having visions and speaking in tongues is some people's religious experience!

The Apostle Paul comes to mind

Guided by Hoarse Voices.

Glad I like pretty much all the bands I've tried on this thread. Should try Newsom someday because I love annoying voices.

Couldn't get into Bardo Pond, Espers, Windy & Carl, The End, Spiritualized and Love Spirals Downwards as much as I would have liked. I think Espers might click now. I love coming back to something after years then it clicks, always a good feeling.

Had a rough patch recently trying to get into Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Lady Land. And with bands I already like: Deathspell Oemga's Synarchy Of Molten Bones and the newest albums by Breeders and Opeth. Loved parts of them all but never fully clicked. Surprising for the Breeders because it sounds simple enough.

on paper just doesn't work. hardly ever has. the only artist which i liked on paper and in real was nick drake, i guess. when i read about him around 1980 i knew his music was for me. but most music i loved i have discovered on my own. like joni mitchell in the summer of 1985 in a house on a hill close to a small lake. without any paper involved. because on paper almost every artist sounds good. by the way i don't consider ilm as paper. ilm made me discover talk talk and i am very grateful for that. thanx everyone.

Serge Gainsbourg. Don't get me wrong though, I do like the occasional track but... I was just rifling through my CDs looking to put something on for some background music and came across "Histoire de Melody Nelson" - an album I've had for years but have never played much - stuck it on and then found myself listening to about half of it before taking it off and literally muttering, under my breath, "Why am I listening to this crap?" And this is his 'masterpiece', I believe? I can only imagine I must have fooled myself at one point, in the dim and distant past, that I liked this, how to describe it, late 60s/ early 70s loungey library music kind of vibe? But I don't. Although I do like when Morricone does it.

melody nelson is not his masterpiece. it is more pastiche than anything else. his real chef d'oeuvre is l'homme à tête de chou. and especially the explicit lyrics which might be quite difficult to translate.

Gainsbourg doesn't even work for me on paper, but I'd read enough rapturous praise that I eventually snagged a copy of Melody Nelson. I sold it back a year or so ago - like Tom D it just never really grabbed me. His louche perv persona didn't really appeal to me either (quite the opposite).

for me, Nick Drake, acoustic saddo slightly jazzy outsidery stuff yet I can't listen to it

― I have not yet begun to fart (rip van wanko), Wednesday, 18 December 2019 01:26 (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

begs the question, which other acoustic saddo slightly jazzy outsidery stuff do you like?

Serge Gainsbourg. Don't get me wrong though, I do like the occasional track but... I was just rifling through my CDs looking to put something on for some background music and came across "Histoire de Melody Nelson" - an album I've had for years but have never played much - stuck it on and then found myself listening to about half of it before taking it off and literally muttering, under my breath, "Why am I listening to this crap?" And this is his 'masterpiece', I believe? I can only imagine I must have fooled myself at one point, in the dim and distant past, that I liked this, how to describe it, late 60s/ early 70s loungey library music kind of vibe? But I don't. Although I do like when Morricone does it.

If you don't know it check out Jean-Claude Vannier's "L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches" album from 1972, he was Gainsbourg's arranger and made this cult-y prog/funk/god-knows-what record that sounds like "Histoire de Melody Nelson" gone mad.

Yes, I've heard it, don't remember much about it.

Artist I like on paper - a-ha

Very droll.

Pretty much the entire Projekt label catalog. I happen to lurve 80s 4AD, but removing the jazz improv from Cocteaus, the ethnic explorations from DCD, or the tuneful originals from This Mortal Coil left a very limp product. IIRC, I wound up liking quite a few things that Project distributed (from Steve Roach to Euro goth bands).

Coil. Scatology is alright but everything else is supremely underwhelming.

― pomenitul

fyi this is objectively wrong, try again

I love the concept of Coil (which I mostly got from England's Hidden Reverse) and I like them well enough but I can't help but feel I'm still waiting for the revelation. I'm reasonably convinced it's a drug thing and meh to that at this stage.

Melody Nelson I like just fine, just that laffing track irritates .

I wonder if Jane beat up her brother because of it.

begs the question, which other acoustic saddo slightly jazzy outsidery stuff do you like?

Tim Buckley? John Martyn? John Renbourn? Bert Jansch? Davey Graham? All of whom I love while also not being able to stomach Drake.

Serge is definitely a good one for me in this regard. I like David Axelrod though

Very weirdly (maybe?) the only Tim Buckley album I keep returning to is Greetings From L.A.

Bardo Pond, Espers, Windy & Carl, The End, Spiritualized and Love Spirals Downwards

I wasn't into any of these at first. Bardo Pond especially I was "guh?" about for years, I think I pretended to like a Hash Jar Tempo album for a week or so. Spiritualized especially annoyed me, I think I read an article where J Spaceman was talking about how innovative he was for orchestrating for eight violas (and no other strings) and eight horns (and no other brass) and my eyes rolled and my ears closed. I came back to Spiritualized years later and I really like them, especially the first two albums. I like Bardo Pond now, came round to Windy & Carl in a big way.

The Goslings were a band I was so excited to listen to having heard about them for years and I really don't like it at all. I think I wanted them to sound like Harvey Milk but they sound like sub-par Beach House songs run through a Rat pedal.

I'm really into the idea that certain bands/artists/composers will get through to you at different points in your life. I have always been lukewarm/negative about Beethoven, and my dad has always said "wait til you're older" and I can feel it happening. I thought Stockhausen was annoying when I was in my late teens/early 20s and now I listen to him all the time; my theory is that his music is actually designed to be respite for professional musicians, aural stimulus that doesn't make you think about your job. I used to be obsessed with John Fahey and Shostakovich but am pretty cool on both of them these days.

I like Robbie Basho on paper but don't really like listening to him.

It's gonna be a really interesting day when I wake up suddenly loving The Lemonheads

I'm gonna make a concerted effort between now and the new year to get into Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who's always seemed interesting in theory but who's never really clicked for me. I bought one of those cheapo sets that has Here Comes the Whistleman, The Inflated Tear, Left & Right, Volunteered Slavery and Natural Black Inventions - Root Strata. We'll see how it works out.

Volunteered Slavery is the best one. But live footage is where he really shone.

I think what makes him “difficult” is that essentially he was a contrarian w competing impulses to be both a classicist and an iconoclast - so if you approached him anticipating something avantgarde he would bust out a note-perfect Rodgers and Hammerstein number, but if you approached him from the opposite end he was liable to just smash a chair and play a noseflute solo.

I love Kirk on the Mingus, Jaki Byard, and Roy Haynes records he's on, as well as Rip, Rig & Panic, the latter being an all-time favorite. But nothing else I've heard of his measures up.

Also great when he shows up on Les McCann’s Live at Montreaux

I should have specified that The End I'm talking about is the metal band (I think there's several bands with that name).

The only Coil album I have is Horse Rotovator but I was impressed by just how much further depth repeated listens revealed to me. Wonderful album.

It does seem like a lot of Projekt artists and their ilk have a narrower pool of ingredients than the main bands they've modeled themselves on but Dead Can Dance and 80s Cocteau Twins is such a high bar that I don't think it's a real issue that most of those bands cant meet it. Lycia, Trance To The Sun and Rise And Fall Of A Decade are better than most 4AD bands.
Also, I like that they have something closer to metal in their dna (even if there's no heaviness) and they're a bit more shameless about how they might appear to goth-phobics.

John Martyn. As I've said on the earlier thread like this one. He ticks lots of boxes for me on paper, but I don't get it

Never got into him either.

Prepare Thyself to Deal With a Miracle is my favourite Rahsaan. Dude could blow.

Of the live stuff, this is something (the solo at the end give me actual palpitations):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFOnCk0p4-8

Gary Numan - a bit Bowie and a bit Kraftwerk should have been right up my alley, especially when I was in my 20s.

The Goslings were a band I was so excited to listen to having heard about them for years and I really don't like it at all. I think I wanted them to sound like Harvey Milk but they sound like sub-par Beach House songs run through a Rat pedal.

― kelis navidad (flamboyant goon tie included)

i somehow missed hearing this band when they were hyped... there are songs? "grandeur of hair" is just an awful slab of unpleasantly oversaturated tape, and i _like_ les rallizes denudes and high rise

i'm a late convert to "solid air" but i like it ok!

If you don't know it check out Jean-Claude Vannier's "L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches" album from 1972, he was Gainsbourg's arranger and made this cult-y prog/funk/god-knows-what record that sounds like "Histoire de Melody Nelson" gone mad.

IMHO, for a record that recycles so many of the same elements it's a remarkably different thing from Melody Nelson. L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches is cluttered, colorful and eclectic, almost like a DJ mix in comparison to the much more streamlined and focused Melody Nelson album. I guess there are thematic similarities (madness, etc) but one is manic and the other is subdued, etc. It has a much higher prog-funk ratio, etc etc.
Agreed that it might be a good re-entry point for someone who didn't like Melody Nelson.

Zappa

i somehow missed hearing this band when they were hyped... there are songs? "grandeur of hair" is just an awful slab of unpleasantly oversaturated tape, and i _like_ les rallizes denudes and high rise

― revenge of the jawn (rushomancy)

seriously how does this record not sound as good as dead's "musical abortions", jesus this shit is the fucking carl ruggles of noise rock

as for roland kirk, i don't know if this is what is meant by "his work with mingus" but his solo on "c jam blues" at carnegie hall... if kirk was a gunslinger that night would have been one of the greatest tragedies in the history of jazz.

I was thinking of Kirk on Mingus's Oh Yeah. I haven't actually heard the Mingus Carnegie Hall set, something I must remedy post-haste.

fyi this is objectively wrong, try again

I did try again many a time. My loss, I suppose.

Prepare Thyself is the Kirk that clicked for me. Until I got the LP notes last year, I didn't realize second side is a continuously held circular breathing blow. I loved it without knowing the gimmick - that's the thing with him, he transcends the flex, even if that's part of what makes him fun.