Thats pretty.

Errrmm..could you give a few examples?

I'll not say which but one of the bands you mentioned performed a gig whihc is one of the very few I've ever walked out of. One I love and one I don't know

buttfuck the 90s dark beat-obsessed grainy hegemony - i want drifting pastoral, oceanic, cosmic ambiguity painted with lemony clouds

rADIOHEAD should try doing gossama nursery rhymes that they can skip along to while sucking raspberri alco-lollies.

clean lines, shifting focus, songs about LIKING people, friendship, being in good company, having a crush, feeling comfortable with someone - if these songs were instrumentals even better.

Music doesn't have to be intellectual(or even proficient) to be good in my reckoning, if it makes me dance then it's equally good.

But then that's me, I'd love to stay and argue the toss over this point but I'm going home (I love early Friday finishes :-)

This is a good question at a good time because I've noticed highbrow music critics always put quotes around the word, as in, This time out the band isn't afraid to make something "pretty". I've done it, too, probably. What is it about the word that makes us think we have to set it off with quotes? Is it some kind of weakness to make something pretty? Or is it weak of the reviewer to describe music that way? It seems like the an implicit assumption is, "We enlightened people know that something pretty is probably shallow, so I'm going to use quotes to show that there is more to the music than that."

And I also think that that's part of why people say that rock is "dead." Its interest in power over pleasantry has forced it to keep jettisoning the most likeable parts of Western music just in order to keep the spark of amazement that comes from something "rocking" like never before. It's a bit like an addiction / tolerance thing: think of how smashingly rocking the now- relatively-poppy Who sounded during their time, and compare with the absurdly-overblown methods of, say, Korn, who still sound pretty limp. Is there any way this isn't a dead-end game? What will top-40 rock sound like in twenty years: Scandinavian prog- metal? Merzbow?

I'm just happy that for indie (in the American sense), anyway, the late-nineties seemed to inject a whole lot of pre-rock perspectives to work with --- all that reclamation of pop songwriters, jazz, Americana, bossa nova, etc., plus the obvious confluence with electronics. Something of a stepping-back, a look at all the options rather than the somewhat limited pipedream of "rock."

Henry Mancini is a good of pretty music. When he collaborated with Johnny Mercer (Moonriver...that song just guts me everytime)...the results are beautiful but basically, a pretty song writer.

Johnny Mercer deserves his own thread for such pretty music but no one was interested....fair enough but a brilliant songwriter.

The late fifties/early sixties easy listening compilation (recently my wife started a collection of those vixens on each cover...), those records are very pretty and cinematically relaxing to listen to.

Burt Bacharach of course, the look of love, etc..etc....

New pretty bands?

High Llamas and Broadcast. Though, Elliott Smith can throw out a good pretty tune now and again (check his cover of Because on American Beauty, that song is beautiful and gives me same reaction as Moonriver)....

Just listen to Mancini's 'An experiment in terror' and then the last broadcast e.p.

i've got another one! la volume courbe. pretty music, that!

pretty music is just that, pretty music, slowdive, butterfly child and the other shame spirals of the class of 1992 *tried* to make pretensiousness (spelt it wrong) pretty....pretty music is never depressing....

Pretty music is simply pretty music. Everyone's catergory will differ but simply writing third form poetry over a wall of feedback does not simply compete with the master of johnny mercer/burt bacharach/hal david or henry mancini....

true masters of pretty music don't hit emotional wrongs.

broadcast fit for the elequont use of the strings, high llamas for the worship of bacharach, dot allison for her brilliant move of putting hal david on her record, stereolab dots and loops....

it's almost victorian, pretty music, a fifties victorian, with simple (yet so simple and uncluttered, so brilliant) lyrics about love, nice days...etc..etc...

pretty music gets interesting when the lyrics are sinister, ie. johnny mercer's 'i wanna be around', burt bacharach 'take it easy on yourself...'

but essentially...that's what i think pretty music is...

how about you??? You call yourself a writer but you just write miserable formless, without style reviews oon allmusic because your connections not because of any particular talent that you possess.

Your love of music does not extend beyond 1992 and when in doubt you throw bad intellectualism at me, which does not affect me at all. You should be doubting yourself becuase your use of cliches is hideous to say the least.

You know what?

I guess you are about thirty. You work in the library. The others at the library think you are wild and crazy Ned.

But in fact...

You are a sad case who spends inordinate amount of time on the internet. I read your reviews and it's about you, hence your reviews and interviews are incomprehensible garbage. This is why you write for allmusic and not well known magazines. This is why you work in the library. You throw intellect where there should be beauty.

I distrust pretty music. Pretty and beautiful are not the same thing, for something to be beautiful as well as pretty, it must have depth and feeling and emotion behind the prettiness. Someone was saying something on the Scottish music thread about the Cocteau Twins which encapsulates my feelings about it... Cocteau Twins are a good example of a band which transcends mere prettiness for true beauty.

Shows how little you know about me. Those reviews were for fun. I have more stuff out there under different names as experiments. I just spoke the honest truth. He is a data base cataloguer. That is not writing. You have not read/seen/experienced what I'm writing. I'm tired of cheap insults thrown my way. I have no respect for people like Ned. I have more respect for people like Kate, even though, she hates my fucking guts, because she is out there doing her thing. I have no respect for people that don't get in the game. People who just bitch about the game.

period.

Agree with your point about erik satie.

If everybody is on stage and no one is in the crowd, it kinda defeats the purpose, doesn't it ?

I do have respect for poster's writing. But that shall remain nameless.

And 'sides, my poptones thang was not outed by me, but others. I am strictly on here not to be bothered and talk about music/not write about music.

Bye.

What am I on about?

Dunno. . .

What I mean, is someone who is passionate about their art, to give up everything for some sort of self belief, deluded or not, that is the game. I don't believe in people who play it safe. Playing it safe is mediocrity. I'm certainly not going to be judged by people who snicker at me, cause, I'm posting on a music board, say my thing, whether it be good, bad or ugly....but at least I'm saying it. The onlyi thing that I would consider worthy for you lot to judge would be the porn that I wrote for a month to pay for my rent.

'Nuff said.

You know what they say about people who "dish it out but cannot take it."

I really _am_ trying to make an effort to understand you, and what makes you tick/act out like this, Doom, it's just very difficult when you come up with glaring self contradictions like "I only believe in TALKING about music, not WRITING about it" while pounding compulsively on a keyboard.

suzy, that was ages ago and...

mark s. we reconciled differences ages ago....

but the overwhelming thing that I noticed on this board, if you take a dissent opinion on here, you are attacked. mind you, I have set myself up this way...

but c'est la vie. colin, life is contradictions, I fully accept that I am full of them, as is everyone.

writing about music: like the experiment I did with the poptones thing, trying to describe a sound. that was the interesting angle for me. could I do? maybe....half successful.

posting on i love music, is me talking, not editing, not rewriting, just talking about something that I love...

PS. with music, I am just a spectator in this sport of games, not a participant.

Back onto the subject at hand... pretty music. I have to ask- what is it that makes you think that things like, for example, are not deep? Not musically deep, or not lyrically deep? Does lyrical depth as opposed to merely pretty music add to or subtract from prettiness in music?

Mmm...alot of Bacharach songs are about obsessive love gone wrong. Check: Walk on by.

Speaking of bad horror films, have you seen Don't go in the woods, or as it is known in Britain 'Don't go in the woods, again'...

I walked away. I came back. I smacked you on the head with a trout. I walked away singing "The Same Deep Water As You" and basking in perfection.

SPECIAL POSTSCRIPT: this offer extends in reverse to anyone curious of artists that i am fantical about. thank you, that is all.

Duran Duran's music is very pretty.
actually, at their best, they're gorgeous.

the Cardigans used to be pretty. Moloko were. Saint Etienne are, too. Stereolab and the High Llamas seconded. Harold Budd's melancholy offsets and takes over the prettiness therein, in my opinion (a remark suitable for Simon & Garfunkel, too).

Eno is pretty.
Madagascan folk music, too.

and how to forget the Penguin Cafe Orchestra? (sigh.)