"Indie Adult Contemporary"

apprehension I felt at also being there to buy wilco: substantial

I've heard Yellow all the way through, just once though, BTW, and I still didn't like it.

If I were anywhere listening to an album on a cold winter night, I think I'd be more concerned about getting back inside and staying warm.

i regularly get choked up at my local savacentre, where they routinely pump some of the most heart-breaking AOR over the stereo system, usually the good stuff too...

Haven't heard the albums since the singles were fucking shit. And what are you saying here? That there must be an environment which you have to listen to this so that it becomes a great record.

In fact that's why I hate these bands: they try to be 'moving' or 'emotional'. They so obviously squeeze those triggers that it leaves a bad taste. In the end they end up being as heartless as the worst chart pop and in the end it ends up being a triumph of marketing, that's all.

I don't get the AOR comparison at all.

oh, speaking of IAC: Luna, to the fucking bone.

There was actually a Slate piece a few weeks ago that praised them on this account. Sort of an "as we've grown older and our lives have changed, Luna has been there for us" piece from a middle-aged man. As with others here, though, I don't see very much wrong with this (the piece, however, was not so good).

The second album, yes. But that was almost a decade ago.

A friend of mine was describing his sister to me. "She likes Wilco and Lambchop and that sort of stuff - y'know, indie adult contemporary."

And speaking of Wilco! And much more besides, nabisco OTM etc.

http://nymag.com/arts/popmusic/features/wilco-feist-2011-10/

roxy mehsic

NPR's All Songs Considered and Nic Harcourt are part of this

That's for sure.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/01/soprano-renee-fleming-indie-makeover

And as noted by Ann Powers on Twitter just now, Nabisco/Carl Wilson mindmeld:

http://www.torontostandard.com/culture-design/feist-how-come-she-never-goes-there

Sufjan Stevens Illinois

x-post- ILXer Alfred S quoted in Carl Wilson piece

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/01/soprano-renee-fleming-indie-makeover

I will never not be angry abt this btw

renee fleming sings songs by a bunch of guys who couldn't pick her out of a police lineup whereas I would literally pay out of my own pocket to hear her rock one of my jams

"Indie Adult Contemporary" = James Blake.

xp: I don't know dude, her phrasing is very reminiscent of Antony

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJC8LB_9mG0&feature=related

ok in fairness Antony probably is into RF & Leonard Cohen gets a pass

the rest of those fuckers are gonna get the stinkeye from me if I ever see em

"indie adult contemporary" and/or "adult alternative" and/or "adult contemporary" and/or "singers and songwriters" and/or "folk-rock/pop" and/or "soft rock" and/or "soft AC" and/or "hot AC" and/or "mainstream AC"... they're all just like any other genre - hit or miss.

you can't judge a genre by one band alone and vice versa

how many bands do I have to hear before I can judge a genre

captain lorax knows his indie adult contemporary coffeeshop music dont doubt him

Here’s the question I’d like to put forth: Shouldn’t it be more possible — maybe even more common — for essays about music to be able to neutrally describe what “sources say,” or sources do, or sources listen to, without out trying to read behind that into what the author’s own tastes are? Amazingly enough, this isn’t something I’m suggesting out of defensiveness: I just think it’s incredibly important. There needs to be room for music writing that’s not just about the author performing taste and making value judgments. So much of the life of music — the ways we hear it, the things we want from it, and so on — exist in a huge, complicated context, and someone needs to describe that context

I suppose it should be possible, and maybe it is, but I don't think so. The huge complicated context includes values judgments that make said context even more complicated.

and again, you need to say who the hell these sources are, lest we assume you're just being even-handed about strawmen.

also, in the first paragraph we get It turns out that Tweedy and his basement “meh”-sayers are both right: Wilco has packed some first-rate musicianship into an album that feels a bit like sitting on a Chicago back deck watching a particularly uneventful baseball game so complaining that everyone misses your neutrality is a bit much.

i think that image was supposed to illustrate "pleasant and not disruptive." some people like uneventful baseball games?

look out y'all da croup ain't buyin it

a bit like sitting on a Chicago back deck watching a particularly uneventful baseball game
i'm such a boring dude. this sounds like a good time. is there beer?

Yeah, I definitely got the sense from the original article that he was criticizing rather than defending Wilco and Feist, but I feel those criticisms were well deserved.

xxxpost

aerosmith, what exactly that I'm saying do you have a problem with?

i have no idea what that sentence is trying to say? that the new wilco is kind of boring but you can drink beer to it?

Well, these excerpts get to the heart of what aggravates me about nabisco's writing sometimes, despite its considerable finesse and formalist power: wanting to be the neutral arbiter – the Nice Guy – in the wrong line of work.

agree with croup 100% on the naming the sources thing. isn't that what fox news does? "sources say that Obama is a secret panty sniffer, what do YOU think?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjuZmtI9Tcg

"music lovers everywhere love the fresh taste of Wilco!"

aerosmith, what exactly that I'm saying do you have a problem with?

nothing, I'm just needling yr CALLIN' BULLSHIT style (you need to say who the hell these sources are)

ha yeah that "the hell" would have sounded more comically annoyed and less "j'accuse!" in person

that apology is painful! i just read it. dude, nabisco, your piece was fine. and people actually talked about it. which is a good thing. you can't write for new york and be that sensitive! give 'em hell! (i figure he's lurking around here) people are always gonna project when they read stuff like that. no matter how impartial you try to be, people will see you as a raving wilco-hating sting-hater. there are worse things to be seen as. like boring and not worth reading.

yeah. i got that. i think Nirvana did change a lot of people's listening habits, though!

― Mr. Que, Tuesday, November 8, 2011 9:19 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

for a lot of folks they were a gateway drug to relevant music, such as staind and creed.

ouch

sorry, sorry that was mean~!!!

i can take it, it was funny

objectively i recognize nirvana as being pretty great, but in a way i think their unintended effect was to make mainstream guitar heavy rock music a little less fun, maybe?

nabisco omar OTM

are you saying Slipknot weren't fun

yeah them and pearl jam but really didn't nirvana open the door for pearl jam kinda sorta?

we all know that grunge killed rock. that's old news. its something that every grunge artist has to live with for the rest of their lives.

let my amp open the door

"i killed what now?"

http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/countygrind/cornellwow.jpg

nirvana was probably a bigger influence in terms of the bands they TALKED about then for how they sounded

how many bands did China Crisis inspire?

yet every one who did either wrote reviews or joined Destroyer.

nirvana had a deadening effect on rock and pop music in general, both sonically and socially. the rise of hootie/blowfish in the wake of cobain's suicide made perfect sense. ppl wanted something reassuring, bland

thanks to cobain's t-shirt, there was that weird moment when atlantic records was like "You know who we should sign? Daniel Johnston! KACHING!!!"

hahaha remember this?

http://thepastisunwritten.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/corporate_magazines_still_suck1.jpg

nirvana turned me on to meat puppets II which is one of the greatest albums ever, so thanks kurdt wherever you are. i owe you a lot, i guess.

the new liverpool. this may be a dumb question, but what other really successful bands came out of liverpool?

metallica

Apart from China Crisis?

Nirvana are responsible for not preventing the record company from releasing two Springsteen albums that spring.

Even though I was there, it's hard for me to believe Adrenalize came after Nevermind.

did you get rocked?

anything that can inspire a band like Bush should hang its collective head in shame.

Generally speaking, it's time to worry when the term long-awaited gets appended to an album. Long-awaited doesn't just mean that the band in question took its sweet time delivering the disc; usually, it's industry code for "bloated and overblown."

Except, that is, when the long-awaited release in question is the work of Def Leppard. This, remember, is the only major rock act that works more slowly than Bruce Springsteen. In fairness, the band's tardiness isn't entirely the product of foot dragging, as the death of guitarist Steve Clark undoubtedly slowed this album (and doubled fellow guitarist Phil Collen's workload) even more than the loss of drummer Rick Allen's arm complicated the completion of Hysteria.

Yet regardless of the time spent in the studio, Def Leppard's albums never seem especially labored or overwrought. If anything, the opposite is true — the band's music seems so effortlessly accessible that most listeners probably don't even notice the incredible amount of craft that goes into each release.

Nor is Adrenalize, with its insistence on intensely tuneful, unrepentantly frivolous material, likely to change that. There's no overriding concept to the album, no sense of the group's confronting its demons or wrestling with the problems of the world; instead, what we get is a seemingly unending string of energetic, hook-heavy, gosh-we-luv-'em songs about girls. A perfect Def Leppard album, in other words.

That's not meant sarcastically, either. Because truth be told, it's far easier to prop up several couplets of self-revelation with a few heavy-metal riffs than it is to turn an idea as commonplace as romantic desire into a song as memorable as "Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad." But that's what Def Leppard does best, and Adrenalize is the band's most consistent effort to date.

Take "Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad" as an example. Although the title pretty much sums up the idea behind the tune, the band is wise enough to recognize that when it comes to love songs, what gets said matters far less than how it gets said. Thus, the heart of the song is its melodic development, the way Joe Elliott's vocal builds from the breathy, low-key opening verse to the soaring, full-throated harmonies of the chorus. It's so perfectly paced that you hardly need to hear the lyrics to understand what the song is saying; the sound says it all.

That's typical of Def Leppard, though. From the first, this was a band that gloried in the power of heavy metal's musical gestures — the towering majesty of a power riff, the momentary freedom of a guitar break, the exhilaration of a singer's scream — and as the group has grown, its ability to manipulate that vocabulary has expanded to the point that its songs have become mini-masterpieces of aural impact.

Just listen to all the sonic detail crammed into the album-opening "Let's Get Rocked." Although rhythmically the song is an obvious descendant of "Pour Some Sugar on Me," playing off a throbbing Rick Savage bass line, stylistically it's miles beyond the last album, full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here"), special effects (when Elliott complains about his girlfriend's fondness for classical music, the band mockingly answers with a snippet of Beethoven's Fifth) and all sorts of stagy good humor. Yet the Leps work these gimmicks in so gracefully that they never interrupt the music's flow, acting not as unnecessary contrivances but simply as another level of hook.

And there are hooks of every sort on Adrenalize, from broad strokes like the gloriously harmonized chorus of "Heaven Is" to ear-catching details like the little yodel Elliott slips into "Personal Property." Adrenalize is so relentlessly catchy that it almost seems as if the band is about to abandon its heavy-metal roots for the greener fields of hard pop. That's not to say the album is any softer than its predecessors — certainly the crunchy guitars of "Tear It Down" or "Make Love Like a Man" are proof to the contrary — just that it's not as noisily aggressive.

Consider that a sign of maturity. After all, what made Hysteria and Pyromania worth returning to wasn't their fist-pumping energy but the unabashed tunefulness the band tied to that sheer force. Adrenalize simply makes that connection more explicit, proving in the process that Def Leppard is one of the catchiest bands in rock. And if that doesn't make Adrenalize worth waiting for, I don't know what would.

That's not to say the album is any softer than its predecessors — certainly the crunchy guitars of "Tear It Down" or "Make Love Like a Man" are proof to the contrary — just that it's not as noisily aggressive.

nabisco! You forgot one!

full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")

full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")full of puns ("Let's get the rock out of here")

hahahahahaha xp

I'm actually curious to hear the little yodel Elliott slips into "Personal Property."

the little yodel Elliot slipped into his personal property.

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

in there somewhere

anything that can inspire a band like Bush should hang its collective head in shame.

But no Bush, no success for Gavin Rossdale, therefore we'd lack this sublimely idiotic moment from Criminal Minds the other year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RP4m8CNzhM