what are the great (non indie-) rock bands of the 00's

not necessarily canonized or mega popular ones, just which ones made really great music

and no indie rock please, plenty of that already. i am hoping this thread might inspire some talk about bands that have been maybe neglected by ilm and internet hipster crit in general

but mostly just whatever band you honestly feel made great rock music during the past ten years

fall out boy

Dillinger Four (at least for 2 LPs)

SOAD

the hunches to me one of the coolest and most perfect bands ever. i found a lot of weird punk got too mired up in vibes of disassociation & detachment, and lost sense of the importance of really rocking out, or freaking out and being really energetic. anyways, the hunches totally know this. you can have a serious blast air guitar-ing, or headbanging, or just rocking out while listening to their more punk stuff.

they've also got an equally strong melodic side (another thing their peers are lacking in) and pretty singing voices. i read review comparing their soft stuff to vu but i think that's a lazy comparison. i find it sounds a lot like smashing pumpkins tunes like "1979," but that's a pretty unhip reference so i can see why someone would avoid it.

every time i die they were my favourite band for a year in high school. even though i wasn't into metalcore or screamo at all and was averse to the accompanying scene, this band was just irresistible to me from the first time my friend lent me an album. remember we had been talking about them on the way home and he was trying to reassure me that they were in a whole other league, only associated with others of their ilk because associations suggested by their name. and you know he was totally right. it's basically a southern rock record with hardcore vocals and crazy dillinger escape plan beats. the lyrics were hilarious, kind of sarcastic self-deprecation iirc.

i love how they really use riffs and breakdowns to create these enormous moments. even though the whole thing was so rhythmically contorted after you listened to it enough times you could rock out to it in perfect synch if you knew what to expect. i'm kind of dissapointed i never got into math rock because it really seems like it opens a lot of possibilities by freeing things up from the limitations of standard 4/4 rock beats.

love the hunches! always got a cheater slicks vibe off them wr2 the chaotic drunkrock thing, especially in their early days. great live band. RIP

hard for me to know what "indie rock" is anymore. hunches seem to fit into that bracket as much as anyone. anyway (avoiding stuff that seems too clearly metal or punk):

ONEIDA
queens of the stone age
white stripes & dirtbombs (both belong to the 00s at least as much as the 90s)
beehive & the barracudas
the bellrays
the reigning sound
riverboat gamblers
king tuff
eddy current suppression ring
audacity (on the basis of one record, but wtf)
king khan/bbq (shrines, mark sultan, etc.)
new idle times LP is ace

red hot chili peppers

I guess Hot Snakes would qualify.

2nd Fall Out Boy and a lot of other mainstream emo bands (My Chemical Romance, Paramore, Say Anything)

mcr is a good one

Got three for you: Burnt Sugar, Oxbow and Resistant Culture.

Burnt Sugar are an improvising funk/jazz/soul/hip-hop group from NYC with a shifting membership, but always led (and conducted onstage) by music critic and total fucking genius Greg Tate. Their stuff's almost all on CD-R and not super easy to get hold of, but totally worth it.

Oxbow are a blues/noise-rock band from San Francisco fronted by Eugene Robinson (not the political columnist), a big dude who takes his clothes off onstage and yowls like a cross between Al Green and a bear. Their most recent album, The Narcotic Story, is their best; the second-best one is Let Me Be A Woman, which might be out of print at the moment.

Resistant Culture are a crust-punk/grindcore band from L.A. made up entirely of Native Americans. They include Native chants and flutes and stuff in their songs, and a lot of the lyrics are about militant environmentalism.

There weren't any.

Arab on Radar
The Flying Luttenbachers
Lightning Bolt
Bride of No No
Absu

warning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqRB8MYYQLU

Yob
Isis
Agalloch (although debut album was 1999)
there's quite a few bands who started late 90s that put their classics out in the 00s like Converge.

and Warning seconded.

2nd Fall Out Boy and a lot of other mainstream emo bands (My Chemical Romance, Paramore, Say Anything)

― Danble Perritration (some dude), Wednesday, November 3, 2010 11:31 PM (Yesterday)

seconding Paramore!

can we veto suggestions? ^

St. Anger by Metallica was another great mid-00's rock record

No one could argue with that

Superfamily
Alphabeat

marked men

a-frames

The Flying Luttenbachers

^^kinda disagree i think their truly great days were in the 90s

^^^ kinda agree but am considering the context

i mean they are good but the one time i saw them in the 00s they had gotten so "pro gear pro attitude" chops metal

I think Clutch hit their stride in the past decade.

"pro gear pro attitude" chops metal

what do you mean by that? like they were never a band with expensive "pro" gear. their gear got less crappy than in the early years.

i guess -- at least whatever lineup i saw at the end times II fest in st paul -- seemed a lot more like pro chops dudes, almost like math metally, and less free punk holocaust like the old school skin graft daze

was that in 06?

High on Fire to my mind is the best rock band of the decade...

Haven't most big (non heavy rock/metal) rock bands since the late 70s started out as kind of indie/alternative anyway?

well "non indie" in this kind of contemporary U.S. context includes major label alternative bands

Andrew W.K.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_BzbVmjyhvHI/Szn0MNd0D2I/AAAAAAAABTI/7XtKqHA57tI/s400/AndrewWK_MotherOfMankind_AlbumCover.jpg

...looks like this girl I dated senior year of high school.

Electric Wizard
Pelican

The Polyphonic Spree

^^ they're not indie?

Textures
Meshuggah

Tokyo Jihen
Boris

Hmm for some reason I though the PS was on a major label. Nevermind then.

unperson, checking out some Burnt Sugar now and I like much of what I'm hearing so far, though I'm not sure this is what the original question meant by "rock" (but then again neither is Tokyo Jihen much of the time).

The Intelligence
The Black Angels

Turbonegro and The Darkness. I checked, nine out of ten ILM threads from the first half of the decade were about one or both of these two bands.

marked men

a-frames

― skreet walking cheeduh widda head fulla facepalm (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, November 4, 2010 6:40 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

Andrew W.K.

― 17th Century Catholic Spain (Abbbottt), Thursday, November 4, 2010 7:51 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Turbonegro and The Darkness. I checked, nine out of ten ILM threads from the first half of the decade were about one or both of these two bands.

― del griffith, Thursday, November 4, 2010 9:35 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

HELL YES to marked men, andrew wk, turbonegro & the darkness. these are the bands i expected to hear about ITT. for whatever reason, i'm inclined here to build walls between straightforward rock-type rock (with at least one foot in the goddam rock and roll of yore) and all of her endlessly multiplying rock subgenres. for instance, i thought about including the a frames on my list above, but dropped them. in my mind, they're more punk or post-punk than straight-up rock. like, the further you move away from a basic, pop-leaning stones/stooges/cheap trick/van halen lineage, the farther you get from rock rock.

which is probably unfair, and boring besides. why limit yourself? the formalism i'm aligning myself with threatens to trap rock in amber, codifying its possibilities so that it can't change with the times. which sucks. i don't want rock to become a museum piece, like wynton marsalis' jazz. i'd like to think that my (admittedly rather narrow) idea of what is and isn't "proper rock and roll" doesn't necessarily doom it to that...

guess this all hearkens back to all that played out, turn-of-the-century "real rock"/"respect the rock" bullshit. and yeah. guilty as charged.

Drive-By Truckers

was that in 06?

― sarahel, Thursday, November 4, 2010 9:09 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah that sounds right

High on Fire to my mind is the best rock band of the decade...

― only! assholes! write on doors! (Drugs A. Money), Thursday, November 4, 2010 10:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

They certainly got my vote

poor 2000s

As a "former" rock-n-roller, I found myself reading this thread to which I had nothing to add and was not really all that interested in (something of a late Friday I-don't-want-to-work-anymore tradition). But now I'm interested in this Burnt Sugar thing. Can someone recommend a good place to start with them?

oh shit! how could i forget STNNNG and The Blind Shake

the only non-metallic rock album i loved in the last ten years was the last clockcleaner album. babylon rules. its the only one i can think of, anyway. as far as metal and hardcore-ish stuff and generally metal-influenced stuff goes, there was a lot that i loved. the list would go on and on and on and on.

(but clockcleaner would be indie rock, so nevermind...)

It was a fairly poor decade for major label rock. One of the worst in my eyes.

Matt2 -

Burnt Sugar's first album, Blood on the Leaf, is a good starting point. If you like that, jump to release #3, a two-CD set called Black Sex Y'all: Liberation & Bloody Random Violets. If you're hooked at that point, go back for their second release, the three-CD set That Depends On What You Know.

Their website is www.burntsugarindex.com and has their complete discography listed thereon.

kinda feels like we do a thread on this theme every few months -- these are the last few i could find:

best major label rock albums of the decade
Good major Label Rock/Metal albums from Late 90's-2008?
relatively mainstream rock songs that didn't completely suck in the 2000s

Thanks unperson. I'll explore.

second DBT's
Old 97's
Kowloon Walled City

Oneida, White Hills, The Heads, Wooden Shjips, Shit and Shine, Electric Wizard, High On Fire, Kylesa, Baroness, Arabrot, Grinderman, No Age, Crippled Black Phoenix, Titan, Citay, Parts + Labor, Black Mountain, Dead Meadow, Chickenhawk, Pombagira, Lightning Bolt, Double Dagger, Viking Skull, Hey Colossus, Black Tusk, Jim Jones Review, Black Breath...

do Sunn O))) count? cause if they do, them. maybe Gogol Bordello, also.

It was a fairly poor decade for major label rock. One of the worst in my eyes.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

P.O.D.

Tantric

all rock these days is basically indie rock - they have subsumed each other thx to the death of major labels

well, there are still rock artists signed to major labels, and a glut of "commerical rock" radio stations, most of which don't play much of what's considered "indie rock acts."

kinda feels like we do a thread on this theme every few months -- these are the last few i could find:

best major label rock albums of the decade
Good major Label Rock/Metal albums from Late 90's-2008?
relatively mainstream rock songs that didn't completely suck in the 2000s

― lil bow bow (some dude), Friday, November 5, 2010 2:12 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

major label rock is dead...but the autopsy could take awhile

Rock is dead again (part 67698769705334288663424557)

Where are the great new guitar bands?
By Ian Youngs Entertainment reporter, BBC News

From The Beatles to the Arctic Monkeys, Britain's great rock bands have belted out the soundtracks to our lives and carved a place at the heart of our culture.

So why have so few new bands broken through in the past couple of years? And what are new acts doing to keep guitar music alive?

There is a theory that says, almost 60 years since the birth of rock 'n' roll, all the great guitar riffs have been played to death.

All the great anthems have been written, every sound has been wrung from the instrument and every possible band line-up and look have been worn out.

In other words, it has all been done a million times before.

A glance at the singles charts, where rock and indie bands are an endangered species, makes that a persuasive notion.

Killers frontman Brandon Flowers and The Kings of Leon are the only such acts to have cracked the top 10 so far this year.

Two years ago, more than a dozen guitar-wielding bands - including Coldplay, Oasis, Razorlight, Kaiser Chiefs and The Kooks - reached the same heights.

But then the world seemed to get bored with the conventional guitar sound and the term "landfill indie" was enthusiastically wielded to beat down bands that sounded safe and stale - The Pigeon Detectives, The Fratellis, The Enemy, The View, Editors and The Courteeners among them.

This year, bands like Muse and Kings of Leon, with large fanbases built over long careers, have remained huge.

Mumford and Sons are the most successful new band of 2010 and The xx won the Mercury Music Prize. Both have had great years, partly because they have broken the conventional indie stereotype.

There are still thousands of aspiring guitar bands under the radar - but it does not feel like many are threatening to grab the public's attention

The disillusionment can be traced back to record labels chasing quick hits rather than acts with longevity, according to BBC 6 Music DJ Steve Lamacq.

"In this current climate, people are signing bands who have got one or two good tracks, hoping they can make one good album," he says. "And inevitably a lot of these bands are going to come and go.

"You end up ruining the sense of trust between tastemaker and audience, or record label and audience, or even musical genre and audience.

"If you stop believing in a certain sort of music, it's going to take a lot for you to come back."

Lamacq is 6 Music's arbiter-in-chief of good new guitar music, and has been casting a critical ear over new bands since hosting Radio 1's Evening Session in the heady days of Britpop.

If Radiohead emerged with their debut album today, it would be "unthinkable" that their long-term prospects would be recognised, he believes.

"It's the short term-ism coming home to roost, and that's a problem for the music industry and the media. But it's a problem that they've created for themselves in a lot of cases."

Singer and songwriter Fran Barker cites Radiohead's second album The Bends as the record that "made me really want to pick up the guitar".

Her band Seerauber Jenny is "very much guitar-driven", she says, with an extra dimension added by bandmate Neil Claxton, who was behind dance act Mint Royale.

Artists cannot get away with simply playing traditional guitar music any more, Barker believes.

"People expect so much more from what they hear, and you've got access to so much more," she says.

"To be edgy you've got to try harder. You can't have a simple sound any more - it's got to be much more complex and instruments need to be used a lot more imaginatively."

A hospital heart monitor - used for beats instead of drums - is among the gadgets Seerauber Jenny have employed.

Many bands are going further in their quests for a fresh sound, taking them far away from their "landfill indie" cousins.

Manchester gig promoters Now Wave say they showcase "the sounds of the near future", seeking bands that are alternative, exciting and original.

Now Wave's Wesley Jones is "a little bit bored" with the standard indie formula. "I think the public are as well," he says.

He mentions Glasgow quartet Errors, who recently played a Now Wave night, as an antidote. "That's four guys with guitars in there - but also an array of other instruments," Mr Jones says.

"And it doesn't sound dissimilar to dance music. It's 120bpm, there are no vocals, there's no singing about having lost your girlfriend.

"But they're utilising guitars in a different way. Not strumming them. There are all sorts of different ways to play it."

Mount Kimbie, another forward-thinking bunch, play "post dubstep", Jones says, which would be "unrecognisable to most indie rock fans".

"And yet there's a guitar in there, both plucked and played with a violin bow. It is used more in a soundscape way, or played and then heavily processed through other instruments to give it a very different sound."

If you're a budding music-maker with home software to create and record all the sounds you need, who needs bandmates anyway?

Sean Adams, founder of the Drowned In Sound music website, says wryly: "If you're a solo artist, you can create your own drummer without having to deal with drummers.

"Because of the way you can now create stuff with Garageband or Logic, it seems really limited to just be making sounds with the guitar, when there's so much more you can do with a palette of sounds."

Mr Adams, who released the Kaiser Chiefs' first single, also believes fans find it unnatural to listen to something that is "attached to previous generations" on their ultra-modern devices.

So where will the sound of the near future really come from? Will one of the mega-hip, bleeding-edge experimentalists hit upon a formula that propels them into the big time?

Or will young fans get sick of the soon-to-be landfill R&B, hip-hop and dubstep, and look to something they have rarely heard before - four blokes (or girls) with guitars, bass and drums and a rebellious rallying cry that they can relate to?
'Second wind'

"Maybe the guitar isn't as exciting and dangerous and vital as it once was," Mr Adams says. "Maybe that's going to come in a second wind with a backlash against all the dancier sounds and getting bored of seeing a guy on a laptop."

"I think the next big thing that will come along will be like an Oasis," Lamacq concludes. "It will sound like something you've heard before.

"And I don't think we'd mind - if they said something about your life. If they were engaging and charismatic. If, when you listen to their song, you want to listen to it again. You want something to believe in."

Very few new bands have been "touching people in that way" in the last 12 months, the DJ says.

"I can't really put my finger on why bands aren't forming like this - apart from they just want to take a short cut to success.

"Trying to be different now will be a struggle. But it will be the bands that are prepared to struggle that will take us out of this mess."

also: the rolling non-indie punk threads from every year are literally bursting w/awesome guitar rock

why is Oneida not indie again?

White Stripes and Radiohead I thought were pretty good, though both peter'd out towards the end of the decade...

they are psych imo

not indie in the sense that most people use the term (though definitely indie in the original sense)

some less rigidly "rock & roll" suggestions, most mentioned above:

yob
high on fire (yeah, pretty much the best rock band of the 00s)
harvey milk
a frames
shit & shine
black breath
lightning bolt
nachtmystium
boris
wooden shjips (live anyway)
coachwhips/oh sees (latter = indie canon, but so what)
country teasers (because i like to mention them when possible)
the fall (great decade for MES)
jay reatard/lost sounds

actually been a pretty great decade for rock, just not for on major labels or in the charts. surprised as well that there's no one in this thread talking up the hold steady, ted leo, titus andronicus, against me and the like (not that i am, mind)

Wait so its not indie if it doesn't "sound" indie but is on an independent label? What a stupid definition.

i don't really know if we're operating on a single defition, stupid or no.

yay - 3 mentions so far for Lightning Bolt

honestly, I would probably rep for over half of the Skingraft catalog

^^ two separate thoughts.

skin graft was the best!

probably the most reliably great label for weird music that isn't all of one genre or aesthetic.

btw m@tt - they did reissue the Luttenbachers "Destroy All Music" in the 2000s

ah cool! lake of dracula was cool

I think the question was originally intended as "major label rock bands", all this A-Frames and Wooden Shjips stuff, as much as I love it, doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the original question. Those bands are totally unknown to a lot of major label rock people who dig White Stripes or High On Fire.

Anyway, the threads some dude pointed out have already covered this question pretty thoroughly.

i'm old school when it comes to this question. 2006!

hey writer-types, do you ever get any big label rock records that are worth listening to twice?

second Sunn o))) and add Earth for good measure

also, Porcupine Tree

At this point, I do think it's better to say "major label" if that's what you mean, rather than "non-indie," because to me (and lots of other people) indie rock bands can be on major labels and rock bands on indie labels can be non-indie rock.

(Or I guess it would have to be major label/non-indie rock style rock.)

no mention of major labels in the thread header

I think we're looking for "non-indie rock"

hence: Current 93, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Hold Steady, Six Organs of Admittance

almost all metal bands are indie rock bands if you want to get technical about it.

feel like the only person on ilm that isn't a high on fire fan. i can live with that.

I think the question was originally intended as "major label rock bands", all this A-Frames and Wooden Shjips stuff, as much as I love it, doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the original question. Those bands are totally unknown to a lot of major label rock people who dig White Stripes or High On Fire.

Anyway, the threads some dude pointed out have already covered this question pretty thoroughly.

― sleeve, Friday, November 5, 2010 3:55 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah but no. thread was started by samosa gibreel, and the 1st band SG mentioned was the hunches. have to assume we're going off the "rolling non-indie punk" thread concept, where indie basically means shit that doesn't rock hard enough. i.e., not vampire weekend or whatever.

point taken, but...

Current 93, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Hold Steady, Six Organs of Admittance

― margana (anagram), Friday, November 5, 2010 4:40 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

only one of these bands is even close to being a "rock band"

jesus, I need a break from ILM.

Wait so its not indie if it doesn't "sound" indie but is on an independent label? What a stupid definition.

― The Porcupine Captain With A Crew of White Rabbits (Viceroy), Friday, November 5, 2010 2:59 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

yeah, but them's the breaks. i used to rail about indie as a genre, but it's pretty firmly established now, so i've made my peace. like modest mouse & built to spill = indie no matter who's putting their records out.

presumably you mean THS but I would say the last two C93 albums have been pretty rocking. ditto Six Organs. and if those other bands aren't rock then what are they.

xp

not necessarily canonized or mega popular ones, just which ones made really great music

feel like the only person on ilm that isn't a high on fire fan. i can live with that.

― scott seward, Friday, November 5, 2010 4:41 PM (10 minutes ago)

same here.

the burning brides!

i knew the burning brides when they used to rock & roll! philly!!!!!

hf

woah i hadn't gone on ilx for a couple days and i just assumed no one had posted in this thread

some things to respond to

the only non-metallic rock album i loved in the last ten years was the last clockcleaner album. babylon rules. its the only one i can think of, anyway. as far as metal and hardcore-ish stuff and generally metal-influenced stuff goes, there was a lot that i loved. the list would go on and on and on and on.

(but clockcleaner would be indie rock, so nevermind...)

― scott seward, Friday, November 5, 2010 2:42 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

don't think clockcleaner are indie rock and babylon rules is possibly my favourite rock album of the decade, was going to write another long and boring paragraph about it to bump this thread in fact. i love the way 'new in town' crawls and then lurches over itself, and the vocals!

all rock these days is basically indie rock - they have subsumed each other thx to the death of major labels

― the Whiney G. Weingarten Memorial 77 Clique (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, November 5, 2010 3:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

don't think i really need to seriously respond to this comment, but if you are still unsure about what indie rock is, i basically just wanted to make a thread for rock bands whose primary influence is not bowie or talking heads. some of that shit is great but it has all been talked about.

what sparked my interest & this thread was the realization that most people's idea of non-indie rock this decade ends at the strokes/hives/vines/white stripes, and that there is not really any larger narrative past that point. everything either diffused into anonymity or went into hyper specific & exclusive clubs like termbo or mrr. it's like if some idiots writing for magazines and websites got way too excited about it and now no one will touch the stuff.

i thought it would be cool to see what bands people have latched onto or discovered absent of the spoonfeeding that goes on in indie circles.

everything either diffused into anonymity or went into hyper specific & exclusive clubs like termbo or mrr. it's like if some idiots writing for magazines and websites got way too excited about it and now no one will touch the stuff.

otm, and it gets me down. not sure about the whys & wherefores, but there's a ton of cool/varied/interesting music that gets tumbled through in the rolling punk non-indie thread (imo), but it's such a tiny lunchtable, with no connection to ILM as a whole. maybe this version of rock is too old-fashioned, too unfriendly or too far removed from pop to have any broad appeal, but the general indifference is a drag. feel it in seattle, too.

nah dude we're the lucky ones. like, don't get me wrong i like me some cool music critics, but i tend to think that the phenomenon of people writing about music on the whole (& partic the what are the good bands of our time meta-narrative stuff) has the pervasive negative effect of creating associations, expectations & constructs in ppl's minds, sometimes before even having heard a band, and i am definitely v grateful that lots of the cool rock shit i'm into has escaped unscathed.

probably a lot of his has to do with a lot of the bands and labels clinging to vinyl, which when push comes to shove most profitable websites cannot really keep up with or dish out cash for (& promotionally is not worth it for them)

too bad about seattle though. promoters here are pretty great in this regard

lightning bolt, human eye, mclusky, so so many white white tigers, harvey milk,

so so many white white tigers

lol

people bringing up the Hold Steady as a non-indie band are fuckin' kidding themselves

still got a lot of time for sol campbell & his riverboat gamblers

people bringing up the Hold Steady as a non-indie band are fuckin' kidding themselves

yeah that was me and I stand by it because indie is a musical genre, a description, and it does not encompass the Hold Steady.