The Alabama Shakes

Are you on the "Huntsville" for new music? Dig the Alabama Shakes. These kids are dynamite. They're getting lots of publicity and have a killer retro Memphis sound. I predict they'll soon be going "Mobile"...up the charts that is.

Great band, them.

Terrible puns, you.

Overrated based on my brief listen or maybe just not my taste. Singer who wants to be Janis Joplin but has heard old soul records, backed by a jam band who want to be the Allman Brothers if they listened to Stax alot.

They've got that sound down, though. Just in time for the 90s neo jam band revival. The thing is, this band is actually good, with a killer singer.

I will stick with Miss Jody

http://www.soulbluesmusic.com/msjody.htm

The Shakes have skills I just do not like how they use them

Almost supernaturally overrated. Unbelievably mediocre. No tunes whatsofuckingever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c

Almost supernaturally overrated. Unbelievably mediocre. No tunes whatsofuckingever.

Are we listening to the same band? No tunes? When I saw them a month ago, I had only listened to them briefly and walked in highly skeptical. It ended up being one of the most fun shows I've seen in years.

What does 'fun' have to do with great tunes? What's fun about "Gates of Eden?" When I want fun I'll don my B-52s t-shirt and spend an afternoon at Chuck E Cheese, thank you very much.

I just want to hear a popular band that can, you know, write beyond rock and roll cliche refrigerator magnet poetry. This shit, though, makes me long for the comparatively introspective lyrics of the Black Eyed Peas.

B52s and Chuck E Cheese. Now that's a party.

so this apparently one of the biggest things out there right now:
http://www.youtube.com/user/alabamashakes?v=Le-3MIBxQTw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le-3MIBxQTw&list=UUkDw4xg86Jlph29KqQw_Xhw&feature=plcp

Drummer's sweatshirt is nice Fugazi joke.

HATE this fucking band.

I LIKE this fucking band. I think a lot of you are drinking some kind of reactionary anti-koolaid.

Explain to me what you like. The sub-Black Keys lyrics that sound like rock and roll cliche refrigerator magnet poetry? The complete lack of tunes? The fact that this is a bar band AT BEST and they're being hailed as the second coming of Led Zep? This shit is garbage. Just when I think the bar couldn't really get any lower...

She has a fucking great voice, which, imho, makes up for the lazy lyrics. "complete lack of tunes" is just wrong though. I'd listen to these guys over Black Keys any fucking day.

Her great voice (that sometimes gets too J. Joplin melodramatic) doesn't make up for her bar band behind her. Been kinda ignoring the Keys, so I can't weigh in on your comparison. Seems better to ignore both of them. I can see lazy Lefsetz baby boomer types liking the Shakes and I am guessing younger jamband types do as well.

Yep. And since when is having a 'fucking great voice' some sort of criteria, and if it is, why aren't yall checkin' Carrie Underwood? I mean, 'great voice' is something my mom would say to defend the purchase of her Clay Aiken CD. This is a music forum, right?

Carrie is way superior to this shitty shitty band of shit.

saw them on Jools, thought they were great, especially as they didn't give a shit what they looked like

I literally just found these guys through the Dakota Johnson wikipedia page, because she hosted an SNL they played. I hate-checked them out because I hated their name and figured they'd sound all Mumfordy. They're pretty good!

Will be hosting! It's not even until this weekend. But I dig the Shakes pretty well.

Like a lot of modern indie bands, I feel like some of the musicianship is just a tad lower than the music really deserves. Drumming in particular sounds a little weak to me. Of course I'm watching three-year-old clips though, maybe they've gotten tour tight since then.

New album is ambitious, I am a fan

drumming still bugs me, but I like this album more than the first

Heard Tom Moon on NPR praising the new album for having noisier and more psychedelic aspects, while I read a review in the Washington Post criticizing it for those same aspects. From what I have heard so far--I still find her voice sometimes goes from powerful to being too Janis Joplin gone bombastic, and the band to be too stiff in an arena rockers trying to be cool ways.

Listen to the whole thing a couple times. I'm thinking her voice at its most aggressive is still deftly so, a precise stimulant, rather than bombastic overselling. Joplineque in that sense, but while listening my first association is with Al Green. Though really I don't associate her or them with anybody else in particular; they're deliberately mashing-up familiar late-60s/early-70s R&B and rock elements, in a personally expressive/idiosyncratic way. Maybe too gimmicky occasionally, but so far, most of it sounds pretty good.

She frequently gets way too marblemouthed for my liking, and it's so affected, especially when she puts it on and takes it off again from song to song, sometimes from line to line, that it throws me out of the experience. But I like the music a lot; as you say, it's a kind of personalized retro thing that I can definitely appreciate, not slavishly imitative of any one sound or era, but with hints of many.

The singer is both the best and worst thing about the band.

How do you mean?
"marblemouthed": heh, maybe that's why I was thinking of Al Green. Mostly okay by me (moreso on this album than the first), but sometimes get the fleeting impression that some of the flitting about (as singer and writer) has to do with wanting/not sure how to address certain subjects: she's young, from an isolated area, incl. people and situations not so far behind or ahead.

Starbucks rock

The drummer is the only guy in the band who touring hasn't helped. That said, the slow bits have this weird drag that reminds me of Flying Lotus. So maybe he's onto something after all.

This is one of my favorite albums of 2015, too. I like the songs but the production really blows me away. Great headphone record, too.

Man, this album really seems slept on, and I'm including myself. Enjoyed it last spring. Enjoying a lot now.

I haven't checked out anything of theirs in a while, but this a really cool song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbR999N5MiA

although comment above about the drummer seems OTM -- his time/feel are pretty bad and detract from some of the best parts. I also wondered if the annoying stick clicking is in there to help him keep time.

And on this one he plays that tom beat through the whole song even though it only works on half of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nin-fiNz50M

But I like how little they sound like any of the things you'd expect them to sound like from their name -- they're not an old man hat band, they're not a nu-Southern cockrock band, nothing twee about them, yet muscular without being obnoxious. Interesting mix of prog and soul influences. At times they remind me of Field Music, although with totally different vocals. Also hear some Bowie.

Their prog influences when I once saw them live at a festival came across as too bombastic.

I actually wonder if you could call them "Festival Rock" -- that slightly bluesy, slightly rootsy, slightly amorphous, too-earnest-to-be-indie category of bands that are big with the Bonnaroo crowd -- My Morning Jacket, Black Keys, etc.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/29/alabama-shakes-drummer-steven-william-johnson-arrested-on-child-abuse-charges

Really awful.

Probably dangerous territory to make any assumptions, but seeing that his ex-wife first accused him in 2018, I'm starting to wonder how much of this played into Brittany Howard distancing herself from the band around the same. At least it puts her cagey answers about the status of the band into greater clarity. Before learning about this, I wouldn't have minded another Shakes record, but given how terrific Jaime was, I'll be happy to follow her promising solo career.

Yeah, the bassist is the only Shakes member she carried over to Jaime, because they were the tightest. I've just been working under the assumption the band was dead for several years now.