Bands That Sound Exactly Like Other Bands, Classic or Dud?

it's weird, I'd assume of myself that I wouldn't like bands who just do the same thing another band does. I just feel like me-as-a-kid would have been instinctively appalled to learn that there'd be bands whose schtick was "there's thing other band who is awesome, we try to basically do exactly that." And yet, I fucking love Zombi and Umberto and I just found out about Caladan Brood, who mimic Summoning quite well (no guitar lines can quite match Summoning's best imo) and I'm like...fuck yes...I love Summoning, so I love this. Copycats, thumbs up or thumbs down?

thumbs up if it's something I love that I don't think there's enough of in the world

ty for bringing to my attention that there is a band called Caladan Brood

since i am here - i have no philosophical objection to this phenomenon

If it isn't a subgenre or aesthetic I'm incredibly in love with I usually can't stand it.

I'm most bothered by this in the vocals, way less so musically.

instrumentally I should have said

Usually it's the case that band B sounds like band A but isn't nearly as good. It's rare that band B is as good as or better than band A.

yeah I mean that's true, but I don't give a shit, you know? Umberto's not Goblin - that's cool - I already have all the Goblin records, so go go go Umberto imo

Usually it's the case that band B sounds like band A but isn't nearly as good. It's rare that band B is as good as or better than band A.

― Poliopolice, Monday, May 6, 2013 2:55 PM (16 minutes ago)

If the vocal style is too copycat it's really hard to ignore despite your point.

What really matters is that you produce a memorable song that I want to listen to over and over again. If stealing another band's style is a way to produce a memorable song, go for it.

Sometimes it can really be a putoff, even if you like the original - Fish's vocal style is just so similar to Pete Gabriel that it just actively distracted me the whole time

Well yeah memorable songs distract from being blatantly derivative.

xpost

xpost as long as the songs present something fresh and interesting and different, the "sound" of the band doesn't make much difference to me.

however if the songwriting is boring or derivative, this can be an easy target for shit talk.

like "i liked this band a lot better when they were called band x" or whatever

I went to a little "jangle fest" thing at Maxwells featuring dudes from bands like Dumptruck and Winter Hours doing solo acoustic sets and was enjoying it until I noticed how much they all were trying to emulate Michael Stipe vocally. Then I had trouble immersing myself as each of them did their own impression. One dude happened to not sound like him and it was very refreshing.

I remember in h.s. a friend who had moved from a couple states away made a tape with some bands from his old hometown's scene and it was kind of hilarious to listen to it like "here's the band that wishes they were Tool, and here's the one that desperately wants to be Shudder To Think" etc.

Everybody's gonna be a little transparent about their influences, but it's such a weird bum out when that's like ALL they do and there's not even any kind little twist or fusion with something else. I always wonder what those bands would sound like if influence X had never existed, would they just copy something else?

Exactly.

i like the ramones, i don't really care for bands that sound like the ramones.
i like the band, and i LOVE marginal seventies acts that ape that sound.

But even a band that takes all of its cues from Tool has to come up with its own choruses, riffs, solos, lyrics, etc. And you can enjoy all of those things for their particular details, even if the rules that generated them were completely derivative.

case study for me would be early Bee Gees. they go hard on the Beatles-ism but the songwriting/harmonies/lyrical quirks only make it all the more endearing

That's the thing, though -- if you're creative enough to write a long complex fake Tool song, you're probably also creative enough to play/sing it so that it doesn't sound so obviously derivative! Go the extra mile!

More respect if you can shape something distinct & identifiable about your sound, even if you heavily borrow/worship another.

i think originality is in the subtleties anyway. i can imgaine a band that sounds a lot like another band on the surface, but if you look closely at their music they are deploying familiar effects for very different ends. i can't think of an example right now, but it sounds like a thing i've noticed before.

I feel like this is never a problem for me if you are talking about stuff from the past - 50's, 60's, 70's - because the records sound cool production-wise, and I can always find something to love. even records that were recorded poorly. they can be endearing or have little details that are cool. now those details are gone for the most part. so much new stuff sounds terrible to me. recording-wise. plus, most bands today don't really have the ability to rip off the stuff I love and do it well. they can barely play the stuff I love. i'm sure I would love it if there were Poco copycat bands out there.

i'm talking about "rock" music, I guess. I have an infinite capacity for rap, dance, pop, metal that is just a copy of a copy.

and live is another thing. I saw a local Goblin-y band play here and it was fun. probably wouldn't buy their cd but it was entertaining in a live space. and they did, in fact, try their hardest to sound exactly like Goblin.

plenty of bands i love that pretty much rip everything from krautrock

i like the ramones, i don't really care for bands that sound like the ramones.
i like the band, and i LOVE marginal seventies acts that ape that sound.

this is really good - it does depend on which band exactly is being ripped off. Like, again, with Goblin, they kind of open a door onto a whole world of music; they're practically a genre. (So's early Carcass, there's plenty of band who unabashedly want to be early Carcass.) But if it's a band whose personality is part of what they do, like the Ramones, then it's like trying to cop somebody's attitude, not just using their musical vocabulary.

In classical this is an interesting question, feel like dudes like Brahms and Schubert and Bruckner end up grappling with these inescapable figures of influence in such great and productive ways that by the ends of their lives they've all 3 arrived at this awesome place where they've synthesized their models and their own voices

lol, bands that want to sound like carcass and brahms! I like those examples.

i love the replacements but every time i hear one of those '90s bands where the singer's obviously trying as hard as he can to channel westerberg i kinda cringe inside and go 'wait, DO i like the replacements?'

all the post grunge/nu metal dudes that ape kurt cobain = DUD

First time I heard the first verses of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" it sounded to me like Cobain was trying to copy Westerberg. But in the chorus he roared like Black Francis in The Pixies, and it was alright.

Also interesting are bands that change direction in their influences, like Phoenix switching from electro pop to The Strokes. Or Primal Scream going back and forth between dance stuff, the Stones, dub reggae, Stooges/Can, back to Stones, back to Stooges/Can...

Somebody says "That A Band Sounds Exactly LIke Another Band" it is kind of a back-handed compliment or unintentional red flag. (see also telling somebody you know the remind you of some famous actor) In theory would say this is a bad thing, that it is going to come off as a pale imitation but more often then not end up liking it, because either they don't really sound exactly like the other band, or they do sound like that band but pick up and amplify a particular phase of their career that the original band passed through and abandoned on the way to something else, or they unite elements of that bands sound from different eras that hadn't been present at the same point in the time line or in the same mix. So The Raspberries don't sound exactly The Beatles, they sound like The Beatles with The Who's drummer. And their singer Eric Carmen sounds like Paul McCartney but he utilizes his Little Richard voice much more often, not just for fifties covers or pastiches or the hardest rockers.

Other thing to think about is certain kind of tribute acts like Elvis imitators or Björn Again where the original act was so stylized to begin with that maybe somebody else really can don the mantle and reproduce it.

But of course there really is the danger of falling into the Uncanny Valley where the derivative thing is not far enough away from the original thing to be its own thing but not close enough to convince so that it ends up setting some alarm bells, wolf in sheep's clothing or something.

Actually this thread reminds me that there was some Battle of the Two Tims recently in which Tim E was trying to explain what he thought made The Bangles better than other sixties revivalists while Tim F kept attacking him and undermining what he considered to be an "essentialist" position and therefore philosophically indefensible.

classic if the tunes are good. rip them off too if you need to. soundalike bands with weak melodies can get to fuck

yeah that's about right.

Here is thar discussion about The Bangles: Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism

Actually find this phenomenon more problematic in jazz, saxophonists trying to ape Trane or Bird and such. Did see a cat once who was doing an incredible job of channeling Bird but it seemed to be mostly because he had been doing time for a long while so that when he got finally got out he was like a visitor from the past.

Eric Carmen even borrowed the count off of "I Saw Here Standing There" for "Tonight." You may argue that people have been counting from 1 to 4 at the beginning of songs since the dawn of time, but he certainly doesn't sound like, say, Dee Dee Ramone.

Eric Carmen even borrowed the count off of "I Saw Here Standing There" for "Tonight."

You missed out the Small Faces, they borrowed from them all the time too, esp. the drumming

... and vocals!

Oh yeah, good call.

Wouldn't give them the kudos I'd give the original band, but I'd buy the records, so I'm sure they could live with that. Only band I can think of in the last 10 years that it did put me off was a band who aped The Smiths to a frightening degree. Just seemed something a bit pathetic about being *so* obvious by aping someone *so* distinctive.

when i was a teenager i was pretty bummed out that there were only two my bloody valentine records i could listen to & so through a bunch of fairly & appropriately primitive labour-of-love websites i would check out the other groups that my bloody valentine fans endorsed as kind of substitutes, like finding out how you could mimic the feelings of hallucinogenics using material that was available domestically, bleaches & sprays from the bathroom cabinet. the thing you actually get from a group can be very different from whatever the sum of that group's parts is; i would like to hear more silver jews records but i have no desire whatsoever to hear some other guy baritoning ironically over country licks because it wouldn't be the same thing. with the valentines it was something kevin once described as like oh those groups with the fuzzy guitars and the girl whispering. it's not my bloody valentine, it's just a kind of faint soap-stamp of their general appearance. ride or whatever. like an e-fit that will never capture the criminal.

i guess one exception to this is maybe for going to see play groups live? like when i watch a movie set in the sixties there's some covers group in the corner rattling through a kinks song & three chuck berry songs & a slow number to dance to & i'm pretty envious of times when music could just be functionally aired, which is less the case so more. or like when you see chico hamilton in sweet smell of success. i guess it maybe makes sense to have duplicitous groups in a live setting. i didn't really feel anything for that group beak that came out a couple of years back, like it just felt like a convincing recreation of the baseline/bassline musical style of a certain place a number of decades ago, like it wasn't so much look what we're doing as look we can do it, but i guess there's maybe an appeal to being able to go see a komische group run a beat into the ground for fifteen minutes given that you weren't able to do so while leaning against the low-ceilinged white wall of a squat amid an art opening in 1970.

less often the case, anymore i should have written

this guy (horse feathers) looks AND sounds like Will Oldham

http://fensepost.com/main/images/bands/h/horse_feathers.jpg

here's the one that desperately wants to be Shudder To Think

I'd love to hear someone try to imitate Shudder To Think!

Heard something yesterday I thought was somebody trying to sound like Shudder To Think- no it was Built To Spill they were trying to sound like. Band of Horses, "Ode to LRC."

I kind of want to make a mix of dudes like that and call it "Will Oldham Impersonator Contest"

Also were y'all aware that the Shudder To Think guy who married the Cardigans girl has been writing detective stories set in post-apocalyptic NYC?

In a parallel universe the head of Sony insisted the Compact Disc be designed to br long enough to hold that Will Oldham soundalike comp.

i don't care about music i like that copies other music but if it's music i hate i will try not to use this copyism as a reason why i hate you and if it's music i'm ambivalent about then sometimes i might wonder if the apery is what's making me ambivalent

otherwise i could give one flying fuck, not least because there's at least one artist mentioned on this very thread where i was familiar with the alleged copyist well before i knew the alleged copyee so where's your messiah now originality bores?

i wd now go back and dissect some of the asinine assertions made up there but i'm breathing deep it's Chinatown i know i know

When I was about 14 I was pretty much obsessed with Nirvana. When I first heard 'Self Esteem' by Offspring I remember being overjoyed and amazed and running out to buy it the next day, simply because it sounded like 'Teen Spirit'. The idea that it might have been a rip-off or derivative or a cash-in of any sort didn't so much as cross my mind, not that it is necessarily. I liked it cos it was like an extra helping of 'Teen Spirit'.

I've said it a thousand times and i'm gonna say it again, when I first heard nevermind I got really excited at first cuz I thought it was a new squirrel bait album. I was drunk though. I had never heard nirvana.

There are a ton of bands/artists that don't exactly sound always like some band that have some tunes that sound like they could have come from another band's hits package like say John Cougar's "Tumblin' Down" and Billy Joel's "You May Be Right" sound to me like total Rolling Stones tunes down to the title and they even pull in some of Mick Jagger's vocal mannerisms.