Music:
Member Since: 27/03/2006
Band Website: http://pissoff-already.livejournal.com/
Band Members: Max Maxwell: gee-tar, rants... 506.450.2638, [email protected]
Influences: THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO DECENT MUSIC
First off, the first eight Bruce Springsteen albums on the Columbia Label--Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.; The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle; Born To Run; Darkness On The Edge Of Town; The River; Nebraska; Born In The U.S.A; and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band: Live 1975/85--are untouchable beacons of what rock music is and should be. Springsteen took the legacies of Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochrane, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie and rolled them up into a ball and polished it and hooked it up to speakers and turned the volume way up.
Then again, the same could be said for the Beatles' British discography on Capitol EMI: Please Please Me, With The Beatles, A Hard Day's Night, Help!, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles, Abbey Road, Yellow Submarine, and Let It Be. Basically, this is rock music (as opposed to rock n' roll music) that predates the vast majority of rock music; from lyrics in the liner notes to singles that aren't off the album, the Beatles invented every trend in the modern music industry, if only by necessity.
And then the Who had their day as well... though less consistent overall, the albums My Generation, A Quick One, The Who Sell Out, Tommy, Live At Leeds, Who's Next, Quadrophenia, and The Who By Numbers are pretty solid, and released between 1965 and and 1975, remain the best pre-punk example of the music and the attitude that would eventually lead to that genre.
Then Bob Dylan had his day, too, as the forerunner of modern Alt.country music, folk that gives a damn. The self-titled debut, along with The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A Changin', Another Side Of Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Blonde On Blonde, John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, New Morning, Blood On The Tracks, The Basement Tapes, and Desire are worthy of being called great recordings.
Just go buy every Led Zeppelin album except the last two and thank me later. For clarity's sake, that's Led Zeppelin I, Led Zeppelin II, Led Zeppelin III, Untitled, Houses Of The Holy, Physical Graffiti (and especially that one), Presence and BBC Sessions.
The Velvet Underground are the forerunners of modern indie and glam rock and their albums The Velvet Underground and Nico, Loaded, and White Light/White Heat, as well as lead singer Lou Reed's masterpiece Transformer, pave the way for Pavement, Sebadoh, the Strokes, Slint and anyone else who's since picked up a guitar without the express intention of channeling SRV. Then you could point out the MC5's Kick Out The Jams or the Stooges three records (self-titled debut, Funhouse, Raw Power) as being similar forerunners to the same thing.
Lynyrd Skynyrd had wicked albums too. Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd, Second Helping, One More From The Road, and Street Survivors are Southern rock in a nutshell. A nutshell with lots of loud guitars and the first metal-style lead guitar harmonies in rock.
Weezer contributed a lot to the pop-punk genre, but mainly through the albums Weezer and Pinkerton, the latter of which is perhaps the best melancholy pop music ever released. After that, though, their discography is sparse and inconsistent. Say Anything, with their albums Baseball and ...is a Real Boy, seem to have taken up the torch; Brand New started along that path with 2001's Your Favorite Weapon, but eventually mellowed out (to great effect) on 2003's Deja Entendu.
Amongst the best performers in recent years is Sufjan Stevens, whose orchestral chamber pop offerings on Seven Swans, Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State, Illinoise and The Avalanche are probably the best Christian popular music available. Then again, I'm told that Christian is a good noun and a bad adjective. Even still, Thrice do the "Christian punk" thing justice, their entire discography (Identity Crisis, The Illusion Of Safety, The Artist In The Ambulance, and Vheissu) belonging in a holy shrine itself.
Elliot Smith put out a lot of badass stuff in the '90s and early 2000s, before he was "murdered." Either/Or, XO, Figure 8, and From A Basement On A Hill are all brilliant examples of what folk had become by the end of the 20th century, as opposed to Alt.country.
Speaking of Alt.country, Ryan Adams has never put out a bad record. For completion's sake, though, those records are: Heartbreaker, Gold, Demolition, lloR 'N kcoR, Love Is Hell Parts 1 & 2, Cold Roses, Jacksonville City Nights, and 29. They're an essential distillation of what country should sound like, and directly in opposition to the shit Nashville puts on the radio these days. Bright Eyes' discography--The Bright Eyes Vinyl Box Set, Lifted: or, the Story Is In The Soil, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, Digital Ash In A Digital Urn, and Motion Sickness: Live Recordings--are equally and similarly upheldable.
The Grateful Dead's discography on Warner Bros. Records is arguably the basis of modern jam music, even more so than with the Allman Brothers' work. There was the obligatory self-titled debut, followed up by Anthem Of The Sun, Aoxomoxoa, the brilliantly-titled Live/Dead, Workingman's Dead, American Beauty, the self-titled live album, Europe '72, and History Of The Grateful Dead: Volume One (Bear's Choice). After that, the discography becomes irreprehensibly muddled and unforgivably inconsistent.
Next we have the Doors, who became known to history as the band that would shatter the Spirit Of '67 and imbue their music with the Spirit Of '68. The self-titled debut, Strange Days, Waiting For The Sun, The Soft Parade, Morrison Hotel, L.A. Woman, and Jim Morrison: An American Prayer are nothing less than essential dystopianism.
Pink Floyd started to suck, for lack of a better word, in the 80s. Before that, though, and particularly in the early '70s, they did anything but. Recorded with the late, great Syd Barrett, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is totally different from the band's output thereafter. Post that, David Gilmour took over on guitar and the albums A Saucerful of Secrets, Music from the Film More, Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, Obscured by Clouds, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall show off his brilliant contributions well. They also represent all but one of the group's albums with Roger Waters.
Queen released a pair of brilliant albums in 1975 and '76 entitled A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races. I'm not entirely sure just what or who hey influence; I do know that literally no one has the vocal prowess Freddie Mercury displayed here and not many have the guitar prowess of Brian May, either.
It's hard to say who perfected '90s "alternative" (read: music that wasn't punk or rap), but it's easy to see who invented it: taking leads from earlier Seattle bands like Green River, the Screaming Trees and the Melvins, Nirvana created what may be the last example of "rock-star" music with their albums Bleach, Nevermind, Incesticide, and In Utero. Nine Inch Nails (or NIN, if preferred) put out a lot of good stuff in the '90s as well, perhaps defining the music of the decade (check out Pretty Hate Machine, Broken, The Downward Spiral, and The Fragile). Incubus brought a jammy sort of feel to the scene with the records S.C.I.E.N.C.E. and Morning View, as well as the more recent offering A Crow Left Of The Murder.
The best hip-hop records are all political and unafraid to actually play instruments. Hip-hop that exists as synthesized beats with mumbled rambling about drugs and clubs over it is not the real deal. Try the Roots' Phrenology, Ludacris's Chicken N' Beer, Rage Against The Machine's The Battle Of Los Angeles, The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphopracy's Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury, The Beastie Boys' License To Ill and Paul's Boutique, and Nas's Illmatic for starters.
Electronica music is inexhaustible in scope and quantity: to put it in simple terms, start with the Stone Roses' self-titled debut, DJ Shadow's Entroducing..., The Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole, and DJ Shadow That Subliminal Kid's Live Without Dead Time.
Finally, and keeping in mind that this is just the absolute tip of the pop iceberg, it'd be good to have a short discography of essential punk here. The Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks... may have been the flame that started the spirit of '77 burning, but you shouldn't start with it; frankly, there're better records. Go for the Clash's classics London Calling, Give 'Em Enough Rope, and Sandinista!!! and the Dead Kennedy's first two masterpieces Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables and Plastic Surgery Disasters/In God We Trust Inc.. After that, check out the Misfit's debut Walk Among Us, and then check out Jawbreaker's entire discography: Unfun, Bivouac, 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, Dear You, and Etc.
Sounds Like: blues rock as filtered through a pop-punk lens.
Record Label: looking to be signed
