@generic - saw them play that at one of the 'paloozas. Star Lake in Pittsburgh, PA. Good show!
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(found due to comments by @PaisleyUnderground and @jthvac )
Found due to Headphonez
Found via Roon’s suggested albums
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Great album! I love Jon Hassell’s music and his approach to sound.
I love Hassell too. I feel like the mixture of electronic music and jazz can sometimes go very very wrong, but his work is an example of just how incredible that mixture can be.
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He studied music with La Monte Young and worked for years with The Theatre of Eternal Music.
He developed with Brian Eno the idea of “Fourth World Music”.
ECM tries time and again to categorise him as a jazz musician which he’s not or at least not in the strict sense of the term.
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Mainly Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Lingua Ignota, Meshuggah, Gojira and Russian Circles.
Really been in the mood for Let Love In and The Boatman’s Call for some reason, and naturally had to have a listen of the new full Gojira record.
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A short list of contemporary classical music chosen from Bandcamp:
Currently finishing out the week listening to Saint Cloud by Waxahatchee. I’ve always loved the composition and instrumentation of country, but rarely the lyrics. This album is my kind of country and by that I mean the preference of an ignorant but interested intruder with very particular opinions of what they like.
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It’s funny, I love Radiohead, but there have been albums that took me a while to warm up to. For each of these albums after a initial tepid response, I ended up really loving them (with the exception of Hail to the Thief). The biggest example would be Kid A and Amnesiac. I wasn’t a big fan when they came out, but now Kid A might be my favorite album of theirs.
In Rainbows also fell into this category. I love this album now, as you said there’s a lot in there.
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I am opposite most Radiohead fans, as I acclimated with Creep. So, I like them up to Ok Computer, plus Hail to the Thief. Two completely different bands they were…
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It’s the same with me, and I think this has a lot to do with quite how radical a departure the two albums were for Radiohead. It took me several years to get into them.
Radiohead were getting to be big when I went to college in Britain in the mid-90s, not just with Creep but also with the early releases from The Bends, like the My Iron Lung EP. I was knee-deep in grunge at that time, and discovering American punk and hardcore bands, so I didn’t pay all that much attention to Radiohead–until, that is, I saw them supporting REM in '95.
They were a prime example of a band that’s far heavier live than you’d guess from their albums, and they put on an exhilarating show in what was an awful venue - a college campus with no mosh pit, seating areas only, and with no bloody booze or smoking (this was in the US, hence the lack of booze). While REM put on a lackluster show - understandably, this was that exhausting, long tour in support of Monster, the one in which the drummer suffered an aneurysm, I think - Radiohead put on one of the best performances I’d ever seen.
A couple of years later, John Peel or another one of the Radio 1 DJs in the UK played Paranoid Android. I still remember vividly hanging out at my best mate’s place and both of us being blown away by it, not knowing what to make of it. And then, a few years later they released Kid A…
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I knew Creep, you couldn’t avoid it, but was more into the Seattle sound, Tool, NiN, Helmet, Rage etc. Then the video for Paranoid Android came on MTV in my freshman dorm room and split my head open.
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I totally agree. I was 18 when Kid A came out and it was so different from The Bends and OK Computer. I wasn’t ready for it.
I think another major contributing factor was that I was listening on really shit earbuds for the most part. I think Kid A really needs non-shit gear to sound good, while I could listen to OK Computer out my IPhone speakers and enjoy it (kinda, you know what I mean).
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Yeah, the sound quality of Radiohead albums is varied and all-too-often disappointing. Some albums are compressed as hell, falling victim to the loudness wars, I suspect, and they sound awful. Drums are terrible on far too many albums. I’m not sure Nigel Godrich is the ideal producer for high fidelity music, even if he does play an instrumental role in shaping the band’s sound.
The Bends and OK Computer, though, are better, which probably explains why they’re acceptable with more headphones or IEMs.
But then, as you note, some releases sound great with the right headphones. I was auditioning the Empire Ears Odin a few weeks ago and Kid A sounded really excellent - I was surprised to hear how well the Odin’s resolution did a big favors to the album. We talk about transducers scaling with better gear. Kid A scales surprisingly well with the right transducers!
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Would you mind sending me a pair of Odins to independently confirm you findings?
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A while back I went through my CD collection and realized that 1993 was a banner year for music releases. In 1991 Nirvana hit it big (following U2, REM, and Jane’s Addiction expanding acceptable mainstream music), so the record labels signed a whole bunch of underground, independent, and young bands. All these bands created music in 1992, and then released the albums starting in 1993.
Radiohead released Pablo Honey with Creep in 1993 – they were thereby lumped in with all the rest of the Seattle hangers-on. As with the 1980s and Hair Metal, the record companies forced bands into the Grunge genre whether they fit or not (e.g., Pearl Jam, as a plain old pop/rock band and never actually Grunge in any way). The same thing happened to plenty of artists before, such as John “Cougar” Mellencamp and Skid Row. Oddly, Skid Row was a serious metal band (e.g., Slave to the Grind album), and forced into the pretty-boy genre because of Sebastian Bach’s appearance.
If not for Grunge then Radiohead might have always been a different-sounding band. If not for Grunge they might not have had a contract in 1993.
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