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Friday, March 16, 2012
MLB: Bronson Arroyo channels Eddie Vedder at Woodjock fest
Woodjock’s plowing your mom’s record collection?
In the fine tradition of most musicians, Bronson Arroyo arrived stylishly late on Thursday night, 10 minutes before his scheduled 10 p.m. set. He wore a faded tan suede jacket, white T-shirt with a hand imprinted on it, and a pair of well-tattered blue jeans sporting holes around the left pocket and knee.
Twenty minutes later he was on stage, joining his hard rock band with no name, which turned up the temperature by wailing Pearl Jam numbers. Arroyo sang the vocals and sounded so much like Eddie Vedder you might have thought the real band was in the front room of Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill. The rest of his group cooked.
It was certainly a much different side of Arroyo, the right-hander who makes his living starting for the Reds. To say the four-song set was the highlight of this year’s Woodjock fest would be an understatement.
...For those Pearl Jam aficionados, the set list included “Oceans,” “Even Flow,” “Alive” and “Given to Fly.”
“They’re my favorite group of all time,” Arroyo said.
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Worse than Warrant? Or Poison, or Styx, or Journey, or Night Ranger?
Maybe, Yes, Most definitely yes, probably, and Yes.
Although I think Pearl Jam is perfectly cromulent band. I just think they are so blah that there is no reason for anyone to go either positive or negative to them. They basically produce one listenable song per album, kinda like Kiss in their prime.(now that is a band that Pearl Jam is probably better than, but of course that was one of Eddie Vedder's goals to produce albums every nine months like Kiss did---note I don't know if Kiss actually did that, but that is what Pearl Jam claimed as their inspiration at one point)
I mostly stopped listening after their debut album, but started again after seeing the Twenty documentary, and have been amazed by all the great material I missed.
I don't think I'd put Pearl Jam in my 100, but they were definitely in my top 10 or 20 for most of my teenage years. At this point, the majority of what I like by them is off the album Vitalogy. Choosing that album over Ten or Vs would surely make me a hipster, except hipsters are not allowed to like Pearl Jam.
I hope we can all agree that the Goo Goo Dolls are a national treasure. They broke up far too soon.
EDIT: Apparently the Goo Goo Dolls still exist. Why had no one informed me?
Mediocre bands never die, heck
I'm close to 100% sure that all of these bands still exist and tour to this day.
And without Styx, Reds fans wouldn't have ever come up with "Domo Arrigato, Mr. Joey Votto" and we would never have had the pleasure of hearing Cartman's lovely rendition of Come Sail Away.
That reminds me of this incident, when the Gin Blossoms were set to play a Delta employee party at which Jeff Francoeur was going to do his thing.
The hipster approach to Pearl Jam would be to choose a random mid-career record and decide that it is the greatest rock release of the last 40 years, and then establish an extremely extensive argument to prove your case. You'd need your listeners to be amused by the irony of the whole thing when you start in on the topic, but then grow increasingly concerned after you've been going on for 25 minutes and referenced things like the Lacanian concept of the mirror stage and Grant Hart's post-Hüsker Dü career.
"EDIT: I think Binaural is the greatest rock record since 23 Minutes over Brussels. That or Flowers in the Dirt."
a sample:
June 26, Styx, with REO Speedwagon(!) and Ted Nugent
July 2, Def Freakin' Leppard with Poison and Lita Ford
July 20, Nickelback with Bush(!).
It wouldn't surprise me if these are the 3 highest attended shows at Riverbend this summer. It appears that Jimmy Buffett won't be there (is he still alive) so, that's one less sell-out to contend with. Yes, Jimmy Buffett is usually the highlight of Cincinnati's summer music festivities. Sad, really.
Just checked and Warrant is still touring, even with Jani Lane having died last year. He's the only name I ever knew from that band! They're playing a festival in Portsmouth, Ohio this summer (population, like, 10000). Awesome!
From Bogart's schedule (smaller year round club, holds about 1500):
June 28, An Evening with Collective Soul! w00t!
I'm seeing nothing bad with that. Well the Ted Nugent I guess, but if he stays away from politics. I guess Nickleback is considered horrible, but they have about a half dozen enjoyable song. Def Leppard is one of the most commercially successful bands of all time, it's not like they are playing utter crap that nobody would go to see.
They have one song, with about 100 different titles. And that song is bland, yet still entirely unpleasant.
Are their non-single tracks very different from their singles? I'll admit that I've never listened to a Nickelback album, so I cannot categorically state that they are a horrible band, but of the songs I do know, which include:
- How You Remind Me
- Someday
- Figured You Out
- Photograph
- Rockstar
well, I don't really like any of those songs. They range from overly schlocky & sentimental (Photograph) to generic radio rock (How You Remind Me). Maybe I am missing some deep meaning but Figured You Out is basically about some guy raping a girl and that does not appeal to me.
I would like to hear Steve Albini produce one of Nickelback's albums because I think he can get some decent songs out of them. It worked for Bush*. I won't say Razorblade Suitcase is a good album by any means, but Greedy Fly, Swallowed, Cold Contagious, and Mouth are all very decent songs.
* Sixteen Stone was OK, so they did have some talent in them pre-Albini.
They are basic generic airtime filler. I tolerate pretty much all the songs you listed. Mind you I have the worse taste in music among all the primates so that could be evidence that they are truly terrible. Like Pearl Jam I just don't see anything to get worked up over, positive or negative. I can understand hating/loving U2(Jeter), Nirvana(Ryan Howard), Rolling Stones(Clemens) etc. But Pearl Jam and Nickleback are like the Skip Schumaker or Bud Norris of music.
How long have you been 100 percent deaf? Twenty years, I'm betting.
BEGONE, HERETIC!
Pearl Jam sucks. Even their band name sucks. Vedder's a major, sourpuss ########. Who sucks.
This is, verbatim, how I've always felt about the Doors and Jim Morrison.
My sarcasm meter is having trouble with this one.
Same here. Still, I sold their first LP for $99.99 on eBay a few years after picking it up as a cutout in the early '90s for maybe $4 in a now-defunct North Little Rock record store, so my hat is off to their crazed, taste-challenged devotees.
I took multiple cracks at Animal Collective a few years back because they were getting a lot of talk and critical love. And...I just can't get there, it's not my thing. I'm sure when I was a teen or young adult I would have been loudly declaring that "they suck."
To be fair, Bronson Pinchot was fine in True Romance, and very funny in Beverly Hills Cop.
Not many people could steal a scene from prime Eddie Murphy.
I was thinking grunge-y-er, though just as precise and clipped.
Try it in the voice of Jeff Spicoli.
Hmm, I guess I can't rebut.
And I wanted to invite to take you to a ST game, but my cars iPod is now all PJ all the time so I'm sad...
Yellow Ledbetter and Jeremy aren't bad, though.
Pearl Jam has been classic rock radioized. They have half a dozen songs that have been played, ad nauseum, for 20 years. If you don't like the band, you're stuck with occasionally hearing these same damn songs again and again, and you grow to resent the band because of it, even if you were initially neutral or even mildly supportive.
From what I can tell, the most interesting thing about Pearl Jam is the energy and creativity they put into their live performances. But it you're not a fan of the band, you don't care about this. They certainly are not still releasing relevant new music.
I don't believe this applies here. There are plenty of earnest indie darlings out there. Neutral Milk Hotel still casts a long shadow, Joanna Newsom, The National, Girls...
Yeah, I got a whole different, scary vibe from him there. Was he ever used like that again?
In a universe where they broke up after releasing JED and HOLD ME UP, when they were a Replacements-ish band with good reviews and no record sales, it actually would have been kind of true.
Define relevant, in a way that doesn't mean "that I care about."
That's not how I would ever use the term "relevant."
There is no national expectation for, or conversation about, a new Pearl Jam record. Radio stations aren't excited to pump their new singles. Critics aren't anxious to put in their say. Perhaps most importantly, young people do not listen. They aren't winning over new fans.
You can make terrific music and not be relevant anymore. Some of my favorite bands from the 90s (Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, Stereolab) are still chugging along, making high quality records, but I wouldn't call them relevant.
You mean to me?
There is no national expectation for, or conversation about, a new Pearl Jam record. Radio stations aren't excited to pump their new singles. Critics aren't anxious to put in their say. Perhaps most importantly, young people do not listen. They aren't winning over new fans.
How many rock bands are there for whom these statements aren't true? Four? The Black Keys .. Kings of Leon ... Cage the Elephant? Are Mumford and Sons a rock band?
If you look at the Mainstream Rock radio charts it's almost entirely bands that critics despise and/or bands that have been around for over 15 years. Critics are a lot more enthusiastic about Pearl Jam than Seether or Puddle of Mudd or Chevelle. And mainstream rock is almost never found on the real Top 40 radio anyway, that being the province of dance music for 15-year-olds.
Give me another word.
Fair enough, but there are many bands that don't fail at all of them. Animal Collective (mentioned by someone else above) isn't played on the radio, but their releases are hotly anticipated by critics, they are growing, they are listened to people under the age of 25. I'd call them "relevant."
Is Bush considered a historically awful band? I sortof enjoy some of their stuff, in a nostalgic-for-the-90's sort of way. I think I still have Greedy Fly on my iPod...I like listening to it even if the lyrics are rubbish.
You use this in response to someone extolling Pearl Jam rather than someone calling Nickelback listenable?
I pretty much consider Nickleback and Pearl Jam to be the same thing. Listenable music. Neither are good.
While the statement was kind of...harsh...IMO it's more defensible calling Nickelback listenable (a very low bar, and a pretty large number of folks agree) than calling Pearl Jam the best group in the last 20 years (an extremely high bar, and almost nobody will agree).
All those albums are fantastic albums as stand alone music but don't necessarilly say anything about the Band's achievements or accomplishments. Pearl Jam had one GREAT album--and that is about it. Really. They are certainly not "one of the best bands of the last 20 years" as was mentioned earlier IMHO. Not even close. They had one fleeting moment in the sun and it was brilliant while it lasted.
Please let's not give them more credit than they deserve.
That comment is going to be archived on Google for posterity's sake, and you will never be able to deny making it.
I wouldn't call it fantastic, but that album is pretty solid. It has one track ("Rise") which I think is a really beautiful song, probably better than anything Pearl Jam ever released. It also has a few more good songs and a bunch of perfectly cromulent background noise. I'm a sucker for anything with a ukulele though, so I'm not the most unbiased opinion when it comes to a collection of ukulele songs.
Also, "Jeremy" sucks.
My sarcasm meter is having trouble with this one.
I seem to be good at having that effect.
I'd be willing to bet that only a small percentage of people under 25 have even heard of Animal Collective, let alone listen to them. They're "relevant" only in the context of a particular community of critics and listeners. People outside that community - still the majority - neither know (nor care) what the tastemakers within the community think. Your use of the term "relevant", to me at least, implies that the tastes of the under-25, Animal Collective-listening, Pitchfork-reading crowd matter more than the those of the numerically larger group of 30 year olds who listen to the radio and buy Nickelback albums. There may well be good arguments for why this should be so, but they require some metric to be specified (e.g. predicted influence on the future course of music, or something) if you want to avoid the response that you're just arbitrarily asserting that your own tastes are the most important.
Linkin Park. :)
If this is not the case, I'm prepared to shoot myself. (Note: I've never knowingly heard a single note of anything Animal Collective has ever played, & I've spent about 5 minutes of my life reading Pitchfork.)
White Stripes maybe?
Porcupine Tree.
Opeth.
I believe that this is probably true. I've been thinking about this "relevant" thing, and I've decided that one of the important factors is the extent to which a band's music is likely to influence future bands. Album sales alone don't tell the story here, and because we don't know the future I would suggest that critical success is the best proxy for it.
These days I hear about a million bands that are clearly influenced by My Bloody Valentine, not exactly the best-selling group of its day. What would have been the best way, in 1992, to have predicted this influence?
I chose age 25 because I feel like that's the most reasonable cutoff for kids that might start their own bands and be influenced by the band in question. Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan have both released acclaimed, bestselling albums in the last decade or two, but the fact that most of their listeners are over 40 is something to be considered in the relevancy discussion.
If you could find me a community of critics that discuss Nickelback albums with real intelligence and enthusiasm, I'd be closer to admitting that the Animal Collective fans are just one "particular community," as opposed to being the single most important community of informed and intelligent listeners. And, to be clear, I'm not just talking about Pitchfork (which I don't read) as much as I am music magazines, alternative weeklies, Pazz Jop voters, etc.
Metric? There's no statistic that could possibly work perfectly. This isn't a debate on baseball value. It's at least partially based on artistic merit, and that requires judgment, not statistics.
Also, as I've said above, this isn't about what I like or don't like. I'll happily call bands that I dislike relevant. And I've never constrained the designation to indie bands ... I certainly think that Kanye West, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Lil Wayne etc are relevant.
I would donate $100 to Rick Santorum if it meant I could have those 45 seconds back.
They're in my top 5 as well.
This sentiment -- a common one, I'll grant you -- is something I've never entirely understood, especially coming from mostly non-fans, and especially especially from non-fans who skew toward what you might call less "accessible" music.
Ten was massive, and moreso than any of their other albums absolutely a "zeitgeist" album. But it was also front-to-back their most unquestionably commercial and "radio-ready" album. Vs. and Vitalogy, while certainly containing obvious "hits", were on the whole more varied and greater artistic achievements. (To say nothing of No Code and Yield, since I'm sure they were deemed "irrelevant" by that point.)
This, from Crispix's #40, is what I was eventually meaning to get at with #36. I was pretty sure you *didn't* mean "that I care about" -- but that most definitions of "relevant" implicitly limit the discussion to fairly new bands listened to by mostly young people. And that's fine, exciting stuff comes from that subset, but holding a 20-year-old band to that standard is a little silly.
For better or worse, they largely fit in the category of a mainstream guitar-driven rock/hard rock band; and lots of people don't dig that, especially one that's been around a long time.
They have such a ludicrous variety and range that it really depends on what you're into. If you're looking for just a song, I usually start people off with A Fair Judgement, as it appeals to many different kinds. Their albums run from death metal stuff to their latest which was a folksy-jazz-thing, so it's hard to recommend an album without knowing where you fall.
I don't know Porcupine Tree at all although they've been recommended to me a number of times.
Depends. Can you tolerate so-called "cookie monster" vocals? If so, my favorite song of theirs is "Serenity Painted Death". If not, "To Bid You Farewell" is entirely clean vocals and pretty beautiful. They've also released two albums which are entirely clean vocals: Damnation (on which Steven Wilson produced and provided backup vocals) and Heritage. I would recommend "In My Time of Need" from Damnation and "The Devil's Orchard" from Heritage.
My favorites of their's usually blend the two. "The Apostle in Triumph" is probably my favorite. Also The combination of Prologue/April Ethereal/When from MAYH.
I like Damnation a fair bit, though: In addition to "In My Time of Need" I love "Hope Leaves" and "To Rid the Disease." I haven't gotten into Heritage, but I think we've talked about that before. "Famine" is a pretty good track, it's about the only one I've listened to more than a couple times.
I could ####### talk about Opeth forever.
Porcupine Tree is the one and only band that is suggested to people who like Dream Theater and are looking for other bands that sound like Dream Theater. My wife loves Dream Theater and yet somehow does not like Porcupine Tree (I think they're both pretty good). There seem to be no other bands anyone has ever heard of that are even vaguely similar. Maybe a Porcupine Tree fan could suggest some. Not Marillion, they are Styx-level boring.
From reading some brief descriptions, looks like Heritage or Damnation (or, maybe, Watershed) wouldn't be bad places for me to start.
Definitely give PT a shot, Shock. I think Lightbulb Sun is Biff's favorite. I like it, but also everything forward of that -- In Absentia, Deadwing ("Arriving Somewhere But Not Here" especially), Fear of a Blank Planet, and The Incident. The Incident might be my favorite overall.
Benji, definitely give Damnation a listen. Other "melodic" songs not on Damnation: Harvest, A Fair Judgement, Benighted.
Also, this is interesting.
I've tried to like Opeth, and did initially, but it somehow got rote for me faster than a lot of other bands.
Following up on #65, putting Porcupine Tree and Opeth in the same sentence would simply have never occurred to me, maybe I've missed something as not a true hardcore fan of either. I really do like Porcupine Tree way way way better, however.
It's a close battle between Shonen Knife or Capitol Offense.
Wilco? Radiohead?
Not my favorites, but when you combine artistic achievement, popularity, and musical evolution, they'd have to be in the conversation.
Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters just seem to make the same album over and over again.
I find this kind of weird, since PT don't really sound anything like Dream Theater except that they could both be broadly called 'progressive rock'.
(And I don't say that from a hatred of Dream Theater. Images and Words is ####### awesome, and I like quite a bit of the rest of their catalog. Haven't liked much from the last ten years, though.)
Following up on #65, putting Porcupine Tree and Opeth in the same sentence would simply have never occurred to me, maybe I've missed something as not a true hardcore fan of either. I really do like Porcupine Tree way way way better, however.
I think they get associated just because the bands associate with each other. They've toured together and Steven Wilson has produced and sang backup vocals on Opeth albums.
I'm not really even that big of a Radiohead fan, myself. but I'd have to definitely put them up on the "best of last 20 years" list without much hesitation.
(I could take or leave Wilco with even less hesitation.)
Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that. That was pretty cool.
Well, he was on Degrassi: The Next Generation, so he'll always be OK in my book.
Anyway, this is probably the best defense that I've read about Drake. I won't go that far to defend him. I like his flow and he picks good beats. I thought Take Care was about 7 songs too long though.
Basically he's the mainstream face of the new electronic/ambient/R&B/hip hop movement. Personally, I think The Weeknd is a much better version of Drake- I like his production better (see House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls), his voice has more range, and his tales of debauchery are way more entertaining ("From the morning to the evening/ Complaints from the tenants/ Got the walls kickin' like they 6 months pregnant/ Drinkin' Alizé with our cereal for breakfast/ Girls calling cabs at dawn, quarter to seven").
I'll also throw James Blake's name out there too, he's doing good work in the same genre.
I was using "metric" in the sense of "standard of measurement" - it doesn't have to be quantifiable or purely objective. Indeed, in your post #59 you identify two potential standards - artistic influence and the more amorphous artistic merit - and give a cogent argument for why appeal to youth is related to influence.
To be clear, I don't necessarily disagree with you - my own intuitive response is that the music favored by the Pazz & Jop voters, etc., can in some meaningful sense be said to be more significant than Nickelback, that "significance" cant be measured by record sales or contemporaneous popularity, and that it goes beyond the question of whether or not I personally like it. What I'm struggling with is trying to identify why this can be said to be so, and whether the arguments that might have worked 10 or 20 years ago still hold true now that the pop music audience seems to have become fractured into a bunch of little communities that listen to entirely different stuff and barely interact with each other.
Eminem. Belle & Sebastian. Super Furry Animals. Nirvana if you're a Koufax supporter.
Pazz and Jop "Albums of the Year," 1992-2011 (I doubt this list is very helpful):
1992 - Arrested Development - 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of...
1993 - Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville
1994 - Hole - Live Through This
1995 - PJ Harvey - To Bring You My Love
1996 - Beck - Odelay
1997 - Bob Dylan - Time Out of Mind
1998 - Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
1999 - Moby - Play
2000 - OutKast - Stankonia
2001 - Bob Dylan - Love and Theft
2002 - Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003 - OutKast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
2004 - Kanye West - The College Dropout
2005 - Kanye West - Late Registration
2006 - Bob Dylan - Modern Times
2007 - LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
2008 - TV on the Radio - Dear Science
2009 - Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010 - Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
2011 - tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l
Of course, the collective hive also voted that "Ms. Jackson" was a better single in its year than "Bombs Over Baghdad," so clearly there's a margin of error at play.
Or for that matter the Velvet Underground - a band that sold nothing, but several of their songs seem to have inspired entire genres by themselves.
Kurt Cobain was the greatest song-writer of his generation.
I would never confuse popularity with quality, but if Wikipedia is to be trusted
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_music_artists_in_the_United_States
The biggest selling 90s/2K "rock" band is a near dead heat between Pearl Jam and Dave Mathews (who I disqualify for not being a rock band and for shitting on Cleveland, a great rock town), and no other band is even close.
To win the mantle of "greatness" a rock band first must be listened to by more than a handful of nose in the air critics. Pearl Jam has sold far more albums than any other rock band from the 90s and 2K era, and continues to tour and sell out big venues. More fans have responded to Pearl Jam than probably it's next two closest "competitors" put together.
Your personal preferences and biases may lead to pronounce many other bands "better" for your taste, but that's your taste and you are welcome to it. But great rock bands write big songs that move many people and proof is when they fill stadiums, and no one has done it better than Pearl Jam the last 20 years.
I will concede their career peaked at Ten. It was an all time great album, and their albums since haven't been as densely packed with great material, but the best work from each album continues to be great. 20 years since an amazing debut still brought "RearviewMirror", "Yellow Ledbetter", "Given To Fly", "Immortality", "I got sh*t", "State of Love and Trust", "Just Breathe", "Noting as it seems", and "Better Man"*, and more.
* I know Eddie wrote it in high school about his mom/stepfather, but the band didn't think it worked well enough to release it until the third album and that's where it counts.
I would also say that Big Train's comment in #60 is totally off. I think that the average person's idea of when PJ was great perfectly dovetails with their popularity, that Is, peaking in the early or mid 90s. Do you think that if PJ were a small band, all of the TV on the Radio and Deerhunter fans would suddenly love them?
Really? I had a chance to see Shonen Knife sometime last year, they were doing a set of Ramones songs. I passed because it seemed gimmicky and I listened to some of their songs off Youtube and wasn't too impressed. Are they a good live band?
I assure you, the dump Dave Mathews took on Chicago was far worse.
They were awesome in 1993 when I saw them, but they are simply long past their relevance - they had been a band for 12 years at that point.
People really hold on to their bands for too long.
Then I screwed up a great joke dammit...
Again it's "greatest", not "best".
The fact that I would nominate Pearl Jam for "greatest" rock of the last 20 years is also an indictment of how rock is nearly exhausted all it's possibilities. I mean how many different compelling or interesting 3 chord riffs can the guitar really make?
So much material has already been done, or attempted, that it has to be many times more difficult to write original rock music today than it was in the 60s. It might almost be impossible today to be truly original and popular at the same time, because true originality is going to be so far off the beaten path to be almost atonal. Trent Reznor's soundtrack to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo comes to mind.
I think todays rock bands work in small increments of uniqueness, with riffs that are often familiar, forced to explore in smaller changes of direction and expectation than the great bands of the past were.
I assume that someday a new band will come along with an amazing new sound/instrument/approach and a thousand bands will flower in the enormously open artistic space they create.
But that may just be hope.
#### yes.
Whoops! Sorry; apparently the person I was in Junior High still surfaces sometimes.
I'm aware of that.
Where do you draw the line? I hope that Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews Band aren't the only possibilities.
In my opinion, any band that was ever big enough to headline a huge festival like Glastonbury or Coachella is probably big enough to be in the conversation. Radiohead has done that, they've had #1 albums... they're in the conversation easily.
Sort of like Paul Westerberg's career.
(I don't consider Creed or Nickelback to be bands - I think of them more as musical sadism)
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