Looks like a good series to grab. I'll copy it here and add links to artists / albums / tracks.
The Sunday Times guide to today's music scene : Part 2
The Sunday Times guide to today's music scene : Part 3
The Sunday Times guide to today's music scene : Part 4
January 11, 2009
The Sunday Times guide to today's music scene
Ambient I Alt-country I Americana I Anti-folk I Art rock I Blue-eyed soul I Conscious Rap I Electro I Emo I Fence Collective I Folk traditionalist I Folktronica I Freak Folk I Fridmann's Freaks I Gangsta rap I Garage I Grime I Hardcore I Heavy Metal I House I Hip-Pop I Indie rock I Manufactured pop I Montreal scene I Neo-Psychedelia I Nordic pop I Post-rock I Power-pop I Progressive rock I R&B I Second Childhood I Singer-songwriters I Slowcore I Synth pop I Techno
From singer-songwriters like Laura Marling to Techno, Emo and Folktronica: part one of our definitive guide to modern music
MP3 players on shuffle, internet radio communities such as Last.fm and “If you like this, try this” guidance on the web have contributed to a surge in people’s awareness of different musical eras and genres, and to a marked reduction in pop tribalism. These days, it is not only acceptable to admit a partiality to several distinct types of music, it’s positively de rigueur. In this brave new long-tail world, we are on a never-ending journey of discovery, veering off at any number of tangents. With the number of music genres reproducing like rabbits, the journey might become a trek. The most welcome help in such circumstances is a trusty travel guide, to place that journey in context, to make it seem less daunting and more fun (and discovering and buying new music should surely be that). Here, then, in the first part of a weekly series, is Culture’s musical satnav.
INDIE ROCK
Arctic Monkeys, Wild Beasts
Blokes who remember
Meat Is Murder (and former riot grrrls, for that matter) grumble and groan when asked about today’s “indie” scene. From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, the term was a rallying cry not merely for music released on independent British record labels such as
Creation,
Factory and
Rough Trade, but for a DIY ethos and an awkward, oppositional attitude. Fey outsiders from
Morrissey to
Belle and Sebastian’s
Stuart Murdoch, and fierce autodidacts from
Mark E Smith to the masked men of
Clinic, could rule their own roosts and connect with like-minded souls. Indie was then a way of life; now the word is applied, willy-nilly, to any two-bit guitar band in skinny jeans. Thus, indie has become a marketing category, empty of meaning. Critics call the interchangeably ho-hum tunes of
The Kooks,
The View,
The Wombats,
The Pigeon Detectives and their ilk “landfill indie”. How grateful, therefore, were grumpy middle-youths for Sheffield’s
Arctic Monkeys, who cussedly signed for an independent label, in
Domino, write great songs and cock a snook at the Establishment. Yorkshire, indeed, is a bastion of “proper” indie values, with labels such as
Dance To The Radio and bands including the
Cribs and
Wild Beasts.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Recent:
Arctic Monkeys,
Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006);
The Cribs,
Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever (2007);
Wild Beasts,
Limbo, Panto (2008)
Classic:
The Smiths,
The Smiths (1984);
The Jesus and Mary Chain,
Psychocandy (1985);
Belle and Sebastian,
If You’re Feeling Sinister (1996)
Key track:
Arctic Monkeys,
When the Sun Goes Down (2006)
BLUE-EYED SOUL
Amy Winehouse, Adele, Duffy
The past two years in music have shown just how commercially potent
blue-eyed soul remains, with singers such as
Amy Winehouse and
Duffy selling millions of albums around the world. A term originally coined in the 1960s to describe white singers and bands — such as the
Righteous Brothers, the
Rascals and
Dusty Springfield — whose sound was indebted to
rhythm and blues and
Soul music, it first became really big business in the 1970s and 1980s, when
David Bowie,
Hall & Oates,
Rod Stewart,
George Michael and
Simply Red rode high in the charts with slick, soul-infused hits.
For some, the term will always be synonymous with a dilution of the form; and, at its worst, the genre has certainly lent weight to that argument. The Australian singer
Gabriella Cilmi, who had a big hit last year with
Sweet About Me, didn’t put a foot wrong in the song, which is a note-perfect facsimile of classic
motown — and in a sense, that’s the problem. Yet from Dusty in the late 1960s to Amy today, white artists with real emotional and vocal heft have proved that soul can come from anyone, as long as the song, and the performance, communicates a sense of rapture or pain that is authentic and searing. Now the singer and
Mark Ronson collaborator
Daniel Merriweather looks set to join the party with his debut album, due in April.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Recent:
Amy Winehouse,
Back to Black (2006);
Adele,
19 (2008);
Duffy,
Rockferry (2008)
Classic:
Dusty Springfield,
Dusty In Memphis (1969);
David Bowie,
Young Americans (1975);
Daryl Hall & John Oates,
Daryl Hall & John Oates (1975)
Key track:
Amy Winehouse,
Love Is a Losing Game (2006)
PROGRESSIVE ROCK
Muse, Radiohead, Secret Machines
To watch
Matt Bellamy, the singer and guitarist of
Muse, the Devon neo-prog trio, pirouette around a concert stage as notes cascade from his guitar, as his songs become ever more labyrinthine, grandiose and verging on absurdity, and as pyrotechnics explode above the band’s heads, is to witness all the mad splendour of prog rock, alive and well three decades after its heyday (and apparent death at the hands of punk). If, today, original prog dinosaurs such as
Yes,
Genesis and
Emerson, Lake & Palmer are still (sometimes unfairly) the names most often wheeled out as evidence of just how pompous and overblown the genre could be, there is nonetheless a growing appreciation of the way-off-the-scale work of earlier bands such as the
Mothers of Invention,
King Crimson,
Soft Machine and, lest we forget, the pre-megastardom
Pink Floyd. Back in the days before prog and art rock were seen as two separate entities, the best practitioners not only justified their mission — to make music of a greater complexity and inventiveness than the standard rock-song format allowed for — with some superb albums, they also pointed the way towards the music of similarly unfettered and adventurous contemporary bands such as
Radiohead and
Muse.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Recent:
Muse,
Absolution (2003);
Hope of the States,
The Lost Riots (2004);
Secret Machines,
Now Here Is Nowhere (2004)
Classic:
King Crimson,
In The Court Of The Crimson King (1969);
Soft Machine,
Third (1970);
Yes,
Close to the Edge (1972)
Key track:
Secret Machines,
Atomic Heels (2008)
NEO-SOUL
Alicia Keys, Angie Stone Raphael Saadiq
Long before the likes of
Mark Ronson spliced together elements of classic 1970s soul and modern production techniques and rhythms, a new generation of American acts such as
Tony! Toni! Toné!,
D’Angelo,
Lauryn Hill and
Erykah Badu took a conscious decision to return to the era’s roots in the music of
Marvin Gaye,
Stevie Wonder and
Donny Hathaway, with a succession of 1990s releases that heralded a rediscovery of first principles — these can be heard in the recent work of artists such as
Alicia Keys and
Angie Stone, and, in an arguably more opportunistic form, that of Ronson,
Duffy et al. Not that the original
neo-soul crew were exactly slouches in the sales department: D’Angelo’s superb
Brown Sugar album sold more than 2m copies, The
Miseducation of Lauryn Hill has clocked up a mighty 18m,
Baduizm, the debut from Badu, went triple platinum in America and
Macy Gray’s
On How Life Is was also a multimillion-seller. With bass-heavy grooves, complex harmonies and classic soul instrumentation, these albums opened doors at record labels and radio stations for artists who followed in their wake: Keys, with global album sales in excess of 30m, has been the most obvious beneficiary. Others have not been so fortunate. With Hill clearly in a troubled place, and D’Angelo not having released any new material in eight years, it has been left to others to package up the idea and make off with the spoils. Which is, when you think about it, pretty much the history of black music in a nutshell.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Angie Stone,
Mahogany Soul (2001);
Alicia Keys,
The Diary of Alicia Keys (2003);
Lina,
The Inner Beauty Movement (2005)
Key track:
D’Angelo,
Chicken Grease (2000).
FOLKTRONICA
Tunng, Four Tet, Caribou
As acoustic guitars returned to the fold in the late 1990s, laptops joined them by the campfire. If quiet was the new loud, then some of the sounds would be software-generated.
Beth Orton’s stony cooing over gently distressed drums had made her the rave generation’s comedown queen when
Four Tet (aka
Kieran Hebden) released
Pause in 2001. Its skittering brand of hip-hop fidgeted under a warm blanket of strings, and
folktronica was born. Hebden refined his formula on
Rounds (2003).
Caribou’s bucolic reveries and
Mira Calix’s spooky sonic collages have developed the more textural aspects of a genre whose co-ordinates aren’t particularly fixed, while songwriters from
Adem (Hebden’s former band mate in
Fridge) to
Peter Broderick, and
Juana Molina to
Laura Veirs, have made good use of gadgets such as loop pedals and samplers. There’s a case, too, for describing
Björk’s album
Homogenic — its beats gurgling like geysers — as folktronica-esque. Yet the folk and electronic halves of the equation best add up in the songs of
Tunng, where
Sam Genders’s dour vocals are dappled by
Mike Lindsay’s audio seed bank of buzzes, flutters and squelches.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Four Tet,
Pause (2001);
Tunng,
Mother's Daughter and Other Songs (2005);
Caribou,
The Milk of Human Kindness (2005)
Key track:
Tunng,
Fair Doreen (2005)
ART ROCK
Franz Ferdinand, TV on the Radio, Bloc Party
For as long as real ale is served and beards are worn, grizzlier male music fans will gather in pubs and mutter into their pints about where
art rock went wrong. Not for them the jagged, post-punky rhythms of
Franz Ferdinand and
Bloc Party, both of whom favour music that sits somewhere between the hollow-eyed
noir-rock of the
velvet underground, the glammed-up artiness of early
Roxy Music, the nervy dance music of
Talking Heads and the jerky, confrontational experimentalism of
Wire. No, what they want is someone who will reconnect the genre with something altogether proggier or more avant-garde. The poster boys for such nostalgists are early
Genesis and
Pink Floyd,
Brian Eno and
King Crimson. (You can trace a straight line from
Arnold Layne to
Psycho killer, but we’ll let that go.) They might like to try Brooklyn’s
TV on the Radio. In a sense, each of the genre’s contemporary exponents, no matter how contrasting their road maps, is staying true to art rock’s core raison d’être: to make music that is, as one website puts it, “in the rock idiom . . . appealing more intellectually or musically, that is, not formulated along pop lines for mass consumption”. If that sounds like it rules out hit singles, somebody forgot to tell
Franz Ferdinand.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Recent:
Franz Ferdinand,
Franz Ferdinand (2004);
Bloc Party,
Silent Alarm (2005);
TV on the Radio,
Dear Science (2008)
Classic:
Roxy Music,
For Your Pleasure (1973);
Brian Eno,
Here Come the Warm Jets (1974);
Talking Heads,
77 (1977)
Key track:
TV on the Radio,
Shout Me Out (2008)
TECHNO
Richie Hawtin, Robert Hood, Jeff Mills, Speedy J, The Advent, Adam Beyer
When the different
electronic genres started to establish themselves in the dance-music boom of the early 1990s, territorialism was rife. If you were a
techno person, you probably had a skinhead and would be seen in a house club either dead or under duress from a female. Techno was the music of the future, with sci-fi themes, indescribable noises generated by yanking machines into overdrive and a rigid 4/4 beat structure, with every beat pronounced for ease of dancing. It was acceptable to enjoy both, but the two sounds were, broadly,
detroit techno and
acid techno. Although the Detroit producers made free use of “
acid”, the pinging, metallic tone wrested from the Roland TB-303 bass generator, they also often based tracks on funky basslines, whereas acid techno was predicated on the 303. “
gabber”, a harder variant at absurd tempi with doom-laden imagery, developed in Rotterdam, and there were more abrasive strains of German techno, but broadly everyone was happy with the formula. Until several lone producers, including
Richie Hawtin and
Robert Hood, independently thinking something was getting lost in the maximal approach, took the sound back to basics, and a minimal movement centred on Berlin took root in about 2003. The latest technology could create music with an appealing sense of space; soon, minimal outstripped old-style techno in popularity. Now that the in crowd has moved on to a subtly different style called
deep house, techno is likely to beef up again, although the synthetic sound and sense of utter control inherent in minimal made it perhaps the most “techno” music yet.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Richie Hawtin,
DE9: Transitions (2005);
Cisco Ferreira aka The Advent,
Trinity (2005);
Trentemøller,
The Trentemøller Chronicles (2007)
Key track:
Ricardo Villalobos,
Fizheuer Zieheuer (2006)
FENCE COLLECTIVE
King Creosote, James Yorkston, Pictish Trail
The Fence Collective is a bunch of musicians connected to the
Fence label and based in or near the fishing village of Anstruther, in the East Neuk of Fife. While Fence emits a folky vibe, its artists also straddle rock,
electronica and even mainstream pop.
Kenny Anderson used to run a record shop nearby, and, although the shop went bust, his time running it convinced Anderson that there was a vibrant local music scene desperate for some kind of outlet, so he set up Fence. Unlike
EMI, say, or
Sony BMG, the boss is also perhaps the best artist on the roster; Anderson records his sweet-voiced folk as
King Creosote. To underline the family feel of the label, Anderson’s brother Gordon recorded as
Lone Pigeon before helping to found
The Aliens, and his other brother Ian is a key member of the collective, under the name
Pip Dylan. Alongside King Creosote, the collective’s most high-profile member is
James Yorkston, whose gorgeous folk songs sound traditional, but are in fact self-penned. Honest-to-goodness pop star
KT Tunstall spent some time with the collective before she became famous, and her references to it in interviews helped to attract media attention to this unique and reassuringly DIY musical scene.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
King Creosote,
KC Rules OK (2005);
James Yorkston,
When the Haar Rolls In (2008);
Pictish Trail,
Secret Soundz (2008)
Key track:
King Creosote,
You’ve No Clue Do You (2007)
GRIME
Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Kano, Sway, Lethal Bizzle, GIGGS, Ghetto, Durrty Goodz, Skepta, Chipmunk
It took Britain a while to develop a proper, home-grown answer to America’s all-conquering hip-hop sound. If you take 1979 (the year of
Sugarhill Gang’s
Rapper’s delight) as the birth year of American rap, then it was more than two decades before a coterie of young producer-MCs in east London came up with
grime. It came about as an offshoot of
uk garage music, the British urban club sound that combined soulful vocals with jittery rhythms, and it often finds itself lumped in with
dubstep, which was being honed at about the same time in south London.
In fact, although the two styles are both in essence offshoots of garage with a lot more bass, grime can be distinguished by its vocal component: yes, grime is musically inventive and versatile, but the rapping is the artists’ calling card. As in the early days of New York hip-hop, grime MCs would gather at club nights for rapping contests or “battles”, which would often be filmed and circulated on DVD. Nowadays, the mixtape has overtaken the battle as the way for new artists to spread the word. The pioneer of grime (his name for the music,
eskibeat, did not catch on widely) is
Wiley, even if it was his one-time protégé
Dizzee Rascal who made the style widely known by winning the Mercury prize with his debut album,
Boy in Da Corner, in 2003, then being multiply stabbed the same year; and it is those two who took the style into new territory last year, with their electro grime songs scoring the genre its first No 2 and No 1 singles.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Dizzee Rascal,
Boy in Da Corner (2003);
Wiley,
treddin’ on thin ice (2004);
Sway,
This Is My Demo (2006).
Key track:
Lethal Bizzle,
Pow (Forward) (2004).
AMERICANA
Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens
If you study those end-of-year best-album lists, you’ll have seen the term “
americana” a lot recently. Two key Americana releases —
Fleet Foxes’ self-titled debut and
Bon Iver’s
For Emma, Forever Ago — were among the most acclaimed albums of 2008, demonstrating the increasing importance of the genre. The first problem you encounter when trying to define Americana is how you separate it from
alt-country. Truth be told, the terms are often used interchangeably, and many artists have been described as both. The simplest way to separate the two is to say that alt-country is country that sits outside the current Nashville mainstream, while Americana draws more heavily on the folk tradition, and on those 1960s pop artists and rock bands — notably
The Beach Boys and
The Band — whose music seemed to evoke an earlier time. Some Americana artists wear their Americanness on their sleeve — notably
Sufjan Stevens, with his series of albums each concentrating on one of the American states; others, such as
Jim White and
The Handsome Family, simply emerge from a peculiarly American sensibility; still others, such as
isobel campbell, aren’t American at all. But if it’s rootsy and folksy, and would sound good being played on
Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, it’s Americana.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Recent:
Jim White,
No Such Place (2001);
Fleet Foxes,
Fleet Foxes (2008);
Bon Iver,
For Emma, Forever Ago (2008)
Classic:
Woody Guthrie,
Dust Bowl Ballads (1940);
The Band,
The Band (1969)
Key track:
Sufjan Stevens,
Chicago (2008)
SLOWCORE
Low, Sun Kil Moon, Stina Nordenstam
slowcore began almost as a joke in the early 1990s, when the members of the band
Low wondered what would happen if they played very, very quietly and very, very slowly in front of rock crowds used to the noise and energy of grunge. What happened was that they invented an astonishingly powerful musical form, in which, because relatively little is played, every single note and every single space matters. This helps to explain why there are — and will only ever be — a smattering of slowcore artists. Anyone can make an electric guitar sound okay at speed, but when you play only one note every three or four bars, you’d better know what you’re doing. Given the minimal musical backing, one of the key elements of successful slowcore is a captivating voice. Low feature the harmonies of married bandmates
Alan Sparhawk and
Mimi Parker;
Red House Painters were fronted by the individual vocals of
Mark Kozelek, who now leads
Sun Kil Moon; while singer-songwriters who have been labelled slowcore (or the virtually interchangeable “
sadcore”) also tend to be distinctive vocalists, such as the Swedish singer
Stina Nordenstam, with her sadly beautiful little-girl whisper.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Low,
The Great Destroyer (2005);
Sun Kil Moon,
April (2008);
Tram,
Frequently Asked Questions (2001)
Key track:
Stina Nordenstam,
Purple Rain (1998)
R&B
Beyonce, Rihanna, Justin Timberlake
Contemporary R&B — or
urban contemporary, as American radio knows it — is not entirely separate from its rhythm-and-blues forebear, but, rather as the original did, it has evolved, in a sort of musical trolley dash, to incorporate pretty much any style (soul, disco, funk, hip-hop, rap and pop) it has found in its path. Today’s leading exemplars, such as
Beyoncé,
Rihanna and
Justin Timberlake, dominate the charts, but do so with music that is often bracingly, and sometimes shockingly, experimental. Indeed, there is an argument for saying that no other mainstream musical genre today is as subversive and left-field as R&B. Hits such as Rihanna’s 2007-dominating
Umbrella, or Beyoncé’s
Crazy in Love,
Deja Vu and now
Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It), boast a sonic eccentricity almost unheard of in chart music. Umbrella and Single Ladies both have choruses where minor chords begin to stalk the song, lending the two tracks an unsettling air utterly at odds with the major-key chutzpah of the top lines. Producers such as
Timbaland,
The Neptunes,
Christopher Stewart and
Nate “Danja” Hills continue to push the envelope and steer their charges up the charts, making R&B not just one of the most pioneering forces in music today, but one of the most successful, too.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Amerie,
Because I Love It (2007);
Rihanna,
Good Girl Gone Bad (2007).
Key track:
Beyoncé,
Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) (2008)
EMO
My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy
While it’s unlikely that many have sloping fringes and kohl eyeliner in common,
emo music fans and Millwall football fans appear to share an anthem: “Nobody likes us and we don’t care.” With brash riffing and bratty vocals, emo deals in teenage angst for kids weaned on the faux-goth
Avril Lavigne and pop-punks
Green Day. Despite claiming distant kinship with the anti-commercial zealots of
us hardcore, it’s slick, self-aware and shifting serious units. These fans suffer for their artists: beaten up, sometimes, for looking “sensitive” and accused, by the Daily Mail, of being a “sinister cult” promoting suicide. Do their heroes repay their loyalty?
My Chemical Romance’s motto, Don’t Be Afraid to Live, couldn’t make it clearer that the Mail got the wrong end of the stick. As befits its adolescent concerns, though, emo isn’t comfortable in its own skin.
Fall Out Boy’s pin-up,
Pete Wentz, worries that he’s “a poster boy for something I don’t even understand”, and all three of emo’s leading bands have edged away from it with their latest albums. Inside, however, the hoodies continue to hum the
Panic! At the Disco refrain “Oh, we’re still so young, desperate for attention”. They need a hug.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
My Chemical Romance,
Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (2004);
Fall Out Boy,
From Under the Cork Tree (2005);
Panic! At the Disco,
A FEVER YOU CAN’T SWEAT OUT (2005).
Key track:
Fall Out Boy,
Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down (2005).
SINGER-SONGWRITER
Laura Marling, Damien Rice, Ray LaMontagne, Aimee Mann, Cat Power, Ron Sexsmith
Laura Marling’s Mercury nomination for her
Alas, I Cannot Swim album underlined that, however weird modern music might get, we always have a soft spot for good old-fashioned singer-songwriters. While everyone who writes and sings their own songs is technically a
singer-songwriter, that’s clearly not what the label means. When we think of a singer-songwriter, we think of someone who conforms pretty closely to a template laid down in the 1960s by the likes of
Bob Dylan,
Paul Simon,
Joni Mitchell and
Carole King: they probably play an acoustic guitar (although we would accept a piano), they’re maybe a bit shy (Marling describes playing larger venues as “scary”) and they almost certainly are capable of writing deeper than average lyrics with the ability to illuminate our lives. Since the 2001 rerelease of
David Gray’s
White Ladder, singer-songwriters have been firmly back in vogue, with Ireland’s
Damien Rice and America’s
Ray LaMontagne, in particular, plumbing the emotional depths so that we don’t have to. There is a subset of the singer-songwriter genre in which lurk sui generis artists such as
Kate Bush and
Randy Newman: they don’t quite fit in here, but then they don’t quite fit in anywhere else, and on the rare occasions when they manage to make an album, they’re always welcome.
Cat Power has more recently joined their ranks.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Recent:
Laura Marling,
Alas, I Cannot Swim (2008);
Damien Rice,
9 (2005);
Ray LaMontagne,
Till The Sun Turns Black (2006)
Classic:
Joni Mitchell,
Blue (1971);
Paul Simon,
There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973);
Neil Young,
Harvest (1972).
Key track:
Cat Power,
The Greatest
Source:
The Sunday Times - Culture
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The Sunday Times guide to today's music scene : Part 2
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