For example, I first heard Suburban Legends - Polyester, so I went to check Suburban Legends and they were just a regular ska band.
What’s your “that song was great, I wish the band did more of that” song and band?
Chumbawamba - Tub thumping. I had no idea they’ve always been an anarchist sea shanty band and that song was the outlier and a total piss take. I am here for it.
LOL!
Came to this comment section to say exactly that, just to discover it to be already the first comment!
But it’s kinda the reverse thing OP had in mind, I think…That whole album has the same vibe as Tubthumping
in fact the album is called Tubthumper
the follow-up album, WYSIWYG, also has the same vibe
Yeah, they went through a few different sounds and that was their party era.
have you tried “The Big Issue”? it’s from the same album and is kinda the same thing, except the vocals are far more female-dominated and the song extends the melancholy a bit
They did a few songs that have a catchy repetitive chorus to be fair. Mouthful of Shit for example. Just not quite to the extent of Tubthumping.
same band that did the song Torturing James Hetfield.
Also, Tubthumper (the album) is entirely amazing. The popular song included
I preferred Mary Mary and it had the same problem. No others like that that I heard.
Sea shanties‽ I absolutely love Uneasy Listening and will blast English Rebel Songs, but they’re not sea shanties.
yeah, it’s called english folk or something
He drinks a whiskey drink, he drinks a vodka drink
Pretty much any individual Ween song
Ween is a truly mixed bag
Harder to Breathe by Maroon 5 got me to buy the album only to find that rest of the album was completely different.
25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago
Everything else is more of a soft jazz rock. But this song is such a high energy banger
I could be wrong, but I believe there were at least two distinct phases of that band.
I think they started out as “Chicago Transit Authority”. A few years after changing their name to “Chicago,” one of their founding members died, so that might account for the change.
I’m weirdly more familiar with the history of this band, than their actual music, so I’m not sure where 25 or 6 to 4 fits in the timeline but it could be related
Terry Kath was essentially the leader, and also their main songwriter, and a truly spectacular guitarist. He died in a gun accident, and the artistic direction of the band changed.
No worries. Their music is just blah, basically. Background noise while waiting in line.
The guitar solo in that song has no right to be that amazing
Absolutely killer song.
Rockit by Herbie Hancock. It’s a great hip-hop/electronica track, but the rest of his work is mostly jazz.
It’s because ‘Rockit’ was made by Bill Laswell, Michael Beinhorn, GrandMixer DXT and three other guys on turntables. Hancock basically turned up at the end to play some synth lines.
Laswell and Beinhorn were in the band Material, and turned it into a production outfit, plus Laswell was a producer at the label Celluloid at the time, which label was a pioneer of hiphop. He also participated in the New York no-wave jazz scene as musician and composer.
Hancock was in his early forties, and his career was getting stale. His manager, twenty-five years old, pitched the idea of making a track to both him and Laswell. Hancock was taken by Laswell to hear some popular djs, but still required more coercing by the manager.
Material’s early stuff might be closer to ‘Rockit’, although it’s more disco-funk. Dunno about Celluloid’s output, as I’m not really into old hiphop. Laswell used scratching in some of his genre-clashing projects well into the 2000s, e.g. in the ‘Axiom Sound System’ concert with Tabla Beat Science and a bunch of other folks (including Grandmaster DXT). Laswell also co-produced and played bass on the rest of Hancock’s ‘Future Shock’ album and the next two albums ‘Sound-System’ and ‘Village Life’, and did other collaborations with him.
(Yall might be familiar with Time Zone’s ‘World Destruction’ with Afrika Bambaataa and John Lydon; and Material’s ‘Seven Souls’ with the voice of William S. Burroughs. Both of these were featured in ‘The Sopranos’, and both were produced by Laswell, just like PIL’s album ‘Album’.)
My favorite from a him was always Chameleon from exactly 10 years earlier. That’s the song I hear when Herbie is mentioned.
I’m more partial toward ‘Watermelon Man’ reinterpretation from the same album.
I had a jazz teacher say that Herbie Hancock would play straight up jazz until he ran out of money, and then release a funky track like chameleon to rake in the big bucks, and then go back to jazz
Seems like a good gig if you can get it.
Whoa, that’s some good insight. As a fan of that New York mutant disco/funk stuff I’ve always liked Material. Never knew they were involved with that song. Cool.
I’ve been a fan of Laswell for about twenty years, and it’s fascinating to dig through his catalog and see how easy production comes to him, how he always had his fingers in a lot of projects and how he gathered a whole bunch of other musicians in his orbit. ‘Future Shock’ also has Nicky Skopelitis, who did guitar on some of Material’s albums and was in The Golden Palominos with Laswell, and whom Laswell pretty much dragged from one project to another for decades.
Eraldo Bernocchi is another illustrative example. He had an ambient project with some dudes, released something like four records, and then did a collaboration with Laswell, inevitably falling into his gravitational sphere. After that all of Bernocchi’s later releases in the project and under his own name were clearly marked by Laswell’s methods and the library of sounds and effects, even without latter’s involvement.
He is a jazz legend, yeah…
…wow. This might be the most “stand on his lawn” comment I’ve ever seen.
Lana Del Rey - A&W
Lana makes great music, but none of it really matches the vibe of A&W, which is unfortunate as that song is phenomenal
Hoobastank, The Reason
100%, can’t even name another song by them
they had other songs??
Lol. Actually I was thinking about it last night and crawling in the dark wasn’t that bad. But it didn’t sound like them.
Yes they had some other decent hard rock songs. Born to lead is the only one I can remember getting a bit of radio play on the local rock station though
7 Mary 3.
They had a hit that sounded dark and grungy. “Cumbersome”. The rest of the album was much less angsty/original/grungy. Disappointing.
Water’s Edge was also on the radio at the same time and had a pretty similar sound I thought.
The best part was the demo version of cumbersome was so much better than the album version…WJRR in Orlando was instrumental in breaking them and it they played the original cumbersome all the time.
In my experience a lot of bands were one hit wonders with alternative music. Cracker low
“My My” on the same album had a lot of energy to it.
Talking Heads (Once in a Lifetime) and Joy Division (Love Will Tear Us Apart)
MGMT, although it’s more like 3 songs with a more electronic vibe and then everything else they’ve done since is pretty different. I remember them even saying they liked a different sound than what made them famous.
If I recall, they hated a certain kind of pop music, and those three songs were basically parodies of the music they hated. So they got famous for making exactly what they were against.
I went to a concert of theirs and they refused to play any of the songs they’re known for
I Can’t Decide
… by The Scissor Sisters
Their other music is badass though.
A nice classic tune to dominate humanity by.
give Mary a listen. It’s pretty enjoyable from most angles
But that song isn’t an outlier.
what songs sound like it?
Most of them? They’re an upbeat dancy modern disco band. Basically a modern ABBA. They make boppers.
which is very different from “I Can’t Decide”, a music hall track that’s somewhat baroque, even though disco also happens to be upbeat and the vocals are very similar
Peter Schilling, “Major Tom” (German and English versions).
Dunno, “Terra Titanic” and “Die Wüste lebt” basically sound the same. Just not as good.
@TheDoozer Last Resort - Papa Roach
The whole Gran Turismo album by The Cardigans. I was a angsty teenager, listened to that album and found it excellent for my angst sessions. Then I got all the other albums and they were not at all good for my angst sessions.
Luckily I got over myself and realized that the other albums are excellent as well, just different. Pikebubbles<3
The Smiths - How Soon Is Now?
