Man Man is a pretty amazing band that uses chaos to create beauty, and they do it oh so well. They don't belong to a genre, Man Man is a genre of its own. They sound like music you would hear from pirates, circuses, doo-wop groups from the 50's, Donkey Kong, gypsies, ballroom waltzes and much more. It's such controlled chaos, I've never heard anyone or any band get it right like Man Man does. It's almost as if their songs shouldn't make musical sense, but it all just goes together superbly. And that alone shows how good of musicians they all are. They're also the most amazing band to see live, anyone that's seen them will agree. Lyrically, the lead singer Honus Honus can write like no one I've heard before. He takes heartbreak and gloom and turns it into anger and amelioration. And even though he sings in an agonized, angry growl, his lyrics are so eloquent that it wouldn't turn anyone away. Man Man can't be analyzed or explained by one song, but I would like to talk about them in terms of their last song on Life Fantastic, their second newest album. It starts off light and happy accompanied by strings and a frolicking piano, but the lyrics are about dead animals buried in someone's (La Brea's) house. The music stays light and Honus wails out his love for La Brea. The way he does it sounds like a doo-wop love song. That is, until the Honus reminds you that he loves no one with a horror movie sounding crash, in which he clarifies he is merely speaking about the tar pit. He's done the same before in "Hurly Burly" with his band chanting "this ain't no love song". The song then goes into some falsetto doo-wops from his band and Honus growls about a love that is no longer there, from which he decides to "drift away". And from there the song carries on without words, it's just beautiful strings that bells that range from sad notes, to ominous notes, to notes that remind you there's still hope. This song is so different from most of the other songs on their new album, but with so many different twists and turns in it, it's easy to tell that this band is one of a kind, and takes influences from all over the musical spectrum. This song being at the end of the album is something worth mentioning too, because their albums have all ended with a heartfelt doo-woppy or beautifully instrumental song.
Honus is also in another band called Mister Heavenly and you can tell what sound he's brought to the band: doo-wop that he's mixed with mayhem. The term for it is "doom-wop", and people have accredited it to Mister Heavenly. But Man Man has had that sound for years, and I think it comes from Honus. A lot of music blogs and reviewers also like to portray Man Man as being heavily influenced by Tom Waits and Frank Zappa. Sometimes I see it, but not enough to say Man Man sounds like either of them. I'm not even going to bother figuring out what specific influences I think this band has built on, because I really don't give a damn. It's so eccentric and original that Man Man stands on its own, and I'm constantly impressed by how their music and style has evolved over the years but still had that controlled chaos, patented Man Man sound. I'm also surprised that Indie Music hasn't gone in the direction that they have created. I think their sound is much more interesting and difficult to create musically than any of this chillwave bullshit that's taken over. Below are all songs by Man Man, including "Oh, La Brea". These are songs that I think exemplify the band's broad spectrum of sounds and influences. It's all over the place -- and it's beautiful because of that.
Cake is a band that I grew up on, although at the time I never knew how cool and innovative they are. One of my very favorite songs ever since I was a kid is their song "Frank Sinatra" off the album Fashion Nugget. After all these years I listen to it again and I'm shocked by how crazy this song is in terms of mixing genres. It's a mixture of rap, jazz and beatbox with punkcountry guitars. If you pick up any of their cd's it really is easy to pick up on all the different influences they've had over the years. Cake's influences range from jazz to country, from spoken beatnik poetry rap to barbershop quartets, and from dirty grungy steels guitars to waltz blues. I'd be surprised if I ever heard a band with such a wide array of influences as Cake. Below is my favorite song, "Frank Sinatra". Also below is a song that I think clearly demonstrates their wide variety of influences (including a barbershop quartet), and finally a link to a video of my favorite barbershop quartet.
The other day I was singing to the Strokes in my car like I do most days, but this time I stopped and existentially questioned my love for the Strokes. What MADE me like the Strokes? When did I first hear them? I knew the answer right when I asked it, but it was interesting to remember my first exposure to the band. I was in middle school in Atlanta, and my class was in the computer labs doing a creative writing exercise. I don't remember how I came across it, but I clicked on the music video for "Hard to Explain". I turned down the volume as low as I could so that only I could hear it. With my ear up to the desktop speaker, I started the song and kept an eye out to see where my teacher was at all times, so that I didn't get to watch any of the video. The song only had to have been playing for about 45 seconds before I got caught and had to turn if off, but that was all the time I needed. The opening line, "Was an honest maaaaaan" gave me chills. It was a combination of notes I've never heard before and the juxtaposition of the note he is singing with the chord that the guitar is playing had me immediately hooked. I didn't get to listen to any more than that, but when I got home that day I looked it up again and listened to every Strokes song that I could.
The Strokes are a really integral band to today's indie music scene as well as the indie music scene for the last 8 years. By listening to and looking at the Strokes, it seems that they created their own, more elegant version of punk rock from the 70's 80's. They dress like punk rockers, and incorporate similar guitar riffs, but their punk rock is easier on the ears; it's even beautiful sounding at some times. They might have been influenced some by the Ramones or Iggy Pop, but Julian doesn't howl or scream. Instead he almost croons like a less resonant Frank Sinatra. There is a slew of bands that came up right after the Strokes which were all part of new-wave punk. I remember seeing lookalikes on TV and hearing them on the radio throughout both middle school and high school. Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, the Libertines, Kings of Leon, JET, and Louis XIV are just a few of the more popular bands that had the new-wave sound. And over the years, that sound has evolved and translated into a lot of the bands I listen to today. The Black Lips, the Strange Boys, Spoon, the Walkmen are all bands that have some new-wave punk in their music. In each case though, they bring in another type of genre to pair with it, like blues and punk in the case of the Strange boys. Below is the music video for "Hard to Explain", which is a better version of Lana Del Rey's music videos of random juxtaposed images. Also are similar bands that came after the Strokes, and an example of 80's punk that may have influenced the Strokes.
Donald Glover is an actor on the mediocre and ever faltering show, Community, but has also used his stardom to somehow forge a rap career these days. He gets a lot of slack from a lot of different people on the internet, but I haven't heard enough of his music to give him much shit. Carles from Hipster Runnoff has written about how bad his music is, as well as how he thinks that Donald is biting Tyler the Creator's style in his new music video. While Childish Gambino may be dressed a bit like Tyler in his video, with the long socks n tiny whiteboy shorts, just look at his picture to the left! This kid seems like the whitest black kid I eva seen with all that nerd apparel! Anyways when I watched his video I noted the the music is pretty unoriginal sounding to me and it's pretty easy to tell who he looked to for making his beats. His beat follows a pattern similar to almost any Lil Wayne song, but in particular A Milli and 6 Foot 7 Foot. (By the way, do you know what song is sampled in 6 Foot 7 Foot? I know everyone recognizes it. The pattern that Childish Gambino's beat follows is a 16 measure snare beat with the beat dropping immediately after that. A lot of Lil Wayne's songs do this exact same thing, although A Milli uses only an 8 measure beat. After figuring out the very Lil Wayne-esque beat, it seems as though Childish Gambino listened to Power by Kanye West and sampled his choir and sirens in the background. Listening to the song, I just plain turned it off early because I've already heard it before Weezy. Below you can compare the sounds of the songs I referenced in order, and see if you hear the similarities.
Dirty Beaches is a guy named Alex Zhang Hungtai from Taiwan who, in his upbringing must have watched a lotta the movie "Grease". I saw him at SXSW this past spring break and he is a pretty cool cat, looks straight up like one of the T-Birds. Most times that I've seen him in pictures online, he's wearing a white t-shirt, blue jeans, Roy Orbison sunglasses, his hair is slicked back, and he's smoking a cigarette. He was the same way at the concert. He's definitely part of the whole new "chill wave" surf music bandwagon, but I think he makes a better/cooler attempt at it than other people. I think he does this by picking cooler surf rock bands to model after. A lot of his songs are super surfy, with low-fi guitars and rumbles. Over the songs are his deep and echoey croons, which sound to me like a mix of Elvis' deep voice and Lux Interior, singer of the 70's psychedelic rock band, the Cramps. Dirty Beaches seems to incorporate 70's punk, 1940's doo-wop, psychedelic surf rock, and maybe some Elvis. To me, it's interesting that a kid born and raised in Taiwan would be exposed to the kind of music that influenced him to make the songs he does today. I think his best song is "Lord Knows Best", which samples an old French song by Francoise Hardy. Below are two songs by him, "Lord Knows Best" and "True Blue". With those, I also included the unique voice of Lux Interior from the Cramps, and a Roy Orbison song, who was a big part of doo-wop.
The 90's brought with it some good music, but most of that good music was rap. Most of 90's rock is pretty terrible, and if it wasn't terrible rock, then it was white people that couldn't rap -- the Insane Clown Posse -- or boy bands that consisted of 4 or 5 questionable white guys. Basically the 90's weren't the best for white people in music. However, at the beginning of the 90's was the tail end of the grunge era of the late 80's. Bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam were the most prominent grunge bands, and influenced a lot of bands that you probably listen to today. What I think is a possible source for where Indie music has gone today, lies in the influencing of said bands on Radiohead. Radiohead's first two CD's really feature a lot of grungy sounding guitar riffs and maybe a few other acoustic sounds that sound like they could be played along with Oasis.
But when OK Computer came out, their third album, Radiohead went in a brand new direction almost out of nowhere.
The grungy Nirvana influence became less apparent and now all new sounding instruments and unconventional noises came into the songs. Some of it sounded like beautifully organized chaos. Some of it sounded like David Bowie and his transitional songs that shifted to different genres. Some of it was robot voices, and some of it was bizarre. Before that CD came out, I really hadn't heard anything like it. It was a new sound with a whiny, angelic voice; and many bands would come out of that sound and try to replicate it. I think from Radiohead's experimental new sound came a lot of experimental Indie bands that featured unorthodox combinations. Coldplay definitely is a popular band that borrowed from Radiohead's mostly piano based songs, the Robot Ate Me, Midlake, Animal Collective, Modest Mouse, and the Flaming Lips are also bands that started emulating the new weird sound. Radiohead is the biggest influence on most bands that I listen to as far as I can tell, and I'll be talking about more of those Radiohead-influenced bands later in my blog. Here's an experimental song on OK Computer, a song by Bowie that I'm comparing it to, and some subsequent weird sounding songs that I think were made in light of Radiohead's new experimentalism.
King Khan and the Shrines was one of the craziest concerts I've been to. In one song, one of the Shrines got naked and danced with his genitalia between his legs. King Khan is in the Shrines as well as many other bands, and his concert antics have gotten him some public recognition. Most known, he shoved his bare ass in Lindsey Lohan's face.
He's apparently from Canada, but he hangs out and plays with a lot of American musicians, typically bands from the dirty South. I saw him in a documentary on the Atlanta music scene in which he, Jay Reatard and the Black Lips were featured. King Khan is also in a band with members from the Black Lips called the Almighty Defenders, who are also really sick. Anyways, King Khan and the Shrines formed in Germany and have a sound that borrows from influences all over the map. The Shrines are basically a big horn section that accompany his guitar and his wailing. King Khan sounds like James Brown mixed with Screamin Jay Hawkins, and the horns vary from numerous music genres. It seems to come from so many directions, ranging from soul, to funk, to blues, sometimes reminiscing Lou Reed and late 60's psychedelic punk. It's music that makes you dance and his voice invites you to freak out and scream around with him. His lyrics range from being on welfare, to flying your freak flag, to having a significant other whom is "so fat n ugly" His wailing and guitar playing add another direction of music that goes into the Shrines, and that is garage punk. It seems like the perfect combination, huh? Like the Strange Boys, The Strokes, Black Lips, they're all just some kind of old style music mixed with punk and your band is golden. Check them out after this and be sure to look at some of his influences according to me.
The Strange Boys are a local band in Austin. The first time I saw them was when they opened for King Khan and the Shrines at Emo's last year. In addition to their music, the singer, Ryan Sambol, is what made the Strange Boys so memorable in my opinion. He had a cool, nonchalant eccentricity about him. He wore a sweater tucked into pants at the show, and it made him look like a real goon. When he sung he'd lift up his neck and get the strangest expression on his face, as if he was writhing in pain. It almost looked like he was strung out on drugs. Whether he was or was not, his voice stood out the most. He has a really whiny and distinct voice that sounds a whole lot like Bobby Dylan. But he uses more tune and pitch than Dylan does, and it works so well. The band obviously has roots in the music of the Dirty South. It sounds like they learned guitar from old African American blues legends like John Lee Hooker or Eddie Kirkland. But they've taken those guitar riffs and blended them with dirty garage punk. The country and blues stick out enough to make the music much more interesting than any recent punk band that I've heard, and I would call the Strange Boys a whinier, more Southern and twangy version of the Black Lips. Sambol's yowls and Dylan-esque singing really is the best, and each and every slip of his voice is done with exact purpose and finesse. Check these guys out, especially if you like Southern blues/rock. Here are a few links to their songs, as well as links to people that I think influenced them.
