Garage bands have always been interesting if they’re any good, if they can play. Experimenting with roles can be even better … for example, all guitars but bass laying down the rhythm section with drums … the bass and soft vocal, not alpha, dominating, playing lead.
Such was noise pop or shoegazing from 1989/90 which the song below is from.
Just setting the scene … we generally start, at this site, in the pre 1920s, a bit of ragtime, we heavily play the 20s, not going too far into the 30s when it went too orchestral. Big bands don’t do a lot for me … 30s/40s, occasional songs being all right. I particularly dislike squeaky new jazz such as the felonious monk.
It started coming good again in the 50s, then the music just died. The 60s had some fun early but became druggier and druggier, the flower in the hair thing was take it or leave it. British invasion had some good pop … almost completely missed mentioning jive, much which was fun.
Woodstock was the nadir for me … drugs, thots, over complicated sounds from bands fancying themselves as almost classical … many will disagree with me on Floyd and the like. Metal began, which to me was humourless, postulating noise with no rhythm. I don’t mind noise if melodic – see song below.
70s fashions were awful … flares, tight shirts unbuttoned to the waist, chains … the music though was experimental and fun again, punk was a phase we had to have, some of those bands came through and were great, late 70s saw some good things happening, musically, though forlorn like Joy Division. Around 1980 saw ska … fun again.
Glam and techno arrived, also awful, the 80s were pretty dire for music, with some exceptions. The late 80s picked up again with early rap, or pseudo with Betty Boo. The late 80s/early 90s saw some experimentation again but there were also dire boy bands … by 1997, the pop music scene was pretty much dead, with autotuned horrors, adenoidal voice throwers and so on.
Thus, if you take maybe 1917 as my start point, ending about 1997, then that’s eight decades of variable popular music. I’m not expecting anyone to like Pale Saints, not least because it is noisy, loud, but with soft overtones which certainly offer counterpoint. What I like are the drone, the use of bass as lead, the voice almost as instrument in itself, the highly melodic tone, not unlike with the Strangler’s Skin Deep.
Sadly, the phase, which had also seen New Order, died … had kids changed? Had they been ruined by then? Actually, who would have listened to this song apart from me? I’m thinking someone born in the first half of the 70s … still children in 1980. What Generation is that? Maybe later Gen X. Do we at this site actually know any later Gen X? Doubt it. Not expecting our readers to like this: