The 2018 Music thread

I never expected to see The Chills mentioned on QT3. Martin Phillips isn’t in the best health at the moment, so I hope this doesn’t end up being a farewell tour.

Dude. The Chills have carved out permanent space in my brain forever and ever.

And yeah, Martin basically needs to completely stop with all alcohol. Hep C has ravaged his liver and put him in a pre-cancerous situation.

BBC confirms Pete Shelley’s death just now, of a heart attack at age 63.

Dude 2. Been loving The Chills for over 30 years. Each evening the sun sets in five billion places seen by ten billion eyes set in five billion faces.

Or, on a less-upbeat note,

What can I do if she dies?

I’d love to see that tour if I can figure it out but a Tuesday night is tough. Maybe I sleep over at a friend’s. But I’m really starting to resent how all the good concerts have left Manhattan for Brooklyn.

Damn, QT3 posters are seriously my people! I’m thrilled to hear you’re a massive fan. :)

There are dozens of us.

This came out earlier this year but I’ve only really started listening to it over the past month or so. Discovered it as part of my deep dive into Italian post-punk bands, some tracks have a bit of shoegaze mixed in.

Japan Suicide - Santa Sangre


Thanks! Blown Away sounds great.

Pretty awesome Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class.

The Cure
Def Leppard
Janet Jackson
Stevie Nicks
Radiohead
Roxy Music (at long last)
The Zombies

I can’t really find fault with any of those.

Yep, I’m on board with all of them. Especially if it gets Bryan and Brian on stage together again.

Nice new pop song from favorites Martha.

Speaking of pop songs and Martha, anyone get their year-end Top 100 playlist from Spotify? Those are always fun to get new songs from. Share!

Bambara - Shadow on Everything. This is a dark album, it’s hard driving post-punk mashed together with a Ennio Morricone western soundtrack. Reminds me a little of Nick Cave.


Yeah, Martha.

Here’s my work-in-progress annual Vintage Sounds playlist!

And here’s the Top 100 Spotify manufactured for me with its army of robots.

(Plenty of overlap between the two, he said, stating the obvious.)

Are there any modern non-Metal (sorry @ArmandoPenblade) rock groups that have really great musicians? I discovered Khruangbin and Altin Gun through this thread, and would like to discover some more. I mostly listen to psychedelic rock. I’m not really into shoegazing or a lot of “indy” stuff like Beach House.

I mean…lots of them, bands and musicians both.

The thing of it is, metal tends to lend itself to more ostentatious displays of obvious technical skill, while other forms of rock may not. You’d never know that Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze was one of the best guitarists in rock history unless you knew some of the crazy chord progressions he plays…or how in a song like “In Quintessence” he sort of casually throws off a 15-second solo that’s a complete finger-bender.

But sometimes it comes to the fore. If there’s a better modern rock bassist than Chad Stocker of the High Strung, I don’t know who that might be (maybe the guy in White Denim is there with him).

The Cheatahs and Preoccupations are both very technically skilled.

And in a super-popular band like Wilco, you’ve got Nels Cline on guitar, Greg Kotche on drums, and Pat Sansone on keys. Those dudes, left to their own devices, would be donking out playing super technical math rock.

I am really liking Khruangbin also. Pity that I got into them after they played in my town.

I like this concert:

And “Maria Tambien” is probably my favorite song of theirs so far:

I don’t really think of Janet Jackson as Rock and Roll (and I still get her music mixed up with Paula Abdul), but I don’t have much of a problem with her).

Joe Osborn died over the weekend. He was one of the greatest anonymous bass guitarists in music history, part of the Wrecking Crew in LA, you can hear Joe playing bass on everything from “Hazy Shade of Winter” (the entire Bookends album from Simon & Garfunkel is him, and it’s amazing work) to “MacArthur Park”. I mean, if you were recording in California from about 1965-1977, Joe was the go-to guy for bass if you needed it. Or even if you didn’t, but your producer decided you did.

The first paragraph of his AllMusic bio puts it pretty succinctly:

From the early '60s to the early to mid-'70s, Joe Osborn’s buoyant, picked bass lines can be heard on more than half the hit records made in Los Angeles, having appeared on over 200 Top 40 hits including 20 number one hits, as well as innumerable film and TV scores and jingles. The electric bassist also has the distinction of being the first to record a teenage Karen and Richard Carpenter in his home four-track recording studio after they tagged along with a trumpet player for a session.

I’m not a fan of Muse, but whenever they are headlining festivals and on telly I always enjoy watching it because they are super tight. There’s always a bit with just the bass and drummer when Bellamy goes off to take a dump or something thats awesome and Bellamy himself is a mean shredder.

Obviously there are a great many fantastic non-metal rock musicians. What does “modern” mean in this context? If it means something from the last 5 years or so, then I’m sorry to inform you that rock is quite dead at the moment. Billboard’s rock charts are dominated by albums from 30 years ago, boy bands like Imagine Dragons and 21 Pilots, and Greta Van Fleet, which might be the most soulless band ever to pick up guitars:

Greta Van Fleet sound like they did weed exactly once, called the cops, and tried to record a Led Zeppelin album before they arrested themselves.

Greta Van Fleet do not possess self-awareness—at all. When asked about a characteristically ugh lyric (“All my brothers who stand up/For the peace of the land”), Jake responded, in part, “I guess it’s subject to interpretation. But I think the initial idea with that was that, as brothers, we stand for the peace of land. And that was for the good of the Earth, and for man.”

If by “modern” you mean a particularly style of rock, I think you’ll have to provide examples to pinpoint it.