Name a Band / Song We Should Know About

New Illuminati hotties and it’s great. I love the first album. This has a couple of songs that are in that vein, but also some more aggressive punk sounds, and some that sound like weird pop. The whole thing is really good.

This ones a stomper!

New Nas

The new Illuminati Hotties album is a great roller coaster ride. It’s cleaver, sweet, angry, loud, fun, poppy, and awesome! The songs cover a wide variety of genres, but the album still maintains a satisfying cohesiveness.

GTG. More Later.

New Sylvan Esso!

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

New Sylvan Esso!

Oh, you beat me to it. Very excited about the new album.

Janelle Monáe - Turntables

Tscott wrote:

Janelle Monáe - Turntables

Oh yeah, that's the good sh**.

Oh man, thiiiiiis video interview is fascinating. I just powered through the first five minutes of terrible white girl talk to get to Janelle Monae, and she is so gracious in how she expresses her righteous anger.

Man, just man.

Richard Cheese’s lounge versions of songs can be entertaining or downright creepy. This is both.

NSFW due to language.

pandasuit wrote:

Richard Cheese’s lounge versions of songs can be entertaining or downright creepy.

You mean like this?

Did you know that Radiohead got sued because some people thought it sounded too much like this:

Richard Cheese is one of those bands where more than anything you've just got to salute their commitment to the gag. I mean, twenty years plus!

That said some of the arrangements they put together really are great. E.g. they do Smells Like Teen Spirit as a latin jazz somba thing, that really comes off, or this epic version of NIN "Closer":

Richard Cheese would be a great live act to see one day. I can really appreciate well done parody music. Heck, I'm subscribed to a YouTube channel that makes Rocket League themed parodies of songs.

Public Enemy has a new LP out and it’s the best one in 25 years or more. This track has some guest artists. Beastie Boys, LL, and RUN-DMC. The whole album is loaded with guest artists.

New Pomplamoose!

Chris Stapleton (and specifically this song) was recommended to me recently and I like it a lot

Stapleton is a superb MFing blues man who can croon and rock with the best of them. Anyone who dismisses him because he's generally labeled as country is missing out.

Just seen them on a awards show.

pandasuit wrote:

New Aesop Rock

First time I heard of them. I like it.

Baron Of Hell wrote:
pandasuit wrote:

New Aesop Rock

First time I heard of them. I like it.

Fun fact- There was a study a few years ago which graphed rappers by unique vocabulary and not only did Aesop Rock score the highest, he scored so high that he broke the graph’s scale.

ruhk wrote:

Fun fact- There was a study a few years ago which graphed rappers by unique vocabulary and not only did Aesop Rock score the highest, he scored so high that he broke the graph’s scale.

I’m not surprised by those results. Even when Aesop does your standard braggadocio it’s hard to keep up with his vocabulary. By the time I’ve processed one line 3 more have already passed me by.

edit
That is a fun infographic. Some surprises. I thought KRS might score higher. GZA makes sense too. Also just fun to play name that rapper just by looking at their headshot.

Man. I'm a long-time fan of the genre, but I just don't seem to have the gene to like Aesop Rock. I get that there's wordplay in there, but every track sounds like a droning monotonic jumble of random unconnected phrases. It almost sounds like he's consciously trying to prevent any of his lines from from standing out enough to be memorable.

Are there tracks of his that aren't like that, that I'm missing?

This was one of the songs playing on Project Power.

fenomas wrote:

Are there tracks of his that aren't like that, that I'm missing?

I got sad whenI learned that he literally sits and combs through thesauruses and dictionaries when composing his rhymes to push that vocab metric as high as possible. I mean, it’s still impressive and it’s just a different set of skills he’s using, but all of his stuff came across more artificially to me from that point

Not sure if this qualifies as an exception to the rest, but it sure is a great piece of music.

Edit: Hot Take:
Eminem owes his entire career to Aesop Rock.

I’m only half joking.

That’s probably my favorite if his songs.

DC Malleus wrote:

I got sad whenI learned that he literally sits and combs through thesauruses and dictionaries when composing his rhymes to push that vocab metric as high as possible. I mean, it’s still impressive and it’s just a different set of skills he’s using, but all of his stuff came across more artificially to me from that point :(

I’ve seen him freestyle at concerts and while it’s slightly less dense, it’s not fundamentally different than his finished songs.

I'd never heard of Laura Marling before this video appeared in my YouTube feed. Amazing folk songwriter. British press called her early work "nu-folk."

What struck me about this video was that big voice coming out of that calm face. I've since listened to her earlier albums; love the music. Each of her albums has been nominated for numerous awards. This one won the 2020 Mercury prize. About Song for our Daughter, in an NPR interview she said:

The [album] title comes from the central song on the album and it’s likely somewhat an homage to Letter to My Daughter, the Maya Angelou book, which is a series of essays to a fictional daughter, or to a kind of a wide, broad idea of a daughter; a younger generation of women. And I wrote that song [the title track] with that sort of thought in mind — I’m not, myself, a mother but the idea of a maternal lineage.

That song was written thinking about how I would have armed myself, a younger version of myself, against some of the experiences, or the accumulation of experiences that one accrues as a young woman in the world. It’s fairly on the nose, I suppose, in some respects. I started my career when I was 16, so I’m now in the position at 30 where I can see people of the ages of 16 to 21 and see how incredibly young they are in the most brilliant, vibrant way, and realize that I was so young. And what an incredibly difficult thing it is to be young and to make lots of very important decisions. So that is just a product of the time of life that I am at.

This woman's music may send me into another folk phase... last time this happened to me was with Nanci Griffith in the late 1980's when I heard her (pre-Bette Midler) version of From a Distance. I ended up liking her own songs even better. And then I discovered Mary Chapin Carpenter, and then, and then, and then...

Thanks for the Aesop Rock recommendations everyone, I will give them each some listens!

RawkGWJ wrote:

Edit: Hot Take:
Eminem owes his entire career to Aesop Rock.

I’m only half joking.

I'm gonna call doubt on that one. Eminem is four years older and had already recorded his slim shady EP before Aesop was in a position to influence much of anything.