recomended UK bands...

[educatedfilm]

I've relized that we get very few truely excellent american bands... I mean we get the main stream cack like Puddle of mud, staind, Nickel back etc etc.. It's ok, but it's nothing special... I mean the few excelent american bands that I know of are Pavement, Ten benson, Smog, folk implosion, At the drive-in, Blackalicious and a few others... as for Aussie and other bands I'll be honest and hold my hands up and say I'm pretty much an ignoramus...

So this got me thinking you probably have just heard stuff like Spice girls, and maybe Coldplay Gomez and RAdiohead (if your lucky, cos they're the few excellent bands that made it across)... so your missing the "mellow explosion" that's happening over here...
So here's some of my recomendations, I have put an example of a song for each band... just to help you out...

Zero 7 : things I've seen.
Straw : Moving to calafornia
Elbow : Dont mix your drinks
Mogwai :
Super furry animals : If you dont want me to destroy you (or fire in my heart, or the man dont give a f-ck)
Angelica : Why did you let my kitten die.
Ed harcourt: something in my eye.(i've just relized he maybe american!)
Swerve driver: Juggernaught Rides.
James: laid or sit down
Blue tones: slight return
Low Gold: buity (sp) dies young
Snow patrol: Educatedfilm by or one night is not enough or Starfighter piolot.
Placebo: pure morning.
Longpigs: blue skies.
The music: take the long road and walk it.
Gene: fill her up.
Ballboy: I hate scotland (or Sex is boring).
Arab strap: love detective.
Inspiral carpets: I want you.
Primal scream: Kill all hippies.


please, if you download.. um... I mean, listen to some of these tracks tell me what you think... I think I may have gone too far with the list... anyway, just get anyone and you have my assurances it'll be good..:)

[Edited by educatedfilm on 01-24-2002 at 06:33 AM]

[PonyOne]

The only two of those bands I recognize from (occasional) airplay in the Northeaster US are Placebo and Mogwai.

The last time I think I was excited by the new stuff coming out in the US was maybe around summer '98, when bands like Stabbing Westward, Monster Magnet, Rammstein, etc were releasing some new singles that were, occasionally, good.

In the US, after the grunge rock revolution (92-94) went pop, from 95-97 you had "R&B" which is more or less a loose term applied to music made by black people that has lots of "oooh"'s in it, then in 98, you had the boy bands which took over the airwaves. Presently it seems as though there's this battle between boy bands, R&B stars, and the occasional... "rock" group vying for airwave supremacy. And through it all you've had rap as the second line of force (except in California, Washington and New York, where from time to time it was the s--t).

Music is a very factionalized, compartmentalized thing here in the US. The only times that people really push non-pop British music in the US is when there's a potential hearthrob element. You have Coldplay's sad love ballads, they tried it with Blur's "Beetlebum" & "Tender" and Radiohead's "High & Dry" at different points. Then Radiohead did "Paranoid Android" and that got airplay, same with Blur's Song 2, simply because nobody could deny that they were good songs.

If I wasn't engaged to marry a girl who's a total xenophobe, I'd probably be moving to London, Oxford or Stratford this July rather than Los Angeles, but well, she IS a total xenophobe. It took me almost two years to convince her to move to the western US (her family is tenth generation Massachusetts and don't you forget it!) and it'll take me two more for the UK... There's more of a market, as far as I can tell, for alt-rock type stuff than there is here, and that's what I play.

[educatedfilm]

"If I wasn't engaged to marry a girl who's a total xenophobe, I'd probably be moving to London, Oxford or Stratford this July rather than Los Angeles, but well, she IS a total xenophobe. It took me almost two years to convince her to move to the western US (her family is tenth generation Massachusetts and don't you forget it!) "
:D... I find this truely amusing... Aren't all you them- there Aam-eer-eecaaans forigners anyway ?...

Yeah... I try not to entertain the idea that the music there is more comercailly driven, cos the poeple i talk to in chat rooms name little heard of american band one after the other, only for me to find that they're probably the best thing for that genere for years (Smog, and Ten Benson)... but that may have something to do with the fact that chat rooms are alt. music..
Poneyone: have you put your music up on-line? I'd like to hear some...

[PonyOne]

Well, if I had a nation to go back to, maybe then I could be considered a foreigner... but if all the caucasians got shipped back to "where they came from" I'd be sitting on a street in Varmland, Sweden, pathetically asking passersby in the incorrect language if I could just please plug my amp into one of their sockets for just three minutes because it'd been so long since I'd had a nice warm place to play my rendition of Rammstein's "Links 2 3 4."
Some of the old British and French families that live in the state of Massachusetts, especially in Boston and Cambridge, as well as a few of the older, more upscale cities & towns (Concord, Lincoln, Rockport) get very haughty about how they have been here for x and x generation and you're just an invader, more or less.
Out on the Western part of the US, people could really care less where you came from, as long as you're not a jerk about it. My family came from Sweden around 1850 and pushed along the US as lumberjacks. My girlfriend's family is mostly a bunch of mediterranean Jews who escaped preholocaust, plus her grandfather's mom was full blood native American and great grandfather was French, and then somewhere along the line she's got a link to some wealthy aristocrat who was a colonist, so her mom's all high and mighty about being a NEW ENGLANDER.

Personally I hate it out here. I can't wait to get back out West. The establishment of things is rooted so firmly here it's sick, government and civil officials constantly pocket money and, suspiciously, despite the fact that the Boston area has the second highest cost of living in the US (the average price for a one bedroom, one bathroom apartment in the city: $1500/month) and has the second highest average income (behind Greenwich, Connecticut, home to billionaire CEO's and the like) in the US, and we have all these massive amounts of yearly surplus, there are almost no programs for the lower classes to get out of debt or get educations, the roads here are beyond terrible, and nothing ever gets done.

What pisses me off about this area is that, out in Seattle, when Bush unjustly got into office, there were protests that never got televised over here. Hell, even Yugoslavia takes action when something unjust happens in their government, like an election being rigged. But here in New England, nobody likes the boat to be rocked.

But anyway, when I took her out to Seattle and LA this summer, that was the furthest any living relative had been after Colombus, Ohio. She had been reared on this notion that the Boston area is perfect, and better than anywhere on Earth. Her mom was furious that she wanted to go out that far, and even more furious when she loved it out there and decided to move.

Her defense for not wanting to move to the UK: "I don't think I'd like it." Her defense for not wanting to move to the West Coast until this summer: "I don't think I'd like it." Well, she's a graphic design major from a rich family, we'll probably start making payments on an Audi wagon just after we move out because she LOVES Audi's, and I'll stick to my '86 Saab with cracked leather seats that smells like old comic books (550 watt stereo!!!). She'll go and buy salmon pate and put them on table wafers, and I'll get a package of Ritz crackers and put some cheap cheddar on them... that's just how we are. She's the blue-blood rich yupster from Trowbridge Street in Cambridge, I'm the scarred-up poverty-boy from a pit south of Seattle. We go out to get a pizza and I'm thinking "$7 greasy 16-inch diameter mass of mozzerella, tomato sauce and some Coke to wash it down and force it out the pipes" and she's thinking "$16 8-inch thin-crust with goat's mozzerella and bleu with thin sliced tomatoes ON TOP and conservative amounts of pickled pepper from Tuscany with Lurisia for sipping."

Sorry, I guess I'm once again living up to my quote... none of my music is up yet but I've got some of the necessary equipment and software, I just need to get a mixer and some MIDI junk. I hope to, if nothing else, get some of my techno up before too long. Maybe I'll just do a cheap 10-second WAV file or something. How bout you, you got anything up?

[educatedfilm]

This is really odd, your about same age as I am (18)... right, I'm to start taking lessons in driving soonish... i've little money, no job. but to be honest I'm ok with it, cos (oh here comes the chese) hope for the near future... I got nothing to do till mid september... So basically for the first time I got "space"... I'm originally a meditranain arab (libyan)... Good luck with the move..

I've got some stuff on line but you need to be a member of the bloody yahoo e-group.... actaully it's a little quite, and I want some one to work with... So join up.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Guitartricks

I think I've got three files up there... there's some stuff I've yet to record. I'm actaully working on an album... Maybe even try to get a signing on a label...

[Edited by educatedfilm on 01-28-2002 at 12:23 PM]