…Anyway. Here is the top 5 underated and then 5 overated
bands. At this present moment. April 2013. Biased towards Western Music of
course. Because I am ignorant. But you can take comfort in the fact that I
don’t get paid to do this, whereas people who work for the NME do. And they’re
just as ignorant to music of the Shiretoko Peninsula as I am…
…they also disabled all the comment sections on their
articles as their poorly informed and factually inept articles kept being
rightly ripped apart by their readers due to their shoddy journalism…
…But anyway. I know people reading this are going to be
thinking “you’re just choosing arty bands who haven’t fully broken into the
mainstream as the underated bands and the biggest selling, most successful stadium
bands as the most overated bands.” And you would be right. But that is largely,
I feel, due to the injustice that so many more people hear this bland grey corporate
sludge which is labelled up and sold to us just like Big Macs are, than listening
to genuine artistic originality and flair, organic music which has a meaning
and purpose and genuinely moves you in such a way of which music was supposed
to in the first place. Music is an art. Lets keep it that way.
The 5 most overrated bands in the world at the moment
5) Franz Ferdinand
Archduke Ferdinand was a hipster in the 1800's. Look at that moustache.This band took his name, and has somehow made a career through the success of
one song- Take Me Out. Like The
Killers, because of the success of their early career, its presumed all of
their average output since their self-titled debut album is still warrant
enough for them to headline festivals every year. They desperately cling on to
the ‘move your hips’ formula they used to great effect in their first album,
and their new stuff is as unmemorable as the plot from Avatar.
They were all blue. That’s all I can remember.
4) Mumford and Sons
We are lads, we play Folk Rock so we’re really different, we
wear country bumpkin clothes to show you how home grown we are, we’re clearly
sensitive boys, we have an antiquated family business name as our band name how
very authentic, oh look what we did, we referenced Shakespeare, how literate
are we. NO!! I see through your inauthenticity, and so does
Manchester’s Town Crier Liam Gallagher, who I quote claimed “Mumford & Sons
look like they've got fucking nits”.
3) Muse
Have you heard? Muse are headlining every festival in the
world this year. Not going to a festival this year? Ah right well don’t you
worry because guess who will be headlining every festival in the world next
year too. Yep. Muse. The year after? Muse again. Its funny how most festival
organisers know they’re guaranteed a huge crowd if they get Muse to headline,
even though most of the people in the audience have probably seen them 5 times
already doing exactly the same set. Just go away and MUSE for a while yeh, so I
can get Uprising out of my head for
the first time in 5 fucking years. And stop stealing Queen’s riffs.
2) The Killers
Never mind The Killers, these guys used to be, ah yah, like,
totally the SKILLers of rock music. I mean they followed up an absolutely
cracking first album of British infused Indie Pop with a slice of eccentric Uncle
Sam inspired Heartland Rock. But then that handsome flower boy of theirs
Brandon decided he’d go back to being a Mormon; which means any sort of
rebellion isn’t allowed. They weren’t the most exciting bunch in the first
place, despite My Name Is Earl being their drummer, and now that Brandon couldn’t
go cavorting around with girls and beer and a cigarette coming out his mouth,
their music has got blander and blander. And even blander. Despite the British music press desperately
trying to cling onto Hot Fuss nostalgia, and make out they’re still exciting,
they are really, really not.
1) Coldplay
Bernard Madoff is Jealous. He thought he conducted the largest
fraudulent scam of all time. But no. Sorry Uncle Bernie. It wasn’t you. Its
Coldplay. Its Coldplay for becoming millionaires whilst ruining the image of Alternative
Rock, leveraging a legacy of dull sap on mainstream Western music, and creating
a legacy of careerist rock musicians, who’s ambition is to get as high up the corporate
music ladder if it means writing bland radio friendly tunes, rather than
writing something that means something. Ok maybe what they're doing isn't a scam. But Coldplay
are lame man. Their predictable and watery dull soft rock is so boring and so
tame. It lacks any kind of soul or art, it is music for your parents to tap
their foot too while they're driving to work. Its incredibly safe, and in being
so safe it actually ends up being incredibly dangerous. As after their
international breakthrough, it made safe-rock ok. It made it ok to write middle
of the road, meaningless songs, ones which are made just so they can be used
frequently in mass-media. Oh a young mans about to run and tell a girl how he
really feels in this teen drama set in California- lets put Fix You over that, it’ll be perfect. Chris
Martin is an intelligent man and a talented musician. So why does he have to
write all these guarded, home-free, monotonous ballads, and instead just let
himself be an artist rather than a ‘lets see how many people we can fit in this
stadium’ type of fella.
The 5 most underrated bands in the world at the moment
5) Kings of
Convenience
This Norwegian Folk band may look boring, and believe me,
they are. They don’t look cool, their band name isn’t cool, and they’re not
friends with anyone cool in the Western Music fraternity. But that’s their
strongest point. They are so far detached from the incredibly fake, pretentious
and masquerading bull crap that is churned out by Ed Sheeran and Ben Howard and
the like, and which gets played every time Paul Rudd’s wife walks out on him in
another one of his crappy ‘I’m middle aged and having a mid-life crisis but
it’s cool because I’m just going to find myself first by going to a party full
of teenagers then realise I know who I am so get back with my wife at the end’
ilk of American cinema. Kings of Convenience’s avoidance of the Mainstream
Indie Folk machine results in their uninterfered, incredibly delicate and
beautifully soulful and melodic folk. And
its wonderful.
4) Modest Mouse
Why has no-one heard of these guys?!? Ok actually why has no
one in the British Isles heard of these guys. They got to number one with
their last album in America. Johnny Marr played on that album. JOHNNY MARR. Yet
no one bats an eyelid in Blighty. We’re too busy being Limey’s and having bad
teeth. Modest Mouse are everything Mumford and Sons are not; they write good
music, they are actually cool and don’t dress up like dickheads just to sell more records. The Bassline on Float
On is incredibly epic, possibly one of my favourite songs of the year that
was 2004.
3) The Roots
They be more well-known now in the States than everywhere
else, but The Roots have been criminally underrated for the majority of their
career, mainstream Hip Hop having been hijacked from what its supposed to
represent somewhere along the way and being turned into manufactured dummies
rapping about guns, bitches and chains. You see, people rapping about real life
and doing it well in an intelligent manner isn’t marketable apparently. Black
Thought is by far one of the most thoughtful and intelligent MC’s in Hip Hop,
but will never be as famous as 50 Cent or Lil’ Wayne because he was never
willing to sell out in an undignified way.
2) Eels
I don’t like Jellied Eels. I don’t like Electric Eels. So
why would I like a band called Eels? Well probably because of their
consistently diverse output of thought provoking musical wonderment, spanning
over a vast range of genre’s and themes, stupid. Mark Oliver Everett, the
brainchild of Eels, calls himself ‘E’. He’s allowed to do this as between 2000
and 2010 he released 7 albums, all of which were brilliant. ‘E’ often asks questions of and
celebrates the concept of human life in such a thought provoking way that it makes
you realise even more how inane this song is- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rISYCquFeI8
.
1) Tame Impale
These guys are more of a breath of fresh air than eating a
wrigleys pie. If there was ever a time when we needed something to save us from
the bland uninspired corporate rock shite which is dominating us in these bleak
times, it was an Australian Psychedelic Rock Band. Tame Impale’s dreamy, melodic
Space Rock is beautifully trippy, and after attempts by thousands of bands, finally
gets the modern take of 60s Psychedelic Rock right. Band Leader Kevin Parker’s
vocals reminisce of Paul Mccartney in later Beatle’s, whilst his songwriting
reminices of Lennon from the White Album period. The incredibly dreamy debut
album Innerspeaker is brilliant from
start to finish, and their follow up album, in which Parker would have been
under pressure to commercialise his music to appeal more to the masses, Lonerism, was just as spacey, paranoid, and
beautiful. They are incredible live too, with the music being coordinated with a
fascinating lighting show giving off an incredibly colourful and kaleidoscopic feel,
transcending perfectly to the stage. This is a band who cares about their music
and their art.
