What Are You Listening to Right Now?

[Matt]

It goes on a little long (but the source song itself is THAT long) but it's pretty great.

[B_Metal]

[Abraham Smashington]

Editing on point.

[Matt]

[Captain Russ]

[BillyG]

Chains is a top 5 or even top 3 band for me depending on how I wake up.

[Captain Russ]

Going back through their albums earlier this summer really hit home how solid the musicianship was in their founding lineup.

[BillyG]

The newer stuff is good too. It's more like Cantrell's solo stuff (which rules) but I don't think it's too far off from the original lineup. Cantrell wrote so much of it anyway, that the loss of Layne isn't as big a hit as I think a lot of people do. I mean on 3 Legged Dog Layne was more or less a guest appearance.

[Captain Russ]

It’s the strength of the harmonies but also the raw range Layne had that made the loss something pretty insurmountable for some people. When he was straight, his voice was incredible. Not to take anything at all away from Jerry, he is about the most talented musician that came out of that scene who really was overshadowed by what was going on at the time as well but the legacy of what that initial explosion of creativity rendered stands the test of time and then some.

It’s that whole mythologizing people do that gets in the way of sound analysis of these sorts of things, but removed from a lot of that, there is a deep abiding love for the roots of hard rock in Jerry’s playing (the anecdote about a producer pegging their sound as “slowing Sabbath down” is accurate if a little too simplistic) and a great evolution of song structure that gets slept on.

[BillyG]

I have had so many conversations that Chains was the best metal band of the 90s, and it just turns into "no they're gruuuuuuunge" because apparently the only metal of the 90s was Metallica's black album.

[Captain Russ]

The black album is babby’s first metal album so that really doesn’t surprise me that the divergences of the genre gets downplayed when you dig back into the time period, but then I don’t expect most to have the working knowledge of just how incredible the variety was at the time in terms of experimentation as well as importation of sound (just looking at the Florida scene of the same era as that of Seattle and you have two tales of metal’s expansion in the states, to say nothing of the funk metal of California.).

The 90s get shit on for the commercialization and dilution of things, but you sweep that away from the table (it’s a pretty surface accounting of most things) and you can have a days long discussion on just how vibrant the music being made was that (tragically in some cases) didn’t find its audience until sometimes decades after they’d faded from prominence. Even some of the one hit wonders of that era had solid albums in a lot of cases.

But music is a weird thing sometimes that doesn’t get along with the zeitgeist (or is actively tread upon in favor of an arbitrary standard banner carrier as is the case with AiC).

[Anderson]

Juliana Hatfield sings Olivia Newton John.

I heard the album of Police covers he did, but this album is fucking great.

New Halsey produced by NiN is really good for that kind of music too.

[Timothy225]

Juliana Hatfield can do no wrong - she's also pretty great live, and a damn good guitarist to boot. Love both of those cover albums, though for the Police one, I wish she did a version of King of Pain or Invisible Sun.

ETA: I saw her live years ago at the Tradewinds (RIP) with Jeff Buckley (RIP) opening. Killer show, and Buckley owned the crowd during his set. "Last Goodbye" brought the house down.

[Timothy225]

Danny Elfman and Trent Reznor's True.

The video is your daily dose of nightmare fuel, BTW. I think they both need some hugs or something.

[B_Metal]

Giving the new Halsey a spin on Troy's recommendation. So far it's better than I thought it'd be. She greatly benefits from Reznor and Ross's production imo. Not sure it's a stay in my rotation type of album but it's so far certainly not disposable