Lately I've been listening to a lot of Brume, Primordial, Trapped Within Burning Machinery, Sky Faction, Minor Birds, Body Void, Moonfox, SubRosa and Yob.
My gigging and (some) recording band in the early '90s was called sub rosa. In the late '90s it was The Difference Engine. Both names can be found on YooToob and none of them is my old bands. Seems hard enough to be original even naming a band these days, so it's a bit harsh to complain if "the music's all been done before."
New Musical Express (NME) had a TV channel that kept me up to date until it died in 2011, and my son tells me that the paper version has given up promoting new talent, just gossips about household names and can't even be given away at university. That's a shame - I would have ripped the arm off anyone that was handing out NME in my day.
It's a cliché, but complaining that modern music is rubbish is a sign you're getting old. In my teens and twenties, older folks mostly listened to awful "proper songs that you can whistle to and words that make sense" but they had some good stuff as well that I got into. The radio played current "sheet music" as I (hilariously) called it and I spent time and energy finding the good stuff that was out there. As I got older and had less spare time, I needed trusted filtration devices to do some of the work for me - all this stuff with 59 views on t'interweb is too much effort.
My son's 19, and I taught at high school until this summer so that's worked out for us both ways. They laugh at a lot of my choices but approve of
Doves and
Elbow (yikes, I've mellowed) and I tut at their formulaic nonsense but perked my ears up at
Everything Everything. The idea that, say, that modern-bloke Calvin Harris isn't creative or distinctive because he uses samples is - respectfully - nonsense. I once depped for a blues-rock band at literally no notice (my band played the prior slot and their bassist had broken his arm that evening) and despite their "original material" I quickly tired of the singer shouting "A...D...A...E..." in my ear and shouted back that I know how ####ing 12-bar works.
Sorry for the long post, but a word of warning: I'm now here in southern Spain and I notice how the English-language radio sucks ex-pats into some timewarp where no tune was ever written after 1987, except perhaps by Adele, and people will pay €50+ to watch a live tribute to The Eagles. I'm not going to let that happen to me.
