For example, I first heard Suburban Legends - Polyester, so I went to check Suburban Legends and they were just a regular ska band.
What’s your “that song was great, I wish the band did more of that” song and band?
Chumbawamba - Tub thumping. I had no idea they’ve always been an anarchist sea shanty band and that song was the outlier and a total piss take. I am here for it.
LOL!
Came to this comment section to say exactly that, just to discover it to be already the first comment!
But it’s kinda the reverse thing OP had in mind, I think…Sea shanties‽ I absolutely love Uneasy Listening and will blast English Rebel Songs, but they’re not sea shanties.
yeah, it’s called english folk or something
have you tried “The Big Issue”? it’s from the same album and is kinda the same thing, except the vocals are far more female-dominated and the song extends the melancholy a bit
That whole album has the same vibe as Tubthumping
in fact the album is called Tubthumper
the follow-up album, WYSIWYG, also has the same vibe
Yeah, they went through a few different sounds and that was their party era.
same band that did the song Torturing James Hetfield.
Also, Tubthumper (the album) is entirely amazing. The popular song included
They did a few songs that have a catchy repetitive chorus to be fair. Mouthful of Shit for example. Just not quite to the extent of Tubthumping.
He drinks a whiskey drink, he drinks a vodka drink
I preferred Mary Mary and it had the same problem. No others like that that I heard.
Lana Del Rey - A&W
Lana makes great music, but none of it really matches the vibe of A&W, which is unfortunate as that song is phenomenal
Outkast - Hey Ya!
Mrs Robinson is the only other Outkast song I can stand.
Also Blur - Song 2, but in a good way. Song 2 is great, but their other music is very different but also great.
IIRC Song 2 was supposed to be a parody of how simple radio friendly rock music had become, then became their biggest hit.
Wasn’t Smells Like Teen Spirit also kinda like that? They have similar places in my head and I think I remember something about Cobain hating how popular that song got.
But Nirvana’s other songs were similar enough that that one didn’t come to my mind for the main question. Blur is like a different band from the one that did Song 2.
I think with Smells Like Teen Spirit is Kurt always felt that like he didn’t deserve as much praise because he considered the song to be a Pixies rip-off. It wasn’t done to poke fun at the Pixies but out of his love for them.
There’s like ten plus great Outkast songs, you need help
I might have given up too soon but the vibe is way different from Hey Ya! for the ones I did try.
Completely agree with the first part (Hey Ya is the only song of its kind, Andre3000 is a genius) but not the second part (you can’t stand their other songs?? What is wrong with you??)
B.O.B., come on!
outkast is an insane take
they have nothing but banger albums (including idlewild)
90s glam hair rock bands all had a hit ballad, despite rock tempo wall of main sound. Then there’s Extreme. “More than words” is one of the best ballads of the time. They had the glam hair look. The rest of their music is jazz fusion funk. Decent, but no real hits/bangers.
I think Extreme is one of the best examples of this where their most popular song is absolutely nothing like the rest of their music.
Also the power balland bands all had similar singing styles Motley Crue/Axel Rose screaming out tone that you knew were part of the generic rock genre. In addition to the ballads having big rock climaxes. More than words is like a Simon and Garfunkle song, even if rest of catalogue pretty loud.
Harder to Breathe by Maroon 5 got me to buy the album only to find that rest of the album was completely different.
Pretty much any individual Ween song
Ween is a truly mixed bag
I never understood this bands popularity until I listened to this song
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7n7WRidwYo
Their other songs are okay but this ones possibly one of my favorite songs of all time
This should become the new rickroll.
Hmmm
Something something username or whatever
As a teen I loved Family Reunion by them. Basically a pop-punk cover of George Carlin’s 7 words you can’t say on television
7 Mary 3.
They had a hit that sounded dark and grungy. “Cumbersome”. The rest of the album was much less angsty/original/grungy. Disappointing.
Water’s Edge was also on the radio at the same time and had a pretty similar sound I thought.
“My My” on the same album had a lot of energy to it.
The best part was the demo version of cumbersome was so much better than the album version…WJRR in Orlando was instrumental in breaking them and it they played the original cumbersome all the time.
In my experience a lot of bands were one hit wonders with alternative music. Cracker low
25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago
Everything else is more of a soft jazz rock. But this song is such a high energy banger
I could be wrong, but I believe there were at least two distinct phases of that band.
I think they started out as “Chicago Transit Authority”. A few years after changing their name to “Chicago,” one of their founding members died, so that might account for the change.
I’m weirdly more familiar with the history of this band, than their actual music, so I’m not sure where 25 or 6 to 4 fits in the timeline but it could be related
Terry Kath was essentially the leader, and also their main songwriter, and a truly spectacular guitarist. He died in a gun accident, and the artistic direction of the band changed.
No worries. Their music is just blah, basically. Background noise while waiting in line.
The guitar solo in that song has no right to be that amazing
Absolutely killer song.
Hoobastank, The Reason
100%, can’t even name another song by them
they had other songs??
Lol. Actually I was thinking about it last night and crawling in the dark wasn’t that bad. But it didn’t sound like them.
Yes they had some other decent hard rock songs. Born to lead is the only one I can remember getting a bit of radio play on the local rock station though
Chris Isaac, Wicked Game
Fun fact: that song only became a hit after having been included in David Lynch’s ‘Wild at Heart’ and then being played on radio by Lee Chesnut, fan of the director.
Rockit by Herbie Hancock. It’s a great hip-hop/electronica track, but the rest of his work is mostly jazz.
It’s because ‘Rockit’ was made by Bill Laswell, Michael Beinhorn, GrandMixer DXT and three other guys on turntables. Hancock basically turned up at the end to play some synth lines.
Laswell and Beinhorn were in the band Material, and turned it into a production outfit, plus Laswell was a producer at the label Celluloid at the time, which label was a pioneer of hiphop. He also participated in the New York no-wave jazz scene as musician and composer.
Hancock was in his early forties, and his career was getting stale. His manager, twenty-five years old, pitched the idea of making a track to both him and Laswell. Hancock was taken by Laswell to hear some popular djs, but still required more coercing by the manager.
Material’s early stuff might be closer to ‘Rockit’, although it’s more disco-funk. Dunno about Celluloid’s output, as I’m not really into old hiphop. Laswell used scratching in some of his genre-clashing projects well into the 2000s, e.g. in the ‘Axiom Sound System’ concert with Tabla Beat Science and a bunch of other folks (including Grandmaster DXT). Laswell also co-produced and played bass on the rest of Hancock’s ‘Future Shock’ album and the next two albums ‘Sound-System’ and ‘Village Life’, and did other collaborations with him.
(Yall might be familiar with Time Zone’s ‘World Destruction’ with Afrika Bambaataa and John Lydon; and Material’s ‘Seven Souls’ with the voice of William S. Burroughs. Both of these were featured in ‘The Sopranos’, and both were produced by Laswell, just like PIL’s album ‘Album’.)
My favorite from a him was always Chameleon from exactly 10 years earlier. That’s the song I hear when Herbie is mentioned.
I had a jazz teacher say that Herbie Hancock would play straight up jazz until he ran out of money, and then release a funky track like chameleon to rake in the big bucks, and then go back to jazz
Seems like a good gig if you can get it.
I’m more partial toward ‘Watermelon Man’ reinterpretation from the same album.
Whoa, that’s some good insight. As a fan of that New York mutant disco/funk stuff I’ve always liked Material. Never knew they were involved with that song. Cool.
I’ve been a fan of Laswell for about twenty years, and it’s fascinating to dig through his catalog and see how easy production comes to him, how he always had his fingers in a lot of projects and how he gathered a whole bunch of other musicians in his orbit. ‘Future Shock’ also has Nicky Skopelitis, who did guitar on some of Material’s albums and was in The Golden Palominos with Laswell, and whom Laswell pretty much dragged from one project to another for decades.
Eraldo Bernocchi is another illustrative example. He had an ambient project with some dudes, released something like four records, and then did a collaboration with Laswell, inevitably falling into his gravitational sphere. After that all of Bernocchi’s later releases in the project and under his own name were clearly marked by Laswell’s methods and the library of sounds and effects, even without latter’s involvement.
He is a jazz legend, yeah…
…wow. This might be the most “stand on his lawn” comment I’ve ever seen.
Not so much song but album.
First, listen to Ministry - With Sympathy
Next, listen to any other ministry album
Don’t act like With Sympathy doesn’t have some great songs, nothing like Thieves, but with Sympathy isn’t a hack album.
That being said my God he created an entire genre music.
Talking Heads (Once in a Lifetime) and Joy Division (Love Will Tear Us Apart)
Peter Schilling, “Major Tom” (German and English versions).
Dunno, “Terra Titanic” and “Die Wüste lebt” basically sound the same. Just not as good.
