[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Yeah, no, I'm OK with that; I meant money. Goddamn MONEY.

oh, acquisitiveness! not an issue for me

life is made of time though

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

life is made of time though

She says, What do you call love
Well I call it Harry
Oh, please I'm being serious
What do you call love

Well I don't call it family and I don't call it lust
And as we all know marriage isn't a must
And I suppose in the end, it's a matter of trust
If I had to I'd call love time

She says, What do you call love
Can't you be more specific
What do you call love
Is it more than the heart's hieroglyphic

Well for me time has no meaning, no future, no past
And when you're in love, you don't have to ask
There's never enough time to hold love in your grasp
Turning time around

Turning time around
That is what love is
Turning time around
Yes, that is what love is

My time is your time when you're in love
And time is what you never have enough of
You can't see or hold it, it's exactly like love

Turning time around
Turning time around
Turning time around
Turning time around
Turning time around
Well I gotta have it
I gotta-gotta-gotta have it

Turning, turning time around
Gotta have it, turning time around
Turning, turning time around
Turning time around

[The Soup Nazi]

Throwing Muses - Moonlight Concessions (March 14)

Eiko Ishibashi - Antigone (March 28)

[Kuhb]

I'm always happy when Kristin Hersh is doing something new

[The Soup Nazi]

Bob Mould - Here We Go Crazy (March 7)

[choc e-Claire]

For some news on artists that are relevant to the 2020s: Perverts, the newest project by Ethel Cain, is quite strong - it's an impressive move to make a shift into industrial ambient drone and scare off the Twitter fangirls who liked the pretty piano slowcore on Preacher's Daughter (which I've tried to like, but have found pretty average). Not that there's no "songs" on the new one, but it's definitely not the main focus.
Despite being 90 minutes long, it's been released as an EP (it's intended as something of an experiment), so the only "album" from 2025 I've heard so far is Asian Glow's 11100011. It's a good summary of what shoegaze sounds like to us zoomers, and the first track is pretty great, but I found it a bit hard to connect with some of the more electronic-focused tracks and it's not as good as I remember Cull Ficle being.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by choc e-Claire

For some news on artists that are relevant to the 2020s.

Bob Mould is not relevant to the 2020s? First verse on the first song on Blue Hearts:

The Left Coast is covered in ash and flames
Keep denying the winds of climate change
The Deep South sinking into the sea
But you don't believe me

[choc e-Claire]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Bob Mould is not relevant to the 2020s?

Bob Mould's band split up fifteen years before I was born. The trendsetters and tastemakers don't listen to Bob Mould, they listen to death's dynamic shroud. This isn't to say that his new music isn't good or anything (I haven't heard it), but he's a small fish in a big pond in the modern landscape.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by choc e-Claire

Bob Mould's band split up fifteen years before I was born. The trendsetters and tastemakers don't listen to Bob Mould, they listen to death's dynamic shroud. This isn't to say that his new music isn't good or anything (I haven't heard it), but he's a small fish in a big pond in the modern landscape.

That was... surreal. Did you really say "trendsetters and tastemakers"? Are they today's John Peels? How do I find them - do I have to Tik the Toks?

Thanks for naming a new band, but I'm afraid if I give you a detailed opinion of them it'll only reinforce your rather twisted opinion of me. Can't help saying this, however: I want, in fact I need, new artists to come up and innovate and game-change shit, but if that's dds then we should all shoot ourselves in the face.

[The Soup Nazi]

William Basinski / Richard Chartier - Aurora Terminalis (out now)

Roedelius - 90 (January 17)

Marshall Allen - New Dawn (February 14)

Steve Reich - Collected Works (26 CDs + 1 DVD, March 14, WOW!)

Ingrid Laubrock - Purposing The Air (March 28)

Dean Wareham - That's The Price Of Loving Me (March 28)

[choc e-Claire]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

That was... surreal. Did you really say "trendsetters and tastemakers"? Are they today's John Peels? How do I find them - do I have to Tik the Toks?

Thanks for naming a new band, but I'm afraid if I give you a detailed opinion of them it'll only reinforce your rather twisted opinion of me. Can't help saying this, however: I want, in fact I need, new artists to come up and innovate and game-change shit, but if that's dds then we should all shoot ourselves in the face.

I'll take you on your merits here - yes, that's exactly what they are. And it's one of the things that gets me to idolise what musical culture was back in the day. The alternative scene in the 1990s was new and exciting, and it made a lot of breakthroughs in terms of expanding what rock could be, what music was viable to create and listen to and still have some semblance of success. But things hit their limit, stagnation set in, and the idea of innovation in guitar music is just a dead end.

Take Black Country, New Road - a band formed in 2019, a band whose debut record received instant critical adoration and got about as popular as any new indie band could get. And their follow up record bettered it (in the eyes of many, I disagree). As wonderful as the band has been so far, it's hard to convince yourself that there's anything new to them - they know this about themselves, they call themselves a Slint tribute act in one of their songs. There's really only so much that can be done with a traditional rock band line-up, and if you take a cursory look at the big records of yesteryear, the 1990s pushed things about as far as they could go. So today's aspiring young rock acts have nowhere to go - bands like the Strokes (forgive me, but they're a good example) took their influences from garage rock of decades prior, but a new band in the 2020s is just going to listen to the Strokes and not anything further out than that. And I feel that that's a big part of why older people bemoan that there's no good music anymore - there are young bands making music in the styles that they like, but since there's no evolution from the better bands of thirty years ago, their aspiring fans may as well just listen to (say) Bob Mould anyway. And that's where the excitement of his new record comes in, and the dismissal from a younger and more cynical generation.

Zoomers don't really have a John Peel (the closest we have is Anthony Fantano - while I'm one of his defenders, this is possibly the most depressing thing I've ever written on this forum). Pitchfork doesn't have the clout that it did in the 00s, and while it may be a good thing that they can't kill off careers anymore (and it's definitely a good thing that they've stopped being exclusively snarky white rockist college boys) it means that we have an atomised, fragmented atmosphere to try and find new music in. You can't find the signal for the noise, at least not until the snowball's become an avalanche and everyone on Twitter is posting about the new Injury Reserve LP. In the 1990s you had a chance of getting your band on MTV, in the 2020s you have to get lucky to get anything close to that. Rock just isn't a TikTok medium.

I don't really listen to death's dynamic shroud, although I've tried a couple of their albums out. But they're something different, something that doesn't just rehash music that was tired years before I could discover it. And it feels like we want two impossible things sometimes - we want artists to open up our eyes and give us something we haven't heard before, but we also want it to sound like stuff that hasn't been innovative since the Clinton administration. And I give in sometimes - of the ten artists I listened to the most last year, the most recently popular of them is Modest Mouse. But learning about new music, new bands, is something that's at the very least worth trying for. Every artist you've posted here was new once, doesn't Geordie Greep deserve the same luxury of being able to coast off his old fame for decades to come?

And P.S., I've never been on TikTok in my life.

[Kuhb]

I would give up on a fetishisation of 'the new', which in the case of bands like dds is actually 30+ years old postmodern juxtaposition with a lacquer of a novel superficiality (basically compress your synths and samples into the 'red', so it sounds impactful on phone and laptop speakers. Hello 90s loudness war. Hello Death Grips).

Be an unrepentant reactionary listener. Instead of listening for something novel, listen for things done well. Listen for the human in the art. The 20th century and its thrust of history and culture is over, but the human isn't. You might find these irrelevant old musicians wasting everyone's time with guitars and songwriting might have something of value after all.

[The Soup Nazi]

^ Love it. Kristin Hersh forever!

[choc e-Claire]

Originally Posted by Kuhb

I would give up on a fetishisation of 'the new', which in the case of bands like dds is actually 30+ years old postmodern juxtaposition with a lacquer of a novel superficiality (basically compress your synths and samples into the 'red', so it sounds impactful on phone and laptop speakers. Hello 90s loudness war. Hello Death Grips).

Be an unrepentant reactionary listener. Instead of listening for something novel, listen for things done well. Listen for the human in the art. The 20th century and its thrust of history and culture is over, but the human isn't. You might find these irrelevant old musicians wasting everyone's time with guitars and songwriting might have something of value after all.

You make some strong points, even if there's a few things I'd take umbrage at (Death Grips are good, although their fanbase is likely the single most offputting one outside of the mainstream pop world). I'll accept that it's pretty funny to be talking about the now and the future for a vaporwave band, a genre so focused on imagined stylisation of the 80s (as well as being weirdly Orientalist), but it's hard to argue that it's not a significant scene in the modern world.

And of course there is value in the music of older artists - hell, some of the best shows I've been to are artists who've been on the nostalgia tour wave for a while. I'm thinking of the Breeders here; when I saw them last year they barely touched on their new material, and while that made for a fun show it would be a hollow argument if you were trying to sell them as a vital modern artist. And that's where my scepticism comes in - I'm a pessimist, I'm going to be surprised by any artist four decades into their career writing a new album that isn't just painting by numbers and a weak imitation of their old work. There's exceptions - the Cure's album from last year was excellent - but if I'm choosing between one artist's 12th album and another's 2nd, I'm going to go for the latter. And so these are the impulses we've got to balance out...

[The Soup Nazi]

Swervedriver - The World's Fair EP (March 7)

[Moshe]

Nels Cline - Consentrik Quartet (March 14, Blue Note)

[Moshe]

Gunn - Truscinski Duo – Flam (February 28, Three Lobed)

[Kuhb]

Anyone got good recommendations on where to start with Nels Cline?

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Kuhb

Anyone got good recommendations on where to start with Nels Cline?

Coward for the solo multilayered stuff, Initiate to hear him with a beast of a band (double album: studio/live). Both include "Thurston County".

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Moshe

Gunn - Truscinski Duo – Flam (February 28, Three Lobed)

Cover looks like a cross between Zuma and Music From Big Pink.