Originally Posted by oscillate

I'll check out Dead Poetic. I've heard of them, but never checked them out. I'm not of the mind to avoid anything "indie" just because people consider it that - if I judged bands based on the genre they were pegged with my fans and music bloggers who feel the need to categorize every band like the back of a soup can, I'd have missed out on a lot of cool music.

The Arctic Monkeys never did much for me, for some reason. I don't dislike them by any means, but the last thing I remember hearing from them was "R U Mine" or something along those lines. I suppose I just react strangely to songs or bands that are trying to emulate previous decades in what seems to be, at least from my perspective, a disingenuous way. All I can remember about that song was that the production, and songwriting and arrangement, was trying to emulate a garage rock, bluesy song/production and it just felt forced. I've had a similar reaction to a lot of the Black Keys stuff.

The Strokes are decent, I don't have any gripes about them. I just never got into it.

I guess my struggle among most modern music these days is I haven't been able to find many new artists who write great songs that can stand on their own if they had to be played acoustically, are performed in a way that really connects with you emotionally, and sonically pushes boundaries. I see a lot new artists who do one or two of these things well, if they're lucky, but never all three. Again, a lot of it is taste and what I connect with, others may not, or may connect with something else. And you could easily look back and say, "Well, the Ramones were just a stripped down rock band," but at the time, that was a complete game changer. I see a lot of new bands, especially among the general "indie" umbrella grabbing stuff from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s and not really doing anything new with it. I'm not seeing a lot of new takes, but rather just remakes of what has already been done, at least in today's context.