The Batlord

Their own earlier work.

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Janszoon

If that's what he's talking about then that's great. Artists who are critical of their own previous work are artists who are still putting in a lot of effort—probably why I like Blakey and Cave so much.

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A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

OccultHawk

They are great artists, both of them.

OccultHawk

The Boatman's Call is my favorite record of his and it came out in '97.

Nocturama of 2003 is his worst.

But his albums after that are all great.

I love the Birthday Party but I don't consider it his best stuff. Maybe the most important concerning the evolution of music but not in every sense better in my opinion.

I don't have full buy in on Grinderman.

Chula Vista

See response below.

In 1969, 1970 they got bigger and bigger via word of mouth. Hell, on their first couple of tours they were often the backup band. But after Stairway to Heaven hit the airwaves in 1971 the damn busted open.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Frownland

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Terrapin_Station

I see it more as a symptom of changing/evolving as an artist:

As an artist, you're always trying to get as close to your ideal as you can (where that's tempered by ability as well as some practical considerations). You're also always changing--it's just a natural function of time, of being exposed to different things, trying different things, etc. So your ideal changes over time. When you listen to (or look at, or whatever for the art you do) stuff you did in the past, you tend to parse it from the perspective of whatever your present ideal is. You think, "If I were doing this today, I wouldn't play it that way--I'd do this and this instead." So folks don't typically like their older work as much. When you listen to other people, though, you don't listen to it in that frame of mind, but it's difficult to experience your own work as someone else would.

Mondo Bungle

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have some completely larger than life musical notions. Basically if you don't think this rules, you're wrong.



The amount of layering and growth in this is uncanny.

And their first album From Her to Eternity is full of Birthday Party moments



Your Funeral... My Trial is Cave at some of his most junked out, just a lot darker and gloomier, and more musically expansive and poetic than the Birthday Party. I dunno what it is about this track, but it is oddly intense



All in all, it's such a massively eclectic project that you can't just disregard it without hearing a lot of it. For the record, I think his soft pianocore albums like The Biatman's Call and No More Shall We Part are super boring. They're okay and not bad or anything, I just don't listen too often. A lot of it can get boring to be honest, but there's still a lot of excitement.

My favs:

1. Your Funeral... My Trial
2. Tender Prey
3. The Firstborn is Dead
4. The Lyre of Orpheus/ Abbatoir Blues
5. Henry's Dream

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Neapolitan

the Led Zeppelin underground test:

They were played commercial AM radio (not FM) in the late 60s, & early 70s
They were a hits machine (like ABBA) constantly appearing in the Top 40
Their music was featured on the Lawrence Welk Show

If you disagree to any or all of those statement about Led Zeppelin then there is a strong chance that Led Zeppelin was "Underground." Despite events that happened later like being one of the more popular artists on AOR/Classic Rock radio.

Since I am not familiar with all those rags I can't say for certain, but most of them were dedicated to what was called "counter-culture" music of the 60s etc.

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Terrapin_Station

"Album-oriented" FM radio took over by the early 70s. It was what was influential and what everyone was listening to--including school kids, middle class suburban families who weren't completely square, etc.

And those magazines were all glossy affairs that were found on every magazine rack--from book stores to drug stores, convenience stores, airport gift shops, etc. They were everywhere. If you had been between, say, 9 years old and university age during the 70s, and you were in the US and at all interested in popular music, there would have been no way you wouldn't have been familiar with those magazines. (The majority of my teen years were during the 70s, by the way.)

The idea that Led Zeppelin was at all an "underground" group is very ridiculous, and seems to be primarily sourced in people noticing that Rolling Stone magazine didn't care for them very much early on, compounded with a strange belief that Rolling Stone was somehow the arbiter (or at least a sole accurate reflection) of popular culture.

Rolling Stone was more fringe than magazines like Hit Parader and Circus in the 70s--which coincidentally wasn't helped by the fact that for most of the 70s, Rolling Stone was still printed on larger-format newsprint, so it was a pain for stores to stock, because the magazines tended to get messed up, easily torn, etc., by people looking at them. But also Rolling Stone during that era was trying to court an older demographic with a bit of an intellectual bent--they regularly ran long political features and so on. At that point Rolling Stone was basically aiming at hippies, people who were at that time in their 20s through their 30s, say, and who wanted to stay in touch with popular culture rather than just drop out and keep listening to their Country Joe and the Fish and Incredible String Band albums over and over.

Those other magazines were aiming towards the hippies' younger brothers and sisters, or just the first post-hippie generation in general, who were trying to establish their own identities. Since I became interested in music at a very young age, and I was part of a family of music-lovers, I kind of straddled both generations.

It was only later in the 80s/early 90s that Rolling Stone started moving away from that angle, becoming more of a "shallow" pop-oriented magazine, and only in the mid to later 90s that they started running their endless "Top 100/200 whatever" issues.