Music that it took you a while to warm up to

For me, it took me a while to start to get into Vampire Weekend. I think it was their song "Oxford Comma" that put me off of them (and now that I actually do listen to them with open ears, I still don't like that song—not really quite sure why). I ended up eventually hearing them over the radio in a restaurant without realizing who it was and liked it a lot. Especially "Mansard Roof"—the frantic drumbeat, bright guitar sounds, and low-fi aesthetics just work so right for me.

Who (or what song, album, etc.) did it take you a while to warm up to?

edited 20th Nov '12 2:52:33 PM by 0dd1

That happens a lot with me, although I don't remember many examples.

My current favorite band, Scar Symmetry, was one of these, I occasionally came to their myspace to have a listen but wasn't a fan at first. My story with Bury Your Dead and Between The Buried And Me are similar.

These songs here also had this effect in me.

edited 20th Nov '12 3:19:16 PM by NEO

Gangnam Style. I still don't think it's that great, but it's okay, I guess.

I also did not care for The Avalanches when I first heard them. Guess who made their trope page?

edited 20th Nov '12 3:27:01 PM by PhysicalStamina

Anything that isn't country. I don't think I unironically liked a non-country song until mom took me to see Bob Seger when I was 8. Beyond that, I shut myself off from anything else until maybe my teens.

Even within genres, I didn't care much for Enrique Iglesias in his early, soft Latin Lover™ days, but he grew on me. I do like "Escape" and "I Will Survive". At the very least, they're light years better than "Tonight I'm F***ing You". Maybe it was because mom used to play the Escape album all the time.

I also didn't care much for Jimmy Buffett until I realized that he actually does more than just party songs. Some of his ballads (e.g. "Trip Around the Sun") are excellent.

Likewise, Kenny Chesney really won me over when he started doing more ballads, like "There Goes My Life", "Who You'd Be Today", and even moreso with the more recent stuff like "I'm Alive", "Down the Road", "You and Tequila", "El Cerrito Place".

Every single Modest Mouse album. I started off knowing only about Float On then started hearing a couple of their songs on Pandora, got curious and checked out one of their albums. I believe I went with The Moon and Antarctica, because it was supposed to be their best. I hated most of it, but clung onto a few songs that I kind of liked, and kept it around for those.

It took me a lot of listens and relistens and special moods to listen in for most of their songs to finally click, and it has been that way for every single one of their albums. Now they stand as favorite band, and I'm constantly waiting for them to release a new album. *

Heh, for me it was the other way around. I used to have a pretty dogmatic dislike of country music; it's only in the last two years or so that I've come to appreciate it (and how).

Also, Robert Johnson. His music was so far removed from anything I listened to at the time that it took me some time to get used to it. Of course, I absolutely love his music - and similar stuff: Son House, Skip James - now.

In a wholly different corner, I once found Judas Priest's slicker material very cheesy and annoying, but now I can rock out to it like nobody's business.

Sometimes, I also have this with specific songs, rather than artists or albums. Two songs in particular spring to mind: "Death On Two Legs (Dedicated To...)" by Queen and "Thunder Road" by Bruce Springsteen. When I first listened to "Death On Two Legs", I thought: 'What a mess. Where's the structure? Where's the buildup? It just jumps from one section to another with hardly any connection between them...' But as I listened to it more, I eventually realised that it was actually a brilliantly crafted piece. With "Thunder Road", it was exactly the same.

A good percentage of my favourite artists. Most notably Godspeed You! Black Emperor and King Crimson.

It took a couple plays before I really got into Daft Punk.

The first time I tried to listen to tool (specifically, Undertow when I was in college), I was too disturbed/offended/generally turned off. After a few times of hearing songs from AEnima after college and finding them pretty cool, I gave them another try and was blown away.

edited 20th Nov '12 6:19:40 PM by Willbyr

Although I really enjoy them now, when I first heard Iniquity's Serenadium (1996), aside from the first track I thought of it as boring bro-slam with some occasionally neat melodies. I rediscovered them this year.

While it's true they do definitely have riffs that are in that category, they're far less obnoxious than the usual Devourment/Internal Bleeding stuff and are more careful with their pinch harmonic use. It's still got the bottom end heft associated with that style but there's a lot of melody behind it that brings to mind something akin to a European version of Suffocation.

Another "brutal" death metal band that took me a while to enjoy was Wicked Innocence circa Omnipotence. Unlike Iniquity, it wasn't that it sounded like a bunch of really slow Suffocation riffs (2:51) as much as it just sounded too... weird and airy for my tastes. And that's coming from someone who enjoys ''Obscura'' by Gorguts.

Like Iniquity I left them alone for years and during that time away from them my knowledge of death metal grew quite a bit. That being said when I listened again, they sounded a lot more coherent to me and I was better able to appreciate their very intricate psychedelic take on technical/brutal death metal and their decomposing sense of structure and composition.

edited 20th Nov '12 9:20:47 PM by StillbirthMachine

Caravan. When I first got For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night, I found it to be bland and mediocre and I kind of dismissed it.

A month later I couldn’t get enough of it. It was another one of those albums I needed to ration out to a single play per week so I didn’t get sick of it. I’d buy anything by them I could find in a record store after that.

Other albums that affected me this way: England’s Garden Shed and Forse le lucciole non si amano più by Locanda delle fate. I’d heard lots of glowing reviews of both albums but I listened to each one again and again and thought, “well...I just don’t get it!” In each case, it was right when I was just about to give up on them, with a final listen that said, “if you don’t wow me this time, I’m giving up on you for good,” that they finally clicked.

I had hopes that the heavily hyped Zarathustra by Museo Rosenbach would affect me the same way but...no, I still don’t much care for it.

I got Gorillaz's Demon Days as a Valentine's gift from a good friend, after I mentioned liking that new iPod song. She said I'd love the album, and after the first listen, I think I had a mild headache. But the songs started rooting into my brain, slowly but surely, and it's now easily in my top five favorite albums, and Gorillaz in my top three favorite bands, of all time.

Death Metal, all of it.

Is it a good place to start with the Gorillaz? I've been meaning to check them out beyond the two songs I have of theirs for a while.

Demon Days is easily their most critically and commercially successful album, and is a pretty good start for their music. There's a lot of genre-bouncing and blending, as with all of their things, but it smooths out the rough patches of their self-titled debut, and doesn't have the overt experimentation (YMMV, I love the album but many didn't) of Plastic Beach. I'd say the best way to get acquainted with their work would be to listen to Demon Days first.

That works for me then.

Many, many listens were required to fully enjoy Captain Beefheart's "Lick My Decals Off, Baby"

I seem to recall being indifferent to most Keith Urban songs besides "Where the Blacktop Ends" and "You'll Think of Me". Then he put out Love, Pain & the whole crazy thing, which was awesome from top to bottom. I also went back and rechecked his prior material, and found most of it to be better than I had remembered. (Except "You're My Better Half" which has a clunky melody, and plagiarizes both his own "Days Go By" and Brooks And Dunn's "That's What It's All About".)

His last few albums can't hold a candle to that, as he's fallen into the Silly Love Songs trap one time too many. ("Without You" was one of the biggest Cliche Storms in country history, IMO. Also made worse by a lifeless, 3 note melody.)

edited 23rd Nov '12 6:40:04 PM by Twentington

Looking back it seems amazing how little I liked Radiohead the first few times I heard them, considering that they're easily my favourite band now.

Jimmy Buffet