Bands you enjoy in styles you don't.

Exactly what it says on the tin. What are some bands you greatly enjoy but have a lot of the characteristics of those you dislike? More importantly, what about them made you enjoy them over their compatriots?

For me, Crimson Massacre is a great example of very modern, spastic, ludicrously technical modern death metal that on paper I should utterly despise. And despise I did for a few years until around one or two years ago I gave them another shot. While the pacing is as frenetic, if not moreso, than Necrophagist and Decrepit Birth what keeps it from falling into randomness is the melodic narrative and the clashing dissonance that forms a sort of guide through these chaotic, confusing songs. The two-faced nature of their compositional heart gives the music short but compelling moments of beauty crushed by harsh, scything discord, keeping it hopeful yet darkly ambiguous at once. It's something in a lot of ways derived moreso from early At The Gates and Eucharist crossed with the consistent high intensity and blurred tonal swampiness of Molested rather than the shredding heavy metal that many tech-death bands are closer to nowadays.

edited 11th Dec '14 1:06:07 PM by StillbirthMachine

Ah, finally, a thread on this.

Probly Pantera, Exhorder and the first two Machine Head albums for Groove Metal (I mostly just don't bother with the genre, though I don't hate it exactly), and Meshuggah and Gojira in "djent" (which isn't a genre per se, but is something that just bores me a lot of the time). That's about it for Metal, since most of the rest I either like most of or (in the case of Deathcore, don't like any of really.

There are also a few Gangsta Rap artists I like, such as Doctor Dre, Snoop Doggy Dog, Tupac Shakur, N.W.A, Ice-T, Ice Cube and The Notorious B.I.G.- but on the whole, I don't care for the genre. Likewise, I think Lady Gag is alright, but I either dislike most modern Pop music or, in some cases, view it as strictly So Bad, It's Good fodder...

I also like Hellogoodbye and, to a lesser extent, Paramore and Panic! at the Disco, even though I generally don't care for "pop-Emo". That's about all I can think of right now...

edited 11th Dec '14 1:03:02 PM by sharkcrap11

Not generally into tween pop, but I unabashedly love M2M. You might know them for this song:

FEMM. Their music is mostly typical mainstream-sounding electrodancepop, but for some reason I don't utterly hate it (though I think Party All Night is their worst song by far).

Here's my favorite:

In the same vein, Classic City Escape from Sonic Generations.

edited 11th Dec '14 3:32:15 PM by PhysicalStamina

That song might be okay if it weren't being sung by two chipmunks on helium.

I'm not usually a fan of dance or electronic music, but I really like Scatman John's "Scatman" and Cher's "Believe". What little I've heard of Lindsey Stirling is also good.

I don't usually like harsh and/or screamy vocals, but for some reason, Kurt Cobain's voice doesn't bother me, at least not on "Smells Like Teen Spirit". I also have no problems with Chad Kroeger's voice.

As much as I like country, I find bluegrass is often a total snooze. But there are a few individual bluegrass songs that I really like, such as "The Lighthouse's Tale" by Nickel Creek.

I don't have any examples of entire musical entities, but I do have an example of an individual song. Generally hiphop doesn't appeal to me at all. I can get some enjoyment out of it, but it's always a passive, appreciative enjoyment, rather than total immersion and awe. This song is an almost completely anomalous exception. I suppose it's because the lyrics (which seem to an outsider to be a defining aspect of hip-hop) are so much less boastful and brazen than many other songs I've heard in the style. The sampled guitar line sets the tone for the rest of the song so well, and is used with enough subtlety that it doesn't at all get stale. Overall, it's just an amazing track.

I'm not really a fan of Synth-Pop but I really like Depeche Mode's album Violator, even though what I've heard from the rest of their discography hasn't interested me. Other than that I like the odd Synth Pop single like "Sweet Dreams" by Eurythmics but that's about it.

edited 12th Dec '14 5:59:10 PM by djbj

Violator is a classic, IMO (and in a lot of other people's opinions, too). If you like the Rockier side of their discography, I'd recommend some of the later ones (i.e. post-Violator), like Songs Of Faith And Devotion, Ultra and Playing The Angel.

On the subject at hand, I'm generally not a huge fan of Country-Pop, but I like The Band Perry and I find Shania Twain a Guilty Pleasure.

Janell Monae. She's a mix of genres, but could mostly be said to be R and B. Yet it's said mix of other genres that breaks her out of the mold and has more in common with progressive roc and dance punk.

I like her, maybe cause she's got attitude that most current R&B lacks, as well playing a more organic and eclectic kind of R&B. I prefer the less Pop-influenced R&B myself, the stuff that's more in line with SoulMusic, Funk and even Disco- which I actually like.

Disco was actually way ahead of it's time, producing electronic music not too unlike current trance, house, and eurodance styles.

Speaking of funk, the P-Funk collective are pretty damn fantastic, even by today's standards. It may have turned self-indulgent towards the end, but it was very creative and artistic too.

EDIT: Sorry, wrong thread.

edited 13th Dec '14 12:29:40 PM by MetaFour

Agreed- Disco provided much of the groundwork for later EBM genres, along with the early Electronic Music pioneers like Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre and Kraut Rock. Also, it was good to dance to and was just... well, fun. Sometimes that's needed.

P-Funk is AWESOME!!! IMO, though, Parliament and Funkadelic themselves stopped making good records around 1980, though Bootsy's and George's solo records kept being worthwhile for some time longer, and they always KILLED as a live attraction. Also, P-Funk members collaborated with the Talking Heads in the late 70s/early 80s, both live and in the studio. And it benefited everyone involved...

Yeah that's usually the cutoff point being at 1980.

Funkadelic were really out there though, and took me a lot of patience to get into, mostly because they were much noisier than I expected. The first Mothership tour is one of the greatest live performances I've ever seen, they were at the hight of their charisma and confidence.

I didn't know Parliament made any records after 1980. I thought their last thing was Trombipulation, which has two of my favorite P-Funk tracks of all time. The only Funkadelic song I know of that was made after 1979 was "You'll Like It Too", which is one of the most sampled breaks in Hip-Hop. I can't be mad at that.

It's... murky. Officially there were so many departing members and financial problems neither name could be officially used. So various members made solo and group albums that rarely had the same creative spark as the whole group. George and Bootsy were of course the big exceptions.

It's been discussed elsewhere, but Sunn O))) and Earth are just about the two bands in my discography that could even be remotely classified as belonging broadly to the metal genre. Even though I don't mind some metal (Rammstein I really like for example), these are the only two "metal" bands of whom I own records.

Although it's not the designated label they're put under, I like to call them dark ambient. It's just they use walls of feedback and guitar riffs rather than sampled industrial and keyboards.

I think the standard label for those guys is "Drone Metal" or "Drone Doom", but I can see the Dark Ambient categorization fitting to some extent as well, they re definitely heavily influenced by it...

I never liked the "djent" movement at all. Rhythmically chugging some ludicrously down-tuned string over and over isn't quite my idea of good music... And yet, there's a good number of bands, like Periphery, Akeldama and The Advaita Concept, I actually like a lot, for having other merits to their music.

I've never really felt "djent" was a coherent genre, per se, but there a few good bands associated with the label- Periphery, as you mentioned, as well as Meshuggah (who are usually cited as the Ur-Example of the sound), Gojira and Tesseract.

I think it's more a stylistic sound that happens to fuse really well with other metal genres. A bit like Grind.

Hence why I called it a "movement". :P

Aha, fair enough- I suppose the two terms are not synonymous, exactly...

I thought Djent was just a band.