Obscure bands. Awesome bands.

City Boy reminded me of a mix of 10cc and Queen, with maybe a little Supertramp in there. But mostly 10cc. I’m pretty sure Mercury signed them up because 10cc had recently lost half their core, they feared the band would not survive and they wanted a talented sound-alike in their roster as a contingency (Cynical? Me?).

That said, those first two City Boy albums totally knocked it out of the ballpark. The Day the Earth Caught Fire too. Most of the others were also pretty good. I’ve still never heard It’s Personal.

Oh, and Lol Mason’s post-CB hit with the Maisonettes was pretty cool:

edited 25th Aug '11 11:49:35 PM by Bananaquit

Confirmed Bachelors: the dramedy hit of 1883!

• Canobliss (excellent Disturbed clone)
• Car Bomb (technical, heavily mathematical death metal)
• Cire (alternates between sounding like Incubus and sounding like Tool)
• Coaltar of the Deepers (experimental falsetto shoegaze)
• Cruentus (Polish Meshuggah clone, most of their songs are in extremely syncopated 4/4)
• Dead Channel (hyper-aggressive industrial nu metal)
• Derb Ryan (Korn clone that gives Korn a run for their money)
• Dog Fashion Disco (does the Mr. Bungle sound better than Mr. Bungle)
• Dreadlock Pussy (aggressive nu metal)
• earthtone9 (sounds a little like Deftones)
• Eisbrecher (Rammstein clone)
• End of April (same as Dreadlock Pussy but more hardcore punk-ish)
• Facecage (aggressive metal band produced by Corey Taylor from Slipknot)
• Flymore (Korn clone, and a great one too)
• Giantkiller (decent Tool clone)
• Given (old-school nu metal, sounds like Adrenaline-era Deftones)
• Haji's Kitchen (technical groove metal, pretty good)
• ikd-sj (Japanese experimental grungy ambient metal)
• Melovine (can't really be compared to anything, but they're amazing)
• Milkweed (ultra-profane hilarious nu metal from Cincinnati)
• Mnemic (pretty obscure, considering they're one of Metallica's favorite bands)
• Painface (death metal band fronted by Anders Colsefini, the original vocalist of Slipknot)
• Peach (Justin Chancellor was the bassist for this band before he left to play for Tool)
• Polkadot Cadaver (band composed of ex-Dog Fashion Disco members)
• Saturate (like their contemporaries Melovine, they have a very unique sound)
• Seeded Crown (alternately known as Calm)
• Smogus (balls-out nu metal, have their own genre called "Xplocore")
• Spine (decent rap metal with Jennifer Arroyo from Kittie as bassist)
• Sunna (absolutely shocked more people don't know about these guys)
• Sunk Loto (first album was forgettable, second album was amazing)

edited 26th Aug '11 3:44:19 AM by Tooru

Check out my crappy internet band.

Just bought the debut album by this Zeppelin-sounding band from L.A. called Rival Sons. They're quite Earworm-y. Here's some guy's review and here's their lead single.

If you like this sort of music, the rest of the track-listing is worth checking out

• 1. All Over The Road
• 2. Young Love
• 4. Only One
• 5. Get Mine
• 6. Burn Down Los Angeles
• 7. Save Me
• 8. Gypsy Heart
• 9. White Noise
• 10. Face Of Light

Sons Of The System was one of the first albums I ever bought.

The 5 geek social fallacies. Know them well.

I like Duke Special, an interesting local entertainer. Here's a video of him on Jools Holland: [1]

edited 29th Aug '11 10:52:03 AM by TheGloomer

You just started buying albums last year?

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

I bought my first couple of CDs two years ago, and I have only bought three more since then because of living in a culturally deprived country and having little free cash for myself. What's the big deal?

Also, Mnemic are fairly well known for a peculiar djent band out of a country that's normally under the radar metal-wise (aside from Mercyful Fate/King Diamond). That said, they hardly receive recognition for their unquestionably best and most ambitious release, which is their debut. Shame.

edited 29th Aug '11 2:34:58 PM by Litis

Just looking at my iTunes library, I can identify a couple of bands that I think are pretty good that would be obscure today, even though they were reasonably successful for a little while many years back.

One is called the Babys. It's a melodic rock group that was John Waite's first band. There's also Pandora's Box, which was an all-female vocal group masterminded by Jim Steinman that only ever did one album (which was only successful in South America and Japan) that included songs later featured on Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell.

Yes.

Well, I bought albums before that, but not that many... Lesee, I got Accelerate, The Downward Spiral... Can't remember what else.

edited 29th Aug '11 5:14:35 PM by inane242

The 5 geek social fallacies. Know them well.

um right now i would say little dragon, they have that jazzy yet cold and detached electronic sound to them.

also themselves, a funky rap group with a twist to them.

oh also TV Girl. they have that whole nostalgic 50's and 60's nostalgic pop with modern beats, and most of their songs are only 1 to 2 minutes long. they're not even in any label yet, nethier independant or major.

edited 6th Sep '11 6:33:44 PM by starfudger122

Today is a sunny day!

If their upcoming album is as good as this, I expect Code For Silence to get in my top ten. And still, this band is sadly obscure.

No regret shall pass over the threshold!

I got some -

• Presence- a decent Post-Grunge band that released one album before disbanding. Their song ride was present on a Bionicle movie sans screaming. They also have a cover of Somebody's Watching Me. check em out
• Big City Rock - i guess you could say they are a bit like the killers. A Pop Rock band, they did a cover of Black Betty for the TMNT movie in a more traditional Hard Rock style
• Hardline - Glam Metal band that started a bit late in the game, though they later branched out into a unique brand of Melodic Metal of some description. Lead singer Johnny Gioelli is also known in Crush 40 and Axel Rudi Pell. Their only hit was probably Hot Cherie. had Neal Schon of Journey on the guitars on their first album.
• Soul Embraced - A Christian Death Metal Band. They started out pretty straight forwardly Death Metal, but branched out almost immediately, becoming a tad experimental with their music . One of their Albums is a blend of Death Metal and an almost Nu Metal flavored Alt Metal. Evanescence covered up their Signature Song My Tourniquet in a completely different style, naming it "Tourniquet"
• The Showdown - another Christian metal band. They started off as a mix of Death Metal and Metal Core (not Death Core in any way, shape, or form) and Groove Metal. Their next album was Groove Metal and Southern rock (where they covered Carry On Wayward Son) and lately they have been a Thrash Metal band with some hints of Death.
• Cryoshell - post grunge band also featured on the same Bionicle movie mentioned above. Reworked the earlier Bionicle song Creeping In My Soul on their first album. Sound a bit like Evanescence, but only superficially .
• Blood Stain Child - Japanese Melodic Death Metal band. Mix in elements of Trance music into their music. Sounds extremely similar to In Flames around the Reroute To Remain era.

One that I've been listening to lately is this band called Le Roux, who were a southern rock/soft rock group from Louisiana in the 1970s and 1980s. I'd describe their original sound as "what Fleetwood Mac would have sounded like if they'd relocated to New Orleans instead of California".

Later on they got a new singer (one of the guys who sang in Toto) and went in a sort of AOR/pomp rock direction.

I'm just gonna pop up here to Entry Pimp The Republic Tigers, Division Day, Juice Lee, and Emily Wells. They're all amazing and Need More Love.

edited 8th Oct '11 4:35:42 PM by BooleanEarth

"In the land of the insecure, the one-balled man is king." - Haven

Fingertight, Dragpipe, Timo Maas, Wing from "South Park"... I could go on all day.

Yeah, Jason Kreis ain't exactly a soccer star.

"I could go on all day" == "I'm all out"

Phantom Alice is badass, but sadly don't have much of a web presence except for a few music videos, like this one;

Thankfully they're local so I may get to see them live in the near future.

Miami dubstep duo Klaypex could be considered obscure for now, I guess, but mainly because they've only been around for a few months. If you ask me, given the sheer quality of the stuff they're making it's only a matter of time before they become big stars...

edited 21st Oct '11 12:35:25 AM by FuschlatzOReilly

Nice.

Also, Captain Panic! is one of my fave dubstep groups. Much better than Skrillex or Bassnectar.

The 5 geek social fallacies. Know them well.

Shadow Gallery and Royal Bliss are both obscure, yet very awesome bands.

Cynic, they're a Technical Death Metal, Jazz-fusion band. I found them on tumblr. [[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ChwHu3iiyc]]

edited 22nd Oct '11 3:23:23 PM by VinniaNein

Cynic aren't exactly obscure.

The 5 geek social fallacies. Know them well.

They were obscure to me.

I like Barry Goudreau's solo albums, recorded while [[Music/Boston his regular group]] was on an extended break between their own albums. Well, the second one is credited to "Orion the Hunter", but it's more or less his second solo album. Obviously the band he was in is far from obscure, but these solo records don't seem to be well known even among AOR fans like myself.

Brad Delp handles a lot of the vocal duties on the album, which is a big plus, and Sib Hashian does the percussion parts. It's kind of like a harder-edged Boston album (or alternatively a more polished Foghat album) and it shows that Boston's output could have remained consistently good even without Tom Scholz's perfectionism.

edited 6th Nov '11 8:47:24 AM by TheGloomer

So, this is a band that are going to be playing the club I help out at next week. We had their CD around to play between bands and I borrowed it. They're a little silly, but they've got an interesting sound and seem like they'd be fun live. That's not a Lady Gaga cover, by the way.