Aging rock act on new album: This time we wanted to go back to the basics

Thing about the Mr Bungle revamp is that it was pre-pandemic — I caught the SF show of their first burst of dates about a month before lockdown.

i knew they'd played it live but i figured they hadn't planned to actually, like, record it until the world shut down...buuut my memory may be wrong on that one.

Art-pop department:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/apr/11/patrick-wolf-addiction-bankruptcy-hit-and-run-night-safari

This confidence in telling the story of his decade of disaster and recovery came from Wolf’s “thrill” at working alone with the same instruments he used on his first two albums. “I reconnected with my craft – it’s how I started when I was 14, just with my four-track,” he says.

"“But Here We Are” has a back-to-basics immediacy and intensity that was missing from the last few Foo Fighters albums. Though not terribly surprising for a group nearing its 30th year, they have sometimes seemed in the past decade to be grasping for gimmicks and overarching concepts to differentiate one record from the next: “Medicine at Midnight,” from 2021, was a forgettable foray into ’80s-inspired dance rock and funk grooves. (As a companion piece, they also released a cheeky collection of Bee Gees covers.) The songwriting on “Sonic Highways,” from 2014, was a bit stronger, but that album still felt yoked a little too tightly to its concept — recording each song in a different city and paying tribute to its musical history, as explored on the Grohl-directed documentary series of the same name."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/arts/music/foo-fighters-but-here-we-are-review.html

"We decided to make an album where none of us was ever in the room."

Be Here We Are Now

Entertain us

Then they brought in Antonoff, whose band, Bleachers, came up around the same time as the 1975, but who is better known for producing Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, and seemingly every other big name in pop. The safest thing for the 1975 to do, Antonoff said, would be to venture further into the esoteric; the surprising and brave thing would be to make a really good, straightforward album, as simple and as complex as a perfect slice of pizza. The band, with Antonoff, set rules in the studio. Everyone would play everything together, in real time, as much as possible. Healy wouldn’t do any of the backing vocals, so that the album would be replicable live. Everyone would play analog instruments, and, ideally, ones they didn’t normally play.

"Everyone switches up instruments" is another established idea, but different from the rest of what's listed – surprised to see that thrown in at the end. I wish bands wouldn't try to make albums "replicable live"... why not give your fans a different experience.

bands changing instruments is new jersey adjacent

Have there been any ironic or "meta" takes on the "back to basics" album... like done with a wink, and maybe a good deal of studio trickery to simulate/"comment on" the live-in-a-room approach?

I guess Royal Trux's Accelerator is one version of that concept... maybe also the last Fiery Furnaces album, in a way.

Cruising With Ruben & The Jets?

why not give your fans a different experience.

Alex Lifeson said he was disappointed when he saw Cream live because the solos weren’t the same ones from the records. This accounts for why Rush always (and inexplicably, imo) strove to make their shows sound as much like their recordings as possible. There were minor exceptions here and there, but that never made sense to me.

Sheesh, just put a boombox on the stage and play the record

co-signing this. never understood why anyone would want to see the band just recreate the record. working in music shops, it's a comment i heard a lot. definition of tedious imo.

On a bit of a Floyd revisit, this is the album that’s really doing it for me. Partly because it’s the one I listened to least during my adolescent Floyd phase so it sounds freshest to me of all their post-Meddle stuff. Gilmour’s playing is really great throughout, and it also has a stripped-down four-guys-in-a-room vibe compared to the grandiosity of most of the ‘70s albums.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Sunday, 4 June 2023 13:11 (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ironic, because didn't Gilmour play a lot of the bass on the records due to Waters' ineptitude on his chosen instrument?

He did but, like, Gilmour was one of the the guys in the room. Animals sounds much more lean than what surrounds it in their discography is all I mean. I’m sure that was intentional. (Famously feeling the impact of punk etc.)

I'm sure Waters could have played those basslines if he'd been bothered, he'd kind of lost interest in playing bass by that time is what I suspect.

lol this just made me reread the production process for The Wall and holy cow. Talk about the opposite of “four guys in a room.” Often not on the same continent.

As Hideous Lump pointed out on the Pink Floyd Animals thread, not only could Roger play the basslines on that album, but he’d already been playing those lines for years — much of that material had been in the band’s live sets since 1974. I’d be curious to know the source of “Gilmour actually played bass on those albums.”

Per the wiki page drawn from published credits, Waters only played bass on “Dogs.”

There was a story about Gilmour's amusement at Waters winning 'bassist of the year' in the NME poll one year - "That should have been me!"

The sound of four guys suing each other in a courtroom

Lol

One side-note about the recording of Animals was that the band had just finished building Britannia Row studio and basically started recording as soon as the paint was dry. IIRC from Nick Mason's book, even though two tracks were already familiar - the actual recording was somewhat of a techinical clusterfuck. Animals took just under a year to record, is that Floyd's idea of back to basics?

They recorded it all in one place and the only credited players are the band members (apart from, weirdly, a guitar part on one song only available on the 8-track release?), so by Floyd standards, yeah.

Gilmour played the same solo for 50 years and was hailed as a genius. Which is, I suppose, a form of genius.

Oh is this the Pink Floyd opinions channel? Excuse me

Pink Floyd certainly qualifies as an aging rock act, although they really didn't have any basics to get back to.

If only we had a thread for them

I don't think this is the thread for purists.

xxp Just four guys, and a set of Elektro-Mess-Technik plate reverberators, in a tiled echo chamber…

In my defense I actually posted on the Animals thread and got dragged in here entirely against my will. Like a giant pig balloon coming untethered and crashing in an irate farmer's field, you could say.

I dub thee unforgiven

I was responsible for that but the fact that the two threads were live at the same time mad it hard to resist.

Pink Floyd’s weird, their “back to basics” impetus gets channeled way way backwards in time to extreme basics, like pre-music caveperson basic, e.g ummugunda studio disc, “household objects”

Four EMS sequencers in a room

pre-music caveperson basic

Four furry guys gathered together in a cave grooving with a Pict, getting back to basics

They'd need Syd if they truly wanted to get back to the basics.

You could make a case for The Endless River as Floyd's "four guys sitting in David Gilmour's houseboat" album. This extra Division Bell material was known to exist and like many latter-era Floyd rumors, its legendary status grew in proportion to how much you love the '68-'72 era of the band. I'd love to hear another More or Obscured By Clouds, but the end product (even as manipulated as it was) still sounds like "four guys sitting in David Gilmour's houseboat looking for ideas"

Three guys, surely?

Floyd (and/or Gilmour or Mason solo) has been using Guy Pratt since the 80s. He's more or less in the Darryl Jones role.

Fall Out Boy

“I remember when Patrick first played the demo for ‘Love From The Other Side’, and it felt new and old at the same time,” continues Pete. “It was something we would have wanted to do [back then], but we wouldn’t have really known how to do it.” Not only did Pete instantly know that the track needed to be the lead single for their eighth album, but it was the moment he bought into Patrick’s “back to basics” vision. “I knew we could build a statement around that song.”

Royal Blood

When Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher sat down to talk about making a new album, they knew what they wanted to achieve. It involved a conscious return to their roots, back when they had made music that was influenced by Daft Punk, Justice, and Philippe Zdar of Cassius. It also called for a similar back-to-basics approach to what had made their self-titled debut album so thrilling, visceral and original.

Are any of these 'back to basics' records successful in that regard, or are they all merely desperate attempts to revive a flagging muse?

And a flagging career.

I'm pretty sure Honking on Bobo was a huge success

Have there been any ironic or "meta" takes on the "back to basics" album

Not quite the same thing, but Quadrophenia was originally supposed to be sequenced as a "history of the Who", with the first disc starting off with 1965-style arrangements, and only gradually introducing keyboards, horns and synthesizers as the record went on.

Pink Floyd certainly qualifies as an aging rock act, although they really didn't have any basics to get back to.

I remember a defensive quote from Richard Wright, maybe in the early 90s: "we could make a great record with just a guitar, a Hammond organ and a drum kit..."

Are any of these 'back to basics' records successful in that regard

Despite a dismissive comment above, I thought the general take on Accelerate was that R.E.M. had stopped their downward slope and at least deserved an honorable mention. I thought it was about as good as Around the Sun, though certainly more energetic (and shorter).

Not quite the same thing, but Quadrophenia was originally supposed to be sequenced as a "history of the Who", with the first disc starting off with 1965-style arrangements, and only gradually introducing keyboards, horns and synthesizers as the record went on.

Yes and no. The original project was called Rock Is Dead - Long Live Rock, and it was indeed envisioned as a kind of Who history. Among the tracks completed were "Long Live Rock," "Is It In My Head?", and "Love, Reign O'er Me." Around that time (May, 1972), they also recorded and/or completed a few songs originally meant for Lifehouse: "Put The Money Down," "Join Together," and "Relay" which were to be incorporated into RID-LLR. There were also three songs that only circulate as Townshend demos (and may not have been recorded by the Who): "Get Inside," "Women's Liberation," and "Can't You See I'm Easy" that were to be part of the project.

The album unfinished, they did a European tour in the summer of 1972, then Townshend got involved with an orchestral performance/recording of Tommy, and then set up Eric Clapton's comeback concert, which is when he started thinking about mod again, began writing Quadrophenia, and incorporated two of the 1972 songs into it. Parts of Quadrophenia -- "The Real Me" and "5.15" -- are four-guys-in-a-room, but most of it is three-guys-in-a-room-overdubbing-onto-Pete's-demos and, separately, one-guy-in-a-room-singing-onto-Pete's-demos; Daltrey would only record his vocals if Pete was not present at the studio. And Entwistle would take the multitracks home after a session and overdub multiple horn parts at his home studio.