"Pop music from an alternative universe"

Lots, since "alternate universe" is a very loosely defined phrase.
jandek, boredoms, whitehouse, charalambides.

excepter would be reigning that universe

Sophie B. Hawkins - "Damn! I Wish I Was Your Lover"

Pop music in the alternative universe prevalent in 1992, natch!

OTM.

Oh, the first "Go Home Productions et al" Bootleg compilation I made for friends, I christened "Hits from a parallell universe" (Kylie backed by the Who, and so on).

Mind you, the second was "flops from..." as they weren't quite as good.

(The one I gave out at one of the FAPs was vol 3, which was one of the best ones, and I never gave it a title...)

Animal Collective's Sung Tongs.

Escalator Over The Hill

Geez: this is less of a concrete thing and more of a general critical approach, one that I've spent a lot of years thinking puts a pretty accurate umbrella on what I look for in music. Critical approaches are just maddeningly vague when it comes to pinning them down into actual concrete examples, but really they should be -- they should be broad enough to inform the way you listen to pretty much anything, and I can't think of a single band I really like that I couldn't, in some way, fit into the pop-music-from-alternate-universe theory. Break the concept down, and what you're looking at feels a bit like a truism: we want to hear popular music that satisfies all the traditional joys of popular music listening -- only in some new and unexpected way. Put it in practice, and you get the thing that I liked best about the "college" era of indie -- the way it was packed with countless pop groups, but each one seemed to have the unspoken responsibility of stylizing what they were doing into some individualized sonic aesthetic. The funny bit about it, in practice, is that it tends to congratulate one-offs, idiosycratic style-aesthetics that sit off to the side of contemporary pop -- but it's not quite as good at handling alternate-universe pop that actually becomes this universe's pop, as consistently happens with hip-hop developments. That's probably the root of any skepticism I have about it as a critical frame -- the fact that it's a rather indie framework, whether you're talking about rock or dance or hip-hop or whatever, and there are plenty of areas where that framework can be actively counterproductive in terms of figuring out how they work.

Whenever I see this phrase, the one album that ALWAYS comes to mind instantly is Duck Stab by The Residents. The songs are all 2-3 minutes long and follow (what I consider) typical pop-song structures & frameworks - recurring parts, repetitions of the title, etc. - but the sounds themselves are just bizarre. Lyrics are simple/nonsensical (yet determinedly rhyming), instruments/singing synthesized and/or electronically distorted, chord changes unpredictable, hooks replaced by creepy dissonances and tritones that still function as hooks. Result is uniquely ugly and hilarious and sounds like no other LP I've ever heard, really, either by the Residents or anyone else. I suspect that Ween took a lot from this record, altho admittedly I haven't heard enough Ween to be sure.

AR Kane?

Or, wait, doesn't this board hate them...? I don't.

John 2 OTM...I love A.R. Kane, but it's very true that most people on this board don't seem to like them. I've once heard them described as being like "Cocteau Twins with something stuck up their ass." It's actually an apt description, but I can't dislike them.

I don't know if I buy that description, but I'm not sure it'd be a bad thing for the Cocteau Twins to have something shoved up their ass. They might even like it.

I'm surprised the whole "pop music from an alternative universe" cliche is getting such a free pass here. has it been discussed extensively in any other threads? it seems like such a transparent and useless thing to say, I cringe every time I read it in a review or anywhere really.

the first time i heard this trope it had to do with "i only have eyes for you" by the flamingos. that is still the only correct answer.

"I'm surprised the whole "pop music from an alternative universe" cliche is getting such a free pass here. has it been discussed extensively in any other threads? it seems like such a transparent and useless thing to say, I cringe every time I read it in a review or anywhere really."

Maybe not everyone else is as finely attuned to the transparent and useless as yourself?