bands overrated by pierro scaruffi

Piero Scaruffi Really IS My Italian Twin!

(seriously didn't assume he'd already been examined in such depth)

haha marco. his site is wildly diverse

http://www.scaruffi.com/music/best100.html

he loves tim buckley

i won't complain with that

http://www.scaruffi.com/ratings/90.html

probably NONE heard of them, but thats part of Scaruffi's fascination.
I strongly disagree with a lot of ideas, but at the same time you can find lots of useful informations and you have to admire the guts of this true catalogue man.

I am chuckling over "phony ranchhand gravitas".

Scaruffi, if you are out there, we need freaks of your calibre!

(i don't know if that was really him posting at the end of that other thread. probably though.)

# Tortoise
# Morphine
# Bardo Pond
# Nine Inch Nails
# Cop Shoot Cop
# Cul De Sac
# Royal Trux
# Slint
# Lisa Germano
# Vampire Rodents
# Built To Spill
# Orb
# Soul Coughing
# Portishead
# Dirty Three
# My Bloody Valentine
# Lycia
# Magnetic Fields
# Lightwave
# Thinking Fellers Union Local 282
# Mercury Rev
# Black Tape For A Blue Girl
# Stereolab
# Autechre
# Type O Negative
# Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
# Jesus Lizard
# Primus
# Nirvana
# Girls Against Boys
# Red House Painters
# Labradford
# Today Is The Day
# Smog
# Rollins Band
# Babes In Toyland
# Dogbowl
# For Carnation
# Cows
# Ed Hall
# Jarboe
# Roy Montgomery
# Pain Teens
# Phish
# Low
# Windy & Carl
# Unwound
# Belly
# Aurora
# Mo Boma
# Polvo
# Mazzy Star
# Bark Psychosis
# Brainiac
# Cobra Verde
# Vidna Obmana
# Six Finger Satellite
# 5ive Style
# Bran Van 3000
# Juliana Hatfield
# Unsane
# Orbital
# Transglobal Underground
# Liz Phair
# Breeders
# Tindersticks
# Gravitar
# Subarachnoid Space
# Radiohead
# Run On
# Bugskull
# Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments
# Kyuss
# Sun City Girls
# Robin Holcomb
# Daniel Johnston
# Ozric Tentacles

tim buckley = overrated!!!!

The Cyber Age (roughly 1995-2001)

The Late 1990s: Globalization
Drum'n'Bass
Trip-hop
Post-post-rock
Ambience
Africa
Glitch Music and Digital Minimalism
Exuberance
Transcendence
Violence
Confusion
Depression
Doom
Hip-hop Music
Digital Avantgarde

The Digital Age (roughly 2001-08)

The 2000s: Decade of Fear
DJs and Rappers
Bards and Dreamers
Tunesmiths
Populists
Intellectuals
Clubbers
Rockers
Trippers

immediately thought Morphine when I read the title

Morphine is great; I'd've said Hash Jar Tempo

Morphone IS great. I'd have gone with type O negative. They topped his metal list too.

Morphine even.

...O'Rourke is obviously not much of a guitar player?

I'm Happy And I'm Singing (Mego, 2001) contains three lengthy improvisations for electronic keyboards and computer. This is trivial minimalism that any fan of Terry Riley's playful repetition (1,2,3,4), Steve Reich's gradual variation (I'm Happy) and both (I'm Singing) would recognize as a clumsy imitation of something that had been going on 30 years before. O'Rourke is jumping on every possible bandwagon, hoping that naive critics will endorse his eclecticism as genius. His curiosity is genuine, but his talent is dubious. The results are certainly not revolutionary, and nothing too exciting. Like most prolific artists, O'Rourke does not have much to say. Jumping from stylistic bandwagon to stylistic bandwagon, O'Rourke is rapidly becoming a uniquely multi-faceted artistic failure.

that is his best album

Hey I love Scaruffi & consider him a huge reference point but the dude's not afraid to bring the rongness...you should read what he has to say about the Fall some time...

here's what the man writes about nico's "desertshore":

"Her second masterpiece, and one of the greatest albums of all time, Desertshore (January 1971), went even further, evoking the desolation of an icy and empty universe, as if after a colossal catastrophe. Stronger doses of urban neurosis further depressed her voice, but also lifted the shamanic/prophetic tone to another dimension. The sense of ancient became more than a smell of death: a smell of the otherworld. The anemic, moribund, suspenseful atmospheres penned by her church-like harmonium and Cale's viola belonged to a catacomb. By now, it was more than fatalism: it was eternal angst. It was fear, both bleak and majestic, leading to a mental paralysis that was both childish and cosmic. Each song was an enigma, and the singer a sphinx. But she was also an explorer, albeit an explorer of the inner world. Nico's cadaveric, petrified voice wandered through the labyrinth of a wasted mind, scouring inner landscapes made of nightmares, visions and nameless shadows for the ultimate meaning. Or, better, Nico lived on another planet, and was the Homer who sang about the apocalypse of planet Earth, as viewed from up above."

i mean, good grief.

if nothing else, it succeeds in making you want to re-listen to the album.

I immediately thought Hash Jar Tempo when I saw the thread title

tbf, charlie h, that paragraph is not much more ott then what Bangs wrote about The Marble Index, her 'first masterpiece'

granted they're both pretty interesting and deep albums, but that's still some fearless writing.

yeah Scaruffi and his followers write that kind of shit a lot about of weird albums. here's one for Irrlicht (which is only kinda worth reading):

Then in 1972 we got Tangerine Dream's Zeit8 and Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht, two very different electronic masterpieces, and Irrlicht is superior. This genre of music with such rich potential, and such rapid development, and such grand explorations, had suddenly birthed a work not only of insight, musical genius, and timbre genius, but of evocative power and beauty and scale far beyond everything that came before it!

Imagine yourself as a film critic in the 1910s (okay, you're the first film critic ever). You see the early experiments of Edison and Melies and Feuillade and Griffith and think "Hmmm, they may be on to something here." You see Birth of a Nation and Intolerance and are jumping for joy at the potential of film. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari opens up a world of frightening possibilities. And then you see The Last Laugh, and you're curled up on your couch, sobbing at the beauty, the power, the humanity in those moving images. You knew this day was coming, but it still hits you like a ton of bricks. (Okay, AJ, you're sitting erect like a man and I'm weeping in the fetal position: whatever. Also, replace The Last Laugh with the name of the earliest film that emotionally overpowered you.)

But in fact, Irrlicht is greater than The Last Laugh for me because cinema, and Murnau himself, later topped The Last Laugh with Sunrise, Citizen Kane, and a hundred others. Irrlicht is, for me, still the most powerful electronic work I have ever heard. For me, it evokes "the universe, riven. It is infinite, overwhelming, and awesome in the purest sense of the word. It is a magniloquent galactic creature, the climax of the fourth dimension, or the breath of God."

The piece begins with a clear kinship to minimalism. As one reviewer writes: "The first 10 minutes of the opening track represent a strict meditation on D. Not the chord of D, mind you. The note." Melodic inertness is a property of many early minimalist works, for example In C9 or La Monte Young's epic yawners like Drift Study10 (1967). But Irrlicht makes much better use of timbre - of the sound of the music - and thusly evokes everything I wrote above with, basically, a single note. Timbre had been a major focus of many composers since Varese's works of the 1920s, which "led to an almost manic exploration of texture, mostly through timbre and juxtaposing of timbres and overlapping of timbres. Notes were, in a sense, less important than the timbre of the instrument that produced them. The "sequence" of notes itself was, in a sense, no more a temporal sequence than a spatial "choreography" of sounds. The composer was no longer creating a narrative but exploring a space, a soundscape." No piece of electronic music before Irrlicht had made such incredible use of timbre. And electronic music is an orchestra of all possible sounds, those made by acoustic instruments, acoustic noises, and sounds impossible to make acoustically.

Consider the rising electronic washes at about the 9:40 mark of "Satz Ebene" and the following few minutes. It is here that you begin to hear what Scaruffi so eloquently writes about the piece: "Schulze penned the first aesthetic of popular electronic music, an aesthetic that inherited from Indian raga the sense of tempo, from jazz the sense of spontaneity, and from late romantic symphonists the sense of magniloquence. In many ways, Irrlicht (1972) created both the archetype and the reference standard for "kosmische musik". Schulze's recipe included Bach-ian organ ouvertures, Tibetan-style droning, "Wagner-ian" polyphonic architectures, Pink Floyd-ian cosmic psychedelia, Gregorian liturgy, John Coltrane's metaphysical explorations... and many other ingredients. The synthesis achieved by that electronic symphony was momentous and ground-breaking. Schulze sculpted/painted an ambience that sounded like a live recording of galactic life, but, rather than indulging in rendering cosmic events, he focused on the pathos that the unknown and the infinite elicit into the human soul. The symphony alternates moments of catalectic suspense, of apocalyptic chaos and of moving melody. Schulze sequenced them so as to maximize awe and angst."

After the incredible "Satz Ebene", the other two tracks may seem like a let-down at first, like listening to the rest of Arvo Part's Tabula Rasa11 (1977) after the glorious and heart-shattering crescendo from about 6:40 to the end of the first movement, or like the "returning home" chapters after the defeat of Sauron in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. In "Satz Gewitter", the intergalactic turmoil calms, a few weakened wormholes and dimensions still snapping and crumbling under the implosive pressure, but the epic narrative comes to an oasis of calm, which is where "Satz Exil Sils Maria" begins.

Throughout the last track, one becomes more aware of the inexhaustible space of... outer space, and shadows of renewing tension creep in as the flotsam of multiversal conflict drifts by. But at the 14 minute mark, the awesome and fearful breath of God exercises a forceful control and the album closes with the universe complete and willfully stable. The journey is contentedly whole and now part of you, like the entirety of Tabula Rasa and Lord of the Rings.

It's an exciting, intense, epic, and deeply satisfying work of great musical and emotional innovation. I'm sure you will not have the same experience of Irrlicht as I have, or as AfterHours has, or as Scaruffi has, but I do hope that sharing my love for Irrlicht may inspire you to love it in your own way."

albums overrated by pierro scaruffi = "Irrlicht"

it's not even close to Schulze's best album or his most interesting...he got lucky by not using a real orchestra and getting this cool astral sound but it's clearly the work of a beginner just learning his craft...like a 7/10 for me

that said I might be biased against this guy so take that with a grain of salt

No, I agree with you, I've never heard any Klaus Schulze albums that I really liked, though he has made about 900 of them and I've only heard a few

anyway not to rant about Scaruffi at length but I really have a problem with things like this:

http://scaruffi.com/vol5/spears.html

obviously he thinks pop music is worthless, but when you make a big deal about the sanctity of your rating system, it's probably not a good idea to rate albums that in all likelihood you have never heard

Type O Negative.