I said in my Friday Miscellanea post that I didn't see much worth commenting on. But just now, I did. More and more I find Rick Beato to be worth following because he often surprises. When it comes to popular music I'm usually a curmudgeon because the mass-produced industrial music we hear in just about every public space drives me right up the wall. But of course, there is a lot, well, some, really good "popular" music being created. Probably not really popular, but really interesting. And Rick Beato has just found some for us:
Yep, everything he says there is true. This really doesn't sound like anything you have heard before and yes, it really is beautiful. But deep in the harmonic structure, it reminds me very much of Debussy if he were alive today, living in London and working with a drummer named "II".
7 comments:
Ah I think I have to dissent! Or at least, my ears don't respond to it. It sounds like a lot of music I used to listen to on the fringes of pop, metal etc. -- but with flatter melodic lines and less adventurous, more static harmony. Maybe it's not quite 'mass produced, industrial music', but it sounds very artificial and heavily produced -- machine music. The Debussy, on the other hand... breathtaking naturalness, flow, shapeliness... How rigid and forced Sleep Token seems by comparison!
I think this, for example, isa better example of a not dissimilar kind of art-rock genre-crossing:
https://youtu.be/q0kl-gQucpI?si=BndWi8CHsCp36RAW
Thanks, Steven. I've been longing for some dissent! I see your point. I hear a lot of creative invention in Sleep Token. But also in the Bent Knee song. This is way outside the pop music norms. I wonder, can either of these groups actually make a living playing this kind of music?
I have to dissent, too. There are probably dozens of acts from the last nearly twenty years presenting this kind of stylistically mixed, but quantized and autotuned, metal-EDM-R&B-hiphop pop music. Beato seems to have missed out on that, and makes this act (which has already peaked and begun to decline) seem more innovative than it is.
If you google band members you sometimes find info about teaching or other work, much like classical musicians. This is impossible to do with Sleep Token, given anonymity, but as they are playing arenas they've surely passed the threshold where they actually make a living from performing. (I confess, this makes me want to like them even less! It's my teenage anti-mainstream prejudice reasserting itself: that is, if a band is too popular they're probably doing something wrong...)
Steven, your view is remarkably similar to something John Cage said once: if people liked a new piece he had written it was a sign he had done something wrong. I like the paradoxical idea that the most radical artistic ideas are often those that reach down to the very foundations of art and reality. We find this in Beethoven and there was, for me, a faint echo in the harmonic structure that Rick Beato uncovered in Sleep Token, underneath all that computerized production.
And Anon, if there was a whole generation of artists that found ways to humanize quantized and autotuned musical styles that Rick and certainly myself missed, then so much the better, not that we missed it but that the trend was to humanize the mechanical. I think Kanye played a role there as well.
Steven, Sleep Token is anonymous as part of their brand image, but the identity of the two band members has been well-known for a while now and is only a Google search away. Indeed, both have done some teaching, albeit presumably that is only now an optional amusement alongside their full-time career as musicians.
Sleep Token lost me within 25 seconds.
If it's a matter of listening to bands that do arena shows I'd probably listen to BABYMETAL over Sleep Token.
Beato's a grunge fan and I generally loathe grunge with the possible exception of Soundgarden.
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