Musical Loose Ends

This week, Janet asked her readers, ”What are your favorite bands or artists of today?”, which is a bit of a challenge. I don't buy music as often as I once did, and my radio station changed to an all-talk format. I'm not completely in the dark, and haven't reached the point of my parents who label everything after the 1940s “that rock and roll garbage”, but the peak of my knowledge was definitely during the 1990s. So I'll do my best to think of some current groups I like, but I'm definitely going to cheat and throw in some oversights from my previous musical posts.



When I wrote about '90s rock, Green Day was certainly one of the bigger oversights. In college, I listened to Dookie as much as Pearl Jam's Ten, The Offspring's Smash, or Metallica's black album. Green Day is still going strong, so I've included here the video from the more recent hit, Boulevard of Broken Dreams. It was put to good use in a Smallville season 4 episode, a high point in an otherwise low season.



As I mentioned, The Offspring are another band I listened to excessively in my college days. The Kids Aren't Alright is a song from 1998, and will always remind me of the film The Faculty, in which it was featured. They're still around, but this is one of the last songs I could listen to repeatedly, and the newer stuff hasn't grabbed me the way the older stuff did.




Finally, I'm listing something more current. Evanescence blended alternative rock with orchestral sounds and beautiful female vocals. I've included a double feature of videos here. While Bring me to Life may be the most popular song from their rise to fame, and was featured along with My Immortal in Daredevil, I went with the marginally less heard latter. There's a lot wrong with that film, but the use of Evanescence is one of the things they got right, and My Immortal will always conjure for me that scene in the cemetery where Jennifer Garner's character moves out of the rain and under her umbrella, thus stepping out of “view” of Ben Affleck's Daredevil's radar vision. She's always in these roles where I wish I could be there to comfort her. There, there, Jennifer Garner. The second video is the most recent tune I've been hearing, Call Me When You're Sober, and proves that lead singer Amy Lee and the band still have it, even after the departure of cofounder Ben Moody.



Audioslave was born from the ashes of two other great bands, when the disbanded Soundgarden's lead singer found a new group in the former members of Rage Against the Machine after the departure of their lead singer, Zack de la Rocha. Greater than the sum of their parts, they've found a new sound with hints of the old. Doesn't Remind Me is one of my favorites. As a bonus treat, check out their cover of Seven Nation Army which matches if not surpasses The White Stripes version. Listen to Cornell wail! Listen to the guitars wail! I'll continue in a minute...



I'm about to get lost in another song. Drowning Pool's original lead singer Dave Williams may have suffered a fatal heart attack in 2002, but Bodies earned him a measure of immortality with its sick transitions from whispering to shouting. I defy anyone to sit still when that comes on.



For the longest time, whenever I heard the pulse pounding Down With the Sickness by Disturbed I thought he was singing “get up, the monkey's down with the sickness” because, you know, monkeys carry diseases, and I'm, you know, a moron. It didn't help that I thought he was making monkey noises in the song too. Misheard lyrics aside, the band in general and this song in particular seriously rocks.



Speaking of “disturbed”, check out this video for Wait and Bleed from Slipknot.



Okay, things were only going to get heavier and angrier, so I've pulled back a bit with this next choice. I meant to correct Jerry the other day when he sent me an e-mail in which he described Nirvana as a dead band, a slightly inaccurate statement. After lead singer Kurt Cobain's untimely demise, Nirvana's drummer Dave Grohl became the lead in his own band, the Foo Fighters. It's hard to believe that a little over a decade later, the group is still going, and has outlived his original affiliation. No Way Back is one of their most recent singles, and they continue to move forward.

* * *

I think I may have underestimated how much I've listened to since college. There's no good point to cut this off, and there are so many other groups I'd like to mention like Tool, Korn, Godsmack, Primus, Velvet Revolver, Outkast, U2 and more. I'll end on a double feature, OutKast's Bombs Over Baghdad followed by a current collaboration between U2 and Green Day, a cover of The Saints Are Coming.