DAY 24 of the 30 Day Song Challenge, alternative music styles!
Breaking up is hard to do - but often necessary and inevitable…. Let’s hear those songs that done called it quits!
Each day I’ll post the challenge and you share some of your favorite alternative & indie songs that meet the challenge!
The easy answer for me would be an REM, but honestly, I’m not sad they broke up - they did it on their terms when they were done, that’s how you do it.
So, instead I’ll go to one that, while ultimately led to 2 great bands (Son Volt & Wilco (and others)), still loved the OG…. Uncle Tupelo. Here’s “Graveyard Shift” https://youtu.be/m5jsrhUQz4o?si=fFG5HY8TPH4EX19e
Oh man, I probably have a lot of these. I have a habit of falling in love with random EPs and early albums of bands that went nowhere (or got big and totally ruined their sound. So they’re dead to me. cough hop along cough)
hop along
What? Bark You’re Head of Dog was their best album yet.
Wow. So have you been diagnosed with terrible taste or are you living in denial?
Just kidding. But go back and listen to their first major release, Get Disowned. A near perfect indie album, with enough punk sensibilities and amazing lyricism to set it apart from the pack. Not to mention it’s unique cadence, where you can tell Frances wrote the songs with her guitar, and then had the band fill in. So it’s not as produced, because the structure was there. Using the band to fill in those spaces gives the amazing lyrics a true punch of sound, because he music follows the words around the tune. It’s very unique in that right.
Compare the lyrics of Get Idsowned to Bark Your Head off, dog. It’s so clear GD was thought out, not rushed, and it was cared for and labored over…And then everything they’ve done since signing to a bigger label was so obviously written with the whole band, probably IN the studio, under the nose of a producer. It’s so…pop. Which, if you listen to Frances’ early solo stuff and the first ever “Hop Along” album, Is Something Wrong?, you’d see that’s not what she does best.
The Hop Along, Queen Ansleis album is really rough and pretty juvenile, but you can still get a sense of what set her apart in songwriting. She had a unique sound that’s been either bought out of her or that she just lost as she ran out of stories to tell.
We can have different opinions on this, but I’m very much of the opinion that even Painted Shut sucks. They lost their sound. I’ll always wonder what would’ve happened if they never signed to saddle creek and stayed on an even smaller label. I saw them a few times, they were opening for Apples In Stereo and they played Johnny Brenda’s. These are all before Painted Shut came out. But I heard the singles from that album and got that sinking feeling. It just…changed so much. And I really can’t say enough about how much the lyrical talent was sucked out of her. Because look at the poetry of GD. And then at a song like…Powerful Man. Which is one of he worst songs I’ve ever heard, not even just from bands I like otherwise. Like…the song sucks. The lyrics are trash. And they haven’t gotten better since.
I’m not sure if this is a really band that split up or just a one off collaboration, but whatever.
Cracklin’ water by OP8The Sundays - Goodbye - superb band, three great albums, and then history. They still make music for their friends and for themselves, but nothing sees the light of day. They got out of music to raise a family and that family is now grown so I would always love for them to get back into it.
You can see the bassist and drummer around on the internet once in awhile. They do their own thing and have their own lives, so it’s been neat to catch up with them over the years. But the singer and guitarist disappeared.
Slint’s 1991 album Spiderland is one of my favorite albums ever. They haven’t done anything since and I have no idea what those guys are up to but I’d definitely be intrigued if they popped up again
God Lives Underwater - From Your Mouth
I always thought this band was underrated. They broke up after the singer unexpectedly died.
Outkast is one of my favorite hip hop artists and I would definitely be excited if they decided to do something together again.
