stupidrockbandtricks

[stupidrockbandtricks]

Porcupine Tree - Lightbulb Sun

Porcupine Tree isn't exactly a super-obscure band among folks who like rock music, but I feel like the chamber pop era gets overlooked as a bridge between their psychedelic era and their metal era. And while it is "in-between" as much as any evolution of sound a band has, they ended up being my favorite albums of the band's output.

Lightbulb Sun in particular is a kind of "depressed older brother" to the band's previous album, Stupid Dream, and the lyrics of the lead single "Four Chords That Made A Million" seem to express the frustration the band was having with their lack of commercial success. The album as a whole is a bit more commercially focused, though I'm not sure the sales ended up reflecting that.

#full album #progressive rock #chamber pop #decade: 1990s #Youtube

[stupidrockbandtricks]

Opus Däi - Tierra Trágame

This is the album that caused me to create the channel in the first place. I bought it at a Borders in 2007, right around when the album came out. I enjoy how dynamic the album is musically,moving from gentle acoustic guitar crooning to full on screaming post-hardcore. You can hear The Mars Volta and Tool mixing in with some more classic rock sounds. It's an alternate timeline sound, like if metal as a genre had focused in on refining Zeppelin instead of Sabbath.

The first time I listened to it all the way through, I was reading American Gods for the first time, and the album has become the unofficial soundtrack to the story for me. There's a lot of religious imagery in the lyrics (obviously, given their name, though they aren't a religious band), which works well with the mythologies at play in the book. I doubt anyone else would agree, but the experience made the album special to me. I can still hear the music in my head when I read the book again, which is something I try to do every winter.

#full album #progressive rock #post-grunge #decade: 2000s #Youtube