My hesitation comes when I try to think of a movement that reinvented the sonic grammar in the way you seem to be describing. There's the Beatles, of course, and perhaps the early rock 'n' roll movement, arguably. But David Bowie?
I strain to hear anything in these bands to parallel the "liftoff" strings in Space Oddity, the Kurt Schwitters-inspired babble interludes in Ashes to Ashes, the prepared piano in African Night Flight... But it's not as if I'm against Brooklyn bands per se; in answer to the three you mentioned I propose Black DIce and MGMT, both from Brooklyn. I would even endorse Vampire Weekend as much more innovative than any of the three you mentioned, or at least the videos I saw by them. I saw a lot more fresh thinking in the visuals than I heard in the music, and that's always a bad sign.
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Date: 2009-11-02 08:02 am (UTC)I strain to hear anything in these bands to parallel the "liftoff" strings in Space Oddity, the Kurt Schwitters-inspired babble interludes in Ashes to Ashes, the prepared piano in African Night Flight... But it's not as if I'm against Brooklyn bands per se; in answer to the three you mentioned I propose Black DIce and MGMT, both from Brooklyn. I would even endorse Vampire Weekend as much more innovative than any of the three you mentioned, or at least the videos I saw by them. I saw a lot more fresh thinking in the visuals than I heard in the music, and that's always a bad sign.