What non-AFI have you been listening to lately?

AFI fans are quite a diverse bunch don’t you think? So I’m curious to know what else is on heavy rotation for you all at the moment and why, if there’s a reason :cd:
In my head, I envision this thread being updated when people find new music they like but we’ll see what happens :relaxed:

I have quite an eclectic music taste as you might well be able to tell…

Top 5 songs at the minute for me:

  1. Utada Hikaru - “Sanctuary”/“Passion” (J-pop/pop)- this was sampled on a song I was obsessed with around 2010 and I thought I had found the original sample but I hadn’t, it was this song. It is supposedly from Kingdom Hearts so you may have heard it if you ever played that.

  2. HIM - “Gone with the Sin O.D. version” (rock)- I love the live version of GwtS and was disappointed I coudn’t get a download of it but this orchestral version is pretty good.

  3. Inna - “Ruleta” (dance/pop) - just a catchy tune!

  4. Shakira - “Chantaje” and “Perro Fiel” (pop) - I don’t know how many people are fans of both AFI and Shakira but they do exist and I am one of them :stuck_out_tongue:

  5. Zolita - “Fight Like a Girl” (pop)- I think I heard Davey mention this woman in an interview recently. Either way, this is an insanely catchy song.

Your turn…

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Hmmm, let’s see, HIM has been getting heavy rotation as I try to prepare myself for their farewell tour.

The new Chelsea Wolfe album Hiss/Spun. A lot of Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf, some Agent Orange, World Inferno, Strata, Marilyn Manson (I’m seeing him Saturday), the Interview With the Vampire Soundtrack, and Creeper.

Oooh, numerous people I haven’t heard of and will now look up :wink: that’s what I like <3

I too am going to HIM’s farewell :cry: tour in December.

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Yeah, I’m going to the date in November. :frowning: sad times, dude, sad sad times.

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I really can’t say I’ve enjoyed anything “new”, as in contemporary, for the last 10 years maybe. Pretty much everyone and everything sounds very homogeneous to me, even in genres (I use this term loosely) that I tend to like. Every band that calls itself “punk” or “hardcore” or whatever these days sounds like a bad Rise Against cover band, and every metal band tries to sound like Metallica or they include some very odd atmospheric/ambient type stuff, which isn’t always a bad thing but in my opinion just doesn’t work well here.

I do, however, have quite a collection of older music that I play a lot. These are mostly bands who were around in the 90s, into the early 2000s…some of them are still around, but they don’t put out anything new or, if they do, it’s just sort of a rehashed take on something old, like an electronic/ambient version of an older album. Ugh.

In my opinion, music has really for the most part just sucked since around 2005-ish. Like with the internet, it’s so easy for bands to find each other and I think that’s led to everyone being influenced by the same stuff and just sounding so similar. I find it difficult to discover anything with even a little bit of creativity or originality now…

Anyway, bands (and albums) that get heavy rotation from me:

Opeth:

  • Orchid
  • Morningrise
  • My Arms, Your Hearse
  • Still Life
  • Blackwater Park (to a lesser extent)
  • Damnation/Deliverance (again, to a lesser extent)
  • Ghost Reveries (every now and then)

Katatonia

  • Jhva Elohim Meth EP
  • Dance of December Souls
  • Brave Murder Day
  • For Funerals to Come
  • Sounds of Decay
  • Discouraged Ones
  • Tonight’s Decision
  • Viva Emptiness (this is a fantastic death rock/goth rock influenced album with clean vox, if you’re usually not into metal I highly recommend it)
  • The Great Cold Distance (every now and then)

Paradise Lost

  • Icon
  • Draconian Times (this has got to be one of my top 5 favorite non-AFI albums, it gives me feelings similar to Sing the Sorrow, absolutely brilliant album)
  • The Last Time EP
  • Forever Failure
  • Paradise Lost (every now and then)

Satyricon

  • Dark Medieval Times
  • The Shadowthrone
  • Nemesis Divina

That’s probably the stuff I listen to most often. I dig a lot of older European metal, but I haven’t explored specific albums from these bands to specify which ones I really like, and/or I only enjoy specific songs from specific albums. Mayhem, from a long time ago when they still had Dead as vocalist, is still fantastic. De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas is probably my favorite album from them because of his lyrics, even though he’d already passed away at that time. And of course Live in Leipzig despite the recording quality. Darkthrone is also sort of obligatory, I think A Blaze in the Northern Sky is their best work. Dark Funeral is pretty great too, their 2016 release is the only album I actually really enjoyed from anyone since maybe 2008 or so lol. Sounds like it was written 20 years ago with superior sound quality. I like 1349 because I really love their drummer (also plays in Satyricon), although I’ve only relatively recently begun really listening to their LPs. Eh…I’ve listened to folk metal sometimes (Finntroll, Turisas, Korpiklaani, Manegarm, Moonsorrow, Eluveitie, etc.), I’ve really got to be in specific mood to listen to these bands.

Otherwise, the Clash, the Misfits, Social Distortion, early Die Toten Hosen…I have a lot of punk rock from the 70s through the 90s on my phone, I used to listen to a lot of bands a long time ago, too many to list but every now and then I feel like listening to them. Some classic/thrash metal (Black Sabbath/Dio, Iron Maiden, Death)…Oh I also quite like Suicidal Tendencies…eh…the Cure (Wish)…

I feel like this is getting super long and I really need to go to work lol. I’m sure I’ll revisit this thread in the future.

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The last thing I listened to was a guy named Taylor Ho Bynum who’s a free improv musician who was one of my music teachers at college. He’s a protege of Anthony Braxton and his music is… quite spicy if you’ve never heard anything like it. Been trying to get into a lot of free improv stuff.
Lately Olivier Messiaen gets a lot of replay. For some reason I’d been listening to a lot more 20th Century Classical music than I do rock, and I like his sense of harmony. Sometimes it can be very thick and grating, but when it does resemble something tonal (O Sacrum Convivium (he was a Roman Catholic)) it sounds both familiar and alien at the same time.
In the rock world, lately it’s been Blink 182’s self-titled album, which in my opinion, is the greatest pop-punk album ever made, Drive Like Jehu’s Yank Crime, which for me, the gold standard of punk rock intensity, and Guerilla Toss’s Eraser Stargazer, one of the few bands out now that’s doing interesting and new. I do have to agree with Vanished’s sentiment that a lot of rock bands are sounding artists are starting to sound the same but that probably means I’m not looking in the right places. There’s only so much bland indie rock/hardcore that I can stand before I’m craving something weird.
I’m probably more influenced these days by weird films these days than I am other music, but that’s another thread for another day.

William Control
Adele
Sam Smith
Misfits (Famous Monsters)
Michale Graves (just saw him live recently)

It hasn’t been a ton but there have been a few.

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OMG, William Control. I forgot he existed! I’ve met him a few times in his different incarnations- Wil Francis from Aiden and William Control. Definitely a cool but intense dude.

Favorite album of 2017, non-Davey Havok division:

Algiers - The Underside of Power. It’s like industrial/soul/gospel/goth or something. It works way better than you might imagine, and was awesome live. Here’s a video for the first single from the album. Seriously, it’s great. Check it out.

Algiers - The Underside of Power

From the “been into them even longer than AFI” side of things, I just got tickets to see NIN in Vegas in a few weeks and have been digging their recent EPs a lot.

@Vanished I can’t vouch for much metal but certainly a lot of mainstream pop/pop-punk/R’n’B/dance sounds pretty homogenous (within genre) to me. I often wonder whether this just happens when you get to a certain age because my parents always said it about music on the radio! I just expected it to happen in my 40s rather than in my 20s!
The majorty of music I listen to is from 2004-2010, when I really got into music.

I’ll give some of the clean vox ones a listen. I remember once a guy asking me if I preferred clean vox and I said “yeah I don’t like bands that swear a lot” :laughing: I know what it means now!

@StageGhost Gonna have to listen to the Blink-182’s self titled now after that review! For some reason, Blink-182 have always been one of those bands for me where I liked the singles but never ventured any further than that. No Doubt and Aiden are some more of those bands for me. I think I’ve missed out on a lot of good stuff.
Will have to look into Messiaen too, just read that he did a lot of music based on birdsong which sounds intriguing!

@LordOfTheLeftHand Listened to that single - it does work!

@STORMS I had never actually listened to Misfits until today despite the links to AFI. Decent stuff :wink:

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When I said “clean” I was referring to this

Rather than this

Of course, I like both and I think both are fantastic, but a lot of people seem turned off metal or they never give it a chance (shame!) because they can’t take “the voice” (i.e. growling). Which I guess I can kind of understand, I’m just accustomed to it now.

Btw Velvet Thorns of Drynwhyl is one of my absolute favorite songs by this band. Fucking killer riffs and some of my favorite lyrics by Renkse. Love it.

Katatonia does pretty much all clean vocals after Sounds of Decay.

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Re: Drive Like Jehu, are you also into Hot Snakes? I’m excited that they’re playing some shows in November. Wonder if they’ve got another good album in them, since they’re apparently signed to Sub Pop now.

I honestly don’t listen to a very wide variety of music on a regular basis. I listen to a lot of the same music from 10 years ago in high school, plus that band’s new albums… maybe. I listen to bands far more than I listen to songs.

Lately, aside from AFI, it’s been:

Authority Zero
Disturbed
Rise Against

Between those three, AFI, and Afi’s sibling, Blaqk Audio, I have a mountain of choices that keep me pretty happy. Especially since all those bands have come out with new albums in the last year-ish.

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Haven’t gotten into Hot Snakes. Maybe that could change but based on what I’ve heard the band say about it, it doesn’t seem as weird. But I’d give it a listen.
You know what’s a really good record? There’s a band in our music scene called Jelani Sei who put out an EP recently. It’s like all the electronic music played at our college, but by a 5 piece rock band. Lots of ambient guitar stuff with refracted hip hop beats.
Also the new Bjork track is really beautifully made. Looking forward to what that album gives us.

Hot Snakes are definitely less weird than DLJ, as far as song structures are concerned. I think that makes me like them more, but if that’s a big factor in your DLJ fandom I could see you not being as into Hot Snakes. (Hot Snakes did close with “Golden Brown” when I saw them in 2012 though, so there’s that.)

:wink:

IMO one of the coolest music videos.

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^ I love that! Thanks :smile:

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In keeping with this thread, I’ve been jamming to very early Queensryche the last few days. I love Geoff Tate’s voice.

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Another band I used to listen to alot before I lost the CD: Assemblage 23

It’s kinda like a Blaqk Audio

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As Radiohead is my favorite band I’m always listening to them. I mainly listen to albums instead of single songs so other than that I’ve been listening LinkinPark’s a thousand suns, joy division’s unknown pleasures, the shins’ oh inverted world, trifonic’s ninth wave, and MGMT’s graduation a lot the last couple of weeks

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