I tried to write some words about this playlist but it kept turning into some sort of thesis on what happens to theater kids when they grow up, and really who needs that. In brief: some of them go to art school and start bands rather than perform in musicals, so there is this theatrical strain you can find in some artists playing otherwise straightforward genres. The most recent hugely successful artist I can think of like this is Florence and the Machine1, but it’s generally a less popular approach.
In this playlist we go from, roughly, art pop to math rock. The David Byrne/Kate Bush2 portion is all ornate instrumentation and drama, and this keeps up until, oh, the Dirty Projectors song? After that, the focus is less fancy instrumentation and more on fancy musical figures, you can tell these people are really into music theory or jazz or both, but they’re not playing prog or shred guitar or jazz, they’re applying what they take from that stuff to their preferred genres. (Though if we’re being honest, Hella isn’t that far from shred guitar stuff, it’s just that Zach Hill is doing a drum solo the whole time too, turning it into something far noisier.) In my mind these people all went to the same parties in their 20’s but spent the time in different rooms. So I guess this playlist is a soundtrack for that.
Track listing
“The Accident”, David Byrne, Look Into the Eyeball
“Cloudbusting”, Kate Bush, Hounds of Love
“50 Fingers”, Little Red Lung, Little Red Lung
“The White Sea”, Bess of Bedlam, Dance Until the Crimes End
“Useful Chamber”, Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca
“Due Process”, Frankenixon, Amorphous
“Split Like a Lip, No Blood on the Beard”, Buke & Gase, General Dome
“Arizona”, Mylets, Arizona
“Republic of Rough and Ready”, Hella, Hold Your Horse Is
“Milk Man”, Deerhoof, Milk Man
You might be able to convince me to say Lady Gaga, but I feel like she plays more with image than with genre.
The music video for Cloudbusting features Donald Sutherland, and is basically a short film depicting the story from the lyrics, with Bush herself playing the child role. Tell me that’s not some serious theater kid shit.