My Top Ten... Bands

A good few months ago I started a series of ‘Top Tens’ with my Top Ten Albums I’ve refrained from continuing this series because I’ve had better things to write about and I see this is as something of a cop out. However I am overburdened with exams next week, so I don’t want to be spending ages on a blog post (sorry guys, but you take a back seat when it comes to very important public exams in which I need to do well). So without further ado, as a follow up to the last one, here is my Top Ten Favourite Bands, again in no particular order.

• Porcupine Tree – One of the best progressive/psychedelic rock bands around at the moment. I’ve raved about how much I love them previously, so I’m just going to tell you to go get In Absentia and leave it at that.

• The Flaming Lips – If you’re looking for completely insane, joy-inducing indie rock then The Flaming Lips are exactly what you need. They’re essentially guaranteed to put you on a fantastic mood. They have a large back catalogue, but if I had to recommend one album it would be The Soft Bulletin

• Muse – Probably the first band on this list that I fell in love with, in fact probably the band that made me fall in love with Alternative music. They’re also one of the more commercially successful bands on this list, probably because they’re less strange, although they’re pretty strange. Listen to any album except for their latest one.

• Pink Floyd – The gods of Psychedelic Rock. Again I got into them before most of the other bands on this list and they’re probably the most well known and successful band on the list. Albums like The Wall, Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here are classics and if you’ve not already heard them then I recommend that you go away and listen to them right now.

• The Decemberists – yet more Indie/Prog rock that most people will not have heard of but really should have done. In terms of raw emotion, The Decemberists are the best band on this list; their music is so charged with emotion and it is conveyed perfectly, both lyrically and musically. The best example of this is Picaresque, which I talked about last time.

• Modest Mouse – I think these guys are possibly even stranger than The Flaming Lips. They tend to be a little hit and miss in that their albums will often contain one or two brilliant songs, a number of pretty decent songs then a few fairly ordinary ones. The brilliant songs make the album worthwhile, but it means that no one album of theirs made it to my top ten. However if pressed I would recommend The Moon and Antarctica, if only for the very first song (3^rd planet) which is superb.

• The New Pornographers – The latest addition to my music library and the only band on this list to have a female vocalist. I’m not normally a fan of female voices, but The New Pornographers do it so well. Twin Cinemas and Challengers are both fantastic albums and you should listen to them both. I plan on getting their newest album at some point and will probably review it, so look out for that.

• Nine Black Alps – The most conventional Rock band of this list so far. I talked about them a fair amount at the start of the year when I reviewed Locked Out from the Inside. Indeed if you want their best album, Locked Out from the Inside is probably it. They’re probably the angriest of the bands listed so far and that is expressed perfectly in their latest album.

• The Foo Fighters – Even more conventional and well known Rock Music. You see people; I do like ordinary Rock Music as well as all this weird Indie and Prog Rock that I continually rave about. I probably got into the Foo Fighters about the same time as I got into Muse, so I’ve liked them longer than most of the bands in this list, even if I don’t like them as much. Again no one album stands out because they’re all pretty good. In Your Honour is the first album of theirs that I got into, so I’ll recommend that one.

• Lostprophets – The most metal of all the bands in the list, which is not saying much. It’s not that I don’t like Metal, I do, but no one band really stand out to make it into the Top Ten, apart from Lostprophets, and many metal devotees would rightly resent the label of ‘Metal’ being attached to them. Lostprophets are another one of the bands on this list that I got into relatively early on. I first really got into music in a big way in 2005 and Lostprophets are one of the bands I got into then. In terms of albums, Start Something is the first album of theirs I got into and remains their best.