Top 5 Bands that Changed My Musical Landscape

YES, I am finally updating. In my defence: I flew to the other end of the country, saw my boyfriend for the first time in two months, moved into residence, and started a new year of university. Things, they have been a-happening. But finally, a Top 5:

Let me state first: this is not a "Favorite Artists" Top 5, nor is it meant to attest that these artists are the best of my music collection. Instead, this Top 5 lists artists that were, due to a flurry of converging circumstances, completely revelatory to my taste and experience in music. These are the artists that were each the first to give me something in music I had not expected before, and which I consequently would demand from any music to follow. This is almost like a list describing the evolution of my musical taste, but that sounds really daunting, because how can I really explain my tendency towards depressing, low-key music other than typical teenage angst? So instead: a basic tutorial in the topography of my musical landscape, listed chronologically.

Top 5 Artists that Changed My Musical Landscape

Tori Amos

I heard the Tori Amos song below one day by pure chance on the radio. Before this song, I was the epitome of horrible pre-adolescent musical taste. My exposure to Tori Amos introduced me to the idea that songs like "Winter" could have, nay, should have, literary value. And Amos has that in spades, though some may find her overwrought; she uses symbolism and metaphors as easily as breathing and she swims in that piano of hers. She was the first to illustrate to me what a musical artist was, this crazy violent quaint faerie with clouds and clouds of red hair and white skin. Thus, sentimental value.



The Shins

I realize how cliche it is to be influenced by Zach Braff's iTunes, okay. But - suck it. I refuse to join in the massive hate hard-on people have against Garden State nowadays. I saw that movie three times in four days, and unabashedly thrilled to the sound of "New Slang" through Natalie Portman's headphones. If this makes me uncool, then so be it. But this song came to epitomize in its quiet way the vast and subtle world of music that existed beneath radio and Top 40 and all that. I also realized you had to work to get at it. A music snob was subsequently born.



Interpol

I realize that I don't show a large tendency towards the rockier side of indie music, but what little I do possess comes as a result of this band. Paul Banks is perhaps one of the most strangely, intimately verbose lyricists in music right now, I think; he writes these rambling, eccentric, compelling love songs that speak both unexpectedly and unconventionally to one's heart. Love is not to him a melancholy force but one of constant joy and motion even in pain. This is beside the point. The insistent pounding ache of "Obstacle 1" and the low drone of Banks' voice showed me that a killer bass line didn't mean a song wouldn't knock me out and hang me up to dry. "I wish I could eat the salt off of your lost faded lips" - poetry.



Stars

Just from "Your Ex-Lover is Dead" (below) alone, you can sense that Stars harnesses their natural tendency for melodrama into a dual narrative both fantastical and communal. I have always loved Stars, but they did not truly change my musical landscape until I saw them live; that concert remains the best I have seen to this day. It would be easy for any sense of real emotion to become lost in the soaring violins and the dramatic absolutes of Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan's personas, but instead they communicate crystalline moments as though nostalgic in prescience.



The Mountain Goats

I went through a period of time after hearing the Mountain Goats for the first time during which I did not listen to anything else. No, really. Since the Mountain Goats, I can say honestly that I no longer hunt for music the same way I once did. I call myself a Darniellead; this band is honestly sort of my religion. John Darnielle is a poet, kids. Fuck, he's a novelist. He has characters who span songs and albums and decades of music: the Alphas, the scarred, bitter, alcoholic embodiments of mutually assured destruction of the heart, and they star in this song, "No Children", the very first song I ever heard of theirs through complete and utter fortuitous chance (my penpal wrote the lyrics on the back of an envelope). He can create in a few well-placed words a description of the place and setting that establishes the tone and meaning of the song. Most literature is not this good, okay. And Darnielle's voice can range from a prolonged grating growl of frustration and hopelessness to a wistful, plaintive elegy. I cannot say enough about the Mountain Goats. They have ruined all other music for me.