The Syndicate

So for whatever reason, I'v been listening to Rush's "Working Man" quite a bit lately. It's only one song but I've come to appreciate Geddy Lee's vocals on the track. They work well with the down-tuned sort of Black Sabbath sound the song possesses. If I didn't have so much catch-up listening to do, I might actually listen to the whole album.

Can any of you Rush fans tell me when Rush ditched the Sabbath sound for the lighter fare they play on classic rock radio?

"Working Man"

On the way home, I tuned into the middle of a song on the classic rock radio station. It had a sound that felt familiar but I couldn't quite place it. It was an instrumental part that was great. As I got closer to home, I began hoping for the singing to return or for the song to end and the DJ say what it was. The instrumental sounded similar to good/early Black Sabbath but I could tell it wasn't them. I was loving it!

Then the singer came in. Freaking Geddy Lee.

When it comes to music, I'm a sum-of-all-parts kind of guy. Amazing how a vocalist can take me from to

But you Rush fans can take heart in the fact that their music at least appealed to me in a vacuum.

Ricochet wrote:Sorry to hear that. One can retire from mafia? News to me.

I think it's more along the lines of abstaining from mafia. Once you've played, you'll always be a recovering addict, no matter how long a hiatus you take.

Yes, but what qualities of the music tell you that it is good? Some people take music at face value and others go all nitty-gritty about things like chord progression and rhythmic complexity. Where do you fall in?

We've got a pretty diverse group of music lovers here, so I am curious what you all look for in music when you evaluate it critically. What in your background informs your opinion of what good music sounds like? I think everyone starts out with biases based on when they grew up, what they grew up listening to, and what types of music they were told was bad by their parents.

For me, my understanding of "good music" keeps evolving as I discover and listen to more stuff. My parents were young (I'm 32 and my dad will turn 53 this year, my mom will be 51), so I listened to some different things growing up. My mom grew up listening to 70s pop (the good kind, not the hippie leftover stuff from the early 70s) and liked a little disco and dancy 80s music. My dad was something of a rebel, listening to a lot of punk rock and new wave in high school and his lone semester of college. He also liked some more sophisticated stuff like Queen, The Police, and Talking Heads. The big impact of all this is that neither of my parents cared for the hair band music that dominated the mid- to late 80s that my generation was handed as supposedly nostalgic leftovers.

According to my dad, I grew up at the point in the rock n roll cycle where rock stopped sucking for a while. My dad was young enough to embrace the grunge rock of Nirvana and Soundgarden (though not so much for Pearl Jam) and the post-grunge rock of the rest of the 90s (Green Day, Foo Fighters, Offspring, etc.). As a result of this 'programming,' I tend to favor music that has a snappy beat, an edge, and some kind of hook to it. A lot of times I find myself listening to simpler, straightforward rock n roll. As my dad used to say- get my feet tapping or get off my stereo.

As I've branched out to different genres, I've come to appreciate slower non-classical music. Some of my college friends tried to turn me on to jazz music but I still haven't broken through there. A Charlie Brown Christmas is still the only jazz album I own. Maybe you guys can help me on this one because I've read about a lot of bands and musicians that I like getting inspired by jazz but I struggle to hear much variety in it.

I tend not to analyze lyrics too much, though if the lyrics are juvenile, or overtly preachy, obscene or silly, it can take me out of the song. If the lyrics don't pull me out of the groove, I usually just listen to the vocals as if they were another instrument in the song. If the singer sucks or the vocals clash with the rest of the music, it counts against the song as a whole. I can forgive a low-quality recording as long as all the components sound good together but everything has to fit together or it bugs me.

I like to think that I have a good ear for pretentious music but I could be wrong. It has something to do with the delivery. Oftentimes it seems to me that pretentious musicians overproduce their work and try to shove five gallons of crap in a three gallon bucket.

So what do you guys look for in music and what aspects do you use to evaluate songs/albums?