Who today is pushing the musical boundaries?

Damn, that's me out of the discussion.

 

One area where I think rock music is innovating and pushing its boundaries has actually been up on the charts the past several years, and that's rock music at the borderline of pop. I think that acts like Gotye, Fun, and Foster the People, even as they've scored hits on the radio, are also legitimately experimental in the degree to which they engage both pop music and rock music. Rock has distanced itself from pop music in the past thirty years; the last time I can think of there being as much interface between the two as there is now was with synth-pop in the '80s, and acts like Tears for Fears. But given the volume of pop music right now, I think there are ideas in pop music that can lead to (and have led to) more interesting rock music. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't--I think that's part and parcel of it being experimental. It's a different notion of "experimental" than we might typically think of--we think of these things as happening outside of a mainstream, rather than within it--but I think it's experimental nonetheless.

 

I only listen to Rock less than 10% of my musical time, as I think folk JaZZ and classical are more deeply satisfying, for reasons harder to convert in to a paragraph, but I hear very interesting things from Flaming Lips and Sufjan Stevens. The folk world in the Uk has really burst in to life in the past decade, with new writing for mainly acoustic ensembles creating all sorts of beautiful stuff (the Staves, Laura Marling, Roddy Woomble, Kate Rusby, the Unthanks), there are hundreds of them. If you want to hear JaZZ innovation, try almost anything on ACT these days, and Sinikka Langeland on ECM who hovers midway between the two aforementioned styles, in a sublime way

 

Yea, Julia is a good choice, one of my big favorites, though maybe a touch on the experimental side for the OP. Have you heard any of the Emile Haynie debut yet? It's all over the place, featuring everyone from Brian Wilson to Lykke Li, and I haven't heard it all, but I do really like the track featuring the dueling voices of Julia Holter and Father John Misty ...

"Ballerina's Reprise" featuring Father John Misty and Julia Holter
"This is kind of a final fight. Man and woman fighting each other. After wanting to get Father John Misty to sing "Dirty World" and him not wanting to do it, we met and became buddies and he heard this and really liked it. I had some lyrics scribbled down and he totally changed them. He came up to my room to play his new album, and it was just another situation where the mic was on. It was going to be this thing where he sang and then she sang, but then it was amazing because they were almost harmonizing with each other and saying the same thing in the left ear and then the right ear. It's a real headphone track. Hearing it on a stereo is weird, but if you listen on headphones you can make out the two voices. It's an agree to disagree moment."

 

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I agree. I was thinking what the term "musical boundaries" really means....1.) Better singing with greater control and pitch correctness, superb vibrato control? 2.) Great octave to octave range? 3.) Ability to play one or more instruments and be thought of as one of the best for that instrument? 4.) Great score composer/arranger mated with someone who can write meaningful lyrics?

I think of vocalists that can take the place of Sinatra, Bennett, Williams, Cole, Holiday, Fitzgerald....with the likes of Krall, Buble', Lynn Stanley, Jane Monheit, Christy Baron, Janet Siegel, & Steve Tyrell, to name only a few and now you have a great group of country singers and musicians that are second to none and fill up concert halls as well as any could.

I don't know if I could define this anymore. I do know this, that when music presents the worst in all of us in word and deed, I'm out.

 

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I agree as it is hard not to like ECM if only for the gorgeous soundscapes they present. This is a beautiful piece you shared. Thanks. The problem is that there is so much new music, so little time, and often from places we know nothing about.

 

Somebody presented me the Flaming Lips. So I present that now to you.

 

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Very nice on my Grado's and there is a lot going on in their to sort out. Very nice.

 

No, I hadn't even heard of the Emile Haynie album--thanks for the tip! That Father John Misty/Julia Holter song is terrific.

 

I agree with previous comments on Kanye West, as well, as being an experimental artist. Especially on the last record, "Yeezus". Some of the beats on that record are, musically, a shock; "On Sight", at the very start of the album, has a sound that's downright nightmarish.

I also agree with the OP that there was some aspect of experimentation by the White Stripes and by Beck. Both acts borrowed substantially from previous rock music, but the way they engaged that music was so distorted and unfurled that, in the end, those influences were transmuted into something completely different and original.

 

I would have agreed they pushed boundaries in the early 00s but today? Not so much unless you consider putting out albums covered in a gummy bear. Ok it was a skull...but personally I think a giant gummy bear would have been far cooler.

 

Tune Yards.
They remind me of what Talking Heads were doing a few decades ago.

 

I'm listening to Kanye's Late Registration right now. I don't know if it pushes boundaries, but DAMN it's a great album. I haven't listened to it for a few years and I forgot how good it is.

 

Tame Impala.

 

One recent experimental rock album I didn't mention earlier but that I love is A Sunny Day in Glasgow's "Sea When Absent", which is full of weird songs, with everything--vocals, guitars, effects--sloppily layered to the point of cluttered. There's lots going on, not terribly co-ordinated, but underneath it all are good pop songs, and what emerges sounds (to me) to be completely unique. My favorite description of it came from a review that said it sounds like what you hear standing equidistant between multiple stages at a rock festival.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow, "Oh, I'm a Wrecker (What To Say To Crazy People)"

 

mostly indies, there are some of them who actually work on writing songs.

 

Hmm, OK. I'm going to go with artists who work more or less within traditional, conventional idioms but whose vision or whatever makes them notably unlike the other people doing the same sort of thing, or makes them difficult to fit into the existing taxonomy of genres. So maybe:

Joanna Newsom
PJ Harvey, still
Father John Misty, or he's right on the brink of going there.
The Lovely Eggs
Radical Face (the music isn't boundary-pushing, but there's a whole "multi-media genre fiction narrative concept" element to his work that kind of is)

My favorite older example of this is Clinic's Internal Wrangler (2000). Extremely listenable and accessible, sort of like a lot of other similar things, but really really not sounding like anyone else and a bit challenging. But their later work, while excellent and enjoyable, went in a much less innovative direction.

 

Mumford and Sons for getting folk stylings and banjos back into the mainstream.

 

Kendrick Lamar

 

I was listening to it yesterday and was blown away by the creative use of samples and live instrumentation.

 

Tame Impala

 

Sigur Ros.

They might be considered too "avant garde" for some people's criteria, but when you see a whole arena full of kids singing along, with those cryptic or nonsense pseudo-Icelandic lyrics of theirs, and they know all the words, cheering for particular songs when they hear the opening notes, it's really something impressive. The venues and the size and age of the people at their concerts and buying their records, are considerably mainstream. They're not a cult or underground band, their releases on Itunes and on CD/LP are a big deal, and on their last tour they were playing some very serious legitimate sized places. Their audience is surprisingly wide....

State of the art visuals and light show, pushing the boundaries of the recording studio and the recording medium, new technology, reviving classic old technology (guitar, violin bow and Echoplex), they make great videos, design great album covers, wear cool-looking stage clothes, they evolve and reinvent themselves from album to album....virtually every single item you could list or think of, as a musical boundary or a groundbreaking thing, they push it.

To me, Sigur Ros really delivers it all. And Beck -- Beck is of course the real deal.

 

Don't think so. Sounds like something Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks would have written and performed!

 

A few recent artists who I think might fit the bill:

St. Vincent
Owen Pallett
alt-J
of Montreal
FKA twigs
Anna Calvi (a bit)

 

St. Vincent.