Music: Who are the most underappreciated bands ever?

[VMBM]

Delete.

 

[Raging Bull]

Roxy Music
The Pixies

 

[TCTC]

Doves are one of the more recent bands that are extremely underappreciated, imo.
They had the misfortune of roughly starting at the same time as Coldplay and Coldplay's music being more mainstream friendly. But Doves were always the better band by far.

 

[NyQuil]

Mr. Bungle
G Love and Special Sauce

 

[Mike C]

Sloan!

Also Anvil I suppose. Not huge on April Wine though

I'm the other man!

 

[Mike C]

The Kinks

RIP-John Gosling Keyboards 75

 

[Hippasus]

Tom Waits

 

[ItsFineImFine]

From the UK modern indie scene, I'd say in the 90s it was Puressence (Manchester band that sounded like 90s Radiohead) and in the 00s it was Scottish indie band Idlewild.

Since the 2010s you can say pretty much any good band is underappreciated because of how the mainstream has ditched the genre.

 

[Unholy Diver]

Warren Zevon

David Lindley

 

[GKJ]

The Doors
Boston

Underappreciated? Hey, not many other bands have big Hollywood films made about them.

Maybe "the other three guys" are underappreciated vis-à-vis Jim Morrison, especially Robby Krieger (I believe he wrote most of their stuff along with Morrison).

I wasn’t around, and I don’t know that it was, but I could see that being the case at the time.

 

[Mike C]

Re: Can: I suppose, but I think they should be even more appreciated. Like at the level of The Beatles, The Kinks, or The Beach Boys.

Get well soon!

 

[VMBM]

Delete.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

I too would take Can before Beatles/Kinks/Beach Boys. Wouldn't particularly hesitate either. They were utterly fantastic.

 

[GKJ]

Well, they had quite a few hits, and seemed to be very popular already in their own time (although I wasn't around either). From my understanding, this thread was about popularity rather than about critical acclaim. Maybe they were slightly forgotten in the late 1970s and/or 1980s, but if so, Oliver Stone's film in the early 1990s certainly seemed boost their popularity again. All I can say is that I knew about them and their best-known songs long before that.

The movie definitely did. The documentary came about a few years before, but I was in 4th grade in 1994-95, and all of a sudden everyone started liking the Doors. And we were 10.

 

[Ben Grimm]

By 1972 The Doors had sold over 4 million albums and almost 8 million singles which were huge numbers at the time. There were less than 210 million people in the US.

 

[Babe Ruth]

By 1972 The Doors had sold over 4 million albums and almost 8 million singles which were huge numbers at the time. There were less than 210 million people in the US.

yeah, I don't think The Doors were underappreciated. They were one of the biggest bands of their generation.
But a good point was made earlier in the thread.. which is that the band (as a holistic unit) can be underappreciated. There's so much focus on Morrison, people overlook the Doors' collective talent.
And I love Morrison, but actually think Manzarek was the most important member/creator within the band.

 

[Rodgerwilco]

Rap group CunninLynguists would have to be my answer for sure.

Hailing from the southern United States, CunninLynguists is a 3-man rap group comprised of rapper & producer "Kno", rapper Deacon the Villain, and rapper Natti. The group was formed in the year 2001 upon the release of their first studio album "Will Rap for Food", with Natti replacing former member Mr. SOS in 2006.

Their early releases were more light-hearted lyrical wordplay, but as they developed they started touching on deeper and more introspective topics like mental health, loss, dreams, religion, and racism. This shift is particularly seen in their 3rd studio album A Piece of Strange, which was the first project with Natti, and really when Kno stepped into his element as a top-tier producer.

I've only met a handful of people in person who have actually even heard of CunninLynguists. However, many underground rap-heads consistently rank CL and some of their works among the most influential in the underground scene, even to this day. They still actively tour, but most of their shows are throughout Europe, where they have gained a much larger and dedicated following than here in the States.

Given the "money, drugs, bling, and women" landscape of the Hip Hop scene through the 2000s and early 2010s it doesn't come as a major surprise that CunninLynguists never broke into the mainstream, but that really was never their intent anyway.

I have a hard time finding a CunninLynguists project that I didn't like overall, but I find their album Oneirology to be one of the most finely crafted albums ever created, no matter the genre.

 

[Ben Grimm]

Rap group CunninLynguists would have to be my answer for sure. ...

I always lost girls to them. I've always thought Digable Planets were under appreciated.

 

[Rodgerwilco]

I always lost girls to them. I've always thought Digable Planets were under appreciated.

I'll have to check out Digable Planets, I've personally underappreciated them myself, considering I've never even heard of them lol.

 

[Lshap]

But a good point was made earlier in the thread.. which is that the band (as a holistic unit) can be underappreciated. There's so much focus on Morrison, people overlook the Doors' collective talent.
And I love Morrison, but actually think Manzarek was the most important member/creator within the band.

Good point. Manzarek was most responsible for The Doors' iconic sound. Nobody else had that twirling, circus-y keyboard style, other than The Zombies. Put Jim Morrison in front of a typical guitar band and I think he loses a lot of his mystical aura. The Doors didn't do power chords. Manzarek's keys and Kreiger's jazzy guitar left plenty of space for Morrison to use his baritone mid-range, which was where his voice was coolest.

Actually.... there's my answer to the OP: The Zombies. Unique sound, great songs, they just lacked the star-power of the bigger bands.

 

[Mike C]

By 1972 The Doors had sold over 4 million albums and almost 8 million singles which were huge numbers at the time. There were less than 210 million people in the US.

we must allow though for the fact that many of those 12 million purchasers were high on acid and had to buy more than once

Good point. Manzarek was most responsible for The Doors' iconic sound. Nobody else had that twirling, circus-y keyboard style, other than The Zombies. Put Jim Morrison in front of a typical guitar band and I think he loses a lot of his mystical aura. The Doors didn't do power chords. Manzarek's keys and Kreiger's jazzy guitar left plenty of space for Morrison to use his baritone mid-range, which was where his voice was coolest.

Actually.... there's my answer to the OP: The Zombies. Unique sound, great songs, they just lacked the star-power of the bigger bands.

ray also had a piano bass that he used live. they played concerts with no bass guitar player. that is where the true appreciation lies

 

[TheGreenTBer]

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I don't mean critically. My personal top 4 are my all-time favorite punk band The Cramps ^, D.C.'s Bad Brains, Minnesota's Husker Du, and Milwaukee's Violent Femmes.

Some suggestions I got from Yardbarker are Anvil, April Wine, Black 47, Blue Cheer, Boogie Down Productions, Cinderella, Exodus, Little Feat, Living Colour (Cult of Personality is my favorite MTV video), Melvins, Naked Raygun, Screaming Trees, Social Distortion, Ten Years After (Alvin Lee is a great guitarist), UFO, and Wishbone Ash. Does @Hockey Outsider appreciate Wishbone Ash? We'll see what he says. I hope @GKJ posts.

Bad Brains was as good a live act as punk has ever had. Electric.

 

[kook10]

Good point. Manzarek was most responsible for The Doors' iconic sound. Nobody else had that twirling, circus-y keyboard style, other than The Zombies. Put Jim Morrison in front of a typical guitar band and I think he loses a lot of his mystical aura. The Doors didn't do power chords. Manzarek's keys and Kreiger's jazzy guitar left plenty of space for Morrison to use his baritone mid-range, which was where his voice was coolest.

Actually.... there's my answer to the OP: The Zombies. Unique sound, great songs, they just lacked the star-power of the bigger bands.

The Animals both had that sound and are underappreciated.


Donovan is certainly underappreciated stateside too.

 

[Hippasus]

Ildjarn-Nidhogg
Lead Into Gold
The Tear Garden

 

[reckoning]

The word underappreciated could be interpreted many ways, so my choices are bands who would be in my top 100, but are not, and likely never will be in the Rock Hall of Fame, bands you'd never see on a Rolling Stone best-of-list, and bands who were never big on the charts except for maybe one or two songs:

Bands
BlackCrowes
Blue Oyster Cult
Concrete Blonde
Divinyls
Faith No More
Fetchin Bones
Living Colour
Los Lobos
Pavement
Replacements
Sonic Youth
Squeeze
Urge Overkill
Waterboys (have lots of great songs beside just Whole Of The Moon)
X (on my all-time top 10 bands list)
Yo La Tengo
10000 Maniacs

Solo Artists
Tori Amos
Steve Earle (his output holds up well against Springsteen, Mellencamp, Petty or Seger)
PJ Harvey (best singer/songwriter of last 30 years)
John Hiatt
Chris Isaak
Joe Jackson
Daniel Lanois
Maria McKee
Graham Parker
Liz Phair

Canadians
Blue Rodeo
Bruce Cockburn
Cowboy Junkies
Grapes Of Wrath
Jr. Gone Wild
National Velvet
Jane Siberry
Sloan
Tragically Hip (underappreciated outside Canada)