The Best Songwriting Band

Pink floyd before The Wall. Floyd never relied on musicianship or flashy playing. They relied on arrangements, lyrics, and concepts. Before the wall all the band members contributed to the writing process, making them a songwriting 'band' rather a group with one really good songwriter.

I like Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's song structures. They don't musically wander around, while gluing together one musical idea after another *cough*DreamTheater*cough.*
At the same time though, they don't stick with the traditional Intro/verse/chorus (on most of their songs).

As for chord structure, they use a lot of dissonance. Sometimes it almost reminds my of Paul Hindemith in the way they use things like 4th's and 5th's as well as Major 9th's and other strange intervals. They also use plenty of semi-tonic dissonance.

...Moving on to rhythmical structure...
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is the only band that I've heard that managed to pull off the time signature of 15/8 and make it sound natural (on their song "Sleep is Wrong").

Apart from all that, they use several home-made instruments including the "electric pancreas" and the "slide piano" as well as more traditional instruments such as guitar, bass and drums. This gives an added color to their music that you wouldn't normally hear in any other band. This adds a refreshing feeling to what they do.

Frank Zappa has the best lyrics, 2nd would be Hammil.
Caravan were quite good at catchy tunes (In The Land Of Grey And Pink, vocal sections of Nine Feet Underground).

To me, however, King Crimson has the best songs in it's repertoire. Epitaph, with music that fits the lyrics completely - and a guitartune that jumps right in when Lake's shouting out "Knowledge is a deadly friend".
Book Of Saturday, with the fade-in guitar fading out at the end (o_O) and the clean guitar that can be so slow yet so fast too.

Genesis are very good too, but they lack something Genesis have.

Yes only is good on the songs Close To The Edge and And You And I (from what I've heard of them).

Pink Floyd are good on certain songs - Echoes for example, and Mason's vocal line on "One Of These Days".

But still, King Crimson hold the top for me. Perhaps this will change when I hear more of PFM - what I've heard by now is marvellous.


Edited by Rosescar - May 10 2006 at 15:08

Gentle Giant, VDGG, Frank Zappa, Supertramp, Genesis

bloody Gentle Giant! Albums full of incredibly addictive, funky songs with none of the lazy "atmospheric" sections of which Floyd were so guilty, and way less predictable than Rush.

I'd have to say Genesis as well, after all they started off as a songwriting collective with no intent of performing their own stuff.

Rush and Genesis for me. Thats why they are my favourote bands. Quality songs more than anything else. Just my opinion of course.

Rush