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| Meet Jonas "theJo" Gustafsson - a Swedish blogger and string bender. |
Rock Today is a project that sprung out of one of my previous blogs onlytheJo, a blog I started without a specific theme in mind but would focus on movies, tv, gaming, and music.
Being very passionate about music, rock especially, I felt the urge to explore it to a greater extent and to dig a little deeper covering things that would interest a more specific audience. Rock Today will be my outlet for just that, which lets me keep the more general entertainment theme for onlytheJo, which will focus more on movies, TV, and games. At least for the moment.
As I'm constantly looking for fresh new music, Rock Today help me keep track of the gems I discover. Hopefully, my contributions to this blog will also help you and others find new bands and artists!
I also plan to add more content types, including straight-up album reviews, and album tier/ranking lists and perhaps give my reaction on various music news.
Apart from Rock Today, I also blog about other things the interest me, such as tech, photography and entertainment. I also produce Swedish content.
My Taste in Music
So '90s
I was born in the eighties and had my formative years musically in the late nineties and early 2000s. Some of the earlier bands I got into were the Foo Fighters, Green Day, Manic Street Preachers, Garbage and Bush. It didn't take long before I caught up with the alternative rock and grunge thing with Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden and of course Nirvana. I remember the first time listening to the Nevermind album by Nirvana and it struck me that I knew pretty much all of the songs already. I had a lot of those experiences where you feel very familiar with certain songs, but can't remember hearing them. Growing up in the 90s it was of course inevitable that you were exposed to a lot of the music of the time. But as I first heard it my ears just weren't ready yet, I guess.
The Millenial Shift
While the American scene around the millennial shift was dominated by nu-metal and butt rock, which didn't appeal to me that much, there were a few acts that stood out to me, including Jimmy Eat World and Rival Schools. But for the most part, I stuck mostly to the UK scene which made the era a great time to live in for rock fans. Bands like Ash, Feeder, A, My Vitriol, Idlewild, Muse, Hundred Reasons and Hell Is For Heroes all offered something very different from the Creeds and Limp Bizkits you often associate the same era with overseas. And I guess if you only looked at the US scene, rock was already going downhill at that point, around the millennial shift. To me, I would say the mainstream rock scene was starting to crumble a little later, in the late 00s. More on that in my article Is Rock Still Alive and Relevant?
The late '00s and 2010s
Crossing Over to Metal...
In the late 00s, I was starting to move toward metal, listening to a lot of classic bands like Black Sabbath, Maiden and Megadeth. I've never been a fan of growling, though, so as I went for newer bands I often steered towards female-fronted acts like Autumn, Delain and The Gathering. I also got into prog bands like Rush, Dream Theater, Threshold, and most recently Devin Townsend.
...Then Moving Back to Rock
I then started playing the guitar in 2009, and by doing so I also went back to basics, since I honestly didn't have the patience to develop and learn all the fancy techniques needed for technical metal. So instead I focused on practising the more basic Nirvana, Green Day, Foo Fighters and Feeder tunes that I knew so well. Here's a clip of me playing one of my faves off of Nevermind. Hint: it's not Teen Spirit.
Synth and Electroclash
Since then, I've mostly stuck to the bands I already knew, and haven't found a lot of new rock that has made me eager to jam along to it. The stuff I've been most excited about over the last decade has rather been more electronic or synth-based, including classics like Gary Numan, Depeche Mode and New Order, as well as the more recent so-called "electroclash" movement, including acts like Alice in Videoland, Marnie and Ladytron.
Rock Going Forward in the Digital Age
I'm still very much a rock dude at heart though and think organic music played on "real" instruments by humans hands still needs to have its place in modern music. If all music was digital loops and bloops with artificial, autotuned voices, it would be a sad world indeed.
The perfection and clinical sound that modern digital production brings to the table has its pros and cons though - especially when it comes to music genres that are inherently organic and analogue. The raw energy and chaos of rock can easily go missing somewhat in the digital era. It often found a lot of rock albums that came out in the 2010s to sound very sterile and uniform in their sound signature. So that might be another reason why I mostly stuck with older stuff and pretty much stopped paying attention to new music. That's changed now, though, and the sport of finding great rock music is something I'm more excited about now than probably ever, and I'd be more than happy to bring you along! Feel free to drop suggestions on bands you'd like me to cover on the site as well!
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