Top 10 American Bands

This list will not be a foundational Top 10 American Bands list, but will focus on the Top 10 American Bands of our contemporary time. Rather than feign a love for things past that we never experienced, we will give credence to the few American bands that actually made a worthwhile dent into the recent history of pop music. This list was incredibly hard to make because of the few worthy bands that have come from America. Rock and pop have not been the American strong suite, musically speaking.  That being said, what genre really has been? Regardless, we had to use all our brainpower to think of our favorite bands and eventually come up with 10 bands worthy of this Top 10. These are all the great bands who happen to be American, past these 10 bands though, you got us.

10. The Beachwood Sparks

The Beachwood Sparks just have the internal harmony that makes for great music.  Their melodies are superlative and their musicianship is incredibly strong, way beyond their ages.  That they don’t get any coverage in the music media shows how aimless American music is knowing what good music is or not.  The Beachwood Sparks first eponymous album was filled with harmonies and slide guitars that were perfectly overdubbed in the chorus’s of the song’s showing a sense of pop dynamics unknown to all the shitty indie bands of today.  Listen to a song like “This is what it feels like” and you would hear a band with an internal sense for the groove also.  Their 2nd album Once We Were Trees was another solid country/pop work from them.  The Make the Cowboy Robots Cry EP had a song on it called “Drinkswater” that was seriously one of the best pop jams of the past decade, if not the only real one.  This band was a convolution of different references point, all never getting away from internal harmony.

9. French Kicks

The French Kicks are an unnoticed band with a  penchant for amazing hooks and undeniable rhythms.  They are a band who come up with some of the most creative rhythms but still hit a groove.  It’s creative without losing it’s step.  They’re early albums are somewhat reminiscent of the easy beats and other British invasion bands in the 60’s which is probably why they have a strong sense of melody and rhythm unlike most American bands.  Check out the song “Close to Modern” and one will hear minimalist pop done to perfect with a bass kicked high in the mix and a drum beat hard on the snare.  Check out their latest album and you will hear classic 50’s melodies spun in a web of unique beats on every song.  And afterall this, finally a good old crooner of a vocalist in Nick Stumpf who voice has a relaxed range inaudible to most American bands.

8. Pinback

Pinback came onto the scene in 1999 with their This is Pinback CD which showed promise of a band who was in the midst of joining some really good influences together.  Their 2004 album Summer in Abaddon is where they became one of the best contemporary American bands.  This album was full of singles from beginning to end.  Starting off with the punchy rhythm of “Non-Photo Blue” all the way to the passionate delivery of “AFK”, this album had timeless written all over it.  The single “Fortress” was a song that is surreptitious and catchy as hell.  There’s an underbelly to that song though that just screams of substance though beyond it’s obvious pop instincts.  The lyrics to this album are arcane which supplements it’s moodier musicality.  Autumn in Seraphs continued the musical motifs of Summer in Abaddon by never releasing it’s grasp of good songwriting.  This is a band that OW hopes can keep making albums as good as their past two into the future.

7. The Strokes

At the coming of the past decade, The Strokes made arguably the greatest album of the decade in Is This It.  Nothing had ever sounded so old but yet so new at the same time.  That they would be thrown into the “garage rock revival” crew was a discredit to them because they were much more than garage rock.  They had the rhythm of classic Mo-Town and the songwriting of the best of British Invasion bands.  Songs like “The Modern Age”, “Someday” and “Last Night” were unforgettable songs.  That they were able to almost match the quality of their first album with Room on Fire and First Impressions of Earth was a testament to their talent.  They became more refined musicians but never lost sense of what a good song was.  For this they will always get the credit they deserve from OW.

6. Pete Yorn

Pete Yorn made a classic album with Music for the Morning After.  This album was a pile of hits with “For Nancy” and ‘Life on a Chain” proving to be great singles.  The true classics on this album though were “Black” and “Murray” with insatiable hooks and guitar lines straight from The Stone Roses best work.  Pete Yorn basically had good influences and infused them into his inherent structural songwriting that made for this pop masterpiece of an album.  His second album Day I Forgot wasn’t nearly as strong as his first but there was still a sizeable amount of tunes on this album including “Come Back Home” and “Crystal Village”.  There’s a timelessness to Pete Yorn’s voice as much as there’s a timelessness to his songwriting.  He’s one of the few American musicians who just gets it.

5. Beach House

Beach House keep writing great music.  They’re three albums in and they can’t stop writing timeless songs.  While their first two albums were full of timeless songs that found their motif in mood and slow tempos, their newest album Teen Dream found the duo embracing their pop roots without any sense of self-consciousness.  As listeners we are treat to perfect pop songs on that album like “Walk in the Park” and “Used to Be”.  Don’t let this pop gem of album fool you from check out their eponymous debut album and Devotion though.  You don’t know what your missing with songs like “Wedding Bells” and “Gila”.  Beach House you take along with you for a hike or a long drive.  They’re easy on the ears and full of musicianship with a vocalist in Victoria Legrand who never misses pitch even live.  This is what makes them transcend the pits of indie music and earns them the title of great pop.

4. Ryan Adams

The music press goes back and forth on Ryan Adams for reasons that never have anything to do with his music.  There’s not one second of his music that isn’t filled with heart and a desire to create the best songs known in the world today.  The amount of good to great songs in his holster is staggering.  Just count how many he has on Gold and you will have more than any American band today.  His most creative world came from Love is Hell  and his work with the Cardinals, especially Cold Roses which took the spirit of the Grateful Dead and made it less hokey and more at home with pop’s inherent quality.  This guy makes albums like he’s eating a regular day meal.  He has too many albums to count and too many good songs on these albums to count.  Ryan Adam’s has a spirit that American musicians in general don’t grasp.

3. Queens of the Stone Age

Queens of the Stone Age were one of the few bands who really couldn’t give a shit about what the mainstream and underground music media had to say about music.  They just got tanked, geeked up, and made some of the best stoner rock of the past decade.  Rated R was beyond it’s time.  “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” was wallop to your ears and your musical senses of what hard rock was able to do, which was having the ability to be creative and not just angry.  Songs for the Deaf was their breakthrough with the massively big single “No one Knows”, soon to be followed by the hard rock pomp of “Go with the Flow” as the 2nd radio single from the album.  See these guys live and you’re in for a treat.  They’re brutal and out to bend the music listening experience to edges it has never been.

2. Mercury Rev

Mercury Rev became good when they moved from hipster Ville New York City boroughs to the Catskills where their imagination flew with the inspiring Deserter’s Songs album which was full of timeless music on every part of the album whether they heard the grand orchestration of “Holes” and “Opus 40” or they heard the majestic romp of “Delta Sun Bottle Neck Stomp”.  They would continue on this glorious path with their latest album The Secret Migration that was a perfect combination of haunt and pop heard in the past decade.  Only when Mercury Rev moved into the mountains and hills of the Catskills did their imagination open up from the closed garbage of inner city New York’s indie gestures.

1. Wilco

Wilco refuses to be labeled, but that hasn’t stopped them from acquiring a trunk-full of them. They’ve been called alt-country, lo-fi, indie, experimental, art-pop, avant-garde, and just about anything else you can think of that would help a person find them in a record store. Wilco is a rare band that has been consistently and simultaneously an amazing live band and an amazing recording band. I can’t recommend an album that they’ve made that couldn’t be my favorite record-of-the-moment. With no end in sight (they’re currently writing their follow-up to the amazing Blue Sky Blue) and seemingly no fumbles along the way, Wilco is without a doubt THE GREATEST American band…in our opinion.

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