In my attempt to give this joint a bit of culture – and also link dump posts are easier to write – I had a post earlier about the peak of modern musical achievements, known as manele in Romanian. I am sure that post elicited the curiosity of the glibertariat. But Pie, everyone wondered, that seems like lower class music. What do the young, hip urban people listen to?

Well, I am not one to leave such pressing questions unanswered. So I have prepared this post. Alas, I am no longer young and, as such, I have no idea what those damn kids listen to these days. So this post will not be about that after all and my insight may be less than valuable. But has that ever stopped me? So what will I post about? Well, whatever I can think of, which is not much as I am well into a bottle of nice wine.

So I was thinking with what to start… And I will start with something that does not really fit with title of the post. Why? Well… because it is the band of a buddy of mine and why not plug those you know… The guy is not famous enough to be considered an actual rock star or anything – although he has had his fair share of hot 20-something female fans, but not that obscure either, and he is very passionate about the guitar and has practiced it intensely for many years, with results I will leave you to judge. Besides that, he is not in the drugs section of rock musicians, but in the martial arts, meditation and passion for Japanese culture section – he learned the language and spends a few months a year at some temple there. The name of the band is Days of Confusion and the style of music was initially based on something called djent. I will post 3 songs off 3 different albums for your viewing pleasure (as usual I do not expect many of you to click the links but whatever.)

 

 

Now, getting on to something more topical, indie and/or hipster-ish bands in Romania use a mix of own songs with various covers and mashups. I will post some, in no particular order for bands and no particular selection for the songs. These songs have a chance of being more familiar to you as a style compared to manele, and I think a few are even in English, as are many of the band names. I will post the original band names, not translations of them. The genre of the music I did not dwell on, basically local interpretations of indie pop/rock or even mainstream pop as a style, but not hugely popular. I am not attempting to do an in-depth analysis, as I am not a music writer and Glibertarians is not really a music blog. I will just give some links and maybe write more for a future post. Or maybe not.

One of the most successful bands, especially with the female demographic, is Robin and the Backstabbers, although the style is called melodramatic pop and the songs can get a bit whiny for my taste. Here is a more recent one:

And as a bonus one of their more popular ones, which was overplayed on the radio station I listen to in my car to the point on annoyance.

 

Moving on with various bands in no apparent order and with a song from each. The songs can be as old as 5-6 years or 1-2 years, I did not choose them for a particular reason…

Toulouse-Lautrec (no relation, and no, they do not sing in French) are a indie rock band of some popularity.

We then have Moonlight Breakfast

Followed by The Mono jacks

The Amsterdams – I went to university with one of these guys although we were not exactly friends. They are an indie band, but sing in a very mainstream fashion.

Jurjak started as on of the few local indie bands doing a sort of electro-blues sound:

Les Elephants Bizzar, despite the name, also sing in a fairly mainstream pop inspired way. So nothing too surreal here

The Kryptonite Sparks – just like hipster beer, hipster bands have silly names, are a fairly young indie rock band

YellLow is a sort of electro-pop

And finishing of with something more electronic than pop / rock we have Karpov Not Kasparov

Anyway if you want further such posts do comment, we can cover 90s pop, classic rock, heavier rock, maybe folk, old time drinking/pub songs, traditional music and more. Sky’s the limit, as the saying goes. Or is Pie the limit? Either way…