Who's the most underrated artist / band in your opinion?

H8GHOTI wrote: »

Underrated is probably the wrong word alright.
But definitely, in the case of The National anyway, they are less well known than they should be. Maybe that's what they meant.
Another one that falls into that category would be Janelle Monae. Highly rated by many but I can't believe how she isn't more popular.
I'll stop there. This isn't the 'Who should be more popular than they are in your opinion" thread.

H8GHOTI wrote: »

Janelle Monae is playing 3 shows here next week. Black Box in Galway, Savoy in Cork & Tripod in Dublin and none of the 3 are sold out. She should be selling them out no problem given how good she is. Her album only reached 24 in the Irish charts. If she wasn't at Electric Picnic last year, I probably still wouldn't even know who she is. And that would be a shame.

I seen The National in the Olympia last year and they were great. I'd much prefer to see them there than the O2 but I think they should of been big enough to play there. As you say, next time they might but they've been around a good few years already.

As for radio play, I rarely listen to the radio so can't really comment too much. But anytime I do hear the radio it's usually Beyonce, Katy Perry, The Black Eyed Peas etc........... I flick through the music channels on tv regularly and I can't remember the last time I've seen a video for either of them.

jill_valentine wrote: »

I ranted about this elsewhere, but Jim Carroll's weird beef with any indie band that plays Oxegen really grinds my gears. I agree with most of the other points he made in that post, but his weird fixation on his perception of "greed" among bands like that makes me want to slap sense into my laptop screen.

Granted, The National were probably paid far in excess of what they were worth to Oxegen's crowd, and no doubt they would have been better received at Electric Picnic - but it's a bit nauseating to hear Carroll slapping his thighs with a demented schadenfreude glee at the crowd pictures.

The fact is, The National have played Oxegen before to perfectly proportionate crowds, and had no reason to suspect that wouldn't be the case this time. The fault was with the booker, who should have known better; not the band, who could not reasonably have been expected to. The experience of Electric Picnic and Oxegen from the artist's side of the equation is probably much for muchness, so to damn them for playing the one that paid better is just ridiculous. It wouldn't make a lick of sense to demand that anybody else should pick the lower paying of two identical jobs, just for the sake of maintaining some vaguely defined sense of "indie" integrity, and it doesn't here either.

Matt and chums are hardly up to their arses in Lamborghinis or anything, and it's not like they got where they are overnight. Carroll's begrudgery could hardly be more misplaced. Accusing The National - or any of the other indie-ish bands that he can't forgive for daring to succeed - of being "stupid" and "greedy" for having the nerve to play Oxegen is moronic and pigheaded. It's an absurd, arbitrary, outdated standard for Carroll to insist on applying to jobbing bands from behind his keyboard, and he uses every Oxegen article he writes to whip somebody with it. As useful a writer as he usually is, I find that one thing really off-putting, and he indulges in it with absolute, clock-setting regularity, every year.

/rant