Consonant or Dissonant Music?

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mainly consonance. The lyrics are hard to follow otherwise, and you think the singer's drunk...

Actually, I'm not so good with dissonance. If it's just to add a flavor to it, mebbe some, but if it's 'I'm trying to offend, repel, or fight with you, If you love me I've failed' sorta mentality, then I'll just change the channel...

I love the contrast they both provide especially when used in the same piece of music, I think it helps you to feel like you're on a musical journey with highs lows atmosphere and mood.

That sounds about right for what Trent Reznor had in mind for the Broken cd; don't know if it was rumor but he supposedly set out to make something unlistenable and it took off bigtime.

I think far more often though people don't take consonance to that end - if they do it just sounds horridly dry, geeky in all the wrong and unrefreshing ways, and yeah, I can't listen to it either. Most of the time I think when people use dissonance its mostly in terms of affecting both texture and mood. The texture aspect gives it something far more earthy, metallic, glassy, organic, gives breadth to the track, makes it feel much more real in a tactile and mental/visual kind of sense. Also with moods, I think when you want to convey something very deep, surreal, sublime, it carries a lot of suspense type chords and suspense chords themselves are by nature dissonant; as in they pull you in emotionally in the same manner that really well written action/drama or suspense/horror movie would.

What really determines the quality of the outcome IMO is what sort of vision they had and how authentic it seems. Yeah, there are a lot of bands I just can't get into just because the emotional style and angles just aren't my kind of thing, but all the same whether a tune really gives you chills or whether its so infectiously funky that you can't get it out of your head; it takes a lot of vision and it takes artists really knowing themselves as artists.

Anyone heard the Naked City? What group of these two do they belong to?

I definitely like consonance. It is more soothing to me. If I want to be stimulated, I will listen to music with lots of dissonance.

I looked up Naked City. You pwned me there. That is too dissonant for me to listen too.

I guess what I prefer is consonant melodies with dissonant harmonics and rhythmic sounds going on in the background. The Mars Volta is a good example of this (check out the song "Drunkship of Lanterns" to see what I mean).

For me too I was shocked to hear them

I like finding consonance in mostly dissonant music (think Fugazi) or dissonance in consonant music (think well-placed guitar feedback)...it's the contrast that is interesting, and gives it soul and punctuation.