Bands You Can't Understand

[WormBoy]

... if you want international success you're not going to enjoy much singing in some language nobody can understand.

Fortunately, not all musicians are in it for the international success. And fortunately, not all listeners need to (fully) grasp the lyrics to enjoy the music. Coming from a small country, I grew up listening to a lot of music that I could not understand. Not just in English, also German, French, Italian etc. Further, we now have a number of acts here that sing in their local dialect, some of which are very hard or even impossible to understand. I enjoy that more than a lot of the middle-of-the-road pop and rock stuff that is meant for the international success, but your mileage may vary.

PS listening to all these languages at a young age really helped my language classes later at school. Now I have a basic grasp of quite a few languages, which is pretty handy when traveling. Finnish is not one of them though  .

PPS there are quite a few songs that I would have enjoyed more if I would NOT have been able to understand the lyrics  .

[davent]

I pay such little attention to lyrics in the only language i do understand that understanding any of it really has no bearing on the music i enjoy and listen to most.

I had surgery in 2011 where the nerve that controlled one side of my tongue was taken and reassigned to other duties. To learn how to speak again i would read aloud while wandering around the house. You just pay attention to how each word sounds, what the word' is' is totally irrelevant, each word is in isolation as far it's meaning, it's only the sound that matters, how it flows into the next, the rhythm and patterns that make up the sentence, ask me the content of what i'd just read, i didn't have a clue.  I had a big anthology of British Romantic Poetry that was great for reading aloud, the rhythm and roll, some poems would be written phonetically, it was a great workout but again no idea what i was reading. Music lyrics same thing.

dave

[thesmokingman]

there's some stoner rock out there from europe that is sketchy at best on language barrier issues but I still like it ... my biggest problem with music I don't understand and coincidentally don't like because of it is "cookie monster" vocals in hard rock/metal. I don't get it. I really don't get it when women do it.

[lars]

I remember hearing this one a few years ago. I still can't understand what they're saying, save a couple words here and there...