Chamber pop
Chamber pop (also called baroque pop[7][8] and sometimes conflated with orchestral pop or symphonic pop[1]) is a music genre that combines rock music[1] with the intricate use of strings, horns, piano, and vocal harmonies, and other components drawn from the orchestral and lounge pop of the 1960s, with an emphasis on melody and texture.
During chamber pop's initial emergence in the 1960s, producers such as Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach, Lee Hazlewood, and the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson served as formative artists of the genre. Wilson's productions of the Beach Boys' albums Pet Sounds and Smile are cited as particularly influential to the genre. From the early 1970s to early 1990s, most chamber pop acts saw little to no mainstream success. The genre's decline was attributed to costly touring and recording logistics and a reluctance among record labels to finance instruments like strings, horns, and keyboards on artists' albums.
In the mid-1990s, chamber pop developed as a subgenre of indie rock[4] or indie pop[5] in which musicians opposed the distorted guitars, lo-fi aesthetic, and simple arrangements common to the alternative or "modern rock" groups of that era. In Japan, the movement was paralleled by Shibuya-kei, another indie genre that was formed on some of the same bedrock of influences. By the 2000s, the term "chamber pop" would be inconsistently applied to a variety of bands whose work attracted comparisons to Pet Sounds.
2000s–present[edit]
By 2009, the term "chamber pop" had fallen to general misuse, as songwriter/author Scott Miller suggests, it "made more sense applied to the Fleet Foxes than to other bands I've since seen it applied to".[38] He also noted that Pet Sounds had become a ubiquitous object of comparison; "[If people] are happy about that, I have to pinch myself and reflect that I'd never thought I'd see the day."[38] Treblezine's Brian Roster wrote that Grizzly Bear's album Veckatimest was a "landmark exploration of the changing landscapes of pop in 2009" that represented an attempt to create "a sort of abridged conclusion to chamber pop's earliest days".[6]