Music!

I quit listening to the radio properly about ten years ago. Which means that with the exception of the very occasional new band or artist introduced to me by friends, I'm really out of touch with modern music.

I'd like to borrow the attitude of one of my characters - if you think it's noise and not music, that just means you haven't figured out how to listen to it yet. But I'm not sure I'm quite there yet. I have wide-ranging tastes but I prefer my music to have some kind of coherent melody - so...

Okay, I don't know the specific terms because my genre knowledge is crap. But I prefer melodic jazz to twiddly-rambly-improv jazz, I don't mind a bit of shouty metal but I like when there's melody along with the shouting, I like dance music but I prefer when it has a melody I can follow and not just decorations on beat-and-bass, for classical I prefer the stuff with pretty melody to the hyper-modern discordant jangly stuff. I'd like to learn more about the kinds of music that my ear doesn't hear as "melodic" and I'm pretty sure "melodic" is a pretty subjective term anyway.

And I'm not doing well right now at trying to figure out what I want to be listening to.

BUT. Having rambled a lot about the music I like, I'd like to hear your... top ten (or top three or five or twenty if either of those is easier) tracks or artists that you think I might not have heard.

You are very welcome to totally skip the bullet points below which I've stuck behind a cut - they're more detailed on the stuff I might have heard of but without listing every artist I'm familiar with it won't be comprehensive and I won't be offended if you rec stuff I already know!

( Here be further information which you are free to skip )

Have at it if you will? Thanks!