Since you’ve clearly just read a bad review of flying microtonal banana and used it to justify your opinion without listening to the bands catalogue, we can use that as an example. The criticism seems to be that they are using Turkish microtonal scales in a chord based progressive context and that’s bad, which would be valid if they were making traditional Turkish music. I think the album is cool because they had the idea to use microtonal as a means of dissonance… the whole point is that it doesn’t “work” with chord driven songs. If you ever make the effort to dive a bit deeper into their catalogue, they do a lot of other interesting things that I think are pretty inventive things like microtonal key change modulation that to my knowledge are pretty unique in modern rock. You can say it’s bad if you want, and I can disagree. Is the branding and drooling over the instruments they modified for the album a bit cringe? Sure, but I don’t think this alone makes them a gimmick band like you’ve implied. I don’t think the band is trying to be “mainstream,” nor do I think they are trying to cater to pretentious math rock types that fetishize unconventional songwriting, I legitimately think they are doing this because it is how they are inspired to create new music.

The fact that you keep talking asking about chords tells me you have a very loose grasp on music theory. Are you asking if they have songs that use chords besides simple major and minor? I’ve already discussed the chromatic elements of their songs, they use tons of non-standard chords. Their newest album is jazz influenced… go listen to that, not that it will change anything here since you’re just mad that your favorite subreddit picked them as the band of the week last week.

It’s pretty obvious you haven’t actually listened to much kgatlw or are just super trenched into your argument. Saying that they just use power chords is flat out wrong, they use more interesting time signatures, polyrhythms, modal mixing, and yes, microtones, than any popular touring band that comes to my mind, and in my opinion I think that this lends to interesting songwriting. I’m not even trying to say I don’t like QOTSA… but it’s super easy to pick apart your “bring gatekeeping back” bullshit by turning it back on the bands that you seem to enjoy.

Grateful Dead and Gizzard both draw from a lot of styles and write complex music, which is not always palatable to general listeners, but tends to actually be appreciated by the “musically literate.” I would contrast that to queens of the Stone Age and stoner rock bands that are basically pentatonic riff droning. I genuinely like QOTSA but would not use them as a pedestal for proving your awesome musical literacy while bashing either of these bands.

Same I’m both musically and functionally illiterate.