The Wildebeest Asylum

Saturday Night Prog Metal Awesomeness

2008-09-10T23:31:00.003+12:00

Opeth
Virgin Black
Live at Luna Park September 6

Man does my neck fucking hurt.

I'm ashamed to admit it but I got into Opeth just a little too late to make it to their last Sydney show (which was two years back now). Fortunately they returned this weekend past on tour for their superlative new album Watershed and my years of regret can finally be put behind me.

The openers were goth metallers Virgin Black, who I saw almost nothing of on account of being across the road drinking in the pub. By all accounts they were OK but nothing to slit one's wrists over missing. All I can say about them of my first hand experience is that they produced a hell of a mighty bass rumble during their last song while I was waiting in line for the coat check.

But as for Opeth...

Heir Apparent

I was 90% sure they would open with this track, as it seemed like such an obvious way to get around the cliché of opening with the first track off the new album by instead opening with the track that was almost going to be the first track off the new album and that still starts things off with the required kick in the face of metal brutality. Having seen Opeth live on DVD before I wasn't expecting too much of an energetic set from them but pleasingly they exceeded my expectations on this count and gave this song in particular the extra balls and energy that a good live performance requires.

Master's Apprentices

Then it was straight into an older but no less brutal kick in the face metal track. The audience responded most favourably to this not so old classic. To my approval I noticed that there wasn't any serious moshing going on, just jumping, fist pumping and head banging. Not that I have anything against moshing when it's appropriate for the music but there are too many fucking kids nowadays who'll start a moshpit for anything. It's fine when it's Rage Against the Machine, Slayer or Dillinger Escape Plan but for fucks sake why at MSI or Tool? I imagine these idiots at a Wiggles concert, dragging little kids out of the way to make a circle and going “Big Red Car! Fuck yearh lets go!”

The Baying Of The Hounds

Mikael introduced this one by saying “All the tracks on this album except one are about the devil. This one is about dogs.” The first of his infamously dopey stage banter, which we got a lot of. To be honest I mostly found him pretty funny, in a characteristically literal Western European kind of way.

Anywho, the start of this song was killer and had a huge bouncing mosh pit going.

Serenity Painted Death

I'm not a huge fan of Still Life, and Mikael introduced this one by saying that none of them liked playing this particular song that much (the only member who did was their old drummer) which vindicates my opinion a little. I actually made a bathroom dash during this track, which for some reason I always feel a little ashamed of doing during a concert, but at least it gave me a chance to notice the light show they had going, which was projected back out over the audience rather than being focused on the band. Very cool!

To Rid The Disease

The obligatory acoustic track off Damnation. Some of the kids seemed pretty impatient with it but I really enjoyed it. It was good to see that Opeth genuinely are as comfortable with the mellow stuff as the heavy songs in a live setting, but this was the only track in that vein for the night. It's a pity because I would have liked to hear 'Face Of Melinda' or 'Coil' as well.

The Lotus Eater

This was a new song that I had been really looking forward to. Unfortunately this was one of the first times they'd played it live and while it was tight technically it didn't come together quite as well as it could of. I was of course still really pleased to hear it but was actually a little disappointed by the lack of audience response to the wacky boogie breakdown.

Bleak

This is one of my favourite Opeth tracks and it went off, except for an unfortunate five minutes of downtime in the middle where Mikael's guitar cut out. (“At least now you know that we play everything you hear!” was his response.) The band stalled for time by resorting to the stereotypical metal cliché of the wank drum solo, which was followed by a wank guitar solo from new guitarist Fredrik Akesson and for good measure a wank keyboard solo too. Say what you like about the new guys but they sure as fucking hell have chops.

The Night and the Silent Water

Mikael introduced this one as being written about his grandfather who passed away. The audience responded with the perfect sitcom “Awwwww” sound effect. This one went off pretty awesomely too, but not as awesome as...

Deliverance!

I might be a totally predictable fanboy but I fucking love this song. That legendary outro was more brutal than my best expectations. The new drummer, Ax, may not have put as much of a syncopated snap into that classic riff as Lopez used to but man did he smash the shit out of it. It was awesome.

Demon Of The Fall

And they finished the main set with the other song that they're obliged to play every night for the rest of their lives. It was good too. They also said that they hoped to come back again next year, here's hoping!

The Drapery Falls

This song was the encore. Mikael apologised for taking a while to come back out, “Mendez had to go to the bathroom”. This track is a little mellower and made a very nice moody end to the night.

To be honest I kept my expectations tempered for this one, based on the slightly unenergetic vibe of Opeth's live albums and my reasoning that the music is fairly cerebral and not ideal metal concert material. Fortunately and to my delight my expectations were well exceeded. They brought the rock and then some and it was enhanced by one of the best metal concert audiences I've ever seen. Despite the presence of quite a few kids the audience was mostly mature, appreciative and didn't smell too bad. I'm hoping, hoping, hoping that Opeth do come back next year!

The wank solos:

To Rid The Disease (Sydneysiders still can't clap in time):

The breakdown of Master's Apprentices. Sideways and wobbly but good sound quality:

Ambient Metal Roundup Part 1

2008-09-05T00:15:00.001+12:00

So I've picked up a shitload of new music recently and this is mostly the fault of the fine mp3 blogs Invisible Oranges and I'm The Most Important Person In The Fucking World. Both of these sites have been dishing out a decent dose post/ambient metal in recent weeks and I'll make a start on writing about some of it in this post.

Ambient metal may well sound like an oxymoron and it could be argued that some of this stuff isn't truly metal. I certainly wouldn't say so but the guy who tried to tell me on Saturday night that metal was by definition 'dumb' (and that henceforth Isis and Dillinger Escape Plan aren't actually metal bands) probably would. In any case there's a definite subgenre out there that takes distorted metalish guitars and the general feeling of heaviness associated with metal, and uses them to create long instrumental tracks with structures better described as soundscapes than songs.

We'll start out with Breatherman by Ocoai, the least ambient of all the albums in this post. They still comfortably sit within the genre described above as their songs are fairly long and sans vocals, but compared to the other bands I'm about to describe they still have some inclination towards providing melodies and riffs. These guys are pretty upbeat for a metal band too, which is a refreshing change and they keep this mood without skimping on the heaviness. For all their chiming piano solos, melancholy trumpet noodling and their slow pace Ocoai still make sure they bust out a huge lumbering monster of a guitar riff every now and again. They may not be as heavy as some but their more relaxed, spacious and positive atmosphere makes a pleasing alternative to the more downbeat and oppressive likes of Isis and Rosetta.

Fitting far more easily into the ambient metal genre are The Angelic Process and their album Weighing Souls With Sand. This record totally eschews the standard metal repertoire of riffs, solos and screaming in favour of a heavy chug and a haze of ambient distortion accompanied by distant vocals that has as much in common with industrial as metal. The outcome is (perhaps a little surprisingly) a very beautiful, soothing sort of music with a mood not dissimilar to that of Wolves In The Throne Room. It's a very good album, but sadly there won't be any more like it since one of the principal members of the band passed away earlier this year.

Lastly we have the self titled album by asbestoscape. This is some seriously great stuff, although I'm not sure if I'd call it either metal or ambient. It certainly sounds unique and doesn't fit into any preconceived genres, a very pleasing quality in an age where it often feels as though there is nothing new under the sun. Absestoscape's songs are (relatively) short and based around simple repetitive buzzsaw guitar riffs, backed by droning bass and processed drumming that ranges from the straightforward to IDM influenced glitch. Yet from these simple elements we get some remarkably catchy and engaging tunes. It's smart, unique and fun music, I highly recommend it to pretty much anyone.

There'll probably be a part two to this post in a couple of weeks but odds are that it might wait a while since fucking awesome concert season kicks off with Opeth this Saturday!

Black Metal Roundup

2008-08-28T00:09:00.002+12:00

I've been buying so much music recently that it's been hard to find time to listen to it all but it just so happened that this week four black metal albums fell into my hands at about the same time, providing a convenient theme for a post.

First up we have Odinist: The Destruction Of Reason By Illumination by French act Blut Aus Nord. This album nicely achieves a balance between black metal's love of dirty production and the need to actually hear what's going on. The production is surprisingly crisp, especially on the drums, but has a good messy wash to the guitars and vocals that gives it some grit but not so much that the melody is obscured. The sound of the album is very reminiscent of Mayhem's most recent record Ordo Ad Chao, which preceded Odinist's release by about six months. The riffs share a similar spiralling, unsettling, atonal style and the drumming reminds me a little of Hellhammer (Mayhem's drummer), alternating between straight up blast beats and pleasingly syncopated stuttering, both driven by a kick drum that sounds crisp but not so much so that it turns into the dreaded typewriter trigger. The vocals are kind of relegated to the background but are pretty good and I must once again make the comparison with Ordo Ad Chao as they are quite similar to those of Attila Csihar on the latest Mayhem release (but not to his comical gibbering on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas).

Odinist is a pretty good listen despite the fact that every song is in an identical style; so much so that while I'd be able to recognise a song off this album quite easily I'd never be able to tell you what the title or even the track number is. Fortunately the song they repeat is a good one and doesn't wear out it's welcome over the album's brief forty minute running time.

Obligatory Black Metal Gimmickry: Blut Aus Nord's take on the black metal philosophy appears to be informed largely by mysticism (and particularly Crowley, who's writing provides the album's subtitle). In other words, the same old same old.

Agalloch's The Mantle isn't exactly black metal, but it is folk metal of a kind that has a history often interwoven with that of black metal so I'll call it close enough to include in this post. Despite the presence of distorted electrics in the background Agalloch's songs are primarily driven by clean acoustic guitars, although on the other hand the vocals give the music its tentative black metal connection, alternating between clean singing and a gurgle/whisper that's 100% black metal derived. The overall effect is actually quite cool and original. Acoustic guitar strumming accompanied by subdued distorted electric rhythm guitar, straight up rock drumming, black metal vocals and flamenco lead guitar is something I certainly admit I've never heard any other band try. The result is a melancholy and dreamy vibe that still has the energy and epic sense of metal. I must admit though that I'm not as keen on this album as I am on Odinist, as even though The Mantle has far more variety over the course of a full hour I always tire of it before the end. Nevertheless it's still well worth a listen.

Obligatory Black Metal Gimmickry: I have to admit that I haven't checked the lyrics but Agalloch seem to be invoking extreme environmentalism, with lyrics and a mood that evokes the natural world and song titles like 'A Celebration For The Death Of Man...'. This is a nice twist on the usual black metal bullshit, and one that a few bands seem to have adopted in recent times.

Which leads us to Wolves In The Throne Room's first album Diadem Of Twelve Stars. Last year saw the release of Two Hunters, an absolute masterpiece which took the evil sounding trappings of black metal, added the occasional soaring female vocal and rendered it into something positive and uplifting. Transcendent, to use the band's own term. It took just one listen of Two Hunters to make Wolves by far my favourite black metal band but I still kept my expectations for their first album modest, and sure enough it doesn't quite live up to the standard of it's successor. All the elements that made Two Hunters so great are already present, dual guitars in a wash of distortion creating more of a texture than a melody and heaviness blended seamlessly with melancholy and their trademark transcendent, uplifting mood. Unfortunately it's held back from greatness by a vestigial concern with riffage (not their strong point) and other conventional metal trappings, as well as songs with excessive lengths outstripping the quality of the ideas therein contained. Listen to Two Hunters and give Diadem Of Twelve Stars a go too only if you're really into it.

Obligatory Black Metal Gimmickry: These guys are another bunch of extreme environmentalists, playing gigs out in the forests over there in California and living in a country lodge 'off the grid'. It doesn't factor too much into their music however, beyond the fact that they focus on the wonder of the natural world to the exclusion of other traditional black metal topics.

The story with Shining's IV: The Eerie Cold is quite similar to that of Diadem. Last year Shining released V: Halmstad, a fucking brilliant blend of prog and black metal, but as with Wolves' first album I found this predecessor lacking. Mind you in all other ways Shining may well be the absolute antithesis of Wolves In The Throne Room. For a start they come from the other side of the world (Sweden). Secondly their take on black metal is totally evil (more on this when we get to their gimmickry section) where Wolves are about as positive as black metal ever can be. Thirdly as opposed to Wolves' skill at mood and texture, Shining excel in the area of straight up metal riffing. Not a track goes by without at least one passage with a groove so fucking powerful that you can't help but nod your head and stamp your foot, which is a little peculiar considering that it comes from a band who's main lyrical focus is desolation, depression and suicide. More in line with expectations for a band with such an image are the ghastly vocals and the maudlin piano and cello interludes, which are also very good. Shining's style and riffs may be derived from typical black metal tremello picking and gurgled vocals but they have very much evolved into their own unique kind of music, incorporating a straight up rock energy and creating something that may be very dark and dismal but is incredibly catchy at the same time.

As with Wolves though, The Eerie Cold is but an inferior copy of its successor. For every head bangingly awesome riff on this album, it is still just an imperfect precursor to an even awesomer one on Halmstad. Nevertheless whereas Diadem Of Twelve Stars is a little tedious to listen to The Eerie Cold is still a solid album, even if it does always make me want to put on Halmstd immediately afterwards.

Obligatory Black Metal Gimmickry: Suicide (amongst other things of a similarly offensive nature). These guys claim to be proud of a number of suicides in their native Sweden that may or may not have been caused by their music. Having watched a few interviews with Shining's obnoxious frontman Kvaroth (and listened to the annoying monologue at the start of The Eerie Cold a couple of times) it must be noted that this band's conceits deserve to be labelled gimmickry more than most. When pretty much everything they do or say seems calculated for maximum offensiveness and obnoxiousness with no consistent philosophy behind it I think it's safe to say that they don't really mean it. (Even if it was pretty funny when Kvaroth called that interviewer a troglodyte.) It's just like that Calvin and Hobbes cartoon: “The fact that these bands haven't killed themselves in ritual self suicide already proves that they're in it for the money just like everyone else.”

Friendly Fire Will Not Be Tolerated!

2008-08-22T00:31:00.002+12:00

Call Of Duty 4 (PS3)

If I'd known that this game was so short I would have saved the snark for this article instead of writing that throwaway post last week.

This is my first game post in a long while, and my first ever about a PS3 game, so I may as well start with a few words about the system itself. As a piece of hardware it can't be argued that it's not impressive. Sure it might be an enormous beastly monolith of a console sizewise but it is still only half the size of my PC (itself an enormous behemoth, by today's PC standards). At least it makes up for it's huge form factor by being whisper quiet, unlike the PS2 (or again my PC, which makes a roar like a dying elephant when it starts up). And as you'd expect from a piece of electronics containing such a ridiculous amount of processing power it renders games beautifully, at the very least justifying its reputation as the technical apex of console gaming today. I haven't bought any blu-ray discs yet (watching hi-def movies on my tiny 22” screens would be a bit of a joke), so I can't comment on that aspect of it, but it's fair to say that overall I'm pretty happy with the PS3 hardware.

Lets skip the incredibly aggravating fact that the model I own is not backwards compatible with PS2 games (guess I'll never finish Final Fantasy 12 then), and focus on the one huge damning failure on the part of the PS3, the much lamented fact that there are seriously, absolutely no good games available for it. At all. It's a real shame (and something of a mystery) that a system with such potential is going to waste, but here's hoping that Sony pull their thumb out one day soon. I was frankly a bit shocked at my lack of choices the first time I went shopping for games for it. While I ended up picking up Dynasty Warriors 6 (shallow but addictive), Assassin's Creed (brilliant ideas, boring gameplay) and Grand Theft Auto 4 (ditto) I considered it a pretty paltry haul consisting only of things that are barely OK, but that I ended up buying just for the sake of having something for the console. It's almost comical, why do we get the shitty Burnout Paradise, but the awesome Burnout Revenge is an Xbox exclusive? The other week in desperation I ended up picking up Call Of Duty, which has gotten pretty good reviews (or at least the Xbox version has).

The Call Of Duty series is part of a booming genre of World War II based FPSs, although this fourth instalment deviates from its predecessors by being set in the modern day (with the obligatory Middle Eastern and ex-Soviet bad guys). There are a lot of things I can praise about this game. For a start it doesn't force you to sit through the obnoxious ten minute install that the other PS3 games I've bought have done. Secondly it looks fantastic, by far the best looking game I've seen to date on a pretty good looking console, and the gameplay is slick, easy to pick up and satisfying to play. However its greatest achievement is a real sense of immersion; the trappings of a real special ops operation are probably not at all accurate but are at least convincing enough to distract you from the fact that you can get shot three times in the head and walk away, and that the terrorist organisation appears to have so much manpower that they can afford to send hundreds of their grunts to get slaughtered by US marines. A late night session leaves the player feeling too jittery and wound up to sleep, with a head full of exploding grenades and close call bullet traces.

Yet despite it's initial appeal I ultimately found Call Of Duty a let down. As I implied earlier, the story is the usual retarded bullshit, and further to that it's also too short. I was quite surprised when the game suddenly came to an end after killing a bad guy who was only introduced a couple of levels earlier. Of course I'm used to this kind of bullshit and considering how little time I have for games nowadays I shouldn't complain too much about the length, but what really lets Call Of Duty down is that the gameplay, while slick, is actually very shallow. For the first few levels the constant sensory overload is enough to distract the player, but it eventually becomes apparent that despite the surface appearance of tactical complexity there's very little to the game except for blindly charging into battle and relying on chance to save you from the occasional incoming grenade. Despite a wide array of abilities, including flash bombs, C4, airstrikes and night vision, you never need to do anything except tap the auto aim button and fire your default weapon for most of the game, an action that is soothing (and satisfying when you pop some poor Ruski's noggin off with a head shot), but ultimately wears thin after a few levels.

Yes the game's real strength is in multiplayer, and I actually happen to have played a moderate amount of it (not my usual style I know), and can confirm that it's pretty decent. This is all well and good, but I'm still waiting impatiently for a genuinely good single player game to let the PS3 show what it can do.

They Stole Our Honour!

2008-08-14T22:29:00.003+12:00

So I've been playing Call of Duty 4, and I hope this isn't a big spoiler for anyone but it turns out that the bad dude is a crazy Russian general who's mad about losing the cold war. Holy fucking shit! Who could have seen that coming! It's only exactly the same plot twist that's been used by every goddamn modern warfare game released in the past ten years (and a season of 24). It's like the entertainment industry sits down every time they try to write a story and say "Who could we use for a bad guy...? I know! The Russians!", and then after several months of production they realise that the USSR doesn't exist anymore but because their dessicated, worn out brains can't think outside of the same old tired cliches they used for thirty years straight, they roll with it anyway.

Just for once I'd like to play a game where you play a former Russian secret service agent who's called back into action in order to stop a crazy American former general who, pissed that the cold war is over, steals a nuke and tries to blow up Moscow.

Saturday Night Icelandic Pixie Confetti Party

2008-08-11T21:28:00.003+12:00

I said they were probably going to suck. I was wrong. I must admit, there was a bit of disingenuousness in that statement, chiefly for the purpose of deliberately keeping my expectations low. I was sceptical of just how engaging a band this twee and mellow could be in a live setting and also I was hesitant because it was at the Hordern Pavilion, a venue which has an inexplicable habit of hosting concerts that disappoint me. Luckily this time around my misgivings were unwarranted on both counts.

The openers, Pivot, were playing as I arrived. This three piece (local to Sydney) has a unique style which layers glitchy electronica in the vein of Autechre (but less avant garde and more catchy) over live drums and guitar. They're a little hard to describe in more detail than that off of a single listen, partly because they traversed a range of moods even in the single half set I saw. However I can happily report that they were a pretty decent live act, with loads of energy and confidence.

Pivot

As for Sigur Ros themselves, here's the setlist:

Svefn-G-Englar
Glosoli
Se Lest
Ny Batteri
Vid Spilum Endalaust
Hoppipolla
Med Blodnasir
Festival
Fljotavik
Saeglopur
Inni Mer Syngur
Hafsol
Gobbledigook

Untitled #8

All Alright

I stole this list from the comments to the concerts last.fm page, as I have little chance of actually remembering it on my own considering that both the length of Sigur Ros' songs and the fact that the titles are in a language I don't understand mean that I've never been too good at remembering which one was which anyway.

As you may or may not be able to tell, the song selection is fairly evenly divided between tracks from the new album, their previous one (Takk...) and their classic Agaetis Byrjun. Despite my misgivings about the new record those songs fitted in pretty well to the set. I must admit that several times I found myself thinking “I'm pretty sure this is a new song, but I'm really enjoying it... maybe it's actually an old one...”

As performers the band were as laid back and as twee as their music. Frontman Jonsi Birgisson, despite being a towering nordic giant, sounds like a pixie with his heavily accented, elfin English. The renditions of the songs were a little too similar to the album for my liking, but were performed with soul and plenty of gusto on the louder parts, especially those exuberantly stompy drums. Birgisson's extended coos (extended as in, 'going on for ages') should be mentioned too as an unexpected bit of showiness/showmanship from a band with such a reserved image.

It was cool to go to a concert where for a change at least half of it was about feeling nice instead of being goaded into an hour long frenzy. It actually took a bit of adjusting to but it turns out that nodding your head and smiling is actually also a fun way to appreciate live music. Mind you that was only half the performance, the rest was big stompy energetic fun even though you wouldn't know it to look at my fellow concertgoers, most of whom seemed to find even nodding their heads to be beneath their dignity. Fucking indie kids are probably scared of messing up their hair or losing their brightly coloured dark sunglasses.

The only lowlight of the set was 'Festival', my least favourite track from the new album, and one that was elevated in the live setting from 'too long and dead fucking boring' to 'too long and still pretty boring'. Fortunately there were plenty of great songs to compensate. The bombast and hooky piano riffs of Takk...'s two big anthems 'Glosoli' and 'Saeglopur' went down very well and the brass band marching onstage during 'Se Lest' was a highlight too. I was also really impressed by the absolute quiet during the final minutes of the opener ('Svefn-G-Englar'), even if the audience was unemotive they were still clearly enraptured. Closing out the main set with the new single 'Gobbledigook' was a great decision, I'm not all that fond of the track on the album but with everyone clapping along and glitter and confetti being fired everywhere, it was a sweet moment, one where I could almost completely by into Sigur Ros' tweeness.

The only track from () was the first encore, predictably enough 'Untitled #8' (or 'The Pop Song') (by far the scariest thing Sigur Ros have ever recorded). As expected given the fact that their music has moved in a very different direction since that album they didn't reach the same anger and intensity as the recorded version but it was still nice and loud and an epic way to finish out the concert.

Or not quite. After rapturous applause the band returned to leave us with the very mellow, sweet 'All Alright', which appropriately provided much less of a downer to end off a night that was mostly ridiculously upbeat.

Have A Little Fun Tonight

2008-08-02T15:43:00.001+12:00

Jerry Lee Lewis – Live At The Star Club, Hamburg

It was another crazy weekend here at Wildebeest Asylum HQ and my head is totally frazzled, but this week I'm going to push on nonetheless and try and wring something sensible out of my fingers through the haze of a headachy hangover and serious sleep deprivation.

The subject of this week's musing is one of the 1001 albums. I anticipated Jerry Lee Lewis with little excitement, knowing little about him and following on the heels of the dire previous entry in the series, Buck Owens' ear murdering country drawling. I was expecting to just give it one quick listen and then move on. How wrong I was. Even half way through the first track I was thinking “Oh this is much better than I anticipated!” and as it transpired Lewis was just warming up. Three songs into his set when he drops into 'Money' (you know the song, “Thats. What I want!”) I was floored by the absolute insanity of his performance. Lewis' piano playing is phenomenal. His riffs may be simple but considering that he's screaming like a madman whilst bashing them out like the keyboard killed his parents, and combined with his reputation for playing behind his back or while standing on top of the piano it's very impressive. His singing is amazing too. Sure most of the time he's just shouting but there's no doubt that he's giving it all he's got both physically and emotionally. And his backing band keep up in the intensity department. The guitar solos may be just two note wailing but even the likes of Opeth or Dragonforce should envy the rawness and wild energy that they capture.

The songs themselves have been reduced to hoary, clichéd golden oldies by the decades. 'Good Golly Miss Molly', 'Great Balls of Fire' and 'Hound Dog' may garner a bit of intellectual respect for their place in music history but few of our generation have much genuine inclination to actually listen to them. All the same in this performance Lewis howls his way through them with an energy and yes even savagery that would give even the likes of Dillinger Escape Plan something to think about, and should cause half assed metal bands who treat a live performance as a job no more exciting than sitting in an office all day (I'm looking at you Satyricon, Slipknot and the Deftones) to hang up their scary masks, wipe off their scary makeup and admit that a forty year old album made by a devout Christian lad has made them look like a bunch of gutless pussies.

The concert recorded on this album was performed at a time when Lewis' star was on the wane, following the media response to revelations of a dubious nature about his personal life (and it's wasn't just some moral majority era wowserism either, marrying one's thirteen year old cousin would probably still be frowned upon today), and it's easy to hear in his manic performance the sound of self-destruction; as though he feels he's lost everything and has nothing left but the catharsis of throwing every piece of oneself into the primal thunder of rock and roll. One of the tragic things about art is that we can only ever achieve our full potential when one's personal life has wound up in such an unpleasant place that the anger or despair brings about some kind of transcendence to create something beyond the norm. Sure I've heard plenty of great performances where the performers are jazzed up in a positive way, usually simply by the pleasure they take in creating music, but those can never quite match up to the spectacle of seeing or hearing someone totally fucking losing it for real. And the appreciation of this is not schadenfreude or pity or voyeurism, but the feeling that you've witnessed something truly genuine; that the hands smashing that keyboard or throttling that guitar are driven by real emotion instead of a mere abstract passion to make some good music. It's a little depressing but of course it's the human cost that it took to create the performance that makes it special. And that's why this album is rightfully regarded as one of the greatest live albums of all time, and why when I see Sigur Ros tonight they're probably going to suck.

I'm Like A Dog Chasing Cars! I Wouldn't Know What To Do If I Caught One!

2008-07-24T23:58:00.003+12:00

The Dark Knight
directed by Christopher Nolan

I've been listening to all sorts of stuff recently, but there's nothing that I really have a lot to say about (except that TID are really good. Go download their album. It's free!), so this week we're going to take a rare detour into the world of film.

I very rarely actually go to the theatre nowadays, and considering what a fiasco I had getting there it's no wonder why. Most of the problems I had, as with most of the problems in the world today, were the immediate and direct fault of the Catholic Church. As you may or may not be aware, last week large portions of Sydney were closed down to facilitate the arrival of many hundreds of thousands of the gullible, simple minded and deluded who were here to see their favourite rotten old ex-Nazi and his cadre of kiddy fiddlers.

Quite aside from the personal inconvenience it caused me, I find it appalling and offensive that the NSW government is willing to close down half the city, attempt to suspend our right to free speech and spend literally millions of taxpayer dollars for the sake of the Catholic Church, who for all the people who seem to have forgotten, were the nice chaps behind the Crusades and the Inquisition, not to mention their general bigotry, the paedophilia and their consistent opposition to reason and progress throughout modern history. Attention Australian government! These people are not our friends! They are in fact one of the most corrupt and vile institutions in Western history! Please remember this next time!

So anyway all this meant that getting out to Bondi Junction was a total ordeal, as the entire central city was turned into some kind of neutered, conformist carnival, filled with roaming packs of teenagers alternating fascist style chants of “Aussie aussie aussie” and “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus”, and singing that godawful fucking 'Jesus loves me yes he does' song. And of course the additional strain on the public transport system meant that the trains broke down and I was stuck in Martin Place station with these people for a quarter of an hour. (In a typically droll piece of public transport organisation we were told after 15 minutes that the train wasn't coming and we should catch the bus, at which point everyone dutifully files out of the station only to hear an announcement that the train was fixed and was arriving in one minute.) It's enough to make you want to go Varg Vikarnes styles on the Sydney cathedral.

I arrived fifteen minutes late but of course, that was no problem. Having not been to the movies for so long I was surprised to learn that nowadays they run a full half hour of ads before the film actually starts. I can't believe that these fuckers get away with that, but I guess with margins being so slim for the cinema business nowadays they really have no choice.

So with all my bitching out of the way I can happily confirm that The Dark Knight is actually a damn good action movie. Perhaps a little long, and with some unfortunate cuts required for its PG13 rating, but otherwise unassailable.

Having not seen Batman Begins I had no expectations for this particular iteration of the franchise, and with relief I note that it has nothing in common with the retarded camp of the Joel Schumacher movies. It does share the Frank Miller inspired grimness of the Tim Burton films, but Burton's characteristic cartooniness has been removed to create a far more realistic tone (relatively speaking that is, in typical action movie fashion people still crash through glass windows, dive through explosions, get shot a couple of times and still manage to walk away afterwards). Gotham City is not so superficially gothic this time around. The demented baroque and art deco nightmares that populated the city in previous versions are gone, leaving cold, grim skyscrapers that somehow end up feeling more gothic than the cartoony buildings they replaced.

The story is familiar territory for anyone who's been exposed to Batman in any of his prior media incarnations. The villains used in this particular instalment are Two Face and The Joker, and while nothing really happens that hasn't been done before the plot is smartly executed, unafraid of complexity and subtlety and not at all predictable. As an action movie it works well too. Despite having enough intelligence in the plot and thoughtful character interaction there's a huge action setpiece every half an hour or so, each of which contains at least one moment that caused my inner fourteen year old to grin his head off and say “That was fucking cool!”.

The papers over here have been full of the predictable posthumous overselling of Heath Ledger's performabce, which needs to be called out as the knee jerk hysterical media overreaction that it is. “Oscar-worthy” they're all screaming, as if this was Shakespeare and not just a decent action movie, and as if anyone with a brain actually gives a shit about the Oscars, that sad tepid one night of the year where the brain dead pillocks in the movie industry make a misguided attempt to raise their artistic consciousness to the level of 'middle brow'. Having said all that Ledger's portrayal of the Joker is genuinely great. Even in Tim Burton's version the Joker wasn't a terribly threatening villain, as his comic nature tended to overshadow any potential menace he could provide. Ledger's Joker on the other hand is one of the most memorable villains to enter filmdom in recent years. Even aside from his hideous facial deformaties his grotesque hunched shuffle and disgusting lip smacking make him truly repulsive. Also his humour isn't overdone; this Joker is first and foremost a frightening psychopath, and although he's still consistently funny, it's very much a twisted, dark and violent kind of comedy. I loved this scene:

although it was better in the movie. I'm sure there were a few more seconds of the Joker muttering away about his magic trick that made the joke.

Other members of the cast deserve mention too. Christian Bale makes a great Batman. In previous versions Batman came across as being almost as fucked up and insane as the supervillains he battles but while Bale's Batman is still a man driven by an unhealthy compulsion he's more human, more sympathetic and more heroic than the Frank Miller inspired psychotics that populate other versions of the story. I also really liked his portrayal of Bruce Wayne, who's makes great comic relief as an apparently over privileged nincompoop. It makes for a far more convincing cover for Batman's secret identity. Maggie Gyllenhaal was very good as the love interest too, she was given a little more substance and personality than the standard damsel in distress, even if she did ultimately end up playing that role (and that she's far too cute to buy as a cop).

It must be noted that The Dark Knight is depressing as hell. On one side the plot is anchored by the tragic story arc of Two-Face, who goes from being a symbol of bravery and hope to becoming an insane murderous monster, and on the other we have the Joker, who is presented as a cypher with no backstory or motivation, an unavoidable consequence of Batman's attempts to do good in the world. If the universe itself will react to the presence of a truly selfless hero by creating a supervillian with an equal and opposite capacity for evil then it seems that the thesis of the film is that the world is a cruel, hopeless place and that any attempt to altruistically improve life for your fellow citizens will only cause a backlash that will make things worse because deep down, people would rather have the freedom to be selfish themselves than see the selfishness of others be punished. However the film fortunately throws in a few moments of redemption towards the end, providing just enough counterpoint to offer hope, but not enough to change the fact that this is one huge downer of a movie.

It's not high art, but The Dark Knight is far more intelligent than the clichéd pabulum that generally passes for action movies nowadays, and that's refreshing. The film has done very well financially on its opening week and it's being spun by the media as being totally attributable to Heath Ledger. Not to undersell his performance, which again is as great as the reviews are all saying, but I'd like to believe that the reason that it has done so well is mostly because it's a well made, intelligent movie. Compare it to the insultingly stupid, lowest common denominator films that it's competing with. Which would you rather pay $17 to see, a smart, well acted movie with a bit of depth, or You Don't Mess With The Zohan?

Years in Music

2008-07-19T20:08:00.002+12:00

I've had surprisingly little 'home in front of the computer' time this week, so in lieu of writing a real post I'm going to participate, slightly tardily, in this meme that has been floating around in which you pick an album for every year that you've been alive. The exact criteria for the choices are left quite vague, so I'm approaching it with the idea that I'll pick the album that is most closely associated with that period of my life.

1980:
That said, for obvious reasons it's a bit hard to do so for my pre-teen years. In fact it's almost impossible to pick anything at all for the first few entries, since for most of the early Eighties it's hard to even find albums that I've even heard for some years. So my first pick is Flash Gordon by Queen. I've never heard the album, but I sure loved that title track when I was 10. “Flash! Aah ahh!”

1981:
This is the only year out of the twenty eight that I'm genuinely at total a loss to pick anything for so I'm going to go with Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports, even though I've never heard a second of it, just because I always liked that guy.

1982:
In contrast 82 is actually an easy one. Dire Strait's Love Over Gold was the first album I ever fell in love with. At the age of two I probably wasn't that fussed about it, but I really got into it once I turned five!

1983:
Pink Floyd - The Final Cut. It wasn't until fifteen years later that I actually heard it, but as covered previously here I still have a soft spot for the Pink Floyd album that everyone else hates.

1984:
This is another tricky pick due to scarcity of decent music that I'm familiar with from 1984, but I'm going with Metallica's Ride the Lightening, even if I don't think I've ever listened to it once all the way through. Eighties metal deserves to be namechecked at least once on this list.

1985:
Again I'm going to go with Dire Straits. Brothers in Arms has always felt like the quintessential Eighties album to me, which is perhaps a little strange given that it's a throwback to Seventies stadium rock in the era of new wave and synthpop, but it sure got played a lot around my house.

1986:
It would be remiss of me to leave Coil off the list! Horse Rotorvator is certainly not my favourite album of theirs, but it's far and away the best thing I could find for 86.

1987:
I'm going to reprise 1983 here and go with Pink Floyd's A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Yet another album that everyone hates, but that I grew to enjoy before I was told that I wasn't supposed to like it.

1988:
And just as it would be unjust to forget Coil, it would also be unforgivable not to mention Skinny Puppy, one of the few good things to come out of a wretched musical decade. Again, VIVIsectVI is one of my less liked albums of theirs, but it's still the best thing I could find listed for a crummy year.

1989:
The Cure's Disintegration. It would probably be more honest to pick NIN's Pretty Hate Machine, but that band is going to pop up a lot later, and Disintegration's unbelievably depressing mood made a pretty huge impression on me when I first heard it, ten years after its release.

1990:
I'll go with Skinny Puppy again. Too Dark Park actually does happen to be my favourite album of theirs.

1991:
There are albums that meant more to me that I could pick, but Nirvana's Nevermind is, to me, the quintessential Nineties album, and provided a pretty consistent soundtrack to my high school days.

1992:
Pretty much the last year that I had any trouble picking an album for. Nine Inch Nail's Broken is a great album. But not that great.

1993:
I wanted to pick Einsturzende Neubauten's Tabula Rasa, or Nirvana's In Utero for the sake of diversity, but who am I kidding? I love Tool's Undertow to pieces. Even if they far surpass it in many ways on later albums, it has a raw dirtiness that I still return to often.

1994:
This was a really fucking great year for music. Nirvana's MTV Unplugged, Jeff Buckley's Grace and Mayhem's De Mysteriius Dom Sathanas are all worthy candidates, but are all comfortably eclipsed by NIN's The Downward Spiral, an album which has all kinds of special significance to me, and which I've blathered on about in this blog many times before already.

1995:
The Smashing Pumpkin's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness hasn't aged that well, but it was both ubiquitous and universally adored (see what I did there) for a good long time in the mid Nineties.

1996:
Nick Cave's Murder Ballads. Great album, although one I didn't come to until quite recently. I'm really only picking it so that I don't have every Tool album somewhere on this list.

1997:
Radiohead's Ok Computer. I didn't actually get this one until the next year, but its morbid paranoia made an unfortunately appropriate soundtrack to my last years of high school.

1998:
This is the point at which I can actually start doing this list properly, as it wasn't until this year that I became a real music geek. The soundtrack to this year for me was actually Ok Computer and Mellon Collie more than anything else, but Marilyn Manson's Mechanical Animals was a pretty constant companion too (honourable mention also goes to The Smashing Pumpkin's Adore and PJ Harvey's Is This Desire?). Can you tell that I was a miserable teenager that year?

1999:
A total no brainer. I must have listened to NIN's The Fragile at least three times a day for a year after it came out. I still remember skipping uni classes to go and buy it the day it came out. And hanging around in the record store for about an hour the day before because they were playing it on the PA.

2000:
A Perfect Circle - Mer de Noms. More fun memories associated with this album, such as coming home totally shitfaced from one of those fun Uni mid afternoon booze ups to find that my friend had left this album in my room for me. When I woke up the next morning I remembered nothing about what it sounded like, only that at the time I was listening to it I thought it was the most incredible thing I'd ever heard.

2001:
Tool – Lateralus. How could I pick anything else? Not just the soundtrack to that year, but to most of my life since...

2002:
I'm pretty sure we listened to Korn's Untouchables and System of a Down's Steal This Album a lot more, (and we definitely listened to Cripple Mr. Onion's album even more still, but it was a year or two old at the time) but Boards of Canada's Geogaddi always brings to mind all the times we sat in the sun chilling out and drinking Summer Ale. It felt like we did that a lot back then, even though it was barely ever sunny in Christchurch, and I was hell busy with my final year of Uni.

2003:
Massive Attack's 100th Window would probably do as well, but Radiohead's Hail to the Thief lived in our kitchen stereo for most of the year and got played probably twice a day at least (once by Barnes, once by me). It must have driven our other flatmates nuts.

2004:
There were many far better albums released this year (Nick Cave's Lyre of Orpheus, Dillinger Escape Plan's Miss Machine and Isis' Panopticon come instantly to mind), but Velvet Revolver's Contraband got a hell of a lot of playtime from me this year, and is fairly strongly associated with an old girlfriend as well. I sure wish I could pick a better album for this year, but this is the actual honest choice.

2005:
I blame Meshuggah's Catch 33 (along with Miss Machine and Panopticon, but they came out the year before) for turning me from a relatively middle of the road hard rocker into an unredeemable metal troglodyte. Damn you brutally heavy, technical music!

2006:
This was the year I moved to Australia, and Tool's 10,000 Days was the soundtrack to the three months of pissing around it took me to get here. Few albums are as strongly associated with specific times as this one is for me.

2007:
I'm a bit torn here. Musically I think of this as the year I got turned on to Nightwish, so I could list Dark Passion Play, but the truth is I like Once a hell of a lot more, and even if the music didn't do quite as much for me Nine Inch Nail's Year Zero is the obvious choice, both for the innovative way that Trent Reznor used the internet as his liner notes, and for how the album concept reflected world events of the last five years so well.

2008:
Opeth – Watershed. See my post of a few weeks back. This album still fucking rocks!

Unthemed Weekly Music Roundup

2008-07-08T00:16:00.003+12:00

So I've listened to a whole bunch of shit this week, and all of it seems worth commenting on, even if none of it really grabbed me enough in a good or bad way to write a full post about.

Ambient Noise Madness:
Black Boned Angel – Bliss And Void Inseparable
Vargr – Northern Black Supremacy

This week I also became reacquainted with Black Boned Angel, who I'd heard before and really liked but never acquired until now. Black Boned Angel is a solo project of one Campbell Kneale, a Wellingtonian, who also records as Birchfield Cat Motel. In the Black Boned Angel incarnation his music is dark, avant-garde ambient, a genre that I used to love but which I have neglected in recent years. Bliss And Void Inseparable is an hour long piece that lurches unnaturally from one moody, disturbing piece of creepy noise to another, and if you're into that sort of thing it's pretty good.

I stumbled across Bliss and Void Inseparable while purchasing Vargr's Nothern Black Supremacy, which bridges the gap between my old and new listening habits by taking ambient industrial and infusing it with a gritty dose of black metal. They do so by taking the BM genre trappings, gurgled vocals, tremolo guitar riffs and blast beat drums and cranking up the murkiness of the production, reducing it all into a distorted wash that blends in perfectly as a backdrop to the industrial noise. The two genre's really do make a surprisingly good match, not just because the sounds mould together so well, but also because they share a few aesthetic and philosophical principles, such as their charming fascination with fascist imagery.

1001 Albums:
The Beatles – A Hard Day's Night
Jacques Brel – Olympia 64

I quite liked With the Beatles which I listened to a month or so back. The songs were nothing special but they performed with a youthful vigour that surpassed any other similar album I've reached on this list so far and introduced the rawness and energy that characterises rock and roll in my mind and is lacking from the likes of say the Everly Brothers. A Hard Day's Night in comparison was a little bit of a disappointment. Perhaps it's just because I've been exposed to these songs literally since the day I was born, as an inescapable part of the pop cultural atmosphere, but the whole album just breezed right past my ears and left little impression.

Jacques Brel on the other hand is a total revelation. I've never heard of him before but in his native France (well, actually he's Belgian, but his musical career was based in France) he is considered an influential singer songwriter. I'm at a real loss as to how to describe his music. It certainly fits into no category I can think of, although iTunes has classified it as 'caberet', and that's as good a guess as any. Brel sings accompanied by a sprightly orchestra which includes plenty of accordion and piany (as opposed to piano!), giving it an definite French character. I guess superficially you might compare this album to those of Frank Sinatra, in that it's a single male vocalist backed by an orchestra which acts in a purely supporting role, but Brel's vocal quirks and dramatic, bitter delivery put me in mind of Mike Patton more than anyone. Brel is clearly a big influence on Patton, at least when he's in crooning mode. And I almost forgot to mention, this album is really good! I love it even though Brel's best quality is supposedly his lyrics and I can't understand a word of it, as it's all in French.

One other random chain of influence. British singer songwriter Scott Walker was heavily influenced by Brel, covering him often. Walker's 2006 album The Drift is one of the albums Mikael Akerfeldt has been citing as an influence on the latest Opeth album. Coming from such a far flung corner of the musical map I'm totally surprised (but also delighted) by just how relevant this guy is to the obscure corners of metaldom.

Sigur Rós - Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust

Sigur Rós are one of the few upbeat, happy bands to make serious inroads into my music collection, which in general resembles a grim nightmare world of hatred, despair and violence. I was a little disappointed with their b-sides album Hvarf/Heim that was released last year, but didn't think too much of it since their last two real albums (() and Takk) were so damn good. Sadly their new album with the nonstandard character filled title too long for me to be bothered typing out again disappoints in a similar way to Hvarf/Heim. At first I wondered (as I often do) if perhaps I haven't stuck my head so far out into the world of extreme metal that I've lost the ability to appreciate music without blast beats, vocals howled by a madman and lyrics about strangling people with their own intestines, so I made a point of listening to Ágætis Byrjun, one of their earlier albums, again and found that I still thought it rocked. By this highly scientific method I have proved that it is indeed Sigur Rós that have started to suck, not me.

Upon consideration I've decided that the thing that's changed about them is that their older albums had more flavour to their emotional landscape. While their main angle has always been prettiness, twinkling piano and uplift, on earlier albums it was leavened with moments of melancholy (and on () even heaviness) but they seem to have discarded these shades of subtlety in recent years. On this release the climactic, soaring conclusion to 'Ára bátur' (backed by the London Oratory School Choir) would on an earlier album have been the triumphant, redemptive centrepiece of an emotional journey that visited a variety of moods, but in this case is just the point where they crank things up from 'really really happy' to 'super extra fucking happy'.

On the other hand these guys are touring here next month, and I am still looking forward to it.

Wake! Lift!

2008-07-02T00:27:00.003+12:00

Rosetta – The Galilean Satellite, Wake/Lift and Live at Hermann's Bar 21st July

Over at I'm the Most Important Fucking Person in the World they've been running a series on bands that sound like Isis/Neurosis/Cult of Luna, as a response to and criticism of the particularly lazy way that the metal music press like to dismiss such bands as 'just another Cult of NeurIsis clone'. Rosetta would be a perfect candidate for their series, as their sound is quite unashamedly derivative of Isis and Neurosis (and in fact, Aaron Turner, vocalist of Isis, designed the artwork for The Galilean Satellite), but who cares how much they fit into an oversaturated genre when their music is so fucking great?

From their progenitors Rosetta borrow the long track lengths, raw, shouted vocals, a slow cycle of build and release and use of alternating gentle interludes and heavy climaxes. The more unique elements that Rosetta display are dense and frequent use of ambient electronica, an enveloping, spacey sound and a positive, uplifting vibe. Not just the electronics, but also the full sound of the instruments create a much richer soundscape than say Isis, who tend to be somewhat sparse and (at least until their last album) somewhat more purist in their adherence to a standard rock format. Rosetta also have a more uplifting, at times even joyous, emotional vibe to their music, which is a nice point of difference to their post-metal contemporaries and indeed to metal as a whole, which of course tends to be melancholic, when it's not downright depressing.

Rosetta have two full length albums out (as well as a few EPs which I haven't heard). Their first, The Galilean Satellite, is the more conventional post-metal record of the two. The songs are all roughly between ten minutes and a quarter of an hour long and are leisurely arranged, allowing plenty of time for the gradual cycling from peaceful acoustic and ambient passages to the heavy climaxes where they indulge in the genre's signature sound, lumbering riffs belting out a wall of crushing distortion. And of course, it's a concept album. This one is about a man who forsakes the company of his fellow humans and begins a life of isolation on Europa (one of Jupiter's moons, hence the album title), but eventually realises that he can't live without human companionship and returns to Earth. It might sound a little cheesy, but simple stories work best as album concepts and this one is well serviced by articulate lyrics and a powerful delivery. The Galilean Satellite also comes with a companion disc of purely ambient music and while it's a perfectly good album in it's own right it's actually meant to be played synchronously with the album proper. It's very a cool idea, even if Neurosis did do something similar a couple of years back.

Wake/Lift is their second album, and it shifts gears slightly by tightening up the arrangements and putting more focus on melody and riffage at the expense of the ambience, which is neither a bad nor good thing, just a difference. By and large the two albums are pretty similar, and they both rock out something wicked so I'd be hard pressed to pick a favourite.

Now I would never had heard of these guys, but they happened to be doing an Australian tour last month; unusual for an overseas band with so little exposure but most welcome all the same. Fortunately a half page interview in a local free music rag caught a friends eye and after a quick look at their myspace page I was sold.

The gig was at the dark and pokey Hermann's Bar, on campus at Sydney Uni. I was curious to see what kind of crowd a band like this would bring in (if any) considering the relatively sparse attendance for Isis last year. I was heartened to see that there at least was one, and as you'd expect mostly comprised of shy young men dressed all in black, some trailing bored, disinterested girlfriends.

There were three opening bands, and we arrived just in time to see the first close their set with a Celtic Frost cover. Following this mysterious, unnamed band were The Surrogate, from Brisbane who were an easy fit with the headliners in terms of sound and style. They were pretty fucking good too, with a lot of fine technique on display from all four musicians. Their drummer was especially impressive, handling primary vocals while playing. They performed with tons of guts and were very well received. The only bad thing I can say about them is that their guitarist didn't wash his hands after he uses the bathroom.

The final opening band did not go down so well. In fact I felt a bit sorry for them, as after the enthusiastic applause that The Surrogate invited they received total silence at the end of each song. I don't remember their name, which is perhaps just as well because I wasn't very impressed by them. They sounded about halfway between Converge and Parkway Drive: screamy hardcore stuff. The singer did have a good strong voice, but I thought that their songs were kind of straightforward and boring, and their performances lacked the fire that that style of music really needs.

Finally Rosetta themselves took the stage. They were plagued by technical troubles to start with, including no vocals for the first song, and a muddy mix that rendered their spacey wall of sound mostly into a dull roar. Such things are to be expected at a rock show though and Rosetta compensated admirably with an impassioned performance. It's been a while since I had the opportunity to go to a smaller gig, where you can get right up and close to the band (close enough to get a bit of a shower when the vocalist went nuts on the climaxes), and the audience is well behaved but appreciative.

Hopefully it wasn't too expensive for them to come all the way over here and play. I'd love to see them again soon!

Here's the only video of them on youtube, or at least the only one I could find:

We were a much better audience than those guys by the way.

For The Great Blue Cold Now Reigns

2008-06-23T22:39:00.003+12:00

The Ocean – Precambrian

German band The Ocean have been around for a little while now but they're new to me, having caught my attention by way of a surge of music press interest brought on by their first US tour, and they are poised to be the 'next big thing' in the world of beard metal, blending the disparate but congruous influences of Mastodon and Isis.

The Ocean are more correctly named 'The Ocean Collective' (at least according to wikipedia) on account of it's constantly rotating membership. Songwriter/mainman Robin Staps is the constant that gives the band its identity, but he assembles a veritable circus of performers for each album. Precambrian credits more than twenty musicians, many of whom are bought in for just one song. The change in performers on each track brings some nice variety, as even though the genre and songwriter remain the same the interpretations of the performance give every song a different character. It works nicely!

Precambrian is a two disc set, the first named Hadean/Archaean and the second Proterozoic (these are the three eons that comprise the Precambrian, the geological term for the lifespan of the Earth before the current eon), and each track is named after a subdivision of each eon. It might seem to be an odd concept for a metal album, but it's strictly metaphorical; the lyrics (which are terrific by the way) are more concerned with alienation and the death of the soul in the modern age, in a nice blend of Radiohead and Rage Against the Machine. The two discs are themed by musical genre, Hadean/Archaean is all fast metalcore, in the vein of Converge or Mastodon, while Proterozoic contains songs that are longer, more moody and more progressive, similar to Isis and with a cinema soundtrack feel to many songs that calls to mind the various projects of Mike Patton.

Did I mention that this album is fucking brilliant? Opening track 'Hadean' immediately kicks the listener in the face with a brutal riff that combines the inventiveness of Mastodon and the intensity of Converge, and indeed the Hadean/Archaean disc as a whole delivers a divine twenty minutes of metalcore that never stops to catch a breath. As befitting the primordial song titles the music is earthy and volcanic, even if the riffs tend towards unconventional rhythms and the performances are precise in a typically German way.

On Proterozoic disc the songs stretch out to seven or eight minutes in length and incorporate gentle acoustic and electronic parts. There is still plenty of brutal heaviness to be found, but these passages are now accentuating points and climaxes that form only part of much longer songs containing a multitude of themes and moods. The Ocean achieve a much wider palette of styles than many of their post-metal contemporaries, from the dark and spacey 'Siderian', which places an unsettling sax lead in a movie score style soundscape, to the peaceful, pastoral beginning of 'Stenian' and the acoustic guitar backed cello piece 'Statherian', which sits behind a sampled movie quote and builds from mournful to menacing in a way that reminded me, surprisingly enough, of Swedish prog/black metal band Shining. Despite such varied styles, the disc makes up for its schizophrenia with masterful songwriting, and it's moody trippiness makes a nice counterpoint to the angry, gutteral first disc.

I'm a huge sucker for bands that combine the violent and the beautiful, and few others do it as gracefully as The Ocean or with such intelligence. And if the live video below of them performing 'Calymmian' is anything to go by, they're a fucking awesome live band too. Here's hoping they make it to Australia some day...

A Couple Of Early Candidates For Album Of The Year

2008-06-16T23:29:00.003+12:00

Meshuggah – obZen
Opeth – Watershed

I've been a big fan of Meshuggah for some years now, but my appreciation for them has always been a little tempered. While there's no denying the awesomeness of their unique polyrhythmic madness, a style that as far as I'm aware no one has even attempted to copy, it's always been the kind of clever music that works more on a cerebral level than on an emotional one. From time to time I would wonder at how awesome it would be if a band came along who built on their technical achievements and infused it with the passion to match, and just how much of a punch to the gut something like that would carry.

So I was greatly delighted when obZen arrived earlier this year and proved that no such hypothetical band was necessary, as Meshuggah have finally fulfilled their potential themselves. One only needs to hear the killer opening riff of the album's single 'Bleed', to hear just how perfectly they've nailed their style this time around. As the barrage of Haake's unmistakable drumming and those brutally low eight string guitars thunder in with such sublime heaviness I'm not only amazed by the speed and precision of the performance (I get wrist strain just imagining playing those triplets, and it's not just from the fapping) but also with the immediate and unavoidable spine shivers and gut dropping feeling that they've never quite managed to evoke before.

'Bleed' may be the standout track but the whole record comes damn close to matching it in awesomeness. Album opener 'Combustion' finds Meshuggah taking a rare detour into the realm of conventional 4/4 rhythms (although the frenzied chromatic riffing and offmeter drumming could almost convince you otherwise) and boasts a classic opening riff, wild guitar solo and throughout just plain thrashes out harder than anything else I've heard this year. 'Dancers to a Discordant System' closes obZen and is about the closest Meshuggah ever come to a writing a ballad. Of course it's still brutally heavy by almost any other band's standards but relative the to rest of the album it's somewhat throttled back, and the soaring outro riff has a melancholy vibe that could almost be described as bittersweet.

But as great as it is to hear these guys finally knock one out of the park, obZen has been overshadowed by another recent death metal record, by a band that has been consistently delivering albums of impeccable quality for years now.

Opeth's Watershed faced a lot of scepticism before its release. Founding member Peter Lindgren and fan-beloved drummer Martin Lopez had both left, and while Mikael Åkerfeldt has always been the songwriter and main personality behind the band internet metalheads are always keen to find an excuse to declare that such and such a band used to be awesome but now sucks. Here's a nice example found here:

The drummer, Axlesnot, or whatever his name is, should be taken out back and shot. The organist/keyboardist should likewise be taken out back and shot, but only after being sodomized repeatedly with the corpse of Axlesnot.

Fortunately despite what you might read on the internet Watershed comfortably lives up to the high standard of its predecessors and is arguably more consistently great than anything they've done before.

The two new members, guitarist Fredrik Åkesson and drummer Martin "Axe" Axenrot, are more straight up metal than the musicians they replaced, lacking Lindgren's sensitive, moody side and Lopez' jazzy snap, and you can definitely a change in the sound. Yet despite this Watershed is Opeth's mellowest album besides Damnation, even if the heaviest parts are heavier than Opeth has ever sounded before, and Åkerfeldt is clearly indulging his interest in Seventies prog rock on this release, or as he likes to refer to Opeth's albums, this 'observation'.

Almost every track on Watershed is a highlight. In a deliberate subversion of the heavy metal cliché that states an album should open with the heaviest song and save the gentle interlude for the two thirds mark, Watershed begins with the beautiful acoustic break up ballad 'Coil', featuring female vocals no less. It's a good sight better than most of Opeth's earlier acoustic songs, which are usually very nice but are clearly not meant to be anything more than bridges between heavy songs. 'Coil' in contrast stands pretty well on its own.

The next two tracks are the heaviest on the album. 'Heir Apparent' just rocks out from beginning to end, with of course all the usual Opethy digressions, and showcases Åkesson and Axenrot's impressive technical chops. 'The Lotus Eater' is probably the album's flagship song, combining blast beats and brutality with a creepy weird vibe and, inexplicably but awesomely, a boogie breakdown near the end.

On 'Burden' Opeth have made their interpretation of a Seventies prog rock ballad and do a fantastic job of it. Even with little distortion on the guitars Opeth still metalize the genre tropes and make it heavier than such a sensitive ballad should expect be. Plenty of room is found for virtuosity on this track, Åkerfeldt and Åkesson both knock out awesome guitar solos, and keyboardist Per Wiberg gets his moment in the spotlight with an orgasmic organ solo near the beginning.

'Porcelain Heart' is the single and is quite easily the most underwhelming track on Watershed. The choice to use it as a single is understandable, because it is after all the most 'standard Opeth' sounding track on the album so Roadrunner Records have in a typical fit of major label stupidity decided to play things safe, reasoning that even if it's not the strongest track on the album a music video featuring twelve string guitars and hot lesbians will sell records all the same. The song's not bad mind you, Axenrot gets a chance to show off with a crazy drum solo, and there's definitely a place for one Opeth-by-the-numbers track on this album, even if it seems obvious to me that 'The Lotus Eater' is the only sensible choice for a single.

Finally the album closes with 'Hessian Peel' and 'Hex Omega', two lengthy tracks which blend elements of Opeth's death metal roots and their ever growing prog rock influence to create something new and interesting, but hard to describe. Lets just say that it combines the beautiful, the epic and the heavy to create a mighty satisfying end to a great album.

Opeth's new album has overshadowed Meshuggah's effort this year, but having said that I'm seeing both bands in concert later this year (no not touring together unfortunately) and while I'm sure that Opeth will be great, I have a feeling that Meshuggah's live show is going to fucking kill.

Here's a few videos for you.

Meshuggah's 'Bleed'. Great song, great video:

Opeth's 'Porcelain Heart', featuring aforementioned twelve string guitars and lesbians:

But that's not really the best song to showcase the album. Here's a live version of 'Heir Apparent':

1001 Albums: Number God Knows What

2008-06-11T00:20:00.002+12:00

The Freewheelin' – Bob Dylan

So I am still digging through this '1001 albums you must listen to before you die' list. At the current rate it will take me about twenty years to get through them all, so who knows if I'll ever actually listen to all 1001, but at least to this point (from the mid 1950s to 1963) it has been for the most part an interesting and educating project.

Since I last posted here this list has exposed me to some truly dire music. Marty Robbins' schmaltzy Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs was by far the worst. I can handle cringeworthy lyrics and themes as long as there's good music for it to hide behind, but straightup cornball country will do little to mask or forgive the inanity of old west clichés and nauseatingly sincere Christian morality tales. Jimmy Smith's Back at the Chicken Shack and Booker T. and the M.G.s' Green Onions both make strange and misguided attempts to fill out half an hour of instrumental organ led jazz. Don't get me wrong, the organ is a fine instrument, but its use in this context evokes the very worst kind of cheesy Seventies muzak and I have a hard time imagining why people who appear to be talented musicians seem so enthused by it.

Fortunately there have been some good discoveries as well. Muddy Waters Live at Newport is fantastic and I actually sat down and listened to a Beatles album (the very early With the Beatles) from beginning to end for the first time in my life and found it not disappointing. But the highlight so far has to be Ray Price's Night Life, which provides country music with a redemptive counterbalance to the godawful Marty Robbins (perhaps aided by the more engaging subject matter of getting trashed in seedy bars and cavorting with loose women).

But anyway, on to the ostensible subject of this post. The most recent album in this list I listened to is The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which contains many of the famous folk singer's most notable songs, opening with the legendary 'Blowin' in the Wind'. Folk is a new genre to me, but the iconic image of one dude with a guitar and a harmonica railing against the man has its romantic appeal and Dylan is more strongly associated with this image than anyone else. However I found that, on this album at least, Dylan's more didactic songs were pretty grating. Not in a musical way but just because of the subtly unpleasant aroma of self-rightous Sixties hippydom. Sure, on 'Masters of War'

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

I might agree with Dylan's sentiments, and I may nod along in a pleased manner when Jim Morrison sings almost exactly the same thing on 'Dead Cats, Dead Rats', but this particular song, and others like it, radiate a particular smugness and arrogance that belie the message of the song and cause me to grind my teeth and roll my eyes ever so slightly.

I like Dylan a lot more when he's only half serious. You can read whatever meaning you like into 'Blowin' in the Wind', but taken at face value at least the lyrics are little more than romantic nonsense. It's Dylan's knowing, assured performance that infuses the song with weighty meaning and has rendered it a classic, and I like this persona of his much better. I also really liked 'Talkin' World War III Blues', where Dylan affects a rambling mumble and injects a healthy dose of humour, while still maintaining a political slant as implied by the title.

There's shitloads more Bob Dylan coming up on this list, so we'll see whether I grow fonder of his pompous hippy side or if generation Y cynicism will cause me to grow weary and dismiss him as an outdated, overly earnest faded Boomer icon.

Blog Hiatus

2008-02-02T14:35:00.000+13:00

The Wildebeest Asylum will be quiet for the month of February, on account of me taking another crack at FAWM. Here's hoping I'm more successful than I was last time...

Mind you, I do really want to write a post about seeing Nightwish...

Itadakimasu!

2008-02-01T01:28:00.000+13:00

Puscifer - 'V' is for Vagina

My expectations for Puscifer, the solo project of Maynard from Tool, were uncharitably low. The juvenile (but amusing) teaser track 'Cuntry Boner' along with Maynard's sarcastic larking during 'V' is for Vagina's prerelease promotion led me to expect that it would be a lame joke album, but I should have given him a bit more credit. After all, the first Puscifer track released ('Rev 22:20' off the Underworld soundtrack) is pretty damn good, and as it turns out the album is far more of a likeness to that song than to 'Cuntry Boner'.

There's a good roster of random guest musicians to be found on 'V' is for Vagina, including Danny Lohner (formally of Nine Inch Nails and A Perfect Circle) and the rhythm section of Rage Against the Machine. The guest with the most obvious influence is dark ambient dude Lustmord, whose menacing, deep, post industrial sound leaves its greasy fingerprints all over the album. Lead single 'Queen B' is representative of 'V' is for Vagina; Maynard puts on his deepest, sexiest voice and croons over a dark, dirty rhythm section, supplemented by industrial electronics. Somewhat surprisingly the tone of the music has much more in common with the likes of (post-)industrial bands like Tweaker or Recoil than with Tool. The lyrics too are not of the same weighty substance as those of Tool or even A Perfect Circle, and instead we get simple, repetitive catch phrases, more suitable for the simpler electronic style of the music. I suspect that part of Maynard's motivation for this project was to take a break from the seriousness and complexity of Tool.

A few more random notes. The cover art is as stupid and goofy as 'Cuntry Boner', but still worth a laugh. I don't like the new version of 'Rev 22:20' included at the end of the album nearly as much as the original, and I think that 'Sour Grapes' would have been a much better album closer. Speaking of which, here's another song who's impassioned end refrain, “It'll always be sour grapes with you boy, until you get right with-a JEEEEEEEEEEEEEESUS!” will add further fuel to the speculation about Maynard's relationship with everyone's least favourite fictional messiah.

Overall 'V' is for Vagina is a most pleasant surprise. Now lets have a new Tool album, or at least another Australasian tour.

Here's the poorly animated video for 'Queen B'.

And for completeness, and because it's funny, here's 'Cuntry Boner':

1001 Albums Number 20

2008-01-30T22:56:00.000+13:00

Miles Davis – Kind of Blue

I didn't think that much of the last Miles Davis album on this list (Birth of the Cool) but the highly regarded Kind of Blue works a little better for me.

It's much more of an arty album, divided into five long tracks which are still in Davis' 'cool jazz' style, but which have more of a modern, bebop influence in the stuttering rhythms and chromatic melodies, making it immediately more appealing to me. All the same the music is still laid back and inoffensive to a degree that I find almost aggravating, but I still appreciate the artistry even when the mood is not my cup of tea.

I do particularly like the last track, 'Flamenco Sketches', which has some nice tension between the mellow jazz and a melancholy flamenco guitar, but it seems to be the case that, by and large, Miles Davis and I just have fundamentally different desires as to what we want out of music.

Long Weekend Munter Cuddle Fest '08

2008-01-29T22:21:00.000+13:00

Big Day Out Sydney 2008

Even with a great performance by Tool last years Big Day Out (my first in Sydney) was a bit average. At the time I blamed the Australian attendees innate inferiority to a Kiwi crowd, but this year was an absolute blast, so either I was being prejudiced or I'm going native.

My enjoyment was in spite of the fact that I'd had a bender the night before and was feeling less than super, but a nice champagne breakfast where I helped myself to a bit of a hair of the dog and a shitload of pancakes got me ready to face the day.

One thing I wish that I'd taken a photo of was the guy they had dancing on top of the entrance to the venue. He was dressed up like that little retard from Melbourne who was in the news last week for inviting everyone on myspace to a party, and was greeting everyone entering the park: “Come on in everyone, it's a party! Woooo!” I thought it was pretty funny.

During the early afternoon we spent a good deal of time just wandering around, and one of the coolest things I saw was the drum playing robot. You can't tell from this picture but it's playing 'Bullet in your Head' by Rage.

A drum playing robot

The first band I made an effort to see was Regurgitator, who I have some fond memories of. They were the first band I saw at the first Big Day Out I went to way back in 1999 (oh my god, that's almost ten years ago...) and were really good back then but I saw them again a couple of years ago and was pretty disappointed. They weren't actually any better this time around but they at least closed out with good versions of 'What's at the End' and 'Polyester Girl'.

Regurgitator

I'm not sure what the deal was with the girls in the wedding dresses

Next up were Midnight Juggernauts, who I wanted to give a chance but after two songs I was bored to tears. I thought their first song was some kind of drawn out intro and was surprised when it suddenly ended to applause.

There then followed a terrifying interlude in which I tried to find a toilet stall that wasn't utterly horrifying, with only limited success.

Tom Morello + half of Anti-Flag

I made it round to the small stage to see in order to see The Nightwatchmen, a.k.a. Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine solo with an acoustic guitar. I'd heard this stuff before and didn't find it very interesting, but I'm glad I gave him a chance because it's the kind of music that's meant to be experienced live. It might be simple and low key (and completely different to Rage) but protest songs work best when heard as part of a crowd and you can pump your fist in the air along with everyone else pledging support for the striking miners union. By the end I was ready to go smash up a McDonalds or something.

Tom plays the tom

I'm not sure why I was surprised but Morello turns out to be a pretty good front man. As befitting the genre he was playing in he put on a folksy, friendly manner, chatting with the audience and joking that his album is 'available for illegal downloading as soon as you get home'. When he had to stop to retune his guitar he had everyone jump around and scream our heads off so that there wouldn't be a lull in the performance. Highlights of his set included the jump up and down singalong end of his second to last song 'The Road I Must Travel' and his Aussie pleasing covers of ACDC's 'Dirty Deeds' and Midnight Oil's 'Beds Are Burning', for which he was joined by two members of Anti-Flag.

Anti-Flag and The Nightwatchmen play 'Beds Are Burning'

After a few shenanigans in the boiler room I returned to the small stages for Battles. My last chance to see them in concert was soured by personal problems, so I was very glad that they got a chance to impress me again when my only emotional issue that they had to contend with was my full bladder. Battles have reworked their songs a bit for the live show, drawing the grooves out more so that the tracks now stretch to seven or eight minutes each. Their performance was as phenomenal as ever. Kind of sort of frontman Tyondai Braxton stunned me once more with his ability to play keys and guitar simultaneously, and the legendary John Stanier showed incredible skill on the drum kit, as the entire 45 minute concert was performed with each song segueing directly into the other, save for the finale 'Race: In', meaning that Stanier drummed for about 35 minutes nonstop. As the long, polyrhythmic intro of 'Race: In' approached it's climax you could see the strain and concentration on his face, and the release of tension when he turned around and smashed that high ride cymbal was a brilliant moment.

'Atlas'. Everyone joined in on the "Woo Ooh Ooh"s

John Stainer is a fucking demon

Battles are a bit of an abstract, egghead band so it's not all that surprising that their audience was full of big black glasses wearing indie geeks, and just as at the Gaelic last year they were a boring, tepid bunch. Fortunately I found a group of really wasted guys who were dancing and joined in. It turns out that Battles live are a lot more fun when you're waving your arms and jumping up and down like an idiot to them. The climax of 'Atlas' was the huge 'fuck yeah!' moment of the day (save for the other one, and you can probably guess what it was, that came at the end of the night) when I found myself involuntarily headbanging my arse off. It was a damn good set and one that quite easily washed away the bad taste of the last time I saw them.

I caught a wee bit of Karnivool, a fairly decent Aussie nu metal act, and I would have liked to have stuck around for a bit more of them but I really needed to get off my feet and rest for a little while in preparation for the headliners. So I ended up seeing a little bit of The Arcade Fire from the stands, who I knew nothing about and who sounded kind of nice but made very little impression. Although I was pleased by their brief inclusion of a few lines of a Bjork song, who we should have been seeing right then but who had cancelled on account of illness (much to my dismay).

And then at last it was time for Rage Against the Machine, who played almost exactly the same setlist as on Tuesday, but with 'Wake Up' switched out for 'War Within a Breath'; a slightly bewildering decision, sure 'War Within a Breath' is a great song but how can they not play 'Wake Up'? The band were tighter and not as tired as they were on Tuesday, but playing in the stadium instead of the smaller venue did mean that some of the atmosphere was lost.

This time around I was in the moshpit so it was a completely different experience to the previous concert. I had to deal with the usual festival moshpit perils: Mr. Ultraviolence, Ms. Clear Out A Space The Size Of A Circle Pit To Take Photos Of Her Friends and worst of all, Mr. Stand There And Do Nothing. For the first few songs I couldn't really appreciate the music because I was moving around looking for a good spot. I ended up in about the worst possible position, sandwiched between a circle pit and a group of sweaty munters crammed together faces to armpits like clowns in a phone booth. I am tempted to suggest that these people only come to metal concerts to experience the untender touch of their fellow man, rather than for the music. After I realised that I was the only one singing along and even trying to pay attention to who was on the stage, I moved back to where I saw a bunch of people jumping, and found a spot where I could kind of see, it wasn't too crowded and people were getting down and having a bit of a boogie.

Part Two of Terrible Rage Against the Machine Photo Masterpiece Theatre

Once I'd sorted that out I had a great time. I can only speculate as to what it must have looked like from the stands but the moshpit must have been enormous. Every song (with the possible exception of 'Renegades of Funk' again) went off like a motherfucker. The climax to the whole day came of course at the end of the set, when they pulled out old reliable 'Killing in the Name', a song perhaps suited like no other to be played for a stadium full of screaming munters by a band who've just returned from an eight year hiatus. The 'fuck you I won't do what you tell me' pay off is one of the most insane things I've ever seen at a concert. Just as the slow build up paused and the band hit the chorus to that infamous refrain, the stadium floodlights came on to reveal the moshpit flying up into the air as one for as far as I could see in all directions, and when everyone hit the ground again on the second beat everything. Just. Went. Fucking. Nuts. Dreadlocks thrashing everywhere. I could swear I saw dudes flying past me horizontally, although perhaps it was just that I was at 45 degrees and they were at 45 degrees in the other direction. A fucking glorious end to the day.

After that it was home to bed for me. Here's hoping next year will be as good!

An uncomfortable night to be a Howard supporter

2008-01-29T01:09:00.000+13:00

Rage Against the Machine
Live at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, Jan 22^nd

Moshpit tickets sold out in seconds so, just as with Tool at the same time last year, I was seated for Rage Against the Machine's Big Day Out sideshow. It was a pity because unlike Tool, who can be appreciated quite nicely from a seated location, Rage are a band that ideally you want to be in the moshpit for. Fortunately my seats were a little better than last year. I was still near the back of the theatre but at least we were dead centre stage.

The openers were Anti-Flag, whose tepid pop punk did little for me and they seemed to be chosen as a support act more for their consonant political leanings than any musical similarity. Mind you they weren't terrible and they passed the time, even if they weren't as much fun as the Mexican Wave.

During the wait for Rage to take the stage the tension and anticipation in the crowd, even way back where I was, was strong. When the house lights dropped off and the huge red star at the back of the stage lit up to the strains of what I'm pretty sure was the Soviet national anthem, everyone leapt to their feet with a roar and, after frontman Zach de la Rocha introduced the band (“We're Rage Against the Machine from Los Angeles, California!” No kidding bro!), the opening riff of Testify had everyone from the front of the moshpit back to the nosebleed seats boogieing their arses off. Tom Morello's first solo of the night was greeted by a massive cheer.

All my photos were exceptionally shit that night, so this is the only one I'll post. Hopefully when I get my new phone tomorrow it will usher in a bold new era of concert photos.

"Oh shit!” says Zach, apparently referring to the insanity of the moshpit, and with barely a pause they launched into the galvanising intro to Bulls On Parade. Turns out everyone else loves that wah wah guitar riff as much as I do. Next up was People of the Sun. With such an impressive backlog of surefire hits the energy stayed at ridiculously high levels for the entire concert with barely a moment for either the band or the audience to catch their breath for the full eighty minutes.

They then introduced the first track off the self titled album, Bombtrack. Zach seemed bored with the old stuff, he mixed the vocals around more and didn't seem as enthused during those songs. On the other hand the rest of the band were fully into it, perhaps they were just relieved that it wasn't Chris Cornell singing. And of course the punters went totally nuts.

Vietnow was followed by Bullet in your Head, which featured the first holy fucking shit solo from Morello, which he began by flipping his hand super fast back and forth around his guitar's neck and only got more crazy from there. Know your Enemy is another fan favourite, and Morello's solo was nuts on this one too. Renegades of Funk was perhaps the concerts' low point. I guess they felt obligated to play something from Renegades, but lets be honest, this is the averagest song off their averagest album.

Guerilla Radio was surprisingly well received. The house lights came on when the full band came in after the intro, giving us high in the stands the spectacular sight of a couple of thousand people totally going off in unison. Next up was Calm like a Bomb, not my favourite song of theirs but it still seemed to be popular, and without a beat the end segued right into Sleep Now In The Fire! I didn't like the way Zach sung it so much (he actually sang, rather than rapped), but it was still one of the highlights of the night.

Wake Up made a fucking awesome finish to the main set. Zach made a long speech during the breakdown, starting with a rant about the Iraq War, thanking Australia for kicking out 'that bootlicker Mr. Howard', mentioning Martin Luther King Day and telling us that 'the real vote takes place in the streets'. I must admit that I wonder just how Zach feels about watching an arena full of people cheer and pump their fists in the air in response to his call for a violent communist revolution when the next day most of us are going to go back to our desks in a tall office building in the CBD and keep on greasing the wheels of international finance. Following the speech Morello's squalling guitar fill ushered in the high point of the concert, as the entire audience bellowed “Wake up” and Morello blew the roof off with his finest work of the night in an unbelievable outro solo.

They kept us waiting a while for the encore, and from the looks of things it was because they were totally knackered. During the last few songs Zach spent a lot of time crouched on the edge of the stage, and it sounded like he was struggling for breath between lines. Mind you it didn't stop him bouncing all over the place during the instrumental breaks. First track of the encore was Freedom (big cheers greeted the cow bells in the 'anger is a gift part') which segued straight into an excerpt from Township Rebellion, (“Shackle your minds as you're left on the cross”), which in turn slowed down into those unmistakable drop D power chords that announce Killing in the Name, the ultimate show closer. It went off like a motherfucker of course, but from where I was standing not the best part of the concert (that was 'Wake Up'), so you'll have to wait until my Big Day Out post for me to describe how fucking crazy the 'fuck you I won't do what you tell me' bit went off.

It was definitely a fun concert, even back where I was sitting, but I do have a few criticisms. Although as individuals the band were great it was apparent that they haven't played these songs together for a while. There were a few flubbed transitions and they played a few of the tracks noticeably slower than they're performed on the album. Zach especially seemed really tired, he looked like he was about to pass out at the end of 'Freedom'. Plus the mix sounded pretty awful from where I was and for the first few songs I could barely hear the guitar.

But of course these guys overcame these difficulties by virtue of the fact that their songs are among the most effortlessly catchy arena metal anthems ever written, and that their individual performances were all great. As well as Morello being a freaky fucking guitar theurgist, drummer Brad Wilk deserves special mention for cranking things up a few notches from the recorded versions with crazy fills all over the place and just damn playing with a metric dickload of energy.

It doesn't rival the fantastic concerts I saw at about this time last year, but it was most definitely a promising omen for the year ahead. Especially with Nightwish next Friday!

Are you staying, or what?

2008-01-24T00:37:00.000+13:00

Einstürzende Neubauten - Alles Weider Offen

As Einstürzende Neubauten began work on Alles Weider Offen they were coming off a truly stunning hatrick of great albums (Silence is Sexy, Perpetuum Mobile and Grundstueck) and they had set themselves a very high standard to match. Sadly, they didn't quite make it.

Alles Weider Offen is still a decent enough album. It goes without saying that on a Neubauten release that the production is impeccable, and a few standout tracks are up to their usual standard. The opener 'Die Wellen' and ten minute mid album centrepiece 'Unvollstaendigkeit' are moody epics in the vein that Neubauten have tapped to so much success with in the past. However the rest of the album feels less passionate than their other recent work, and that's a serious disappointment.

Alles Weider Offen continues the trajectory that Neubauten's music has been taking over the last few years. The instrumentation is not as pretty as Silence is Sexy, the swooning strings have largely been replaced with a return to the industrial percussion that characterised their earlier work even if the raw aggression that they had in the Eighties has been replaced by a very German, contemplative sense of beauty. The new album also further develops their forays into a weird kind of pop music, many songs have a twisted sort of R&B feel to them, and there are a few tracks such as 'Let's Do It A Da Da' which are outright bubblegum pop in their approach, although of course not in their execution. These upbeat, energetic songs don't sit well next to their more usual style of moody, epic music, which is perhaps part of the reason why this album has an unsatisfying, inconsistent feeling.

The supporter version of Alles Weider Offen comes with a b-sides album (and a DVD, which I've missed out on for various reasons attributable to my own incompetence) which was released track by track as they were completed during the recording process. These songs are actually surprisingly good, they're shorter, more experimental and less cohesive than the real album tracks but taken one at a time they're almost all great songs.

This album has been a long time coming and it's quite a disappointment that it turned out to be not up to their usual high standards. Still, it's good that their online subscription business model is still working out for them (they've been doing it for five years now, anticipating Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails' rejection of the record label system by quite some time), and I'm still looking forward to finding out what they'll do next.

Here's their official video for 'Nagorny Karabach'. Blixa Bargeld sure is a peculiar fellow:

Towards Ragnarok

2008-01-21T23:48:00.000+13:00

Burzum – Dauði Baldrs

And with Dauði Baldrs we have finally made it through the entire Burzum catalogue to date. This record is the second to last that Varg released, and the first one he made in prison. The melodies are of the same stock as those from Burzum's older black metal albums but due to production concerns (the only instrument Varg is allowed in prison is a synthesiser) this album is entirely devoid of drums and guitars.

Dauði Baldrs is less ambient and minimal than it's successor Hliðskjálf; indeed the songs are straight up black metal performed sans vocals and with different instrumentation (one track is even melodically a straight up copy of an earlier black metal styled song), but I can't avoid making the same comparison as I did when I listened to the latter album - that this stuff sounds a hell of a lot like Coil. The chiming bells and spacey strings of 'Hermoðr Á Helferð' sound almost exactly like those on Coil's 'Titan Arch'. Burzum's interest in the occult is another similarity shared with those post industrial hedonists, and where the earlier black metal albums evoked the dark, gothic northern European wilderness, Dauði Baldrs has more of an abstract, mystical mood.

The songs suffer a little from the lack of vocals. Without them a standard black metal song is too simple and repetitive, and stripping away the distortion and feralness and replacing it with synth strings and horns only emphasises the fact that, for all his originality in developing the style of black metal, Varg's songs aren't actually that interesting in and of themselves.

It's been interesting to see how he influenced and in fact set a standard for the genre but other than Filosofem I don't think I'll be revisiting this music all that much. After all, even I feel a little bit uncomfortable listening to the work of a murderous neo-nazi.

WARNING!

2008-01-19T22:12:00.000+13:00

The new Meshuggah track is so awesome that it actually will melt your face off. Whatever you do don't listen to it!

Since You Betrayed Me So...

2008-01-17T23:52:00.000+13:00

PJ Harvey – White Chalk

It's an indication of how far I've stuck my head down into the dank, dark oubliette of the metal world that my first reaction to this album was 'OK, but... meh...'. It took the right context for it's brilliance to be revealed, and this happened to be while trying to sleep in Singapore airport and needing something quiet enough to relax me to sleep but substantial enough to drown out the soul killing awfulness of the muzak being played over the speakers. At that moment, trying to find a way to get comfortable on the horrible plastic chairs, I was unexpectedly stunned by its beauty.

PJ Harvey has always made a point on not repeating herself so it's par for the course that White Chalk sounds like nothing else she's ever done. Throughout the album Harvey sings in a high, fragile sounding voice and is accompanied by a similarly fragile sounding piano. Reinforced by the lyrics and concept art, the songs have a Victorian gothic air about them, as Harvey's stories of loss, longing and regret portray romantic characters from a bygone era.

Despite the artifice of the White Chalk's concept the music is very moving, and there's some killer songwriting to be found. While most of the album is low key and contemplative, space is found for a few climactic outbursts, which don't come as an eruption of heaviness but rather when Harvey's voice builds from the disassociated, regretful sighing that she affects for most of the album to a howling, tormented shriek. Given an environment when you can pay it the attention it deserves, White Chalk is beautiful, in a strange, moody kind of way, and more intense and affecting than you'd expect from something that comes from so far out of left field.

Here's 'The Mountain':

1001 Albums Number 19

2008-01-16T23:51:00.000+13:00

Ray Charles – The Genius of Ray Charles

I've got to admit, I know next to nothing about Ray Charles, other than that he died recently and that everyone thinks he's awesome, so it is at the risk of sounding like an ignoramus that I must admit that, for the most part, The Genius of Ray Charles doesn't do much for me. It's not to say that it's bad, but the poppy jazz that he plays has a tendency to float through one ear and out the other. Mind you, I like the enthusiasm of his singing and I think that his piano playing is pretty good. In fact now that I think about it I do really like a few of the mellow later songs on the b-side (such as 'Come Rain Or Come Shine' and 'Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying') where the noisy, rambunctious jazz band is reigned in and Ray's voice and piano take the spotlight.

I'm reminded of Little Richard, where I admired the performance, but not so much the songs.

Next up: I give Miles Davis another go.

Children of the Cave

2008-01-15T23:49:00.000+13:00

Finntroll – Nattfodd

If you've ever heard the term 'polka metal' before, you probably thought it was a joke. Well I am pleased to inform you that Nattfodd proves that it is very real indeed. The genre of folk metal combines black metal with traditional music of the band's country of origin (or at least that of a country they think is really cool) and in Finntroll's case this is traditional Finnish polka, which is not dissimilar to the kind of oompah music you might hear in a German beer hall.

Now you're forgiven if you think that this sounds like a totally retarded idea, but give it a chance because I assure you that it's actually pretty fucking awesome and there is more to Finntroll than just this goofy gimmick. The only reason that it works at all is because the band are skilled songwriters and they wring a lot of variety and musical ideas from the starting point of the two vastly dissimilar genres and also by including ambient and acoustic interludes.

Where most black metal is laden with a mood of doom and despair, Finntroll's take is more upbeat so that when the evil sounding tremolo strumming morphs into a happy polka lick and is joined by a perky accordian and horns it fits naturally, and in fact the whole album is loads of fun to listen to and is dare I say it even joyous, an adjective that is almost inconceivable to apply to black metal.

While black metal traditionally deals with themes of evil and the occult, Finntroll's lyrics are occupied with far more accessible subjects, such as being a troll, living in the forest and drinking lots of beer. In fact their innocent, cheerful celebration of nature and the simple life is a nice counterpoint to say Burzum's morbid evocation of the Scandinavian wilderness as the grim, frostbitten, 'whites only' abode of Satan.

Get past the ridiculous concept and you'll find that this album is great fun. It's definitely what I'd have playing in my beer hall!

Here's the unnecessarily slo-moed video for 'Trollhammaren':

For Hate's Sake I Spit My Last Breath At Thee

2008-01-15T00:16:00.000+13:00

Moby Dick
by Herman Melville

It's always a bit of a gamble picking up a so called classic novel. There's every chance that it might turn out to be Dickens, or some other shite that has managed to coast into the canon under the cover of night and is kept there by the malice of some secretive cabal of English teachers. Fortunately Moby Dick is not one of those novels, and is in fact pretty fucking awesome.

The novel is recounted by a man who calls himself Ishmael, although after the first couple of chapters our narrator disappears from the story more or less altogether. Ishmael takes a job aboard a whaling ship which, much to his misfortune, is captained by the insane Ahab, a man who has developed a terrible obsession with the eponymous Moby Dick: the whale that attacked the last boat he captained and bit off his leg. And as anyone with a passing familiarity with the story knows, the voyage and Ahab's quest do not have a happy ending.

Moby Dick was not well received upon it's release in 1851 and it's easy to see why. The novel has a remarkably post modern sensibility for its time, and it makes every bit of sense that it did not become respected until after the World Wars. Melville's character Ishmael is obviously a stand in for himself, and having had much practical real world experience with whaling he spends a good half of the book detailing the technical particulars of life and work on board the whaler and the lives of the whales themselves. These constant digressions, which increase in frequency and length as the novel goes on, were maddening to the audience at the time of the books original release.

Melville also has a very post modern sense of irony and a fairly relativistic attitude. Ahab's whaler, the Pequod, is staffed by three harpooners of Pacific Island, Native American and African origin, and despite his use of a lot of terminology that we would regard as slightly racist nowadays, his sympathies clearly lie with these noble savages, especially in comparison to their twisted, obsessed civilised shipmates. His digressions upon why the whale should be classified as a fish, not a mammal, and why whaling will never have a noticeable impact on the population of the hunted animals may or may not be ironic, but are damn funny nonetheless. In fact, the constant, verbose, irrelevant tangents remind me of David Foster Wallace's epic (but fantastic) pile of bloviating digression Infinite Jest, a book so pomo that it threatens to collapse into a singularity of hipness under the weight of all its cynical irony and smirking self-referentiality.

Above all, Moby Dick, despite its length and formal nineteenth century language, is great fun to read. Melville's wit is very fine, both in straight up humour (I loved the cook's sermon to the sharks:

Dough you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you, fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness – 'top dat dam slappin' ob de tail! How you tink to hear, 'spose you keep up such a dam sleppin' and bitin' dare?”
Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him, “I wont have that swearing. Talk to 'em gentlemanly.”
Once more the sermon proceeded.
Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now. Look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don't be tearin' de blubber out your neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one shark good right as toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I know some o' you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts soemtimes has de small bellies; so dat de brigness ob de mout is not to swaller wid, but to bite off de blubber for small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge to help demselves.”

) and the quality of the writing in the more poetic and romantic parts. Also the story of Ahab's doomed quest is as iconic as they come and the allegorical meanings of his obsession with Moby Dick are a clamouring multitude. Among those suggested explicitly by Melville in the book: Moby Dick as God, Moby Dick as Satan, Moby Dick as the immense, uncaring universe and Moby Dick saying “Stop anthropomorphising me, I'm just a fucking whale!”.

With such great humour, poetry and insightful philosophy Moby Dick truly deserves its reputation as one of the great American novels. Well done Western canon of literature, you got it right this time at least.

Annoying Whinge of the Day

2008-01-13T17:58:00.000+13:00

As mp3 (and aac) becomes the new standard for music storage in the digital era, the complaining of audiophiles about the lack of music quality gets louder and more insistent. Via Arts and Letters Daily, here's a good example of what I'm talking about. Sure, I too am disheartened when I read that recording levels are being manipulated for volume (for best results on a portable mp3 player) at the cost of quality, but the anguished moaning about how an entire generation of kids is growing up with no experience of a quality music recording is starting to annoy me.

Here's something that no one seems to be considering: Moore's Law. In ten years, our portable mp3 players will probably be able to hold every surviving audio record ever made at lossless quality and still have room for rips of all three Lord of the Rings boxed set DVDs. Fear not audiophiles, the current trend towards shite audio quality is just a passing phase, the birth pains of the digital era. In a few years you'll be able to go back to arguing over whether the kind of wire used in your headphone cables makes the music sound 'warmer'.

This Is The Sound Of A Downtuned Guitar

2008-01-11T00:54:00.000+13:00

Opeth – The Roundhouse Tapes

I was going to wait for Opeth's new live record to come out on DVD but restraint failed me and I grabbed the audio CD version. It turned out to be a wise choice, as the DVD has since been delayed until next September.

On paper at least, this album looks amazing. The setlist to the concert is like something from a wet dream; if you were to ask me to choose the best song off each Opeth album I would come up with almost exactly the same list (Opeth nerd note: I would actually replace 'Windowpane' with 'Closure' and include 'Deliverance').

Unfortunately as it turns out The Roundhouse Tapes is a bit superfluous. The songs are performed almost exactly the way they appear on the album, which is by no means a bad thing because the original version are awesome, but I was expecting little more. There are some differences of course. Per's keyboards are not present on the original versions of the older songs, and his work makes a nice addition to them. They have a new drummer, Martin Axenrot, who fits in well. His predecessor Martin Lopez will be much missed, with his jazzy take on death metal drumming, but Axenrot has his own style, one that makes me think a little of Josh Freese from A Perfect Circle and Nine Inch Nails with his huge sound and epic crashing fills.

In the technical arena all five band members deliver note perfect performances. Perhaps the most impressive instrument on stage is Mikael's voice, which surprises with its power both in clean and death metal mode, just as it did on their last live album Lamentations. We also get a lot of Mikael's intersong banter. He has a reputation for talking total crap at his concerts but I found most of what he said to be at least mildly amusing, “This song has some lyrics that are absolute black metal nonsense” made me laugh more than once.

I'm told that in person Opeth are a phenomenal band (and still not a day goes by that I don't kick myself for missing my chance to see them in 2006) but that doesn't really come through on this live album. Still, it's no bad thing to have alternate versions of nine of the best songs ever written sitting on my ipod.

1001 Albums Number 18

2008-01-09T23:22:00.000+13:00

Ella Fitzgerald – Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book

Our third consecutive female jazz vocalist is the most famous of them all, Ella Fitzgerald. As the title tells us, on this album she sings over the course of three long discs the songs of old timey songwriter George Gershwin.

Fitzgerald's voice is obviously deserving of it's reputation. When compared to Holiday and Vaughan she surpasses them with her strength and confidence, and while the other singers have their singular qualities, Fitzgerald's is the obvious candidate for iconification with her bold, poised and assured character shining through her singing. Even if you never knew who she was, you'd recognise her voice as it's solidly embedded in the public consciousness.

Gershwin's music deserves note too. This album is in the same musical style as Billie Holiday's Lady in Satin and the Frank Sinatra's albums but where I found the backing music of those recordings to be lacking substance, the guy whose name is in the album title is well done by here. His songs blend the accessibility of pop and the sophistication of classical, and his brother Ira's lyrics defy the cheesiness that's inevitable given the songs' Broadway origin and remain compelling and witty throughout.

There are two surprising omissions on this album. There are no songs from the Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, which is perhaps understandable given that Fitzgerald had already recorded an album of the whole opera (with Louie Armstrong), but I was really looking forward to hearing her acclaimed version of 'Summertime'. There's also none of Fitzgerald's scatting until the last track, which is a little disappointing since it was one of the things that she was most famous for.

This album clocks in at a fucking long 180 minutes, so it's a testament to Fitzgerald and Gershwin's considerable skill that I quite happily sat through the whole thing three times!

Next up: Ray Charles.

A Mouth Without A Heart, An Action Without Meaning

2008-01-09T00:33:00.000+13:00

Dillinger Escape Plan – Ire Works

Poor old Dillinger Escape Plan have had a rough time over the last couple of years. Since the release of the brilliant Miss Machine, both of their guitarists have suffered from muscle problems that prevented them from performing. Fortunately main songwriter Ben Weinman has recovered, but sadly second guitarist Brian Benoit will probably never be able to play again. On top of that the drummer, Chris Pennie, quit the band and for inexplicable reasons joined the dire Coheed and Cambria, a band whose unique blend of all the worst aspects of emo, prog rock and nu metal reveals an artistic capacity for terribleness that is the dark twin of Dillinger's genius.

With all these problems surrounding the recording, it was hard to guess what to expect from Ire Works. It was also difficult to imagine how their sound could be improved from what they achieved on Miss Machine, so it was a question of whether they'd just try and make the same album again or go in a new direction, as well as whether it would turn out to be any good. The answers turn out to be a surprising sort of compromise to the first question and a 'hell fucking yeah!' to the second.

The meat and bones of the album are a number of two minute thrashers in the style that has endeared DEP to their fans over years past. These will be familiar territory to anyone who's heard any of their older albums. Ben's guitars spit out twisted, free time riffs with astonishing technical skill, vocalist Greg Puciato screams with savage intensity and the new drummer, Gil Sharone, is (much to everyone's relief) a perfect fit for the style and if anything his capacity for controlled cacophony is even sicker than Pennie's. Two of these tracks feature guest vocalists, 'Fix Your Face' brings back original vocalist Dimitri Minakakis and 'Horse Hunter' features Mastodon's Brent Hinds. However I can't help but feel that the band is a little tired of this style, they have after all been doing it for a while. There's nothing here that isn't good, but none of these songs reach the levels of greatness found on their older albums. But despite such a slight deterioration of quality on this half of the album, the rest turns out to be well worthwhile.

Ire Works contains a healthy number of surprises that will no doubt offend many old school fans, but which are in fact uniformly brilliant. Dillinger throw their first curveball on track three, 'Black Bubblegum', which as the name suggests is their version of a pop punk song, complete with a catchy singalong chorus. It's followed by 'Sick on Sunday', a weird ambient piece that bursts into metal at the end, and the trio of 'When Acting As A Particle', 'Non Eye Gong' and 'When Acting As A Wave', which are two twin tracks that appear to be the distant descendants of Calculating Infinity's title track, surrounding a short, angry song in the old style.

Not long after that is the brilliant 'Milk Lizard', a heavy song that replaces their usual rhythmic insanity with a bluesy swagger and a soaring chorus. 'Dead As History' is hard to categorise; introduced by acoustic guitar, strings and piano, transforming into a menacing nu metal chugger and ending the same way it started, now accompanied with twee falsetto vocals.

And finally, just when you think that Ire Works couldn't get any better, it closes with 'Mouths Of Ghosts'. You know that feeling you get when you first hear a song and it gives you goosebumps, and you drop what you were doing and stare at the speakers in astonishment? And then you start to cry a little bit? Well that's how good this song is. It features a heavy ending as a powerful, cathartic finish to the album, but the intro shows off Weinman's considerable aptitude on the piano in a melancholy build up that sounds a little like Pink Floyd crossed with Secret Chiefs 3 in their Western film score mode. It's even more of a surprise to hear as a Dillinger song than 'Black Bubblegum' and is one of the best songs they've ever done.

Ire Works is quite easily one of the top three albums of 2007, perhaps the best. Come for the screamy mathcore craziness, stay for the catchy pop and mellow piano noodling.

Here's 'When Acting As A Particle' and 'Nong Eye Gong' live:

R3M1XxX0rr3D

2008-01-08T00:55:00.000+13:00

Nine Inch Nails - Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D

Yes, the normally internet savvy Trent Reznor actually used l33t speak in his album title, showing us all that he's still hip with the funky jives that the kids rapped at each other in 1997. Looking past the stupid title you'll find some nice artwork and a fairly standard NIN remix album, which is to say a wildly uneven disc that contains a few good tracks, a few terrible tracks, and a pretty large amount of averageness.

Amongst the good remixes are Saul William's 'Gunshots By Computer' ('Hyperpower' with Saul's vocals added), a very dancey version of 'My Violent Heart' by Pirate Robot Midget and best of all a welcome return from the Kronos Quartet, performing 'Another Version of the Truth' as a string quartet (just as they did with 'The Frail' on Things Falling Apart all those years ago).

Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D (man that's a pain to type) ends with 'In This Twilight' and 'Zero-Sum' (the remix album follow roughly the same tracklisting as Year Zero itself). Fennesz' version of 'In This Twilight' is brilliant, infusing an already beautiful song with more lush ambience. In contrast Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert's 'Zero-Sum' remix is a missed opportunity, with a boppy bass line and cheesy electronica ruining what was originally the tear jerking album finale. Other lowlights include Olof Dreijer's 'Me I'm Not', because it's not a real NIN remix album unless you include a ten minute borefest, and a long stretch of about half a dozen mediocre remixes in the middle of the disc, which evoking no feeling as much as making me want to listen to the original album again until I remember how badly I've thrashed it into the ground already over the last year or so.

Also worth mentioning is the bonus disc, which contains the original album's master tracks for listeners to use to create their own remixes. It's a great idea, and it will be interesting to see what comes out of it, but on the other hand I wonder if maybe anyone who has the tools, experience and inspiration to make a decent remix isn't already making their own music...

2007 Year End Roundup Addendum

2008-01-05T14:16:00.000+13:00

Oh yeah I forgot one category:

Podcast Quote Of The Year:

“The pussycat dolls are in charge of their own sexuality only insofar as a cow is in charge of its own meat.”
- Penny Arcade

Runners Up:

“I fucked her mouth, I fucked her arse, I fucked every hole on her body and then I made some new holes and fucked them too. I fucked her tits and her ears and her nostrils. But I didn't fuck her vagina, so on our wedding night she'll still be puuuuuure and virginal.”
- Dan Savage

“Sure, if you have an addictive personality you can get addicted to anything, from jerking off to reading Tolkien”
“Or both at the same time.”
- Gamers With Jobs Conference Call

Semi-Icelandic Gibberish Is Not My Natural Tongue

2008-01-03T23:43:00.000+13:00

Sigur Rós – Hvarf/Heim

The 'damned by mediocrity' tag on this blog has, to my surprise, not seen a lot of use this year, but fortunately (or not) here come Sigur Rós with a textbook example. Hvart and Heim are a pair of b-side discs, the former consisting of the standard unreleased tracks and the latter containing acoustic rerecordings of songs from their proper albums.

The term 'acoustic' being applied to this band's music might seem a bit redundant, seeing as they already sound like the musical equivalent of cuddling a puppy on Christmas morning, but believe it or not these versions do actually sound different, with the drums being pulled way back and the other instruments being replaced by simpler, gentler versions of themselves. The one downside of this approach is that at the points where the original songs erupt into a string laden climax complete with bombastic drums and distorted bowed guitar, the versions on Heim just kind of peter out.

Both discs have their moments, 'Samskeyti' on Heim and 'Hjomalind' on Hvart are both good, and the beginning of Heim's version of 'Agaetis Byrjun' is quite deliciously pretty, but on the whole this is a typical b-sides album; everything found here is but a mediocre version of something else that they've done better in the past. Sigur Rós are a great band but this album doesn't live up to their normally high standard. Damned by mediocrity I say!

1001 Albums Number 17

2008-01-03T00:36:00.000+13:00

Sarah Vaughan – At Mister Kelly's

For the first time since I started these I've found myself unable to track down a record on the 1001 albums list. Soulseek and isohunt have both failed me, so if anyone knows where I can get a copy of Ramblin' Jack Elliot's Jack Takes The Floor, let me know. Instead we're skipping ahead to the next one, Sarah Vaughan's live album At Mister Kelly's.

Vaughan is a jazz singer but unlike her peer Billie Holiday the backing music is more in line with what I normally consider jazz – the piano and drums take a more constant rhythmic role, rather than as merely popping up for a treacly response to the vocals as they do for other jazz vocal performers like Holiday and Sinatra. There are an almost endless number comparisons and contrasts between Vaughan and Holiday that I could make, and I'll just list the most obvious. The first that comes to mind is that while both singers lived a life characterised by drug use and hard partying, Vaughan kept it together and died respected and successful at age 66 as opposed to Holiday's sad story. It makes sense therefore that while Lady in Satin has a sad mood engendered by Holiday's fragile, weary voice, Vaughan is perky and full of energy, and obviously enjoying herself greatly even on the more sombre songs.

Vaughan's voice doesn't have anywhere near the pathos of Holiday's, but it has a combination of strength and character that I find quite enchanting. I also prefer Vaughan's phrasing, perhaps it's just more 'rock' like in manner, but for whatever reason I find her singing to be a lot catchier and more immediately appealing to my ears.

Most notable among the charms of this particular album are the entertaining and charming in between (and during) song stage banter and the more substantial, interesting backing music (when compared to other music of this genre that I've heard). This one is definitely another winner.

You Show Me That Everything Lies There Inside Of Me

2008-01-01T21:32:00.000+13:00

Elis – Show Me The Way

It takes a lot for a little band from Liechtenstein to impinge on the global consciousness of the internet but Elis managed it, although unfortunately under very sad circumstances. Their singer died suddenly and unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm last year, and during a rehearsal no less! This year the band have released the EP Show Me The Way as an interim measure to remind everyone that they have not broken up and to introduce their new singer.

The EP contains three unreleased songs featuring vocals by the late Sabine Dünser, and two versions of their new single 'Show Me The Way', recorded with the new singer Sandra Schleret. There are obvious comparisons to be made between Elis and Nightwish, with the way they blend metal with a melodious female voice, the keyboards supplementing the sound and their willingness to include a peaceful acoustic string-backed song in the midst of all the heaviness. The new song also puts me in mind of Evanescence, with it's chugging nu-metal guitars, although the new vocalist's voice has a more immediate similarity to that of Tarja Turunen (formally of Nightwish).

To my ears neither vocalist is better or worse than the other, but I do have a slight preference for Dünser, whose sweet, gentle voice was more unique within metal. I may have to seek out their last album with her, Griefshire, since she sadly won't be appearing on any more.

End Of Year Round Up

2007-12-31T15:27:00.000+13:00

It's that time of the year again kids! As in, the end of it. So that means I am morally obligated to present you with a list, culled directly from my arse, of the best music, games and whatnot that have crossed my path in 2007.

Normally I'd start off with a TV section, but I haven't actually had a TV this year and so most I've what I've watched has been old stuff on DVD. However I will make a few quick notes:

Biggest Downturn in Quality:
Dr. Who
This years season started and ended with a bang but went through a long lull in the middle. A sad thing to happen to a show that was my favourite for the previous two years running.

Biggest Upturn in Quality:
Lost
This got the biggest downturn in quality award last year, because of the execrable first six episodes of season 3. Fortunately they pulled things right back on track, and it ended up as the best thing going on TV this year.

Best Game
Portal
Bioshock is pretty good too, although I don't know when or if I'll get around to finishing it.

Icewind Dale 2 Award For The Best Game I Bought But Will Probably Never Finish:
Final Fantasy XII
I just can't find the time to sit through all those interminable cutscenes, when the reward for doing so is some frustrating, unfun gameplay. But of course, it's still Final Fantasy, so I constantly think about going back to it.

Best Books:
Neil Gaiman - Fragile Things
Stephen Donaldson - Fatal Revenant

Best Movie:
Sunshine

Best Albums:
Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero
Tomahawk – Anonymous
Shining – Halmstad
Wolves in the Throne Room – Two Hunters
The Dillinger Escape Plan – Ire Works
Boris – Rainbow
P J Harvey – White Chalk

A lot of these I only bought recently, so no posts exist for them yet.

The NIN album deserves special mention, because of Trent's savvy use of the ARG to promote the album and enhance it's concept, which nicely captured the zeitgeist of 2007's global situation.

Best Album That Actually Came Out Last Year:
Isis – In The Absence of Truth

Best Album That Actually Came Out Ages Ago, But Is Still Fucking Awesome:
Nightwish – Once

Biggest Disappointment:
Nothing that came out this year really caused me to wail in dismay, but both Radiohead's In Rainbows and Nightwish's Dark Passion Play let me down a little from the high expectations I had for them.

Trent Reznor Award For The Best Album That Was Supposed To Come Out This Year But Didn't:
In a year when Trent released a new album, a new DVD, a remix album and played three concerts in Sydney it would be bit uncharitable to give this award to him again (although technically I still could, for the Closure DVD), so for the first time ever this award will go to someone else:

Opeth – For the new album and the DVD version of The Roundhouse Tapes.

Most Overrated Band:
Within Temptation. It's Evanescence with Kelly Clarkson singing. Why does everyone love this shit?

Worst Song By A Good Musician Who Should Have Known Better:
Tarja Turunen covering Alice Cooper's 'Poison'.
I was going to buy her solo album until I heard this.

Least Convincing 'Former' Junkies:
Velvet Revolver

Runner Up:
Phil Anselmo

Best Concerts:
This year I was genuinely blessed to attend a truly outstanding concert almost every other month. In no particular order, the following concerts all totally blew my mind:
Tool
Suffocation
Isis
Secret Chiefs 3
Boris
Peeping Tom
Nick Cave and Grinderman

Boringist Concert:
Sunn O)))

Best Onstage Bottling:
Jet at the Big Day Out

See you next year everyone. I.e. tomorrow!

Merry Festivus

2007-12-22T17:19:00.000+13:00

Happy holidays everyone, don't expect to see much appearing here for the next couple of weeks!

Close To Euphoria

2007-12-21T00:34:00.000+13:00

Collide – Live at the El Ray

A friend once remarked to me that while he really liked Placebo's albums, he felt that they didn't generate quite the energy that the songs required on record and that it would be much better to see them live. I agreed but as it turned out, Placebo are a terrible live band with even more lacklustre on stage than on their albums. Collide's albums have always given me a similar feeling of unfulfilled potential so it's not much of a surprise that Collide's live album is disappointingly tepid.

Collide's albums Chasing the Ghost and Some Kind of Strange are very good but they always leave me feeling that despite the musical talent displayed, there's some subtle failure to make the deep emotional connection that defines great music. I hoped that in a live performance they might remedy that deficiency but once again I must sadly note that in fact, performing live only exacerbates the problem.

There's a lot of good things about Live at the El Ray mind. The setlist is a nice greatest hits collection, and they've very skilfully arranged the purely electronic, industrial songs for an analogue rock band format. However maybe it's because the backing electronics enslave them to a click, or maybe it's because vocalist Karin (I refuse to type the cutesy industrial alternate caps spelling) sounds as though she's either extraordinarily nervous or high as a kite, there's definitely a lot lacking in the performance department, and this is a pity because they're so close to being truly great, and maybe all it would take to get them there is just a bit less stiffness.

Just Remember My Face When I See You In Hell

2007-12-18T23:28:00.000+13:00

The Power and the Glory – Call Me Armageddon

Listening, at long last, to the final album in the little package of albums that began by getting me into Converge coincidentally comes at a time when I'm getting a little tired of hardcore. There's something about the earnestness and lack of subtlety that makes it less appealing to me than a good metal album.

Having said that I still liked Call Me Armageddon a lot. Once again these guys are a band that have drunk deep from Converge's well of inspiration (Converge vocalist Jacob Bannon even did the cover artwork), but they do it well and with a few twists of their own to add to the style. Most of the tracks on the album are two minute long volcanic explosions of hardcore brutality with guitars thrashing out the grinding, arrhythmic riffs in the style that Converge made popular aside indecipherably screeched vocals, behind which incredibly powerful drums pummel away like a landslide. The whole effect is one of impressively controlled insanity and it comes as a surprise then that when they segue into the occasional mellow song they display admirable restraint and gentleness.

These guys are a great band who have won me over even though this is not what I am usually in the mood for these days and it's a pity that a quick investigation of their myspace page implies that they may now be defunct.

To Die In Battle Divine

2007-12-18T00:34:00.000+13:00

Black Dahlia Murder – Nocturnal

Other than my intentional forays into the music of the genre's seminal instigators, I don't think I've listened to a straight up black metal album for quite some time. As with other genres that espouse a deliberately simplified, stripped back form (punk, industrial) the practitioners eventually got bored and expanded or merged their music with other styles. Every black metal album I've heard of recent years is prefixed or suffixed by a qualifier: ambient black metal, blackened thrash, polka metal and so on.

The Black Dahlia Murder's take on the genre is different again. While the drumming and vocals are clearly black metal through and through and the visual aesthetic of the band is also a fit, the production is so clean and slick that Euronymous probably stirred restlessly in his grim, frostbitten grave when Nocturnal went gold (well, more so than usual anyway) and the catchy, melodic guitar hooks are more the kind of thing you'd find in a heavy thrash band (I'm put in mind of Arch Enemy), than the minimal droning riffs of Burzum. And maybe it's just their hair cuts, but somehow I keep getting a bit of an emo vibe from these guys.

Nevertheless if you're not too much of a purist the result is some damn good ear candy. Can you ask any more from a metal album than brutally heavy rhythms, diabolically wild guitar solos and literate but sociopathic lyrics screamed by someone sounding like a demoniac? The Black Dahlia Murder are a perfect example of good pop-metal; the production is high quality and the songs are as catchy and accessible as anything Jack Johnson ever wrote (but with all those boring fifths nice and flattened!) yet the melodies, aesthetic and energy are all genuinely evil. It's good fun stuff and I'm a bit annoyed that I missed my chance to see them play last month while I was overseas (damn you for ruining my holiday Dillinger Escape Plan and Meshuggah!)

Here's 'What A Horrible Night To Have A Curse' from Nocturnal:

Nerd Links Day

2007-12-16T13:26:00.001+13:00

If your day job involves software at all then you probably want to be reading The Daily WTF, it's fucking hysterical.

But even funnier is Zero Punctuation at The Escapist, easily the best video game reviews I've ever read.

Burn The Spirits Of Cold, That Travel Through My Soul

2007-12-15T00:37:00.000+13:00

Opeth – Orchid

And at long last we have finally come to the end of my traversal of Opeth's back catalogue. Orchid is their first album, and my disappointment with their second release Morningrise meant that my expectations were low. Fortunately it turns out that, while Orchid is nowhere near as accomplished as their mid and late period masterpieces, it's still ranks favourably in their oeuvre.

Most of the songs fit into the standard Opeth style. Long compositions formed of baroque death metal riffs alternating with moody acoustic passages. This album differs because there's still some clear roughness to the performances, production and songwriting when compared to later albums, but the passion shines through and delivers a collection of solid, enjoyable metal songs.

Two tracks stand out for special mention. 'Silhouette' is a short piece for solo piano, featuring some very impressive playing by original drummer Anders Nordin, a type of song that they've never done since and which caused me to remark sadly that there's not enough real piano in metal (a wish that was fulfilled in a most satisfying manner recently by the new Dillinger Escape Plan album, but more on that later). Secondly 'Under The Weeping Moon' stands out as one of the best songs they've ever done, most notably for it's moody ambient breakdown in the middle.

Opeth's artful compositional wizardry has always been the first thing that comes to mind when I justify my love for them, but even back in 92 when those skills were still being developed they excel all the same because of their excellent sense of mood. Despite all Akerfeldt's talk of 'evilness' the music as a whole, even the heaviest parts, is laden with a romantic melancholy for which the brutal death metal image is just a façade. The fusion of the genre with such an antithetical feeling is something that no other band I've heard has pulled off. And when you combine that with the writing genius that Akerfeldt later developed, why you have a series of albums made of pure win and metal!

Sing! My Angel Of Music!

2007-12-13T00:31:00.000+13:00

Nightwish – End of an Era

As previously mentioned on this blog, the band Nightwish underwent a drama filled change of lead woman a couple of years back, and in true ghoulish twenty first century media fashion they have documented it on DVD. We don't quite get to see the look on Tarja's face and the tears in her eyes when she realises she's been ditched, but they've recorded their last concert with her (she was fired immediately afterwards) and included a documentary of the last few weeks of the tour, complete with ominous title cards saying 'X days until Helsinki concert...' and full of retroactively ironic statements by Tarja about her perceived future with the band.

The documentary is a little weird for that reason but fortunately the concert footage is fantastic, despite the best efforts of an obviously demented director whose passion for ill advised post production effects (overlayed flames, slo mo, etc.) is remarkable in it's lameness. Fortunately the performance still shines through. In fact, this DVD makes me incredibly sad that when I see Nightwish in February Tarja won't be with them. I'm sure the new singer will do fine but I very much doubt that she'll generate the same stage presence as Tarja displays here.

Nightwish's stage show is full of spectacle: Rammstein style pyrotechnics, huge video screens and all the over emoting of metal and opera combined, but even that is overwhelmed by the power of their music, which rocks and stomps it's way into the category of unbelievable awesomeness and beyond. Highlights include the old school singles 'Wishmaster' and 'Ever Dream' as well as 'The Siren' and their cover of Pink Floyd's 'High Hopes' (both of which I posted as videos in my review of Once). Perhaps best of all their version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 'Phantom of the Opera', which confirms my long held suspicion that that song was always supposed to be done metal.

I think this disc would probably make a great drinking game. Drink every time one of the other band members visibly snobs Tarja onstage, drink for every shot of a teenybopper goth chick crying in the audience, drink every time Tarja changes outfits and I'm sure the astute viewer could think of more.

Here's 'Phantom of the Opera':

1001 Albums Number 16

2007-12-11T00:23:00.000+13:00

Billie Holiday – Lady In Satin

This is another one that I've been looking forward to. Even though I'm unfamiliar with Billie Holiday's music she's (in)famous enough to have caught my attention more than a few times in the past.

Although she's considered a jazz singer this album had far more in common with Frank Sinatra's In The Wee Small Hours than say Duke Ellington or Thelonious Monk. In fact on the two albums Holiday and Sinatra perform three of the same songs.

The arrangements are very similar to what is found on Sinatra's albums - sad, swooning strings submissively complement the vocals while other jazz instrumentation quietly keeps restrained time in the background. And, just like with the Sinatra albums, I found these arrangements to be dead boring. Fortunately this isn't as much of a disaster on Lady in Satin as it was for old Frank, as the album is easily redeemed by Holiday's voice.

Where Sinatra cooed pathetically with less convincing pathos than Bumblebee Man from The Simpsons, Holiday's distinctive singing contains genuine depth and the sadness that a life of abuse and drug addiction had given her is inescapable. While I may turn my nose up at many aspects of this album that I normally judge music on (songwriting, originality), it would be incredibly heartless for anyone to not appreciate something so honestly soulful...

There Will Be Cake!

2007-12-07T00:31:00.000+13:00

Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal

It's taken a long time but Valve have finally released the next episode of Half-Life, more than a year after the last one. It's a pretty sorry attempt at an episodic release scheme but when the results are this detailed and polished it's hard to complain that they've been taking their time to get it right.

There's not much to say about this instalment that I didn't say about the first episode, as the developers have found a winning formula and with fair reason see no reason to deviate from it. Expect lots of frenzied battles in a wide variety of locales, a spot of logical puzzle solving, and plenty of biffing stuff about with your gravity gun, just like in its predecessors.

While the Half-Life Episodes series has not thus far introduced much in the way of new gameplay, I am very pleased with their main contribution to gamedom: the use of actual real believable characters who look and act like like actual human beings, instead of ridiculous action movie clichés. For once I actually gave a shit about what might happen to the supporting cast during the cutscenes, which is something that I don't recall ever feeling while playing a game before (there were a few games that came close (some of the Final Fantasies, Planescape Torment) but the mechanics of gameplay always ensured that nothing permanent would happen to any of your party members. Yeah, I'm not one of those people who cried when Aeris died. She was pretty boring really...)

Fortunately for the long-windedness of this post the new episode was released in a package with a unique new game, Portal. Using the same engine and gameplay as Half-Life, and loosely set in the same fictional world, the game puts you in control of a sketchily defined character trapped in some kind of research facility and forced to complete a series of puzzles using a gun that creates portals that you can use to teleport from one place to another.

It's a short, clever puzzle game, with a smart but simple plot that is revealed a little at a time as you explore. Definitely worth noting is the game's weird, perverse humour. The player is guided by a sinister, omnipresent observer who's gentle, upbeat manner is belied by the dangerous situations that it's forcing you into (“We regret to inform you that our last statement was an outright falsehood. We promise to always tell you the truth in the future.”) and the game as a whole has a general atmosphere of gleefully sarcastic whimsy that I, and apparently almost everyone else expressing their opinion on the internet at the moment, find delightfully refreshing.

It's great to see a successful, established game developer doing something like this. A short, smart, cheap game that doesn't wear out it's welcome fills a much neglected niche in a market dominated by huge, expensive blockbusters. Also, any game that features the vocal talents of Mike Patton as a gibbering ball of hate is already made of win and awesome.

When Does Ellen Come On?

2007-12-06T00:57:00.000+13:00

Reaper

So I watched the first half dozen episodes of the new TV show Reaper, a decision made irrationally and almost involuntarily based on early reviews comparing it to Buffy. It certainly had a great premise: on his 21^st birthday our protagonist, a boring young man named Sam, finds out that his parents promised his soul to Satan before he was born. Now that he's reached the age of majority, he must work off his parent's debt by becoming the Devil's bounty hunter - catching and returning souls that have escaped from hell.

Unfortunately Reaper, at least in the first few episodes, fails completely to capitalise on such a great premise, instead quickly finding a generic formula and falling into a dull routine. This would be tolerable if the writing and acting were sharp enough to keep it entertaining but sadly the show also suffers from a fatal lack of wit. The characters are unbelievably generic, the attempt at a wacky sidekick (a guy who acts out a pretty straight impersonation of Jack Black) might have helped if his wackiness contained a trace of genuine humour, and the less said about the others... well there is nothing to say about them because they're so boring and two dimensional. But the nail in the coffin for the show was the romance, in which Sam pines for his workmate Andi, which over the course of a mere six episodes became so offensively inane that I had no choice but to cancel my bittorrents in disgust.

Sam spends a decent percentage of each episode trying to gauge Andi's feelings for him and/or smooth over the latest misunderstanding that has arisen between them because of his secret other life. At no time does Andi evince any hint of a personality or an opinion of her own, merely making puppy dog eyes when Sam breaks a date with her after work and remaining a blank cipher, both to her suitor and to the viewer, as to what she's really thinking or feeling. If I saw someone behaving this way in the real world I would shake my head and cluck disapprovingly at her cruel and manipulative toying with this poor sap who's quite obviously infatuated with her, but of course that's not what the writers intend us to see. Andi is a perfect example of this peculiar American TV/ Hollywood creation, the artificial love interest: a character (invariably a woman) who exists only to stand in as an example of chaste virtue, and to be used by a primary character to learn a valuable lesson about honesty, or some other fatuous homily. Aside from the obvious crimes against characterisation that this approach entails, it's offensive for two more reasons. Firstly the creepy crypto-chauvinism it implies (the perfect woman is completely passive and virginal), not to mention the numerous opportunities it provides for the writers to massage conservative America's madonna/whore complex (contrast Andi with the women Satan sends to tempt Sam with, who (gasp) have tattoos and make the first move in trying to kiss him). And secondly because of the nauseatingly Disney moral of twue wuv that it's expressing.

But there is a reason that I made it through six whole episodes, and that's because Reaper does have one genuinely great redeeming feature in the person of Satan as played by Ray Wise (who of course we all remember as Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks). Appearing as a distinguished, tanned, well dressed older man, Wise steals every scene with his delicate balancing of the character's cheerful, friendly outer persona and his true nature as the malevolent manifestation of all evil. He is also apparently the only character which brings out any trace of wit in the writers. Sadly he (and the concept) are not enough to redeem the show. I've since shifted my attention to Pushing Daisies, which has it's own problems, but pleases me much more on a moral and philosophical level.

As Your Attorney, Your Friend, And Your Brother… I Strongly Suggest That You Get Yourself A Better Lawyer

2007-12-04T23:35:00.000+13:00

Twin Peaks Season 2 Part 1

It's taken a long time but finally the second season of Twin Peaks is out on DVD, and as it happens there's good reason that no one's too excited about it. The first season was a mere eight episodes, all of them taut with tension and mood. It was buoyed along by a mystery driven plot which, while it couldn't be expected to really go anywhere (this is a David Lynch project after all), kept things moving and interesting. The show's best qualities were its moody setting, colourful characters and infrequent but brilliant black humour.

Sadly things rapidly declined in the second season. The plot threads began to wander and the weird gimmicky characters outlasted their welcome. That said there are still many high points to be found, the unique mood of the peculiarly Lynchian isolated mountain town, where the surrounding forest is home to supernatural creatures both wonderous and diabolical, is still showcased frequently. The season's midpoint climax episode (the unmasking and capture of Laura Palmer's killer) is riveting watching, and scattered elsewhere through the season are many brilliant scenes, most memorably this one, probably the creepiest thing I've ever seen on TV (although I'm not sure how well it will come across in a grainy out of context youtube video):

Sadly, I doubt I will bother to get the second part of season two. With no central plot thread remaining after the mystery was solved the story devolved into pointless wandering. But it's still remarkable to see just how much influence this series had on those that followed it, which ranged from The X-Files to Lost and include many others. These shows are quite clearly the direct successors to this one in atmosphere, style and in their deliberately cruel manipulation of their audiences with mysteries that are never truly meant to be solved (I swear they even reuse half the music from Twin Peaks in Lost).

1001 Albums – Numbers 14 and 15

2007-12-04T00:34:00.000+13:00

So we've got a couple of these to catch up on. First up is Little Richard and his literally titled album Here's Little Richard. The style of music is early rock and roll with a swinging boogie feel, but the main focus of the songs is Little Richard's distinctive wailing voice. He's a great performer and there's no denying the energy and showmanship he exudes, but the arrangements that he's put in tend to be predictable and lifeless. Sure, it's hard not to enjoy 'Tutti Frutti', but the rest of the album drags more than a little, save for when the sax gets a chance to blast out a wild, impassioned solo, or when Little Richard gets to unleash a few of his trademark howls.

Next up is Tito Puente's Dance Mania. I generally disapprove of listening to dance music without doing any actual dancing, but in the interests of science I did my best to give this album a chance anyway. The dance in this particular instance is of the latin variety, encompassing subgenres such as cha cha and mambo, and numerous others that I won't even try to pretend I can name. Like all dance music it suffers from an excess of faked enthusiasm, especially in the vocals, when listened to at home on headphones rather than in its intended setting (a busy social environment supplied with psychoactive substances). Nevertheless once I got past that and really paid attention I was impressed by the musicianship, especially of the jazz style horns. There's actually a lot more going on here musically than my initial sneering dismissal of it as Ricky Martin's drunk, abusive parent, and it's certainly not possible to listen to without tapping your foot. In fact, maybe I should try starting latin dance lessons again...

Random Metal Article of the Day

2007-12-02T16:28:00.000+13:00

An article about Californian black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room at Slate. I like to see semi-obscure, interesting bands like this profiled in the mainstream media.

And yes, they are a pretty awesome band. I haven't gotten around to getting their album yet, on account of the options for doing so being slim. In this age of digital downloads mail order feels like a waste of time, and I haven't seen their stuff in the local stores either. I should have spent more time in music stores while I was overseas...

Random Meme of the Day

2007-12-01T12:12:00.000+13:00

This blog am much good English having!

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2007-11-30T00:32:00.000+13:00

Various Artists - Forged In Steel

While on a recent music purchasing outing I found myself laden with this free compilation, published by Roadrunner Records. Normally I hiff this stuff in the bin as fast as possible, but my curiosity was stimulated by the chance to actually hear the mediocre mall-metal that the kids are a-hipping and a-hopping to today.

We start out in solid enough territory, with Machine Head's 'Now I Lay Thee Down', a song I have already declared my fondness for on this very blog, and Megadeth's 'Sleepwalker', which doesn't need to be described any further than to say that it's 'a Megadeth song', but definitely a decent listen.

Later on there are a few other bands that I found moderately entertaining. Porcupine Tree, Pain and Daath were all pleasing (the former two reminding me that the genre of industrial metal does still exist), and the last track by Sanctity, which I can't actually remember anything about at all. I guess that means at least that it wasn't terrible.

Most of this shit is pretty dreadful though. At track three we encounter Within Temptation, a band that takes the Evanescence's gimmick, removes even that bands small traces of subtlety and sophistication, and makes up for it with extra shitty rapping.

Things don't get any better from there. Shadows Fall, Behind Crimson Eyes and Stone Sour give me both a belated insight into the dire metalcore that the kids have made popular today and a sense of gratefulness that my aversion to radio and television has thus far mostly spared me from it. To these bands I have only one thing to say: I hope your dad finally gives you that raise in your allowance and gets off your back about succeeding in school. Maybe then you can quit your angsty, crappy kiddy metal metal band and start a better one. Even Killswitch Engage, a band that up until now was my touchstone example of shitty radio friendly metal, come off looking not so bad when compared to these shamelessly commercial appropriations of teenage angst.

Lastly we have a few bands that are just so bad that I can't even be offended by their terribleness, and merely take pleasure in marvelling at just how bad they are. Trivium are a shitty rip off of Dragonforce (or perhaps Manowar) without the decency to inherit their (few) non-sucky elements. Dragonforce themselves also have a song on this disc, which I estimate to be composed of 23% “Whooaaah's” and 76% wank solos, and arranges said elements in such a way to create a song even more gratingly awful than what I've heard of them previously.

As much of a chore as this was to listen to, I'm at least glad to know that by deliberately insulating myself from mainstream pop culture I haven't accidentally missed out on anything truly worthwhile.

He's A God Now!

2007-11-28T23:57:00.000+13:00

Arch Enemy - Rise of the Tyrant

Arch Enemy have blown me away with great live performances twice in a year now, and I've finally gotten around to getting some of their music on record.

At their heart Arch Enemy are a straightforward kick ass thrash band. Rise of the Tyrant bursts out of the gate ferociously and doesn't let up for the full running time of the album (save for a misguided mellow instrumental towards the end that it would be uncharitable to dwell on). The rhythm section hammers away with an energetic viciousness that more than makes up for the fact that we've all heard this kind of thing done many times before, and the raw, exposed (but polished) production gives it a punkish kind of urgency. The first guitar contrasts the thrash with more restrained, classic rock style leads that tend toward the epic and melancholy. A tasteful touch of choirs and synths is added here and there help to keep things interesting. And of course in true thrash metal tradition there's plenty of wild soloing to be found, which on this album evokes the styles of both Slash from Gunners and Terrance from Suffocation (a pairing which is much more successful than you might expect).

As is the order of the day in metal currently political allegory is all over this album, and unlike so many of their peers Arch Enemy actually know how to do a real allegory. There are few overt statements to be found, just smartly ambiguous references to the scenario of the albums title and an inspired choice of audio sample (from the movie Caligula) to open the title track.

Of course Arch Enemy's true point of difference is vocalist Angela Gossow, a petite blonde capable of grunting out death metal bellows with the best of her male counterparts. Curiously enough her voice on the album sounds less brutal than when I've heard her 'sing' live, but it's still fucking impressive! Her guttural howls may be higher in pitch than is conventional for a death metal band but there is something far eviller about this vocal style when it comes from a woman. A guy doing death metal growling is always on some level engaging in testosterone driven macho posturing, but when a woman is forcing such unholy noises out of herself, there's no question that it's all purely in the service of evil and for the glory of Satan.

Here's the official video for 'Revolution Begins':

Milk From The Flower, Blood From The Dawn

2007-11-27T22:26:00.000+13:00

The Smashing Pumpkins - Zeitgeist

Billy Corgan's precisely planned and calculated breakup of the Smashing Pumpkins back in 2000 was done in such a way to ensure that there was little question of a reunion at some stage in the future. The only question was when, and who would be invited back. As it happened Billy only held out for a mere seven years (I always imagine him pacing impatiently in the studio... “I wish I could reform the Pumpkins now...”) and the only other original member to return was drummer Jimmy Chamberlain (yes, the same drummer Billy had with him for all of the music he made during the Pumpkin's defunct period). And indeed, Zeitgeist sets off from the exact spot that their last album, Machina, left off from without missing a beat. The powerful, thundering drum fill that kicks off the album and the killer guitar riff (reminiscent of that of 'Bodies') that it dives straight into immediately reassure the listener that the next fifty minutes of music will be cast from a very similar mould to that of Siamese Dream or Mellon Collie. The odds of Zeitgeist surpassing or even equalling those albums were never good so no one should be surprised that it doesn't rank up there with them, and I would certainly not rate it as high as Adore either (of course my fondness for that album is atypical). The good news is that it's much better than the troubled, awkward Machina, and I'm pleasantly surprised to find that Zeitgeist is a worthwhile listen and a genuine return to form.

I have a few minor criticisms of it however. The cover art, portraying the Statue of Liberty half submerged under the waves behind a red, swollen sun, the Grim Reaper as President of the USA, Paris Hilton and other omens of disaster, would imply that the subject matter of the album would be inspired by the concerns of the world at large today, but it turns out to be just another trip down into Billy's navel (the epic album divider 'United States' would appear to be the most likely track to deal with such themes but Billy's whined refrain “What will they do with me?” shows that no matter where he looks for inspiration, he always ends up talking about himself). This approach has served him well in the past, but the fact is that Billy just isn't as miserable and angsty as he used to be and while that's great for him personally it leaves him with the same problem as many of his peers from the early Nineties grunge era who also found that their anguish was their muse, and the music lacks the passion and intensity of his earlier work. Taking a turn to the political and directing his anger at the outside world worked miracles for Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails earlier this year, and I think Billy missed an opportunity by not thinking along similar lines.

My second complaint is that the album is front loaded with it's best tracks. First single 'Tarantula' is found at track five and is a solid song in a very classic Pumpkins vein. The album begins with 'Doomsday Clock' and '7 Shades of Black', which both rock out like motherfuckers, and track three, 'Bleeding the Orchid', is easily my favourite from the album, with a combination of heaviness and Adore-style romanticism that is probably what Machina was supposed to sound like. Unfortunately such promise is unfulfilled as there's nothing later in the album that comes close to equalling those songs (even if none of it is actively bad).

But by and large Billy's talent as a composer and musician remains solid. The songs found here all play it pretty safe - there's no question that you're listening to a Smashing Pumpkins album and yet it would also be impossible to take any given song and place it with confidence as being in the style of any of their earlier albums, as they've developed their sound just enough so that Zeitgeist is not redundant. Jimmy's drums are as powerful as ever and Billy's return as a master of guitar wankery is most welcome. His trademark wild, squeally solos are as impassioned and unique as ever, especially the one that closes out the album on the otherwise mediocre track 'Pomp and Circumstances'.

It's far from their greatest album but Zeitgeist is certainly better than I'd feared it would turn out to be. Here's hoping they tour Australia for this album so that I'll finally get a chance to see the Pumpkins (in one form or another) live.

Holiday Reading

2007-11-27T00:32:00.000+13:00

OK, now I've kind of caught up on things again, so blogging should once more be fast and furious!

While I was away, I also got to read some books:

First up was Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power. He's nuts! He's completely myopic! He wildly overstates his case in every paragraph! Some of his 'facts' are incredibly dubious*! By the time I'd finished the first couple of chapters I was totally prepared to give this book a real bashing, yet somehow by the end he'd kind of won me over. He has some pretty smart, convincing explanations for his apparent prejudice and constant America bashing, and even though I disagree with many of his conclusions, I found the worldview he presented thought provoking and indeed a useful model with which to consider political subjects. My thoughts on it really deserve more space than I have in this multi-book extravaganza post, so they will just have to wait until the next time I read something of his.

* “So in northeast Brazil, for example, which is a rather fertile area with plenty of rich land, just it's all owned by plantations, Brazillian medical researchers now identify the population as a new species with about 40 percent the brain size of human beings, a result of generations of profound malnutrition and neglect[...]” Here's the citation.

I also read Lost in Transmission, by Jonathan Harley, which I really enjoyed. It's an autobiography by the former central Asian correspondent for the ABC (Australia's version of the BBC or TVNZ) and details the years of his life spent living in India and Pakistan, reaching a climax when he reports from the front lines of America's invasion of Afghanistan. Despite it's straightforward prose (obviously written by a news reporter) and modestly direct emotional aspect (obviously written by an Aussie) it captured my attention effortlessly. On one hand there's the political and world events portrayed, which provided a surprisingly relevant counterpoint to Chomsky and in one weird moment of synchronicity, the news (reporting Pakistan's General Musharraf declaring martial law) on TV in front of me. On the other hand there's the personal side of the story, which has numerous aspects and narratives (as any honest autobiography would) and introduced me to the concept of 'teen-creep', the state of living one's life with all the lack of responsibility and maturity of a teenager until your late twenties and beyond. Good thing I don't know anyone like that!

And you'll probably be surprised to learn that I didn't realise for over two months after its release that Buffy Season 8: The Long Way Home had been published. For those not in the know/who don't give a fuck, Joss Whedon has format shifted Buffy from TV to comics and this is the first collected instalment. It's a solid enough effort (certainly miles better than season seven) and Joss takes full advantage of the new medium by upping the epic battles, violence and lesbianism. Yet despite such sound artistic development, it doesn't quite scratch the itch. The dialogue is still great and the plot and characters are developed in a satisfying way, but as with most serialised comic collections the pacing feels terrible. Five months worth of comic issues feel filled with about as much content as a one hour episode of the TV show. Nevertheless I'm still stoked to see Joss continuing the story and I am eagerly looking forward to the continuation of the series and the forthcoming resurrection of Angel.

Lastly I also finished off the recent release Fatal Revenant (make sure you pronounce the title the same way George Costanza says 'prognosis negative'!), the latest instalment of Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant fantasy saga. The series has been a favourite of mine since I was a teenager and I'm still loving it even now. It's been a three year wait since the last book and I eagerly devoured this one (only to find that this has merely replaced one cliffhanger with another that I will no doubt have to wait another three years to read the resolution of) and it cemented Donaldon's place in my list of favourite authors. Fatal Revenant was definitely heavy on exposition and low on action, a flaw I am confident will be remedied in the remaining two books in the series, but even the exposition was still absorbing to read. A little more maturity has allowed me to see past the full on angst fest of the main characters in this series to the beauty of their world that Donaldson has created to contrast it. I really must go back and read the original series again. I'm curious as to what I might get out of it this time...

Holiday Viewing

2007-11-22T00:38:00.000+13:00

So I got the chance to watch a few movies on the plane while I was away. I'm pretty slack at getting my arse to the actual theatre nowadays so it was good to catch up on a few recent releases that I'd missed.

At the top of the list of movies I'm annoyed at myself for missing was Stardust, based on Neil Gaiman's novel. I loved the book, but adaptations of this type rarely go well and the reviews had been lacklustre so my expectations were low. Fortunately it turned out to pretty damn good. While the movie feels free to deviate wildly from the plot of its source material, it faithfully retains the fairy tale spirit and Gaiman's unique style and mood. Plus it features some stunning visuals, proving that expensive CGI can still look good in the right hands, something I'd begun to doubt in this age of overrendered Spidermans and Fantastic Fours. My only criticism would be Claire Danes, who I found quite annoying and who also managed to be out-foxed by the almost fifty year old Michelle Pfeiffer.

Next I finally got to watch The Simpsons Movie. As much as I loved the show in its heyday, it's recent deterioration left me without much compulsion to catch the big screen version. I'm not sorry I saw it, thankfully it isn't the worthless mockery of a once great comedy that I feared, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it. Sure it's worth a few laughs, particularly near the beginning but despite all the winks and nods to fans there's no denying that the writers lost their spirit a long time ago. Plus, I can't believe they killed Dr. Nick for no reason! Why choose to off one of their best characters (and one that has been around since nearly the beginning), and not one of the lame later additions that have mysteriously hung round for years (Like the “yeeeesss” guy. Does anyone think that shit is funny?)

Next I gave Knocked Up a try. Freaks and Geeks gives Buffy a run for its money as the best thing ever to appear on television, and Judd Apatow has made a decent career in Hollywood following the demise of that show so I had high expectations for his new(ish) film. Nevertheless, I couldn't make it through half an hour of this movie. My hatred for the characters (all of them, I couldn't decide if I loathed the snobby rich girls or the gross slobby guys more) grew so extreme that I had to calm down by watching Transformers. The gentle sounds of explosions and cheesy generic rock soundtracks washed away my misanthropic anger and sent me off to sleep before the movie was half over.

Later on I ended up watching Daywatch, an almost incomprehensible Russian sci-fi movie. Despite the ridiculous plot and overwrought acting I neither fell asleep nor turned it off in disgust before the end so on some level at least it must count as a success.

I also caught 28 Days Later and its sequel 28 Weeks Later. The first film was a perfect example of someone taking a timeworn genre (in this case the zombie film featuring political allegory) and creating something completely new from it without deviating from the established trappings of the style. I loved the first both as an action film and for its unpleasant but affecting insights into human nature. The next film was still quite watchable but lacked all the things that made the first film so good, despite the addition of many scenes of famous parts of London getting blown up and/or attacked by zombies.

Unfortunately my nineteen hour flight back to Australia was movieless, thanks to Qantas' shitty entertainment system being on the blink the whole time. At least that meant that I got through half of Moby Dick.

I'm Back

2007-11-21T00:36:00.000+13:00

Cornelius J. Ferryweather III may have beaten me in the end (but only with the help of his team of black hearted rogues and their gigantic fog machine that bested me in the exotic port city of Dubai!) but the important thing is to reflect on the lessons that we learned along the way. The many uplifting and enlightening experiences that I had on my journey included:

Getting grifted by an Indian magician in Singapore airport.
Being woken up by soldiers armed with automatic rifles in Singapore airport.
Getting grifted by dodgy electronics salesmen in New York.
Getting lost in the projects on Staten Island.
Getting grifted by strippers in Times Square.
Getting detained by immigration in the UK.
Enduring the stunning ineptitude of the Emirates ground staff in London.
Sitting next to Mr. Elbows McCoughsalot for twelve hours flying from London to Singapore.

But I built a lot of character!

cucucu

2007-11-03T12:02:00.000+13:00

"The Sugababes!" I snarl, slamming my rum and coke down on the bar.

"You simply cannot be more mistaken," says Cornelius J. Ferryweather III with a sneer, "Britney Spears' The Blackening will undoubtedly be the feel good party album of the summer."

"THE SUGABABES!" I roar, lurching unsteadily to my feet and knocking over my barstool as I do so. The bartender tells me that I need to leave, and that he's not going to ask again.

"On lead single 'Gimme Gimme Gimme' Britney channels her recent troubles into fresh artistic expression," Cornelius J. Ferryweather III states in his refined accent, "infusing her trademark bubblegum pop with a mature, earthy sexuality..."

He continues on but I am not listening. I can see the bouncers making their way to the bar, and I know that I do not have much time. "I foresee only one way to settle this...", I interrupt. "I propose a race around the world!!"

"Very well, I accept!" returns Cornelius J. Ferryweather III. "I have no doubt that my zeppelin, The August Queen Victoria, shall see me back in Sydney while you are still struggling across the Sahara in your solar powered hovercraft!"

I have no chance to reply, as I am now being carried out the door. I know not how I shall beat him, nor what perils I may face along the way, but I am steadfast in my conviction that I shall triumph in this race... AROUND THE WORLD!!!!

...Unless They Some Smart Ass Pawns

2007-10-31T22:57:00.000+13:00

The Wire Season One

After watching (and loving) the first season of The Shield, I was more or less obligated to tune into the similar (and even more critically lauded) The Wire. The two shows have strong similarities, both are gritty cop shows set in poor, crime ridden neighbourhoods (The Shield is set in a bad part of L.A., while The Wire takes place in Baltimore, a choice of setting that behoves the creators to make the slightly unusual choice of having an almost entirely black cast). However despite starting from similar places the shows have vastly different approaches to the genre. The Shield poses, explicitly and didactically, questions about concrete issues, mainly the attitude of 'the ends justify the means' with regards to law enforcement. The Wire is far subtler and more philosophical with it's themes, which are presented with a sophistication far beyond that of any other TV show I've seen, even in our current golden age of good TV.

Ten years ago television was the 'idiot box', the lowest form of entertainment. As a kid I was always puzzled by the far greater artistic merit attributed to film, when I perceived them both as moving pictures and could see no reason that one should be greatly different to the other. In a sense I was right. There's no reason that television should not be a medium for intelligent and enlightening story telling, but the fact remains that, with rare exceptions, no one was using it as such for a very long time. Certain shows (Buffy, The Sopranos) turned that around and now series' with long running, complex narratives are common place. Sadly this little renaissance comes at a time when broadcast television' lifespan is coming to an end, with the internet's Sword of Damocles poised delicately over its head. This era will no doubt be viewed in retrospect with a lot of nostalgia when we're all stuck watching the puerile offspring of lonelygirl on youtube or it's successor, and when we do so The Wire will no doubt be one of the touchstone examples used.

There are two halves to the first season of The Wire. In one we follow the fortunes of D'Angelo Barksdale, a rising player in his family's drug trafficking business, and his associates. In the other we watch the police investigation tasked with bringing down the gang's kingpin, D'Angelo's uncle Avon. Despite the dedication of the officers carrying out the investigation the authorities within the police department have little patience for the 'waste of resources' so our main protagonist, detective Jimmy McNulte, balances his time maintaining covert surveillance on the drug dealers while playing politics with his superiors who are constantly pushing to shut the operation down.

On the plot level there's a lot going on, and while I have always been in the habit of watching Lost, 24 and even Buffy with one eye on the TV and the other on the internet, it's impossible to keep track of what's going on in The Wire without devoting most of your attention to the show, with it's fast paced, jargon laden dialogue and, refreshingly, it's willingness not to spell everything out for the viewer. Even a show like Lost, which has a reputation for keeping people guessing, deals out its mysteries methodically. The viewer of Lost is not meant to actually figure anything out for themselves, all will be explained (if it's going to be) by an explicit, revelatory scene or line of dialogue. The Wire, in contrast, keeps a lot of things, particularly the less important details, implied and unstated. The closing montage of the season is particularly good. Without any dialogue the point of the show is made clear, you can put as many criminals in prison as you care to, but without changing the social situation there's always going to be someone at every level of the organisation ready to step into place and carry on doing the same old thing. Sure, individuals lives and careers have been shaken up or destroyed (and one or two have even been improved), but the faceless institutions of the police force and the drug gangs remain trapped and unchanged in their perpetual war; a war which neither has any real interest in winning.

It's a downer but a great one to watch. The show lacks the gritty realness of The Shield, but makes up for it with artificial but snappy and entertaining dialogue and a plot that is never predictable. More than once I was on the edge of my seat, genuinely concerned for the fate of a sympathetic character (and they're found in both sides of the series' conflict) because the show unfolds like a novel, where plot is paramount, rather than a TV show, where a character's sudden death is more likely to occur because of the actor's contract negotiations than any dramatic reasoning.

To start with my opinion of this show was that it was good, but not as good as The Shield, but the elegant and genuinely unpredictable denouement of the season brought it all together so well that I'll happily concede that the common consensus is correct and this really is one of the best (can't say the best, that's Buffy) things ever screened on TV.

You'll Go To Hell For What You Did

2007-10-30T23:20:00.000+13:00

Radiohead – In Rainbows

Measured in terms of both critical and commercial success Radiohead are probably the greatest band in the world today, and having held that position for some time now they can pretty much do whatever the fuck they want, and so they are. Sitting in a comfortable financial position gives them the freedom to allow people to download their new album for a price of their choice, just to see what happens. I suspect that the commercial aspect of their decision is a little savvier than some might give them credit for. Someone asked me recently why they didn't just charge a fixed price for the album, in the nonsensical economic assumption that if you offer something for free there's no reason that anyone would give you money for it. The fact of the matter is that people now have the option of paying any value at all for the music, from nothing up through to maybe twenty pounds, (at which point you may as well just buy the forty pound hard copy version), whereas with a flat fee they have the choice of either paying the fee or nothing (i.e. getting it off soulseek). It's hard to explain without drawing a graph but my guess is that it will actually be more profitable for them this way. And even if it's not, I'm sure the expensive 2CD, 2LP boxed set will cover costs.

My box set will be arriving in December sometime, but in the meantime we have the first disc worth of material available to listen to. It was nice receiving it completely out of the blue like that, with no early reviews to give you any idea of what to expect. Take that critics! You had to wait just like everyone else!

Radiohead have never done the same thing twice but even still In Rainbows is surprising in many ways. For a start it's easily the most quiet, restrained thing they've ever done with almost no high or low hooks to latch on to. It's an album that's so minimal (especially compared to their earlier work) that it demands careful listening to really appreciate a lot of it. Thom Yorke's distinctive voice is still front and centre but Johnny Greenwood's guitars and electronica are vastly subdued compared to his normal style. Unexpectedly enough this album gives Phil Selway a chance to shine. I've always thought he was a great drummer but in the past he's always been buried by the huge musical personalities he's keeping time for. However the biggest surprise with In Rainbows however is the upbeat, positive emotional vibe of the music. Coming from the most miserable band on the planet and on the heels of Yorke's maudlin solo release it's at least as stunning as their novel distribution model.

In many ways the album is also a bit of a return to rock. The electronic and avant garde elements that have dominated their last three albums are still present but are never anything more than background to the traditional rock elements. Hell, 'Bodysnatchers' sounds like it could have been on Pablo Honey, with it's fuzzed out indie rock tone and Thom's shouted but upbeat vocals. Yet the album as a whole reminds me mostly of Amnesiac, not just because they're both albums that greatly disappointed me, but because of the wilfully obtuse, opaque nature of the songs, especially Thom's voice, which goes out of it's way to confound my melodic expectations in ways that are not necessarily satisfying to the ear. 'All I Need' from the new album reminds me a lot of 'You And Who's Army' from Amnesiac, in the way that an song that I found unsatisfying for most of its length suddenly bursts into a wonderful, soaring piano break segueing to a beautiful outro that doesn't last long enough.

At least Amnesiac contained a few songs that I really liked ('Pyramid Song' and 'Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box') but almost everything on In Rainbows leaves me with this unsatisfied feeling. I can't fault the songwriting, every song seems to have been crafted with great care and skill, but it's so minimal and subdued that it's often hard to appreciate this. I feel as though this is perhaps the bands intention. Just as they are one of the only bands with the power to do something audacious like their record-label-less free download idea, they're also one of the only bands who can make a deliberately obtuse, difficult album and expect people to have the patience to give it time and attention to grow on them. For now I'm giving In Rainbows a tentative thumbs down, as the least incredible album to date (save Pablo Honey which doesn't count) in a spectacular career, but I can't shake the suspicion that it's precisely crafted songs are going to unexpectedly unveil hidden depths some day when I'm least expecting it.

The Tears Of Snow White Sorrow

2007-10-30T00:31:00.000+13:00

Nightwish - Dark Passion Play

Replacing the singer of a rock band is always a dangerous proposition for the remaining members. Even if said singer is not a primary songwriter they are still the public face of the band and without them the audience may well lose interest. At one end of the spectrum we have The Doors without Jim Morrison, an endeavour so unlikely to succeed that Ray Manzarek doesn't even acknowledge that they tried it. At the other you have bands that ditched legendary frontmen but still carried on to greater success, for example Black Sabbath without Ozzy or Pink Floyd without Syd Barrett. And of course there are numerous examples of the middle ground, such as Pink Floyd without Roger Waters. In 2005 Nightwish dismissed their singer Tarja Turunen (following a concert in which they, appropriately enough, covered Floyd's (post-Waters) 'High Hopes'). Dark Passion Play is their first album with their new singer Annette Olzon.

Even without the change of vocalist Nightwish would have trouble providing a worthy followup to the superb Once and coming on the heels of a lesser album Dark Passion Play and Olzon might have received a better reception, but unfortunately the new album is a bit of a step down from the achievement of Once.

The new singer is more of a rock singer (where Turunen's style was opera) and to her credit she's capable of a broader range of styles than Tarja was but she just can't measure up in terms of power. Olzon's a capable replacement but there's no denying that something has been lost with Tarja's departure.

Besides the lineup change the music has taken a rockier turn. While the heavy aspects of Once often reminded me of Rammstein the metal aspects of Dark Passion Play are thrashier in a more classic metal vein and give the guitarist and drummer opportunities to shine by showing off their ability to thunderously rock out.

The songwriting is as strong as ever. It's easy to overlook the sophistication behind the sleek, polished pop surface of things, but there's actually a lot to be impressed by in the interleaving of the different aspects of the music (metal guitars, pop rock vocals and the orchestra) and there's some genuinely impressive melodic development and harmonising that you don't see a lot of in popular music. Despite that there's definitely something missing, and I don't think it's just the change of singer. The songs simply don't seem to have the energy to match the high standards of the production and composition. Perhaps it's a little too overproduced for the rock and metal elements to have the strength they need and perhaps they just need more time to gel with their new vocalist.

Of course it would be misleading for me not to note that even though Dark Passion Play doesn't match the high standard of Once it's still a pretty good album. One of it's most notable attributes is the outstanding production of the backing orchestra. This is the most expensive album in Finnish music history, and it shows in the glorious sound of the 175(!) additional musicians assembled to provide the accompaniment. And despite my criticisms of the performance above there are still a substantial number of songs that are pulled off pretty well. 'The Islander' and 'Lost of the Wilds' provide a nice pair late in the album, the first an acoustic ballad, the second an instrumental blending standard metal elements with frenzied bohemian fiddle (a genre mashup that almost always pays big dividends). The singles, 'Bye Bye Beautiful' and 'Amaranth' are almost overwhelmed by their cheese factor but still deliver infectiousness and great chorus hooks. 'Amaranth' in particular was my first introduction to Olzon's voice and while I was at first turned off completely (“Oh my God it's the fucking Corrs!”) I was somehow reeled back in by the splendorous pop vocal line of the chorus. And there's absolutely no denying the brilliance of the opening and closing tracks. The album begins with the quarter hour epic 'The Poet and the Pendulum', which ebbs and flows through five movements of film score orchestra and rocking metal, and ends with 'Meadows of Heaven', in which vocal histrionics are unleashed over a song that puts me in mind of nothing else so much as Pink Floyd's 'High Hopes'. Bringing things full circle...

Unbelievable Awesomeness Is Suprisingly Believable

2007-10-28T16:58:00.000+13:00

So I was looking at this the other day, and it got me thinking about what search terms might bring the Wildebeest Asylum up as the first result on Google. I couldn't really think of any (other than obvious, dumb ones, like my name), but I tried 'unbelievable awesomeness', since that's a phrase I use frequently and one that I thought came straight out of my arsehole. Turns out that this blog is on the second page of results for that term. 'Unbelievable awesomeness' is all over the blogosphere, and I have no recollection of where I got it from.

Ha!

2007-10-27T19:47:00.000+13:00

Today's random funny news post has nothing to do with animals or India.

A Norwegian politician advocates legalising illicit music downloads. Enslaved reply by stealing his sheep.

In trve black metal fashion they released the sheep to freedom in the mountains, where it can now forever roam twixt the blackened peaks bathed in the dark light of the frostbitten wintermoon, preserving the spirit of metal within its black unbeating heart.

1001 Albums - Number 13

2007-10-26T02:02:00.000+13:00

Machito – Kenya

Given the title (and the explicitly ethnic cover art) I was expecting something very African from Kenya, perhaps even more so than Palo Congo, so I was surprised to find that (to my ears at least) this album sounded about as African as the queen in blackface. This is really just me speaking from my modern presumptions of course, while my immediate association of peppy upbeat jazz is with unfunky white guys, it is of course perfectly correct to say it is an African art form.

Kenya's sound is roughly in the same genre as Palo Congo, but not by much. Where Palo Congo overlays African rhythms with Latin American guitars, Kenya tramples over those same rhythms with super cheesy, upbeat jazz.

But don't think that I didn't like this album, it's actually pretty enjoyable. Yes, the jazz is cheesy, (putting me in mind of kitsch classics ranging from the themes of old James Bond films to that of The Love Boat), but it somehow did more for me than Miles Davis last week. I guess it is at least partly because Machito doesn't make playing relaxed and happy music sound like such serious hard work. The conga rhythms are shoved far further into the background here than on Sabu's album, but they sound just as good as those on Palo Congo when they are allowed their own space.

To my surprise I'm quite liking this genre. Next up, Little Richard.

Today In Murderous Indian Animal News

2007-10-25T02:18:00.000+13:00

First it was the monkeys, now it's the Drunken Elephant Rampage!

Sunday Night Goth Piano Freakout

2007-10-24T01:04:00.001+13:00

Grinderman / Nick Cave
Live at the Enmore Theatre, Sunday 21st

It's been a few months since a concert came around that I was genuinely excited about, and almost as long since I saw one that truly blew me away. I'm happy to say that both timers were reset by Nick Cave's (or rather, Grinderman's) concert this Sunday past.

I arrived a bit late, just in time to catch the end of the opening act, an antiquated stage magician. It was a cute act and kind of entertaining, but he was no Dr. Octavio.

We didn't have long to wait until Grinderman took the stage, led by Nick Cave sporting an improbable handlebar moustache and featuring three other members of the Bad Seeds, Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos and Martyn Casey, who are also following the theme of wild facial hair (Jim and Warren's beards reach ZZ Top proportions). Together they delivered a dirty, bluesy variation on Cave's usual style. Cave himself was, as you'd expect, the centre of attention for most of the show, dancing wildly around the stage with that distinctive, preacher-like way of waving his skinny arms around (his dancing as almost as iconic as the spasmodic flailing of the Yorke Gimp Dance) and leaning out over the barrier to speak directly to the front row of the audience. Cave wears a persona for this band, an angry one that makes appear like a man possessed, but it's done with a wink and a grin.

Grinderman: Featuring some big assed beards

The music was fine stuff, supported by a light show that enhanced the bands Tom Waits-esque vaudeville goth sound, and I was particularly impressed by the raw, improvised feel of the band. Most bands I see these days sound perfectly honed and play every note precisely the way it's meant to be, and play it the same way at every concert. While that's a solid musical achievement I'm still more impressed by a band like this one, where the artists are so familiar and comfortable with one another that they can decide which songs to play off the cuff (a memorable exchange from the later set: Ellis: “What key is this in again?”, Cave: “Uh... somewhere between C and G I think.”, [muffled arguing], Cave: “Must be C, it's an easy one. All white notes.”) and to mess around and improvise within the songs without losing the groove.

Grinderman: Featuring Invisible Nick Cave

Grinderman Setlist (to the best of my recollection, as usual the order is probably a bit wrong):
Depth Charge Ethel
Get it On
Electric Alice
Honey Bee
Grinderman
I Don't Need You
When My Love Comes Down
No Pussy Blues

The short (forty minute) set was good fun, but in my opinion the Grinderman album is a lesser light in Cave's stellar back catalogue and it seems that this opinion is shared widely among my fellow Sydney music fans, as there was an element of restlessness throughout the set. It was good, but we knew that what was coming would be better. The closer, 'No Pussy Blues', was the highlight for most (although I was more excited to hear my favourite Grinderman track, 'When My Love Comes Down' and Cave's awesome guitar freakout at the end of their eponymous song) and at the end Cave announced “Good night... from Grinderman”.

After a short break a new band took the stage, one that looked remarkably like Grinderman but wearing different coloured suits and without the silver stage backdrop. In his guise as 'Nick Cave solo', Cave is much more relaxed and chatty (even more so than Lemmy was), responding to requests and heckles from the audience. I've never heard a band get heckled as badly as Cave was here (although the audience was as a whole wildly appreciative), perhaps it's because he's an Aussie, and therefore fair game as 'one of their own', or is it just because a lot of his songs are quiet, allowing the drunken idiots to be heard? I remain uncertain.

Nick Cave as Himself (rather than the Grinderman)

This set was the heart of the show and the songs ranged in quality from 'Jolly good fun' to 'Completely fucking awesome'. Some were played straight, some were a little Grindermanized from their Bad Seeds origins, and all were introduced by a amiable and witty Nick Cave.

Red Right Hand

With that distinctive bell tone the band suddenly launches into Cave's signature song. The audience immediately goes wild. This one was played fairly straight, save for some particularly aggressive piano and violin freakouts after each chorus. It was an incredible rendition and a fantastic first taste of a band I've been aching to see for years.

Into My Arms

Cave: “We're going to play a few hits for you tonight. Well, not really hits, but songs that wanted to be hits. They tried their very best... Well, they're all hits to me. If you'd all sing along to this one, [pause] it'd be a hit!”

This one was played straight (save for the addition of the backing band, who kept themselves respectfully quiet behind the piano and vocals), but it's another favourite of mine.

The Weeping Song

Holy shit this was awesome. One of the best single songs I've heard from any band this year. On the album it's a classic, but such maudlin stylings does not necessarily carry over so well to a live setting. They've reworked this one into a huge, stomping, aggro motherfucker of a rock track and although it might not sound like a good idea I can assure you that it was an almost transcendent scream-along.

This video has terrible sound quality and it's not nearly as good a version as what I heard (it's from a year ago), but it gives the general idea:

Babe, You Turn Me On
Cannibal's Hymn

These two tracks from the Bad Seeds most recent album were played pretty much straight, although there was a bit of a country twang to 'Babe' and a bit more stompy rockness to 'Cannibal's Hymn'.

Love Letter
The Ship Song

And these two mellow piano ballads were more or less straight too. They lacked a little energy compared to the rest of the show, which is unfortunate, as on record they're two of my favourites. In an amusing interlude the audience asks Cave to move the organ he played on Grinderman as it's obstructing their view of the grand piano. “Lose the organ!”, “Lose the music stand!” Cave dutifully does so (yelling in mock anger at the roadies “Get rid of it! Get rid of it!”). “Lose the moustache!” someone yells out. “NO!” replies Cave, “It's here to stay. And as for the beard...” (pointing at Ellis).

God Is In the House

The heckling actually became pretty entertaining towards the end of the show. Cave introduces the song by saying “It'd really mean a lot to me, if you'd all sing along with the chorus.” “What's in it for us?” someone yells out. Cave laughs for a while and replies “That's the best thing anyone's yelled out at me for... quite a while.” Another funny moment at the end when the song gets really quiet as Cave sings “...as quiet as a mouse...” and someone ruins the almost dead silence of the theatre by screaming, causing Cave to leap off the piano stool, run to the front of the stage and make angry shushing gestures.

Tupelo
The Mercy Seat
Deanna
Jack the Ripper

The main set finished with four old songs that I'm only partially familiar with (but which were all highly enjoyable all the same), performed in a rocky, aggressive style (even 'Deanna'). 'The Mercy Seat' was particularly intense, probably the highlight of the night besides 'The Weeping Song'.

Obligatory not shitty photo

At most concerts the demand for an encore is fairly perfunctory and lacklustre. On Sunday night the roaring of the crowd was an emphatically heartfelt demand for more.

Lime-Tree Arbour
The Lyre of Orpheus
Right Now I'm A-Roaming
Go Tell the Women

There was a fairly long winded discussion about which song to play to first for the encore. Cave ignored our demands for 'Stagger Lee', considered a few others and then abruptly settled on a straight but nice version of 'Lime-Tree Arbour'. This was then followed by an impromptu rendition of Happy Birthday by a random member of the audience to Jim (the drummer) whose beard had apparently grown another ring on Sunday. 'Right Now I'm A-Roaming' was a nice, light hearted end to the set, except that just as they were walking off, Nick whirls around, says “I almost forgot!” and played a last, final Grinderman track.

My best beard shot

Another brilliant concert. I've been so lucky to see so much great stuff this year (although I wish I'd bought tickets to Grinderman's Saturday and Monday shows as well). Cave is another brilliant frontman, lacking the charisma of Lemmy or Mike Patton but making up for it with huge amounts of infectious energy. I loved the way he would leap out of his piano stool just to wave his arms in exhortation at the audience in between bars for a mere five seconds before returning to start playing again (his excellent musicianship kind of goes without saying). At any rate, who needs charisma when everyone knows that you're one of the finest songwriters alive today?

Cave will be back next year with the Bad Seeds (and a new Bad Seeds album). I can barely wait!

News Post of the Day

2007-10-23T02:00:00.000+13:00

I know this makes me a terrible person but this is the funniest thing I've read in weeks: Indian Mayor Murdered by Gang of Monkeys.

New Webcomic

2007-10-21T15:07:00.000+13:00

Dresdan Codak. It's not updated very often but it has fantastic art and a nice surreal flavour that's very unique. This one is my favourite.

1001 Albums – Number 12

2007-10-20T00:04:00.000+13:00

Miles Davis – Birth of the Cool

Miles Davis is one of those legendary names that has so much respect attached to it that you just assume that he must be as good as everyone says he is. After enjoying Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington as much as I did I was quite surprised to find that I didn't rate this album much at all.

On Birth of the Cool Davis has assembled a large (nine piece) jazz ensemble, with his trumpet taking the lead role, and they play music that reminds me a little of Ellington's Live at Newport album, but a lot busier and more upbeat. My main complaint is that it lacks the almost classical compositional elegance of The Duke.

As implied by the title this album represents one of the starting points of 'cool' jazz, a laid back and accessible reaction to the aggressive and complex bebop movement. Me, I like my music aggressive and complex so it's really no surprise that this leaves me cold while Thelonious Monk blew my fucking ears off with awesomeness. It's by no means bad, but I'm so far removed from it's target audience that it's almost unfair for me to judge it. Plus the infectious peppyness of it all can't help but bring to my mind the dread thought of cool jazz's nightmarish spawn, smooth jazz...

Next up, more African music with Machito.

From The Fucking Awesome File

2007-10-18T22:36:00.000+13:00

I've got Nightwish tickets! Woohoo! Unfortunately I've got to wait until February to see them...

I wish I knew if some good bands were playing in New York or London while I was there. All I know is that I'm missing Isis by about two days.

A Choice From The Gods Is As Useless As The Gods Themselves

2007-10-18T01:56:00.000+13:00

God of War 2

The original God of War was one of the best games of 2005. The gameplay was perfectly executed, delivering a visceral thrill as your avatar, the Spartan warrior Kratos, carved a swathe of death and devastation through a fantacised Ancient Greece swarming with mythological demons. The game was enhanced by hugely epic art direction and a decent story which, while no Planescape: Torment, was a cut above the standard idiotic console game bullshit.

For the sequel the developers have changed exactly nothing. Despite being elevated to godhood at the end of the first instalment, the beginning of God of War 2 sees Kratos stripped of his powers and sets him off on a quest largely similar to the one in his 2005 outing: retrieve a magical artifact in order to slay a pesky deity, simply substituing Zeus for Ares as the villain of the day.

The story leaves much to be desired, in the first game Kratos was an interesting character in a tortured anti-hero kind of way, but in this instalment he does little except shout “ZEUUUUUUUUUUUUUS” and threaten to kill people. The art direction doesn't hold up quite as well either, although only for technological reasons. The last couple of years have seen the release of the next generation of gaming consoles and the creaky old PS2 doesn't look too shit hot any more. Even with these shortcomings it's hard to be unsatisfied with this glorious gameplay. Armed with the experience of the first game the developers have streamlined things still further so that there is never a moment not filled with awesomeness as you run from brutal battle to epic setpiece to cunning puzzle. They've upped the 'epic' aspect to ridiculous heights (as usual Penny Arcade say it well) and the boss battles are all absolutely brilliant, beating out even the high standards of the first games' 'giant cyborg minotaur' setpiece. The penultimate battle with the Fates is just stunning.

There's nothing new to see here but it's executed flawlessly once more. There's been a bit of a shift to style over substance but when something is this fucking stylish there's no reason to complain about that.

Reaper's Gale

2007-10-17T01:45:00.000+13:00

by Steven Erikson

Steven Erikson's absurdly overwrought epic fantasy series, The Malazan Book of the Fallen, is now on its seventh entry out of an intended ten. Surprisingly he has continued to crank these out at a rate a little slower than one book a year, at a time when his contemporaries have been letting deadlines slip for years, and even flat out dropping dead before finishing their stories.

For those playing along at home the action in Reaper's Gale takes place in the Letherii empire, the same setting as that of book five (Midnight Tides), where a few stray plot threads from the almost completely unrelated sixth book (The Bonehunters) are about to wash up onshore and cause all sorts of havoc. The last two books were heavy with political allegory and real world commentary and Reaper's Gale is no different. Barbarians have conquered the Letherii empire (imagine a hyper capitalistic version of ancient Rome), yet have effected very little change to the lives of their new subjects (save the large proportion of their army that was slaughtered). It hasn't taken long for the Tiste Edur (said barbarians) to be seduced by the wealth and luxury that is theirs for the taking as the rulers of the empire, and opportunistic collaborators amongst the ruling class of the conquered are only to eager to keep the apparatus of their system working. A symbiotic pair of sinister organisations, the Patriotists (a particularly horrifying gang of fascist secret police) and the Liberty Consign (a consortium of powerful business interests) are consolidating their power by imprisoning, torturing and executing anyone who disagrees with them, and justifying the extension of their authority by engineering punitive wars against smaller, weaker neighbouring countries. The conversion of the Tiste Edur to the ways of the civilisation they conquered is fairly analogous to the real world barbarian conquests of Ancient Rome and Ancient China. The observant reader may notice that other plot elements bear striking similarities to those of that other popular epic fantasy series, the daily news.

All the same I find it hard to think of any real life analogue to the Tiste Edur's emperor Rhulad, gifted with a magic sword that renders him unkillable, secretly in thrall to the series' overall villian (The Crippled God, an intriguing character who we don't get to see enough of in this instalment) and driven mad by the deliberate machinations of those who would control him and his power (oh yeah and by the sword's terrible curse). Lets just say he represents big government. Rhulad not so secretly longs for the release of death so he has sent emissaries to every corner of the world searching for warriors who may be powerful enough to finally defeat him. At the end of The Bonehunters two of the series' recurring extreme badasses were recruited into this contest, and Reaper's Gale as a whole is weighted with the portentous promise of the cataclysmic confrontation between the three most absurdly powerful characters in a series known for ridiculously overblown, continent shattering battles.

But we still have to wade through eight hundred pages or so to actually get there, and perhaps Erikson's setup is a little too juicy because while the three characters in question stand around brooding for the better part of the book there are many other plotlines in motion, some of which are more interesting than others but all of which test the reader's patience at times, as we mutter with frustration under our breath “When are we going to get to the fireworks factory!”

It must be said that while Erikson still obviously has the overall arc of the story well set out in his head, the plotting of individual books is starting to get a little befuddled. The Bonehunters started to feel a little like a Robert Jordan book, with characters being shuffled around the map in a desperate bid to hit all of the plot point required of them in that volume. Reaper's Gale is an improvement on this, but is still a step down from the quality of the earlier books. It's hard to not be a little annoyed when Erikson introduces a whole cast of new characters and dedicates a quarter of the book to them only to have the end result of it be that 'X dies, Y mystery is introduced, Z plot thread is dispatched with suddenly and offscreen'. Fortunately when the climax finally arrives it doesn't disappoint, but neither is it any Deadhouse Gates (the series' second entry and the widely agreed high point so far, especially in terms of its stunning resolution). I still have high hopes for the remaining three books in the series, but it is a little disappointing to see a bit of 'middle book syndrome' creeping in for the most recent two.

Still The Same As Yesterday

2007-10-16T01:43:00.000+13:00

Opeth – My Arms, Your Hearse

That's right kids, it's time for another Opeth album. My Arms, Your Hearse is the bands third release, coming between Morningrise and Still Life. As you might recall I found those albums a little disappointing compared to the brilliance of their later work, so my expectations were not that high for this one. Fortunately it turned out to be pretty damn good!

Hearse marks a transition point for this band. On their earlier albums, Morningrise and Orchid, they showed a unique sound and style but it is only at this point that their compositional skill suddenly makes some sort of quantum leap, and the thunderous heavy riffs and mournfully beautiful gentle passages that always populated their songs coalesce into arrangments of perfect proportion and craftsmanship. Martin Lopez' drumming is particularly insane on this disc. He has this brilliant way of alternating and even combining straight up death metal thundering and syncopated jazziness. I may not like this one as much as Blackwater Park or Deliverance, but it's still a fine entry in their discography.

Like Still Life and Ghost Reveries, My Arms, My Hearse is a concept album. The first half of the story has a mood bittersweet and sad, describing a recently deceased ghost watching over his widow, waiting for her to die so that they can be together again. The highlight of this first section is 'When', a nine minute epic encompassing the whole spectrum of this bands' dynamic range. The tone then takes a sudden turn to the horrific in the much loved fan favourite 'Demon of the Fall', in which the protagonist's feelings change to rage and hate, as he sees his love begin to put the past behind her and get on with her life. The album proper closes with the brilliant 'Epilogue', a song unlike anything else done before or since. Sure they've recorded other straight up wank solo centred prog rock instrumentals before, but not something as Eighties as this. I love that Dire Straits-esque organ.

The version I have also has two cover songs tacked on to the end. Their version of Celtic Frost's 'Circle of the Tyrants' is not terribly interesting, it sounds just like what you'd expect of Opeth covering a straight up thrash metal song. 'Remember Tomorrow' (written by Iron Maiden) works a lot better, probably because it's more sophisticated quiet/loud dynamics are a better fit to Opeth.

Another great album from these guys, but not their best.

In The Interests Of Science

2007-10-14T17:11:00.000+13:00

New Scientist finds a link between a stripper's earnings and her menstrual cycle. I'm guessing their next experiment will be to find out if a hooker performs better when she's fertile.

In other news according to Durex Kiwi women are the most promiscuous in the world. *Starts singing the national anthem*

Bust Out and Make a Mistake I Could Regret for the Rest of My Life

2007-10-13T00:41:00.000+13:00

Mammal – Vol 1: The Aural Underground

One of the things I've been quite surprised to learn about Aussie music since moving here is that, at least in Sydney, they love their funk metal. I've seen any number of bands that channel the quirky grooviness of Mr. Bungle or Faith No More, many of them quite good. Mammal are one of the more popular bands of this type, although a more apt comparison of their relatively mainstream style would be to Rage Against the Machine.

You may recall that I've seen these guys live a couple of times, and thought they were fucking great. (They're coming back for a few more shows this year too!) Mammal appear to be fully cognisant of the awesomeness of their live performances, and have therefore made the unusual decision to make their first album a live recording. It's a choice that you certainly can't argue the effectiveness of, as they're a tight act and there's not a bung note or a song not pumping with energy to be found.

As for the music itself, the comparison to Rage is a good one, as they have the same kind of funky but heavy rhythm section backing more aggressive guitar and vocals (even if the singer sounds, ironically, more like Chris Cornell than Zach de la Rocha). The difference between the two bands is in their emotional approach. Rage are full of, well, rage and listening to one of their albums leaves one well and pissed off. Mammal may share some of Rage's political sensibilities but their music is upbeat and rather than dwelling on the bad in the world they express hope and for all the aggression in their music there are also a hell of a lot of exhortations to just dance.

1001 Albums – Number 11

2007-10-12T01:53:00.000+13:00

Sabu – Palo Congo

After a solid diet of early rock and roll and jazz, we take a little diversion here into latin music, or more properly, Afro-Cuban music. While about half the tracks are upbeat, fun latin numbers, the rest are based around traditional African drumming with strange (to my ears), wordless vocals.

I actually really like this album. It has a truly alien sort of quality about it which I attribute to it's roots in genuine traditional African music, rather than the commodified tripe they call world music nowadays. The percussion is really impressive. Even those of us conditioned by prog metal drummers pushing the envelope in any way they can can't help but be drawn in by the pulsating polyrhythms on display here.

My favourite track is 'Choferito', which is one of the fun latin songs and which I love for it's kookily slurred vocal line.

Next up, Miles Davis.

A Good Day!

2007-10-11T02:23:00.000+13:00

Today marked the release of:

Big Day Out tickets for Sydney
Half-life 2 Episode 2
The new Radiohead album

My internets have been very busy!

Sunday Night Bogan Rampage

2007-10-10T02:17:00.000+13:00

Motörhead
Rose Tattoo
Live at the Enmore Theatre, Oct 7^th

I must admit that I'm not at all familiar with Motorhead's work. In fact, the only song of theirs that I would even recognise is the inescapable 'Ace of Spades' (which pops up in the unlikeliest places...). Still, they have a reputation as a great live act and Lemmy is over sixty, so it's possible that this may be my only chance to see them.

I was told to expect a diverse crowd and that's certainly what I found. There were a large number of the expected bikers, bogans and metallers, but they were surprisingly enough balanced out by all sorts of punks, goths, emos and even a few normal people, who stood out like beacons in the night with their non-black t-shirts and blonde hair.

Rose Tattoo

The openers were Airbourne (who I completely missed) and Rose Tattoo (who I didn't). I'm not sure if I'd ever heard of Rose Tattoo before I moved to Sydney so for those who need filling in they're basically the Aussie equivalent of Motorhead. They maybe have a little less of the punk and a little more of the Seventies rock than the headliners, but it's a pretty solid comparison, as both bands are populated by aging, leather clad rockers. Rose Tattoo's set was pleasing enough and a passed the time well.

Apparently Lemmy sets his mic pointing down like that so he doesn't have to see the audience.

We didn't have long to wait until Motorhead took the stage. Their set was a decent ninety minutes and while it started out a bit tepid the band slowly but steadily cranked the intensity (and the volume) right up until the end, when they blasted out a nice three song encore which included, of course, 'Ace of Spades'. The moshpit started out pretty much non-existant, got rowdy about four or five songs in when they pulled out 'Killers', and steadily got messier and messier, in the way that only moshpits full of tanked forty year old bogans can, until the last song when a brawl erupted over a drumstick thrown into the crowd. As for the volume, Motorhead are supposedly the loadest band on earth and while I was wondering what the fuss was about at the time, it turned out that they start at a reasonable level and only gradually increase the volume so that even though it didn't sound loud at the time my ears are still ringing now!

Hey look a decent photo!

The star of the show in terms of flashy musicianship was the drummer, Mikkey Dee. He had his five minute drum solo in the spotlight, which was actually pretty cool (and I usually hate long drum solos, thank you Neil Peart) but even besides that he was an absolute machine the whole way through. Of course the real star of the show was Lemmy, who is a living rock legend. He may not have Mike Patton's showmanship (during his actual performance he seemed kind of bored a lot of the time. Maybe too much booze and not enough speed today...) but his casual, affable nature (he actually had conversations with people in the front row) gives him a different sort of charisma, an understated kind that is unspoken but supported by the weight of his reputation as a honest to god rock and roll motherfucker. His stage banter didn't seem at all premeditated and he even seemed genuine when he thanked the audience. He truly is one of the greatest rock and roll frontmen ever.

My phone really likes the colour purple.

This gig won't go down as one of the best I've seen all year, but I am very glad that I did go, both just for a fun night out and also so that I can now say that I've seen Lemmy in the flesh.

Pet Peeve

2007-10-07T16:03:00.000+13:00

Pet peeve of the day: the term 'neo-classical metal'.

I first noticed the term when it was applied to Dragonforce. As far as I can tell it's used only to infuse cheesy metal bands with more importance and respectability than they deserve. What it technically means is that they use 'classical' instruments such as piano, and that they steal riffs and motifs from classical music. In every other respect, it's indistinguishable from normal metal.

It's all total bullshit. Firstly, a piano is no more a classical instrument than the guitar, they've both been rock music staples since the beginning of the style. Secondly, just because you're playing rock music with an orchestra doesn't make it classical.

Also, the actual music that they appropriate is usually Romantic rather than classical, I'd let that slide because they're just using the colloquial definition of 'Classical', but it brings me to my main complaint, that there already is a genre existing called neo-classical, which refers to the music made by composers such as Stravinsky and Shostakovich which reversed some of the trends of Romanticism and returned in some ways to the styles of the Mozart/Beethoven era.

Attention Metal Heads!
Just because your song has a piano in it does not make it classical!
Just because your song has a violin in it does not make it classical!
Just because your song has a long elaborate wank solo in it,does not make it classical!
Just because your song is written in a diatonic scale does not make it classical!
If the London Symphony Orchestra got Yngwie Malmstein to wail along with them on a Wagner tune, would that make it a metal song? No! Of course not!

Every band listed on the wikipedia page for neo-classical metal could be more properly classed as some other brand of metal, usually power- or prog-. The term itself is simply an attempt at pretention, with no real meaning.

In Every Night There Is A Different Black

2007-10-06T23:06:00.000+13:00

Burzum - Filosofem

Filosofem is Burzum's most highly regarded album, and it also happens to be the first Burzum album that I've genuinely enjoyed.

It's not actually much different from his earlier albums. Varg is the king of trve black metal and this is one of the albums that define the genre. The production on every instrument is tuned to produce the ghastliest sound possible; the guitars are a wall of lo-fi distortion that borders on static, only just coherent enough to give definition to the tritone heavy leads that propel the music. Varg's vocals are, as usual, whispered in an unholy gurgle. You don't need the Norwegian legal system to tell you that this guy's fucking crazy. Insane drumming is perhaps one of the only defining characteristics of black metal that Burzum does not usually feature but on 'Jesus' Tod' (track two on this album), Varg records some of the most impressive drums to be found in Burzum's discography. It merely consists of a single simple figure repeated throughout the song, but it's a fucking mean one and it's full of driving energy.

The low point of the album is the obligatory ambient track 'Tour Around the Transcendental Pillar of Singularity', which is just as wanky as the title leads one to expect. It's actually a decent song, but runs for twenty five long minutes with little development to justify such a long running time. I'm sure it's intended to be meditative, but I don't listen to black metal to achieve inner peace.

None of this is at all dissimilar to any of Burzum's three earlier releases. The reason that I find this one so much more engaging than the others is probably because of it's cohesive and well expressed sense of mood. The cover art sets the tone, a woman blows a traditional fluted instrument against the backdrop of a lonely Scandinavian forest, and the music paints a complementary picture. It's hard to explain but despite the evil tone of the music (and the evil person who made it) Filosofem evokes not so much imagery of violence but more the beauty and mystery of the natural and supernatural worlds. It may have been made with the latest in heavy metal production technology but this album feels like it is invoking something very old.

Such a feeling can be appreciated as a unique insight into the mind of a very disturbing person, but if you can divorce your understanding of the music from the person who made it, Filosofem's weird beauty stands pretty well on it's own.

I Can't Do This Anymore

2007-10-05T01:47:00.000+13:00

24 Season 6

I think I've finally gotten a handle on the politics of 24's writers. By and large they're liberals, there's handwringing aplenty to be found in the early parts of this year's storyline about the erosion of civil liberties and the injustice of racial profiling, but they sure ain't the kind of limp wristed, pussified bleeding hearts who wouldn't take to a suspected terrorist with a hammer and a length of electrical cord if it could stop a nuclear bomb going off! Despite the often unpleasant fascination of the show with torture, earlier seasons delivered a lot of good, somewhat realistic action and a compelling plot. However after five years they seemed to have drained their small reservoir of decent ideas and season six contains little good to offset the offensively authoratarian concept behind the show.

Last year ended on a cliffhanger as our hero Jack Bauer was being shipped off to a Chinese prison. This season begins as Jack is released after two years of torture. His haggard, haunted appearance gave me hope that they had found something interesting to do with a character who had became a disturbingly fascist caricature of an action hero, and in an early scene Jack is unable to go through with the torture of a terrorist (despite the literal nuclear bomb ticking away at every ad break), turning away and saying “I can't do this anymore...” Sadly this promising direction is quickly discarded (the writers are quite open about the fact that they make the story up as they go along) and before long Jack is unhesitatingly putting the thumbscrews on to his own brother. The torture scenes are thankfully fewer in this season, between the 'torture your own brother with your dad watching' scene in this series and the 'torture your own girlfriend' scene in the last one the writers have pretty much exhausted the possibilities for pushing that envelope. Unless maybe next year Jack ends up having to torture himself.

As usual the main storyline is padded out with plenty of lame romantic and personal subplots which go nowhere and stretch believability. (Yeah, don't worry about the fact that downtown L.A. just got nuked, now is the perfect time to discuss your marital problems!) At least no one had a baby this time. Why they continue to include this crap is beyond me. Even fans of the show loathe it.

Sadly the primary plotline is not much better this year. They've done the 'swarthy terrorist with a nuke in a suitcase' angle a few times now and it's getting tired. (My suggestion for next year is Tim McVeigh style domestic terrorists. Maybe make them Christian fundies as well. That ought to push a few buttons!) The international intrigue towards the end of the season made for an improvement, but it still lacked in the execution. Frankly this season was actually quite boring to watch.

As I watched the show I noted down a list of specific good and bad things that I noticed. There turned out to be quite a few of them and I'm lazy so I've just put them into a pair of bullet pointed lists. Beware of spoilers:

Bad things:

They can't be bothered with a scene of Jack explaining to everyone how he escaped from the terrorists but this is supposed to be in real time so when he shows up everyone just says “Oh hey Jack, good to see you escaped certain death”. It seems more than a little cavalier after the tearful goodbyes when they sent him off to die.
It's going to be hard to top this season next year in the death and destruction stakes, considering that four episodes in they nuke L.A.
Jack pronounces nuclear 'noocular'.
“Send them back to CTU, they'll be safe there.” Yeah right, over the last six years the only place less safe has been standing next to the president.
America would never elect a president so bad at reciting dramatic speeches.
They've more or less stopped caring about the real-time gimmick that originally was such a big deal about this show. The only time I noticed it this year was when I realised that two characters must have been fucking for forty minutes.
I'm always a little disappointed at the lack of motivations in the terrorists. They're always one dimensional 'We hate America! Bwahahahaha!' types. A little more detail could make things so much more interesting.
Funny how an explosion will knock over a bad guy ten minutes away but not a CTU agent just round the corner.
If I was as unhelpful and obstructive at my work as the people at the counter terrorist unit are I'd be fired within a week.
The country that the terrorists come from is never named (leading to stupid things like the President saying “Get me the ambassador for Assad's country”). I think we can safely assume they came from Dukkadukkastan.
The terrorists' plan relies on the US president being a fucking idiot and lashing out at Middle Eastern countries more or less at random. Plot twists pulled straight from today's headlines!
Poor Jack. No sooner does he defeat the terrorist boss in hand to hand combat and retrieves the nuclear bombs, but he barely has time to make a sigh of relief before the Chinese bad guy rings up and informs him that they've kidnapped his girlfriend.
Jack becomes a suicide bomber!
Jack is the only person alive who can overhear cellphone conversations.
Obligatory computer nerd angst: The autistic guy who can hack into anything. Uh, I don't think that's how computers or autism work...
The writers seem to have a bit of a virgin/whore complex. Every woman who has sex on the show invariably turns out to be evil.
They blew some guy's face off just so he could come back next season with an eyepatch.

Good things:

The chick who plays Nadia is hot.
That's it.

And yet despite all that bullshit, I have a disturbing feeling that I will watch it again next year...

Running the Gauntlet Again and Again

2007-10-04T01:10:00.000+13:00

The Blinding Light - The Ascension Attempt

I bagged The Blinding Light's EP a few months back, and I actually feel a little bad about that now. It's one thing to unleash the snark at a substandard release from a bunch of coasting self satisfied millionaires who are capable of far better, and another to do the same to an independent, neophyte band. In the future I intend to apply a more biased double standard.

Even having said that, I did like this album more than the Glass Bullet EP. It's still the same sort of music, similar to Converge but without that band's flair for combining punishing brutality with original songwriting. (Although it must be noted that even though The Blinding Light suffer from the comparison to their forebears they do approach the same level of raw intensity.) On The Ascension Attempt they have more room to try different things, and they have some nice groovy breakdowns and restrained, moody interludes. The heavy stuff is actually pretty catchy and has a lot of grunt too.

However when all is said and done, I'd still much rather listen to Converge.

1001 Albums – Number 10

2007-10-03T01:17:00.000+13:00

Thelonious Monk – Brilliant Corners

So far the best thing I've gained from listening to these albums has been a bit of an introduction to mainstream jazz. Some of it hasn't worked for me but mostly it has been very worthwhile and we can now add a second name to the 'pretty damn awesome' list (after Ellington).

On Brilliant Corners Monk assembles a small jazz ensemble: drums, bass, sax, trumpet and Thelonious himself on piano in order to play some baffling, complicated music. At first it seems like standard cool jazz. The mood may be warm and intimate but before long you'll notice the continued intrusion of deliberate dissonance and arrhythmia, so gracefully composed that it almost doesn't register as such to one's ears.

The centrepiece of the songs is Monk's piano, although the degree of this focus ranges between songs. 'I Surrender, Dear' is a solo piece for keys, while all the other songs break the seven minute mark and give ample attention to the rest of the band.

As both a performer and a composer Monk is something special. His style is based around an aggressive, staccato way of stabbing the keys in a deliberately counter-rhythmic way, and his melodies have a noncommital relationship with tonality. The miracle of his music is that despite such a difficult approach the result is still upbeat and easy to listen to while also being rewarding to the careful listener. Definitely a keeper.

Next up, Sabu Martinez.

October

2007-10-02T02:14:00.000+13:00

The next month looks pretty damn good for new music. Nightwish has a new album out, Serj Tankian's solo album will be released and in early November there's new Dillinger Escape Plan. Opeth will put out another live DVD, one with a setlist that I once saw in a wet dream.

And if that wasn't enough (you read it here tenth!) Radiohead has just announced, completely out of the blue, that their new album will be available online next week. And without a record label to dictate things they've set the price at 'whatever you feel like paying'.

New Blogroll Additions

2007-10-01T00:11:00.000+13:00

Back in the early days of this blog I bemoaned the lack of other blogs talking about the same kinds of music that I like. Well times sure change and now there are tons of them. Here are a few recent discoveries:

Aversion Online
Metal Runs in My Veins
The Metal Minute
Heavy Metal Librarian
Blonde at the Bar, hey wait... how'd that get in there?

Saturday Lazy Music List Post

2007-09-29T16:43:00.000+12:00

Copying slacktivist again - First to Float:

First - Coal Chamber
The First Five Minutes After Death - Coil
First Light - Converge
First Phase: Moon's Milk - Coil
First Phase: Under an Unquiet Skull - Coil
Fish & Bird - Tom Waits
Fist Fuck - Nine Inch Nails
Fistful of Steel - Rage Against the Machine
Fitter Happier - Radiohead
Five Seconds - Peeping Tom
Five to One - The Doors (In no less than five versions)
Fix it so the Bruises Don't Show - Mike Patton
Flashback - Tomahawk
The Fletcher Memorial Home - Pink Floyd
Flight of Luminous Insects - Download
Flight of the Foo Birds - Count Basie

Songs containing the word fist:

Fist Fuck - Nine Inch Nails
Fistful of Steel - Rage Against the Machine
Clenching the Fists of Dissent - Machine Head
Love is a Fist - Mr. Bungle
Levez Vos Skinny Fists Comme Antennas to Heaven; Gathering Storm - Godspeed You Black Emporer
Stinkfist - Tool
Use Your Fist and not Your Mouth - Marilyn Manson

Dammit that was a pretty legendary list of songs until Manson had to come and stuff it up.

Wednesday Night Math Rock Geek Out

2007-09-28T22:09:00.000+12:00

Battles
Live at The Gaelic Club, 26^th September

The Gaelic Club was about ten times more packed than the last time I was there, which was back in February to see Suffocation, a very, very different band to Battles. The audience in attendance this time around was also ten times less intense and in fact it was probably one of the geekiest crowds I've ever been in.

My Disco

The openers were My Disco, who I saw last year opening for Mogwai and who really impressed me back then. They're a good match for Battles; their mathy but danceable rhythms are quite similar, although My Disco have more of a straight up rock tone compared to Battles' artificial synthiness. They were just as good this time around, almost as much fun as the headliners.

Battles: Featuring shirtless John Stanier

As artificial as their sound is, Battles turned out to be a great live band. With a combination of guitars, keys, crazy noise boxes and of course John Stanier's amazing drumming, they recreate the sound of the album more or less straight up, but with a more loose, aggressive energy, as befits a live concert. The music is highly technically challenging and it was a treat to see them deliver it so skilfully The guitarists liked to show off by fingering their guitars with one hand and playing keys simultaneously with the other. Stanier is a fucking machine, and his kit is given pride of place at centre stage front in order to reflect his importance to the band. Collectively as performers they come across as a bunch of cocky showoffs, but I'm inclined to give them a break. Anyone who does the hard yards in brilliant but underrated bands like Tomahawk or Don Caballero and finally ends up getting recognition for something as imaginative and skilfully impressive as Battles deserves to smugly enjoy all the coke and pussy that's coming their way.

Yes, Stanier's ride cymbal is set absurdly high.

The happy, adrenalising energy of the music was a little wasted on the crowd. Many of the pimply basement dwellers in attendance would probably be too scared to actually move in any way more exaggerated than a rhythmic nod of the head and a polite golf clap between songs for fear of losing indie cred, and even were that not the case, the pokey little Gaelic was packed wall to wall so there was no chance of flailing around like a lunatic, the way the music wanted you to.

Predictably enough, big single 'Atlas' was the highlight of the set.

Here's hoping next time they play in a bigger venue so that we can all flail away.

Upcoming Concerts

2007-09-28T00:23:00.000+12:00

Yesterday: Battles (post coming tomorrow, or maybe the next day)
Early October: Motorhead
Late October: Nick Cave/Grinderman; Mammal (again)
Early November: Machine Head with Arch Enemy
Mid November: Would be Muse, but I'll be in London; Would have been Dillinger Escape Plan with Meshuggah, but they cancelled.
January: Rage Against the Machine!
March: The rumour has it that this is when Tool are planning to return...

The Dread Opens Its Maw

2007-09-26T20:38:00.000+12:00

Earth – Hibernaculum

If you like your music slow. Reaaaaaaaaaally sloooooooooooooow, then this album might be for you. Earth have flitted around a few different genres in their eighteen years of existence but they're primarily known as practitioners of doom metal, the somewhat avant garde style that strips metal of all speed and melody and reduces it to mere rhythmic heaviness.

On one of their most recent albums, Hibernaculum, Earth lighten up a little. The distortion is gone and they've rerecorded some of their older, heavy songs in a style that they refer to as 'country', although to my ears I don't hear the relationship, beyond the hint of a twang in the guitars. It's definitely interesting music. The format is drums, bass, two guitars, no vocals and the occasional appearance of an organ, and as I stated above, it's very slow. The rhythm section play less than one note per second, and while the lead guitar is a little more garrulous, it's minimal melodies are still played at a shuffle.

There are only four tracks on this album and they are reasonably lengthy, so I would have expected such sparse music to wear out it's welcome well before the record's end, but surprisingly enough it turns out to be very engaging. Part of this is because of the skilful arrangement, with introduces just the barest amount of melodic development, but mostly it's because of the intense mood of the music. It reminds me a lot of Isis' Panopticon, which had a similar feeling of oppression, heaviness and doom. Isis have a lot more aggression and dynamism; listening to them feels as if the world is ending right now, literally crashing down around you. Earth sounds more like the last (protracted) dying moments as the world is swallowed up by the sun. It might be doomladen but it has a powerful, resigned beauty to it as well. The album art is beautiful too, decorated with artificial looking photographs of nature, in a nice illustration of the album title, and some short but evocative text.

The album also comes with a DVD. There's always a small risk in getting to see the people behind the music, as if the music is that great, the personalities behind it will never turn to be as cool as you imagine they should be. Sometimes they're still cooler than you'd have any right to expect (Opeth, Tool). Sometimes they come across as a little dorky but not so much as to matter while you're listening to their music (Dillinger Escape Plan). But sometimes they're just so aggravating that their obnoxious personality actually impinges on your enjoyment of their music forever after. I sat through the hour long documentary on the Hibernaculum DVD, and I can honestly say without hyperbole that I have never heard such a big bunch of wank in my entire life. Here are a few choice quotes:

“I think that the more complicated music gets, the closer it becomes to just being noise.”

This one's not so bad, but I do have two responses. 1) Tell that to Bach. 2) What's wrong with noise anyway?

“I could take it farther... if I wanted to. I could get into just intonations and all those kind of intonating systems...”

Just... gah... Just shut up!

Next time just stick to the live footage guys.

Hearken to the Sound of Calling

2007-09-26T00:41:00.000+12:00

Nightwish – Once

Here's one for the 'things that should be terrible but actually turn out to be awesome' file: Rammstein meets Evanescence. My previous expeditions into the realm of power metal had soured me on the concept, but Nightwish have convinced me that I've done it a disservice.

So this is the idea, take one metal band (with keyboards), add orchestral backing and get a hot chick to sing opera style over the top. (Don't fret if you have an aversion to high pitched warbling, we're talking opera as in Andrew Lloyd Webber here, not Wagner.) It sounds like a recipe for disaster but Nightwish are a testament to the fact that if you're a competent, original songwriter you can make even the most unlikely concept work.

The songs on Once span a fairly diverse range within this setup, beginning with straight up stompy metal anthems that could be written by Rammstein (save for the inclusion of female vocals) and ending with ballads that focus more on the voice and classical elements. Along the way they investigate a variety of musical styles and variations to the side of that path, giving them room to showcase each of the diverse elements that make up their music, from bombastic metal guitar solos and quirky, original pop metal keyboard instrumentals to sad, haunting passages for voice and strings and escapades into different ethnic styles.

I can't help but compare these guys to Dragonforce, up until now my touchstone for all things power metal. While Nightwish's lyrics are rarely explicitly fantastical they do have that kind of a feeling about them, but where Dragonforce come across as embarrassingly juvenile these guys are at least sophisticated enough writers to keep things ambiguous and yes it's still cheesy but at least it's heartfelt, a quality which extends to the music. And that makes a big difference.

The most overtly fantastical Nightwish get on this album is in 'The Siren', which is inspired by The Odyssey, (if it's classical then it's classy!) and it's probably my favourite track on Once. Vocalist Tarja Turunen's (since kicked out of the band for being a primadonna) wordless aria is as beautifully haunting as befits the titular mythological beast. Meanwhile the bass player, Marco Hietala, complements her nicely as he sings Odysseus' part, heartbroken as he realises that he will never see the source of the song calling him. The band complement them with hard, driving metal during the verses and understated ambience during the interludes. It's good stuff, I defy anyone to write it off as being cheesy.

If you get this album make sure it's the bonus track version. I normally dislike it when record companies disrupt the flow of an album with bonus tracks but 'White Night Fantasy' and 'Live to Tell the Tale' are pretty good songs and fit well at the end of the album.

Nightwish are so awesome that they get two embedded videos. Here's their video for 'Nemo':

And here's 'The Siren' from their live DVD:

Fuck it. Lets make it three. Here's them covering Pink Floyd's 'High Hopes'.

1001 Albums – Number 9

2007-09-25T01:07:00.000+12:00

Count Basie – The Complete Atomic Basie

I don't have a whole lot to say about this one. This is another jazz album and I did enjoy listening to it, but it had an unfortunate tendency to blow in one ear and out the other while I did so without leaving much of an impression. I am a little surprised that this should be the case, Basie definitely has a bit more edge than other jazz albums I've heard and enjoyed recently such as Louis Prima or Duke Ellington, which are examples of jazz in it's poppy and sophisticated forms respectively. This album on the other hand brings to mind dimly lit basement bars with names like 'The Jazz Hole' where this band perhaps shares a billing with Bleeding Gums Murphy. It's not dangerous music by any means, but it does have that low down swing that brings to mind the earthier pleasures of life.

Despite the very cool mood the music is a little substanceless from a more serious musical perspective, especially when compared to Ellington, despite having some nice hooks. I could do with something that took the swing of this band and made a bit more dangerous.

Next up, Thelonious Monk! One of the first albums on this list that I'm really looking forward to.

Random Weekend Links

2007-09-23T14:39:00.000+12:00

Via Making Light: Homeland Security Blanket
Via Arts and Letters Daily: More arguments against the war on drugs

More Musical Lists

2007-09-22T17:46:00.000+12:00

By way of Slacktivist. These make good lazy weekend posts! This week it's 'everyone to everything':

Everyone Has a Summer - Lovage
Everyone I Went to High School With Is Dead - Mr. Bungle
Everything's Ruined - Faith No More
Everything Goes to Hell - Tom Waits
Everything I've Known - Korn
Everything in Its Right Place - Radiohead (three versions, and the first song in five weeks that's also on Fred Clark's list)
Everything Keeps Dissolving - Coil (two versions)
Everything Must Converge - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Everything You Can Think - Tom Waits

And for the record: 'Heaven' - 9 songs. 'Hell' - 12 songs. I expected much more hell!
'God' - 27. 'Devil' - 9.

Edit: Was too lazy to spell people's names correctly.

Random Link of the Day

2007-09-21T00:45:00.000+12:00

Ruthless Reviews: The ABCs of Drunkenness.

I'll Smash Right Through Your Spotlight

2007-09-20T01:19:00.000+12:00

Velvet Revolver – Libertad

Here's a tale of two bands. Velvet Revolver and Audioslave both formed at about the same time. Both were comprised of three former members of one legendary Nineties metal band and the singer from another. Both released début albums that were decent enough, but nowhere near as good as the music that had propelled them to stardom in their earlier bands.

Wildebeest Asylum Editorial Disavowal
Back in the early days of this blog I rated Velvet Revolver's album Contraband as one of the best releases of the year. In retrospect such a judgement is far too generous. There are some truly great songs on that album ('Slither' and 'Got No Right' come immediately to mind) but they're balanced out by an equal amount of total shite. Given that I gave the same honour to Slipknot's The Subliminal Verses in a year that also saw the release of Isis' Panopticon, Nick Cave's Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus and Dillinger Escape Plan's Miss Machine, I can only conclude that blogger must have been hacked by malevolent terrorists with bad taste in music who subtly changed some of my older posts in order to discredit me. You can all trust me when I say that I have convincing evidence that these terrorists were colluding with Saddam Hussein, which is why The Wildebeest Asylum is invading Iraq.

The sad trajectory of Audioslave's three albums will be familiar to many of us. The simplified version is as follows: OK; terrible; terrible. Velvet Revolver are only up to their second album but so far they're keeping pace with their fellow supergroup.

The album opens promisingly with 'Let It Roll', which infuses the style of their first album with a bluesy, sleazy swagger, and rocks out quite sufficiently. For me Slash's guitar has always been the main reason to listen to either Velvet Revolver or Gunners, and he's still well worth listening to on Libertad, where he's taken a more subdued, less histrionic approach as befits the album's blues influence.

Unfortunately after that encouraging start the band waste no time in wading out into the shallows of mediocrity, and by the midpoint of Libertad they're swimming deep down in the trench of suckiness. It's a pity because most of the songs seem to have potential, they're just spoiled by lacklustre performance and a reliance on generic pop rock hooks, despite the occasional, too brief bridge or solo which provides a trace amount of innovation or passion. Take for example 'American Man', a boring, by the numbers upbeat classic rock track with an unimaginative, grating vocal hook (“Yes I am an American Ma-an...”) that's totally beneath this bands potential, which is suddenly and unexpectedly redeemed by an achingly sad, evocative and uncharacteristically restrained solo by Slash, which lasts for a too brief thirty seconds before returning us to the mediocrity of the chorus.

I saw these guys live a few years back and really enjoyed it. Others who have seen them have not been impressed and Libertad comes with a short live DVD which makes me wonder how objective my enjoyment really was. In the four song set the band give the impression that the audience is just another sea of faces in a darkened room at the end of another long plane flight, and that they're performing more for their own egos and legends than for the people who paid money to come see them.

It's sad really, there's obviously still a bit of musical talent floating around in Velvet Revolver, but it's being wasted as I don't think their hearts are really in it any more...

What I Did On My Weekend

2007-09-18T22:23:00.000+12:00

Go Trent Go Edition

Well it felt like it took forever but Trent Reznor and his goons have finally gotten their arses back to Australia to make up for the shows they cancelled last May. According to Trent these were the third and second to last shows for Nine Inch Nails with this lineup and also the last in the format of a rock band. It will remain to be seen just what he has in mind but it did feel a little like the end of an era...

The first concert was at Luna Park, the same venue as the May show, and it's a smaller, more intimate venue than you'd expect from a band of this stature.

White Rose Movement were the openers, brought over specially from London. If you're in to the whole nu-new wave thing they might have been entertaining but I was bored to tears. I have no fondness for bands who stand around on stage looking like fashionably dressed robots who have been programmed to only feel ennui. The singer jumped around a lot but it looked more like he was just going through a mental list of actions to be performed by a rock singer rather than that he was picking up the mike stand and waving it around because he was actually excited. K. actually likes this kind of music and even she said that they were a crap live band.

But lets not dwell on that. Nine Inch Nails' history of poor opening bands is no new topic. For Saturday night I figured it was my opportunity to get up close to the band so I found a good place in the mosh pit, and waited patiently until we heard the martial beat of:

~~Hyperpower!!!~~
The Beginning of the End
They opened with the same two songs as last time. And fair enough too. 'Hyperpower' is a pretty good walk on track and 'The Beginning of the End' is a good opener.

The band take the stage for 'The Beginning of the End'

Last
On this tour the band have been playing a lot of oldies that have never seen the light of day until now. This is the only one we got over all three concerts, but I'm glad we did. It's a favourite of mine from back in the old days, and this tour might be my only chance to ever hear it.

I don't go out of my way to take photos of people dissolving into a blissful white light but I do seem to end up with a lot of them.

Sin
March of the Pigs
Something I Can Never Have
Closer
They followed up with a selection of their staples. Much to my satisfaction 'Sin' had the awesome synth intro from the Fragility tour this time around. 'March of the Pigs' was pretty much the same as the last three times I saw it, but I get the impression that Trent really likes watching a moshpit go nuts to a song about how shit moshpits are. His vocals during the extended outro sounded a bit like those on 'Memorabilia', but maybe that's just my imagination. 'Something I Can Never Have' was nice, Trent played a nice extended outro on the piano. As is now standard 'Closer' had bits from 'The Only Time' mixed in as a breakdown. This time with lyrics!

Survivalism
Burn
Gave Up
The moshpit was far rougher this time around (compared to the almost stationary audience back in May). Possibly it's because last time they divided the moshpit into two with a barrier, thereby halving the population of shenanigan causing troublemakers.

Burn!

After these tracks they lowered a big LCD screen over the stage and, as in the previous show, they changed their setup to just three laptops, manned by Alessandro, Trent and Aaron. With the ambient noise from 'Another Version of the Truth' providing an intro, they played a little set of:

Me, I'm Not
The Great Destroyer
Which were both fucking excellent. The last time I'd seen them was the first time they ever played 'Me I'm Not' and this time they had it ironed out a bit better. The crazy noisy outro was really good this time. 'The Great Destroyer' of course has an even crazier, noisier outro, and was incredibly fucking brutal. As an extra for experts they even mixed in samples from 'Happiness in Slavery'!

Me, I'm Not

The visuals on the screen were pretty cool (but abstract, unlike the stuff on the live DVDs) and the screen itself was pretty cool too, it could be turned partially transparent, revealing the band behind it.

I wish we could have had more of these visuals, but I'm glad I've finally seen a proper NIN stage show.

Eraser
Only
The band then hid behind the screen for these two songs (Roger Waters styles!), and they had some nice effects during 'Only' when parts of the projection would turn off, showing a glimpse one or another of the band behind it through the static. As far as the moshpit was concerned 'Only' was one of the highlights of the night, although Sydneysiders apparently still have a lot of trouble jumping in time with the music.

Wish
The Good Soldier
Even though they played this one last time I was thrilled to hear it again. The band seemed to be in a better mood this time so I think the original, melancholy spirit of the song came through better.

Following this Trent made a little speech, introducing the other guys on stage and mentioning each of their other musical projects that they'll be pursuing once he kicks them out of his band. He didn't exactly apologise for cancelling the earlier shows but he did joke that 'It feels like just yesterday that we were playing here...' and that he recognised almost everyone in the audience. He also apparently still hates Billy Corgan. Ten years may be a long time to hold a grudge, but by and large Trent seemed so much happier and more upbeat than the last three times I saw him. Good for him!

No, You Don't
Suck
The Day the World Went Away
This is one of my favourite NIN songs and I'm so glad I finally got to hear it!

Dead Souls
Down in it
A nice surprise to get this one! The band seemed to have a lot of fun playing such a goofy song.

The Hand that Feeds
Head like a hole
And they closed with the standard finishers. “But wait”, cried every munter in the audience, “you forgot something!”, well that's not quite what they said, they actually just chanted “Hurt! Hurt! Hurt! Hurt!” so two minutes later, Trent returned onstage alone and played another very beautiful version of

Hurt
The screen descended and displayed a small starfield behind Trent as he played. As the full band joined him for the final chorus the field expanded, and when the heavy bit kicked in the screen turned transparent and the stage was bathed in yellow light. It lacked the emotional power of May's performance but for the visuals this was definitely the coolest version I've seen. I also noticed how Trent has developed the way he sings this song over the years. He's taken a maudlin tale of crushing depression and turned it into a song of redemption. It was a wonderful way to end the set.

Trent plays 'Hurt'

Despite my sarcastic comments above I don't think Trent is actually firing the rest of the band. I suspect that what's happened is that those guys have toured with him for basically three years straight and now they want to do other things, and Trent is using the opportunity to reassess how he's going to perform live. I'll be sorry to see Josh Freese go, he's a great drummer, though often understated and that suits this band perfectly. Alessandro is also pretty cool, although he too gets overlooked because the nature of his role is to stay in the background, save for one or two moments in the spotlight like the start of 'Sin' or the solo in 'The Hand that Feeds'. I'm not so fond of Aaron North on guitar, he seems to do one thing and do it very well and that's those crazy waily, wobbly solos where he swings his guitar around madly. Those are pretty cool but I don't think he really carries the mellow side of this band very well. Jeordie White ostensibly plays bass but I think his main function is just being Jeordie White, he'll be missed but I'm sure we'll see him lurking around stage right again with some other band in the future.

Sunday's show was at the much larger Hordern Pavilion, where I saw them way back in aught five. K. was hungover and I'd done my time in the moshpit the last night so we decided to sit and watch from the seats, where we could actually see the band. The setlist was similar to Saturday, but with some nice surprises.

~~Hyperpower~~
The Beginning of the End
No kidding!

Heresy
Terrible Lie
March of the Pigs
The Frail/The Wretched
We saw the welcome return of 'Heresy' but even though the next three were songs they'd played to death the band went absolutely nuts playing them and they were among the highlights of all three shows.

Closer
Ruiner
Here's another one I didn't expect to hear, and another old favourite that I'm glad I was given a chance to singalong to.

Survivalism
Piggy
Gave Up

I wonder if the smoke machine is there to stop cellphone video bootlegging.

Me, I'm Not
The Great Destroyer

You can't really tell from this photo but the outro of 'The Great Destroyer' is pretty fucking loud, especially if you're right in front of the speakers.

Eraser

At least you can see through Trent's Wall.

Only

"There is no you there is only me"

Wish
The Good Soldier
No, You Don't
Reptile
Trent cracked a few more jokes at this point (“I think I recognise all of you tonight”) and mentioned the rant that he posted on nin.com the last time he was in Australia about high CD prices are here. He asked if the prices had dropped since then, and received a resounding “NO” in response. He then told us that we all knew what to do about it. “Steal away!”

The Day the World Went Away
Hurt
The Hand that Feeds
Starfuckers Inc.
Head like a hole
The band seemed to lack energy for the middle stretch of this concert, I thought the crowd (which was a bit small for the venue) was relatively tepid, especially when compared to the feral aggro of last night and the die hard fans hanging on every note back in May, but they sure pulled it out for the last few songs. 'Hurt' was nothing special when compared to the last two times I heard it (although Trent did add some nice embellishment to the piano parts), but the last three rockers were pretty intense, probably because they seem to be favourites of the band and it was the second to last time they'd have a chance to play it together. 'Starfuckers' in particular was wild. Josh kept cranking the tempo during the outro and by the end I wished I'd joined the moshpit, which looked spectacular.

Well that's all the Nine Inch Nails there is for now. Trent promises to release a new album next year and tour hear again next winter (maybe there'll be New Zealand dates this time), here's hoping that's what happens, but we all know how these promises have worked out in the past!

Sneak Preview

2007-09-16T17:10:00.000+12:00

Death!

2007-09-15T19:24:00.000+12:00

Over at Slacktivist Fred Clarke posts an alphabetical selection of tracks taken off his ipod every Friday. He invites the reader to compare their own itunes list, which I often do, even though my music collection bears almost no relation to his. Yesterday he did 'De...'. See his list here. Now look at an excerpt of mine:

De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas - Mayhem
Dead Cats, Dead Rats - The Doors
Dead Friends (Around the Corner) - Einsturzende Neubauten (three versions!)
Dead Gardens - Nightwish
Dead Goon - Mr. Bungle
Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground - The White Stripes
Dead Souls - Nine Inch Nails covering Joy Division
Dead Star (live) - Muse
Deaf as a Bat - The Jesus Lizard
Deanna - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Death - Skinny Puppy
Death Dealer's Descent - Underworld Soundtrack
Death in the Family - Sparta
Death is not the End - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Death King - Converge
The Death of Passion - Nevermore
Death Whispered a Lullaby - Opeth
Deathblow - Deftones
Debase (Soft Palate) - Aphex Twin remixing Mike Flowers Pops
Deceit - Suffocation

That's only half of my 'De...'s, the rest are not really interesting except to note that I have a lot of German songs ('Der ...'). That's 15 songs out of 4362 with titles that begin with the words 'Dead' or 'Death'. The search function tells me that I have 18 songs containing the word 'Dead' and 23 containing 'Death'.

Slightly worried about what this says about me, I tried 'Love' and got 77 matches. Phew! My music collection isn't as morbid as I feared!

'Sex' returns only 8 matches, including three versions of 'Robot Sex' by Mike Patton. 'Fuck' returns 13, including five versions of 'Starfuckers Inc.'.

Lastly, 'Life' returns 19 songs, but that includes 'In Death - Is Life' by Meshuggah. Not sure if that should count!

1001 Albums - Number 8

2007-09-14T00:57:00.000+12:00

The Crickets – The “Chirping” Crickets

After sojourning in the realm of jazz for a few albums we're now back in the familiar and comfortable territory of rock and roll. Buddy Holly and his group The Crickets, like Elvis, are clear forerunners to most of the music I listen to and write about here. The production might be super old-timey, with twangy guitars and barber shop style vocal harmonising, but the format and arrangement is really not so different to that of Meshuggah or Sigur Ros. The song 'That'll Be The Day' is found on this album and (assuming you haven't lived your whole life under a rock and don't know it) it gives a pretty good indication of what this band sounds like.

I wasn't looking forward to this one all that much but I have to say I rather like it. Sure the lyrics are pretty conventional (they all revolve around how crap it is to be dumped) and I can't attribute my fondness for this album to plain old 'balls' as I did with Elvis and Louis Prima but I think there's just some good old fashioned solid songwriting and competent performing here. On its own it doesn't make up for Sinatra but I have to say that the old 1001 albums seems to be coming up mostly positive so far.

Next up, Count Basie.

Just Because It Is Not Heavy Does Not Mean It Is Not Evil

2007-09-13T01:09:00.000+12:00

Opeth – Lamentations

We've taken a bit of a break from the Opeth love here at the Asylum for a little while, mainly due to my disappointment with Still Life and Morningrise when compared to their later stuff. However I've finally managed to track down a copy of their live DVD, Lamentations, and I'm pleased to report that it's super fucking awesome.

This disc was released following their Deliverance/Damnation tour and contains material only from those two albums and from their preceding release, Blackwater Park. This just happens to be the period where, in my opinion, they were at the height of their ability. (The reason for the limited selection range of tracks included is, I believe, because of legal issues with their former record labels. They have another DVD due out later this year which covers material from an even spread of all their albums.)

The concert opens with the entire Damnation album played front to back, with 'Harvest' off Blackwater Park slotted in near the end for consistency's sake. As I mentioned in my very brief one line review of Damnation, it is a stylistic departure for the band, one where they temporarily put death metal aside completely and pulled out the acoustic guitars, clean vocals and ethnic drums to make a mellow prog rock album. Much to everyone's surprise Opeth fans as a whole, while not numbering Damnation among the best of their albums, gave it decent amount of credit and for the first half of this DVD you'll be treated to the unlikely scenario of a concert hall packed to the brim with greasy haired, black t-shirt wearing metallers standing quietly and respectfully as they listen to a dude strum away on an acoustic guitar.

But fuck if this disc didn't make me even more angry at myself for missing their concert here last year. Their albums are inspired enough but live they deliver still more intensity. The ~~four~~ five (mustn't forget Per tucked away behind the keyboards there!) members of the band may not be showmen like Peeping Tom or Mammal, but they all seem totally absorbed by and in love with the music they're making while onstage. The viewer is treated to many shots of leadman Mikael Akerfeldt looking skyward with eyes shut tight and a blissful look on his face as he busts out another glorious guitar solo. And speaking of Akerfeldt, fuck this guy is awesome! The whole band are brilliant musicians but he in particular astonished me with his talent. Metal vocals in a live context are always likely to disappoint but Akerfeldt's voice is if anything even better than on the albums. His cavernous growls on the heavy tracks are as great as I'd hoped but I was especially stunned by the strength of his clean singing voice during the 'mellow' part of the concert. It probably sounds like I want to marry this guy and have his babies so I will offer one criticism: what's up with that facial hair? Shave it off and then we can talk about the babies.

After they finish playing Damnation the band leave the stage for a break and return to play a totally fucking awesome set laden with the best fucking metal songs ever written; 'Master's Apprentice', 'Deliverance' and 'The Leper Affinity' are all here and would be unquestionably given six stars if my ipod allowed ratings that high. While I was more impressed by the acoustic set (I think maybe because the style was new and fresh to them the band was a little more into it) this stuff is top notch too.

And just when you thought you could turn off the computer and go to bed content in the knowledge that you just watched one of the awesomest DVDs ever, it turns out that there's a documentary on the making of Damnation and Deliverance too! It's probably not essential for anyone who's not a huge music geek and a huge fan of Opeth in particular but for me watching the arrangement and recording processes of the best fucking songwriters in the world is basically the coolest thing ever committed to digital versatile disc. By the time it got round to the footage showing the guitarists recording almost every solo on Deliverance!!! I was pretty much delirious with delight.

Oh Opeth. Don't ever stop being awesome. Here's 'Death Whispered A Lullaby':

Anniversary

2007-09-12T00:27:00.000+12:00

I didn't realise until about ten o'clock, after about half an hour of reading blogs, that today was September 11th. Sure, I knew the date, but I didn't click that it was that anniversary until I suddenly noticed that every political blog in the world was talking about the same thing.

My slowness to notice was probably because every non-political blog in the world was talking about Britney's bad lip syncing and drug fucked demeanour at the MTV video awards.