Years in Music

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

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.

Itadakimasu!

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':

Are you staying, or what?

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:

R3M1XxX0rr3D

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...

Close To Euphoria

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.

What I Did On My Weekend

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!

Super Hungover Music News Roundup

Trent Reznor: Still awesome.

Trey Spruance: Still awesome and crazy.

New Smashing Pumpkins single: Actually kind of good.

Upcoming concerts in Sydney: Machine Head and Arch Enemy (November), Nick Cave and Grinderman (October) and Marilyn Manson (October). Somehow I have a feeling I will end up going to that last one against my better wishes.

Marilyn Manson

Now officially a big emo loser.

Fight! Hyperpower!

Nine Inch Nails
Live in Sydney 9^th May

So much for my big plan to see NIN three nights in a row. The second two shows were cancelled for unknown reasons (the semi official rumour is that Trent had a sore throat but I wouldn't put much stock in it, this is the industry standard bullshit excuse and is tour manager code for "We don't know" or "We don't want to tell you"), but unlike many unfortunates I at least had the opportunity to see them once on Wednesday.

The first time I saw Nine Inch Nails was on the Fragility tour in 2000, where Trent had trouble playing the piano and singing in tune on account of being trashed out of his fucking head. It was a very different Trent (with a completely different backing band) who I saw on the With Teeth tour two years ago. Much grumpier, but a better performer. Nevertheless I felt that both those concerts lacked a bit of energy and were not everything I expected from one of my favourite bands. Little time has passed since the last tour so this time they had almost the same line up (Jerome Dillon got booted and replaced by Josh Freese on drums) and a fairly similar setlist.

The opening band, Serena Maneesh, were OK, kind of a mix between Sigur Ros and Sonic Youth. They passed the time well enough but didn't really do a lot for me.

Trent sings 'The Beginning of the End'

Hyperpower!
The Beginning of the End
Survivalism

Nine Inch Nails opened with the first three tracks off the new album. 'Hyperpower!' was the walk on track, with Trent appearing in time to provide vocals and tambourine for 'The Beginning of the End'. Remember what I said about how funny it was when he pulled out the tambourine for 'With Teeth' on the last tour? He was playing the damn thing for almost the whole concert this time around.

Said tambourine

The band seemed a lot more passionate and aggressive this time, and all three of these tracks were rapturously received by the audience. 'Survivalism' was a highlight for me, especially the noisy extended outro.

March of the Pigs
Heresy
Closer

'March of the Pigs' is a setlist staple of theirs now for obvious reasons. It's virtually guaranteed to go off like a motherfucker every time. 'Closer' was the same version as on the last tour (with a bit of 'The Only Time' added to the end). 'Heresy' was an unexpected but very welcome surprise! I love that track and it was great to finally hear it live. The setlist in general sounded a bit like Trent had raided his earlier albums (mainly The Downward Spiral and Broken) for songs that matched the themes of the new album.

The light show was pretty cool

Burn
Gave Up

I was a bit surprised to hear 'Burn' again, as it was a bit of special fanservice when they played it on the last tour, but it's still part of the standard setlist on this tour. Again this is probably because it's lyrics fit in with Year Zero quite nicely. Like 'March of the Pigs' 'Gave Up' would be pretty unlikely to be left out of their set. Not only is it a great rock out track, its fantastic singalong parts are perfectly suited to live performance.

Help Me I Am In Hell
Me, I'm Not
La Mer

Absolutely brilliant. If you were to ask me which three NIN songs I really wanted to hear but was extremely pessimistic about getting then it may well have looked like this. 'Help Me I Am In Hell' and 'La Mer' were little solo instrumental performances that covered up a change in stage setup for 'Me, I'm Not' (keys and laptop for Alessandro and Trent). After it was done Trent retreated to the back of the stage and started plinking around on his keyboard, before coming back out front to snarl at the lighting crew, “I like the dark as much as the next guy, but can I get the lights turned on over here? I can't fucking see shit.” Then, too my delight he began playing the lovely melody of 'La Mer', and I couldn't help but scream “Fuck yeah!!”, to the apparent amusement of the people standing around me. What, I'm not allowed to get excited by a piano and acoustic guitar song?

'Help Me I Am In Hell' was played in almost complete darkness by Aaron, Josh and Jeordie. It was a heavier, eviller version than that on the album, and it turned out pretty awesome. Out of all the tracks on Year Zero 'Me, I'm Not' was the one I thought least likely to be played live as it's so quiet, moody and electronic, but it went down really well with the audience. One of the good things about playing a number of shows in a smaller venue like this is that the band can be sure that the majority of the audience at the first show is a serious fan, so they can do something like play a weird, mellow song from the new album which has only been out a month and get a good reception. 'La Mer' was Trent on keys and Aaron on guitar, and although it was only an abbreviated version (without the noisy parts), I almost creamed my pants in delight.

You can't really tell in this photo, but that's Trent playing 'La Mer'

The Good Soldier

One of my favourite tracks off the new album! That makes four unexpected songs in a row that I was just thrilled to hear. Aaron played the guitar solo at the end with a lot more aggression than on the album but I still really liked it. Third best song of the night, after 'La Mer' and another one that I'm coming to.

Wish
No You Don't

After a long mellow out the band started getting heavy again with these two. 'Wish' is another of their standard crazygonuts songs, and 'No You Don't' is a random pick that seems to have been chosen for its conceptual alignment with Year Zero. Other than 'La Mer' it was the only track from The Fragile that was played (and it was one I'd heard them do before in 2000), which was slightly disappointing.

"I am so dirty. On the inside"

Mr. Self Destruct
Only
Suck
Dead Souls

'Mr. Self Destruct' and 'Only' were pretty good. The other two I was less fussed about (I'd heard them both live before). Trent had a funny speech before 'Dead Souls': "We tricked you and got back here sooner than you thought we would! We have a new album out which many of you will have have stolen already. This song is not on it... it's not by us, it's by one of my favourite bands.”

"I am so dirty... ohhhhhh!"

After knocking his keyboard over again in another tantrum, Trent got around to
Hurt

This was the third time I've heard this one live, but even considering that and the various live versions floating around on record this was the best performance of it that I've heard. Trent solo with piano for the first half of the song (and the whole audience singing along) was just brilliant. Highlight of the show.

The Hand That Feeds
Head Like A Hole

And finishing with a couple of catchy, aggressive crowd pleasers. Everyone had great fun screaming along with these two.

Obligatory single decent photo

In general, the things I was disappointed about:

• No 'In This Twilight' or 'Zero-Sum'... maybe next time.
• No stage show. I've seen the things they've done in the past on their live DVDs and it's really fucking awesome. I really wish they'd bring the whole show out to the antipodes some time. Maybe in September...
• Almost nothing off The Fragile.

The things that were good:

• The audience was great. Everyone was a genuine fan (tickets were sold out in half an hour to this first gig) and I met some really nice people. The moshpit was great (and not really a moshpit). Everyone was really packed in as you expect at shows with this kind of popularity but there was no pushing or shoving, just everyone jumping up and down. It was heaps of fun.
• Being the first to hear 'Me, I'm Not' and 'The Good Soldier' live.
• 'Hurt'. Just brilliant.

The thing that really sucked ass:

• Coming home the next night to find the second (and later the third) shows cancelled with no explanation. What the fuck?!

Five Possible Reasons Why Nine Inch Nails Cancelled Two Of Their Sydney Shows

1. Trent fell off the wagon.
2. Josh fell off a literal wagon and broke his arm.
3. Government agents broke into Trent's hotel room, kidnapped him and shipped him off to a concentration camp in Guam.
4. It's part of an elaborate practical joke that Trent and Thom Yorke are playing on Bex.
   
5. The crushing disappointment of having a concert cancelled on you mere hours before the event is all just part of the Year Zero experience.
   

All We Ever Were. Just Zeroes And Ones.

Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero

It was a Christmas miracle. Not only did Trent Reznor release a new Nine Inch Nails album a mere two years after the last one (four years ahead of schedule), but at the same time he put out a live DVD, masterminded a brilliantly original promotion campaign for the record and started an international tour (Sydney show reviews coming soon!)

Calling the Year Zero promotion a marketing campaign is a little dismissive, it's really an extension of the album itself in which the plot and setting behind the album's concept are fleshed out and explained by a cluster of secret websites. The album on it's own probably wouldn't make much sense out of this context and reading the websites is a fun experience in itself, not to mention the liveliness of the little community that has sprung up around trying to unravel the clues to reveal the next site and piece it all together.

Before I even get to the album there are three things that need to be mentioned about how well Trent handled the release of this album. Firstly, he's been very savvy about the use of the internet in promoting his music and in his handling of piracy. While most of his peers in the music industry are still, even five years after this stuff went mainstream, viewing the internet with mistrust, as if it were some kind of fad that they just have to weather until they can deliver DRM strong and draconian enough to make your computer grow legs, jump out the window and run down to the police station to report you if you try to play anything that you haven't paid for. The Year Zero ALG (dopey terminology but it's the only name we have to describe this stuff for now) got the online fanbase onboard in promoting the album before anyone had even heard it. The deliberate leaking of a few songs well in advance turned out to be a smart move too. But the thing that impressed me most was how on the very day that a high quality leak of Year Zero appeared online, the whole album was made available for streaming off the official website. Rather than being tempted to download it I just listened to it once off the website and then waited for the proper album release. I doubt it made a lot of difference to how much the album was pirated but it's probably the smartest thing that can be done about it in this day and age.

The second thing that impressed me was the very idea of the Year Zero ALG itself. Trent has been bitching for years about how no one does proper album art any more, the days of big beautiful LP artwork are long gone and it looks like even the cramped, small confines of the CD case shall soon be a thing of the past. I've been waiting for someone to click and realise that with online distribution they now have the whole internet as a canvas on which to supplement their music. I should have guessed that NIN would be the first ones to do so.

Lastly I have also been impressed by this Open Source Resistance thing that they've started up. It's worse than a cliché when a band stands up and rants about politics and the state of the world, but rather than just bitching Trent is actually using his fame and influence to actually try and start something that could make a difference. It remains to be seen where this OSR business will end up going, but even if it does nothing more than to promote peace and art then it will be a worthwhile endeavour. At the very least it will make a refreshing antidote to Rage Against the Machine's uncomfortably violent exhortations.

It easy to dismiss artists taking pot shots at the powers that be. They don't have any power to change anything and it sometimes seems like they never make any real difference. But while listening to Year Zero I realised that the fact that I believe the things I do is at least partially attributable to the fact that while I was growing up people were willing to stand up and say “Hey this is bullshit” when they saw it, either directly or via the medium of popular culture. It might not seem like much on it's own, but little by little the influence of these things does accumulate and does make a difference in shaping the world.

The dystopian future world of Year Zero is fairly unoriginal. Climate change is starting to cause real harm, the western nations are embroiled in war in the Middle East and their governments are taking increasingly aggressive moves to curtail the freedoms of their citizens. Yes, the future is just like today, only more so. Such a generic sounding story would be a little thin for a movie or novel but it is perfectly suited to being the concept for a rock album where a more complicated narrative would drag things down.

So anyway, onto the music. If you've heard the single 'Survivalism' then you know pretty much what to expect. Trent has kept the music pretty uniform in texture for the duration of the album; crunchy, minimal, electronic and totally laptop-mungus. This is an appropriate (if not commercially savvy) decision, as it reinforces the message of the album's concept and it makes the few spots where the music departs a little from that style so much more striking.

The album opens with 'Hyperpower!', a short instrumental prologue in the vein of a military march which is the closest thing on the album soundwise to Nine Inch Nails' previous output (possibly because the screaming in the background reminds one of 'The Becoming' or perhaps something off Broken).

Most of the tracks on Year Zero are, like those on With Teeth, short, succinct and to the point. This suits Trent pretty well as he has always had a flair for putting his dirty industrial instrumentation in pop arrangements. 'The Beginning of the End' and 'Survivalism' are the best examples of this (the former track has a beat lifted straight out of 'My Sharona'), and most songs on the album exude a wealth of catchiness.

The next few tracks stretch out their running time a little more, 'The Good Soldier', a gentle song with violent lyrics, ends with a sweet guitar solo that is one of my favourite moments on the album. In contrast 'Vessel' (a dirty, sexy song about drug addiction that recalls 'Closer' and 'With Teeth') ends with a freaky electronic glitch out which is also very satisfying.

As a whole I think this album has some of the best lyrics Trent has ever written. I'm impressed with how well he has succinctly and unpretentiously presented the story behind the concept while also making each song at least somewhat relevant and interesting on it's own. Sure this is kind of easy because every element of Trent's freaky dystopian future nightmare is drawn straight from today's headlines (imminent environmental catastrophe, authoritarian governments keeping the population stupid, kids taking lots of drugs) but it's still very well done. The lyrical highlight of the first half of the album is the tremendous (and tremendously unsubtle) 'Capital G':

I pushed a button and elected him to office and ah,
He pushed a button and he dropped the bomb.
You pushed a button and could watch it all on television,
Those motherfuckers didn't last too long.

That's a pretty cool opening stanza, but it gets better. It's immensely satisfying to hear someone so sharply stick it to all the right wing media blowhards who have sold their integrity in order to brainlessly toe the party line no matter how inane, stupid or dangerous it gets.

Later on the music starts to deviate more from the style and mood established early on. 'The Greater Good' is one of the best tracks on the album, a creepy ambient piece with whispered lyrics describing brainwashing in both overt and more subtle forms. After the brilliant 'The Great Destroyer' (in which a crazy ex-soldier gone terrorist announces his intention to “murder everything”) comes 'Another Version of the Truth', a peaceful piano piece (no NIN album would be complete without one). Is it just me or is the motif of the first half straight out of Chopin's 'Mazurka'? It's not the first time I've heard a snippet of a Romantic composers work in a Nine Inch Nails song.

The last two tracks, 'In This Twilight' and 'Zero-Sum' are sad album closers in the vein of 'Hurt' or 'Right Where It Belongs'. At this point in the album's story the world is literally coming to an end, although it remains unspecified exactly why. At various times it is suggested that it is either by environmental catastrophe, the vengeance of God, the vengeance of angry aliens or perhaps the work of the psycho narrating 'The Great Destroyer'. I like the implication that from a certain perspective these are all the same thing; “...and all of this is a consequence, brought on by our own hand, if you believe in that sort of thing”. In terms of sadness the lyrics of these songs give even 'Hurt' or 'Something I Can Never Have' a run for their money. Honestly, the first time I heard 'Zero-Sum' I almost started crying. At work.

And the sky is filled with light,
Can you see it?
All the black is really white,
If you believe it...

from 'In This Twilight' is sad enough, but then you get to 'Zero-Sum':

And I guess I just wanted to tell you,
As the light starts to fade,
That you are the reason,
That I am not afraid
And I guess I just wanted to mention
As the heavens will fall
We will be together soon if we
Will be anything at all.

Sniff sniff...

A maudlin ending to a Nine Inch Nails album is no surprise but this time Trent has found a way for his miserable message to become one of hope. The internet sites associated with Year Zero reveal that they, and the album, are actually artifacts sent back in time from the date of this future armageddon in the hopes that those of us who receive the message can do something to avert humankind from the course it is on. We'll try future Trent!

Year Zero may not be quite up to the musical standard of The Downward Spiral or The Fragile but it's not far off and it's concept along with the brilliantly well done supplemental material raise it's profile to that of a pretty legendary album in my estimation. Plus it has a song about George Bush dying and finding himself in hell. Awesome.

I Know That I Suck

Skinny Puppy – Mythmaker

I was ready to bag this album. The Greater Wrong of the Right had engendered some high expectations, but just yesterday I gave their latest album, Mythmaker, one last listen and found that it had suddenly raised significantly in my estimation. Maybe it was because I was jogging when I listened to it this time (a bit of adrenaline can be just what some music needs to be appreciated), or maybe it was because my shitty iPod earphones finally gave up the ghost on Friday (ripping them to pieces was ever so satisfying) and I bought new ones; cheap ass thirty dollar Sony jobs but they still sound like a chorus of angels when compared to Apple's headphones, which do their best to reproduce the acoustic properties of an epileptic beating a trash can lid during a violent fit.

Whatever the reason, I've decided it's not so bad. It's certainly a departure from their signature sound (even more so than The Greater Wrong of the Right or The Process) and even though it is a logical progression from their previous album, it sounds more than anything like the fractured dance pop of Oghr (vocalist Ogre's side project that he worked on during the years that Skinny Puppy were broken up). Compared to what would be considered their classic albums it's extremely poppy and far less edgy or abrasive, but there's still quite a bit of interesting stuff going on musicwise. As usual these guys are masters of electronic texture and crazy beats that still somehow come out catchy.

A few tracks really stand out. 'Pedafly' is absolutely brilliant, with an awesome talkbox style hook that ranks among the most infectious things I've heard all year. It's followed by 'Jaher', based around a pretty acoustic guitar riff which showcases their downbeat, moody side. It's a bit of a weird album and not what I, or probably what anyone, expected from Skinny Puppy, but while it's certainly not amongst their best albums it has it's moments and is worth a listen.

A Busy Few Months

Not featured: Lamb of God... apparently it came in the mail months ago but I can't find the fucker. Lets hope I do by April 29th!

Twelve Unjustly Maligned Albums Part 3

Part 1
Part 2

Wow it actually took me less than a week to write all of these. It's an Easter miracle. Anyway, here's the last four:

4. The Smashing Pumpkins - Adore

Adore was at least reasonably well appreciated by critics but it was a total commercial failure, coming as it did on the heels of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, one of the most successful albums of the Nineties. The reasons for this are fairly obvious; on this album Billy Corgan abandoned a more familiar heavy grunge sound in favour of subdued electronica, acoustic guitar and piano to the tune of millions of angsty teenagers hitting the 'eject' button.

It's still a great album, and even though music snobs generally seem to recognise this I'm still surprised by how many people I meet who claim to love the Smashing Pumpkins but hate this album.

Bold Statement: Adore is better than Siamese Dream.

3. Pink Floyd - The Final Cut

As with A Momentary Lapse of Reason, the drama of Roger Waters leaving Pink Floyd probably soured people on this album more than it deserved, but at least in this case there are also stylistic reasons to explain why it is so disliked as all of the electronics and ambience that found Floyd the success of Dark Side of the Moon and it's immediate successors has been stripped away and replaced by orchestral arrangements.

If you can tolerate the change in musical medium it's still a great album; similar in subject matter and style but less bloated than The Wall, and full of plenty of humour and quirks in the traditional Pink Floyd style.

I must admit however that it did take me a few listens to appreciate it. In fact if I recall it wasn't until the first time I listened to it on headphones that I thought “Wow, this is really good!”

Bold Statement: The Final Cut is better than Dark Side of the Moon

2. Skinny Puppy - The Process

It's no surprise that this album is universally hated by Skinny Puppy fans, as it has a history far more full of unpleasant details than the juvenile shenanigans of Pink Floyd breaking up. Not only were the two founding members, Ogre and cevin, barely speaking to each other while recording, but the third member, Dwayne Goettel, actually died of a heroin overdose while the album was being made. On top of this the record company (American) applied a lot of pressure to make a more commercial album and generally shafted the band so the results were (somewhat understandably) a huge disappointment to fans after the crazy noisefests of Too Dark Park and Last Rights.

It's too bad, because besides a regrettable early attempt by Ogre to sing (rather than growl or squeal) on 'Cult' this album is actually pretty good and the first four tracks are absolutely brilliant as long as they're approached as the best Nine Inch Nails songs Trent Reznor never wrote rather than genuine industrial. The standout track is 'Death'; my conception of the Platonic ideal of an industrial song. No album that contains a song that good deserves the bashing that The Process gets.

Bold Statement: 'Death' is better than anything on Last Rights.

1. Barnes – Drunken Karaoke to Radiohead

If you can look past some small difficulties with the high notes, Barnes' rendition of Radiohead's 'Let Down' after half a bottle of vodka captures the plaintive ennui at the heart of the song; that muted sadness found when the initial buzz of intoxication has worn off and you realise that you're just drunk (again). “Just let down and hanging around.” Critical response was unnecessarily harsh, leading to disparaging reviews along the lines of “Oh God Barnes and Jon are drunk and singing along to Radiohead again”, but those in the know recognised it for the understated gem it was.

The Twelve Most Unjustly Maligned Albums List Part 2

Part 1

And we're back. Through the magic of long weekends I have actually written the second post of this series in a timely manner.

8. Deftones - Deftones

Self titled albums confuse me a bit. I can understand why a bands debut album may not have a proper title, but I'm not sure quite what inspires a band well into their career to decide to name an album after themselves. It seems to imply that it will be a completely forgettable placeholder in their discography.

That's how most people view the Deftones' self titled, but I've always felt that it deserves better. As I see it the main problem with Deftones is that they were too stoned while writing it and forgot to put in any hooks, write any lyrics that made sense or think of a proper title. If you can look past that the songwriting is actually pretty good.

Part of the reason that this album gets dissed is because the first single was the relatively mellow 'Minerva', which turned off the meathead demographic (who apparently didn't remember 'Be Quiet and Drive'), but it's hard to see how even the most noise headed munter would fail to enjoy the likes of 'Hexagram', 'When Girls Telephone Boys' and 'Bloody Cape', which all rock out something wicked.

It's a dense album that you have to give attention to in order to appreciate (i.e. a stoner album), but it's worth the effort.

Bold Statement: Deftones is better than Adrenaline.

7. Pulp - We Love Life

Pulp's last album followed the massive success of Different Class and This is Hardcore and the band were therefore ripe for a critical backlash. This is a bit of a weird album for me. If I listen to it from beginning to end I'm inclined to agree with the critics; these guys have lost the spark and are just foundering, trying to rediscover the magic they once had. On the other hand if I have my ipod on random and a track from We Love Life comes up I usually love it.

I'm at a loss to describe why this is, but maybe it's because these tracks are all breezy pop songs in format (although not in subject matter) and listening to an hour of them is a bit much. It's nowhere near as good as This Is Hardcore, but it doesn't deserve the critical bashing that it's received.

Bold Statement: Jarvis Cocker looks like a dork.

6. Marilyn Manson - Mechanical Animals

Poor old Marilyn Manson will always be remembered for a couple of catchy industrial rock songs off Antichrist Superstar followed by a subsequent slide into obscurity, but it's sad that his best album, Mechanical Animals, gets lumped in with Holy Wood and The Golden Age of Grotesque (which were at least somewhat deserving of their dismissal).

Manson lost a few fans with a conscious switch of genre from hard rock to glam, but despite the David Bowie inspired veneer of the music it still at it's heart was good catchy industrial rock, merging angst and (only slightly ironic) grooviness quite nicely, and all without the helping hand of Trent Reznor to rely on.

Bold Statement: I harbour hopes that Manson's new album (due out later this year) might be worth listening to.

5. Pink Floyd - A Momentary Lapse of Reason

I'm not quite sure why this album is so hated. It is the first release since Roger Waters left the band so that probably has something to do with it. It followed the also maligned The Final Cut which is probably relevant too. It contains the unbelievably cheesy songs 'On the Turning Away' and 'Learning to Fly' which are not points in its favour. But even despite all that, if you simply listen to the music unencumbered by the accompanying baggage, you'll find that it's a perfectly serviceable Pink Floyd album (which translates to quite a good album in absolute terms), with no true stylistic differences from their earlier albums. Well OK, it is a bit slicker and a bit more Eighties.

Although you're not likely to enjoy it if you have an aversion to long guitar solos. At least half the tracks on this album finish with a fade out to one of Gilmour's accomplished but wearisome solos. I always imagine the studio technicians slowly turning the volume knob down and slowly backing out of the room because Gilmour's been going for the past two hours and they want to get back to the wife and kids.

Bold Statement: I kind of like The Division Bell too.

NIN!

Listen to the new Nine Inch Nails album. You won't regret it.

In the Next War We Shall Bury the Dead in Cellophane

Old Man Gloom – Christmas

This album was a completely random discovery encountered during my mission to illicitly download some Converge. Much to my astonishment I was completely blown away by how brilliant it was. A quick wikipedia search revealed the source of the awesomeness; Old Man Gloom is a supergroup of sorts boasting the presence of, among others, members of Isis and Converge. Fuck yeah.

This album alternates minimalist ambient tracks with heavy hardcore songs, and the contrast is quite striking. The ambient tracks are moody and disturbing (but great), the best example being 'Something for the Mrs.', in which an unpleasant sounding male voice recites absurd but unsettling nonsense about religion and war over a brooding ambient soundscape. These tracks are in the main the ones that stay with you after listening to the album. Like all the best ambient music it's beautiful but laden with sadness and regret, and in this case with a little disquieting menace.

The heavy tracks are brutal and angry, but nowhere near as affecting as the quiet ones. Fortunately they make up for it with sheer rock-your-face-off brilliance. The best track is 'The Volcano', which is a genuine revelation to listen to. The preceding ambient track fades into a quiet but menacing guitar riff, which is soon complemented by the meanest fucking bass figure ever written, boasting what is the most pants-creamingly crunchy bass guitar tone I've ever heard. After a decent few minutes of this it erupts into screamy hardcore bliss, with riffs so fucking awesome that they'll melt your face. If you like heavy music, run, don't walk, to soulseek and download 'The Volcano' by Old Man Gloom. Best song I've heard all year.

What If Everything Around You Isn't Quite What It Seems?

Nine Inch Nails – Beside You In Time

Assuming nothing goes awry between now and April 17th this might be the first year that the Wildebeest Asylum does not award the Trent Reznor Award for the Best Album That Was Supposed To Come Out This Year But Didn't to Trent Reznor. The new album is looking set for a April release and the new DVD is already out. Also, Trent is no longer even pretending that the Closure DVD will be out any time soon. He even quietly released a high quality version of the Broken movie. Trent's sobriety certainly does seem to have rendered quite a change in his work ethic.

The new DVD seems in some ways to be a little superfluous. And All That Could Have Been was released after the last tour, and it was a pretty solid effort; two discs packed full of drunk Trent at his best. Beside You In Time doesn't really contain anything that it's predecessor didn't, save for a different setlist and a different band, but it is cool to get a chance to see the stage show and the songs from the With Teeth tour that didn't make it to the Sydney show.

For example they do some very neat stuff with a translucent curtain that drops down in front of the stage during the middle of the show, using it to play videos while the band is still visible behind it. The videos themselves are brilliant. 'Eraser' is suitably freaky and disturbing, while 'Right Where It Belongs' is truly affecting, in that weird NIN kind of way, somehow making beauty out of the strangest components: mundane shots of suburban houses and supermarkets, slow motion nature show footage of animals eating one another, and even more unpleasant things, such as George W. Bush and his wife dancing. 'Beside You In Time' is another highlight, a song that I was sorely disappointed not to get at the Sydney show, but it's very cool at the climax when Trent throws his microphone stand through the curtain and the videos play an image of a glass screen shattering.

It's interesting to compare the band in this DVD with the old one. Josh Freese puts poor old Jerome 'competent but not very exciting' Dillon to shame as a drummer. The new guitarist, Aaron North, is a lot better than Robin Finck (I was especially impressed by his mastery of feedback), but there's just something about his style that I dislike. I'm probably just biased because he's so emo. I do miss Charlie Clouser on keyboards and Danny Lohner on bass though. Those guys were cool.

The disc also contains the music videos for 'The Hand That Feeds' and 'Only', the two most boringist Nine Inch Nails videos ever. The DVD is still worth a purchase, but I would have much rather have received Closure.