Archive for the “Music” Category

Some thoughts on last night’s The Twilight Sad show in Toronto:

• Venue was a dudefest. There was a line-up for the men’s urinals and an empty ladies washroom. I have only seen this at large-scale sporting events.
• The bartenders kept giving me a handful of change expecting me to tip them higher. When I give you a $10 bill for a $5.25 bottled beer, don’t hand me 3 quarters and 4 loonies. That means I will tip you even less. $0.75 for you.
• I was slightly right of centre six people back and could barely hear the lead guitarist Andy MacFarlane positioned to the left. Of course, it was because the amps were stacked behind him for controlled feedback but there should’ve been something mic’d so the whole crowd could get a better mix. His wailing is their signature sound!
• They played for about an hour with no encore. Who are you? Tool? I don’t believe their set was any longer than when they opened for Mogwai back in May.
• Their bassist may be a robot.
• Love the live interpretation of Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters’ first song “Cold Days From the Birdhouse” instead having an a capella intro.
• Fellow Scots We Were Promised Jetpacks are pretty awesome. Glad I accidentally arrived early enough to catch their set.

All points aside, solid show with much love around.

Shrinebuilder is a new underground metal supergroup of sorts that has a blog called We Burn Through the Night that’s updated by Neurosis guitarist Scott Kelly. These updates make me believe he’s a man whose intensity places himself constantly on the brink of a psychotic breakdown. The line-up:

Guitar: Scott “Wino” Weinrich (Saint Vitus/Obsessed/Spirit Caravan/Hidden Hand)
Guitar: Scott Kelly (Neurosis/Tribes of Neurot)
Bass: Al Cisneros (Sleep/Om)
Drums: Dale Crover (Melvins)

Another year of quantifying tastes, this time with more links and less prolix. Begin!

If this video clip doesn’t turn one into a Fleet Foxes fan, I don’t know what will.

Insert more funeral jokes.

Welcome to another edition of me telling you what is already known. Death Magnetic-edition.

St. Anger was an embarrassment of tin drums and dull songwriting. After watching the album’s documentary Some Kind of Monster, I could only conclude that Lars Ulrich is one of the smuggest motherfuckers on the planet. Yes, you’re the first band ever to express anger in a positive way. Innovators.

After that critical wreckage, the band assembled themselves by just regressing to their past successes. Use the same riffs as found on …And Justice For All? Extend songs minutes past their expiration point? Reintroduce solos that are technically laughable compared to their above-average guitar output from the eighties? Check on all of the above.

Most major publications are giving it positive reviews because it’s comfortable, familiar, and infinitely better than St. Anger. But it’s pointless. If you want Metallica, throw in Master of Puppets and then stop it halfway through because that riffing gets boring quickly when taken into the context of today’s music. From the directions acts like Agalloch, Opeth, Cult of Luna, and Mastodon have taken metal, Metallica’s one-dimensional approach is irrelevant when overtaken by the musicianship and songwriting exemplified by the former. Attempts at diversity like S&M or “The Unforgiven III” are cringe-worthy.

So why bother? As Henry Rollins said, “if a place has electricity, Metallica can play a sold out show.” Cash! Cash! Lots of cash! Even with bad public relations stunts thrown around, they can still tour the world and watch the bones roll in. As an artistic statement, this album has no purpose. Why did I just spend four paragraphs on this? Consumerscape blogosphere!

Cliff Martinez – Solaris
Lush sci-fi electronic with a numb feeling.

Peter Gabriel – Passion: The Last Temptation of Christ
Tastefully appropriating other cultures.

Clint Mansell (Featuring Kronos Quartet) – Requiem For a Dream
Haunting movements built for curling into the fetal position.

Philip Glass – Koyaanisqatsi
Repetition ascending to a chaotic swirl.

Ennio Morricone – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo)
“The Ecstasy of Gold”. That’s all you need to know

This article is late for many reasons (mostly slothfulness) since I scour other year-end lists to ensure I don’t miss out on anything important. OCD has its advantages. So I’ll cover some bands rediscovering their roots, art metal being described as “dirgy”, middle-class dudes ripping off channeling Joy Division (yes, still), and some post-rock groups incorporating actual human vocals. That’s innovation !! I’ll run out of adjectives, make blatant misuse of semicolons, and repeat the same sentence in each review via synonyms.

My original intention was to scale back this year’s list since 2006’s article turned into a 10,000+ word behemoth. I never even expended that much energy for upper-year university papers. A little bit shorter, a whole lot sweeter, so was the plan that was made to fail. Now let me condescend your place in the world by using the collective terms “kids” and “folks”.

Hip to be Square

In an endeavor to fill my empty soul with joy in the form of capitalist fulfillment, I embraced my consumer whore nature and purchased an 8gb Apple iPod Touch. The “I” stands for inflated sense of ego.

In early 2007, my CD/MP3 player broken and I never really got around to purchasing another device. A friend threw me a replacement in the form of a JSK Digital MP-407 USB thumb drive MP3 player (oddly, the manufacturer doesn’t have a web site), which had a measly 256mb capacity. I generally only listened when mobile on transit and I also stuck to the same artist for a week at a time, so it really wasn’t an issue only have two or three albums with me at any time.

The manufacturing defects of the thumb drive started to become exposed via random player reboots and the inability to lock the next track button leading to my pocket suddenly deciding on song changes. I decided it was time for a quality player, but resolved to not making it an impulse buy. My next plan of action? Impulse buying an expensive mobile music player. Of course, as a fashion accessory, it kind of is a thief-happy device due to the white earbuds. I didn’t even let those rubbish pieces of audio equipment leave their packaging. Instead, I’ve been using my dumpy (but adequate) Sennheiser PMX-60 pair which don’t attract much attention, although they supposedly leak a lot of sound due the open design… but nobody on public transit has complained yet. I dare you! I FUCKING DARE YOU! I tend to keep my iPod in concealed as to avert the questioning eyes of the young and the beautiful. That I must above all things love myself.

I’ll get right into the Negative Nancy.

It bugs me that controlling music volume or making a track change both require looking at the screen. So you can’t just throw a hand in your pocket to make a quick adjustment. No Adobe Flash negates the “full web experience” that Apple claims. It may be a strategy to avoid streaming video that isn’t YouTube or a method to reduce memory usage, but Flash is now a necessary component of the web. It isn’t just used for frivolous splash pages anymore. There is also no scrobbling through Last.FM to keep a record of all the music you listen to. There are workarounds and I imagine there will be a supported standalone app once the iPhone SDK third-party additions are allowed to be copied over through iTunes in June.

Now on to why the thing sells well. Apple sure knows how to throw a nice graphical layer or some simple, useful features. The user interface is pretty and responsive with its PowerPoint-style page transitions from menu to menu. My attempt at drunk Facebooking while sitting in the crowd at a Guelph Storm hockey game was luckily thwarted by the small touch keyboard, hazy vision, and my Man-Sized fingers. The next morning moved nicely into a session of hungover bed-chillaxing while checking the message history in a competition to see if I could delete possible items before recipients read their contents. It was as I remembered – nothing sent since I was too drunk to log in. Stay in school.

Some of the iPhone/iPod Touch-specific webapps are very nice, such as the aforementioned Facebook version, mostly since it doesn’t waste whitespace on advertisements (which I block anyway, on PC) and doesn’t require zooming on any screen. The zoom in/out finger strokes can get tiring when browsing the web, but once more sites create webapps, it can make the mobile Internet experience much more seamless.

I’ve yet to really use the features of the Touch other than music and email, mostly since I don’t want a jailbreak attempt to create a $350 brick. In all actuality, with my lifestyle, the WiFi features are simply a gimmick since I’m so often near or at a PC anyway. I probably soon will be buying a mobile phone, but the iPhone was never in my frame of thought since Rogers are fucking assholes about allowing their wireless service prices to even approach anywhere near the somewhat reasonable prices of US provider. This covers both their equipment costs and data plan options. Of course, the reviews of the iPhone for its phone functions haven’t been too praising, other than the visual voicemail feature. I’ll probably instead find an unlocked Sony Ericsson and be that annoying jackass double-fisting expensive technology while crying out for Nature as the disillusioned man-child he really is.

The new Nine Inch Nails instrumental release Ghosts I-IV finally got music release methods down to the way they should be. By self-releasing five different packages choices, the consumer can make a decision on how much they wish to invest into the product. The higher-end selections are for the hardcore listeners that decide quality and support for the artist are paramount, while the digital download or 2CD set attract the casual listener. For any package, you get the immediate lossless, DRM-free download link so you don’t have to wait for your package to ship. You can even sample 1/4 of the release in a shareware-like plan to invite listeners to purchase more. This range of selection doesn’t devalue music, as I felt Radiohead’s deceiving blind 160kbps MP3 fiasco introduced and Saul William campaign represented for its fully-free download option.

Within hours of release, there was so much immediate demand that the web servers handling orders were down to a standstill. This, of course, exposes the limits of HTTP as a delivery platform; this is why the über-nerds prefer BitTorrent for data transfer. I bought the $10 2CD release however my FLAC download cut off at 161mb out of 608mb done due to the server overload. Now the best part about the new album is its licensing under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike, which means I can jump on The Pirate Bay to grab the album in full and it’s completely legal. The abandonment of outdated copyright law restrictions puts power completely in the consumer’s hands (hello to you, democracy). It doesn’t make the assumptive pretense that the artist or audience are a victim or criminal. They’re on equal ground and have the free will to define the value of a piece of art. I imagine in the next month you’ll find Ghosts I-IV is worth far beyond expectations simply due to the message its release represents.

When Pigs Fly: The Death of OiNK, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide by Rob Sheridan pinpoints many of the similar opinions I have about current music. It’s difficult to support an industry where no-talent businessmen reap the rewards while those expending effort that means something get cast aside. For years it was an exercise of learning the golden rule: he who owns the gold makes the rules. With the current technology, we now have the power to bypass the middlemen and enjoy music as it should be. This means turning off your radio. Artists like Saul Williams, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Radiohead are now allowing fans to directly support their work.

While perusing my bank statements a couple days ago, I discovered the last time I purchased music was June 5, 2006. It was Muse’s Black Holes and Revelations, in which the Canadian release, of course, didn’t include the B-side bonus track “Glorious” found on the Japanese and iTunes releases. I had actually downloaded the release months before the purchase, as I had done with Absolution which was out in Europe almost six months before North America. The instant retrieval of information is oh-so naughty in a world where regional markets must be established to maximize profits (see: video games and Steam Territory Deactivations).

When I Mother Earth’s 2003 final release, The Quicksilver Meat Dream, rapidly faded away due the glut of “Three Days Default Theory of a Nickelcreed”-itus permeating Canadian airwaves, I stopped feeling sympathy for major record labels. For now, my money is better spent paying off student loans and watching the music industry curl into submission.

I do what I must because I can.

The ongoing saga of the loudness wars continues with an article from austin360.com, Everything Louder Than Everything Else, detailing the compression techniques used in modern sound recordings that make listening to music exhausting.

Have you ever heard one of those test tones on TV when the station is off the air? Notice how it becomes painfully annoying in a very short time? That’s essentially what you do to a song when you super compress it. You eliminate all dynamics.

This was the main annoyance I had with Front Line Assembly’s 2006 album, Artificial Soldier, mastered by Brian “Big Bass” Gardener. For such an underground band, I don’t understand why they would destroy the whole recording when they aren’t even competing for records sold. Hell, people that enjoy the band listen with headphones or hear the songs in a club. We don’t need to hear digital clipping. Furthermore, the article goes into why this paradigm shift has taken place:

We listen to music in completely different ways than we did 20 or 30 years ago. For most people, music is listened to on the go, in cars, on headphones while running, on computers at work. Music has to compete with the sound of your car’s engine, has to punch through the background noise of street traffic or a loud office.

This is pretty much true for me. The couple hundred CDs I own are stowed away in my parent’s basement and now I only listen to MP3s on my computer or MP3 player. I don’t even own a standalone stereo. Sound quality also deteriorates by the subsequent compression placed on music by FM radio and MP3 player equalizers. Ever notice television commercials are much louder than the actual program? That’s due to the compression placed on the sound to make them jump out from the program. It’s just a marketing tactic to do the same on music, stressing a lack of subtlety in the art.

• What is the worst mastered CD?
• Over the Limit (Rush)
• Imperfect Sound Forever (Stylus)
• Another Victim of the Loudness Race (Depeche Mode)

Now for some asides, it looks like there will be no Deadwood movies to close up the story. Those HBO cocksuckers. There’s also some Scrabble OUTRAGE! over the term lesbo being a valid word in the video game. I guess this dude hasn’t seen the South Park parody of 300? Move on, sugartits. Simon took the time to uncover other slang accepted by the game when he came across:

Nedette (noun): derogatory name for a female adolescent hooligan

The hooligans are loose, the hooligans are loose.

Seeds in fruit should be made illegal in the Western world. Also, please don’t eat citrus fruits near an LCD monitor.

Take a glance at Quirking Around to find out how the tragically hip drool and dick jokes courtesy Judd Apatow rule. Wes Anderson’s shtick has been pretty tiring from the get-go and it looks like The Darjeeling Limited’s characters only continue the trend of banal details that aren’t even smirk-worthy. Next up is Juno which all its Little Miss Sunshine whackisms. Even Michael Cera yet again playing George-Michael Bluth can’t save this from only being another flavour of the week. But we have Richard Kelly’s clusterfuck Southland Tales to look forward to! You should read this above article if only for this quote:

He still believes Second Chance will be bankable, once the bull gets the testicle-goring out of his system.

Speaking of Judd, I spent last month watching the full season of Freaks and Geeks leading up to the Superbad/Knocked Up marathon. I guess I didn’t grow up around a cliquey high school so I didn’t really relate to the “it happened to you, didn’t it!” humour (Trailer Park Boys did enough of that for me). I probably most appreciated the ignorant father played by pseudo-Canadian Joe Flaherty for such cold war gems as:

Lindsay Weir: Dad, give me one good reason why there can’t be a woman president.
Harold Weir: It’s called three irrational days per month. Now, I would have no issue with the other twenty seven, but we’re talking about the atomic bomb here.

I also took the time to watch season one of Friday Night Lights in one go and managed to do it in 4 days. I really need a life. On the plus side, since Demonoid is now blocking all traffic from Canada, I didn’t have to seed the 8gb file to get an even ratio. Yarr, me booty. I actually didn’t find the constant ShakeyCamâ„¢ (even during dialogue) as distracting as I find in action films (Batman Begins, I’m looking at you). However, I doubt I’ll be watching season two since there’s already whispers about it being canceled when the premier only airs next week. I can also say that it’s fucking odd watching a prime-time show scored by post-rock band Explosions in the Sky and supplemented by TV on the Radio, LCD Soundsystem, and Isis, amongst others.

Finally, you must acquire the new Oceansize album Frames as it’s the best of the year. Notice my not so diplomatic verb.

Yeah, I just wrote a post using the term “paradigm shift”.

Despite misgivings about 10,000 Days, one can’t deny the chance to check out Tool in a live setting. I’ve seen them twice previously, the first time on September 18^th, 2001 at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, followed by August 25^th, 2002 at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton,. For July 9^th, 2007, I headed back to The Hammer after an almost five year hiatus.

For pre-drinks, we hit up Hess Village at Gown & Gavel (I enjoy how the site’s logo is in Comic Sans). On the way out, I noticed the Leafs’ Brian McCabe and his entourage exiting the patio. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to be that Typical Hockey Fan and make a loud (but distant) accusation of suckage. Next time.

We were in section 122, row 4 which were the best seats I’ve had for a Tool gig. My sleight frame won’t ever want to deal with the physical realities of general admission. The stage had four 10′ high screens, with two larger screens to the side of the stage. There were three circular-structured lights above the stage that rotated and laterally moved about while later in the show, green laser lighting was introduced. Alex Grey’s large-scale Sacred Mirrors curtain was also revealed behind the short screens, similar to how the Lateralus tour setup was handled.

Nearing the end of the show, singer Maynard repeatedly requested for no flash photography, to which you could see a dozen flashes in the crowd within the next instant. It’s not like security searches people properly given the pint-size of mobile phones. Then fans wonder why he performs whole concerts turned away from the crowd.

Aside from ambient segues (including “(–) ions”) and the instrumental extensions to a couple songs, here’s the setlist:

1. Jambi
2. Stinkfist
3. 46 & 2
4. Schism
5. Lost Keys/Rosetta Stoned
6. Flood (intro)
7. Some Days It’s Dark (cover of a Death Lurks song from Kids in the Hall’s Brain Candy)
8. Flood
9. Wings for Marie
10. 10,000 Days
11. Lateralus
12. Vicarious

Overall, yeah, I pretty much go to see Danny Carey beast it behind the drumkit.

Nike+ may continue commissioning the creation of iPod Nano exercise mixes by LCD Soundsystem and Aesop Rock to appease the hipster market share, but they don’t have my touch. Savour the flavour.

1. (6:12) The Knife – 2006 – Silent Shout – 07 – “Like a Pen”
2. (5:56) !!! – 2007 – Myth Takes – 03 – “Must Be the Moon”
3. (7:41) Celldweller – 2003 – Celldweller – 04 – “The Last Firstborn”
4. (5:44) Covenant – 1996 – Sequencer – 06 – “Tabula-Rasa”
5. (3:53) Skinny Puppy – 1990 – Too Dark Park – 03 – “Spasmolytic”
6. (5:01) E-Craft – 2001 – Dos Unit – 02 – “Embryonic”
7. (5:55) Cleen – 1998 – Designed Memories – 02 – “Freezeout”
8. (8:00) Infected Mushroom – 2003 – Converting Vegetarians (CD1) – 07 – “Scorpion Frog”
9. (9:37) Hybrid – 2000 – Wide Angle – 11 – “Finished Symphony”
10. (5:39) New Order – 2005 – Waiting For the Sirens’ Call – 09 – “Guilt is a Useless Emotion”
11. (5:01) KMFDM – 1995 – Nihil – 03 – “Flesh”
12. (7:18) Envy – 2006 – Insomniac Doze – 07 – “A Warm Room”

Running time: 75:57