Music Is My Eiderdown

Valkyrie - Man Of Two Visions (2008)

2008-12-10T12:48:00.003+05:30

I really wanted to love this album. It's just the sort of thing I would. Ostensibly doom metal, it's basically a combination of the St. Vitus/Pentagram kind of sound, lots of Thin Lizzy, some NWOBHM - a more mid-tempo version of Slough Feg, maybe, or kissing-cousins to Witchcraft.

The problem is, the album never really seems to get going. There's two nice, chuggy enough songs to begin with - but they feel more like warm-ups. Then, just when you're ready for the main course, there's an instrumental. It's dreamy and a bit insubstantial. Then comes the centrepiece of the album, 'Apocalypse Unleashed', a totally brilliant Thin Lizzyesque epic, all groovy riffing and folksy melody. It seems like the party is finally under way, even if the next song, while good, isn't up to the same level. Then - kaPOW - another instrumental! A nice little acoustic workout, but one that begins to overstay its welcome at over 5 minutes. Fortunately, the title track, which closes the album, is another knockout, but that's not enough punch to make for a really classic album. And at just around 37 minutes, this is a pretty concise offering in any case.

Of course, what there is of this album ranges from the nice, if disposable, to the really quite cool. It doesn't descend into tedium, but it never really scales the heights either. A decent filler between doom metal/classic-style heavy metal main features.

5/B

eiderdown on the upside

2008-12-10T10:25:00.002+05:30

I find I'm just happier reviewing stuff in my own tiny corner, at least for now. So, we ride again. Under the eiderdown.

Chrome Division - Booze, Broads & Beelzebub (2008)

2008-12-10T10:12:00.008+05:30

What black metallers will get up to when left to their own devices...

The thing about dirty 80s-style hard rock is that it's made the transition into being an alive-and-well genre in the 21st century a lot better than all the hip new shit people cast it aside for in the 90s. Look at Spiritual Beggars. Alabama Thunderpussy. Grand Magus. And now, Chrome Division.

The major cited influence is, of course, Motorhead, and the foursquare, rocking riffs and gruff vocals do bear some of the Moley One's stamp. But I hear traces of WASP too, or Motley Crue in their more rocking, sleazy moments, or maybe a Simmons-fronted KISS. Oddly, the ZZ Top cover, 'Sharp-Dressed Man' is a bit of letdown. All they do is speed it up a bit and lose some of the groove.

In many ways this album feels like what The Almighty could have been if they'd managed to get their groove on this convincingly for a whole album's worth of songs. Eddie Guz' hard-rocking persona reminds me quite a bit of Ricky Warwick's throaty roar. The difference - and what makes Chrome Division work - is that the agenda here is fun. Booze, broads and Beelzebub. There's no slowing down the pace to rip out a soulful number, or a sudden integrity-seeking veer into punky aggro. It's just dirty rock n' roll from start to finish.

6/B

my reviews, now at kvltblog

2007-10-15T08:05:00.000+05:30

This place has made this place mostly redundant.

or how about 'should I stay or should I go'?

2007-08-02T07:02:00.000+05:30

Have you ever thought about your funeral?

I'm guessing anyone reading this probably has, since you most likely share some of my tastes for dark music (without, I trust, being anything so cheesy as a Goth or suchlike). If you're anything like me, your main concern hasn't been the colour of the pallbearer's costumes, the wooden logs vs. electric crematorium debate, or whether towers of silence really attract the class of vulture they used to, but what music should be played at that solemn occasion.

For the longest time, I used to favour the song 'Don't Follow' by Alice In Chains, off their Jar Of Flies EP. It's a beautiful, sad and even elegiac acoustic ballad, soaked through with mournful harmonica and sweet, sad country-tinged harmonies. It also has a take-off at the end that builds to one of the most spiritually moving moments on any grunge-era record - and I say this as a conformed sceptic and disbeliever in all things spiritual.

I still think it's a beautiful song, one that brings a tear, or at least a speck of dust to my eye each time I hear it. But I'm not so sure it would be right to appropriate it as my funeral song anymore. It seems more fitting as an epitaph to Layne Staley, as do a surprising number of Alice In Chains' songs, in retrospect. In any case, the song is shot through with a deep unhappiness, a depth of sorrow that I probably can't equal, having never locked myself away in my house to picnic on stale pizzas and heroin, or played guitar on a later-day Ozzy Osbourne album.

Sometimes, I incline towards the apocalyptic deathbed bravado of Nick Cave's song 'Lay Me Low', off his Let Love In album. It's the song of an unrepentant sinner, imagining the upwelling of denunciation, hatred and relief that will follow his death. 'They'll interview my teachers,' Nick Cave intones, deadpan, 'Who'll say I was one of god's sorrier creatures, they'll print informative six-page features, when I go...'. It would be incredibly cocky and funny to have that played at my funeral, but perhaps in questionable taste. I'm still considering it, though.

Lately, however, I've been very taken with a song off David Gilmour's last solo album, On An Island. Gilmour, apart from being a surprisingly mellow guy for someone how used to play for the world's most neurotic band, is also an avowed atheist, and his song, 'This Heaven' speaks of the contentment and integrity that someone with no imaginary friends in the sky can find in a life well-lived. 'This earthly heaven is enough for me', and that's what I'd like the people who will be there to remember - that I held no faith in some reward to come, but tried to find my fulfillment in what this world has to offer. If there ever was a heaven for an atheist, I would already have been in it, to the extent that I managed to live according to my ideals and fulfill my dreams.

And after that, I'd want them to let loose with Obituary's 'Slowly We Rot'...

What about you? What would you like to have played at your funeral, and why?

2007-06-10T12:56:00.000+05:30

It's going to be a while before I can consistently update this blog again - I'm getting married later this month. In the meantime, here's a list of what I'm listening to frequently right now, for no real reason:

Gojira: The Link, From Mars To Sirius
Candlemass: Tales Of Creation, Nightfall
Neurosis: Given To The Rising
Autopsy: Mental Funeral
Saxon: The Inner Sanctum
Deicide: Incineratehymn
A whole mess of blues including Lightning Hopkins, Memphis Slim and Howling Wolf

2007-05-24T07:29:00.000+05:30

Ensiferum: 'Victory Songs'
2007

Finns are Funn! When other Scandiavians tap into their heritage for metal inspiration, you get the church-burning shenanigans of tr00 black metal, or less extreme, the sculling-beer-and-slaying-christians exuberance of Amon Amarth. With the Finns, however, you get the glorious polka-metal hoot that is Finntroll, and, just as wonderfully cheessy if less of a novelty act, Ensiferum's giddily-gallopping brand of folk metal. Combining rollicking folksy melodies with propulsive metal rhythms, and screechy/growly vocals backed by heroic male choruses, they achieve a rather amusing blend of earnest tunefulness and catchy metal posturing that works more often than not, on its own terms. The atmospheric intro, 'Ad Victoriam', sets the tone perfectly, with its soaring, striviing synth-flute melodies and slow build. 'Deathbringer From The Sky' boasts some genuinely cool riffing and a neat transition into acoustic folk melodies, while 'Ahti', an ode to a deity from the Finnish pantheon is surprisingly effective for essentially being the same melody played for nearly 4 minutes with different metal band dynamics to vary things. 'Wanderer' is almost affecting at times with its mid-tempo heroism, but things do begin to stale halfway through the album. This style is very close to the predictable romps of Gothenburg bands like Children Of Bodom or In Flames. For a listener like me, those incessant galloping rhythms and we-don-tknow-no-diminisheds melodies, without a single exotic note choice, can get pretty stultifying after some time, like a shoving in a whole CD of jigs & reels in the middle of a mosh session. One problem I have with these bands is that they go too gllefully for the easy hook and melody, without really challenging you or themselves with unexpected harmonic combinations or tonal choices. It's pretty much vanilla European tunesmithery throughout, and that can pall a bit. The album-closing title song, at a length of 10 and a half minutes exposes the limits of this approach. Rather than seeming epic, it becomes merely tedious with its lack of surprise or even the slightest variation from a set path. That chorus will probably lodge in your head for a while, but a lot more balls and innovation would help. This certainly isn't on par with bands like Skyclad and the likes who brought real inventiveness to their folk metal music, and a lyrical sensibility that went beyond recounting past glories, or Slough Feg, who combine essentially the same approach as Ensiferum with a much more gutsy and raw NOWBHM touch.

To sum up, decent cheese, but not the best.

DNA: Into The Void

2007-05-19T10:10:00.000+05:30

Master Of Reality was a bit of a culmination for Black Sabbath - the very last album to be recorded entirely in their original, lead-footed proto-stoner metal style. Starting with Vol. 4, the band, perhaps miffed by critical derision, perhaps sparked by their move from herbs to powders by way of recreational accessories, began infusing more diversity into their sound, some good, some bad, some interestingly ugly. From the orchestral-kitsch melodrama of 'Supertzar' to Ozzy's truly inexplicable stab at neurotic pop music, 'Am I Going Insane (Radio)', stranger sounds would emerge from future Sabbath albums, along with a modicum of classics of course.

But in 1971, the Sabbath was still a heavy, sludgy cornucopia of turgid yet sinewy riffs. No song on Master Of Reality epitomises the brilliance of this phase of Sabbath as much for me as the album closer, 'Into The Void'. Clocking in at 6 minutes and about 12 seconds, it throws at least 4 riffs at us with typical-at-the-time Iommi generosityl all played on guitars that are tuned a whole one and a half steps lower than standard tuning. The ascending figure of the intro sounds like a determined yet halting march, a combination of martial threat and ambiguous uncertainty. Butler's pusling bass underscores the threat, the fills that Iommi breaks into keep the more cryptic side of the riff in sight. A quick bridge underscores the same tension between a free-flow and a plodding stacatto, while bringing the drama with some scalar development that leads back to the introductory figure. This quickly moves into a more filled-out, chugging riff that still carries on the thematic tendancy of breaking up a solid motif with note-bending fills. Iommi introduces this riff, and then the band joins in, with Ozzy coming in after another measure, laying down a very straight, monotonous vocal line that gives the lyrics, which juxtapose images of environmental decay against a space race, a sense of weight and pathos that a more dramatic rendition might have lost. Two verses pass in rapid succession, before Iommi takes a split-second break to bring in a new riff, a more dynamic, groovy and circular passage, complete with vocals, that's gone almost as soon as it arrives, leading back to a third verse in a similar arrangement as the first two. This time, Ozzy takes the story further, talking of space travellers escaping into the void and leaving the earth to Satan's legions. The riff gradually gives way to Iommi's solo, which itself moves into one of the most remarkable musical passages in the Sabbath canon, with another circular riff giving way to a call-and response passage where Iommi replies to a simple chordal figure with increasingly flamboyant and daring bends, which ultimately take him all the way out of a predictable pentatonic minor progression, before he breaks the tension with a fluttery licks in the gaps and then a few more measures of the double-tracked soloing he favoured at the time. The circular motif that preceded this remarkable series of bends returns to see the song with a quick wind-up.

And that's it. The song begins with a slide-up to the tonic, and ends with a reverb-drenched final chord. Emphatic bookends to a song that charts a fair amount of territory in between, without breaking the grey, grim spell of its atmosphere. Just guitar, bass, drums, vocals, and mostly penatonic minor scales spiced up in typical Iommi fashion with a few exotic note choices in just the right places. It all seems simple enough when you think about it, and the lyrics aren't even that awesome, but the collective impact of this song is immense. Each riff continues to reveberate in my head long after the last note fades from the speakers. This may not be the definitive Sabbath song - they've writen too many contenders for that title - but I think it is very definitive of something very special, original and brilliant in Sabbath's music, something that has found adherents as diverse as Melvins' Buzz Osborne and Candlemass' Leid Edling, to name just two. There's something about distortion, a de-tuned guitar, deliberate, controlled speeds verging on downright slowness and the proud iteration of a good motif as many times as it needs to really breathe that began with songs like this, and will hopefully remain in the wider world of rock music until we all burn fuel through the night sky at last. At the risk of hyperbole, I will say that I believe a song like this is not just a memorable moment on a classic album - it's a musical Rosetta Stone, a key to musical esoterica that people are still using to unlock new sonic chambers.

2007-05-18T07:25:00.001+05:30

Dio - 'The Last In Line'
1984

This was one of the first CDs I ever bought, and the first to be stolen by some bastard with no morals and great taste in music. I recently picked up a replacement copy, and I've been rediscovering what a great album this is. It might just be Dio's finest moment as a band. Holy Diver was a great album, bursting at the seams with energy and enthusiasm, leavened by a couple of Ronnie James Dio's effective exercises in creating epic centerpieces that would stand as worthwhile succesors to the classic songs he created with Black Sabbath and Rainbow. Still, it's a lot more rock n' roll hyperboogie than metal in many places and it also has the slightly nebulous sense of identity many debut solo efforts do. On the follow-up, however, I believe there's a stronger sense of identity and direction, as well as a truly democratic group dynamic that doesn't seem to be there on a lot of Dio's later albums.

The mix of songs is great, and the flow of the album is immaculate. From the opening shot of 'We Rock', through the more intricate (but concise - the song is just over 5 minutes long) considerations of 'The Last In Line', the album continues on a winning streak with pacey, gutsty tracks like 'Breathless' (with a great Campbell solo) and the proto-speed metal blast of 'I Speed At Night'. 'One Night In The City' seems like a throwback to some of the more boogified moments on the previous album, but it rapidly takes on an epic feel with some tasteful mid-tempo arrangements and Ronnie James Dio in full storyteller mode. 'Evil Eyes' sizzles with some seriously scorching riffage, and keyboard motifs that actually accentuate the heaviness. 'Mystery', in contrast, sounds more like a typical mid-80s commercial hard rock radio staple, down to the cheesy keyboards. Still, it has all the (melo?)drama of the more metallic material, and the heavy stadium groove of the 'Eat Your Heart Out' gets things back on track. If the epic tracks on 'Holy Diver' built from Ronnie James Dio's work with Black Sabbath, the album closer 'Egypt (The Chains Are On)' looks back at the eastern-flavoured epics on the early Rainbow albums with its leaden, pusling riffs and snakecharmer-music keyboard embellishments. It's a great way to close out the album - a slowed-down grinding assault to finish what the speedy artillery of the opening track started.

I haven't mentioned highlights from individual songs, but what really makes this album stand out for me are the little fills and frills that Vivian Campbell, Jimmy Bain and Vinny Appice throw out all over the place. A band of competent musicians can just play it straight, sticking to the script except for pre-agreed solo spots, and put out a perfectly servicable album. But if there's real chemistry between them, everyone is spurred on to add that little bit extra that doesn't serve as a showcase of individual worth, but instead adds to the mood and atmosphere of each song. They produce bass slides and runs, drum fills and incidental guitar flourishes that are individually easy to play, but placed in the right spots to lift the song from a rote exercise to something really compelling.

This album is full of that sort of magic, and I don't think that Dio the band ever sounded this together and excited again. They continued to put out some great albums, of course, but to me this will always be the big one, the one where the thrill of having put out a totally killer debut, and the evolution from a thrown-together band to a real heavy rocking ensemble seem to have contributed to some of the finest moments in Ronnie James Dio's already-legendary career.

2007-05-07T15:28:00.000+05:30

Rat Salad: Black Sabbath
The Classic Years 1969-1975
Written by Paul Wilkinson

I'm not a huge fan of books about rock stars or bands. They can be too slick and PR-driven, too focussed on the personalities (and really, how many rockers really break out of the regular pattern of growing their hair, jamming, making it big, embarking on careers of sex, drugs and rock n' roll and eventually ODing, cleaning up or becoming living dead?) or, as in the case of a memoir of Keith Moon I once read, written by his drum roadie, ultimately depressing in their relentless chronicling of mindless excess. (One of the few rock tomes I would recommend is Lemmy's autobiography, White Line Fever - it's just too funny and uninhibited, and clever to pass up). I don't really have a puritan attitude to the rock n' roll lifestyle - I've done my share of alcohol and a smattering of herbal accesorising in life - but I don't buy into the cult of personality that drives too much of the music machine. It's great to know that David Gilmour shares my spiritual allignment (or rather, lack thereof) or that the Manics continue to reflect my own increasingly cynical but still rather lefty political views, but that isn't really what it's about for me. I'm more interested in the music itself, in the notes being played and the words being sung, and only as much biographical knowledge as is absolutely needed to help illuminate those songs further.

This doesn't mean I don't care about the music I listen to - I do, and passionately, but I draw a very clear line between the singer and the song, so to speak. I may love one, but must reserve judgement on the other. So a book like Rat Salad is just the ticket for me.

Wilkinson isn't an outsider spinning marketing-approved praises, nor is he muckracking tell-all. Instead, he's just a fan like you, me, and that chap in the corner with the overbite. Admittedly, he's a pretty knowledgable fan, freely speaking about andantes, arpeggios, accelerandoes and other musical phenomena as manifested in the songs of Black Sabbath. He's pretty opinionated too - and all his preferences may not jibe with everyone else's. For that matter, he thinks that any music recorded after the death of punk is pretty much crap. Also, he likes talking about himself a lot, whether or not it is connected with his love for Sabbath. In other words, he's like the slightly older, knowledgable, funny but kinda eccentric music fan we all latched on to at some point, sitting through their anecdotes and jokes for more of the real stuff - the juice about great music, who made it and how, what amps and chords and influences went together into making it, what this sort of transition or that phrasing is all about, what it all means and why it works the way it does.

Of course, this book is strictly informative in a factual sense as well - Wilkinson does present a sort of potted biography of the band members in those heady years of the Ozzy era, stopping short after the release of Sabotage, arguably the original Sabbath's last definitive album. He also fleshes out a bit about the cultural and poltiical context in which each album was made but most importantly, he has cobbled together chapter-lenth analyses of each album. A mixture of lyrical, musicological and endearingly subjective stream-of-consciousness analysis, these are the sort of in depth discussions of beloved music that reviewing minnows like your very 'umble correspondent would love to write some day.

Ultimately this book won't please anyone. A lot of the digressions that seem witty, learned and illuminating to me might seem pointless, pompus and self-indulgent to others. As for the autobiographical intrusions, you'll either ignore them, hate them or realise that they are inevitable in a labour of love like this book is. Finally, you may disagree with every comment the author makes, and rail against the lack of orginal research here. While the last might be a fair critique, I don't think the book's aim is to dig up new intricacies about the band's history but to illuminate the making of some of the best, most enduring heavy metal music ever. I think the book succeeds in this - and makes me want to go back and listen to that music with new years. Which, ultimately, is what I look for in a book about music - greater understanding and therefore pleasure in the music itself. Well done, Mr. Wilkinson.

2007-05-03T14:02:00.000+05:30

'Devin Townsend Presents Ziltoid The Omniscient'
2007

A madman with a solid work ethic, Devin Townsend played everything on this album himself, except the drums, which were programmed using Meshuggah's "Drumkit From Hell". Heavy Devvy's done a lot of great music before, but this is his first concept album - and the good news is, the concept is a total hoot. It's about this intergalactic marauder named Ziltoid who is on a quest for the universe's ultimate cup of coffee. He comes to earth and asks for our best of coffee - which however turns out to be far from good (no doubt, the hapless Ziltoid touched down somewhere in the USA where they drink this acrid black secretion instead. A cup of steaming South Indian filter coffee would have inspired him to declare himself humanity's lifelong protector). Ziltoid then determines to destroy the planet. Woe is us! Or are we? For you see, Captain Spectacular has seen through his facade and now sets out to expose Ziltoid for what he really is - a nerd.

I won't give away any more of the plot, but it's all super fun, a classic B-grade SF movie filtered through a seriously warped sense of humour and an equally warped and totally brilliant musical mind. The music is as strong as anything Townsend's ever done, ranging from really heavy semi-industrial fare like 'By Your Command' or the ferocious 'Ziltoidia Attaxx' to the many moods and soaring melodies of 'Solar Winds', the more melodic and mid-tempo 'Hyperdrive', the demented 'Planet Smasher' or the epic 'Colour Your World', which has as much right to be called prog as anything by Dream Theater.

I think they'll be calling this one an eccentric masterpiece in the years to come. You could say that about all Townsend's music, of course, but his hijacking of B-movie thematics and OTT narrative interludes is so utterly corny - yet artistically succesfull - that I'd rate it pretty high. It'll make you laugh and it'll impress you too.

2007-05-03T13:33:00.000+05:30

U.D.O. - 'Mastercutor'
2007

Give the little devil his due - Accept's Udo Dirkschneider's stature isn't much removed from Ronnie James Dio's, literally or in the sense of his place in the pantheon of metal vocalists fans like me carry around in our heads. His voice has the raucous, spitfire attack of Brian Johnson and the larynx-ripping menace of Rob Halford, along with a sense of snotty in-your-faceness and incredibly catchy hookiness that's Udo's own.

I haven't really followed his career with his solo band, U.D.O. all that closely, even though Accept is one of my favourite classic metal bands. When I heard there was a new one out this year, I reckoned I might as well give it a whirl for shits and giggles. Of course, this album is worth a lot more than just a few laughs, if you've got any room at all for classic, kickass metal in your blackened little heart.

The introductory track 'Mastercutor' starts things off with a sort of game show theme song pastiche over which your host, the Mastercutor is introduced, and the festivities are kicked off as a huge, melodic power chord based intro shifts into one of those classic early 80s metal riffs. Udo is in fine form vocally - maybe just a little more raspy than in his earlier days, but more than just okay for a 55 year old. He launches into one of those huge, singalong choruses that manage to be both catchy and incredibly kickass at the same time, and that's it - I'm sold.

What follows is a very strong set of rocking metal songs with infectious, headbanging riffs, melodic guitar parts, and irresistably metallic vocal hooks. 'The Wrong Side Of Midnight' piles on the menace, 'The Instigator' is one of those fast, punchy songs 80s metal bands used to love starting their records with - you know the sort of thing I mean - 'One Lone Voice' and 'Tears Of A Clown' allow Udo to showcase a more melodic side to his voice, without wandering into the out and out cheese of some of Accept's early balladry attempts. 'We Do - For You' is a great arena-filling anthem, 'Walker In The Dark' is a stalker song with another irresistable chorus and great shifts between power chord riffs and arpeggiated passages, 'The Devil Walks Alone' and 'Dead Man's Eyes' are two more great distillations of classic metal attitude that make sure the second half of the album doesn't slump.

There are weak spots though - both 'Vendetta' and 'Crash Bang Crash' fail to really distinguish themselves melodically or by way of riffs. Also - and this is both a failing and a virtue - the songs are all so concise. Udo and his band rock out the under-5-minute thrashers as if it was 1982 all over again. Some of the songs have serious epic potential, and the lack of some really extended (some might say self-indulgent, but there's a place for that and this would have been one of them) soloing or perhaps an extra riff or three to take some of the songs a bit further does make the overall experience feel a trifle insubstantial.

Still, what we have here are 12 kickass pure heavy metal tracks from one of the genre's most distinctive and definitive singers, and a crack squad of talented musicians. If you're in that Balls To The Wall/British Steel sort of frame of mind, you could do a lot worse than to try out the Mastercutor's latest gig. Don't forget - you have to be in it to kill it!

2007-04-23T10:36:00.000+05:30

Secret Chiefs 3 - 'Book Of Horizons'
2004

In the space of 4 albums, Trey Sprance's post-Bungle outfit has moved from being a more-or-less me-too exercise in musical confoundment and evolved into an esoteric, challenging and utterly immersive musical experiment in its own right. Spruance combines his dual fascinations with Mid-Eastern and Indian music, and the grandeur of classic movie themes of the Ennio Morricone variety with an affinity for disjointed electronics, a little surf music and a surprising dose of death metal on this brilliant, wayward and amazingly expansive album.

The gimmick behind this album, and the two that are slated to follow it in a trilogy of sorts is that it is a compilation of tracks by different bands with distinct styles, contributing to the latest Secret Chiefs 3 anthology. FORMS plays Mid-Eastern marches and ballads, sometimes adulterated with experimental touches. Ishraqiyan plays a sort of Persian-rock fusion music that often sounds oddly Bollywoodish. Traditionalists play huge, sweeping movie-score type music. Holy Vehm is death metal with a lo-fi, experimental bent. The Electromagnetic Azoth is a strange power electronics project, not above throwing slices of Bhangra riffs at the listener amongst other Easter doodads. UR is a sort of avant-garde surf band. The trick behind the gimmick, of course, is that Trey Spruance is the leader of each of these bands, which sometimes share other common musicians as well. Still, the 6 outfits are more or less discrete entities musically, albeit with a common penchant for atmospherics, sudden mid-stream shifts and Mid-Eastern styles. It's like if Frank Zappa was The Tea Party's frontman, to go for the music-journo-shorthand analogy.

The progression of this album is lurching and spastic at times, but ultimately it's an ebb and flow of tension and release that retains a common thread (which goes beyond the common Mid-Eastern influence), while twisting it hither and thither with mad abandon. Something about the vast ambition and almost mystical immersion this music reflects puts me in mind of classic King Crimson at times, for reasons that are very hard to define in terms of literal musical correspondence.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline:This is mind-bending, brain-challengingly quirky and intelligent musical experimentation. It's also very good listening - there are great, big melodies that draw you in, brutally unexpected transitions balanced perfectly with pure ear-candy moments, just enough totally scary discords to make a point without descending into abstruse atonal elitism and generally a vast variety of musical sights, sounds and smells to lure you into Mr. Spruance's Bizzare Bazaar of Sonic Delights. I honestly believe this may be one of the most original and awe-inspiring albums to be realeased this century. The sequel(s) are slated to appear sometime this year, and I can't wait to wrap my ears around them.

2007-04-20T10:43:00.000+05:30

Paradise Lost - 'In Requiem'
2007

I stopped following Paradise Lost around the time they released Host. I didn't have anything against them going all electro-goth, but considering that I already listen to and enjoy Depeche Mode when I need that sort of thing, the whole concept seemed redundant to me. I liked being able to listen to Depeche Mode albums when I was in a Depeche Mode mood, and Paradise Lost albums when I was in a Paradise Lost mood. For me, PL going all DM was a loss of diversity in the world of music, and cause for regret.

Apparently, however, they've since been charting a course that brings them back to somewhere around where they were when they released Draconian Times, which I liked a lot (although I'd have been as happy if they'd carried on in the Icon vein for a while longer). This is a common direction for bands who have pushed the envelope a bit too far, and found themselves in a position where their new sound doesn't really give them a huge enough crossover success, and it alienates substantial portions of their old audience as well. The results are usually mixed at best.

Anyhow, I reckoned it shouldn't hurt too much to try Paradise Lost's new album, In Requiem. As a matter of fact, it didn't. It is very like Draconian Times, in a broad way, but there are more keys and trace of the more mainstream-friendly goth rock sensibility they must have acquired when they were doing that Depeche Mode thing. Still, the guitars occupy musical centre stage most of the time. Gregor Mackintosh's huge, rolling melodies still carry the songs, underpinned by faithful Aaron Aedy's rhythm guitar and some pretty solid rhythm section work from Stephen Edmondson and current drummer Jeff Singer. Nick Holmes is the more melodic, at times oddly Hetfieldian singer of Draconian Times, and even goes so far as to sound rather modern-rockish at times, although he brings the aggression on the song 'Requiem'. He's broadened his range, like the rest of the band, for ever if not always for better.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: All in all, it's a decent, tuneful collection of dark, doomy songs where the guitars create most of the atmosphere, with keyboards serving more as embellishment. This is the right proportion in a metal band, if you ask me. Paradise Lost's digressions have certainly added diverse things to their sound (and sometimes just a little annoyingly - some of the keys on 'Fallen Children' are a bit too jaunty) and if these songs bore their way into my head over time, this may stand as a respectable descendant of Draconian Times. Also, it's given me enough hope to go try the intervening albums between Host and this one. Cautious hope.

2007-04-17T15:45:00.000+05:30

Slough Feg - 'Down Among The Dead Men'
2000

A lot of recent bands that try to play traditional NWOBHM-influenced metal sound really fake to me, because they're too polished and slick. Even when the original NOWBHM bands were impeccable as musicians, there was always this raw edge to their music that really sealed the deal. Something that wasn't amateurish or simplistic like punk, but similarly immediate, which gave the impression of a band with no time for artifice, for anything except simple inspiration and pure energy.

The Lord Weird Slough Feg, or simply, Slough Feg, appear to have listened long and hard to their old Iron Maiden, Angel Witch and Omen records (and, just as important, probably picked out some classic Thin Lizzy as well) and learned their lessons well. While their musicianship and songwriting are great, they're never so slick and polished that I feel like puking a little into a silken barfbag instead of headbanging along. Their main man Mike Scalzi, who both sings and plays guitar is an especialy treasure - he has a great, very Brit-sounding voice that hits those heroic, bombastic pitches and cadences really well, without ever sounding like he's singing a national anthem or a hymn. His riffs are as good, chunky and catchy, irresistably energetic and driving but melodic too.

The song-sequence that consists of 'Beast In The Broch', 'Heavy Metal Monk', 'Fergus Mach Roich' and 'Cauldron Blood' is just great, a real metal epic. 'Warriors Dawn', 'Sky Chariots' and 'Death Machine' are flamboyant, heroic tracks that don't sound self important or stale, and the OTT lyrics of 'Troll Pack' show that the band can retain a crucial sense of humour amongst their more earnest mythical content.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Juicy, infectious metal that reminds you of the best of NOWBHM without sounding like a cheap nostalgia act. I didn't think it was possible to play Maiden-inspired riffs and melodies and still sound so fresh and original. Well done!

2007-04-17T11:37:00.000+05:30

Sonic Youth - 'Daydream Nation'
1988

It's a lot more listenable than Bad Moon Rising or Confusion Is Sex. If their previous two albums, EVOL and Sister can be thought of as a progressive learning process in how to write actual, listenable and even catchy songs while being artsy and postmodern and dissonant, this is the final exam. Part of the trick is that they make sure they play a nice, jangly, even jaunty chord progression with energetic drumming backing it up for a reasonable period of time before dedicating the middle section of most songs to jamming egg cutlets under their strings, or whatever it is that Moore and Ranaldo do to their guitars to make those odd noises. Or they turn in a pretty arpeggiated section with neat spacey tones and layers after beating their humbuckers with chopsticks. Either way, there's always something in there on each song that rewards you for listening to the noise sections. It's pretty much the pattern for all future mainline Sonic Youth releases, right up until the present day, and it's a good way to go about putting together an album. It takes avant garde post-rock, punk and noise roots and welds them together into something that's actually huge and gorgeous and even exultant at its best, rather than simply odd and risky for epileptics.

All in all, it's amazing how little the band has changed since this album - it has pretty much the same mix of pretty, sublime, pretty sublime and plain annoying moments as nearly every album since (your mileage will vary). I'd submit that, since the late 80s the Sonics have been in as much of a holding pattern as, say, post-1916 Motorhead, but who will listen to me? On the one hand, hipsters will shoot me down because I am a metalhead, on the other hand metalheads will ignore me because everyone else who rates this album disses metal and being able to play guitar solos. Oh dear.

To sum up, a good blend of the elitist and the populist strands of Sonic Youth's sound. An immediate, persuasive album that sums up a whole vein of 80s alternative rock but sounds fresh and timeless at the same time. And a great soundtrack for a cyberpunk movie they'll never make.

foray: karen dalton

2007-04-11T12:03:00.000+05:30

(Forays are going to be shorter pieces about music that is different from the styles that I am most familiar with. Rather than attempt in-depth reviews of musical idioms and artists I know little about, I will offer brief impressions that might interest you as well.)

The Guardian calls her the best singer you never heard. Nick Cave calls her his favourite female blues singer, and used her rendition of the traditional song 'Katie Cruel' as the basis for his song 'When I First Came To Town'.

Dalton's voice was often likened to Billie Holliday's. It has the same direct, raw feel to it. She sang in a high-pitched tone, which sounds as if it was produced mainly in the mouth with the throat clenched a little. Her voice sometimes sounds like a trumpet, and her phrasing is brilliant, sometimes more immaculate than her actual pitching. It can take some getting used to, but find and listen to her rendition of 'It Hurts Me Too' for a good introduction to her style.

She played a mean 12-string guitar, too.

She came by folk-singerdom in the old-fashioned way, never wrote original material, was reluctant to record and rarely did, and died homeless in New York city in the 1990s. But her music is not just an oddity left behind by an enigmatic, romantic character - it's very real and vastly soulful.

Go here for a discography and more links.

2007-04-05T15:21:00.000+05:30

Scariot - 'Momentum Shift'
2007

I listen to a fair variety of metal music, but like any metalhead I have my checklist of elements I like to hear in my favourite kind of metal. Something about as heavy as, say, Megadeth's Rust In Peace or the later Death albums, as technical as them too, with great solos and riffs and kickass drumming, but not so polished that it starts sounding more like prog, melodic without sounding like a damn national anthem, moshworthy but groovy too and emotional without compromising on the aggression. To make it clearer, my favourite metal band right now is probably Nevermore. And Scariot seems to have a lot of the same strengths as Nevermore, including, on this album, an added bonus for a sometime-bassist like me - Steve DiGiorgio!

The songs on this album move effortlessly from really thrashy and heavy riffs with pounding double bass to melodic, almost symphonically dramatic passages. The drums lockstep with the guitar rhythms when reguired, and ride roughshod over them at other times, which is something metal drums need to do sometimes, you know? The guitar work is equally convincing from the precise, rhythmically exciting rhythm work to the melodic, flowing and imaginative lead work. The vocals are great as well, clean and soaring without being cheesy and predictable like that fellow in Hammerfall. And when I'd be happy to settle for a good thud and maybe some clanky cut-through on bass, with everything else so awesome, there's Steve DiGiorgio cooking up a storm underneath it all!

The mini-epic 'Forming Humans' is probably my favourite at the moment, packing in some really impressive shifts and melodies in just over 5 minutes. 'Sickening World' contains perhaps my favourite lyrical statement (guess what it is!) and a kickass cover of Death's 'Symbolic' manages to do for that song what Death once did for Judas Priest's 'Painkiller', and makes their musical lineage pretty clear, as if there were any doubt. I never did buy into the opportunist Schuldiner worship that accompanied his illness and sad demise, but he certainly was a great metal songwriter and musician, and and I'm sure he'd approve of Scariot's take on his song. They do that rarest of things - make the vocals of the original more melodic without totally defanging the vocal lines. Good work.

I understand that this album was released after considerable line-up changes. I'd certainly like to hear more by this line-up - and investigate Scariot's previous discography on the strength of this album, which is about what you'd want the first album you hear by a band to do.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Thrashy progressive metal that stands alongside the relatively traditionally metallic likes of Nevermore, rather than the more arty flights of Opeth. An album of real power and artistry, with a certified lunatic on bass guitar. In not so many words, bring it on!

2007-04-05T13:23:00.000+05:30

Grinderman
2007

It's nice that Nick Cave feels kinder and gentler, it'll help him stay sane and live longer, but I miss that old manic intensity. The intensity that made him bark like a dog on Birthday Party's title song, the intensity that was presented in its most polished form on an album full of Murder Ballads, and then put away in a shelf with old bones, empty cognac bottles, tattered Bibles and discarded French letters, never to be dusted out again.

Only, never is an excessively long time, and Old Nick couldn't stay domesticated for too long. Nocturama already shows signs of a certain tension between the old, raving Cave and the new, croony-gloomy one. The struggle for ascendancy reached its peak on the twin CDs of Abbatoir Blues/Lyre Of Orpheus and the Bad Son seems to have gained ascendance for the moment . At least for the purposes of the current record, the debut from Nick Cave's side project - a band consisting of a stripped-down version of the Bad Seeds, without long-term collaborator Mick Harvey, and with the CaveMan on guitars.

It's a far more organic and spontaneous sound than the structured, premeditated writing that has marked recent (and probably future) Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds records. Still, it isn't as if it couldn't have been released as a Bad Seeds album - for all that the first two tracks, 'Get It On' and 'No Pussy Blues', and the album closer, 'Love Bomb' brim with noisy guitar, pounding rhythm and frantic vocals with lyrics about sex, and rock n' roll, and sex and what have you (and sex) (and rock n' roll), the album soon moves on to more mid-paced, melodic material. The title track is a stripped-down, rootsy affair that wouldn't have been out of place in classic Bad Seeds albums like 'Tender Prey' or 'The Good Son'. '(I Don't Need You) To Set Me Free' could have found a place on 'Let Love In' it certainly has a rhythmic imperative that hasn't been seen a lot since then. 'Man In The Moon' might as well have fit on any album since 'The Boatman's Call'.

But I think these are only superficial similarities. There really is a raw, personal feel running through these songs - a return to a more confessional, cathartic statement. I felt that even the best albums of his recent phase missed a certain darkness and directness, and this album sees all those elments back in place. Sure, it's an older, wryer, less impatient Cave at work here, but one who is again on the edge, as a songwriter, reaching deep into his favourite music of the distant past and the the darkest places in his blackened heart to create songs like the latter-day folk masterpiece, 'Go Tell The Women'.

There are two versions of this album. A leaked version, and an official one. The leaked version has three rather good songs - 'Decoration Day', 'Rise' and especially 'Vortex' that are missing from the final release. Not that the replacement songs, 'Depth Charge Ethel' and 'When My Love Comes Down' are any weaker, but I wonder what happened. Perhaps the idea was to create a more focussed set, with as few slower, more ballady songs that could instead be saved for the next Bad Seeds album.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Botomline: Cave strips it down and notches it up to deliver the album that I've been hoping he would for a while, now. He's back on the edge, but he's done his thing, he has evolved - he just might be invincible again!

2007-04-04T13:50:00.000+05:30

Silverchair - 'Young Modern'
2007

I really have to begin this one with a quick recap. Silverchair, back in the 90s, were cherubic juvenile rockers from Australia who wanted very badly to sound like a Seattle band. Soon after getting signed and releasing their debut, however, they decided to move in a less derivative direction, adding orchestral touches to their music, until their last album, Diorama, consisted mainly of tuneful modern rock balladry buoyed up by lush orchestral arangements. A lot of Silverchair listeners consider this their finest hour, but I'm not much of a ballad listener. I prefer Neon Ballroom and Freakshow with their balance between riffy, somewhat heavy stuff and the softer, more intricate material.

Sometime in the early oughts, Silverchair hit a hiatus as main man Daniel Johns got on with various things in life. One of these was Dissociatives, a collaboration with electronica artist Paul Mac. The resulting album was a mix of electronica and quirky pop that felt too twee and and light to my tastes.

Now, Silverchair is back in action, but the fact that Johns has carried Mac back with him to the band suggests that they won't sound like any of the old Silverchairs did.

In fact, what we have here is a mix of very quirky pop music overlayed with various tones and textures, much like an album by The Beatles or Beach Boys from the latter part of their career. Fittingly, Van Dyke Parks, who also collaborated with Brian Wilson, adds arangements to some of these songs too. So what we have here is no longer dervative grunge, grunge plus orchestra or even the lush ballad rock of the last album. Instead, it's a quirky mix of songs that seems to draw from all sorts of diverse influences, none of which hark back to Seattle, circa 1991. A very diverse set of songs that perhaps aims to be the Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper's of its era.

That seems to be the ambition anyway.

In practise, any album with the cringe-inducingly sappy ballad 'Waiting All Day' would tend to be disqualified from keeping such august company. But that's my little tic, don't pay it too much mind.

On the other hand, the 'Those Thieving Birds (Part 1)/Strange Behaviour/Those Thieving Birds (Part 2)' 3-song suite is actually pretty cool. It's very ambitious, and it nearly succeeds in being a classic sequence of epic pop music. 'Mind Reader' is upbeat in a way that veers between chirpy and manic, and manages to be more Art Brut than anything I've heard by Art Brut, and cop some Ziggy-Bowie vibes as well. 'Young Modern Station' is a bit studied and over-produced like everything here tends to be, but even so, the sheer joyous feeling of playing together again comes through. 'Straight Lines' on the other hand is little more than a standard modern rock power ballad, very disposable. Perfect single material, in other words. 'Reflections Of The Sun' is perhaps the most succesfull ballad here, and it's refreshing in its relative straightforwardness. 'If You Keep Losing Sleep' is anything but straightforward though, very Beatles-esque totally mad pop rock. More Macca than Lennon, if you know what I mean. Then there's 'Low' which keeps threatening to rip off the lick from 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps', and 'Insomnia' which kinda rocks in a very queasy way. 'All Across The World' ends things on an epic and psychedelic note, and makes it impossible not to trot out the Abbey Road comparisons.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Uhh. I hate trying to summarise every song around, but this album is too wilfully varied to sum up as whole in any easy way. In a way, it puts me in mind of a transitory album by The Who, where the band has already shot its load on a bunch of classic stuff and is lurching around wondering what to do next, trying a bit of everything. But is it Silverchair's 'A Quick One' or is it their 'Who Are You'? Only time will tell, I suppose. I certainly can't - this album is as intriguing as it is confusing. A bit of everything. At least they're not playing it safe.

Dead Soles

2007-04-04T12:58:00.000+05:30

These are actual for-real Joy Division sneakers. I refuse to link back to the source.

What gets me most about them isn't just that it's just another creepy way to cash in on great music and a long-dead rock star. Or that the symbolism of an ostensible Joy Division fan wearing the artwork from the Unknown Pleasures album cover on their soles seems a trifle misplaced to me.

No.

What's worst about these sneakers is that they're white. A nice, healthy sporty white. Did Ian Curtis ever jog, anyway?

Way to rape a dead man's skull and not even get the basics right.

2007-04-03T14:26:00.000+05:30

Testament - 'Low'
1994

This is a fierce album. After losing Alex Skolnic and the push me-pull you musical differences that made 'The Ritual' such a moderate album, singer Chuck Billy and guitarist Eric Peterson felt liberated, free to be as heavy as they wanted to - and that's precisely what they proceeded to be. This album scales the aggression back up to Practice What You Preach levels - and heavier. While 'The Ritual' fit in with the overall trend of thrash acts mellowing out in the mid-90s, 'Low' took a few lessons from the more extreme metal of recent times to create an album that thrashed and grooved ten times more than anything they'd done before. Death metal guitar hero James Murphy helped them up the ante, contributing solos and textures that combined the new emphasis on brutality with as much skill as Skolnic had graced the band with.

A heavier musical direction was matched by more venomous lyrics and vocals. The title song, 'Low', with its stacatto, broken-up riffs and sledgehammer double bass only further hammers in the fierce scorn Chuck Billy directs at opportunistic political exploiters. And just think of the sheer shock to the system it was, after 'The Ritual', to hear this song and hear incredibly tight double bass and riffing...and growling! Billy hadn't shed the more shouty or tuneful sides to his voice, but this new growl - oh, my! 'Legions (In Hiding)' just kept the intensity building with its build-up into sheer groovy riffmania and Billy's vituperation directed at families that conceal dark secrets and 'keep spinning the wheels of abuse'. 'Shades Of War', 'PC' 'All I Could Bleed' carry on the trend of political and social comment, coupled with tight, groovy and heavy riffing.

'Hail Mary' and 'Dog Faced Gods' fit in more with Testament's older occult and anti-religious themes. 'Hail Mary' is like a blasphemous twin to 'Low' in its intense perfection, while 'Dog Faced Gods' ups both the intensity with positively death metallish sequences and some of the most atmospheric passages on the album, superbly conjuring up images of dark rituals in ancient Egypt. I'd say that 'Dog Faced Gods' is the real pinnacle of the album and a total vindication of the decision to forge ahead with a heavier direction rather than rely on thrash nostalgia or radio friendly homogenisation. 'Chasing Fear' is more of a general paean to mental disturbance, but just as sharp and focussed musically as anything else here, kicking in with some incredible soloing straight off the bat. 'Ride' is more paced-out, but just as intense, with great yell-along choruses that hark back to their earliest days as snotty thash kids kicking up a racket somewhere in the background while Metallica and Slayer dominated the scene.

'Trail Of Tears' is a ballad, and it veers a little too close to 'Return To Serenity' territory musically, although the lyrics are about the plight of native American tribes whose lands were usurped by the white man. That leaves two instrumentals. 'Urotsukidoji' is named for a tentacle-rape Jap comic, it's quite an instrumental workout, including some very fluid and kickass soloing by bassist Eric Peterson. 'Last Call' is a more groovy piece, with a great, unique atmosphere and a cool way to close out an album.

By now it should be clear to anyone with half a brain that sticking to your guns and progressing in heaviness is what works best for metal bands. Judas Priest discovered it before Testament, and Testament used that lesson well. If only more people had heeded the example of 'Low', bands like Kreator, Megadeth and others may never have had to get around to doing a comeback album in the first place.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Thrash metal gets a heaviness upgrade for a decade that, sadly, didn't really appreciate Testament's efforts as much as they deserved. Definitely a peak in Testament's already notable career, and as fresh and fierce today as it sounded 13 years ago.

2007-04-02T13:46:00.000+05:30

Alabama Thunderpussy - 'Open Fire'
2007

This album sounds a lot like Arch Enemy guitarist Michael Ammot's side-band, Spiritual Beggars. Classic hard rock/heavy metal worshipping riffs, melodic and expressive solos, and great, full-throated rock vocals. A lot of the time I really felt like I was listening to something from Spiritual Beggars' awesome 'Ad Astra' or 'Demons' albums.

To be honest, it also sounds a bit closer to what I was hoping for with the new Clutch album - songs like 'The Cleansing', 'Greed' or 'Whiskey War' have solid southern-rock inspired grooves, but they're also heavy to an extent that a lot of the material on 'From Beale Street To Oblivion' isn't. I wouldn't declare a definitive preference one way or the other at this point (I am a moral coward), but I will say that, upon sober (and also completely drunk) consideration, 'Open Fire' is looking better and better as a contender for that personal year's best listing I was blathering about recently.

I'm also encouraged by the sound of this album. I'd peg the sound as general-purpose heavy music - not stoner, or southern or sludge or whatever. At a time when heavy music seems divided into an excess of sub-genres, many of which are self-limiting rather than self-defining, a band like Alabama Thunderpussy that hits so hard, taking no hostages while opening fire, without declaring an allegiance to any genre other than rocking kickassery in its broadest form is a bit of a rare and fine thing.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: This one should get a dumb grin cracking your face open the same way a really good spliff will. If it doesn't, please go to Muzak Jail, and turn in all your rock and metal CDs at the gate. Come on! It even has a marauding barbarian on the cover - what more do you want??!!

2007-03-29T11:09:00.000+05:30

So let's see, it's almost April. I've already heard four albums that are a shoe-in for any Best Of 2007 list I might put together to amuse myself with:

1. Grinderman - Grinderman
2. Clutch - From Beale Street To Oblivion
2. Unsane - Visqueen
3. Melechesh - Emisaries (going by the US release date)

I've also heard a few more that are in strong contention:

1. Alabama Thunderpussy - Open Fire
2. Scariot - Momentum Shift
3. Immolation - Shadows In The Light
4. Monstrosity - Spiritual Apocalypse

Others I wouldn't rate that highly for various reasons:

1. The Good, The Bad & The Queen (Not bad, not outstanding)
2. Therion - Gothic Kabbalah (They sound like a sub-Theatre Of Tragedy Therion rip-off band now)
3. Vital Remains - Icons Of Evil (pretty solid, but also kinda stolid)

What am I missing? Also, this list is rather heavy with metal (snicker, snicker) - what good releases in other, possibly totally unheavy genres am I missing? Be warned that I am one of those troglodytes that does not comprehend the thing that they call Indie Rock although I love that Television album they say started it all, and have a Platonic regard for the Velvet Underground album they also say started it all.

2007-03-29T09:28:00.000+05:30

Richard Wright - 'Wet Dream'
1978

Rating - 6/C

Listening to the Pink Floyd members' solo albums is like contemplating pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When put together, the box assures you, you will have a completed picture which matches the one on the box - the Mona Lisa, let's say. As you look at the pieces you think you discern hints at those cowed eyes or the muddy scenery and the serpentine path. Just as often, the pieces puzzle you - that shimmering yellow, almost like a sunburst, that indistinct haze where rust red seems to fade through a truncated spectrum to drab khaki - where could they possibly fit? Surely this satiric smirk is not that famous broken-jawed grimace? Somehow you have to take it on faith that the parts do add up to the promised whole, and perhaps you even gain a better understanding of its composition and elements.

So let's see, with the Barrett albums you have the free flow of lyrical invention, both whimsical and nightmarish, and a certain penchant towards poppy vocal melody to balance out the weirdness. Roger Water's albums grumble and whine and accuse and mourn. David Gilmour has the soaring guitar playing and the tendancy to sound calm rather than dramatic. So what does that leave Rick Wright with (utterly ignoring Mason for the moment)?

Well, on this album, he seems at times to be trying to channel a bit of everyone else's schtick. Some of that Watery moodiness, Snowy White on board to provide a sort of pocket David Gilmour impression and so forth. But there's also a more layered, atmospheric sound to the album - a sense of musical breadth, which on consideration is, after all what Wright brought to the mix. 'Animals', 'The Final Cut' and 'A Momentary Lapse Of Reason', all albums which featured relatively few, or no inputs from Wright just don't sound as huge and spacey as the ones before or after them (in the case of 'Animals' the resulting album is amazingly strong anyway, but that's another issue).

Whether he's sticking to introspective piano-tickling, as on the opening verses of 'Holiday' or the instrumental opening track, 'Mediterranean C', or providing a full-blown sonic spacescape as on 'Waves', Wright puts together songs minor, modest, earnest and tuneful but also very atmospheric. It isn't really that different from Gilmour's feel, really, especially on 'On An Isand', and suggests that Gilmour and Wright are probably the only two real kindred spirits in what otherwise seems like an assemblage of strikingly different, even contradictory musical visions. Only, looking at Gilmour's first two albums I'd suspect that he picked up on some of that lush feel by realising what Wright was on about and studying it carefully.

Still, atmosphere doesn't necessarily add up to a compelling musical experience. While everything is nicely put together, and there are excellent performances by Snowy White and King Crimson saxophonist (and flautist) Mel Collins, most of the songs float by in a comfortable haze. 'Cat's Cruise' and 'Waves' are both very neat instrumentals though, very Floydian and with some impressive playing by all converned. But the waltzy tendances of 'Mad Yanni's Dance' fail to elicit any lasting edge of excitement. What does stand out a bit is the track immediately after it, 'Drop In From The Top' which has a more pulsing beat, energetic drums and some nearly-ominous keyboard lines, over which Snowy White really tears it up. The tension is immediately brought down with 'Pink's Song', a gentle elegy which people will assume is for Barrett but probably is for Wright's children's tutor as he claims, because I can't imagine anyone calling Space Cadet Syd a 'quiet, smiling friend of mine'. The album also ends on a more upbeat groove - literally - with 'Funky Deux', which is a funky intrumental, as the label might suggest. However, even funk can't altogether obscure the flattening effect of the propensity for mellowness that the non-whacko Floydians seem to share.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: A pleasant, more than competent album, like Gilmour's solo stuff, but with weaker songwriting and without Gilmour's not-so-secret interest-regaining weapon - the Big Solo (although Snowy White and Mel Collins help). Establishes Wright as the main atmosphere man in Floyd, though.

2007-03-26T15:04:00.000+05:30

Here's my review of the Iron Maiden show, at the Split Magazine site. Well, really, what was I ever going to say except 'uhhh....awesome'?

2007-03-26T12:52:00.000+05:30

Unsane - Visqueen
2007

Rating - 9/A

This is the album Bleach could have been if Cobain was a better riffer. In other words, it's a little bit like a Melvins album but heavier and more scary. I find myself constantly replaying the first three songs on Visqueen - 'Against The Grain', 'Last Man Standing' and 'This Stops At The River' in an attempt to fathom the visceral rush of dark power they contain. Not that the rest of the album is any weaker - 'Shooting Clay' is like a more pissed-off stripped down take on something similar to the early Soundgarden vibe, and 'Disdain' is completely disorienting, a burst of pure abrasion with hardcore-style riffing made dirtier and more terrifying. I've been listening to a lot of death metal lately, and this mid-tempo, mega-distorted belting drone is just as furiously heavy, uncompromising and intense as Vital Remains or Immolation, although stylistically there's a lot more in common with something like Helmet.

Unsane are not a new band - apparently they've been around since the late 80s and are considered pioneers of noise rock. For my sins, this is the first I've heard of them. This isn't your free-form post-Velvets Sonic Youth style art noise, however - it's a meaner, leaner hybrid sewn together from bits and pieces of hardcore metal and punk styles. It's almost kissing cousins with the stoner rock sound - the same low tunings and over the top fuzz, the same slow, pulsing tempos, but there's an aggression in the music that's not stoner at all. More aggression and an interest in not so much lulling the listeners into an opiate-friendly state of mind as in beating them into submission, albeit with great care and deliberation. The tortured vocals, placed low in the mix, add to the impression of something not quite wholesome, but threateningly nebulous rather than in-your-face blatant, which makes it that much heavier somehow.

It's a very tightly defined style, and Unsane certainly don't veer from a formula on this album - some songs like the epic album closer 'East Broadway' are so determined in making their point through the sheer crushing weight of repetition that the experience can get claustrophobic at times. And I think that's part of the point - this isn't amiable music. It isn't a ghastly cacaphony that jolts you from discord to discord, but it is a very cold, harsh and bleak style of music. I'm personally comfortable with such a musical atmosphere, and when that atmosphere is so skillfully conjured up with such simple tools, all I can do is listen in awe and, yes, just a trace of fearful unease.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Powerful, uncompromising heavy music from a scarier place somewhere left of stoner sludge. This one's already a strong contender for my Best Of 2007 list, and a great impetus to check out more Unsane.

2007-03-22T12:47:00.000+05:30

Melechesh - 'Emissaries'
2006/2007 (different release dates in Europe and the US, apparently)

Rating: 9/A

Melechesh play Sumerian thrashing black metal. That's what their website says. To my ears, the black metal elements are not very important - more in the vocals than anything else, although the riffs do have that sonorous iteration black metal can sometimes produce. I hear as much death as black metal in the riffing, though, and left to myself I'd say they play extreme metal that favours mid-eastern scales.

And they play it bloody well. The huge riffs pull you right in on 'Rebirth Of The Nemesis', and show a band that is great at dynamics as well as heaviness, as they move between tempos and vary the arrangements, from mid-tempo interludes to full-speed havoc, complete with chants to Sumerian gods. Most of the remaining songs follow similar general principles, but the actual riffs and melodies are distinctive enough. Some stand-out tracks are a killer cover of The Tea Party's 'Gyroscope', 'The Scrbes Of Kur' an acoustic interlude that employs tradtional instruments, and the oddly grunge/punk riffing on 'Leper Jerusalem'. But these are just songs that are a bit different from the rest - and the rest is of such a uniform high quality that it's almost scary. This album has a distinct mood and atmosphere, and apart from being moshworthy, it also transports me mentally to ancient places somewhere west of the Tigris...

I'd really like to say more about this album, I'm so taken with its huge feel, the mammoth riffing, that amazing feel and the great songwriting, but if I go on nattering away in this vein this whole thing is going to seem embarassing.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: This is not Egyptian death metal. Not a Nile-alike but a very compelling album with a unique and engrossing sound. I like a bit of that mid-eastern shimmy in my rock, and in my metal too, if I can get it. This one's a keeper, and I'm going to go find the previous album, 'Sphynx' next.

2007-03-22T11:38:00.000+05:30

The Human Instinct: 'Stoned Guitar'
1971

Rating: 8/B

Now this is more like it. A raw blues-rock sound, powered-up with Jimi Juice and probably more than a little substance abuse (when they call it 'stoned guitar', the visual pun in the cover art is just a joke, okay?). This short lived 70s act from New Zealand, of all places, stakes its claim as an early stoner/sludge/hard rock legend with opening squalls of the epic title track. Strange, ululating, whines give way to waves of feedback and swirling tides of wah-drenched distortion. Skirting just this close to ripping off 'Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)', 'Stoned Guitar' instead evolves into a groovy, ballsy jam with its own identity and spirit. Of course, the classic blues rock bag of tricks was never as diverse as it was influential, and nothing here will totally fail to remind you of odds and ends by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, early Led Zeppelin or, momentarily, Cream, but in spirit some of this stuff can be seen as aniticpating the art noise gestures of bands like Sonic Youth as much as anything else.

Elsewhere, the good lads of The Human Instinct transform Beach Boy Dennis Wilson's 'Black Sally' into a chugging, scary riff monster. Tunes by songwriting contributor JesseHarper make for more sludgy mayhem, as 'Jugg-a-Jug Song' and 'Midnight Sun' are turned into pretexts for gloriously drawn-out, textural and spacey workouts. A moment of respite arrives in the form of the acoustic ballad, 'Tomorrow', but it feels like a balancing agent, a rest-stop before the final stretch - a blitering cover of Rory Gallagher's 'Railway And Gun', recorded live.

What makes all this work, and stand out in my (admittedly subjective) esteem from, say, Blue Cheer, whose early albums' spirit I salute, but whose actual ability and sensibility I tend to dismiss? In this case, I suppose it would have to be Billy Te Kahika, or Billy TK, the 'Maori Hendrix'. This is guitar-based and guitar-focussed music. Even though Maurice Greer is not a bad singer and drummer at all, and Larry Waide's bass playing is quite good (it carries the song really well during some passages on 'Stoned Guitar', for instance), this album rises or falls on the strength of Billy TK's playing. Mostly, it does pretty well. I'm not sure I'd rate Billy TK up there with Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix as one of the greatest guitarists of the 70s, as some people seem to, but he's certainly a player of cosniderable ability and expressiveness.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: I hate to boil it all down to one person, but the album's called 'Stoned Guitar', and it's only fair to judge it on how effectively that guitar has been stoned. Very effectively in this case. A little more outright diversity - shades of jazz, or more funk, or more full-on psychdedelia would've elvated this album further, but now I'm nitpicking. It is what it is, and it's very good at being that.

2007-03-19T15:07:00.000+05:30

Amon Duul UK with Robert Calvert: 'Die Losung'
1989

Rating: 7/B

I don't know much about Amon Duul, Amon Duul II or the apparently ephemeral and tenuously titled Amon Duul UK. I know even less about Kraut Rock in general. I hunted down and listened to this album because of the involvement of the late Robert Calvert, sometimes-lyricist and occasional frontman to Hawkwind. Bearing that in mind, I've tried to find out a bit about the history of this album before reviewing. It appears it was recorded as a collaboration between Amon Duul II guitarist John Weinzierl and Robert Calvert, recorded in 1987/88, and released hurriedly and in a somewhat unpolished form under the instigation of Dave Anderson, bassist on this album and on various Hawkwind and Amon Duul II albums, in 1989, after Calvert's untimely death. Weinzierl claims that the project was never meant to be relased under the Amon Duul banner, and that it was intended to be polished to a far more idiosyncratic sheen if time had allowed.

Be that as it may, what we have here is an album of music that bears the mark of 1980s moderate-rock Homogenisation, but also a few traces of character in the guitar work, which is more gutsy and leftfield than the 80s moderate-rock norm, when it's allowed to breathe, and the drums by Van Der Graaf's Guy Evans are typically hyper when the music allows for it. There are a few gossamer threads of spacey keyboard work floating around, courtesy of the Ozric chaps I believe, and then there's Calvert.

A lot of the time here, Calvert's voice sounds nothing like his snotty, almost proto-punk delivery on Hawkwind classics like 'Quark, Strangeness & Charm' or 'Reefer Madness'. Instead, we have a more cold, introspective Calvert on display here, with an almost apathetic vocal delivery that's remniscent of the equally late and lamented Ian Curtis on songs like the luck-of-the-draw meditation, 'Big Wheel' or the epic meditation on romantic fascination, 'Drawn To The Flame'.

He's more upbeat on the rocking 'Urban Indian', where he sings about the joys of fighting for his freedom in the urban wilderness, and urges his listeners to do the same and be Urban Indians. I'd suppose I've already achieved this goal, but I suspect what he means for us to be is like the Red Indians, or more specifically like the romantic ideal of the free, self-reliant Noble Savage. There's some trademark wordplay here and the song fits in well with the spirit of urban rebellion Calvert often captured in his work with Hawkwind, althout Weinzierl is a bit more over the edge than Dave Brock's rocking chug. The song ends with Calvert chanting disjointed syllables in one of the most bizzare moments of the album.

Adrenalin Rush is another upbeat song, and the lyrics are, true to form, not quite what you'd imagine. Calvert praises the sudden rush of adrenalin available through seemingly slow-paced activities like cricket and fishing and warns people who always run around that they could get a heart attack. And here I thought it'd be a druggy anthem.

Visions Of Fire has a more epic feel, and has Calvert recounting the story of a disilluionment in love and the process of burning all her letters thereafter. This dark take in romance is, of course, explored in greater detail in the oppressive and monumental 'Drawn To The Flame', the best song on the album along with 'Urban Indian'.

There are also a couple of songs sung by Julie Waring, and she also does some neat backing vocals on 'Drawn To The FLame', her ethereal, girly voice contrasting tellingly with Calvert's more harsh and withdrawn vocal. The songs where she handles lead vocals are rather divorced from the rest album by her very different voice, but 'They Call It Home' does have a very cool feel, a sort of ardent, pulsing rock that reminds me of The Cult.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: The music is far more undistinguished and generic than you'd expect from this line-up. but some songs stand out, especially the epic 'Drawn To The Flame'. A somewhat average album, but worth the effort for fans of Calvert's unique lyrical and vocal presence.

2007-03-19T11:51:00.000+05:30

David Gilmour - 'David Gilmour'
1978

Rating: 6/C

When I reviewed David Gilmour's 2006 album, 'On An Island', I identified a sense of calmness as the defining element of the album. It seems as if Gilmour was an equally calm bloke some 28 years before 'On An Island', which probably explains a thing or two along the line, especially why all the attempts at Water-y darkness on those last two Pink Floyd albums never sat that well.

Gilmour's distinctive guitar tone and his gorgeous, soaring solos are all over this album, as is his rather nifty and soothing voice. That's the good news. On the other hand, the album fails to deliver any really incisive moments or hooks, instead serving as a sort of very high-grade aural candy. From the ethereal opening instrumental, 'Mihalis', through 'Cry From The Street', which has some tasty blues-rock licks and a more organic and bluesy solo than is usually the case in Pink Floyd, the somewhat hard-rockish opening of 'Short And Sweet', the sinuous-and-sinewy licks on 'Raise My Rent', the somewhat intent and hypnotic pulse of 'No Way', which transforms briefly into something rather huge and a trifle noisy, the shivery, tricky playing on 'Deafinitely' to the closing song, the wistful 'I Can't Breathe Anymore', nothing here is less than immaculately arranged and played, or much more than professional and just a little dull.

The Eiderdown Stuffing-Bottomline: Gilmour explores more straightforward soundscapes and rocking guitar lines than is the norm with Floyd, but his sound is so much a part of the later Floyd eithos that the association is hard to shake off. The album comes across as background music, but it's a gorgeous, quality backdrop with the inspiring soloing and high standards of general execution and production one associates with Gilmour.

2007-03-19T10:08:00.000+05:30

Testament - 'The Legacy'
1987

Rating - 9/A

A whole gang of people are reviewing this album on their blogs, which of course inspired me to dust out and listen to my own copy and weigh in with my own review, as is my wont.

First of all, I'd like to say there will be no comparisons, after this paragraph, to the famous thrash bands everyone knows - y'know, Metallica, Megadeth & Slayer. I see Testament as their absolute equal in cumulative musicianship, songwriting and heaviness, and perhaps the superior of some of these in terms of sustained integrity and creativity. There, I've said it. I've always thought of Testament as The Little Band That Could (And Can), and I'll bet that the album being put together by the reunited original line-up will blow away anything any other thrash band (except perhaps Exodus) might release around the same. And I say this knowing that Megadeth has an album coming out soon. Hah!

Well, so much for my armchair bravado. Now to the review.

'The Legacy', titled in a nod to Testament's original name, sees vocalist Chuck Billy flexing an impressive set of pipes all over a bunch of songs mostly co-written by another thrash legend, Steve 'Zetro' Souza - and doing a bloody good job of it. To my ears, the vocal patterns and some of the intonations are more Souza than Billy, but Billy never falters. If anything, he has the throatier and more range-y voice, and brings a power and aggression to the vocals that ensure that Souza won't be missed. Listen to him bark out the title on 'COTLOD' (Curse Of The Legions Of Death) - brutal!

The rest of the band shines as well - the interplay between guitarists Alex Skolnic and Eric Peterson is downright preternatural and it's frankly terrifying to think that Skolnic was just 19 at the time. His playing is so intelligently conceived and lucidly executed, you'd never expect such accomplished playing on the debut album by a bunch of snotty heavy metal kids - until you heard this album. Check out those blinding runs on 'Burnt Offerings'! The rhythm section - bassist Greg Christian and drummer Louie Clemente are no slouches either, and the whole band succeeds admirably in creating that glorious wall of sound you always get with the best '80s thrash.

The music is unrelentingly heavy, a cornucopia of textbook thrash riffing, although time is taken to build things up from a clean, almost neo-classical opening on 'Burnt Offerings' and 'Apocalyptic City'. Old school gang vocals bolster Billy's already blasting vocals on songs like 'Over The Wall' and 'Do Or Die' , the only song co-written by Billy easily stands up to anything else on the album. 'Alone In The Dark' stands out a bit with it's soaring choruses and melodies, but thrashing riffs and those gang vocals ensure that it's as heavy as everything else on this album.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: 20 years later, 'The Legacy' has lost none of its intensity and sheer heaviness. It still has the power to take a listener aback with its sheer vehement aggression and the quality of the music. A thrash metal dream team of a belting vocalist, guitarists with huge chops and a slamming rhythm section delivers the goods - and not for the last time in Testament's career, either!

2007-03-15T16:09:00.000+05:30

So I'm going to be watching Iron Maiden play on Saturday. I'm pretty stoked about it - their last few albums haven't really set me on fire, but what the hell! At their best they were bloody awesome, and they still put out an incredible live show. I'm also rather thrilled to note that I'm going to attend the press conference tomorrow, because of my association with this online music mag. My main coverage of the conference and the event will be on their site, buit you can expect some outtakes or at least a link here. Cheers.

ETA: Well, crap. It seems only one person from Split will be allowed in, now, and the photographer gets to go. Them's the brokes.

2007-03-15T09:57:00.000+05:30

Tribe Of Gypsies - 'Dweller On The Threshold'
2006

Rating - 10/A

All of a sudden, I am awash in covers of Van Halen's 'Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love'. The oddest is probably the bluegrass version on the Strummin' With Devil tribute. The most downright embarassing was Velvet Revolver's sub-pub band rendition at the Rock N' Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremony. Listening to that last tragedy, where the least Van Halen-esque guitarist of his generation plays a song that is just a little too far beyond his range, aided and abetted by a man who used to be an ersatz grunger and has now moved on to be a faux hard rock singer, it's all too easy to shake one's head sadly and conclude that the great days of real hard rock are over. It's all downhill in a barrel now, with nothing but cheesy nostalgia-wanking and parodesque eclecticism to look forward to.

And then there's Tribe Of Gypsies. A little over halfway through their latest album, the Lovecraftian-titled Dweller On The Threshold, the band trots out a cover of that Van Halen classic that had me not just shaking my head amusedly or worse yet, cringing, but grooving along, a big goofy grin plastered over my furry face (I need a shave). Like everything on this album, it's ballsy, rockin' and brilliantly played - and it has a solid dose of Latin music running through it! What amazes me is that ToG have mixed in those Latin elements - the percussion, a general sense of added grooviness, and even some Spanish vocals in the chorus without producing something that sounds like a novelty version. Instead, it's a compelling, valid reading of the song by a band that both loves the original and is confident enough of their own musical identity to take the song into a couple of new places.

Oh, it also helps that ToG guitarist/bandleader, Roy Z (producer to the Metal Stars) is a kickass lead guitarist. I know him as the chap who gave Bruce Dickinson and Rob Halford their best-sounding solo albums, as guitarist/songwriting partner and producer to one, and just producer to the other, and definitely a guitar whizz in the grand old dino tradition. I was aware of his own band, Tribe Of Gypsies, all these many years since they provided back-up on Dickinson's Balls To Picasso album, but I just never got around to checking them out until now. My loss.

With the singer from John Bonham's band on vocals, and a crack squad of musicians doing the needful, ToG are the very epitome of great rock music - they can groove, they can get pretty heavy, then can go soft and soulful, and the music is always full of melody, attitude and hooks. Their music keeps getting compared to Santana, and that's perfectly fair, if you bear in mind the Santana of the first three albums, which were basically hard rock being adulterated by Latin music and hints of jazz (as opposed to the more forthright fusion elements Santana moved onto immediately thereafter). The groovy, soaring instrumental 'Flying Tigers, Crying Dragons' could be a modern answer to 'Singing Winds, Crying Beasts' of Santana's Abraxas album in more ways than just the title. 'Hola' merges some pretty heavy riffing with Latin rhythms and Spanish chants, and a fiery guitar workout by Roy Z in a manner that's just a little remniscent of things like 'Soul Sacrifice'.

But there's a lot more to the band beyond the Latin/rock crossover. The songwriting is as versatile and accomplished as the musicianship. 'Ride On', 'Desolate Chile' and 'Hands To Eternity' are great, groovy rockers with huge riffs and hooks, the ballads 'Halos', 'After The Summer' and 'Never Will Be Mine' are filled with poignant melodies and heartfelt vocals, without wimping out and compromising on the groove. The funky grooves and gospel touches on 'Stop Bombing Each Other!' make for an instant anthem that the Woodstock crowd only wish they could have written. And, needelss to say, Roy Z just brings the juice everywhere, always serving the song and stretching out where it's appropriate - which, fortunately is enough times to satisfy the unreconstructed guitar freak that dwells on my threshold.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: A brilliant slab of hard rock shot through with Latin grooves and great guitar playing. The songwriting and musicianship are equally impressive, there's a bit of everything, from driving rockers and soulful balladry to mind-blowing instrumental workouts - what else do you need to call an album a Perfect Ten? Not a thing.

I'm alive

2007-03-14T16:58:00.000+05:30

Full disclosure: I think 'Strummin' With The Devil', the bluegrass Van Halen tribute is pure fun. To hell with guiltiness, it's just a pleasure to listen to.

Laziness: I haven't been able to work up full reviews, but here is some new and newish stuff that's cool:

Melechesh: Emissaries
Monstrosity: Spiritual Apocalypse
Grinderman: Grinderman
Amon Amarth: With Oden On Our Side
Tribe Of Gypsies: The Dweller On The Threshold

A lot of this is some form of extreme metal or the other. Not all.

Full-length reviews will be resumed soon. No later than this weekend.

2007-03-05T09:02:00.000+05:30

Gojira - 'From Mars To Sirius'
2005

Rating: 9/A

Gojira gets compared a lot to Mastodon (having a whale on the cover might be one reason), and listening to this, their third full-length album, I can hear some of the reasons for that. This is pumelling metal with a solid death influence, but also progressive aspirations, and vocals that alternate between a hoarse yell and a more clean shout. For all I know, Mastodon is an influence on these French metalheads, but I'm personally reminded as much of bands like Meshuggah, and maybe a touch of Fear Factory. But all this is a little beside the point, in your quilt-oriented reviewer's downy opinion. I was given both Mastodon's much-vaunted breakout, Leviathan (which I've reviewed here too, and I liked just fine) and this album at the same time and I have to say that Gojira received just as much repeated spinning on my CD player.

The reason for this is twofold - groove and feel. For all their bludgeon, and the crisp, blitzing drumming (a real highlight), Gojira have a real sense of groove underyling their compositions - and groove, my friends, is the underlying ingredient that will get me nodding along unthinkingly to a band, opening the way for the songs to insidiously embed themselves in my mind. And that's where the feel comes in. I like metal bands where there is an atmosphere to the sound - something large and tangible that I can loose myself in. I get that from bands as diverse as Nevermore (RESPECT!) and My Dying Bride, Clutch and Cannibal Corpse and I get that here. This is all very subjective, but heavy music seems to be where my opinions are most governed by subjective attachments.

To be honest, I'm even a little more drawn to Gojira than to some of their more famous contemporaries because there just seems a stronger songwriting instinct at work here - the individual parts, interludes and bridges really build together into gripping pieces of music that carry distinctive moods and images with them. While the over-60 minute length of the album can seem a bit much for someone used to the days of 45 minute or at most 60 minute albums on tape, there's no denying that Gojira have used all this time well, giving the heavier moments (the majority of the album) enough space to breathe amongst melodic or mid-tempo sections, notching up the cumulative impact that much more. Gojira knows when to hit you over the head with a ten-tonne sledgehammer, and when to lull you with an arpeggiated melody or momentarily pacify you with a more sonorous, ringing medium-paced riff. These are very simple heavy metal dynamics really- you can learn them by listening to Black Sabbath's 'Master Of Reality' a few dozen times, or even just the 'Embryo/Children Of The Grave' sequence, but it's a lesson that can get lost in the rush to be huge and heavy and stomp your way by sheer force of decimation and ambition, and I'm glad to see these relatively young musicians have their sensibilities as firmly in place as their chops and their hunger for heaviness.

I haven't even commented on the ecological theme of this album - I'll just say, yes, bugger, I agree, but if you don't it's okay - you can't make out the lyrics so easily anyway. Just let that music wash over you like a sonic Ocean Planet.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Technical, super-heavy modern metal with solid songwriting values and a really engrossing feel. God, that drummer is great. Does he use triggers? No matter, this is great stuff anyway. Metal is alive and well in this 21st century of ours.

2007-03-01T09:23:00.000+05:30

Summoning - 'Oath Bound'
2006

Rating: 7/B

This album is both a uniquely late-20th/21st-century creation and a sort of epitomisation of some popular, age-old cliches about metal.

Created by a 2-man band (Polish black-metalsters Silenius and Protector), it relies heavily on a whole slew of synthesised wind instruments, keyboards, percussion, some semi-industrial sampling, and the capability for two people to record and mix complex multi-track arrangements fairly easily and cheaply using various handy softwares to create a sweeping, atmospheric, multi-layered aural experience. 2 chaps, some synths, a computer, a guitar or two creating an album - that's so Chemie Bros, dewd! Except that no one would ever to think to spin this disk at a rave. And that's because of the other significant fact about this album - it is a metal album, with abrasive vocals, and songs based on the works of JRR Tolkien. There's even a song written in Orcish (specifically, the lingo of the fighting Uruk-Hai, I think) and the album largely revolves around themes from The Silmarillion - Morgoth's quest to conquer Middle-Earth, and Feanor's mission to avenge Morgoth's theft of the Silmarils, if you're concerned. However, I think Summoning avoid the potential cheese factor by avoiding cliched metal epic gestures, and crafting a form of music that goes beyond the boundaries of metal in its emphasis on a martial, timeless atmosphere. The guitars are present more as a supporting factor most of the time, and generally in the form of arpeggiated parts and atmosphere and tempo-sustaining layers. The vocals, in this case, also help - the members of the band come from a black metal background, and they put out screeches and snarls that sound almost like an atmospheric element in themselves, which is a great improvement over corny 'storyteller' clean vocals. The atmosphere never degenerates into a sub-Spinal Tap unintended-comedy routine, even if the concept suggests that it should.

Although Summoning are not playing generic black metal, this music is clearly rooted in black metal. The songs are all very long, with patterns being repeated to the point where a sort of hypnotic trance-like grind is achieved, and there are strong melodic stabs that enliven those passages of repeition from time to time. Much of this is used employing non-traditional elements, all those synthesised instruments, which is what gives the sound a more folk-metal element. The traditional blasting drums have also been abandoned in favour of a more percussive sound that suggests drummers pacing armour-clad troops to some dread battlefield. It's all about hammering home that atmosphere, which at heart is what traditional black metal seems to be about too. The vocals, of course, reveal the black metal allegiance most blatantly.

I must admit it can get a bit homogenous at times. After the stirring flute and percussion of the intro, 'Bauglir', the stirring martial strains of 'Across The Streaming Tide' and the inhuman orcish bestiality of 'Mirdautas Vras' everything can start getting a bit too extended, martial, atomspheric and simply meandering. The thing is, all the songs do more or less the same things in teh same way, with the differences lying in specific arrangements and movements. Fortunately, if you feel the plot has been lost a bit along the way, the album picks up again towards the end. 'Menegroth' makes good use of harp sounds and a choir (which is the two singers multi-tracked) and the last song, 'Land Of The Dead' with its heroic choral chants is a suitably bleak and epic conclusion to this icy, battle-fraught journey through the Good Professor's imaginary realms.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: The length and repetitiveness of these songs can relegate the album to background listening status at times, but the strength of the melodies and the wonderfully bleak, epic feel are decidedly inviting. A credible evocation of the high fantasy atmosphere and proof that even black metal can evolve into cool things!

2007-02-28T09:08:00.000+05:30

Hawkwind - 'Hawkwind'
1970

Rating: 6/C

This is very much a debut album. There are elements of the fully-developed Hawkwind sound here - the proto-ambient, fractal jams and druggy feel, for instance. There's Nik Turner's peculiar sax work and electronics (by Dik Mik in this case). What's missing are the swirling, phased synth sounds, the rock-solid hard rock oriented rhythm section and the explicit science fantasy lyrics. Also, I've always thought of Dave Brock as a minor hero of the electric rhythm guitar, but he isn't really fully-fledged in that capacity here, even though the songs, such as they are, revolve around his rhtymic foundation. There are broad hints of his later mastery of the chugging, hypnotic riff here, hints that would, over the next two or three albums grow into blatant allegations and finally, outrageous revelations. For the time being, though, it's only a promise. As is Huw Lloyd-Langton's fluid but frequently directionless lead work. He would leave the band after this album, only to return 9 years later and help to power some of Hawkwind's better mid-career work.

There are only two tracks on this album that I'd call songs in the traditional sense - the opening track, 'Hurry On Sundown', and the closing track, 'Mirror Of Illusions'. The first is an acoustic-and-harmonica based folk-blues jam. It's nearly the only song on which Brock actually embraces his frontman role and sings something that amounts to a thought-out vocal part with its own melody and lyrics that bear some attention, but this sort of blues sound was pretty much second nature to a lot of British musicians at the time, and the song doesn't really tie in with the the rest of the album or Hawkwind's career. It's a catchy little piece in its own right, though.

Most of the subsequent tracks are really one large,organic jam, divided loosely into songs. Considering them as discrete, standalone pieces is often a disservice, but they do serve some purpose in the larger whole. 'The Reason Is?' works well only as an atmospheric build-up to the simple, but catchy 3-chord hook that 'Be Yorself' revolves around. The latter is one of the more distinctive moments on the album, moving from a somple chant to an equally simple but ebullient jammy workout on the same basic progression. Nik Turner plays some of his trademark 'I have no idea if that's really clever or utterly dumb' sax breaks in the jam section. The two parts of 'Paranoia' revolve around very, very simple musical ideas, and by the time the epic 'Seeing It As You Really Are' cuts in, everything seems to have devolved into a shapeless 'make a spacey noice here' sort of mess. The second real song on the album then ends things reasonably strongly. 'Mirror Of Illusion' is still lighter than the classic Hawkwind sound, but it has a pulsing, driving bass motif and spacey atmosphere that point the way ahead.

My copy of this album includes a few bonus tracks of varying interest. The blues cover, 'Bring It On Home', confirms my intuition that blues was something Brock simply did a lot of in the early days, and hence was comfortable with. The alternate vesion of 'Hurry On Sundown' is a trifle superfluous and 'Kiss Of The Velvet Whip' is again a distinct song, but still underdeveloped. The cover of Pink Floyd's 'Cymbaline' is worth having though - it doesn't totally ape the original, and is the sort of cover that seems very fitting, like if The Cure re-did a Joy Division song.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: A so-so collection of paleolithic jams. Hawkwind at this point sound more like psychedelic stragglers than space rock pioneers. Still, a nice, organic album that works well as surrounding atmosphere. Get it after you've got all the classic Lemmy-era stuff and the two or three post-Lemmy essentials.

PS: Don't despair, there are non-Hawkwind reviews coming up!

2007-02-23T12:21:00.000+05:30

Hawkwind: 'Quark, Strangeness & Charm'
1977

Rating: 8/B

No more chugging Lemmy bass, no more astral Nik Turner synth and sax ... and somehow, Hawkwind deliver a pretty strong, consistent and enjoyable album for the second time after their classic line-up was decimated. I suppose a great deal of this is owed to the strong presence of Rob Calvert, back in the band, and seemingly together if not sane for the moment. He brings a quirky, enlivening sense of humour to his strongly SF-influenced lyrics ('Spirit Of The Age' is sung from the viewpoint of one of several clones manning a deep-space voyage, I think, and boasts lyrics like 'Your android replica is playing up again, it's no joke, when she comes, she moans another's name') and his singing accent has a charming directness and down-to-earth humour to it. I almost typed that it's a Brit accent, but I seem to recall that he was from South Africa. Nik Turner's trademark swirls (and peculiar sax work) are gone and we're left with Simon House's more wide-ranging and state-of-the-art beeps and swashes - I miss that classic phasey sound, but what you have here is old-school hard rock dressed up with spacey lasers, so it's still the same Hawkwind formula, evolving and mutating a bit.

Like any Hawkwind album not everything is equally strong, but the signal-to-noise ratio is starkly less than on some albums simply because there are no dispensible spoken-word interludes. The album is cleverly front-loaded. starting with the more uptempo and catchy 'Spirit Of The Age' and 'Damnation Alley' (inspired by the Zelazny story, of course), followed by another Hawkwind Special astral ballad, 'Fable Of A Failed Race'. I think Brock takes the mike back for this one. The title track is a real winner - it strips away the cosmic debris to deliver a bouncy, hooky little tune which anticipates the casual ebullience of 90s Brit Pop, or ever more recent bands like Art Brut. The lyrics do rather underestimate Albert Einstein's love life, though. 'Hassan I Sabha' is all Arabic-snakecharmer melodies and a neat bass groove (new bassist Adrian Shaw isn't Lemmy, but he's alright). What's it about? I love Michael Moorcock's comment about this song: 'I thought Bob Calvert introduced it into the repertoire. Maybe not. There was a lot of romantic stuff about assassins and hashish, of course, at the time, which frankly I thought was plain silly. But then in certain ways I never did make a perfect hippy.'. It's a great song though, corny and catchy and quirky, which is what we want from Hawkwind. Simon House's instrumental 'The Forge Of Vulcan' has those Floydian bleeps and thrums and anvil sound-effects, but it's little more than generalised spacey atmospherics, without a distinct melody or hook. 'Days Of The Underground' has a chugging Brock riff, and looks back at Hawkwind's long, strange trip and raises the energy a bit, although the vocal delivery on this song actually gets a little tiresome. Simon King's intrumental, 'The Iron Dream' (presumably named after the Norman Spinrad novel, which, incidentally, purports to be an SF novel by a disillusioned German ex-soldier who moves to the US some years after the first world war, and is called Adolf Hitler) is brief, but ends things well. How come Hawkwind drummers write good enough instrumentals that aren't drum solos?

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Some of the atmosphere is gone, but Calvert turns in an engaging, witty vocal and lyrical turn, making this a very accesible and fun Hawkwind album. The usual amount of so-so material, but some neat moments too. Just don't take it all seriously.

2007-02-21T15:45:00.000+05:30

Hawkwind - 'Warrior On The Edge Of Time'
1975

Rating - 8/B

This is a dicey album, really, for all that I rather like it. Hawkwind were a bit of a community deal, with assorted friends and hangers-on being allowed to contribute poetry, dance routines and suchlike to their stage act. That's the principle on which fantasy writer Michael Moorcock (one of my personal favourite writers), who shared similar creative and recreational interests with the members of Hawkwind became involved in shaping concepts with the band and writing poetic interludes for either himself or a handy Hawk, usually Rob Calvert, to declaim. There are three such interludes on this album, two of which are actually recited by Moorcock himself. These echo-drenched spoken-word pieces with background musical gestures probably contribute conceptually to what appears to be an album loosely structured around Moorcock's Eternal Champion, but are among the most drastic self-imposed barriers to the appreciation of an otherwise fine set of songs I've encountered since King Diamond chose to sing on every album he's ever made. Oh, I crack me up. These interludes might well have been very cool live, with swirling lights, the amazonian Stacia twirling around garbed in nothing but body paint, the smell of spliff rising through the air and a blotter melting slowly in your mouth, but they break up the musical flow of the album in a distinctly jarring fashion.

Once you either accept and learn to live with this, or to program your CD player to skip these tracks, what we have is one of the strongest studio efforts from the classic Hawkwind era. The album opener,'Assault & Battery' hits hard with a typically monolithic Dave Brock riff, ushered in and underpinned by a great Lemmy bassline, layered with spacey keyboard swirls and topped with an instantly anthemic refrain. 'The Golden Void' follows through commendably, first taking us soaring through astral realms with sax peeps from Nik Turner and cosmic keys by Simon House, and then settling onto a crunching, heavy riff around which swirl whisps of psychedelic sound. And then - oof - Moorcock recites a piece called 'The Wizard Blew His Horn' while the band makes a few dramatic noises behind him. It's a bit of a googly, but we're quickly reassured by the steady pulse of Lemmy's bass ushering in the intrumental, 'Opa-Loka' (written, oddly, by the two drummers, Simon King and Alan Powell). Seagull squalls frame the introspective, acoustic musings of Brock's 'The Demented Man', one of the most gorgeous songs in the Hawkwind canon. 'Magnu' brings the bombast back with its epic length and pleas to some sort of magical steed, and another striaghtforward, chugging Brock riff, emebellished with vaguely eastern keyboard noodles. Then it's poetry time again with 'Standing On The Edge', another Moorcock incursion, another matter of taste (or lack thereof). Keyboardist Simon House quickly restores things with his intrumental composition, 'Spiral Galaxy 28948', a soaring, trippy track that positively oozes LSD-fuelled starbound vibes. The proceedings are somewhat compromised by another poetic bit and Nik Turner's song, 'Dying Seas' which seems to lack in focus or a central hook or riff. But the closing song on the original album, 'Kings Of Speed' makes for a strong ending. It's a very normal hard-rocking beast, at heart, but is treated with Moorcock lyrics - thankfully sung by Brock - and those ever-churning keyboard layers. The CD release extra track is a little ditty called 'Motorhead' - yes, the same tune and name carried over by Lemmy for his new band when he was fired from the band soon after. It's fun to hear that slab of primal heavy metal with added violin and flute. Flute! Hah!! That crazy Nik Turner! Hawkwind were never musical virtuosos, but when confronted with a good riff and a strong hook, they could always be counted on to work it to perfection, and layer it with all the outer-space charm you'd want.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Eiderdown: A pretty essential studio offering from what may well have been Hawkwind's strongest and most creative line-up. The spoken-word bits are a very questionable addition to the cosmic experience, but you mustn't let them bias you against either Michael Moorcock or this album, which is why I'm more or less ignoring them and increasing my rating from an initial 7.

2007-02-21T12:35:00.000+05:30

The Firm - 'The Firm'
1985

Rating: 5/C

Do you like Paul Rodgers? I mean, not just occasionally enjoy a song by early Bad Company or Free that includes his vocals, but out-and-out fannishly love him, think he's one of the great rock singers and swear by his voice and style? If you do, you'd best sit this review out. Really. We just won't ever see eye to eye on this, save yourself the aggravation.

OK, here goes. 1985. The charts are dominated by white-boy soul, synth-pop and AOR. So naturally, when rock legendinosaurs Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers put together an honest-to-goodness new band to reconquer the rockin' world and dominate untold score of groupies the world over all over again and generally show a generation of wimpy kids who could never be as cool as the 70s how it's done, they choose to do so by emloying the inscrutable method of releasing an album that employed elements of white-boy soul, synthpop and AOR. All homogenised via middle-of-the-road commercial rock, of course.

Paul Rodgers, the most non-testicular (aside from a few early Free singles), cheaply catchy and unimaginative singer in rock this side of Lou Gramm weighs in with his usual thin, catchy tenoristic stylings and inane lyrics, penning great songs for the low-brow like 'Together', a country ode that states that 'a man needs a woman to share this wonderland together', or Make Or Break' an alleged rocker with a good guitar tone but a woefully penurous riff and lyrics that go 'baby, you got to make your mind up, or you and I are going to wind up out of love and in confusion, doin' time for love's illusion'. Huh what? Deep, man. And so original. Or the touching revelations of 'Money Can't Buy' - 'Now I buy you diamonds and pearls from the orient, now I live in a penthouse suite and I don't owe no nobody a cent - money can't buy me the love that I used to know'. Aww, man. He's a fat, rich rockstar but he can't get no true lovin'! That's so universal and heart-rending!!!

Not that the co-comps with Page are much better. Everything on this album seems to lack distinctive riffs or motiffs, which are supposed to be Page's strong suite. Even when there are ideas, the parsimonious playing and weak production makes Page play the role of general provider of generic rock-guitar backing (which would work better if Rodgers had a more arresting voice and lyrical muse) and lead breaks (which would work better if lead playing were actually what Page was strongest at). Even the epic 'Midnight Moonlight', supposedly a Zep leftover, is ruined by weak arrangements, overwrought backup vocals and Rodgers' lack of imagination (who's been listening to Hendrix' 'Angel'?)or real power. The cover of 'You've Lost That Loving Feeling' isn't as bad as you might imagine - instead, amazingly, it is ten times worse! The only real spot of overachieving on this album.

The only half-decent song is 'Radioactive', which has a kinda-neat chromatic lick Rodgers copped from a jazz exercise someone showed him. Everything around that lick is moderate-rock crap, though, which may be why that lick seems like such a breath of fresh air.

To make matters worse, they have this bloke who would probably really wow me if he was doing his fretless swoopy-trebly basslines on a Weather Report album or something, but just sounds like a Gacy clown interposed into Rembrandt's Nightwatch here. Not that this album is a masterpiece like a Rembrandt painting - I get a bit wanky and reach for clever ways to say things like 'incongruous' at times.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Conclusion: If you thought Coverdale/Page was stale (and I'd disagree with you if you did), this is a continent-girding coral reef of fungal eruptions spawned from a slice of toast discarded in the Hadean Eon! Distressingly generic 80s rock claptrap, devoid of soul, verve, taste or fire. I'm sorry I had to hear it a minimum of four times so that I could write a review in good conscience, and save you the ordeal. Now I must go weep.

2007-02-20T08:50:00.000+05:30

Agents Of Oblivion
2000

Rating - 9/A

As requested by Ravi...

Acid Bath were one of the best 90s bands you never heard. These Louisiana rockers easily matched the darkness and sludge of Alice In Chains and Soundgarden, as also older bands like Corrosion Of Conformity and had an absolutely iconic lead singer in the form of Dax Riggs. Blending hardcore death-influenced metal, stoner sludge, psychedelia, acoustica and a very, very dark and disturbed lyrical content, delivered in an alternately snarly, growling or soaring and emotion charged, but always anthemic voice, they could have ruled the damn world. But then bassist Audie Petrie died, and the band folded, leaving behind two albums that are among the most treasured atrifacts in some of my luckier friends' colections.

Agents Of Oblivion was the next effort by vocalist Dax Riggs and Mike Sanchez, one of two guitarists from Acid Bath. They were joined, interestingly, by Petrie's brother, Chuck, who adds a more atmospheric and melodic touch to the music. Acid Bath always had its slower moments, moments where a post-apocalyptic depression and elegiac sorrow overcame the fierce, shamanic morbidity of their heavier material without compromising the darkness and intensity of the mood - songs like 'New Death Sensation', 'Bones Of Baby Dolls' or 'Dead Girl'. This album follows more in that mid-tempo oriented, acoustic-based or embellished vein.

So it's interesting that one of the tracks here is an electric version of 'Dead Girl', a song that, in its original form, served as a haunting, acoustic finale to Paegan Terrorism Tactics, Acid Bath's second and final album. Sludgy riffing and a full rhythm section (Jeff McCarty and Alex Bergeron, to complete the roll-call) replace the acoustics of the original seamlessly, while the vocals sound identical to the original. It's brilliant - I can listen to a different version of that awesome song now depending on whether I'm in a heavy or a lighter mood! 'A Song That Crawls' is acoustic and piano based, but it isn't a step down in complexity or ambition with its odd time signatures. 'The Hangman's Daugher', 'Wither' and 'Cosmic Dancer' are all killer tracks that resonate with acoustic guitars and funereal elegance. But it's not all soft stuff - 'Slave Riot' and 'Ash Of The Mind' are faster, more heavy tracks, while the world-ending opener, 'Endsmouth', 'Phantom Green' (with its weird spoken-word outro reminding me of similar excursions by Acid Bath, as does the alarmingly profane kid ranting about god-damn rabbits at the end of 'Big Black Backwards', followed by a strange melodic section), 'Anthem (For This Haunted City)'and 'Ladybug' are all marked by sludgy, heavy guitars and hypnotic mid-tempos.

The Eiderdown Stuffing Bottomline: There's actually no point name-checking songs here. Frankly, it's all very good, with no filler at all. The sheer preponderance of mid-tempo sludge can have a cumulative downer effect on you, but that would actually be quite a fitting outcome, and you're probably going to be running a lot of these riffs, melodies and vocal lines in your head as you sit in your grey study. A less hardcore, but no less intense and diverse continuation of the Acid Bath style. It's a shame this band only lasted for one album. Guess they danced themselves into the tomb...

2007-02-15T11:50:00.000+05:30

Jeff Beck - 'Blow By Blow'
1975

Rating: 9/A

This album's a real grower, but you've got to have an intrinsic interest in virtuoso guitar soloing and a liking or at least tolerance for groove-based fusion and cheesy synth sounds to really get into it.

Having got those caveats out of the way, I have to say that I really love this album. It's Jeff Beck's first all-instrumental venture (with one or two very minor qualifications), and it pretty much set the pace for the rest of his career. Given some of the triter blues-rock material ventured by the second Jeff Beck Group or the Beck/Bogert/Appice combo, the instrumental route is probably the best fit for Beck. He's not that great a songwriter, and doesn't seem to retain collaborators long enough to build solid songwriting partnerships, but he is a very, very good guitarist and a true musician, more so than a handy provider of riffs-and-solos for a hitmaking rock combo. He's just too independant for that role. Also, as far as I know, this is one of the earliest all-instrumental albums to issued by a rock artist aside from those Shadows albums, and it certainly blazed a trail that several guitar heroes of varying degrees of actual interest have followed.

For a soloist-orented intrumental album to succeed and be more than wankery, at least one of several factors have to be present - compositional strength, musical originality and a solid backing team. All of that present here, or carefully compensated for. Never the most prolific composer, Beck does contribute a fair share to the group compositions here, puts down one solely-composed track and offers well chosen covers of The Beatles and Stevie Wonder to fill things out. The music's certainly pioneering enough in its own way - one of the earliest fusion records to be essayed from the rock side of the tracks, and one in which there are serious doses of funk and a touch of disco in addition to the jammy, free-form jazz influence. Actually, I think of this album as nearly being all-out funk, because funk is just jazz played much faster and more excitedly, with more emphasis on groove. Check, check, check and check. From that perspective the backing band is a mixed bag. The drummer Richard Bailey is a mighty solid groover, and keyboardist Max Middleton holds down the structures and backing tracks for Beck to perform his explorations over, even if his keyboard patches can sound a little dated and tinny at times. His solo breaks are always tasteful and deft as well, without stealing the limelight. Bassist Phil Chenn isn't bad at all, but I think he lets the side down a bit by playing a purely supportive and restrained role. Still, no one listens to albums by guitar legends to critique their bassists' skills, so enough of that. The rhythm section succeeds in laying down some pretty sleek grooves which give Beck enough rhythm to ride on, but also enough space to fly in to essay what appears to be an awkward phrasing, and that's what counts.

Beck's reggaefied cover of The Beatles' 'She's A Woman' gives him the chance to play some soulful, sometimes blues-tinged lines. It's also got a small talk box interlude with someone mouthing the main lyrics to the song, hence the not-entirely-instrumental tag. It's a novelty moment to be sure, but the playing on the song is strong enough to make it only minorly amusing. Stevie Wonder's 'Cause We've Ended as Lovers' gives Beck another chance to smoulder in ballad mode. I love the phrasing on this song - Beck does convey that ballady melody well enough, but he always eschews the cheesy power-ballad tricks, making note choices and phrasing decisions that elevate the tune to a completely different level from the populist lighters-out statement it could have been in a lesser musician's hands. His self-composition 'Constipated Duck' takes a syncopated and oddly gawky groove/riff and lays great flaming gouts of guitar glory all over it. 'You Know What I Mean' is another great funky, nearly disco, workout. 'Freeway Jam' taps into Beck's bluesy roots, and the album closer, an epic jam called 'Diamond Dust' even lets producer George '5th Moptop' Martin flex his orchestral muscle a bit, which he also does on the multilayered fusion workout, 'Scatterbrain'.

Some of the jams don't have a really distinctive hook, but there's always something intriguing and cool happening, either a really good groove, some tight ensemble playing or - most important - some breathtaking fretwork by Beck. Beck really delivers the goods here, playing fast, slow, bluesy, jazzy, tender, ferocious, excited, laid-back and whatnot, displaying the level of proficiency and inventiveness on his instrument of choice that shows you why that annoying phrase 'guitar hero' was actually invented.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Funky, jazzy, groovy guitariffic glory. The accent is on grooviness, but the slower bits are great too, and the reggaefication of The Beatles adds to the sense of variety. Even the more generic jams are illuminated by the presence of Jeff Beck playing at the peak of his powers. Good groovin', good playin' - who needs Rod Stewart?

2007-02-15T09:51:00.000+05:30

Jeff Martin - Exile And The Kingdom
2006

Rating - 6/C

I was a huge fan of Jeff Martin's erstwhile band, The Tea Party. Their first three albums (4, if you count the independant label debut) were among the most unusual and exciting things to come out in the 90s - a private genre composed of equal parts classic rock swagger, 80s new wave/goth romanticism and darkness, and eastern musical influences and instruments. Their 3rd major label album, Transmission added trendy electronic/industrial elements to this mix, but did so in a manner that conveyed musical growth and experimentation, even if some of the songwriting on the album was only passable. Since then, they rapidly fell off their pedestal, releasing perfectly amiable but stale albums that employed modern rock radio-friendly arrangements and hooks in a bid at replicating their first crossover hit, 'Heaven's Coming Down', and trotted out eastern touches and progressive flourishes in what increasingly seemed like sheepish sops to long-term fans.

Now The Tea Party have folded, victims of personality conflicts, and mainman Jeff Martin has a solo album out that he claimed would tap into the original Tea Party vibe, the vibe that made albums like Splendor Solis and The Edges Of Twilight so alluring and exciting.

He shouldn't have raised the bar so high.

Exile And The Kingdom plays a lot like a latter-day Tea Party album, only more acoustic and freed from the constituency-appeasing touches of the band's last few albums. Everything's just more stripped-down, largely acoustic and supposedly more intimate.

'Daystar' and 'Stay Inside Of Me' are trademark Jeff Martin romantic anthems (the later having a really egregious bit where Martin goes 'oh woo-woo-woo' in an uncharecteristic and cheesy falsetto), while 'The Kingdom' is the patented tortured-sensitive-soul schtick, only more ebullient and positive in tone, which isn't necessarily a plus. The gospelish backing chorus vocals give the song an excessive sheen and smoothness.'Black Snake Blues' tries to recultivate his earlier blues interests, but, while it isn't a '3 cent New Orleans blues song' as my friend Prem would probably put it, it comes across as rather studied and contrived, trying too hard. 'Lament' has some of the heaviness missing elsewhere, and is a decent enough song, if not especially fresh or memorable. The other heavyish song here, 'World Is Calling', supposedly a jibe at GW Bush is harder-edged, but it seems a trifle over-obvious. It's got some nice riffs though, the heaviest on the whole album. 'Good Times Song' is actually a bit of a breath of fresh air - a lively, folksy tune that is fairly different in tone from Martin's previous work, but it's also kinda minor. As is this whole album, really.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Jeff Martin hasn't forever betrayed himself with this album - it sticks close to the Tea Party blueprint, and the songwriting and performances here are all of a uniform level of healthy competence. But that's it- not only is there no fresh ground being charted, the lyrical content is positively stale when it's not cloyingly positive and the songs all sound like poor cousins of better, earlier material. It isn't self-derivative in the literal sense of ripping off past compositions, but it's nothing new or exciting, just music that must have occured to Martin very comfortably and easily. If you like The Tea Party, as I do, this will either be a pleasant but forgettable addition to your collection, or one more nail in the coffin. I leave the decision to you, and promise not to call you a fool either way. Really.

2007-02-13T16:25:00.000+05:30

Silverchair - Neon Ballroom

1999

Rating - 8/B

(Because Prem asked...)

Let's see now, Silverchair...they were that novelty act from Australia, right? Back in the 90s? Those children who dressed like they were from Seattle and played exactly like Nirvana and/or Pearl Jam?

Er, yea, okay.

If you ask me, Silverchair started showing a broader songwriting imagination than derivative riff-based grunge rock on their second album, Freakshow. But it's on Neon Ballroom where their growing artistry and songcraft (well, Daniel Johns' anyway) really really explode all over the place. And it isn't just the orchestral arrangements either - stripped down to their essense, songs like the grunge-band-with-piano-and-strings epic 'Emotion Sickness', 'Ana's Song (Open Fire)' and 'Dearest Helpless' (which isn't much embellished in any case) are very good songs, with good melodies and hooks and different parts interestingly and intelligently structured and ordered.

Having said that, the orchestration really lifts this album. Those strings and pianos on 'Miss You Love' take a vaguely REM-ish tune and move it into another dimension altogether, for instance. But Daniel Johns' middle-eight on a lightly fuzzed guitar and the increasing use of distorion and feedback at intervals in the second half of the song add as much to the dynamics as the orchestration. Point Of View is another really good song with a great vocal performance, where the orchestration only augments an already well developed song structure.

Not everything is quite as stellar. 'Do You Feel The Same' is a saccharine pop-rock song that goes nowhere, 'Black Tangled Heart' is a bit overwrought to be really gripping (and relies excessively on orchestral lushness as opposed to a well thought-out musical framework underlying the embellishment) and 'Spawn Again', a perfectly good screaming riff-grunge workout, feels too at odds with everything else - it was written earlier for a movie soundtrack, as a matter of fact, and rejigging it for this album wasn't really needed. 'Anthem For The Year 2000' of course became dated a year after the album was released, and is musically too simplistic, being built around a very basic riff that basically goes on forever, mutating a little into a barebones version for the verse and layered with odd noises that can't conceal the very primitive musical idea at play here. It's a pity they had to put in these songs, as if compelled to fulfill some rock-out quota, especially considering that 'Dearest Helpless' and 'Satin Sheets' get pretty rocking in that appropriately grungy manner without ruining the flow of the album or belying the band's development. The album closer, 'Steam Will Rise', reconciles the two sides of this album' sound excellently, too, building to a truly climactic end.

Neon Ballroom sees the Chairs' early promise actually delivering - though I wonder whether anyone involved in their early success expected their big leap forward artistically to be in this direction. The next album, Diorama, expanded on the orchestral aspect, but was a bit wieghed down with bland moderate-modern-rock songwriting in many places - the price of maturity? They've been on an extended hiatus since, but have a new album slated for release this year (2007). If it lives up to the level of songcrafting ability on this album, it just might be a surprise hit of the year, even if the whole concept of a grunge-inspired band seems irrelevant in today's indie/garage-retro rock climate.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Think of this as a dark horse album, then. Grungestruck kids evolve into a pretty decent modern rock band with some neat songwriting chops and a gorgeous orchestral backing. Not all the material matches the ambition and evolution on display, but at least half of this album stands as one of the better moments in the dismal world of second-generation grunge. Possibly the finest moment of that regrettable phase, really, when you consider the competition consists of trash like Creed and Godsmack. Pity the vocals are just a bit too whiney at times, but this is grunge, after all.

2007-02-13T11:05:00.000+05:30

John Lee Hooker - 'Specialty Profiles'2006 (recordings made in 1954)

Rating: 9/A

For years now I've been telling people that my favourite bluesman is the late John Lee Hooker. That deep, insouciant voice, those one-chord blues jams - that's the high point of the whole genre, for me. A few days back, however, I realised that all I know of Hooker's work are his 70s collaboration with Canned Heat and those slick 90s albums with all the guest artists (some of whom really cook up a storm with The Hook - Van Morrison and surprisingly Bonnie Raitt, and some of whom, especially Santana, seem to simply impose their sound around Hooker's). Of course, I'm just showing my age - the string of albums released in the wake of 1989's come-back hit, The Healer, are how anyone of my generation would have discovered this blues legend, and I think they stand as pretty good albums on their own. The round of guest artists don't always work evenly well, and sometimes Hooker's sound seems to get lost in all the slick production and arrangement, but there are still moments on each album where everything is stripped down to just Hooker's voice and guitar, maybe backed up by one more guitarist, and those moments are pure magic.

So I figured it was time to stop being such a poseur and check out some of his early work, already.

What came to hand was the above-pictured CD. Hooker looked the youngest on this CD cover, and the notes on the back mentioned the year 1954, so I figured I might as well begin here. I might in future discover better early recordings of Hooker (there's quite a lot of early material to be had actually, some of it from the legendary Chess label if I recall correctly), but as of now I'm quite happy what I hear, here.

It's mostly very stripped-down stuff, just Hooker, his guitar, and a good pair of shoes with which to stomp on the floor. Some of the songs ('I'm Mad', 'Everybody's Blues', 'No More Doggin'')pit Hooker's songs against generic drum, bass and piano/sax band arrangements, and, as I'd suspected, it's the solo tracks that really shine.

'Boogie Chillin' No. 2' is a raw, almost primal take on Hooker's first big hit. You'd never think someone could get so much dynamism out of a main riff which consists of banging on a single chord on a box guitar, but there you go. And it isn't as simple as just one chord, really - there are moving-finger embellishments, a percussive attack and rhythmic breaks - blues at such a stripped-down, basic level. The fact that it still works - and brilliantly - confirms my esteem for Hooker.

The other songs aren't so much slack either - 'Burnin' Hell' has some effective harmonica work, a far better accompaniment than the full-fledged band, 'I'm Mad' has some seriously biting and pissed-off vocals, even if the tinkly piano is a bit incongruous. 'I Need Lovin'' pulses with unfulfiled yearning, 'Huckle Up Baby' gets upbeat in a very cool, endearing manner, you can imagine the dance floor frenzy in the juke joints when 'Grinder Man' was played (nad the only percussion on that track is Hooker's shoes, again!) and 'Nothin' But Trouble', where he dispenses domestic advice and 'Odds Against Me' (an alternative title for 'Backbiters and Syndicators', another perennial Hook track) seethe with paranoia and I've-been-done-wrong vibes. He even whistles a bit on 'Goin' Down Highway'!

Hooker never tethered himself to one flavour of the blues, playing both citified urban blues and acoustic folk blues as the trends demanded, and he seems to have brought the same feel and hypnotic quality to everything he took on. I'm glad I took a chance on this recording - I was afraid it would simply be a curiosity and nothing more, like a Leadbelly collection I have, but instead it's a very listenable album of raw acoustic blues with a mood and compulsion of its own. The vibes are different from the more warm, integral and remniscent moods on his later albums - things are rawer, hornier and angrier here, this is the young, hungry Hooker, not the seasoned, gracious living-legend of later years.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Stripped down blues by one the genre's most charismatic performers. Hooker's musical approach hasn't really changed over the years - it's just the accompanying equipment and collaborators that have moved with the times, so if you like anything from any Hooker era, there's no reason you won't like this, too. This is a very raw and basic interation of his style, and the primitivity is a great part of the appeal, so if you're more into electric blues with virtuoso guitar leads or not much into generic blues at all, avoid. You fool!

2007-02-09T14:26:00.000+05:30

Smashing Pumpkins - 'Gish'
1991

Rating - 7/B

OK, let me get this out of the way right at the beginning - I can't listen to the song 'Crush' on this album without cringing. It has this recurring bass lick on it that sounds like a bloody scale exercise. It's not that different from the guitar melody it usually accompanies, but at least on the guitar there's watery flange/chorus effects and non-obvious phrasing touches to dress it up - every damn time D'Arcy plays that damn bass line (some one million times in the song) it reminds me of someone doing scale practise on the bass guitar and makes the whole song sound retarded. Sorry.

Apart from that, the Smashing Pumpkin's first album is a rather good debut. Released just before the big alt/grunge jamboree took off, it's a good collection of artsy, quirky but still hard-rocking songs. Billy Corgan's voice is already distinctive, but isn't quite as all-out debatable as it would later become, so if that's your big qualm with the band, this album may be your best Smashing Pumpkins gateway drug.

The music here is mostly bombastic, if idiosyncratic rock, with big riffs and strident single-note melodies, but also goes soft and tenderly melodic when it needs to. The album openers, 'I Am One' and 'Siva' stomp and strut with great big groovy riffs that could have been re-jigged a bit and fit smoothly onto an 80s hard rock album. 'Rhinoceros' and 'Suffer' among others tap into a more mellow, dreamy sound, but the sheer guitar presence never drops out. The Smashing Pumpkins always struck me as guitar rock, 90s style, above and beyond any transitory generic labels affixed to them at the time, and this album certainly supports my theory. Their penultimate album, Adore, sort of demolishes my theory, but it also sort of demolished their career.

Billy Corgan is clearly the man in charge here, but that druggie drummer of theirs, Jimmy Chamberlin, clearly demonstrates why he was considered one of the hottest drumifying people of the alternative era. He's way more powerful and dexterous than the ridiculously overrated Dave Grohl, that's for sure.

Lyrically, the album seems to be about whatever most Smashing Pumpkins albums seem to be about, which is largely random romantic sentiments and the contents of Billy Corgan's psyche at the moment. I never listened to these guys for the lyrics,can you tell?

My only real complaints about this album? Aside from that damn bass line on 'Crush', there's also the issue of a very sappy song sung by D'Arcy right at the end of this whole affair, which rather negates the concepts of ending on a strong note. Were they trying to be like Pixies or something with the girl bassist singing too? Was that the plan, Mr. Corgan Man? Oh, one last complaint. Although most of the songs are of a very even quality, apart from a handful of songs, mostly in the first half of the album, they don't really stand out as individual tracks. Still, can't blame a band for frontloading that all-important debut album.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Smashing Pumpkins really broke through creatively on their next two albums, but this is a strong enough beginning to their rather rapid rise-and-fall story. Guitar-heavy alternative rock, the way it sounded just before it took over the world. For a while.

2007-02-05T12:26:00.000+05:30

David Gilmour - 'On An Island'
2006

Rating - 6/C

This is probably all for the best. On the last two Pink Floyd albums (with any luck, the last ever), Gilmour came across as a little desperate. A good singer and guitar player, but not the most creative or brilliant songwriter around, he now had to take on the lion's share of writing and composing albums to be released under the name of one of the most legendarily pompous, meaningful and exploratory bands. To be fair, he chose this path - hence that legendary law suit where he, Wright and Mason won the rights to the Floyd name. In any case, Gilmour was only intermittently up to the task, often sounding like he was unconsciously parodying his own band on Momentary Lapse Of Reason, and calling in an army of song-doctors to make Division Bell more unified and musically even, if rather tending to buckle under its own weight.

It was an uncomfortable act, and one that not only took some of the shine off the Floyd legacy but also obscured Gilmour's real talents in favour of turning out Dark Side-derived arena-oriented product. These real talents, in my considered and very valuable opinion are:

-He plays the guitar pretty well and has a good ear for creating pleasing musical arrangements in general

-He's got a very good singing voice

-He's a real pro who is able to ensure a high degree of musical class and studio polish on whatever he does

All of which are sterling virtues, but weren't the values on which Pink Floyd were built. It's a lot better for everyone concerned that Floyd appears to be on permanent hiatus and Gilmour can make his music without having to try very hard to make it sound like PF product.

Having said that, this album isn't a huge diversion from the Floyd sound - it's just more stripped-down and varied, with most of the songs going for a sort of personal, mellow vibe rather than sifting through the remains of Waters' megalomania and neuroses (the Barrett vibe is of course long gone). 'This Heaven' and 'Smile' are probably the two least Floydian tracks here. The former is an engaging shuffle with jaunty acoustic lines and Gilmour in fine voice singing about his perfect little secular heaven on earth (the man's a celeb atheist, of course, remember the Douglas Adams connection). 'Smile' weaves acoustic and slide guitars to create a pretty little pop tune that's romantic in the essentially domestic and cozy vein that dominates much of this album.

The opening intro, 'Castellorizon', tries to channel some of that psych-pomp, meandering around in a sound collage haze until, with a minute to go, Gilmour launches into one of his trademark arena-ready solos. It's followed by 'On An Island', which uses Floydian approaches but is basically a warm, nostalgic and comfortable sort of song. Messieurs David Crosby and Graham Nash provide harmonies here, but are somewhat overwhelmed by the huge production. 'Take A Breath' tries for an edgier sound, with slightly uneasy chords, but it sounds like an outtake from Momentary Lapse Of Reason, not the happiest association to conjure up. There's more arena-oriented guitar heroics as well, but Gilmour has never been very convincing when he tries to just rock out. Those trademark solos can be a bit of a liability as well because they often simply conjure up memories of some of the worst excesses of late-career Floyd, in studio and live. Still, he never hits a bum note.

There's a couple of instrumentals too. Neither is a tour de force. 'Red Sky At Night' shows that Gilmour has been taking sax lessons, but it isn't all that compelling, more of a vanity piece if you ask me. 'Then I Close My Eyes' on the other hand is fresh and pretty with banjos and things being used.

Before long though, that mellow, lush and easy-going feel starts to dwindle into boredom. 'Pocketful Of Stones' moves between very ballady piano-dominated verses and all manner of orchestration, but by this point I for one felt too sedated to really stand up and notice. An earlier track on the album, 'The Blue' also tends to drift away in a similar ambient haze. The album closer, 'Where We Begin', is more intimate, mid-tempo mellow melody and calmness.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Calmness. That's the keynote of this album. What we have here is the sound of a calm, content elderly gent crafting some mellow tunes with a few friends. The fact that he used to be a vital part of a legendary band shouldn't obscure the fact that is just a very personal, mellow, somewhat solipsistic album by a well-settled old guy. He sings beautifully, plays his guitar rather well, barely overstays his welcome and fails to really rock the boat. Play back-to-back with Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music for full effect.

2007-02-05T09:01:00.000+05:30

Paul Simon - 'Surprise'
2006

Rating: 8/B

What's this, Paul Simon sings and plays and Brian Eno provides 'sonic landscapes'? Oo er. Unsure what to expect, I ripped the plastic shrink-wrap off my brand new copy of 'Surprise', slid it into my CD player, pressed play and...

...was assaulted by the sounds of a distorted guitar banging out the opening chords to the album's first song, 'How Can You Live In The Northwest'. Oh boy, I thought to myself, utterly bemused, Eno's turned Simon into Townshend! Well, no, not really, at all. Despite the distortion imposed on Simon's guitars on this song, he's still playing the crystalline, lightly melodic poppy guitar lines, previously seen in excellent juxtaposition against the groovy inputs of South African and South American musicians on his late-80s world music-type albums, and now ensconced in electronic guru and producer of immense repute Brian Eno's layers of effects, loops, programs and whatnot.

This does lead to some completely new textures - the distortion on the opening track, the lo-fi funk of 'Outrageous'(where Simon himself is unusually sardonic), a song co-written by Simon and Eno and the free-form excursions of 'Everything About It Is A Love Song' and so on. Perhaps it's Eno's presence, too, that has freed Simon to work with unusual, non-traditional song structures. Other songs are less unexpected - 'Beautiful' is fairly standard, apart from the falsetto in which Simon sings the title, conjuring uncomfortable memories of fairly-recent hits by wimpy guys with nasal voices.

This isn't path-breaking stuff - electronica has been a well established gimmick for classic artists to experiment with for a while now. Everyone's done it - Bowie with typical chameleon-like precision, Jagger with predictably pretentiousness and distaste (on that rather worthless Goddess In The Doorway solo album). Paul Simon isn't staking a claim as a fearless trailblazer here - rather, he's doing something that has worked well for him before, reinvigorating his music with the addition of seemingly alien elements. It's to his credit that he is able to pull off a worthy album in the process, one that doesn't stick out as a bandwagonesque deviation on his musical path or a simple layering of electronic blips and bleeps in order to sound current.

What does let this album down a bit is the shortage of memorable melodies or really cohesive songs. Many of the aforementioned songs tend to meander about through a variety of moods, which a brave and good thing to do, but at times the cumulative impact is just a little too hard to pin down. The lyrics are the same - they touch upon what my friend Ravi characterises as the usual old-guy rocker issues of the moment - 9/11, identity, faith and so forth, but in an often confoundingly equivocative way. 'Beautiful', for instance, seems to be about the joys of adopting babies from thrid-world countries, but its hard to tell precisely what point Simon is making here, pro or con. You can chalk it up to subtlety, which is good, but sometimes it all seems a bit too vague. I need some of that clarity now! Still, I won't rate the odd strcutures and opaque (or at least translucent) lyrics as real minuses - mostly, they help create an album that doesn't just shoot its load first time around, but delivers on repeated listens.

Some of the best songwriting on this album checks in fairly late with 'Another Galaxy' and the wonderful 'Once Upon A Time There Was An Ocean'. On the very last song, Simon chucks Eno out and strikes up a straightforward ode to his love for his daughter, 'Father And Daughter', a song which will either seem maudlin or sweet to you.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: In the end, Surprise is slightly more laudable than memorable. It is never unlistenable however, and the more Eno-ised and freeform songs do grow on you, so it's worth giving it some time to sink in. Simon fans will not find an unrecognisably mutated artist here, but you won't be disappointed if you're interested in hearing a classic artist exploring new territory with taste and intelligence.

2007-01-31T14:20:00.001+05:30

Coverdale/Page
1993

Rating - 7/B

This poor little album gets no respect at all. The major argument made against it is the presence of David Coverdale. I'm not a particular fan of Coverdale's work either, he has a good, powerful voice but little taste or subtlety in general. He broke Deep Purple (Ritchie and heroin helped). He's also responsible for some really corny (but fun) 80s hair metal, and that's an immediate black mark in the hipster score book. But really, especially if you happen to like Led Zeppelin, don't you automatically have a tolerance for often-obnoxious cock-rocking vocalists with a dubious lyrical ability? Or is it just that Percy's hair was naturally blond and Coverdale dyed? Of course, Plant does seem to have matured over the years, and this album sees Coverdale as the same old cartoony, overblown rock-star he always was, but then again his voice is in a lot better form than Plant's at the time and since. Sure, he imitates a lot of Plant's mannerisms, especialy the more annoying ones, but that is a criticism you can level at every single post-Zep hard rock singer, so drop it. What, was Page supposed to collaborate with Billy Corgan for a back-to-basics project?

I think the real complaint being levelled against this album is that there's no sops to the times here - no alternative or electronic elements, just big, bright production, the same old hard rocking themes and forms, in short, no new twists on the old formula. Well, hell. I'm all happy that Page and Plant did that whole east-meets-west gig on Unledded, that Page and Plant's studio album was a restrained and credibly old-guys-rocking-in-a-grown-up-way album and that Plant is singing about things other than his lemon these days, but was anything actually wrong with the formula crafted on those first 3 Led Zep albums? Anything intrinsically wrong, I mean, apart from the fact that it is a specific, limited formula and one that has been somewhat tarnished by excessive crappy imitators? If you think so, this really isn't the album for you. I fully appreciate that, and wouldn't try to shove it down anyone's throat who wasn't attuned to these particular sorts of basic rock n' roll values.

Okay, that's out of the way. Now let me point out one of the best things about this album: one Mister Jimmy Page. He honestly sounds more engaged and interesting than at any point since sometime around Physical Graffitti or Presence. He's not trying any ideas he didn't already try back then, but he's having so much fun. The hard bits groove and the soft bits soar, there's a lot of snotty, raunchy blues rock, a power ballad here and there and a few pretentious epicy things of varying interest. He layers a variety of guitars and generally sounds tight, happy and productive. Certainly a lot less tethered-down than on that po-faced Walking Into Clarksdale album with it's dry-as-dust production and 'we must act our age' imperatives.

Remmeber how Custard Pie on Physical Graffiti had that broken up, groovy thing where the same or a similar line is played at regular intervals, with solid gaps in between and a rock-solid drum beat underneath? Catchy as hell, wasn't it? well, it seems Jimmy Page thinks so, too. He recreates that Custard Pie stomp a lot here. On both the opening songs in fact. Shake My Tree starts with a slow passage where Coverdale moans and groans like a man drowning in whiskey, but then it takes off with the grooves. Waiting On You is the same, only this time the some of the refrains bring in the softer touch. The only real complaint is that Coverdale sounds really shrill and over-cocky at times. Take Me For A Little While is a picture-perfect power ballad, and even has a nice solo. Coverdale is great at these lower-register things and fortunately shows some taste and restraint for once. Pride And Joy takes a freakily catchy and groovy little acoustic thing and builds it into another latter-era cock rock classic. I spent days humming the verses from this one after I first heard it, and I don't really consider it tio have been time ill-spent.

After that, things do tend to settle into a much of a muchness. Feeling Hot is a disposable arena rocker with a truly despicable vocal -um - performance. Over Now has more power-balladish overtones. Plant kicks off Easy Does It With a great acoustic rhythm with gorgeous little touches overdubbed on various guitars, and then plunges into that Patented Kusstaerd Pye Stomp again. Okay, there's a complaint. Just a little much of that pie flying around here, what? Take a Look at Yourself sounds more Whitesnake than Zep, but that's not really a good thing. It's not a bad song though, just too ecstatic-lovey and string-drenched. At least one of the last three songs - Don't Leave Me This Way, Absolution Blues and Whisper A Prayer For The Dying - is better than the others, but I can't be sure which one. They're all so overlong and epickal they tend to blend into each other. A little more imagination and variety from the hired-gun rhythm players might have helped here, but whatever. Oh, Absolution Blues does have a great riff on it. Lots of these songs do. If Page had carried on with this sort of line-up and a regular schedule he may have emerged as the sort of evergreen riff-mongering perennial Tony Iommi has come to be thought of as. Then again, overproduction is rarely a good idea.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Yes, it's basically ersatz Zep, but one of the masqueraders is His Crowleyian Majestickness Jimmy Page, after all, and he sounds a lot more into it than he did or has in a long while. The songs subside into an amiable competence pretty soon, but there's nothing really despicable here apart from Feeling Hot and some of Coverdale's shriller croaking. The first 5 songs are nifty in their traditional hard-rocking/power ballading way and while the rest feels disposable, it isn't wretched.

2007-01-30T11:22:00.000+05:30

The Tea Party -'The Edges Of Twilight'
1995

Rating - 10/A

This is one of those absolutely perfect albums that most artists record only about once in their careers - which makes it even more amazing that The Tea Party did so at least twice - their major label debut, Splendor Solis, is similarly flawless, and almost did so again with their third album, Transmission which boldly took their sound into new territory. After that, they pulled back, perhaps alarmed at their own growth and fearful of burnout, perhaps in response to the normalising effect imposed by the collective conservatism of record labels and the larger buying public, and released a string of pleasant, mostly amiable but unadventurous albums before calling it quits last year (2006, if you need to ask). Tchah.

Having chronicled their sad decline, or rather plateau-ing out, I shall now proceed to heap accolades and encomiums on the album presently under consideration. First of all, of course, you want to know: what do they sound like? Well, it's basically brash, chest-thumping classic blues-rock, which was already rather quaint in the mid-90s, but the good lads of TTP had a couple of aces up their sleeve.

For starters, they also had a fetish for the east-meets-west flavour of Led Zep's Kashmir, and spent time learning about the special and exotic instuments and scales that actual eastern music of maily the mid-eastern variety uses instead of endlessly ripping off Kashmir itself. This translates into a variety of eastern motifs and ideas apart from the stacatto-riff thing and the snakecharmer thing, although both are on display here, too. It also means there's all kinds of exotic instruments being played here - 32, the official count goes.

Secondly, while main man Jeff Martin has more than a trace of the swaggering, cocky Jim Morrison/Robbie Plant type rock star persona (he even sounds like Jim Morrison, although he writes marginally more mature poetry, erm, lyrics), he's also picked up cues from the romanticism, despair and so on of various post-punk acts like Joy Division, The Cure and Echo & The Bunnymen, even if this isn't immediately evident.

Having said all that, the emotionally intense, romantic and mystical nature of the band's lyrics and sound (music matches lyric perfectly here) isn't everyone's cup of tea. It even seems a trifle overwrought at times to me, lately - a lighter touch at times, a trace of humour would be nice. But that isn't what TTP do, and if you're willing to accept that, you're in for a great ride.

Fire In The Head, Coming Home and Walk With Me are all huge, bombastic rockers but with their own touches of subtlety - the acoustic passage that Coming Home builds from and its strummed verses, for instance. Classic rock-worthy arena filling swagger meets eastern melodicism and romantic lyricism. Pretty heady stuff. The Bazaar has a riff that sounds perfect for strolling through a rollicking, crowded bazaar and the choruses take the song back into dark romantic territory. Turn The Lamp Down Low, Shadows On The Mountainside and Drawing Down The Moon take bluesy motifs and infuse them with a variety of moods and characters. Shadows On The Mountainside is perhaps the most transcendentally contemplative number here, while Drawing Down The Moon roars with desperate romance. Man, that word romance keeps getting used in this review in various forms. It's hard to avoid it though, and if you know this band, you'll have to agree.

Among the slower numbers, The Badger is a gorgeous, folksy instrumental. Correspondences layers pianos, strings and other less-identifiable things, all contributing to truly gorgeous melodies and a brilliant mood - wistful at first and ardent in the climatic end section. Speaking of sections, Sister Awake stands as the very centerpiece of this album. Constructed with a complexity that is outright proggy, it moves from quieter passages through a rapid fire percussive break into a heavier passage, containing one of the most memorable and brilliant sets of changes I've ever heard. This song alone raises the album to stellar heights. It helps that the other material isn't that much worse. Silence is less stunning, but has a similar variety of moods, all perfectly combined.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: The swagger of classic rock, combined with eastern intrigue and bluesy grace. Near-perfect songwriting, great melodies everywhere, huge riffs when required, a brilliantly dark and inviting album that actually lives up to all of its considerable ambition.

2007-01-29T11:25:00.000+05:30

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - 'Tender Prey'
1988

Rating - 8/B

Tender Prey was Nick Cave's 5th album with The Bad Seeds, his solo-career backing band, the last of his 1980s albums - he took a break to write his (rather good) novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel soon after - and the last album written and recorded while living in Berlin. It showcases an artist who has moved consistently in a more diverse direction since the punkish caterwauling of his first band, The Birthday Party, and the equally disturbing but slower and more stripped-down sounds of his earliest work with The Bad Seeds. The accesible elements - real melodies, discernable song structures and reasonably palatable singing - are well matched with a broad palette of sounds that draws from blues, folk and avant-garde influences to create a shifting, but instantly recognisable backdrop for Cave's dark tales of love, lust, murder and religion. I think it presents Cave as a consolidated and fully-formed entity - elements of his past work are combined in a manner that would more or less represent the direction in which he moved for the next decade or so. More importantly, it's a pretty strong album with no really weak or unapproachable material on it.

The centerpiece, and opener, of this whole experience is of course The Mercy Seat. A dark, haunting narrative spat out in the persona of a convicted murdered on death row, awaiting his turn in the electric chair's 'mercy seat', it bristles with fury and desperation, Biblical imagery, and evokes defiance and resignation in equal measure. Musically, the song rides on a throbbing, dynamic Bad Seeds backing, complete with German noise-master Blixa Bargeld conjuring an unholy tempest on guitar, augmented with dramatic strings. The song is really long, but its sprawling length is kept taut with an unbroken intensity of delivery, which just the right amount of counter-weighing melody and regret, and it never seems over-extended. It's a strong, compelling lyrical statement and the music matches the mood perfectly. Perhaps no one other than Nick Cave could conceive of or pull off a song like this, and it deserves its place as a perennial feature on his live setlists.

The other material rarely reaches The Mercy Seat's apocalyptic heights, but it's not just filler, either. Deanna sounds vaguely like a doo-wop or early garage rock song, but played with a psychotic verve than no actual 50s or early 60s artists were allowed to portray on record. The lyrics are about the protagonist imploring his lover to join him in killing spree in a fast car - classic Nick Cave stuff. It's also bloody catchy. Sugar Sugar Sugar works on similar lines musically, but is less concise.

Up Jumped The Devil is an archetypal hard-luck story that begins with the narrator's mother dying in the course of a messy and bloody delivery, and ends at the gallows pole, with that mean old devil watching in delight all along the way. A chilling song, shot through with black humour and built on a lurching, brooding musical base that turns a rather melodious and almost pretty piano motif to dark purpose. The group vocals on the choruses add to the folk-gone-psycho feel. It's all so melodic and genuinely hooky under the darkness and doom, which is the hallmark of the best Cave material, if you ask me. City Of Refuge builds a vaguely gospel/bluesy feel into another frantic, desperate hard-luck tale on similar lines, though equally compelling in its own right. Sunday's Slave again revolves around a pulsing rhythm and decidedly melodic piano lines while Cave weaves a dark fable based around days of the week and what sounds to me like a rather negative attitude towards the priestly class. I could be wrong of course - Cave's religious views are especially opaque to me. He sure likes his Biblical imagery though.

Among the slower songs, Watching Alice is an especially lovely ballad-like song, although the lyrics confound you here - they seem to be about an especially mournful voyeur. Or is it a metaphor for the alienation and isolation within a once-close relationship? Either way, it's haunting. Mercy weaves togeher arresting but somewhat opaque lyrical images, a vaguely Eastern touch and desprate pleas for mercy. It's a subjective thing, but it works less well for me than the almost Leonard Cohen-ish (though, always, less urbane and more morbid) Slowly Goes The Night. Maybe it's only because the latter song has xylophone on it to make it more special, or because the choruses on the former just feel too monotonous and whiney to me. Genralised pleas for mercy just don't fit Cave's unique blend of piss-and-vinegar and doomed romanticism at this moment.

New Morning seems to end the album on a positive note, and I'm not sure whether it's intended as a genuine respite from the darkness elsewhere (although this song is more of a light-after-the-terrible-night message than an unalloyed ode to joy and hope) or some sort of ironic gesture. Anyway it serves as a lightening factor and a good way to end the album, unless you have the Video Mix of The Mercy Seat on your version, which is an even better way to end the album.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Folk, blues, and other rootsy influences combine with apocalyptic stomp and swagger and Cave's growing melodicity. Everything's dark and doom-laden, although musical variety, touches of black humour and an ambiguous gesture of hope keep things diverse. Easily one of the peaks of Cave's first decade as a solo artist.

2007-01-25T16:47:00.000+05:30

Nirvana - 'Bleach'
1989

8/B

This is where I always lose my only-metal friends, and also the ones who don't mind a spot of Chains or 'Garden but insist that good old 'Vana Trump was utter, unmitigated trash. The point at which I actually confer KC and his Sunshineless Band's debut album the same rating as Celtic Frost's Morbid Tales and Judas Priest's Sin After Sin (looking through reviews I've already completed). 'Really?' they ask. 'Really!' I answer. 'Bye bye!' they say. 'I was shaved!' I yell after them, waving a fist.

Seriously though, I admit that I was one of those angsty teenage kid who were pulled in by the singles off Nevermind (although I'd like to specify that it was Lithium that did the deal, as if that confers some maturity and taste on me). This will skew my regard for the band a little, and there are two different angles from which I can be told that they don't even deserve to be given time in light of their historical context. Pixies/Melvins/Sonic Youth etc fans will rightly point out that Nirvana copped so much of what they did from these aforementioned bands. They're right of course, but Cobain never denied this, and his band's ability to take these decidedly left-of-centre influences and ram them through the mainstream consciousness can't be ascribed completely to 'right time, right place' coincidence. And for what it's worth, without all those overplayed singles by Nirvana it's unlikely that a lot of people of my generation would ever have gotten around to listening to Pixies and co, so their efforts weren't entirely without some utility in that respect either.

The other great argument of course is that Nirvana left nothing of worth by way of influence. This is a harder argument for me to counter, and I'm not certain I can. Nirvana were basically the apotheosis of a certain musical ethos - they managed to strip it down to a very basic and also catchy core and run with that. I don't think this is a mean achievement - it takes some sensibility and talent to do this. For comparison,.think of the way the Stones transform Robert Johnson's Love In Vain into a creature of undeniable rather than obscure beauty. The potential was there all along, but I wouldn't wager much that just anyone could have spotted that potential or realised it so well. So Nirvana were great synthesisers - but what about influence? Sadly, all I can see is negative influence. The ludicrous posing of Bush, for instance. The band, not the president. The cheap angst of most American rock bands at the turn of the century, and the final and supreme disregard for instrumental virtuosity that still shows no signs of subsiding. Yes, these are hard legacies to justify, and I won't even try.

I will try and suggest that it's pointless to do so - should I dock the Stones and Led Zep a few points becuse of Aerosmith, or diss Van Halen because of Warrant? I don't think that's fair, and I'm going to apply the same thinking here.

If you don't buy all that, fair enough. I know this is a pretty divisive band amongst my friends, and I wanted my own stance as clear as possible before beginning to actually review them. I also put in a few jokes to show you I don't revere or worship them! Please continue to be my friend!

Chee. Let's get to the album, then. This cheaply-produced small-label-released debut doesn't sound all that bad, really. Especially since I think Nevermind sounds a little too slick. The drummer isn't all that bad either, especially since I think there's nothing special about Dave Grohl beyond good production and healthy competence. The musical formula is pretty simple - rely completely on riffs, like a metal band, but make them simple and jagged like a punk band. Let a touch of melody and catchiness creep in because you can't help it - the weird left-handed kid leading the band happens to be in the process of developing a flair for those things - and play everything really loud. Throw in screechy guitar breaks that owe nothing at all to the preceding decade of escalating neo-classical virtuosity. And that's nearly what you have here, apart from one exception.

Blew pretty much epitomises this formula. The riff is like Sabbath, only with punk influences traded for blues and a tamer drummer. A peppier chorus alternates with a droning verse. The vocals follow the riff more or less exactly. Floyd The Barber is more punky, and pretty memorable too. The lyrics are a disturbing story about going for a shave and then being snared in some terrible semi-incestous covert aex orgy. Negative Creep and Scoff repeat the formula, but speed it up and throw in singalong choruses that serve as anthems for the early-90s slacker. Yea, those choruses. Silly, aren't they? At least there's nothing about albinoes. Yet. Swap Meet is a quirky story about an arts-and-crafts selling couple who seem to have a lot of darkness hidden witin their love for each other. The music is the same as everywhere else - but Cobain betrays an early flair for vocal hooks that becomes more pop-friendly in the years ahead. He does this on other songs too, but a lot of them are pointlessly extended beyond the sub-3 minute length that is an average by repeating everything too many times - Mr Moustache and Big Cheese suffer from this padding. Paper Cuts is possibly the most chilling song here, with its alternating melodic and desperate-holler vocal lines on the verse over a pretty rudimentary but ugly riff, and a chorus that sounds huge, dark and has a slightly atonal twang on some of the vocals. Was Layne Staley listening to this song?

About A Girl is the song that really sticks out, of course. As in, it's pretty much different from everything else. The guitar tone is a drier clean-electric rather than the heavy distortion heard everywhere else and the song has a simple melodicity that seems at odds with everything else, save for Cobain's typically cynical lyrical touches and the raw (self)loathing his voice conveys despite the vocal melodies. It's like The Beatles discovered heroin instead of acid, ma.

And that's it. A lot of simple, ugly, riffy songs that are kinda-punk, kinda-metal but not quite, one sign of budding songwriting talent and diversity and one weird cover that I haven't mentioned before. That's Love Buzz of course, which has a sort of Eastern vibe but is played with the same proto-metallic simple-mindedness as everything else here.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: In a way, this album seems as if Nirvana were consciously notching things back to Blue Cheer-ish levels of primitivity so that a new musical phase could be brought on. It drags at times, but if you are at all into what Nirvana did later on, it's worth trying out and could even be your most authentic and favoured Nirvana album, depending on how much you rate DIY integrity and punky bludgeon over songwriting evolution.

2007-01-25T13:41:00.000+05:30

Blue Cheer 'Vincebus Eruptum'
1968

Rating - 5/C

Blue Cheer's first album consists of 6 songs, 3 of which are originals and 3 of which are covers. The covers have mostly all been done, and covered by far more adept bands in more definitive performances, but that's a part of the slipshod charm of this band. They aren't the best at what they do, even when they're among the first to do it, and if you can get over their primitiveness, or see it as a partial virtue, you can actually enjoy this as a raw, ragged but glorious noise rather than turning off for the horrid racket it also sounds like. Critics talk about Black Sabbath being raw and shoddy, I suppose they don't even mention Blue Cheer because, by their standards, words wouldn't suffice.

A lot of these songs sound like they want to be Hendrix' Purple Haze. Or Fire. Or Manic Depression. Even the covers. Listen to Summertime Blues - tell me they're not trying to slip the Purple Haze riff in there! And the original song, Doctor Please, cops dynamics off Manic Depression. It even sounds at moments like a very, very tone-deaf and musically challenged youngster's attempt to play Manic Depression, if you squint your ears and listen sideways! The solos are all pentatonic-destroying squalls from a guitar that thought that this lovely thick tone (gotta give credit) meant it was going to get to wail out like Jimi's baby. But, no, instead it's put through the silliest sub-par attempts to channel Hendrix this side of Stevie Ray Vaughan. Erm. Scratch that last bit, I like SRV, peacock tattoo and all. There's a moment on Second Time Around where the guitar comes back in after a quiet bit, and you can hear it screaming 'no, mama, no!!!! I wanted to wail them cozmik electric ladyland blues! Not THIS!!!! SAVE ME!!!!!!'

Stil, it's not all Experience-whackery. Second Time Around and Out Of Focus, two more originals, both have fairly distinct riffs and nice dynamics. The vocals sound really good a lot of the time - totally raw and raucous and with a limited range, but somehow they work. It's only against the mellower verse backing on Doctor Please that the vocals seem really bad, because they have no convincing soulful or mellow settings at all. The cover of Rock Me Baby suffers from some silly attempts at dramatic noise making, but Parchment Farm is nice enough. Their blues isn't very authentic, but their heavy-rockisation of blues is fun to listen to. It would be a lot worse if these people tried to do an authentic blues jam.

Interestingly, apart from the jammy length of these songs there isn't any trace of the psychedelic feel to be found on the first few songs on their second album, released later the same year. Maybe that was an attempt to sell out? They were from San Francisco, after all. Wo knows? The second album's better, anyway.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Pretty raw stuff. They are moved by their betters to play sped-up power-trio blues rock, but shine because of energy and enthusiasm rather than technical prowess. Still, it is proto-metal of a sort, and that may be one reason to hear it. Another would be that it can be great fun.

2007-01-24T15:30:00.000+05:30

Celtic Frost - 'Morbid Tales'
1984

Rating - 8/B

Morbid Tales was Celtic Frost's debut album, and it thrashes! It's certainly furious - the riffs are simply crushing, whether speedy or played at a grinding mid-tempo and the drumming certainly keeps up, even if sessions drummer Stephen Priestly isn't a Dave Lombardo or Lars Ulrich. Thom Warrior's vocals are hoarse, barked out, kinda corny in their sense of menacing relish and wonderfully raw. Bassist Martin Ain achieves the average extreme metal bassist's lifelong ambition of doing nothing at all to stand out, while presumably being as tight and fast as the guitarist.

The mood here is dark, evil and menacing. It's not epic, or debauched, or angry, just downright dark. While this atmosphere is largely achieved through the traditional metal-band tools listed above, there are two glimmers of the extensive expriments CF would later perform on the genre. The exceptions are the two odd and disturbing interludes based on what are probably voice samples, Human and Danse Macabre. Just as soon as the souls-in-torment vibe of Human gets to you, the speedy, heavy riffs of Into The Crypts Of Rays crashes in. A song that screams 'this one will influence metal kids for years to come', it's one of CF's best thrashers ever, and features Warrior's trademark grunt-snarl vocals, often rushed to fit with the riffing to great effect. 'Into the crypts of rays - inna'th'crypsofrays!' Great! Other great tracks include Procreation (Of The Wicked), framed around a supremely hypnotic mid-tempo riff, the heavy-yet-groovy Dethroned Emperor, with its dark, mammoth atmosphere and the thrashy title track. All of these have Warrior barking out the titles in a suitably memorable way, and can be the basis for comedy if you are very immune to the pure, simple pleasures of metal music.

Echoes of this album can be heard all over the metal world - just check out Obituary, Carcass, Sepultura, Deicide and whatnot after listening to this album. But it isn't just a worthy historical document - Warrior's instinct for rhythms that both energise a mosh-pit and menace the living daylights out of the listener is almost unerring at this point and even if there is a fair amount of less memorable material his songwriting is strong enough to ensure that at least half of these songs will have either a riff or a vocal hook stuck in your head right away.

This album was rereleased with a few tracks from 1985's Emperor's Return EP tacked on at the end. The production on the EP songs is far muddier, for some reason, which makes them subside into a generic thrashy sludge at first listen, but at Circle Of The Tyrants, at least, will repay closer listening. Still, these songs and some of the more regular thrash pieces on Morbid Tales do come across as a bit interchangable.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Are you morbid?! This album is essential for anyone into dark music, sludgy riffing and metal in general. A primer for many bands to come, but also a strong, memorable metal debut outside of all the context.

2007-01-23T11:35:00.000+05:30

Blue Cheer - 'InsideOutside'
1968

Rating - 6/C+

What a peculiar album. It's a strange mix of hippy-ish psychedelia, crude but catchy bashing-rock glory and all wrapped up with some smatterings of poor taste and delivered with questionable musicianship. For all that, it's mostly okay to listen to - everything's done with a sort of joyous excess that is never nearly as menacing as the metal it supposedly inspired but is cvertainly riotous. If it weren't for the simple-minded inability to stretch beyond three-chord rock jams and what was beginning to be called heaviness, this would just be another album by a late-60s blues-rock based power trio ensemble, distinguished largely by an inability to match the prowess or invention of more notable examples of such assemblages.

Indeed, it isn't all that much more than that, but the fact of chronology does place it as an important early rumble towards the hard rock and heavy metal sounds you, me and your step-aunt enjoy with such mad abandon. What saves this album in my opinion is basically that same simple-mindedness - the only really egregious over-reaching here is in attempts to match the fretboard fury of early Hendrix. If you can excuse that for the nonce you have a very fun album, and it's the fun aspect that makes it potentially endearing.

As to the individual songs, the best one here has to be Come And Get It. This song sounds exactly the way you'd expect Blue Cheer, influential and ragged early forefathers of metal to sound like - basically 60s rock n' roll overdriven and played at ridiculous speed and volume. 'Let me hear, let me hear the way you feel'! Yeah! The vocals are kinda thin and whiny, but full of energy and enthusiasm, the guitars are primitive but loud and fast, the rhythm section isn't monumental but it is suitably thunderous. That's great then, that Blue Cheer heavy good-time rock n' roll there. Devil horns!

Oh, right. There's 8 more songs on the album. Alright, let me elucidate thereof. The next best song here is Just A Little Bit, which is just as endearingly frantic as Come And Get It, but a little more chaotic and confused. Babylon starts with a rather nifty riff, and can be safely cited in your paper on metal influences. However, it wanders into a generic mid-tempo bluesy rock a bit too soon and has an especially atrocious solo followed by a clumsily introduced and rather perfunctory climatic-ending manouver. Feathers From Your Tree, Sun Cycle and Gypsy Ball are full of the heavy guitar tone, but are more mid-tempo although there are some neat riffs here, as on Gypsy Ball. There's a more psychedelic vibe running through these songs - this was the psychedelic era, after all, and acid was the best new nutritional supplement since Calcium Sandoz. Someone even seems to have played a little piano on one or the other of these songs, but don't let that bother you. The riffs are really huge. The little instrumental Magnolia Caboose Babyfinger is riffy and groovy, even if the title suggests a bluegrass excursion on a jam-band bootleg.

All this is fine - a little lacking in technical finesse, but very catchy, energetic and raw in the right way. Some really memorable songs and the okay songs aren't awful. So naturally the good lads of Blue Cheer had to throw in a couple of covers that definitely make me downgrade my impression of their collective IQ (not especially high to begin with) and my rating of this album.

They may have listened to a lot of blues, but these guys couldn't play it for nuts. Their take on Booker T Jones' The Hunter is total cornball, a passably enthusiastic and stomping cover version that would sound okay from a high school band, not a pro (I use the term strictly in its literal sense) trio on their second studio outing. For extra insight, contrast and compare with the 'call me the hunter' sections on How Many More Times off Led Zep's debut, released the same year. Page and Co. may have been too vain to credit their cover, but damnit, they reinvented it with a verve and skill that weathers better than this sloppy fanboyism. Even worse, because genuinely offensive instead of just embarrasingly hammy, is their attempt to Blue Cheerize the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction. You'd think they really hated it! Like any college band band trying to be hard and original they speed up the riff so much it sounds like a ridiculous parody of itself, they try a variety of guitar tones, each of which is uglier than the previous ones, and the singer reminds you that, energetic and well-meaning as he is, he's no Jagger. It's not a good idea covering material that's so vastly better than your own, really.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: And look at that! I've spent more words beating Blue Cheer up than praising them! Still, remember that this platter of midway-between-r&b and hard rock music, with its psychedelic touches, isn't a crap album - it would have to be downright unlistenable for that. Approach as simple, honest fun rendered influential by history alone and you'll be fine. It'll look good in your record collection too, up there with Black Sabbath and Budgie like the slightly retarded elder brother everyone loves and cleans up after.

2007-01-22T14:57:00.000+05:30

Green Carnation - 'The Acoustic Verses'2006

Rating - 8/B

The first time I heard this Norwegian band, they'd released a 60-minute epic song called Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness. Like any Jethro Tull fan, I'm inclined to view such excursions with a sort of pathetic hope, like a kicked puppy believing that his drunken master won't kick him this time. Fortunately, this particular album/song project amply delivered pats on the back and scratches under the chin. Essentially dark metal, the album included forays into more symphonic and acoustic terrain as well. So it's not a big surprise that, 6 years and two albums later, they'd choose to release a largely acoustic album. It's not all acoustic, but it is stripped down and without a single power-chord riff or double-bass beat in sight.

It isn't the sort of back-to-basics excursion these acoustic wanderings usually are, but a pretty well-realised album with a few moments of the prog-friendly ambition you'd expect from the band responsible for the longest song in metal history (not guaranteed to be an actual fact). It also has moments where prettiness overwhelms depth, which is why I'm giving it a relatively low rating of 8, when my first instinct was to go with 9 or even 10. I'd go a bit lower, but I just love Sweet Leaf, and several other songs are just growing on me, and I expect will do the same for otehrs. I still think Green Carnation could well have made every song equally good without sacrificing diversity, considering that they once created a 60 minute song that managed to sustain interest throughout.

The album is full of great atmospheres and melodies - even the weaker songs happen to be very melodically strong. Sweet Leaf opens the album with a truly brilliant mood, warm yet longing, with a great mix of high and low vocals and a neat fleshing out of the sound with horns, strings and electric keyboard. The song Maybe seems fairly normal, but it has a section at the end which evokes shades of psychedelia, with odd chorus vocals and theremin in such a cool manner that you have to love it. At least, I did. Alone is essentially a musical adaptation of a poem of the same name by Edgar Alan Poe and is distinguished by the presence of some very folksy violin playing - seems more Irish folk than Scandinavian, though. 9-29-045, which has three distinct parts in it, is the most proggish song here. The three sections segue together very well and the moderately dark atmosphere is pretty captivating too. Great melodies and chordal content all over the place. The instrumental Child's Play 3 is another weak spot, however - it could have served as a more light refreshment between the two full-course servings on this album, but the piano melodies are just a little too saccharine for my taste, a little too easy-listening to hold up to the overall level of ambition here. Similarly, the second song on the album, The Burden Is Mine Alone is a little too close to smething nearly any mopey modern rock band could have written to really excite me. It's actually rather good in its own way, but it feels too common for this album, especially after the stellar Sweet Leaf. The last song, High Tide Waves, is again a longer, more ambitious piece with slightly heavier arrangements and some great guitar playing.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: From the churning depths of Scandinavian black/dark metal emerges...an acoustic-dominated album of real depth and melodicity.

2007-01-22T08:07:00.000+05:30

Joy Division - 'Closer'
1980

Rating - A/10
Aw, man. Even if this album hadn't more or less coincided with frontman Ian Curtis' suicide so closely, it would still be one of the most downright depressing and beautiful things in the rock canon. It's even more cold, dissociated and yet desperate than their debut, Unknown Pleasures (which I will also review at some point). The band's schizophrenic mix of jaunty and dominating bass grooves, melodic and often poppy keyboards, guitar turmoil and Ian Curtis' detatched, despairing vocals and lyrics can sear their way into your consciousness with rather deleterious effects if you're not careful. The mood never lets up, and I can't blame the surviving members for swinging more towards the pop end of things in their next avatar, New Order. Anything to get that darkness behind. This is the sound of terminal alienation, which is not a healthy staple diet for any boy or girl.

All of which might sound like I'm an emotionally vulnerable listener panning this album for being too dark. That's not true, and quite apart from my personal fortitude, this album has enough compelling music and unforgettable songwriting to make it a worthwhile listen.

The epic opening track, The Atrocity Exhibition sets the pace. Titled after an equally disturbing JG Ballard novel, it's a chilling portrait of atrocity-as-spectacle via the Nazi death camps. The music is spare and precise, and the almost robotic groove and roiling guitar point the way to industrial music. Isolation juxtaposes driving bass and jaunty keyboards with a haunting journey into Curtis' state of isolation. Passover is plodding and desperate, while Colony is disturbingly pacey. Means To An End is another epic-feeling track with a chilling message of betrayal. Things get more groovy, and the melody is back, for Twenty-Four Hours which sees Curtis trying to find his destiny 'before it gets too late'. That melodic sense just kills on tracks like this. The Eternal and Decades are cold elegies to a broken spirit. The gentle piano work on the former, placed against a plodding, definite rhythm is a great aural portrait of a state of mind and Curtis' vocals are unforgettably vulnerable, and relatively unmasked by the distancing veneer of monotony he often resorts to. Decades has those almost pop-friendly keyboards and upbeat rhythms in places again, sounding very elgiac however, and ends the album fittingly, with a cold knife through your heart.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: With its precise, spare soundscapes and layerings of unsettling groove and melody, this is THE party album for your suicide salon. If you're beyond teen-Goth angst, it's simply a very beautiful and haunting album with enough musical merit and truly expressive lyrics to justify more than a few listens. Just don't listen to it all alone, with the lights off.

2007-01-22T07:37:00.000+05:30

Santana - 'Abraxas'
1970

Rating - 7/B
Long before the guest stars, modern rock chart-ready singles and increasingly schtick-like lead playing of his recent albums, there was Santana - a group of young, hungry musicians with a revolutionary new fusion of Latin rhythms and rock music. Fresh off an incendiary gig at Woodstock and firmly propelled into the musical zeitgest, this band, with their 'Latin Hendrix' centrepiece, axeman Carlos Santana, ventured into the studios to create a sophomore album that would carry on the momentum, becoming one among a standard pantheon of classic rock albums.

For all that, what we have here is a somewhat mixed bag - a handful of wonderfully executed tunes, mostly covers, a few mediocre originals and a couple of throw-away instrumentals. Songwriting wasn't one of the young group's major talents, as can be seen on the two numbers penned by Greg Rollie - Mother's Daughter is disposable rock and Hope You're Feeling Better isn't much better, although furious guitar and keyboard lead breaks and the trademark percussion sound help elevate it. The group's cover of Fleetwood Mac's Black Magic Woman is a pretty song with good guitar playing, but it's the harder-driving groove of Gypsy Queen, which it seques into, that takes the cake, for me. Elsewhere, Carlos S crafts a lovely, tender instumental on Samba Pa Ti - what a melody on that one! - and the band execute a truly impressive performance on Incident At Neshabur, a multi-faceted instrumental with shades of jazz fusion. The opening instrumental, Singing Winds, Crying Beasts, doesn't have much of a melodic hook, but it's a haunting, atmospheric passage with a calm, warm presence. It's remniscent of the psychedelic instrumental bits on Hendrix's Electric Ladyland, but with the Santana feel. Oye Como Va is a groove monster, too familiar for me to assess easily, unfortunately. Se A Cabo and El Nicoya are percussion-dominated and rather short instrumental breaks. Of the two, Se A Cabo is better developed and can sit as a moment of assertion of original identity before the rather generic Mother's Daughter. However, El Nicoya feels like a rather weak way to close the album after everything is over.

The reissue that I consulted for this review adds three live tracks from the same era - concert versions of Se A Cabo and Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen and something called Toussaint L'Overture . There's some incendiary percussive work here, and since none of these performances are below par they make a nice way to extend the album experience, since albums back in the 60s and 70s used to not only define genres but do so in a rather minimal running time.

It's a little hard to appreciate the revolutionary nature of the album at the time, now that we're saturated with Latin pop but this was a revolutionary album at the time. While one can imagine a far wilder fusion of Latin rhythms and rock (like all that Brazilian tribal drumming on Sepultura's later albums), and some of the material here sounds minor or generic, the overall vibe carries the album as do the undeniable talents of the band's guitarrific leader and its cooking percussionists.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline - A pioneering album with its share of highs and lows. Beautiful atmosphere, great guitar and percussion, low on original songwriting. Traces of the fusion sound Santana would later pursue in more detail.

2007-01-19T09:40:00.000+05:30

The Zombies - "Odessey and Oracle'1968

Rating - 9/A

Here's an interesting little artefact of the vissicitudes of the music biz. The Zombies were one of many 60s British Invasion bands who unleashed a spew of R&B covers on the airwaves in a quest for global domination. Their originals were distinguished by a great sense of melody. At heart, they were basically a very smart, catchy pop band so the R&B covers tend to sound pretty forced - their cover of Summertime is so blue-eyed it's almost self-parodic. Anyhow, after some initial single successes they embarked upon a career of some 3 years of unrelieved obscurity. Distressed at the lack of success, they convened for one last time to release an album (their second, by the way) that would stand as their final hurrah. This album has, over the years, scored one sleeper chart hit and emerged as a sort of hidden gem of the late 60s. It's often cited as being a rival to other classics of the era like The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and whatever Beatles album the reviewier in question feels like bashing, but that may be overstating the case.

What we have here is a charming, often catchy and sometimes moving collection of pop songs. They're very well-crafted pop songs with good melodies, interesting parts, nice harmonies and everything, certainly intelligent pop rather than faceless product. There are traces of the environmental influence of psychedelia, and the keyboard player brings in traces of classical-influenced motifs that are fairly innovative and give the music some distinction.

I wouldn't hail this album as a lost grail and so on, but it is a nice little find, and on its own terms - intelligent pop rock with good melodies - it may even be a masterpiece. I wouldn't know for sure, my expertise runs more towards heavier fare. But there's no denying the charm of this album. The first side of the album is almost unversally gorgeous. Care Of Cell 44 is a catchy song about writing to one's girlfriend, who is in jail, and counting the days until they set her free again. This is just the sort of thing I like about Britpop - the song, though catchy, is not musically unique, and it doesn't stray beyond love-song themes, but it gives those themes a quirky, unexpected twist that add a lot of oddball charm to the proceedings. A Rose For Emily is a rather charming keyboard-dominated ballad about an Eleanor-Rigbyish lonely person. This song could have been pure schlock with an excessive arrangement and overly impassioned vocals, but the relatively simple score (possibly dicatated by low budgets) and the straightforward-but-heartfelt vocals (a hallmark of the best of the British Invasion sound, for me. Even Jagger was rarely OTT, though it isn't his heart that the feelings come from, most of the time) make it easy to appreciate the beauty and pathos of the song without any twinges of outraged taste. Maybe After He's Gone is a little more average, but it has a very catchy chorus. Beechwood Park with its nostalgia for childhood memories is another highlight - it's just so pretty and wistful. I dislike a lot of modern pop-rock (that masquerades as alternative for some reason) precisely because it is unable to channel this very simple sort of sadness, and tries to deal in a Cobain-wannabe suicidal, mentally-unsound anguish instead. Brief Candles is even more memorable, a really wonderful melody that'll stick in your head instantly (it's running through mine right now) and lyrics about people who have lost someone nursing their memories.

At this point, however, things get a little monotonous for me, because the band puts in a number of songs that try to be a little more rocky (they have more drums and mid-tempo, that is) and the result is a sort of wimpy competence that appeals to me less than the all-out balladry. Hung Up On A Dream and I Want Her She Wants Me are perfectly decent songs - and the latter has actually grown on me but they just float pass me with their inoffensive melodies and clean tenor vocals about love. Nestled between them is an odd mellotron-dominated excursion called Changes which is quite experimental, and has a few parts that work and a few that don't quite. The charm is back with the contagiously upbeat This Will Be Our Year and the amusingly amiable Friends Of Mine. Dumped between these is another stab at variety - Butchers Tale (Western Front 1914), an anti-war song that does diverge from the general mood and theme of the album, but is decent enough on its own terms. Even if the nerdy vocals make the first-person narrative seem especially unlikely. The album closer, Time Of The Season, was of course the great sleeper hit of the album, about a year after release, by which time the band had already broken up. It's a nice peppy piece of pop rock with great keyboard playing and so on. It's a good song, but extremist that I am, I seem to like The Zombies best when they're in all-out tragic mode.

::ETA::Actually, all these songs grow on me more and mor with repeated listens, so I'm bumping the rating from a strong B to a normal A.

The re-release I've heard has a couple of extra tracks - but these are just a few of those alternate takes/mixes/studio versions that make a lot of these re-releases as frustrating as they are essential. There's another version that includes a couple of singles from the same era - that may be a better package.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline - For the most part, this album is much like an eiderdown, a deliciously soft and warm pop rock quilt. A few threads of psychedelia give variety, while the keyboard-led sound bestows uniqueness on the sound. Worth the occasional revival just to ensure it gets a few new listeners every now and then.

2007-01-17T09:50:00.000+05:30

Judas Priest 'British Steel'
1980
Rating - 9/A

In my Sin After Sin review I mumbled about the importance of formulae in metal, and how Priest's greatest contribution to the genre was their introduction of a patent-leather-and-chrome gleaming-and-roaring guaranteed 98%-effective formula for the production of a proper heavy metal album. It was a formula they would (and do) turn to whenever excursions into compositional sleepwalking, synthesised tedium or simply having a different singer and trying to get with the nu stomp and the death dissonance had compromised awe and adulation amongst the metallic masses. That formula reaches a point of near-perfection on this nearly-perfect metal album. Rather than try to elucidate this formula, I shall let a description of this album, British Steel, serve instead. Which is handy, because this is supposed to be a British Steel review.

First, the thrash. The album begins with another straight-for-the-jugular opening stab, Rapid Fire. It's incredibly tight and ferocious, with an incessant single-string pedal-point pattern looping over a steady, throbbing power chord base. The song is played with so much power and passion that even a 21st-century postmodern ironist (supposing you want to be such a quaint thing at this point) might just feel the urge to wave a fist about and sing along as Halford intones lyrics about 'Pounding the world...like a ba-tter-ing ram!' and so forth. Next, the big, anthemic feel. And look, here we have Metal Gods, a more mid-tempo number with lyrics that glorify Judas Priest and metal and a simple iteration of the title for the chorus that still drives the fans wild in the Budokan! Oh, and then we need to be incredibly catchy because otherwise only a very small hardcore faction will bang along, and no one will ever bring their girlfriends along to the show! And stepping up to bat are: Breaking The Law and Living After Midnight. These are both superdupermegabumper hits of course, but it has to be said - they deserve to be. Breaking is simple in construction, fierce in execution and has just the right blend of antisocial angst and heroic rebellion to fire up the metal fan (that's me, in case you refuse). It's also wonderfully concise, at around 2 and a half minutes, so even incessant overplay at pubs or on radio can't make the experience too bitter. Living After Midnight has a fantastic pop-metal melody and hook, one that KISS would kill for - but with added power and guitaristic lead glory that KISS never came close to.

Once you have all these elements in place, the trick is not to let things slide over the rest of the album. Sadly, some of that does happen which is why I can't quite give this album a perfect A+. United is their second attempt at a Queen-esque stadium chant for the brothers and sisters of metal, and like any blatantly populist manouver, it doesn't have much staying power, or none at all if you're over the age of 13 when you first hear it (I wasn't, but I'm pretty much over it now). Similarly, the song You Don't Have To Be Old To Be Wise has some nice vocal hooks, but the main riff is too simplified to count, even if they strum and chug at those 4 or 5 chords a little more than would be the case on the minimalistic Point Of Entry album.

There are still a few decent tracks left to sit through, though. Grinder has an incredibly silly chorus, but the vocals are great and the riffs rule. I personally treasure The Rage - it has an oddly reggae-ish opening that doesn't sound like a silly, cheesy experiment but instead finds a potential for purposeful menace in their modification of the bouncy reggae groove. The ghost of Marley shudders and faints with the rage! The song itself is very compelling with it's 'we are a breed apart, despised yet proud' thematics and nicely screechy lead breaks. Steeler isn't on par with Rapid Fire, but it is a rather pounding thrasher and a fitting way to an end a metal album (unless you opt to go with an extended epic track, but that can be dicey unless it is really good).

The remaster muddles the effectiveness of the running order a bit by adding an unreleased outake (a deservedly unreleased song which is a nearly unlistenable stab at pseudo-patriotic anthemicness with power ballad stylistics) and a redundant live version of Grinder. But that's what the Stop button is for.

A couple of things stand out in this iteration of the Priest formula. The first is the conciseness. None of these songs aspire to potentialy tedious beyond-6-minute lengths, and most of them deliver the goods in around 3. This also helps keep a sense of overall dynamism going, as you move from one track to another without too much delay. Secondly, there's a great deal of restraint on this album - Halford doesn't hit the highest registers of his voice a whole lot, and that makes his voice sound more warm and anthemic than banshee-like. Similarly, Tipton and Downing don't just go for the flash, but play breaks that mostly add a layer to an already good song - heck Breaking The Law dispenses with the solo break altogether and nothing's lost. Looks like restraint - within set patterns of excess - can be an important part of that formula, too.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: As near-perfect a set of tight, fierce and catchy metal songs as you can get. There are hints of the compositional parsimony that would make some future releases seem weaker, but for now this is all-out heavy duty British Steel.

2007-01-16T15:14:00.000+05:30

Alice Cooper - 'Killer'
1971

Rating: 9/A

Alice Cooper's discography currently consists of about 23 studio albums. I've heard about half of these, and a couple of compilations and a live album that fill in some of the gaps in my overall picture of his career. So here's my little recap for you: Alice Cooper's career has 4 broad phases, leaving aside an early one where Frank Zappa tried to make him sound a lot odder in a different way than would come naturally. So, first we have the band Alice Cooper, a collective of aspiring rocksters who played anthemic garage rock, made songs about teen angst issues and B-horror movie scary themes and had a stage show that established them as the sleazier, darker aspect of the then-happening glam rock scene. This is viewed by many as his best phase, and more or less may be. Then, frontman Vince Furnier disbanded the group and assumed the monicker for himself in a more definitive fashion. In this second phase, he relased albums that mostly acted sort of as soundtracks to really twisted Broadway productions. The sound is generally less of a basic rock one, but also varies quite a bit from album to album. This is his most diverse phase, and boasts quite a few badly overlooked albums. Then, in the mid-80s he suddenly re-invented himself as the Godfather of Hair Metal and released a brace of albums that notched up his biggest commercial success for a while, but also tended to submerge his identity, and very real wit, in generic 80s metal stylings and self-parody (not that self-parody isn't always a factor with such an OTT artist with a strong predilection for schlock horror and sleaze themes). As the 80s played out, he seemed to grasp the reins of his career again (translation: fuck off, Desmond Child) and started releasing albums that were sometimes over-metallised but far more dark and with most of the old humour and wit back as well. His commercial come-back seems to have served as the platform for his artistic come-back, so I suppose one shouldn't grudge him the whole 'you're poi-zaaaahn, pumpin' up mah sales' era, but what can a poor boy do but complain about rock n' roll bands?

Anyway, the matter presently at hand is an album from that first, most widely acclaimed phase of his career, and what it's rather awesome, to be honest. Guitarists Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce are no hotshot virtuosi, but they are an excellent tag-team for the creation of catchy, muscular and downright enjoyable riff-rock noise. The rhythm section is suitably steady and energetic as well. Together with Alice Cooper and his odd, but oddly non-moronic (which is not to say cerebral or profound) lyrical flair and not especially developed but still effective voice, the original Alice Cooper band was a rather effective outfit, not one that would advance the rock idiom by leaps and bounds (although they still managed to be pretty influential), but then the pleasure of this band isn't about jaw-dropping chops and mind-blowing innovation. It's all about catchy rock songs with a satisfyingly true-to-the-basics crunch and an attitude that's snot-nosed and comic-book morbid, but self-aware at that. Look, if you can't handle cheese served straight without a seasoning of irony you probably mustn't listen to rock music in the first place.

And yes, I shall now come to the songs. The centerpiece of the album is the hilarious and riffy epic Halo Of Flies. It's a little over 8 minutes long and is packed with simple but inventive riffing, and Alice singing about being a top international secret agent. It's awesome stuff, and if a lot of it can seem funny at times, the passion and raw inspiration of the musicianship here is nothing to scoff at. Among the shorter rockers, Under My Wheels is a great piece of teenage thematics and catchy sing-along, while Desperado is a suitably moody character-piece, with Cooper mythologising himself and being incredibly anthemic and free with the vocal hooks. Another epic, the title track, Killer manages to be quite sombre and haunting within the contexts of an album that you can't actually take too seriously (in the best sense of it - good music doesn't always need to be weighty music, no matter what the more politically minded will proclaim). Be My Lover, Yeah Yeah Yeah and You Make Me Nervous are more minor, bu they're all great little garage rock nuggets with a mood and hooks that pull you right in. Dead Babies is an early example of several OTT, melodramatic songs in which Cooper indulges in his relish for the morbid, but it's actually a rather plaintive ode to infant victims of parental neglect if you bother to listen to it rather than react to the image of the artist or his admittedly repulsive stage act for the song.

The average-but-enthusiastic muscianship and basic production values of this album oly add to its charms, if you're at all sensitive to those charms. The balance between more ambitious or atmospheric tracks and the straight-ahead rock songs is nearly perfect, and damn it, Halo Of Flies is so cool. Why can't it be there on all those rock epic songlists you hear on radio or at pubs along with Kashmir, Child In Time and whatnot? It would certainly add to the sheer enjoyment factor and probably has more parts than many more highly-regarded works of rock craftsmanship as well. On the other hand, overplaying would probably kill all the charm of what you can instead consider to be private favourite.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline Between the dirty rockers and the grimy epics there's no really bummers on this sleazy, shlocky little platter of classic glam affront. Surprisingly tasteful and ambitious without compromising its humble strengths.

2007-01-12T15:00:00.000+05:30

Mastodon - 'Leviathan'
2004

Rating - 9/A-

Mastodon have certainly mastered a broad lexicon of metal approaches. And that's saying something, really. When nu-metal bands can blatantly rip off stale Iron Maiden melodies and score major hits, secure that none of the Adidas-wearing teenie-angsters slurping up their product will be able to spot the thievery, just the fact that here is a band that has dedicated serious time to learning the different ways in which you can make metal heavy is sure to bring a tear of joy and a fond smile to a fogey metalhead (which I suppose I must qualify as in spirit at least). There's a good variety of approaches to the basically post-thrash riffy sound on Leviathan. I Am Ahab is pure thrash fury, for instance, while Aqua Dementia is stonerish melodic metal, complete with vaguely Ozzy-ish whiny vocals. Thrash, stoner, a bit of death and a touch of prog are basically the flavours of metal on aural display here and it's a pretty good mix on an absolute scale, not just for these cheapjack times.

What really matters of course is what Mastodon do with all this, and thankfully the end result - the songs - are pretty strong. The guitar tone is thick and organic, the drums are thunderous and heavy (but also pretty complex), the melodies are sonorous and pulsating, the riffs pounding and suitably mosh-worthy. The band sounds huge and the songs hold together well. The vocals mostly vary between a shouty growl and the slightly more whiny tone mentioned earlier, which is okay. It can get a bit one-dimensional at times, but that's pretty true of any metal band - the actual dimension in question is all that varies, mostly.

Having said all that, I will confess that this album takes some time to sink in. It's a pretty long, complex album and there aren't really a whole lot of hooks to pull you in at first. The catchiness of the album either works by way of the sheer heaviness and complexity, or through little details that can pull you in on further study. Also, even though the Moby-Dick inspired theme runs fairly thin a few songs in, the songs themselves all feel like part of a larger whole, with the emphasis on cumulative impact. And with a cumulative impact as strong as this, I won't complain. I still think several of these songs will emerge as metal classics given time - the songs I mentioned above, Iron Tusk, the epic Megalodon, the other epic Hearts Alive. That instrumental at the end is great too, although I can't see what poor Joseph Merrick has to do with all this aquatic monstrosity. I miss a sense of emotional resonance, although the music itself is not unable to evoke mood and emotion.

There's a slight shortage of really memorable musical motifs, but this is a relatively new band still, for all that everybody was calling this the future of metal at one point. Yes, it is one of the very best metal albums, and by a new band, in a while, but let's calm down. Remember what a huge leap there is between, say, Rust In Peace and Killing Is My Business in Megadeth's discography? And what an even huger leap in the wrong direction between RIP and Risk? My point is, second album is still an early stage, so (even though the third album is now out) it's early to make those kinds of statements. In the meantime, metal is thanfully alive and well in some places in the 21st century, and here's one of those places.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Mastodon play huge, heavy, unapologetic metal. This album has variety, artistry, intelligence and sheer bludgeon-power enough to keep the demanding metalhead happy and at least give the non-metalhead a moment's pause.

2007-01-12T10:58:00.000+05:30

Jeff Beck - 'Jeff Beck's Guitar Shop'1989

Rating: 7/B

Jeff Beck's a really good guitarist - maybe he's even as good as everyone says he is - but his discography is rather uneven and patchy. His seminal hard rock outfit, the one with Ron Wood and Rod Stewart, only lasted two albums, and he doesn't seem to have stuck with one line-up or one direction for very long ever since. Also, he has a somewhat damaging, in my estimation, love for electronics, whether it's the 80s synth-pop of Flsah or the 90s electronica of Who Else. Despite all this, he has cut more than a few nifty albums from time to time, and this particular album is a good introduction to his moderately-eclectic, but largely blues/hard rock informed sound, and a certain combination of kinda-boring professionalism and constant artistic growth at his chosen instrument. Truth and Beck-Ola are much more visceral, the fusion albums possibly more sophisticated and exciting, and you may even fancy hearing a seasoned rock guitar hero dabbling with techno, but this is as good a Jeff Beck 101 piece as there is.

The band consists of Mr.Beck accompanied by Zappa-sideman Terry Bozzio on drums and keyboardist/bassist Tony Hymas. While keyboards don't overwhelm the sound, they do tend to give the album a bit of a plasticky, 80s sound at times, and the drum sound is just too studio-polished for my tastes, but this is an 80s artefact and you have to learn to mentally edit out some things to get to the music at the heart of a lot of 80s releases.

The title track has a bombastic, yet broken-up drum pattern that I have never ever warmed to, and a keyboard motif that just adds to the annoyance, but Beck is in fine form and the spoken-word bit which describes the features of a guitar with car-sales-pitch type hype is pretty amusing. For me, though, Savoy is where Jeff Beck gets down to business with a far more organic riff and groove and solos that show that time has only added nuance and technique to his patented trademark blues-rock soloing. Behind The Veil is a reggae-ish song with Beck playing figures on his guitar that would not have been out of place as a song by The Police (although Sting would have played them himself and made Andy Summers hit jazz chords at random intervals instead). Big Block begins with a driving mid-tempo bassline-led groove over which Beck plays some really smoking bluesy licks. The song gets a touch of drama as well, as Hymas' keyboards lend a touch of menace that reminds me of Tony Martin-era Sabbath, only less cheesy. I'm not a huge fan of heavenly sounding atmospherics but the delicate, tender melodies on Where Were You, played almost unaccompanied on a clean-tone electric except for some chordal backing on keyboards, are seriously sublime and haunting. And it's short too, so the prettiness doesn't have a chance to devolve into boredom! Stand On It is again driven by a great, chunky riff that makes me wish the original Jeff Beck Group could have stayed together and honed their songwriting skills to the point where riff and leads like these could have been found on heavy-rotation classic songs to rival Led Zep's, rather on relatively obscure releases like these which are doomed to be heard only by classic rock stalwarts and guitar solo addicts. Before I start getting too dewy-eyed with admiration and regret, the boys fuck things up with a rather repetitive workout which, like the title track, has a spoken word thing looping around. This time it's something laudable but annoyingly preachy and repetitive about how no one is doing anything to save Mother Earth, and a A Day In The House is where I'll usually nod off for a bit or wander to the loo while playing this album. Two Rivers is a slow, melodic track but I don't remember much about it. Then fortunately for us, Jeff Beck tears into another ferocious, speedy riff and the concise but powerful rocker Sling Shot kicks butt and shuts down the shop.

And there you go!

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline:The cold professionalism can't hide Beck's gift for crunching riffs, memorable melodies and great solos.

2007-01-11T11:59:00.000+05:30

The Doors - 'Waiting For The Sun'1968

Rating - 7/B

No, this isn't the strongest Doors album, and is probably even a bit shocking if you hear it in sequence, after their debut (catchy hard rock with dark, apocalyptic yearnings) and follow-up, Strange Days (dark, apocalyptic yearnings and scary hard rock). After establishing themselves as these really dark and dangerous acid-rocking poet messiahs (at least, that's the story), they loaded their third album with chirpy pop songs, gentle ballads and just a trace or two of the patented Doors mystical menace. And to be fair, a lot of the material on this album is weak or at least forgettable. But I don't believe The Doors ever went so far as to release a really bad album, so much as a couple of slightly confused and uneven albums (it's easy to be a bit confused and uneven when you're behaving as if drugs are a speedway to nirvana, let this be a lesson to you!). So let's take a look at the highlights, lowlights and so-so's of this not entirely disposable little album by the late Jimmie Lizard and his Reptiles.

Hello I Love You and Love Street are both upbeat and even poppy little songs, but they're both good at what they do, which makes them a lot more creditable than if they'd been failed pop attempts. They both have terribly memorable vocal and instrumental bits, good hooks and a neat weaving of lines between Krieger's guitar and Manzarek's keyboard. A trace of lyrical quirk and edges of musical weirdness keep things Doors-worthy, if you're worried about that. I especially like the bit in Love Street where Morrison breaks out of the verse cadence to sing a few slightly out of place lines about liking the year fine...so far. You can see that he just ran out lines, invented something at random and later on made a virtue out of necessity. This little flash of uncertainty actualy endears me far more to the band than all the sub-HuxleyBlake posturing. Not To Touch The Earth, The Unknown Soldier and Five To One are all fairly menacing and dark rockers, and more consistent with previous expectations. Not To Touch The Earth is an excerpt from their whole poetry-and-music performance piece, The Cannonisation Of The Wizard (or was that Uriah Heep?) and having heard that whole thingujib on a live recording I can assure you that nothing has been lost. The Doors have wisely chosen the most musical excerpt from the suite, and it works quite well on its own as a driving, menacing piece with some really queasy-making flirtation between bent-notes and things on both keyboard and guitar, relieved now and then by a reasonably buoyant refrain. The Unknown Soldier, with it's Sousa-march remniscent melody,firing-squad break and so on is a nifty little audio drama that serves as an anti-war song. Five To One is just downright alarming, with Morrison sounding like a bloodthirsty caveman as he rips out his revolution-calling lyric over progressively more fluid and melodic guitar lines. Interesting study in contrast, there.

The minor songs are all perfectly nice love songs, and some of these can conceivably become anyone's personal favourites. Summer's Almost Gone is a haunting song which could be about the turn of the seasons, the loss of love or just as easily the end of the world. It has a gripping mood of sorrow and yearning that flows nicely into the wistful and guarded optimism of Wintertime Love. I think the sequencing really gives these two songs added strength, and then after all that lyricism you have the dramatics of The Unknown Soldier which helps to keep me awake and engaged, at least. Good dynamics.We Could Be So Good Together is not exceptional in any way, but it does its job well enough with a good groove and a reasonable melody. Yes The River Knows is another minor little ballad, and mostly suffers because we'e already had several of these on the album.

And now we come to the stinkers! I used to love the classical guitar work on Spanish Caravan, but so much of it is lifted from actual classical pieces for guitar that I find it hard to respect, let alone love the song any more. It's okay, otherwise, I suppose, but too much of a novelty tune anyway. As is the egregious desert-chant My Wild Love. It's amusing enough the first few times, but really, songs just don't cut it without things like instrumentation, groove and melody, sorry. I suppose it's okay as a sort of period piece - look at the kind of things those craaaaazzzyy acid kids used to put on their albums ha ha (like that grotesque 'What's Become Of The Baby' contraption on The Grateful Dead's Aoxomoxoa) - but that's about it.

And there we are. A perfectly reasonable album that should only be panned if you were expecting unrelenting genius from these clever, imaginative but also young and all-too-often stoned fellows. The good songs are pretty good (if sometimes from a direction that you may not have expected), the okay songs are all capable of being someone's personal favourite if approached with tact and sympathy and the weak material serves its own documentary purpose, possibly (certainly Krieger wasn't the last rock musician to rip off classical lines without credit - hello, Steve Harris!).

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Not the best album to begin with, but, tell you what, it's probably best to begin with a Best Of so you don't get the sort of one-dimensional view of the band that would prevent you from appreciating the charms of this oddly beautiful little album.

2007-01-09T11:25:00.000+05:30

Paul McCartney - 'Ram'
1971

Rating - 8 on 10, B+.

Macca's solo career gets a lot of scorn thrown at it - and having heard the synth-disco mess of 'McCartney 2', random forgettable pop hits on retro shows on music TV and the disturbingly rudimentary sounds of 'Flaming Pie', I can certainly see why.

On the other hand, he was a Beatle, and a member of one of the most brilliant songwriting teams ever. He's also among the best melody-makers of the rock era and a pretty talented and versatile composer and performer, when he puts his mind to it. Surely his entire career can't be crap - right? After all, even Lennon, who never lost his credibility, released some pretty self-indulgent and tuneless (in a few instances music-less) stinkers, and although Harrison began and (posthumously) ended his career with two great albums, there was a fair amount of filler and faff in between. Ringo Starr was always the most brilliant and productive of the lot, but that was even true back when they was Faboo. So it might be worth at least giving the lad a chance.

McCartney's (look, I'm just calling him 'Paul' from now on, okay, typing his surname is a pain) second solo album is probably a good starting point, anyway. Its predecessor was by all accounts a fairly rushed affair put out between Beatles albums to prove a point or beat Ringo to it or something. This post-Beatles album is the real beginning of a rather lengthy solo career, and a joyous beginning at that. Lyrically the album varies from more-or-less nonsensical psychedelic and absurdist outbursts, proving that Lennon wasn't the only Beatle to have a streak of Lear in him to rather maudlin but heartfelt and goofy paeans to Paul's newfound love and domestic rural life. Musically, it feels like a lot of well-fleshed out demos - realised enough not to seem like mere sketches, but not so slick and finished that they lose an endearingly hand-crafted feel.

Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey and Monkberry Moon Delight are the two most thoroughly realised pieces of psychedelia here. The first song is just Paul singing away about two odd characters in a more or less extempore fashion, and could fit in with any of his whimsical character portraits on Beatles albums, like Maxwell's Slver Hammer. It's as good too, with nice melodies and changes in the Abbey Road medley vein, something about 'Hands across the water, heads across the sky' that's infernally catchy and opaque at the same time and a trumpet bit that's probably played on a mellotron. Monkberry Moon Delight is another delightfuly loopy excursion, with Paul going on about sitting in his attic with a piano up his nose and who knows what else. It makes no sense whatsoever, but is magnficently melodic and has Paul in prime screamy form, which is put to better use on absurdist songs like this than to convey an overblown sense of emotion. Monkberry is my favourite song on the album, by the way.

Carrying on with funny ditties, but somewhat more modestly-scaled are Smile Away, a merry little rocker with a nicely dirty guitar tone and the hilariously blues-styled 3 Legs. The album opener, Too Many People has the most meaningful and non-sappy lyrics (relatively) here, set to a great upbeat guitar-pop tune with really cool lead breaks at the end. Heart Of The Country and Eat At Home are catchy, humble odes to Paul's love of rural life and domestic bliss, made palatable by the dollop of wry added to all the sugar. More infectious melodies, too. Long-Haired Lady is probably about wife Linda, too, and features her on backing vocals (she does a lot of that on this album, and at this stage in the proceedings her voice is at least engagingly campy, in keeping with the generally light hearted atmosphere) and is a sort of multi-part pop epic. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and Paul still churns out gorgeous melodies and harmonies so it's all acceptable. Ram On is a cod-folksy ditty which might refer to Paul's occasional stage name of Paul Ramon(e). Dear Boy is a vaudeville-piano tune - big surprise, huh - with gently sneering lyrics which some assume are directed at Lennon. Who knows? In The Back Seat Of My Car is a nostalgic take on the teen-love idiom that dominated the Beatles' early fare, and is pretty charming in its own way, with great harmonies and all that.

The bonus tracks on my reissue CD are decent, but not an essential part of the Ram experience. Another Day is a ballad about another Eleanor Rigby-ish lonely person, but she has a job. Oh Woman, Oh Why is a completely disposable rocker with Paul trotting out his screamy vocals in emotional earnest, rarely a pretty experience.

The hand-made and home-crafted charm of the album is furthered by the cover art, a collage of Linda's photographs surrounded by Paul's doodles. The back cover, reproduced here for your benefit, has an amusing visual pun in the form of a pic of beetles buggering.

And there you are. This is a totally non-serious and goofy album, but fun is a worthy musical aim as well, and if you don't think so you'd be better served defragging Thom Yorke's hard disc instead. The great melodies, musical energy and well-crafted vocals on this album make give the fun substance (which is not the same as weight), and while I prefer the stuff John was doing on those latter-era Beatles albums this album helps me realise that Paul's work was no slouch either, trivial as it may have seemed at times. It's a shame the rest of his solo career wasn't always this joyous and inspired. And joyous and inspired isn't that easy to pull off, you know.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Fluffy, charming but not musically trivial enjoyment. Put it on and be prepared to Smile Away.

2007-01-09T09:17:00.000+05:30

Judas Priest - 'Sin After Sin'

1977

Rating - 8/B

Sin After Sin was Judas Priest's third album, and their first with a major label - CBS, as they were then called. The two preceding albums are also well worth a listen, and contain their share of Priest classics, and I'll review them eventually. For now, though, it's 1977 - the same year I was born. That's a bit of a sobering thought, dating as it does both this album and its present reviewer.

Sin After Sin is a good album, but it still has moments that prevent it from being a 10 on 10 classic. While Priest may look upon themselves as heavy metal innovators, forever searching for new sonic territory, the truth is that most of their innovations were made in their first few albums, whereupon the band perfected a formula that would ensure them metal glory. There's nothing wrong with a formula as long as it is well formulated and honestly pursued - see Motorhead and AC/DC for further details. To their credit, Priest's formula has always been a little more diverse, allowing for straight-ahead thrashers, more rocky songs, anthems, epics and even ballads at times. Not all these elements work as well, however, and they really perfected this formula when they gave up trying to be as diverse as early Queen and zeroed in on the things that would make them metal gods - pace, power and (admittedly cartoonish) bravado.

I'd like to stress this point a bit more, if I may. Like the blues, metal is a genre that thrives on formulae as easily as it falters upon them. There are certain values that a metal band must espouse, and the further they deviate from these values, the less convincingly metallic they will seem to the metal audience. Which is fine, as far as I'm concerned because of the flipside- when applied with due diligence and creativity, that metal formula is capable of yielding great results, and a surprising amount of diversity, within its own perimeter (consider such diverse examples as the tribal drums on Sepultura's Chaos AD or the jazzy grooves on Atheist's Elements). Priest established a very good formula for great metal albums - a formula that produced classic or at least very metallic-ly satisfying albums throughought their career. Conversely, the albums produced in an attempt to veer away from the formula - Point Of Entry and Turbo - are not among their finest. The rule has its exceptions of course - Defenders Of The Faith and Ram It Down have always struck me as somewhat over-nervous attempts to stick to this formula in the aftermath of unsuccesful deviations, or triumphant returns to form, but then nothing works out perfectly in this disturbingly real world of ours.

But I digress. Coming back to the album at hand, one of the most striking things about it is the way it is bookended by two really strong, headbangng tracks. The opener, Sinner, is built on a mid-tempo sludgy Sabbathy groove that wouldn't have been out of place on Priest's earlier albums, but the chorus kicks in with an emphatic, vehement riff that is pure classic Priest. Halford's voice is in fine form as his vocal imagination. The track that closes the album, Dissident Aggressor, sounds exactly as its title would suggest and is a near-perfect slab of proto-thrash fury. Absolutely perfect ways to begin and end Priest's first major-label venture.

What lies in between is a little uneven. The Joan Baez cover, Diamonds And Rust, causes some dissension among friends of mine who cherish the original and feel that this is a senseless metallising of song that was extremely personal to its original creator. I suppose I'm less of a purist - I've always liked the way Priest tackle covers, and this one is a real classic. If there ever was a metal singer who could channel the wistful lyrcism of the original into something that preserved the mood of longing nostalgia while rocking at the same time, it was Halford. Which is handy, because it's Robbie Halford on vox here, you know. The musical arrangement is cool too, with its galloping power chords and nice bursts of melody. Two of the other faster songs on the album are decent as well - Starbreaker is a bit mellower - early-Rush levels of metallness, here, but a good SF-ish track. Raw Deal is a barroom boogie gone metallic, with lyrics that begin with describing Halford scoping the scene at a gay bar in New York and seem to end with him being tied up in a sack and beaten up by the 'big boys'. Oh, my. It's also a bit of a riff-fest, and musically quite complex although the guitarist keep the feel going so well that you don't necessarily notice this. Let Us Prey/Call For The Priest begins with a Queen-esque bombastic intro, and launches into a pacey if not expecially memorable rocker with defiant lyrics which could be about heavy metal tribal integrity or gay pride, depending on how much you want to retroactively intepret Priest lyrics in terms of Halford's sexuality. It's not nearly as good as the bookend tracks, though. It does have a descending guitar motif that kinda puts me in mind of a real epic on their next album though, but that's not immediately pertinent.

The two ballads work even less well, to my mind. Last Rose Of Summer is a tender, romantic ballad that fits even worse here than the Stones' Lady Jane did, sandwiched as it was between miosgynistic anthems like Stupid Girl and Under My Thumb. It's a pity though, the song itself is a rather good ballad, and immaculately rendered by Tipton, Downing and Halford. The other ballad, Here Come The Tears, is much more of a by-the-numbers power ballad, rising in pace and volume into a passage with Halford-wails and powerful solos, but the heavy bits actually come across as a bit of under-conceived caterwauling done as an aobligato. Which is a bit of a suprise considering that Priest had a really classic epic in their last album, Victim Of Changes, but the dynamics there were very different.

Still, there are passing worries, with the strong points as strong as they are. It's perfectly okay for an early album to have shaky moments, and the relatively low rating of this album has to be seen in light of the slew of near-perfect metal classics that followed it. You may even have a stronger tolerance than I do for metal power-balladry in which case you'll love this album that much more. Historically, this album was released at a time when the buzz-saw fury of punk seemed to have rendered the thud and pomp of classic metal extinct. Priest, along with other bands like Motorhead, Iron Maiden and Saxon would soon reply with a new, speeded-up and raucous metal but this album stands as a halfway mark between what, in 1977, were the old and the new. Songs like Sinner and Dissident Aggressor show the way forward, while songs like Send For The Priest and Here Come The Tears stand as a legacy of the artsier approach that was then out of favour (although Maiden, at least, would succesfully combine near-prog ambition and NWOBHM grit for a brief, shining period).

The Remastered edition of the album cetainly boosts the sound, and this is the edition you should own. Be warned, though, the bonus material adds little to the experience. Race WithThe Devil is a fairly standard rocker, although it would have made a good replacement for one of the ballads, and the live track - Jawbreaker - is both a mediocre performance and out of place, as it is a version of a song from a much later album.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: If you're new to Priest, Sad Wings Of Destiny or British Steel may be better places to start. That aside, this is as diverse and creative a classic metal album as you could want, even if all the diversity isn't used to good end.

2007-01-05T16:10:00.000+05:30

The Rolling Stones – 'Let It Bleed'

1969

Rating: 10 on a scale of 10, A on an A-B-C scale

By the mid-60s, the Stones had really hit their stride. Jagger and Richards had shed the safety of souped-up rhythm n’ blues covers, discovered their songwriting talents and proceeded to release albums that took British invasion rock to dirtier, dingier and more downright unsavoury places than the usual smattering of teenage romance and them old rhythmic blues cover tunes. Their original material had sounded stronger than the covers ever since 1965’s Out Of Our Heads – the album that debuted their signature tune, (I can’t get no) Satisfaction. 1968 saw the release of their first bona fide masterpiece, and a strong contender for best Stones album of all time – Beggar’s Banquet. For my money, though, the follow-up, Let It Bleed, is even better. It’s virtually a carbon copy of its predecessor, but with the added benefit of one more year’s worth of creative development – which, for a band at the peak of their growth curve, means a lot. The melodies are sharper, and the balance of ambitious ‘epic’ tracks (which is not to say proggy – the Stones never showed the slightest hint of prog aspirations, but sometimes a song will be pretty long and sometimes it has more than two parts and a mid-8), groovey rockers and ballads (Stones-style, of course) is even more well-crafted. That’s a subjective summation, of course, and you should really go buy Banquet as well, and also 1971’s Sticky Fingers for a solid gob of the Stones at their best.

But let’s return to the album at hand. It starts off with the dark, paranoid-hysterical track Gimmie Shelter, in which Jagger’s misanthropic vocals are augmented by one Mary Clayton’s searing, gospel-in-a-hurricane backing vocals. Jagger sings - ‘Oh, a storm is threatening my very life today’, and the production makes the music sound like that storm! There’s something about love being just a kiss away at the end, but we can ascribe that to the general hangover of existing in the 60s and chalk this up as one of the Stones’ truly epic tracks. It helped that the lyrics about war and unrest gave it some sort of resonance as an (accidental?) anti Vietnam song, but let’s label that interpretation as another 60s hangover and move on.

The blues were always as important an element of the Stones’ sound as fat Chuck Berry-esque rock n’ roll, and the next song is, appropriately a cover of legendary bluesman Robert Johnson’s ballad, Love In Vain. Johnson is pretty much a revered and renowned roots genius now, with Eric Clapton devoting an entire album and DVD to playing his material, all of which is also available in lovingly remastered editions, but in 1969, to mine this gem of a song from the vaults was an unprecedented act of love, dues-paying and a strong statement that probably speaks most of Richards’ love for the rootsy blues and rock music and his vision of how it could be incorporated into a new musical context. This cover fleshes the song out with better production than old Johnson could ever dream of, a full-band arrangement and some superb mandolin playing by Ry Coooder. It’s a plaintive song, filled with timeless heartache and a great follow-up to the more rock-y darkness of Gimmie Shelter.

Next, we’re in cowboy territory with the rollicking Country Honk, a different version of the more rock n’ rolling single, Honky Tonk Women. Mick Taylor’s slide guitar and Byron Berline’s farm fiddlin’ make this song nicely stomp-worthy while Jagger swaggers about various conquests. The single version is more classic, but this is a fun side-light.

Live With Me is a grooving rocker, propelled by driving basslines from Keith Richard, who usurps Bill Wyman’s post on this track. More honky tonk piano than you’d find in a street full of Gold Rush gambling dens, courtesy sessions men Nicky Hopkins and Leon Russell and a great sax break from Bobby Keyes add to the spice in this slice of the Stones’ pie. The lyrics are a bit of a psychedelic stroll, with Jagger describing a truly surreal and unsavoury household and inviting his lady love to move in with him, anyhow.

The title track has Jagger spouting out a very different universalist message from the somewhat-similarly-titled track by The Beatles (you know the one I mean), pointing out that we all need someone we can bleed on, and inviting anyone who wants to, to bleed on him. Then he gets a little more explicit, but the song mostly sounds pretty gorgeous with Richards crafting some fine slide guitar lines and frequent collaborator Ian Stewart playing that boogie piano.

The sound gets meaner and more electric with the harmonica-embellished Midnight Rambler, another nasty Jagger ditty recounting the exploits of a serial killer, patterned after the Boston strangler, in creepily exultant detail. There’s a really nasty bit where the groove builds and Jagger chants ‘Oh don't do that, oh don't do that’ and the music suddenly stops – only to start all over again for a few speeded-up verses of gratuitous misanthropy and menace. Brrr. No one ever said the Stones were nice lads.

As if to calm us down a bit, Richards steps in with a ballad, You Got The Silver, one of his best vocal performances over the years. It’s slide-y and piano-filled and genuinely tender, and at this point in the proceedings you feel like welcoming it as if it was a long-lost sibling. Keith Richards’ vocal contributions to Stones albums are often regrettable, but sometimes they work, if oly because he always conveys a heart-felt sincerity that contrasts well with the Mick The Lick’s swaggering. This is one of those times.

The pace quickly picks up with Monkey Man, a song which features one of Richards’ best riffs ever. The song’s just about how Jagger’s a monkey man, and he’s glad you are a monkey woman. What, you want profundity too with your groovy riffs? It’s only rock n’ roll, and it isn’t being written by Pete Townshend in any case.

And then there’s the closing track, still a concert favourite - Can't Always Get What You Want. There’s a choral intro by the London Bach Choir which is probably pretty but also a little tacked-on. Anyway, it’s a great way to bow out, with the whole band in fine form (except Charlie Watts, who for some odd reason is replaced on the drum stool by one Jimmy Miller for the occasion), Richards cranking out the guitar parts that would later fill out arenas and stadiums across the land, Jagger bawling out the anthemic lyrics that have become a platform for audience interaction in latter years and guest Al Kooper doing wondrous things with pianos, organs and French horns. In keeping with the balance of moods on this album, it’s a relatively optimistic finale to the general dreariness of sentiment elsewhere.

This was, in one way, a transitory album for the Stones – it was released when Brian Jones, considered an important force in the band had died, and new Stone Mick Taylor was still in the process of being inducted into the band. It’s amazing that they took this in their stride, releasing an album that actually exceeded their previous album – itself a high point in their careers – and is still one of the best platters of rock n’ roll available for your aural pleasure. While the thought of bleeding onto Sir Mick continues to be a rather repulsive one, the non-literalists among you can be assured of a fine interlude of dirty rock by simply inserting this album into the player of your choice, following the album sleeve’s injunction to play it loud, and letting the sounds wash over or pound you, as the case may be. It’s what you want, really.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: The Stones really were the best rock n' roll band in the world for a while. Here's evidence.

2007-01-05T14:07:00.000+05:30

Paul Simon - 'Graceland'

1986

Rating: 8 on a scale of 10, B+ on an A-B-C scale.

Simon and his buddy Garfunkel were one of the Big Three classic artists my parents introduced me to when I was just a small child. So, many years later, when I stumbled upon this album in a high school classmate's house, I was understandably eager to take it back home, load it into my Phillips tape deck and let the sounds mangentically encoded upon the tape wash over my ears. I was quite pleased by what I heard - the vocals were melodic and gripping, in that wimpy-but-brainy way Simon is known and loved for (he's sort of the Woody Allen of popular music, in a way), the lyrics were well-crafted and evocative. The music was nice, too - a rather groovy soft-rock with some nice instrumentation. A few songs into the album, though, I was really blown away. I can't recall if it was all the African girls chorussing on 'I Know What I Know' or all the African guys chorussing on 'Diamonds On The Souls Of Her Shoes'. Suddenly the extra grooviness and trace of instrumental quirk underlying the melodic pop/rock fell into place. This was Paul Simon turning in a very creditable solo album, indeed (one that has further risen in my opinion as I encountered some of his less successful previous solo ventures) but also one that was a bit more than just a Paul Simon album.

Of course, the phrase 'world music' has become shorthand for milking ethnic music for exotica value and cheap hippiefied human-family sentiments by now, and anyway Simon isn't Peter Gabriel, but forget about that and what you're left with is pretty decent. A mid-career artist not quite reinventing but certainly refreshing himself with an infusion of exotic styles and musicians, and basically creating an album that retains his own identity all over it, with a bit of extra spice for added appeal. It's also got shades of rootsy US music, zydeco and southern styles that are closer home to Simon and also gel rather well with the African stuff. Everything's founded and capped with Simon's own immaculate songwriting and most of the songs would have, with slightly more banal arrangements fit lyrically onto one of his musically weaker albums.

Not all - Homeless and Under African Skies are the two songs most directly lyrically inflenced by Simon's interaction with black South African musicians in the apartheid era, and much of Homeless is pure African vocal music. 'The Boy In The Bubble', 'Graceland', 'I Know What I Know', 'You Can Call Me Al', 'Crazy Love Vol 2', 'That Was Your Mother' and 'The Myth Of Fingerprnts' are all middle-aged ruminations on old loves, past times, relationship troubles, feelings of alienation, affirmations of identity, nostalgia, reflections on the state of the world and so forth. Standard middle-aged guystuff, but bundled up with verve and sensibility. There are some great lyrics - you could just sit down with the lyric sheet for an hour or so and ponder over its poesies, if you wanted to. It's not TS Elliot, but it is Paul Simon, and it's not for nothing that I studied some of his lyrics in poetry classes in college.

The music is mostly mellow, but memorable, with the requisite hooks and melodies. Some of songs are relatively jumpy with ultra-catchy choruses - 'You Can Call Me Al', 'Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes' and 'That Was Your Mother'. There are no weaker songs that let the material down, although 'All Around The World' is lyrically vauge, even if it is very pretty. The songs are great at evoking moods without drifting into a curdy ambient murk, and while I wouldn't call it an awe-inspiring masterpiece, it is a very good album. Full marks to Simon for taking it up a notch or two just in time to boost a sagging career and for releasing one of the most genuinely creditable albums by a classic artist in the 80s. This isn't even close to embarassing, and it's actually good enough to justify the feelings of awed anticipation I experienced all those years ago when I discovered it in my classmate's house.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Mature older-guy soft rock with musical ambition and lyrical grace. Good deal, but don't forget to be good and take a spoonful of Ramones the morning after.