Aaah, the heady days when it was edgy to name your band after a geopolitical boundary: America, Kansas, Europe...

Anyway, the headlining track here is Carry On Wayward Son, which is a absolutely fantastic classic rock song. This one thing keeps niggling me: it feels Kansas is totally trying to emulate Queen and Bohemian Rhapsody. Consider:

• Multi-tracked, chorus vocal intro
• Epic headbang riff
• Solo piano and vocal break

However instead of the operatic vocals, there's a staccato guitar instrumental.

It really strikes me though that this is very much a 70s sound through and through - it lacks the timeless quality of really transcendental music (e.g. Queen). It was like I had accidentally tuned into a baby-boomer nostalgia-rock station on the radio. Don't get me wrong, this doesn't make it bad, just...it feels out of context? They also consistently use reverberated multi-tracked vocals like Auto-tune.

In the end, they're a great performing band, and it's easy listening.

The thing that stands out for me here is the great instrumental arrangement. I mean you've got a flute, heh, but even if you look at all the standard stuff, keyboards, vocal harmonies, guitars e.t.c, they're all audible and distinctive and doing complementary call-and-response things. It's quite orchestral.

My verdict: I like it.

I really like it though. There's huge variety here, from acoustic ballads like My Friends to weird beat-poem stuff in Pea to the frantic Coffee Shop and Deep Kick. They allowed Flea to get out his modulated bass auto-wah in Falling Into Grace. I also quite liked Walkabout.

And of course there's my ultimate all-time favourite RHCP song, Aeroplane.

I am of the first camp. Many, in fact let's be honest and say pretty much all of my friends are in the second camp.

So experimental composition can be pretty divisive. This particular experimental composition (listen to an mp3 here) consists of a speech that was recorded, then played back into the same room and re-recorded, then that recording was played back into the same room and re-recorded...e.t.c, e.t.c. What happens is that the sound is distorted each time by the resonance and frequency response of the room, taking it further and further from being a recognisable human voice.

Depending on which camp you are in, what results is either a haunting wash of tones that provoke deep thoughts about the nature of sound, or ten minutes of irritating feedback noises. Your mileage may vary.

(p.s.: check out a video version of the same idea here)

Let's get this over with: seriously, what a mediocre cover of Hallelujah. I have no idea why that is his definitive work. I mean, you only had to wait for the next track to hear Lover, You Should've Come Over, which is just incredible and blows it out of the water. That's the one I've been listening to over and over.

The arrangement and sound of the album just comes across as really tasteful, restrained, and subtle, and it complements his voice really really well. But at times all the taste and restraint was just...boring, and a bit uniform. That would be the main weakness. Possibly it's a frame of mind thing.

The actual music is a lovely 70s ballad kinda style with actual stories in the lyrics. And of course the trademark extended jams.

I really like Jerry Garcia as a guitarist. He's not a shredder but fills in with a wonderful lyrical, melodic style.

You can find this whole concert online here. ]]> http://www.samuelmay.id.au/music/blog/post/1272166097 http://www.samuelmay.id.au/music/blog/post/1272166097 Sun, 25 Apr 2010 13:28:17 +1000 http://www.samuelmay.id.au/music/blog/post/1271740339 http://www.samuelmay.id.au/music/blog/post/1271740339 Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:12:19 +1000 Aaah Dream Theatre. The band that never fails to offer up epic 20 minute tracks with epic musicianship and epic guitar and epic keyboards and epic drumming and dramatic, epic lyrics. They're pretty epic.

But for some reason, there's always a point where they feel the need to break out the 'Dynamic Piano 3' sound on the Roland and launch into a terrible, cringeworthy power ballad. Strange that.

This album is decent I guess, they just keep doing their thing. It's pretty funny that they give you a second CD which is just all the tracks from the first CD without the vocals. Supposedly it's the 'instrumental' version but it looks like an admission that their singer is average and the lyrics are tryhard.

But the funniest part was when they broke into Root Of All Evil halfway through track 3 (40 minutes into the album and they're only halfway through track 3?!?), almost like they were just testing to see if anyone was actually still listening.

At The Drive-In > The Mars Volta + Sparta.

The break-up of At The Drive-In is an almost textbook case of creative differences, where you have one half go off to form the utterly boring Sparta and the other half letting loose with the insanity that is TMV. When they were together, ATD-I was more than the sum of these parts.

In this album the worst excesses of Cedric and Omar are restrained, almost unleashed by the rest of the band (who are sane). It's really interesting and original rock that has attracted such labels as 'post-punk' and 'post-hardcore'. Highlights for me are Pattern Against User and One Armed Scissor. Mannequin Republic, Cosmonaut, and Sleepwalk Capsules are also great. The last song Non-zero Possibility ruins the mode, it's just slow. What is it with these crappy boring closing songs? Overall it's an awesome album though.

Even though this album is apparently a 'concession to the mainstream' (now seriously, what kind of an indie wanker says stuff like that) this is definitely pretty out there stuff. I learnt about these guys from an unrelated Metafilter thread where everyone was writing them off as being impenetrable noise. It's not impenetrable, you just need to think in a penetrating fashion as you listen.

Memorable tracks are The Girl and Sleeping Sickness which are really quite nice.

(They're also actually very good musically - drums, guitar and keys all tight, mixed well with a great keyboard sound)

But here, all the musicians are sitting around a dimly-lit lounge wearing sunglasses and mellowing out on depressants. The sunglasses are Cool. The muted trumpet is Cool. The horn arrangements are Cool. The drum breaks are Cool. The bass is inaudible, which is worrying because I'm supposed to be performing Deception in a week and I have no idea what the bass player actually does. Occasionally, when someone is soloing, you can picture a band member removing a joint and going 'yeah man, play it'. Coool.

...Again, it's the drummer who is driving this stuff. Count the beat changes. See if he ever misses one of those beats. Does he? Nope. He may give the best rim job of any drummer I've ever heard. Shut up. I mean it. STFU. ...

...And, yet, is "Bryn" one of the whitest names you've ever heard? "Vampire Weekend" was dubbed the "whitest band" in the world by Christian Lander, the creator of the site "Stuff White People Like." And I say, "Hell, yes! I do!" ...

... Just in case you have some of that ADD stuff and forgot that they were privileged college kids, here's a song about a classmate named "Walcott." It's Monopoly set to music, isn't it? ...

This is better than the new Triple J morning show guy getting his dad to review the feature album of the week.

There's a very fine line between 'good' punk and 'bad' punk. I tend to place the Offspring on one side, and Blink 182 on the other. Greenday hops from one side to the other, while the Sex Pistols are pissing on the line.

Most punk bands that hit the big time, despite lacking in formal music education, manage to become quite tight simply by playing really fast a lot. The effect is kind of like an uncoordinated person managing to run by constantly falling forwards and recovering with alternate legs; however they've practised this until they can run 100m in ten seconds flat. It's actually really hard to do.

Not that the Vandals are lacking in songwriting ability. The opening song People That Are Going To Hell has a great use of dynamics; Come Out Fighting rocks as a feel-good anthem; and F'D up Girl and So Long, Farewell show a surprising diversity of sounds.

In the winning track Little Lion Man, the words 'your sex is on fire' are not uttered once.

On the other hand, you listen to it and go "Aww, how cute, they used a banjo". Then you listen to the rest of the album and realise that no, the banjo is not ironic; the banjo is in EVERY SONG. The lively acoustic strumming, the tasteful string, keyboard and brass lines (which often came in towards the end, giving a building song structure which I approve of), the harmonies and pensive lyrics; no, it just wasn't enough was it. Pluckety pluckety pluck. I was immediately forced to downgrade this album from 'Indie/Acoustic' to 'Country'.

Well, at least it wasn't a harpsichord. The only excuse for that is being The Decemberists, because they're just like soooo clever.

There's times though, e.g. Tony Delany, where they seem to be channeling the Beatles, or at least the ghost of Harrison is yelling "7th chords, dude!" frantically in someone's ear on the edge of hearing.

I still can't believe that when they played at the UNSW end-of-session party me and Perry were the only ones going "IT'S THE FUCKING JOHN STEEL SINGERS" and listing in rapt attention in the front row. Yeah, I like these guys.

Anyway, this album is one of my favourites. It's pure songwriting from start to finish, with some very classical elements harking back to Schumann or Chopin. Just the piano and the stories and the human condition. And don't some of the songs hit close to home ("You're so young, you're so god DAMN young"). Ghost Of Corporate Future, Carbon Dioxide, oh man just a second there's something in my eye...nah it's just been raining ...on my face. sniff.

OK, I admit, Grizzly Bear is much much better than this. Although at times they stray perilously close to the aforementioned boring atmospheric filler, they have a strong sense of composition and tone that keeps this interesting.