It's Been a Long Time

I haven't written a review in a long time. Writing reviews can be fun sometimes but I'm not sure that it's the best way to interact with music. I love sharing music though. I think I might try to write shorter reviews of things I like so I can accumulate a little stash of endorsements for things I like so I'll be prepared the next time someone asks me for some new music to check out.

It's a good time for me to pick this back up. There are tons of good releases popping up. Life at These Speeds and The Body recently released split seven inches, and Bucket Full of Teeth came out with a cd on level-plane. Sinaloa, Death to Tyrants, Daniel Striped Tiger, and Tiny Hawks all recently recorded some songs that should be coming out on full length records soon, plus there are plans for splits amongst Ampere, Sinaloa, Life at These Speeds, and Welcome the Plague Year. Oh, and Ampere and Tiny Hawks just put out their most recent vinyl releases in cd format....

Sinaloa / Wolves 7" on Cleanplate Records

This record (on Cleanplate Records) was finally finished and distributed to the music loving public on August 21, 2004. Wolves played their last show (having spent their last time recording in the studio even earlier) back in January. So what else is new?

The 7" features "16", the last recorded Wolves track left to be released, and two tracks from Sinaloa, titled "New Teen Craze" and "Strike Aloud". "New Teen Craze" is a thumping song with a driving beat and minimal melody. As can be guessed from the title, the lyrics deal with the artificial creation of "necessity" in the minds of young people through clever marketing tactics and fashion trends. The song's repetitive nature musically goes well with the "static function" discussed in the lyrics. The words break into more interesting territory at the end of the song with "refuse my sight, refuse my mind." Sinaloa discussed the theme of the gap between mental images and perceived reality previously in "Ancestry Is Relative" on the Fathers and Sons LP. However, then they chose to use the disconnect to their advantage rather than highlight the pitfalls surrounding. Hopefully, more songs will take up this theme in the future.

"Strike Aloud" is the longer, more emotional of Sinaloa's offerings. The subject matter this time is the helplessness felt by a mother and son trapped in an abusive family relationship with the husband/father figure. The dynamic structure of the song complements the song's narrative progression, or rather regression, wonderfully. After beginning the song with a typical Sinaloa frenzy, musing upon the life-lasting effects abuse will have upon the boy, the band settles into a quiet wash of simple but driving chords which seem to swell towards and recede from a climax which they never reach. Meanwhile, the lyrics dwell upon the temporary relief which night time affords the family as they each lie in their beds. Such a complex emotional state does not bear any sense of accomplishment and contains too large a degree of uncertainty to be felt as a climax. Sinaloa render this scene well.

The Wolves' side of this record makes me even more sad that they broke up. At close to five minutes in length, the song is more epic than the set of songs on Wolves' split release with Transistor Transistor. The vocals comprise a smaller portion of the song than on most Wolves songs. However, the musically the four instruments more independent and inventive as well. For the second half of the song, the guitars give up their jittery rhythms for soaring lyricism, while bass sounds particularly bouncy. The song's climax sounds almost more blissful than urgent as the singer cries, "We've got to change this changes this weather" with the guitars creating a rich, high pitched texture.

Overall, I enjoyed this record and I want to listen to it more. I don't think any of the songs are my favorite by either band but they are all strong and go well together to form a powerful 7".

A Day in Black and White - My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys

On a cursory listen, A Day in Black and White's new five song EP "My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys" (on Level-Plane) sounds almost indistinguishable from the recently defunct City of Caterpillar. Both bands make use of a similar aesthetic of long, repetitive guitar patterns which slowly build in tempo and volume over several minutes, while their vocalists wail away with little interest in sounding tough or vulnerable or any other usual emotional affectation that a singer might attempt. Since City of Caterpillar were based in Richmond and A Day in Black and White appeared in D.C. shortly after their break-up, I even thought that perhaps this was a new project from one of City of Caterpillar's members, but it actually is not. I could continue discussing the similarities and differences between these bands, but for the sake of readability, I will now begin a legitimate review of the album....

Containing four songs with vocals and then a long instrumental track at the end, "My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys" is a modest debut offering from Washington's A Day in Black and White. However, like the band's name and the name of their album all five tracks are sufficiently long-winded. The band manages to maintain a constant level of mood and intensity throughout all of the first four songs, which are all similarly structured and do not vary much musically. This consistency does not get old and, if anything, serves to build a stronger atmosphere than any one of the songs does on its own.

With their music and lyrics, A Day in Black and White construct a vision of reality which is colorless and decrepit, crumbling all around them and at the same time capable of unexpected mutations and unexplainable mysteries. Perhaps the best lyrics to illustrate this point are "Stumbling back, the ceiling's more than just caved in, it was never there to begin with" from "Forward/Backward" or "See what we fear, See what we fear, it's the shadows on the walls" from "Storming the Bastille" (from the interviews which the band has given, it would seem to be pretty clear that the literary reference is intentional there). However, the lyrics and their delivery fit so well with the music that pulling them out of their context really does them a great injustice.

As for the music itself, it is a dark mixture of delicacy and machine-like rigor. All four band members are good musicians who work well together, producing a sound which is notable for its precision through numerous tempo and rhythm changes throughout the songs. The band's typical dynamic is a mimicking of lines back and forth with subtle variations between the two guitars, which are usually using some high pitched echo effect, while the bass and drums play around with some steady, driving beat, although not the sort that you would want to dance around to. Ultimately, all the parts coalesce into a chugging riff over which the vocals whine with their tone of bewilderment at the world in which they find themselves. Of course, they play around within this paradigm, often in devestating ways which only add to the crumbling, desolate tone of their songs.

I truly enjoy listening to this album and find myself liking it more with each listen. Even though each song is close to five minutes or longer it feels much too short.

Slipknot - Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses

With their third and possibly final album, Slipknot has unleashed massive slab of new music which requires an equally massive aural fortitude from its listener. For one hour, the nine masked men from Iowa march through a surprisingly diverse array of influences and textures, showing the influence of hot shot producer Rick Rubin. I have tried to come up with an adequate metaphor for the totality of this melange of sounds and the best that I have been able to formulate so far is that listening to this album from beginning to end is like excavating one of the pyramids and discovering that it is haunted by the zombie corpses of former circus performers: it's a massive undertaking full of surprises that amaze you and that make you scratch your head. Despite the fact that the album has received generally good reviews across the board, Slipknot remains in my view too easy of a target simply to bash so what follows is a critical, objective discourse on my experience of The Subliminal Verses.

What makes this album interesting is the breadth of musical styles which the band employs and the tension that then arises as the music is pushed further and further toward one extreme, only to be jerked in a different direction when the sound begins to coalesce into something uniform, cliched and predictable. Further adding to the unease of the sonic atmosphere are the musical deficiencies of the band members especially when they veer out of the groove oriented thrash of their trademark sound. All of these aspects of the album are encapsulated in the figure of the band's vocalist Corey Taylor. Taylor's voice ranges from exasperated gloom on the opening track through modes of standard alt-rock posturing, country-tinged melancholy, slacker rap, and the usual tattered and torn bellow that earned Slipknot their fame.

The Subliminal Verses could indeed be considered an "experimental" album, a title that the band is clearly after. Like any group of experiments, the songs on the album are a collection of successes, failures and unexpected outcomes. The album gets off to a good start with "Prelude 3.0", a slow, fairly quiet song built out of circular guitar and drum patterns which lead up to splashes of feedback. Although not much musically, the song builds a nice atmosphere and Taylor's vocals remain subdued enough not to ruin the song, an event not uncommon later in the album. The song leads into "The Blister Exists", a piece of vintage Slipknot that goes nowhere for the first two minutes, unleashing a barrage a simple detuned riffage for Taylor's embarrassingly nonsensical lyrics of violent imagery (eg "Chemical burns and the animalistic/I'm just anohter hardline psuedo-statistic/Can you feel this?/I'm dying to feel this"). The breakdown halfway through the song in which all of Slipknot's drummers pound out a march rhythm to which the guitars add some nice high speed noodling that would not sound out of place on an eighties metal album.

Following "The Blister Exists", the band takes three shots at the shout-thrash verse and alt-rock sing-a-long chorus paradigm that characterizes much of the album with the songs "Three Nil", "Duality", and "Opium of the People." All three songs are helped by the fact that the band totally rocks out with riff after stomping riff and tempos ranging from fast to faster. In "Three Nil", Taylor keeps the vocals musically simple enough to keep up with the tone of the music if not adding anything special. The sing-scream mixture of the chorus which leads into a double time drum and guitar breakdown also works well. "Duality" is a puzzling song opening with Taylor crooning the chorus with a piano adding variety and a bit of wholesomeness to the building storm of the rest of the band: "I push my fingers into my eyes/It's the only thing that slowly stops the ache/But it's made of all the things I have to take/Jesus, it never ends, it works it's way inside." No, I don't know what he's talking about. The verse is a rap which has some decent lines although there's always one head-scratcher mixed in to keep them being really good and the further repeats of the chorus are helped by the backing of the full band and Taylor's singing hesitating on the edge of screaming. "Opium of the People" is one of the strongest songs on the album. A rejection of religion, the song is marked by the Taylor's best vocals on the album, a hopping, frantic rant about religious herd mentality. Although the chorus is not all that special, it is the only straight up singing on the album that manages to stand on its own without merely serving as a contrast to screaming.

With the song "Circle", the album moves into its weaker, softer midsection. "Circle" itself is not a bad song, especially for Slipknot. It is an acoustic ballad about the passage of time in which for once Taylor's lyrics do not embarrass him. Still, this is Slipknot, and if you want to listen to acoustic ballads, I can recommend much better.

The hardcore songs in the midsection of the album, "Welcome," "Pulse of the Maggots," and "Before I Forget", range from mediocre to awful. "Welcome" is not bad but lacks the interesting variety of the some of the other hardcore songs on the album. It is a pretty standard rap-rocker that follows a set formula of tone and texture from beginning to end. In "Before I Forget", Taylor offers his rebuttal to John Donne singing "I am a world before I am a man", whatever that means. Once again, this song does not offer much variety and it is musically pretty boring, although it might be fun to dance to. The melodic bridge is so awesomely random that it almost redeems the song...but not quite. Unlike these to throwaways, "Pulse of the Maggots" is an absolutely unforgivable track. Slipknot refers to the fans as maggots and this song seems to be little more than a shout-out to the fans, something that I really think all bands should be above. The lyrics offer some comic relief that I only wish was intentional. "I fight for the unconventional/My right, and its unconditional/I can only, be as real as i can
/ The disadvantage is I never knew the plan." Or perhaps even better: "We, we are the new diabolic/We, we are the bitter bucolic/If I have to give my life you can have it/We, we are the pulse of the maggots/Do you understand? YES! (repeated alot)/Say it again say it again We won't die! (repeated alot)." Okay, I could put up more lyrics from this song but I'll stop now.

The two parter "Vermillion" and "Vermillion, Part 2" comprises the rest of the heart of the album. "Vermillion" features Taylor trying out his best Count Dracula impression. There is an obvious Jonathan Davis influence on this song, which is not bad, but unfortunately for Taylor Davis has a guest appearance later in the album in which he does a much better job sounding like himself. The two parts together form a failed epic. There is so much ambition and variety on display in this love song to a girl that exists only Taylor's imagination that it is hard not to admire the effort, although the end product in its totality can not be characterized as a success. It does not help that the lyrics are quite flat and fairly trite love song fare, something surprising considering the usual Slipknot lyrics. The effectiveness of the contrast between the first bombastic crashing distortion of the first part and the subtle twang of the second, which would not sound out of place on one of the Stone Temple Pilot's later albums, is also lost on me. The two parts are both love songs, but why the two parts were made and how they are supposed to complement each is unexplained. Still there are interesting small successes within the overall failure.

"The Nameless" gets Slipknot back on track for the end of the album. It features the ultimate the ultimate contrast between a chorus of shouted simple call and response lyrics with machine gun craziness from the band and a crooning chorus that almost sounds like it was taken from an early Jazz or Motown single. The two styles ultimately merge when the band works in the chorus with chugging guitars followed by a screaming, pounding conclusion to the track. It is the greatest success of all Slipknot's experimentations on the album and rivals the next track, "The Virus of Life" for the best on the album.

"The Virus of Life" features Korn's Jonathan Davis and is very much more a Korn song than a Slipknot song. Unfortunately for Taylor, Davis' lyrics put the rest of the album to shame with their unsettling preoccupation with the taboo and instinctual. "Your relaxed, your sublime, your amazing/You don't even know the danger you're facing/If I'm quiet, I'll slide up behind you/And if you hear me I'll enjoy trying to find you." The song features sludgy, grinding guitars detuned almost to low to even produce distinguishable notes. The vocals are fuzzed out and low in the mix, blending into scratching, clattering samples with clatter around the edges of the song.

The album closes with "Danger - Keep Away", another quiet excursion far far away from anything usually associated with Slipknot. The song is buoyed by a keyboard loop which would fit in easily to any of Radiohead's recent albums. It, like the opening track, is a bit of a throwaway song and does a good job closing out the album. Taylor's vocals stand out a bit too much and the echo effect used on them is a bit silly, but they don't ruin the song.

So...I'm out of songs. Ultimately, I enjoyed listening to Vol. 3 and I would recommend it to anyone who likes hard music and likes to listen critically to music. It is far from being the most solid of albums, but it is filled with highs and lows and it is a pleasure to seek them out from the solid hour of musical experimentation.

Upcoming...

The first album to be reviewed on this site will be Slipknot's Vol. 3 (Subliminal Verses). I hope this selection pleases no one.