Mastodon – Remission

Review# 60

Ahhhhh, that's better! So I feel a little bad about my rant about Mastodons Crack The Skye album, not really though but I would like to review a good album (which could be almost anything after Crazy Town) and this is an amazing album and will destroy the memory of that last pile of shit I reviewed!

Remission is pretty much just 50min of brutally amazing tracks that make you forget this is a debut album. The album is raw aggressive power and was listed in Metal Hammer magazines top 100 heavy albums a good 5 or so years ago. The technical ability shown by the band always blows me away and especially so on Remission. The riffs are big and strong and powerful with the drums adding just enough technical craziness but not too much to override the guitars and vocals. I love the sound on this album, the drums definitely stand out for me as some of the best sounding drum production on an album with an organic sound. So basically it hasn't been over polished and on the whole feels honest.

I find it hard to pick favourite tracks when I listen to the album in full but I am particularly fond of March Of The Fire Ants, Workhorse, Mother Puncher and Trainwreck so you can have all of them as your video/aural treats for today!

March Of The Fire Ants: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uShqlufsq5w
Workhorse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5NBft-49OE
Mother Puncher: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BiOITZHC8I
Trainwreck: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRXMHUWcY3s

Crazy Town – The Gift Of Game

Review#59

Oh fuck this sucks fetid maggoty ass! I would like to point out first off that I have never owned, nor listened to this album before and have no idea what else Crazy Town do besides the embarrassingly catchy Butterfly but I found a copy of this in my flatmates CD tower so I had to go there... It's like a kid wanting to touch the hot oven... I just had to do it!

To be fair the Rap Rock thing, for the most part, never really clicked with me but even basing this on radio play it's a tragic effort and really only had Butterfly to push the album which peaked at #10 in NZ. So yes, the “music” is painful to listen to, the lyrics are shit “I'm tripping on acid rain” …???? Usually people die if they drink acid rain so I guess kudos to them. The production is nothing to write home about either.

This is actually the worst album I have listened to in a very long time! I cannot find anything good about it as I don't really have the nostalgia kick like with Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory with the very brief exception of the song Butterfly which reminds me of working at Pizza Hut!

So to sum up this album; this is an anger inducing piece of aural rape and is more likely to make me go on a killing spree than anything that is usually blamed for making people go on killing sprees! Sorry Sam you have had to sit through this shit with me, it really shows your dedication to our relationship though! And kids, don't think it will be interesting to touch that hot oven as all that will happen is that YOU WILL WANT TO STAB YOUR EARDRUMS OUT!

I don't want to put a video up as I would hate for someone to end up watching it but I will leave you with a line from what is possibly the worst song (it stuck out to me as the worst anyway) I have head in a very long time. This is from Only When I'm Drunk: “I get drunk and I stumble to the phone and conjure up a bitch to bone when I'm alone” …. … … … Cool.

Revolting Cocks – Got Cock?

Review# 58

Revolting Cocks, or RevCo for short, is a side project of Ministry main-man Al Jurgensen and on this album is the only one of the three founding members. The name came from an incident when Al, along with founding members Richard 23 and Luc Van Acker, went to a bar to celebrate their new project and resulted in a brawl, when the owner threw them out he told them he was calling the cops and that they were a “bunch of revolting cocks” so they decided to keep the name.

Got Cock? Is the most recent output and sixth studio release by the band. Personally I feel it is the fun flip side of Al, at least to a degree anyway, but after the serious but provocative nature of Ministry it must be fun to provoke some shit in a fun way. The album is predominately about sex (but you would have guessed that already yeah?) but it is also very tongue and cheek through out most of it with the main exception being Fuck Money. The album is divided between Industrial Rock like Filthy Senoritas or Poke-A-Hot-Ass (… it's about Indians) and a heavier Industrial sound like Dykes or Juice.

Overall the album is solid and fun but it does get a little weak toward the end but does pick up again for Poke-A-Hot-Ass and Me So Horny (with samples from Full Metal Jacket), but I don't know if the remix of Me So Horny was necessary especially after listening to the original just before that and there is a remix of this entire album in the works as we speak.

Dykes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmIUcN9-wfs
Juice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJkenqO1WqA
Filthy Senoritas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkQMARFPNrk

Dio - Magica

Concept albums are something of a divided beast, they are usually either excellent or horrible with little middle ground, and usually this is dependant largely on how good the concept is. If you have something like The Wall then the ideas are universal enough for everyone to relate to without the specific storyline needing to be all that important. Even Operation: Mindcrime, which has a pretty specific storyline, has themes with are vague enough for the audience to connect to. Here is a fantasy/sci-fi storyline about people who turn into stone or something. There’s also a love story in there. Dio talks you through it at the end of the album. It goes on for about 20 minutes and I’ve never listened to it all the way through because I kind of don’t care that much.

The music is alright I guess. When you have songs written around a storyline they have to point in one direction so the sequencing can ruin the flow of the album. That’s the ultimate problem with the record, it doesn’t flow. You’ve got about three short introductory themes, and then a few riff-driven rock songs, all of which sound pretty similar and to top it off the riffs aren’t really all that exciting. These are rock riffs, they don’t have to be technical but they DO have to be exciting. When they’re exciting the band is on a buzz and that comes across on the recording. Most importantly it puts the listener on a buzz. I must have listened to nothing but Children of the Grave for three weeks solid when I first heard that song. Here the music is largely filler to move from one exposition point to the next. The lyrics aren’t particularly good, but if it was at least exciting it wouldn’t matter. Take the track Killing the Dragon from Dio’s following album: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKcuPnkG-mM . These are lame lyrics that could be thrown together by just about anyone with a vague idea of what Dungeons and Dragons is about, far worse than anything on here. The chorus is grammatically borked. But it is a cool song. It’s exciting and it takes you on its corny Elvish adventure and you love every minute of it, all four and a half of them. Here it’s a lot harder to get as invested in what’s going on when you need to do the work to keep your interest up.


The best two tracks (that is, the two tracks I really like) are the power ballad As Long as it’s Not About Love and Losing My Insanity which was probably raided from a Jethro Tull demo reel. Everything else is pretty dispensable.

As Long as it’s Not About Love: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR8RMdhOZeM
Losing My Insanity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfh7to0dmco

The Beatles - With The Beatles

After Please Please Me and a handful of singles turned out to be really, truly, incredibly popular The Beatles returned to the studio in late 1963 to record their second LP. By all means this is following the successful formula of the first album, the openers are pretty similar, Money is kind of like Twist and Shout, but obviously nowhere near as good. This was still in the days of pop where the prime material was released on singles and everything else went on the LP, so it comes as kind of a surprise that the material here is actually really good. To be honest I’ve never really been huge on the early Beatles singles from memory. Something like From Me To You is a fine song, but a lot of the stuff here just makes for a more compelling listen.

This album also seems to rock a wee bit harder than the last album does overall, although the clunkers on this one seem to be way less memorable. For one of those really rare occasions it’s the Ringo track, I Wanna Be Your Man, which really stands out. In fact it would have done really well as a single had they not given it to the Stones before this album was finished. Other than that it’s probably the most John dominated album in the catalogue. Paul’s best track is All My Loving followed at a distant second by Till There Was You. Why is the word ‘until’ abbreviated to ‘till’ in the first place, that second ‘l’ really works against it.

Get the mono 2009 mastering. The album was recorded to two-track still so you could drive a truck through the separation.

It Won’t Be Long: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmXXFbhokc
I Wanna Be Your Man: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-CjxASY3to

Austrian Death Machine – Double Brutal

Review# 57

What more could you want but a band entirely devoted to the one and only Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not only that but a good album to boot? Well look no further than Double Brutal! ADM is the side project of As I Lay Dying singer Tim Lambesis and features Josh Robert Thompson who is well known for his Ahhhnold impressions. The album consists of original songs and short skits of Ahhhnold and Tim etc on one disk and on the second disk is a bunch of broootal covers. All of the original songs are inspired by Arnie movies from Terminator, Total Recall and Conan The Barbarian right through to Kindergarten Cop, Jingle All The Way and Batman & Robin. The album is a lot of fun and having Josh doing all of the Ahhhnold lines is much more satisfying than Chad Ackerman who performed them on the first album Total Brutal.

The covers disk is good, they have been clever picking songs that thematically go with the films Arnie has been in eg Metallica's Trapped Under Ice and I Turned Into A Martian by the Misfits. I quite like the cover of Judas Priest's Hell Bent For Leather due to it's ridiculousness, but to be honest this is just not as good as the original disk but good for a laugh.

Personally I have found that this can be an enjoyable album even if you don't know Arnie's work all that well and lets face it, who hasn't at least attempted to do an Arnie impression at some point? He is a figure embedded in popular culture one way or another so it was really just a matter of time before it would have happened anyway and it could have come off with even worse results... Brokencyde tribute to the Governator anyone?

Extra brootal tracks are:

I Need Your Clothes, Your Boots, And Your Motorcycle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llUV6hPuQsU
See You At The Party Richter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaQ3TQud9Ck
Conan, What Is Best In Life?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSTCEtwVci8
Hell Bent For Leather: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glNOhWFyqX0

Cuarteto Casals - Metamorphosis

I don’t know very much about classical. I guess you need a fairly invested understanding of musical theory to really get the most out of it. What I do like is hearing musical sounds I’m not really used to, so the change from rock and jazz is highly welcome.

The disc focuses on three pieces by Hungarian composers of the 20^th century. There is Bartok’s string quartet no. 4; Ligeti’s string quartet no. 1 and Kurtag’s 12 Microludes for string quartet. The first two works are about 20 minutes each and the last is 12. You sort of need to learn how to follow the music to get the most from it but from first listen I think I like the Ligeti piece the best.

Nothing from the album itself is on Youtube, but here is a link to someone else playing the Ligeti piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OD4oJKJFVI

Judas Priest – Angel Of Retribution

Review# 56

This is one of those albums that is part kick-arse and half pants. Judas Is Rising, Deal With The Devil, Revolution, Demonizer are all solid tracks that are hooky and interesting. Unfortunately most of the rest of the album is lacking with songs like Worth Fighting For and Angel tending to be boring and have no impact whatsoever. Lochness would definitely benefit from having no lyrics and being solely an instrumental.

To be honest its hard to write about this album since it is so hit and miss. None of the songs really wind me up to rant about, except some of the lyrics to Lochness maybe, and the enjoyable tracks are not exactly the best things priest have ever done and while they are good they are not Breaking The Law or Painkiller. If you are looking at getting into Priest try British Steel or Painkiller first then give this a whorl.

Revolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PA1n83U-4A

Pink Floyd - The Final Cut

Out of the issues and themes raised from the work done in the sessions for The Wall, in my opinion Pink Floyd’s greatest work, many ideas still weren’t developed by the completion of the double LP. Roger Waters’ isolation is less an issue here, but it’s clear that The Wall opened up a lot of scars regarding the death of his dad in World War II, which is the primary focus here.

This is in no means the Pink Floyd of the 70’s. For all intents and purposes this is the first Roger Waters solo record, much more so than The Wall even. There are little significant instrumental passages throughout and not so much as a residue of psychadelia. I don’t know exactly what you’d call most of the music on the album actually... singer songwriter? Adult alternative? Some other made up genre so that everything fits into a neat little box? All I can tell you for certain is that these are good songs, they have a good amount of emotional connection to the audience and they mean something to the person performing them.

Production wise a lot of the sound effects that are layered throughout the album are recorded binaurally, so if you’re listening on headphones they will move around and over the top of your head. 3D sound dudebro. There are two versions of the album that are readily available. I recommend the remaster which also has When The Tigers Broke Free from the Wall film which despite its awkward placing after the third track doesn’t detract from the album as much as you’d think. All in all even if it is just another brick in The Wall it's still one of my favourite Pink Floyd albums.

 
Two Suns in the Sunset: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOJHz6Przdw