Sound of the Future (Or, How to Die Forgotten)

By: Tzarathustra

If you want to hear a compact history of contemporary music, look no further than The Winston's virtually un-listened-to B-side from 1971 called "Amen, Brother". It's a pretty standard funky soul song, but then something happens just after the 1:20 mark: a drum break so prescient and hip that it's been omnipresent for the last thirty years. It's known as the Amen Break, and it's pretty much the basis for sampled music as we know it. This is the birth of techno and hip hop who knows what else, all in one short drum solo.

It's crazy that this one obscure song sounds so incredibly like 1971 right until the break, which now sounds like it's been spliced in from a 1998 techno track. It's also crazy that someone in 1980 or so picked up an old vinyl record and decided, "This will be the sound of the future."

Even crazier, but somehow not surprising, is that the composer of the song never saw a penny's worth of royalties, and the drummer who performed the song (G.C. Coleman) died homeless and broke in 2006

Rock. Is. Not. Dead. (Pt 1)

                                       photo by Bertrand used under creative commons    

by Tzarathustra

For a while there it was thought we'd soon be awash in great music as technology liberated the masses of bands that were waiting to break out. Then came years of computer music as technology liberated nothing so much as its self and rock music was purportedly on life support. 

This series is my justification that rock and roll is not dead, or 

even close to it. The kids may not want loud guitars anymore, but 

there are isolated enclaves of dirty rockers doing their thing. I'll 

admit that there is probably no rock revolution waiting to storm the 

gates of pop culture because that's not the world we live in 

anymore, but there are a ton of great bands out there toiling away 

in obscurity, doing it because they have to just to get it out 

somehow, just waiting for people to listen to the great things 

they're doing. 

What will follow are the ones that I've stumbled across lately. It's all heavily indebted to the blues in various ways, as all good rock 

music is. It's dirty and loud and satisfying, as all good rock music 

is. Everyone keeps pondering how we're going to save rock and roll, 

but they're looking at it backwards. We don't save rock and roll. 

Rock and roll saves us.

First up is The Blackwater Fever from Australia. Somewhere between the bluesy riffing of the Black Keys' early days and the psychedelic sludge alternative of Soundgarden and Monster Magnet 90s alternative

Marilyn Manson: The Pale Emper (Review)

      

The new Marilyn Manson album The Pale Emperor flows slowly like lava, driven primarily by bass and drums rather than the brittle processed guitars of the past. The second single "Deep Six" might be about the heaviest thing on the album, the rest falling closer in tone to the first single Third Day of a Seven Day Binge, with its rock steady beat and lurching bass. Manson hasn't crafted atmosphere like this in some time, maybe since Golden Age of Grotesque, and it sounds like he's traded some of the raw aggression for a sense of nocturnal desperation, not unlike the Afghan Whigs or Nick Cave in some places. The Pale Emperor sounds almost classy for a Marilyn Manson album, like dark suits and spilled wine.

Manson at his peak was a man of the times, and never an artist that people could picture doing his schtick at age 70 like the Stones (though I imagine that in the late 60s it was hard to picture the Stones still doing it at that age either), but The Pale Emperor shows us hints that Marilyn Manson might just find a way to age while remaining a viable artist. It definitely shows that despite the confused feel to some of his last albums, he's found a way to write honestly in the 21st century, without the need to resort to blunt force or elaborate artifice.

In a recent interview, he credited the sounds on this album to his time spent working on Sons of Anarchy, where he was exposed to more blues and blues-based rock than his background in goth and industrial had offered. Of course, that's not to say that he picked up a battered acoustic and a glass slide and started wailing about working the fields - it is still identifiably a Manson project, but perhaps for the first time he's leading with something other than excess. There is a stripped-down feel and slower tempos to many of the songs, and while the blues may not be overt, it is very definitely present in the voodoo drums, warm guitar tones, and diabolical swagger. It's clear that while Manson always wanted to be our devil's advocate, we are dealing with a different devil here, because the record feels less like a shocking dare and more like a tempting suggestion.

 

2014 in Review Pt. 2 (A Great Year for the 90's)

Here at this blog we like the nineties. And while many opinion makers and music reviewers slag off the persistence of some of these twenty-plus-year careers as flogging a corpse, it does not change the fact that 2014 was a great year for the decade of my teens, the decade of theatrically morose guitar bands and youthful disaffection. Listening back to the year in music one can easily be lulled into feeling like the last 20 years never happened...a pretty reassuring fantasy for most.

--by Tzarathustra--

Counting Crows: Somewhere Under Wonderland

A spry album that plays with the idea of Americana in a way that only the Crows can do. It's viewed through the lens of nostalgia, yes, but that lens isn't rose-tinted. They're courageous enough to speak the truth and talented enough to do it over a set of songs that run the gamut from bouncy fun to wrenchingly poignant. Glad to see they're still going strong.











Bush- Man on the Run

This one is ironically more memorable than their last album Sea of Memories. It hearkens back to a sort of Science of Things vibe, with the thick guitars combined with occasional electronic accents. Rossdale has written some good vocal melodies on these songs that take me right back to the 90s. This isn't a groundbreaking record by any means, but I don't think any of us have ever expected that of Bush. We only needed them to rock like those days would never end, so this is a nice addition to their discography.







Foo Fighters- Sonic Highways 
There are two ways to look at this album. It could be viewed as a bit of a conceptual failure by some, because the band did eight songs inspired by eight different cities as a love letter to America's classic rock and roll heritage, but instead of the incredible diversity that you might expect, it appears that the Foo Fighters' triple-guitar attack kind of quashed the regional character of the songs. Without a guide, you'd be hard pressed to determine which city inspired which song. On the other hand, just the attempt to be more diverse gave the band the extended sonic palette that they've been lacking for the last few albums. This record's spirit does reside firmly in 1976, but if you can appreciate some Springsteenian gigantism, there is some memorable work here.



Smashing Pumpkins- Monuments to an Elegy 

A short, sweet demonstration that Corgan can still pull out some engaging tunes, even if they are dripping with synth burbles and reverb. The whole thing comes in at just over thirty minutes, which for Billy is a demonstration of remarkable restraint (thought there is another LP already partway done). That restraint is one of the album's biggest strengths; elements arrive, entertain, and then bow out. Nothing stays around long enough to become tedious or overcooked. This is a strong outing for Corgan, and though I understand that it is no longer 1995, part of me is still holding out hope that he can rediscover the power of a dry distorted guitar tone.

2014 in Review pt.1 (Monster Magnet)

It's an easy knee jerk reaction at the end of every year, looking over "best of" lists, to think that
nothing interesting is going on. Music journalists comb through their year's listening and try to make it all seem more important than it was, jamming hyperbole on top of overstatement until Rolling Stone is trying to convince everyone that U2 released the best album of the year.


Fortunately the fact is that some interesting, strange, and compulsively listenable things happened and were released this year. In compiling my own list of high water marks I even began thinking that itwas (gasp!) a good year for music.

As far as I'm concerned "Best of" lists are a nonsense conceit that attempts to quantify the unquantifiable. So our list, which we'll reveal an entry at a time over the coming days should be viewed as a review of notable moments, cool stuff that happened, music worth revisiting. By the end, when we reset and refocus our ears for 2015 we should have a playlist that will refute the claim that "nothing interesting is going on."

MONSTER MAGNET: MILKING THE STARS

You could be forgiven for not knowing that Monster Magnet released an album this year. after all they just released one last year and this puts them off their long-established 1 every three years release schedule. But Dave Wyndorf got done mixing the last Monster Magnet album The Last Patrol, and wondered, "How would this sound if it were recorded in 1968?" This re-imagining is a pretty fair approximation of just that. They've turned down the gain a bit, added organs, and tweaked the arrangements. The songs have a whole different character to them, more acid trip than stoner sludge. Definitely a compelling experiment.

 

Apology Accepted, Weezer- Everything Will Be Alright in the End (Review)

by Tzarathustra



After one full listen-through, I can say that this is certainly the strongest record that Weezer has done since the Green Album. 

   




The first single,  "Back to the Shack" 

is a simple rocker that  functions as an 

outright apology for the bland pop 

experiments of the last few Weezer 

records, and they do seem sincere about 

getting back to the sound that we all know 

and love from the 90s. 

     Ric Ocasek is back behind the boards, 

and the big crunchy sound with the 70s 

stadium rock leanings is firmly in place. 

The songs all have that unmistakable Weezer 

catchiness and Cuomo's way with a melody, 

and there's a nice balance between the more 

serious relationship-type songs and the 

breezier songs. Overall it's fun, it's 

rocking, and there are some enjoyably weird 

arrangement choices throughout to hold your 

attention.

     The only thing that I think keeps it 

from being a truly great album like the Blue 

Album or Pinkerton is that those songs feel 

like they were written in more of a vacuum, 

or at least for a small devoted audience. 

Twenty years of big-time fame later, these 

new songs have a tendency to feel like Cuomo 

wrote them knowing that everyone was 

watching, and while he's giving the people 

what they want again, the songs have a film 

of self-awareness to them. Considering how 

much better the whole thing feels than their 

previous few records though, that's a pretty 

small complaint, and perhaps with more 

listens the songs will feel more lived-in 

and the album will settle into a spot beside 

their best work where that self-awareness 

won't be too noticeable. 

The Screaming Trees- Last Words:Final Recordings

 

In August of 2014 The Screaming Trees 

released their long rumored final recordings 

as Last Words: The Final Recordings. The 

band broke up back in 2000 with the songs 

comprising the album already long since in 

the can. But due to the poor performance of 

their previous album (1996's Dust) and the 

generally tepid mood of the industry towards 

their type of sound at the time, the songs 

found no home. 

     The Screaming Trees were signed by Epic 

in 1989 but came into the mainstream 

consciousness on the wave of enthusiasm for 

grungy northwestern rock that followed 

Nirvana and Pearl Jam's success. 

Specifically they had a hit (Nearly Lost 

You) from the soundtrack for Cameron Crowe's 

film Singles. The band bore only slight 

sonic resemblance to its peers. They always 

tended more toward psychedelic garage rock, 

rather than the harried and hard worn  Black 

Sabbath homages of their northwestern scene 

mates.

      
     Though they had a minor hit with Nearly 

Lost You and some name recognition, their 

career never really ignited. Their 1990's 

albums are among the top under appreciated 

recordings of the decade. And now, to add to 

that list, comes Last Words. It shows a band 

still possessed of fire and energy and 

sounds like what it is, a message in a 

bottle from a great 90's band banging on all 

cylinders. What more could you want?