Here lies the only post of Metal Sam. It’s kind of condescending and then I couldn’t get him to write anything else for the website. As such it will be left here in memoriam of… I don’t know, something.
John Vs. “This Station Is Non-Operational” by At The Drive In
When I’m thinking about my music, I occasionally worry that it’ll make a difference. I’ve come to understand how important music works, most of the time: unless it has the industry and the marketing heads behind it, it will end up being seminal. What a fate! Maybe I’m weird for thinking this, but I’d rather not consider the idea of not seeing the fruits of my own work for decades, if ever (my life plan doesn’t expand past 34). So the respect that some bands for being seminal always seems lost on me, because it’s not really relevant to the creators, and seems like a precursor to reunions. Not that there’s anything wrong with reunions. It’s just that not everyone can be Mission of Burma about it.
This is one of many reasons I respect Omar Rodriguez, for knowing without certainty that he doesn’t want to relive all the ‘important’ music At The Drive In made through the 90s. It’s all well and good that it’s important in 2010, but they’re older men now, and rock and roll is a young man’s game. I’ve come to see their post-breakup compilation as their best album because of this, since it’s such a primer on a band that’s critically important to where radio rock went in the last decade. They are somewhat responsible for emo, but this was before that meant “super produced white boys singing about how much they hate their dad.” There’s a little bit of that in earlier ATDI (the lyric “Daddy taught well at the end of his belt” appears frequently in Picket Fence Cartel) but the distance away from it’s initial release gives it a weird capsule property, a moment in time the same way a lot of early emo feels before the sideways white belt and shitty haircut phase.
Of course, the more notable break in ATDI is the movement away from what we know as emo now into much more surreal matters. The songs from Vaya and Relationship of Command show the direction the band was moving in before the break up, which seemed destined for some kind of incredible new frontier of surrealist hardcore. And we return to this idea of seminal music; Relationship of Command is the best rock and roll album of the last decade, and it remains unchallenged and without a successor, from band members or not. So it would be a natural transition to listen to this and then Relationship of Command.
After Non-Zero Possibility, there’s a heavier focus on oddities. Bonus tracks, singles, remixes and such. It’s a still further exploration of where they were going, in a heavily more experimental direction, with two odd sticking points of Smiths and Pink Floyd covers.
Here’s my point; you should familiarize yourselves with At The Drive In. It’s the music the last decade was, but also should have been, and there’s still a lot to learn in there. Maybe someone’ll be able to understand and answer them in this decade.
WINNER: John
WHY: Well, if they’re seminal, and they influenced me, I guess that makes me more important.
Filed under John
Podcast? #2
Now with proper audio quality, it’s the Podcast? This week we discuss ODB, Frog Eyes, The Stooges. Our main event album discussion is “Public Strain” by Women, out tomorrow on world wide digital release. See how many times we came over it (no homo)! Also, this.
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Podcast? #1
Just in time, my friends. John, Matt & Andrew discuss the super relevant “The Suburbs” by Arcade Fire. SUPER relevant. It’s like thirty minutes, and it’s like a lot of good things. Check it out! Share it with a friend! The audio quality is not the best-est but we’re still getting back into the swing of things.
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Podcast? Update
Hey, so we are doing a podcast, but we’ve hit a bit of a snag. See, it costs money to be able to upload MP3s, and I am, how you say, impoverished. So behind the scenes, we’re working on how to bring this amazing audio event to you, but it may take a bit longer.
In the mean time, enjoy the sweet logo that Mr. Halverson made.
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Andrew Vs. “The Suburbs” by Arcade Fire
Arcade Fire has continued to be a beloved group since 2004, the year they put out one of the best albums of the decade: “Funeral”. When “Neon Bible” was released in 2007, it became apparent that the band enjoyed tackling a broad message on a single album. With “Funeral”, they expressed the challenges and sadness of dealing with death and in “Neon Bible”, the subject matter involved religion and the controversy around it. Finally, their newest release “The Suburbs” sets an all too familiar tone. It’s about home, growing up, and the nostalgia of being in a place you wish you weren’t in.
“The Suburbs” is the first song, a swingy, piano-powered track. Essentially, the song is about becoming an adult and feeling trapped inside the cage of suburbia. There are some extremely well-chosen words used by Win Butler: “The kids want to be so hard, But in my dreams we’re still screaming and running through the yard.”
The guitar riffs surrounding “City With No Children” are perhaps one of the coolest highlights of the album. They are cleverly written and extremely appealing to one’s earholes, or so I hear (pun).
“Half Light I” appears to be a neutral song, however there is a sense of relief and wariness in the lyrics. For some reason, it reminds me of “Funeral” quite a bit, which is a good thing. “Half Light II (No Celebration)” brings something unseen on the album so far, being sort of half-dance track, half-rock anthem. The rock anthem side doesn’t surprise me as much as the other, and it’s pleasing to hear some variation in the bass and drum beats.
The track “Suburban War” borrows lyrics from “The Suburbs”, basically being a song of rebellion and escape. It also borrows a verse from “The Suburbs”: “In the suburbs, I learned to drive, People told me we would never survive, So grab your mother’s keys we leave tonight.”
“We Used To Wait” starts with piercing piano, driving the majority of the song. Its premise is caring and then eventually losing your drive. The rest of the song sounds kind of fun as opposed to the message, possibly because Butler now cares again.
The best song on “The Suburbs” is quite possibly “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” carrying the same basic principle as “Sprawl I (Flatland)” but a little more anthemic and pumped up in emotion. It almost seems like it’s a Springstein/ABBA collaboration. “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” is what you would expect from Arcade Fire, but it’s also a pleasant surprise.
“The Suburbs (continued)”, the album’s closer repeats the theme of the starter almost as if it’s the conclusion of a high school research paper, ending with “Sometimes I can’t believe it, sometimes I’m moving past the feeling again”.
Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” is no doubtably their second best record to date (it’s damn hard to beat “Funeral”), however it is my personal favorite of theirs. It emulates a message and feeling that is extremely important to me in my life. All I’ve really known is the suburbs and it seems that they haven’t forgotten either.
WINNER: “The Suburbs” by Arcade Fire
WHY: Arcade Fire has put out some amazing music over the years and this is no exception. Definitely one of my absolute favorite albums of the year.
Filed under Andrew
Podcast?
So we’re thinking about doing a podcast, in the case of albums that are basically too big to actually write about in any coherent fashion (for example, if we were to do one this week, it would be on “The Suburbs” by Arcade Fire.) So we might have more news on this later in the week. Maybe that news will include a big link to a podcast and RSS feed information.
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Matt Vs. “Murmurs” by Caroline
I promised myself numerous times that I wouldn’t write about any form of J-Pop on this website.
Promises are made to be broken.
Caroline is an Okinawan-American singer/songwriter and “Murmurs” — I think — is her first and only album. When I learned about this information I was greatly disappointed that there wasn’t more music of her’s out there. It’s really too bad because I saw a lot of untapped potential in her, even though “Murmurs” is quite lacking in some areas.
“Murmurs” is slow techno-pop. Synth drums, keyboards, the works, everything you’d expect from a techno/trance album is here. A lot of the songs tend to be slow and low-key. The easiest comparison I can make here is that Caroline is like a Japanese Imogen Heap. Take that for what you will. Much of the instrumentation, I find, is pretty predictable and serves its purpose. The real point of intrigue is Caroline’s voice.
Caroline sounds like a small person trying to sound bigger than they actually are – puffing out their chest and raising their hands in the air wildly. She has a tiny voice, as most of the Japanese female singers I’ve heard do. It works pretty well. Songs like “Drove Me to the Wall,” especially in the chorus, makes her sound like she’s trying to be powerful but fails and kind of comes off as cute, which I find endearing in an odd way.
Unfortunately besides Caroline’s voice, there isn’t much interesting content in this album. The songs have a great atmosphere to them, but the tone is held throughout the entirety of the album and rarely deviates. A lot of the same tricks are used; the same chord structures, the set of sounds. It has a great set of songs to listen to individually but as a whole comes off as fairly uncreative.
My inner Japanophile wants to really like this album – and, believe me, I do to some degree – but on the basis that I don’t think it actually does anything original, I can’t really recommend it. It’s simple pop music and it doesn’t really need to be innovative, but when all of the songs sound the same and you make it obvious that they do, it’s hard to not get frustrated by that.
WINNER: Matt
WHY: Caroline Lufkin is a good songwriter and “Murmurs” has good songs on it — the problem is that they’re all the same and it just doesn’t work as a whole product.
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John & The Five Most California Albums Possible
With all this Wavves, Best Coast, chillwave talk going around it’s making it really fucking hard to live in California and be happy about the music coming out of here. It’s certainly all got a pretty lazy beachy quality to it, but it’s also not any good at all. So here are five albums that more honestly resemble California than god damn King of the Beach. I’m going to go ahead and leave out anything involving drug usage, as the desire to get fucked up is a basic human drive which is not uniquely Californian.
-Pet Sounds, by the Beach Boys
Well come on, now. Of course this is on here. It’s not on because it resembles California at current date. This album is best thought of as the symbol of California’s image of peace, good times, and pretty girls. It’s also a pretty good collection of songs. I don’t know if you know this, but that Brian Wilson guy’s got a good ear.
-Self-titled album by HEALTH
I prefer to use this album to illustrate learning about California first hand through the people. Starts nice, suddenly unsettling, violent and off-putting while simultaneously pleading for sorely needed attention, lashing out, warped by the leftovers of overdevelopment, unbalanced, and just growing more and more and more, leaving only the dread of finding the tipping point. In other words: noise rock.
-Straight Outta Compton by NWA
An honest confession: I’ve only made it through this album once, and I don’t have plans to do it again. The reason it’s on here, though, is that it only felt right to use the album that is the birth of gangsta rap to use to represent the gang riddled image of Southern California. It’s a vicious, biting thing that happens here, serving as the most recognizable symbol of a culture I’ll never know first hand.
-Evil Empire by Rage Against The Machine
The college student culture is vital to Californian identity in 2010, what with vague outrage and general inaction. Rage Against The Machine is probably one of the better ways to channel that young outrage since they’ve chosen their specific targets, and have their own exposure and mystique. That way, people don’t have to go out and find things that really bother them when they can listen to Zach De La Rocha scream at them over admittedly great music.
-Ice Cream For Crow by Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band
Not the Beefheart album everyone’s heard of, but the most useful for expressing the most natural influence on Californian behavior: the desert. Nothing quite fucks up a mind like persistent heat, and born of people who live their life in that heat is a biologically made dialectical tension, of human needs of belonging with the solitude of the desert. Sooner than later, the heat becomes welcoming, and the mind starts warping bit by bit that oft results in a collection of totems in tribute of the heat. What I’m saying is, the desert does bad things to people, but it’s the kind of beautiful warp of human nature that most great art comes from. It permeates this record start to finish, in it’s tightly composed bizarre nature and rambling storytelling.
Filed under John
Andrew Vs. “No Más” by Javelin
I’m going to say right off the bat, I really love electronic music. I also can really despise it a great deal of the time. With that now in the air, it’s safe to let you know that I was interested in trying out Javelin’s “No Más”. After a few good listens, I realized that I found an album that was extremely enjoyable and I will definitely listen to it again and again.
Javelin has a unique style, mixing 70s funk beats with specified electronic elements. It mixes up tracks with the occasional go at vocals and produces innovative sounds that were pretty much made to rap over, but still stand by themselves as great songs. The first song “Vibrationz” is a chilled out track when one could find peace while listening to it in a convertible by the beach. However, that’s only how to get the maximum effect out of the song and it’s extremely easy to see its catchiness and overall fun attitude without any of that.
A ton of this album sounds like it came straight out of a mid-to-late 80s video game, making great tunes, and sampling great shit. The tune that powers “Oh! Centra” is reminiscent of a well-written classic video game theme, also probably the easiest area of that song to listen to. The rest of the song is powered by Katamari Damacy / Animal Crossing raps from a squeaky voice. This is a toss-up enjoyment for most people; the voice could come off as annoying, cute, funny, or stupid. I find it that it’s a mix of all of that.
“On It On It” is perhaps the best jam on here. The keyboard sounds that occur throughout the song sound so damn cool, it’s totally hard to dislike it. Then it revs up into full funk status and ends with some interestingly composed vocals. I can’t help but want to dance every time I hear it.
The album progresses from being funk based, to not, and going back again, having nice time coming up with enough variety so it keeps you interested until it ends. It also decides to through some out of place but welcomed acoustics amongst the dancy beats, which I can appreciate if it’s done right.
I really don’t know what else to say. “No Más” is just straight-up fun. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys music. A broad stroke, but a very pretty looking one.
WINNER: “No Más” by Javelin
WHY: It’s one of the funnest albums I’ve heard all year. Perfect for summer, fits your lifestyle.
Filed under Andrew
Fermata over Whole Rest 