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Reviews [+] Nail by Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel [Foetus] It is inordinately difficult to describe the sound of this album with a singular prescribed 'genre', not necessarily because it genre dips (because most music by most artists travel this path frequently) but because it essentially blends together seemingly incompatible genres with a chaotic disregard for the pliability and malleability of certain techniques popular in one genre that is all but unheard of it another. Foetus (here under the name of Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel) is most often described as Industrial, but that title does little justice to the Rock 'n' Roll, Swing, Classical, Post-Punk, Gothic, and perhaps even Blues elements that permeate the music's core. The context of this is important because the labeling of 'Industrial' diminishes many of the things J.G. Thirlwell sought to achieve with this project and likely creates a more narrow view of his music--and possibly a rejection of his music--because of this prescribed label. Not that the describer is altogether inaccurate. It clearly has a basis in something solid, continuous, and well-defined over the course of this album and in fact much of Foetus' other material. A crusty, clamorous, and altogether metallic sound is the root of most tracks, save for the orchestral 'Pigdom Come' exercises, which offer more to the conceptual idea of inner torture and madness than to the conceptual sound of metallic clangs and fuzzy tapes. Both are big parts of this album. The lyricism and delivery are simultaneously humorous and tragic, as if larger and sadder parts of his life are being shrugged off by an approach that reflects a 'who even gives a fuck?' attitude. "The Throne of Agony", "Descent Into the Inferno", "DI-1-9026", and the old-timey children rhymes in "Anything (Viva!)" attest to this, a favorite lyric of mine being "Just rules wrapped in barbed wire/laced with busted glass/yeah I'm the one/who gave the sandwich to Mama Cass". Somebody I spoke to described this style as being 'cartoonishly evil' which drives home a lot of things about Thirlwell's approach musically and his dark lyricism. It can oftentimes be hard to tell if he's being genuine or if it's all just a stab at transgressivism, but it's more likely that it's a lot of both. The uniqueness of the music itself can also not be understated. The Classical and orchestral elements in the "Pigdom Come" duology, "Pigswill", and parts of "Enter the Exterminator" are all surprisingly well-done and sound fully realized in spite of the fact that a single person performed the music and subsequently mixed the sounds to create everything; if the string arrangements were largely the result of synthetics or tape samples, then it passed me by, its sounds plunging a depth that most Progressive Rock albums who tried doing the same would be spiteful and angry with jealousy. "Pigswill" also has extraordinary percussion and macabre vocals that bring to life the lyrics' themes in an otherwise above-average Industrial/Classical fusion song, allowing the listener to revel in the psychotic violence the narrator is speaking at length about, which ultimately elevates the entire thing to levels it could not have reached otherwise. That's another thing about the album that is quite impressive, the way sometimes insignificant, small parts of songs culminate to form this grander picture, every part playing off each other accordingly. "Descent Into the Inferno" showcases the vocal range, rhythmic approach, and basic songwriting skill of Thirlwell; starting from a low grovelly Blues singing very much like that of Tom Waits--with an accompanying finger snap percussion--it eventually works its way towards the genre-busting madness of its climax, complete with compressed and multitracked scat vocals, a queasy bassline that wedges itself into the middle of the mix forcefully, and archetypal Rock drums that take on the quality of the Industrial label without forcefully drowning out the rest of the song--the end result being surprisingly pleasant in spite of the extremes it ventures to. "Private War" and "Enter the Exterminator" are perhaps the most atmospherically-centered and unconventionally designed songs on the album, being a short noise track and a largely ambient track with melodious moments and erratic bursts of energy, respectively. The former is very much a sonic experiment in pinning down how to expand sounds with non-instruments and how metallic clangs even in seemingly random formation can create aurally unique and worthwhile material (similar to This Heat's song "Water"); the latter on the other hand is very quiet throughout most of the first half, but also hearken back on production methods This Heat utilized on their first album, the atmosphere consisting of hisses, tape squeals, whispery vocals, and echoey instrumentation while centering on the idea of something not entirely unmelodious (while the second half of the song symphonic tones and rhythms that embody the spirit of the previously mentioned "Pigdom Come" series). "The Throne of Agony" stands out enormously here, the strength in its passages best illustrated by the willingness with which Thirlwell actively combs through a breadth of conflicting noises to transcend every influence that spawned it like a mad professor studying the zeitgeist that his colleagues live in astutely. The immediate lurching shift after the end of "Theme From Pigdom Come" is one of the most important aspects of the song, and in fact reminds me of yet another This Heat example, the lurching shift from "Testcard" to "Horizontal Hold" on their first LP being of similar importance; here, however, the shift doesn't come as a system shock by way of total dynamic shift, it is simply an incredible style shift from being eerily eloquent to grimy and gruff. All aspects of the song work together in a sordid harmony devoid of any true chemistry, the fills that every other instrument or part of the song omits being coldly performed as a way of unifying every piece, which both reflects the despondent lyrics of the song as well as the likely lonely approach of making an entire album alone and subsequently playing every single instrument in the process; I often personally describe it as a 'dance jam for the damned' because it is honestly quite 'catchy' and has one of the most compelling usages of electronic violin (in the form of a solo) I have heard in a song. Big shoutout to this album. I've already decided that it's definitely a favorite, though I have been listening to a lot of really good and interesting music lately. Or maybe I just don't have a lot of bad things to say about music. I guess that's also why I haven't given any ratings for these reviews. Whatevs.
From BeyondMassacre (1991) If you want to hear the epitome of generic death metal I think we have a winner here! MASSACRE is one of a gazillion Florida based death metal bands that emerged at the time when the subgenre severed its ties with the thrash world from hence it came. The band is rightfully most famous for having three members (Rick Rozz / guitar, Terry Butler / bass, Bill Andrewss / drums) that were in early Death, the undisputed king of the entire subgenre. Well maybe it is disputed but they were one of the biggies nonetheless. This album caught my eye knowing nothing about them simply because of the extraordinarily cool album cover by Ed Repka who has painted a gazillion metal covers over the years for various metal acts but most notably Death, Megadeath, Vio-lence and this one! I think this is one of the most eye-catching album covers of all time and total amusing! I mean how many of us have fears of myriad strange shaped aliens raining down from a pink vortex ready to do unspeakable things to the human race? Ha ha! The album cover alone guarantees that this will remain in my collection despite not really ever wanting to give this a spin. I have the 2011 remastered version of this album and the cover art has been spruced up visually as well as the remastering bringing the sound quality to modern day standards. The problem with this album is that every song is played extremely well, yet every song sounds the freeking SAME! There is so little variation amongst songs it is like so a shame. I really want to like this album. It is kick ass death metal, albeit old school. Some of the intros are pretty cool and symphonic and all but it always ends up with a simple drum beat, the same growly vocals, same tempo, same... same... same!!! Oh well, for a generic album at least it's a good one. Expect a sound in the vein of “Leprosy” era Death. If you loved that album and want even more, nine tracks worth (four more on the remastered version) then check this out. Not a bad zone out album though. If there is such thing as elevator music for death metal fans then here we go.
Dagenham's finest almost didn't get to represent the UK in the 1967 Eurovisionn Song Contest because of her involvement in a divorce scandal. During a trial separation between Douglas Murdoch, a television executive who had worked on Ready Steady Go! and his wife Veronica, the wife turned up at Douglas' flat on two occasions in 1964 to find Sandie there, on one occasion in her nightdress. At the divorce hearing, Veronica Murdoch's barrister claimed that Sandie harrassed Veronica: ""She caused an affray, and a row in the neighbourhood, broke a door down, caused consternation and considerable embarrassment ... and used foul language in the early hours of the morning or late at night." So when Sandie, who later stated that she wanted to grow old disgracefully, sings "I've been around / I've had a lot of fun", in "Tell the Boys", you kind of feel there's more than a smidgen of truth in there. Sandie's now a trained psychotherapist, specializing in helping people in the "creative industries", though frankly the least of what today's flimsy, convention-ridden pop stars need is yet another normalizing discourse. Sandie ought to be teaching them a thing or two about breaking the mould. It's well-known that Sandie hated "Puppet on a String", later deriding it as "sexist drivel" (and you can see her point), but nevertheless caused a commotion by performing it barefooted at the Eurovision Song Contest. There's a temptation, viewing her Eurovision performance, to attribute the song's success to this tension between Sandie's utter hatred of the song and her desire to win. You kind of get the feeling she's rolling her eyes inwardly as she smiles into the camera. In some respects Sandie was ahead of her time, and this strikes me as one such instance; an irony-laden performance with an audience not yet sophisticated enough to detect such things. Nevertheless, when all is said and done it's hard to deny just how infectious "Puppet on a String" is; still instantly recognizable. Yes, it's daft, but superbly put together, and absolutely one of the finest Eurovision winners of all time. You don't even need to feel guilty about liking it; you just need to be able to give a knowing wink.
Cosmos and ChaosWitsend (1993) Too much potatoes; not enough meat. Perhaps even moreso than their Scandinavian counterparts, it's the United States that has carried the symphonic prog mantle into recent decades. I'm not sure what it is about the richly pastoral sounds of Genesis that appeal so much to the Americans, but there has been a surge of (often Christian) bands in the US dedicating to keeping the symphonic tradition alive, long since the original progressive zeitgeist died. Echolyn and Transatlantic rank among the best-known (though, in the case of the latter, far from the best) examples, but many are left for the genre's more dedicated fans to seek and discover. Among the more promising of these Second Wave adherents is Syzygy, who first made their start as Witsend, a trio who were still attending a music conservatory when this debut was released. Although a lot of the album seems to be hinting at a point the band never makes, the early Syzygy's (mostly) instrumental blend of classical guitar and Hackett-focused Genesis worship is unpretentious and capable. Although Witsend (or Syzygy) experiment with vocals (with mixed success) on "Circadian Rhythm", Cosmos and Chaos is an otherwise instrumental album. In a much more recent interview, Baldassarre described the album as an "honest" mixture of progressive rock and classical music, and I would tend to agree. Although they were still years away from fleshing out their sound (2003's The Allegory of Light was more substantive, 2009's Realms of Eternity doubly so) the trio is confident and eager to explore the progressive format. The strongest reference here would be Steve Hackett, particularly he did concurrently, and following his work with the legendary Genesis. Listening to a piece like the excellently composed and pastoral "Voyager", I can't help but recall Steve's Voyage of the Acolyte, one of my favourite symphonic prog albums. Emerson, Lake and Palmer is also evoked, on the considerably show-ier "Strange Loop II"; Sam Giunta's enthusiastic synth observations closely parallel Keith Emerson's. "Mount Ethereal" and "Closure" respectively lend harder-hitting approaches to Witsend's style, in turn reminding me of some of the heavier symphonic rockers. Making the leap between Steve Hackett to ELP and Kansas doesn't seem like a world of change, but it proves at least that the nascent Syzygy were more than the simple Genesis acolytes they and many of their less-promising contemporaries appear to be. With the handful of fleshed-out instrumentals and jovial "Circadian Rhythm" obviously aside, most of the tracks on Cosmos and Chaos are short, to-the-point, and built around Carl Baldassarre's not-inconsiderable skills with the nylon-string guitar. While many of these might pass as wayside interludes on a more substantive prog album, Witsend give them at least as much importance to Cosmos and Chaos as the meatier compositions themselves. Fortunately, these 'interludes' tend to be very tasteful and enjoyable. Carl Baldassarre is clearly a guitarist of the Steve Hackett school, choosing his notes carefully, hesitating to stress technique if it's not deemed necessary. In particular, his twin classical etudes are beautifully composed and played. Think of the pleasant acoustic "Horizons" Genesis used to prelude "Supper's Ready" on Foxtrot, and you should have an idea how roughly half of Cosmos and Chaos sounds. The problem here, of course, is that there is no "Supper's Ready", or otherwise epic demonstration of what Witsend are so apparently capable of, judging from the mid-length rock instrumentals. To be fair, all four of the instrumentals sound ambitiously composed, but by the time the album is over, it feels like half of it has been spent wading through pleasant interludes, waiting for Witsend's meatier progressive rock. It's understandable that the band would want to showcase their guitarist's expertise with classical guitar, but as it stands, Cosmos and Chaos sounds a bit like an empty stomach; enthusiastic, but unsatisfying. Cosmos and Chaos is most certainly "honest"- something which feels sorely lacking in a lot of prog- but I don't believe it's much more than that. The instrumentals are engaging, and the classical guitar is pleasant, but something is certainly missing from Syzygy's debut. Ultimately (and in spite of the fact that Baldassarre's short pieces are well-written), Cosmos and Chaos is a case of too much potatoes and not enough meat. Although the jumbled montage of the its final track, this album doesn't have quite enough adhesive to keep it together. 62/100
Do It AgainRöyksopp & Robyn (2014) The billing is no accident: this five-track, 35-minute EP is more Röyksopp than Robyn, with just two songs that might've fit stylistically on Robyn's own Body Talk projects and the last 10 minutes taken up by a useless, nothing-particularly-wrong-or-right-with-it instrumental. (For a few moments near the beginning, that instrumental seems to portend some majestic tree's phoenix-like birth from a pond...and then it rather quickly dawns on you that it will deliver nothing, so you just have to sit there for many minutes, waiting for the arrival of more nothing.) I actually saw both Robyn and Röyksopp on their tour this past summer, and seeing the lady doing rapid sit-up after sit-up to the Tron-like digital raceway motion of the robotic "Sayit", or shaking around ebulliently to "Do It Again" brought me back to the EP with fondness. "Sayit" in particular, with its retro house drums and anxiously rippling synth loops, is a pretty infectious track. Take it with this innocuous personal story attached: my girlfriend does a dance-pop show on our local volunteer radio station, and the other week her topic was Robyn. The girlfriend, my other roommate and I all have a mutual friend who volunteers at the station too, a younger guy who's quite nice but also pretty bro-y and overbearing in spite of himself. He's been coming over to our apartment way too often lately, except we're too nice to say anything. Anyway, a few weeks ago my girlfriend's doing her show at the studio and my roommate and I get the door-knock from the mutual friend — a knock that we really, really, really didn't need at the time. After turning lights off and hiding like cowards to make him think we weren't home - for a full 15 minutes, that's how overbearing the guy is, and how cowardly we are - he drives to the station and hangs around for a full two hours for my girlfriend to finish her show, knowing full well that he'd be able to offer her a ride home and that, given the weather, she'd have to accept it. Thus, he'd find his way in the house. So she texts my roommate from the studio pleading for a rescue, because she wants the guy over least of all. So we agree to a drop-and-roll in the Pizza Hut the parking lot across the street from the studio, which she'd have to make a quick break for without the guy noticing she left. We get in my roommate's car to complete our mission, and my girlfriend was closing her show with "Sayit". All I can say is that the five-minute drive to collect our roomie and complete our mission - obviously inane even compared to most first-world white-person's problems - set to that song, felt like we were in the Matrix or something, rescuing our damsel in distress under humdrum town streetlights that felt like pixelated neon. I guess what I'm trying to say is that "Sayit" is a pretty awesome driving song. Especially at night. If you have a destination in mind where time is a factor, all the better. And if you're having sex with robots, as Robyn is apparently doing in the song, well, you've already heard it. The rest is fine, excepting the instrumental. Of the two Robyn-centric songs, "Do It Again" and "Every Little Thing" (not a cover of the Beatles song, although wouldn't that be awesome?!?), the former is significantly catchier, and even then the beats are a little more distorted and metallic for her; they're definitely warpings that've happened to take rhythm, not rhythms that've happened to get warped. (Does that make sense? I think that makes sense.) But it works anyway: the chorus is one of those "Just Dance"-type sentiments (i.e. do it again because 'it' is not only good enough to tempt us into it, it's also good enough to make us forget that it might be hurting us), and the early rave-y house keyboards strobing in and out are potent. It's no "Include Me Out", mind (which for whatever reason it made me think of), and doesn't pace its rave quite as cathartically as it wants to. But it's solid. "Every Little Thing", meanwhile, is a very minimally interesting tune and moves, or doesn't, like waiting for the traffic light while trying to convince yourself you're still moving, just barely put over by the lower synth line in the choruses and the way those synths drop out for the strings to take over — brief as it is. And the long opener "Monument" builds up some nice phasing and artificial steppings-up of echo in drifting loops that get louder; Robyn's meant to be more like a robot here, seeing the world for the gorgeous glacer-like cavern Röyksopp feel it is, especially with those quick high split-second pivots of her voice sliding up into eerie place. It's like preparing to be frozen to death, stoic and maybe even a little grateful. Wish it'd had more to go after the first three minutes, though. But the breathy sax that shows up in the last two turns elegiac, so ah well. Yeah, that's it. B.
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