The Conversation: 2025, So Far

The midpoint of the year comes just after the summer solstice, which is the longest day of them all. That means the most sunshine, and metaphorically the most optimism. I'm not sure it works that way, but let's go with that for a minute. If we're being optimistic, there is still music out there overcoming out general sense of ennui, which is a harder and harder task with each passing year. That segues us nicely into...

THE GOOD

Chris C: For most of these six months, I've been lamenting the lack of albums that have made me care, thinking this could be the worst year in a downward trend. But a funny thing has happened, as a couple unexpected albums have dropped into my lap, and a couple of others have gotten better as I've listened to them more. I'm not saying the roster of good ones is remarkable or historic, but it's more satisfying than I would have told you just a month ago. My old stalwarts Avantasia put out a record that disappointed me some when it came out, but that I like much more now. It isn't one of their absolute best, but it does what I want. W.E.T. might have put out the best uplifting album in several years, so that was a wonderful step up from their last one. Then there's the surprise of A-Z, who I not only didn't care about when they put out their first record, but who added a guitarist/songwriter I have personal animosity toward, and yet the record is damn good. I've bene listening to those three a ton, as well as the three good songs from the Ghost album. We'll get to that in a moment.

D:M: You know, I feel like I haven't said this in a while at the mid-year point, but there's been a fair amount of good so far this year.  To that point that I already have nine albums that I would feel pretty good about putting on some manner of year-end list.  (And possibly one more, the new Helm's Deep album, which I'm listening to as I write this.  It's cheeky as hell, but also very smooth and catchy in that old-school Judas Priest way that so many bands try and fail to emulate.)  It's also been a satisfying mix of the new and and the familiar - newcomers to my ears like Dunes and Tayne have given me a lot to think about, while old friends Arch Enemy and Lacuna Coil both submitted strong efforts.  I want to single out Year of the Cobra.  I kept going back to their album from February, and I couldn't figure out why, until it finally fit me - they are, in many ways, a grunge band.  Which is a) a sound near and dear to my heart, and b) a sound that after thirty years of dormancy, deserves another chance..

THE BAD

Chris C: Not yet. First, let's just say that the worst album of the year, bar none, is from The Darkness. Any album with a song about literally trying not to shit the bed is too stupid to exist. Steven Wilson wrote an album about the immense feeling of awe and wonder you get from seeing Earth from outer space... and turned that into the most boring thing you've ever heard. I also continue to be utterly flummoxed by why people think Spiritbox is a good band. I didn't even get all the way through their album without needing to turn it off. And then there's a 'pop' artist named Ethel Cain who put out a record called "Perverts", which is a modern update of how insulting Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" was. I'm not sure either can rightfully be called music.

D.M: I have a feeling you're going to have Ghost's album under the "Disappointing" category, but I'm going to drop it here.  It's just bad. I suppose 'bad' is generally reserved for albums of low expectations that are of poor quality, while 'disappointing' is more for bands that didn't meet a high standard, but the first word I think of when I think of the new Ghost album is 'bad.'  It's a captive animal - humbled, de-clawed and muzzled, a shadow of its wild relatives.   

THE DISAPPOINTING

Chris C: This is the biggest category of the year. It starts with Ghost, who have three amazing song on their album, and the rest is as bland as the rubber masks Tobias wears to distract from how absurd Ghost has become. Dream Theater's big reunion was paint-by-numbers, not as good as most of the 'dark' period where they weren't themselves, and doubly disappointing for how it memory-holed the fact that many fans didn't like what they were doing before they split apart. Katatonia's album might be the most disappointing of them all. They went from putting out an AOTY winner to one that I barely got through enough times to write a review. I guess I was the only one who wanted them not to be a sad-ass dirge band anymore. Also disappointing were the Killswitch Engage album, and Avatarium not knowing what to do with their sound. I could go on, but let's save some space.

D.M: This is where I start to get sad.  This year in particular, it feels like there a lot of musicians in this category for whom a rebound may not be possible.  Their disappointing efforts this year are representative of more than a misstep.  Warbringer leads the list.  After this many years and this many albums, they may really be done as a creative concern, and may never regain their spark.  Misfire, borne from the ashes of Diamond Plate, the same.  Bumblefoot, who I adore in many of his guest appearances on other albums, released a milquetoast guitar record of no particular inspiration.  Spiders remain a one-hit wonder.  Volbeat...well, your review more or less said it all.  I would have liked to see a more legit album from Red Fang than a compendium of previously unreleased material.  There's nothing wrong with it, it's fine as it is, but that always feels like a band that's trying to get out of their record deal.  The list goes on.

WHAT'S NEXT

Chris C: The big deal is, of course, the upcoming Halestorm album. The two singles so far have both been very different, but in a great way. I'm still a bit wary overall, but nothing else has my attention the way they do. In fact, I'm struggling to come up with anything else confirmed for the rest of the year I know I'm excited to hear. I know I saw a mention last year of a new Dark Element album, but nothing has come of that yet. Just going by the usual schedule, I wouldn't be shocked if a new Soen album arrived in the fall. Otherwise, I'm really not sure my focus on nostalgia is going to be turned around and focused on the future again anytime soon.

D.M:I, too, am looking forward to Halestorm.  That's the biggest release in the near future that I'm concerned with.  I'm curious to see if this grunge thing becomes a real revival or not.  Year of the Cobra is great, but they're not alone - Pyres and Benthic both sounded like the radio station that played on my middle school bus (Z Rock, 102.3, RIP,) they just weren't great albums like YotC was.  The nostalgic in me is hopeful that maybe more bands will pick up that gem and see what they can do with it.  And I'm also, if I'm being honest, hopeful that we'll get some honest-to-goodness protest music.  There's enough going on to merit some, as we well know.

Butterfly Boucher Said, "I Can't Make Me", But She Can Make Us Think

For all that poets and philosophers have written over the centuries, we are still incapable of accurately diagnosing and describing what we call 'love'. It is a complex melange of chemicals and psychology, an indescribable gravitational pull toward another person that is as inescapable as a black hole. We sometimes struggle to say the words to another person, because doing so is to commit to the unknown, to admit someone else has an almost magical power over us. That is a vulnerability we are not always ready or able to admit to, one that scares us into the desire to control the ephemeral.

History is littered with myths and stories about this. Love potions, love spells, Cupid's arrows; we seek to exploit and control love, because we know few pains as intolerable as being drawn to someone who notices our presence as much as Jupiter notices the fragments of rock we call its moons.

We seldom stop to think about the ethical ramifications of these urges. If we were to use divinity or magic to will someone into loving us, what have we accomplished? Love is not valuable if it is forced, nor would it feel the same to know it only existed because we created it for ourselves. What makes love special is knowing the other person has chosen you, of all other people, by their own free will. Removing that from the equation leaves us with nothing more than an organic automaton, which is as sad as those who have mastered technology for the sole purpose of creating their own artificial companions.

Ethically, things get even murkier. To force someone to love you is to assault their free will. Coercions of that kind are not notably different than using physical force or psychological abuse. The difference between controlling someone's heart and mind, and controlling their physical body, are matters of degree. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that we have struggled to come to terms with how to deal with the most severe cases, if we still consider the more 'gentle' forms to be somehow romantic.

We have countless songs we can point to that describe love in its most noble form... or at least try to. Many of those songs also cross the line into creep territory, where the narrator doesn't understand or notice the entitlement to another person they are describing. What we don't have many songs about is the truth about love; the messy, difficult, complicated reality of two people coming together at the right place and right time.

Butterfly Boucher gave us one of those songs in "I Can't Make Me". The thing about love is that not only can we not control someone else's affections, we cannot control out own either. We may want to love someone, but our heart remains stoic. We may want to forget someone, but emotional cement does not stick in the etching of their name.

"I can't make me love you, and you can't make me either," the lyric tells us.

That is a fascinating admission to make in a song, and precisely the kind of nuanced thinking we get so little of in music. Butterfly is telling the subject that she knows they are sweet, and she does see the good in them, but that isn't the same thing as being in love. She refuses to lie to them, and more importantly she refuses to lie to herself.

"It's not a hurry that we're in. It's the pollen, it's the Spring."

Only time can tell if love is real. There are other emotions that come and go in the span when love is still finding its legs. Demanding we commit to the most intense and personal confession we can make is a sure sign the love was never real to begin with. That person pushing upon us is showing their 'love' is concerned only with their own experience. To truly love someone is to let them find their happiness in whatever form it takes, even if that does not include you.

When Butterfly is telling the subject to have patience, because she needs time, it is a test they are not aware of. True love would allow her to find her way to them on her own. Are they willing to wait?

The song is also interesting if your mind, as mine does at times, flips the pronouns. To think about a song saying we can't make the object of our affection love us is perhaps the lesson we all most need. Butterfly's song gets us halfway there, if we are intuitive enough to ask the follow-up question to it.

All of this means "I Can't Make Me" is one of the most interesting songs I can point to for deep thought, and what a wondrous bit of fortune it was to have happened upon it all those years ago.

Singles Roundup: Halestorm, Creeper, & Rise Against

There's a lot to talk about in this group of new singles. Let's not waste any time.

Halestorm - Everest

The second single for the upcoming record continues to show us Halestorm is moving in a very different direction. They lean fully into Dio-esque epic construction, letting the song build from one section to the next, taking us on a ride that feels more epic than the four-plus minute running time might indicate. Lzzy matches this with her vocal, which goes from soft cooing with the piano at the beginning to nearly screaming her lungs out as she belts the chorus.

That chorus... Lzzy tells us how her journey to the person she now is compares to climbing the highest mountain, and she does so by throwing in the pun of metaphorically summiting Mount Everest being an endeavor in which she won't "ever rest'. The pun seems obvious, but also completely unexpected among an album of songs that dig into the journey of healing yourself. This might be an example of laughter being the best medicine, and the nod-and-wink joke being an indicator that Lzzy is now able to look back and laugh at the path that brought her to today.

Either way, like "Darkness Always Wins", "Everest" is the sound of Halestorm opening up and becoming more artists in addition to a rock band. There is nuance and power to this song they have not explored in this way before, and it's a fascinating twist on their usual approach. Their first shift occurred on "Into The Wild Life", and this signals their second. So far, this shift is sounding like they already know the way forward, and there won't be any growing pains along the way.

Creeper - Headstones

I did not enjoy "Sanguivore" at all. Other than the Meat Loaf inspired opening epic, the goth rock of that album was a sound completely lost and/or wasted on me. I found it dull, and far more forgettable than either of the sounds Creeper had taken on before. That makes the idea of a sequel album a less than appealing thought, but that is what we will be getting in the autumn. The first taste of that is "Headstones", and I'm rather surprised.

While there is still a bit of goth in the sound, this is more of a makeup job over the original Creeper sound than a pure attempt to emulate goth of the olden days. The guitars retain their punk energy, the vocals don't get bogged down in the deep resonance of croaked goth, and we get a hint of comedy that at least tells us Creeper knows how ridiculous their entire career has been.

Leading into the chorus by chanting, "give us head.... stones", is the sort of terrible joke that Jim Steinman would have loved to have written himself. That this is the band's most propulsive song since their debut might indicate they realize they had drifted too far from their identity, and made it difficult for some of us to feel like we know who they are as a band. Adding color to the original, rather than painting with a whole new palate, sure sounds a whole lot better to me. I'm not burying them just yet.

Rise Against - I Want It All

I know many Rise Against fans have not been overly fond of the band's recent work, but I am in the camp that thought "Wolves" and "Nowhere Generation" were great records. In fact, the bonus EP "Nowhere Generation II" is even better, and is one of the few EPs I truly love without feeling disappointed it isn't a full-length experience. With all that, I should be excited for a new Rise Against album, but songs like this one make it hard to say such a thing.

The production choices are a key in that. The guitars are dirtier without sounding heavier, which push the vocals back in the mix a bit. With some filtering in the chorus, it all makes me wonder if it was a choice to hide age creeping in. Regardless, it leaves me with the impression this is a noisier take on Rise Against's sound, one that comes with less in the way of hooky melody. The stop-start chorus doesn't grab me, and the rest of the track is merely a means to and end. After hearing three songs from this record, I'm not feeling very good about the rest of the songs salvaging this one.

Album Review: Byzantine - "Harbingers"

Cutting to the chase, there’s a sentiment surrounding this Byzantine album that seems to be a common trend across the metal spectrum in 2025.  The listener may find themselves wishing this was just a little bit more.

Byzantine has been toiling for nearly twenty-five years now, having at one time been discovered by Lamb of God’s Chris Adler.  They’ve added a fifth member for this, their seventh album, “Harbingers,” and the band returns with their usual flavor of strong melodic metal that intersperses with singalong choruses and just a touch, just a touch, or prog at the edges.

We’re going to start halfway down the album with “The Clockmaker’s Intention.”  This is the perfect example of both everything that’s right and everything that’s wrong with “Harbingers.”  There’s a big, chunky, Candlemass riff that sets a great scene, and this get juxtaposed with the clear, airy guitar of the chorus, creating a rather enjoyable duality…but that’s it.  The song spends nearly six minutes going back and forth between those two things, but never adventures farther, and in the end the riffs and the chorus wear out their novelty.

Two songs down, “Harbinger” brings it with this really cool outro riff/solo combination, and for ninety seconds, the skill and musicianship of Byzantine shows in a tangible, impressive way. [Editor’s note: “Harbinger” is not technically a title track.  The album is plural, the song singular.  I had to check ten times to make sure I wasn’t going crazy.]  But that last ninety seconds doesn’t extend to the rest of the song, which is fine, but is a totally boilerplate modern metal song.

Same goes for the last three songs on the record, “The Unobtainable Sleep,” “Kobayashi Maru,” and “Irene.”  That last is particularly notable, as the middle section of it breaks into this proto-Ghost breakdown, with ethereal vocals and a heavy, undercutting riff, but again, the same issue - before too long, we’re back to basics.

“Harbingers” is a frustrating record because there are these little moments of brilliance tucked away within, but they don’t stack on each other or build together into something more cohesive and enjoyable from beat to beat.  The talent is there, Byzantine shows that without issue or hesitation, but in the end, six or ten compelling minutes of music on a forty-five minute record does not for necessary listening make.

Album Review: Volbeat - God Of Angels Trust

For as long as Volbeat has been around, one thing has always been true about them; they are inconsistent. Both from album to album, and within each one, there is a massive gap between their best and worst songs. They write some of the most unique and catchy metal out there, but they also write some of the most generic as well. It has meant I have always been somewhat of a fan of theirs, but I have never been able to fully commit to calling myself one.

I was worried as this album cycle opened, because in the time since Volbeat last released a record, Michael Poulsson put out a record with his death metal side-project. I was afraid of that approach creeping into Volbeat's sound, dragging them into something that doesn't play to their strengths.

I hate to say I was on the right track when those thoughts arose. There are fewer of Volbeat's typical hooks, and more moments where the songwriting veers wildly from one riff to the next as if a riff collage is the point of the song. Poulsson's vocals get layered to the point of obscurity in some places, and overall there feels like less focus on the melodies than has been present in quite a while. Death metal songwriting is something quite different, and I don't like hearing it in Volbeat to this degree.

The worst offender is "In The Barn Of the Goat Giving Birth To Satan's Spawn In A Dying World Of Doom", which not only has an absurd title that makes me cringe, but jumps from part to part with no concern at all for how it all works together. The first single, "By A Monster's Hand", offended me as a songwriter. The song speeds up the tempo when the solo comes in, then drifts back down for the final chorus. What? If the tempo is going to be shifted, it should carry through the final chorus to carry through the extra energy. By reverting back, it gives the impression they had a solo section already written, and threw it into this song without bothering to make sure it fit.

Little things like that make the difference when the core ideas aren't shining so bright as to blind us from seeing the flaws. These songs are not Volbeat's best by any means. A big issue is that so many of the riffs and melodies are sounding like bits from their past songs. I've lost count of how many times they're basically re-written "Sad Man's Tongue", which they essentially do for the opening of a song here again. We're a far cry from the days of "Guitar Gangsters & Cadillac Blood", which might be the last time Volbeat sounded like they had new tricks up their sleeve.

Volbeat is a mixture of thrash/groove metal and old time rock. When they get that right, there's nothing like Volbeat, and they don't need to do anything but follow the blueprint. When they get in trouble is when they try to drift too far into their heaviness, because doing so sucks the fun out of the melodic component. Their chugging riffs are fine when the songs are hooky, but they aren't interesting enough to be the core component of the song we're supposed to remember. Unfortunately, Poulsson's foray into death metal has brought too much of that into Volbeat.

I can't say I'm disappointed, though, because I learned long ago that counting on Volbeat to deliver does not come with the best odds. I wanted more, but I didn't expect it.

"Jagged Little Pill" Hasn't Been Sanded Down By Time

We use the phrase as an illustrative Mad Libs, where filling in any nouns or adjectives will give us a dichotomy to begin a discussion. There are indeed two types of people... and in this case we can begin with the 90s sitcom "Full House". Yes, really. There are two types of people; those who heard the stories about Alanis Morissette's "You Outta Know" being written about Dave Coulier and were aghast at a beloved family show actor being included in such things, and those who heard the stories and laughed at one of the actors in a cloying and annoying piece of schlock being as unlike his character as all of us who were sick of the moralizing sitcom tropes.

"Full House" was a defining piece of life for that period of time when it aired, which makes it ironic that the period just after was in part defined by "Jagged Little Pill", an album that tore down the conventions of playing nice in pop music, ushering in an era of confessional truth that would drown "Full House" in the tub just to have the corpse to play with as a bath toy.

Pop music has been many things through the years, with 'honest' and 'raw' rarely being among them. Pop is escapism, it is music to leave behind our worries for three minutes at a time. That might feel good, but it means an entire genre is mostly empty calories. Even when it felt like everything had changed when Nirvana released "Nevermind", it was only a feeling. Look over the lyrics Kurt Cobain was writing, and it becomes clear that if he was the 'voice of a generation', it was a generation with nothing to say.

The turning point in bringing truth back to pop music was not him, it was Alanis Morissette. "Jagged Little Pill" was a revelation because she was the rare artist who was telling the full truth of her story through her songs, not manufacturing an image or hiding the pieces that were uncomfortable to show the world. Her music was not designed to go down easy, as the title makes clear, but rather to rip us open so we could not ignore the uglier side of life any longer.

People have been arguing for decades about whether "Ironic" is truly ironic, which misses the entire point. Whether or not the situations described in the song qualify under the technical definition is irrelevant, because the irony is that it is a song about feelings that aren't defined by academic versus colloquial usage of a term. Alanis was writing about the feeling of getting punched in the gut by life again and again, sarcastically asking whether it was the feeling of misery or the misery itself that came first. It is a song that takes on the question of why bad things happen to good people with more than a degree of skepticism that good people even exist.

Perhaps it was ironic that Alanis would set the stage for this revolution in music, and the next few years would come to be defined first by Shania Twain's hyper-corporatized "Come On Over", and then the wave of teen pop and boy bands. One dose of Alanis' honesty was what we needed, but was almost too much for our senses. After having music confront us with the reality of the world we were creating for ourselves, we needed to revert back to a safer space, one where we could look upon plasticine stars and feel as if we never had a chance.

Alanis' most defining trait was her relatability. She was an artist of the people, rough around the edges the way we all are, not posturing as anything but herself. That let her music connect with a massive audience who turned "Jagged Little Pill" into one of the defining records of the time, but it also meant we could see in her how small the gap between artist and audience truly was. While most of us could never imagine being the ultra-polished star with the airbrushed looks and auto-tuned voice, we could have been an artist like Alanis. We can all write down our feelings, we can all vent our frustrations with life and scream them out. By bringing music closer to us, and making clear how we could be her if for a few bits of fate and luck, it drove us to push music further away again. We need the distance to keep us from wondering why we haven't made any art of our own worth a damn. Do we have nothing to say for ourselves?

All of this is ironic, no? It's a bit of a cheap question, but it returns us to the heart of why we are still listening to "Jagged Little Pill" thirty years after it came out. Pop music is often disposable outside of the earworm melodies, so no matter how often Shania Twain's songs might have gotten stuck in your head, they seldom made you think while they were there. Alanis' songs were in a unique voice, and they stirred in us something more authentic than we expect from pop music.

Over the years, we have gotten glimpses of raw honesty since. Every time a song comes out with a searing lyric that makes us believe it is written from a place of true hurt, every time a song makes us consider our own place in life, it owes a debt to Alanis Morissette for making it possible for such music to be accepted as part of the mainstream. Maybe even more than "Nevermind", "Jagged Little Pill" was an album that came out at a time when we didn't know what the next chapter was going to be, and we didn't know how to explain why we still felt so frustrated and angry.

Alanis Morissette was the one who showed us how to turn inward. That didn't last long, as soon the world would start to burn once again. Maybe it's healthier for us to have global crises rather than existential ones. Massive problems may be easier to cope with than our internal ones. That's ironic, right?

Album Review: Katatonia - Nightmares As Extensions Of The Waking State

Evolution is a continual process, taking us from one step to the next as time passes through the hourglass. Nature does not let us stand static, neither in the quest to freeze our genetics in a single moment nor in the vastness of space. Life, existence, is entirely based on the forward movement toward whatever unknown comes next. Science may try to stop the process, but as of yet we are unable to overcome the laws of physics and biology.

Katatonia has been evolving throughout their career, shifting from extreme metal progenitors to melancholic masters to progressive provocateurs. They have always been interesting for that reason, and the proverbial cocoon finally cracked open with "Sky Void Of Stars". That record was Katatonia emerging as the epitome of what their blend of sounds could be, giving us music that was dark and emotional, yet uplifting and optimistic. I named it my Album Of The Year, and marveled at how a band so far down the road was able to make their greatest work.

Things have changed in the two years since then, with the band's founding partnership dissolving. The track the band is on does not change with that move, but it reinforces the knowledge that Katatonia was not going to stand still, no matter how much I would have liked to hear at least one more record mining that same ore before the next gold rush was discovered.

I was concerned with the first single "Lilac", when listening to it gave me none of the spark the previous album did. The lush melodies and captivating energy was not there, instead replaced by a slower and more insular atmosphere. It was the same components, but with the polish and paint stripped off. "Temporal" was very much the same case, feeling like it was cut from the same cloth, but only after it had sat in the sun and had the color bleached into a new, pale shade. This was the Katatonia of "City Burials", not "Sky Void Of Stars".

Digging deeper into the record, my concerns only grew. "Wind Of No Change" was more of a slow doom lament, which in and of itself isn't a bad thing. However, when the underwhelming chorus of the song culminated in a lyric calling to "hail Satan", it felt out-of-place for the emotional territory I expect Katatonia to explore. There is a fine line between being cheesy and campy in a way that is fun, and doing so in a way that makes the edges of your nose cringe. This is the latter, and if anything made me appreciate Scorpions even more for making an anthem complete with whistling into a classic. "Wind Of Change" is beyond capable of Katatonia's grasp here.

My disappointment continues throughout the record, as the tempos stay so slow that the momentum is like pushing a Nerf ball across Velcro. "Sky Void Of Stars" worked so well because Katatonia was subverting the melancholy of their natural sound with the swelling melody of happier music. It was gorgeous, infectious, and the most engaging they had ever been. This record, though, pulls back on the reigns, trudging through ten tracks that suck the life from the experience. Too often, the verses resort to bass and drum 'rhythms', but the notes are so sparse Jonas Renske is left to croon over beds of near silence. As unique and evocative as his voice is, that is not the right setting for it.

In evolutionary terms, everything about this album, including its overwrought title, feels like a recessive allele that had been buried in the gene pool. Through happenstance it has emerged, and perhaps like folklore creates stories about those afflicted with the resulting traits, we will one day try to reason how Katatonia veered so far from where they had just been.

Even though "The Fall Of Hearts" faded in my esteem, I still hear what it was trying to do. "City Burials" took years to unravel its approach, but I came to appreciate that record as a lovely transition. "Sky Void Of Stars" was an immediate gem. This record... this one I'm having trouble seeing the silver lining in. It doesn't do any of the things I like about Katatonia as well as they have been done before.

I figured it anything could reach me as I have been stuck in my own darkness for much of this year, it would be Katatonia. I was wrong, and that might be the most disappointing thing I have to say all year.

Album Review: Miley Cyrus - Something Beautiful

An artist 'finding their voice' is usually a metaphorical statement about them discovering the particular focus that lets them get the most out of their talents. In some cases, though, it's a literal statement. That's how I felt about Miley Cyrus, who found her voice when "Flowers" became the song that let her make the transition to full-fledged adult pop star. The album that followed suit was a mixed bag, with two distinct halves that did not work together at all, but the whole thing was an interesting dynamic in how the unexpected can be exactly what we need.

Let's be honest about something; Miley's voice is not what it once was. How much of it is natural versus abuse is a question to debate (she has explained a medical condition), but her tone has become rougher and grittier with each passing year. I would not argue with anyone who says her voice is damaged and lessened, but her new tone fits my tastes better. "Endless Summer Vacation" was the first time I found Miley interesting.

That brings us to today, with this musical experience being presented as a 'visual album'. That's a phrase I hate, because there is something almost offensive to me about the idea of needing to stare at a screen to get the full experience of music. Maybe there's something of an inverted version of synesthesia, but crossing visual and aural pathways feels unnecessary to me, and a bit like an artist telling us in advance they aren't sure the music can stand on its own.

That worry was exacerbated by the title track, which is a slow burning torch song that explodes into a modern electronic drop. Her vocal runs through filters as the song lurches to get started again, and the resulting melody was nowhere near exciting enough to smooth over the rough edges of the composition. "End Of The World" boomeranged us in a different direction, with an almost disco swell behind its pop grandeur. That song hits the right marks, letting Miley shine as she delivers a song that sounds like it has life in it.

'Cinematic disco' is an apt term to describe the sound of the record. The combination of beats and strings pulls from the glossy heyday of the 70s, and ironically feels more current than the modern pop that has sucked all the color and energy out of what used to be fun music. Miley is painting with a wider palate, but the thicker brush makes the details harder to get just right. While the sound is bigger and bolder, and the record gives off the air of being a statement, the songs themselves can't consistently live up to that standard.

After the one-two punch of "End Of The World" and "More To Lose" showing us the best side of Miley, the remaining tracks push harder into dance-pop, rather than soul. For my money, Miley is better suited for the more emotional and confessional approach. When we get to songs with spoken interludes and synths at the forefront, I struggle to embrace the vision she and her producers have in mind. Rather than sounding like Miley putting herself forward, the impression I'm struck with is a sound that is putting her in the background of her own album.

The differences between this album and "Endless Summer Vacation" are more in structure than in sound. They mine much of the same territory, but in different ways. "Something Beautiful" is more focused, and more decided on what it wants to be. Ironically, that works against it, because it was the dichotomy of the previous record that let me enjoy as much of it as I did. If she had committed to pop throughout the whole of the last record, I would have been disappointed, because it was the torch songs that defined that one. This album has fewer of those moments, and so while the pop bits might be better this time around, they make up a bigger portion of the pie.

With all that, I'm left feeling disappointed that Miley wasn't able to find a way to combine the glitz and glamour of the production with vocals and melodies that bring out the best in her. I know it can be done, but this record doesn't quite get there.

Album Review: A-Z - A2Z2

What's in a name? When it comes to A-Z, that's an interesting question. The band already had the connection made between them and Fates Warning, with Mark Zonder and Ray Alder being the driving forces. The ties to the past only become stronger on this second album, as guitarist Nick Van Dyk joins the band, who spent many years writing and playing with Ray in Redemption. Now, with all three of them mixing the elements of the past, A-Z almost feels like two timelines that have merged into one.

The first album was intended as a celebration of melodic hard rock, filtered through a bit of their old prog habits. I will be honest with you and say that record slipped past my attention. This record shifts their sound, bringing more of those prog elements into the playing, which in a way makes this album both better and worse.

The good side is that the music is more interesting for the new players. While the basis is still focused on making melodic rock/metal, there is more to this than the usual approach. Hints of thrash and prog creep through the guitar playing, toeing the line between being rock and metal. Melodic rock can often get too 'fluffy' when the wrong assumptions are made, and these veterans are able to wisely push in the other direction.

The bad side is that the combination of Ray and Nick make this sound like a more focused and streamlined Redemption album. Those albums they made together are perhaps my favorite prog metal, so I'm not complaining about that, but having the two bands sound so similar raises questions in my mind about the necessity of both. Regardless, A-Z has found a sound that is befitting of everyone involved.

That necessity comes in the form of tone, as the main difference between A-Z and Fates Warning, Redemption, or Ray's solo albums is in the brightness. All of their previous work has mined the darker side, with atmosphere being at the forefront. This record is the brightest and sharpest sounding bit of music I've heard from them. I don't know if I can call it optimistic, but it's certainly more upbeat and dare I say fun. In that way, it draws from much the same well of inspiration as Katatonia's fantastic "Sky Void Of Stars" a couple years ago.

As the record unfolds, there is something special about the connection Ray and Nick have, as they bring out the best in one another. Ray never sounds better than when he's belting out melodies over Nick's guitar playing, and Nick's songs simply don't have this kind of life when Tom Englund is singing them. Ray's voice is deeply emotional, but still able to find the bright side to these songs. That lets them be not only maintain that human connection, but also cry out for return listens. The closing "Now I Walk Away" is one of the best songs of the year, and it leaves me wanting to come back to the album. That only happens when something is bordering on greatness.

Existential questions aside, A-Z have stepped up their game considerably on this album. They not only have made an album that will appeal to fans of melodic rock/metal, but they have also provided a landing spot for people who are disappointed in Fates Warning's retirement and/or Redemption's output since Ray left. This isn't the same thing, but it serves as the other side of the coin to Ray's solo albums to fill the spot some of us, myself included, see as empty.

Part of me wanted to dislike this album for personal reasons I won't get into, but I was won over by the end. I don't know if this album can ever have the level of emotional impact as Redemption's best work, but that isn't the point. Redemption could never be a 'good time' listen, so A-Z has done something worth noting. They have also, as the midpoint approaches, made one of the more enjoyable albums of the year. Color me surprised.

U2 & The Mandela Effect

Few concepts in pop psychology are as fascinating as The Mandela Effect, because it makes us question both our perception of the world, but also whether reality exists as being independent of our own conscious and unconscious thoughts. The Mandela Effect is the ultimate expression of existential philosophy applied to the world, as it places our experiences in conflict with those of others, and we must question whether we believe ourselves or the evidence we collect along the way. It is, in essence, an embodiment of the quote, "Who are you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes?"

I cannot claim to have ever given much thought to most of the classic examples. Either I was a keen observer of reality, or I am not able to make myself care enough about them to prompt my own self-doubt. There is an example of a Mandela Effect in music, which is being brought to the surface this year. That is the case of U2's album "All That You Can't Leave Behind", which is celebrating it's twenty-fifth anniversary in 2025.

What is the Mandela Effect here, you might be asking?

I was not prepared for this anniversary, because in my memories, this album was U2's version of "The Rising"; an album-length response to 9/11. "Beautiful Day" was an anthem to remind us we were still alive, and to focus on the good things we still had. "Walk On" told us to carry on and not let anything stop the progress of life. "Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of" was obviously the song acknowledging the trauma we were going to struggle to move beyond.

It all makes such sense in my head, and the memories feel vivid. But they aren't real.

"All That You Can't Leave Behind" came out a year before those events, and while U2 was still riding high on their career resurgence on that day, the connection seems to exist only in my mind. If I didn't know about The Mandela Effect, I might be inclined to think I was crazy, having slipped through some wormhole in time where the only difference between universes is that U2 took one extra year to overcome their career nadir.

If I did not remember the album's origins, do I remember the album itself very well? That is another question that leaves me a bit perplexed. I remember the talk about the record being U2's return to form, and I remember hearing the singles all over tv and radio. Those memories include "Elevation" being U2's most rocking (at the time) song I could remember. As I recently listened to the album again, I was left puzzled by my own memories, as that song barely rocks at all. The entire album fits that mold, actually. While U2 was never a heavy band, the middle-aged gloss of this album has only cured with additional time.

It became cool to hate U2 when they pulled their stunt with Apple and iTunes, but I was disinterested in them long before that. I am one of those people who has never listened to their classic 80s albums in full, because the singles from that time have always struck me as mostly being dull. "With Or Without You" and "I Finally Found What I'm Looking For" are interchangeable dirges of boredom, where the most interesting aspect is how The Edge can go so long avoiding playing a chord.

But there was something about that moment in time when even I could not avoid embracing U2 a bit. I dearly loved "Walk On", and I found comfort in the way Bono's voice nearly breaks when he has to sound more passionate than ironically cool. Someone I cared about had pointed me to "In A Little While", where his similarly cracked vocal tried to tell me something about what love was supposed to do to us. It was not an album I would say I loved, or that I put in regular rotation, but it was always there when I was in a particular mood. The fact Bono is unable to sing a harmony gives U2's music a unique sense of loneliness and isolation, which has been appropriate far too often in my life.

Looking back at this album, I'm left with a few thoughts. 1) U2 is a quintessential singles band, because if this album is truly a comeback, they were never great at consistent greatness. 2) They wasted their second chance by buying into their own self-importance. They may still be a huge band, but they are no longer an essential part of our culture. 3) The passage of time grows harder to wrap my head around.

What this album does is make me think about time, memory, and all the ways my own past is lost to me. Much like how I misremembered the details of the album's existence, I misremember elements of my own. I have long threatened to turn my college experiences into a comedic novel, and for that purpose I wrote down as many memories as I could a few years after they happened. I read through those again this past year, as I was struggling and needed to remember times when things seemed easier. As I did so, many of those stories felt foreign to me, as if they happened to someone else. There were details I had completely forgotten, or mixed up, or had turned into personal Mandela Effects.

That is to say perhaps existential philosophy is both right and wrong. Life is as we experience it, but also as we remember it. The path may change after we have reached the destination, and it doesn't actually matter if we know this or not. We are where we are, regardless of the route we took. Questioning what cannot be changed is pointless.

And yet, that seems to be all I do. Thanks a fucking lot, U2. You always ruin everything, don't you?