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?

The Blind Luck Of Blindly Falling In (Musical) Love

The through-line of history is marked with the signposts of moments that endure in our memories. Certain dates echo throughout the ages because they sparked events that changed the world. The same thing is true of our own lives, with a few select days etched so deeply into our hearts and minds that no amount of erosion from the sands of time can dull the sharp edges of the memories. Those are times we hold dear, times we recognize we were moved from one chapter of life to the next. Those are the moments that made us the people we are today.

Music is the soundtrack to our lives, it is said, and that axiom is true. Many of us always have music running through our minds, and it is the records we are listening to that help us remember the details of our nostalgic reminiscing. There may only be a handful of those instances, but that only makes them even more special.

The first of those came for me when I heard Meat Loaf's "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)". Even more than Meat himself, it was hearing the rumble in the voice of 'Mrs Loud' as she pleaded, "will you hose me down with holy water if I get too hot?" that crystalized the moment. That was when I became a music fan, and not just someone who heard music because it was on in the background.

The next such moment came when I first heard the haunting opening chords of Tonic's "If You Could Only See" ringing from the radio. Though I couldn't explain why it was that song among all others that caught my attention, I heard something in it that reflected the haze that made me soul difficult to see. It would take time, but putting that song in the opening slot of my radio-taped cassette was the impetus that led me to my (for many years) favorite band, and to think of myself as a musician. That would become my identity, then the downfall of my psyche, but that's not the story we're telling today.

THE moment that changed everything was still to come. I don't know if 'love at first sight' is a real thing, as I've certainly never experienced it. I do know that 'love at first listen' is very much a real thing, as that is how the golden spike was driven into my heart.

That voice came out of the television, and it took only seconds for the sound to seep into my blood. I knew nothing of her, but I felt like I knew everything. A voice can tell us everything about a person's soul, and beauty is hard to turn away from. Despite being a writer, and taking pride in turning phrases, I struggle to explain what I feel when I hear one of the truly special voices. My common refrain has been to say that she, alone, reverberates at the frequency of my soul. That doesn't seem like enough, at times.

Dilana changed my life. From that first moment I heard her sing, I came to understand myself in new ways. I hadn't realized where my tastes came from, or where they were going, until I discovered the center of my musical universe. Few singers have ever sounded as if they were bleeding their soul into a recording the way Dilana can, with her voice rumbling the ground with the power of her pain, with her heart healing the deep cuts she leaves on us.

For years, I wrote off my fear of being a broken person in the form of a joke about being emotionless. There was enough truth in it that other people did not disagree, although what I think is the root cause of those doubts would not become clear for many more years. Music was many things to me, but it was not 'emotional'. That was a concept largely beyond my comprehension, as was the love so many songs were written to express. It was uncomfortable for so many songs to feel alien on that fundamental human level, but I would have been more concerned if I felt like all those songwriters understood what was going through my mind.

What started in that first moment I heard Dilana blossomed into its final form the first time I listened to "Beautiful Monster". That record is more than just an album. It was the key that unlocked pieces of myself I didn't know were there. I was not broken in the way I thought, I had just never been exposed to the kind of love that could survive in the acid of my blood, that was sweet enough to overpower my bitterness. Dilana's voice could, and did, and the armor plating of my self-deprecating humor fell in a clamor to the ground over the course of those forty minutes.

Toward the end of "Falling Apart", Dilana sings "I'm so bloody fucked up, I don't know where to start." Perhaps no line has summed up my life more than that, and the vulnerability of telling the world that the smile in a picture may be a lie hit me at my very core. If she could feel lost and hurt, but still have so much heart and passion, maybe I could too. I never know whether the shared experience of pain is an encouraging reminder that we aren't alone, or whether it is a depressing reminder that happiness is as difficult to keep as holding a ghost in our hands.

Over the last few years, there have been times when I have found myself at the bottom of the proverbial hole, looking up and barely seeing a dot of light above me. In those moments, when I feel disconnected from humanity at large, Dilana's voice is there in the back of my head to remind me that the threads may be thin and weak, but they are still there. Hers is the voice of the human experience, and hearing her sometimes is the only thing that convinces me I am whole enough to be human.

I loved Dilana's voice the moment I heard it. I loved "Wonderfool", "InsideOut", and "Beautiful Monster" from the very first listen. She is an artist whose voice and whose words felt like someone I knew and understood. While that would be special enough, I have come to know and understand her as one of my dearest friends. I am prone to bouts of existential questioning, wherein I tear myself down to everything but the doubt Descartes told us was all we could know for sure. When that happens, and I struggle to see myself as anything but a black hole devoid of gravity, that connection is the rope that rescues me from drifting into the eternal emptiness of my own little world.

Her song "When You're Around" might be my favorite vocal performance. She croons with the hint of rasp that sands off the facades we put on, then she builds to a powerful roar that hits me in the chest every time, and illustrates that she has lived more life than most of us could even imagine in our minds. Me, especially.

Dilana is more than a great voice and a great musician. She is the dividing line between who I was and who I am, she is who allowed me to begin to understand myself. She has taught me, she has sustained me, she has seen me. Love was one of those 'four-letter words' before she came into my life. For all of that, I will never be able to offer enough thanks.

And all because of a single moment in time... Funny how that works, isn't it?

When The Wallflowers Implored Us To "Rebel, Sweetheart"

"We're different now than when we started," Jakob Dylan sings in "The Beautiful Side Of Somewhere". It's a simple statement of an obvious truth, but it ties back to when The Wallflowers broke through. It was in "One Headlight" that he told us, "I ain't changed, but I know I ain't the same."

The universe is an illusion in many ways. We seldom stop to think about how we are hurtling through the cosmos, both around the sun and around our own axis. Despite life feeling stagnant at times, we are always in motion, always moving toward an unknown future. Even if we never move, we do not remain in the same place for more than an instant. That thought is both terrifying and comforting, as it gives us hope that the black curtains cannot hide the stage forever, but it also means the spotlight is a fleeting flash we cannot blink without missing.

The Wallflowers were a band that embodied this spirit, as each of their records had a unique identity. After becoming unlikely stars on the "Bringing Down The Horse" cycle, they moved to shore up their critical reputation with an album rooted in the act of songwriting, then reversed course to embrace their most radio-seeking batch of songs. They were always The Wallflowers, but each record showed a different face of the cut gem.

"Rebel, Sweetheart" is in many ways the summation of the band's run as a consistent unit. Every record that came before is embodied in the sound, blending Dylan's poetry with weeping lead guitars, muscular Heartbreakers-esque rock, and a sheen of pop gloss that covered up the fraying edges.

Everything the band had been seeking to become, musically, had been leading to a record like this one. The songs were tight, melodic, and suited to Dylan's distinctive rasp. It took several albums, but Dylan had found his voice as a mainstream songwriter. A string of songs from this collection could have been successors of "One Headlight" and "6th Avenue Heartache", except for the fact that the world had changed as much as the band had. The sad truth was they had moved in different directions, and there wasn't room left for a band playing classic Americana rock and roll.

The Wallflowers were never fated to be popular hit-makers. They lucked into the role, but Dylan's poetry was too esoteric for the mainstream to embrace. "One Headlight" was a hit, but the lyrics were enigmatic images that never fully revealed themselves to the majority of the audience. When "Sleepwalker" tried to keep the momentum going with references to Sam Cooke, it was going over the heads of those who were the target audience (myself included).

This record features a song written about a drunk marionette, which is the sort of thing that generates side-eye in people who do not understand, let alone enjoy, allegory. People knew what Dylan meant when he sang about Cinderella, but the puppet was a step too far. In that way, the album feels like an experiment to make radio-friendly esoterica, to prove that pop hooks are too light to carry much beyond vapid trivialities. The irony of saying that is in the fact the album fails if such is the case, because these songs are sharp enough to bring the poetry to the forefront of (at least my) mind.

On every record, there are a few lines Dylan writes that are elegant explanations of complex thoughts. Here, that comes in the line he croons in his most weary voice, "Not every smile means I'm laughing inside."

We have all heard of 'putting on appearances', and that is what he is saying. In the song, he describes the act of hiding ourselves under an air of amiability as akin to crawling "a quarter mile through black pools of razor wire". A cutting barb to remind us of how deeply life cuts us. The scars are both physical and metaphorical, and we are expected to keep them covered for the sake of everyone who refuses to admit that it takes more energy to keep your lips curled into a friendly smile than it is to express how you truly feel.

That point, in particular, is what I think about when I listen to this album. "Rebel, Sweetheart" is an album that seeks to hide the sad truth behind the polish of joyous production. It succeeds in that, often fooling me into thinking it is an album for happier times. But that's not what The Wallflowers do, and it's seeing the core start to show through as the candy coating dissolves that makes this a record I have listened to for twenty years with the same eager anticipation as the first time.

This record will never mean as much to me as "Breach" does, because linear causation will not allow that, but it is the record that told me I am as much The Wallflowers as a wallflower. "Bringing Down The Horse" is the album everyone knows, "Breach" is the album everyone needs to hear, and "Rebel, Sweetheart" is the album everyone doesn't realize they missed out on.

We may be two decades on, but it's never too late to rectify that mistake.

Album Review: Pridian - "Venetian Dark"

Debut albums can be hard to read.  If they’re any good at all, they fall into two camps - the first is the more common, which is the camp of “they’ve been writing these songs for ten years, constantly refining them and finding their voice, and this is the pinnacle of what this band will ever be.” Think Life of Agony and “River Runs Red.”  The less common camp is the one populated by records that are good…but are instilled with the promise of so much more.  Think Iron Maiden’s debut album.  The second camp forces upon us that thing we hate most in our modern lives - delayed gratification - but the patience is worth the agonizing wait, as bands in the second camp are capable of stratospheric careers.

Enter Pridian, a shiny new metal band out of Estonia (you read that right, Estonia, which has the coolest flag of all the Baltic countries, hands down,) who is casting their lot into the metal circle with their debut album “Venetian Dark.”

(Sidebar: the band apparently used to be known by another name in Estonia, ÆØNS, and released an album under that name, so whether this is truly a debut record or not is distinctly in the eye of the beholder, but it really has little bearing on the substance of this review.)

Pridian aims to be a lot of things to a lot of people.  A metalcore band at heart, there’s a lot of electronic undertones and industrial atmospheres, and in the end, the stew ends up something like a Gen Z version of Fear Factory, complete with the occasional soft(er) contemplative piece.  

Skip on down to the fifth track, “DINY,” because that’s where the album really comes to life.  There’s a “Mr. Roboto” synth line vocal to start, accompanied by a hammering but very accessible metal riff.  The juxtaposition of those elements in and of themselves is novel enough, but then the main beat breaks and the song adds more layers, becoming a catchy, fun metal smasher.  The clean vocals of the chorus tie the whole thing together, and keep the piece grounded amidst the chaos surrounding it.  Within The Ruins could pick up a tip of two if they gave it a listen.

“Void Resonance” is the next real highlight, and man, it serves to remind how long it’s been since we’ve heard a metal band that can be versatile within a single song.  Okay, fine, “Void Resonance” is not even three minutes long, and every part of it is metal through and through, but the first half and the second half tell two different stories, and there’s just not enough of that in the genre in the last couple of years.  We’re not talking about something as dramatically, gleefully chaotic as Destrage, but we are talking about an artist in Pridian who is capable of thinking in parallel lines.

Pridian spends most of “Venetian Dark” circling the concept of mixing metalcore and electronic into a single package.  Most of the cuts are permutations of that idea, where the band feeds different percentages of each into their creative machine and sees what the process spits out.  “Out for Blood” is a Browning-style electronic mash, but with softer vocals thrown in that serve as a protective layer.  “Darker Tides” is almost the same thing, but switches out the consistent soft vocals for a mix of harsher ones, and tips the scales more toward guitar distortion.  

What you’re probably realizing as you read this, is that “Venetian Dark” is an album built on experimentation in the moment, a mixture of ideas and concepts atom-smashed into cohesive songs, or at least something resembling them.  Part and parcel with that is the necessary double-edged blade of trying out a bunch of different stuff - it doesn’t all work.  “Cyanide Dreams” is a straight-ahead metal banger…but that’s all it is.  One of a thousand similar straight-ahead metal bangers. The album’s lead track “The Downfall of Apathy,” ambles about and never quite finds a home, and later on, “Ruin” is going for the soft-Fear-Factory aesthetic we talked about, but it’s messy -  it doesn’t have the (relatively) clean definition of FF’s “Resurrection.” (Man, remember when Fear Factory was a good band?)

I like “Venetian Dark,” but I wish I liked it just a little more, because there’s something here, something that could be explosive and novel and groundbreaking and great.  Pieces of it are there, easy to see, sticking out from the scattered detritus of the genre like prehistoric bones jutting out from the ground after a monsoon.  “Venetian Dark” is a quality album, but it’s Just. Not. Quite. There.  Wherever there is, and whatever that means.  I am already anxiously awaiting the band’s sophomore album, eagerly hoping Pridian falls into the second camp.

Singles Roundup: Katatonia, Kelly Clarkson, Battle Beast, and Jules & The Howl

May is proving to be a month with no full-length releases I want to talk about, so let's take the opportunity to talk about a few singles instead. 

Katatonia - Temporal

The second single from the band's new chapter reveals a bit more about what we can expect. The rhythms of this song are just askew enough to bring in hints of prog, while Jonas' delivery is his usual somber yet beautiful tone. Like the first single, this one takes the basic tone of the last two albums, but gives it a bit more of a clinical feeling. It lacks the pervasive darkness of "City Burials", and the pseudo-optimism of  "Sky Void Of Stars". That leaves the song feeling a bit sterile, and I worry this is an insular album that will be much more difficult for me to embrace.

Kelly Clarkson - Where Have You Been

Over the years, Kelly Clarkson has tried on many hats. Some of them have worked better for me than others, but what has always been undeniable is the power of her voice. This new song may or may not indicate a new chapter, but if it does it points in an interesting direction. Kelly as a blues chanteuse is maybe not what I would expect, but it plays into the strength of her voice beautifully. Her power and expression plays off the weeping guitar leads, creating a blend of sounds that is worlds away from what made her famous, but feels every bit as natural. I might not have been all that high on her more recent pop phase, but I can get behind more of this.

Battle Beast - Last Goodbye

It was only a couple weeks ago that I lamented how Noora Louhimo's collaborative album was lacking in ways that made it feel essential. With Battle Beast unexpectedly returning with this new song, I'm reminded that I believe everything I was saying. Battle Beast is once again giving us a dose of energetic power metal that balances the power of Noora's voice with sharp hooks that bring out the best in everyone involved. I often say that power metal is simple, yet difficult. This is an example of how much fun it can be when it's done right. We can all use a lot more fun in our lives.

Jules & The Howl - In The End

Perhaps more than ever, the current moment feels like a time when carrying on gives the air of being impossible. The world is crumbling around us, people are now comfortable showcasing the worst we are capable of, and our mental health suffers as we think about how hard finding a shred of happiness can be. Jules & The Howl counteract that malaise with this new song, which is a pop-punk anthem keen on giving us the energy to leap over the chasm between where we are and where we want to be. Jules sings that she isn't going to let anything hold her back, and for a moment we believe her, because it's in our nature to want to believe. Jules knows the road might be bumpy, and long, but she's going to stick it out as long as it takes. Each time the chorus comes along with it's bouncy hook, Jules is holding a match to the pilot light. Hopefully, hers will stay lit longer than mine.

When The Music Dies

Music has always been my connection to the world, first as a way to understand and mimic the emotions I didn't think I could feel, then as a conduit through which I could express the thoughts I didn't think I could share. Music let me say things I could not otherwise voice, serving as a therapist who understood how to read into the metaphors that couched my honesty. That is what music was at its core; honest. My favorite songs and albums were as much about how the mood and tone echoed in my body as they were about the actual chord and note choices.

Music was a rare source of pride. When I felt like I had accomplished nothing else, the songs I was writing were there for me. As I learned how to turn my thoughts into poetry, and let them escape through a flow of 'notes', the songs gave me a sense of peace, and stopped the existential questioning of my mind. The feeling of emptiness that usually fills me would slough away, replaced with a contentment that would not last, but would keep me motivated to find the next moment.

Those songs were written for me. I had no aspirations of making anything of them, because the idea of attention was, rather ironically, off-putting.

Everything changed when I figured out how functionally tone deaf I actually am. Twenty years of strumming a guitar should have told me this, since I struggled to identify even the simplest of chords when I heard them. Songs I listen to are tuned noise whose theory is as incomprehensible as the idea of God. While some will hear a song and immediately analyze the banality of a chord progression, I am completely in the dark.

I never thought I was much of a singer, but I was not prepared to learn that not only could I not sing a note, I couldn't even tell how far from the truth I was. No longer was I fighting the ideal voice I heard in my head, I was now fighting not to humiliate myself every time I opened my mouth. It was too much, and it led me on a pursuit that has caused almost nothing but depression for the last two years.

After that revelation, humming the songs to myself became uncomfortable, then painful. Now, even the thought of singing stirs those feelings of depression, because I can't forget everything I have learned. The idea of writing new songs has become impossible, because I can't keep hurting myself that way. Even playing in my head, every song is a disappointing reminder that I will never be the person I have spent so long wanting to be.

With that, I have found myself growing distant from all music. New albums don't stir my emotions like they once did, new songs don't spark my imagination to novel thoughts anymore. Music is enjoyable, but it no longer feels important in the same way.

That terrifies me. I have already seen my sense of self dissolve, and having lost that, I don't know what else I can afford to lose. Music feels like it is slipping away from me, and I don't know how to stop that.

There are times I look at the pile of papers my songs are scrawled on, and I wonder what it would feel like to watch them burn...

Can I "Make Believe" Weezer Broke Up Twenty Years Ago?

Fame is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Weezer are a prime example of this, as they have been in the public eye for thirty years, and have been cringe-inducing and/or outright terrible for twenty of them. And yet, Weezer still sells tickets and carries on with a career modern bands will struggle to ever match. Once "Buddy Holly" became as big as it was, Weezer was guaranteed to have a career. All one-hit wonders do, to a degree. When "Hash Pipe" became their second unavoidable song, they were set for life. They could do nearly anything and walk away with enough goodwill to keep their audience.

They tried to throw it away with an album of angry incel energy referencing opera. They tried again with an album of impersonal songs written according to formula. They tried again with an album of half-written faux-metal saved by an appearance from The Muppets in a video.

As album number five came around, Weezer was looking for new ways to fail to tank their career. For this occasion, Rivers Cuomo didn't seem to have an idea for which bad idea to jump on first. What happened was multiple sets of demos coming out that showed what the album could have been, all of which were scrapped again and again for what became the finished product. Those demos are an entire story unto themselves, but for now let's say Rivers came across unfocused. There were gems in those demos, and there were experiments that simply didn't work at all.

Despite that, every second of even the worst of those demos is better than how we were introduced to "Make Believe". That would be the song "Beverly Hills", which was the true turning point where Weezer went from being a band using gimmicks to get attention to a band that had nothing left to offer. Rivers' lyrics had already been vapid for a couple of albums, but now they were unbearable in their pursuit of fame. The almost rapping cadence made him sound even more ridiculous than when he was singing about Buddy Holly and sweaters. The ultra-generic riff repeated again and again was the icing on the cake, showing a complete disinterest in developing the idea into an actual song worth listening to.

Somehow, "Beverly Hills" became their next (and last, thankfully) enduring hit. I don't understand how or why, but that song still gets airplay even now. It single-handedly ruined the reputation of "Make Believe", which has long competed for the title of Weezer's worst album. I don't think that it possibly can be, given how much further down they would sink, but I understand the loathing of "Beverly Hills" making the rest of the album impossible to hear properly.

I will never try to tell you "Make Believe" is a great record, but there are worthy songs that got shackled to a period when people were angry with Rivers. "Perfect Situation" is a rare song that is able to be successful even without a chorus. "This Is Such A Pity" was an 80s homage that didn't feel cloying and pathetic. "Haunt You Every Day" was an even stronger version of how "Only In Dreams" closed out their debut record. There are good moments to be found here, truly.

"Beverly Hills" ruins things, but it isn't alone. The other skeleton we have to pull out of the closet is "Freak Me Out", which would be a good song if not for the fact that it's written about being afraid of a spider. I hate even typing that sentence.

What's interesting about Weezer isn't the debate over whether or not they fell off the proverbial cliff, it's that we can't agree on when they did so. Pretty much everyone agrees the band has pissed away their legacy as important musicians, but we all have a different take on when that happened. Maybe it was when "Pinkerton" failed miserably. Maybe it was when "Green" stripped away all of River's personality. Maybe it was when Rivers grew a mustache and play-acted as a cowboy. Maybe it was when they put the actor from "Lost" on their album cover.

The point is; Weezer has given us ample opportunity to hate their guts, and yet they never seem to go away. That says more about us than it does them. We're the ones who keep forgiving their sins, the ones who keep giving them yet another chance to disappoint us.

Weezer is destined to hurt us, but in the grand scheme of things "Make Believe" is not their greatest sin. It was a warning, a test of how masochistic we were willing to be. I'm drawing the line here. Now let's hope I don't have any reason to talk about them again until I have to write about the thirtieth anniversary of "Pinkerton" next year. That's going to be a doozy.

Ugh... The Goddamn Smiths

I hate myself when I find The Smiths creeping into my regular listening, because I know it means my mood is circling the drain. There aren't many outright misanthropes in popular music, and Morrissey might be the foremost authority on self-loathing among them. To embrace Morrissey is to step into the 'iron maiden', to allow yourself to be punctured again and again by the poison-tipped skewers of what society expects from us.

My introduction to The Smiths came through a connection that now feels like a figment of my imagination. That person must have seen something in me that I didn't at the time, pointing me in Morrissey's direction when I had yet to discover my own voice as an outcast who would be as angry being accepted as rejected.

"I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does" he sings in the iconic "How Soon Is Now?"

The driving force of that song is Johnny Marr's tremolo guitar, which throbs with the uneasy feeling of a racing heart losing the battle against anxiety. If Sartre was right that "hell is other people", then the answer to the question "What fresh hell is this?" is the name of whomever the new person we have met is. The heart of Morrissey's philosophy is that people are everything that is wrong with life, but also everything we want out of it.

I have come back to The Smiths in recent days, because that idea is one I cannot escape. Like Morrissey, I want to feel connected to the world, to have people I matter to. That has proven elusive, as time has shown me that my own universe is much like the one we live in; entropy pushing everything further away. There are days... ok weeks, when getting two words out of people is the heaviest burden I can carry.

Yes, I do feel like "Half A Person", and yes, I can say "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" when it is thrown in my face that even people I thought I held dearest view me as being their last resort. It raises questions of what affection is if it is only expressed when things are not going their way. Too often, these people either disappear or stay quiet when they are enjoying their personal successes, returning only when the tides turn and they think I can commiserate with their misery... if you pardon the wordplay.

There was an episode of the show "Daria" that dealt with this phenomenon, where Daria was the sounding board for everyone after a tragedy, because she was 'the misery chick'. Whether we want to use that terminology, or the concept of the 'confidence friend' who is kept around only to make yourself feel better about your own life, either option is insulting... and yet the only attention that sometimes comes along.

Is it comforting to think that someone else has gone through the same pain you have? That's an interesting question, and I'm not sure there's a good answer to it. If we take a zero-sum approach, the pain someone else has felt limits how much is left for us. If we don't think in finite terms, it isn't encouraging that pain spreads as widely as it does, but it can help not to think we are the only ones to be cursed by fate.

Morrissey is not one of those people who will tell you that feeling sad is selfish, because other people have it worse than you. That particular morsel of advice has been given to me, and is no more helpful than those who say that 'everything happens for a reason'. They never do explain the reason, or why we are supposed to be grateful for being put in those positions if there was a choice available by a larger force to do things differently. It speaks of cruelty to me. Morrissey is also cruel, but more to himself than anyone else. He knows what he is saying, and the honesty of the approach is certainly worth noting.

The truth about Morrissey is that he is insufferable, and seeing yourself in him probably means being insufferable as well. Because of this, The Smiths are one of those bands who veer wildly from songs of near brilliance to the most self-serving tripe imaginable. Their discography is short, but spotted with festering wounds as if scarlet fever has washed over the whole of it.

"If you have fifteen minutes, I'll tell you the story of my life" he sings in "Half A Person". It wouldn't even take me that long to run through the highlights. "This Charming Man" always has an "Unhappy Birthday", and the worst thing of all is this; despite everything, there are people I carry a torch for, and with that "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out".

The goddamn Smiths. I love to hate them, and hate to love them. The needle is pointing in the wrong direction right now.

What We Still Pull "From Under The Cork Tree"

"We're friends, just because we move units."

That line was a bit of snark on an album full of tortured wordplay and smarter-than-thou cynicism, but little did we know it would come to be prophetic. Fall Out Boy was only breaking through, but it was already the beginning of the end. Across an album of emo and pop-punk anthems that spoke to a generation coming of age in a time of unjustified war and soon-to-be avoidable financial collapse, the songs gave us messages about the futility of caring, honesty, and getting involved beyond watching from afar.

"From Under The Cork Tree" came out as I was just about to graduate from college, which made it a fitting soundtrack for one phase ending and another beginning. College was an experience, to say the least. As an observer, I learned about alcoholism and drug use, and the decision making skills of people who would soon be considered 'adults' to the world. That was frightening, and made Fall Out Boy's cynicism feel more than necessary, but rather mandatory for survival.

Fall Out Boy were not a humble band, by any means, and Pete Wentz made sure he let you know that through his lyrics. He threw as much wordplay as he could into the songs, as if he had heard Elvis Costello and missed the point that one well-timed joke caught the audience's attention more than an entire stand-up set. Wentz would work through issues of inadequacy through his bravado, culminating in the line in "Sugar, We're Going Down" about being taken out by a "loaded God complex". The smoking gun of that image is the most defining moment of his career, and for good reason.

This album was the moment in time when the band's past, present, and future found the perfect balance. Their hardcore roots still bleed in around the edges, and their pop aspirations give polish to the more raw moments. This was the point where two diverging lines meet, only to go their separate ways for all eternity. Or so we thought. The more gloss the band put on their songs, the less effective they became. "Infinity On High" and "Folie A Deux" are both fine records, but they lack the punch and power of "From Under The Cork Tree", and Wentz' celebrity status would come to overshadow the band's outsider image. Fall Out Boy was no longer the band for whom everything was 'coming up Millhouse', they were the unhappy kid trying not to fuck up his part in the major motion picture.

And then we return to the line I started out quoting. When the band returned from their hiatus, so much had changed. Fall Out Boy was no longer a band laughing at the world who took them seriously. They were now a band that took themselves seriously, and did so by embracing the trends of the day in search of radio hits and... moving units. The fact that they succeeded does not make the shift toward literal cynicism any more forgivable, nor does it allow them to take any credit for moving back to their most popular sound when they had bled dry that vein of attention.

"Dance, dance, we're falling apart in half time," they sing. How true that was, as the band did fall apart, and it did take longer than an immediate collapse. Sometimes, the worst thing that can happen to a band is success, and that is sadly the case for Fall Out Boy. I don't say that necessarily as a criticism, because I believe Fall Out Boy was always destined to be a short-lived thing. Cynicism may endure, but it shifts as we get older. The snark of youth turns into a weariness, then into helpless resignation. Neither of those would fit the band's ear-candy-emo songwriting, so they were never going to burn brightly forever.

What is most interesting about Fall Out Boy's music, to me, is that is much the same experience as looking through old photographs of yourself. You recognize yourself, but in the same way you recognize the faded paint on an old billboard along the side of the road. It isn't bright, sharp, and in focus, but it contains clues to a past that we lose little pieces of with each passing day.

After twenty years, listening to Fall Out Boy is a reminder of simpler times. The crises of the world felt less existential, as did the crises of self. What I find helpful is to be able to draw the line from The Smiths to Fall Out Boy to the present day, realizing that there has always been reason to be skeptical and cynical. That fact does make it feel less like a flaw in my personality, and more like a fitting reaction to the world.

Dammit, I'm giving Fall Out Boy credit.

Album Review: Misfire - "Product of the Environment"

 

A little more than three years ago, we wrote about how Misfire, on the heels of their debut full-length “Sympathy for the Ignorant,” had risen from the shadows of the defunct Diamond Plate and was poised to succeed the unfortunate Power Trip as the vanguard of thrash in America.

There was a caveat to the band’s assumed dominance though.  It rested on the principle that Diamond Plate matured for their second album, and that if Misfire hoped to hold thrash’s crown, they would have to do the same, and smooth out some of the misgivings of their debut effort.

Now, there’s a caveat to the caveat - Misfire comes armed with a new vocalist in Tim Jensen, and as such the entire color the band has been altered, at least in a small way.  Which is all a needlessly long introduction to the band’s sophomore album “Product of the Environment,” and a complicated way to say that there’s a lot of layers to this onion.

We’re going to jump to the conclusion and work backwards - “Product of the Environment” certainly smooths out some of the rough edges of “Sympathy for the Ignorant,” but not always in a positive way.  The entire experience has been streamlined and hammered into sheets, which makes for an evenly consistent delivery, but not always an exciting one.  This new record is something of a thrash assembly line - eleven variants of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, chorus.

That doesn’t mean that aren’t great moments.  The single “We Went Through Hell” is a personal tale, the kind of yarn that every listener can listen to and empathize with, as we’ve all been through some similar personal hell (so much so that I just used ‘yarn’ in a sentence.)  Plus, the riff is characteristic of some of the great thrash-y riffs of days gone by, in that it leaves room between the notes and phrases, letting the song breathe, rather than just throwing every rock at the window and seeing which one breaks through.

Skip all the way down to “Privacy,” and this is one of those songs were the crunchy guitar tone pays off in that old-school Megadeth way, as Tim Jensen, who even according to the band’s own press occasionally tells stories like Dave Mustaine, does just that, completing a construction that reminds of the way thrash was during its best days some forty years ago.  It’s great, and the singalong chorus even smacks a little of GWAR-style punk styling.

There are other fun parts that pop up here and there.  “Born to Die” has a great, head-nodding breakdown at the end, “End of an Age” has a cool staccato riff that bridges to the outro, and there are skillful and enjoyable solos from Kostadin Kostadinov from several other guests throughout the record.  

Still…there’s something missing here.  “Product of the Environment” has the blueprint of a thrash classic, but it’s as though the band followed the directions of the blueprint to the letter and didn’t add any flourishes.  There’s nothing here that makes one say “wow, this is Misfire!”  The album does a great job of replicating thrash from its halcyon days, making the listener remember Exodus or Slayer or Anthrax, but doesn’t draw attention back to itself once that initial job is done.

What we’re left with is an enjoyable, perfectly good thrash record from talented and experienced musicians.  It could have been great, though.  Did Misfire mature from their debut album?  Yes, this effort is a more professional, consistent experience.  It lost some of its youthful exuberance along the way, though.