Album Review: North Sea Echoes - How To Cast A Shadow

I don't pretend to know the complications and considerations that go into the business of making music, but sometimes the optics make very little sense when viewed from the outside. Fates Warning was not the biggest band in progressive metal, but they had an audience, and they had a legacy. That made it rather difficult to understand how as the band wound their career down, the members have moved on to other projects that keep them busier than Fates Warning itself was. They make different shades of music, but it's all cut from similar cloth, so a progressive band would not have been out of place in attempting to traverse these new influences.

North Sea Echoes finds Jim Matheos and Ray Alder joining forces once again, exploring the melancholy strains of rock they have spent the last three decades trading in. This project has a bit more ambience, and electronic flourishes, but the heart of their partnership will always sound like themselves. As to why the situation seems so odd to me, let's address it this way; despite Fates Warning being in my sphere of knowledge, I'm not sure I knew this project's first album ever existed.

The trouble with melancholy is that there is a fine line between the beauty of sorrow and outright black depression. Plenty of bands have tried to ride that edge, only to find themselves in a bitter slog that shows no light making the trip worth taking. As the opening track on this record unfolds, the four minutes of slow ambience gives the impression we are headed toward the ugly side of the ledger. The song offers little in the way of an immediate musical foothold, traversing on a cloud of sound that struggles to explain why we are listening to it.

First single "Enjoy The View" follows, and paints a very different picture. The guitars enter the mix, which give the song more than enough energy to keep its movement intact. Ray sounds great belting out the chorus, which is able to find that balance I was referring to. This can be mistaken as nothing else but melancholy, but played with a passion that lets us think there is something waiting for us on the other side of it. It's the difference between film noir and simply not turning the lights on at all.

"Good Enough" is another slow build, but Ray's melody has a contour that makes it engaging and enjoyable, and this song builds to a true payoff, which is an essential part of letting the fuse inch forward. When the song is slow and doesn't build, it can feel like a waste of investing our feelings in it. When there is a cathartic moment for our pathos, it makes all the difference. That comes as Ray sings the chorus, "I'll leave a light on in case you come home/But I won't hold my breath". It's a beautiful melody, a lovely delivery, and a message that leaves enough of a cliffhanger to want to hear the next chapter.

The majority of the record follows suit, with enough texture and grit to the music to match the emotional heaviness Ray is singing with. These songs aren't metal, but the roots of their writing can be heard in the softer tones. If you transported Fates Warning back to a time when amps were less saturated, the result could very well sound like this record. There is also a familiarity with Opeth's "Damnation", if that record didn't muffle its sound quite as dramatically.

North Sea Echoes is indeed doing something different than Ray has achieved with his solo albums, or with A-Z. Taken together, the three projects split Fates Warning's personality as if a prism, giving us smaller ranges of the old totality. That makes them interesting distillations, and somehow more interesting than the fuller mixture. This record leaves me with questions I can't avoid asking myself, but know aren't necessarily fair; Is this better than Ray's solo albums, or A-Z? Sharing so much connective tissue, separating them is rather difficult.

What is less difficult is saying that all of these projects are more effective for me than Fates Warning ever was. Ray's solo albums both appeared in my year-end top ten list, as did A-Z's second album, and this feels like a lock to join them. I've heard very little music this year that stirred something in me, but North Sea Echoes absolutely has. It may not be the best album of the year, but it's not far off.

The "Lemon Parade" Keeps Marching On

Ten years ago, I sat here to muse about my relationship with "Lemon Parade" after twenty years of listening and love. Tonic was my favorite band, "Lemon Parade" was my favorite album, and "If You Could Only See" was the reason I had picked up a guitar and tried to be a musician. Back then, the album meant more to me than I could have expressed, because it was wrapped up in my very self-identity.

Here's the inevitable thing about life; nothing stays the same. No matter how much it feels like things are immutable, everything changes while our minds blend the differences like an old zoetrope turning still images into an animated wonder. Much like how our bodies regenerate our cells so we are literally not the same people we were ten years ago, music is not static either. The ways we interact with it shift, the electrical pathways in our minds carve new branches, and old friends become acquaintances we nod and wave to as we forget where we ever met them.

I've been thinking a lot about relationships over the course of the last year, because many of the threads that connect me to the world have felt as if they had frayed to the breaking point. People who I thought were dear have been receding from my life, and I have proven to myself it makes no difference whether I try to hold on or not. If people can fade so easily and so quickly, the same holds true for music. It isn't always enough to have an old record sitting on the shelf, there needs to be a reason that pulls us back together time and again, much as having a photograph hanging on the wall is not the same as maintaining the connection with that person.

Ten years ago, despite being cynical by nature, I was more optimistic than I am now. "Lemon Parade" was still inspiring me to explore my own depths for the sake of art, and I still had the energy to love Tonic enough to believe a new chapter was still on the horizon. Now, after another decade in which we only have one new song to show for our patience, belief is a hard thing to come by. Perhaps I am too much an empiricist, or perhaps it's existentialism manifesting, but when the only experiences left are memories, the future is nothing but an illusion.

When I listen to "Lemon Parade", I remember every second of those first twenty years; the obsession that wore thin the magnetic strip of the cassette tape, the reflexive strumming that taught me the basics of guitar before I had one, the voice that rang in my head as if it was my own. I remember all the times I put the record on when I needed something to make me feel like 'me' again, when I needed music to fill the role of the 'trusted friend who tells me lies', to borrow a phrase from a different band.

With ten years of dust collected atop the old memories, seeing the past in vivid color isn't quite possible anymore. I know plenty of people who use the term 'friend' far too liberally, applying it to anyone they have ever had a passing conversation with. To me friendship is a two-sided connection, one that needs attention so as not to corrode and eventually snap. It's an irony that I was once lectured by someone for saying something that was taken as a slight on our friendship, despite the fact that person has not had any conversation with me that was not in service or about themselves in years. I've been trying to convince myself those sorts of people are not friends, and the same applies to bands and music.

This isn't to blame Tonic for not making a new album in more than fifteen years, but merely to say that figments of the past aren't able to grow with us in the same manner as someone who is still here in the daily fight. Tonic has not given me any new context to think about their music and their evolution, stuck in the amber of my memories. I spend too much time there as it is.

Since the last time I wrote about "Lemon Parade", and the ways the re-imagined acoustic version gave me a new perspective on something I loved so dearly, much has changed. Maybe I haven't changed, but I no longer call Tonic my favorite band, I no longer have "Lemon Parade" listed as my favorite album, and I've given up on writing/playing the music it inspired me to create. It isn't painful to listen to the album, but it does serve as a reminder of dreams I used to have but no longer do. That's another topic I've written far too much about. I was young and stupid, so my interpretation when I first heard "If You Could Only See" was mistaken. It's funny when I think back to that, because to this day my errant take on that song is more relevant to my life than the song itself. Perhaps I wasn't quite as stupid as I thought.

The point of all of this is to be a reminder that being dead-set in your thinking is not noble. Changing your mind is not just healthy, it's vital when the world around us is constantly changing. If new experiences and new evidence don't make you reconsider things from time to time, you no longer have opinions and feelings, you have reflexes that are as worthy of praise as being tapped on the knee by a rubber mallet. Love is not a reflex, it's a choice we make on a daily basis, and there's nothing wrong with realizing one day that we are making that choice out of habit.

Ten more years down the road, I still love Tonic and I still love "Lemon Parade", but it's the kind of love that is wrapped up in the nostalgia for memories we don't want to see fade away. "Lemon Parade" is the old friend you see at a reunion and reminisce about some stories with. It is no longer an album I make memories with, it's an album I use to recall memories when I need to remember what having a bit of hope felt like.

That is to say, in another five or ten years, I may not even remember the anniversary of such an important part of my life, because there really isn't anything left to say.

Love, Death, & A Welsh Siren

There's a scene in the movie "High Fidelity" where Rob Gordon is putting his record collection into autobiographical order, and he says he can explain the moves in life that got him from one artist to the next. The steps are not always so easy to see, and I have taken note that much of life can only be understood when looking in the rear-view mirror. I have lost count of how many times I have made a revelation, only to realize my subconscious was well ahead of me on that count. Most of the time, that involves realizing what the music I was drawn to was telling me all along, if I had been able to hear the subtext.

The loss of Bonnie Tyler is one of those moments that makes me stop and realize certain things about me have always been there, and were perhaps immutable. It might not have been luck or happenstance that led to this path, fate (if such a thing exists) had already written those elements in ink upon me.

Bonnie's appeal was obvious to me; she was the voice of several songs from the pen of my musical hero, Jim Steinman. His story was incomplete without Bonnie Tyler, and so mine would be as well. To be without "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" would be to not fully understand Steinman, the 80s, or the very idea of melodrama. His song about vampires finding love in the dark, and wondering if the fires of passion were too bright for them to survive in, worked for me because of the overblown and ridiculous scope of it all. Even as a child, I think part of me realized there was something amiss about my emotions. I needed the exaggeration Steinman brought to the table in order to feel what was supposedly 'normal'.

I would diagnose that issue later on, and 'solve' it with the help of a different singer, although the solution mostly seemed to invite depression among all the options, so we can debate whether I am better off with the knowledge and ability. Steinman's music was my entry point to the human experience, and Bonnie Tyler was absolutely a part of that. She not only delivered songs that spoke to me, she did it with her raspy voice that struck a chord with me. Here's where things get a bit difficult to parse; Did the songs lead me to love rasp, or did rasp lead me to love the songs? I don't know if I can answer that.

I was not thinking about how much Bonnie's voice singing those songs was seeping into my mind, just like I hadn't thought about how much I was obsessed with the sound of "Black Velvet", which I have already written an essay about. If I was more clear-eyed about myself, I would have seen the connection between their voices, and how they were touching my soul in the same spot. It is obvious now that I was sensitive to voices that carried some husk and rasp to them, voices that sounded as weathered as my heart would ultimately become. Perhaps that also explains the crush I had on someone in high school whose speaking voice sounded as if emphysema was an affliction of youth.

Now, it is obvious that Bonnie Tyler and Alanah Myles were prelude to my deepest connection with a human voice, that of Dilana. They all share characteristics that echo in phase with each other, and create a through-line I can trace through decades of life, up to and including Lzzy Hale. Many of the songs and voices that have meant the most to me, that have unknowingly defined my taste and persona, all come from this same stem of the musical flower. If I am to compare myself to a bloom, it only exists as a bulb planted by those seeds.

Bonnie Tyler, through Jim Steinman, is responsible for being the voice behind a statement that sounds rather terrible, but is as much hope as I tend to hold: "Loving you's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it." That song was another in a line of Steinman's songs turning common phrases into contrary and sarcastic quips, but sometimes comedy is the ultimate form of telling the truth. What has been made clear to me time and again over the years is that love is inexplicable, except for the fact it seems impossible of afflicting some of us. Indeed, I imagine whoever draws the short straw when the timer runs out will be saying that exact thing about me, and I will thank them for the effort.

I did not have any of those thoughts when I started loving Bonnie's rendition of the song. It was an amusing piece of the Steinman oeuvre, but little else. Like everything, only time would reveal to me the obvious backdrop I could not see through the spotlight glare.

When I listen to my favorite Bonnie Tyler songs now, whether they are the Steinman tracks, her versions of "The Best" and "Have You Ever Seen The Rain", or the proto-Bon Jovi of "If You Were A Woman And I Was A Man", what I hear is a nostalgic reminder that at our core we don't change as people. I find that reassuring, because I want to believe the people and the music I love are going to be with me for the rest of my life. To know I have always been drawn to the same energy means perhaps I always will, and that gives me a map to where to look for the next gold rush.

Bonnie Tyler is a part of that story, and for that I am grateful.

Not All "Legends" Are Legendary

One thing we have established over the years is that words are important. They are the way we define the world, and agree how to share the experience of life. Without words, we have no way of conveying what is happening in our minds, or what we believe the world is trying to tell us. Words are the currency we use to not be completely isolated in this life, so when words get misused, it feels a bit insulting to the entire human race.

Not that I want to name names, but last year I received press releases promoting the new album from Ronnie Romero. I'm quite familiar with him and his work, so I didn't need to read the whole of it, but the headline caught my attention. It alerted me to the upcoming album from "legendary singer" Ronnie Romero.

I'm sorry... what the actual fuck?

The word 'legend' means something. Legends are the people who endure through time because they have made an impact with their talent. They are the ones we will be listening to for the rest of our lives, the ones who will eventually cash out and sell their catalogs for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ronnie Romero is not a legend.

The whole of his career has been spent toiling in the European metal underground, releasing countless albums of provided songs for the Frontiers label, with different groups of people playing behind him to give the impression is isn't just cookie-cutter results with various colors of food dye put in he same icing. Romero had a brief window when he fronted Rainbow, but that was for a few pathetic comeback shows, and one song that disappeared from memory as soon as it was released.

Let me pose a question to you; When was the last time you heard people out in the world talking about Ronnie Romero? I'm guessing the answer is never, because even among the rock and metal communities I keep abreast of, his name only seems to come up as the prime example of label over-exposure. I cannot point you to which project or album he has been on is the keystone, not because no one can seem to agree, but because I'm not sure anyone still listens to any of them.

To the best of my knowledge, Romero has never been on a 'hit' song or album, or anything the general population could have ever heard. At one point, he even boasted that he amassed his legendary career in half the time as most artists. Yes, because he over-saturated the market with his voice, and was recording anything the label put in front of him. It's easy to make a lot of music when all you have to do is show up and sing what they tell you to.

But he is not the only one who gets sucked into this vortex of lies. Some time before that, I received a press release touting the return of a 'legendary' rock band that had been missing for years. Curious, I read to find out who this was talking about. As it turns out, it was The Calling. If that name sounds familiar, they're the band who put out the song "Wherever You Will Go" twenty years ago. That was, in fact, their only hit, and from their only album.

I'm sorry, but a band with one notable song, and even without a catalog of deep cuts they can claim fans love, is supposed to qualify as legendary?

Barney Stinson was the chief purveyor of legendary in pop culture, and there came a point where the other characters had to tell him "if all nights are legendary, no nights are legendary." And that is the crux of all of this; if we talk up the mediocre, there are no words left for the truly great. If Ronnie Romero or The Calling are legends, what does that make Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, and the like?

I know people who do PR are tasked with trying to get the attention of cynics like me, and they have to bend the truth sometimes to do that. There is a huge difference between spin and lying, and too often it feels like I am being fed lies to gaslight me into thinking I'm the only person not seeing the massive success all over the rock world.

And just as an aside, I will mention this. I skimmed through Romero's album after getting my guile up, just to see if things had improved. It was the same bland music he has been delivering his whole career, but there was one interesting bit to take note of. The press release that came with the album mentioned a remarkable cover of a classic song... that wasn't on the version they sent to me.

Is it really too much to ask that we talk about people in the proper terms? If we want to go down this road, we can point out the reality of math, and how almost everyone we talk about here is unknown to 99% of the people on the planet. Is 1% the new mark of being legendary?

Album Review: Deep Purple - SPLAT!

When we talk about life and maturity, we assume there comes a point at which we are supposed to grow out of certain things. With members of Deep Purple pushing 80, the days of spelling in all caps and exclamation points should be behind us, no? Deep Purple has been on a run of inspiration making new albums, but they have been coming with odd titles and terrible cover art, which one could interpret as a lack of care being put into the product. The title of this record is practically begging me to write a pun about it being a sloppy mess hitting the floor.

What I find curious about Deep Purple is that after thirty years of developing a musical identity with Steve Morse that was befitting of a veteran band growing more adept at what they do, the band has chosen now to strip things back to the barest elements. Do men of this age have it in them to make raw and raucous rock and roll? To be completely honest, no, I don't think they do.

Part of that comes down to Ian Gillan, who at his age would be forgiven for not being close to the singer he once was. I don't think anyone would expect him to be, and I don't fault him for keeping his range in its comfort zone. The issue is that what his voice can do now is not compatible with making the band heavier and more neanderthal. It only highlights the absurdity of his lyrics, like when he literally tells us in a song that he is "scriblin' gib'rish", as if we didn't know that already. Ian's word choices have been growing more concerning by the album, and his stories aren't all that much better. Maybe it's just me, but I don't want to hear someone his age singing a song called "Jessica's Bra", I'm sorry.

Gillan also goes too far on "Guilt Trippin'", where he layers the highest shrieks he has left in him on the verses, which render the lyrics utterly unintelligible. I don't know why he ever thought that vocal tone was appealing, but not that he can't do it while enunciating, it's even more infuriating. If you write a lyric, make damn sure we can hear it. Otherwise, you wasted your time and effort, as well as mine.

The biggest failure of the album, though, is that it doesn't go far enough toward what it wants to be. The band is trying to be heavy and gritty, but they don't really have that in them any more. The tempos stay lax, and the guitars lack the bite to really hit hard. The whole thing sounds like a heavy record being played back through muffled speakers, or like a live show that didn't have a good sound engineer.

Maybe it's for the best that the band spends more time in longer instrumental passages this time around, which might help with some of those issues, but lands this album outside the realm of what I want to hear. This sounds like Deep Purple trying to be Deep Purple, rather than merely being themselves. As UFO got to the end of their career, they were facing most of these same issues, but their records gave me the impression they had accepted their fate, whereas Deep Purple feels like a band that thinks they can still recapture the 70s... while in their 70s.

I know the narrative around this record is going to be that Deep Purple is still putting out great records no matter their age, or how many guitar players have come and gone. Maybe the hardcore fans will believe that, but from my vantage point Deep Purple is a band that is pumping out too much music for the sake of saying their still so active. All of these albums comes across too loose and improvised, and without enough great songs to keep me interested. Merely being and sounding like Deep Purple isn't enough.

Album Review: Krystal System - "Da Punch"

We’re all familiar with the axiomatic mixing of ingredients into some greater whole.  The most common refrain used to illustrate this concept is “you got peanut butter in my chocolate!  You got chocolate in my peanut butter!”

Now, take that as a basic principle, and add in rainbow sprinkles and a cherry, and you get something musically akin to Krystal System’s new LP Da Punch.

Like a musically self-aware Voltron, the French electro-metal duo (which hardly seems like enough of an epithet to encapsulate what the band displays, but that’s what they call themselves) folds in pieces of a veritable panoply of genres to make something new.  Pop punk, old-school industrial, electronic, rock, and even a taste of those big, atmospheric Fear Factory ballads all blend into a sugary album of ear candy that’s hard not to smile at.  And, oh by the way, half the songs are in French.

Certain constants of music remain immutable.  One of them is the intrinsic appeal of the descending scale.  Every band and every genre has played with it, from the haunting tones of Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused,” to the thumping bravado of DMX’s “X Gon’ Give It To Ya.”  Right from the beginning of “Someday,” Krystal System dives into that same pool, filtering it through distortion and airier vocals than either of those other two examples, creating a song that buzzes with venom, particularly as it moves into the thunderous pre-chorus and ultimately into the catharsis of the chorus.  Never mind the hints of alternative that color the margins.

Not to be outdone for versatility, Da Punch then moves into “Eclats Rouges” (“red flashes,” for the uninitiated,) which, with apologies to the band for saying so, is a pop punk song with a singalong chorus that just happens to have some electronic overtones.

Step by step, Krystal System moves from form to form, and without warning, the next two songs take us through a loving tour of KMFDM records from the early ‘90s.  We’re taken on a journey of both the pure industrial drive of “Iryna’s song” (think “Rip the System,”) and then the proto-industrial metal of “Neon Cage” (akin to the entire Nihil album,) right down to the machine-gun drum machine sample.

One last highlight - “Soleil Noir”...well, it’s gonna sound odd, but the best descriptor of this song is that it sounds like the Pixies covered the boss battle music from the old Raiden video game series.  In French.  Yeah, that makes no sense.  But trust us, for all that your instincts are saying that can’t work, this song is, as the kids say, a bop.

There are several bands who have been lauded on these pages for their ability to stretch the definitions of genre or outright exceed them by reaching for disparate elements and flexing their adaptability.  Where Krystal System and Da Punch differ from those bands is that they reach outside those boundaries, but rather than adapt to the form, they make the form adapt to them, cramming and mangling other styles into their own existing idiom until the machine hums with life.

It should be noted that even on an album such as this, creativity in this mold can only be stretched so far - and while Krystal System accomplishes a hell of a lot on this record, the songs we didn’t discuss here are fine, but are permutations of the twists and turns already mentioned.  Which is in no way a knock, more of a note for accuracy’s sake.

Da Punch is one of the finest albums to come out this year, hands down.  It is energetic, explosive, exploratory, expansive, and a bunch of other adjectives that don’t start with the letter ‘e.’  It’s hard not to get caught up in the infectiousness of the beats and the groove.

Singles Roundup: Sailor Hunter, The Jayhawks, Dogma, & North Sea Echoes

The second half of the year is beginning, and we have new music to kick it off with. This week's new songs are:

Sailor Hunter - Nox

Previously, I wrote about Sailor Hunter's song "Unbound", which hit me as one of the best songs so far this year. This chapter with their new singer Dimitra was off to an incredibly promising start. This next song is an indication that we can't think we know everything that is coming, because the band is not interested in following a script. Rather than deliver another song that hit the same (excellent) marks, they shift their tone and style to remind us more of their roots, infusing far more death metal into the equation this time.

That gives the song a far different feeling, as the swell and emotion of the chorus to "Unbound" is put to the side on this one. Instead, the band puts as many ideas as they can into this one song, with the vocals going from guttural growls and Dimitra's screams, to her metallic belting and almost operatic high notes. It's an impressive display of range, and doing so much all at once gives us a lot to wrap our heads around as we listen. They are challenging us as much as they are entertaining us. But, as someone admittedly not much of a fan of extreme metal and growled vocals, this is a song targeted toward an audience I am mostly an observer of.

There is still promise to be heard, and pieces I like quite a bit, but "Unbound" is still my song of choice.

The Jayhawks - Keeping Our Heads Above Water

I neve know how to react to an announcement that The Jayhawks are gearing up to release something new. It's been a roller coaster ride being a fan, not just because nothing they do has ever been able to recapture the spirit of "Hollywood Town Hall" (one of my favorite albums of all time), but because Gary Louris' influences run the gamut, including many psychedelic and experimental roads I would rather not travel down. The only record of their last three I enjoy at all is the one compiling old songs, which might say something.

That makes it all the more confusing that this song is a return to classic Jayhawks, but with a twist. The band has found their sunny-day pop sensibility once more, which pairs beautifully with Louris' melancholy voice. Especially without the band's earlier dual vocal approach, the clashing tones of voice and music are necessary to give that traditional Jayhawks feeling. If this is an indication that the band is going for a "Smile The Green Grass" or "Smile" vibe again, that's good enough for me. I'm cautiously optimistic this might be The Jayhawks I love.

Dogma - My Matricidal

When I talked about Dogma's previous single, I mentioned how uncomfortable it feels to enjoy their music, given everything we know about the band's situation. That has not changed, but what "My Matricidal" does is make it less important for me to have to answer those questions. Why? That is because Dogma was not able to keep up the spark and fireworks of that song, instead giving us a song that is enjoyable, but not as memorable, or as essential.

This time the music is a bit slower, a bit heavier, and the drama the band is going for doesn't quite pay off the way they intend it to. The chorus features a powerful vocal, but the melody lacks the immediacy of "Fate Unblinds", and the camp factor that makes all of this work is missing. The band is playing the schtick too close to the vest, and when they are taking the characters so seriously it makes it difficult for me to take the music seriously. This is a gimmick band, and they can't come across stone-faced when they are singing love letters to their dark lord. It doesn't work in that context.

But that's a good thing, because now I don't feel as bad about enjoying "Fate Unblinds" as much as I do. A one off is easier to justify... at least in my mind.

North Sea Echoes - Enjoy The View

The members of Fates Warning are awfully busy, considering that they don't want to be Fates Warning anymore. This time, Jim Matheos and Ray Alder have teamed up once more for another record from their more ambient and emotional project. I shudder at the mention of ambient music, but this song is not that, or at least not entirely. The chorus introduces layers of electric guitars that don't sound that far off the melodic rock Ray made with A-Z last year, just with a weaker tone coming from the amps. It's powerful enough to let Ray emote as only he can, and damn if it doesn't work.

For my money, Matheos has always been at his best when not falling down the rabbit hole of ambient sound, so the fact that this song mixes those tones with enough energy to still be a rock song is a perfect combination. The somber feeling is present, but Ray has enough to latch onto to draw a strong melody. No, it isn't as much fun as A-Z2 was, but it's not supposed to be. This song is great for what it is, and I only hope it's not a one-off on the album.