"No Thanks-Giving", Part II

This is a time for giving thanks to those people in our lives who have brought us joy, who make the experience we call living worth the effort it takes some days to get up and survive another day. It goes beyond people, though, with many of our other loves filling that same space. For those of us who would find ourselves here, music is near the top of the list. I could spend today's essay running through some of the things I am thankful for that come from music, but what's the fun in that?

Last year, I used this week to talk about a few things I am not grateful for in the music world, the things I quite readily say "no thanks" to. At the end of that missive, I mentioned a few more things I would get to the next year, if I wrote a sequel.

Here we are, and with the true holiday season approaching (if you refuse to let it start this early), it feels right to go down this path once again.

So here are a few more things I'm saying "no thanks" to:

Covers Albums

There is nothing wrong with bands doing the occasional cover. They can give an interesting spin on an old favorite, and they can show us the roots of bands that perhaps aren't able to put that influence into their own music. I usually consider them a bit trifling, but they are harmless when done in moderation. Entire albums of covers, though, strike a very different chord. They move from being an homage to being lazy, where it feels a band knows they need to put out a new record, but they don't have anything to say. Believe me, I fully understand that head space, but the answer is not to pull out a bunch of songs you already know how to play.

What is worse is when you find a band like UFO, who made their last album a covers record. If anything gives the indication of giving less of a fuck about your fans and your legacy, I'm not sure if I can think of it. The very last impression they wanted to leave was with mediocre renditions of songs that aren't even theirs. Ugh. That's the extreme case, but covers albums fail across the board. You wind up either with an album that sounds wrong because the styles don't mesh, or one that sounds right but doesn't feel authentic. If you want to listen to Slayer, for example, who wants to hear them playing punk songs?

Double Albums

Perhaps this is a controversial statement, but I would say there has never been a double album that could not have been improved by being pared down to a single. Writing songs is hard, and I know we artistic types get attached to most everything we create. They are pieces of us, but not everything we come up with is great. I have no issue criticizing my own work, and it would be nice if bands were more willing to do the same. When you write a batch of songs, they will not all be as inspired, let alone as good. Some will rise to the top, some will sink to the bottom. That is true whether it is ten songs, twenty songs, or (god forbid) fifty.

Asking anyone for nearly two hours of their attention is a tall order, and if that comes with a dose of filler, you have asked too much. If you have one or two great songs too many for an album, that is actually a gift. It means you have a starting point for the next album, not a reason to put out two watered-down albums at the same time. Brevity is the soul of wit, and editing is the godsend of musicians (writers too, but we're not talking about me today).

Worthless Introductions

How many albums have you put on, only to find it starts out with a one to three minute bit of sound collage, or orchestral buildup? It is especially numerous in the power and symphonic metal worlds, and they make me wonder if the bands understand what making a record is all about. Albums are not 'cinematic' experiences, no matter what kind of language we use to describe them. World-building is necessary in film and literature, only at times, but it is never needed in music. A song has to live or die on its own merits. Another question comes to mind; if the introductory piece is so important to the song that follows it, why is it not a part of that song? The impression these pieces leave me with is a combination of ego-boosting to sound more like an 'artist', and padding out the album without needing to write another song. In either case, they rarely contain music worth hearing more than that initial time. Just let me get to the real songs, please.

Jukebox Albums

Here is the one that gnaws at me the most currently. After the success of Avantasia, the melodic metal world became flooded with albums put out by a 'mastermind', who brought together a collection of singers to create a kaleidoscope of sounds over the course of an album. It sounds like a wonderful idea, and a fun way of adding diversity to static songwriting. And in theory it is those things. Tobias has done many great things with Avantasia (even if I do claim to prefer Edguy, overall), but he created a monster that grows new bodies every time we lop off an appendage.

Here is the problem with all of these projects; I don't think you can love every singer the same way. Voices are all different, and we all hear them differently. Even when they occupy similar tone and tenor, some will hit us in ways others never can. The only way I can explain it, as I did with my muse, is to say some voices resonate at the frequency of our souls. That means other voices bounce off us as if we are wearing polarized hearing protection. Even on Tobias' albums, he usually has one singer whose voice I would rather not hear (it's always Michael Kiske or Geoff Tate).

When there are multiple singers on an album, and I love the record, I can't escape the nagging thought of what the record would sound like if my favorite singer from the bunch performed the entire thing. Rarely, if ever, have I thought the extra voices made the experience better. Instead, I listen to these album with a sense of trepidation, waiting to hear if the next song is the one I know is going to be the disappointment.

I wouldn't mind if this trend was outlawed by the metal gods, but I am not so lucky.

All I can do is say "no thanks", as often as I can.

"Sweet Pain", Cyrano, & Me

They say art imitates life, although there are times when the imitation is not noticed until after we have seen the connection flow the other direction. Occasionally, life will unfold before our eyes, and only after the fact will we realize there was a song echoing in our heads that told the story before we lived it. The human experience might be individual, but it is also shared, and the arts have borne that out as fact more times than we would like to count.

I had not read the story of Cyrano De Bergerac as a young man. Literary history was not a thread I explored with any fervor, beyond what had been required. I could recite the first few lines of Hamlet's soliloquy, and I was intrigued by the energetic fervor of Kerouac's writing, but the stories of the past did not feel vital and relevant to life at the turn of the millennium.

I was listening to Blues Traveler, though, and I knew the first line of "Sweet Pain" made reference to Cyrano. As it was on a record I had trouble grasping, and there were more immediate options for me to dive into, it was a song that slipped through my consciousness for many years. Looking back, I would say it was a benefit, as knowing the way the story plays out would not have been helpful to my experience.

In college, I was put in the position of Cyrano. A friend relied on me to help him navigate the contours of his relationship, while another needed help organizing his thoughts into phrases that would not scare away the objects of his affection. In both cases, I was massaging words to help other people live out things I had no experience with. These people had never seen me 'with' another person, and they hadn't heard me talk of such things, and yet they considered me their best option to find ways of expressing love, lust, and passion. This is where I would include a joke about the failures of the education system, but it seems too obvious, doesn't it?

Cyrano lived a life of pain, wanting desperately to love, but being cursed to be seen as a monster by those whose affection he wanted.

"And when beauty kind and full of grace
Again denied the beast her hand
The beast he turned and hid his face
And tried with all his might and magic to understand"

I spent many nights sitting up, listening to the crushing melancholy of Opeth, trying to understand those very same realities. I was not without drives and passions, but less so a monster I was a ghost, an invisibility floating in the background who could only be seen when no better option was available. Or perhaps it was only when the drink and drugs has fully broken down their inhibitions, and then the barrier between good taste and me was thin enough for my visage to bleed through.

"What did them in? Not suicide
Just a lengthy friendship and a dream of how it could be
And isn't it a crime?
Was it more than they could bear?
You know they did not even care
At all and they might have something there
But I'm here and I don't see where
All I hear is their silent prayer"

Being the option of last resort does not hurt because you are at the bottom of the pile, but rather that you are kept in the pile at all. These friends who could be more have the ability to let us go, to set us free from the heartstrings binding us to hope, but they know it works to their advantage to keep us on the hook... just in case. In my example, the cord severed when the alcohol burned through it, and I learned that all of this rationalizing and philosophizing is a long-winded way of trying to make the same pain hurt in two different ways, so I could at least claim the bruises were fresh.

"In no position to give advice
My heart, it spoke and I wrote it down
And you know every wisdom has its price
My head up in the stars
And my feet planted firmly on the ground
When will I embrace this life I see?"

I wrote many words, not so much for them, but for myself. I was learning what passion was, learning who I was, and trying to figure out how any of the pieces fit together. What emerged was a poet who had insight into life from the very fact I had never lived it. I observed, I saw the mistakes others made, and I became aware of what being a good and loving person would entail. Not that I would be able to pull off such a feat, but through my words I could pretend to be the person I wanted to be.

Understanding why people came to me for advice still made no sense, as they had no idea what was going on in my head. I tried my best to point them in the right direction, but things fell apart regardless. I felt their blame, even though it was their own fault for putting their trust in someone who clearly deserved none of it. If I could not win someone over with my own feelings, I certainly couldn't speak so eloquently to achieve success for someone else.

Eventually, I would happen upon someone who appreciated my words, even if they would always be a one-way correspondence. The shadows would remain the best place to stand, because it was there I could hide the disappointment I could not wipe from my face. I could claim to be happy for people's happiness, I could tell them I was going to be okay, and perhaps they wouldn't notice every metaphor was hiding a bitter code inside.

"Sweet pain
Is sometimes what you need
Sweet pain
It allows the blood to bleed
Sweet pain
From the moment of your birth
Sweet pain
You know it keeps you here on Earth"

In a perverse twist of fate, that pain has been necessary. If I hadn't been in those positions, if I hadn't felt the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, I don't think I would have been any happier. The pain is a reminder that I once had hope, that I once believed in a better future. I'm not sure if I do anymore, which comes with the realization I haven't felt hurt in years. I have remained numb, which is the worst feeling one can have. That numbness is a resignation, a fire's dead embers, an emptiness that cannot be filled.

As much as being Cyrano hurts, there is sweetness in the pain. Blood alone is an acrid taste to have on my tongue.

Like I said, it was probably a good thing I wasn't thinking about all of this at the time. "Sweet Pain" might have hurt too much then, before the numbness set in.

Album Review: Opeth - The Last Will And Testament

Few bands frustrate me as much as Opeth does, and it has nothing to do with the band themselves. Ever since they decided to shift away from their death metal roots, the conversation around the band has always been about the absence of growls, and whether they will ever return. Often, it feels like more of the audience cared about how Mikael chose to vocalize than on whether or not the music he was making was any good.

That raised questions in my mind about the nature of being a fan. I heard so many people pining for a certain sound that it made me wonder if they were even listening to the music at all. Were they the types who were enjoyed the tone of growling, and would therefore be happy with any songs so long as they had the 'right' sound? That line of thought is so foreign to me, I have a hard time trying to imagine the way it works in their minds.

Surely, Opeth's quality as musicians has to be independent of the presence of growling, right?

That is the question "The Last Will And Testament" attempts to answer, as it is very much a late-stage Opeth album, but with a few growls thrown into the mix. When the opening "S1" was released, the entire discourse was centered on Mikael's deathly roar returning. It was suffocating, and completely ignored the fact the song itself was beyond mediocre. Mikael has been struggling to write riffs and melodies with any sort of hook to them for many years, and "S1" was a bunch of intricate noodling that didn't amount to a single memorable moment of music. Unless, of course, you get off on growling.

I do not, which means I am probably approaching this album from a different perspective than most. My favorite Opeth albums are from the death metal era, and I have likewise been disappointed by prog-era Opeth, but the two things are corrolary, not causal.

This record has a massive, glaring, unavoidable flaw that renders it nearly unlistenable before even hitting play. "The Last Will And Testament" is a concept album about a family of entitled rich assholes arguing over the will of the deceased, complete with voice-over narration. Basically, that means unless you want to spend an hour listening to songs that are barely songs about greedy people being greedy, there isn't a single thing to this record worth hearing. That's the short of it.

The long of it is that this record expands on everything that has been wrong with Opeth for years. The return of growling cannot mask the fact that Mikael has gone so far down the prog rabbit hole he no longer thinks writing memorable songs is part of his job description. Opeth became legendary not for writing long songs, but for imbuing their long songs with unforgettable riffs and melodies. You can't listen to "Blackwater Park" without being struck by the melodies in "Bleak" and "The Funeral Portrait". That stuff used to come easily to Opeth, who straddled genres, but now are as dead in them as the character in this album is.

'Prestige tv' is the name we give for dramas that want to make you think they are saying something important, when all they really do is waste a bunch of time watching bad people do boring things. This record is the musical equivalent of that. There is lovely cinematography, and some of the acting is flawless, but the story and dialogue are so trite you can't even parody the stuff. Of course, there is also the question I ask about many albums of this sort; If this is a concept album telling a story, why is so much of it instrumental? How does that advance the plot?

There are bands that stick with you for your entire life, and bands you outgrow as your tastes change. Then there is a third category, which are bands that make you feel insane for ever liking them at all. That is where Opeth has headed, and where I find myself right now. I still consider "Bleak" one of my favorite songs of all time, and "Ghost Of Perdition" is a masterpiece of the genre, but I can't help myself from wondering if that version of Opeth was Mikael struggling to be the musician he wanted to be, while this record is his final form. If so, enjoying someone's shortcomings more than their success is a perverse form of fandom, and I'm not sure if I should carry on in that case.

Opeth haven't just made a terrible album with "The Last Will And Testament", they have made a terrible album they think is brilliant art. That just makes the whole thing feel that much sadder.

Goodbye, Opeth. You're dead to me... until I need content again.

Love, Dilana, & Neurology: Fate Or Fortune?

The most complex machine in the universe is the human brain. Despite our intelligence, and our experimentation, centuries of investigation have given us barely a scratch on the surface of the how and why it works as it does. The wires tangle and loop, knotting themselves into clots that unclog themselves when damaged, all the while we cannot come to an understanding of the very thing that makes us human; consciousness. If we cannot answer the most fundamental of questions, does that not render all of philosophy moot?

Socrates was indeed profound when he said it is the intelligent person who realizes they know nothing, as sad as the acknowledgment can be.

The impact of our wiring does not begin and end with philosophical thought. It creeps into every experience we have, defining the way we interact with the world. The only filter we can ever see and hear through, we can ever truly understand, is our own. Everything else, and everyone else, is a mystery we have to imagine in our minds.

Often, people will recommend a band or a record with the introduction, "You'll love ___ if you like ___." That may be true for some people, those who are comforted by the sound of sound, but it does not hold true for all of us.

As I have written, this year I discovered the likelihood I have a degree of neurodivergence. That manifests in a few ways, one of which is an extreme sensitivity to certain stimuli. I am the person who can wear sunglasses on a rainy day, the person who physically wretches at the sound of styrofoam rubbing against itself, the person who doesn't think Pepsi and Coke are even in the same category of product. That is to say; minor differences are amplified for someone like me.

When someone tells me I will like music because it sounds like something else, that very well may be true for them. They might hear the two things as being nearly the same. I do not. My ears are picking up on differences in frequencies, are hearing subtleties in tone that perhaps slip past those who are wired in a more 'normal' manner. Most of the time, it doesn't get in the way of enjoying music. There is one exception to that.

I have also mused several times over the years about the human voice, and how fascinating it is that we hear the same singer in such different ways. Voices some people love sound unbearable to me, and some of my favorite voices are either unknown to the masses, or treated as jokes if they are.

The question I cannot answer is whether our taste is inherent or acquired. Do I love the voices I love because those are the ones I first heard, and they defined how music was 'supposed' to sound, or did I gravitate toward them because I was predisposed to the way they echoed in my head?

One of my earliest memories of music is sitting on the green velour interior of our family car, listening to the radio as we drove around the lake on a summer day. One of the songs I vividly remember hearing was "Total Eclipse Of The Heart". The relationship between me and Jim Steinman has been well-documented, but that memory lingers in my mind as much for Bonnie Tyler's voice. Her husky rasp was unlike anything else I was hearing, but the combination of her voice and that song was something I could feel, even before I was able to think about it.

That was a seminal moment in my development, as it was Bonnie Tyler who would come to define so much of what has soothed me over the years. I would not realize this until much later, when I had lost the potential interest in diving through her catalog, but her voice would echo through the timeline of my life.

The next example came when "Black Velvet" became a hit. That song should not have spoken to the younger me, but to this day it is something I return to, firmly because of Alana Myles' voice. She had the same sort of grit in her voice, and my subconscious ate it up. I did not put two-and-two together at the time, but the line between the two points in indeed straight.

I remember the exact moment all of this crystalized for me, although I cannot remember why I turned the television on that night. On this manufactured reality show, singers were vying for a 'prize' I think most of us knew would be a millstone around the winner's neck, but it turned out the winner was me. A singer appeared on the screen who caught my attention with their first word, and by the end of the song had changed my heart.

That singer was Dilana, whom I have spent countless words talking about over the decade-plus I have been doing this writing. I have often boiled down the feeling I get listening to her as her voice "resonating at the frequency of my soul", which was the poetic way of saying I didn't know how to convey in words the power of an emotion. I still don't.

With my neurology, there are moments when my senses are crossed up, when the wires fray and send electricity to every corner of my body. The right singer hitting the right notes literally gives me a sensation that runs down my nerves, washing over me with a split second of cascading numb. It is a feeling of pure calm, of overwhelming stillness, of the world making sense. When Dilana reaches into her soul and lets loose with the thundering power of her voice, I have that feeling, no matter how many times I have heard those songs. Her voice is like a fingernail tracing down my skin, a light touch so intense I have to force myself not to pull away.

Those feelings come ever so rarely. I got it from Bonnie and Alana, I got it from Dilana, and I got it the first time I discovered Lzzy Hale. I may be the only person who hears it, but there are shared tones and qualities between their voices that slide down my neurons in ways other voices are not able to. They shake the wires of my mind, throwing aside the dust and debris, signing their names on the clean, exposed spaces of my soul. It doesn't matter to me whether I was taught to let them in, or they already possessed the keys, because the feeling would be the same either way. It is that feeling which matters more than anything.

Existential philosophy tells us that life is seen through the prism of our experiences. What neurology tells me is that the prism refracts different colors for each of us, and some of those shades dissipate into the air faster than others. Blue may be blue for everyone, but it is more vivid for some. The same is true for voices, where some of them are filtered through our senses as if sediment in the air, while others slip through the mesh undiluted. When those voices hit us, they are the closest thing I have ever experienced to a miracle.

Does that mean Dilana is a Goddess to me? I am fortunate enough to say the answer is perhaps yes.

The point I'm making is that we seldom stop and consider that our own experience is not the one other people have. So when someone tries to recommend music to me because it sounds to them like something they know I love, they don't realize (or possibly understand) how rare that love is for me. I profess my love for very little music, both in absolute and proportional terms, because of how extreme love is for me. No one can know that feeling other than me.

I love Dilana. I love Lzzy. I love "Total Eclipse Of The Heart".

The odds are I'm not going to love anything you recommend to me, but I appreciate you trying.

Album Review: Linkin Park - From Zero

We live in a world or remakes and reboots. Everywhere you turn, you are confronted with names from the past, brought back to life in order to make a quick buck. At a certain point, it becomes tiring to see the past get exploited, rather than a future being charted. Some of these efforts are worthwhile, but it isn't easy to wade through the pile to determine who is using the familiar as a vessel for new ideas, and who is merely using the ideas of others to mask how devoid of them they are. There is risk in being original, but that risk is what makes a reputation. If you succeed with an old idea, have you accomplished anything? If you fail with a previously successful idea, how terrible does that make you?

Linkin Park is in that situation. After the death of Chester Bennington, I think we all assumed the band was going to come to an end. Chester was one of the most iconic presences of the nu-metal era (I use the term as a time period, not an argument over the band's sound), and when they did not carry on right away, it gave the impression they knew he could not be replaced. So to see them come back now is rather jarring.

Also jarring is the choice they made in Emily Armstrong as their new singer, as two things are true here; 1) Despite the differences, she sounds remarkably like Chester, and 2) She is a Scientologist, which many people consider to be a cult.

The band resurrected the name, only to tie it to a potential cult. That's an... interesting way to honor Chester's memory.

When they released "The Emptiness Machine", the song was unavoidable, which might just be all the explanation we need for why this record exists. The song was tight, the hook was solid, and Emily's voice had a wonderful grit as she belted the chorus. It is a really good song, and I was rather confused what I should be thinking, considering that I was never a Linkin Park fan in the day. For this to be the first time I actively thought about liking something of theirs stuck me as being wrong.

As the album unfolds, the tenor is tilted heavily toward melodic radio-rock sounds, which is quite the evolutionary step from where I remember Linkin Park. Perhaps it is more natural if you are part of the re-evaluation of "One More Light" that has seen that record's reputation flip from horrible mistake to underrated gem. I did not take part in that alteration of history, so I am seeing this as punctuated equilibrium, when the full fossil record will tell a more complete story.

That phrase sticks in my craw a bit, as this record is only 31 minutes long. For as big a deal as Link Park's return is, and for all the emotional devastation they have been through, giving us half an hour feels incomplete. It feels as if they were half-hearted in this effort, where they could have written it off as an experimental EP if it was not well-received.

Ultimately, this record is one that caught my attention, but was unable to keep it. It's much like when you see someone from across the room and can't look away, but as soon as a conversation starts you realize you have nothing to say to each other. I very much enjoy Emily's voice, and the heavier moments on the album are a good showcase of how to make hooky hard rock. The emotional moments don't hit me as they will long-time fans of the band. Instead of ripping my heart out, they sound slow and disconnected. Shinoda, especially, is not a vocalist who can carry that weight to my ears.

Linkin Park's return was a surprise, but the record isn't. This new version of the band hasn't quite found itself yet, as you would expect. Maybe they will, or maybe they shouldn't. I'm not sure. Fans will love being able to head to shows and watch this incarnation play the classics. I'm sure Emily will fit right in doing that. That kind of reboot might be all anyone really wanted.

Is Tonic's "Sugar" Still Sweet, 25 Years Later?

If you know of the 'liminal spaces' phenomenon, you are aware of the sensory deprivation that comes from emptiness, and how angst builds up when you lose track of the path back out into the white noise of life. When we look back at our favorite bands, sometimes the stories of how we came to find them feels like one of those liminal spaces. There is an eeriness as we wonder what it was about that one particular record that caught our attention, or how we found our way around the hollow spots without falling into the pit.

My cassette was well-worn, having seen me replace the songs I had recorded off the radio time and again, trying to keep an old format up to date with my taste. The very first song on that thin film when it was finally retired was Tonic's "If You Could Only See". The song was on the radio constantly, but I needed to hear it even more often, so it was given the leadoff spot, even though that was where the tape was most prone to failing. It was a simpler time, and even then I didn't have the energy to care to a startling degree.

I never ventured further than that song, as I seldom did in those days. Perhaps I knew in my mind that my interpretation of the lyric was going to wind up wrong, and I was protecting myself from having to explain why I so loved a band and song I didn't understand. That's giving myself too much credit, I fear. The simple truth is back then an album was an investment, and I did not want to get burned on one song leading me down the wrong path. Matchbox 20 has three singles I loved, so they seemed the safer bet.

I was also not terribly into the kind of movie comedy that led to "American Pie". I saw the movie, as seemingly everyone did, but it was not a landmark achievement that is etched in my memory. What caught my interest was actually a video that popped up on VH-1 that came from the soundtrack. It was a song with a driving guitar riff and a candied chorus. I loved it, and was surprised to see it came from... Tonic.

That song was "You Wanted More", and with a second piece of evidence, I was then eager to dive in further. As luck would have it, this was 1999, the very beginnings of the online music revolution. My brother was in college, as was able to procure me a copy of the brand new record, "Sugar", to cauterize the potential for a hemorrhage of disappointment. I put that CD in the player and listened intently, getting caught up in a textured blend of rock and pop that hit every side of my personality.

After this, I would go back and listen to "Lemon Parade", but it wasn't the same experience. "Sugar" was fresh and exciting, and I was caught up in it. I loved the heavy guitars, I loved the melodic solos, I also stupidly loved the random f-bomb Emerson threw in for some reason. The record went everywhere, and standing at the center, it looked like a universe shining in all directions.

Here's where the story turns. As the years wore on, how I saw and heard Tonic changed. "Lemon Parade" went from being the grungier disappointment to the album that was trying to reflect classic rock through the sound of the time. There was a depth to those songs and that recording which invited more repeated listenings. It was not a surface-level album, while "Sugar" was sort of its namesake sugar high burning off. When "Head On Straight" took the band in a heavier direction, eschewing much of "Sugar", it was clear which record was the outlier. To have come into the band, to have fallen in love with their music, through their oddest album was one of those existential questions I would wrestle with for eons.

That brings me back to the idea of liminal spaces. Since Tonic only has four records to their name, these twenty-five years have been a hall of mirrors reflecting those same few experiences back to me again and again. They have been heard so many times, and for so long now without any context to change them, that I can hardly remember the beginning anymore. They exist as if they always were, and always will be. The music stretches on in an endless loop, with no exit visible.

Much like how those spaces blur into a wash of indistinct colors that eventually become unsettling, so too does a band that is essentially over despite still existing. I will never say I don't love "Sugar", because it has meant so much to me over so many years, but there are times when I do curse at the record. I curse at it because being lured in by the black sheep is disconcerting. I curse at it because I now hear experiments throughout the album that don't work as they should. I curse at it for giving me a favorite band I would spend a decade waiting for, before I was finally able to give up on giving a shit anymore.

Twenty-five years on, when I think of "Sugar", I mostly think of how stupid I used to be. When you're caught in a liminal space, all you have is time to think...

Album Review - Neal Morse & The Resonance - No Hill To Climb

Musicians often like to play with new musicians, because there is something to collaboration you can't get when you write and make music on your own. Or at least that's how it is supposed to work. New combinations of musicians should produce new musical ideas, open avenues you would not go down if left to your own devices. Of course, that doesn't always happen, and sometimes it seems that new groups are put together only to fill the time and space left behind when the usual suspects aren't available.

That is what this record feels like. The Neal Morse Band was chugging along, but the recent reunion of Dream Theater put a halt to that. Without the full lineup being able to get together to keep things going, Neal has branched out on his own again. He put out a pair of religious concept albums (which are terrible), a singer/songwriter album (that I haven't heard, because of the odd release strategy), and now this new prog band.

The problem is that this prog band sounds indistinguishable from every other prog band he has been in. What is the difference between this and NMB? Or this and his prog solo albums? Pretty much just the names in the credits. Otherwise, it is pure Neal Morse doing the usual Neal Morse things.

That extends to the very structure of the album, which is entirely predictable. That's the opposite of prog, right? The opening "Eternity In Your Eyes" follows the blueprint; slow buildup, several individual songs stitched loosely together, big reprise to finish. We've heard this many times before, and it has become rather tiresome, in all honesty. Lots of bands follow patterns, but it is more objectionable when it comes from a 'prog' band. I should not be able to predict the beats this easily. It's disappointing.

The shorter songs between the epics lack Neal's best melodies, which I have found to be the case for several years at this point. They aren't bad songs, but I don't get the immediate hook from them I did when I discovered his music. Part of that might be the production, which also continues the trend of slapping an over-abundance of echo and reverb on every voice. It's a sound I do not understand, as it distorts the tone to an unnatural state, but someone must think it sounds good.

By the time the title track closes things out with nearly half an hour of music that could have been condensed quite a bit, you know where you fall on the prog spectrum. If you've heard any Neal Morse album before and still love this one, you're a hardcore prog nerd. If you're more like me, you probably found yourself drifting off a few times during the instrumental sections that stretch on for minutes at a time, and not being drawn back in by the flat-ish melodies that try to anchor things. It's Neal Morse by formula, but it is far from his best work.

I haven't listened to enough prog this year to know if that is just the way the genre is going these days, but I've heard enough of Neal's music to know this is not one of his better works. As tedious as the trio of double albums NMB made are, they all have far higher highs than this record, which never gets out of first gear. This is about as 'meh' as it gets.

The Offspring's One Brief, Bright, "Smash" Of Success

Did you ever have a full circle moment when you realized that art and pop culture were influencing one another, slowly circling the drain until you felt just as empty? Perhaps it's just me, but there are specific instances where I become disappointed, as I realize the reason we use the 'lowest common denominator' is because it is also the largest one.

If you are of a certain age, you might remember the days of syndicated television airing on regional cable networks. You knew you were seeing something the rest of the country was, but no one was watching it at the same time, or experiencing it in the same way. It actually isn't that different from the streaming realities of now, but it was a completely different feeling back then.

Anyway, in the mid 90s there was a renegade wrestling promotion called ECW whose programming aired on one of those networks early on Saturday mornings. I can't fathom why they put the most violent and profane wrestling to ever grace television on when kids were up before their parents, but they did, because that's the kind of world we used to live in. I was one of those who was tuning in before the rest of the house was up, not entirely sure what it was I was so interested in.

One character caught my attention more than the others, because even at that age I felt myself either being or becoming bitter and sardonic. He would philosophize about the meaning of pain, rationalizing his actions as being part of a cruel world that didn't care much for our attempts at morality. Even watching wrestling, I couldn't escape my overthinking ways. His arrival every week was signaled by the guitar riff in The Offsping's "Come Out & Play". I knew nothing of punk, but hearing the song enough times, I would up with a copy of the album "Smash" at some point.

I didn't know what to make of the record at first. I was rather confused by the buzzing guitars, Dexter's oddly nasal vocals, and the lyrics that made no attempt at being what we would call conventionally 'good'. As he got to the end of "Bad Habit" and shouted, "you stupid dumb-shit goddamn motherfucker", I did not realize I was hearing the figurative line between adolescence and adulthood being obliterated. This was a band reveling in their refusal to grow up and have complicated thoughts, instead liking to think of themselves as living in a Tarantino movie, all the while not realizing he was merely re-writing foreign movies and taking all the credit for them.

"Smash" is a landmark album in that it broke open the gates for independent records to sell huge quantities, bypassing the traditional means of distribution. Did wrestling help with that development? I have no idea, but I do think there is a correlation between watching people hit themselves over the head repeatedly and thinking The Offspring were ever anything but jerks who happened upon a few good tunes.

That is the most interesting aspect of "Smash"; it stands with "Dookie" as the two poles upon which the hammock of pop-punk was hung. Two albums of snotty, self-loathing were able to marry the abrasiveness of punk with the subversive charm of power-pop. It's hard not to listen to the jaunty bounce of "What Happened To You?" and not find yourself bopping along, nor is it easy to escape the infectiousness of the "la la" choruses of "Self-Esteem". These were accidents that would later ruin the band, we would learn, but for a moment in time The Offspring were balancing on the knife's edge of being popular in the mainstream and heroes to the underground.

What went wrong? you ask.

I tend to believe the exact moment when The Offspring switched from being cool to lame came not from anything they did, but from Weezer. Yes, once again Weezer is ruining everything, because that's the kind of band they are.

In their song "El Scorcho", Rivers Cuomo wrote a lyric about watching ECW wrestling. For the most uncool person in rock to be writing a song mentioning something cool is to render that thing uncool in an instant. No one wanted to be associated with Rivers at that moment, as his record was rightfully bombing (before it unjustly became a classic), so I look at Weezer's embrace of that culture as the death knell for it. How could The Offspring still be cool if they were part of the soundtrack for something the nerd in the "Buddy Holly" video thought was awesome enough to write a song about?

It hasn't been easy to listen to "Smash" without thinking about how The Offspring became the kind of bullshit posers they were writing songs about thirty years ago. They thought they were being clever throwing in that nearly surf-rock riff as a take-down of the past, not realizing their future would become swallowed by those very gimmicks. When you hear Dexter shouting about how he doesn't "give a fuck 'cause it's good enough for" him, it rings so very hollow today, because he has spent so much time absolutely giving a fuck what everyone thinks of him and his band.

The thing about being anti-establishment is that it requires a degree of commitment. Listening to anything The Offspring did afterward is nearly as jarring as watching Ice-T as an actor playing a cop. Retroactively, they are pissing on their legacy, and telling us not to pay attention to anything they ever had to say.

I could talk about how "Smash" is very much the sound of punk absorbing Kurt Cobain's songwriting talents, setting the stage for pop-punk being the next step in the pop-ification of underground rock. I could, but what's the point?

"Smash" is one of those albums that has to be listened to nostalgically. I can put it on and feel like it's the mid 90s again, when rebellion felt clever because there really wasn't anything culturally to rebel against. They were pissing people off for the fun of it, whereas now they piss people off for not being able to write a good song anymore. "Smash" is a relic of time, and it feels out of place in this current age. It remains an important album, and one that can teach us about how we got here, but it no longer has anything to tell us.

ECW burned bright and burned out, and "Smash" did the same. There's no shame in that, other than trying to re-light the fuel that is obviously spent.

Album Review: Casandra's Crossing - Garden Of Earthly Delights

Sometimes we make judgments about musicians and bands that are surface level, that aren't necessarily fair, but nonetheless give us a shortcut to placing them in the right place in our thinking. With as much music being released as we get every year, there simply isn't time to properly assess and absorb everything. We need those shortcuts if we are ever going to remember each new thing we hear from among the flood of other music we will barely hear long enough to finish listening to.

In the case of Casandra Cross, that judgment came when hearing her singing on the EP from The L.I.F.E. Project. That was a decent enough release, but the thought I jotted down in my mental notebook was that Casandra was a singer very much in the mold of Lzzy Hale, who I have said on multiple times is the greatest voice of her/my generation. So when this album reached my inbox, and I realized who was involved, the note is the only reason I was convinced to listen to yet another album featuring George Lynch.

I say that part because despite his acclaim as a guitar hero, I was too young to ever care about Dokken, and I have not been interested at all in any of the many collaborations he has been involved in for this particular label. Until now, that is. And why? The mental note I made has calcified, as Casandra on this record sounds even more like a doppelganger for Lzzy Hale. And with a more eclectic blanket of guitar sounds to sing over, this record moves from being yet another put-together collaboration to being more of an alternate universe imagination of what Halestorm could be.

When this collaboration works best is when Lynch is being his odd self, utilizing more open strings and ringing chords. That open space is lighter and airier, and gives Casandra's grit more room in the mix to reverberate. When she roars, and the music isn't filling all that space, her melodies are able to hit us with full power. It's almost the case that you can have heavy guitars or heavy vocals, but the combination of the two comes out sounding smaller because they cancel each other out.

That means songs like "Ring Me Around" and "Closer To Heaven" hit a sweet spot that melds 80s rock with the modern day, feeling fresh while also not feeling played out. Maybe it's just my weakness for that particular kind of voice, but Casandra is a star on this record. What is also true is that "Run For Your Life" and "Wicked Woman", which veer toward the heavier side, don't work as well. The tones are right, but they flatten out enough of the melodic edge to sound too predictable, too inconsequential.

All that means is the record isn't perfect, which is something I would say about 99% of the albums I've heard in my life. And since this isn't one of those records that barely cracks half an hour, having one misstep doesn't change the calculus.

There are a few takeaways I have after listening to this record multiple times. 1) Casandra Cross has the potential to be the next singer who catches and keeps my attention. 2) The difference in how I'm reacting to this record, as opposed to one of the Sweet/Lynch ones, reminds me how important singers and vocal melodies are. 3) Frontiers Records has put out a ton of albums this year, few of them have done anything at all for me, and this might just be the best of them all.

That's plenty for me.

It Is VK Lynne, Not The Wayward Son, Who Will "Carry On"

When we need to be strong, we look to our roots.

After a disaster, when we assess the landscape of destroyed lives and altered landscapes, we can see that many of the trees and structures we relied on for safety and security were too easy to pluck from the ground. Some of the most beautiful things are fragile, because they have no depth. Look under the surface, and there is only the void of earth that commemorates the emptiness that comes after life.

Our roots are important, not only because they explain how and why we are the people we have become, but because they are what we return to in times of struggle. There's a bit of advice that tells us 'the only way of getting out is through'. To head through the tumult and storms without losing our direction requires strength and dedication, and those qualities are fed by our roots. We can spread our arms and tilt our faces to the sun, but that is of no use if a gentle breeze can tip us over like a helium-filled cow balloon.

This month, VK Lynne returns to her roots as "The Spider Queen" approaches its end. The 'blues metal' experiment has been a kaleidoscope of sounds and moods, but there is an aperture around which it all swirls. For VK, that is the blues, and "Carry On" is the bluesiest she has been in all the years I have been fortunate enough to know her.

Kicking off with a slow groove bass-line, VK addresses someone who thinks "the whole world is a snow globe in [their] hand". There is a strong, possibly growing, desire in many to exert control over people. I have never understood the impulse, and may in fact lean too far in the other direction for my own good, but the cultural air at the moment is one of stifling suffocation. Everyone has become an 'other' to someone, and the idea of conformity is rising in those who are too weak to bother to explore themselves.

As the guitar chords become swampy, and the melody bends to refract blue, VK pledges to carry on. She will shed the weight of expectations, and the experiences in her life that have kept her from being her truest and best self. The greatest revenge we can have, and perhaps the only healthy kind, is to stip off the layers of life other people have wrapped us up in. Once shed, we are free to be ourselves, and to find our north star may not be the one everyone else is oriented to. That doesn't make us wrong, it means we merely have to find our own way, rather than leaping off the cliff so we can feel for a few seconds as if we have lost weight.

VK tells us "the worm keeps turning like the dust in the dirt", before she segues into a wailing run of notes. The worm slithers through the earth, leaving behind a richer loam for our roots to grow. Likewise, the best of us leave behind a richer world as we make our way through life. We not only dig deeper with our roots, but we send out tendrils that anchor ourselves to one another, creating an entire ecosystem that holds together. At least that is the goal.

The blues is not filled with optimism as a genre, and VK's passionate vocal is a reminder that pushing through the toxic cloud life and people put before us requires work and energy on our part. Carrying on is what we must do, but it is not a certainty. We must want to endure and survive, we must fight off the demons threatening to knock us down, and we must stand firm from our very roots.

"The Spider Queen" has been filled with every color of the rainbow, as is the sunlight refracting across her web. Some are more hopeful, some more angry, but none are as essentially VK as is this song. To "Carry On", we must know from where we came, and that is evident listening to VK exposing her roots.

 "Carry On" releases on Halloween. Pre-save it here.

'Why' Is The Hardest Question. I think I Can Finally Answer It.

My colleague D.M. asked me, I believe when I was eulogizing Jim Steinman, what it is about his music that spoke to me in a way no one else's ever has. My answer was likely incomplete, as I struggle to understand my own emotions, let alone put them into words. Perhaps the reason I spent so much time wrapped up in the idea I had no emotions at all was simply to avoid having to explain them to people when I lacked the means to do so. I wouldn't put it past me.

I wrote recently about having officially declared Meat Loaf and Jim Steiman is/are once again my favorite artist/s, usurping my decades long list-topper, which has given me pause to stop and re-evaluate the relationship I have with that music. To be precise, I was now asking myself the question D.M asked me back then; why Jim Steinman above everyone else who has ever written songs?

I believe I can answer that question better today than I could in the past. That stems from a better understanding of myself, which is another topic I have written about to a degree in recent months. Music and personality are not independent factors that move freely through space and time, they are energies headed in the same direction. They might fluctuate, moving closer and further in imperfect paths, but I am drawn to music that fits my personality just as much as the music I like influences the person I am.

I discovered Steinman's music when I was ten years old, which amuses me, because it was entirely the wrong point in life for his music to have drawn me in. Steinman was perpetually stuck in the tidal pool of teenage hormones, while I had not yet felt them. Would I ever? That's hard to say. The point I'm making is that what makes great music great is the ability for it to speak to us from multiple perspectives, and to grow and evolve with us as we change as people.

As a kid listening to "Bat Out Of Hell II", Steinman's childishness was what caught my ear. I wore a hole in my tape when Meat Loaf sang the line about how you could take the future and "shove it up your ass". Even though I was a Laurel & Hardy person, his reference to The Three Stooges was an amusing middle-finger, although I didn't know to whom.

That young version of myself heard the obvious jokes and got a chuckle. That was why he was interested.

As time wore on, and I felt my soul rusting in its cage, I began to see more that lived beneath the surface of the songs. That line about the future was not just an off-color joke, it was a recognition that the future is a concept we create to give the world meaning. The reference to the Stooges was an acknowledgement that life is an absurdity, as we need to be able to pop the balloon of self-importance.

When Steinman ended "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" with the epic statement, "I'm waiting for the end of time so I can end my time with you," it wasn't merely a pun, it was a painful understanding that being people who live up their promises no matter the consequences puts us in positions where happiness is always on the wrong side of the horizon. Being a good person and being a happy person may not be compatible.

Or when Steinman wrote in "Left In The Dark" that "there are no lies on your body, so take off your dress, I just want to get at the truth," he was navigating the complexities of relationships by understanding that sometimes the lust that gets you through the night is more essential to our sanity than the love that gets us through life.

The older version of myself waxed philosophically. That was why he was interested.

Today, I find myself in very much the same place Steinman spent his life. I feel trapped in a mind and body that doesn't allow me to experience the things I want most. Perhaps it is an "arrested development and just another wasted youth" as Steinman wrote, but I see it as something more insidious than that. Whether you are a philosopher or just someone who gives advice to friends, we have agreed there are certain drives and experiences that make us who we are, that give life meaning, that define the human experience.

Some of us are wired in ways that make those nearly impossible, and the torrent of love songs and Hallmark movies that show us how things are 'supposed' to be only boils the disappointment into a thicker depression. There isn't a place in pop culture for people like me to be anything but the butt of the joke, or the triumph of pity when the lode has finally been mined. (I think Steinman would appreciate how bad that line is.)

Jim Steinman's songs are about love and lust, but they have always been written from the perspective of someone who is never able to get what he wants. Even when he thinks he does, it turns out to be a tragic twist of fate. These songs are a way of working through the existential pain of feeling cursed by whatever force you think guides the universe, even if that is merely the terrible luck of getting corrupted genes.

I struggled for much of my forty-first year not to hate myself for various reasons. I failed at times, and when I did, Steinman's songs were always there for me. They reminded me I am not the only person to feel as if I was not built for this world, I am not the only one whose dreams are encoded in a language only I can understand.

Jim Steinman's music is a lesson that even when it feels as if hope is a four-letter word (one of my favorite jokes), pain can be turned into beautiful art.

The current version of myself needs to believe that. That is why I remain interested.

A Critique Of Pure Criticism

If you were to ask me what the most enjoyable aspect of being a critic is, the answer is two-fold; 1) Writing in purple prose about music that has moved my emotions and taught me about myself, and 2) Writing in acidic prose about music that offends me and drains by bile. They are flip sides of the same coin, the metaphorical 'two cents' we chip in even when not asked for our opinion. Having one is the ante to sit at the table, but only those who are able to think critically and examine the situation will be able to master the game.

The worst thing that can happen to a critic is to be struck by music that is merely average. Those albums and songs are the bane of my existence, because they offer nothing to talk about. They are the musical equivalent of when you meet a person with no personality, and then try to describe them to your friends. As one of those people, I know how hard it is.

Music is the same way. There are plenty of records that serve the purpose of idle chit-chat while you wait in line, but few that are worth remembering when you're asked later on how your day went. As we get older, stimuli need to be stronger to make a mark on us, and the average no longer stands a chance of pounding their shape into the tanned leather of our memories. Perhaps the faintest outline will be there if you stare through a loupe, but you would only be seeing the remnants of lipstick from a kiss whose moisture long ago turned into desert sands.

Writing critically is more than merely sharing an opinion, it's an exercise in explaining your understanding of the world. With so much of the world now boiled down to star ratings, we seldom dive deeper to understand the how and why of our opinions. Do we know why we hate certain records? Why we have an instant dislike of certain people? Why we hate aspects of ourselves?

Negative reviews are some of the most fun I can have as a critic, but not because I enjoy ripping bad music apart. In all honesty, I would welcome having the ability to love the majority of the albums I listen to, the way it must be for people who make lists of their hundred favorite records of a given year. Discerning taste is not a bad thing, although in some areas it can lead to intense loneliness, but I consider it a better option than having no standards at all. If someone tells you they like everything, is their opinion worth anything? Are they possibly happy people if anything at all is good enough for them?

Those are heady questions for another time. I want to focus on negative reviews, because it was pointed out to me recently that the most bitter pieces I write are often the favorites of readers. I get that sentiment, but I do wonder if they are taken the way I intend. While I don't hold back my feelings, and I attempt to find creative ways of expressing myself, I do so from a perspective of trying to explain exactly how and why these albums fall short of the mark.

As a critic, I find it insulting when writers and reactors offer nothing more substantial than "it sucks" as a hot take. While it might be the same conclusion, it is by no means the same evaluation. Criticism for the sake of being mean and petty is not criticism, it is laziness that says as much about the critic as it does the criticized subject. The purpose of criticism is not just to share an opinion, but to be constructive and explain what mistakes can be avoided in the future. It's true that few of the artists I talk about will ever read the negative reviews, let alone take them to heart, but the sentiment is still there. And it has happened in the past that an artist thanked me for a negative review, because I gave them suggestions on how to better their songwriting the next time around.

When I tore into the new album from The Offspring as I did recently, I could have thrown together a litany of insults and pejoratives. Instead, I tried to consider the arc of their career, explaining how they have taken paths that have shot their own success in the foot, and how they no longer understand the irony they used to live in. My essay on the legacy of Blues Traveler's "Four" did the same thing, as I lamented how the band's highest moment was an eclipse that blacked out the awareness of why they became successful. My review of Blink 182's reunion fit this bill as well, as the uncanny valley of that record questioned whether people were being nostalgic for the band, or nostalgic for the nostalgia itself. I doubt anyone, the band included, thought about any of that. But I did.

What I am saying is that being negative is often considered a bad thing, but it is a key element in learning how to better ourselves. Society complains about the paradigm handing out participation trophies to those who don't even try, but we then hold it against those who are honest about the situation.

A friend told me recently that I am too hard on myself, that I am relentlessly negative in ways that push people away. Perhaps that is true, but I would ask a question of them, of everyone; What good does it do to tell people they are wonderful and talented, if they aren't? Much of that negativity I talk about with myself isn't intended as such, but is what I consider a realistic view of the situation. I don't consider it a flaw to admit the ways I fall short of the person I wish I could be. I have come to realize much of that is out of my control, but I know it would be worse for my psyche if I was wading into self-delusion. Of course, those same people who criticize my negativity rarely are able to offer a refutation, let alone an affirmative case to be made on my behalf.

But I digress. The point I want to stress is that music is not a finite battle where only a select number of band and albums can be good. There is no limit to how much great music can be made, and I consider it a duty to tell those who are falling short the ways I think they can improve. I may do it harshly, but some lessons can only be learned that way.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, as the saying goes. I won't try to tell you anything I have said about Manowar had good intentions. They deserved it.

Singles Roundup: Dream Theater & Michael Schenker ft Axl Rose

I hope you didn't want positivity today.

Dream Theater - Night Terror

The big news with Dream Theater is that Mike Portnoy is back in the band. That news has little bearing on this song, except for when it does. I'll explain, but it's a bit complicated. The short version of the story is that this new song is standard fare Dream Theater, so your preconceptions are entirely accurate. There is nothing surprising or new at all, so we don't need to get too far into a discussion of what all of this means for the next chapter of the band's career. The straight line will not bend, or break.

The deeper discussion involves the way we listen to music. I am not someone who listens to drums under most circumstances, so Portnoy's return makes almost no difference to me. He plays like himself, which means it still sounds like Dream Theater. Where I think his impact can be felt is in the way the song is arranged, as that is where he was so often involved. That is also where this song feels like a huge step back from where the band has been in his absence.

The biggest issue this song has is in its construction. There are copious riffs, fills, and solos, but it feels like we have gone back to their self-indulgent worst. Ideas are thrown against the wall with little concern about the narrative through-line. Instrumental parts pile up in between the vocals, playing into the worst stereotypes about prog being music for music nerds. When those vocals do come in, it's in the form of a chorus so melodically simple it doesn't grip me at all.

While it's nice that they haven't recycled their usual formula for a lead single, this song is not inspiring confidence in what the new album is going to be. These ten minutes are Dream Theater at their worst, and there is another hour of material still to come. They had focused their songwriting much more during their time with Mike Mangini, and this song feels like when you return to a familiar place to realize you memories sanitized what was never so great.

Michael Schenker ft Axl Rose - Love To Love

I want to thank Michael Schenker for releasing this song. No, not because it's good, which it isn't. I want to think him for finally making it clear the world is better off without Guns N Roses ever releasing a new album again.

Why? If you listen to this song, it's clear that Axl has no voice left. He sounds absolutely horrific trying to softly coo the verses. There was a time he was described as having 'helium voice', and this version of Axl is that, but with even less power. He sounds broken, tired, and like a shell of who he used to be. The fact that Schenker is re-recording these songs is enough to elicit a groan, but to pick an Axl who can't sing to perform one of UFO's most legendary songs is such a stunning lack of self-awareness. I'm truly baffled.

As I was saying, hearing the current state of Axl's voice makes it clear a new Guns N Roses album would be a complete clusterfuck. There is a good reason the reunited band has only put out songs Axl sang a decade ago. Those are the only recordings they can make sound presentable. Unfortunately, Schenker didn't figure that out until he had already committed to Axl being on his record. As much as we complain about people who stop making new music, there is often a good reason why they do. Axl is one of those people I will not complain about if he decides to retire. In fact, I wouldn't have minded if he did so before recording this song.

Quick Reviews: Myles Kennedy & Smash Atoms

For a change, we've got two good ones this week.

Myles Kennedy - The Art Of Letting Go

If eventually everything comes full circle, this album is a fitting example of that. Myles' solo career has now reached a point where he is pulling from all three of his phases, filling the gaps between them in a way that will probably satisfy everyone. This record sounds like what Alter Bridge used to be, with a few hints of their current obsession with heaviness, while also pulling a few guitar licks from his time with Slash. It's very much a melding of everything Myles has been doing all in one album, which happens to fit his voice more than anything else.

Both the production of the last Slash album, and the continued down-tuning of Alter Bridge, have pushed Myles' voice into its most shrill range. He avoids that on this record, and it's all the better for it. These songs are in the right place for his voice to sell the hooks, which he does well. Myles mostly avoids the huge soaring melodies intended for European stadiums, and focuses on more 'songwriter' style melodies.

If you have been a bit put off by Alter Bridge morphing from a rock to a metal band, this album is the perfect antidote. Myles is a rock singer, not a metal singer, and having the proper level of heaviness is key. This record is heavy, yes, but only as a predicate to having good songs. That's a lesson some other bands have yet to learn.

Smash Atoms - Smash Atoms

We have noted there is an increase in the number of bands making attempts at reviving the sound of grunge. Most of those bands do a decent job of capturing the sound, but they don't necessarily capture the spirit. That can be a good thing if you weren't into grunge when it came out (as I wasn't, since I was slightly too young to have been listening at its height), but it also exposes a lack of understanding of what made grunge what it was. The same is true of the retro 70s revival, which underscores either how little thought it given into some of these things, or how much worthless thought I put into it.

Smash Atoms aren't a clone of Alice In Chains, but they sort of are. The sound is ripped straight from their catalog, with the heavy bends in the riffs, and the strained harmonies giving that same haunting tone. The sound of the record is massive, with the guitars filling every corner of the sonic landscape. And yet, there is room for the gritty vocals to stand out.

The band delivers on the songs as well. These songs have big, muscular hooks that play into the power of the sound. I would imagine most people who have spent the last thirty years loving "Would?" and "Man In the Box" will be intrigued by how much Smash Atoms sounds like a rebirth of that period of time. There isn't the same tortured pain to be found here, but maybe we're better off not being so far down that hole. In any case, Smash Atoms is easily the best of these neo-grunge bands that have popped up, and this record has a sneaky chance to be one of the better albums of the year.

Album Review: The Offspring - Supercharged

Punk was supposed to be about being cool, wasn't it? You wouldn't know that from The Offspring, who have now spent the majority of their career writing terrible novelty songs, and throwing in a couple of punk numbers on each album to make it seem like they still have some level of credibility. They don't, and Dexter Holland is a great example of how being smart doesn't mean you can't still be an idiot. To use his own parlance, The Offspring are not fly, even for a bunch of white guys.

Their previous album was not only their worst record by a landslide, it was so bad it felt like an insult to the fans. It was the same kind of half-hearted bullshit effort Green Day put in on their "Father Of All..." album, and I wasn't going to sugar-coat it by trying to find the upside. There was a time when I liked The Offspring a lot, and I'm one of the few people who even liked them into their pop ballad days, but I drew a line. The only reason I'm talking about this album at all is because it happened to find its way into my inbox. I wouldn't have actually put any effort into hearing this thing.

The bullshit starts early, as "Looking Out For #1" not only has terrible spoken interjections, but it entirely borrows the melody and cadence of "Half-Truism" for the chorus. It's enough of a clone that if it struck me the very first time I heard it, the band that has been playing the other song for over a decade should have noticed it sometime in the production and recording phase. But this is late-era Offspring we're talking about, so we shouldn't be expecting anything more.

"Light It Up" follows by completely ripping off "Smash" this time, which at least is the right era of their history to go for. It doesn't do anything to make me think this record had any energy at all put into it, but at least the sound of this one isn't offensive. It's not as good as the source material, but it's not as embarrassing as a lot of their more 'original' sounding material of recent times.

"Make It All Right" has more spoken interjections, this time that come with the sound of the band dropping out, like in the early days of digital music when labels were watermarking promos so they couldn't be spread online. It sounds so ridiculous I'm wondering how anyone can think it was a good thing to put on a record, let alone a group of veterans. Did Dexter decide he didn't have to do an extra take or two of the vocal if they covered it up with a terrible voice-over? That's the impression I get.

Maybe it's just the promo I received, but all of this disappointing music also comes wrapped up in a horrible production. The guitars are thin and buzzy, Dexter's vocals are buried despite being high in the mix, and the cymbals distort all over the place. It's an ugly sound, and lacks any of the charm "Smash" had. That wasn't a 'pretty' production either, but it was clear, heavy, and powerful. This record sounds like it's the copy someone taped on their 1980's boombox while the actual CD was playing.

If that doesn't give you enough of a warning, I'll put it bluntly; The Offspring are no longer a good band. Maybe they put on a decent show if stick to playing the old stuff, but they lost the plot as far as making records a while ago. The only reason to ever listen to this album is feel better about the last time your favorite band disappointed you. The odds are it couldn't be nearly this bad.

Album Review: Ad Infinitum - Abyss

No band sets out wanting to fall into the category of AC/DC or Motorhead where even their most hardcore fans admit every album is pretty much identical. It's one thing to have an identity, and another to have a static identity, and the latter can only work once you have a fan-base large enough to sustain you for the rest of your career. For growing bands, you need to keep people invested, which means doing things that are slightly different, which means doing things that catch us off-guard.

Ad Infinitum had been doing that by sharpening their pop hooks on each album of their three-part cycle, which culminated in last year's nearly flawless "Chapter III". They had finally mastered their craft, writing songs that were modern metal on one level, and melodic joy on another. Combined with Melissa Bonny's immense vocal talent, Ad Infinitum were absolutely one of the few shining stars on the metal horizon.

That's what makes the shift to "Abyss" so jarring. Rather than building on what the previous record did so well, this feels like a jump into a completely different world. The band's penchant for hooks is still there, but the way we get to them is very different, and a change I can't say is for the better. Whereas they were playing a modern sounding version of melodic metal before, they have gone headlong into the depths of modern metal this time.

That means Melissa unleashes more growling vocals, and songs like "Surrender" add in electronics and breakdowns. There is more of a 'core' approach to these songs, which I don't think works on two different levels. There is obviously the level where I simply don't find the growling sections to be nearly as memorable as when Melissa is using her voice in its more natural state. There is also the level where the song construction feels contrived in trying to shoe-horn some of these new sounds into the equation. There is less flow to how the songs move from verses to choruses, and the disjointed nature is a hallmark of modern metal, but it doesn't play well for those of us who are old enough to still eschew playlist listening.

As I said, the album's hooks are still wonderful. The band has been getting better on that front with each album, and they remain at the top of their game in that regard. There are choruses I can hear the crowds at festivals headbanging in time to, screaming the words as a sweaty mass that reminds us how music connects us. I'm not as sure the whole of that horde will enjoy the time between the cathartic moments quite as much.

The dive into modernity is also felt when looking at the track listing. With the majority of these ten songs clocking in at less than four minutes, that means this record is barely over 35 minutes long, which is becoming more common, but feels too short. Honestly, given how quickly this record is arriving after "Chapter III", it almost feels as if the band didn't think they needed to provide us with more of a full album experience. Maybe that's true, and I know my listening tendencies don't mesh with how much of their audience experiences music anymore, but I can only give me own impression. I would have rather waited until the start of next year for the record, if it meant they could write two more quality songs to flesh things out a bit more.

Last time around, I was raving about how Ad Infinitum had finally lived up to the promise I heard in them. I was optimistic about the future, which is a rare thing for me to admit. Now that the future has set in so quickly, my optimism was not entirely a mistake, but at least an overshoot. Ad Infinitum still has all the talent and ability to be great, but if they are shifting their focus, they need to hone the way they work in this style just like they did their more melodic version. Maybe they'll get there, maybe they won't. All I know is that this record, despite its good qualities, feels like a disappointment when I consider where I thought they were going.

"Abyss" is by no means its namesake, but this new chapter isn't stopping me from putting down the book.

Are These The "Futures" We Dreamed Of?

Do you dream in color?

Answering a question that requires you to be asleep may just be an exercise in psychological projection, but even so it leads us in interesting directions. One might think we dream in color because that is the reality we live in, and our dreams are even more fantastical versions of that reality. Much like Technicolor when it first arrived on the scene, color would be saturated to the extreme and distort reality just enough to remind us what we are seeing was never real, but merely a created image bright enough to soak onto film.

Dreaming in black and white, on the other hand, says more about how the world is filled with light and dark, filled with shades of grey in between the extremes of tears of joy and pain. Given that we cannot truly know if we see colors the same way as anyone else without creating a machine to broadcast our thoughts, black and white is the most accurate way of capturing the dreams we conjure for ourselves.

When bands suck the color out of their sound, one of two things will happen; either they will fail miserably with the limited palate, or they will find themselves using the shadows to create shapes of emotion that can cut us deeper than the rays of the sun ever could. It is a difficult trick to pull off, but narrowing the aperture creates a deep focus that brings out the details of pain, that memorializes the cracks in our soul before they scar over once again.

I realized little of this twenty years ago, when Jimmy Eat World put out "Futures". When I initially heard the record, I was the kind of listener who was expecting more songs that sounded like "The Middle" and "Sweetness". I did not understand why a band at the height of their popularity would make such a shift in sound, would suck the shining pop coating off their candied melodies, leaving only the sour core behind. It all makes sense today, and was a brilliant way of making sure the band didn't get caught up chasing after fickle listeners who were going to move on anyway.

"Futures" is a one-of-a-kind record. The guitars are a deeper, thick wash of drop-tuned chords. The production turns down the high end to emphasize the darker and heavier tones. The songs alternate between the band's angriest and saddest reflections of chapters of life they were ready to leave behind, but whose memories they knew they would never escape. They sing about taking pills to forget, and choosing between the drugs and the people, all of which creates the image of an addict to the drama of life. Even if we have moved on, we are never free of the experiences we had, and all it takes is one trigger for us to relapse into the past.

Those chapters can reappear in our minds as historical dramas where we were cast in the starring role, or newsreels to remind us that the news has always been consumed by the worst things that happen on any given day. They are colorless playbacks of events we cannot change, that feel foreign to the current versions of ourselves, but yet circle around our memories as if an old zoetrope attached to a perpetual motion machine.

When we finally get to the line wishing to "kiss me with that cherry lipstick", it is the one spot of color in the entire album, it is the one bright spot we want to remember as the black edges of time and memory collapse in on our past. If we can remember one color, one taste, one feeling, perhaps we can remember who we were. In turn, we can remember why we are who we are today.

The genius of "Futures" is the way it plays with the darkness, using the angry punk energy of songs like "Pain" and the title track to get our blood flowing, which flushes our system with the hormone rush of the painful moments in "Drugs Or Me" or "23". The balance of tempos and tones takes us on a ride, pushing our stomachs into our throats before pulling the rug out from under us. By keeping us off-balance, the record does not let us ready for the next impact. We are hit by it, we are moved by our own memories of coming of age. Some of us are Sisyphus crushed by the rock, unable to push it off us to at least enjoy the sunshine as we toil at our futile task.

"Futures" is not a record for everyone. To truly understand the record, to feel the ways it plays with our emotions, one probably has to be a sad bastard. If you can only see your past in black and white, even through the prism of tears, "Futures" is the sort of record that is essential. The truth exists around us, but sometimes it can only be seen when we close our eyes. "Futures" may be a dream, a fever dream, or a nightmare for some people. Regardless of which option, it is a reflection of the alternate reality some of us spend far too much time living in, one building ramshackle sets atop the stage of the past.

In twenty years, "Futures" has not lost an ounce of potency, because pain never dies. It may fade, but just like running your finger over the spine of an album sitting on your self, sometimes you're just a reminder away from living that moment all over again.

Album Review: April Art - Rodeo

We all know the taste of disappointment, that moment when your hopes are dashed in an instant, and your stomach falls into the depths where your soul was supposed to be. Some of us live there for most of our time, but I think it's safe to say all of us have felt it for at least a short spell. In music, that happens when a band you thought was going to be great turns out to be not bad, but average. Why average? Because there is nothing worse than having almost no reaction to something.

Anger isn't healthy, but it gets the blood pumping in the same way that love does. Apathy is the real killer, because that is when we can struggle to remember if we are human or not.

I'm exaggerating here, but disappointment is the feeling I got listening to April Art's new album. When they started this cycle with the single, "No Sorry", I was all-in. I absolutely loved the high-energy assault, especially Lisa-Marie's gravelly vocals. It was one of my favorite songs of last year, and the album went in bold print on my schedule when it was announced.

So what went wrong? Before anything else, let's start with the issue of the album as a format. The record clocks in at a short thirty-six minutes, which is becoming more and more normal. I wouldn't penalize them for the length if the record was as good as expected. In those thirty-six minutes, we get the aforementioned "Not Sorry", but we also get an acoustic version of the song. Yes, two of the eleven tracks on this record are the same song, which is a step too far for me. It isn't even a bonus track added at the end, it sits before the closer so it can't be avoided.

Those choices become more glaring as the record plays on, as the band delivers time and again. Some of the songs might go a bit far with breakdowns for my taste, also some modern glitchy and hip-hop bits, but each and every song is anchored with a huge sing-along chorus. Their knack for hooks is amazing here, and Lisa-Marie is exactly the voice I want to hear belting these numbers out. She won't be for everyone, but she hits the sweet spot of what I hear in my head when I imagine new strains of music.

We're in similar territory to Amaranthe, which lacks a defining term, but for our purposes can be distilled as ultra-heavy hyper-pop metal. You can hear what I mean better than I can say it. Amaranthe also put out an album this year, and while it was another fine entry that delivered on their trademarks, April Art's album is a more engaging version of that sound. When April Art gets heavy, you can feel the power of the guitars hitting you, and when the hooks come, Lisa-Marie's voice is able to scour away the sheen of our skin so those melodies can easily sink in.

That gets us back to the idea of disappointment. This album is disappointing because there is enough here for it to be one of the best albums of the year. There are also inherent flaws that probably keep it from doing so. To hear that potential falling short is exactly the sort of thing that has made this a year where I have spent far more time listening to old favorites as opposed to new music. The lower bar of nostalgia isn't a fair fight, but I can't control how the past lives on in the present.

What I can say is that April Art has made a record I'm hoping will overcome my initial feelings as I listen to it repeatedly between now and the time I choose the best albums of the year. If that happens, I will happily eat crow. But right now, I can only tell you how I feel in the moment, and that's tempted by the allure of a truly great album that was one or two slight changes away from being what we have.

Album Review: Cemetery Skyline - Nordic Gothic

I think I made it clear when Creeper released their last album that I have never been a fan of goth. In fact, I harangued that album for so blatantly aping goth rock without seeming to understand the ethos at all. Goth is more than sounding cold and croaking a baritone vocal, but that is often what we are given when someone tries to revitalize the scene in a more mainstream way. Creeper failed at it spectacularly, but perhaps a group of people from the icy world of Nordic metal will have better luck.

They do, and I'm not going to waste any time getting to that point. These veterans may not play goth as obvious as some other imitators, but they have been around long enough to know when a good song is a good song, ad they deliver plenty of those. The mood is dark, and rather cold, but the choruses have the semi-uplifting tone to be a black velvet blanket we use as a vampire cape. It's smooth, and soft, and damn comfortable.

The key to all of this is Mikael Stanne, whose baritone crooning has the requisite dark feelings we expect, but who can also give the choruses the scope they require, and perhaps even a bit of tenderness. That gets juxtaposed with the music, which is more metallic than perhaps I would expect from a goth record. Their roots shine through, as the synths play their usual part, but do so atop muscular guitar chords. The result is a sound that feels both musically and emotionally heavy, which is far more striking than a more image-focused approach.

As the record unfolds, we are struck by the proposition that the darkness is merely the space where light has been blocked. Often, that has been done by our own hands, because we don't want to see the truth more clearly illuminated. In the musical sense, that means this much might be trying to be icy and goth, but ice shines quite brightly when light hits it at the right angle. That is how this record comes across, as the melodies of songs like "Never Look Back" are sweet and enveloping.

There's a shared ethos between this record and Katatonia's approach, where beauty and darkness are entwined together to create a lush expression of the human condition. Cemetery Skyline is on the brighter end of that spectrum, but the similarities between this record and "Sky Void Of Stars" are quite strong. It isn't easy to make something beautiful out of the sadder side of our emotions, and bands that are able to do so should be commended.

The only misstep on the record is the closing "Alone Together", which stretches on for nearly eight minutes. That running time means the song is the slowest on the album, and without the energy of the rest, it feels like a drag in comparison. That's a shame, because it leaves a slightly sour aftertaste for what was a perfectly balanced record up to that point. I assume they were trying to end on a more epic note, but the extra time and space doesn't turn into a bigger sound or a bigger hook, which means it hits the cliches of slow music so many metal fans have always had.

Don't let that dissuade you, though. The rest of the album is a wonderful blend of slick and sad, giving us songs that remind us that in the zombie apocalypse, the half-brained becomes a treasured commodity. There's almost always an upside, even if we can't see it. With this record, we can at least hear it.

"Don't You Want One" More Taste Of VK Lynne?

Rhetorical questions are more than a manner of speaking, they are an essential element to having us think about issues we might otherwise skip past. Those questions belie our assumptions, and point our minds in directions where the light may be too bright for us to voluntarily look. It's easy for us to assume we know more than we do, and that we have everything figured out, but we need to have people who challenge us if we are going to become the best versions of ourselves. No matter how good an idea you might have, or how true a moral compass, someone else might be able to show the calibrations aren't as accurate as you have always believed.

VK Lynne this month tackles this task, with her latest song asking us who we want to be as people.

She asks us if we want to be the kind of people who take from those who already have nothing, the kind of people who would take a soul from those who feel they have no love, the kind of people who would give a smile that covers up the edges of a sneer.

We are complicated creatures, and our issues of morality are often complicated. One thing is not, though, and that is whether or not we want to be good people. It doesn't take a philosophical treatise to understand everyone should be treated with kindness, lest we find ourselves on the wrong end of that venom. It also doesn't take a genius to see that neither pain nor love are finite supplies, and we do not have to give one to save the other for people we hold more special.

Some of us have one-track minds, and some of us are the whole damn railway. That is who VK is, as she sheds her usual skin on this song for a more synthetic vibe. This is synth-rock with an electronic edge, not in the industrial sense, but more akin to bands like The Birthday Massacre. As the people we present ourselves to be are usually plasticine versions of the truth, the backdrop is a fitting one for this song. VK is usually a blues baroness, but she proves here she can fit in no matter the landscape.

The authenticity in her voice plays off the synthetic music in interesting ways, altering our perception of what the sonic landscape truly is. Humanity can be artificial at times, but not when art is being made and presented. VK shines through with her performance, streaking a mist of pink notes through the gray atmosphere. Are they the refracted rainbows of optimism we see in the sunlight? That's a rhetorical question, I suppose. What is most interesting here is having a blues song presented to us through a mechanism, proving that while artificial intelligence may one day understand the form of the blues, it will never be able to replicate the feeling.

The point of all this is to say that we all have dark sides, and it is tempting to give in to them at times. When it feels like the world is working against us, we might be entitled to take what we can when we have the chance. Still, it is our ability to see this in ourselves, to fight the urges when they rise, that defines whether we can call ourselves good people.

I am a cynic, and this year especially I have found it nearly impossible to think of humanity as being inherently good. While that might sound depressing, I look at it the other way. If we are selfish creatures, and yet we find it in our hearts and minds to push that aside and be kind to one another, it is a sign of the triumph life can be. Good people may not be born, they may be created, we may choose to be them.

Don't you want to be one?

Album Review: Pale Waves - Smitten

Cynicism abounds, and often for good reason. There are ample reasons to be cynical about Pale Waves. They burst onto the scene with an album that many people regarded as being a copy of The 1975, which earned them plenty of criticism. They pivoted away from that toward the pop/rock revival, which earned them plenty of criticism for still being unoriginal, while also not being good enough. So now they are returning to their original sound, which I'm sure will earn them plenty of criticism, because there is a chance it is merely a ploy to try to win back the people who liked their first album and not the ones that followed.

I am in that camp. Their debut record was a lovely bit of cold, detached synth-rock that in hindsight was mining the same territory Taylor Swift would find on "Midnights". I still have fondness for "Television Romance" and many of those other tracks, yet I have not re-listened to their second or third albums since I found myself talking about them on these pages. And that's despite the fact I liked those records more than a lot of people did. They didn't stick.

So I am happy to hear the band sounding like themselves again, even if there are questions about exactly who they are, and if this is actually their sound. Heather's voice fits this aesthetic better than a more energetic rock band, and simply not being miscast is a point in their favor. "Not A Love Song" has bits of that pop-rock chapter in it, but filtered through Smiths-style synth work, which tamps things down enough to befit the performance. Cold pop has been a thing for a few years now, and Pale Waves takes the best parts of that sound and is able to actually make it sound like pop music. Too often, being muted leaves the songs with no hook at all to them, but Heather has just the right voice to bridge the gap between sad and memorable.

"Perfume" uses the same falsetto jumps "Television Romance" did, which we might call 'hipster yodeling', but gives movement to the melody that is able to hook us. Even when the music itself is a bit flat, as if Heather's vocal, those little movements give the songs a sing-song feeling that makes them engaging through the morass. It's the same high-wire act they performed on their debut record, and to hear them return seamlessly to it is a bit of a difficult thing to wrap my head around.

As the second half of the record unfolds, the shift becomes more natural. Songs like "Seeing Stars" and "Imagination" are pop/rock with a veneer stapled atop them. This is where we hear what is really going on with the record; Pale Waves is realizing it wasn't the songwriting that was failing them, but rather an aesthetic they couldn't embody naturally. Heather's voice is perfect for one thing, and wrong for nearly everything else. When the band tried to be more up-tempo and snappy, it didn't work. She isn't that knid of singer, and pulling the temperature of those songs down to match her tone is all that was needed.

I coined the term 'Daria rock' when I first heard them, and that is where we remain. Rather than being season one, when Daria was a cynic who hated everything, we are now in season five, and Daria has shown emotional growth. Pale Waves is similar, wherein they now are able to be the pop/rock band they have wanted to be, but do it in a way that feels more like themselves. Only time will tell which way this record will age, but the initial feeling is that they just might have pulled a rabbit out of their hat. It's about time.

Quick Reviews: Sinner's Blood & Serious Black

Two different types of disappointment this week:

Sinner's Blood - Dark Horizons

I feel like sometimes certain labels ruin a band's potential before they ever stand a chance. Sinner's Blood put out a debut album I liked quite a bit. They did the modern melodic rock thing very well, and had a singer who stood out as one of the best in the genre. You would think everyone would want to strike while the iron was hot, and try to build some momentum, but that is not what happened. Rather than move to get a second album out, both the band's singer and guitarist went and made multiple albums with namesake projects instead. That had two problems; it took focus off Sinner's Blood, and it watered down the impact when they finally returned.

Unfortunately, the latter of those issues is exactly what has happened here. The band has made another solid album of melodic rock, but with these musicians having put out so many albums already treading the same ground, there is nothing new or novel about hearing their writing anymore. It is only the band's second album, but it feels trite already. Did the solo outings help elevate Sinner's Blood? Did they elevate the members either?

I can't answer that question without data we won't get access to, but from the perspective of a listener it was a lose/lose. There are many up-and-coming musicians who have been put in the position of being overexposed past my point of exhaustion, and Sinner's Blood is feeling the effect of it. I should have been excited by this record, and pleased with the result. Instead, I find myself wondering how much of the same thing I'm expected to listen to before I get tired of it.

Serious Black - Rise Of Akhenaton

Well... this time Serious Black hasn't written an album with multiple songs engaging in rampant misogyny, so this is an improvement.

The band did write a song about the power of heavy metal, which might be my single biggest pet peeve when it comes to this kind of music, so maybe it's not an improvement.

The problem the band has is a lack of vision. Listening to this album is entirely different than their last album, which was different than any of the albums with their former singer. Playing with new elements is fine, and welcome, but there still needs to be a core identity to who a band is. I'm not getting that from Serious Black. The shift from 'personal' songs that creeped me out to a more symphonic power metal direction is exactly the sort of shape-shifting that feels inauthentic, and ultimately leaves a band feeling as if they are trying to follow whatever they think is popular. It hasn't worked for Bloodbound, it isn't working for Creeper, and it doesn't work for Serious Black either.

This record isn't bad by any means, and is clearly a more enjoyable listen than the last one, but I can't say there's anything about it that sounds vital, or that I can say I would ever connect to.