"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.