What the bloody hell is going on here?
Earlier today I found out that Stomp (one of Fist2Face's suppliers) had most of Opeth's back catalogue on campaign (that's fancy record label speak for "on sale"), so I set about adding them to our system and ordering a couple of copies for stock.
The album cover images on Stomp's catalogue website were shite to say the least, so as I normally do when searching for album cover images I went to Wikipedia to see if I could find it there. God bless those nerds, Wikipedia had it in relatively high-quality. (If you click that link and view the image, you'll see that the album cover is nice and dark, but completely greyscale. No colour anywhere.)
I'm a little frightened.
The Butterfly Effect back in the studio
The Butterfly Effect have hit the studio to record a follow-up to the brilliant 2006 album Imago:
The band will debut their first single from the album when it hits radio in July and retail on August 23. Following the release of the band's album on September 13, they will then hit the road for an extensive tour in October.
When I first read the headline, I thought "hang on, didn't they just release an album?" It's hard to believe that Imago will be over two years old when this album comes out.
Court rejects RIAA's 'making available' piracy argument
Court rejects RIAA's 'making available' piracy argument:
"The court agrees with the great weight of authority that section 106(3) is not violated unless the defendant has actually distributed an unauthorized copy of the work to a member of the public," wrote the judge in his order. "Merely making an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work available to the public does not violate a copyright holder's exclusive right of distribution."
Porcupine Tree round up
I'm still extremely tired from all the traveling so my own review is going to be a while coming, but here's a quick rundown of some Porcupine Tree reviews, blog posts and bootlegs so far:
The same guy that bootlegged Dream Theater's Sydney show recorded Porcupine Tree's, which can be found on his MySpace blog. I haven't listened to the recording but photographic evidence suggests he got a good spot in the crowd for recording, so it should be a high quality recording.
There are Last.fm event reviews here, here, here, here (all Sydney) and here (Melbourne).
I'm sure I'll have more to link to in the coming days, with the Brisbane show happening as I type this.
One thing I will say now is that Sleep Parade got a great reaction in Sydney considering they're not a local band. A lot of people in the crowd were already familiar with them, and they got a huge cheer at the end of their set.
Coheed And Cambria, Closure In Moscow at Billboard
When my illustrious colleague Andrew Saltmarsh got home from seeing Coheed And Cambria in Brisbane, the only thing he could say about the show was how bad the opening band were. Without banging on about it, it's pretty fair to say that they were one of the worst support bands he's seen.
Intrigued, I went to work finding out who they were, and if they would be opening the Melbourne show as well. Turns out it was Closure In Moscow, a Melbourne band, so I would be seeing them at the show I went to that Tuesday night at Billboard.
I've known of Closure In Moscow for a while through working at Fist2Face, but I'd never heard their music nor seen them live, so I went to the show with a pretty open mind. While I didn't dislike them nearly as much as Salty did, they're really not my thing.
It's almost as if they've decided that full, layered instrumentation and screaming vocals are the key to success, but haven't figured out that you actually need to write interesting compositions to get anywhere. All their songs sounded the same, striving for the Coheed And Cambria sound, but came off decidedly less pleasurable than the original and the best. I suppose it's ironic that a band trying to be like one of the music industry's most original could sound so derivative.
Billboard was completely packed, so Carmen and I struggled to find room to move amongst the crowd, let alone somewhere she could see the band well enough. We ended up staying towards the back and having to look through a mass of heads to see anything, which turned out to be a blessing with the lighting as blinding as it was. I enjoyed being able to block out the halogen blinders with the afro in front of me.
Musically, Coheed have a chaotic live show. Everything seems sped up a tiny bit from their records, and playing riffs, notes and melodies exactly right doesn't seem to be a requirement. But given that, each member was still perfectly locked in to one another, so it didn't sound sloppy at all. It was really quite amazing, almost like watching The Mars Volta on stage.
Obviously one of my major fascinations was with Claudio Sanchez's hair, and how it can turn from a gargantuan afro into almost nothing with the use of a single hair-tie, but his voice was also relatively well-kept. Thanks to the pair of female backup singers he didn't have to hit anything too high, which was clearly a good decision. Chris Pennie (formerly of the Dillinger Escape Plan) seemed completely at ease playing everything, and though I never saw Coheed with Josh Eppard, I can't imagine he was anywhere near the drummer Chris Pennie is.
They concentrated on the "single" material from their latest albums more heavily, although there were a few surprises thrown in. As a fan of In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3 more than any of their other releases, I was slightly disappointed that I only heard a couple of songs from that album, but since it's five years old now I can't really complain about that. Fans of No World For Tomorrow would certainly have been pleased with the setlist, as would Iron Maiden fans be pleased with the fact that they did a really cool cover of "The Trooper".
But it was the encore that had me completely flummoxed.
After a 10-minute solo section - which was cool for the first five minutes - each member quietly left the stage, one every couple of minutes, until Pennie was left alone on stage to play a drum solo. I've got to admit that it was pretty good, as far as drum solos go, but by that stage a lot of people were ready to leave. Some, in fact, were leaving.
The band came back on for one final song together, but I felt like it was sort of an anti-climax. The solo section could easily have slotted into the middle of the first part of the show, freeing up more time for some of the "must-play" songs in the encore.
But all-in-all I was really impressed with how well they played such difficult material in a live setting, and I'm certainly regretting the fact that I missed their 2005 tour in order to see Kanye West.
PluggedIn
PluggedIn: a fundamentalist Christian website which reviews music, film, video games and television for objectionable content. Great for a laugh.
From the review of Ice Cube's The Predator:
Pro-Social Content
On "It Was a Good Day," Cube is thankful for a day without killing. He criticizes the indignities of prison ("First Day of School") and de facto segregation ("Integration").Objectionable Content
Ice Cube threatens violence (including shootings, bombings and forced anal and oral sex) against targets including Los Angeles police chief Willie Williams ("Wicked"), former chief Daryl Gates ("We Had to Tear This Mothaf-a Up"), the jury that found L.A. police officers not guilty in the Rodney King beating ("Now I Gotta Wet 'Cha"), the officers themselves ("We Had to Tear This Motha-f-a Up"), the editor of Billboard magazine ("The Predator") and even the anti-gang Guardian Angels ("Dirty Mack").Cube, formally of the rap group N.W.A., approves of looting ("We Had to Tear This Mothaf-a Up"), kidnapping prostitutes ("Say Hi to the Bad Guy"), and has no problem with sexual promiscuity that he describes in graphic terms ("Dirty Mack," "It Was a Good Day").
Summary Advisory
While it may be important to understand the anger of Ice Cube and his peers, this violent, near-paranoid attitude should be soundly rejected. A vile number-1 debut disc that should be put on ice . . . permanently!
Last.fm's free music boosts sales
Some of that is attributable to an expected increase in site users following the new offering - but Last.fm also claims those who were members prior to the launch have been purchasing 66 percent more albums and tracks than beforehand, thanks to the full new previews.
RIP Jawn
Sometimes, the universe is arbitrary and unfair. Good blokes who do nothing but make people laugh get cut down in their 20s.
John William Neil Wiggs - "Jawn".
February 24th, 1984 - April 10th, 2008.
This was posted only two weeks ago.
Interview with Luke Gower (Cog)
No one could have known it at the time, but with albums from fellow alternative metal acts Karnivool and The Butterfly Effect to follow in quick succession, Cog turned out to be the catalyst that began Australia's progressive music explosion, which would surge in popularity in the years that followed.
Two and a half years later - after debuting at #1 on the AIR chart, #19 on the ARIA chart and conquering the local touring scene (by now populated with the likes of Dead Letter Circus, Mammal and Sleep Parade, all of whom owe Cog a huge debt of gratitude) - returning to Weed and Massy to record The New Normal's massively-anticipated follow-up must have seemed like a great idea at the time.
But after running out of money, falling out with Massy and having to stick out the final two weeks of the session on their own, they must have wondered how it all went wrong.
Luckily they pulled through in the end, and the resulting album Sharing Space is a deep and confronting release, befitting the trials that Cog went through in creating it.
While the lyrics show a move towards the more direct and hard-hitting, there is a definite shift away from the driving riffery that underpinned The New Normal, as bassist Luke Gower explains. Liberal use of keyboards, strings, vocal effects and harmonies make for a far more, dare I say it, progressive album, at least musically.
"I think it was a bit of a natural progression for us, we love experimenting," says Gower. "[But] it's not like we set out to say 'oh in this song we want to put down three different keyboards' or anything like that. It could be, you know, you're tracking a song and making a cup of coffee in between doing something and you see an instrument sitting on a shelf that you've never seen before, so you go over and flick it on and fuck around with it for a while, and it's like 'fuck, that might actually work in that song'.
"We're very open to experimentation in terms of instruments and we all write on each other's instruments as well so there's a huge diversity of what we can come up with. All egos aside, it's just all about the song and what's best for that. I mean we put some things down and they don't work so we piss them off, but that's just the way we work."
Lyrically filled with overt political statements such as "I don't listen at all to the Government / the Government has gotta go", and written mostly in the lead-up to Australia's 2007 federal election, you'd be excused for thinking that the Cog trio had set out to write a protest album. But as it turns out they were actually almost completely unaware of the situation back home for the 10 months they were stuck in the studio.
"I suppose to the outsider, they would be like 'yeah they're talking about John Howard' ... but we didn't set out specifically to write about the situation that was going on in Australia. To tell you the truth we didn't really watch any TV and we weren't getting any newspapers, the only form of news we had was when you log in to Hotmail, and you know what that kind of news is like, they're more worried about Megan Gale and fucking 'the actor from Home and Away's been caught on the beach wearing a new bikini', you know."
Regardless of the lyrics' inspiration - the bushy-browed Howard, the bushy-tailed Gale, or neither - the candidness on Sharing Space may come as a bit of a surprise to existing fans used to Cog's extensive use of metaphor and allegory. That, though, was a conscious decision.
"(Politics is) something that we feel strongly about, it's hard not to with the things that are going on these days I think. I wanted to try and target specific issues, whether it be political or whatever the song was going to be about, I really wanted to try and hone in a bit more so as not to be as sparse as the last album."
Given that background, Sharing Space is a title as appropriate as it is poetic. Exploring themes such as time away from loved ones, fear as a tool of government to quell dissent, and the more obvious theme of political change, the one idea holding the album together is that we're all "sharing space", and that with the right to indivuality comes a responsibility to ensure you're doing the right thing by your fellow man.
"Instead of saying 'thanks for having me' or 'thanks for hanging out', [Weed locals said] 'thanks for sharing space' ... and we all thought that was a fitting title for the album. It's applicable to the time we're living in at the moment on all sorts of levels, it can work on a macro or a micro level I think."
Cog will be sharing space with Jakob, Kora, Melodyssey and Sleep Parade on their "Sharing Space" tour, taking in five states throughout May and June. Sharing Space is out everywhere on April 12th through Difrn't Music.
Mushroom Giant, Sons of Abraham, Tinman, Bring on the Junta, The Eleventhour at the Evelyn
Sneak Peek is a monthly series of themed music nights at Fitzroy's famous Evelyn Hotel - indie, rock, blues and roots, among others - run by a team of music industry and promotions types. Put in front of a room full of photographers, writers, reviewers, booking agents and the occasional record label representative, bands have the chance to showcase their wares in front of people who could potentially help them further their careers.
When I walked into the Evelyn a few minutes after The Eleventhour had begun their set, there were far more photographers than ordinary punters in the venue, with half a dozen still cameras and three video cameras strewn around the room. That has to be a nerve-wracking environment for any band to perform in, let alone one barely four years old and with a single self-released EP to their name.
But as tentative as they were in the beginning - vocalist Danny Boy in particular - The Eleventhour really warmed up as time went on. To be honest I found Danny's demeanor as a singer to be far too meek and nerdy early on, but I was well and truly won over by the natural power in his voice by the time their set ended.
Musically they blend a sort of straight-forward alternative rock in the vein of Why Valerie..? with occasional flurries of Mammal-esque funkadelia. Their main point of difference from the pack is their liberal use of aggressive screaming in the form of background vocals. In my opinion, it's way too easy to chuck some screams in a song to up the aggression, but it's a lot more difficult to write a song that stands up on its own without such trickery. But all-in-all I was pleasantly surprised by the entirety of their set and will be keeping an eye out for them in the future.
Sons of Abraham are - like The Eleventhour - a band who seem to gig a lot more often than their small profile would lead you to believe, and it really shows. Their brand of driving, occasionally crunching Tool-esque alt-metal would be a challenge for all but the tightest of bands, and as a three-piece they are all the more impressive. Their bassist, Jamie Cavalieros, in particular reminded me a lot of Dead Letter Circus' Stewart Hill, both in his on-stage mannerisms and his playing.
With an EP due for release in the coming months, they will surely continue their rise in the Melbourne music landscape, especially if they keep playing on bills with bands like Mushroom Giant (whose existing fans would surely love Sons of Abraham's post-metal side).
By the time Mushroom Giant graced the stage the Evelyn had filled up considerably, and I doubt there was a single person in the crowd who wasn't completely mesmerised by the sublime experimental post-rock being so brilliantly brought to life in front of them.
With an unassuming entrance and complete vocal silence for the majority of their time on stage (save for a couple of thank yous and a plug of their CD by bassist Craig Fryers), I was completely drawn into the visual nature of their compositions. "Poor Tom" is just as great a song live as it is on their album Kuru, and I struggled to comprehend how they could play such a frenetic, intricate song so perfectly.
Guitarist David Charlton, the "frontman" of the band (if an instrumental collective can have a single focal point), finds a way of looking so immersed in the music that you wonder if he's consciously playing notes at all.
But hey, that's Mushroom Giant.
Next up were Bring on the Junta, and the only two things I will say about them are:
- I'm not into the kind of music they played, so it would be unfair of me to judge them, and
- Their bassist had one of the most majestic lumberjack beards I have ever seen. 1
That's all. If I were forced to give my opinion on their music, I would say that for an aggressive band I was surprised to find their music somewhat pedestrian. Certainly, there was a blatant lack of any kind of diversity between songs, but it seemed to manifest itself in their playing as well. It was as if they didn't really want to be there.
Unfortunately I missed Tinman due once again to public transport's personal vendetta against me, but heard they were good. Yet another band on my list. Great.
So Sneak Peek definitely gets a bit tick of approval from me, and if they continue to put together such strong line-ups I can't see any reason why they couldn't become a cornerstone of Melbourne's live music scene.
- Check it out for yourself in this photo from one of the many photographers present at the gig. ↩
