I've listened to 30 albums this year; I should have opinions on SOME of them - Music Reviews, 3/14/19
Back again like a phoenix from a flame, it's time to show you what's fire and what went down in flames. (I'm not picky about an intro; let's just make it happen.) Music review time!
Dream Theater "Distance Over Time" *** and 1/2
Definitely give "Untethered Angel" credit: It's a song. That's more of a compliment than it seems: Dream Theater have a tendency to either pile up a bunch of technical exercises and put them in a predetermined order for thirteen minutes (and that's coming from someone who's favorite album used to be Scenes From A Memory), or make five to fourteen minutes of lighter-waving dreck and call it "emotional". This is an actual fucking song, with a hook, with lyrics that don't go into corny, over-literal diatribe, with real structure and solos that don't feel tacked on because John and Jordan both had to get their shit in. This is an honest-to-goodness SONG, and it's a good opener for this; it sets the tone for what's to come.
"Paralyzed" gives me pause instantly however, because it's one of the most dumbed-down things this band has ever done, musically or lyrically. It's not bad per se, but wow is it generic. Almost nu-metal, but not whiny enough. Which honestly makes it more boring.
"Fall Into The Light"'s opening gives me flashbacks to "In Constant Motion" from Systematic Chaos, but with two differences: Halftime thrash leading into some bonkers speed and clearer production. I struggle to recall when I've heard all the elements of this band be audible, though part of that is there was always too much happening at any given moment to hear it all and this is...refined is the word I'd use. At this point in their career if Dream Theater can still have soaring choruses paired with top notch shred and have it all feel streamlined in comparison to their previous work, they've done something remarkable.
"Barstool Warrior" is extremely reminiscent of early 90's DT, except for the odd song title. It has the melodic self-importance of something from Images And Words or the "Mind Beside Itself" section of Awake. "Room 137" is one of the most simplistic, meatheaded songs the band has ever done, but it fits well enough and as it's something different than what they've been churning out in the last ten years, I'll give them credit for going down a different path. (And it was written by Mike Mangini, so hey! New blood!)
"S2N" sounds, rhythmically, like something I would have tried to write at the end of high school, but played with the ability to actually make it work instead of coming off as a failure of a counting exercise. It's in 4/4, but it's subdivided into...I think it's 9/8, but it might even be 9/16 and two other small subdivisions. It's really slippery and hard to latch onto, but sounds compelling enough to make you keep trying. Then the ending just crunches out, letting Rudess noodle all over the place, but by this point in the album they've kind of earned it.
Now comes the only song to crack the nine minute mark! Yes, believe it or not "Distance Over Time" is their first album since "When Dream And Day Unite" in 1989 to not have a ten minute song. (The Astonishing technically did that too, but you could make the argument that it was 38 scenes in a two hour ten minute play so it muddies the distinction. Also, fuck The Astonishing. It knows what it did.) "At Wit's End" is the first song they wrote for these sessions, and...it's okay. Definitely more streamlined but still with some of the same marks. It's good and in context with the album flows quite nicely, but it's not exactly setting my world on fire. Still, I'd probably remember what this sounds like more than anything else they've done in the 2010's (same with the rest of the album). Though even the nine minute runtime is misleading, since "At Wit's End" fades out around 8:25 and the rest of it is some weird interstitial recorded down the hall from where the band was playing.
"Out Of Reach" has some of the band's most embarrassing lyrics in the "Ooh babe" vein. This is a legit power ballad, played straight. It's got a cool piano line about halfway through, but man are the drums clumsy when they come in. They should have just left Mangini out, honestly; it could have worked as a straight ballad. (If not for the lyrics, of course.)
"Pale Blue Dot" brings back the heavy Dream Theater of the early 2000's with a bouncing B-tuned groove. It gets a little slow in the verses and loses momentum as a result, but overall it's a decent eight minute slab of prog metal.
"Viper King" is listed as a bonus track, which frankly does it a disservice. It's got lyrics by James LaBrie, it's about a car, it's a pretty simple swing groove tuned down to A and it's a brisk four minutes on the dot. It's one of the more vibrant songs they've done this decade and I feel like having it be an optional extra does the song and this album dirty.
Overall, this is the level of improvement and change of pace I've been wanting out of Dream Theater since before Portnoy left the band (Black Clouds & Silver Linings was ASS). Shame it took then ten years to do it, but we're here now and DT are back off the shit list! Good times!
Clear Soul Forces "Still" **
Lots of lyrical acrobatics, not a bad beat selection either, even some of the punchlines hit well (especially the lines about Diamond Dallas Page), but for some reason I just couldn't get into this. It's...it should be nice as fuck on paper, but a lot of the lyrics are filler rappety-rap shit that I've heard a million times. I used to eat that kind of thing up, so I feel like I should have liked this a little better.
One lyric that made me bristle however was "real rap got infiltrated by the internet". The internet infiltrated the entire world. To dump on people using the internet to be inspired to create rap music is misguided at best. The only reason I even heard of Clear Soul Forces is the internet. The only reason I listened to them is I could click play and find out what they sounded like. So yeah. I was already kinda bored, but that lost me.
Aberdeen "Downpour" **
The albums starts with a song called "It Was Here" and unfortunately that was the most I could say about this one. Which should be impossible with the musicians (in quantity and quality) involved. Onstage this is like a 13 piece band with horns all over and strings and guitar/bass/drums, but every song blurs together. It's not bad music per se, but if you're not looking to have chill background tunes with brass, this isn't worth the time.
I feel like I'm being a little unfair with that assessment, so let's try to dig up some positive takeaways: The title track is decent. It has some cool string swells in the middle and it actually builds to something at the end with the horns trading leads into a crescendo. The unexpected punk ending of "BKNY" is kinda neat. What's weird though is it bleeds into the next track and then another song fades in underneath. And stays underneath. Like a punk band crashed the album and decided to squat. The other band isn't loud enough to pierce through, and even when the punk band is done the album only gets a few seconds until another punk song jumps it and mugs it in the alley. It's a total fucking mess.
It was at this point I realized I'd opened another tab for later and SoundCloud had started auto-playing. This shouldn't have been the only interesting thing that happened while listening to this, but here we are. As if in solidarity with the union of underachievement, the last song is called "Still", just like the previous album I reviewed which I almost forgot about already. The vitality on display in Adam Neely's gig vlog for this band didn't translate to the record for me.
Hand Habits "placeholder" * and 1/2
Really pretty sounding, but so sleepy and with lyrics so boring you can't possibly care. (She seriously says "Fire desire" as a phrase, in the third or fourth song talking about fire and/or desire in a row.) Pleasant enough to listen to, but completely falls apart at the slightest hint of scrutiny.
Charlotte Adigéry "Zandoli" ****
Delightfully weird. This has elements of early to mid 90's electronica, but with an Afro-French accent on it. The first two tracks are more dance oriented and vibey, but the last three are about off-kilter atmosphere and abstract turns of phrase. On "BBC" (which I loved the shit out of) you get phrases like "Salmon satin cumberband; Purchaseable joy" and "Shrimp cocktail contessa; Oscillating diaphragms" followed by a buttery smooth chorus. Weird synth sounds take it all up a notch. And on the last track "Okashi" I'm even getting some vocal inflections of Madonna circa "Ray Of Light". I toyed with the idea of not giving this four stars, like 3 and 7/8ths, but I think that's because I'm mad there wasn't more. I have to give it up.
Michael Franti & Spearhead "Stay Human Vol. II" *
This album wasn't boring, I can say that much. Being that I've always had tastes that lean toward the corny (and as I get older a lot more toward the basic), and that Michael Franti's heart seems to be in the right place, I wanted to give this project the benefit of the doubt. I took everything at face value, as if it were sincere and saw what that made me feel.
And I was on this album's side for awhile, at least through track 6 or 7. It wasn't great, but it was at least trying to put something positive in the world. There's precious little of that, so maybe I should take what I can get, right? As the lyrics got cringier and cringier, as it slowly dawned on me that I was listening to "woke Coldplay from 2015 with cod reggae undertones" (released in 2019), even as I was starting to get a Christian music vibe, which...I should go into more detail about that last one. What I mean is "Christian music" as in the bland, slow, soulless variety with vagaries about belief, not that it was a Christian message. If there's anything that could have made this album lamer, Contemporary Christian was certainly it.
But there are calls to "believe", which I'm not going to shit on, mainly because it doesn't say what to believe in specific. Cynicism has hit everyone really hard, and it's genuinely difficult for anyone to believe anything anymore. You have every right to respond with someone asking to believe in something with "FUCK YOU!", because our trust in institutions, persons of authority and people we respected and fed with our adoration and commerce all turned out to be snakes trying to fuck us physically and financially. In the face of that, even if it seems misguided, I can't begrudge Michael Franti wanting to foster belief in...community, in each other, in love, in...any kind of positive force to hold onto.
So why did I end up turning on this album? The wackness kept piling up to the point I couldn't ignore, sure. There were literal "Ooh baby baby"s in one song; that pegged the cliché-o-meter. The song "Extraordinary" (which sounds like a castrated version of "Can't Stop The Feeling" by Justin Timberlake) boasts multiple times: "I know the words to the song"...I'd hope so motherfucker; you're singing it!
But the one that sent me over the edge was “Nobody Cries Alone”. I’ve always been a bit of a shut in, a bit of a loner because socialization intimidates me. That’s not what this song’s even about; it’s some generic crap about how you aren’t crying alone because Spearhead is here, "down" with you in the struggle. So when I thought about it, I couldn’t take it anymore. I've dealt with mental issues and depression for my entire adult life pretty much on my own, so I'm living proof you're full of shit. Get ALL the way the fuck out of my face with that patronizing happy horsecum.
I hope Michael Franti is at some level self-aware of how lame his songs are, because holy hell it would be sad if he wasn't. Music like this is the reason people shit on being positive, because look, this was already a tough sell in 2019. Asking those who've had everything they fundamentally believed in stripped out from under them like some feckless party magician inexpertly yanking a tablecloth away and ignoring all the vases and plates that just broke to just "use the power of positivity and togetherness" to solve some problems, they're not really gonna be in the mood to listen. But ESPECIALY when you come with shit sounding this whack, don't expect any converts. I wasn’t anticipating this much venom from some hackneyed hippie dreck, but here we are. 2019, y’all.
Bananarama "Stuff Like That"
I don't have any thoughts on this. Just wanted to let you know Bananarama put out a song in 2019 that sounds like it would have been their late 90's comeback attempt, cheesy and about eight years behind the times 20 years ago. It's catchy though, so it's stuck in my head. Look forward to spending the rest of the day with the soundtrack to a shopping montage from a third-tier Blockbuster rental in the back of my mind. (Honestly could be a lot worse.)
The Japanese House "Good At Falling" *** and 2/5
If Imogen Heap crashed back down to Earth and struggled with the negative emotions from such upheaval, you might get something like this. The seemingly random momentary inclusion of acoustic instruments is a nice surprise in an otherwise electronic landscape. The one weakness I'd point out is the plaintive nature of the lyrics and vocal delivery gets samey by halfway and grating by the end, but I guess the melodic structure keeps me listening. I don't quite know what to make of this one yet.
So that's this week's roundup. I had two more reviews started but got distracted and now I have to listen to the albums again. Look for those in a little bit (hopefully before April). Til then, take it easy.
Definitely give "Untethered Angel" credit: It's a song. That's more of a compliment than it seems: Dream Theater have a tendency to either pile up a bunch of technical exercises and put them in a predetermined order for thirteen minutes (and that's coming from someone who's favorite album used to be Scenes From A Memory), or make five to fourteen minutes of lighter-waving dreck and call it "emotional". This is an actual fucking song, with a hook, with lyrics that don't go into corny, over-literal diatribe, with real structure and solos that don't feel tacked on because John and Jordan both had to get their shit in. This is an honest-to-goodness SONG, and it's a good opener for this; it sets the tone for what's to come.
"Paralyzed" gives me pause instantly however, because it's one of the most dumbed-down things this band has ever done, musically or lyrically. It's not bad per se, but wow is it generic. Almost nu-metal, but not whiny enough. Which honestly makes it more boring.
"Fall Into The Light"'s opening gives me flashbacks to "In Constant Motion" from Systematic Chaos, but with two differences: Halftime thrash leading into some bonkers speed and clearer production. I struggle to recall when I've heard all the elements of this band be audible, though part of that is there was always too much happening at any given moment to hear it all and this is...refined is the word I'd use. At this point in their career if Dream Theater can still have soaring choruses paired with top notch shred and have it all feel streamlined in comparison to their previous work, they've done something remarkable.
"Barstool Warrior" is extremely reminiscent of early 90's DT, except for the odd song title. It has the melodic self-importance of something from Images And Words or the "Mind Beside Itself" section of Awake. "Room 137" is one of the most simplistic, meatheaded songs the band has ever done, but it fits well enough and as it's something different than what they've been churning out in the last ten years, I'll give them credit for going down a different path. (And it was written by Mike Mangini, so hey! New blood!)
"S2N" sounds, rhythmically, like something I would have tried to write at the end of high school, but played with the ability to actually make it work instead of coming off as a failure of a counting exercise. It's in 4/4, but it's subdivided into...I think it's 9/8, but it might even be 9/16 and two other small subdivisions. It's really slippery and hard to latch onto, but sounds compelling enough to make you keep trying. Then the ending just crunches out, letting Rudess noodle all over the place, but by this point in the album they've kind of earned it.
Now comes the only song to crack the nine minute mark! Yes, believe it or not "Distance Over Time" is their first album since "When Dream And Day Unite" in 1989 to not have a ten minute song. (The Astonishing technically did that too, but you could make the argument that it was 38 scenes in a two hour ten minute play so it muddies the distinction. Also, fuck The Astonishing. It knows what it did.) "At Wit's End" is the first song they wrote for these sessions, and...it's okay. Definitely more streamlined but still with some of the same marks. It's good and in context with the album flows quite nicely, but it's not exactly setting my world on fire. Still, I'd probably remember what this sounds like more than anything else they've done in the 2010's (same with the rest of the album). Though even the nine minute runtime is misleading, since "At Wit's End" fades out around 8:25 and the rest of it is some weird interstitial recorded down the hall from where the band was playing.
"Out Of Reach" has some of the band's most embarrassing lyrics in the "Ooh babe" vein. This is a legit power ballad, played straight. It's got a cool piano line about halfway through, but man are the drums clumsy when they come in. They should have just left Mangini out, honestly; it could have worked as a straight ballad. (If not for the lyrics, of course.)
"Pale Blue Dot" brings back the heavy Dream Theater of the early 2000's with a bouncing B-tuned groove. It gets a little slow in the verses and loses momentum as a result, but overall it's a decent eight minute slab of prog metal.
"Viper King" is listed as a bonus track, which frankly does it a disservice. It's got lyrics by James LaBrie, it's about a car, it's a pretty simple swing groove tuned down to A and it's a brisk four minutes on the dot. It's one of the more vibrant songs they've done this decade and I feel like having it be an optional extra does the song and this album dirty.
Overall, this is the level of improvement and change of pace I've been wanting out of Dream Theater since before Portnoy left the band (Black Clouds & Silver Linings was ASS). Shame it took then ten years to do it, but we're here now and DT are back off the shit list! Good times!
Lots of lyrical acrobatics, not a bad beat selection either, even some of the punchlines hit well (especially the lines about Diamond Dallas Page), but for some reason I just couldn't get into this. It's...it should be nice as fuck on paper, but a lot of the lyrics are filler rappety-rap shit that I've heard a million times. I used to eat that kind of thing up, so I feel like I should have liked this a little better.
One lyric that made me bristle however was "real rap got infiltrated by the internet". The internet infiltrated the entire world. To dump on people using the internet to be inspired to create rap music is misguided at best. The only reason I even heard of Clear Soul Forces is the internet. The only reason I listened to them is I could click play and find out what they sounded like. So yeah. I was already kinda bored, but that lost me.
Aberdeen "Downpour" **
The albums starts with a song called "It Was Here" and unfortunately that was the most I could say about this one. Which should be impossible with the musicians (in quantity and quality) involved. Onstage this is like a 13 piece band with horns all over and strings and guitar/bass/drums, but every song blurs together. It's not bad music per se, but if you're not looking to have chill background tunes with brass, this isn't worth the time.
I feel like I'm being a little unfair with that assessment, so let's try to dig up some positive takeaways: The title track is decent. It has some cool string swells in the middle and it actually builds to something at the end with the horns trading leads into a crescendo. The unexpected punk ending of "BKNY" is kinda neat. What's weird though is it bleeds into the next track and then another song fades in underneath. And stays underneath. Like a punk band crashed the album and decided to squat. The other band isn't loud enough to pierce through, and even when the punk band is done the album only gets a few seconds until another punk song jumps it and mugs it in the alley. It's a total fucking mess.
It was at this point I realized I'd opened another tab for later and SoundCloud had started auto-playing. This shouldn't have been the only interesting thing that happened while listening to this, but here we are. As if in solidarity with the union of underachievement, the last song is called "Still", just like the previous album I reviewed which I almost forgot about already. The vitality on display in Adam Neely's gig vlog for this band didn't translate to the record for me.
Hand Habits "placeholder" * and 1/2
Really pretty sounding, but so sleepy and with lyrics so boring you can't possibly care. (She seriously says "Fire desire" as a phrase, in the third or fourth song talking about fire and/or desire in a row.) Pleasant enough to listen to, but completely falls apart at the slightest hint of scrutiny.
Charlotte Adigéry "Zandoli" ****
Delightfully weird. This has elements of early to mid 90's electronica, but with an Afro-French accent on it. The first two tracks are more dance oriented and vibey, but the last three are about off-kilter atmosphere and abstract turns of phrase. On "BBC" (which I loved the shit out of) you get phrases like "Salmon satin cumberband; Purchaseable joy" and "Shrimp cocktail contessa; Oscillating diaphragms" followed by a buttery smooth chorus. Weird synth sounds take it all up a notch. And on the last track "Okashi" I'm even getting some vocal inflections of Madonna circa "Ray Of Light". I toyed with the idea of not giving this four stars, like 3 and 7/8ths, but I think that's because I'm mad there wasn't more. I have to give it up.
Michael Franti & Spearhead "Stay Human Vol. II" *
This album wasn't boring, I can say that much. Being that I've always had tastes that lean toward the corny (and as I get older a lot more toward the basic), and that Michael Franti's heart seems to be in the right place, I wanted to give this project the benefit of the doubt. I took everything at face value, as if it were sincere and saw what that made me feel.
And I was on this album's side for awhile, at least through track 6 or 7. It wasn't great, but it was at least trying to put something positive in the world. There's precious little of that, so maybe I should take what I can get, right? As the lyrics got cringier and cringier, as it slowly dawned on me that I was listening to "woke Coldplay from 2015 with cod reggae undertones" (released in 2019), even as I was starting to get a Christian music vibe, which...I should go into more detail about that last one. What I mean is "Christian music" as in the bland, slow, soulless variety with vagaries about belief, not that it was a Christian message. If there's anything that could have made this album lamer, Contemporary Christian was certainly it.
But there are calls to "believe", which I'm not going to shit on, mainly because it doesn't say what to believe in specific. Cynicism has hit everyone really hard, and it's genuinely difficult for anyone to believe anything anymore. You have every right to respond with someone asking to believe in something with "FUCK YOU!", because our trust in institutions, persons of authority and people we respected and fed with our adoration and commerce all turned out to be snakes trying to fuck us physically and financially. In the face of that, even if it seems misguided, I can't begrudge Michael Franti wanting to foster belief in...community, in each other, in love, in...any kind of positive force to hold onto.
So why did I end up turning on this album? The wackness kept piling up to the point I couldn't ignore, sure. There were literal "Ooh baby baby"s in one song; that pegged the cliché-o-meter. The song "Extraordinary" (which sounds like a castrated version of "Can't Stop The Feeling" by Justin Timberlake) boasts multiple times: "I know the words to the song"...I'd hope so motherfucker; you're singing it!
But the one that sent me over the edge was “Nobody Cries Alone”. I’ve always been a bit of a shut in, a bit of a loner because socialization intimidates me. That’s not what this song’s even about; it’s some generic crap about how you aren’t crying alone because Spearhead is here, "down" with you in the struggle. So when I thought about it, I couldn’t take it anymore. I've dealt with mental issues and depression for my entire adult life pretty much on my own, so I'm living proof you're full of shit. Get ALL the way the fuck out of my face with that patronizing happy horsecum.
I hope Michael Franti is at some level self-aware of how lame his songs are, because holy hell it would be sad if he wasn't. Music like this is the reason people shit on being positive, because look, this was already a tough sell in 2019. Asking those who've had everything they fundamentally believed in stripped out from under them like some feckless party magician inexpertly yanking a tablecloth away and ignoring all the vases and plates that just broke to just "use the power of positivity and togetherness" to solve some problems, they're not really gonna be in the mood to listen. But ESPECIALY when you come with shit sounding this whack, don't expect any converts. I wasn’t anticipating this much venom from some hackneyed hippie dreck, but here we are. 2019, y’all.
Bananarama "Stuff Like That"
I don't have any thoughts on this. Just wanted to let you know Bananarama put out a song in 2019 that sounds like it would have been their late 90's comeback attempt, cheesy and about eight years behind the times 20 years ago. It's catchy though, so it's stuck in my head. Look forward to spending the rest of the day with the soundtrack to a shopping montage from a third-tier Blockbuster rental in the back of my mind. (Honestly could be a lot worse.)
The Japanese House "Good At Falling" *** and 2/5
If Imogen Heap crashed back down to Earth and struggled with the negative emotions from such upheaval, you might get something like this. The seemingly random momentary inclusion of acoustic instruments is a nice surprise in an otherwise electronic landscape. The one weakness I'd point out is the plaintive nature of the lyrics and vocal delivery gets samey by halfway and grating by the end, but I guess the melodic structure keeps me listening. I don't quite know what to make of this one yet.
So that's this week's roundup. I had two more reviews started but got distracted and now I have to listen to the albums again. Look for those in a little bit (hopefully before April). Til then, take it easy.
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