Friday, August 18, 2006

Music That's Not Nearly As Good As You. Week 5


Honestly, I’m surprised by the lack of bands that really fire me up. Of course I have worked very hard to distance myself from pop culture and accordingly remove myself from the grips of horrible goddamn music.

Not to say the underground doesn’t have plenty of garbage, but even some of the worst underground artists have some inherent merit- because some part of their product is keeping them out of the mainstream. Often that one thing is what makes them interesting and unique. And I can rarely be upset with anything interesting and unique.

Having said that, there are plenty of bands climbing their way out of anonymity and despite being denizens of the underground- they’re still completely void of anything worth-while or interesting. And then of course there are groups who are simply over-hyped and need someone to drag their asses back out of the clouds and through preverbal shit.

So call me the great shit-dragger.

Let’s do this thing.



Avatar – Comets on Fire


For those of you who compulsively shit your pants with every Mars Volta release; go ask grandpa to borrow his ‘special pants,’ cause this album’s a squirter.
For the rest of us, who know damn well that there are eight-hour-long Santana live albums brimming with enough stoner-Latin-jam-session 70s-rock to fill that void that none of us feel from time to time- well for the rest of us, Comets on Fire is simply more re-hashing of passé genres. This is more of the same garbage that’s been storming the music media since the Strokes first hit the scene, and ruined my life.

Thanks guys. No one knows else knows quite how to say “fuck you” to creativity and innovation like bands like Avatar.



A Vintage Burden – Charalambides

For anyone who’s ever wondered to themselves, why the divorce rate on this planet is so damn high, take a moment and listen to A Vintage Burden.

Ya see Charalambides latest album is the perfect paradigm for marriage: you’ve got the man: quietly tinkering behind the scenes trying to create something vaguely pleasant or at the least, barely audible, all while being upstaged and thoroughly drowned-out in a deluge of his wife’s warbling and wandering pathetic claim at vocalization.

Yeah, Charalambides truly are a married-musician-couple. And this album actually is a wonder.

It’s a wonder this man has yet to kill his crooning, undulating, attention-whoring spouse.

God knows I wouldn’t have made it through the wedding ceremony without throttling her with the veil. I bet the loud mouth wanted to sing her vows.


Slayer – Christ Illusion

Normally overt and utterly unrestrained, heavy-handed pro or anti-religious album content and especially album titles- light a big neon “this blows” sign for me.

Well, if you’re thinking Slayer’s latest is an oddly brilliant and stunning exception to that rule… guess what?

… You’re high.

Really. High.

Even making allowances for Metal’s obvious tendency towards redundancy and unabashed repetition, I’m still woefully under whelmed and frankly, bored by this release.

Being one of the forefathers of Death Metal, Slayer has both a beautiful boon and vicious curse to grapple with. On one hand, Slayer has thoroughly mastered one sound and they need never stray far from that sound to appease legions, upon legions of drunken, black-t-shirt enrobed fans.

On the other hand, shouldn’t we expect a genre’s fraternal source to eventually birth something progressive and fresh? Shouldn’t we look to these masterminds to push the sound they’ve spawned onto great heights of glorious shredding and relentless beating?

Well, if so, Christ Illusion is not that future bending, genre warping product. And furthermore if it appeases old fans I’d still be Leary of their sincerity. Sure the die-hards may claim to love it, but will it truly see heavy rotation a year from now?

Actually, it probably will.

As far as I can tell this album sounds close enough to Slayer’s other work to keep most old-school metal hounds happily trashing and nodding.

For my buck it doesn’t hold a candle to any of today’s metal-best. Shit, I’d even listen to any one of those ten thousand post-metal slow-sludge bands, before I listen to something as obvious and weak as Christ Illusion.


0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home