Posts Tagged conceptual
The Beatles | S/T
Alright, I’ve got two copies of this one, both the stereo mix on CD. There’s notable differences between the two, which I’m going to focus on because trying to come up with some kind of original thought on this album is insane and pointless.
But isn’t this whole thing insane and pointless? One day someone might sit me down and say, “Look, you’ve proved your point or whatever with this record review thing. Why not [do this other thing], we’ll pay you. Real job, it’ll keep you busy. I understand this blog thing is the closest thing you’ve had to a desk job and that you only keep doing it to keep from going completely insane, but that’s enough for us. Just forget it.” I might go for that. Not counting on it, but I sure haven’t turned down such an offer. But how could I make sure, even once ensconced within the cushy chair of seated gainful employment, I don’t fully lose it for good? Most people have some thing, I’m sure you’ve said it: “If I didn’t have _____ I’d go crazy!” Would you? You’d go crazy. You’d take off all your clothes, jump out of a window screaming, run down a crowded street on broken ankles and among horrified onlookers, cut your throat with a butter knife. I’ve never done any thing quite like that. But I keep blogging just to be sure.
Maybe it’s in bad taste to bring up such things in a review of this particular album, as it somehow inspired Charles Manson to…go crazy. I’m not making any effort to unravel any of the lyrics or themes on this thing except to say as an artist, you can never second guess what your supposed message could be or what it could inspire in a crazy person, because they can literally make anything mean anything. I mean Helter Skelter is about an amusement park ride. Paul’s just really enthusiastic about it. But there I go with stuff you can read elsewhere.
I bought the first version in ’94, I remember that’s when I got a CD player and the Beatles albums were some of the first ones I got. Came in a longbox, two single CD cases. I got tired of them getting separated because when I listen to this thing it’s gotta be all the way through every time. So when they started making the dual cases I put them together. I still prefer this to the fancy slipcase foldout deal of the new reissue, and the minimalist Parlophone labels are far…uh, don’t wanna say “superior”…they tie the whole design together. The new one also has some new photos and notes, who cares. I like the zero meta commentary of the first reissue. You can make whatever you want of it. Hopefully it’s not a paranoid, murderous fantasy that you tragically manifest, but what are the odds of that, more than once. Not something you should worry about. Sorry, I keep bringing it up.
Really, it’s not something I used to think about when I listened to the thing. I’m not listening to it right now. Usually when I do these things, I put the record on repeat the whole time until I’m done with it. I prefer not do that now because there’s just so many paths to go down that could go on forever and I used to have this thing where I listened to it every year on my birthday, which is so corny it’s embarrassing to admit and I also used to get very drunk for this which I try not to do at all anymore so why bum myself out with a half-assed experience.
I try to put the whole thing entirely in it’s own context. No, you can’t cut it down to one disc, or listen to it doing the dishes or anything else. You gotta lay down and put the headphones on and every stupid thing is intentional and important. It’s a conceptual album with no concept. It’s a kind of story, like a David Lynch movie. Some things are better left unexplained. It’s just pure experience.
But I’m going to point out one major beef with the remaster, and it’s got nothing to do with compression or any kind of audiophile thing which is maybe there if you really get into that but it’s just one song I notice a big difference: While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Because that is one of those songs that is just such a classic rock pop song, you know this song even if you never sat down and really listened, and everyone makes a big deal about the Clapton solo but I do not give a fuck about that—it’s that the way it’s originally recorded is so crazily cacophonous with that high-pitch organ drone, it’s almost painful. That really blew me away more than anything, that they got away with that sounding like it did. Of course on the remaster, they went back to the original tapes and turned the organ down. Wow. That pretty much says it all.
So, if you don’t have this, I really think you need the non-remastered version. On Amazon the only option for that right now is the 1990 reissue on cassette. That’s probably not worth it. Look around. I’ll eventually try to get an old vinyl copy if I can find one in good shape at a reasonable price. It depends if I live long enough to eventually get paid. Might be worth it.
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GWAR | Scumdogs of the Universe
Thisssssssszzzzzzzzsssssssssszzzssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss is not the only or last GWAR album that I have purchased, but it’s the only one I currently own. I sold the others a while ago, and haven’t kept up with the new ones for at least a decade. Can’t say I regret it all that that much, but there are a couple things I do regret—1: repairing my keyboard at the beginning of the draft and just leaving it in there like people would think it was funny or something. There’s nothing funny about that. But what can you do, there’s no going back, man. 2: Looking up the wiki for the album after I had most of the thing written in my head. This might not seem like a big deal, but I’ve wasted precious mental real estate assembling my hard-won observations over the years, when all has been previously laid out in the plainest of prose. Depressing.
And why did it take me so long to notice the Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker of Ministry co-produced? (They are actually credited with their real names if you read all the fine print, unlike any member of the band.) But who is this mysterious “Ron Goudie”? Hoho, Wikipedia, you can tell everyone what they already know but remove what we don’t. I’ve got the info of Ron Goudie alright, that you think you can hide! Turns out he is a guy. Some kind of musician. Well.
Wait, there’s probably something I can say about this besides trivia. It’s good, right? In my opinion? Yeah, it’s the best. There’s some good songs on the other albums but this is the only real classic full album. Look, I compared Gwar to Mastodon and maybe it averages out, like Gwar is 80% live experience 20% album and Mastodon is the reverse, but it’s kinda the same thing. BUT. IS. IT. ?. Oh, I see what’s going on here. You’re trying to get me to admit that Gwar’s songs are not that good and it’s basically a joke band. Mastodon is not a joke band. What kind of asshole would even suggest that.
I will not admit it. I do not think it’s true. The good songs on this album are as good as anybody’s. They are completely credible Metal songs. At least the one’s Brockie sings. He was a real guy, man. And non-Metal people will praise the band at a distance, like, “they play live in those rubber suits every night, that’s dedication, gotta give those guys credit”…because the problem for some people is the authenticity vs. a regular clothes-wearing, non-pretending-to-be-space-aliens band like Mastodon.
And let’s talk about the artwork for a second. Wiki’s got nothing to say about that. In addition to everything else, there was also a Gwar comicbook that they sold at their shows. I was always too broke and covered in fake bodily fluids to get a copy. The integration of that art to the inside of the album was reason alone to hold onto it. I love the super-deformed versions on the characters and the bios. (“Balsac the Jaws of Death: Has a beartrap for a face, but why?”)
But there are the songs. Yes. I love the songs. There are the obvious joke songs: NWA take-off The Salaminizer, what I’m going to call a “spoken-word piece” Slaughterama, and show-stopper, Sexecutioner. These tracks may not hold up in the harsh glare of adulthood. They may have been the only tracks you have heard. And probably Sick of You. That was like, a single.
So they do these dumb(?) singalongs and these joke songs. Why do I take them seriously?
Take a song with fairly typical Metal lyrics like The Years Without Light. If they made a whole album of songs like this it would be better than most Anthrax albums, admit it. 95% of Thrash albums are attitude and stringing riffs together, most bands don’t always try make each song so individual and able to stand on its own. Thr broken gallop beat, the vocal cadence, it’s great.
Then you’ve got the songs like Maggots, King Queen, and Horror of Yig, my personal favorites, incorporating theatrical flourishes and sound effects that take you into the world of their unique live experience, but never leaving the musical world of Metal. Except for the bagpipes, which Korn stole. I don’t get the reason for either, but I like the instrument. Is there some kind of gay connotation? There’s a lot of gay references on the album that I don’t get why they’re there. (The printed lyrics are annotated by a member of “The Morality Squad” with things like “shocking!”) Maybe the live show originally had Oderus cross-dressing? If so they dropped that by the time I saw them in…’97, w/ the Misfits. And Mephiskapheles. And Earth Crisis?!? That was a thing that happened.
Then you’ve got (not in this order) Vlad the Impaler, Love Surgery and Death Pod, all solid standards. Black and Huge has the most obvious Ministry-like touches, with porn movie samples, not so obviously dropped in there, but woven into the texture, or perhaps layered, like a delicious industrial metal lasagna. Possibly the least defensible lyrics, because they don’t really make enough sense to be offensive. I’m not going to try to explain someone else’s in-joke. This one and album closer Cool Place to Park, a total vocal departure sung in high screams by Beefcake, always puzzled me as far fitting into the concept of the album. It all ends with the sound of sinking underwater. Maybe I need to read more Lovecraft.
Donate to the Dave Brockie Foundation or buy a t-shirt in an unresonable size b/c you waited too long
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Yamantaka // Sonic Titan | YT//ST
Hm. According to…my own internet presence…I’ve gone completely insane as of a few years ago. I’ve just been looking through what is the backlog of records I should be in the process of reviewing, if I’m taking this project seriously, and uh…it’s not looking too good. But I know better. The truth is, I’ve been insane most of my life maybe until…today? I dunno, people can snap and go insane one day, not always traumatically, just a lot of little things build up sometimes. Why can’t it work the other way around? I’ve had a few good night’s sleep in a row and things have been generally ok…maybe that’s all it took. After…so many years.
So anyway, in Japan, it’s Buddha’s birthday today, or yesterday, since it’s already tomorrow there. Some people think it’s in early December. It’s not really important. But you’re supposed to spend the day in mindful reflection, I guess, which in what you’re supposed to be doing all the time, but it’s like every other religion pretty much in that most people aren’t taking it very seriously most of the time.
So here we are. I’m picking this one unrandomly out of the pile.
Hey, I’m glad I have a blog. I would not have remembered this album. I’m trying to reorganize my files and it would take years to get to this listening to this again. Goddamn mess. What the hell do you expect from a crazy person? It made my Best of 2012 (altho it came out late 2011), which should really be a best of albums I already reviewed, shouldn’t it. Well.
☸☸☸☸☸
First of all: could we just call this album “self-titled”? We could. It is. But you know what the deal with this band is? They’re fuckin’ cool. It’s a good thing. It’s a band. That’s why you start a fuckin’ band, to do something cool. Look, if you put some unicode bullshit in your name that has to be copypasted every time, you’re kind of a cock. Granted. Some would say double slashes are just as pretentious, but it ain’t. It’s just the right amount. So the name of this album just looks better in this format so I’m using it, but let’s be clear that it a self-titled album and we’re not going to say “why-tee-slash-slash-ess-tee” in conversation, if it comes up. Which it should. Also acceptable at this point would be “the album” or, in the future, “the first one”. OK.
This band has a whole live element I don’t know much about, it’s supposedly “operatic”. I only get this from the first track, Raccoon Song, which is the most forgettable. I had literally forgotten about it. This is definitely against the general common sense “rules” for new bands, which is to put your best song first. But another of those rules is to not make the cover some kind of incomprehensible artwork that does not even have the name of the band on it, but like, a picture of the band. That makes sense. But man, fuck making sense. This cover rules. There’s no way I could not listen to a record with this cover. I would be so bummed if it wasn’t great. What the fuck is that thing? Fuckin’ cool, that’s what.
Also, there’s only 7 songs that average out to average length, for a total of only about 31 minutes. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a full album, but how many songs do you need. More than 1 or 2? NO. It’s just about perfect. If you can’t say something in under 45 minutes, you don’t have anything to say.
And what are they saying? Absolutely nothing coherent or intelligible as a real message. JUST THE WAY IT SHOULD BE. (Or not, get off my back, I’m just not-crazy today.) The only words I can make out on this album are in Japanese, a language I don’t believe any of the members actually speak. They translate to “I AM STAR CAT.” YES.
This is the single I guess, Hoshi Neko. The big stand out with a with a phased intro and the catchy Japanese hook. These are Canadians, btw. I assumed at least one was J-Canadian but apparently not. The bandcamp page uses the tags “chinese” and “iroquios”, so it’s intentionally mixing things up. Seems like some of the references are Buddhist and some are Native American…maybe. Maybe they are just making some of the shit up out of thin air. You can totally do that when you work on something cool. It’s not like fucking fan fiction. There’s no canon!
The other songs are also pretty good put not as pop. “Operatic” outside of whatever the live show consists of is squarely within the concept and sound more or less of “rock opera”, altho this is usually a bad thing in my opinion. They make something that works. I think they achieve the effect by making music that is more like soundtrack music than part of a musical.
Reverse Crystal is like a more-rocking out/less Kraut Stereolab with those same kind of high-register, unintelligible, repeating vocal phrases, and even a long second-half pop drone coda but with a lot of cymbal bashing, and it’s got like an Iron Butterfly organ solo in there. Great.
A Star over Pureland is the only explicit Buddhist reference I can find apart from the name, which most people(?) will people recognize from the Boredoms’ Eye Yamantaka (it’s not his real name). Altho if you want to get into it, these are reference to competing schools of Buddhism. Yamantaka is mostly a Tibetan thing. Pure Land is a like a Buddhist afterlife which not all Buddhists believe in. No, there’s no way to prove I am not looking this up as I go along. Oh wait, there is Pure Land in Tibet. I did just look that up. Well, there you go. There’s some Tibetan cymbals and horns in there. I knew that. I know stuff. Guitar freak-out on this track is cool, but it’s clear the keys are more their thing. It’s definitely the climax of the show, but as far as songs and general moods go, they are best and building up the tension than actually exploding. Or resolving. But it all seems worth it for the parts that work.
You know what, Crystal Fortress Over a Sea of Trees could also totally be a Tibetan thing. I don’t know that much about the Tibetan stuff. But I do know it has another killer organ solo. The particular synth rhythm track they use sounds a little out of place. It’s like we’ve been in something like a 70s horror movie and now it’s like Knight Rider all of sudden. Doesn’t quite mesh. Ends with some vague chants. Maybe that is in Tibetan. Usually done by dudes of course so it doesn’t sound anything like the standard stuff, or maybe it’s not that at all. Questions, with answers, that I am not going to try to find out. It just doesn’t matter. %
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