About this blog

This is my secondary, extremely-seldomly updated blog about music.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Some Headphones Amplify Celebrities Over Sound

This excellent New York Times article summarizes the trend of branded, often celebrity-endorsed headphones you see all over busses and college campuses these days. Celebrity endorsements, attractive visual design, and extensive marketing all serve to drive up demand and get consumers to pay hundreds of dollars for headphones with a decidedly cheaper sound. The main purpose of headphones is to reproduce sound, and sacrificing this goal for peripheral ones like style is, to me, a poor trade. If you want to wear something cool-looking on your head, get a nice hat.

Monday, February 11, 2013

2012 Addendum--Anathema, Woods of Ypres, and more

As luck would have it, within a month of finishing my top 30 albums list for 2012, I have happened upon a wealth of great albums from that illustrious year which would surely have qualified for the list had I known about them. Five great albums each of a different genre and country of origin.

Infected Mushroom - Army of Mushrooms (Psychedelic trance/Electronica; Israel)
As their name suggests, Infected Mushroom's intense, bizarre sound is evocative of a bad drug trip. Their new album is a big move away from the metal influences that had been creeping in since IM the Supervisor and toward other contemporary electronic styles like dubstep. This style of music is not my specialty at all; the general pattern is bizarre electronic melodies, percussion, and judiciously chosen (for lack of a better word) noises over a driving beat, sometimes with vocals and sometimes without. The balance seems to be more towards instrumental jams or less-emphasized vocals on Army of Mushrooms, as well as a somewhat more intense, less playful mood throughout compared with Legend of the Black Shawarma. "Nothing to Say" and "Serve My Thirst" are good examples of Army of Mushrooms' brand of genre-bending insanity. There are also two interesting covers: "Send Me an Angel" by Israeli band Mashina with all-Hebrew vocals, and "The Pretender" by Foo Fighters. Like Infected Mushroom's earlier work, it's a lot of fun and great to listen to while coding.

Orden Ogan - To the End (Power metal; Germany)
I've often said that power metal, as a genre, is more about the pursuit of a Platonic ideal than innovation and reinvention. In this case, Orden Ogan hits wonderfully close to the mark on their new album To the End. With bombastic "chorus"ed vocals similar to Blind Guardian and amazingly versatile musicianship that explores a vast compositional space, they may be Germany's greatest unsung metal heroes. See just the first four tracks, "To the End", "The Things We Believe In", "Land of the Dead", and "The Ice Kings" (a sound ballad) for examples of how varied, yet consistently good the songs are. "This World of Ice" seems to be channeling Meshuggah, of all bands, in its atonal chugging I normally ignore intro tracks in my reviews, it the one on this album, "The Frozen Few", is noteworthy for its anthemlike guitar harmonies and galloping drums, almost sounding like an Iced Earth creation. To The End takes many risks and succeeds on nearly all counts, managing to stay fresh like a breath of icy air for over fifty minutes. Easily one of the best power metal albums of 2012. (Also, if you are learning of Orden Ogan for the first time like I was, be sure to check out their other albums, particularly Easton Hope)

Anathema - Weather Systems (Neo-progressive/atmospheric rock; United Kingdom)
I find it difficult to stop enjoying this album long enough to write about it. Weather Systems is 55 minutes of beautiful, symphonic, largely acoustic neo-progressive rock, which is especially amazing coming from one of the pioneering bands of the death/doom metal subgenre. With emotional soundscapes of pianos, acoustic guitars, and strings that range from minimalistic to grandiose, Weather Systems could almost be easy-listening music if not for the thoughtful songwriting hidden beneath the beauty; while the sound has much in common with Marillion, the organic, evolving song structure is more akin to post rock. It's becoming something of a cliche for me to say that this music engages your head and your heart, but seriously, do yourself a favor and check out Weather Systems. It's as if Anathema wanted to rebut progressive metal bands who think that being more abrasive makes you more interesting. Special recommendations: Both parts of "Untouchable", "Lightning Song", and "Internal Landscapes". The latter in particular, with its beautiful voiceover narration of a near-death experience, speaks better to the concept of afterlife than any doctrine-filled Christian contemporary song I've heard.

Woods of Ypres - Woods 5: Grey Skies & Electric Light (Blackened doom metal; Canada)
This album is absolutely brilliant and would definitely have been top 10 (maybe even top 5) material if it had been ranked. Woods of Ypres' surprisingly accessible, mid-tempo blend of black and doom metal is one of the most unique I have ever heard, somehow managing to seem dark and melancholic at the same time as upbeat and almost "fun", almost like a more pensive version of Kvelertak. See "Lightning and Snow" and the raucous, black metal-infused "Adora Vivos" for some examples of this fascinating fusion of styles. "Keeper of the Ledger" and "Traveling Alone" are slower and more doom-y, with the latter featuring what sounds like a clarinet supplying a nice backing melodic line. They have some of the best song titles I've ever seen, such as "Career Suicide (Is Not Real Suicide)", one of the most upbeat songs on the album, or "Kiss My Ashes (Goodbye)", an eleven-minute epic that seems to cycle through every musical idea they explore. Their deep-voiced vocalist, David Gold, was very memorable, switching between a remarkably expressive basso profundo and higher-pitched rasps and doing both exceedingly well. Tragically, he died in a car accident in 2011, so this album is Woods' last. This casts the album in an appropriately macabre light, and lyrics like "A moment of silence/But not one moment more/The dead are to be forgotten/We are here to be adored " seem so prophetic they send shivers down my spine. I plan on ignoring the advice and continuing to enjoy Gold's and Woods of Ypres' magnum opus even now that they're dead and gone.

Ne Obliviscaris - Portal of I (Progressive death/black metal; Australia)
When I hear that a band is "progressive death metal", I can't help but compare them with classic Opeth, and the band tends to lose out in my mind on this comparison. The extremely ambitious new Australian band Ne Obliviscaris (Latin for "forget not") is the first I have heard with the potential to make Opeth (even when they were metal) look pedestrian. This is a progressive extreme metal band with a violin. They combine the progressive brilliance of Opeth with the compositional complexity of Dream Theater with a touch of the string-y insanity of Unexpect with the colossal scale and ambition of Wintersun's Time I (but clocking in at a robust 71 minutes). Like a veritable kaleidoscope of sound, their music masterfully varies its dynamics, mood, and even genre to suit the band's whims. For instance, the first song, "Tapestry of the Starless Abstract", starts like a solid black metal song with thundering blast beats and double-bass drumming over intricate, atmospherically dissonant riffing and screams--but then at 0:40, is that a banjo? That somehow works perfectly into the music? And then, after a few more minutes of chaos, it transitions to a lighter progressive rock section with violin harmonies that then fades completely to a tender, delicate acoustic guitar and violin section that not only sounds like a different song, but by a completely different band. Or consider "And Plague Flowers the Kaleidoscope", where the ominous sound of the violin evokes an image of a dying flower before an almost tango-like guitar riff transitions us into a jazzy violin-and-bass intro. The bass guitar is delightfully audible and present for this excellently-produced album unlike in so many others where it gets virtually lost in the compressed mix. "As Icicles Fall" features more clean vocals (the band has two vocalists) and a more mellow, but still thoroughly cold sound more akin to power progressive metal. This is probably the most promising debut album I have ever heard besides Wintersun and overall one of the best releases of 2012. I'm sad I missed it during that illustrious year.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

2012 in Retrospect

As luck would have it, within a month of finishing my top 30 albums list for 2012, I have found a bunch of great albums from last year. I am writing an addendum post going over them, but here are some previews of the highlights:

Absolutely beautiful neo-prog from a former death/doom metal band:

Brilliant and truly unique metal sung by a dead man:

Foo Fighters cover by a psychedelic trance band:


Extreme(ly) progressive metal with a violin; Opeth meets Unexpect meets Wintersun: