Review: Mindless Self Indulgence's If

“There is nothing you can do that I have not already done to myself” begins Mindless Self Indulgence’s If, and truer words cannot be spoken by a man who’s drank his own urine on stage. For more than ten years, MSI has invented a genre of their own, which can only be described as ‘Sounds like Mindless Self Indulgence.’ A blend of hardcore punk rock’s fury, the oppressively electronic atmosphere of dubstep, and lyrics so vulgar that they make the super-sexualized MTV rap videos look like a preschool in the bible belt.

In contrast to their other albums, If is possibly the most straightforward one that MSI has created. Gone are the two-minute explosions of Ritalin-deprived noise from their previous works in favor for a much more conventional verse – chorus – bridge song structure. Lyrics are still the same gigantic middle finger to anyone and everyone – fans and groupies especially. There’s a song specifically about boners. A song specifically about getting high and rocking out. And most of the rest of the album is about fucking everything that moves, and I am especially a fan of Issue’s chorus: It’s 3 am / She won’t put out / Let’s go make out with her friends / Make out with her friends’ friends.

The album is well-made, with the melodic Never Wanted to Dance and the directly disrespectful Bomb This Track standing out as the high points, but the real problem is that as a whole, If just isn’t as good as the work that MSI has done in the past.

Their well-established attention-deficit musical style just isn’t present on this album of conventionally written songs that just happen to have all the musical elements we’re used to hearing from this group. There’s none of the outrageous shock value present in this album (Frankenstein Girl’s ‘Faggot’ comes to mind) or the outright abuse of their fans (Stupid Motherfucker off of You’ll Rebel to Anything) that is present in abundance at their live performances.

There’s not much left to say about If. It isn’t a bad album at all, but it lacks the, I guess, charm of their earlier music. The lyrics are too focused on the well-traveled topics of debauchery and drugs and rock stardom, and less on the self-aggrandizing two minute tantrums that launched them to fame. I don’t think that MSI has run out of ways to push the envelope, because there are comedians like Louis CK whose claim to fame is no different. I think that If is simply an attempt at making a normal record by a band who’s fought tooth and nail for years to be anything but.

So check it out if you want some very abrasive punk-techno-rock. But don’t bother bracing your sensibilities, they’re in no real danger here.

Review: Iron Maiden's Final Frontier

Final Frontier is Iron Maiden’s fifteenth (!) album, arriving in the band’s thirty-fifth year as one of the founding fathers of heavy metal. After writing song after song on historical battles, figures, and stories, this album marks a slightly new direction for the band: This isn’t War Album, or Ancient War Album, or even Time Travel War Album. This is Nuclear Space War Album.

We are reminded right off the bat, with Satellite 15’s thundering, nearly five minute introduction that Iron Maiden is back, and they are not fucking around. This is going to be an hour and fifteen minutes of the most balls-to-the-wall rock that these six British men can possibly come up with. No significant studio trickery here, either: If it’s not a noise that a guitar can make, then they probably don’t care about it.

You will not find a more straightforward metal album than this. Chugging riffs and belted, ominous lyrics, the occasional perplexing song about peace and unity (Coming Home) that never feels quite right coming from a band that’s always singing about the apocalypse and giving graphic descriptions of death and battle, but I can see how that would get boring.

The songs on this album are a showcase of what these men have learned over the last thirty-five years, which is mostly that they really, really like heavy metal. And they like it the way they play it. Both lyrically and musically, this stuff fits comfortably in with any of their other work and, where Iron Maiden has refused to expand and explore other styles of music they have in turn become better and better at making this brand of music.

Most readily apparent is, after all these years and all these albums, and while these guys have done nearly all there is to do within the rather limiting New Wave of British Heavy Metal genre, they’re not coasting on success and endlessly touring with the same material. And while their music feels at home in the 80’s, it manages to not feel stuck there, as here and there you will hear a melody or riff straight out of contemporary radio rock. The first couple minutes, and chorus of, Starblind is a good place to go hunting for this.

But it’s the final two songs on the album that really make it for me, The Man Who Would Be King, and When the Wild Wind Blows. King is a powerful and straightforward trip down E major avenue, with no surprise key changes or augmentations lying in wait to disrupt the power chord groove.

Wild Wind is a fantastic song for several reasons: Dickinson finally decides to, however briefly, use his voice in something that can not be described as ‘very intense’. The basis for the song is a folky, almost Irish ditty which is nicely mirrored throughout the verses between the vocals and guitar. And the solo, which makes up the balance of the track’s 11 minute length is a carefully constructed miniature symphony, Maiden putting down their riff machine gun in favor of thematic variation that lends itself very nicely to the original melody, which echoes here and there throughout the entire piece.

If you’re a fan of Iron Maiden, you will definitely like this album. Partly because it’s metal, partly because it’s Maiden, but mostly because it properly sounds like Iron Maiden. The lead single, El Dorado, is essentially The Trooper but redone and dressed up a bit. They know what their fans want and love, and they love it just as much, and are very much above phoning in a so-so record with a few weedlies here and there. Final Frontier is a quality product, and an anomaly in that here we have a tried-and-tested group of musicians who are still making and kicking ass at the very same thing they were doing over a quarter of a century ago.

Review: The Gorillaz's Plastic Beach

The personnel list of the Gorillaz 2010 Plastic Beach looks like something Timbaland or Danger Mouse would attempt: nearly a front-to-back string of collaborative tracks (even the intro!), with only four the total 16 being credited entirely to Damon Albam and Jamie Hewlett, the group’s creators. On the guest list we have a long list of hip hop artists I’ve never really heard of, the Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music, and for some reason, Snoop Dogg.

The album loosely follows a theme based on the keywords of its title: Plastic Beach. We find many references to tropical paradises, the ocean, and peaceful co-existence, and a few instances of warning against the plastic beach, the falsified, manufactured façade of beauty and dishonesty that has wormed its way into the public’s scorn. Don’t look too deeply for meaning in this, though, because what we have here is an alternative British hip hop / rock album with a liberal Jamaican mindset with about twenty different creative minds sharing the spotlight, and that’s a little too cluttered for any well-defined purpose or message to take root.

What makes up the length of the album is about 70% spacey hip hop, 30% more traditional pallet-cleansing pop music, and the really, really, really weird Sweepstakes. I’ll talk about the hip hop first.

Snoop Dogg’s entry leads the album, and his drawling rhyming style brings you into a properly mellowed state to listen in, and the tracks that follow, all the way up until number six, the groovy and snarky Superfast Jellyfish is one display of competent musicianship after another, with more bass grooves and twinkling vocoded accents than you could ever find a use for. Many of the rappers on this album make the unfortunate mistake of talking about themselves more than they should, which will lead to a few moments of eye-rolling. This won’t be too much of a problem, because it isn’t that difficult to ignore the voice for the skillfully crafted beats for a few measures.

Empire Ants, On Melancholy Hill, and Cloud of Unknowing retain all the shadowy technoy tassels that hang from every single second of the album, but offer a more melodically driven experience which is a welcome break from the frequently experimental atmosphere. Melancholy Hill won me over instantly with its prominent bass, chorus, and extremely tight focus.

Sweepstakes, however, is just weird. Not even the talent of Mos Def is able to make sense of a needlessly complex percussive loop with beep-booping recorders in the background. Beepy sounds are the domain of computers, mister Albam, not woodwinds.

As was the case with the majority of this album, it wasn’t until the third or fourth listening that the songs began to open up, and reveal their inner workings and complexities. What sounds at first as trippy, ambient and confusing will eventually be understood to be a well-made, tight hip hop beat that is accented here and there by a digital orchestra that you won’t see implemented any better until somebody really really studies this and tries to outdo it.

Plastic Beach is a risky chimera of an album: many people working with almost entirely electronic sounds. There is a definite risk of coming off as ingenuine, as studio magic these-guys-have-no-talent negligible. But fortunately that risk was averted. The music is well-crafted, making up for the occasionally wandering lyrical performances. While still largely a hip hop sound, Albam manages to keep enough variation from track to track so that nobody gets bored and nothing gets too repetitive. A successful album, and a wise step forward for the Gorillaz as a whole.

Review: Jimmy Eat World's Invented

I’ve been waiting for this one.

Invented, the seventh album by the curiously humble Arizonian Jimmy Eat World is adding another chapter onto the band’s almost fifteen year career. It is also something I’ve been looking forward to all year, being a great admirer of their music. Their 1999 work Clarity has been lauded by fans and critics alike as their greatest, and touted by the Alternative Press as one of the top ten albums of the decade. High praise indeed. Still, their self-description has always been simply ‘We are a rock band from Arizona.’

Invented, however, is three albums and eleven years separated and in that time, the styles of a group can drastically change. Have they retained the skills and sensibilities that made them the underground juggernaut of ten years ago?

Our first track, Heart is Hard to Find gets things going with all the familiar set pieces that made Clarity stand out; simplistic, unobtrusive acoustic backing, gentle ‘oooh’s’ in the background, and probably the best use of orchestration on the album that punctuates the song and serves as a reminder of Adkins’s penchant for writing the most obviously simplistic melodies that masterfully augment the song by bringing out unheard qualities of the same three chords in ways you’d kick yourself for not thinking of first.

My Best Theory, Action Needs an Audience, Higher Devotion and Coffee and Cigarettes fight the usual losing battle for distortion and balls-out rockery on this record, not for lack of quality, but because they’re simply overwhelmed by the slow stuff this time around. That being said, the excellent E minor Theory is perhaps the tightest pop song they’ve written yet. And Devotion’s chugging, percussive chorus is a noble attempt, but it’s pretty clear that this isn’t where their passion lies: the slow stuff.

A look at the track listing shows not one but two six and a half plus minute songs and what do you know, both of them are the kind of gentle, lovelorn downers that have unfailingly given the heart and soul to every album of theirs since the titular Clarity. Taking into account the other similar tracks, we arrive at a grand total of almost thirty minutes of such music. Melodic, choral and orchestrated, Littlething, Movielike, Cut, Invented, and Mixtape will satisfy anyone’s need for soaring chords and belted vocals.

It’s very difficult to write about this album, to explain exactly what the magic ingredient is that makes me enjoy it so much. Because it isn’t their strongest, most heartfelt work (Clarity) and it doesn’t hit the sweet spot of emotion and pavement-thumping rock and roll that 2004’s Futures did, the fast and heavy songs feel like unwelcome guests in an album that tries very hard to recreate the feel of Clarity.

Is it fine art? No.

Will it make you think? Probably a little.

Does it sound good? Hell yes.

For the next few days, the whole album will be on the band’s myspace: http://www.myspace.com/jimmyeatworld. Go give it a listen.

Review: Avenged Sevenfold's Nightmare

Nightmare, the fifth album by Californian metalheads Avenged Sevenfold is very easily one of the most anticipated and talked about releases in the heavy metal community, and the music world at large. The group was propelled into a brief pseudo legendary status after the death of their drummer and primary songwriter, James “The Rev” Sullivan. Much speculation was given as to whether or not the band would continue with the album, or if all efforts would be put on hiatus. To their credit, however, the band pushed forth and entered the studio with Mike Portnoy, a meteoric talent himself and, until very recently, the drummer of prog rock masters Dream Theater. Should this album fail, then, it will not be for lack of musical talent.

The album’s title and lead track, Nightmare will sound immediately cliché to any connoisseur of the heavy metal arts, from its music box lullaby opening that is swiftly crushed by blast beats and soaring, sinister guitar riffs. Did Metallica kinda do something like this? Yeah. Didn’t Iron Maiden do something like this? Yeah. Didn’t Ozzy kinda make a band about this? Yeah. But it’s okay, because the super-heavy, almost western, cowboy metal that this group offers brings a new flavor to the bland and overused concept of setting bad dreams to creepy music. Didn’t Tim Burton do a movie about this? Sorry, I’ll stop.

After Nightmare, we are subjected to seven songs in a row that contain some of the heaviest and most unrelentingly furious work that has ever been produced by Avenged. Fingertapping and sweep picking through avant-guarde modal scales and doubly diminished chords do a fine job of keeping the songs aurally dark and closed off, but in most instances, the choruses are melodic and anthemic, finely sung poems of war-torn woe, or of woeful soldiers on far-off battlefields. This odd mix of dark, atonal guitar wankery and soulful choruses just barely works, as for the entire album we see the band battling its own indecisiveness as to whether they’re going to go off the deep end and be the loudest and most assaulting musicians possible, or if they’re going to retain their marketability after the formidable commercial success of their previous albums.

The first two thirds of the album are punctuated by the super duper heavy God Hates Us, and once beyond that, we arrive at the two songs that best represent the battle of the genres in this album; the uptempo ballad Victim, and the ephemeral and haunting Fiction.

While the guitar work in Victim is much slower than many of the other songs in the album, one might think that makes the song not as good because of course, faster equals better. But the fact remains that slower music is much easier to hear, and when our axe man Synyster Gates is flying off the handle with his 32^nd note apreggios, there is a great deal that is lost in the distortion and the overall mix of the sound. Victim solves these problems with two finely crafted, acrobatic solos that are truly lighter than air and compliment the smooth vocal presence. It all stays in the same key, and there are none of the major, sudden dynamic changes that jar the earlier tracks. If there is a conventional, proper rock song to be found on the album, here it is.

In the opposite direction, the band’s desire for dissonance and the ethereal realm of the whole tone scale we find the ghastly Fiction. This is also noteworthy for being the final piece of music competed for the album by Owens, reportedly finished only three days before his death and ending with the lyrics “I hope it’s worth it / What’s left behind me / I know you’ll find your way when I’m not with you tonight”. Owens provides us with a floating, echoing piano vamp that feels like Bohemian Rhapsody’s melody being chased by Jason Voorhees, without any accompaniment for nearly the entire piece. If you only listen to two songs on this album, make it Fiction and Victim, and then it’s up to you if you want to hear how these two styles mesh across the rest of the work.

All told, Nightmare is a success. There is a lot of confusion within the album as I’ve already said, but at the end of the day, it breaks down to a brief section of rabidly energetic sonic devastation followed by a beautiful chorus that begs to be sung along to. And when you’re in the audience, these are the two things you want the most in the act. So while this isn’t the best thing to listen to on your iPod, it’s quite a different matter when it’s performed live.