Review: Planetoid's Abraxis Tactics

Planetoid’s The Abraxis Tactics – Phase 1: The Kiss of the Magnetar is both their newest release, and first foray into the wide open world of confusing record titles. Only four tracks long, it is the first, presumably, in a series of releases of singles that are, presumably, about a lot of things being either threatened with, or met by their destruction.

Sound-wise, it’s much the same as the band’s first album. For those of you who do not already know this sound, think of Muse getting into a bar fight with Symphony X: spacey guitar effects laid thick upon not quite prog, but not simply rock arrangements. One notable change though, is this single has more polish than Shadow. Some studio magic is apparent in the layered ending of Soul Power, and other more subtle touches crop up here and there.

Step Away From the Controls is both the centerpiece and tightest of the record’s tracks. A jumping, thick groove adds another layer of threat to Locrius’s screaming preacher vocals. Flowing smoothly into Kiss of the Magnetar, a more moody and brooding song, but still sufficiently violent: ‘If I run out of plasma / I’ll rip you apart with my hands’.

Fortunately, Planetoid hasn’t bled their ideas dry on their first record, as many groups are wont to do. Unfortunately, this here Abraxis Tactics is over too quickly, and I can’t figure out what the title is supposed to mean. I’ll end by saying that while I do not know who/what a/the Magnetar is, if this band is singing about it, I don’t think I want it kissing me.

Review: Agalloch's Marrow of the Spirit

Folk metal. Not two words you’d expect to find in that order. Typically coming from regions in northern Europe, Scandinavia and Norway and the like, and dealing with themes of paganism, Vikings, glorious battle, and the black plague. Very, very popular and prominent in the areas that it’s from, folk metal has not really broken into the American audience very successfully. Which makes it rather interesting to discover that Agalloch is from Seattle which, if you’ve completed the second grade will know to be nowhere near Europe at all.

Agalloch has been around for fifteen years now, and Marrow of the Spirit is the latest release, totaling four full-length albums and seven EP’s. Clearly there’s some significant back-catalogue for this record to live up to. So, can it?

Yes, mostly. One thing irks me right away, however. Historically, Agalloch is not a metal band in the ‘loud and fast’ sense, leaving the slow, plodding pace of their music and the empty and hopeless lyrics to amass the proper brutality and power that other bands don’t have to worry about because they’re tripping over their double bass pedals and guitar solos. So picture my displeasure when Into the Painted Grey opens with… forty seconds of blast beats. The real shame here is, that while the instruments (most notably the guitar) are playing as fast as they possibly can be, the runs of tremolo picking last just as long as a typical riff’s slower playing would. It just feels like they’ve written a very nice introduction to their song and somewhere along the line decided to stuff it full of as many notes as possible. Just doesn’t jive so well with the rest of the album.

The rest of the album is par for the course: Agalloch's inspiration comes from the massive, expansive forests of the American northwest, and their music is their attempt to capture the desolation and sinister mysteries that could lurk in the shadows of the hills. Lyrics like these, from the seventeen-minute Black Lake Nidstang really capture the supernatural glow of their music.

Where have all the noble cranes gone?
Where have all the stags disappeared to?
Piled below in the tomb of this burdened pool
a curse to those who corrupt these sacred woods
a curse to those who taste this solemn water

Marrow is by and large a very risk-free album for the band, save for those stupid blast beats. All the set pieces are here: old, rusty sounding acoustic guitars, fuzzy distortion, big, dissonant open chords and half-whispered, half-screamed vocals. One interesting touch this time around is that the entire album was recorded and mized in analog, on old equipment from a few decades ago to give the music the same slightly rough, slightly unpolished beauty as the forests it's written for. And it works very well, because even though it's not up to the same standard of quality as the music we're used to listening to , this album isn't nice, clean I-IV-V rock music either. It's ugly and it's rough, and a fittingly ugly, rough final cut is appropriate.

If you're into Agalloch, this new release will not disappoint you. NPR (of all groups) put this in their top 50 albums of 2010, and Decibel Magazine crowned it as the single best album of the year. So check it out if these merits impress you, or if you're still wondering what exactly this 'folk metal' crap is all about.

Review: Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster

Lady Gaga has risen to the peak of the pop star world in just two years. Managing to generate staying power and interest within the highly dispensable genre, she’s somehow found a way to charge two hundred dollars for her sold-out arena shows despite having only one and a half albums to her name. The wet dream of gossip columnists, and flamboyant champion of the flamboyantly gay, what the hell is it about her heavily synthesized music that’s turned her into such a juggernaut?

It’s part inspiration, part liberal borrowing, and part her being a good pianist; Gaga’s one-off performances of her songs on talk shows and radio programs (check Youtube) are far more interesting to listen to than the songs as they appear on her albums. Fame Monster is a much more polished and pleasing product that its predecessor. Straight away, the first three tracks are criminally catchy, sappily romantic dance songs, one of which was strikingly familiar on the very first listen…

I was fortunate enough to spend my entire childhood listening to the records of ABBA, easily one of the best pop groups that ever was. And the second track of Fame Monster, Alejandro, is a composite song of several of ABBA’s singles and melodies, and feels much like electronic re-creation of ABBA’s style, and if ABBA hadn’t fallen by the wayside a decade ago, I’m sure some kind of stink would have been raised over this, but alas.

Speechless is both refreshing, and a sore thumb juxtaposed to the rest of the album. A piano/rock ballad doesn’t fit very well on a sexualized dance album, nor does the use of acoustic piano and drums, and electric guitars with weeping riffs. And it’s after Speechless that the album kind of falls apart. Dance in the Dark and Telephone feel like a rehashed return to the styles of the first three tracks, in a not-so-good sloppy seconds kind of way. So Happy I Could Die almost gets it right, but oddly emphasized masturbation references and an out of place hook of ‘Aay’s’ and ‘Yay-hah’s’ interrupt the slow and mellow groove of the song. Lastly, Teeth is a strange country-gospel-blues song that manages to have a full brass section playing above the synthesizer bass that Gaga seems unable to leave home without.

Fame Monster is half great and half unsuccessful experiment. Fortunately, the good and bad parts are already neatly organized from the start to save you the trouble. It’s kind of sad though, because nothing on any of these songs is as good as this bare-bones variation of Paparazzi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3R3KqrJAI4 She doesn’t need all these programmed beats and overdubbed vocals to play great music, and her album works are definitely performing below her potential. Hopefully her future work will show some of the musical complexity that she’s really capable of.

Review: Cherry Suede's Cherry Suede

Cherry Suede is a little-known rock band from Ottawa, Canada whom I discovered through a Facebook advertisement that touted them as a ‘Classic rock band that sounds like Boston meets Def Leppard’. That was enough to get my attention, so off I went to see if their deeds could match their Facebook words. I was very pleased.

Boston meets Def Leppard indeed. Classic rock indeed. Their debut (and so far only) 2006 self-titled album is twelve songs that are absolutely reminiscent of 70’s and 80’s rock. Plenty of love songs, the word ‘baby’ pronounced ‘baybay’, all that good stuff. Mix these songs in with Boston’s own debut, or Def Leppard’s work, and it will feel right at home.

While obviously a modern recording, all the instrumentation and effects are straight out of thirty years ago; two guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, and a singer (with one track’s exception of a very cheesily implemented harmonica). The guitar effects are bare-bones. Distortion, of course, but the analog, tube-amp distortion that came before all the direct-intervention electronic modification that exists in modern amps, and just a single wah pedal enable the guitars to be used properly: as something more than power chord dispensaries. We’ve got actual, fully-realized chords in every track, frequent use of modulations, both direct and chromatic, and secondary dominants, techniques that sadly elude many current artists, and guitar solos that feel at home in the song, and not just an excuse for the guitarist to go off on a fast-as-possible shredding tangent.

Given the small pool of instrumentation and effects, and the budgetary limitations of a debut album, the risk of the songs ending up as samey-sounding is large, and they band does not escape this entirely. The uptempo songs all follow similar formulas, and the slower songs their own. Majority of the songs are in G, E, D, or C major – pretty standard for this music. However, the arrangements are very carefully done, and there are enough tricks and surprises in each track to keep the whole album sounding fresh enough.

Best of all, the whole shebang is free. The band has, for whatever reason, decided that they’re going to give away the whole album for free online under Creative Commons on their website, just Google their name. This is a very cool, very selfless move on their part, and while it doesn’t affect the content of the music, the act of gifting this music to anyone who wants it, with no aim for profit or fame gives the album as a conceptual item a very personal feel, which is very rare in music.

This is an album that strives to tread the same ground as the rock artists of the late 1970’s, and I really believe that if it had been released then, Cherry Suede would be a household name today. I’m aware that the realm of classic rock is a dangerous area to assign musical merit within, classic rock fans being a very entrenched community, but this record is made with the same styles, themes, and attitudes as the rock of thirty years ago. It simply took a while to get to us.