Review: The Birthday Massacre's Pins and Needles

Pins and Needles is the fourth album by Toronto’s goth rockers The Birthday Massacre, three years after the release of 2007’s Walking With Strangers. They’ve clearly taken their sweet time writing this one, so how did it come out?

This group has always had a rather unique approach to rock music, maintaining a sickeningly stereotypical Hot Topic/Mall Goth appearance of untold thousands of misunderstood 14 year old girls everywhere. And though the lyrics are through and through one lovelorn heartbreak after another, this album is a success, for several reasons.

Firstly, the band places heavy emphasis on the keyboard player, who rotates between a techy square wave sound, chimes and bells, and overly synthesized strings. His contributions on each track singlehandedly maintain the atmospheric haze which has remained a constant from album to album.

The vocalist, stage name Chibi, does not have a very powerful voice, and fortunately she knows it. In time she’s worked with these limitations and Owen’s keys to transform the band’s sound into what can best be described as lullaby gothic rock. Very simple, almost cinder block melodies permeate every song, occasionally coming off as repetitive and phoned in, but very often her smooth soothing voice works well with the deep, yet equally cinder block guitar work and distorted, throbbing bass.

Third, is their drummer. He likes to be called Rhim, and in all honesty, his place should be a touring drummer for a big-ticket hip hop artist because his beats are damn good. With his skills added to the band, we arrive at a sextet of gothic lullaby rockers who could walk onto any nightclub stage and burn the house down.

Pins and Needles is the end result of ten years of music-making, and their skills are honed to a catchy, wonderfully consistent point. Though there are rapid shifts in dynamic throughout the album, most notable on the title track, none of these are jarring or off-putting at all.

The second track, Always is a perfect example of how these guys take some very contrasting talents and make them work very, very well. We’re treated to a precision-written piece with two choruses back to back, in which the melodic tension is maintained and built upon masterfully before resolving into itself with a deeply satisfying drop. “It’s not what I want, for always” laments Chibi but oh how wrong you are my dear, this is what I want.

Other moments of prowess are the percussively driven Shallow Grave, with a beat that would be at home in any top 40 hit, and the eerie and powerful Control.

The remainder of the album’s music is good, but the dragged out down-tempo ending goes against the grain of the first three quarters’ worth of energetic noise, but this hardly detracts from what this album is: solidly made, and a clear indication of progress and improvement from their previous work.

Almost as Knee-Jerk as the People I'm Bashing

Music is a major part of our culture. I’m not going to give a history here of the profound effect that musical expression has had on our society, and how screwed we’d all be without it. No, I’m going to describe how music is dividing our culture, and making fools and barbarians out of the best of us.

Music is what we use to identify ourselves. The emotions and words, melodies and beats contained in the songs we love is how we see our inner self. Listen to almost any ACDC cut and you think “This is what I’m like. I’m a badass, and if you can’t handle this, then get out.’ We aspire in our minds to be that rock star on the stage, to wail on that guitar, to play the hell out of that drum kit, to drop the greatest verse ever, or to sing into the rafters, and leave the crowd weeping at the power of your voice. What I’m saying is that we put our favorite musicians on a pedestal, and idolize them to the point of blind reverence.

Famed videogame critic Ben “Yhatzee” Crenshaw said once that, “The worst thing you can do to an artist is to tell him that his work is perfect when it isn’t.” If that is true, then the second worst thing you can do is to disregard his work as pointless and meaningless before you give it a chance.

Music fans are the quickest to commit this sin, and it’s most apparent across decades, and contemporary popular styles. The most infuriating critique I hear made against artists is that they’re ‘talentless’. And ten times out of ten, the offender is not a musician themselves, couldn’t tell a major seventh from an inverted minor second. And one of the artists I used to hear this used on was Fall Out Boy; a pop-punk band that was slammed left and right by anyone with a soapbox, largely because their fan base consisted largely of fourteen-year-old screaming girls.

Listen to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV2YKdiFjDE

Listen to that! That’s a powerfully talented vocalist, who’s hitting notes he has no business going anywhere near. But still people dump on it because this kind of music isn’t representative of their generation, or their geographic region, or whatever reason they choose to become their battle flag.

There is a rule that I have in regards to criticizing someone else’s work. If you’re going to say it sucks, then say why it sucks, and how it could be improved. If you want to say that your preferred style of music is better, then tell me why it’s better. If you’re going to say that a group is talentless, then prove that you can do it better. Play their songs better than. So many times I’ve heard one group or another assigned a quick label and then forgotten, “Oh they’re emo, they suck.” Or, “Those idiots can’t even play their instruments, X is much better.” It’s this knee-jerk, unreasoned criticism that is guaranteed to break my balls and drive me up the wall. So please, if you’re going to criticize something, aspire to be more than a passive participant.

Review: Linkin Park's A Thousand Suns

Linkin Park’s fourth studio album A Thousand Suns marks a radical departure from the rap-rock formula that set them on the international stage and made their debut work Hybrid Theory the second best-selling album of the last decade. It’s a concept album, telling the events of a nuclear holocaust (Complete with almost a full minute’s sampling of Robert Oppenheimer’s speech following the first atomic bomb test). The band has described it as ‘atmospheric’ and ‘genre-busting’, saying that it’s a more evolved, mature sound, a departure from the angst-driven lyrics of Hybrid Theory and Meteora.

A Thousand Suns is a carefully constructed political statement, a logical progression in subject matter from 2007’s Minutes to Midnight, in reference to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist’s Doomsday Clock. Does this album have what it takes to keep Linkin Park in the spotlight?

Straight away, the old Linkin Park feel is absent, with not one, but two ambient intro tracks aiming to establish a spacey, contemplative mood. Not a good first step for a group whose original single featured the lyrics “Shut up when I’m talking to you!”

After that, three minutes into the album, we arrive at the first actual song, Burning in the Skies, which opens with heavily processed drums and an ambient piano vibe that permeates nearly every track here. “I’m swimming in the smoke of bridges I have burned.” Croons lead vocalist Chester Bennington, in the chorus of this borderline synthpop adventure.

After Burning, we have an eighteen second interlude of crickets chirping (presumably the extended middle finger of the first three tracks was enough to clear the room), which leads into When They Come For Me, a Shinoda-centric rap track with a tribal drum beat, and a Muse-inspired bridge. What’s most annoying about the song is that while it’s more or less a return to form, and excellently displays Shinoda’s rapping skills, it’s like everything else in this album; a sore thumb. It doesn’t fit with what came before, or what comes after, Robot Boy

Robot Boy is another ambient piano item, with overlaid four-part vocals on top of a marching hip hop beat. It’s the second of many times in this album that the band strives for the spacey get-up-off-the-ground balladry of Muse. It’s a largely failed experiment of a song, with Chester’s off-key moaning and ‘YEAAAHHH’S’ toward the end endlessly echoing and cluttering up an already reverb-packed cluster of tones. At the very end, for a few brief bars, Linkin Park remembers that they are in fact a rock band, and bring in their bassist Phoenix to lay down a single note.
Up next is Jornada Del Muerto, yet another ambient passing tone of a track, just over ninety seconds long that builds up to yet another synthesizer riff, with driving marching drums and a cacophony of noise that builds to a magnificent climax only to fade quickly into nothing like it was caught with its hand in the cookie jar, and the cadence is lost just in time for Waiting For the End, which I am doing in earnest now. Another confusing mixture of genres, Shinoda brings a borderline Jamacian accent to the mic to deliver his vocals, describing himself as ‘All cahht up in dee eye ah dah stahm’ while Chester puts down a skillful, if slurred new-age ballad in the chorus.

Next we have Blackout. And here I am the most conflicted. This is strictly a Chester piece, blending the chaotic assault of Mindless Self Indulgence’s acidic-techno rebellion, and the soft keytar bleeps of nerd rockers Freezepop. Two styles of music I like, that, when combined do not complement one another. Within sixty seconds we’re taken from a sample of Chester’s most intense vocal presence on the entire album cut up on a mixing board, and fired from an M16 in a brutal staccato to a tender chorus set against a synthesizer and that damned ambient piano that will leave no track untouched.

Track 10, Wretches and Kings, marks the first time in the album that two actual songs are back to back with no filler material in between. And if Blackout was Chester’s time to shine, this is absolutely Mike Shinoda country. Wretches positively oozes the energy of Shinoda’s masterful hip hop project, Fort Minor. The grinding, shrieking atonal guitar chugging mesh with the drums to create the heaviest, loudest, drag-your-knuckles-in-the-concrete beat that the band has ever produced. Chester makes a devastating foul in the chorus, deciding that it is now his turn to pretend he’s in a reggae band, delivering a chorus straight out of the Bahamas. I guess nothing has gone right on this record.

Wisdom, Justice, and Love is a ninety second sampling of a Martin Luther King speech that sets the stage for the return of the ambient piano. As the track moves, the voice becomes distorted and robotic, with a chorus and the roar of a rocket engine filling the background. ‘Do not be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.’ The robo-MLK warns.

Iridescent comes next, a slow, pop-piano duet between our two vocalists. “Do you feel caught and lost in desperation?” Bennington asks. Yes. Yes, I do. Fortunately, the track redeems itself somewhat, as over time it transforms into a proper rock song, and is the closest the band has come so far to actually getting this whole ‘genre’ thing right so far.

Almost over, and with one more filler track, The Fallout, a robotic auto-tuned reprise of Burning’s chorus. And with that, we are brought to The Catalyst, the album’s lead single. It is important to note that this is not a rock song. This is a synthpop, techno anthem which amounts to Mike and Chester belting out the same chorus over and over and over for nearly six minutes.

Track 15. The Messenger is… a four-chord campfire acoustic ballad. Chester enters the booth for the first time without any autotune and sings the hell out of this song, overloading the mic a couple times. But do you want this guy to be screaming his lungs out on top of, essentially, the chords of Oasis’s Wonderwall? At the song’s end, my longtime friend and entrenched Linkin Park fan only had the following commentary to offer, “It’s over. Silence. Why.”

This album feels like it was designed. Constructed. By an indecisive committee. Everybody wanted their own pet project song on the record, and instead of sitting down and finding a way to link all of this, the hip hop, the balladry, the techno and the Rastafarian post-apocalyptic drum circle, they just said, “Okay, toss your song onto the pile”, and the result was a catastrophic mishmash of genres, styles, and ideas all loosely strung together by that damned piano. And it’s a shame, because if more time was put into this, the filler tracks were turned into something other than howling wind and piano and robot speeches, the album could be so much more. The pieces of a great work are present, but none of them are used properly. Maybe all this 24-million record selling business has gone to their heads.

The Explorer

My guitar is my weapon against silence. My guitar is my baby, my prize, my outlet. It therefore makes sense that I have myself the best axe I can get my hands on.



Meet my guitar, a 2010 Gibson Explorer. The weapon of choice for the hard rock and metal players of the last thirty years, the Explorer is the iconic instrument of James Hetfield of Metallica. C.C. DeVille of Poison, Def Leppard's Phil Collen, and Claudio Sanchez, frontman of Coheed and Cambria all bring an Explorer to the stage.

The Explorer has been around in its current incarnation since the mid-70's, originally a late-50's attempt, dubbed the 'Futura' to cash in on the retro futuristic fad-du-jour of the time. And it does look like something that you'd find in the trunk of one of those old Jestons bubble-dome nuclear powered cars of the future. During its original market run, the Futura and its sister model, the Flying V, both tanked with impressive speed, leading to the product lines being mothballed so quickly, that nobody even bothered to make a record of how many instruments were produced. Consequently, a Futura or Flying V from this era surface now and then at auctions to sell for bewilderingly high prices.

This is no junker, my guitar. This is a professional-grade instrument, and it blows all of my other guitars out of the water. The body is almost ten pounds of solid mahogany, as is the neck. The bridge and strings sit entirely above the body; no holes have been drilled into it which would dampen the resonance of the body. In fact, nothing's been drilled into the body, save for the pickups. The neck is set-in, perfectly seamlessly melded to the body, as opposed to bolt-in, which uses (unsurprisingly) four to six massive bolts to keep the neck set and level against the tension of the strings. Sound carries very well through this instrument.

A rosewood fretboard, to minimize wear on the strings, frets barely a centimeter high, and the action (average distance the string has to travel to touch the fretboard) has been lowered, by me, from low to about the width of an atom. This is a very fast instrument.

Beyond being just an instrument, it's also a showpiece. The whole thing is nearly four and a half feet long, and the size of the body makes it weigh about twice as much as the average electric guitar. This isn't a garage band junker, this is my polished, precise vehicle of sonic conquest. It's so flamboyant, so attention-demanding that, in the same way you expect the guy driving the Ferrari to know how to handle the extreme power of his car, you expect the person wielding it on the stage has the skills to back up the audacity it takes to use such a tool.

Hello, who am I?

Greetings Internet, classmates, whoever finds this. I am Denny Wright and this is my Wright Music Blog. This blog will contain a vary of subjects from album and concert reviews, impressions of artists and commentary of musical themes and styles. When those topics are exhausted, I will write about myself and my life.

I hope to be an engaging, entertaining, and informative writer for the duration of this blog. Within a couple days, I'll get my first real post written and get the ball rolling.