Review: Madina Lake's Attics to Eden

Fun fact: Madina Lake’s Nathan and Matthew Leone are twins, and got the band’s start-up money by winning Twins Fear Factor. Now you know.

Attics to Eden is the 2009 sophomore release of Madina Lake, a band who, similar to Coheed and Cambria, uses their music to tell a story. Unlike Coheed’s galactic warfare and genocide, Madina’s is some sort of 1950’s whodunit mystery story that, to be honest, I can’t really make any sense of from the lyrics.

What is the album? It’s a pop-rock affair at its core, with a few moments of ballsier, thudding weight to the music, most apparent in Let’s Get Out of Here, which is also one of the standout tracks on the album. But as a whole, this album isn’t clicking with me and I’ll tell you why.

The lead tracks are driving anthems that capture the ear with their energy and forceful rhythm and serve as excellent openers. But the third track, Legends is something like a mid 90-s alternative rock mixed with a club-ready chorus complete with synthesizers blasting over the mix. Many of the songs are well written, but the vocal melodies are either too repetitive, or they suffer from bring overwritten and won’t just resolve at the end of a phrase, often opting to jump to a whole new key. And that seems to be the key dilemma with Attics to Eden, it’s constantly either underwritten or overwritten, never entirely sure what kind of album it wants to be; a simple, fun rock album or a complex and diverse concept record with music as diverse as the characters in its story.

In all Attics isn’t a bad album at all. It’s indecisive, like so many others, it lacks focus and direction, which, if given to presumably the right producer, the result would be powerful. These guys know how to do it, but they’re not sure what is is that they want to do.

Review: 30 Seconds to Mars's This is War

Right off the bat, if you’re a fan of Muse then stop reading right now and just listen to this album.

This is War is the third album from the Californian 30 Seconds to Mars, and it is a dangerously potent mixture of styles. All throughout the sound is tinged with the spacey passion of Muse and the sickeningly sweet electronic digs of Daft Punk, executed with an orchestral zest for melodies and themes that don’t soar so much as they’re strapped to nuclear missiles and shot into the sun.

Every piece of music on this album is not like all the others, but what they have in common is that, save for the intro and outro tracks, there is an unrelenting intensity that fills every moment of sound, thanks in large part to Jared Leto’s preposterous vocal range and volume. Synthesized dredging bass, impressive, complex orchestration, and some furiously tight drumming come together very well to create an album that is track-for-track consistent. There is no faltering from the established feel so, if this album doesn’t appeal to you from the start, it probably won’t ever.

But if it does appeal to you (and it obviously did to me), then prepare for a relentless one hour flat of music. 30 Seconds to Mars has replicated the formulas for nearly every style of rock music in War. We have ground-shaking stadium anthems in This is War, Night of the Hunter, and the ‘popular rapper gets a verse’ song with Kanye West’s autotuned lines in Hurricane. Closer to the Edge is a techno-singed sprint of a song whose chorus carries the bellowing echoes of mid-2000’s Creed.

I think the reason this album is so appealing is its successful mixture of three very successful, but often exclusive styles of music: The extremely catchy melodies found on the lips of pop acts such as Lady Gaga, or Fall Out Boy; the cryptic, powerful and emotionally charged lyrics of the more traditional styles of heavy metal; and an instrumentation that is almost not rock and roll. These three elements are brought together with equal face time and love given to each, producing a pop-rock-metal-spacey-techno result.

This is War is an album I liked very much. It doesn’t feel like that these twelve songs are simply the best of the batch. There is a specific feel to the entire album, and it flows from measure to measure very well, very deliberately. It is very much a complete package that wants to take the listener on a journey, wants to show its complexities and depth and meticulous construction for all to see. But this album is first and foremost a product whose first purpose is to entertain and engage the audience, which it accomplishes with a great amount of polish. What’s better, it’s got enough pop in it to hook you on the first listen, so the second time through is less of a chore, and much more of a pleasure.

Review: Coheed and Cambria's Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV

Yes, the singer is a guy. I know, it confused me too at first. Moving on…

Concept albums are nothing new, musical theatre done on the small scale in the studio. Winger, Rush, Pink Floyd, to name a scant few are all architects of such works. Coheed and Cambria’s Good Apollo (full name Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume I: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness) is also a concept album, but there’s a bit more to it that makes Coheed a unique presence in the musical world; not content with making concept albums, they have embarked on a concept career, with each of their albums telling a different chapter in a vast, overarching sci-fi story penned by lead vocalist, guitarist, and part-time wookie Claudio Sanchez. It gets a little confusing, and I’ll address the lyrical aspects last.

Musically, Coheed and Cambria isn’t progressive, but there’s much more complexity than a cut-and-paste rock and roll ensemble to be found. The way the guitars and bass interact is like the four-part chorale writings from the likes of Bach, with massive chords being played across all three instruments to create a sound not unlike the depth found in classical music. Very rarely will any one song be a sequential power chord chug, seventh and ninth and thirteenth chords in most every imaginable inversion and variation will be found, thanks in part to the constantly energetic, sometimes hyperactive bass, and constant two-guitar counterpoint riffage. The music flows effortlessly through keys, through time signatures, and vocal melodies that never feel juxtaposed against the instrumentation. All in all, the music is very deliberately constructed. Every note has a specific place and a reason for being there

Across the soundscape of Good Apollo we are shown their proficiency in numerous styles of rock, from the metal-tinged Welcome Home, a crushing, sinister, hateful symphony to the radio rock friendly The Suffering. There’s the tender, beautiful, soulful ballad Wake Up, and the thirty-six minute long suite of songs called The Willing Well that ends the album. If you’re looking for some consistently skilled, polished-to-hell rock, you will find it here. I could go for pages about the intricacies to be found in each of the songs, for there is a staggering amount of shit happening here, but I will move on to the lyrics.

First off, don’t try to understand them. Nobody understands them, not really. Claudio’s sci-fi story is a giant allegory for his personal life, and the events therein are meta upon meta upon meta. Thematically, the album is about Claudio’s girlfriend leaving him, and this really pissed him off, because Good Apollo is an extremely dark, extremely bitter and violent and hate filled album. So he put himself into his story, as ‘The Writer’, an omnipotent god-figure who writes the story of the people in the universe (I told you it was meta), gave The Writer a horrible, unfaithful liar of a girlfriend, and sat back as The Writer killed her over and over again. This is where the lyrics get their twofold strength

Firstly, the songs are so impossible to understand, and there’s no way for a casual listener to know what context within the very confusing story a particular song is written in. Therefore, every song means whatever you think it means. Any listener can take any song from the album and make its words fit their life, or their situation however they wish.

Secondly, the words are very emotionally charged, and the writing is verbose, yes, but only for the sake of subtly layering narrator and scene into the limitations of verse-chorus song structure. It’s a deeply confessional album of hurt and anger and violence and vengeance written by a very hurt and very angry man who didn’t want to admit his own injuries, so he gave his voice to his characters. Because of this form of expression, all the extremes are brought to light. These characters don’t weep over lost love, they kill the bitch with a shovel, hate, poison, writhe and scream. No subtlety here, only raw power in these words.

It’s very difficult to write about this album that I am a great fan of without sounding like I’m gushing, but I really think it’s that good. There’s always some new little thing to discover each time through, and it’s quite simply some very balls out rocking. His voice takes some getting used to, but if you’re willing to give Coheed and Cambria a shot, you’ll discover a quartet of dedicated, talented musicians.

Review: Ozzy's Scream

Like many artists from the 70’s and 80’s, Ozzy Osbourne’s music has had a tremendous effect on the culture and music of today. The intentionally dark, moody, doom-laden styling of 1970’s Black Sabbath were unlike anything heard in rock music before and the group’s continued success created the blueprint that heavy metal was built upon. But over the last decade or so, the MTV show about his family turned the aging rocker into something of a joke, and the annual Ozzfest tour has turned from a prestigious collection of heavy metal talent into a gathering for the obese, bald, and inebriated to shout horrible fuck words at one another and awkwardly waddle in and out of stadium seating. All this entropy taken into the light, one would expect 2010’s Scream to suck out loud. One could not be more wrong.

Scream is as much a tribute to the styles that Osbourne pioneered forty years ago as it is a well done contemporary radio rock album. It’s moody and dark. Crunchy, sinister and heavy. At times, unrelenting and anthemic. It’s ten songs of pissed off, toothy-grinned evil melody.

Somehow, after forty years and enough drugs to put half of Columbia through college, Ozzy is still the songwriter he always was. The leading tracks, Let it Die and Let Me Hear You Scream are warped and bent marches steeped in drums and bass with simple, but very effective melodies and catchy lyrics throughout. Ozzy’s getting old though, and nearly every vocal track on the album has some form of echo effect, auto-tuning, or robotic distortion to it. These are smartly partnered with some light industrial elements, most notably in the simplistic, groaning riffs that pop up from time to time.

Life Won’t Wait and I Want It More are wonderfully crafted ballads that manage to properly mix the rising, powerful chords and sounds that are expected of the style with the darkness and gloom that fills every corner of the album. The sullen, tightly clustered chords will dissolve in an instant, giving way to a thundering chorus that falls in a powerful cadence all the way back down into the spooky, diminished forest we just came out of.

The lyrics tend to follow a vague theme toward the end, as we encounter a few songs dealing with Chrstianity, religious disdain, and the big JC himself. The usual topics of greed, holy wars, and exploitation of the devout come flying left and right, and I think that it’s good that in an album so full of anger to see some of that anger directed somewhere deserving of it. And in the usual form of songs before them, and War Pigs comes first to mind, the lyrics aren’t nearly as half-baked as they could be. A lot of time and effort went into this.

Scream is very good. Zakk Wylde’s replacement, Gus G is a strong guitarist. He’s not Randy Rhodes, though. And unfortunately, there’s nothing on the album that will top Crazy Train, or Bark at the Moon, for something being released in the fortieth year of a creative, artistic career there is a remarkable amount of originality to be found. So listen to Scream, and be glad that Ozzy hasn’t fully lost it yet.

Review: Interpol's Interpol

I’ll be totally honest; this is the first time I’ve ever listened to Interpol, and I don’t know a lot about the band. A product of the post-punk revival movement of the late 90’s, they fit the mold that I understand the genre to be to a T: Slow, echoing vocals with dissonant harmonies. There are swooping, falling, drooping melodies that never ever resolve when you expect them to. There is frequent use of diminished chords, and a lot of flatting done in the slower songs. And for some reason, really good drumming.

Interpol starts out good. Really good. The first four or five tracks are very energetic, very catchy songs with an excellent rhythm and a very good drumline. The instrumentation is well done, with all the right chords in just the right amount of echo soup, so that all the little accenting tones stay not one second longer than they’re needed.

The vocals irk me, though. Frontman Paul Banks has a singing style that comes off as strained, forced, clenched, and with little emotion. And across every song, his style and sound remain exactly the same. This causes me to believe that he’s trying too hard for consistency in his performances instead of exploring his range. And the ever-present distortion in the vocal tracks never allow Banks to show his true abilities. The guy just sounds like a machine.

The second half of the album isn’t as inspired as the first, I would say. Four of the final five tracks feature a simple, repeating four-bar riff all throughout, and none of them do a very good job of carrying the four to five minute pieces along, which is really the only thing an all-pervasive melody can do. The final two tracks feel like a two-parter, the wandering, electronic, ambient All of the Ways tries to be way more minor than it is, giving way to the almost redemptive sounding The Undoing. And the first couple minutes of Undoing are good. An okay riff accompanied by a few strings and light percussion. It’s not until the second chorus, when the band decides to layer some pretty dissonant and jarring chords directly on top of one another that I’m shocked from my reverie. And then the British-New York City band sings in Spanish for the rest of the song with Banks pleading ‘Please, please, the place we’re in now’ in the background for an extended, trumpeted outro.

In this album, I hear the workings of smart musicians. I can hear the foundations of a strong set of songs, and I definitely saw their passion and talent. What I don’t see is direction. I don’t know where they’re trying to go with this work. I don’t see what’s supposed to be blowing me away and winning me over. Interpol’s Interpol is a good album gone astray, it’s worth looking into because like I said, the first half is quite nice. It’s just not going to have the staying power that other albums do.