The Metal Show!

Oh man. I almost don’t know where to start. Sunday night. Metal happened. And it was aaaaaaaawesome! The date: Sunday, April 26th, 2009. The venue: Chain Reaction in Anaheim, California. The bands: The Number 12 Looks Like You, Misery Signals, Protest the Hero. The redux...

The Number 12 Looks Like You: These guys…I don’t know. They make strange music. I can’t say I was much of a fan. Let me explain. The band was made up of your standard line-up of guitar, bass, drums, and a singer. They were all obviously ridiculously talented musicians. Their songs were unfathomably complicated in their structure, their time signatures, and their style. The musicians displayed a pretty gnarly ability to not only keep the complexity of the songs straight in their heads but also showed an intense technical prowess over their respective instruments. What I didn’t like, quite plainly, was the music. It was like a weird mix of The Fall of Troy and The Dillinger Escape Plan. It was that same style of jazz influenced spazz-core type music. On top of the fact that the crowd largely wasn’t having it, the music was just hard to follow and generally unappealing. I appreciate the fact that this is an incredibly difficult style to play in, but honestly, no one can really play Dillinger type music better than Dillinger. And it should probably stay that way because unless you can dominate that style as it doesn’t lend itself well to an unfamiliar ear.

Misery Signals: Oh god. This was the show for me. It’s almost difficult for me to articulate everything I think and feel about this band. But for you…I will try. There’s a level of musicianship that these guys bring to the table, the metal table, which is not only unbelievable, but unparalleled. Their live act included all the positive and fun energy that I love in a metal performance combined with an extreme attention to musical detail. The front man of the band, Karl, has one of the more powerful styles of screaming/yelling/growling that I’ve heard. It’s deep, guttural, and through an appropriate PA, bowel buzzing…almost brown note status. So this combined with the way he jumps around on stage makes the guy larger than life. Every part of his appearance, his energy, and his voice commands the audience, which is exactly the job of a front man in a band. The guitar/bass players are ridiculous. Given that their song writing ability is just supidawesome, their ability to recreate the parts live was spectacular. I’ll give one example that pretty much speaks to their ability and detail-orientation through the entire set. There’s a part of one song (“Failsafe”) where Karl is screaming some line and there’s a sung background line behind him. It’s one of those long “ooo” kinda lines. However, in a live setting, it’s really hard to project and sustain a really long “ooo” on pitch. What usually happens is that either the guy singing will just cut it short, or he’ll force it out and it’ll sound all waver-y and bad, or the band will just play along with a backing track that has all the really pretty, studio edited “ooo”s and stuff...but that’s a cheap shot. When this line came up, while playing, one guitar player started singing the “ooo” and halfway through, when his voice started running out of steam, he would slowly back away from the mic while the other guitar player started HIS “ooo” and moved closer to his mic. So the effect was actually that the “ooo” not only stayed in key and on pitch, but panned across the stage as it faded from left to right. This kind of ability and awareness is NOT something you see all the time…especially in as raucous a genre as metal is. To cap it off, all the ambient parts that set their music worlds (literally…worlds) apart from other metal bands translated PERFECTLY on stage! It totally floored me. I was literally standing to the side with my jaw in my hands, keeping my chin off the floor while swaying back and forth to the awesomeness. I was definitely NOT expecting them to play or even pull off this ambiance. The highlight of their set was the equally brutal, spacey, complex, and ambient song Reset. Seamlessly this song fluctuates between a brutal, facial assault of metal and an ambient, bluesy , prog-rock anthem complete with chimes, acoustic guitars (clean-electric guitars live), and synthesizers. And they pulled it off beautifully. Literally…goosebumps just writing about it. I was talking to a friend of mine earlier in the week about this exact song and about how they’d pull it off live. My answer was that they’d probably play with a backing track or just not play the song at all. I have never been so glad to be so wrong. I’m not even going to talk about the drummer. The guy is unreal and deserving of a Wlfbkr posting in his own right. So I’ll save that for another time. All in all, this band is everything I could want in a metal band and they do it with equal amounts humility, grace, and metal-brutality. I can’t wait until I get to see Misery Signals again.

Protest the Hero: They are by FAR the beardiest band out of Canada. Sure Chris Steele in Alexisonfire has (or had) a pretty epic beard for a while, but no band I’ve seen can hold a candle to the face-pubes on these kids. Rody, singer, had probably one of the most disgusting neck-beards I’ve ever seen. The guy is cursed with the inability to grow facial hair much above his jaw line, but can grow a veritable forest below it. Gross. The other beards are pretty beardy and in the words of my brother, the Cowardly Lion (of Wizard of Oz fame) plays stage left guitar. Literally. So apparently in his time since the release of Wizard of Oz, Cowardly Lion not only found his courage, but also learned to SHRED…and moved to Canada. There was one moment of surreality (that should really be a word, I don’t care what spell check says) where I was watching the guitar players and their hands almost transformed into centipede’s legs. It’s ridiculous watching their fingers move. It’s beyond my comprehension how someone can make their brain work in time with their hands to consistently turn out a desired sweep or what have you. If I were to do that it’d probably sound like someone stringing up a gagged cat. In short (because I’ve gone on WAAAAY too long) these guys were equally as nuts as I was expecting. They played everything to damn near flawlessness and melted all the little hardcore kids’ faces RIGHT off. Being the greedy music aficionado I am, I can’t WAIT for their next record. What these guys have done with shredology is at the limit of my comprehension of what can be done with a guitar. So naturally, I want to see them go beyond that…even though they pretty much just put out Fortress, their last release. I want more. And I want it yesterday.

There’s one last thing I wanted to make note of… On a very superficial level, Misery Signals and Protest the Hero look like they belong together on stage as autonomous groups. Karl’s onstage activity (Misery Signals) looks like it was comfortable as he’s in a t-shirt and basketball shorts. The other guys in the band are wearing whatever jeans and t-shirts that suited them. They looked comfortable and looked like they belong on stage together. The same went for the Protest the Hero guys. There was no pretension in that they didn’t look like they needed to dress a certain way or project themselves to fall into a pre-fabricated style. The only reason I mention this is because the band before them, The #12 blah-blah-blah, had an awkward onstage “look” that only added to the awkwardness of their set. The singer was all emo’d out with his perfectly side-swept, straightened hair, his deep v-neck shirt, and his open vest. The guitar player looked like he was pulled out of a Hugo Boss casual-wear ad with some sort of light blue polo and slacks or something. The bass player was in normal jeans and a t-shirt and the drummer was metaled out with a sleeveless shirt and everything. I only bring this up because there’s something to be said about looking like you belong together on stage. It adds to the cohesiveness of a band. The four dudes in #12 didn’t look like they’d be hanging out outside of the band. The 5 in Protest and the 5 in Misery Signals look like they ran in the same crowd…which in turn makes them look more comfortable on stage and more comfortable with each other.

The Protest the Hero Cowardly Lion

Karl of Misery Signals commands the crowd. Epic. Word.

Cell phone picture = indisputable proof I was there. Fact.

A Lapse In My Infinite Knowledge

HA! Me. Knowledge. Infinite. Hilarious. I mean, realistically speaking there must be one or two things I don’t know right? I suppose so. Either way, I found one recently. Let me share.

Rap music. I don’t understand it.

I mean, beyond the culture of it all, which is just worlds away from what I know and experience on a daily basis, the music is so weird to me. I spent a lot of time in various clubs this past weekend…most likely the reason that it’s taken me until Thursday to develop the mental capacity to pen another entry on this little e-journal of mine. Needless to say, all weekend I was facially assaulted by club-music. Now, some of it is admittedly not rap. It would probably fall under various foreign categories like house, trance, electronic, etc. I can’t even pretend to joke about what it’s classified as because I literally know that little about it.

What I want to understand (someday or somehow) is HOW the music is made. Based on the knowledge and experience I’ve garnered playing/writing/listening to the music that I’ve been listening to since my childhood, I can listen to almost any pop, alternative, punk, rock, metal, or really any genre who’s core instruments are guitars, bass, and drums and figure out, or at least understand how someone could write a riff or song. I’ve fiddled around on guitars long enough to understand that sometimes it takes a flub in a scale to create a riff. Or sometimes drawing chords out of a hat to make a progression will actually stick (done it…). Or sometimes you’ll be driving around Isla Vista delivering pizzas when in a moment of surreal clarity and divine intervention on behalf of the pizza and metal gods, you develop the sickest riff in your head and have to call your drummer to IMMEDIATELY meet you at the practice studio (studi-HOOOOO) to hammer it out and get it down on paper. These things happen. This is how I have written songs. This is how I can understand that by fiddling around with these instruments you can write music.

The disconnect I guess comes with the instruments themselves. I don’t understand how DJs create music. I’ve heard rap songs where the music behind it was a series of bed-spring squeaks spliced in with, like, car horns and accented by, I dunno, some weird digital bloopy-bleep-o sound. What baffles me is how a guy can be sitting at a computer with a seemingly endless bank of singular sounds and be able to formulate a rhythm, melody, and song structure. It’s crazy!

So needless to say, after a long weekend’s worth of rap/club immersion, I ran home and flushed my system with some Iron Maiden. Nothing like “The Trooper” to purge Fiddy Cent. Lather, rinse, repeat.

That Is Who They Are

MagooooOOo! The new As I Lay Dying DVD “This Is Who We Are” came in the mail today! It came complete with limited edition poster (which I will probably lose in my apartment) and limited edition t-shirt (which I will probably immediately accidentally shrink then have to cut the sleeves off of so I can wear it like a respectable human being). More importantly, the DVD set came with three discs. The first is a retrospective documentary on the history of the band thus far. It seems a little silly thinking that a band like this has had enough history to warrant a documentary…but then again, they’ve been at it for the past 8 or 9 years. It seems weird to me that a scene that still seems so young has bands that have been in it for a decade. That’s a long time to be living the dream. I guess that only validates the legitimacy of the music they’ve been producing. The second disc is a collection of live performances of songs from their three releases (“Frail Words Collapse”, “Shadows Are Security”, and “An Ocean Between Us”). The last disc has music videos and other random stuff that they’ve released.

Now, I haven’t watched the documentary in full yet or the music videos (even though I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them all here’n’there in my adventures as Fanboy the Magnificent), but upon tearing open the UPS box I slammed the live DVD into my DVD player, turned the volume up, sat down with the dog, hit play, and let the glory of ear pounding metal wash over Jack Wolfbiker and me.

Oh man was it nice. The live portion of this DVD set was done in an interesting way. Rather than recording and showing the entirety of one live set, the band recently played a couple different shows and compiled selections from each set. Let me explain a little better. As I Lay Dying has been one of those bands that started playing in the basement of random community centers and churches for like, 8 people, then started playing smaller bar-type venues, then gradually worked their way up to headlining US tours and playing festivals like Cornerstone (about 10,000 people) and other huge European metal-fests (upwards of 30-40,000 people). The first couple songs on the live disc are from a show they played at a community church in San Diego (where the band hails from) for about 150 kids. At this show they played their entire first CD cover to cover as these were the songs they would play at that stage of their career. The next few tracks we see are from a set they played at a 300 person venue in San Diego as they played their second CD cover to cover. The next segment is from a show at the Grove in Anaheim to a sold out crowd of 1700 people. This show in its production value is more a testament to where they are at their current level of success. They’ve got stage lighting, banners and banner-changes, high quality professional sound gear, a big stage to run around on, risers to climb all over, and all the fun gadgetry that goes with a full-fledged (major) indie-label touring band. The last couple live tracks on this part of the DVD are selections from a couple festival shows they played. These are the videos where the cameras swing back behind the guitar player and reveal the veritable sea of people they’re playing to.

All in all it’s a pretty awesome way of documenting a band’s live performance. Between each section of the DVD, the band members talk a little bit individually about the uniqueness of each type of performance. Little things like the informality that makes playing in a church or garage or community center fun. They talk of the frustrations of playing at a club where you have almost negative room to move around in where you wind up swinging your bass around and cracking your singer in the back of the head (okay, that’s an anecdote from the Killswitch Engage live DVD…but it still applies...). The difference between playing on a small stage where all your movements seem so much more epic because the crowd is literally a high-five distance away from you versus playing on a stage the size of a football end zone (I have no idea if that’s a valid size reference, but I’m going to say it with authority hoping that you’ll buy it) where you’re all of the sudden a small part of a much larger image…your movements and energy have to be able to fill the space you’re given to make it a much bigger performance. I’ve got to say, I was kind of hoping to be shown a more cohesive live set so I could really get into the swing and flow of their performance. But seeing the band explore each step of their growth on stage was really unique, unexpected, and cool!

Needless to say, these guys have grown as song writers and as performers and their set is as brutal as it is tight. Jordan, although small, is a damn metronome on the drums. You can literally set your watch to his playing. Nick and Phil run and jump all over the stage while melting face all over the place with their respective shredology. Josh, the bass player and singer, is crystal clear while Tim’s screaming is bowel-gurglingly guttural. Man oh man it’s fun watching five ultra-nice dudes from San Diego play ridiculously ridiculous music and garner the success that they not only deserve but tirelessly worked for.

Matt’s grade for the DVD: A
Level of predictability of “Matt’s Grade” on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being not predictable and 10 being really really predictable: 10

Party Smasher!

I’m going to start this post with a request…nay…a demand. I’m going to need you to suspend, at least for as long as it takes you to read this nonsensery, everything you know about your own taste in music. Done? Good.

I’m going to talk at you today about a band called The Dillinger Escape Plan. They may be one of the most underappreciated, overlooked, and moderately successful bands in the hardcore/metal/math-metal/spazz-core scene. Honestly, I hesitate to try to attach them to a specific “scene” as there really aren’t any bands that do what they do…at least with any level of success …but I’ll get into that in a bit.

This band is headed up by their special-minded, weird-sound creating, prodigy or maybe un-diagnosed clinical psyche patient, lead guitar player Ben Weinman. I don’t know what beautiful-mind-type things go through this dude’s head, but what comes out the other side is either the purest form of musical genius…or speaker thrashing, headache inducing, noise…played as loud as he can. Allegedly, the writing process starts with Ben sitting at his laptop, guitar in hand, punching chords, time signatures, digital effects, mathematical formulas mapping the path of an electron through a gamma ray infused rare earth magnet, and planetary coordinates into some sort of recording program. What comes out is a series of boops, beeps, bleeps, and bloops. This all gets arranged and structured (?) into a working song/piece/composure/collection of noises.

I’m going to stop there. If you’ve taken the leap and listened to anything on their myspace/purevolume web pages yet, you can see what I’m getting at. The music is ridiculous. It’s cacophonous, it’s spastic, it’s generally difficult to follow…and it’s this initial impression and quality in their music that first drew me in.

When recording, a band will perform dozens of takes of the smallest passages to get the tiniest section just right. Bottles of aspirin are consumed by everyone in the control room while they try to focus in on the minutest details of the most minute guitar lick trying to pick out its every flaw so it can be redone to perfection. But it’s this hardly discernible lick that will inevitably tie together the phrase it’s in, which in turn will pull the song together and link everything together. So with that in mind, you have to understand that in nearly every song, every note has been painstakingly thought out, recorded, re-recorded, and analyzed. Now that we’re aware of this and listening to a song like “Fix Your Face,” it has to be assumed that each part of that song was carefully laid out and performed for a very specific reason (like that weird scale at 0:36). The quest to understand that reason is what I spent a lot of time trying to figure out.

After listening to their most recent record, Ire Works, a couple times through I had a bit of a breakthrough. The first 8 tracks range in spasticness, tempo, key, mood…everything. It’s a trial to get through because it’s such a barrage of discordant passages, out of key lines, alternate rhythms…man…it’s almost like work to listen to at times. But the 9th track, called “Milk Lizard” starts. The song almost feels out of place in its straight forward nature. It has defined verses, choruses, bridges, and even though there are few strange passages with those awkward, out-of-key scales, the song sort of made sense. It all clicked.

What these guys have managed to do was take common musical theories, de-lobotomize them, and turn the principles of successful music-making all on its ear. Contrasting the beginning of the record with Milk Lizard, you can understand that Dillinger Escape Plan has shown you that they CAN write a rock and roll song. But that’s boring and predictable. They’ve taken bluesy, jazz inspired riffs and scales (which push and pull the lines of genius and severe musical retardation at times in their own right), sped them up by six or seven hundred percent, screamed over it all, and called it music. Going back and listening again, you hear all these reaaaally subtle textures, scales, and sweeps that if was slowed down, played in a more delicate fashion, would in turn sound like a beautifully composed jazz piece. Listen to the song “Mouth of Ghosts” (it’s not online, so you’re going to have to buy it on iTunes or something…I promise you won’t be disappointed…it’s an INCREDIBLE song that’s INCREDIBLY composed). You can hear, and almost track, how The Dillinger Escape Plan blend together the most complex, delicate passages that define blues and jazz into the spastic, screamfest that is 90% of their musical repertoire. Fascinating!

When Picasso was a kid, he painted landscapes, still-lifes, and portraits at the caliber of the classical masters in painting that were believed to be the definition of artistic perfection. But the ability to paint in a style that’s been mastered was boring. (I’m basing that statement on nothing.) So Picasso seemingly rejected that whole style and made up his own. But if you look carefully at any of his blue period pieces, his cubist work, his sculptures, it’s clear that he had a very clear understanding of the principles of color, shape, field, etc (ran out of art terms) that he got from his training under classical artists. Using this knowledge, he expanded the scope of art into a new understanding. With their understanding of music (popular, successful music at that) The Dillinger Escape Plan has opened up a whole new dimension in the realm of music.

Check it out…it’s a total mind fu