Metal Lite

This week I’m going to be writing about something I admittedly don’t know a WHOLE lot about: knee socks. Well, not so much knee socks as A Day To Remember I guess... (www.myspace.com/adaytoremember). Lets talk.

A Day To Remember (ADTR) has been “in the scene” for a while now and have wedged themselves between two unlikely genres: metal and tongue-in-cheek-high-school-style pop-punk. I know. Weird right? Right.

Anyway, I recently was introduced to these guys by a friend of mine who described them as “pretty alright” and “catchy.” Being that I was in a slump of new music (before all these wonderful CDs came out by Darkest Hour, Alexisonfire, Killswitch Engage, Poison the Well, etc etc) I decided to pick up their newest record titled Homesick. On first listen I was only moderately impressed. I mean, the songs were pretty well written in that they had catchy hooks, definite progressions, and an interesting dynamic. But it was nothing earth shattering. On a gear-head note, the tones of the record are pretty sweet…but I attribute that one hundred percent to the sentence in the upper left corner of the back jacket that reads “Mixed by Adam D.” Duh. Tonemaster City one hundred percent good fun time.

I’m going to go ahead and leave the notes and general geekology about the tone of the record for you, my dedicated reader, to play around with and dive into. What I really wanted to talk about is the genre crossing that these guys do. Imagine what it would be like if Blink 182 played metal. That pretty much exactly describes how these guys sound. Blink 182 to legitimate punk rock is like ADTR to legitimate metal/metalcore. Now, I don’t say this as a bad thing at all. I mean, look at Blink…their pools are heated if you know what I mean. What I’m more referring to is the way both of these bands adhere to their genre in a very casual, playful way. From the voicing of their songs to even the titles of them, both bands take an almost high-school, ‘immature’ approach to their music.

If you listen to the song “The Downfall Of Us All” you can hear some of the aspects I’m referencing. First of all, the song titles (maybe not as apparent in this one) are a bit of a joke. How do you take a band completely seriously with songs titled “NJ Legion Iced Tea”, “Another Song About the Weekend”, and “I'm Made of Wax, Larry, What Are You Made Of?” Anyway, once you hit play, the song titles don’t really matter anymore. So first off, most of the songs on this record, and in their catalogue in general, are very hook-oriented. In “Downfall” the hook isn’t necessarily a melody so much as a rhythm…which becomes immediately obvious with the crowd-chanting rhythm in the beginning of the song. The hook is repeated, reprised, and referenced through pretty much the entire song…as a good hook should be.

Next, it seems to be a stylistic mainstay of the metal scene for a band to be heavily focused on riffage and shredding. Verses are usually built around a repetitive moving guitar lick while the choruses typically will have some big rhythm guitar playing behind a different lead lick. The pop-punk element of ADTR comes from the fact that their songs are structured largely around simple power chord progressions. The metal influence comes from the voicing of these power chords. Rather than straight forward strumming, the guitars frequently attach a heavy, palm-muted, rhythm to the progression. This is exemplified in “Downfall” I the second verse which can be heard at about 1:28 and again at 2:20 into the song.

I’m admittedly not REALLY well versed in this band or their history, but this disk is heavy on the vocals. Since a lot of the guitar work is very lackluster, or at least very downplayed in its complexity, there is a lot of room for vocal styling. The singer really dominates these songs with respect to melody. It just so happens that they style in which he sings sounds a lot like a bubblegum pop punk band. However, again they blend in that metal element every once in a bridge when the singer puts on his angry face and screamy pants and lets a verse/bridge/breakdown get nice and mad. This would be at that second verse at 1:28. That’s a ten second metal song right there.

These thematic elements seem to comprise a large majority of this record and make for an interesting listen…at least with respect to genre. At the end of the day though…Poison the Well is back in the CD player. Sorry boys…

Tropic Ripe

Oh my god it’s finally here! It’s here! Poison the Well! The Tropic Rot! Eeeee [with hands flapping at nipple height]!! It’s not like I haven’t been pining over the release of this record or anything. Not like I haven’t stayed up at night viciously you tubing for precious in-studio clips. Not like I haven’t had their myspace page open nervously clicking refresh hoping for ANY news…be it updates from touring, new photos of the studio set up so I could geek the hell out of their mic set up and stuff, or little factoids for me to store in my vast bank of ALWAYS relevant musical knowledge (which occupies corners of my brain which used to hold useless information like how to formulate coherent sentences, act in professional settings, or function as a successful engineer).

REGARDLESS! It was all NOT in vain! I now have, quite literally in my hand, my copy of the newest release from Poison the Well entitled The Tropic Rot. AHHHHHGGGGG!!

What the title means? No idea. But they’re from Florida (and not completely useless human beings…who knew Florida had ANYthing to offer?) so maybe it has something to do with that? Don’t care. The music! If you couldn’t already tell by my rant of disjointed nothingness…IT’S EXCELLENT! Let me dissect:

As Versions progressed from You Come Before You, The Tropic Rot left the comforts (?) of the winters in Scandinavia (where Versions and YCBY were recorded) and took Poison the Well to sunny Garden Grove, California to the studios of producer Steve Evetts (Dillinger Escape Plan, Every Time I Die, etc). Under his watchful eye and with his hands off approach, Evetts and the band crafted a record that built off the successes and innovations of their previous recordings under the more than talented knob-turning hands of Eskil Lövström and Pelle Henricsson and pushed the envelope of what it is to be an eleven year old hardcore band in 2009.

Sometimes when you listen to a record, what you end up hearing isn’t necessarily the talent of the band itself but rather the talent of the producer. Look at Bleeding Through’s most recent release Declaration produced by Devin Townshend…Case. And. Point. When the band is lacking in certain aspects (be it song writing, song structure, or things generally outside the actual band member’s abilities to play their instruments), it’s the job of the producer to step in and gently (or brutally) push a band in the “right” direction…please use big obnoxious finger quotation marks around the word RIGHT. RIGHT is defined to be, in this case, the artistic vision of what the producer deems a successful song or collection of songs given the current musical trends of the times. Blood has literally been shed over this subject. I heard once Art Garfunkel knifed a producer for saying his chorus wasn’t catchy enough. I’ll verify it on Wikipedia. But I digress.

One of the more interesting things I immediately noticed in this record was the influence of the band on the producer, rather than the other way around. Steve Evetts’ mixes usually come out sounding pretty conventional with respect to guitar tones, drum tones, vocal tones, etc. His snares are usually sampled to even out each stroke (meaning he’ll overdub a second snare drum hit on top of each “real” snare drum hit…this normalizes out the consistency of each snare hit), his guitars are usually pretty conventionally balanced between crunchy distortion, beefy gain, and some noise suppression for the electrical hum/fuzz in the guitar, and the vocals are usually pretty clean. To his credit, the mixes always sound good. Conventional, but good. I think where he excels is in his ability to take bands with a more alternative musical styling (like metal and hardcore) and subtly nudge them towards a more globally appealing product. Usually you can listen to a collection of records by the same producer and hear similar tones and similar song structures. On The Tropic Rot, what you hear instead is Poison the Well (PTW) pushing Evetts to use more bluesy tones, stripped down drums, raw guitars, alternate vocal processing (like putting distortion on sung lines among other stuff). Whether it was an intention of PTW to come in and “direct” Evetts to lay off the gain/distortion or whether it was a fortunate accident, the tones and sounds on this record are, first of all, atypical to Steve Evetts’ mixes, and second of all, fantastic! If anything, it’ll be a feather in his cap! An arrow in his quiver! A…um…another rock in his sling? Another missile in his arsenal? You get it. It’s proving that he can not only be accommodating but versatile.

One more quick note on the tone before I move on. I always listen to PTW and think of them as being heavily influenced in old southern blues. But I couldn’t really put my finger on exactly why I thought that. But I figured it out. The tones on their records, at very least the last three major releases, have all used VERY bluesy tones…more so in The Tropic Rot and Versions. The music is still heavy and raucous, but if you solo out the guitars and played through whatever amps they use, the tones of the guitars are very reminiscent of blues and jazz. But when played hard, the amps’ tubes naturally distort (as opposed to solid state pedals or forcing a bunch of gained overdrive) in the way a blues guitar would. Interesting stuff.

So I’ve discussed how the band successfully influenced the producer…But Matthew, how did the PRODUCER influence the BAND?! I’m dying to know! Please tell me? Well okay children, sit tight.

Listen to the structure of the songs on this album versus the previous two. You Come Before You and Versions were very experimental and more traditionally hardcore in nature. By this I mean that in some cases there weren’t really defined choruses and versus but rather repeating parts. Breakdowns or bridges seemed to be the focus of most of the songs, like the loooong bridge in the song “Letter Thing” on Versions featuring the wicked awesome slide guitar. Longer melodic passages spaced out the tone and pace of the record. On their newest release, there are still creative bits that exhibit the talents of the band nicely. I would go as far as to say Steve Evetts’ contribution or influence is actually pretty minimal…which is awesome! The guy has a tendency to let his musicians write and play what they want to write. What it seems that he does is take the parts they write and help arrange them in a fashion that both makes the song interesting when the parts aren’t by keeping the more uninteresting phrases short and creates space for the more interesting passages by helping arrange the parts around it…the jury is out whether that made sense to anybody else but me.

The beauty of this CD is that the end result is a record full of songs written and performed by Poison The Well as Poison The Well would want to be heard. They’ve taken tactics they’ve learned from other producers and records and blended them with the subtle styling of a new producer to mold and refine how they want their band to be heard and understood.

Good job boys! Thanks for not disappointing!

Guitarist Ryan Primack channeling the patented Angus Young rock and roll face.

Hiatus Undone

Aaaaalright folks. I realize I’ve been on a bit of an unscheduled and unannounced hiatus of sorts, but in all honesty, I’ve run into a little bit of a combination of sensory overload and writers block. A strange combination I know. But what it created was the perfect storm of literary stupidity. I’ve inundated myself with so much new stuff to look at, listen to, and think about that my brain is having trouble forming one coherent thought. The effect is similar to when you’re at a restaurant and hungrier than you’ve ever been in your life ever…at least that’s how it feels. The waiter hands you the menu and you start looking at it. All these options. And you’re so hungry. But all you can really make out are random numbers, letters, words, and fragments of thoughts. What plays out in your head is some weird bastardization of the menu that would read something like: “Oh god I’m so hungry. I would literally eat anything on the menu. Probably the menu itself. What is there? [opens menu] Almond crusted 10 dollars appetizer spicy burger side of tuna steak 7 chef special salad coconut farm raised Oklahoma balanced twenty seven cents tartar marbled medium horseradish…” You get it.

So with this in mind, what’s been going through my mind the past couple days/week would go something like “Finally new music! Alexisonfire is so drum tone’s sick new evergreen terrace single I think I’m Italian sub in Ferret Records screwed up my Killswitch came early E-I-E-I-O haven’t gotten my Poison the Well oh my Maxim cranes god I can’t get over that floor Darkest Hour is sick but hasn’t it gotten lost in the how am I already over shred Every Time I Die released a single punk rock Dave Grohl is such a seriously tambourine Halliburton when’s the DVD in September new Ignite House of Blues or wow Glasshouse Australia is hosting a lot of that sounded a lot but I haven’t heard them like a hollowbody…”

Needless to say that doesn’t translate well to my readership…all…seven of you?

While I try to run my thoughts through a sifter and try to pick out all the petrified turd nuggets of useless thoughts (of which there are many, example: “what’s the difference between a stretcher and a gurney”), here is what’s been keeping me occupied that I haven’t already written about:

-My undying obsession with Misery Signals.
-Parkway Drive is writing new material and releasing a DVD (with live footage…potential for a serious epic win) in September.
-Evergreen Terrace posted a new track from their upcoming CD (titled “Almost Home”…which, title-wise, can’t even begin to compare to “Wolfbiker”…but more on that whenever it comes out)
-Every Time I Die posted a new track from THEIR upcoming CD (titled “The New Junk Aesthetic”)
-The Dillinger Escape Plan is finishing up their newest CD which I didn’t even know they were writing called “Option Paralysis”
-A Day To Remember’s most recent CD caught me by surprise
-Poison the Well’s new CD (which is literally lost in the mail…because I wrote my address wrong…way to go Matthew)
-Killswitch Engage’s newest release
-New tour dates GALORE!
-Alexisonfire’s “Old Crows/Young Cardinals” has yet to find its way out of my CD player
-Patiently waiting for new Thrice and wondering in what direction they’re going to be progressing
-Hoping It Dies Today figures out whatever legal issues are preventing their FINISHED record from being released
-August Burns Red’s newest release (which I’m literally picking up immediately after posting this)
-My new artwork I’ve conceptualized and now realized from Lisa “Iconic Rock Photographer” Johnson.

This is what’s been occupying my mind. Don’t worry though, all that, and probably more, will all eventually settle out in the coming days and provide me with a bountiful harvest of tasty word bushels to put together for your ocular interpretation. But until then, look into the leads I’ve hinted at in your bored hours and check back soon.

Old Crows, Young Cardinals, Middle Aged Alexisonfire

As the anniversary of our nation’s birth arrives we fire up our grills, we ice our beers, and we don our American flag underpants. In the spirit of the weekend’s festivities, it’s only fitting that I give you my two cents on the newest record from the bacon eating, mounty loving, caribou chasing Canadians in Alexisonfire (www.myspace.com/alexisonfire).

These poor guys were stashed away for like, two WHOLE months in a studio within a stone’s throw (literally, you can see it from the doorway of the studio) of a massive brewery. Somehow, through the miracles of modern digital recording technology, they were able to edit out all the bottle clinking and belligerent yelling through the talk-back microphone. Science is awesome. ANYWAY. Splits and indie single releases aside, this is the 4th record these cheery Canadians have put out. I’d like to think that these guys haven’t peaked yet as their style, class, and talent over the past several years have only proven to progress and refine by leaps and bounds. Being the consummate greedy listener, I can’t WAIT to see what the next step in the ascension to rock god-dom will bring. But in the mean time let’s focus on the tasty ear nuggets they’ve given us this past week.

I’d blobbed a couple weeks ago (I know, I’m hilarious) about the newest release from a band called The Chariot. I had mentioned that their record wasn’t genre bending and how that can be okay because as an aggressive statement in hardcore, it only solidified the band as a mainstay in their genre, and only their genre. “Old Crows/Young Cardinals” by Alexisonfire does the opposite of this with a similar outcome. Rather than affirming their status as the premier band in the Canadian (and American) hardcore scene by releasing a record that sounds just like their other records, Alexisonfire took a step forward with their song writing, their style, and their technical abilities in their newest release while still advancing their status as a household hardcore name. Whereas it takes a certain level of technical prowess to possess the ability to shred at one’s instrument, I would argue (and maybe expand into a separate entry) that it almost takes MORE talent to possess this ability but restrain in its use. There are little guitar fills and licks here and there that exhibit the talent these guys posses (like in the opening of “Born and Raised”) but there’s never an extended portion of a song that is just a series of parts strung together to show how the individuals dominate their instruments. An example of the opposite would be the band Trivium who pretty much write songs just to show off an unbelievable solo.

Beyond the restraint these guys show, there’s a wide variety of genres exhibited on this disk that make it quite an enjoyable listening experience…to put it pleasantly for a change. The disk starts out with a really awesome throwback vibe to old school 1980s punk. George, the screamer guy, changed up how he articulated his voice going from a scream to more of a grainy yell type thing. The verses of the song “Young Cardinals” have an awesome old school feel to them. To compliment George’s punk styling, Wade (one of the guitar players) sings in much the same fashion but with a slightly different timbre. Then there’s Dallas. Oooh Dallas Green. He sings…to me. This dude has pipes. Contrasted to the punk undertones, Dallas’s SUPER clear vocals cut through the mix like something really sharp cutting through something pretty soft. Not to mention that songs like “The Northern” and “Burial” seem to have been written in such a way as to provide Dallas with a blank canvas to paint glorious vocal colors all over. In fact, speaking of genre bending, “Burial” as a song sounds closer to a song by Dallas’s folk-indie side project (City and Colour) in that it borders on the stripped down, natural sound of a folk song. Of course, to bridge the gap between the punk revival (“Accept Crime”, “Young Cardinals”, “No Rest”) and the borderline folk (“Burial” and “The Northern”) are some good ole fashioned rock and roll tunes that have a very comfortable, familiar feel to them (“Headed For The Sun” and “Midnight Regulations”). The comfortable sound is a testament to Alexisonfire’s capability to not only write a catchy riff, but write a coherent song. This ability, while not tied to technical skill, is easy to do, but difficult to do and sound NATURAL doing it. In the first spin of this disk, I was listening to songs I’d never heard before and by the second or third chorus, was already humming along the melody, filling in the words I was able to pick up without realizing it. This is NOT a talent of the listener. It’s exclusively a trait of the band writing the song.

To make a song relatable on a melodic front takes a lot of talent and a lot of conscious song writing proficiency. I would go as far as to say that this ability would go hand in hand with the capacity to demonstrate restraint as a musician as the tendency is to use a song to showcase your flair and talent. Alexisonfire has done this while at the same time relating the scene and genre they came from to a listener who may not have found it appealing on first exposure.

So again I’ll end my post with the following:


Epic. WIN!!

The Alexisonfire drum tracking...can you HEAR me geeking out from wherever you're sitting?!

Darkest Hour's Darkest Hour?

It’s finally here! My days of anxious waiting by the mailbox have finally paid off! The first of my many pre-orders that I spoke of earlier has finally arrived. The first one in? Darkest Hour’s newest release The Eternal Return. And here’s what I have to say about it:

Hoooooly butts!

That about sums it up pretty well. However, the short story long would go a little something more like this:

Darkest Hour is one of those bands who developed a really large following in their early years. Tiny clubs in the greater Washington DC area would become sweaty meat boxes exuding testosterone and metal in one big stinky mess. As the band grew along with the scene they’d become a part of, concern grew among the truest of the true fans that they would "lose their edge" or "sell out" or what have you. In their past two CDs produced by Devin Townsend, Darkest Hour has danced the fine line between the absolute brutality that has become synonymous with the little thrash metal niche they’ve carved out for themselves and the dangerous turf of commercial success. Under Devin’s watchful eye, the song writing abilities and general compositional talents of the guys in the band flourished…although not to the extent of sounding manufactured. However, the guys decided to record The Eternal Return with Brian McTernan, who produced their record Hidden Hands of a Sadist Nation. Also, for whatever reason, before the last tour cycle, the band parted ways with their lead guitar player (and one of the fastest shred-junkies I personally have ever seen) Kris Norris. Not gonna lie, when I heard this I had this pang of fear that the unprecedented talent brought by Norris and the change of producers would push the band a step or two back.

NnnnnOPE dot com! Seamlessly they picked up right where they left off and continued writing, composing, and producing super awesome one hundred percent good fun time excellent America speed thrash metal!! Oh man and I couldn’t love them any more for it!

Couple key little factoids I’ve picked up in the couple spins I’ve given the record:

-New lead guitar player goes by Lonestar. Awesome?...! And he’s pretty above average himself.

-Mike Schleibaum does a lot more soloing and the guy LOVES his wah pedal and whammy bar. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this.

-The album has a very "major key" feel to it making a lot of the songs sound optomistic and upbeat. Compared to Undoing Ruin and Deliver Us (their last two CDs), this CD seems to present a more hopeful lyrical scene. Whether this is all part of a larger musical/lyrical purpose I don't know, but its an interesting little something I noticed.

-Guitar tone on the record for a lot of the rhythm work is kinda grainy sounding. It’s almost to the extent of sounding bad, but I think this was intentional. Having a grainy distortion on a mix like this adds to the raw, testosterone driven sound of the composition as a whole.

-The drums are TOTALLY roomed out. The beginning of one song has a little drum fill (track two or three I think) where you can hear how BIG and AMBIENT the room is. Totally sick…bro.

-The kick drum tone literally drives this record. With the grainy, distortion on the guitars, the HEAVILY fuzzed bass, and all the screaming, the super clean and super up-front (meaning that in the mix the kick drum, and only the kick drum, is really loud) kick tone punctuates every down beat, accent, and rhythm.

-I’d say the biggest victory on this CD is the use of the really roomy, clean sounding drum set mixed into the mess of everything else to produce a really interesting balance. It holds up the intensity while allowing the listeners attention to be directed to the interesting rhythms and picking techniques exhibited by the bass and guitars.


Epic. WIN!

Reset & Homecoming: A Dissertation...sans Homecoming post facto

One of the games I like to play when I listen to music is what I fondly call the “Whoa, what the hell was that?! Lets rewind and re-listen to that 4-second passage about 79 times so I can figure out, or try to figure out, what exactly just happened that sounded so cool/unique/different/strange” game. No, I didn’t just make that up. Yes, I play it all too often. Sometimes I play it to the extent that I never actually make it through and entire song, I just hear it as a selection of 3 to 8 second clips that are constantly rewound and repeated. By the way, I live in hyperbole.

Regardless, I do love doing this when I listen to music. It’s a different level of music enjoyment for me. It makes songs seem like puzzles and gives me the opportunity to try and figure out what the band was intending by putting together different passages or recording techniques. So with this in mind, I’ll play this game out loud for your reading enjoyment.

I’ve been fixated recently on two songs that blend together on Misery Signals’ most recent disc “Controller”. The songs ‘Reset’ and ‘Homecoming’ provide a stunning eleven plus minutes of musical composition. Through the two songs, there is an incredible display not only of technical prowess and musicianship, but also of tasteful producing and engineering on the part of Devin Townsend who produced, mixed, and engineered this record. I could sit here and wax poetic about the band and the producer, but that would viciously side track me in a post that’s already going to be WAY too long. So all nonsensery aside, let’s begin:

Reset (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDWWIkfSCJQ)
(0:00) The intro guitar part starts out as a non-reverbed, non-delayed riff. This keeps the space of the song very close to the listener, which will be immediately contrasted when the song picks up.
(0:11) The second guitar, drums, and vocals crash in, the mix fills out with reverb, delay, and an increase in volume. The second guitar’s big open chords (that ascend in scale) combined with the effects on this guitar open up the mix and ramp up the momentum of the song. This is accentuated by the snare roll that starts as having an accent in it and ends as just a straight quarter note roll.
(0:23 – 0:33) Here the first guitar stops riffing and plays big ambient chords combined with little scales, pick slides, bent notes, and other general hints at shredology that open up the mix even more. All the craziness that happens in the guitars and drums allow the song to build and introduces the main verse.
(0:39 – 0:42 and 0:49 – 0:54) The breakdown sounding bit here (“Nothing is picture perfect”) has the kick drum accenting the rhythm of the guitars. This draws attention away from the more ambient guitar before and after this section and makes this part feel heavier because all five instruments (the two guitars, drums, bass, and vocal rhythm) all sync up with each other.
(0:58) Oh man this little lick is so sweet! Everything cuts out, this delayed guitar plays this very staccato line and then we’re hit in the face with a SUPER fast, double-kicked barrage of down picked, palm muted guitar. Its like the song goes from a jog to a sprint! I love this change. Best part is that it’s reprised later.
(1:00 – 1:20) The drums in this part help emphasize the “sprinting” nature of this passage. However, what’s interesting is how the cymbals he chooses to play on change the voice of the passage. The drummer, Branden, starts on the ride, a bigger, darker (lower pitched) cymbal. Then he moves up and wails relentlessly on a crash which is a thinner, smaller, brighter (higher pitched) cymbal. To me, the higher pitch makes the voice of the song sound a bit more frantic/urgent. Then it moves back to the ride which brings it back down and back up to the crash. All this moving around doesn’t really hold some crazy significance, but it provides a bit of change that makes this part more dynamic and more interesting to listen to…even if you don’t immediately pick up what it is you’re hearing.
(1:21 – 1:37) The verse repeats.
(1:37 – 1:59) The interlude here separates the first movement of the song from the second with an alternating brutally heavy section and an equally ambient, spacey section. The heavy section is a departure from any established melody and builds on the rhythm that we’re first introduced to at 0:39 – 0:42 and 0:49 – 0:54. What’s interesting is that the way the drums play behind the repeating guitar parts changes the accent, tempo, and even timing of this rhythm. It starts with the drummer playing on the toms accenting the 3/4 timing. At 1:48 though, the drummer switches to a reaaaaally slow 4/4 count that slows everything down.
(1:59 – 3:09) BAH!! The great reprisal!! This is where Devin Townsend as a producer shines! Try to listen closely from here to the end of this segment. These are all parts of the song we’ve already heard before, but everything’s been changed in some aspect. After the re-introduction with the intro riff, we’re hit with a subtle keyboard-chorus line. Normally this would sound cheesy if it were the primary focus. However, Devin mixes it way down and uses it to compliment the open chords the rhythm guitar plays. This as well as the delay/verb used on the lead guitar opens the space of this song WAAAAY up. Also the drumming changes up the rhythm by dropping down to the china and playing weird ghost-noted passages that almost sound like a slow shuffle. This creates a compLETEly different feel in this song. Also, at 2:28 the lead breaks from the riffing style of playing that lick to playing the chord that he’s creating the little arpeggio out of…another cool change.
(2:34) All the chaos that’s created with all the space, delay, riffing, shuffling, and chorus and all gets cleared when the vocals come in. It’s like the muddiness of the song settles out and we’re left with a wide expanse of clear sonic space. The drums fall down to a simple open 4/4 beat while the guitars play matching open monster-chords.
(2:45) The transition from the chaotic openness, to the clarity when the vocals come in is used as a template to juxtapose that awesome lick from back in 0:58. Except this time they beef up the delay (which you can hear not only repeating, but panning across from left to right and back again making the notes swirl around your head) and repeat it a second time in a higher harmony.
(2:47) Aaaaand again! More reprisal! This time with that rad super fast face-blast of double kick. All the space in the song almost loses the listener. Parts start literally blending together and the definition of the song gets lost as it all kinda planes out into a huge soundscape. This all gets put in perspective by reintroducing the brutality of this (and the following) hard hitting guitar parts.
(3:09 – 3:42) This part of the song always confused me. I can’t figure out why they use SUCH a different part here. I don’t think I’m out of line saying that this passage doesn’t sound like it belongs in this song. But then again, maybe it’s the uncomfortable feeling of this segment that allows for the part that follows it to feel as good as it does. Cool note about the blast beat section (blast beat: when the drums play a rhythm that is just eighth/sixteenth/quarter/whatever notes of the kick drum, snare, and hi-hat/cymbal all at once) though: at 3:19 there’s a section where the drummer is playing three different time signatures at the same time. His right hand on the china cymbal is playing in a half-time 2/4 beat, his left hand on the snare is playing around a 3/4 rhythm, while his feet on the kick are playing all sorts of weird accented notes in 4/4…I think. I haven’t been able to bend my brain around the time-space continuum quite enough to fully understand what he’s done here, but regardless, it’s something incredible.
(3:42 – end) Ugh…this is why I love this band and this producer. Seamlessly they translate from a hard hitting, brutal metal song into a beautiful, ambient, acoustic jam…and then back. Right after the abrasive, uncomfortable bit, the guitars space back out (as Devin ups the verb/delay/panning of the guitars) and at 3:58, the guitars start fading out, holding one note and letting it slooooowly die out. By 4:22 you can hear the last of the distortion give way as the drums lighten and start dinking around on the cymbals. Everything gets so delicate that you can hear such subtleties as how loosely the guitar player is holding his pick (loosely, you can hear it hitting each string on the acoustic louder than you can hear the note of the string) to even the kind of sticks the drummer is using (a hard-wood tipped stick…if it were nylon tipped the cymbals would be pinging a lot more and if it were softer there wouldn’t be as much attack from the stick tapping the cymbal). At 4:51 we’re introduced to another, honorary, member of the band, the guitar player and drummer’s (who are brothers) dad. The guy is a member of some symphony as a trained percussionist. So there a bunch of chimes, vibraphones, and bells and stuff that accent the guitars. This all adds a depth to the ambience that you normally wouldn’t find. Other cool things happening here…in list form:

-Drummer starts alternating crash cymbals which spreads out the sound of the drum-sound-space.
-Drummer is playing with the snare chains off the snare which makes it sound like a tight tom.
-There’re really faint synthesizers playing in the background which opens up the mix even more.
-The final chime at the end of the song is met with a brutal attack of distortion and drums and screaming as the song after this begins. An interesting juxtaposition.
-The guitars layer and layer until there are literally about 5 or 6 guitars playing on top of each other.

You know what, I’ve gone on long enough on this one song that to go into the intricacies of “Homecoming” would be ridiculous. But take a listen to it. Put yourself in the mindset of listening behind the obvious melodies and figure out what is happening and why. There are some REALLY interesting things going on in the soundspace that these guys have created. Maybe you’ll pick up on them. There’s a whole world that (some) bands create behind the caustic assault of screaming and distortion. It’s your job to find it and appreciate it when it’s there.

Misery Signals play rock shows.

It's A Hard Knock Life

It’s hard being a super mega nerdo fanboy these days. This is a rough life I lead. Burdened with the responsibilities and expectations placed on me by my friends, my family, myself, and my adoring throng of loyal readers…all like, 8 of you. I struggle through each day scouring the interwebs, the airwaves, and magazine stands pulling tidbits and factoids, soaking up information and knowledge like a leathery old broad who against all better judgment STILL sits out at the beach in the sun reading grocery store rags yelling at kids who kick sand on her towel all the while leering at the lifeguard who has no choice but to watch all the idiots in the water who think that since they’ve got a boogie board they’re impervious to the powers of the ocean. What are they thinking? Do they know how big the ocean is? Do they understand the force they’re dancing the dance of fate with? A sharkbiker could totally annihilate one of these kids should it be in the area and have the taste for flesh. Not that the life guard could really do anything about it. Sharkbikers are WAY more adept in water. It’s like they’ve lived there for thousands of generations! I mean, if a shark was on land and tried to start it with me, I’d TOTALLY be able to punch it right in its sharkface and run away cuz what chance does it have on land? None. We dominate the land. But I digress…

What do I do with this information I’ve gleaned? I digest. I analyze. I blatantly make stuff up and speak with conviction and surefootedness (Holy crap that’s a word? If spell check doesn’t pick it up that means it’s a word right?) in hopes that nobody questions the ridiculous claims I make.

So with this in mind, I’ve been doing my due diligence and do a pretty above average job at keeping all the inter-pages in my recent history, perusing the music magazine aisle at the book store, and keeping my ear to the ground for any tremor yet unheard. And what ho?! What’s this I hear?! The dawn of the new season! You’re damn right! New music season!

Let’s be honest, there’s no season for this, but somehow bands seem to put music out all at the same time…I think it has something to do with the average half life of Matthewkatzium…it’s the 111th element. No need to look it up. It’s fact. Either way, plastered all over MySpace, PureVolume, ReverbNation and all the respective record label websites (victoryrecords.com, ferretstyle.com, roadrunnerrecords.com, etc etc) are album presales! Woo!

For any music idiot super fan boy/girl, this is the golden harvest. What’s this? The CD I could buy in the stores for $10? Except that now, for the added cost of $9.99 (plus shipping and handling of course) I could have the VERY same CD but with an exclusive t-shirt?! A t-shirt that no one else will have unless they too feverishly refreshed their myspace page too? I. Must. Have. This. Immediately.

We fan-people don’t deal in dollars and cents. We deal in “making-of DVDs” (in one of Killswitch Engage’s presale offer packages), “limited edition t-shirts” (Poison the Well’s presale goodie), “signed screen printed posters” (as featured in Darkest Hour’s presale), “limited edition packaging” (one of the better gimmicks…same cd…different box), “exclusive 7 inch record complete with never before heard b-side recording and alternate version of a song already on the record” (unnecessarily part of August Burns Red’s presale bundle), and the ever popular bonus tracks as featured in pretty much EVERY pre-sale come-on ever.

Do I resist? Never. Do I nerd out about every single piece of paraphernalia? Absolutely 100% yes every time. Will I ever stop? Signs point to no.

This is one of the August Burns Red pre-order packages. I hate them for making me choose between the bundle with the t-shirt + poster and the one with the 7" vinyl. Decision: pending.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Every so often an album is dropped on the unsuspecting public that rattles the very foundation of what the masses know and don’t know about music. Genre-bending, mind-expanding, and soul-clattering, these albums go down in the annals of history as pieces of musiclature (non-political science majors can make up authoritative sounding words too) that are timeless in their own right. The album “Wars and Rumors of Wars” by the Chariot…is not one of these records.

The Chariot, formed by the original singer of Norma Jean, a mainstay of the Christian hardcore scene in the turn of the millennium, present this furious half hour (plus or minus) feedback-ridden, instrument-smashing, rhythmic train wreck to the unknowing masses in the setting of a changing scene. As the hardcore, punk, and metal scene runs its natural progression towards melody, structure, and a general broader appeal in hopes of lending itself to a larger, more mainstream fan base, The Chariot has remained true to their initial musical vision. Their latest record doesn’t try to make any huge leap across difficult genre lines or redefine their existing style.

This is by no means a bad thing.

This record viciously assaults and batters your ears like a gang of soccer hooligans. They yell, they pound, they generally raise a ruckus about things you’re not completely convinced are actually worth getting this worked up about. But your own lack of understanding about all the fuss only seems to make the rage-ridden even more red-faced. Alas, I suppose this is what happens when you give hardcore kids and art students a soap box to stand on and an instrument to wail on.

All ranting aside, here are some particularly rad things about this record:

-It doesn’t sound much like anything else I’ve heard released in the past year or so.
-It’s nice to hear what Norma Jean would sound like if they hadn’t replaced members.
-It’s fun trying to pick out the melodies and rhythms heavily masked in the distortion.
-The live tone of the guitars and drums are EPIC. They must have tracked most of this record in a gymnasium sized room, mic’d everything close up, then put room mic’s WAAAAAY back in the room and turned them WAY up. It’s like you can hear the natural reverb of the snare drum move all the way around the room. Pretty awesome!
-The guitar tones, while maintaining their brutality, have a cool Texas style twang to them. It sounds like fresh, crisp strings on a classic Fender…then put in a blender of distortion! Yowza!
-The packaging concept is cool and unique. Each CD is packaged in a heavy-gauge printing paper envelope thing with the cover art stamped on. So whoever did the cover art made it into a stamp then the band themselves hand stamped, numbered, and initialed each copy. It gave a pretty cool, unique feel to each individual album. Props for thinking outside the box boys.

The Metal Show! Part 2...

Holy sweaty sweet Jesus tap-dancing monkey balls!! Last week I had the privilege of going to another metal show! I know right!? It’s been a good couple weeks. Needless to say, right around the time my ears healed from the onslaught brought by the Canadian beard aficionados in Protest the Hero and the Milwaukee metal monsters in Misery Signals, I got my head pushed back in by the Australian group Parkway Drive (www.myspace.com/parkwaydrive).

So…given I missed the first couple bands, I was told by my very capable metal buddy that they all blew ass…it’s a technical term in the biz for “terrible.” I’m getting really sick of bands getting on their soap box and preaching at the crowd. We go to shows to see music. Not get a damn sermon about religion or politics or whatever. Play your songs damnit! Alas, I digress. The point I’m making is that the opening bands were terrible. They’re not even really worth mentioning much beyond that. It’d be wasted text…and then the terrorists would win.

Eventually Parkway Drive came on and we’ll just put it this way…I thought my days of being “that sweaty dude walking out of the metal show” were over…apparently not. Usually, when I’m at a show, I’ll hang out at the back and take in the whole scene, show, and performance. I watch the band, listen for what’s going on, take note of particular expressions of technical prowess, watch how the crowd reacts and how the band reacts to the crowd’s reactions…you know, this kinda thing. Not that night!

If you’re bored (and have a free moment where people aren’t walking by long enough for you to listen to a loud crazy metal song for a sec) you should/could check out their myspace page and listen to the song Boneyards. It’s probably one of their more brutal and fast songs. This was their opener. Well…they took the stage aaaaand pretty much turned Chain Reaction upside down, inside out, and backwards. People lost their ever loving minds. It was sweet. Bodies were flying, stage was rushed, massive pitting all over the place. It was literally all out mayhem for those first 3 minutes and 15 seconds…and it continued pretty much uninterrupted through the end of their set. What always makes this level of chaos WAY cooler is when the crowd and the band feed off each other. The dudes on stage were all smiley, bouncy, and fun to watch which in turn made the crowd that much more active as well. I love love LOVE when bands look like they’re having a good time on stage. Anyway, after Boneyards, the singer was totally floored. He was looking at the rest of the band members saying things like “Oh my GOD!…wwwwwwwwwHAT just happened?! You guys [the crowd] went NUTS. That was just the first song…! How are we going to top that?” It was like the first song of the set brought the energy that usually the last song brings…that final, last hurrah, leave it all on the floor type energy. UGH! So sickies!

By the end of the set I had gotten all wrapped up in it and had pushed myself up to the front. At hardcore/metal shows the singers like to do this thing where they’ll shove the mic down at someone’s face so they can scream a line or two or whatever…it’s kinda awesome…connects the band to the crowd. Anyway, I got to scream “dead by first light” with the singer (at the end of the song “The Sirens’ Song” that they ended their set on). That was fun. Oh ya, I also did a flipping stage dive. I think I landed on some little kids…possibly girls. My bad. Sorry. Life kinda happened for a second. Buy your ticket, take your ride. Right?

Soooo that was very atypical Matt behavior at concerts. But what can I say? It happened.

By the by, I can’t emphasize enough how awesome it is that these dudes look like they’re having a blast on stage. They’re all smiles. They look like 5 total surfer dudes with lots of tattoos going out of their way to play the most brutal music they can muster. Oh ya…and on top of the showmanship, they’re kinda stupidly solid. Other than one guitar losing signal for part of a song (which is more dumb luck than anything else) I didn’t see/hear many, if any, flaws in their playing. It was superawesomesweet.

A Photo Essay Of Sorts

Looking back at my posts here on Wolfbiker, I’ve realized I’ve been lacking something… Color! Flare! Panache! Of course I mean pictures! I talk about all this whacky, zany stuff but what does funny metal stuff really look like? Well…let me show you. I’ve scoured the internet (a little more than half-assedly) looking for photos of what I see as the goofy things that happen in metal. Given that I’m at the whim of what’s already out there, the following pictures characterize some of the more humorous aspects of a musical genre that is sometimes mislabeled as serious.

My first example is probably one of the most outlandish minds in metal, Adam Dutkiewicz (known lovingly as Adam D). Whereas he’s one of the most influential, talented, and anal retentive producer/engineer/mixers out there, on stage with his own band Killswitch Engage he is the biggest caricature of the metal genre there is. Everything he does is so outlandish and overstated that it can’t possibly be taken seriously…no matter how you spin it. Don’t be fooled though, this guy is a fantastically talented musician with a stranglehold on songwriting, music theory, and ultimate shrediness. For seriously.

Scrawny white guy wearing a cape flexing non-existent muscles? Sounds familiar… Note the neon green taped arrow pointing at his hand so you’re sure not to miss how awesome his shredology-ism is.

Viking helmet? Short shorts shorter than the boxers he’s wearing underneath? Licking the guitar he so shamelessly shreds proving not only his technical prowess but also his ability to do so while emulating the 80s hair metal that inspired him? Stupid stuff written on his guitar in tape? Check. Check. Check. Check.

Oh the denim rock god strikes. Taking the image of the “heavy metal guy who has rips in his jeans but doesn’t care because he’s so metal” image to the next level. Left the cape in the tour bus? A problem for mortals! Make do with what you have! …in this case, apparently a blow-up doll.

Metal and fire go together like koalas and cuteness. Greg Puciato from The Dillinger Escape Plan demonstrates this at some outdoor festival. Note the guitar player’s neon pink guitar…I’m pretty confident color totally effects the sound of the guitar. Probably has a bright tone. Punny.

This is Mike Schleibaum of Darkest Hour. Metal’s ultimate “dude.” The guy is a total gear head and can and will talk anyone’s ear off about tone, pedals, guitars, amps, or ANYthing really. Anyway, the guitar company Washburn made him a custom guitar named the Dude. They eventually made him a second one…called the Dude II. Note the headstock truss-rod cover.

I saw the Bled once at the House of Blues where the stage has a drop down curtain. When the first song started RIGHT as the curtain pulled open, this is what the crowd saw. Aside from having a full frontal assault of raucous hardcore to the face, there seemed to be something horribly wrong with the singer. Soon everyone caught on. You could literally hear the laughter over the music…which was saying something…cuz boy howdy it was loud.

Ken Susi plays guitar for Unearth…really well. Apparently, he also plays the air horn. I like that at a loud metal show, the air horn still makes him wince like a baby.

The Unearth guitar players are just lil’ guys…which makes them perfect for stage antics…like mid-song push-ups, mid-song beer chugging, mid-riff high-fives, and mid-song 100% fun-time acrobatics…like this! Buz McGrath rides John Maggard around like a metal totem pole. Gross. Awesome. Gross.

I’d like to finish this little photo journal with the consistently wittiest and goofiest band I’ve seen. Every Time I Die is a silly band…specifically their guitar players. Andy Williams is a massive loaf of dude with the ability to sneeze facial hair out of his face. To top it off, he’s probably one of the nicest, most genuine dudes ever. For example, he went through an entire US tour advertising the fact that he’d be outside at every show offering hugs. What a teddy bear. Last time I saw them (I think…or maybe 2 times ago?) they took the stage to play their southern rock inspired metal wielding these guitars. Andy played the pink zebra striped one and Jordan played the light blue guitar that has a painted-on caricature of Andy’s face.

Andy also went the entire length of Warped Tour one year making a shirt for each show…here’s one sporting the Queen song/lyrics “Fat bottom girls make the rocking world go ‘round”.

So that’s pretty much that...hopefully you enjoyed the visual hilarity that this music can inspire! Now imagine all this in motion. How can you not laugh?

The Handicap of Knowledge

Without getting too philosophical about things, because God knows there’s already WAY too many people being WAY too serious with their blogs, I think there could be something to the statement that (I’ve made up) knowledge can confine the mind. Of course I’m limiting my bs-thesis (thes-bs? Pronounced thees-bee-iss) to the realm of music knowledge.

We all know that there are countless trained musicians, or at least people who study music and music theory, who go on to logically make really incredible music. I mean, of course there are in turn trained musicians who boggle the mind in their ability to make really crappy music as well, but these people aren’t worth the breath, or typing-energy, to talk about. That would make for boring reading… “Hey, you know that one guy with the degree in music theory from the Berklee School of Music? Ya? Aren’t his songs good? Ya. They are aren’t they.” Booooring.

What baffles the mind, and makes for more interesting reading, are those who with NO musical training or anything defy the odds and make some pretty cool music. Crazy stuff. There are even some out there that have SOMEhow seemingly redefined the art of their instrument. The best example of this would have to be Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers who is arguably (as in I’m sure there’s an argument for it…but I don’t know what it is) one of the best alternative-rock/funk bass players ever. And the guy has taken like, zero lessons. THAT is pretty damn impressive.

Metal has its own heroes as well. The guitar players in Norma Jean, one of the founding hardcore staples, are probably one of the bigger hardcore bands to have come from absolutely nil musical background. The two founding guitar players picked up the guitar and basically tried making the instrument make sounds like those of their influences in the hardcore-punk scene of the 80s and 90s. The style of play was abrasive, heavily rhythmic, and not strong on melody. Even though I feel that over the years they’ve been a band they’ve strayed from where they started more towards the mainstream-middle ground of music, their roots lie in the discordant, off-beat, and heavily rhythmic roots of early hardcore. One band that, despite meager musical forethought, has turned my mind inside out has been August Burns Red. These Pennsylvanian kids have all but blown the doors off of conventional metal and metalcore. Picking up where bands like Norma Jean left off with their heavily rhythmic guitars and experimental time signatures and such, ABR has generated a style of their own by infusing more “metal” elements like breakdowns, a very slight movement towards song structure, and more breakdowns.

I think it’s important to point out what this lack of musical background has given these guys. Both bands I’ve mentioned approached their song writing process from a place of making their instruments make sounds and progressions that sound “neat.” Without having to operate under the confines of knowing that the notes they’re putting together don’t fall into the same scale or don’t technically belong together, they’re able to assemble a song or riff that for no explicable reason (at least until you drink a pot of coffee and stay up to tomorrow listening to the same passage over and over trying to understand what exactly just happened…not that I speak from experience in this or anything…I need a hobby…and to leave this aside behind and get back to whatever I was talking about) sounds freaking SWEET! They don’t have to worry about counting out a time signature or mapping how the tempos ebb and flow because without knowing the exact framework of how music “works” they just play what they feel. That is a powerful powerful thing that can often be hindered by the knowledge that what you’re making shouldn’t, by any good reason, work.

Obviously the number of bands that can function beyond these confines with any level of success are FAR outnumbered by those who can probably write a successful dissertation on the ability and technique of failing miserably. However, it’s worthy to mention and recognize those that beat these odds. And I salute you with this keg of coffee and pounding headache…as I try to decipher this beautiful chaos that is the music I love.

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

Break Down the Breakdown

Ohhh man I love breakdowns. The bigger, the heavier, the screamier, the rhythmicier, the better!

In all honesty, this is where metal gets silly. It's really easy to dig deep into complex song structure or analyze weird scales or passages and get totally enveloped in dissecting how everything works. But the inevitable will happen. The floor drops out from under you, all shredology comes to a screeching halt, your face stops melting just for a bit...and the breakdown HAPPENS! And boy howdy are there some geniuses out there who know their way around making this metal phenomenon happen. But we'll get to them in a sec, first lets talk about what makes breakdowns and what makes them fun(ny). Shall we? Yes. We shall.

Okay, so, I'm listening to "Gimme A D" by Parkway Drive (www.purevolume.com/parkwaydrive). These Aussie teens (so young, so good, so not fair) with the aid of the production wizardry of Adam D provide probably the most clear cut, auditory definition of breakdownage. The song starts with pure unadulterated craziness: tapping, screaming, monster guitar tone, double kick in your face, more tapping...it's pretty much like a full frontal assault of metal. And what's not to like with that?! Nothing. Nothing's not to like. Double negatives, like double bass pedals, are fun. Anyway, right after getting assaulted with facemeltage for no more than about 50 seconds, we're hit with a breakdown (the first one at least). After a fast galloped section, everything stops for a beat and an ultra elementary, heavily rhythmic passage begins. Contrasting with the pace and ferocity in the beginning of the song, the half time feel combined with the rhythmic (versus melodic) nature of the guitars lends to the sludgy, headbanging wonderfulness of a breakdown.

In my own opinion, a successful (not to mention rad) breakdown is one that is sandwiched with fast, melodic guitars, complex vocal leads, and technical drumming. When that breakdown hits, the simplicity in all three of these independent lines unifies into one simplified beast of a rhythm. And that's awesome. The sole purpose of this unity is to make the listener/crowd lose their minds. It's hard to articulate how exactly that works. I think the best way to put it is that the complexity and busy nature of the parts that lead up to the BD (as I'll call it because I'm getting tired of typing "breakdown" so often) create a bit of anxiety that builds in the listener/audience. So when that quality in the music that keeps you so focused on what's happening stops and you're hit with an almost OVER-simplified riff, that anxiety gets released in the form of punchdancing, jumping around like an idiot, goosebumps, or for me: laughter. It's an awesome feeling.

There are a number of bands who all are known for their ability to let the floor drop out from under you, namely Bleeding Through, Every Time I Die, Parkway Drive, Unearth...but I've gotta say that the undisputed champions of the ole BD would have to be Evergreen Terrace. Holy butts. They're not really the most shred-y band out there, but there's enough going on in their verses/choruses as a function of their punk background and influences that the meat of their songs are very fast tempo'd and busy. But then it comes. Sometime around the second verse or second chorus. Metal happens. Both guitars and the bass play some ridiculously simple, single-note rhythm that gets matched by the kick drum. The snare/cymbals play a simple 4/4 lick that drives the off-beat crunch of the instruments behind it. It's such a distinctive sound and feel and I think this band has captured better than anyone else. They seem to revel in the simplicity. And that's really the key to a successful breakdown. Check out the following songs (BD time is in parentheses) from their myspace - www.myspace.com/evergreenterrace:

Wolfbiker (1:12)
Chaney Can't Quite Riff Like Helmet's Page Hamilton (builds @ 2:42, floor drops out at 2:54)
Where There Is Fire (1:26 and again is reprised at the end of the song at 3:12)
New Friend Request (builds @ 2:23, lose your mind at 2:35)

...oh man, and there are so many more...but you get the idea. Hopefully you'll be able to hear them on your own and enjoy the nature of the beast.

There's nothing like an Evergreen Terrace breakdown.

Dude, bro. Wolfbiker!

The FEAR

This could be the cause for celebration in the belly of the beast.

I've realized recently that the "scene" I've attached myself to has come to a critical breaking point. The bands that have established themselves in this genre (your Killswitches, your Every Time I Dies, your Alexisesonfires, your Poisons in the Wells, et cetera) are reaching the point where they've managed to separate themselves from the masses and made names for themselves in their own right. Their labels realize the cash cow that's been created by a gaggle of kids who throw some screamed, witty lyrics over discordant verses. The suits fan the fire by throwing money, tour buses, and producers at these lucky few in hopes of the big dream of commercial success. And this is all fine and dandy. I mean, who doesn't love money right? On top of that, who doesn't love screwing around with your closest friends on a stage and making sweet moolah hand over fist? Nobody...that's who...except maybe communists.

So all this "corporation"-, "major label"-, "the man"- bashing isn't really what I'm getting at. Hell, when I hear of a band I like getting signed to a major label I'm excited! It usually translates into bigger venues, higher production value (on record and live), more extensive tours, longer sets...all in all it's a good time for all! Growth. Hell ya.

What worries me is the machination of the whole process. At a certain extent, some ear at some label hears the potential for a certain sound from a certain band. So the push comes not towards creative liberty but towards chart-topping. With the commercial success of bands like Killswitch Engage, Every Time I Die (ETID), Alexisonfire, Poison The Well, and others, I can't help but sit back and wonder if Epitaph is going to start pushing ETID towards a more mainstream sound for example. Or maybe Poison the Well will start shopping around to major labels again like they did with "You Come Before You" which was put out on Atlantic. Will these larger labels whittle away at the uniqueness of these homegrown success stories? I honestly couldn't tell you. But with new records on the horizon for all four of those bands (not to mention several others, Evergreen Terrace and August Burns Red to name a couple more) I can't help but worry a little. Look what happened to Atreyu...Avenged Sevenfold...Norma Jean...All That Remains.

To end on a positive note though, its hard to ignore the roots. These bands managed to "make it" in a time when power pop, faux-metal, nu-metal, and general teenie-bopper "punk" dominated the airwaves in the forms of anything from American Idol, Linkin Park, Finger Eleven, Breaking Benjamin, Newfound Glory, to Blink 182, these small garage bands managed to grow to national recognition. Sans help from MTV, sans help from mainstream radio, sans help from Rolling Stone, this scene has flourished. How can a band leave behind what has been doing for the past decade and hop onto that gravy train? It's hard to imagine. I'm not going to pretend like it DOESN'T happen...but I'm gonna say that I'm hopeful for the future.

Hopeful with a pinch of trepidation.