King Crimson – THRAK

Though I said I’d be visiting a lot of bands again by the time the year was out, this will be my last un-planned Album Du Jour entry. Until a few hours ago, I was racking my brain trying to think of what album would make a good Christmas Eve album, because I already know what album I am writing up for Christmas, but then I remembered that I hate seasonal music and thus today we are going to give King Crimson one last spin:

THRAK is that kind of album that instantly fascinates me not only because of the music, which is superb in this album, mind you, but because of the elements that might otherwise go unrecognized that make up its creation. When we last left King Crimson, it was the 80′s and they were actually making *good* music, which in and of itself was a rarity, but even rarer was the fact that, after the album Discipline, Crimson went on to record not one, but two albums with the exact same lineup. You might as well tell me a giraffe gave birth to a helicopter at that point, but let’s leave that uncomfortable metaphor quickly.

One thing that is far less surprising is that, after that trio of albums, the band broke up again, only instead of breaking up “forever and ever”, and based on the nature of King Crimson only requiring one member to exist, they more or less went “on hold” for about 10 years. A few things happened within that decade, but most of it was in the 80′s so who cares, right?

Well, fearless leader Robert Fripp was once again bored with not being in a very successful rock band  (he decided to take up teaching this time, which amassed for him another Chapman Stick player by the name of Trey Gunn, so he decided to bring back King Crimson again. The usual players were called, Adrian Belew returned to lead vocals after a solo stint as well as some work with David Bowie and his own band called The Bears (an appropriate name given the fate of other former King Crimson members, it all makes sense now!) Bassist Tony Levin was called away from his other gig of making Peter Gabriel suck less, and some new players were brought to the group as well. Trey Gunn, in an unusual move, was kind of made a “second bassist” as his instrument was the Stick and that’s what Levin played as well. Pat Mastelotto was brought on as drummer, having worked with one of Fripp’s interim projects, and then, the strange and awesome happened.

Bill Bruford, who you may remember from the band King Crimson, more or less saw a Crimson reformation starting up, and ran up to the group saying “Don’t forget about me!” Fripp couldn’t say no, because not only is Bill Bruford awesome, but this meant that King Crimson was now composed of two guitarists, two bassists, and two drummers, and thus the idea of a “double trio” was introduced. THRAK is the resulting album of having two band’s worth of members jamming out some awesome songs.

Indeed, from the heavy-hitting introduction “VROOOM” (onomatopoeia would be a freqently-visited concept on this album) which brings back the Mellotron, to the ending track of “VROOOM VROOOM (Coda)” (I love these names), the album is thick with instruments, but not in the way you’d really expect. At no easily-discernible time are instruments just playing in tandem, and neither are they venturing so far away from each other that it just sounds like a mess; instead, everything is arranged to the core, with a noticeable lack of lengthy improvisational segments. Heck, the longest song on here is just over 6 minutes and is closer to Pop than Prog. That song, by the way, is my favorite and is called “Dinosaur”.

After what seems like a double-introduction song in the form of “VROOOM” and “Coda: Marine 475″, which kind of has lyrics but then kind of doesn’t, we’re given a Mellotron-backed diminished chord wonder with a stomping rhythm that sounds like John Lennon writing and singing a Stravinsky number. Seriously, maybe it was intentional on Adrian Belew’s part, but his vocals on this song are very Lennon-esque, and the back-and-forth guitar chords sound to me exactly like a play on “I Am The Walrus”. The song’s chorus, “I am a dinosaur, somebody is digging my bones” seems to be kind of a play on King Crimson feeling a little old at this point, though plenty of groups by this time were digging their bones, Tool and Primus being notable examples. Either way, “Dinosaur” is an incredible song, and though it only bears a passing resemblance to “I Am The Walrus”, it doesn’t have the nonsense lyrics, opting instead to actually be clever with lines like “Ignorance has always been something I excel in, followed by naivety and pride”.

Instead, the nonsense lyrics would come in the form of one of the much later songs in the set called “Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream”:

Sex sleep eat drink dream
Primal tribal apple egg vegetable eel
I have a new canoe but it does not have a wheel

Not bad at all, not bad at all. This song also has a wonderful funky-to-disaster switch-up that I am quite fond of.

In fact, the more disastrous parts of the album, particularly in the instrumentals, are really fun from a music appreciation standpoint. The album even features, for the first time ever, a gol’dern drum solo in a track called “B’Boom”, which seems to be a bit of an inevitability when you’ve got two drummers going, is what I’m thinking. The album’s title track features guitars (107 of them, according to Fripp, but that’s probably a joke) playing these nonsense chords in a way that is slightly off time, just enough to overlap and refer to another part of the rhythm. Of course, those might be the Chapman Sticks as well, it’s kind of hard to tell because I have never seen any of this stuff live, as much as it would have blown my little mind to do so.

The album’s got its tranquil moments too, which are actually quite pleasing in their own way. “Walking On Air” is the first, and is a deep-toned tune that again seems to sound like The Beatles given the Prog treatment (also known as Radiohead), and it’s a nice peaceful tune with a lead guitar duet that are played in more of an ambient way, to great effect. It’s a nice counter to the more oppressive tunes, which are mysteriously broken up across the album, such as “Radio” and “Inner Garden”, both of which are kind of fragmented and scattered across the middle of the album, not to mention that there are 3 different songs with the word “Vrooom” in them, so don’t go thinking this is a pop album, it’s every bit as confusing as prog gets.

I really do love this album, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s more because of the music or more because the “double trio” gimmick is really interesting to me, but that’s like trying to decide whether you like the peanut butter or chocolate more in a stocking full of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: either way, you win.

The Wiseguys – The Antidote

Today I am a tired fellow. In an effort to sort of “loop” my atrocious sleep schedule around (my average time of posting these writeups has been about 5-7am after being up all night), I stayed up all night last night and refused to sleep until tonight, when this writeup is done.

Hence, today’s album writeup began with some very specific criteria: 1. I am going to be too tired for even basic coherence, so it should be an album that is easy to talk about without all that pesky research and 2. Since the writeup will suffer accordingly, it has to be an album I do not care about in the least.

We have a winner! It’s The Wiseguys with The Antidote:

It all started, like my brief infatuation with the Eels, with some late-night MTV2 viewing back when that channel used to play videos because MTV wouldn’t (I wonder who plays the videos now? Oh right). I was watching videos, with my VCR recording the whole thing on one of those 6 hour cassette tapes they had back in the day (you kids and your DVR, why back in my day etc. etc.), and there are very few, in the sea of thousands of videos I must have watched, that actually stuck with me. Not only did a little video from The Wiseguys stick with me, it was all I could do to get it unstuck for a while there.

I’m talking of course about “Start The Commotion“. For one as unaccustomed as I was to this style of music back then (I’m still ignorant of it, actually, because I don’t know what to call this stuff besides somewhere between techno and hip hop), the idea of taking bits of real instruments, sampling them, and adding them into a groovy mix that builds on itself every 4 measures and then referencing every added part with a little video that is repeated like the loop was just dang brilliant. In fact, I’ve not seen a video work quite as well as this one before, in being utterly and perfectly fused into one entity, one may forget or entirely ignore that the song is kind of terrible really.

Still, the “unique” factor got me hooked, and I had to know more. I consulted whatever store it was where I bought CD’s before Best Buy opened anywhere reasonably close to me 10 years ago, and picked up a copy of the album.

To my delight, a lot of the songs are just like “Start The Commotion” (fancy that!), there’s “Ooh La La“, and the album’s title track, “Re-Introduction”. I was fine with all this, but then the album turned into 15 songs, all of them long, even the short ones, and well my enthusiasm for this album wanes about as quickly as it comes.

I am not sure if this techno hop drum babble hip nonsense is supposed to be listened to in the “album” format, or if the album is a cheaper way to get all these little dance club singles that were originally released one by one every 15 seconds when the world had just forgotten about them. There’s no account for taste, of course, but the repetitiveness just gets to me after a while, and there’s gotta be something wrong with that, because about half the genres I listen to are firmly rooted in the tradition of repeating choruses until a reasonable person wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore.

There are some pretty OK raps in here, “Experience” is one that particularly stands out in my mind, but there’s another problem at work here. I have no idea who these people are supposed to be. One of the reasons I dislike rap and hip-hop “as a rule” is because so much of it is based on image and persona, and I just don’t have the energy to study up on personas, opinions, brand-affiliations, or any of that garbage. Music should speak for itself, and just blatantly reporting the situation of your current financial status or the frequency of sleeping with women is tiresome at best, and at worst, well let’s just say I prefer Phil Spector.

I actually can’t remember if there are any instances of ego in the many rap segments of The Antidote, because it’s all done through “guest stars” that I have also never heard of, and I remember the lyrics being pretty vague. I suppose if I knew Jerry Beeks and Season & Sense Live a little better, I’d know firstly if they even ARE rappers, and secondly if their track record of opinion-giving has been consistent with the report on this “Experience” song I was so happily grooving to until a heavy-handed message started drilling itself into my subconscience.

Of course, occasionally the group goes a little crazy and pulls out oppressive sounding stuff like cellos and hollow drum sounds in a track like “Face The Flame”, which is actually a pretty cool little song. I also like how they turn elevator/Weather Channel jazz into a really groovy little tune called “The Executives”, which should be an easy title to recognize because that’s also all the lyrics.

Probably the strangest song is “Cowboy ’78“, which has some strange Eastern music held up by the samples of voices chanting something or other. I could swear to you on the holiest of underwear that they are chanting “Dig Dug”, and that’s why this song haunts me in my dreams to this day.

So yeah, the album is consistent, I’ll give it that much. “Start The Commotion” became quite the hit, in fact the only way I was finally able to break the spell that song had over me was to see it used for the promotion of the film Zoolander, with which a “remixed” video was made featuring clips of the film, totally ruining the song/video’s flow. That kind of made me hate Zoolander (that and the comedy) the first few times I saw it. Of course, the irony is that now that’s a film I really love and I don’t really care for the song anymore except as a novelty. Well, maybe that’s no irony but I am very sleepy.

Anyway, The Wiseguys broke up soon after achieving fame and one of them went on to work with Fatboy Slim which absolutely aborted any interest I might have gained in this group upon hearing this album. Hopefully you will enjoy them more than I will, until then!

Primus – Antipop

Ah, you probably thought I forgot about Primus, didn’t you? Well, actually I probably did; in fact, I frequently do. Though I enjoy Primus immensely, I only really listen to them when in the mood for them. The reason behind this is probably that I have only heard a few of their albums, and was only recently introduced to their most popular stuff.

So I was thinking we could talk about the album that I’ve had the longest, Antipop:

Apparently I picked a bad album to have as my go-to Primus album. Antipop was created during the “Brain” years, when Tim Alexander, the group’s original drummer, had left the group for reasons I’m not clear on (I think because they got popular because of “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver”?) Either way, his replacement was a drummer who actually had auditioned to be the original drummer, Bryan “Brain” Mantia. This is the second of two albums the group recorded with Brain before calling it quits forever and ever… for 3 years anyway.

On top of not having their original (and, in my opinion, much better) drummer in the group, Antipop is also marked by a veritable slew of guest appearances from members of groups that I would consider “Pop”, at least in my own definition of the term. I consider “Pop” to be any kind of music that is far too slick and engineered to appeal to the masses to be in any way realistic, so yeah Britney Spears and Nickelback could be considered pop, but so could Metallica and Limp Bizkit. Sure enough, James Hetfield of Metallica and Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit appear on this album, the latter of which thankfully as a non-talent-contributing producer of one song. Also present is the more legitimate Tom Morello of Guitar Hero III fame, and every hipster’s fantasy, creepy uncle Tom Waits, who contributes the best material to the album.

In fact, the album starts with Tom playing a Mellotron (a suitably creepy instrument for the old codger) and counting off the first song, a nice little ditty called “Electric Uncle Sam”. In it, the singing makes Uncle Sam (the old guy representing our country by pointing at guys from posters) out to be a creepy evil guy:

Don’t get caught with your fingers in my pie
Mess with me and boy you’re surely gonna die
If ever you’re in doubt about who or where I am
I’m here, I’m there, I’m everywhere
I am your Uncle Sam

Anti-America more like, Primus! Of course, I’m kidding, they’ve always been that way. The song has a nice hard groove, though is unfortunately a little light on that fancy bass work that makes Primus so great, but that’s ok because there’s plenty of fancy basswork to hear.

“Natural Joe” has a really cool drum and bass groove, with lyrics about… a guy… named “Natural Joe”. The lyrics don’t amount to very much, other than that it’s about a guy who is normal but likes to go to seedy places for a little bit of something, which is never named but implied with a cool chromatic bass run-down, except for the very end, where apparently he goes down to the liquor store for a little bit of… a sample of noises from a war like machine guns rattling and people screaming. I tell ya, I love this band but I do not get them much.

The “hit” of the album (in that it has a video) is “Lacquer Head”, which is an anti-drug song about people who huff gasoline. Personally, I think that one shouldn’t huff on gasoline, and I’m glad that a band has decided to pick up on this too. This is the song that is “produced by Fred Durst”, and other than it being a little heavy, I don’t really hear anything that is particularly soul-destroying on this recording, so I guess his evil influence isn’t that present. The oft-repeated line at the end of the song is “Keep on sniffin’ ’til your brain goes pop”, and though I know that they mean “pop” in the sense of damaging your brain until you’re retarded, they could also mean “pop” in the sense of Madonna-flavored music (can music taste like veneral disease?)

Primus is very against this “pop” thing, and they demonstrate this in the album’s title track, which comes hard and heavy and with rather clever lyrics that say just what they mean.

It’s after this song that my interest in the album begins to wane, and it’s mainly because the next track is “Eclectic Electric”, which is 8 minutes and 34 seconds of James Hetfield and Jim Martin of Faith No More playing guitars for the most boring song to ever feature delay on a bass guitar.

Things pick up after that, though not a whole lot. First is “Meet The Sacred Cow”, which is kind of “back to normal”, but is a little too much metal mixed in to be particularly exciting. “Mama Didn’t Raise No Fool” is much better, though it very unapologetically features guitar work from Tom Morello, but is at least catchy enough to make up for the riffiness.

“Dirty Drowning Man”, which features Stewart Copeland of The Police (what happened to anti-pop, Primus?) on production duties, is better than the last track, but also quite similar, except it has a really cool instrumental break about halfway through and a fast-paced groove all throughout.

“Ballad Of Bodacious” is the moment where I declare the Middle Album Slow Down to be pretty much over, as it’s a funky Primus jam of the highest calibur, as it has some cool envelope filter bass and some of that good ol’ “what the hell” Larry LaLonde guitaring. All of this for a song about bull riding, specifically a bull called “Bodacious”. I kind of love how Primus doesn’t really have a reason to write songs but does so anyway.

“Power Mad” is amazing just for its beginning sample of a guy talking about panties, but it’s also a really fun song, Tom Morello notwithstanding. Actually, I really do like Morello’s part for this song as well as that other song where I was making fun of him, having such “recognizable” guitar playing, he fits right in with one of the most recognizable bands in rock music.

The album nearly ends with a spacey synth noise and squishy bass line for nearly 2 minutes before the song “The Final Voyage Of The Liquid Sky” fully unfolds and then fades out again into the bass soloing again. I love the squishy distorted bass-line because it sounds a lot like a guitar noise I created once that I was particularly proud of.

The Mellotron starts up again in order to take us out with the best song on the album, called “Coattails Of A Deadman“, which is a spooky, almost carnival-like tune that Les Claypool sings with an over-the-top kind of singing style as he sings a ballad of how evil women are. I would say Tom Waits wrote the song, but the lyrics might as well be from the Bible. I will say, I don’t know why Tom Waits is so popular, but I kind of like how he sounds like a pirate on this particular recording.

Anyway, that’s Antipop, I guess it sure was anti-stuff. On top of Pop, we’ve got anti-America, anti-drugs, anti-women, and anti-bullfighters, which is an effective enough vendetta for one album at least. I do enjoy this album, even if it’s far from the band’s best, and I look forward to hearing their popular stuff now. Until then!

Radiohead – Pablo Honey

Well, I knew when I started talking about Radiohead albums in backwards chronological order, that I would have to eventually come to Pablo Honey, a terrible album that I’m afraid to say I actually quite like:

To many music listeners out there, and even most Radiohead fans, this album is pretty much “The one with ‘Creep’ on it”. To be honest, it should probably be left at that, but it would feel less like an album writeup if I were to end things here, so it looks like we’re stuck with 11 more songs that aren’t “Creep”.

To put things into perspective, Radiohead’s first album had all the makings of a “one hit wonder”. After changing their name from “On A Friday” (thank goodness), they released a really poor-selling debut EP and then sought out Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade (who would later produce Warren Zevon’s Life’ll Kill Ya based on their merits as having “worked with Radiohead”) for their full length album. The album would feature some stuff that they did before they were a signed band, as well as some new material, but none of it was particularly good. Of course, bad bands make albums all the time, so nobody thought twice about it.

While recording, the band half-heartedly tossed out an impromptu version of “Creep”, which got the producers’ attention, because it was better than the other stuff they had done thus far (despite being in the key of “G” like just about half of this album). Suddenly, the band had a hit on their hands, a song about being lonely and pathetic, with an easily recognizable hook and one of the most intense midde-eights (fancy talk for “bridge”) since Iron Maiden. Thus Radiohead the UK hitmaker band was born, even though they never liked the song and only after becoming huge without it did they start tolerating associating with it again.

As for the rest of the songs, well, they’re just there. A lot of them sound like attempted hits, especially “Anyone Can Play Guitar”, and the other half just sound like stuff that they tossed together because all the band could all play the chords without thinking too much about it. It’s kind of weird to hear something like In Rainbows or Amnesiac with their fancy effects and interesting melodies, and then to try and not crack up at the tune to “Ripcord” which, incidentally, has nearly the same melody right after the chorus as the theme to Disney’s Pepper Ann. Seriously, check it out! You’re welcome, internet.

Some of the songs are really good though. I can’t, in good conscience, say anything bad about the album’s opener, “You”. From having that lovely thick wall of distorted guitars to a single high note that Thom Yorke has refused to hit since the mid-90′s, it’s about the best English rock song about being a stalker that I know.

In fact, the album is bookended with goodness. I have always loved the album’s ender, “Blow Out” (Youtube warning: do not watch if you suffer from epilepsy). It’s only two chords, but after the second chorus, the thing just erupts into this rising guitar feedback effect that just kind of takes over the mix and rises like some tidal wave of barely discernible sound. It also stands as the only track from this album that the band itself is actually proud of, so that’s something I suppose.

There are other notable attempts on the band’s part to “rock out” in this album that never seem to get quite off the ground. Perhaps it’s Thom Yorke’s voice and how unsuitable it is for anything other than what the band would eventually start doing, but to listen to the song “How Do You?”, one may get the feeling that something is amiss. Yeah, there are distorted guitars all over the place, but Thom does not have the voice for punk rock, and despite turning his entire head into a nose in order to get such a nasally performance, it just doesn’t seem to work out for him.

Even worse than that is his performance on “Anyone Can Play Guitar”. Now here’s a song that shows a lot of promise, it’s in the Angry People’s Key of E minor, and features a catchy enough major-key chorus, but the words and vocal performance handily derail the whole thing. For one, it’s got words like this:

Destiny, Destiny protect me from the world
Destiny, hold my hand protect me from the world

Here we are, with our running and confusion
And I don’t see no confusion anywhere

And if the world does turn, and if London burns
I’ll be standing on the beach with my guitar
I want to be in a band, when I get to Heaven
Anyone can play guitar
And they won’t be a nothing anymore

For one, does London even have any beaches? For two, these are terrible lyrics. I understand that Radiohead occasionally considers themselves “above” rhyming (unless you count rhyming “guitar” and “guitar” and “world” and “world”), but even then, these words are entirely misrepresentative of what the band stands for nowadays. Heck, after the 90′s, it might as well had been “I’ll be standing on the beach with my Ondes Martenot”. I am not even going into how Thom actually sings the song, just go listen to it yourself.

Wow, I just watched that video for the first time ever, and… I have no more words. I’m just going to end this thing here.

So yeah, Pablo Honey is the most hated of Radiohead albums, and one that seems to be universally agreed upon as a stain on their otherwise amazing career, but still a necessary stain, for the embarrassment, pain, indignity, and most of all, money, was necessary to push the band in the direction they were meant to travel. The album shouldn’t necessarily be hated, there really is some fine work done on it despite some mistakes and lots of lazy bits, there’s just a reason Radiohead tends to only refer to it in hushed whispers or indignant moping. Oh wait, that’s how the refer to everything… nevermind.

Jars Of Clay – If I Left The Zoo

As you can probably tell from reading this blog for any extended amount of time (and why would you do that), I used to be pretty into this whole Christian Rock music. Fact is, though I have since all-but dropped it in favor of the heathen music that I write about the other 6 days out of the week, it’s really only because “secular” music (how I hate that distinction) is a deeper well to draw from, whereas there are only a few Christian albums that are any good, much less actually stay with me through the years.

Well, If I Left The Zoo is one of those albums that has stayed with me for the 10 years it’s been out, in fact next to anything by Poor Old Lu, it’s my favorite Christian album. So let’s check it out:

Released just about a month and a day over 10 years ago, I always thought this was Jars Of Clay’s third album, but I guess they sneakily released a few little limited edition things in between 1994 and 1999, so this is actually either their fifth or sixth album, depending on who you ask. Either way, one thing is clear: this album marked a prodigious paradigm shift for our little acoustiternativerockers, as they were almost heading for with their slightly-electric album Much Afraid but without moving all the way away from their smooth, melancholy minor chord ways. If I Left The Zoo is a loose, laid-back, and overall fun album, with emotional intensity where it needs to be, smooth melancholy where it needs to be, and a lot of fun everywhere else. It’s not only one of my favorite examples of a good Christian album, but a good album in general.

One thing I can remember about the end of the last decade was the feeling of trepidation in the air that all the computers were going to lock down and the world was going to end because computers were going to get the clocks wrong. Believe it or not, “Y2K” was a real concern for a lot of people, and despite absolutely nothing actually happening, it created a lot of stress for people, not to mention how many crazy folk were going around predicting the end of the world (which they’re still doing, apparently we’re supposed to watch out for 2012 and 2061). Either way, there are a few examples of music I can think of in that notorious year 1999 that, whether subtly or not, referred to that apprehension lingering in the air, and Jars Of Clay opened their album with one of the best.

The first song is called “Goodbye, Goodnight”, and with its pushed-back acoustic guitar and accordion, sounds like a French street corner band playing to a group of soldiers or something as they wait to go to war, at least that’s how I always pictured it. Anyway, the words utilize the same flowery poetry that Jars are known for:

A flower for your vanity
A penny for your thoughts
About the world’s insanity
And how we’ve gotten lost

Strike up the band to play a song
As we go marching by
And fake a smile as we all say good-bye
Good-bye

…and more words about war. It’s a nice little folk song actually, and the melody is really hard to get out of your head (10 years and counting for me, this is usually the song that makes me pick up the album and spin it again). It doesn’t help that the little instrumental additions that come to join in the acoustic guitar are all full of character themselves. Cellos, tubas, a boisterous choir of voices that join in for one line, even someone quietly “cha cha”-ing in the background really adds an element of ease to a song containing the otherwise dire lines:

Raise a glass to ignorance
Drink a toast to fear
The beginning of the end has come
That’s why we all are here

Stike up the band and play a song
And try hard not to cry
And fake a smile as we all say good-bye
Good-bye

Interestingly, that’s one of the low points of the album, and with the exception of the middle and very end of the album, that’s about all there is for melancholy. The second song, “Unforgetful You” may distress or otherwise surprise fans of the band’s first two (five?) albums, as it’s a punchy, clean electric song with electronic effects, joyful lyrics, and is generally upbeat. Good stuff, too bad it was used in the soundtrack of not one, but two horrible movies, the first being the Melissa Joan Hart teen movie Drive Me Crazy and the second being briefly during the Britney Spears movie, not the porno, the actual movie she was in with fatty Dan Akroyd. Tragic.

The third song, in having no affiliation with terrible movies and being generally awesome, is a further improvement on the proceedings. The song is called “Collide” and has some interesting production techniques that I’ve never really heard in other recordings, even on this album. The drums are really pushed back, and the distorted bass sustains to the extent that it almost sounds like organ foot pedals. Dan’s vocals are pushed way up to the front, and all kinds of effects fill up the rest of the sound stage, including bleeps and blips, phase shifting guitar and other guitar notes that almost sound like they could be slide notes. Either way, the song is also punchy, and the rhythmic vocals are still hitting all cylinders with the whole “interesting melodies” thing. I don’t know, I just never get tired of this song is all.

Lest we forget that Jars Of Clay used to be an acoustic band, they return to those roots for a song or two, starting with “No-One Loves Me Like You”, which is another poetry session as far as lyrics go, but the acoustic guitars, instead of inundating us with cluster chords or “church” chords, present a bouncy tune accented by flourishes of mandolin and a nice, deep bass-line as the drums, being played with brushes, have a nice steady cadence going. The song is so calming and sunny that the intensity of the lyrics are somewhat lost, but that’s kind of the point, because the song is generally optimistic anyway.

There are a couple of examples of ideas in this album that don’t work quite as well as hoped, and “Famous Last Words” is one of those. It’s a great tune, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s just a case of lyrically trying to chase a good idea and not quite catching it:

You say you heard every word, but I watched you turn away
Your eyes grew colder than winter
“Love is so intrusive,” I thought I heard you say
And laugh so unconvincingly

Famous last words, “I’m not ready yet”
“I won’t be gone a minute” but I won’t forget
Those famous last words
If tomorrow never comes, will I ever know that I was in love?

I mean, these lyrics are fine and all, but I think they’re not quite getting the joke behind the phrase “famous last words”. It’s something you say in response to someone saying something that could possibly be unexpectedly dangerous, like “What does this switch do?” Oh well, I’m not complaining about the actual song, just its use of the idea.

Some of the ideas seem like they should be bad, but work in a way. The song “Sad Clown” is an example of this. I know that the idea of a “sad clown” is about the most cliché thing one can think of when one thinks of a clown. Still, the slow, bluesy ballad being played on a piano that sounds 200 years old being backed up by a toy piano actually works really well for giving the song a showy yet convincing feel. I’ll give the guys one thing, they chase that idea of the clown all the way to where it suddenly doesn’t seem like such a goofy piece and something one can sympathize with. The song is good, and I can tell because I usually hate the mention of clowns in songs (another exception is one of my favorite Nick Drake tunes, “At The Chime Of A City Clock”).

Still, now that we’re over the dire middle of the album, it’s time for a particularly inspirational piece called “Hand”. The melody has this very “love song” feel to it, but the driving beat and dropped-tuning bass keep it from feeling too “adult contemporary”. Still, if those elements weren’t in place, this song would sound more like a “classic” Jars Of Clay than anything else on this album, with the possible exception of the ending portion where Dan Haseltine really belts it out, which goes against his usual method of whispering out the vocals.

In fact, I noticed that a lot of the “new” elements that are introduced in one song on this album are usually fully realized in the very next track, and I think that shows a very good amount of cohesion in the album. This album couldn’t have come together any better if Hannibal Smith planned it (and he loves it when a plan comes together). In this case, Dan Haseltine belting out some noteworthy notes is more of a feature in “I’m Alright”, a positive song that has a very Gospel Music feel to it, thanks to the choir of backup singers and the general pop feel to the instrumentation. It’s a really excellent song, especially when you consider that the lyrics are actually a rather mature song about relationship problems, but it’s all done in such a sweet-natured way that there’s a farfisa(?) organ solo followed by whistling. Nicely played, fellas.

“Grace” and “Can’t Erase It” make up the late portion of the album, and are both fairly similar in feel and the fact that both are driven by guitar riffs, which is another new element developed in the first and seen to fruition in the second. I just didn’t want to talk about them at length because we’re running out of room here.

I did want to mention briefly the final song, “River Constantine”, which has a special place in my heart attached to some happy memories. It’s otherwise a really lovely acoustic number with thunderous percussion going on in the background, and the lyrics are just about a river representing God. Nothing too special, I suppose, but it’s one of my favorite songs ever, so of course I’m at a loss to describe why it’s so great, I can almost never do that successfully with my favorite songs.

So yeah, an amazingly well-put-together album to end the decade with, and as we end this new decade, and I listen to this album again, it really puts perspective into where I was 10 years ago and where I will be once that clock rolls around to “0″ again and we begin a new decade. Of course, that time is not quite here yet, and we still have albums to write about. So, until then, thanks again for reading!

Weird Al Yankovic – The Food Album

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! On this fine day, Americans from all over the world gather together to celebrate the magic of food. Though we traditionally like to carve up turkey and make stuffing (finally, a food named after the verb that goes along with it), and craaaaaanberry sauce, thanks to The Food Network and the American Dream (and those terrible vegetarians like uhh, Weird Al), we can pretty much eat anything we want on Thanksgiving, provided of course we eat too much of it.

So, in the spirit of the true meaning of Thanksgiving, which is food and the promise of genocide, I might as well talk about Weird Al and his Food Album:

Of course, I originally had not planned on talking about this album, because it’s a compilation, but I evntually figured something out. Basically, hardly any Weird Al albums are actually albums, per se, because of the nature of his work. The music wasn’t written to contain any kind of cohesion or agreement, because he didn’t write the music. Thus, a collection of singles about a single topic, despite being recorded all over the 80′s and 90′s, is as close to a proper album as anything else. Heck, the word “album” is right there in the title so I have no problem.

As Weird Al’s food-based parodies tend to be some of his most famous, this album is quite good despite its ho-hum rating from Allmusic, which cites that it has too many songs about food on it (thanks, Allmusic). Also, as I mentioned in my last writeup of Weird Al, it’s the first CD I ever owned, as I only had cassettes before that (and now I feel old).

The first song is one of Weird Al’s best and most cited (thanks to its amazing video), the Michael Jackson parody “Fat”. Really, I could tell you what this parody of “Bad” is all about, but I think Wikipedia description is better than anything I could do:

“About a man’s obesity that is blown out of proportion.”

Either way, it’s certainly one of those songs that really sort of makes me unable to really appreciate the original anymore because it’s not hilarious. Such is the way with most Weird Al parodies, really.

The second song is a parody of one of the most annoying songs I’ve ever heard, “La Bamba”, which is now about a food item very close to a certain America’s Favorite Cat, “Lasagna”. The song is presumably based on the understanding that, if you visit an Italian person’s home and have dinner with them, you will wind up eating everything in their house. This is presented in “La Bamba”s typical over-the-top Flamenco-ness, which oddly translates really well into Italian, mainly thanks to Al’s extraordinary accordion chops. What Al does extraordinarily well is over-the-top Italian accents, as that is the main joke of the song. Still, I quite enjoy this one, especially for the accordion solo half way through.

“Addicted To Spuds” is based on Robert Palmer’s “Addicted To Love”, which was a big song in the 80′s or something. I actually quite like this song, either version, which kind of goes against my rampant 80′s-hatin’. Again, Wikipedia’s summary of the song is better than anything I could come up with:

“About a man’s fondness for potatoes prepared in an assortment of ways.”

There is a particular line that says “I used to hate them, now they’re all that I eat”, and I can relate to that, because I used to hate potatoes when I was a kid, and I think everyone goes through that phase at some point. Mind you, I’m no addict, I can quit any time!

One of my favorite songs on the collection is “I Love Rocky Road“, a parody of The Arrows’ song “I Love Rock N’ Roll” as covered by Joan Jett. As with many songs from Al’s first album (and one to come in this collection), this one features much original and less “authentic” reproduction of the original music and much more accordion and “manualism” provided by the legendary “Musical Mike” Kiefer. “Manualism” is, of course, just a fancy way of saying “making farty noises with your hands”, and this wouldn’t be the last time he would work with Al.

Another really great one is “Spam”, from the song “Stand” by R.E.M. I’ve never heard the original, so I don’t really know what’s been changed, but as far as songs about certain “ham and pork” products go, this one is tops. In particular, there are some subtle lyrical jokes that always crack me up, like the lines:

The tab is there to open the can
The can is there to hold in the Spam

Which is just kind of awesome.

The “other” Michael Jackson parody is next, this time we’ve got “Eat It“, which also features an awesome music video. The song itself is a brilliant parody, utilizing wordplay masterfully in mocking the “tough guy” attitude of “Beat It” with the words of a parent scolding a fussy eater of a child. Having heard both versions, I actually quite like the speedy guitar solo in Weird Al’s version, which is played by American Rick Derringer (who, in my mind, insists on having “American” incorporated into his name), as opposed to Jackson’s version featuring Eddie Van Halen. Not to say anything negative about Van Halen, he is in fact the only good thing about the band Van Halen. On a personal note, I have stolen the “amplifier exploding” gag for a song I wrote, as I have no shame.

The next song is one man’s obsession with the stuff in the middle of an Oreo, “The White Stuff”. A pretty cool take on “The Right Stuff” by New Kids On The Block, there is a certain line I always mixed up in this song, which cracked me up originally because I thought he was singing:

I love the filling most
I rub it on my roast
Mix it in with my coffee
And spread it on my toes

He is, in fact, saying “toast”, which is ok but I would have thought a more “Weird Al” move would have taken love of sandwich cookie filling to that kind of level. Interestingly, the song actually never saw the light of day as a single because the record companies held it back for being too outdated (the original having already been out for 4 years). It’s no wonder Weird Al has been so quick to embrace the digital age and its instant-release capabilities.

We then get the other song from Weird Al’s debut album, “My Bologna”, a play on the creepy classic “My Sharona”. Again, the instrumentation is much more accordion-centric, with more “manualism” from Musical Mike. In that sense, the song is actually tonally really enjoyable, I don’t know what it is about accordions in rock music, but this one’s great, at least until the middle eight which is puncuated by a loud belch.

The song “Taco Grande” is one of those that displays Al’s uncanny rapping ability. Of course, the “rap” is more of that sort of Latin pop style used for the original song, “Rico Suave”. The whole thing takes place in a Mexican restaurant with an actual Mexican (Cheech Marin!) providing a hilarious and probably authentic run-down of the menu.

Finally, we get Survivor’s “Eye Of The Tiger” played off as “Theme from Rocky XIII (The Rye or the Kaiser)”. It’s about a disgraced ex-boxer, now “fat and weak”, who runs the neighborhood deli. The song is perhaps the least “funny” out of everything on the collection, as it seems more bent on recreating the original to be about something else rather than making the song all that funny, but maybe I’m just picking on it. An interesting point about this song is that it seemed to predict the plot of the newest Rocky Balboa film, as the character is working in a deli in the beginning of the movie.

Phew! So that’s a lot of words for a 10 song album, but I do rather enjoy listening to this one from time to time. Sure, it’s more fun to watch the videos, but The Food Album showcases some really good stuff from our favorite musical parodist. Happy T-day, everyone! Enjoy the leftovers!

Sunny Day Real Estate – Diary

This writeup is more or less dedicated to my brother, who is an enthusiastic fan of this band, and who had a birthday today. He also loaned me this album so I could listen to it, which I was planning on doing anyway, so there’s also that.

Ah, Sunny Day Real Estate, at last we meet. I have heard about this band for nearly half my life, and judging the connections between this band and one of the most reviled genres in music (“Emo”), I knew that these guys would either be amazing or the most vile thing to ever pass through my headphones.

Turns out… they’re pretty ok!

Thing is, it’s been impossible for me to avoid eventually listening to this band, and when the scope of their influence stretches from Dashboard Confessional to Death Cab For Cutie, you can be assured I was not looking forward to the experience. Interestingly, even before those jokers were huge and before “Emo” meant anything other than “The world’s greatest comedian“, I knew about Sunny Day Real Estate, because I’m an enthusiastic fan of Poor Old Lu.

The connection between Sunny Day Real Estate and Poor Old Lu is, at best, a tangential one. Before Poor Old Lu or Sunny Day were around, the boys that made up Lu and Sunny Day’s 2nd (and enduring) lead singer Jeremy Enigk were in one of those high school bands that every musician goes through at some point, and they played exactly one show, I imagine probably in front of about 3 people and 2 dogs, before going their separate ways. Poor Old Lu went on to be the best “alternative” act in the Christian music thing, and Jeremy went on to carve out a fine career helping to invent a genre that is Hell-bent on digging my brain an early grave. Oh, and Jeremy came back to sing a song on a Poor Old Lu EP, so there’s also that.

The association with Jeremy Enigk is something Poor Old Lu would be saddled with forever, and if they weren’t one of my favorite bands, I would simply laugh about it. I’ve read interviews where the inevitable question of “SAY I HEARD YOU GUYS WORKED WITH JEREMY ENIGK ONCE WHAT WAS THAT LIKE” arises like if one were to grow up with the name Michael Bolton and get the daily “Is that your real name?” question. If you were to somehow wind up on the Wikipedia page about Jeremy Enigk, you would see, under “Guest Vocal Appearances”, that he is credited for “Poor Old Lu – “Answering Machine Message” on Sin (1994)”. That is not a song. Seriously! It was literally an answering machine message tucked way into the darkness of the end of that album as an Easter egg, and it’s Jeremy, as a child, calling the band’s future bassist in an attempt to get his mom’s necklace back due to some misunderstanding. This is not worth mentioning, yet I have already mentioned it twice on this blog, so I hope you’re happy, Wikipedia.

Anyway, now I’ve spent over half of this writeup associating Sunny Day Real Estate with their tangential connection with Poor Old Lu instead of talking about them, how mischeivous!

So yes, Diary. This is the band’s first album, made just minutes after being signed to a record label during their second show ever, for all of you “career musicians” out there who have been playing for 10 years without a prospect. To be honest, I should hate this album. It has the (mostly) toneless, reverb-laden electric guitars and indiscernable shouting that only “emo” music can pass off as singing. The drums are there, all right, and the bass is adequately lost in the mix like any pop recording. Indeed, the guitars kind of dominate on this album, and after seeing the credits on the album I came across the producer’s name, Brad Wood, and was immediately like “Oooooh“  (for you folks out there who want to hate along at home, this is the producer who did The Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore album).

So it surprised me as much as anyone that I actually really like this album. Well, ok, I *like* this album, the “really” part is reserved for a handful of songs. Basically, there are two ways in which I like to enjoy this album. The first is to just listen to the opening track, “Seven”, which has recently gotten the Guitar Hero treatment, and then be done with it. It’s a magnificent track with guitar hooks, busy drumming, and those wonderful beat shifts that really get the blood flowing. Jeremy’s voice is great, kind of a lispy, 15 year old Bono if Bono didn’t know how to control his voice (he does, believe it or not). The real strength of Jeremy Enigk’s voice isn’t the ability to control it, it’s the sheer muscle. If there’s a note to hit, he’ll pinch until he gets close enough. Indeed, the effect is stunning on this particular recording, but for the hundreds of emo groups, professional and amateur, that have followed in this band’s wake? Not so much, in fact I wish to commit violent acts against them, if violence were my style.

The second way I can enjoy this album is by listening to the whole thing, front to back, and then kind of zone out until something interesting happens, usually somewhere toward the middle of a song, before it lapses back into kind of a sludgy mess. The sludge doesn’t bother me though, I have checked out the lyrics, and they are just abstract enough to be bereft of any points of contention on any reasonable person’s part. Basically, the lyrics are too esoteric to suck, it’s like how a colorful smattering of fingerpaints isn’t really art, but since there’s no possible way to see a picture in it, you just kind of have to take the artist’s word for it, and it’s also somehow still pleasant to behold. So yeah, Sunny Day are no Rembrant when it comes to songwriting, but there are enough enjoyable points on the album to kind of drift along for an hour and be all the better for it at the end.

I also do appreciate that they whip out a piano in the album’s second half for an interlude so brief I’m not even going to try and type the title out.

The version I was able to borrow for this writeup is the 2009 re-release, which is definitely worth a purchase, because for some reason the band included two songs, appropriately titled “8″ and “9″, and both songs are exponentially better than anything else on the album proper. I think they did that just to mess with everyone.

So yes, this may seem more of a cantankerous acceptance of an album rather than a glowing review, but given the genre, they’re lucky to get even that. If “emo” had died with the breakup of Sunny Day Real Estate over a decade ago, we would really have no problems, but with all the emo bands out there, and not to mention the indie bands that were spawned out of that, there is no reason that I shouldn’t hate these guys, except that I understand that they aren’t the “first” emo band, only one of the more influential. Also, the differences between these guys and a band like, oh say, Jimmy Eat World or Angels & Airwaves are wide enough that I don’t want them to die in a terrible car crash, so there’s also that.

Audio Adrenaline – Underdog

We’re pretty much winding down as far as Christian albums go, folks. I can only think of about maybe 2 more I’m going to talk about by the time the year ends. Interestingly, all 3 writeups (including this one) are going to be the final albums in the trilogies of “good” albums by the top-name Christian artists I’ve talked about thus far. The fact that I’m calling that “interesting” probably indicates that I’m clutching at straws at this point, but you’ll forgive a poor migraine sufferer from trying to get through one of these things while in blinding pain.

Speaking of blinding pain:

I just realized something else, all three of these albums that I am going to talk about were released in late 1999 (the other two within a week of each other in November), so perhaps 1999 was also a very good year for Christian music?

Or, perhaps I speak too soon. Although Underdog is probably considered one of Audio A’s best albums (in fact I have known people to make that distinction), that’s when you consider that this is the same band that brought us… well refer to my earlier writeups to see what they brought us. Either way, this album is what I would call the band’s first “Pop” album, deprived of the funk/blues goodness that would occasionally peak out from behind the “whatever’s popular at the time” sound the band would use on most of their albums.

This is probably due to the absense of once of their key players, Barry Blair, who had left shortly after Some Kind Of Zombie was being recorded. In his stead was teenaged guitarist Tyler Burkum, and the band now had a permanent drummer named Ben Cissell. Now, with their five piece band lacking any sort of properly-educated musicians (Barry had taught the bassist and keyboardist/guitarist how to play), they were in a spot of trouble as far as figuring out how to produce their new material.

Luckily for them, there was outside help available. Not luckily for them, this help kind of sucked. Oh, I’m sure the pop glitter of this album was thrilling back in ’99 (even if I can distinctly remembering raising an eyebrow towards it), but some of the “inspiration” for the direction of some of these songs have aged about as well as the groups they stole… err, “were inspired” from.

First off, we’ve got the album’s first single, “Get Down“. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love this song, it’s catchy, got some cool instrumentation (I’m a sucker for bottom octave piano after all), but there’s something amiss here. Why does this song seem so familiar? That drum beat in the chorus, that chord progression.

Oh yeah, it’s “All Star” by Smashmouth.

Yeah, if you can remember the year 1999, the entire world was gay for Smashmouth, and the money we threw at them for just that song so we could put it in not 1, but 5 films put ham sandwiches directly into the buttery mouths of that band for eternity. So enamoured were we with the group that we let them produce one of the worst cover songs in music and that song is still played in department store radios.

Anyway, with this album in just the right spot to capitalize on such a maelstrom of popularity, it was a “clever” idea, marketing-wise, to make this single (which one could draw lyrical parallels with if one weren’t pressed for time) sound like the other, and if that isn’t the case, then I guess chalk it up to an eerie (and profitable) coincidence.

Still, I’m leaning toward “rip off”, especially when one listens to the already-annoying “Jesus Movement”, which features an acoustic guitar riff that is, with the exception of 1 note, the same acoustic riff used in a Sugar Ray song. I don’t even want to get into that any further.

Still, the album has some more original moments that are much more satisfying. The song “The Good Life” is one of the ultimate examples of one of my outspoken theories about Christian Rock: that you can make the song as depressing as possible as long as you tag on a God-inspired “It’s all right” line in there somewhere. Just check these damn lyrics:

I’ve watched my dreams all fade away
And blister in the sun
Everything I’ve ever had is unraveled and undone
I’ve set upon a worthless stack
Of my ambitious plans
And the people that I’ve loved the most
Have turned their backs and ran

Sounds terrible, right? Any other song would end with the author throwing himself out of a window or something, but the chorus adds in that vital “it’s all right” line in the very end:

This is the good life
I’ve lost everything
I could ever want
Or ever dream of
This is the good life
I found everything
I could ever need
Here in Your arms

Suddenly, the whole thing seems a lot brighter. In fact, this song’s second verse is what really draws me to it, and is one of the reasons I consider this to be a very important “Christian” song:

Loneliness has left me searching
For someone to love
Poverty has changed my view
Of what true riches are
Sorrow’s opened up my eyes
To see what real joy is
Pain has been the catalyst
To my heart’s happiness

If you want to translate this to real-world psychology, have you ever read about what the whole “positive self image” idea has done to people? Everyone’s depressed because they keep telling each other that they’re great, with no proof to back it up. Indeed, even if God were taken out of this song, those lines still say a whole lot about how one should approach the subjects of happiness and unhappiness. It’s impossible to manufacture happiness, it must be sought out.

Indeed, this entire album carries a good message along these lines with songs like “Underdog” (a racing allegory that uh, falls apart in some respects), and “Hands And Feet” (a good, humility-laden song about doing God’s work). The band even takes the message of “everything will be all right” a step further and includes, for the first time, an actual traditional hymn. Not only a traditional hymn, but one of my absolute favorite traditional hymns, “It Is Well With My Soul“.

Indeed, the song was written in the last part of the 19th century (when lots of people were suffering and the “making something out of nothing” attitude was very popular), when a hymn-writer named Horatio Spafford lost his children, one in The Great Chicago Fire and three (and nearly his wife) in a shipwreck, and wrote the words while travelling to meet up with his wife, who survived the shipwreck. It is one of the most inspiring hymns for any person of faith, and it ranks really high in my book, so when a Christian Rock band decides to record their one-and-only hymn, which follows along perfectly with songs they have written, it’s gotta be a good thing right?

Nah, it sucks. Again, I have to blame the production for this one, because there’s nothing wrong with the way Mark Stuart sings it (nor his duet partner, Jennifer Knapp, a really good vocalist/songwriter in her own right). The instrumentation turns the song into a mostly-minor key arrangement, with really deep tuned-down bass notes and fake strings and a canned beat with wiki-wiki turntables. That’s right, they turned one of the greatest hymns of all time into a porno song. Though I dug on it initially, when a friend of mine pointed this out, now I can’t even listen to the song correctly anymore. What would have been so bad about a couple of acoustic guitars or something? Even Jars Of Clay (huge proponents of that acoustic guitar thing at one time) didn’t get it right. I’d love to see a modern act get it right some day, to be honest with you.

The album ends with an interesting little number, at least. It’s a story-song called “The Houseplant Song” written by Bob Herdman and played clumsily on an acoustic guitar, with the fake background noise of a busy coffee shop to compensate. The song is fairly cute in its story about his neighbor trying to tell him about the evils of rock and roll, and trying to use a well-known experiment of playing music for plants and seeing which one grows better after playing Mozart for one, and “Petra or Megadeth” for the other. Unfortunately, nothing comes of this challenge and the song ends with a plug for Audio Adrenaline, the band you’re already listening to. This would prove to be Herdman’s last song with the band, which is unfortunate because I understand he wrote pretty much all the good songs for the group.

Well, my headache is gone at least! I don’t mean to put this album down, it really is a good album, but its attempted pandering to the popular music crowd is something that’s really hard to overlook. Still, I don’t blame the actual band for it, and they do a good enough job with it that I definitely prefer it to the groups they seem to emulate. Indeed, when one considers the band’s original sound, anything that came after it should sound like solid gold.

I’m still a little mad about that hymn, though.

 

 

The Immortals – Mortal Kombat: The Album

Since we’re close to the end of the year, I figure maybe it’s about time I expanded the scope of music I wish to talk about, and touch briefly on one facet of music that’s rather interesting to me: video game music.

Of course, this isn’t music contained within the video game Mortal Kombat, as that music is rather sparse and not worthy of really mentioning. No, instead this is music inspired by Mortal Kombat, that is completely terrible, yet went platinum within less than a week. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

MORTAL KOMBAAAAAAAAAAAT *cough*

Yes, that infamous roar followed by pounding synth bass and that oh-so familiar riff will be emblazoned in the minds of everybody around my age as we think fondly back to the year 1994. Oh sure, it was a year that had its bumps; in April, disgraced vocalist Kurt Cobain had an unfortunate mishap with a firearm, ending his brief career in making music that would annoy me forever, and exactly one month later, Weezer would release their first album. Yes, it was a dark time in music, but kids like me, around the age of 12, couldn’t give a crap about music. There were video games to be played.

One of the biggest games to come out the previous year (besides Color A Dinosaur, of course) was Mortal Kombat. Combining the new, insanely popular “Street Fighter II” style of face-to-face fighting gameplay with bad spelling and a grittier, more “realistic” representation of violence:

Super Nintendo Graphics!

…The game was a legend. In fact, it’s the game that more or less singlehandedly unleashed the torrent of lawsuits directed at video games for screwing my generation up, and in that respect, is the video game that best represents rock n’ roll.

 

You know, besides this one.

Anyway, as would become the tradition for ultra-successful video games, the entertainment industry (a bunch of evil guys in suits) saw the success in this contemptible form of entertainment, which caused their eyes to turn into dollar signs as they rubbed their hands greedily. These guys in suits were Virgin Music, and they wasted no time in contacting… get this… a moderately successful techno group in Belgium to produce an album of music based on this game (there was also a movie involved somewhere starring The Highlander but whatever), so that they could have an official soundtrack without having to pay Midway or Acclaim much more than the price to use their dragon logo and ridiculous misspelled name to make piles of money appear. Well, that’s my theory anyway, but doesn’t that just sound like something evil guys in suits would do?

So the group, at the time called Lords Of Acid and fronted by an artist called Praga Kahn (Maurice Engelen), decided to call themselves The Immortals for this album, presumably under the wise decision to not associate this album with any of their other stage names (which is why I’m doing that right now). Besides Maurice was long time compatriot Oliver Adams, who wrote the songs, and an ex-roadie of his (but very important to our cause) called Dieter Troubleyn who is apparently a well-known Belgian soap opera star (he looks it), and a girl called Julie Wells.

Now, most of you are going to know this album just by its most popular track, “Techno Syndrome (Mortal Kombat)”, which you would probably know better as the “MORTAL KOMBAAAAAAAAAAT” song. True story: I used to do karate back when I was a teenager, and some of the younger kids would put on performances and do a bunch of fancy moves with nunchucks or whatever, and this was almost always the soundtrack to said performances, even though this would be somewhere in the late 90′s.

Anyway, that theme has been well established, but what about the rest of this album? Well, I’m glad you asked. Basically, using nothing more than a Sega Genesis with a copy of the game that Virgin sent them, songwriter Oliver Adams had to write some kind of lyrics to go along with the terrible techno music that they apparently love so much over there in Belgie-land. Shouldn’t be a problem for this guy:

The only problem with the music in this album is everything. Despite the obviously terrible techno music going on here (well I don’t know, maybe it’s supposed to be good, I don’t care for techno, but I know cheese when I smell it), these guys don’t have the strongest grasp of English, much less the intricacies of these ridiculous video game characters.

Take the first song, for instance, a synth-blatting tribute to Mortal Kombat, disguised as a tribute to the game’s supposed hero, “Johnny Cage“. The chorus kind of has nothing to do with anything but some kind of lyrical mad-libs where Mortal Kombat is the noun:

Prepare yourself, the Mortal Kombat’s on today
Prepare yourself, Mortal Kombat all the way
Prepare yourself, Mortal Kombat’s here to stay
Ooh, Johnny Cage is not afraid to die

And yeah, there’s kind of a rap in the song that describes Johnny Cage’s moves, but the main point of the song is that he’s not afraid to die. Sure, this isn’t really a point that’s driven home at any time in the game, indeed most of the characters shouldn’t be afraid to die, they do so at the end of every match if you know the fatalities, but still, the song remains.

The song about “Kano” is even more perplexing, partially because a song about a hardened criminal should maybe not have “Woo!” being shouted on every bar, but also because all the lyrics are sung by a woman (the same woman who sings Sonya’s song, thus is sounds like Sonya’s singing a love song to her supposed bitter enemy and… please excuse me, my coke-bottle glasses just slid off my face), and go something like this:

You are wanted, and you’re haunted
You’re the Bad Guy, but I feel for you
You’re the danger, a fallen angel
But I like you, you’re the strongest of them all

Kano Wins
Use your might, Kano fight
The world is at your feet
Fight, use your might
I’m on your side

Well, I applaud the song for wanting to take a stab at some depth to the character, but seriously? His “fatality” move is that he punches a hole into the chest of the other guy (or girl) and rips out their still beating heart, exactly how much can you empathize with this guy? (Woo!)

Still, if you want to talk about classics (sorry, “Klassics”), there is only one song that wears the assless chaps around here: “Sub-Zero (Chinese Ninja Warrior)“. Featuring epic piano and an admittedly catchy beat, this is one of the songs I’m convinced is using Dieter Troubleyn’s singing voice, because there is no way those “WHOOOOAAAOH”s are coming from anything but a guy that looks like this:

Dieter, your life is a mystery.

Indeed, the song makes absolutely no sense, but it is the funnest thing to sing to at the top of your lungs, if you can suppress the laughter long enough. True story: I heard the female “FREEEZING VIBRATIONS” line (what?) in a song on the radio a few times, and though I haven’t found out whether there was some kind of sampling going on, apparently that particular line sounds very similar to one by Marky Mark, but I have not found out which song because I’ll be damned if I’m going to go looking for Marky Mark material to find Sub-Zero material. That’s lose/lose for everyone.

The song “Liu Kang (Born In China)” is another song that also amounts to little more than a Belgian guy spouting off facts about the character that he read in the instruction book. The real pay-off in this song is in a section that starts off with someone shouting “FIREBALL!”, as that is one of Kang’s moves, and then a sample of the game character’s voice, which is a bad Bruce Lee impression in itself, going “WWWEEEHH HEHHH!” in every beat, and then, presumably to note the character’s “flying kick” move, instead shouts out “FLYING CAKE!” I shouldn’t have to explain why that’s hilarious, but the best is yet to come.

Basically, if you took Sub Zero and colored him yellow, you would have an equally ridiculous ninja called Scorpion. His song is called “Scorpion (Lost Soul Bent On Revenge)”, and Scorpion is generally a favorite among players for his super easy Fatality and the fact that his face is really a skull, so you’d think it would be a pretty killer track, right?

Well give it a listen and come back, I can wait.

Yes, this is perhaps the most ridiculous track on the album. It sounds like a drag queen singing against a new agey kind of tuneless thing, and the whole thing is followed up by repetitions of Scorpion’s famous lines “COME HERE! GET OVER HERE!”, which in the game is what he shouts when he throws a harpoon into your sternum and drags your bloody body over to meet with his cheap uppercut. In the song, it just sounds like he really wants you to come over to him, and his insistence is unyielding. So yeah, that and nature sounds, this album went Platinum folks.

The other half of the album is ridiculous as well, what with a feature-length rap about Sonya (again detailing her special moves and other information they got from the instruction booklet) and Raiden, where they insist that, because he’s a thunder god, he can’t be killed and is thus immortal (which kind of makes him a bit out of place in “Mortal” Kombat?) Another point they  make in a very matter-of-fact way is that he has no eyes; apparently the songwriter was just done by this point.

Speaking of, I have milked enough writeup out of this disc that cost me $2 and some shipping. It’s a fun disc, but don’t actually buy it, you can just hear it all on Youtube and forget you ever heard it, that is until you’re at work someday and suddenly you break into a round of “WHOOOOOAH CHINESE NINJA WARRIOR, WITH YOUR HEART SO COOOOOOOLD, SUB ZEROOOOO”, then you too will be affected with the plague that beset my entire generation, and you too may seek legal action against Midway (despite their going bankrupt this year) and the nation of Belgium.

 

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Eels – Beautiful Freak

So, sometimes when you’ve got the blues, you listen to The Blues, but sometimes when you’ve got the blues, you listen to unapologetically dour pop music. Today is apparently one of those days:

The first time I can really remember having the blues (ok, so it was crippling depression), was about age 18 or so. Insomnia was wrecking my physical and mental health, I felt like the walls were closing in on me, and several other factors basically caused me to have a bad time, all the time. I remember distinctly being in the depths of an unusual amount of despair, and watching a lot of MTV2 (which used to show music videos for those not old enough to remember that MTV used to show music videos too). Actually, I taped a lot of MTV2, and then would watch the videos at the end of the day, kind of like a precursor to Youtube, but without videos of pets playing pianos or kids having bad dentist trips. Anyway, at some point, I ran across a black and white video where everyone was floating, and the song had this beautiful, dark English melody, and the band was Eels and the song was “Novocaine For The Soul“.

I realized something while listening to “Novocaine For The Soul”, something that may not have done anything in the way of helping me through any hard times, but more of an amusing observation: I will never be as depressed as the writer of this song:

Life is hard, and so am I
Better give me something, so I don’t die
Novocaine for the soul
Before I sputter out

Naturally, I became quite a fan of the song, and it took coming out of that dark time of my life to realize that this song isn’t actually all that good. It, like the rest of the album it appears on, is self-pitying, helpless, and indulgent to a fault. Doesn’t mean I don’t love it, of course. Also, the video is brilliant, I’m starting to really become a fan of Mark Romanek (who also directed Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” in what is perhaps my favorite music video ever).

Still, let’s look at the rest of the album. It’s kind of hard to get to the other songs that are any good, because you have to get through the second track, “Susan’s House”, at least once. “Susan’s House” has this canned beat that I swear was stolen from the Butthole Surfers at some point, and is a mostly spoken-word tune where “E” (or “Mr. E” or “Mark Oliver Everett” which is honestly the best of the three) describes random depressing scenes he sees on his way to Susan’s house, “Susan” probably being code name for a heroin dealer.

Much better tunes await us as we move on to “Rags To Rags”, which nearly takes the same 2-chord philosophy from “Novocaine”, but brings it all together for the chorus. Though it’s cut from the same black cloth as the previous pop song, it feels a little more personal and kind of beckons the listener to dig deeper into the album and see what all is going on in this mess of songs.

We then get the album’s title track, placed in the hallowed “fourth track” position, but instead of the album’s “hit”, it’s a somber tune played on an electric piano with a melody that sounds like it was stolen from one of Beck’s acoustic albums. The song was apparently written for “E”‘s sister, who was suffering from suicide. Not to detract from the song’s thoughtfulness, but the lines:

Beautiful freak, beautiful freak
Too good for this world
But I hope that you stay

Didn’t really work. In fact, his sister’s eventual suicide inspired a lot of the next album, but let’s move on before we all kill ourselves, eh?

The album is not without its kind of “cutesy” moments, like “My Beloved Monster”, which is a little bit of a love song, little bit of a friendship song, with more banjos than probably belong on this album. Interestingly, they used the song in that Shrek movie, which is about a monster, if you didn’t know. It’s not interesting for the fact that this is a depressing song (Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” makes an appearance, after all) or that it’s a good song being used in a kids’ movie, but because it’s such a cop out, since this album was distributed by Dreamworks’ short-lived music label. Hmm!

Those in need of a good little jammin’ beat should look no further than “Guest List”, though the ridiculous self-indulgence of the lyrics is downright palpable:

Are you one of the beautiful people?
Is my name on the list
Wanna be of the beautiful people
Wanna feel like I’m missed

Are you one of the beautiful people
Am I on the wrong track?
Sometimes it feels like I’m made of eggshell
And it feels like I’m gonna crack

These are totally the kind of lyrics that, as an angsty teenager, I’m sure I would have really identified with, but here, about 10 years later, I would be slapping my head. In fact, I never obtained this album until recently.

Honestly though, it’s hard to get away from how great the melodies are in a lot of these songs, so there’s a lot of redeeming value to be found here. There are also enough musically unusual moments to keep one’s attention. A good example of this is the afore-mentioned “My Beloved Monster” and its layers of soloing instruments that sound like monsters roaring. Some of those moments are unintentional, like the percussion in “Mental”, I am seriously convinced that the drummer is hitting a basketball for this song.

One song that I wish wasn’t buried so far into the back of the album is “Your Lucky Day In Hell”, but at least I can hear it without having to watch Scream 2. The song has that really catchy “James Bond” chord movement, with some interesting lyrics for a change.

Either way, it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to get into albums like this on a “this album totally speaks to me man” sort of way, but on those days when you’re feeling a bit low, it’s always good to know that you will never be as depressed as the author of these songs. It’s also nice to remember a time when you could watch music videos on the television, good times.