Monthly Archives: April 2018

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Day 5: Conny Ochs – Raw Love Songs I came across Conny Ochs while looking at a history of doom metal, owing to an album he had done with Wino (of St. Vitus). The album was singular, in that it was a rare acoustic album from a performer in a heavy genre, but it lead to me a new favorite artist in Conny Ochs (Pronounced ‘ox’, not ‘oaks’). Ochs is in the unique position of being accessible from both singer-songwriter tradition, and from the heavy music side of things. Raw love songs was the first of his solo albums, and it covers acapella material, as well as acoustic and electric guitar backed songs. Lyrically, his work is magical, and he manages, in his lyrics, to cover a range of experience and emotion without ever overplaying it or frankly, stepping on it as so often happens. But I think what makes this special is that several of the tracks seem to be studio performance takes, rather than carefully multi-tracked and produced material. The album is a very present and immediate experience. Today’s nominations are Amber Lee and Greg Paquette, mostly because I think they’d find this guy’s work rewarding.

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Day 4: Insomnium – One for Sorrow Insomnium is known for their particular blend of melodic content with death and doom metal. The result with this album, is that it ranges from dark moods to exalted flights through open spaces. “One for Sorrow” finds Insomnium finding their balance and arriving at a place where they have the liberty to bring nuance and a sense of contemplation to the music. Among other things, this album sees a move toward using not only the vocal growls that are the staple of the genre, but makes clean vocal harmonies part of the backbone of the album. These harmonies are usually two vocal parts, but one of the guitars is often picking up a third harmonic line as a compliment. Even when I’m not necessarily in the mood for something in the metal genre, this remains a go-to album because of its strong melodic sense. Today’s nominations go the Justin Hunt and Mike Dolan.

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Day 3: Planet P Project – 1931- (Go Out Dancing) First, If you watched MTV in the early 1980s, you may recall that P3 had some of the first videos in heavy circulation – “Why Me?” and “Static” were synth-based electronic prog, and Tony Carey – composer and primary performer of the P3 material, followed it up with one of the deepest concept albums of the Cold War – “Pink World”, which gave us “A Letter from the Shelter” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Nfbk_hLsE) and is maybe one of the great under-appreciated albums of the 1980s. Those albums had such a depth of awareness and compositional sense that even when some of the synth tones used were… very 80s… the structure of the music holds it together beautifully. I spent many years wishing that Tony Carey would release more P3 material, and wondering if it would hold up. And then, in 2005, this album made it onto my radar, and I snapped it up. The album is simply cinematic in scope. It draws a strong and unsubtle analogy between the politics of 1930s Germany and the politics of the new millennium. If you come into this album with any sense of history, it’s gonna hurt – and P3 feeds every note into supporting that criticism. Go Out Dancing comprises a trilogy of albums released between 2005 and 2009, which, as a whole very much show that it’s been obvious where we’re headed, how we got here, and what its going to mean if we don’t change course. It also shows that it was obvious to anyone who cared to watch. If, as Shelley wrote “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, then perhaps some few musicians are its prophets. Also, I really wish Tony would write a book titled “The Art of Making Compressors Your Gimp.” I’m going to tag in my left-wing comrades Meredith White and and Trinyan MacLellan on this one.

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Michael Gagnon tagged me into the 1 Album a day for 10 days Challenge. So, here we go. These are all albums that have stuck with me, that I listen to pretty regularly, and all have music that changed the way I understood music as an art and as a science. DAY 2: LIFE OF AGONY: RIVER RUNS RED I love me some heavy shit. This is one of the heaviest sounding albums ever. It’s claustrophobia inducing. But here’s the thing: A lot of heavy music is great, but lyrically, it’s disingenuous crap. Fake anger, fake pain, fake satanism, whatever. I love a good schtick, but seriously, it gets thing sometimes. This album is the dead opposite of that. This album is about some real shit, and while it’s a nominal fiction, if you stuck with LoA through the years, you might have an idea of just how close to the bone this was written. Suicide, familial alcoholism, abuse. It’s not a comfortable album, but it’s musically amazing and painfully reflective of a lot of experience. Additionally, the band were between the ages of 18 and (I think) 24 when they wrote this, and it’s an extremely mature execution of a concept album, let alone in this genre.

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Michael Gagnon tagged me into the 1 Album a day for 10 days Challenge. So, here we go. These are all albums that have stuck with me, that I listen to pretty regularly, and all have music that changed the way I understood music as an art and as a science. First Up: Sisters of Mercy with Floodland. One of the first albums that ever held my attention by being oppressively large. The production on this record is just monstrously huge. It’s like having someone drop the blame for the cold war in your lap. I’m going to nominate Craig Storm and Scott D Vault for this one.

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