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4
May

Day 8: Sieben – Ogham inside the Night/Sex and Wildflowers 10 or so years back,I heard a track from this album, and immediately went and bought this as a double album becuase not only was the song good, but the methodology was fascinating. Matt Howden, the performer of “Sieben”, plays the violin, and a bunch of loopers and effects pedals. Sieben is about live performance, and seriously, he makes it all happen real time. Basically, he builds his songs by stacking musical phrases on top of each other, and performing other manipulations of those passages along the way. The approach is fascinating, but his songwriting is unbelievable. Each of the Sieben albums is written around a unifying theme, and he’s one of those rare musicians whose lyrics often stand up as poetry on their own. He’s amazing to watch perform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKRKqCV1QfA

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2
May

Day 7: The Smithereens – Especially for You This is the most perfect rock-n-roll album of the 80s and 90s. This is the album that I’ve bought at least a dozen times because I keep giving it away to people. This is an album everyone should listen to. My love for this record is endless, and it’s influence on the way I hear music, particularly baselines, was transformed by this record. I was maybe 10 when I first heard it. I still listen to it end to end several times a year, and I always find something new to love about it.

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2
May

Day 6: Arch Enemy – Anthems of Rebellion If there’s one thing you can say about metal, it’s that it’s had a long term hormonal imbalance when it comes to major acts. With only a few exceptions in 40 years, it’s been a male dominated genre from the stage. By the mid-1990s, the technical excellence was over the top, but the genre as a whole was suffering from a lack of conviction and drowning in middle-class suburban testosterone. So, it’s 1995 and you put together an extreme metal supergroup, you know, like you do. All the pieces are there, but somehow, it just doesn’t work right. Your album is insanely aggressive, intensely musical, and everything your fan base expected. It’s a solid album but something’s off. It’s all weirdly middle of the road. You push two more albums out, and they do well, but they just aren’t killing it. So, 4 years in, your bass becomes a revolving door, and then your vocalist bails. You look for a professional who can get up to speed, do the job, and hopefully gets what you’ve been trying to do. And that’s when you accidentally redefine your sandbox. Because the person who you’ve been looking for turns out to be a German woman with a massive voice and huge charisma. There’s a lot of media noise and it’s all treating your band like a like it’s become a novelty act. So, you head into the studio, make a record, and put that novelty treatment in the grave. Then you follow it up with new recordings of tracks from the first three albums, and that wraps that novelty coffin up in battleship chains. Because 5 years of well-written metal is suddenly being delivered with real conviction by someone who means it. Gossow completely transforms these songs from an exercise in middle-class suburban escapism to something convincing and real. This is where Arch Enemy started a renaissance in the genre. Because Angela brought back conviction to the music. This is where Angela Gossow changed the game in extreme metal. This is why, in 2018, Arch Enemy is still female-fronted, and women are increasingly significant to the survival of the art form. And if you want your metal to be something more than a pose, you need to listen to the women. Because that’s where you find real frustration, rage and injustice.

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30
Apr

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30
Apr

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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29
Apr

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29
Apr

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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28
Apr

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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27
Apr

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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27
Apr

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