“Them Crooked Vultures” by Them Crooked Vultures

 

Birds of a feather flock together, and so when Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss), Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana) and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) flew in formation they realized their feathers were a perfect match. But were Them Crooked Vultures circling above their premature death, in a twisted cannibalistic irony?

Them Crooked Vultures put out a brand of hard rock that’s relentless and not very commercial-minded. At times they throw in a bone that vibes of funky blues. But not like a “Red Hot Chili Peppers” blues funk, more along the lines of exactly what you’d expect out of the men who wrote songs like “Black Dog“, “Song for the Deaf“, and “Everlong“. Homme’s all about riffs and solos as cracked as the desert sand he hails from. Grohl’s beats know when to take to the background and when to lay down the law. John Paul Jones shows that even at 63 he’s able to write a bassline you can bob your head to and tie the ends of the rest of the band together.

It’s all so heavily layered that you might not be able to pick up on finer details until you put on some headphones. Other times, you’ll have a guitar solo hard panned to one side and a keyboard solo panned to the other. It feels very old-school and badass, like taking a page out of Deep Purple’s book. Unfortunately the production work is the biggest chunk of tar in the feathers, not allowing each instrument to really shine through the creepy atmosphere. Though I continue to say that Them Crooked Vultures is a dish best served live, as the album can’t possibly capture the energy of the group when they’re on stage.

So as it turns out, Them Crooked Vultures aren’t circling over themselves, they’re marking the death of lesser, vanity fueled “supergroups”. You aren’t beat over the head in each song with “Hey listen, it’s this guy! You remember him, right?” Instead, Them Crooked Vultures sound like they’ve been around picking at the bones of dead, garbage music for years.

“Embryonic” by The Flaming Lips

The Flaming Lips have been doing their own thing since the early 80s, sticking with a lo-fi psychedelic garage rock sound until the late 90s. The band became much more publicly aware with their trio of electronically injected space psychedelia albums The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and At War with the Mystics. They were accessible and contained an infectious energy. The sound achieved on these albums have become synonymous with the band, and they seemed comfortable floating there.

Embryonic however, contains some of their least accessible material in years. This isn’t an album that contains radio friendly psych-pop rock (candy not intended) tunes like “Do You Realize?” and “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song“. Embryonic harkens back to their darker, stranger days. Many times a song will burst into a heavy distorted dementia, with strange electronic sounds exploding into existence from every direction while wild screams echo off of the walls. Some tracks like “Evil“, “If” and “The Impulse” give your ears a restful moment as the band restrains from any intense freakouts. But just as you’re settling in the in-the-red mastering and garage inspired spaciness kicks back in.

There are a lot of sounds tucked away in the developing layers of Embryonic. You’ll find strained harps, animal noises (provided by Karen O of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs), and an assortment of bleeps and bloops that come from god knows what. Wayne Conye’s voice floats around the madness like an angel delivering a message, though at other times he chants like a man who can’t find his mind. The lyrics contain their signature deep, thoughtful reflection. The album will certainly bring a challenge to those fans who are only familiar with their less experimental side. But fans who have been with them for every Zaireeka and Christmas on Mars will want to throw a pair of good headphones on and be comforted by the warmth of the electrostatic womb.

“Black Gives Way to Blue” by Alice in Chains

Grunge was a child of the early 1990s, and was almost something you had to be there for. The genre spawned out of the state of Washington almost out of nowhere, and stole radio-waves all over the nation. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Melvins, Mother Love Bone, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden and many more shook the youth of the world with a new sound that was taking over. Unfortunately after the death of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, Grunge began to drop in popularity and faded away before the new millennium. Alice in Chains met their own end after singer Layne Staley passed away from his drug addiction in 2002. And with him it seemed, that the final “great” grunge band had come to pass.

But here we are in 2009, and we have a new album by Alice in Chains. The band has picked itself back up, and has picked up William DuVall as their new vocalist. Some fans may feel this is disrespectful to the Alice in Chains legacy, but is it as sacrilegious as many fans feel it is or does the new album do justice to one of the more popular grunge acts of all time?

Black Gives Way to Blue features the same members of the band that gave us the intense sludging sound way back in the 90s, and it is certainly audible. There isn’t much of a difference in the sound of a new Alice in Chains song and an old one, save for the singer and more modern production. Jerry Cantrell still performs as if he was still wearing his flannel shirts around his waist and not bathing for weeks. William DuVall stays away from trying too hard to be a replacement for Layne, and instead does his own take on the Alice in Chains style. He comes very close to the old AiC sound in the song “Check My Brain“, but he still lacks the haunted, addiction tinged edge that gave Layne the real power behind his vocal performances.

That Seattle Sound is present all over Black Gives Way to Blue, and is a welcome comeback album as well as a tribute to the grunge scene of days past. While the album may not have the full power of the original lineup, it does a good job to appeal to old fans without being offensive or phoning it in. It won’t catch the youth of the nation by surprise like its predecessors, and it certainly isn’t their best material. But fans who want their fresh grunge fix should look no further than Black Gives Way to Blue.

“Mono and Stereo Remasters” by The Beatles

I’ve been a Beatles-fanatic since I was a kid, growing up on their albums after being exposed through a set of tapes my parents left sitting out one day when I was probably just old enough to operate a tape player. So the recent Beatlemania revival has been both a nostalgia trip and an appreciated way of bringing the fab four back into the spotlight. Love them or hate them, there’s no denying that they changed the face of music forever. On top of the beautiful tribute video game The Beatles: Rock Band, the albums have been remastered to clean up the old tapes and give them a fresh sound since their last remastering some 20 years ago.

This review is not so much about the music individually, but rather about the differences between the Stereo and Mono remasters, which were released recently. It isn’t one album, but each major studio album of theirs separately. You can also buy box sets for both the mono and stereo remasters, but good luck finding those as collectors have scraped them up.

The mono remasters only go up to The White Album, which was the last album originally produced in mono. This doesn’t mean that the songs are only going to play sound out of one speaker. Rather, the mono remasters are the songs as they were originally produced, but cleaned up. There’s no stereo separation, no one sound will be stuck to one channel or the other. Both left and right channels produce the same sound. This does give the tracks a dated sound even with the cleanup job, but some fans may argue that these are the purest forms of the albums that were originally done in mono sound. It sounds denser for sure, but whether this is a good thing or not is all personal preference.

The stereo remasters span the entire discography, including those originally done in mono. These remasters contain a similar clean up job to the mono remasters. The main difference (and one that is almost instantly notable) is that different instruments and voices are hard panned to either the left or right channel. This gives the songs a more modern sound and feel, and it allows you to enjoy individual elements of a song somewhat better. However, the imbalance might drive some fans mad having certain instruments only coming out of one speaker and not the other.

Whichever remaster you prefer, this is the same music that caused an international sensation back in the 60s. Beatles fans have been given a choice, and newcomers are given multiple ways to be exposed to their timeless works.

“The Blueprint 3″ by Jay-Z

When a big name in hip hop like Jay-Z brings a trilogy of albums to a close, you know people are going to have some massive expectations. Unfortunately, The Blueprint 3 doesn’t really feel like the final chapter of a trilogy of albums. The album starts off with songs that sound like a wave goodbye, a long goodbye that takes 5 songs to get through. At first it may not make sense that Jay-Z is already closing the curtains from the get go. But, as you progress into the rest of the album you begin to wonder if perhaps his subconscious was trying to warn him about the bloat of the remainder of the tracks.

Bland and sterile production removes any thud or thunder from the songs, which I feel is a disservice to even the few songs that managed to come out OK. The Blueprint 3 pales in comparison to the first two albums, and there has certainly been better material released this year. If anything, fans of the hip hop scene can take delight in the irony of the song “Death of Autotune” and the fact that Kanye West has production credits on a good chunk of the album. There may be some fans who will dig these new beats, but a lot of people may have a hard time taking the diluted, flat approach in stride.

“The Resistance” by Muse

Muse is known for their powerful, loud and heavy approach to music. And being cheesy. The Resistance simmers down their wildness a tad, which may be a disappointment to some fans. The easiest way for me to describe the album would be to call it a cheesy synth space arena rock opera. But Tommy this isn’t. The power and roughness from Muse’s Absolution era is almost completely absent. In place of fuzzy stadium rock The Resistance frequently relies on a classical piano sound to carry a lot of the emotional weight.

Part love songs, part half baked politics, and part comically tragic falsetto. The final 3 tracks, called the Exogenesis Symphony, takes all of the elements Muse scattered throughout the first 8 tracks and melts them together into a beautiful and strong concentrate. If the album had followed the formula from that 3 part track, it may have been a lot better. As it stands, The Resistance is Muse’s most theatrical album yet, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

“They Say it’s your Birthday”

On September 9th, 1988, this cheesecake popped out of the oven looking as all cheesecakes tend to. I was a blank slate, ready to be garnished and sweetened however my upbringing would see fit. Would I be graced with blueberries? Strawberries? Raspberries? A chocolate pattern, perhaps? No one knew at that time what would become of this little cheesecake, other than that he would follow the same basic path that all cheesecakes do. They’re baked, and then they are eaten. It was up to me to decide what I would do along that path to being digested by the universe.

I grew up in a rather musical household. Neither of my parents were musicians, but they both had a large appreciation for music of all kinds. It was actually split between my parents. My mother had the widest taste ranging from jazz and classical to the tiniest sub-genre of rock your standard pigeonholing fruitcake would try to create. My dad on the other hand was mostly a southern rock and country kinda guy, which was something my mom didn’t listen to often but appreciated nonetheless. As the years went by I was lucky enough to be exposed to music from all generations past, including what was at the time considered “modern”.

Frank Zappa, Talking Heads, Billie Holiday, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Pink Floyd, Travis Tritt, Elvis, The Rolling Stones, Stone Temple Pilots, BB King, Django Reinhardt, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Offspring, Johnny Lang, Johnny Cash, Jimi Hendrix, Brooks & Dunn, Beethoven, Everclear, Steely Dan, ZZ Top, The Allman Brothers, Chopin, The Tubes, Roxy Music, System of a Down, Etta James, Metallica, AC/DC, KMFDM, Susan Tedeschi, The Grateful Dead, and countless others were artists I was exposed to at a very young age and gained an appreciation for. Not just the bands themselves, but for their respective sounds, influences, and impact on the music world as a whole. But one band stuck out to me the most as a child growing up. A band that my family would soon identify as “My Band”.

That band was The Beatles.

After I first heard their early material (Love Me Do, Please Please Me, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, etc) I confiscated my parents’ tape collection of their work and held it in my room. I listened to it nonstop as I was taken aback by the power of the overly cheery love songs, spiced up with the occasional downer such as Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby. Then I discovered the weirder side of The Beatles, with Yellow Submarine being my jump off point into the darker, psychedelic side of the band.

I have fond memories of taking my Talkboy out with me to the park in the summer and swinging on the swings, with tracks like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds fueling unusual twists in my imagination. Somehow the vibes were always right, and after years of this the smell of grass and the view of the old park (which has since changed quite a bit) have become associated with good times, and The Beatles. My aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins all got to hear about my own case of beatlemania. My friends thought I was quite strange for having The Beatles as my favorite band, but I couldn’t imagine someone not liking their music. It had become fairly ingrained in my very DNA, that the music of The Beatles would never leave me until the day I die.

September 9th, 1999. The Dreamcast is released in the United States. At the time, I was still fairly behind in the game world. I had a SNES with a massive library of games, and an N64 which was purchased a year before that. But how my mouth dropped in awe at the look of launch title Dreamcast games like Sonic Adventure. It looked so much better than my N64 or my friends’ Playstations. And every game I saw made me want a Dreamcast more and more. But I couldn’t convince my parents to allow me to get a third console, so something had to go.

I remained stubborn on this, until an issue of EGM came to my doorstep that contained details on a great new game called “Phantasy Star Online”. From the moment I set my eyes upon the first screenshot of the game, to reading about the class system and the loot details I was hooked. After the game came out, I read each review I could find and drooled over the extremely positive marks it got. I decided it was time to get a Dreamcast. Unfortunately, my SNES and the entire library of games had to go in order to get it. But I was fine with this, and not but a year or two after getting my Dreamcast would I step into the emulation world so I think things turned out alright after all.

PSO was just the jumping point for my Dreamcast adventures. Jet Grind Radio, Skies of Arcadia, Grandia 2, Sonic Adventure 1 and 2, Ikaruga, Outtrigger, Illbleed, Shenmue… So many radical new worlds and ideas to explore. I played my Dreamcast more often than I did my N64, and the Dreamcast quickly became my favorite system of all time. My room was covered in demo discs from the Dreamcast Magazine and printouts of drop charts and maps and strategies from PSO-World. Unfortunately for me, the Dreamcast would die an early death at the hands of the Playstation 2 and Sega’s own fanatical thinking and experimentation. Even with Seganet, the world just wasn’t ready for the Dream Machine.

September 9th, 2009. The Beatles: Rock Band will be released, making a huge jump for the legacy of “My Band”. It is an outstanding tribute to a band that has changed the face of music for an uncountable amount of people. I am happy to say that I am one of them. Along with the release of the Stereo/Mono remasters, and the rumor of The Beatles finally joining iTunes, The Beatles are inescapable right now. Recently, every day is just ever so slightly rose tinted for me by the fact that The Beatles are back in a big way. And the thought occurs to me: What luck I have to have so many things fall in to place like this.

I also turn 21 on that day. I will have made my final step into “adulthood”, achieving the last hurdle of being able to legally drink. It is a landmark day for many a person, but for me it won’t just be a day about the booze. To this day, I still listen to The Beatles. Their albums are on my laptop, my desktop, my iPod, my external hard drive. To this day, my Dreamcast sits proudly in my room. I boot it up every once in a while to play the classics the way they were 10 years ago. I own Xbox Live versions of Ikaruga and Rez, Gamecube versions of Skies of Arcadia, PSO and Ikaruga, and Jet Set Radio Future. And I play them to this day. I am still an active member over at PSO-World, ever since I first signed up there back in late summer 2003.

Music is still a huge part of my life. I listen to a wide variety of artists and genres, and always look out for a new and different sound. In my spare time I write album reviews for albums that are able to inspire me to write something about them. My love of music brought me to love the Rock Band series of games. I was exposed to it by a friend who took me with him to perform vocals during the Rock Band Tour that went around the country in 2007. I currently own Rock Band 2 for the Xbox 360 and an insane amount of DLC. And now “My Band” is being brought to a format that I love, to a system that owes a lot to the ground the Dreamcast broke. Some people may be a little tired of being stuck in a rut where a lot of things haven’t changed since they were kids.

But me? I’m just fine here, thanks.

“Pine/Cross Dover” by Masters of Reality

It’s been 5 years since Masters of Reality’s last album, the folk inspired Give Us Barabbas. Pine/Cross Dover takes a spin in the other direction, taking an entirely electric guitar approach. Chris Goss’ signature haze laced production adds an otherworldly spaciousness to each song. You can feel that the boys are having fun with each track, the drums being especially perky and in the forefront. From the raw groove of “King Richard TLH” to the 12 minute spaced-out jam session album ender “Alfalfa“. There are a few dark moments and some lively jams that hint at some of MoR’s previous works, but manage to stand out completely on their own.

Masters of Reality have set out to create an album they haven’t done before. Chris Goss proves once again that he can make some killer music. The stoner rock god is back! Electric, eccentric and eclectic: Pine/Cross Dover is Masters of Reality’s strongest and strangest album yet.

Putting the “Gory” into “Inglourious Basterds”

As an American, one of my favorite past-times is killin’ Nazis. We’ve been doing it in video games for years, but it has grown so stale. So what better way to put the spark back into Nazi killin’, than to rewrite history like a demented Major Payne style bedtime story farce? Inglourious Basterds does just that with a wink in its eye and a cheeky, blood soaked thumbs up. For Tarantino fans, this is the movie that they have been waiting for all summer.

For the rest of you, this equates to (in)glorious violence, larger than life characters, unforgettable dialog and tons of Tarantino’s trademark cheese. Brad Pitt’s “Killin Natzis” character is just the tip of the iceberg in a cast who all perform their roles with perfection. The plot may not be clear at first, but it all comes together in the end and the payoff is well worth it. With the use of more dialog than one-liners and violence, some untrained eyes may feel Tarantino’s lost his touch. But only a fool would not realize that he’s got a childish grin on his face as he’s directing the few scenes of pure wanton violence. Put the history books away and forget how World War 2 happened. I think you’ll prefer this way instead.

“Broken” by Soulsavers

Broken marks the third album for the Soulsavers, their second featuring ex-Screaming Trees vocalist (and Queens of the Stone Age alumni) Mark Lanegan on vocals. There are also some high-profile special guests, including Gibby Haynes (of Butthole Surfers), Mike Patton, and a mysterious girl named “Red Ghost”. The overall atmosphere of the album is less religious experience (as was heard in their previous album) and more of a sunrise over a run down city. Take some of the funk-electronica of TV on the Radio and mix it with the sleeze of The Twilight Singers. Top it off with a slight country influence, and you’ve got a sound that is familiar, but warming and new to the ears.

The album starts to sag towards the middle, but Red Ghost’s vocals bring new life to the final few songs. And I feel that perhaps the few of the other special guests don’t have enough influence over the gloomy Lanegan in the respective songs they appear in. It’s easy to forget that this is classified as “Electronica” and reminds me a lot of Unkle’s “War Stories” and “End Titles…”. And that’s A-OK with me.