#specifically my thesis is on concept albums in rock and metal
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thekidsfromyestergay · 18 days ago
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Wait I haven't bragged here yet. I got accepted onto a masters program at a russell group university :3 I'm gonna be a master of music composition
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sendmyresignation · 4 years ago
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You Got Blood On Your Money
Question: how do you make honest art? Is this not the eternal conflict as a creator- how to stay genuine to yourself and your art without tripping into the pitfalls that lay within fame or money or popular culture? Every creator must grapple with the fight between being seen and being sold. But very few artists struggle with this quite as visibly as My Chemical Romance has. From the inception of this band, which has always been more art project than musical endeavor, its members have tried desperately to convey a bone-deep sincerity fundamental to their work. From their very first song, the band proclaims itself as a savior to a generation that had been stripped of their will in the face of unimaginable horror. At the same time, there exists within their music a commitment to storytelling, a desire to fill the empty space in rock music with narrative and macabre and emotion that had been absent. Both of these elements manifest themselves into a band that very seriously considered it their mission to save people’s lives, as well as to create deeply meaningful art. But how do you save as many people as possible without being corrupted by the spotlight? And how do maintain genuine storytelling as you get further and further from the basement shows you got your started in?
These are questions that permeate their music at every turn, something that haunted each album and made itself known in each new project. And while there are many ways to dissect this particular struggle in their discography, nowhere is it more apparent than in the dispute between Thank You For the Venom and its reimagined successor- Tomorrow’s Money. These songs are noticeably similar in their structure as well as lyricism and imagery but instead of the latter building off of the other, they are inverses of each other. And they speak to My Chem’s long battle with becoming a legendary band in the midst of also attempting to keep their identities as artists and outsiders. And in analyzing their differences, it becomes reflective of the band’s main career-long conflict between the commodification of their art and the need to create something larger than themselves. And the question remains, were they successful?
Before we answer that, let's talk about Thank You for the Venom. To begin, it's important to note that Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge is an interesting part of My Chemical Romance’s discography because ultimately, it is unconcerned with legacy, but instead is centered on the immediacy of loss and the reactionary pursuit of revenge. In a record overwhelmed with death and grief, there is very little mention of the afterlife for either the living or the dead- characters are murdered but there is very little textual violence. Characters come back to life but there is minimal discussion of how they died or where exactly they were in death. However, that does not mean Revenge is not devoid of mythologizing- it just happens to be about immediate intention rather than a long-term commitment. It is because of this reckless drive forward almost to spite the odds that allows for Venom to exist as the band's declaration- it is their call to arms. Specifically, the track is a pronouncement of My Chemical Romance as renegades fighting against the fake, safe bands writing hits for money instead of survival or purpose: they “won’t front the scene” if you paid them, after all, but are instead running from their enemies. And not only are they an oppositional force, but they are pariahs, targets- something you can try to kill but will fail at. More specifically, in “If this is what you want the fire at will” there is an element of martyrdom, the idea that they are not just a necessary part of the very structure of society but also there is the implication that killing them is to concede to their influence and a necessary part of their lifecycle. Once you get big enough to become a target, you inevitably will be shot down- that is the final step of a great and honest band’s success. This also feeds into the album's wider ideas surrounding revenge as a concept as the greatest revenge is finding success in the aspects of yourself and, by extension, the things you create that other people thought were worthless (I don't think it's a coincidence so much of this album is steeped in comic book imagery and art and mixing punk and metal and theater when those are things the band would get shit on for enjoying). At the same time, this theme exists as the foundation necessary to create an anthem of survival- revenge is the fuel that keeps the protagonist, as well as the band, in motion. Look at the specifics of their thesis- “Just the way the doctor made me” and “You’ll never make me leave” are both reconciliations with the self in spite of the prevailing narrative against them. That connects to the way this song is a statement of a savior and a martyr twofold- “Give me all your hopeless hearts and make me ill” as a representation of the band taking on the pain of others to keep them both alive. All told, in Venom there is perseverance in the face of a large, unimaginable adversary. It is a threat directed at your enemies. It’s living as free and ugly and completely yourself as you can until they shoot you down in a hail of bullets. And then even that end is itself a victory.
Here, at its core, Venom is really the singular instance in the entire album where the band reconciles with an image. And the image the band creates for themselves is as outcasts in opposition to the "scene" and as a revenge plot, proving to their audience the value of authenticity and survival and rubbing it in the faces of those who doubted them. These themes about what My Chemical Romance is and what their goals are is something they wrestle with for the rest of their career- how do you say lives, reach an audience, and remain a fighting force against the societal norm when you exceed your mission and become part of the fabric of popular culture? But that is for later, at this moment, Revenge imagines no future. Only this desperate battlecry.
By contrast, Tomorrow’s Money is dealing with the aftermath. Functioning as a cynical reimagining of Venom, the song is structurally, thematically, and even lyrically reminiscent of Venom to an uncanny degree. First and foremost, the songs are structured the same- a slow build-up into a whispered intro, a multi-part chorus, the exact same chorus-verse layout, and a strikingly similar solo. Looking at the two Toro solos more closely, they both feature more building up as well as tremolos, triples, darker tones, and what sounds like a slide progression just ripping through both of them. Tomorrow’s Money is mimicking Venom pretty clearly here- either as a direct reference or because Venom is so reminiscent of the condensed MCR sound that they’re ripping off to make their point. And looking deeper at the themes present in Money specifically, just like Revenge, there is a clear lack of legacy- “we got no heroes ‘cause our heroes are dead” calling back to the very real disillusionment of Disenchanted that’s placed specifically in a song about becoming part of the machine, being heroes themselves, to nod to the fact that the very mission of the band is dead as well.
Simply put, Money tackles similar issues as Venom about fame and audience and creating art while using much of the same language and metaphors to completely invert the claims found in the “original”. To start with, both songs use the verbage “bleeding” to associate with a kind of suffering for your art that was an aspect of their previous band ideology. Namely, it’s the idea that the audience makes the band ill through the “hopeless hearts” as much as the “poison” does. The “what’s life like bleeding on the floor” of Venom is paired with “you’ll never make me leave” is a statement of defiance and survival against the odds while still bearing the burden of other’s pain. Money, on the other hand, explicitly says they “stopped bleeding three years ago” as a rejection of this leftover martyrdom prevalent in Revenge especially.  But it also refers to their newfound luxury of comfort, they have a way to stitch themselves together that they didn’t have before. These implications transition directly into the ideas surrounding health, vitality and living- specifically surrounding both doctors and infection. Speaking of the former, Money has an interesting lines in “If we crash this time, we’ve got machines to keep us alive” and "me and my surgeons and my street-walking friends" because they speak to both becoming a part of the “industry” by mentioning mechanization but also specifically evokes the living dead. In the MCR canon, the idea of the undead (both vampires and zombies) are antagonistic forces that represent the outside world, specifically fake people or the music industry. And zombies, in general, are already rife with allegorical connections to consumerism, like how Dawn of the Dead, a known mcr influence, is directly about materialistic culture. Vampires, subconsciously or not, are often representatives of exuberant wealth as well as beauty and desire. They’re also blood-suckers and leeches that someone in this narrative has fallen in love with, as if colluding with the enemy and allowing them to literally drain them and their life force. Thus, in describing themselves as essentially undead (when they crash, they’re revived) as well as directly collaborating with the undead, they are connecting themselves to the very forces they’ve been fighting. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of this association is how they specifically relate it to survival, the only way of staying alive is to accept them, to allow themselves to be hooked up to the machines that make them undead in the first place. Almost as if you make it far enough not to tear yourself apart, you’ll eventually assimilate into and become part of the industry. 
This idea of unavoidable assimilation is compounded with the multiple references to viruses- “You're loaded up with the fame. You’re dressed up like a virus” then being reemphasised with “We’re gonna give it for free. Hook up the veins to the antibodies, got it with the disease, we’re gonna give it to you”. Both these lines condemn fame but also implicates themselves as part of the contagion that is celebritidom at the same time it depicts this process as unavoidable. Not only that, they’re the ones spreading it at the same time they condemn it. This duality, possibly even exaggerated hypocrisy is buried deep into the foundation of Money. Even the ending line, as angry and inflammatory as it is- still names them as complicit as the "I’ll see you in hell" implies that they're going to hell too. Looking even deeper, there are multiple references to the dilution of their message:  “Choke down the words with no meaning” and “The words get lost when we all look the same'' both representing meaninglessness in the lyrics while “the microphone’s got a tapwire” is reminiscent of wiretapping or even the surveillance company Tapewire, suggesting their words are under scrutiny, they are being monitored and that could be one of the reasons for meaningless words. All of these lyrics reference, with subtly or, in the case of the last one, very obviously about the sellibility and how rigid the label of “emo” is and how they couldn't escape it - they may not have gotten paid to front the scene, but they sure did inadvertently lead a cause. And being put in that position was clearly very stifling, striping them of their artistry. Even looking at the response to Black Parade, it's clear that popular culture at large did not appreciate the record for its genuine message but for the moment in time it represented or the aesthetics it called back too. In many ways it was taken at face value- “words with no meaning” or just another dark, death obsessed emo record. What Tomorrow's money is is a rejection of the glorification of suffering and nativity of Venom in the face of becoming pop culture icons but it's also, in a way, reconciling with a perception of failure and loss of creative control that will haunt My Chem for the rest of their years.
Ultimately Tomorrow's Money is representative of the band's response to the gradual shift of My Chemical Romance, as an entity, away from martyrs to an accepted part of the music industry and culture. How do you reconcile with that? In this moment, in a post-Black Parade era, they try taking everything down with them- becoming a whistle blower to their truth. But perhaps most importantly, this conflict lays the foundation for Danger Days as both critique of industry’s commodification of art, as well as the reutilization of the obsession with legacy and death in their next project -no longer can they let the machines revive them, they have to get out of the city, yell incendiary graffiti at the top of their lungs, and explode in brilliant colors. It was time to return to calls to arms. It was time to return to the power of not just of death but of living on long after it, the album the act of becoming folk heroes for a new generation. And while the bright lights didn't last forever, by scrapping Conventional Weapons and starting over in the name of artistic integrity they truly created a legacy of material unrivaled in its sincerity, reach, and cultural significance. 
As we know, the story didn’t end there. The final chapter used to be closed, and ending with "I choose defeat I walk away and leave this place the same today" as the conclusion of their career. This was not the explosion Gerard wrote about, not the doomsday device but a quiet goodbye, a silent curtain call. It's another round of disillusionment finally fully-realized. And yet, the Reunion seems to be a direct contradiction to their farewell- in some way they did come back because they were needed, because their absence was a gaping hole in music at large which suggests they did change things, that they do have a noticeable effect on the world they inhabit. Looking at A Summoning for even a moment, the picture illustrated to the viewer is that they are an otherworldly power. That they are an entity that you plead for the return of, the hero and the savior on clear display. And regardless of how you feel about the postponement, you can never talk away that fact- some force bodily brought them back in their narrative, that it was human interference that started the resurrection. And that it was primarily through art, especially that video, that they declared their forced-to-be unfulfilled intentions. I've always liked to believe that we've cycled back around, that the cynicism of Conventional Weapons and then later Fake Your Death has had its moment but now it's time to return to that world of rebellion in this era of the desert- the reinhabiting of reckless living and creation. Again, we must ask: what does it mean to make art for the masses? I don’t think we’ll ever truly find the right answer, but I think My Chemical Romance have always tried their best to solve the equation.
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ckret2 · 5 years ago
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So I’ve got a Spotify playlist consisting of the compiled contents of 81 different Alastor-centric playlists, like I just copied the contents of every single playlist I could find with no cultivation, no filtering, and no censoring. The one limitation I put was no duplicates of the same song—although multiple versions of the same song off different albums was allowed.
And since then I’ve been listening to this all-packed-together playlist on shuffle. It’s brought up several comments/questions. Highlights include:
- To every single person that includes a romance song with lines like “baby you’re my angel” or the like: are you a Radiodust shipper actually referring to Angel, or are you a Charlastor shipper referring to Charlie’s “fallen angel” heritage?
- One of you included an entire creepypasta story about the devil talking a man into killing his ex-wife and her lover as part of a 500-step-long plan to conceive the Antichrist and I’m not quite sure why it was on an Alastor playlist but I appreciate the characterization of the devil in it. I guess a creepypasta is kind of a radioplay of sorts? Maybe more Alastor playlists should just have random radioplays mixed in.
- To the person who included half a Kidz Bop album on their Alastor playlist: I’m not judging, I just wanna know why. I want to understand. I really want to understand.
- I respect all you people that included song covers by Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox and I understand where you’re coming from, but like, if you’re not familiar with music genres from before 1990, I suggest you look up which genre a given PMJ cover is trying to emulate, because if you’re stuffing PMJ covers on a playlist specifically to make them “sound like” Alastor’s era or because you’re going for “songs Alastor would like because they sound like what he’s used to,” then a PMJ cover that makes a 1990s song sound like a 1970s song isn’t quite in the right neighborhood.
- There are different philosophies that go into making a character playlist. Some go “the genre has to fit the character’s era and/or personal tastes, whether or not the lyrics do.” Some go “the lyrics have to fit the character, genre be damned.” Some go “these songs were big/popular when I was into this character so that’s what I associated with them.” Some go “these songs are really out there for the canon character but fit my headcanons.” Some people may have totally different criteria I haven’t even thought of! Anyway the point is: when you mix over eighty playlists together, you get every single playlist-making philosophy mixed together, and it’s an exciting experience to listen to.
- And on that note: every single genre on the planet is on this playlist. We’ve got Britney Spears, we’ve got Vocaloid, we’ve got Thomas Sanders (we’ve got a LOT of Thomas Sanders), we’ve got My Chemical Romance, Two Steps from Hell, Barry Manilow, Oingo Boingo, Within Temptation, Madonna, Kesha, Hans Zimmer, ... we’ve got the poppiest pop, emo, metal, electronic, folk, rap, rock, movie soundtracks, TV soundtracks, classical, disco, country, KPop, Carrie Underwood, every single decade for the last 150 years... and I’m deliberately leaving out all the jazz, swing, electroswing, and musicals, because those are a given for Alastor. Obviously those ones dominate the playlist but it’s amazing how much variety there is outside them.
- I’m frankly amazed by how much of this playlist is Thomas Sanders and Bendy and the Ink Machine. Like. It’s a notable quantity.
- That said, actually the playlist doesn’t quite include every single genre. Like, for example: I can tell y’all want to lean into Alastor’s New Orleanian/Louisianan/Creole roots from how many songs I’ve seen that include words like voodoo, Creole, New Orleans, bayou, uhhhh The Princess & the Frog, etc... And yet aside from a few New Orleanian jazz artists so far I have crossed paths with very little Louisianan music compared to, say... Undertale songs. So here. Start with some Cajun, try some Mardi Gras songs, I’m not totally sure how much of this playlist is “actually from Louisiana” and how much is “other people making songs that they think are Louisianan” but try this one anyway, and once you’ve oriented yourself a bit dig in here. I wanna see ten Alastor playlists with one song that includes “Zydeco” in the title or album name, stat. Sure, we know Alastor’s all jazz and swing and musicals, but I sure don’t listen to only three genres, you probably don’t listen to only three genres, and Mr. Radio Guy Whose Public Title Includes The Word “Radio” Who Likes Bursting Spontaneously Into Musical Numbers probably listens to more genres than you and me combined, and those genres probably started with what was local & accessible & common around where he grew up.
- Then again I haven’t listened to this whole playlist yet, sometimes I put it on shuffle and sometimes I put it in alphabetical order to try to slowly work through it from top to bottom (I’ve made it mostly through the C’s) so maybe y’all hid the Cajun & Creole music down in the D’s. But lemme say this: while randomly shuffling through the playlist, I’ve randomly run into multiple Irish drinking songs & shanties, and randomly run into zero zydeco, so like from those of you who follow the “music that sounds like what the character listens to” philosophy of playlist-making, non-jazz Louisianan music could use a lil more representation. If there’s room for twenty-six Billie Eilish songs there’s room for one BeauSoleil song. (I’m partial to “L’ouragon,” but you do you)
- Somewhere in this massive mixed playlist there are three parody medleys of Disney songs rewritten to be like “here are grimdark edgy lyrics about all of the terrible real-world things happening to the cultures depicted in these Disney movies!” and like, okay, I can see why that merits inclusion in an Alastor playlist, his big moment in the pilot was “take an optimistic song worthy of a Disney princess and rewrite it with grimdark edgy lyrics,” but those three songs still annoy the hell out of me because the specific way they frame the concept of their songs is that Disney movies/songs are “full of lies” and these songs reveal the lies. And then it’s things like... “Aladdin got captured and interrogated by the CIA,” which is definitely a thing that happened to a character living in an ambiguous time period that predates the existence of the United States, much less the CIA, much less the CIA’s meddling in the middle east, by several centuries. Disney was definitely lying about the reality of Aladdin’s day-to-day existence by not depicting American imperialism that predates America. Or “the characters in The Princess & the Frog have to deal with the fallout of Hurricane Katrina,” like, yeah, Disney sure is pulling the wool over our eyes by dishonestly denying the devastating consequences the 2005 hurricane had on 1920s New Orleans. Listen the lyrics are clever and all the things they discuss are real salient social issues but it still drives me nuts that the songs are framed like they’re revealing “lies” being told when half of the movies are taking place in (fantasy versions of!) time periods or locations where the issues they’re discussing didn’t apply, if they’d just framed that one line differently— Okay, okay, I’m finished, I’m done, I’ve got it out of my system
- Every single love song makes me go “are you imagining this song with a ship (and if so which ship) or do you just think Alastor would be into this song?” The question goes double for songs from the 20s/30s, because the odds that they added it to their playlist just because they think Alastor would like the song increases.
- On the other hand, if whoever added “A Formidable Marinade” isn’t a Charlastor shipper I will eat my hat. Also nice work on the gory cannibalism sex song.
- Every once in a while I’ll run into a song that makes me go, now how the heck did you end up on an Alastor playlist? Does this song line up with someone’s very specific headcanons and/or fanfic plot? Do they think Alastor would like this song? Did they happen to like the song and like Alastor at the same time and so they associate them with each other? Examples: “I Got You (I Feel Good)”, “iRobot” (is it the emotionlessness of being post-death?? do they headcanon that he’s got radio hardware replacing his guts?? is it a post-breakup ship song??), “Greensleves”, “Barbra Streisand” (the song, not the singer), “Jolene,” “The Last Steampunk Waltz,” “Seven Nights in Eire,” “Cruel Angel’s Thesis,” and the person who included half a Kidz Bop album, please, I just wanna talk—
- Every time I hear a song that includes the words “hell,” “sinner,” “smile,” or “radio,” I go, “Haha. Nice.”
- An incomplete list of songs that amused me for how on point they are: “Hotel California” (how often do you have a fandom where “Hotel California” is actually very blatantly fitting without having to twist through an extended & convoluted metaphorical interpretation?), “The Hunting Song,” “The Axeman’s Jazz,” and “Time Again”
- I sort of hate whoever put “Circus” by Britney Spears in their playlist and made me realize that lyrically it’s a perfect Alastor song because it is.
- *scrolls past six versions of “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”* Haha. Nice.
- *scrolls past five versions of “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”* Haha. Nice.
- *scrolls past a song from Bambi* Haha. Nice.
- *scrolls past five versions of “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without A Smile”* Haha. Nice.
- *scrolls past eleven versions of “Sing Sing Sing”* Haha. Nice.
- What’s with those of y’all putting steampunk songs in Alastor playlists? Listen, listen: steampunk vibes are for Sir Pentious. Swing vibes are for Alastor. Don’t cross the streams. Take your steampunk songs and make Sir Pentious playlists with them. He could use more playlists.
- The playlist includes 39 songs that include “smile” somewhere in the title.
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grimelords · 6 years ago
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My March playlist is finished! This one is slightly more diverse than usual, swinging all the way from vibraphone jazz to Bhad Bhabie to black metal so I’ve taken the liberty of actually sequencing it properly for you. So if you’ve got 3 hours you can listen to this straight through and be taken for a hell of a ride. No matter what you like I’m sure you’ll find something in here that you love.
Tahiti - Milt Jackson: For an unknown reason I had a big jazz vibraphone phase this month and when you're talking jazz vibraphone you're talking the Wizard Of The Vibes himself, Milt Jackson. I feel insane even having an opinion on this but it's a shame that some of the best vibraphone performances were made at a time when the actual recording technology wasn't really there, they all have this very thin quality that I think misses a lot of the great character of the instrument.
Detour - Bill Le Sage: Like compare this from 1971 to Wizard Of The Vibes from 1952, the sounds is miles warmer and gives so much more of the full range and detail of the instrument. I also listened to this song five times in a row when I first heard it, the central refrain is just so fuckin good. Like I said, big vibes vibe and who knows why.
Blowin' The Blues Away - Buddy Rich And His Sextet: Superhuman playing aside, it's unbelievable how good these drums sound. The whole first minute just feels like a tour of each specific drum and I absolutely revel in it. I feel like flute and vibes is a relatively rare combo so it's extremely nice to hear Sam Most and Mike Manieri go ham in tandem.
Yama Yama - Yamasuki Singers: A friend sent me this song that he's had stuck in his head for ten years ever since it was in a beer ad from the days when beer ads were incredible strange for complicated legal reasons about not showing people enjoying the product or something https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORfkh0OojxY and this incredible song is apparently from a 1971 French concept album where a couple of guys wrote a bunch of psychedelic songs in Japanese for an unknown reason that later became a massive drum and bass breaks album, and one of the guys was Thomas Bangalter from Daft Punk's dad! Music is crazy.
Alfonso Muskedunder - Todd Terje: I'm starting a petition to get Todd Terje to write the soundtrack for the next Mario Kart. I absolutely love this song and this whole album because it's so joyful and strange and it just sounds like nothing else I've ever heard. He seem to truly operate in a world entirely of his own.
Pala - Roland Tings: I love this song. It's like he wrote it with normal sounds and then went back and replaced every instrument with the party version. This song hands you a coconut and says welcome to the island where bad vibes are punishable by firing squad.
Keygen 13 - Haze Edit - Dubmood: There's a fucking album of keygen music on spotify and it's absolutely great and so good that someone's doing the work to recognize the value of the music this extremely weird scene produced and preserve it. If you don't know, back in the day when you pirated photoshop or whatever, you would download a license key generator which was a program made by extreme nerds who had cracked the license key algorithm to give you a fake one, and for unknown reasons they would make the keygen program play original chiptune music that someone in their nerd crew would compose. Who knows why but god bless them.
My Moon My Man (Boys Noize Remix) - Feist: The very concept of a Boys Noize remix of My Moon My Man is hilarious and it turns out it sounds absolutely amazing as well. Two great tastes that taste great together.
Low Blows - Meg Mac: I had a big Meg Mac phase this month too, listened to her album a lot and it's extremely solid. Great timing too cause her new one comes out in a month or so too. I really am excited to hear her next album because she's so good but I've always got this feeling that she hasn't reached her full potential yet, she's only going to get a million times better in an album or two.
Patience - Tame Impala: I love that the cover of this single is a pic of congas because it feels like that's the central thesis here. Kevin Parker bought some congas and is making disco Tame Impala now and I really couldn't be happier about it.
Unconditional (feat. Kitten) - Touch Sensitive: I love a 90s throwback done with love. There's nothing cynical or ironic about this it's just fun as hell!
Last Hurrah - Bebe Rexha: Get a fucking load of this Bebe Rexha song that interpolates Buy U A Drank by T-Pain for the chorus! It's a testament to how good that song is that she's using the verse melody as the chorus. T-Pain will quite literally never get the respect he deserves. Also this song goes for 2.5 minutes. There's something happening where pop songwriting is getting more and more compact, completely trimming the fat and ornamentation and it's very interesting.
Hi Bich - Bad Bhabie: Also I'm fully six months late on Hi Bich but I'm of the opinion that it's extremely fucking good. A perfect little reaction gif of a song and it only goes for 1m45!
Friends - Flume: I'm doubling down on my thesis about emo rap from last month but this song literally sounds like a Flume remix of a Hawthorne Heights song. The whole melody of it, the overlapping yelled/clean vocals. The lyrics obviously. I don't know it's just very odd how close it is. A sort of emo trojan horse to trick people into thinking The Used are cool again. 
How To Build A Relationship (feat. JPEGMAFIA) - Flume: I've been meaning to check out JPEGMAFIA (AKA Buttermilk Jesus AKA DJ Half-Court Violation AKA Lil' World Cup) for a while but this is the song that convinced me. There's just so much to digest in this. Every line is gold and delivered with massive conviction even when he realises it's total nonsense like 'dont call me unless I gave you my number'.
Bells & Circles (feat. Iggy Pop) - Underworld: Underworld alive 2019?? I love this song becuase Iggy Pop has been riding a fine line between punk provocateur and old man yells at cloud for a while now and this song is the perfect mix of both. You can't hijack airplanes and redirect them to cuba anymore and as a result it's over for liberal democracies. Just yelling about air travel for six minutes and it's good.
Guns Blazing (Drums Of Death Pt. 1) - UNKLE: This beat is some of my favourite DJ Shadow work I think. The menacing organ bass throughout, and especially the distorted drum freakout near the end. It's just great all the way through.
Homo Deus IV - Deantoni Parks: Another Deantoni Parks track like I was raving about last month. This whole album is great and flows together as a single piece of work amazingly. I love the purposefully limited sample palette of each track forcing an evolving groove throughout. He absolutely wrings every bit of variation he can get out of every single sound he uses and once you get into the groove of it it's absolutely mind blowing.
Boredom - The Drones: I love that The Drones can write a song about joining ISIS that's also a lot of fun. Spelling out radicalization in a way anyone can understand and sympathise with and then switching it in the second verse to spell out how we got into this situation anyway. 
Loinclothing - Hunters And Collectors: I love how much this song sounds like a voodoo celebration in christian hell.
The Fun Machine Took A Shit And Died - Queens Of The Stone Age: There's a good bit on the live dvd they put out after Lullabies To Paralyze where they play this song and they say it was supposed to be on the album but somebody stole the master recordings from the studio, which is an incredible and brazen crime. Then when they put it out on Era Vulgaris as a bonus track Josh Homme said in an interview "The tapes got lost. Actually, they were just at another studio, but we falsely accused everyone in the world of theft" which is extremely funny. This is really one of their best songs and I sort of really with it had been on Lullabies because it fits perfectly between The Blood Is Love and Someone's In The Wolf type of vibes, I love how it just kind of keeps shifting ideas and riffs throughout. An absolute jam overflowing with ideas.
10AM Automatic - The Black Keys: This song is an all time great in my opinion. It's so straightforward and so effective. I wonder if we'll get a blues rock revival ever or if Jack White still being alive and bad is souring everyone on that idea. This song also has one of my favourite guitar sounds in history I think - the outrageously huge sounding solo that comes out of nowhere and swallows up the rest of the mix like a swirling black hole near the end.
Gamma Knife - King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard: I've never gotten much into King Gizzard and because of their one million albums already it's hard to know where to start but I've been listening to Nonagon Infinity a bit and it's great, it's just good old fashioned 70s prog jams front to back.
Gina Works At Hearts - DZ Deathrays: I absolutely love this song and I absolutely love the second guitar sound in the chorus of this song that sounds like it's made out of thin steel.
Black Brick - Deafheaven: When I saw Deafheaven the other month I was right up the front and it was a life changingly great experience AND they played this new song live for the first time before it went up everywhere like three hours later which was very exciting to be given a sclusie like that. After they finished a guy behind me whispered to his friend "Slayer..." which was very funny to me.
Gemini - Elder: I found this band because one of my Spotify Daily Mixes was all stoner metal for a while, which is a good genre to see all lined up because it'll have Weedeater, Bongripper AND Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats right there in a row for you. Anyway this album is extremely good, the very best kind of stoner metal where it's groovy and fun and has big meaty riffs and ripping big solos and it's extremely easy to listen to three times in a row.
The Paradise Gallows - Inter Arma: My big obsession the past little while has been Inter Arma ever since Stereogum posted The Atavist's Meridian from their new album. It is just so fucking good and I can't believe I've never heard of them before. You know when you find out about an amazing band and then you find out they've been around for nearly ten years and you can't believe everyone in your life has been selfishly hiding them from you?
The Atavist's Meridian - Inter Arma: I think a big part of my enjoyment of this band has also been that I discovered them at the same time as I'm listening to an audiobook of the complete Conan The Barbarian omnibus so I'm very much in the brain space for music that sounds like it would be nice to swing an axe to.
Untoward Evocation - Impetuous Ritual: I love how halfway through this kind of just turns into a big swirling mist of dark sounds. It feels so formless and dark that it could just shake apart and dissipate at any moment and you'd look down to realise your skin is gone.
Eagle On A Pole - Conor Oberst: from Genius: 'In an interview with MTV news, Oberst stated “We were on the bus one day and a friend of ours that travels with us and works for the band kind of came out from the back of the bus and said that first line: ‘Saw an eagle on a pole… I think it was an eagle.’ And then this guy Simon Joyner, who is a great songwriter from Omaha and one of my great friends, he was on tour with us and sitting there and he was like, ‘You know, that’s a great name for a song.’ We kind of had a contest where he wrote a song with that first line, and [then] I did, and a couple of our other friends. We kind of all played them for each other. Simon’s is better than mine, but it is a good line to start a song.” Another version–Mystic Valley Band drummer Jason Boesel’s interpretation–is on the next album, Outer South.' The idea that such a good song has such a braindead origin only makes me love it more.
Lake Marie - John Prine: When I saw John Prine the other month he played this song that I had never heard before and I had to look it up after and now I'm completely obsessed with it. It feels like falling asleep during a movie and missing a critical plot point so the rest doesn't make sense when you wake up but is thrilling nonetheless. Also he absolutely screamed "SHADOWS!!!" when he played it which was a fucking cool thing to see a 72 year old man do.
Little White Dove - Jenny Lewis: The drums on this whole album are absolutely huge for some reason and I love it. My favourite recent sound is in the first chorus where there's a funny little pitch correction noise as she sings 'dove'. It's very strange and very very good.
Locked Up - The Ocean Party: I only found out The Ocean Party existed as they announced their farewell show this month which is a real shame but I'm glad I got to hear of them at all because they're very good. A very good song about that feeling we all know and love: driving for a long long time.
Plain & Sane & Simple Melody - Ted Lucas: I found out about this song from Emma Ruth Rundle's Amoeba Records video and she makes a good point about this whole album sounding like something's gone wrong and it got accidentally pitched down slightly in the recording process. It's unclear if that's what happened or that's just how he sounds but it adds a very softly spooky undercurrent to a very nice song.​ 
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chevd-blog · 7 years ago
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My Top 100 Favorite Albums of All Time (Part 6: 10 - 6)
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10. Anno Domini High Definition – Riverside (2009)
              In 2010, as I was preparing to leave Emily Carr University with a degree in fine art, I was faced with questions about the direction I wanted my painting practice to take. What did I want my artwork to say? I began by reevaluating my niche as an artist, trying to take stock of whatever attributes I had which set me apart from my peers. The largest, as far as I was concerned, was my training in computer animation. All of my colleagues were traditional painters, and that was a skillset which I could see that I possessed and others didn't. With that in mind, I decided to focus my work thematically on technology; I wanted to be able to incorporate my training with 3D computer modeling software and Photoshop into my painting, and I also felt very strongly that technology would be one of the most vital themes that could be explored by a 21st Century artist.
              Around the same time, I discovered Lunatic Soul and Riverside. At first, I was just happy to have something new to listen to in the studio while I painted. But when I obtained their most recent album at the time, Anno Domini High Definition… it truly spoke to me. It was perfectly in line with the theme of my own artwork— an album which explores the effects our advancing tech is having on us. Is it really connecting us, or is it driving us apart? Is it really enlightening us, or is it turning us all into zombies with goldfish attention spans? It's all there in the title of the album, a phrase which alludes to the fact that we live in the age of wi-fi and high resolution, but also serves as a clever backronym for ADHD. This was the thesis statement for my artistic practice, in musical form.
              The album begins with "Hyperactive", which emerges from a simple piano melody, and picks up steam until transitioning into a heavy metal day-in-the-life chronicle of a person whose entire perception of reality has been altered by his electronic existence. It is also the shortest song on the album, with each of the four subsequent songs being progressively longer. Clocking in at nearly 9 minutes, third track "Egoist Hedonist" meanders through three movements, including a jazzy brass section interlude, while dealing topically with the crushing pressure of conformity to society's expectations. The beautiful slower-paced "Left Out" picks up where the preceding song leaves off, detailing the emotional consequences of being overlooked in such an oppressively homogenous society. But the album's full power is conserved until the final track, "Hybrid Times", an almost 12-minute epic that embodies the perils of 21st Century life in its most virulent form: technology addiction. It starts with a frantic piano, and gives rise to squealing organs and guitars and Mariusz Duda's screams about obsession, before sinking into a seductive sea of digital ambience. In summary, from an aesthetic perspective, this is one of the albums which I feel best encapsulates my relationship with the ever-advancing world around me.
Prime cuts: "Hybrid Times", "Egoist Hedonist", "Hyperactive"
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9. In Absentia – Porcupine Tree (2002)
              With as much of Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson's solo work as ended up on my list, I'm sure it's not going to come as a colossal surprise to anyone that In Absentia ranks this high. This is, after all, the most critically and commercially successful album in the band's two-decade discography, and the one that many fans will point to as their best. When you mention Porcupine Tree to someone, chances are, this is the album they're going to think about first. It's a fantastic album for initiating someone who hasn't heard of them. I should know. It was the first one I heard, too.
              I came across Porcupine Tree around 2006, while I was still at Ringling College in Florida. I had recently heard of this cool new website called Pandora Radio, which could recommend music based on a listener's selections. I decided to test it out by asking it to find me music in the same modern progressive rock vein as the Mars Volta. One of the songs that popped up was "Radioactive Toy", an early Porcupine Tree song that was featured on their 1992 debut album On the Sunday of Life. It wasn't as similar to the Mars Volta as I had expected, but it was interesting enough to me that I remembered it and moved on. Later, when I got around to doing more research into Porcupine Tree, and which album was best to properly introduce me to their sound, In Absentia was the one upon which everyone seemed to agree. So I tracked down "Blackest Eyes" and "Trains" on YouTube, and gave them a listen. Just from listening to those two songs, I was an instant convert. And it was a rather momentous timing as well, as I was reaching the end of my time in Florida, and preparing to start a new chapter of my life in Canada. Looking back on it, I now realize I've unconsciously drawn a pretty big line in my head: my last two years in Florida were my Mars Volta years, and my six in B.C. were my Porcupine Tree years. It's a funny thing, how the mind works sometimes.
              Musically, In Absentia is an infectious blend of the band's progressive roots with a distinctly post-90s alternative rock influence, as well as some heavy metal edge and a little extra ambience tossed in for good measure. Though not a concept album in the purest sense, many of the album's tracks, including "Blackest Eyes" and "Strip the Soul", are thematically linked to serial killers, and an exploration of the impetuses behind their twisted mental states. Like the other two albums directly before it, In Absentia also has one of Steven Wilson's trademark critiques of the music industry, this time in the form of "The Sound of Muzak", which laments the apathy with which the degradation of popular music is regarded. Wilson's vocals may perhaps not be the flashiest, but there's something in the conservative, simplistic nature of his singing that has always struck me as charming— particularly in songs like "Trains", where he layers the vocals to produce a wholesome choral effect. And while we're on the subject of "Trains"… yes, I know it's so cliché of me to say, given how it's the single most popular song in the band's repertoire, but it's damn near flawless. Listen to "Trains" and tell me you don't feel something special, I dare you. And the same challenge can also be extended to the devastating "Heart Attack in a Layby", or the melancholic "Prodigal", or the album's beautifully graceful piano finale, "Collapse the Light into Earth". There's just so much stellar musicianship here, that I have a difficult time fitting it all into a terse few paragraphs.
Prime cuts: "Trains", "The Sound of Muzak", "Strip the Soul"
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 8. Ænima – Tool (1996)
              One of the most indispensable albums of my high school years, I received my copy of Ænima sometime around 2001 or 2002. Upon my first listen, it became an instant favorite, and cemented Tool as one of the most profoundly important bands I had ever heard. I can't overstate this. When I was 17, Tool was the axis around which all my other musical tastes rotated. They were the foundation of my love of progressive rock and metal. In an era when boy bands were only just beginning to peter out, Tool— and Ænima specifically— helped me keep my sanity, and showed me that musical appeal and intelligence were not mutually exclusive. That was incredibly important to me at that age, because I sure didn't see many other signs around me that my intellect was something of which I could be proud.
              Ænima is, in many ways, a transitional album— after the band's first full-length release, Undertow, they parted ways with their original bassist Paul D'Amour and replaced him with Justin Chancellor, which shifted their sound away from the blunt, primal heaviness of their early work, toward something much more nuanced and thought-provoking. Ænima was the sound of Tool evolving. The name itself is meant to be symbolic of change— a mixture of "anima" and "enema", representing the purging of the psyche. And of course, I would be remiss if I failed to mention one of the other major catalysts for this metamorphosis: the band's experiences with the now-legendary comedian Bill Hicks, who passed away in 1994 from pancreatic cancer, and to whom Ænima was meant as something of a posthumous tribute. Hicks was first and foremost an evangelist for free and critical thought, and while opening shows for Tool, his influence rubbed off on the band. It was Hicks' routine entitled 'Goodbye You Lizard Scum', a tongue-in-cheek rant about the destruction of Los Angeles as retribution for its vapid banality, that inspired the album's apocalyptic title track (albeit, spelled "Ænema" instead).
              While it may not quite be their most advanced work, Ænima is sonically one of their most interesting albums, and was the one that was responsible for laying much of the groundwork and setting many of the precedents for the path the band was to follow in their post-Undertow years. It is the album that introduced the band's use of experimental segue tracks to pad between the actual music and showcase their quirky sense of humor—here, there are several, including "Message to Harry Manback", a violent answering machine message from an irate Italian which the band reframed as a love poem; "Useful Idiot", which is comprised of the sound of a record skipping, and which was included in order to mess with listeners of the vinyl edition; "Intermission", which is a Monty Python-esque organ intro for the song "jimmy"; and "Die Eier Von Satan", an industrial-sounding German screed intended to fool the unsavvy listener into mistaking a cookie recipe for a Nazi rally. Thematically, the songs themselves are largely tied to the subject of personal evolution: "Stinkfist" vocalizes a disenchantment with desensitization, "Forty-Six & 2" explores the idea of growth through terms of Jungian psychology, and the album's 13-minute finale "Third Eye" begins with samples of Hicks's stand-up act and takes the listener on a journey of deep, psychedelic-fueled introspection. From start to finish, Ænima is about shedding one's old skin and attaining a new consciousness— it's what the band themselves did in the course of making the album, and musically, it's what I did in discovering it.
Prime cuts: "Pushit", "Stinkfist", "Third Eye"
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 7. Kid A – Radiohead (2000)
              Let me set the scene for you: It's Spring Break 2007. The beginning of April in Florida, and I'm 21 years old. I'm staying in a hotel room in Orlando over the weekend, after driving up from my parents' house in Bradenton. My mission is to gain entrance to the Canada Pavilion at EPCOT, so I can do some artistic research on totem poles for my senior thesis presentation at Ringling. It's been a few months since my first trip to actually visit Vancouver, when things didn't go as well as I had hoped. On Saturday night, I am heartbroken, despondent, and completely at a loss for what to do next in my life. Sitting alone in the dark of my hotel room, I listen to "How to Disappear Completely", and totally collapse into despair. Kid A was an album that I discovered from my time spent in Canada, from friends who were fans of Radiohead. In that moment, though, the music perfectly mirrored my isolation and melancholia—I actually felt like disappearing completely.
              I know it's a strange incident to cite as a reason for liking this album, but it isn't just this one incident that has indelibly stamped Kid A into my consciousness. I have so many memories tied to that album: camping near Harrison Hot Springs, in the forests of British Columbia; late-night singalongs in the car with friends while driving somewhere; the ending of my time in Florida. Despite the fact that Kid A alienated a lot of Radiohead fans who were expecting something more along the lines of OK Computer, Part 2, it's actually my favorite Radiohead album specifically because it's such a hard-left turn away from everything the band had ever done up to that point (well, that, and the memories). There's an eerie feeling permeating the entire recording— steeped in paradox, simultaneously calm and frenetic. I once told my friend Laurie about the Orlando incident, and that I interpreted "How to Disappear Completely" as six minutes of sheer melancholy. She replied that the impression the song gave her was much more positive and uplifting. And here's the thing: after that conversation, both of us could understand the reasoning behind the other's perspective. The song is both of those things at the same time.
              The biggest change, of course, was Radiohead's risky decision to ditch their trademark 90's alt-rock sound for an avant-garde art rock blend with a sound palette of strange digital textures and electronic drum beats— "Everything in Its Right Place" and "Idioteque" being textbook cases. In other instances, like "The National Anthem", the band experiments with jazz instrumentation that, only three years earlier, would have been unthinkable on a Radiohead album. The only song on the album that even remotely resembles the old Radiohead's rock roots is "Optimistic", although even that song is much more ambient than their usual early fare. And through it all, Thom Yorke's distinct voice, despite being frequently unintelligible, lends the music another dimension of emotion with a collage of strangely oblique lyrics. It's an album that has served very well as an expression of my own adventures into the unknown.
Prime cuts: "Idioteque", "Everything in Its Right Place", "How to Disappear Completely"
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6. The Fragile – Nine Inch Nails (1999)
              As a teenager, I was slow to develop an affinity for Nine Inch Nails (as well as associated act Marilyn Manson). It wasn't for lack of interest; I'd seen NIN and Marilyn Manson music videos, and I knew for sure that I was interested. It was mostly because I lived in the Bible Belt, and because I was also wary of what my parents' reaction might be if they knew I owned anything by them. Don't get me wrong—they weren't really religious themselves, and they were usually pretty laissez-faire about my musical tastes… but I can recall an occasion where my father once told me in no uncertain terms that he saw no artistic merit whatsoever in Marilyn Manson; it was one of the very few times growing up when I really felt like my parents and I clashed on the sort of music to which I could listen. But The Fragile changed that. In 2003, in the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, I spent a month at a pre-college program at Ringling, which was intended to give prospective students an idea what on-campus life would be like. During one of my periods of free time, I was browsing a nearby store which sold used vinyl records and CDs, and came across a copy of The Fragile. It was my chance! No parents to worry about for weeks, no conservative Georgia atmosphere to tell me no— I was totally in the clear to buy it and add it to my collection, and no one could do a goddamn thing about it. Over the next few weeks of the program, as I became familiar with the album, I finally had a chance to properly fall in love with NIN.
              So what do you do after you create a groundbreaking album like The Downward Spiral? How the fuck do you top it? That question has already been partially answered by my review of Kid A (another album that was created under similar circumstances). But in Trent Reznor's case, I suppose another part of the answer was quantity, because The Fragile is a double album, separated into a "Left" disc and a "Right" disc. That doesn't necessarily mean he sacrificed quality, though. I sort of feel conflicted saying this, because I know that Reznor was personally going through a particularly difficult and painful time in his life during the recording of this album… but it's my favorite NIN recording, specifically because it's so much more nuanced than anything else he'd done up to that point. I can't say it's heavier, because Broken takes that distinction; I can't say it's truly darker, because of The Downward Spiral. But The Fragile is very hard and very dark, in a less readily apparent way. It doesn't bludgeon you like its predecessor does. There are still furious outliers like "Somewhat Damaged" and "No, You Don't", but the rage of The Downward Spiral has been transmuted into resignation, self-loathing, and even some quieter moments of introspection here.
              One of the biggest differences between The Fragile and its forerunners is the increased presence of piano—not a synth, not a keyboard, not digital textures, but a real, honest-to-goodness traditional piano. It was something that really hadn't been seen very much from Reznor at the time. Aside from the raging intro (the aforementioned "Somewhat Damaged"), the Left disc is full of songs where the piano has a conspicuous presence: "The Frail", "The Wretched", "We're in This Together", "Just Like You Imagined" (also known as the instrumental from the trailers for 300), and the oddly gentle "La Mer". The end of the Left disc is capped by the eerily beautiful "The Great Below", which has, over the years, earned the dubious distinction of being one of my top picks for listening during my depressive bouts; it is about as close as I've ever truly been to staring into the abyss. On any other recording, I would consider it the climax of the whole work, but in this case, considering its subject matter, I wonder if it's not more fitting for me to call it the nadir instead. The Right disc, on the other hand, sees Reznor more in his usual element, with the hard-edged guitars, precision drums, and rasping, glitching electronics of songs like "Where Is Everybody?" and "Please". When it comes down to it, The Fragile's real strength lies in being the best demonstration of NIN's full musical range— and through it all, Reznor's mix of self-deprecation, cynicism and flirtations with nihilism hold the diverse assemblage of songs together as a binding element.
Prime cuts: "We're in This Together", "The Great Below", "Into the Void"
And at last, all that is left is the top 5! Check back here tomorrow for the final part of the list!
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