album review: 'words to the blind' by savages & bo ningen

Let's talk a little about collaboration albums. Outside of hip-hop, pop, and occasionally country, it's fairly rare to see artists from two different acts work together on an official collaboration, especially when you venture towards the more indie genres. Sure, you get your supergroups or when a member of another band jumps on a song or two to provide some additional texture, but team-ups between two distinctive bands or musical acts is a hell of a lot rarer, especially over the course of an entire album - mostly because it doesn't always tend to work. It's not like a guest rapper jumping on for verses, this is the fusion of distinctive artistic styles in songwriting and instrumentation, and most often it results in both acts meeting in the middle with watered-down blends of their own unique styles, or one group completely subsuming the other.

And yet this year one of the collaboration albums that has been high on my personal radar was this one, an enigmatic single track stretched over thirty five minutes to "album" length. The first contributing group was the all-female post-punk group Savages, who you should all remember from last year dropping one of the best records of 2013 with Silence Yourself, delivering a brutally cutting message through potent and explosive instrumentation. The second group is the Japanese acid-post-punk group Bo Ningen - and I'll admit right out of the gate that I wasn't all that familiar with them, and what I did hear was a little disconcerting and not exactly to my tastes. For one, the tone of their material was a lot more spasmodic, jerky and off-kilter between melodic and dissonant intervals that didn't seem to have the coiled intensity and grit of a band like Savages.

Now it turns out they've collaborated before - lead vocalist of Savages Jehnny Beth has contributed vocals to a few Bo Ningen songs, but their most recent collaboration 'C.C.' featured a lot more messy, noisy guitar lines and a frantically overstuffed mix that didn't flatter anyone, especially Bo Ningen lead singer Taigen Kawabe with his skittering, shrieked vocals. And considering this project was a single track, I was very concerned this could prove to be a real ordeal to sit through. But then again, Savages has earned enough goodwill with me, so I steeled myself for whatever might come and listened through Words To The Blind - what did we get?

video review: 'no fixed address' by nickelback

Ugh, that should take care of the duds this week. Man, what a mess.

Okay, next up... hmm, either that Savages/Bo Ningen project, that critically acclaimed Lucette debut, or that Leighton Meester album everyone keeps yammering about. Decisions, decisions. Either way, stay tuned!

album review: 'no fixed address' by nickelback

I know a lot of people who hate Nickelback.

And here's the thing, most of you don't get it if you don't live up here in Canada. For as much as Nickelback ruled the radio across the Bush administration, they were much more omnipresent here in Canada, where regulations require the radio play a certain amount of Canadian content. And sure, we get Metric, Marianas Trench, Serena Ryder, and a slew of other great Canadian acts, but it also means that of the many singles Nickelback charts, they all get airplay up here.

And it's probably from that broader point-of-view that I can say this with certainty - trust a guy who knows, there are a lot worse bands than Nickelback. The band got hit with the 'worst band ever' label not because they were legitimately that much more terrible than their peers - when Three Days Grace, Creed, Seether, Hinder, and Theory Of A Deadman have produced far worse music - but Nickelback were everywhere in the 2000s and that's made their mediocrity a lot easier to hate. Now granted, Nickelback have written some terrible songs, especially when they were trying to go for any pretensions of depth, but there was a place for a few of them, when they catered to the lowest common denominator of hard rock debauchery and sleaze. And to be fair, it was a much better fit for Chad Kroeger's voice than the insufferable bitching of songs like 'This Is How You Remind Me' or 'Someday' or 'Saving Me' or the pretentious platitudes of 'Gonna Be Somebody', 'If Today Was Your Last Day', and especially 'If Everyone Cared'. To me, Nickelback worked best on grimy tracks about fighting, drinking, screwing, and behaving like swaggering rock star assholes, completely awash in bad taste almost analogous to Katy Perry.

Now some of you are inevitably thinking, 'Wait, you rip on bro-country all the time when it gets sleazy and ignorant in much of the same formula, are you seriously giving Nickelback a pass'? And let me make this clear, I'm not doing that - catering to the lowest common denominator will only get you so far, and Nickelback can get away with more than most mostly thanks to Chad Kroeger having a lot of presence behind the mic, the band developing more of a rock edge, and some genuinely solid songs like 'This Afternoon' and 'Burn It To The Ground'. But there are huge tracts of their discography that pushes the sleaze into uncomfortable territory, and it's rarely enough fun to back it up. But most of the hatred they get isn't for that reason - no, it's not about hating Nickelback but hating the fans of Nickelback for supposedly giving them a free pass - something that rings more than a little hypocritical from some critics who have praised similar brands of vulgarity when it comes from hip-hop or metal or R&B. Say what you will about Nickelback's Dark Horse, for as gross as most of the album is, at least it's honest and knows what it is.

That being said, with Nickelback's commercial decline in the 2010s, they have aimed to diversify their sound a bit. Recruiting Joey Moi to produce for their 2011 album Here And Now proved surprisingly effective in adding some punch and meat to their usual formula, although that album felt bogged down in unnecessary and really quite embarrassing ballads. In other words, I had no idea how good their newest album No Fixed Address would turn out to be - so what did we get?

video review: 'four' by one direction

Well, this could have been a lot worse. Not great, but decent enough.

Oh Christ, it's Nickelback next. Stay tuned folks, this week is going to get... well, interesting...

album review: 'four' by one direction

Okay, let's try this again.

By now most people who have watched this channel are well aware of my feelings on the British boy band One Direction when I reviewed their last album Midnight Memories. Basically, I'm not a fan, partially because I found their blatant appropriation of classic rock and hair metal songs to be in bad taste especially when they couldn't back it up, and I found their lyrical contributions to be less than savory and frequently creepy. In other words, I wasn't a fan, and I raised the question why any of their fans could like them beyond stereotypical boy band charm, especially when The Wanted and The Backstreet Boys dropped markedly better albums that same year. All of that being said, there was one legitimately great song on Midnight Memories with 'Diana' and the fact they pushed the amateurish and clumsy 'Story Of My Life' over that song is baffling to me.

But now a full year has passed, and the pop landscape is in a very different place than when One Direction dropped Midnight Memories last year. The charts have made a major shift from pop towards R&B and soul, even in the UK, and while The Wanted have effectively gone nowhere, One Direction does face real competition from 5 Seconds To Summer, who I've already covered twice this year and who actually dropped a decent self-titled album. And with the band taking over significantly more writing credits, I was prepared to cut One Direction a bit of slack - mostly because I remember what happened about thirteen years ago the last time R&B took over from the boy bands, and since One Direction are signed to Simon Cowell's Syco Records, I have no illusions surrounding the band's potential shelf life.

In other words, I was inclined to be charitable when I checked out their new album Four - did it surprise me?

video review: 'cadillactica' by big k.r.i.t.

Well, that was worth listening through. A lot of work to get there, but definitely worth it.

This week... oh god, Nickelback and One Direction. Well, at least we've got Savages and TV On The Radio to look forward to, but look out, folks, this is going to be rough...

album review: 'cadillactica' by big k.r.i.t.

It's one of the most common stories in music. You have a young, aspiring artist, an independent spirit who makes impressive music with depth, complexity, and real emotion, doing it with skill and passion and intellect. He gathers buzz, builds up a fanbase, and is poised to smash into the mainstream. And then he finally signs to a big label... and it all falls apart. Suddenly the money gets involved and to guarantee an investment, the artist is compelled to make the same homogeneous crap we all see. Nothing changes, the artist gets dispirited, and the choices are stark: lash out and get dropped from the label; give in to the machine and lose your artistic integrity; or somehow manage to hold things together and try to maintain a balance.

And to me, the artist who has managed to hold that third option reasonably well was Big K.R.I.T. He originally struck me with his early mixtapes with bringing some impressive rapping, production, and content to his material that was both tempered by real introspection and definitely had the possibility of crossover appeal thanks to his very radio-friendly production. But when he dropped that first album Live From The Underground in 2012, many - and I'd include myself in that group - were a little disappointed. I mean, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either, just another radio-friendly hip-hop record featuring a great rapper delivering cliched content with occasional snippets of real brilliance. He managed to follow it up with King Remembered In Time in 2013, another mixtape that featured some more varied production, and it was pretty good, but at this point it was starting to get obvious that Big K.R.I.T. was falling towards a pattern. Not a bad pattern, mind you, but I found myself thinking he could be pushing himself harder on more thoughtful tracks or even aiming for stronger, punchier club bangers. I wouldn't quite call it a holding pattern, but it was becoming familiar and I had the feeling Big K.R.I.T. could do more. 

And it started looking like he would. The first promotional single was 'Mt. Olympus' and though it wouldn't show up on the standard issue of Cadillactica, it showed Big K.R.I.T. with more fire and potency than I had seen in a while with great bars. And it was enough to get me enthused to really dive into this record, which has been getting critical acclaim across the board and drawing comparisons to acts like OutKast - did he pull it off?

video review: 'arms of morpheus' by kingfisher sky

I can't believe I keep forgetting these...

Ah well, next up is Big K.R.I.T. Stay tuned!

album review: 'arms of morpheus' by kingfisher sky

So here's an interesting situation: you're an technically minded musician, looking at pushing the boundaries of your craft, and you're part of a band that's on the precipice of breaking into the mainstream. And you know that if you start aiming to push for more complex progressions that are less commercially friendly, it could hold you back from that breakthrough. So what do you do - stick with simpler instrumentation that really aren't stretching you artistically, or forge a new path that will almost certainly be less commercially viable?

That was the choice Ivar de Graaf made when he left symphonic metal titan Within Temptation after their critically acclaimed album Mother Earth. And to some extent, it makes complete sense - Within Temptation were always a band with a keen eye to appealing to a more pop-friendly metal crowd, and de Graaf's desire to play more complex progressions and improve his compositional skills would almost certainly fly in the face of that. He still maintained a friendly relationship with Within Temptation and would occasionally play with them on later occasions, but in 2005 he collaborated with his wife Judith Rijnveld to form the progressive symphonic metal band Kingfisher Sky.

And here's the funny thing: listening through their debut album Hallway of Dreams in 2007, I definitely saw some real potential but I also was struggling to see the areas where Kingfisher Sky could stand out from the crowd. Keep in mind that not only did Within Temptation release The Heart of Everything that same year, Nightwish released Dark Passion Play in all of its folk-flavoured genre-bending might, and it's not hard to see how Kingfisher Sky might have been overshadowed simply for being quieter and having more restraint, their influences being less film scores and more Porcupine Tree, Kate Bush, and traditional folk. But I'd argue that being a little softer gave Kingfisher Sky a chance to develop their songwriting and acoustic textures, and while they did occasionally fall into cliche, they frequently were able to compensate for it. They followed that album with Skin Of The Earth in 2010, which was heavier and had tuned the songwriting a little finer, but it was at this point the lower production budget was definitely hampering the more symphonic side of the band, and while the guitars had crunch and some of the more progressive grooves were interesting, I found myself wishing that Judith Rijnveld was a more powerful vocalist or they could expand their sound into something with a little more import and scope.

In other words, I wasn't sure what to expect with their crowdfunded 2014 album Arms Of Morpheus - I expected to like it, but it's been a crowded year for symphonic metal. So how is it?

video review: 'man against machine' by garth brooks

Can't believe I forgot to post this last night... ah well, it's a comeback that for the most part most people outside of the country music sphere will completely miss, and while that is a shame, it's not like Brooks was helping himself in the right direction here.

Okay, next up, I want to talk about Kingfisher Sky, because I still need more time with Pink Floyd and Big K.R.I.T.. Stay tuned!

album review: 'man against machine' by garth brooks

It's a name that hangs over modern country music and will probably never be forgotten. An artist who is one of the great selling music acts of all time and who was probably most responsible for leading the popular resurgence of country music in 90s. For me, it's music that I didn't just grow up with, but material I'd consider formative in shaping some of my deep-seated love of country music. I grew up with his CDs in the car pretty much since I was born, and I can look back on many of his records as having some absolutely stellar songs.

Yeah, you all know who I'm talking about - and yet as a music critic now, Garth Brooks is one of the more complicated acts to talk about. His most famous and iconic songs - 'Friends In Low Places', 'The Dance', and especially one of my favourites 'The Thunder Rolls' show up on his earliest albums, but throughout the early 90s he maintained a damn impressive level of quality, but as the decade wore on, things started to get shakier. Everyone looks at the fascinatingly disastrous Chris Gaines project as the breaking point, but to me the wheels were starting to come off as early as Sevens. He made a modest comeback of sorts on Scarecrow, but at that point he stopped making albums and after a few years 'retired', he went back to performing and has been consistently making a fortune doing so.

See, here's the thing about Garth Brooks - many have put forward the point that he's less of the 'artist' than the professional businessman entertainer, a little analogous to Jay-Z if he had actually retired after The Black Album. Because let's be fair here, Brooks is still a pretty damn good songwriter and a powerful presence behind the microphone, and while the Chris Gaines experiment is dated and embarrassing, it's not hard to theorize that it was Garth Brooks taking a chance artistically that the public rejected en masse in favour of his material packaged through lucrative deals signed with Wal-Mart. The public didn't seem to want Garth Brooks the artist, and that bugs me - granted, it's not like he hasn't embraced the businessman mold to the point where his army of lawyers have ripped every single music video of his off of YouTube, a move where even Prince has backed off. It's gotten to the point where Brooks launched his own music distribution system rather than work with iTunes - and to me, all of this strikes me as monumentally short-sighted. Sure, I remember Garth Brooks and his older fans will remember him, but YouTube is how most of the youth across the world disseminates and remembers culture, and purposefully fighting against it is an easy way to lose a younger audience, especially when Billboard counts YouTube streams these days for chart positioning.

What this means is that, for the first time in a long time, I'm not including backing music from the album, half because his lawyers would use YouTube's broken Content ID system to prosecute a case they'd lose under Section 29.1 of the Canadian Copyright Act but would still make my life hell simply because they can, and half because I want to make a point. But that's asinine business practices, we're here to talk about the actual music of this album - and I'll admit I was excited. I grew up with Garth Brooks, he made some of my favourite country songs of all time, and now he's back with his new album Man Against Machine - how is it?

video review: 'sonic highways' by foo fighters

While there could have been more to this album, it's still solidly enjoyable, and I still liked it.

Okay, next up... hmm, either Big KRIT or Garth Brooks, because I need a little more time with Pink Floyd. Stay tuned!

album review: 'sonic highways' by foo fighters

You know, for as big of an act as the Foo Fighters are, I don't think I've ever, in public or private, really given a comprehensive opinion about the band. I've talked at length about many of their contemporaries, some great and some awful, but I haven't really talked about Dave Grohl's post-grunge turned arena rock band in, well, ever. I think it's time I rectify that.

So, the Foo Fighters are, for me, a defining example of a pretty damn good band. Not a great one, not an all-time classic act, and it'll definitely be interesting to see how long their historical legacy lasts in comparison with their peers, but a pretty damn good rock band. There's a lot of common opinions about the Foo Fighters as well - their best material was in the late 90s, they really are more of a singles act over structuring cohesive albums, and a lot of their material sounds the same. Having revisited the entire Foo Fighters discography... well, they're not wrong, although Wasting Light was a solid step to reinvigorate the band. But tapping into the reasons why gets trickier. For one, as potent of a frontman as Dave Grohl is, some of his more serious, hyper-earnest, 'we're the last real band in rock' self-aggrandizing gets exasperating - and the sad fact is with the decline of hard rock in the mainstream, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. But on the other hand, earnestness is one of the Foo Fighters' greatest strengths - you believe Grohl when he's howling or singing, and the band's knack for a melodic hook has kept them a steady draw for years. On the flip side... okay, lyricism has never been their strong point, and many, many songs fall into easy cliche and feel more broadly sketched than they really should. But once again, there's another side to this, as broadness can work well in the fist-pumping anthems the Foo Fighters can make like clockwork.

So you can bet I was intrigued by their newest album Sonic Highways, reportedly recorded in eight different American studios in order to capture the unique musical vibe of each city. And not only that, with each song they brought on guests to enhance the roots-driven sound, from Joe Walsh to Ben Gibbard to Zac Brown, the last of which was the biggest draw for me being a massive Zac Brown Band fan. On the other hand, I also know the Foo Fighters - we weren't likely to see Little Big Town levels of experimentation on this record, and at the end of the day they'd still probably sound like the Foo Fighters. 

video review: 'broke with expensive taste' by azealia banks

Well, that was the unscheduled review, shame it wasn't better. Now back to my schedule with Foo Fighters next. Stay tuned!

album review: 'broke with expensive taste' by azealia banks

Okay, normally when I get requests, it's pretty scattershot. I get a few for upcoming records I'm obviously going to cover because they're so big it'd be insane for me to ignore them, I get a few for offbeat oddities that I might check out if I find them interesting, and of course I get the requests for records that came out two years ago and weren't particularly well received even then. Let me clarify something about my schedule - with every artist I cover, I endeavour to assemble a full and fair picture, which means going through their past discography to get some historical context - which means that in addition to covering the album and listening to it multiple times, I'm also backtracking through history, either for the first time or just to get back up to speed. In other words, a lot of time and work goes into my schedule, and I can't cover everything, no matter how hard I try, and even my year-end catch-up of albums won't snag everything.

And yet, when I get a wave of requests for an album where nearly the only comments are asking for one specific debut record, I take notice. And the more they poured in, the less they made sense. I had heard the name Azealia Banks before for a strong EP and mixtape she dropped back in 2012, but since then her buzz has been less from her music and more from feuds with fellow musicians like Angel Haze and Baauer and from asinine remarks she made at tabloid fixtures like Perez Hilton. It didn't help that there had apparently been label problems that led her to getting dropped from Universal and this album being delayed extensively. So with little-to-no promotion and following in the footsteps of her idol Beyonce, Azealia Banks released her debut out of nowhere and I started getting requests to cover it. On the one hand, she probably couldn't have picked a better time - with the biggest charting names in pop rap being Nicki Minaj and Iggy Azalea, this is a better time to be a woman in hip-hop for a long time. On the other hand, I wasn't exactly sure what I was stepping into with Broke With Expensive Taste, and I remembered what happened with Angel Haze's Dirty Gold very early this year, a record that really was a complete non-starter even though it did have songs with commercial appeal. So what are we getting from Azealia Banks?

video review: 'z²: dark matters' by the devin townsend project

God, I wish this was better. It's still a good record, to be sure, but it just didn't quite land with me. Ah well, it happens.

Next up, I need time to get through my backlog of albums before I start the one of the heavier weeks of the year. Foo Fighters, Big KRIT, Azealia Banks, and more, so stay tuned!

album review: 'z²: dark matters' by the devin townsend project

And now we come to the second round of our Devin Townsend discussion, of the second disc and the one that definitely gripped more of the fans coming from Ziltoid The Omniscient. It was the sequel that so many of them had been asking for, the glorious return of Ziltoid and the madcap space insanity that had defined that album.

And yet, if I'm being completely honest, the more I thought about it the more I wasn't sure a sequel to that 2007 record was a great idea. Sure, there was undoubtedly more space to be tapped in the gloriously epic and epically silly saga of Ziltoid, but that album also ended in a way that didn't exactly leave itself open for sequels in the same way. It's similar to the sense of annoyance I had when I saw Disney's live action Alice In Wonderland directed by Tim Burton that actually turned out to be a sequel, couldn't be bothered to call itself Through The Looking Glass, and was a total piece of shit. Not spoiling anything, but when you transform what was designed as a pure flight of fantasy or madness into something grounded in a more concrete reality - you run the risk of breaking the joke.

And it seemed like Devin Townsend was running into problems too. A followup to Ziltoid was announced in 2009, and yet it took him five years to fully get the project to coalesce. He utilized the character on a satirical radio show in 2013 and bandied around the idea of a visual project, but this year he finally managed to pull things together for Z², and to placate the label he had to bundle it with a Devin Townsend Project album that actually managed to be pretty damn awesome. And even despite my serious misgivings going into this record, I have to admit I was still pretty damn excited for a new Ziltoid adventure - did we get it?

video review: 'z²: sky blue' by the devin townsend project

Part one was glorious, so let's see how part two pans out - stay tuned!

album review: 'z²: sky blue' by the devin townsend project

I've mentioned in the past that there are certain musical acts that have an insane work ethic, acts that will pump out distinctive, potent material that somehow manages to maintain a standard of real quality. Now from my observations, these acts tend to fall into two distinctive camps: acts that have a formula that allows them to subtly augment it with each release; and acts that simply have so many ideas that they have to let them all explode forth on project after project, with some of the ideas inspired genius, some merely inspired, and some that inspire headaches for all involved. In other words, there's a little less consistency in their output. And no, I'm not talking about Lil Wayne and his album/mixtape releases, today I'm going to talk about one of the more eclectic figures in metal, a Canadian musician who already dropped a country and blues flavoured record earlier this year and now has a full double album of progressive and extreme metal.

Yes, we're talking about Devin Townsend, formerly of the extreme metal act Strapping Young Lad and the frontman of the Devin Townsend project. He's a musician with a gift for versatility, a ton of explosive presence, and sheer oddball weirdness in his lyrics that can send many of his projects spiraling into madness, or at least be difficult to take them somewhat seriously. And to be fair, I get the feeling that Townsend recognizes this to some extent, as he's made some truly hilarious metal records that still manage to kick ass. I was first introduced to him through his 2007 album Ziltoid The Omniscient, a record about a power-mad galactic overlord searching for the universe for the perfect cup of coffee and with an ending twist that really shouldn't be as much of a fun surprise as it is. 

Now in terms of pure Devin Townsend albums, it was his last until now, but that didn't mean he wasn't active. Instead, after quitting booze and drugs, he embarked on the Devin Townsend Project, a series of five albums that showcased five different sides of Townsend's experimentation to varied amounts of success, the last being the more pop- and hard rock-flavoured Epicloud in 2012. So when I heard that he was coming back with a double album this year, a sequel to Ziltoid The Omniscient, I honestly didn't have the slightest clue what was coming. So I took several deep breaths and plunged in - what did I get?

video review: 'vii' by teyana taylor

Well, this was a nice surprise. Quite liked this, and honestly wished she had more traction on mainstream radio.

Okay, next up will probably be Diamond District, but I also want to get a crack on this Devin Townsend double album. Either way, stay tuned!