The Last Candle

The liner notes I’ve been reading lately have been very insightful. No, really.

I should clarify that the aforementioned notes have been coming from blues and jazz albums — not power metal albums. Power metal liner notes are usually good for a laugh, as the Finns and Germans dole out the “GREETZ” and “THANX!” in their respective gibberish languages. Although maybe Tony Kakko isn’t giving out props to his frosty homies back in Scandinavia; maybe he’s dishing out some wisdom among those strange, obscenely multisyllabic Finnish phrases. Just maybe.

The first mind-opener came from the liner notes of a Charlie Parker compliation album. The following quote appears in a different form on the Web, but I’m going to reprint it from the liner notes because I like this version better.

First you master the instrument, then you master the music, and then you forget about all that shit and just play.

And that, in a nutshell, is what separates Satriani from Vai and Malmsteen, Pat Metheny from Pat Benatar, Stevie from, well, pretty much anyone, and what makes the blues in general so damn beautiful: these musicians just want to play. The playing is the difference between Opeth and Dimmu Borgir or Soilwork. Other groups, like the Dream Theater guys, have been as far as the music phase, and someday they may rock like Queen or Led Zeppelin, if they can find the soul.

Some other bands will never get past the instrument part (I’ll refrain from giving my opinion on said bands). I, being in the early stages of learning guitar, probably won’t get past the music phase either. But having these other folks around, the ones who really know how to play, is more than good enough.

The second quote is by Martin Scorsese of all people, from the liner notes of one of the albums based on the TV series he created about the blues, called, succinctly, The Blues. I culled this particular quote from the Eric Clapton album, although I’d guess this same quote is mimicked in the other albums in the series.

Like most people of my generation, I grew up listening to rock & roll. All of a sudden [after hearing Lead Belly’s C. C. Rider], in an instant, I could hear where it all came from. And I could feel that the spirit behind the music, behind that voice and that guitar, came from somewhere much, much farther back in time.

When you really listen [to the blues] — and believe me, it’s not hard, because this is music that grabs your full attention from the first note — you’re hearing something very precious being passed down. A precious secret. It’s there in all those echoes and borrowings, all those shared phrasings and guitar figures, all those songs that have passed down from singer to singer, player to player, sometimes changing along the way and becomings whole new songs in the process.

Combine the rich, intimate history of the blues with the players that Charlie Parker’s talking about — Robert Johnson, the Vaughan brothers, the Three Kings of Blues, Buddy Guy, the Allman Brothers, Los Lobos with their Tex-Mex blues, and so on — and you get one of the most stunning music genres and the most soulful musicians in the world.

Out of the new American Film Institute’s “100 Years … 100 Movies” list, I’ve seen…33. Load up the Netflix queue, it’s time for catchin’ up!

Actually, considering the volatility of the list — in the span of just a few years, films that are 40+ years old jump up or down several places or disappear from the list entirely — I don�t take it too seriously. Might we attribute the list’s plasticity to a fickle bunch of mustache-tweaking artisans, table-thumping about the juxtaposition of the candlestick next to the water pitcher, barking wine and attributing glory on how the cinematography in that one scene in the bedroom included so few oblique lines? Or a do we have a medium that molds itself through time?

False dichotomy alert, yes. But without without trying to sound (too) petulant, I don’t have much of a mind for most of those movies anyway. I’m going to go with the assumption based on the evidence of this list that the AFI is a bunch of fellows who, after donning caps that tilt lazily on their balding heads and daintily peppering their popcorn with celery seed, watch Star Wars in dubbed Italian to make it seem more distinguished.

The noted films are classics, no doubt about that, but, as is plain to people that have suffered through my grousing about films in general (which typically sounds something like, “Boy, that flick is bad/was bad/looks completely terrible”), my tastes are tempered enough that most of the list’s films don’t tickle my fancy. I may have seen only a third of the 100, but out of the remaining bunch I’d jump to see only five or six others.

I was sent the list on Thursday morning by a co-worker who has the same general taste in films that I do. After my initial perusal of the list I prepared to reply with a complaint about the list’s lack of Kurosawa titles (as well as a note of appreciation for sending me the list in the first place, of course). Thankfully, my morning tea sparked the right neurons in the right places, and I read the list again, noticing during the second reading that it was composed by the American Film Institute, about American films. Ah ha.

But I griped to her about the lack anyway, and she agreed with me. Kurosawa should be everywhere.

Here’s a cell phone camera image I “snapped” last Saturday, the lens facing into a Gamestop bargin bin:

The forlorn copies of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney were strewn about the bin among tasteless fodder such as bad Sonic the Hedgehog iterations (read: any Sonic the Hedgehog game after the third one), tired movie adaptations, and XTREME sports titles. I stacked ‘em together as seen in the picture — they look a bit less lonely that way.

I know Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is a couple years old, and part of a niche genre, and pretty weird for an American market in the first place, but seeing a favorite game in the 50-75% basket is pretty cheerless.

This next picture shows, in fact, the end game credits sequence to The Game That Took Me Eight Months To Complete. Time of capture: Monday night, 10:46 PM.

That’s right: the rollin’ credits indicates that I’ve finally finished Planescape: Torment. The journey took eight months of infrequent gameplay — about 40 hours or so total, I’d estimate — and a lot of grousing, since I stuck to my personal pact of not picking up additional PC games without beating Torment first (insert obvious game title-inspired pun…here), thus halting much forward progress on the Beat PC Games front for several months.

But now that the game is over, I expect that to play it again sometime in the next couple of years. The atmosphere, characters and writing in this game is so rich, inventive, interesting and rewarding that it makes the next game on the agenda, Far Cry, a typical run-and-gun shooter, look extremely weak by narrative standards, and I likes the good narrative business.

Oh well. Far Cry is regarded in the critical community as a high-quality shooter, so I guess I’ll have to acclimate myself to shooting guys with a Desert Eagle as the new debate format, rather than Planescape: Torment’s extremely detailed and comprehensive dialogue trees. Just a tad bit of difference, there.

April, May, and June of this year have been three of the most bountiful months in my personal sphere of music. Besides seeing a half-dozen excellent live shows, several of my favorite bands have released new studio albums during the three month period.

I usually like to punch out a sizeable write-up with my impressions on new records, but with such a glut of new material and a relatively little time to blog about aforementioned material, I have a few choices: talk about one or two favorite albums; write a little about each; or not write about them at all, and choose to talk about cats.

Since I don’t really like cats, and since I need to pick up the post frequency around here, I’m going to take the middle option — a few words apiece about a few albums.

Here’s the general format of the mini-reviews, which I just now came up with, on the fly.

• Three statements on the general qualities of the album. The statements might be about something I like, something I don’t like, or just general observations.
• A one-liner that sums up my like or dislike for the album as a whole. I’ll also note how long I’ve been listening to the album; it’s safe to assume that the longer I’ve been playing the record, the more confident I am of my critique (albums “grow” over time, etc.).
• Finally, I’ll throw out a couple of iTunes links to favorite songs, if available (that is, if the iTunes links are available — I liked songs on all of the new records).

So yeah, my cute format is a bit of a cop-out, replacing a more thoughtful, detailed review, but hey, I’m driving this crazy blog, not you.

Contrasting with the previous two rock- and metal-heavy albums, In Absentia and Deadwing (both which I hold in very high regards), Fear of a Blank Planet pulls back from the crunch, returning in part to the ambient days of the earlier Porcupine Tree albums. The production is good as always — Steven Wilson, singer, songwriter and guitarist, is extremely talented — but the onslaught has been scaled back, and the ether has filled the regression.

The work succeeds on many levels: as a concept album, as a continuous piece of music (all of the tracks blend into each other), and as individual songs. The concept —the state of youth today amidst cultural coersion — MTV, prescription drugs, video games, sex, advertisements and television, and the rest of the noise — is well-thought, but is mostly expressed through the instruments — Wilson seems more interested in making music that sounds like a disillusioned teenager, instead of writing like he’s one. As for the sequence of tracks, it’s terrific — listening to the album from the first second to the last sequentially is much more enjoyable that listening to the album on “shuffle.”

When I first listened to Fear of a Blank Planet back in mid-April, I admit that I didn’t like it very much. “This is it?” was my general reaction. Needless to say, this new Tree album has grown on me quite a bit since April, and the album is arguably my favorite out of their already high-quality catalog.

To sum up: A terrific and significant work. Porcupine Tree isn’t the best technical band, but the brilliant, smart and richly atmospheric songwriting furthers their reputation as one of the best prog bands on the planet.

iTunes tracks: the title track; Anesthetize; Sleep Together.

When I first listened to Unia, my reaction was similar to my reaction after hearing Fear of a Blank Planet: “This is Sonata Arctica?!” Gone are the traditional aspects of Finnish power metal — song-wide double-bass kick rhythms, guitar and synth-harpsichord duels, and straightforward tempo, time signatures and keys — and in comes the prog. Frontman Tony Kakko evidently wanted to do quite a bit of changin’ up in the ole’ Arctica repertoire for this album, and the result has a paid off.

But Unia is still power metal — it just has a hell of a lot more prog in the mix. Paid in Full is a pretty ordinary (and typically good) single; Caleb resembles an elongated drama in the tradition of The End of This Chapter or White Pearl, Black Oceans; and Under Your Tree and Good Enough Is Good Enough fill the quota for super-sentimental ballads. However, most of the other tracks are completely different forays for the band, not only constantly switching up the technical side of things, with new keys and tempos four times a song on average, but introducing plenty of complex vocal overdubs and new instrumental productions.

All that said, it’s almost too much. Listening to Unia gives me the impression that Tony Kakko had an influx of ideas for this album, and was so attached to all of them that he tried his darndest to cram them all into an hour of music. If that was the case, Tony was successful in getting all of the ideas out of his head and into Unia, but the resultant melodic cacophony is occasionally jumbled and irritating. Nonetheless, the band’s progression is overly positive.

To sum up: Surprisingly progressive, but still powerful. This is easily Sonata Arctica’s most interesting and best-written album. After a month of listening, I can confidently rank Unia as Reckoning Night’s superior — and I really like Reckoning Night.

iTunes tracks: For the Sake of Revenge; The Vice. The video for Paid In Full is on YouTube

In a video on YouTube I saw a couple of weeks ago songwriter and virtuoso drummer Mike Portnoy said that he talked to fellow bandmember and songwriter John Petrucci about the album’s concept — that he wanted the album to “have balls.” (For those who don’t speak Metal, he means “aggressive.”) But on the album’s special edition DVD, Portnoy says that he had no concept in mind during the songwriting process. That Mr. Portnoy’s a nutty one!

Systematic Chaos is pretty “ballsy,” as Portnoy might put it. The traditional technical tomfoolery and expertise that Dream Theater is known for is still omnipresent, but the sound emphasises chunkier riffs and heavier tones when compared to Octavarium, the band’s previous, more dreamscape-esque record. Systematic Chaos reminds the learned Dream Theater of past album Train of Thought, widely regarded as Dream Theater’s heaviest album, but with less crunch and more melody.

You know, I keep wanting to love this band, but they’re just not quite cutting it for me. The band lineup is incredibly, crazy good, but for all that skill the music just doesn’t have much soul. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence — released four albums prior to Systematic Chaos — is my favorite work of theirs to date, not because of the technical skill (which was still exhibited in force), but because the success of the mental illness (the “Inner Turblence”) concept and storytelling. They need to go back to that, or else just do the full double-live orchestra album they must be dying to produce.

To sum up: I like the record, but my appeal for this band grows dimmer with every release due to the lack of soul, which is either absent or overpowered by the frenetic technical wankery.

iTunes tracks: In the Presence of Enemies, Part I; Constant Motion; Prophets of War (sounds a bit like Muse).

Okay, this one’s going to be pretty easy: one step forward, one and a half steps back.

I’ve always thought of Kamelot as the most mature band in the power metal genre, combining finessed songwriting, thoughtful concepts, and music that’s complex without being completely indulgent. The two previous albums, Epica and The Black Halo, are stand-outs in the genre for the mastery of the aforementioned aspects, but I’m not getting the same vibe from Ghost Opera. The new album seems almost…relaxed, like the band figured it could go about halfway through the production of another Epica session and get the same fantastic result.

My opinion of Ghost Opera so far is that it’s far from fantastic, but I’m a little hesistent to stick to that opinion, having only listened to it entirely through twice. I’ll have a more definite opinion in a couple weeks, but my impressions thus far are that the band has scaled down what they’d previously built-up to make Epica and The Black Halo so darned good.

To sum up: After only a few spins of the album I’m a little disappointed, even if this new release doesn’t diminish my high respect for the band or their relative position as one of the greats of the power metal genre. Hopefully my impression will improve the more I listen to the new record, but Kamelot’s definitely changed their tune.

iTunes tracks: title track; Love You to Death; EdenEcho.