Day 89: The Dandy Warhols – 13 Tales From Urban Bohemia

After nine really enjoyable songs, I was shocked to discover this was the band responsible for one of my least favorite songs ever. Even hearing it right now makes me want to buy a Kia. Fuck. I’m turning this one off. Too bad, because the rest of it was quite pleasant — a meander through the many forms 90s alt-rock assumed over the course of that wretched decade. It’s a testament to their versatility, in fact, that “Bohemian Like You” could have taken me so by surprise, and could stick out so painfully here, as except for maybe one other track, almost no element of the song sounds like it could have come from this.

A review I read (okay, fine, it was Pitchfork) on another album of theirs accused them of being cultural tourists, who liked to poke their torsos into movements and scenes and critique them without ever committing themselves to any one scene. That makes sense here, in a lot of ways, though I don’t think I would have made that observation myself. Without prior knowledge of the band or what they have sounded like or went on to sound like, this just sounds like a disc of powerfully nostalgic 70s rock unearthed from the cultural detritus of the reflexive 90s. There is plenty to like here, from quiet, almost Byrne-esque singing on “The Gospel”, to the flirt with psychadelica of “Mohammed” (perhaps my favorite track), or the calamitous, arena-sized fuzz-rock of “Nietzsche”.

My one criticism, that unspeakable track aside, is this album doesn’t have a lot in the way of emotion. It’s dispassionate, and — this may just be the influence of the various reviews I read shining through — disconcertingly detached. I don’t see this one aging well, on a lot of listens, as I’m on my 3rd and am already pretty bored with them.

Day 88: Billie Holiday – Love Songs

I posted a couple of days ago about how continuously I find myself realizing how very, very much I don’t know about music. And not just esoteric, obscure things, but like, Music 101. For instance, I’ve never heard the song “Strange Fruit”. I didn’t know about it until a minute ago, when someone brought it up in relation to my listening for the day. “1999, Time magazine called it the song of the century.” Okay. I’ve never even listened to Billie Holiday. I think I’ve heard “God Bless the Child” in the background of a movie or something somewhere, because I can conjure the faintest memory of it, but that’s about it.

And what am I to say about her now? Someone that momentous, that influential. Tasked with an assignment so broad, I’m all the more inclined to shrug it off. Shall I cobble together some words to throw onto the million that have already been written about Lady Day?

Maybe you haven’t listened to Billie Holiday either. Not everyone sits around to listening to this stuff, I remind myself. If you haven’t, you should. Her voice is a powerful instrument, focused, narrow, and forceful. She sings with a fragility that makes her sympathetic, and a sweetness that makes her lovable. On this disc she runs through a bunch of classic love songs, a couple her own compositions, and her talents are on full display. She was a tragic figure, dead of drugs and liquor in her early 40s, by all accounts ravaged by the things she did to herself. On this disc she portrays devotion, an obsession perhaps requited just enough to fall short of a mania. She giggles melodies, her voice flitting around scales effortlessly, channeling that giddy squeal of a woman desperately smitten.

These are great renditions, backed by strong bands, and great recordings. If you want to fall in love with Billie Holiday, give this a listen.

 

Day 87: The Buggles – The Age of Plastic

I read up on this a bit because I realized aside from the usual “First video on MTV” thing I didn’t know anything else about The Buggles, including but not limited to: what the rest of their music sounded like, what country they were from, how many albums they put out, etc. MTV did not invent the one-hit-wonder, right? Surely this was a band and not some kind of single-function apparatus?

I can only imagine the befuddlement of the citizen of the 1980s who fell in love with “Video Killed The Radio Star” and bought The Plastic Age on the strength of that. Instead of that charming hit (in not my opinion, that song is a pustule on my brain that refuses to stop secreting), people get a nearly-conceptual album of synth-charged progressive pop/rock. In fact, after their first album came out, the two principal members of The Buggles would join Yes for an album. But how does something like that happen? In my opinion, “Video…” does not accurately represent the style of the album proper. “Video” was fun, damn near ebullient, with its gratingly high tones and sweet-on-the-cusp-of-irritating vocal hook, but move past it and you have the exciting, dramatic “Kid Dynamo” and “I Love You (Miss Robot)”. They are both much more straight-faced than their hit-single predecessors “Video…” and “Living in the Plastic Age”, and seem to reject its immediacy. From there the album settles into a slower pace. Even when the tempo ratchets up, as in “Clean, Clean”, the songs seem less intended to delight the proles, and more for introspection and analysis. The songwriting throughout is rich and detailed, and rewards close listening.

It’s clear from a listen that “Video…” and “Clean, Clean” are the two most immediate, accessible songs on the album, aside from maybe the title track. The Buggles originally were a trio of songwriters. Bruce Woolley wrote most of “Video…”, at which point they submitted a demo to Island Records without any other material ready to record. Island signed them immediately, and it combusted. They got to work on writing an actual album, but Woolley didn’t end up with songwriting credits for anything but those two very tracks.

While the band sound is consistent between those two tracks and the rest of the album, it’s clear that the two consistent members of The Buggles had their own ideas about what to do with it. Woolley gave the album its two hits, freeing them to write a very self-serious series of meditations on life in a futuristic age. It introduces a whole new undertone to “Video…” to know that rather than being kind of cute and winky, the sentiment of the song was actually probably rather serious. They were clearly a closet prog band. Prog bands are never not serious.

Day 86: CKY – Camp Kill Yourself, Vol. 1

Some hooks are so good that you can hum them note-for-note despite not having heard them for years and years. In that respect, CKY’s “96 Quite Bitter Beings” is right up there with “Another One Bites the Dust“, “Can’t Stop“, and “Arpeggios From Hell“. When I was but a youth huddled in front of a diminuitive television and trying to unlock everything in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, I used to just listen to this song over and over and kickflip my damn thumbs off. That damn riff became more familiar to me than anything.

Anyway, I guess they had 4 LPs, including this one. I always used to idly wonder, “is the rest of that album as good as that riff?” I was skeptical.

Well, the answer is “noyes.” While on one hand I can say after listening to Vol. 1 all day that nothing else on the album is as brilliantly catchy and as gripping as “96 Quite Bitter Beings”, I can also say that I’m kind of an asshole for saying that, because as the first paragraph of this post suggests, it’s borderline impossible for me to hear this album as the entity that in my head has taken shape as CKY, the unstoppable guitar-rock hitmakers behind the 3rd most catchy song I can recall off the top of my head (which claim would collapse if you asked me to recount nos. 1-2 off the top of my head; I would stammer, unprepared for this eventuality, not wanting to say “Take Me Home Tonight“, which I predict would be the first thing to come to mind).

I always used to hate the sludgy, plodding middle third of 96QBB. It was tiresome and refractory. I needed the riff again. But maybe filling the middle with the riff, too, would have been too much? Maybe they were very wise in starving the core of their great song of the ¡ and ! with which that magical riff encased the song.

Hours and hours later, well, there’s no more of that riff in this album. That doesn’t make it bad, but it does make it suffer in light of my presumptions about it. What you get instead of a riff that the CDC probably still gets phone calls about is a short-feeling-long sludge-rock anthem machine. CKY’s 2nd single from this album was “Disengage the Simulator“, and it’s hard for me to see any commonalities between the two singles. “Disengage” does have a catchy riff, but it’s in the background, and the reverb-cushioned vocals take center, left, and right stages. I’m struck by the similarity between this track and early-00s nu-metal crooners Flaw, actually (“Whole“), and I don’t doubt that these guys’ were an influence, perhaps indirectly.

Vol. 1 is a mixed experience, in every sense — stylistically it’s untrackable, from “The Human Drive (in Hi-Fi)“‘s sexy 70s guitars, to the stoner-rock sludge of “Knee Deep“, to the rich folksy storytelling of “My Promiscuous Daughter” (“I caught my daughter giving head to my brother / What can be done with my promiscuous daughter? / I can’t be down with my promiscuous daughter”), they sound keen on experimentation, which for some reason actually works out. The album never becomes stagnant, and never tries too hard to sound unlike itself, leaving the whole thing kind of an angry Tasmanian cloud that blows by and you’re not sure what the fuck.

Postscript: The Wikipedia article for this band is highly amusing, and paints these guys, perhaps unfairly represented by their own words, as pretty serious dicks.

Bruni was fired from the band in February 2000, after four years with Miller and Margera, due to his general abilities and performance on the Warped Tour, with Ginsburg taking over live bass duties until later on in the year. Bruni’s tenure with the band had been questionable throughout, with the band choosing not to tell him they were recording an album until near the end of the process (resulting to his contributions to “Lost in a Contraption” and “The Human Drive in Hi-Fi”). Responding to a question from a fan in 2002, Ginsburg described Bruni, simply, as “boring”. Attempting to justify Bruni’s exclusion from the recording of Volume 1, Miller suggests that “he wasn’t quite good enough yet [to perform on the album] and he did not have enough money to contribute to the cost of recording.” Miller made it clear that there was no “bad blood” between the two, although Ginsburg has said that Bruni “sucked and wasn’t rock”, also labelling him an embarrassment.

Day 85: Tangerine Dream – The Dream Mixes (I)

Music is a subject rife with things to know. For instance, your favorite modern band (let’s call them OLED Megaphone) could have grown up listening to (let’s call them) The Quimbowls, who grew up listening to Total Recall On VHS, who were hugely influenced by Krautrock, which was a bunch of people reacting to let’s say one pivotal band. Some butterfly flaps his wings and blows the fuzz off a dandelion, and those wisps falling into the breeze are all the things you don’t know about everything you love, as you grab for one and the displaced air sends them scattering further. I’m finding it a lot like that trying to learn about music. Just when I think I’m starting to learn things, I get this album for the day, do a little research, and find out that Tangerine Dream was probably the very butterfly that kicked up half the bands I love nowadays.

HUGE DISCLAIMER FOR THIS ALBUM, WHICH SHOULD BE EMBLAZONED ON ITS JEWEL CASE OR SLEEVE OR THE INCLUDED .TXT FILE: Warning. This album is highly sensitive to your listening equipment. If you disrespect it by trying to listen to it on budget speakers, it will sound a lot like something you’d hear while on hold to take a Target Customer Glad-isfaction survey. For your own sanity, wear headphones or have weapons-grade speakers handy.

Which is to say I spent about three hours listening to this thing on my speakers (not the aforelinked, but scarcely any better) and was ready to write it off as offensively boring, like some Kitaro outtakes CD. And then I put my headphones on.

While songs like “Rough Embrace” and “Jungle Journey” do sound like what might have been stock audio for a rave scene in a 1990s movie, their sonic palettes sounding extremely dated, or basically antique at this point, Tangerine Dream understands how to make that not matter at all. The group waves fistfuls of glow-sticks, creating sound excursions that show off the group’s extensive experience in doing soundtracks. They know how to make a seven minute song positively chug.

From what else I’ve read I’ve gathered that this album is not quite indicative of Tangerine Dream’s overall style. They seem to be more about sedate ambient soundscapes (and a brief listen to their 5-starred-on-Allmusic Phaedra confirms this) and technical alchemy:

The title track was originally based on an improvisation that happened to be recorded in the studio, and unintentionally exhibits one of the limitations of the analog equipment used at the time. As the equipment warmed up, some of the oscillators began to detune (they were highly temperature-sensitive), which was responsible for some of the changes in the music towards the end of the piece.”

FUCKIN’ COOL. How does that translate into dance music? The brains in the group apparently reside in bodies that like to dance, because this shit would kill at the roller rink, with some lasers popping off the disco ball and the fog machine in full swing. You might think that is some condescending remark intended to relegate this album to venues that are ostensibly merriment-oriented without having the savviest grasp on how to party. It is not. I want to buy a roller rink, install a great sound system in it, place 48 or more fog machines around the perimeter of the rink itself, and have them all discharging in a staggered rotation so that there is never not fog bellowing onto the floor. I want to perhaps ingest drugs while I do this, and probably wear very little in the way of clothes. I want for the roller rink to be inadequately ventilated. If this doesn’t sound enticing to you, keep in mind these tunes would be applicable to any other format of rhythm/dance/undulation-oriented party.

Also, as the previous two hours of my very finite life can attest, this is also great music to blare while watching corgi tetherball over and over again.

Day 84: Four Year Strong – Enemy of the World

Pop-punk is a genre that I love and hate more simultaneously than almost any other. On one hand, it ignites a raging nostalgia in me, bringing me back to driving around and around in my neighborhood in my first car before I had my driver’s license, air coursing through the open windows, blasting Josie (which I still insist is one of the best songs ever written) and feeling awesome. So you get the right power chords together with the right vocals and it makes me smile irrepressibly.

Four Year Strong succeed at that. The group, the second best thing to hail from Worcester, Massachusetts (after the sauce), had two previous full-lengths and an album of covers. I haven’t heard either of the LPs, but I’ve also spent a little time tonight listening to the covers album, and I must say I like these guys. They have that inarticulable quality or combination of qualities: they obviously enjoy their music for its own sake, they are not posturing, they are creative, to excessively emphasize the first point they seem to be having a great time — all of these things combine into refreshingly entertaining, good-spirited pop punk that uplifts and satisfies.

Thankfully, Four Year Strong seem to respect the genre, and rather than continuously re-releasing New Found Glory songs anymore or at all for that matter, and try to expand on the style they’ve committed to. They fold more aggressive, post-hardcore guitars, double bass drum, breakdowns, and riled-up gang vocals, but never seem like they’re trying to come off as hardcore per se. There are choruses aplenty here that encourage the listeners to stand strong, to be themselves, etc. While most bands that bandy that kind of us-and-themism about come off as conceited, self-appointed vanguards of their sacred tenets, Four Year Strong instead captures with their music an infectious, all-inclusive sense of purpose. What’s their purpose? It doesn’t matter.

Day 83: Delorean – Subiza

I wonder what people will think when they listen back on the chillwave wave of 2010. Will this music sound as disco does to most ears, completely incongruous with any mode of existence that seems reasonable? Who would listen to this? Why? Were the people of 2010 driving around in convertibles with the top down on sunny days all year? Did global warming give us a surfeit of beach days?

Was there a beach blanket boom?

Sometimes sounds just come together, though, and one band does something, another does it better, and then another still combines everything so far, and a genre that hasn’t celebrated its anniversary suddenly seems to have traversed a clear arc to get to you, when you may not have even seen its point A or B.

Here, Delorean achieves just that. Sounding like a mashup DJ “best of 2010” mix tailored to the greatest desert-island party you couldn’t afford the helicopter fare to, Subiza flawlessly conveys a shitload of every positive human feeling I can think of.

catharsis (pluralcatharses)

noun

1. (drama) A release of emotionaltension after an overwhelmingvicarious experience, resulting in the purging or purification of the emotions, as through watching a dramaticproduction (especially a tragedy). Coined in this sense by Aristotle.

These guys have that shit down. Their amalgamation of the best elements of indie rock, house music, and MDMA-fueled revelry absolutely shines with light, serrating its seams, and just about every song has some great release. They have a wide range of techniques and a deft hand with them, because this album never falls into the cycle of some (even good) techno records where every track seems to be an excuse to pitch an insane breakdown. Rather, the songs on Subiza just swell and swell with joy, gibbering giggles from your mouth. “Come Wander” is the soundtrack to a caper if I’ve ever heard one; “Grow” rescues one of the despairing female voices from a Burial track and washes her in honey; the songs abound with almost-excessively multi-tracked handclaps, synths, tribal drums, and Merriweather Post Pavilion-esque party klaxons; “Simple Graces” sends rays of giddy guitar to Heaven where they bounce off of Heaven’s force field and fall back to earth, heating to 350 degrees above absolute chill and pouring on the heads of Molly-munching trust-fund teenagers — kids unsullied by disappointment, whose skins are thick from caress — on their third tour of Ibiza, raining on them like the tears of a mother reunited with the child that was kidnapped from its cradle and kept hostage by Basque terrorists for three years, bringing them — at long, long last, the wait having driven her to the brink of emotional collapse — shuddering into each others arms.

Delorean’s lyrics are pretty terrible, though, but they’re Spanish, and what’s more important is they speak music.

Day 82: Julian Casablancas – Phrazes For The Young

What? It’s only been 10 days.

Anyway, moving right past my glaring dereliction, I’ve now had a very adequate amount of time in which to listen to and contemplate this album (thought I said I was gonna move past — oh fuck it). I needed it.

I am still a fan of The Strokes, although I deliberately avoided listening to their First Impressions of Earth. Is This It won unquantifiable amounts of good will with a lot of people, and in the process cast a huge shadow over the musical industry and their own futures. How do you improve on that? How do you incorporate anything new into a band that succeeded so flawlessly on the basis of garage rock so authentic that you can still today smell grass shavings and leaked motor oil when you listen to it? How do you change without losing that spirit?

“Guys,” Julian Casablancas perhaps said, “What if our garage just has lasers in it now.” And so 12:51 was born. But despite the robosynth infusion, the music was formulaically identifiable. Julian Casablancas squirmed in his leather pants at band practice. He yearned for a world where he could wake up in the morning and not steel himself for another day of secrecy and shame; a world where he could take his phone off of silent and let his friends hear his rad ray-gun ringtones.

By 2009 The Strokes hadn’t done anything in a while, and the members busied themselves with solo albums, quirky “really, those two?” marriages, and otherwise quietly hibernating. Then out comes Casablancas with a real head-spinner of a single, “11th Dimension“.

Okay.

The cat’s out of the bag on the pet predilection of The Strokes’ chief songwriter: Mega-cheesy synths and drum machines yanked sniffling out of the 80s milieu.

So he likes The Cars. Cool. That doesn’t really matter. Some people (according to something I just read) said The Strokes sounded just like Television. No one came along in 2001 and invented swaggering garage rock. No reason they should be married to it. But they made the sound work so well at the time because they inhabited it flawlessly. I saw some live performance of theirs on MTV2 back when that album was going crazy — which, holy shit the internet blows my mind every single day, here it is — and their 70s style was so convincing, and so inscrutable, from the sets and stages they played on, to their clothes, to their hair, to the sounds and models of their instruments, that at the time I honestly thought it was some old band receiving a retrospective of sorts.

Flash forward to Phrazes, which after 400-some words I’ll come right out and say is a touch of a mess. Casablancas has shown an obvious nostalgia for bygone eras, and Phrazes seems like the culmination of everything he’s ever found cool, from clothes to literature to music. One viewing of the aforelinked “11th Dimension” video is all it takes to understand what’s wrong with this album. It’s dreadfully unfocused, and is one of the first albums I’ve heard that begs the term, which I’ve never actually heard applied to music, “design by committee.”

Those first three tracks suggest that the album will be a ton of fun. “Out of the Blue”, which if you can successfully not hear the lyrics clearly for your first several listens is a rollicking good song that exemplifies verse-chorus-verse songwriting, and “Left & Right in the Dark” and “11th Dimension” are also great, catchy tunes. It ends there, though, as the album’s b-side careens wildly into a morass of dour affectations, as Casablancas trades the poppy momentum he has for a long story-song about a historic New York avenue (from which I learned virtually nothing) and a few uninteresting synth-ballads. Songs go on forever, lost in their own tangles, with awkward organ and guitar solos butting in all over the place. There are great melodies and hooks here and there, as you’d expect from a musical genius like Casablancas, but they get swept away by a convolved undertow of unchecked ideas.

Overall? Not bad, necessarily, but it definitely feels like listening to someone’s experiment. I’ll be interested to see how this creative detour feeds into the upcoming Strokes album, Angles.

Day 81: George Strait – 20th Century Masters: The Millenium Collection

Man have I been shit at this for the past week or so. I admit I have totally run out of steam on this project, but the whole point of the project was to learn how to keep doing something even if it’s unpleasant and I don’t want to do it. So I often think about writing, each day, and find the idea of putting together thoughts on an album while saying anything productive or interesting whatsoever to be an insurmountable task. Which is too bad, because for a couple months there, I feel like I was learning a lot, and writing a lot of things I was relatively content with (for what they were).

I’ve been reading a John Barth short story collection called Lost in the Funhouse, and a lot of the stories are about a writer (presumably Barth himself) having trouble writing about anything but the existential stress of writing  — the fact that I am writing about the difficulty I’m having writing and citing that story makes this blog post a few levels of abstraction beyond obnoxious, and I apologize for that. But it’s my main roadblock in this project.

But it’s my big hangup here. This is yet another country album, and it’s hard not to look at it that way. It’s a collection of, honestly, some great songs, with well-written, clever, and most of all sincere lyrics, almost all dealing with heartbreak(/ing), but I’m running out of ways of contextualizing what is essentially reiterations of the same music over and over.

What’s more, I honestly feel like an ignorant prick for so casually condescending to several entire genres of music. I don’t like that, because it runs counter to the whole point of the project: To dig into what other people liked, and figure it out. But it seems like the more I listen to, the more I suspect that my polarities are crossed from my friends’, because I have gone through so many things that people love, and tried to find why and just failed so many times now.

Today I replaced my earphones (which finally succumbed to poorly-made-plug syndrome and went out of service days ago, worsening the prognosis of this blog dramatically). Flippantly forgetting the resolve I had a couple posts ago to not stray from my daily albums, I put on the new Cut Copy. I didn’t even have an album picked out for today until like 7 p.m. Anyway the album started and from about ten seconds into the first track, something happened. I was boxing textbooks to return to the publishers and was alone in the big warehouse, which was so quiet that all the books on the shelves seemed to be in repose. And the music started and it just grabbed the fuck out of me. It flooded me with feeling, and reminded me of listening to LCD Soundsystem last spring, shuffling in a daze out of the woods of a terrible winter, and deciding to make my spring/summer feel as good as that music felt. I danced in place while I worked for the next hour and excitedly queued the album up again, all the while planning out the writing for the Album of the Year accolade I would bestow it in January of 2012.

How do you make someone else feel that? When I fail to connect with an album someone recommended to me that they have that kind of tie with, or even if they don’t, if it’s just something they feel represents what they like, when I fail to see it I feel like I’m driving a stake into so many little hearts. What is important ultimately isn’t whether this music I’m listening to every day is good or bad. The worst music I’ve had to listen to so far wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been (I count maybe five just unredeemable albums, off the top of my head), but my ability to identify, to relate, to what are essentially bewildering strangers, is wearing out and not regenerating.

This project is going to take more than a year, that much is already obvious — and I’m experimenting with being fine with that. I have 284 more albums ahead of me, and I can guess I might not like 84 of them right off the bat. But someone did, and that means something. And if I’m not gonna at least try to figure out what, then I’m wasting everyone’s time here. And I promise to try not to use this space to write about how hard it is to write about these albums.

What a little open-mindedness can do. Here I was thinking this album sounded like generic country. Apparently, if it sounds like that, it’s because George Strait basically created contemporary country.

Day 80: Madball – Hold it Down

An experiment.

Intro – What is this going to be? The intro sounds like generic hip-hop, with samples of angry people being interviewed about what “being hardcore” means. “You know, this isn’t 1982, you can’t expect things to sound the way they used to…” “We don’t really like to think about it to much, don’t like to practice moves or anything, we just go out there and do our thing…”

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop – “…New York style.” And there it is. The drums crack out, and the guitars roar to life. All the typical elements are here. That typical hardcore punk beat, the thick and evil power chords hit and sustained out over the galloping drums (such an epic-sounding technique, no wonder all of these bands use it so relentlessly) . “And I know that there’s still hope for me, when I see myself in these streets.”

Hold It Down – These songs are going by too quickly to construct much in the way of opinions about. That’s a good thing. This one is a real pit-kicker, guaranteed to get shoulders slamming into things. I mean that in a good way. This rocks, sure, though I’m not sure if that’s a verb they would identify by. That’s something you say about Lynrd Skynrd, you know? Do punks want that kind of association? This music slams. Is that better? I don’t know. Maybe not. This one is going on a lot longer, so far. 100% longer than the last song, I think. At least. I feel anxious, like I am waiting for the other shoe to —

Fall This Time – — drop. There we go. Okay, this song mixes it up a little. It’s a bit slower. More of a traditional hard rock beat. This kind of sounds like a Danzig song except with the “Evil” knob turned from “Masturbating in a graveyard” to “Posting those secret nude pictures of your girlfriend on the internet because she broke up with you after the Black Dahlia Murder concert.” This song is another 100% longer than the one before it. At this rate, these are gonna be some epic songs coming up. Oh, a breakdown. I will say, these guys have me on their side. This is only the first time hearing this, though, and I imagine my 2nd and further subsequent listens might change my opinion. Fuck, this album is 14 tracks long.

Everyday Hate – One minute long. This is a real rollercoaster. This song couldn’t be more than a minute long, though. Fast punk. Metal guitars. Usual combination. At the :40 mark it sounds as if the song has run out of steam. Then this outro, damn, actually sounds like running out of steam. Or seething. More seething.

Done… – I don’t mean to be a dick here but this sounds like a Sevendust song so far. And it’s continuing to. The vocals are different, they’re harsh screams rather than his black Elvis singing. This one’s slower and chugs along. Here’s a bass guitar breakdown, that’s cool. Giving him some time in the spotlight. Bam, it kicks back up. Banging my head. Trying my best.

Say What? – High-BPM drumming, go. Guitars seething over it, go. Slam on the breaks for one of the guitars to play the verse chords all by itself to emphasize how big their dual-guitar attack actually is by way of contrast, go. These vocals are surprisingly intelligible. Kinda refreshing. Yet another track imploring the listener to consider who is actually hardcore. This is a popular subject for these guys and other hardcore bands.

D.I.F.M.M. – “This one goes out to all the kids, by keeping it real, by turning their backs on hardcore bands who make any money…” — they actually put in a slide whistle here. They’re being funny — “…Sure I live with my mom right now, but I’d live on the streets if I had to… and I know, in my heart, that one day I’m gonna graduate from college, get a real job, and forget all of this…”

Show No Fear – We’re in for a long one — 2:40 long. Settling in. Slow set-up. Things are building. Oh yeah, heavy. Slamming home. Holy shit, 681 words. This is a lot easier than my usual posts. Gonna skip writing anything about this song so this doesn’t get unpleasantly long.

Never Look Back – Bam, up goes the tempo again. Super fast. Puuuunk. Vocals switch into this weird talk-scream that is very fluid and overshoots rhythmic patterns. Breakdown. Abrupt cessure.

Still Searching – Pretty much the same as every other track so far. I’m curious how fans of stuff like this judge the music. Like what would be their favorite song on here? And what would their criteria be?

Confessions – When I was really into metal I thought punk/hardcore were boring, so I know it’s not just a matter of not being able to identify with the necessary emotional states or points of view, because I definitely used to. Oh man, this song had the most jarring breakdown transition so far. I’m too trained by mid-00s breakdown-based hardcore, I keep expecting one of those kind of breakdowns when these guys build up and it’s always just…

Thinking to Myself – Again, the guitar chords sustaining over the fast drums. “Shit’s about to go down,” their instruments are saying. This stuff might be fun live, but good god is it boring to just sit and listen to. Okay, now this is kind of turning into a rap song. Record noise and intentionally cheesy rapping. Just some jokes.

Semper Fi – I saw some girl on the bus in a Black Dahlia Murder shirt, with jet-black hair and all sorts of piercings. Her headphones were bleeding sound like crazy and her music was just cranked, and I could hear it clearly. She was bobbing her head intensely and hand-drumming along on her knees. She looked very intense. I dunno if she had just been in a fight or something.