Music Blog

Yes, the annual celebration of Euro-kistch has come round again. As we know, last year winner was Finnish monster metal band Lordi, who won at least partly as a result of a word of mouth campaign across metal forums and blogs across Europe.

Some random impressions of this years contest:

• Will somebody please strangle Terry Wogan. He committed the unforgivable sin of prattling all over Lordi’s performance of last years winning entry. Right. Through. The. Entire. Song. Metal Warriors! Burn the heretic!
• Finland have entered a rock number again. It’s very much in the Nightwish/Within Temptation style of commercial female-fronted pop-metal, but it’s just a little bit tame. Finland can do better than this.
• Nobody else has tried imitating last year’s winner. This is probably a good thing. Balkan monster-metal would be a scary, scary thing.
• The Irish entry certainly didn’t feature the best bodhran-playing singer I’ve seen this year
• A few countries avoided formulatic bacofoil glam disco, like Germany’s swing number, or the rootsy blues entry from Hungary.
• There were a lot of very, very bad entries.
• One of which was the British entry. Scooch were truly, truly awful. Who voted for this bilge? Nul points?
• Bacofoil disco is not dead.
• Neither is glam-pop from circa 1973.
• I voted for Finland. Anything that scares Terry Wogan is good for me.
• While they’re counting the votes they’ve got the wonderful heavy metal cellists Apocalyptica playing (a band I’ve seen live supporting Rammstein) and that moron Wogan is prattling over the top of them.

Update: Just when Britain’s appalling entry looked like getting the nul points it richly deserved, the Irish go and ruin it. Why?

Just bought a ticket for Fish at Manchester Academy on September 15th, for what might be my 18th gig of the year.

As well as promoting the new album 13th Star, he’s going to be playing the twenty-year old “Clutching at Straws” in it’s entirity. That’s one of my favourite Fish era Marillion albums, and marked the point where they left the ghost of Gabriel-era Genesis behind for good. Although it was to be the last album Fish recorded with Marillion, it seems to me that it set the template both for Fish’s subsequent solo career, and the music Marillion produced after Fish. While I’d like to hear more of Fish’s lengthy solo back catalogue, it will still be great to hear CaS live again.

The band will include four-sevenths of Mostly Autumn; Gavin on drums, Heather and Angela on backing vocals, and Chris Johnson as the second guitarist.

I’ve been listening to the excellent live album Communion (available from The Fish Shop) recorded at the Fish fan convention last year, also featuring Heather and Angela on backing vocals. It’s giving me some idea as to what ‘Mostly Fish’ are going to sound like. Will Angie be playing any flute this time round, I wonder? It would add a new dimension to “Brother 52″, if they play that song. And what about flute replacing the widdly keyboard solo on “Just for the Record”? I know there are purists out there wanting to hear a note-for-note reproduction of the original album, but sometimes I like to hear bands creatively reinterpret older material. And when you’ve got a great flautist in the band….

Whatever they do, I expect it to be good.

The Psycho Chicken has discovered the album that people like NRT really, really need to own

That is one ugly album cover. They sure don’t do them like that any more.

These, from the Metal Storm forum, seem rather more true than some prog-metal fans are prepared to admit. Some examples:

6. When showcasing a new prog metal band to a non-musician friend, put on the most technically difficult song, and skip directly to the solo part.
7. If your friend says that it is cool, tell him that he has grasped the grandeur of prog and shown that his intelligence is superior to that of the mainstream sheep.
8. If he doesn´t, accuse him of lacking musical intelligence and not being a true prog fan.

And then…

34. Make sure your bandname is either a
a) Oxymoron
-Silent Noise
-Tender Harshness
-Healing Gun
Some geeky sounding name ripped from some obscure book.
-Deitronus
-Tarakoch
-Fentaran
or
c) Random combination of at least 2 three-syllable words.
-Eternal Twilight Tranquility (Can’t get much progger than that)
-Redolent Arithmetic
-Evolution of Vernacular Domesticated
35. Don’t worry about if your band name makes any sense or not. Since 90% of your fanbase is from Brazil and Japan, you can safely ignore conventional English grammar and instead focus on what´s really important:

NRT would probably approve of rule 90

90. No, Marillion is not prog. I kindly refer you to rule 20.

Link from DavidT (or possibly DavidT’s cardboard cutout) on the Unofficial MA forum

Update: 101 Rules of Power Metal from the same site is even funnier:

71. Whenever you short of ideas, pick up your Dungeons and Dragons books. You might as well be the first band to sing about owlbears.

Owlbears? I’m waiting for someone to start singing about Gelatinous Cubes…

The Ministry of Information has posted good reviews of both Porcupine Tree’s “Fear of a Blank Planet” and their gig at Preston.

But there are a couple of thowaway lines I rather take exception to. This one…

Queuing outside the venue, the audience seemed older and more predominantly male than usual, wearing a disconcerting number of retro ‘prog’ T-shirts.

And then this…

The album features guest appearences from Alex Lifeson and Robert Fripp from Rush and King Crimson respectively, if not respectfully – I’m not an admirer, and including what music critics and potential album purchasers could regard as ‘prog dinosaurs’ was needlessly dangerous. I didn’t exactly welcome the announcement that they’d be participating.

Even knowing which guitar solo was provided by Lifeson, I didn’t regard it as noteworthy; SW could easily have composed something himself and denied lazy journalists the opportunity to dismissively liken Porcupine Tree to retro ‘prog’… stuff. Fripp’s contribution, a layered guitar interlude between 4:11 and 4:48 on ‘Way Out of Here’, reprised towards the end of the song, was pleasant enough but again, not distinctive, and nothing SW couldn’t have generated himself.

So why have guest appearences by ‘name’ musicians only of interest to old-time ‘prog’ fans, which have the very real potential to alienate more mainstream listeners and critics? It’s a bad idea in terms of mass-market credibility, which succeeded musically only because the guests’ contributions were unobtrusive to the point of being anonymous. I’d call that a pointless gimmick.

I was probably one of those older males wearing a retro-prog T shirt, which I’d purchased at The Reasoning the night before.

I’m really annoyed by the whole “we’re not prog” attitude of some people; Porcupine Tree’s Steve Wilson and Marillion’s Steve Hogarth, I’m looking at you. I’m thinking of SW’s ridiculous spat with Roine Stolt 18 months ago.

I don’t believe there’s anything to be gained in attempting to appease NME-school music critics. They’re never going to like a band like Porcupine Tree. PT are all about musical content, rather than image or attitude. Their lengthy songs, instrumental virtuosity, complex musical structures and lyrics that aren’t about fights outside chip shops in Leeds are the antithesis of everything the NME school stand for.

Which is why pandering to them is akin to battered wife syndrome. “If only they didn’t invite certain unfashionable musicians these nasty critics wouldn’t be so mean” is a bad, bad strategy. Better to challenge the stupid revisionist ‘post punk orthodoxy’, and get the world to recognise that a clique of critics that seem to think Mark E Smith is a greater genius than Roger Waters aren’t really worth listening to any more.

A while since I’ve done one of these.

This time, rather than select random songs from the last N CDs I’ve played, the list is taken from the 11 gigs I’ve been to so far in 2007. Just to make things interesting, all of these were performances by a different band from the original recording. Some are covers, others were performed by the original songwriter, but with a different band. One band appears both as the coverer and coveree!

1. Birds flying high you know how I feel
2. Comin out of nowhere, Drivin like rain
3. I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. “I am the Walrus”, guessed by Rob. But who performed it?
4. I remember who you are
6. I’ve exposed your lies, baby
7. Lend me your ear while I call you a fool. “Witches Promise” by Jethro Tull, performed by Odin Dragonfly, identified by Hippydave
8. Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na
9. Put your hands upon me, feel the light inside. “Talk to Me”, by Karnataka, performed by The Reasoning. Identified by Hippydave
10. Your love is like a tidal wave, spinning over my head

Yes, #5 is an instrumental. But it shouldn’t be impossible to identify if you’re been reading this blog and know what bands I’ve seen.

As before, put your guesses in the comments, not just the songs themselves, but the band that played them. Yes I know one of two are by little-known local bands, but they’re all listed in the blog archives. Think of this as a test to see if you’ve been paying attention.

I haven’t posted reviews yet of Marillion’s Somewhere Else and Porcupine Tree’s Fear of a Blank Planet, perhaps because there’s not much I can add to what others have already said. Electric Nose clearly loves both albums. NRT, of The Ministry of Information loves FoaBP, but is decidedly lukewarm on SWE.

For me, the Porcupine Tree’s opus clicked almost immediately, although hearing the whole album live certainly didn’t hurt. “Somewhere Else”, on the other hand, still isn’t working for me. A couple of songs, most notably ‘The Wound‘ are starting to stand out, but too much of the album still reminds me of Radiation and Marillion.com, two of my least favourite albums in Marillion’s back catalogue.

Perhaps it will all start making sense in June, when I get to see them live.