Music Reviews
Following are some of the albums and concerts I've reviewed, most of them written for Extreme Magazine. They aren't in any particular order. Of course, all of these reviews are copyright 1998 and 1999 Michael Fiegel. But you wouldn't do THAT, would you?
Scratching Post (with No Trips For Crowley and Artery)
About 40 people wandered upstairs at Mr. Goodbar to check out No Trips For Crowley, mostly curious college students willing to throw down 4 bucks for a few songs. Aside from having the drums miked way too loud, and the vocals way too low, they were pretty decent, with a guitar wall-of-sound sound reminiscent of Hum. Artery, a 5-piece incorporating a distracting, unnecessary one-man brass section, suffered from weak vocals and an altogether uninspired show. Swelled by an influx of friends, the crowd doubled for them, then mostly cleared out as Ontario's Scratching Post took the stage. They missed a great show. Scratching Post has been compared to Veruca Salt, but they are in a different league entirely, at once much heavier and more sweet. With influences as varied as Voivod, Sepultura, Life of Agony, Boston, Styx, Weezer and Juliana Hatfield, I truly expected something different from Nicole Hughes and company, and that's exactly what I got. Grinding, crunching guitars supported Nicole's baby doll voice throughout a strong 13-song set, mosltly consisting of songs from their latest album, 'Destruction of the Universe.' Her sugary-sweet voice may have been a bit hoarse, but unlike the openers, her lyrics were intelligible and on-key, as well as ironically funny. Hearing her belt out 'I'm your demon, I'm your darkside...' is like listening to your little sister sing lullabys to your Slayer albums. And watching her work the guitar during 'Bloodflame,' then say 'I'm such a girl' as she tried to locate errant guitar picks, was at once precious and impressive. Sadly, a number of people started leaving halfway through the set, obviously not 'getting it.' Perhaps if they'd stayed till the end to hear Nicole's little pussycat growl during the title track to 'Destruction of the Universe,' they might have understood a bit better. This is ass-kickin' metal with a modest sense of humor, and it works. Expect big things from these guys...and girl.
Offspring (with Ozomatli and The Living End)
A surprise meeting with old friends prevented me from catching The Living End, but I arrived in plenty of time to see Ozomatli do their thing. Never having seen them before, I was a bit surprised when they started their set at the back of the auditorium, leading a conga line of energetic fans to the stage. Their energetic 9-song set, a bizarre salsa-reggae-jazz-funk-blues fusion, drew great response from a friendly crowd (not so when they played in NYC, where they were greeted with boos and hisses). After a reasonable downtime for a set change, the crowd of a few thousand (mostly 14-year-old girls in tank tops and their worried moms) screeched their delight as Offspring took the stage in a flare of red, white and blue as they performed an energetic rendition of 'Americana.' Sounding a bit hoarse at times, Dexter and crew proceeded to take the crowd through a 21-song set, pulling eight more rabbits from their newest hat and mixing in a healthy dose of material from Ixnay and Smash. Crowd reaction was, as expected, most favorable for the radio hits, including 'Gone Away,' 'Bad Habit,' and 'Come Out And Play.' And yes, Dexter did pay some kid 20 bucks for his Vanilla Ice shirt, bringing him onstage to dance for 'Cool To Hate.' A few songs later, the kid from the 'Pretty Fly' video came out to do his own thing before everyone settled down for 'Intermission' (which is actually a track off Ixnay), including cocktails, bubbles, confetti and a half-naked guy in a cape and mask. Sadly, by the time they came back out for their encore, the crowd seemed ready to head home, and 'Pay The Man,' 'Why Don't You Get A Job' and 'Feelings' saw more people heading for the exits than there were moshing and pogoing. All in all, Dexter and the boys put on a solid show, despite a few swallowed vocals, a few missed cues from the support crew, and a few rough starts (the first two minutes of 'Pay The Man,' which kicked off the three-song encore, were in the wrong key). And someone please tell the staff of the Flickinger Center to turn the music off in the lobby when the concert starts.
Offspring - "Americana"
Just in case you thought they were going soft on you, Offspring jumps right into the pit with the first two songs on this album, 'Falling' and 'Staring At the Sun.' Both are fairly unremarkable, straightforward rockers which, along with 'Walla Walla,' 'No Brakes' and 'Americana,' will please fans of mosh-happy punk music. The best songs are definitely the ones that take a step beyond the norm, including the first single off the album, 'Pretty Fly For a White Guy,' which is getting Top 40 airplay even as I write this. Sure, parts of the song are reminiscent of 'Come Out and Play (Keep 'Em Separated)', but there's so much more going on here. Everything from the intro to 'Rock of Ages,' to some Betty Boop soundalikes chanting 'Give it to me, baby,' to what sounds like ska (listen to Rancid's 'Time Bomb' and judge for yourself). 'She's Got Issues' also takes a hard right turn away from your typical 'punk' song, and in doing so manages to recreate some of the same radio-friendly sound of 'Gone Away,' their big hit off _Ixnay on the Hombre._ 'Why Don't You Get a Job' incorporates flutes, horns, and what sounds like a steel drum to create what may be one of the best songs on the album. And then there's the final track, 'Pay The Man,' an 8-minute epic that opens with a full 3-minute instrumental followed by some haunting lyrics that would make The Tea Party proud. The rest of the CD is a mixture of the good ('The Kids Aren't Alright') the forgettable ('Feelings') and the unusual, including the obligatory hidden track (found at 9:16 of track 13) and a bunch of CD-ROM videos for some older Offspring songs. All in all, a worthwhile addition to your music library.
Compilation - "Pure Moods II"
Don't scoff. Both _Pure Moods_ and _Pure Moods II_ are among the Top 20 'New Age' albums in sales, and both are well worth the purchase price, even if the same can't necessarily be said for their bastard cousins, 'Celtic Moods,' 'Instrumental Moods,' and the many other 'Moods' out there. PMII is Loreena McKennit sandwich, opening strong with 'The Mummer's Dance,' which you've heard at least a dozen times, and ending with McKennit's 'The Mystic's Dream.' In between you'll find a nice mix of aethereal mood music from the likes of Sacred Spirit, Adiemus, Cusco, Delerium, Massive Attack, Clannad, Vangelis, Enigma and others. There are also a few nice surprises here: Dream Academy's 'Life in a Northern Town' is a nice addition, though it doesn't exactly fit with the rest of the selections, and Craig Armstrong's 'Weatherstorm' creates a big, theatrical sound that slides in nicely amongst the bigger names on the album. I could do without the Yanni, George Benson and Dave Koz, which you may have heard in your doctor's waiting room, but that's why they make Fast Forward buttons.
Alanis Morisette - "Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie"
Is it as good as the last album? Yes. Better, in fact, and for several good reasons. First of all, with 17 songs and a running time of 72 minutes, SFIJ is significantly longer than _Jagged Little Pill_ (though 'Uninvited' is not on here, so don't look). And as one might expect, with more time and more songs to do it in, Alanis lets loose with a wider range of emotions, burying her past by opening up a Pandora's Box of rage, sorrow, forgiveness, and yes, even happiness. You've gotta listen close, though, because Alanis has a lot to say. 'Front Row,' the opener, has more lyrics than all the other songs put together, and seems to cover the gamut of emotion and feeling. 'Baba' is about searching for some sort of holiness, and not finding it, and 'Thank You,' of course, is all about where she is today, and how she got there. There are some disappointments here, but the plusses definitely outweigh the minuses. In 'Are You Still Mad,' Alanis sounds genuinely sorry, but is she really? In 'Sympathetic Character,' she says she's afraid, but is she really angry? And so on. 'Can't Not,' 'I Was Hoping,' 'Would Not Come' and 'So Pure' are other standouts, with memorable lyrics and catchy riffs that sound downright triumphant at times. Songs like these definitely take SFIJ in a different musical direction than JLP, incorporating complex drum machine loops, interesting voice effects and distorted guitars that would make Trent Reznor proud. This is a multi-facted, multi-layered musical collage that definitely moves Alanis away from the world of bubble-gum radio-friendly pop. This is a very solid album.
Metallica - "Garage, Inc."
What's old is new again, and this time it's Metallica proving it. Both of the discs in this double-CD set include all cover tunes, the first of the two discs here being 'new' covers (the term 'new' being used loosely.) This one is sandwiched between two Discharge covers, 'Free Speech for the Dumb' and 'The More I see,' both decent tunes. Standouts include Sabbath's 'Sabra Cadabra,' Nick Cave's 'Loverman,' the old traditional 'Whiskey in the Jar' and The Misfits' 'Die, Die My Darling,' though Hetfield does swallow the lyrics a bit on this one. 'Turn the Page' is distinctly unlistenable, despite being the first single from the album, while 'Tuesday's Gone' proves that Skynyrd will always be more coverable than Seger. The Mercyful Fate medly crammed in the middle is the perfect bridge to the second disc - hearing Hetfield sing about the devil takes you back to the good old days of 'Am I Evil' and 'Blitzkrieg,' though it is a little like listening to your dad talk about his youth - you can't really believe that he actually used to do that stuff. The second disc is probably the one most will buy the album for, since it's nearly impossible to find some of these old tunes in any form. The entirety of Garage Days Re-Revisted is here, including the classic Misfits' cover 'Last Caress/Green Hell,' as well as some of the best B-sides Metallica's ever put out ('Breadfan,' 'Stone Cold Crazy,' 'Killing Time' and the very disturbing 'So What'). They could have picked something better than the 'Motorheadache 95' quartet to close out the album, but when you're digging up old covers I guess you take the good with the bad. Overall, the double-album has got it all. Some bad, some questionable, some disturbing, a lot good, all of it a mish-mosh of influences from a band that has tried to be everything, and has succeeded. This is the definitive Metallica album.
Orgy - "Candyass"
You know that band where you hear their first single on the radio and it makes you go buy the album, and then you're disappointed? This is that band. It's not as if Orgy is bad. They're just not great. The first six tracks on the album, from 'Social Enemies' to 'Fiend' all sort of blend together into an electronic collage, with no real distinctive riffs, and with absolutely no stretching of vocal range. Buried halfway down is 'Blue Monday,' the best song on the album, and a cover song at that; this is the one you'll hear in clubs five years from now, wondering who sings it. You certainly won't remember any of the remainder of the album, which runs for five more songs before mercifully coming to an end. This album is a perfect example of the danger of computers - it's all too easy to run everything through a filter and make it all sound 'electronic'. But making yourself sound like Prick doesn't guarantee you a long career - you need to stand out in a crowd, and Orgy (as their name suggests) is nothing but a jumbled mess of words and music that all sounds alike. Even the liner notes were apparently typed by a monkey on crack, making the lyrics damn near impossible to read. What Orgy has done with Candyass has been done better elsewhere. Buy the single.
Staind - "Disfunction"
This sounds exactly like what you'd expect from an album helped along by Fred Durst (Limp Bizkit) and produced by Terry Date (Deftones, Pantera, Soundgarden) in Seattle's Studio Litho (Pearl Jam). That is to say, it's an amalgam of all of those other sounds, and little more. Starting strong with the grinding guitar of 'Suffocate,' the album all-too-quickly drifts into familiar territory, with 'Just Go,' the second track and first single, epitomizing the Creed-clone sound that rock stations love and I am beginning to loathe. Most of the remainder of the album falls somewhere between AIC and Limp Bizkit, including a particularly unispired cover of 'Bring the Noise' and a travesty called 'Spleen,' which becomes a total ripoff of AIC's 'Sickman' after about a minute. There are some interesting bits here, including the hidden acoustic track buried at 16:25, but all-in-all this isn't much different from anything else you already own.
DDT - "Urban Observer"
According to the members of DDT, their name comes from the pesticide that stays in the food chain forever; like the toxin, their music is not easily forgotten. DDT certainly has all the ingredients needed to make a solid album: strong, often psychedelic-sounding guitar riffs (especially evident on "Hey Steve" and "Walkabout"), good vocals (in the same range as Vinnie Dombroski of Sponge) and funky beats. The problem here is a lack of a true signature sound, with each and every one of the album's 13 full-length songs sounding different from the rest. Bands like Ozomatli, I Mother Earth and others can pull off the fusion thing easily, blending many different sounds into a tasty stew, but here it's all a bit overdone. Ska rhythms accompany tinny-sounding guitars in "Liquid." Clever Saigon Kick-like harmonizing is suddenly interrupted by a silly rap in "Unsaid." A brilliant hook in "McDDT" is practically ruined by another rap. And so on. All the way to the cliche distorted vocals of "Boring" and the fake crowd noise in "Overripe." Urban Observer has its moments of brilliance ('Pistol Whip' could almost be dropped on a Sponge album as is), and they're probably a ball of fun in a live setting. Fans of the 'anything goes' attitude will absolutely love DDT, but Urban Observer is a little too uneven at times for my taste; I prefer my meat a bit more evenly cooked.
KMFDM -"Adios"
The final album from KMFDM is an unbalanced effort, as one might expect considering the turmoil the band members are going through. After all, this album marks the end of the road for everyone except Sascha, and a new beginning for iconoclastic newcomer Tim Skold (the man behind hair-band-turned-industrial-act Shotgun Messiah). Skold, who handled "Anarchy" on KMFDM's last album, gets writing and vocal credits on every song on this album, and his influences are quite obvious throughout. KMFDM has a more interesting, multi-layered sound here, as opposed to the full-frontal guitar assault (and much more radio friendly sound) of older songs like "Light" and "Juke-Joint Jezebel." "Adios" opens the album strong, with "Sycophant" and "D.I.Y." quickly demonstrating the new sound of the band. Skold handles lead vocals on "Today," "R.U.OK?" and the creepy "Full Worm Garden," taking some of the weight off of Sascha's back, and Ogre (of the late Skinny Puppy) lends a hand on "That's All," surprisingly one of the most "radio-friendly" songs on the album. It's not all great, however: the awful "Witness" features Nina Hagen belting out some uninspired lead vocals, and "Bereit," sung entirely in German, is a pretty weak way to close out your last album. KMFDM has obviously hit a creative wall, and one can only hope that the next Sascha-Skold project, titled MDFMK, will take things to a new level when they release their first album later this year. Pick this up for a taste of what's to come.
Entombed - "Same Difference"
There's a scene in Kevin Smith's "Clerks" where a Russian guy sings a song called "Berserker," which is hillarious for many reasons. Entombed is musically better, but they definitely need to reconsider their lead vocalist's capabilities, because he reminds me of that guy in Clerks. Maybe his screaming makes more sense in Sweedish, but this is just a mess. But let's just call him "lyrically challenged" and move on, because there's a lot of good things to say about this band from Sweeden. Solid drumming, thundering guitars, crunchy bass... they've definitely got the makings of a great metal band. "Addiction King" and "The Supreme Good" are particularly crunchy, and "Close But Nowhere Near" is quite catchy with its choppy, train-rolling-down-the-tracks tempo. The CD also includes 6 extra "Bonus" tracks which are actually some of the better songs on the disc. The distorted industrial-sounding vocals on "Kick Out The Jams" and "21st Century Schizoid Man" are an improvement over the non-pitch-shifted vocals of the preceding songs, and "Bursting Out" is a frenetic thrash/speed metal nightmare that brings Motorhead to mind.
Misfits - "Famous Monsters"
These guys have done it all (including making weekly guest appearances with El Vampiro on WCW Monday Nitro), and with this album they've officially done more than it all. Produced by Daniel Rey (Ramones, White Zombie), and mixed by Ed Stasium (Ramones), this thematic album of movie-monster-inspired songs rocks hard. If you've never heard the Misfits, this is a good place to start - like most of their work, it's a solid piece, combining 1950s-esque vocals and harmonizing with loud guitar rock designed to shake the plaster off the ceiling. Standouts include "Crawling Eye," a speed metal masterpiece, "Pumpkin Head," a good head banger thrash song featuring furiously spoken lyrics, and the amazing guitar hook of "Scarecrow Man" (drop James Hetfield's vocals in and it's a Metallica song). But of course, there's always a light note to The Misfits (how serious can you take yourself when you've got action figures?), and these songs prove it. "Saturday Night" and "Hunting Humans" have the whole "50s in the 90s" metal sound down from start to finish, and "Lost in Space" rocks even louder, with a humorous twist - how serious can metal be when you're singing about giant spiders from outer space? Good, solid fun from start to finish.
Amen - "self-titled"
I'm not sure what's going on here, and I'm not sure I want to know. The album cover of this self-titled debut is some sort of a perversion of Houses of the Holy, and the liner notes are strewn with some sort of messy lesbian pedophilia drug use art thing, the lyrics nearly illegible. But if you put the milk cartons and drugs aside, what you're left with is pretty simple, noisy rock which ain't bad at all. "Coma America" features a solid grinding guitar riff, lyrics chanted angrily throughout, and "Drive" is a steady 4-beat-per-second guitar assault on the senses. If they sound like anyone, it's definitely Anthrax - "Down Human" sounds more than a bit like "Caught in a Moshe", and "TV Womb" is so much like classic Anthrax it's not funny. When they try to be different, as with "No Cure For the Pure", they wind up in a flat, one-dimensional world. "Private" in particular really shows their limitations, vocally and musically; in the hands of another band it could be a great song, but their inability to take chances means the song is merely good. "The Last Time" is one of their best because it is what they are: guitars chasing vocals, a nice choppy beat, all of it loud and nasty and in your face.
Drain sth - "Freaks of Nature"
When an album sends chills down my spine and puts gooseflesh on my arms, I know it's something special, and these four ladies from Stockholm, Sweeden are definitely something special. "Enter My Mind" (which has been getting a ton of radio airplay) starts out with a distorted loop similar to Bjork's "Army of Me", quickly heading into a grinding guitar attack headed up by Maria Sjoholm's voice, a deep, raspy Joan-Jett-like warble that grabs you by the ear and doesn't let go. "I Wish" is a pretty little rock ballad (anyone remember Vixen?), but this is not just another early 90s chick rock band. "Black" could be a Metallica song, from the creepy guitar work at the beginning, to the powerfully eerie vocals (though Mr. Hetfield would need an operation to sing like this), and "Alive" alternates between a radio-friendly chorus and more of that weird spooky warbling that sets this band apart from the pack. The standout track is definitely "Simon Says", a metal/rap fusion that brings to mind the classic Judgment Night soundtrack. When they say "Throw your hands in the air!", you will.
Dope - "Felons and Revolutionaries"
This is nothing short of an all-out attack on America, a guitar-driven industrial blast that sounds like a collision between Marilyn Manson, Saigon Kick and that last Shotgun Messiah disc that nobody owns. Though the band hails from New York, the Dope Brothers (Edsel and Simon) grew up in Florida, a fact which has definitely shaped their music. Did I say they sound like Marilyn Manson? Yes, I did. And it's not as if these guys don't know it - from their own name ("We're All Stars Now, In the Dope Show" pun here) to cleverly borrowed riffs and lyrical nods, it's clear these boys own the Manson library. "One Fix" sounds an awful lot like "Dope Hat", "Debonaire" sounds more than a little like "Beautiful People," and "Sick" is also a mix of a Marilyn Manson-esque bassline with some positively frantic drumming and guitarwork. It would be unfair to say that these guys are merely copycats; all bands borrow a bit, and there are worse things one could borrow than sounds from South Florida. "Everything Sucks" and the hidden "Track 8" both feature a vocal rhythm that's a pretty obvious nod to Saigon Kick (and both rock in their own right), and nowhere is the "Saigon Manson" mix more evident than in "America the Pitiful," a slow, angry rumble chastizing that cream-centered doom Twinkie we call the U.S.A. Currently touring with Orgy (a one-hit wonder who can't come close to Dope's level), these guys are definitely worth checking out. Just don't piss 'em off.