I have given the new Genghis Tron album a few listens and am very impressed. I was initially cautious as the band had been banging on about being more melodic and, though that is fine in itself, I found the practicality of such a transformation detrimental to many bands who tried it. Not so much because those were bad albums per se, but because they sounded more like works in progress, with wanting to commit to a new sound while being careful not to alienate the existing fan-base. Neurosis, Isis, Dillinger: you know who you are.

As I lack a Hitchcockian penchant for suspense, I shall now mention that I needn’t have worried. There is more melody here, but it doesn’t come at the expense of either heaviness or quality. Indeed, this record is all about varying degrees of dynamics, rather than the binary quiet/loud, electro/grindcore that admittedly fit the intentionally cold-technological Dead Mountain Mouth; making that album actually seem rather limited, like Pantera’s Great Southern Trendkill did to Far Beyond Driven in 1996.

The album opens with a boldly chiming electronic melody, contrasting greatly with the almost apologetic electronic tones the band had used previously; while the effect is rather similar to the brash intro of ravesploitation warriors Captain Ahab’s excellent After the Rain My Heart Still Dreams set, the overall aesthetic is an almost innocent, Perrey-Kingsley/Plone one. See, not only are the band varying between rock melody and thrashiness, but between the dark grindcore grooves and sunny-(d)light synth tones. Exciting!

The ‘Tron are also branching out in terms of personnel on this album. Dillinger Escape Plan’s Greg Puciato guests on one song but, rather like ex-DEP screamer Dimitri Minakakis’s contribution to the latter band’s ‘Fix Your Face’, the invited vocal timbre is blink-and-miss-it. Not like the time Phil Anselmo guested on that Vision Of Disorder track, with his power-extreme vocal noise terror injecting a dose of steroids into the mix, both Greg and Tron’s own Mookie are reduced to the status of living ghosts in Genghis’s electro-grind metal music machine.

This chat about vocals and dynamics brings me to what sadly irks me about the record (and also the last Pig Destroyer one, but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it): the screaming vocals are all well and visceral, but they render unintelligible some really rather poignant lyrics, another dynamic facet that adds depth only for those with a lyrics sheet. The titles tip you off (‘Things Don’t Look Good’, ‘I Won’t Come Back Alive’, ‘Colony Collapse’), but there is a sadness in Mookie’s words that contrasts with both the metal aggression and vibrant electro-melody.

I mean it: as J.R. Hayes lends Pig Destroyer an entire extra level of depth with his demented poetry, so too does Mookie send his band into the third dimension; are all the gleaming musical structures and visions of an aural future merely façade, the smiling face while the entity that is Tron cries inside? There is, after all, a lot of fear described at the very beginning of the record:

The streets have gone dark
They’ve been dark for days
We board up the house
Hide upstairs and wait


And as the album goes on, there is plenty of chat about humanity’s Promethean nature (‘We cast our roots deep / The grid extends its reach’), relationships doomed to failure ( ‘We’re strangers / Pulling stolen reigns (sic) / I’m not proud / We’re staging an ugly fable’), all musings on endings. Relationships ending, the world being exhausted, life coming to an end. So much so, in fact, that pretty much every song ends with negative lines:

’…No one comes / And the boards stay up’
’…Flames will walk the Earth / And nothing will change’
’…You’ll come to fear / Each day / Each night’
’…Our veins run dry / Don’t stop / This can’t get much worse’

The one song whose lyric ends relatively optimistically (in the Oldboy sense) is ‘Relief’, which is entirely anomalous in the context of Board up the House. An epic which is housed on its own disc (it fills a side, while the fourth side is an etching), its all-breathing-space, mantra-filled hypno-core runs in complete contrast to the hyperspeed ravings of the rest of the record. And it’s fantastic for it. Most of this type of album has that one song where you hope/wish the band will follow that path. It was ‘Crawl Back in’ for Neurosis, ‘’Mouth of Ghosts’ for DEP, Botch’s ‘Afghamistam’… maybe the Tron will space out on the next album, and really send us into a groove for its entirety. It’d be nice. Named as a ‘relief’ from the blizzard of fire that was disc 1 (presumably), the words end with ’If we’re broke / It’s the right time / All will be forgotten / All will be well’.

It’s a tad nihilistic when one looks at the rest of the lyric (sample lines: We knew the water’d rise / Felt the ground subside’), but it is a relief to at least know Mookie’s protagonists are finally at peace with their end, after all the despairing and fretting. And, perhaps more importantly, I’m at peace with their end, very satisfied with what was probably my most eagerly awaited new record of 2008. Is it their best? Who knows; by the time I decide, their next opus will likely have arrived.


Portishead are good, aren’t they. Today I received in the post a vinyl copy of their debut full length album Dummy; you may have heard of it. I got it for a mere tenner, which came as a pleasant surprise to me as I thought new album hype would have worked up the average price up a bit for this one. Maybe it used to be a fiver, who knows. I am still yet to hear anything from the new album. I am assured it is good, both from the internet and friends, but for the moment I am content with Dummy.

It took me a while to get to this album in the first place. In 1994 I hated pretty much anything that wasn’t hard rock or heavy metal. Apart from Crash Test Dummies, oddly. I hated Britpop, Trip Hop and… I don’t know, Be-Bop. Actually, I do remember liking one thing that involved Tricky at the time. well, I hated it, but loved it secretly and that illicit love made me hate it that much more. I remember it airing at the end of one Top of the Pops episode; Tricky morphing into a woman and back. Maybe Martina. Oh, this’ll be it: ’Hell is Around the Corner’. Boy did that sample ever confuse me.

Anyway, my ‘awakening’ to dance/electronica/rap in any big way (of course I listened to the odd bit of PE and NWA in middle school, Cypress and Prodge early in high school, but always as an anomalous ‘hey look, this isn’t rock and I like it!’ kinda deal) was in summer-ish 2000. I caught up on stuff that had been happening outside my ghetto as I became increasingly annoyed by what was currently happening in metal. So I got lent Dummy by a co-worker about three years my senior, among other things.

And I loved it. 2000 was a suitably balmy summer, many nights spent on grass outside pubs, the trusty old MD player (what has happened to me?!) banging out the Leftfield and Gravediggaz – as well as old rock. That was the summer I also got into Led Zep and Van Halen. But one of my most enduring memories of that year out, spent working as opposed to backpacking, was being on the top deck of a sweltering and deserted bus during what should have been rush hour. I was listening to Dummy and reading What Hi-Fi (before I learned of that magazine’s dubious ties with Cambridge Audio and Richer Sounds), loving the summer sun as it beat through the windows, their crack-like openings doing nothing to stymie the stuffiness, and most likely dehydrating just a little. But it was great.

Isn’t it funny how when you’re young, you think albums are really old but they aren’t really? For example in 1996, I thought Master of Puppets was fucking ancient, being from 1986 and all. Fast forward to 2006, and albums like Roots and Odelay seemed nothing of the sort. And it works in a way that is more extreme than simple ageing relativism. Can you believe Mezzanine/1965/Our Problem/This is Hardcore/Music Has the Right to Children (delete according to taste) is a decade old this year?! I guess my point is Dummy was only six years old during that freaky-nice summer, but it already felt like it had been around forever; an acknowledged Classic.

And now it’s fourteen years old. That’s pretty sobering news to someone like me, freaking out due to being in late twenties now: everything to do with the passing of time is like an ice pick betwixt the shoulder blades. But it’s pretty cool in a way, both because I am now at a stage where I was cynical about albums that came out a decade and a half ago, and also because this current state of no-time softens the blow a bit. Like, who gives a toss, when I’m getting in stuff like Perrey-Kingsley albums from 1966 (in stereo, to boot!) and they fit oddly well with the Tusses and Landstrumms of this era.

This is all a roundabout way of saying I have listened to Dummy at least twice since getting in from work this evening, and each time, it has been a sheer delight. Maybe it’s due to the ubiquitous legacy of the album, but it seems to tread that fine line between cool-thing-that-everyone-can-like and merely coffee-table. It’s always on the correct side, like (something that cannot always be said for Massive Attack or Leftfield), but the fine line is an interesting thing to consider for middlebrows like me. The production is fantastic, as the sorta warm, crackly aesthetic fits perfectly with the vinyl format: not so much modern day attempt at faux-antique authenticity as album on vinyl that sounds like it should be on vinyl. The bass that always loomed large over (or under) the record is bigger than ever, but still defined, stabbing away as it does like a battering ram of low frequency.

I’m not sure I ever noticed before how great Beth’s vocals are on this one. Her choice of tone suits each moment perfectly, which is a rare skill nowadays (1994, ‘nowadays’ – I am getting old), and her melodies manage to be both imaginative and inordinately catchy. Every song is fantastic, and I have to love an album which celebrates sadness in such a blatant way while avoiding overdosing on woe-is-me. In a way, I bought this at quite the wrong time, as the new album has an awful lot to live up to all of a sudden.

I have bought rather a lot of records recently, by which I mean those slabs of vinyl, as opposed to the synonymising many people use between the term ‘record’ and a full-length recording on any format. So far this year I have taken receipt of one hundred and forty-five records. But while my rate of purchase seems not to be reducing any time soon, some favourites are popping their heads out of the melee and making themselves known. At some point I will write on them all, but for now I shall make mention of one particular release.

I have grown to loathe the current trend among music listeners to announce that a certain album is their Album of the Year So Far. I can see no reason why I should care given that, certainly at the time of writing, the majority of albums this year are yet to see release. Granted, I appreciate the possible slippery slope of a blogger mentioning the necessity of anything, but at least if someone tells me that a particular album is their favourite of 2003, I will likely pay attention (depending on whom is saying this).

With this in mind, it is with great trepidation and shame that I inform you that this particular release is my favourite of 2008 thus far. There is a condition to this statement: it is a collected re-release of albums released in 2005 and 2007, so I have both lived with this music and already rate it highly. How highly? I’m afraid that will have to wait until such time as my countdowns resume. (Hopefully not too long now.)

So what is this album that melds two previous ones in such a fashion that I am ridiculously impressed with it?


Long had I waited for a vinyl release of some Shining; indeed that was the sole reason I hadn’t got any of their CDs in. I could feel some twelves on their way: I would never have dared dream that their two Rune Grammafon releases would emerge for the price of one. Sometimes it pays to wait.

I knew Shining were a great band. I ‘knew’ this before I had even heard them, because they appeared inextricably linked to the awesome Jaga Jazzist. It turns out the only real link there is the fact that Shining leader Jørgen Munkeby was in Jaga until 2002. That fact makes the similarity between the two outfits so much more impressive. Munkeby left before Jaga became the organic jazz-rock monster they are now, and a similar description could realistically be used for the music of Shining since he departed the relative security of Jaga.

Of course there are differences, of a very stark yin-yang nature. Where Jaga revel in the euphoric in music, in intricate poly-melody and dense arrangement, hard brass and drums meeting twinkling keys and serene wordless vocals, Shining proffers the dark side of the aesthetic. No less technically skilled, well arranged or clearly produced, Munkeby’s baby (Jaga very much belongs to the insanely talented Lars Horntveth) focuses more on the bombastic, the sense of primal power that rock music brings to the table.

Described by the band itself as ‘art-rock’, the music on these two discs (disc one being the more recent Grindstone and disc two being 2005s In the Kingdom of Kitsch You Will Be a Monster) combines propulsive rock with eerie, almost black metal-inspired, sequences and lush soundtrack-esque arrangements. It sounds darker and a touch less unified than the polished teamwork easily recognisable from the recent Jaga material, but that is probably to its benefit. The music of Shining feels more spontaneous, and liable to surprise. Where Jaga comforts – in the best sense possible – Shining is music of such dynamic nature that the listener cannot know what is around the corner until that corner has been passed by.

I shan’t go on too much about Shining or Jaga quite yet,: they will feature on yearly countdowns as I’m sure you have gathered. But the Shining double pack is something I have been listening to a lot of, and can see myself listening to a lot more in the near (and hopefully distant) future. Adrien Begrand was fortunate enough to see them in Norway recently. I can but hope they will appear soon on these shores; while I attend few gigs nowadays, this would be quite essential musical nourishment.

Another album I have greatly enjoyed listening to, with strangely similar musical intent – has been The Rotters’ Club, the final album from Hatfield and the North, released on Virgin in 1975. I can’t remember exactly when I began wanting it, or why, but I did and I got it in the other week for only thirteen pounds. I thought it might have been Reynolds or Woebot, but Woebot evidently hated it. That’s really odd, because I thought he loved it. Reynolds, as far as I can tell, hasn’t said too much about it on his blog. He did pen an awesome prog-listomania reference thing back in October 2003, in which little was said of H&N. And, though I have navigated pretty well, direct links to his posts seem not to be working. So here, a massive month-archive you’ll have to scroll through. Or just not click on.

Well I don’t know why I wanted it then. Maybe I saw the cover and thought ‘that’s nice’, in a move completely oppo-zoppo to Woebot. But I am glad I did get it, because it’s technically insane but not nobby about it; it’s really really English but not offensive to my largely – let’s face it – un-English tastes. And it’s humorous, but not crap like most ‘humorous’ music. i really want to get more Pip Pyle stuff, as he seemed quite the rock composer. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it is easily one of my favourite records of the seventies. Not that I have heard too many, but of the ones I have heard it is high pon de list. And here’s the sleeve (Woebot’s copy) so you can make your own mind up:

Dirty Sexy Money: initial thoughts

So the latest US hit drama to hit our screens comes executively produced by none other than Bryan Singer, the man behind The Usual Suspects (which I love) and X-(Men)2 (which I also love). He is also responsible for House and the American version of Footballers’ Wives, which we shall conveniently gloss over. It first aired tonight (oh zeitgeist, how long I have wanted to capture thee. So pretty, so precious… it is just as I imagined), and – well – it was rather a game of two halves.

There was once a glorious TV series from that home of glorious TV series HBO. This particular one was called Six Feet Under and it was dark and lovely at the same time. A short while later someone at one of the networks took its template and turned our funeral director brothers into playboy plastic surgeons, but that it a topic for another sermon (seriously, I have only seen season one of Nip/Tuck – and liked it! – but its episodes follow the exact same ‘here’s our customer and while we cater to their needs, here’s a bit of grand narrative to tie the episodes in). Anyway, 6FU was great, but it had to end. A moment please.

Since then, the stars of that programme have gone on to other things, with varying levels of success. Perched atop the podium with a show both watched and complimented is Michael C. Hall (he was David). He plays Dexter in the Showtime programme of the same name, about a serial killer who works for the police. But it is actually good. Write-up of the first season is on the way. Apparently. Less successful, though returning for another season, is Rachel Griffiths, who played Brenda and is now part of the ensemble snooze-fest Brothers and Sisters. That is also apparently being written up.

Languishing at the bottom of the pile was poor old Peter Krause, who played Nate Fisher, partner to Brenda and brother of David. He turned up, like a seaweed-covered corpse washing onto the beach, in mini-series The Lost Room, which not even I watched. But now he stars in – and finally the preamble ends – Dirty Sexy Money (from this point on to be referred to as DSM). It’s all rather reminiscent of Bros and Sisss in that it concerns the dysfunction of a wealthy family (this one called Darling) with an inescapable patriarch. This one differs in that the protagonist is actually outside the family. He reckons one of them killed his dad and he is going! To find out! But yeah, dead dads abound in these shows nowadays.

More than anything else, this premise rather reminds of An Inspector Calls for the Fab Life generation. Perhaps this’ll turn out like the Priestley play, wherein all family members were partly to blame for the untimely demise of the victim. We shall see. I’d be both impressed and disappointed if that did turn out to be the case, though I have no idea how I would physically express two such differing emotions at the same time. I’d probably just have to alternate really quickly like a flick-book.

What I do know is this is pretty corny fare. As the Krause voiceover opened with ‘love of money is the root of all evil’, knew – knew! – he would follow up with ‘well that’s what they say’, and sadly the dialogue didn’t really improve from there. There was one nice line late in the episode, but it wasn’t so nice as to prevent me forgetting it. There was a nice touch in reference to Krause’s character’s dad and the patriarch in which he and one of the sons got into the kind of playground fight they might have done as kids. I guess you had to be there: it was a plush anniversary party and everyone emerged from a lift to see them rolling around (a la Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip).

Which brings us to the family. I suppose it’s a decent enough set of stereotypes – you have the ditzy blonde daughter, the young playboy son, the slutty daughter, the evil minister (OK, that’s a decent break from the norm) and the wannabe senator who loves his cross dressing hookers (all right, another one. Plus he’s played by a Baldwin. And between you and me, his cross dressing hooker friend isn’t half bad…) – even if most of their character profiles have been ripped straight from Arrested Development . Not the best idea to pitch your drama so close to a recent comedy that parodied this kind of thing so well, but that comedy got tragically cancelled after two and a half seasons so what do I know? The casting is pretty strong from what I can tell; not only is Krause generally very good, but the ditz is played by the delectable Samaire Armstrong (from the never-forgotten O.C.), we have the aforementioned Baldwin – apparently William, not that I could have guessed – and his melting face and the heretofore unknown (by me) Glenn Fitzgerald impressed as Rev. Brian.

There is promise to this one, notably in the acting, the minister with his secret family and the fact that Singer’s involved, but I dunno. The pilot was a tad too hackneyed, the script a bit weak and there is very much a sense of ‘been there, done that’. Plus, with the Darlings being such a charismatic bunch, there is a very real danger of – and echoes of the storyline here – their overshadowing his actual family. Ooh. Especially as our man’s dad spent too much time with the Darlings in the first place, rendering him overshadowed as a kid, which made him initially promise he would never have any more to do with them and he’d be a proper dad to his kids. Double ooh! But yeah, the whole thing is that on-the-nose.