The throughsilver Singles Premiership 2007!

I had an on-off running top singles list at a message board last year, and I decided I might as well give the Premiership its own page this year. I have been slowly (very slowly) writing about the singles that I like – and only the sigles I like; I’m not trying to document everything that gets released – and I decided that once I get to a twenty, I can ‘go live’ with it, as it were. I like this style of ranking, probably more than the end of year deal, because it gives anyone interested a look at how the list evolves over time. Not that anyone other than me is that interested, but it’s there anyway. What is really fun about this method is that, now we are up to the full complement of twenty, any more contenders will shove the existing number twenty into relegation. Oo er!

So there you have it. I’ll permalink it on the sidebar and anyone thinking I’m missing out on any good singles should feel free to let me know; input is appreciated.

P.S. I am aware my title graphic has vanished; I’m trying to get it sorted now.

P.P.S. Sorted!

Chris Cornell – Carry On Initial Thoughts

This is not what you could really accuse of being a great album. What’s really sad is that I wasn’t expecting it to be particularly good either. A bit of history then:

I love Soundgarden. They really are one of my favourite bands of the decade that was the nineteen-nineties. Not only were they consistently great, but Cornell was a marvellous front-man. He was the best looking man in rock back in 1991 (at least I’m pretty sure he was – better looking than Vedder, Cobain and Patton at any rate), and he was oddly humble the whole time. I remember reading in Metal Hammer in 1996 his answer to ‘what would you do if Pamela Anderson propositioned you’; it was something to do with lawsuits and being happily married.

Anyway, the music. I have liked Soundgarden since I was about eleven years of age, and Cornell had this strange knack of improving with every release: Badmotorfinger was better than what had come before; Temple of the Dog better than that; Superunknown better still; Down on the Upside was the best Soundgarden release of them all, and don’t let anyone tell you different; his first solo album proper, Euphoria Morning, managed to improve even on that. Not only was there a steady increase in quality, but the style changed with it.

Soundgarden, like that first generation of grunge bands, liked to make noise in a fuzzed-out-Sabbath style. Of course, that generation can be pretty easily summed up by looking at the track-listing of the seminal Deep Six compilation from the mid-eighties. Their peers were the likes of Melvins, Green River, Malfunkshun and I’d argue even St. Vitus. Wino from the latter band wrote that he’d been ‘born too late’ what with the thrash metal being cool at that time, but he was definitely not alone in the Sabbath worship. Even the first Nirvana album is in thrall to this style of rock.

By the start of the nineties, what was once grunge (but I would argue no more, in the strict sense) was making it big. Former glam rock band Alice In Chains were building up steam, as were Pearl Jam, another band whose roots lay in glam (Mother Love Bone represent). Luckily, proper grunge bands were also making headway, in the form of Nirvana and Soundgarden (you also had Screaming Trees and Afghan Whigs, but neither band was ever really grunge).

So, with metal still just about being the toast of the rock town (Metallica and Megadeth releasing their biggest albums, Queensrÿche still being pretty damn massive), Soundgarden effectively incorporated metal riffing into the mix, complementing Cornell’s Plant-goes-hardcore vocals perfectly. Superunknown tempered the speed freakery with a fuller, bassier, mix and Down on the Upside was just insanely varied for the time.

With a lot of Soundgarden’s best songs being of the ballad variety (‘Room a Thousand Years Wide’, ‘The Day I Tried to Live’, Fell on Black Days’, ‘Zero Chance’), and written solely by Cornell, it stood to reason that the first album released under his name would be stripped of the riffery. Prior to its release in 1999, he said it would be a ‘singer’s record’, and it was clearly going to be influenced by his late friend Jeff Buckley. It was a beautiful piece of work, the delicately layered arrangements working perfectly as a backing to his pained, wonderfully recorded vocal.

I made the mistake of missing his date that year at Manchester Academy, and he ended up in a band with the former Rage Against The Machine instrumentalists, initially called Civilian, but later officially dubbed Audioslave. Here is where the disappointment began as, a few choice riffs and the gorgeous ‘Like a Stone’ aside, Cornell had released his first mediocre album. It certainly wasn’t bad, but the sheer fact it wasn’t that good was alarming enough.

Audioslave released two more albums – that I didn’t even hear – and split up after enjoying a deserved amount of commercial success (hey, I’m not going to grudge the quartet some dollars after the entertainment they have given me in the big picture). Cornell resurfaced with ‘You Know My Name’, a suitably camp Bond theme and again it wasn’t bad; wasn’t great.

Alarm bells sounded first when it turned out the latter song was going to be on his debut album (a camp fun single is one thing, but it might besmirch an otherwise serious ‘artist album’), and then when news broke that he was covering ‘Billie Jean’. To make matters worse, I heard a new song in HMV and was unmoved.

So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I downloaded Carry On, his new album, and we are now up to speed. I was definitely expecting something very Adult Orientated Rock in its sound, a tad bland perhaps, and my expectations proved right. Part of me would like to write it off as a bad album so I don’t have to bother with it anymore (and spare myself more potential heartache as I consider what could have been), but there are glimpses of the old Cornell to bring me back into the mix, batting my wings against the window pane like a moth catching sight of a lamp on a cold winter night.

Opener ‘No Such Thing’ offered both that relief of blandness (yay, I don’t have to bother any more!) and the empty feeling in ones gut that comes with a long-time favourite failing to bring the goods. It was no ‘Let me Drown’ as far as album starters go, that’s for sure. But then, something about ‘Poison Eye’ heartened me a tad. It wasn’t like he’d started massively rocking out or anything (that reminds me: ‘No Such Thing’ had a decent bit of guitar about it), but that was the point.

It seems that it is when Cornell tries to rock out these days that he makes the biggest missteps. It was true of ‘Mission’, by far the weakest song on Euphoria Morning and pretty much of Audioslave as a whole. What so filled me with chagrin was that, after an excellent album largely composed of ballads that suited his ageing voice, his attempts to rock were just awkward and unnecessary. So ‘Poison Eye’ was a small triumph in that it had his one-time trademark wicked little vocal melodies and that tightrope walk of self-deprecation and misanthropy (previously seen on the likes of ‘Burden in my Hand’ and ‘Follow My Way’).

For the most part, though, this is MOR (though let’s not get carried away, it’s no worse than The Killers or recent Flaming Lips): songs like ‘Disappearing Act’, ‘Ghosts’ and Finally Forever’ are neither here nor there. What’s worse is that, a couple of hours removed from my initial listen, I can’t even remember a lot of the tracks.

It is in the unlikeliest places that this album succeeds. I was terrified of hearing his take on ‘Billie Jean’, especially when his own songs sounded so bland, but this stripped down, slo-mo performance actually works. I was rather dreading the high notes of ‘the kid is not my son’, but Cornell carried it of with aplomb. Similar was the odd ‘She’ll Never Be Your Man’.

Being a positive person, I won’t accuse the song of being anti-gay women (definitely one reading, as Cornell mentions all the roles the titular woman can fill, but ‘she’ll never be your man’. Hmm), so we are left with a bizarrely good Cornell-goes-Prince workout. Luckily, Chris doesn’t try to out-sex the tiny genius, but there is a definite reminder of ‘I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man’ or ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’.

We get some lyrically ‘nasty Cornell’ on the likes of ‘Poison Eye’ and ‘Killing Birds’, and the vocals range from good to occasionally great. I just wish he’d go back to writing songs that suit his voice. While it would definitely be great if he would go back to working with Eleven, or sonically stripped further down, I suppose the lure of the FM rock dollar is too great. Perhaps most worryingly, the familiarity presented by ‘You Know My Name’ was actually a massive positive, which rather sums up this album: on its own it’s OK. As a follow-up to Euphoria Morning it’s a disaster. The small mercy here is that it is just good enough not to turn me off the man. Which is pretty sad, all things considered.

Download: ‘No Such Thing’
Download: ‘Poison Eye’

Pig Destroyer – Phantom Limb Initial Thoughts


I have decided that I am going to post initial thoughts and reactions on this album as I listen to it for the first time in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way. These thoughts are so initial that the album is not in shops yet. I haven’t even burned the mp3s to disc yet. This is a straight up reaction to playing the brutality on my crummy computer. I apologise in advance for what is probably going to turn out rambling and insane, but I thought it might be a nice experiment in the Initial Thoughts genre, and it’s fun to experiment once in a while. What follows is a document of my instinctual, unedited, reactions only given thinking time of however long it takes for a thought to get from my little brain to my keyboard. Erk.

* * *

This is really technical, but absolutely horrible at the same time. and I mean that literally, as in it invokes a feeling of horror on a listener, rather than any strictly qualitative statement. There are bits of definite old school Slayer breaks, but with such a feeling of malicious intent.

Is a song called ‘Though Crime Spree’? Whatever it’s called, it’s probably the most impressive track yet. Well, it’s only track four, but it’s insane. Great drop-off to just the drums hammering out a beating on your brain, the guitars crunch back into action, and there is actually some melodic riffing going on. For a bit of context, their take on melodic riffing is pretty much on the level of the heaviest Pantera: I don’t see anything in the way of a ballad coming from these lads; ever. The riffs are great, and the blast-beats are insanely visceral. We’ve just had some inordinately high-pitched vocals, too. This is on the fifty-second ‘Cemetery Road’. The only word to describe this is that it shreds.

Onto ‘Lesser Animal’ now, and the switch from song to song is so instant and breathless, so devoid of anything resembling recuperative periods, that it reminds me directly of Converge’s Jane Doe. OK, a disturbo-sample about a man getting his face burned off, and that is our breathing space.

This album is so heavy that it is not a reincarnation of the shock-horror gore death metal of the late eighties, but a modern day equivalent; just as heavy today as that stuff was then. I can’t wait to get this on the Death Deck. The title track has a great mosh section, but even then it’s not that slow, and it has some Dillinger-style shredding over the ‘slow’ riff, and then the thrashy shredding comes right back to bite your face off.

While this music does sound very modern, there arte definite nods to the past, to death metal in particular, even while the strained-throat vocals recall the most boisterous of hardcore. Another great mosh section halfway into ‘Loathsome’. Great percussion, too, it has to be said – cymbal frenzy. No sooner do I write that, than a wonderful drum rhythm kicks in. the vocals have switched to that Kiss It Goodbye-influenced ‘very angry man trying his hardest to stay reasonable’ that is so much more satisfying than when you just get the angry in your mug. It provides a bit of relativism to make the angst that bit more intense.

All the tricks are being employed here, too. ‘Heathen Temple’ starts with a nice bit of feedback before exploding into what might be the fastest song yet. Things have slowed a tad, and this song actually reminds me a bit of late nineties Today Is The Day, and not just because it has ‘temple’ in the title; there is a great touch of ‘humongous insect’ vocal, and a gnarly, bassy riff. This might be the best song on the album thus far. This band gets through riffs like the world’s about to end, this most recent reminding me of 1986 Megadeth. Despite all this, though, they get away with it; it never actually sounds retro. This is probably because anything this heavy is automatically state of the art in metal circles.

The main reason I can’t wait to get this on the Death Deck, aside from playing it as loudly as possible, is to see exactly where it resides on the heaviness scale. Heavier than Dillinger Escape Plan’s Under the Running Board EP? Heavier than Jane Doe? Time will tell. Yeah, I think whomever wrote these titles hit a few typos. ‘Fopurth Degree Burns’ (sic)? I don’t think so. Great song though. There is a real At The Gates style urgency to the melodicism in a track like ‘Alexandria’. If this write-up is full of hyperbole, good. I’m not pretending to have any kind of critical distance here; it’s all about the visceral reactions being documented as and when they happen. Great chuggy mosh section about two thirds into the song too.

There is a definite sense of self awareness going on with Pig Destroyer, too, as they’ve called the current song ‘Girl in the Slayer Jacket’. I’d love to know what the vocalist is banging on about, because this one is particularly discordant and angry. Right, thirteen tracks in and I’m hoping there is not too much more to come. Not because it’s anything less than brilliant, but because this kind of album just has to have a ceiling of thirty minutes.

This riff on ‘Waist Deep in Ash’ really reminds me of the unstoppable marching that was the melody on Slayer’ ‘Seasons in the Abyss’, just with so many cuts into furious blast-beat that it’s taken onto a whole new level. The vocals remind me, again, of Tim Singer from Kiss It Goodbye and Deadguy. That is definitely a good thing. Onto ‘The Machete Twins’ now, and there is a definite throwback to the nineties on the serpentine lead guitar parts, slinking along the fret-boards all diabolus in musica like.

Right, the album proper is finished, and now playing is the seven and a half minute unlabeled track, in fine Coalesce swansong style. This should give me a minute to sit back and get a touch of distance on the album. It wasn’t amazingly hyper-modern, but one wonders where traditionally-arranged heavy music really has left to go. The band does well in melding the old school thrash and death influences with a metallic hardcore (dare I say Noisecore?) delivery, and it meshes well together, like an incredible heavy take on the Mastodon formula.

I have mentioned a couple of times about how the fast, energetic-to-the-point-of-overload type of music seems to have fallen out of fashion this decade, replaced both in rock and electronic music with the likes of sunnO)))/Khanate/new Earth on the one hand, and the critically unstoppable leviathan that is dubstep on the other. While that is all well and good, and I’m all for change, I was missing the music that just shreds and leaves you confused and motionless. We had Trap Them a few months ago with an irrepressible slab of speed noise, and now the mighty Pig destroyer have returned for the first time since 2004’s excellent Terrifyer with something that might actually be better.

Only time will tell, but if this remains no more than a tasty portion of fast fury I will be satisfied. I do think, though, that the months and years will to come will be very kind indeed to the album called Phantom Limb. And the music has just now finished.