It’s funny what returning to an album after a while can do for ones appreciation of it. When I first heard Resilience, I was immensely pleased. It seemed that the inordinately talented joker of electronic music (OK, there are a few, admittedly) had finally ‘matured’, and in doing so, produced the album of his career thus far.
I always wished Richard ‘Aphex’ James could have played it straight at least once in the past decade. He’s another artist of the computer with a ton of talent, but it seemed he just wanted to make silly noises to diminishing returns rather than an actual album. It’s his prerogative, I suppose, but on hearing that the Kid had ‘gone straight’ I was made up.
The album is really well composed, and has energy when it needs to, never having to drop into pure noise. The melodies are cool, the album unfolds well, and it just seemed very satisfying.
So I listened to it again for the purposes of this list, and something changed. The album is still the same well-crafted slice of mature electronica, but could it be that in the cold light of day it’s just a tad… boring?
Some of the songs are still really good, such as ‘Spanish Song’ and ‘Phoenix Riddim’, but as a whole it just drags, and never reaches the levels of beauty of many other, similarly ‘mature’ albums of this year. I never thought I’d find myself wishing Kid606 was still a noisy ADHD simulator, but there you go. Maybe he could have left growing up for later.
Queens Of The Stone Age – Lullabies To Paralyze (Interscope)
Like the Cave In album of this year, Lullabies… is a good album, but one with qualification. While a new band releasing this record would impress me for being so good, the fact that this is QOTSA comes with the weight of the classic Rated R, not to mention the final three Kyuss albums.
In the light of this past, the listener is forced to see this album as a disappointment. Many would attribute this to the loss of Nick Oliveri, who provided a dynamic counterpoint (he’s crazy and noisy) to the smoother Josh Homme, as well as being one of the two constants since the formation of the band.
I would disagree, as Oliveri played on their last album, Songs For The Deaf, and that wasn’t great either. The problem, as with this album, is that there is just too much of it.
Rarely is an album of 14+ songs at 60+ minutes an essential one. Soundgarden managed it twice at the height of their powers in the mid-90s (Superunknown and Down on the Upside), but Homme is no Chris Cornell, it would seem. Even on those latter albums were songs that could have been cut.
So this album is a victim of its own ambition. The first half certainly contains good songs, but absolutely nothing happens in the second half until the excellent conclusion that is ‘The Long Slow Goodbye’ – an epic and sweeping modern rock great.
The nail in the coffin of this album would be that the good first half – catchy though it is, is never actually exciting. No ‘Avon’ on this, nor a ‘No-One Knows’, or ‘Auto Pilot’ for that matter. As good as this album can be at times, very little would be good enough to feature on …R.
Released earlier in the year than Patton’s Fantômas album, this is aurally very much a practice run for what is to follow. The key difference, though, is the method of composition. Whereas the Fantômas was essentially an incredibly complex take on the heavy metal lexicon, this collaboration was obviously less ‘traditional’ for Patton.
The X-ecutioners, being among the world’s most famous purveyors of turntablism (I don’t know how cool they are within the scene, but that Linkin Park collaboration cannot have helped them), made for a different flavour for the Patton oeuvre, but the novelty seems to have ended at the methodology stage.
The turntable work on display is of an absurdly high standard, cutting up and layering to ridiculous levels. However, there is a fine line between great technical arrangements and sheer virtuoso masturbation, and this album is a tightrope walker of quite perilous magnitude.
It soon becomes clear that Joint Special Operations Task Force falls prey to the trap that Fantômas and Bungle occasionally do: while there are plenty of good ideas on show, the problem is that there may actually be too many. The listener hears something cool, be it a sound or a hook, and it is instantly lost, washed off by the high tide, never to be heard again.
Patton projects do sometimes irritate in their habit of not letting ideas breathe, rushing through them like this was the end of the Generation Game. Joint Special Operations Task Force is a ‘good’ album, but an incredibly frustrating one at the same time.
Devoid of any real framework, or grand narrative, this is just a blast of myriad ideas. Some are good, some are amazing; it’s just hard to discern, when you become forcefully desensitised after a few minutes. Perhaps that’s the relevance of the military gimmick.
System Of A Down makes the right noises a lot of the time; the angst is present and correct, the riffs are usually solid and well constructed, and the occasional melody creates a level of emotional affect. However, and with little in the way of exception, I can’t escape the feeling that it’s all too contrived, too cynical.
As much as I love the idea of only being into cool music that pushes the envelope and stuff, I have to admit that I’m about as big a fan of the big rock ballad as you can find, and even then, I can’t buy into the likes of ‘Lost in Hollywood’.
It’s just so hollow. Why am I listening to a Californianu-Metal band deriding sunny Cali culture? To be quite honest, I would rather listen go the very ‘maggots smoking fags on Sunset Boulevard’ than this self-important exercise in Metal box ticking.
Freakout, anything-goes, Metal band Mr. Bungle are no more, and that has been the case for a few years now. There is definitely a void where once they stood, but System Of A Down lack the imagination, the instrumental proficiency and the simple ‘we don’t care’ attitude to fill it. Doesn’t stop them from trying, though.
So we get explosions of wackiness. I hate wackiness. I hate those stupid faces Jim Carrey would pull in his idiotic mid-90s films, I hate those people who sit on the floor, at the front of gigs, simply because it’s kooky’ to do so. I especially hate wackiness in Metal. Really, if you are going to plough your furrow in such a straight-faced, angsty genre, then either embrace the ridiculousness of it (like sunnO)))), or play it straight.
What we have here is a band that, not content with producing some Metal version of Timmy Mallet, has deigned to release two albums of it in one calendar year. This is the better of the two.
Much like when Guns n’ Roses before them tried this trick, neither on its own is a particularly good album. It would be a stretch to even say their being merged would make one good album. These are two half-arsed albums that combine to form… well, a pile of arse. What’s worse is the presence of a couple of legitimately very good songs, to really shine a light on the mediocrity elsewhere.
‘BYOB’ is a good song, but I think part of my positive affect for it might be down to the context in which I first heard it. They popped up on some MTV award show and, as such, were a pleasant surprise. While the riffs were warmed over 1986 Metallica, the riffs were there, on my telly, when they could easily have been The Kooks or some crap.
So, I associate the song with that happy surprise, and its competent structure, crunchy guitar and superficial satire (‘Everybody’s going to the party have a real good time / Dancing in the desert blowing up the sunshine’ – cute, but only in the context of Stuff You See On MTV) are nothing special on their own.
‘Violent Pornography’ is more like it, with less of a reliance on ‘ooh, aren’t we crazy’ dynamics and more of a celebratorily derisive chorus (‘Choking chicks and sodomy / The kinda shit you get on your TV’). The riff swings with as much swagger as the band can bring and, for four minutes, all is right with major label Metal.
Overall, though, it is a case of too little, spread too thin. And when this is the band looked at as The Next Metallica or whatever, you know something’s up. And the guitarist sings too much. He is nasal and whiny, and they should just multi-track vocalist Serj Tankian, who really is the silver lining to this band.
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