Megadeth – ‘Holy Wars / The Punishment Due’ (1990)

So in this post I’m really just going to gush about a song that I’ve been into for [thinks] most of my life, now. However, it’s only recently that I have been hit by quite how masterful a song it is. Anyway, before I go any further it’s probably best for those ignorant of the greatness to take a listen to it for themselves, and for those in the know to revisit it:

Megadeth – ‘Holy Wars… The Punishment Due’

Right, we’re back. Yeah, I’ve always liked this song a lot, but for some reason viewed Rust In Peace as some kind of no-man’s land between the classic ‘In My Darkest Hour’ era and the streamlined pop-metal brilliance of (the first half of) Countdown To Extinction. However, this song is an absolute classic. The kind of genre-transcending thing that Metallica used to do so well.

The first thing that hits is the mania of the piece. Guitar notes descending like someone who’s running so fast down stairs that they’ve lost control of their legs and are now just falling. And on top of that we get the bizarro lead melody which sounds like someone learned to play it backwards before they learned it forwards. And it’s all more punk rock/hardcore than metal in its delivery, especially for 1990. There’s an immense aggression to it that even goes beyond what Slayer were doing at the time with their excellent Seasons In The Abyss.

What will undoubtedly be a sticking point for many is Dave Mustaine’s voice. It’s very high-pitched and weird. However, I reckon that works really well on the best Megadeth music. The very fact that he is not some gruff, masculine Hetfield/Anselmo/Thomas lends an emotional fragility to the bluster – the listener really gets the sense that this talk of holy war and general mayhem is not just something to get righteous about, but is actually very real. And scary.

Then we get that Spanish guitar breakdown (which I guess is supposed to sound Middle-Eastern), which leads directly into the more traditional realms of macho staccato metal. It’s a really rhythmic segment, with strangely phrased lines about ‘know-it-all scholars’. And it goes crazy, because that doesn’t last either. Classic riff kicks in (‘wage the war on organised crime’), and the emotional poignance is there once again. No idea what he’s singing about this time – Mustaine seems to have turned himself into a super-soldier, and there is a sadness in his voice when he sings ‘either way, they die’.

The song seems to have settled in now, as Dave tells us about ‘their’ mistakes – killing his wife and baby for a start. He prefaces the first solo with the warning of ‘no more mistakes’. And then it all breaks down again, into a thrash-fest that is punctuated by some ejaculation-delaying palm-muting. Then the proper nutty solo that Thrash of the time was so happily full of. And it’s a really good solo, too. Marty Friedman goes all-out in showing why he’s comfortably a peer of the likes of Kerry King and Kirk Hammett.


Oh, it turns out that the lyrical content of the second half of the song was inspired by the Punisher comics – explaining the ‘Punishment Due’ part of the title, natch. That lends more sense to the superhero lyrical content of this portion, as I thought it had just gone completely off-kilter. What was it with Mustaine in this era, and his dual songs? We have this one, as well as ‘Rust In Peace / Polaris’ and ‘Good Mourning / Black Friday‘… it’s actually a good idea, lending a sense of dynamic and variety to a type of Metal that can get samey in the wrong hands. Either that, or he had some kind of alcohol-fuelled ADHD.

Anyway, by the end of that it’s really roaring along. We get a really energising and heavy conclusion to a song that is a really fucking great six and a half minutes. So yeah, vague lyrical content aside this is a top notch song from the turn of a decade, and Megadeth really do deserve more props than they get. While I am generally very modernist in my listening to heavy music, I do wish more of the big modern metal bands had songs like this – most of them have nothing to compare. I suppose the closest would be System Of A Down with their excellent ‘Chop Suey!’ (though that doensn’t really get great until the second half). Worryingly, a very real modern equivalent would be ‘We’re All To Blame’ by Sum 41. I always hated them, but I’ll be damned if that’s not a great song.

It’s a shame Mustaine was so deranged due to drug intake during this time. He once said about the song: ‘It’s revolving around the way that war is imminent and it doesn’t really matter what country it’s in… Khadafi [Libya]… Khomeini [Iran]… It’s funky (sic) how these guys have weird names, these idiots that lead different countries. But it shows you… war’s war, no matter where you’re at.’

A bit bigoted there, but anyway, it’s sad that sixteen years later, Jihad is still as real a threat as it ever was, whether the ‘idiots’ in power are in Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan or England/America/Italy. I didn’t mean for this to turn into a political blog post (and it won’t), but it’s sad that people in power within each major religion never seem to learn from past mistakes.

‘Next thing you know, they’ll take my thoughts away’, indeed.

Memento


Christopher Nolan (2000)

This was a confusing film. I started watching it with the knowledge that it was the number one film of the 2000’s according to a message board I frequent. I expected it to be great.

And it was, to begin with. From the start I could see that it was based around a messed up narrative syntax. I should mention that I avoided any and all spoilers, even to the extent of not reading the back of the DVD case, nor looking at the snapshots inside the case.

It got confusing, though, especially irking when I thought I had a handle on it early on. The narrative was going backwards. So he killed his man, and it went back from there. Except, when it got to the end, it turned out that was what we saw at the start. Or was it? So it was working backwards after we saw that bit?

I initially thought it was very good but not great, on account of it’s narrative-driven, and a lot of the narrative was driven through the tool of Leonard talking the story through. It all seemed a bit expositional to me.

But then that didn’t seem to be so much of a criticism. The phone calls, through which we learned a lot about him and his boy Sammy, weren’t just some tacky on the nose device, but a method within the storyline for him to get caught out. I think.

See, the thing about this film is that it confuses me to The Usual Suspects levels. I really don’t know what to make of it; perhaps a re-watch will sort me out. Perhaps I can glean some info somewhere on the two discs of extras. Perhaps, like that other film, my mind will never let me know the answer in the end.


What I do know is that this was a very intelligently written film. I love when people mess with the linearity of traditional narrative anyway, and this overcame initial fears that the backwards thing was just a gimmick ripped off from a Seinfeld episode. The dialogue was great – I especially loved Leonard’s line to Natalie (man, this conditioning works – I normally have to look character names up) about how the world doesn’t stop existing when you close your eyes. That’s the kind of ostensibly throwaway metaphysical line that gets me thinking far too much.

Funnily enough, it turned out to be rather an important line after all, seeing as it was something of an epiphany for our man Leonard. But that’s the rub, I guess. I’m not sure whether giving our protagonist such a massive disability was a masterstroke in playing with our perception[1], or whether it was just a cheap tool to distract us.

Hey, I’m just a very suspicious film-watcher. This was a really good film though, like I thought. Just not too great. Still, the fact that this was based on a short story by Jonathan Nolan bodes well for the next Batman film, which he is apparently writing. Could be interesting.

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[1]Such as the ‘don’t trust your imagination as fact’ deal in Almodovar’s La Mala Educación, where what we trusted as our characters in the film were just characters in a film within the film, and the real characters were different.

Adventurers~!

In the past couple of hours I have discovered, and listened to a million songs by, BE YOUR OWN PET. They fecking rule. Actually, I lied a little. Just a little white lie. I had heard their single at some point last week. But the point…

The point, it remains. They rule, and are some really punky cool rock band with short songs. Like how good Nashville Pussy thought they were but really weren’t. Like some kind of really drunk mix of Minor Threat and The Donnas.

Like if Melt-Banana were Texan, or something. I think they played near me not so long ago, and I’m gutted to have missed them. Moreso than I eventually will be at having missed Wolfmother last night. I will see them, anyway, and it’s gonna be great. I’m gonna go off like a hand grenade. And marry the singer. When I see what she looks like (ts: w00t! Found a pic).

Anyway, all that Arctic Monkeys nonsense can fall out of a plane without a parachute for all I care. This is so good, and I hope I never stop listening to these songs. I also hope this isn’t their first album because I need more More MORE.

‘I’M AN INDEPENDENT MOTHERFUCKER AND I’M HERE TO TAKE YER MONEY!’

Live Review: Melt-Banana, 18 November 2005


Joseph’s Well, Leeds.
Support: Khanate

Melt-Banana. What a band. They play some bizarre cartoon mix of very intense hardcore, grindcore and recently even electronic music. They are the perfect ‘extreme’ band for today’s MTV-conditioned, two-minute attention span society, with its desire for the instant fix. The fix doesn’t come much more instantly than Melt’s very Japanese take on the music.

It is so creative, in the restraints of what is ordinarily a very uniform genre. Melt find a way of surprising and confounding the listener at every turn, and have done over numerous albums since the mid-90s. The best thing is, they seem to be getting better as they go on.

So it was with delight and no small excitement that I greeted news that they were due to play in my town. That was a gig I just had to attend, especially when it came to my attention that Khanate were to be supporting.

Khanate are almost the polar opposite of Melt-Banana. While the Tokyo band specialise in very short, fast songs, Khanate are masters of the epic. And that’s ‘epic’ in the sense that their last album, Capture and Release, featured just two songs – ‘Capture’ and ‘Release’, and was well over forty minutes.

Featuring modern drone-king Stephen O’Malley from sunnO))) on guitar, Khanate are similar to that band in that they’re about the promise of riffs, rather than the actual delivery. They specialise in feeding back, low-frequency drones and occasionally-struck discords. They build and build without the song ever truly ‘kicking in’, in the traditional sense.

While this is very effective and the sounds they create (especially with their wailing vocalist) are intense and harrowing, this can sometimes lead to frustration. The aforementioned ‘release’ never actually comes.

Still, this promised to be a very dynamic evening. The day came, and I had other things to attend to, which were of equal value. However, at nine o’clock, I decided I had to leave my prior engagement, as I wanted to make sure I caught Khanate, and who knows when they’d be playing?

So I got to the venue and met my friends. Turns out that, not only had Khanate not played yet, but doors were yet to open. So I chilled, ruing the fact I had departed my other engagement as early as I did. Hindsight, eh? Anyway, after a decent though uninspiring opening band, Khanate finally emerged in a haze of distortion.

And it was good. Really good. The sound was immense as bass rumbled all around the sunken sweatbox they like to call ‘The Well’. There was an agonised screaming, which I thought was running on a DAT tape, but was actually emanating from the singer who I just couldn’t see. Shame, as I reckon his facial expressions while performing would have been something to behold for that sound to come out.

The frustration I mentioned reared its head during the set. In a live environment, the listener (me at least) wants to rock out, and the definition of what Khanate is prevents that. There is no rhythmic riff, no hook. While that’s all well and good when it comes to listening at home, or analysis of just how clever and post-everything they are, it just doesn’t translate live. They tease the kick in, I want to dance, but it frustratingly just never gets going.

With the knowledge that they would never kick-in in mind, I went about different methods of getting the most from the band. I closed my eyes and visualised. It turns out that Khanate are a great band for tripping out to, as I was experiencing quite vivid closed-eye hallucinations.

The hallucinations consisted mainly of reds and blacks (which prompted me to worry that perhaps I was a repressed Scum fan), and explosions. I saw grand mountainous thrones, belching smoke and fire. I saw flying things, some shades of white and obsidian tides. It was great, except for the idiot scenesters right in front of me who decided it was a good idea to hold a conversation during the set.

Khanate finished, with me slightly disappointed at the lack of a rock-out. More worrying was the feeling that, with Khanate being as intense as they are, I was feeling drained. They had played three songs and I, while having really enjoyed the primal power of their set, was feeling rather fatigued to be experiencing Melt-Banana. Perhaps they would energise me, I hoped.

So Melt-Banana came on, and they were a blur of noise and energy. Lead singer Yasuko O. is a fascinating front-person. The obvious juxtaposition of such a pleasant and attractive person singing for such a brutal band goes without saying. However, the main thing that struck me was quite how she performs.

I know this is playing into pop-cultural national stereotype, but I was put in mind of a very specific type of anime character. The female or child in charge of something really goddamn powerful, an archetype prevalent in the genre. You’ve seen them, Leona of Dominion Tank Police or whatever – the idea is that someone small of stature and perceived as ‘weak’ or ‘cute’ is in charge of a machine capable of great power and devastation.


And so it was with this. On the surface, Yasuko seemed totally innocent, but with the knowledge deep down that she was in control of the sounds. She was either conduit through which the energy could flow or, more malevolent, a Tetsuo-esque being who was directing the violence.

Whatever the case, her voice carried with it 1.21 gigawatts of utter madness, as guitars, bass and noise exploded in accompaniment of her hyperactive yelping. Not only did she control the mania onstage, but she was like a lightning conductor for the frenzy of the pit. She’d introduce a song, and her punctuation of the music sent the sweaty throng into hysteria.

While of course it was the band who was creating the storm of noise she, as signifier, was symbolically the operator. Much as I’m dwelling on it, there was a sense that, as with all great front-people, it was all coming from her. That’s actually a theme common to the other gigs from this time, as both Bob Dylan and Josh T. Pearson evoked the same feeling. Just for very different reasons.

On the onslaught went, the pit convulsing as though shocked by every sonic charge fired from the stage. As the set went on, energy levels never dipped. Despite the very uniform noise of the band, there was a definite dynamic to the set.

Midway through the performance, Yasuko announced that the following section would be devoted to their short songs, and it’s not as though the band is known for its 20-minute drone sequences anyway. Songs ranged from really short to really, really, really bloody short. Like, a few seconds.

Anyway, it meant the pit could go absolutely nutty with no fear of fatigue, and also that I was mightily amused at the staccato nature of everything that was happening. The normal set resumed, the band left the stage, the band returned to the stage.

Encore time, and I was revitalised. The general malaise engendered by the Khanate set, which had slowed my whole system down, threatening to ruin my night, had fully lifted by this point, and I was determined to show the pit a thing or two. And I did, accompanied by some great songs.

Chief among these was my favourite, an off-kilter, yet very melodic (for them) ditty, named ‘If It Is The Deep Sea, I Can See You There’. Brilliance, as the initial grind gives way to acoustic strumming and robotic vocal melodies. Fired up I was, wreaking havoc, and it was a great end to the night.

Leaving the building, I was very self-conscious in my vest (or ‘wife beater’, as those without taste are wont to dub it), especially as we were in the depths of winter. I didn’t care – I was standing there with steam rising from my body, for a solid quarter of an hour. A good gig indeed.