Current Trend: May To March

A long time ago, I was putting out a monthly article about what style was making up the majority of what I was listening to. During my shitty summer, I fell off that wagon, and I think it's time to get back with it. This one will be a short re-hashing of the past nine months, to get us back to the current age. Nothing too in-depth or long, just an overview:

Ok, so the trends I have been going through have been back-and-forth between Funk and Stoner, with the occasional Progressive strewn in. I have really been sticking with these three genres for the majority of the past year. Parliament, Funkadelic and Sly and The Family Stone are some of the best music from the 70's I've had the pleasure to bear witness.

Retrospective: Type O Negative (Part 1)

While Peter Steele's first band, Carnivore, was mostly thrash, and later ToN releases are mostly doom, these first couple of albums blend the two to become the center of the sub-sub(sub?)-genre: sludge metal. Sludge metal is characterized by having slow verses or other passages but having thrash-infused choruses or breaks. Basically it's two extremes being mashed together, to varying success


Discography - Part 1

• Slow, Deep And Hard (1991)

Coming off as more of a collection of Carnivore tracks with a new band, Slow, Deep And Hard is something else. While some elements from this album will be apparent in later releases (especially the humor), other then the next release, The Origin Of The Feces, this has very little of the sound that would become Type O Negative in future releases. One thing I love about this album are the track titles, they are so unnecessarily long and actually pretty funny. The opening track is titled "Unsuccessfully Coping With The Natural Beauty Of Infidelity," which all about a woman who cheats (gets pretty vulgar towards the end), and the equally impressive titled "The Misinterpretation Of Silence And Its Disastrous Consequences" which is nothing more then a minute of silence - that is it, silence and it gets a huge title. While the titles thing is funny, this album is pretty crap overall, the only good track off of it being its first, "Unsuccessfully Coping..." which is over twelve minutes long. This track fully embodies the sludge title, with the beginning seeming like a thrash song, some long droning bits, more thrash, and then just straight metal chanting. It is a funny song, filled with interesting lyrics, although it does get very vulgar at the end, while he describes what she is for being a cheater (alot of four-letter words). Other then track one, this is a throw-away album, not thrash enough for Carnivore, not doom enough to be truly Type O Negative.

Retrospective: Queen - Queen II (1974)

I know this has been a long time coming, but here it is, part 2 of the Queen retrospective.

While Queen II continues the progressive sound heard in their debut album, it also is a step towards the main-stream stadium-rock that they would become world renown for.Now I have listened to this album a lot less often then the first Queen album, and as such, I am not as familiar with the tracks. With the first part of the retrospective I wrote, I could complete the entire article without listening to a single song (except "Son and Daughter") and still pull off a decent description. For this one, I will need to work through every song, which is why I have taken forever to continue this project.

New Album: Airbourne - No Guts. No Glory.

I don't know what it is about Airbourne, but I love them. Their songs are simple, both in music and lyrics, most of it sounds the same, and the guy can't 'sing' worth a crap. But they wail! If this was the 80's these guys would be huge. They play a stadium-rock reminiscent of AC/DC or Kiss - simple sing-a-long lyrics for the working man. Their songs are about girls, fighting and booze, stuff you can stand behind. Their second release, No Guts. No Glory. follows suit.
There isn't a lot to say about this album that wasn't said above, like their first release, Runnin' Wild, songs are short and sweet, with a focus on the chorus and the guitar solos behind the lyrics. Reading this you'd think they were some cookie-cutter group, and if this was 1985 that might be the case, but it's 2010 and stadium-rock is in short supply, so Airbourne has found their niche. Listening to any of their albums, you can't help but bob your head along, and by the end of any song, odds are you've already memorized half of the lyrics (if you can understand what the singer is saying that is).
So I guess what I'm saying is, if you love the golden-era of Brian Johnson AC/DC (Back In Black era) they you will love Airbourne. And for anyone from my generation, who didn't grow up with this style (well I did, but not everyone has a father that blasts Bon Scott while driving his son to school), this is something new for you to sink your teeth into.

Awesome Album Art: Giant Squid - The Ichthyologist

Album art is a fading... well art, in today's society of mp3s and digital downloads. But to me, a band is only good as it's name and it's album art. While perusing random albums, whether online or at an actual music store, what the album looks like often denotes how much time I'm going to hesitate at an unknown artist. And in today's thousands-of-bands world, a hesitation is what you want. And so for this I will give credence to whomever is out there designing art-work, beginning with Giant Squid's latest release The Ichthyologist.

Albums Listened To In February (83)

February, the shortest month. Unlike last year, when Feb held the most albums I'd listened to yet, this one is not so musically dominating. It's still a stellar month, with 83 albums (52 brand new) played - two better then last month - I hope to keep this trend alive. The number would have been more, but I began watching the complete series of the HBO show, Entourage, this week, and have done little else. I was hoping to get to 100 albums, but TV took it's hold over me. I still have 2 1/2 seasons left, and then it's onto the other HBO series, Oz, so next month might be a bit slow as well. Time will only tell.

I started the month with a hunt for the new, week 1 was almost entirely new bands - aside from the Led Zeppelin discography - and week 2 followed suit. Towards the end of the second week I had begun new discographies (Rush, Van Halen, Sum 41), which began to dominate my car listening selection. The trend of Van Halen/Rush continued into week 4, when I became bored with them both, instead moving back into funk, with Funkadelic taking the reins. This will probably continue, at least through the first week or two, into March.