Miss Piggy Lunchbox

The folks in Newport, Oregon, that’s who.

This is the closest I’ve ever heard Nine Inch Nails come to metal. It’s also the best release of theirs in my collection with the possible exception of their debut Pretty Hate Machine. Despite ridiculous titles like “Help Me I Am In Hell” and “Happiness In Slavery,” Trent Reznor funnels most of his histrionic melodrama into the music…and it sounds great.

Most notably, there isn’t a single terrible song on here. “Pinion” and “Help Me I Am In Hell” are pretty dull, but at least I don’t cringe when I hear them. Even “Gave Up,” the other non-keeper, has its moments.

No, this is Reznor at his best. The sounds he creates, both for his instruments and as effects on his voice, are far beyond anything he did before or in the years following this. He’s elevated his sound invention reputation beyond its already stellar standing here…this is his MVP season. He didn’t just improve his strengths, though…he also reduced the negative effects of his main weakeness: there’s very little self-pity, either from the point of view of a character or for Reznor himself.

With its incredibly harsh textures, relentless distortion, and heavy beats, this is the most “difficult” Nine Inch Nails listen I’ve heard. It’s also the best.

Rating:

Mixer: “Physical (You’re So)”
Non-keepers: “Pinion,” “Help Me I Am In Hell,” “Gave Up”
Filed Between: Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like A Hole” and The Downward Spiral

I don’t know what the saloon is a reference to, but the tango in the band’s name is not rhetorical: this is definitely tango. For the most part, this project of Julian Curwin is traditional tango, including a couple covers of Astor Piazzola tunes, but there are aspects of modernity and experimentation thrown in, like synthesized timbres and complex start-stop song structures.

The biggest problem is that there are too many areas where the music gets bogged down in itself with no passion to pull it up. And tango without passion…well…it’s not really tango. It’s the novel composition that causes the most problems. The worst parts are when the songs either hit some jam-band rut or become too interesting for their own good.

But even when it’s not all that great, you’ve still got that interesting to fall back on, and when the focus is on sound instead of structure, the disc shines. The 70’s sci-fi sounds that pepper “Man With The Bongos” and the last 25% of “Intermission” are reminiscent of Messer Chups, and the mixers are must-hears. Even some of the non-keepers have grown on me in the last few days as our recent heavy cloud cover (honestly, a recent eastern- to western-border drive confirms that clouds in Seattle are simply darker and more depressing than clouds elsewhere) has mellowed me to the point of being more in tune with the pleasant but passionless non-keepers. It’s still not tango without the passion, but whatever it is, those tracks are not a bad accompaniment to a chill mood.

Rating:

Mixers: “Upon A Time,” “La Calle 92”
Non-keepers: “Overture,” “March Of The Big Shoe,” “Carol,” “Intermission,” “The Little Plane That Could”
Filed Between: Talking Heads (Popular Favorites: 1976-1992) and Art Tatum (Piano Starts Here)

R.I.P., Michael.

Seriously.  May you find the peace from your demons you couldn’t in this life.  The backbeats in heaven just started hitting a lot harder.

It’s on a post a couple of months old, so I wanted to point it out in case you missed it: a golden comment came in on Saturday on my two-lunchbox review of Bon Jovi’s New Jersey.  It begins:

Wow you are a complete musical idiot.

The insight doesn’t end there.  The whole thing is here.

Worst. Melvins show. Ever.

There, I said it. My heroes let me down, though it wasn’t always their fault.

It’s still hard for me to believe that the Melvins’ 25th anniversary show with Green River involved sucked, but it sucked.

Things got off to a great start, with Melvins kicking off the night. They moved drummer Dale to bass and had somebody else drumming while they performed songs from all the way back in 1983, the band’s sludgiest, raunchiest, punkiest stuff. Then they moved into newer stuff, focusing pretty heavily on their most recent studio album, Nude With Boots. And that’s where the suck started.

Since Melvins’ newer stuff is more complicated, a move back to drums for Dale was necessitated. And apparently Melvins couldn’t find a single person who could play bass for their 25th anniversary show. Melvins goes through bassists like Spinal Tap goes through drummers. Invariably they herald each new bassist’s arrival as finally having found the bassist that’s right for them, and just as invariably that bassist leaves amid Buzz and Dale mumbling about how that bassist just couldn’t play right or didn’t play hard enough or didn’t want to keep up with their brutal touring schedule or whatever. And so Melvins has become the Buzz and Dale show with a revolving door of bassists. To this point, that hasn’t been such a bad thing, but when you can’t find a single bassist to play for your 25th anniversary show, that’s kind of a sign that maybe you shouldn’t be such an asshole to all your bassists because your songs SUCK ASS without low end.

Anyway, then Green River came on, and as if to make up for the lack of bass in Melvins’ first set, there was waaaaay too much bass in the sound, which basically cemented Jeff Ament’s position as my second-least-favorite member of Pearl Jam. I generally don’t like being dickish, so I rarely point out to sound guys that their sound is awful, but the bass was so overpowering that it was pretty much impossible to enjoy the songs. The sound guy seemed to be paying attention, in that he was looking at the stage, but he was completely clueless. I damn near said something, but decided to err on the side of not getting punched in the face.

The saving grace for this set was that they did a longer set than at SP20 and really got into some deep cuts, including the awesome “New God.”  I’ve had the line “I’m not really asking for much/I only want your soul” going through my head ever since the concert.

Unfortunately, the same problem with the sound existed for Melvins’ second set, which consisted of them doing Houdini in its entirety. And now I’m getting pissed just remembering how bad the sound was, so f**k you Showbox sound guy, you should be fired and should have to reimburse us all for our tickets, since we got such a lousy show. You should also probably burn in hell and be forced to listen to lousy sounding music for the rest of eternity…though apparently that wouldn’t bother you since it didn’t back in May. But I don’t like being dickish….

With about two weeks left in faltering, I figured we could now wrap-up the never-snow totals for this year.

If the search functionality on MPL is working right, the last never-snow was here, when Beckers and Isabelita reported never-snow.  That was number 16.  16 conservatively called never-snows (remember, I only counted the monster Christmas storm I was absent for as one never-snow).  Beckers says there was one dusting in mid- to late-May she didn’t report, and if memory serves, My Baby reported never-snow on the Eastside after that, but it was vague enough and far enough away I didn’t count it.

There you have it.  When I first moved here i thought it only never-snowed two or threetimes a year, because that’s how much we had my first winter.  My second winter we were up around double digts, and my third winter we hit 16.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go through the ritual of forgetting all of this and enjoy “summer.”

This sign, and the keys directly above it, were up for at least six months.  I called the number but it was no longer in service.  Today the sign is there with no keys.

I wasn’t quite sure I believed it when it was mentioned in my speech technology class, but this article from the BBC has some really cool findings about how elephants communicate through their feet, using the ground as an acoustic medium.

“We are focusing on the idea that elephants may be able to detect seismic vibrations through the earth,” explained fellow researcher Lynette Hart, from University of California, Davis.

“That would give them information about the location of other elephants, whether they are in distress, if they are family members and also tell them something about distant weather patterns.”

…

By sensing the seismic waves caused by the foot stomping of their counterparts, the elephants may be able to interpret the warning signals of far-off danger.

“[Elephants] are highly social; they vocalise often and they like to maintain acoustic contact with other herds.

“If they were able to do this over a much longer distance, then elephants could forage at much longer distances in the dry season and still maintain social contact.

That’s it.  I have nothing else on this front.

When I loaded up Melvin’s Bullhead into iTunes, one of the pieces of data that came down with it was that it was at 192 BPM. Whoever put that joke in there, bravo. The idea that Melvins recorded anything at 192 beats per minute is preposterous, of course. Sometimes they don’t even get 192 beats on an album.