Miss Piggy Lunchbox

I’ve been skipping those CDs I got from J-mez that are duplicates in my collection, for obvious reason. But if one of them is a duplicate of a cassette I have, well, I’ll give that a truncated treatment.

Honestly, I just don’t feel like doing the full-on review process for a turd like this. This was Mötley Crüe’s fifth album and last before grunge hit. I.e., it was their last album where they were relevant. Their first album was a masterpiece, their second was really good, and the next three were god awful and also their most popular. Dr. Feelgood might be better than Theatre Of Pain, but I think it’s inferior to Girls, Girls, Girls. Gawd, I can’t believe I wrote about Sibelius just two days ago.

So this gets just a quick listen to remind myself that, yes, it sucks, a rating that is an estimate of how many lunchboxes I would give it were I to torture myself with five full listens, and a quick assessment of which songs I’d consider on mixes and want to keep on my DMP.

Estimated Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: “Kickstart My Heart”
Filed Between: Dr. Feelgood on cassette and Crüe’s Decade Of Decadence ’81-‘91

Tired of waiting for the impetuous Axl Rose to get his act together and release Chinese Democracy, Guns N’ Roses’ third proper studio album, guitarist Slash, bassist Duff McKagan, and drummer Matt Sorum teamed up with Scott Weilland of Stone Temple Pilots and Dave Kushner to form Velvet Revolver. In 2004 they released their debut album Contraband.

So I’m listening to this on Tuesday and thinking, damn, Chinese Democracy is never gonna come out and, hey, 2008 is almost over and Dr. Pepper said they’d give us all a pop if it was released this year, what’s the latest on that?

And holy s**t, Chinese Democracy is scheduled to be in Best Buy stores on Sunday. This f**king Sunday. And Dr. Pepper is making good on their promise and holy f’ing lord up is down and there’s a new Guns N’ Roses album?

And I’m supposed to review this ancient artifact? Pfft.

I half-expect that the new Guns N’ Roses album will blow big chunks, but nevertheless, this is probably the most anticipated album of all time and holy good god I’m running out to Best Buy on Sunday just to buy it on the day it comes out and it’s not waiting its turn in line because, again, Most. Anticipated. Album. Ever. So, musical history right there, by definition.

What’s most amazing about this being the most anticipated album ever is that their previous release (Use Your Illusion, I’m not counting The Spaghetti Incident) was previously the most anticipated album ever. I remember waiting outside the Title Wave in Columbia Heights at midnight in September, 1991 for those two albums, which had themselves been scrapped in their entirety and completely re-worked a couple of times at least, if we’re to believe reports from the GnR camp. They also were, of course, a huge let down. They were good, it’s just that nothing could match the five-lunchbox awesomeness of 1987’s Appetite For Destruction.

So now we’ve got Chinese Democracy out soon, and I guess everybody else has already heard most of it due to a leak. I’ll still be waiting for the release date and listening to it then because I’ve got enough to keep my ears busy in the meantime…during which I should write this review, huh?

So, yeah…. This hour’s worth of material, apart from the two requisite power ballads (these guys really are still living in the early 90’s), is pretty monochromatic: it’s got a heavy groove with an even heavier distorted guitar layered on top creating the song-obscuring din of noise that mixer Andy Wallace loves so much. I like a few more colors in my rainbow and a touch of bass in my rock.

Still, there are only two truly bad songs (“Big Machine” and “You Got No Right”) and another that’s borderline bad (the hit power ballad, “Fall To Pieces”). The two mixers are really good, but even the verses of “Illegall i Song” are boring in their simple aggressiveness. It gets considered for mixes only for the great chorus which features the most inventive drumming on the album. And after the rest of the album is a pretty even spread of “good” to “meh,” with the band at times sounding a lot like Stone Temple Pilots and at others like Dirt-era Alice In Chains. Fans of Slash will be happy as his characteristically melodic Les Paul playing is, naturally, everywhere. On balance, it’s all a little bit more good than it is bad.

Finally, one more thing about Chinese Democracy. That free Dr. Pepper has to be the best part of this, right? I mean, one of the biggest rock bands of the past twenty years basically got mocked and dared into releasing their third album by a pop company. That’s awesome. So bravo, Dr. Pepper, for using your cavity- and obesity-causing syrup power for good. Even if the album sucks I’ll be able to wash it down with a free 20 oz. beverage, and we got a great piece of media history to go with it.

Rating:

Mixers: “Illegal i Song,” “Spectacle”
Keepers: “Sucker Train Blues,” “Headspace,” “Slither,” “Dirty Little Thing,” “Loving The Alien”
Filed Between: Velocity Girl (¡Simpatico!) and Billy Vera & The Beaters (By Request)

Finland is one of those countries where they put their famous artists on their money. Despite my respect for the ladies and gentlemen gracing our currency, I wish we put our great artists on our money. It’s hard to think of a more famous Finn than Sibelius, and he graces or graced the 100 mark note in Finland.

After listening to this, it’s hard to imagine there could have been any greater Finn ever, so I guess it’s appropriate that I can’t name any others off the top of my head. This double CD has his last four symphonies, one movement (“The Swan Of Tuonela”) from a larger piece based on Finnish mythology that is possibly his most famous work and contains possibly the most famous English horn solo in the canon, and a 20-minute tone poem written about the Finnish forest (Tapiola).

On first listen, Sibelius doesn’t quite fit into the radical mold of much of the 20th Century classical music I’ve been listening to lately. In fact, I think most ears accustomed primarily to popular music wouldn’t think twice about throwing it in with Beethoven and Mozart. Closer listening, however, reveals that, despite the conventional instrumentation and emphasis on tonality and thematic development, there are halting, unsure vacillations in the rhythm and a brooding angst underlying almost every minute of these pieces.

Sibelius, as the reputation of the Finns would suggest, suffered from severe loneliness, depression, and solitude, and naturally it comes through in his music. The third movement of the Fourth Symphony takes forever to do anything; themes are started, left incomplete, and then subside to the same theme emerging a bit differently or stand aside for a new theme altogether. Finally, at the 7:45 mark we get about 50 seconds of sublime beauty, but it falls back down in its bed to mutter away for several more minutes, making hearty attempts here and there but never quite becoming ambulatory. The final movement feels as if it was written by a man about to take his own life. It’s nine-and-a-half minutes of music falling apart, as if it can barely will itself to go on. Here we have a violin ostinato, there the winds pipe up for a brief moment. Things end in a sea of lukewarm entropy, everything having fallen apart.

Symphonies Five and Six are alternately Sibelius’ greatest symphony, depending on which one I’m listening to. The first movement of the Fifth is a masterpiece. At times it is bold, stately, fast, gripping… everything that the Fourth was not, the manic to the Fourth’s depressive. The Sixth is the controlled middle ground, healthy, and reaching for inspiration and guidance from the Overture to Wagner’s Lohengrin, one of my favorite pieces.

If the thought of a Finnish forest, especially during a long, dark winter, frigthens you, I don’t recommend listening to Tapiola, because your pants will be wet with “fear” before it’s over. From catchy but harmonically tricky thematic development at the start to total Wagner/John Williams-Darth Vader moments midway through to howling and screeching in the violins that would put the most abrasive David Lynch moments to shame, this is one of the darkest and greatest dark pieces in the history of music.

I appreciate honoring their artistic heroes, but there’s no way Finland can have a denomination high enough to warrant Sibelius’ image. They should just name their GDP after him.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: Symphony 4, Movement 1; “The Swan Of Tuonela;” Symphony 5, Movements 1 and 3; Symphony 6; Symphony 7, Movements 1-3; Tapiola
Filed Between: Shudder To Think (50,000 B.C.) and Silverchair (“Tomorrow”)

I saw Morphine once. It was St. Louis in the fall of 1994 and I was being loaded into the back of an ambulance. Long story.

Anyway, this is the band’s second album and probably their most well-known one. They had a couple of mid-level hits with it in the form of “Cure For Pain” and “Thursday.” The three-piece has an interesting instrumentation: a drummer, a two-string bassist and vocalist, and a saxophonist who hangs out on both the tenor and the bari. It’s a sound that is fresh and instantly recognizable; no other band sounds even close to Morphine.

It’s also the best thing they’ve got going for them. It works about half the time, and for the other half the interesting-ness can’t carry it through the low-key, repetitive songs. When it works, it’s accompanied by a killer emotional melody, like on “I’m Free Now” or “Candy,” and those tracks work great. There’s quite a bit of meh to go around, though, like on “A Head With Wings” or “Mary Won’t You Call My Name?,” two completely forgettable tracks.

Speaking of “Candy,” the best songs given female names are clearly those given “Candy.” You’ve got this one, which is the best track here, “Sex And Candy” by Marcy Playground (which actually might be a band that sounds remotely close to Morphine, now that I think about it), and the best song ever, Springsteen’s “Candy’s Room.”

The band’s not completely a one-trick pony, though. When they go away from the formula, putting the bass way down in the mix and replacing the saxes with a mandolin, you get “In Spite Of Me,” a quiet, whispery, contemplative piece that would have fit on Springsteen’s Nebraska, or at least on that album’s tribute, Badlands.

This kind of at-times-great and too-much-of-one-flavor vibe is what I remember when I added the band’s 1997 release Like Swimming to my collection, but I wasn’t reviewing here then, so I’m not completely sure. Regardless, it’s definitely the opinion of Morphine that’s currently getting solidified in MPL-land.

Rating:

Mixers: “I’m Free Now,” “Candy,” “In Spite Of Me,” “Thursday”
Keepers: “Buena,” “Cure For Pain”
Filed Between: Morning Becomes Eclectic and Morphine’s Like Swimming

It’s been 17 years since Type O Negative burst into our consciousness with Slow, Deep And Hard’s opening track, “Unsuccessfully Coping With The Natural Beauty Of Infidelity,” featuring the call-and-response “I know you’re f**king someone else/He knows you’re f**king someone else.” It’s kind of hard to believe it’s been that long, considering that they continue to pound out the exact same flavor of the gothic-doom-sludge-metal genre they basically invented in 1991. That was a compliment all the way through their fifth album, 1999’s World Coming Down (I skipped their sixth album in 2003), but it’s not anymore.

More impressive than their longevity and consistency, was the knowledge that with Type O you not only knew what you were going to get, but it was going to be heavy, catchy, funny, dark, and damned good, all at the same time. It’s damned near impossible to write from the same basic template for a decade and keep it interesting, but Type O did it for the 90’s. Unfortunatley, given that back catalog, there’s not a lot to recommend 2007’s Dead Again, as a full half of the album’s ten tracks will fall off of my DMP after posting this review.

The best stuff is actually when they get away from the proto-typical Type O style here. They’ve always incorporated tons of different styles in their music; it just happens to be the most compelling stuff on this album. The faster, thrash-influenced tracks like “Tripping A Blind Man” and “Some Stupid Tomorrow” increase your heart rate by several bpm, and the groove-y, bluesy tracks like “An Ode To Locksmiths” will loosen up your hips. The highlight, with a kickin’ backbeat and a wry take on the afterlife of dead-too-young rock stars is “Halloween In Heaven.”

Taken by themselves, the keepers and mixer here make a damned good 25 minutes. Unfortunately, their propensity for epic-ness, usually done so well, does them in in the remaining 52(!) minutes. The 14-and-a-half minute “These Three Things” is nearly an ode to Melvins for the first three minutes, with sustained, ringing guitar chords held together by spooky, echo-y drums, but it plods and drags and condemns (cheekily or sincerely, I can’t tell) practitioners of abortion to hell before bizarrely talking about how the “alien” Zion “shuns the son.” There are stretches that have me turning up the volume, but the band was not at all able to make every minute of this album as gripping as their past work. The good-stretches-but-too-long category applies to most of the non-keepers from Dead Again, including “September Sun,” notable for beginning almost identically to Mötley Crüe’s Home Sweet Home.

The production values are stellar, as always. When the band swings its heavy hammer down after a slow section, it’s an assault that I can’t believe I didn’t think of in my review of ISIS. “Tripping A Blind Man” adds beeps and bloops that sound like my phone is ringing but also integrate perfectly with the song. So the band is not completely relying on the same template, but they do so enough, and poorly enough, that you’re better off with their output from ten years ago.

Rating:

Mixers: “Halloween In Heaven”
Keepers: “Dead Again,” “Tripping A Blind Man,” “Some Stupid Tomorrow,” “An Ode To Locksmiths”
Filed Between: Type O’s “Everything Dies” single and U2 (October)

Here we have three piano pieces, two concertos (which are backed by an orchestra) and one solo piece, from the first third of the 20th century by two of that century’s most respected composers. Each piece has lengthy, incredibly technically demanding sections, and so Argerich is the real star here.

Prokofiev is quickly becoming one of my favorite composers. I loved Alexander Nevsky last spring and, as with that piece, I find his Third Piano Concerto (1921) to be the perfect blend of Romantic and 20th Century music. It has enough of the 19th century to be easily understood and emotionally gripping while including enough 20th century experimentation to be interesting and exciting.

Since Ravel was a French “impressionist” composer, I’ve always just assumed he was Debussy, Part Deux. I may eventually determine that to be the case, but his compositions here distinguish him from his countryman in my mind. The Piano Concerto in G, from 1932, could have been written by Gershwin, with its seamless blending of classical and jazz idioms. One recurring theme is, in fact, a direct quote from Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue from eight years prior, if im not mistaken. Horns wail out themes plaintively only to be swept away by the orchestra and piano. It’s so obvious when you hear it, but so few composers have done it. It is an absolute triumph and, in the present, an almost sad statement of what was missed from the general lack of combination of these schools of music.

Ravel’s other piece here, Gaspard de la Nuit, a setting for a poem by Aloysius Bertrand, is more like Debussy in that each movement paints an impression of some noun: water fairy, gallows, and goblin. There is less harmonic lushness and, as a result, an ultimately unsatisfying aspect to this piece. “Ondine,” the first movement, sounds like riplling reflections of water, but never seems to go far below the surface. I think its most unsoundly blemish, though, is in Argerich’s muddled interpretation: often times the melody seems to get lost in the blur of glissandi and rapid runs on the page.

Conductor Claudio Abbado is to blame for this as well in the piano concerti. I often find his tempi to be far too fast. The third movement of the Prokofiev is marked “Allegro ma non troppo” (quickly, but not too quickly). Abbado’s tempo is, however, definitely “troppo.”

Those flaws are not enough to take away from the technical brilliance displayed by Argerich, nor the compositional beauty of these pieces. On both of those counts, this is an excellent disc.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Non-keepers: Piano Concerto in G Major, Movement Three; Gaspard De La Nuit, “Scarbo”
Filed Between: Prince (Musicology) and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky/Scythian Suite (perf. Linda Finnie, Scottish National Orchestra, cond. Neeme Järvi)

[See?  Now you know why I had to put up this post...I couldn't lead with this review this morning. -Ed.]

According to Wikipedia, this is the greatest-selling album by a female artist of all time. More than anything by Madonna, Mariah Carey, Janis Joplin, or Aretha Franklin. Huynh. That’s surprising to me because I was under the impression that Jagged Little Pill was pretty universally scoffed at. But there it is at number 327 on Rolling Stone’s 500 list (two albums ahead of Sonic Youth’s masterpiece Daydream Nation, no less). I guess Morisette has Hootie disease, which is named after Hootie and the Blowfish and refers to an artist that becomes massively huge in a short amount of time, but after a little bit of reflection by the public is victim to such a severe backlash that it overshadows that time when they were huge. Of course, there’s no Hootie on that RS500 list (no Faith No More either…don’t get me started…).

I confess to being into “You Oughta Know” in the summer of 1995, but I always found the subsequent singles here (“Ironic,” “Hand In My Pocket,” etc.) awful. I think my attraction to that first single was its titillating lyrics and break-up rage. It fit me at 20. Marriage is one long suck-and-f**k fest, though, so now it takes more than movie theater blowjobs and fingernails down the back to rile me up, and the stalker-ish obsession in that song and on the bonus track “Your House” is far creepier now.

This will be one of the very rare discs where I don’t keep anything on my DMP. It’s not that every song is awful, it’s just that the ones that are tolerable still aren’t quite good enough to want to hear over and over again. “You Oughta Know,” “Right Through You” and “Forgiven” came the closest, but Morisette’s vocal stylings of singing some caricature of a cackling witch combined with the squeaky voice thing are a pretty big turn-off. Plus, half the thing is still played on the radio, so it’s not like I’ll never encounter it again.

All I’m going to say about this album’s most well-known single, “Ironic,” is these two things. First, due to the completely overblown semantic backlash, I now assiduously avoid using any form of the word “irony” at any time for fear of some kind of ridiculous smackdown. Second, I will always hear “death row pardon two minutes too late” as “death row hard-on….”

So I can listen to this in the background and not be completely disgusted, as it’s safe, but not interesting. It’s got its awful parts (like “Perfect,” “Head Over Feet,” “Ironic,” and good lord how does “Wake Up” get recorded, much less put on as the last listed track?), but it’s also got some parts of songs that are at least bordering on good. Still, one of the greatest 500 albums of all time? 60 spots better than Def Leppard’s Pyromania? I don’t get it…and it’s not like I’m missing something, because this is so straightforward that, besides a few f-bombs thrown in, this is basically a continuation of Morisette’s turn as a teen star in Canada.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: none
Filed Between: Monster Magnet (Dave Wyndorf interviewed by Sean Yseult of White Zombie) and Morning Becomes Eclectic

May the good Lord shine a light on you/
Make every song your favorite tune
- “Shine A Light”

Let’s get right down to brass tacks here. The Rolling Stones’ 1972 double album Exile On Main St. is widely regarded as their best album. Acclaimed Music (god that site gives me a hard-on) has it listed as number seven on its all-time top albums list.

But come on, that’s played. I don’t know whether it is or isn’t the band’s best, and it’s not an opinion I’m going to come to in the space of this review. What I’m really interested in getting at right here and now is which is the best of the four sides of this album. I mean, this has been debated by the world’s top music critics for, literally, like a minute now. The earliest reference to this debate I was able to find was late 2008.

Everybody seems to agree that the two five-song sides, sides one and three, are immediately out of the conversation, as that’s where the band put the songs where Jagger can’t quite stay on the mic, confusing anybody trying to follow that line in the music, as well as the harshest-sounding songs whose guitars are just too loud and abrasive to allow aural exploration of what seem like interesting keys parts beneath.

I have to agree with all of those critics on that point. “Rocks Off” and “Rip This Joint” are killer rockers and “Tumbling Dice” is one of the four contenders for best song on the album, but “Shake Your Hips” and “Casino Boogie” are roots experiments gone wrong. Side three is even worse, with only “Happy” and “I Just Want To See His Face” (a space-jam experiment gone right) getting kept and the other three tracks coming in at fine, but not worthy of the space they consume on my DMP.

So that leaves us with the two four-song sides, sides two and four, and for paragraphs and paragraphs, music critics have just not been able to determine the superior side. Since both sides have four songs, it allows us to compare song-by-song. “All Down The Line” is better than “Sweet Virgina,” so that’s a point for side four. Side two comes right back, though, with “Torn And Frayed” beating “Stop Breaking Down.” The third contest isn’t even close as “Shine A Light” crushes “Sweet Black Angel” to move side four back into the lead, but it’s short-lived as side two’s strongest entry, “Loving Cup,” is next and handily beats album closer “Soul Survivor.” So a 2-2 tie and serious methodology issues anyway isn’t helping. Moving on….

Now, on the one hand, side four seems to have the higher peaks, as it has two of the album’s four contenders for the album’s best song: “All Down The Line” and “Shine A Light.” However, side two is more evenly awesome from start to finish. It has an album’s-best-song contender in “Loving Cup,” as well as “Torn And Frayed,” the excellent, steel-guitared ode to a road-weary guitar-slinger performing night after night in some of the furthest corners of America imaginable, and the just-missed-mixer “Sweet Virginia.” “Sweet Black Angel,” about Black Panther Angela Davis is the weakest of the bunch.

And the fact that I can’t even pick a weakest song on side four (though it almost certainly comes down to two just-missed-mixers, Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down” and “Soul Survivor”) is a big part of why this critic is settling the debate once and for all: Exile On Main St. closes with its strongest side, side four.

Suck on that, rock critics. In just a few minutes I’ve solved the debate you’ve been having for a few more minutes.

Rating:

Mixers: “Rocks Off,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Torn And Frayed,” “Loving Cup,” “All Down The Line,” “Shine A Light”
Non-keepers: “Shake Your Hips,” “Casino Boogie,” “Turd On The Run,” “Let It Loose”
Filed Between: Rocket From The Crypt (Scream, Dracula, Scream!) and The Stones’ Some Girls

If you know one thing about Stravinksy’s ballet The Rite Of Spring it’s probably that at its 1913 debut in Paris it set off riots. Here’s a dirty little secret, folks, people loved to fucking riot in Europe at concerts and ballets in the 19th century and the early part of the last century. It happened all the fucking time. If you pick any piece out of the canon that debuted after the French Revolution, there’s probably a 50/50 chance that there was a riot at its premiere. (Aside: I don’t know why I’m swearing.)

But for some reason this story about the riot at The Rite is retold far more than than all the other riots put together. I don’t really know why that is, but I’ll make up shit because I like doing that.

So, I think it’s because when it’s heard today, either for the first time or the hundredth, it still sounds obnoxiously foreign yet innately familiar all at the same time. The Rite is completely different than everything that came before it, and very different from everything you’ve ever heard, and yet everybody immediately gets it.

Its rhythms are all completely unexpected, with syncopated accents appearing in no discernible pattern, yet it cuts right to the rhythm of the human body, mind, and soul. You feel its accents inside you, echoing the strongest emotions of your life as well as the Big Bang. You can’t predict when the next downbeat is coming, yet you can’t help but move to it. It’s thrown off the formalisms of common time and the artificial civility of the ballet that accompanies that and replaced it with something sinister and pagan within all of us. Every instrument is playing in a different meter, simultaneously, conjuring up the most excited, confused moments when our brain is scattered, racing, and torn between competing sets of desires.

Alternately ominous and beautiful, crystal clear in its dominance of your ear canal and bewildering in its presentation of so…much…information, The Rite leaves you gasping for air. Your mind will race, confused, and yet excited at the same time. One moment you’ll hear madness in the composition, and then it will quickly resolve to genius, and just when you think you’ve heard everything, like it can’t get any better, it does. You can’t keep up with this piece as it whisks you along at its own exhilarating pace. A nearly steady build right to the end, this is what a primal, hedonistic, 30-minute orgasm, delivered as only a true dom can, sounds like.

The premiere of The Rite is still talked about because we can still hear its echoes when we listen to it today. It’s still discussed because at that moment music changed…Stravinsky opened the door to a whole world of music that was immediate, obvious, and exciting, but had been unknown to us before that time. In my opinion, it’s the first piece of rock and roll ever written, and owes as much to its current state as native African music and its mutation, the blues (to take absolutely nothing away from those contributions to modern Western music, of course). Not only was it a music-changing, an art-changing, piece, it is a life-changing piece. I don’t care how you feel about classical music in general, you must hear this piece, and Obama is going to require it to be taught in high schools because it is that fucking important.

This album, featuring Stravinsky himself conducting The Columbia Symphony Orchestra, begins with Petrushka, a “burlesque,” kind of a ballet suite like The Rite, as far as I can tell, and it’s awesome as well. It’s got a few more dead spots than The Rite, but it probably stands up there at about four lunchboxes just by itself.

It blurs the line between reality, fantasy, and dream in the tale of a sometimes animate marionette named Petrushka who is treated cruelly, and eventually murdered, by his creator/owner/pupettmaster. More traditionally dancey and less radical than The Rite, Petrushka still features motifs obscuring other motifs in a way that Wagner couldn’t even quite bring himself to pull off and also features a brilliant sonic impersonation of the hustle and bustle of the early 20th century crowds that would hear its 1911 premiere.

Going backwards chronologically from right now, Stravinsky is the first composer you get to where you think, “Yeah, that guy is clearly a giant, one of the greatest composers of all time and head and shoulders above his contemporaries.” He was, and still is somewhat, a modern celebrity, conducting these recordings in 1960 and passing away in 1971. It’s been 95 years since the premier of The Rite, and the world is still reeling, still feeling its aftershocks. Someday composers may be willing to wade into this world and write in this style. For now, though, Stravinsky’s greatness is still too intimidating for anybody else to truly attempt to further his work. That would be a shame if what the maestro had left us weren’t so brilliant on its own.

Rating:

Mixers: The Rite, Part I: “Dance Of The Earth,” Part II: “Summoning Of The Ancients,” “Sacrificial Dance”
Non-keepers: Petrushka, Tableau I: “Russian Dance,” Tableau III: “Beginning,” Tableau IV: “Conclusion (Petrushka’s Death),” The Rite, Part I: “Adoration Of The Earth,” Part II: “Introduction,” “Mystical Circles Of The Young Girls”
Filed Between: Richard Strauss (Der Rosenkavalier perf. Te Kanawa, Rydl, Von Otter, Grundheber, Hendricks, orch. Staatsopernchor Dresden, cond. Haitink) and Sub Pop-200

You know what would be awesome? Less of this.

I was under the impression I liked Mocean (pronounced like “motion”) Worker based on his track on KMTT New Music Sampler 2005. Turns out he bores me to tears. This came out several years earlier and, whereas “Chick A Boom Boom” from that sampler was lighter and airier with more jazz and soul elements, this is darker, heavier, more synthethic, with more of a dance and techno feel. I’m assuming this difference, then, represents a career progression for him because man does this suck.

To be fair, this just wasn’t meant to be listened to except on ecstasy at a raging night club at 2:00 in the morning, and it is extremely rare that I experience even one of those things, much less all three at the same time, so Mocean Worker’s got his work cut out for him to win me over.

Still, dude. These songs don’t have to be six minutes long. You could really get everything out in about 90 seconds, which would make these ten tracks much more bearable since for the most part I find the first minute or so quite enjoyable. As it is, it’s just lay down some beats, quickly build up some layers, and put it on repeat while you go smoke a j. I mean, I know that’s the point with this techno dance stuff, but it doesn’t fly at MPL.

You know how boring this was? I had to turn on the NBA while I gave it its focused listen. It wasn’t boring enough, however, for me to actually watch the game. I just turned the damn thing on and then proceeded to ignore it. God the NBA sucks.

Anyway, I’m giving this an extra half-lunchbox because about half of the grooves are pretty cool, even if they go on way way way too long. There’s gotta be a way to do this in a way that’s interesting when sober, though. Vocals would be a start, like an Us3 or Soul Coughing thing, but then you don’t get played in clubs. So I guess it’s get played in clubs or get a good review on MPL. Seems like an easy choice to me.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: “Detonator,” “Times Of Danger”
Filed Between: Miscellaneous and Modest Mouse (The Moon & Antarctica)