Brad Sucks - Out of It

There aren't many things I like better than finding an artist or band I've never heard of whose music I totally dig. In the past two years or so I've been having that pleasure more and more often, thanks to the combination of iTunes sampling, Amazon's MP3 store, and the growing network of artists whose main sources of distribution are their own websites.

Jonathan Coulton is the model web phenomenon, of course, but I've also picked up on several other acts that appeal to my sensibilities, such as MC Frontalot and Brad Turcotte, AKA "Brad Sucks," a self-proclaimed "One-Man Band with No Fans," who is probably exaggerating on the latter part of that title. Or, at least, he should be, because his music is definitely worthy of fan attention.

I picked up his first album, "I Don't Know What I'm Doing," late last year, after hearing him in a collaboration with MC Frontalot called "Living at the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe" and following a link over to his site, where he has all of his music available for download and for self-priced purchase.

IDKWID is a fun album, with extremely consistent, high song quality, catchy beats, and a wry, self-deprecating humor that I found pretty appealing. Many of the songs, like "Overreacting" and "Fixing My Brain" manage to mix melancholy and black humor very adeptly. Brad has a voice that, along with his generally quirky style and penchant for throwing retro-sounding synthesizer tracks into his tunes, brings about an inevitable positive comparison to Beck. His Wikipedia entry lists his genre as "expermental pop," and I can't think of a label that's more apt.

This week, he released a new album, "Out of It," which I hardly managed to sample a few tracks from before buying for the suggested price of $10. It's an amazingly consistent and strong album, from the uber-catchy "Dropping out of School," to the glum but irresistable "Bad Sign" and "Total Breakdown." For an independent, self-distributed artist, both this album and its predecessor have great production values and an extremely consistent sound and quality. That consistency applies doubly to the quality of the songs themselves. I've listened to "Out of It" at least four times through and I'm still enjoying every song.

I strongly encourage anybody to take a minute or two and head over to Turcotte's site and, at the very least, listen to a few of the tracks. Download the free versions of the albums if you like them well enough, or, better, buy the higher-quality versions for whatever you think they're worth. To me, they were probably worth more than the suggested price that I did pay, and I'll be looking forward to his next release.

Nine Inch Nails - The Slip

Trent Reznor is stickin' it to the man. Now that he's a label-free artist, he's been giving stuff away (or selling it very cheap if you don't make it to his site during the free period). His new album, The Slip, is currently available as a free download.

The question is: Do you get what you pay for?

Thankfully, no. In fact, I prefer The Slip to its predecessor (2007's Year Zero) by a fairly wide margin. That may not be saying much, considering my rather "meh" response to Year Zero, but I paid for that album.

That's not to say that The Slip is a great album throughout. It isn't. Like every Nine Inch Nails album except Broken, it's very hit-or-miss, and filled with several tracks that sound suspiciously like Reznor was just messing around with a drum machine and a mixer. This kind of noodling may have fans somewhere, but it bugs the crap out of me.


The first single from the album, "Discipline," which Reznor released for free a short time before the whole album, is also the best track. I'd compare it favorably to "Only" and "The Hand That Feeds" -- the two best tracks from 2006's With Teeth.

"Echoplex" doesn't have the same kind of drive that powers "Discipline." Rather, it's a moodier song in the mode of The Downward Spiral. It still has a good beat and is pretty decent in its own right, however.

"Head Down" and "Demon Seed" are noisy tracks with weird time signatures (to my uneducated ear). They're more industrial-sounding than the stronger tracks on the album, and probably won't make single, but "Head Down" has a good chorus. The tweaky noise overlaying a lot of the track will likely turn non-fans of the genre off pretty quickly, though. "Demon Seed" keeps promising to break out into a bigger sound, but fails to deliver.

"Lights in the Sky" is a breathy piano-noodling song reminiscent of the classic, "Hurt." It doesn't soar nearly as high as that song, however, and is rather short for this kind of track.

The rest is mostly noise.

It's interesting (and maybe a little disappointing -- I'm not sure) that the newly-awakened political voice Reznor surprised everyone with on Year Zero has virtually disappeared. It seems strange to me that he could be so strident on an album last year and then drop it so completely, and I wonder if there wasn't a fan backlash of some sort that Reznor's responding to.

Bauhaus: Go Away White

"Wait, there's a new Bauhaus album?"

That's right, kids.

Twenty-two years or so after their last studio album, Peter Murphy, Daniel Ash, David J, and Kevin Haskins have managed to record one "last" album as Bauhaus. Some sort of bickering seems to have quashed any hopes we might have had for a supporting tour, but the album itself is a nice surprise (if you're clueless, like me, that is -- I'm sure their core fans knew this was coming out a long time ago).

Go Away White is a strange, but mostly positive entry in the Bauhaus catalogue. The music has a considerably more produced sound to it, which is probably inevitable. There's also a distinct tone to the music that is less raw than old school Bauhaus, with more than a hint of the music created in the interim by Ash and Haskins (as Tones on Tail), by the whole crew sans Murphy (as Love and Rockets), and by Murphy on his own solo albums.

The most remarkable and welcome aspect of the album is the fact that Peter Murphy's voice hasn't lost any of its power or character. The music is decent, but his voice stands out more than ever as the signature element of the band's sound.

The opening track, "Too Much 21st Century" is a kind of bluesy rock song with a simple but catchy bass line. "Adrenalin" is closer to traditional Bauhaus, with some trademark screechy guitar going on in the background. The drums on "Endless Summer of the Damned" are very evocative of early 80s goth punk, though they remind me more of Joy Division than Bauhaus for some reason. "Saved" is a sort of wailing novelty track that I'm not really crazy about, though it does build to a decently atmospheric creepiness. "Mirror Remains" is a sort of unsettling dirge condemning the kind of vanity that leads to self-destructive behavior (mainly anorexia and the like) parts of it are fairly funny, in a very, very black way. "Black Stone Heart" is another "produced" but recognizably Bauhaus tune, though it drifts into Love and Rockets territory a bit with some odd sound effects and synth. "The Dog's A Vapour" is another dirge, but it suddenly kicks into a more rock mode around the four-minute mark.

If you buy this album, I recommend the iTunes Plus version, which comes with two videos from Coachella 2005 -- most notably their unforgettable performance of "Bela Lugosi's Dead," wherein Peter Murphy was lowered upside-down to the stage from up in the rafters someplace like a bat and sang the whole song in that position. Both this one and "Dark Entries" which closed the set, are well-shot and surprisingly well-recorded.

I was lucky enough to be there for that show, and it was pretty amazing. Unfortunately, I can't quite find myself in the crowd shots.

Reasonable Facsimile

Yes, I have realized my lifelong dream: warbling into a microphone and fooling a computer into believing that I can sing.

Rock Band is quite possibly the best game ever.

I will leave the drumming and guitar playing to my cohorts Full Metal Ted and Ixtililton, however -- I have no time for those aspects of the game that actually require "rhythm" or "skill."

No, instead I will use my sort of half-assed mynah bird-like ability to mimic sounds, which seems to be enough to fool Rock Band quite handily at easy and medium difficulty. This is because the game does not notice whether you actually know the words, or can even read them off of the screen. No, all you need to do is match the pitch and timing.

You could be singing in Japanese, as long as you were hitting something approximating the right notes at the right time. It even shows you what pitch you're actually singing at, relative to what you should be hitting, so you can find your note.

That is why, contrary to all logic, the hardest songs to do well on, vocals-wise, are the punk songs and the irritatingly-syncopated Aerosmith song "Train Kept A-Rollin'."

(Speaking of Aerosmith: how is it possible that this man was left off of this list? I mean, seriously.)

So, anyway, our "band," "Reasonable Facsimile," isn't exactly sweeping Rock Band off its feet (ace drumming by FMTed notwithstanding), but we have managed to score a tour bus and win a band challenge against an "evil" rock band --- a victory right out of a cheap Hollywood version of Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas (which is an obscure Jim Henson holiday classic, notable mainly for the fact that the down-homey good guys lose to the scuzzy heavy metal stylings of the Riverbottom Nightmare Band).

We specialize in songs that aren't particularly challenging, amped up to "medium" difficulty when we're feeling daring. Our manager tells us that if we want to be World Tour material or get our own private jet, we're going to need to expand our repertoire beyond Nirvana's "In Bloom" and Weezer's "Buddy Holly," but, dammit, we have to play to our fanbase.

Plus "Blitzkrieg Bop" is really, really hard to sing, for some reason.

Random Rules II

It's that time again, kids! For lack of anything more inspired to write about, I'm gonna hit you all up for audience participation.

In case you forgot (or are new to the Random Rules thing I stole from the Onion AV Club), the rules are as follows:

Take your iPod or other MP3 player and do a shuffle that includes all the tracks on the device. Take the first 10, list them, and comment. One track per artist, and you can skip soundtracks and audiobooks if you choose. You can also take one "mulligan" and skip a single track you find too embarassing to describe (mention it at your discretion). Add a comment to this post with your list to let us know how much cooler you are than me.

Here are mine:

1) "Spade" - Marilyn Manson

Okay, justifying Marilyn Manson isn't easy, but the album this comes from, "The Golden Age of Grotesque," is probably their best, and this is one of the best songs on it. Hard rock, alternating between slow and moderate tempo, with a very effectively sinister tone. With the number of Manson tunes I have on my iPod, I'm surprised I didn't have more of them to choose from. Oh well, "Spade" will do.

2) "Waste it On" - Silversun Pickups

Silversun Pickups sound a lot like Smashing Pumpkins (who I hate), but I like them anyway. This isn't the best track off of the album ("Carnavas"), but it has a cool baseline.

3) "The One" - The Like

The Like is a girl band I bought a few tracks from because they were playing at Coachella the last time I went. Not bad. Kind of sound like The Pretenders to me, but less annoying. They ended up playing at Coachella while we were still in line to park.

4) "Ikea" - Jonathan Coulton

From the "Smoking Monkey" album. It's not his best song, but it's funny and clever. You can't really beat a song that features the lines, "Ikea: Just some oak and some pine and a handful of Norsemen/Ikea: Selling furniture to college kids and divorced men."

5) "Haven" - Flesh Field

Obscure industrial with a nice buildup. It sounds a fair bit like soundtrack music from The Matrix before the lyrics kick in, and then it sounds ... well, Flesh Field doesn't use excessive vocal distortion, but they have both male and female singers, which rarely works well for my ears. In their case, it works better than many.

6) "Ball of Confusion" - Love and Rockets

I forgot this was on my iPod. It's a good song if you haven't heard Love and Rockets lately, but it's a bit too plodding for my taste. Certainly not their best single ever, but that technically goes for every single they ever released as Love and Rockets, considering their entire ouvre as Bauhaus was better than anything they did without Peter Murphy.

7) "Doggie Tom" - Lords of Acid

This is one of my favorite Lords of Acid songs. It's got a fantastic drumbeat and is a very catchy song. Its limited popular appeal can probably be attributed to the fact that the subject matter is risque, to say the very least...

8) "Tentative" - System of a Down

I liked System of a Down for about a week. I really need to remove all System of a Down songs from my iPod.

9) "Right Here, Right Now" - Fatboy Slim

From his album, "Greatest Hits - Why Try Harder?" This song is cool background music, I guess. It has a cool beat, but, like many Fatboy Slim tunes, is incredibly repetitive.

10) "Roots Radicals" - Rancid

Yay! A punk song. Now I seem pretty cool, huh? Well, I would feel a lot cooler if my mulligan hadn't been "Uncle Noah's Ark" by the Wiggles. (I guess I can be thankful that it wasn't "Shake Your Tail Feather" by the Cheetah Girls. What can I say? I have two young daughters.)

Prevaluation

Radiohead - In Rainbows

When I heard about Radiohead going to the extreme of releasing their album on the internet with a "choose your own price" purchase plan ... well, I forgot about it for about a week. But then I remembered and went over to check it out at their website.

Now, I've never been a huge Radiohead fan, but I did recently buy a few tracks from lead singer Thom Yorke's solo album and liked them pretty well. I am, however, a huge fan of big artists helping us all to make record labels a thing of the past.

The interface on the site is very, very (very) simple. You don't even get to preview the tracks, like you might on iTunes or Amazon. I'm sure you could preview them somewhere by now, if you really wanted to, but I was on a mission.

After a few minutes playing around with a currency converter (the field for setting your own price is in pounds), I decided that showing my support by buying an album I might not like much was worth about ten bucks to me. I got a link to a zip file, downloaded it, and added the resulting MP3s to iTunes (not without a certain pleasant feeling, as they are DRM-less.)

Then I gave the album a listen, and the first two tracks were pretty encouraging. "15 Steps" has a neat sound and was pretty listenable, despite Yorke going a bit warbly on the vocals, and "Bodysnatchers" is a respectable scratchy rock song, even. Unfortunately, the next four or five tracks didn't really interest me much. They're kind of laid back and unmemorable.

The album picks up a bit in the last two songs or so. "House of Cards" is still laid back, but it's a bit more interesting than the mid-album lull. "Jigsaw Falling into Place" is another rock song, though it's a lot cleaner and not quite as much fun as "Bodysnatchers."

And that's it, really. Three or four songs I'd listen to, and five or six I'd probably skip. In my book, that makes it a decent but not exceptional album. I've certainly paid more than ten dollars for albums that weren't anywhere near as good, but I've also heard better.

Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm

Yesterday afternoon I happened to be looking at Jonathan Coulton's website. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, since I subscribe to the RSS feed that would (in theory) alert me to any upcoming shows in my area. I had clicked over to his site from the link over there -->, and was just browsing when I noticed an entry about upcoming shows. My reaction:

"Oh, he IS going to play in L.A."

"Wednesday, September 12th... today's Wednesday ... September 12th."

"Shit."

At any rate, I frantically called up a couple of friends and convinced them to come with me to the Paul Gleason Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Finding the venue was rather harder than I had anticipated, considering the link from Coulton's site led to Ticketmaster, who thoughtfully provided the wrong address.

Thank you, Ink Gorilla, for arriving early enough to call me and tell me that 6250 Hollywood Boulevard is actually a parking lot. Luckily, Ixt had his iPhone with him and, with the speed of a very slow web connection, was able to deduce the actual location of the venue (6520 Hollywood Boulevard as it turned out).

After purchasing our tickets and heading inside, we went immediately to the refreshment stand. Ixt casually mentioned that, should I want to meet Jonathan Coulton, I might want to walk over to the T-Shirt and CD table, where he was standing talking to the woman making the sales.

I did, and Mr. Coulton was kind enough to take a picture with me. Unfortunately, that picture was taken with Ixt's flash-less iPhone in a very poorly-lit room:

But, thanks to the miracle of computers (and my amazing skills):

Okay, so it still looks bad. It was considerably better than my camera would have been able to capture, however, because I forgot it at home.

Paul and Storm, the opening band, were surprisingly entertaining and funny. Both Ixt and Ink Gorilla purchased their CD (I spent my remaining cash on JoCo T-Shirts for me and the wife). Their set included a "tribute" to Randy Newman, demonstrating just how much better The Lord of the Rings and The Passion of the Christ would have been had Newman contributed to the soundtracks.

During an intermission in which dozens of people waited for a single, non-functional bathroom while warily eying a rather stout cockroach.

Hey, look, Jonathan Coulton!

Coulton's set was fantastic. There were a few songs out of his repertoire that I doubted he'd play, but he hit just about every one of my favorites.

He opened alone onstage with the fan favorite "Skullcrusher Mountain" and followed it with another few songs. My personal favorite Coulton tune was one of them: the Plimpton ode, "A Talk with George."

Before long, though, he had Paul and Storm back onstage to help out with several songs, including "Creepy Doll," the ever-popular "Code Monkey," and a truly great cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back." The latter two songs are probably his two most popular tunes thus far. Paul and Storm looked like they were having a particularly good time backing him up on "First of May," but, really, who wouldn't?

Another highlight of the show was a live performance of Coulton's tune "Flikr," named after and the website that allows you to post your personal photos to the web. It was accompanied by a slide show of the random pictures from the site that are the basis of the song:

It's no exaggeration to call "Flickr" multimedia brilliance.

Coulton finished the regular portion of the show with the audience-participation favorite "Re: Your Brains," during which we all groaned out the chorus of "All we Want to do is Eat Your Brains!" in our best zombie voices. During a short encore, Paul and Storm joined him for two more songs, closing out the show with a rousing rendition of Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline."

The show was a lot of fun and I'm glad that whatever random impulse had me reading his page yesterday didn't occur today instead, otherwise we'd have missed out.

If you don't know his work and would like to check it out, you can (net traffic willing) visit his store here. At the moment, it seems to be VERY SLOW, but I was listening to songs on it yesterday. You can listen to the entire song there, as well as buy MP3s by the track or by the album. A lot of his stuff is available via iTunes as well, but, of course, you only get 30 second samples, there.

Random Rules Thanks and Skinny Puppy

Thanks to all who participated in my Random Rules iPod audience participation thing.

If you haven't yet, click on the link and give it a shot. You can also read other folks' responses in the comments section for that post. (And, for the record, I do love my wife, despite the first track that came up on her iPod.)

In other news, I spent a fair amount of time last night (or maybe the night before--I'm not 100% sure) trying to write a review of Skinny Puppy's album Mythmaker. I realized, after about 500 words worth of trying to explain who the hell Skinny Puppy even is to all but two of you, that the only helpful thing I'd accomplished was formulating the following theorem, which I call "Morgue's Law of Industrial Music." To wit:

"If it sounds like Skinny Puppy, but it isn't, it probably sucks."

The corollary to that law would be:

"Even if it is Skinny Puppy, you'll probably hate it."

Because, really, to most people, saying you like Skinny Puppy is pretty much shorthand for, "I often mistake anger, hate, and noise for music," if they even know who the hell Skinny Puppy is.

That said, Mythmaker continues a trend in Skinny Puppy music that largely carries over from "Oghr," the side project of two of its members: it's less annoying and more accessible than their previous work. On their last album, I really only liked a song or three. This one ups that to four or five.

At this rate, I might like an entire Skinny Puppy album by 2012.

(If they don't lose any more members to heroin overdoses before then, that is.)

More Album Reviews

Rather than buying a bunch of several-years-old music to review again, I figured I'd just see what I've bought this year that was actually released this year, and review that instead. So, here goes:

Judgement - VnV Nation
The seventh album from techno/industrial/dance icons Ronan Harris and Mark Jackson is fairly stock VnV Nation, with a couple of decent standout tracks and several less interesting pieces.

"The Farthest Star" is a solid song; not terribly revolutionary in VnV's catalog, but very listenable. "Testament" hearkens back to the hard-driving beat of "Chrome" back on the "Matter + Form" album and is probably the best track on the album -- it's not as hard as "Chrome," and it's not quite as good, either. "Nemesis" tries to go the same way, but it's not as successful.

"Illusion" is probably the best example of a bad VnV Nation track. It's a slow and melancholy track where Harris, from London via Dublin, drones out some very strangely and awkwardly phrased lyrics to no particular meter.

The world is just illusion trying to change you.
Being like you are
Well this is something else, who would comprehend?
But some that do, lay claim that
Divine purpose blesses them
That's not what I believe, it doesn't matter anyway

I'm not sure if this is just improvising lyrics to go with the music or what, but it really hits my ear all wrong. And he's just so damned earnest in his nonsense, that it's difficult for me not to be annoyed.

VnV Nation is decent when they have a good beat to drive their songs, but precious few of their slow tracks are listenable, mainly because the nonsense lyrics are thrown into sharp relief.


Enjoy the Fall - Edge of Dawn

I got this album after a track showed up on my iTunes recommended for you list. That list is usually laughably bad at predicting music that I might like, but in this case, it did very well by me indeed.

Edge of Dawn is a sort of evolutionary project, I gather. It started as a solo project by German industrial musician Mario Schumacher in 1998, but didn't really come together until 2005, when Schumacher got together with Frank Spinrath, who is also the lead singer of the industrial act Seabound. After a couple of EPs, Enjoy the Fall is their first full-length release.

Unlike the vast majority of German-to-English EBM/Techno/Industrial/Whatever music, the tracks on Enjoy the Fall don't trip up by presenting serious awkward phrasing with intensely serious delivery. It reminded me a bit of another German band called Wolfsheim which also does the German-to-English transition quite well, though Edge of Dawn is considerably less poppy than Wolfsheim.

Tracks like "Black Heart," "Damage," and "Elegance" are pretty straightforward EBM tunes, with good beats but no real surprises. "Isolation" starts out a bit like a Nine Inch Nails track, but turns fast and energetic rather than fast and noisy.

"Chamber Six" has a musical style very reminiscent of recent Skinny Puppy, but without the massive vocal distortion that SP still hasn't managed to get away from.

"Pray for Love" and "Beauty Lies Within" are pretty good approximations of what a collaboration between Roxy Music and Frontline Assembly would have sounded like (better than you'd expect).

All in all, if you like non-trance techno music, Enjoy the Fall is a very good album that, like most music of its type being made these days, sounds a few years older than it really is. There's nothing particularly evolutionary here, but there's a lot of good stuff.

Random Rules

Okay, time for some Audience Participation. I would humbly request that anyone who actually reads this AND has an iPod (which is probably most or all of you), partipate by adding your own entry in the comments.

The Onion AV Club has a segment they do called "Random Rules," in which a celebrity guest of the week hits "Shuffle Songs" on their iPod and then list the first 10 songs, whatever they happen to be, and gives a brief blurb on why that song is on their iPod.

For this particular activity, I'd like to do a similar thing, with the following ground rules:

• You must use only "Shuffle Songs" -- i.e. no playlists.
• You may exclude any purely-instrumental soundtrack tracks that come up, if you wish.
• You may have ONE "mulligan," though I do not encourage it.
• You should avoid the temptation to exclude embarassing songs -- they are almost invariably the most entertaining to read.
• If the song itself isn't particularly interesting, talk about the album or the artist.
• You can skip a second track by the same artist, if you want.
  

With that in mind, here goes...

1: Chains, by Project Pitchfork
From the album "Kaskade"
Project Pitchfork is one of those German industrial bands that would be a lot better if they would stick to singing in German. It's not that you can't understand the lyrics in English -- the accent isn't too bad at all. It's just that they, like most native speakers of German, don't really grasp English idiom very well, and end up with awkward translations like, "This thing isn't human, but it's made out of them," which, while amusing, kind of kills the otherwise ominous coolness of their music.

2: Dancing Barefoot, by MC 900 Foot Jesus
From the Album "Welcome to my Dream"
I'm very sad that MC 900 Foot Jesus kind of dropped off the radar in the mid-90's. He was a very talented guy who mixed a sort of jazz/industrial/hip-hop sound that made for some amazing listening. "Welcome to my Dream" was by far his best album, and featured the uber-cool songs "Killer Inside Me," "The City Sleeps," and "Adventures in Failure."

3: Mr. Brightside, by The Killers
From the Album "Hot Fuss"
I really don't have much to say about this song. It's pop, you've heard it, and it doesn't really mean that much to me. It is one of the better Killers songs I've heard, but I only have about 1 1/2 of their albums.

4: Horror Show, by The Birthday Massacre
From the Album "Violet"
As "interesting" as their name is, The Birthday Massacre is actually a fairly normal band, sounding a lot like a mix of Missing Persons and Garbage. Horror Show is one of the better tracks on the album.

5: Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun, by The Beastie Boys
From the Album "Paul's Boutique"
My favorite song from what is often described as the best Beastie Boys album. I would tend to agree with that description. I'm not a big rap fan, but the Beasties will always have a place in my heart.

6: That Calls for a Wilhelm Scream, by Possible Oscar
A Web Download
Two rap songs in a row. That's odd. Well, this one is pretty much a joke song, and is very, very funny at that. It's the accurate history of the famous "Wilhelm Scream" (you'd know it if you heard it) that gets featured in virtually every war, action, or sci-fi movie that gets made in Hollywood, offering advice on how to use it in your everyday life.

7: Kingdom Come, by Coldplay
From the Album "X&Y"
I saw Coldplay at Coachella in 2006 (I think), having previously heard very little of their music. Considering that, at the time, they were supposed to be one of the biggest bands on earth, that's pretty indicative of my separation from pop culture. At any rate, they were quite good in concert and this song, as fate would have it, is my absolute favorite. This is largely because Chris Martin mercifully refrains from going falsetto at any point in it. Those falsetto bits in other Coldplay songs are the main reason my interest in them waned pretty quickly after Coachella.

8: Animal, by Front242
From the Album 05:22:09:12 Off
Front242 is a Belgian industrial band who kind of peaked in the heyday of industrial music with the album 06:21:03:11 Up Evil (a pair of very stupid album names, to be sure). This album was the follow-up, released in the same year (1993), and was a general disappointment. It had decent beats, but only one interesting single (Happiness). Generally, the fact that the preceding album had kicked so much ass made this one's mediocrity particularly hard to take, especially if you were a diehard fan of the band, which I surely was.

9: mOBSCENE, by Marilyn Manson
From the Album "The Golden Age of Grotesque"
Yeah, well. It's Marilyn Manson. I don't think I'm going to change any minds about him in a paragraph. I will say that I own several Manson albums, and this one is by far the best. He's an entertaining rocker, there are good, hard-rock songs on this album, and I dig it.

10: Thunder Kiss '65, by White Zombie
From the Album "La Sexorcisto: Devil Music vol. 1"
The object of near constant ridicule by Beavis and Butthead, White Zombie was actually an awesome metal act. I think Rob Zombie has yet to do anything solo nearly as good as his days with White Zombie. Thunder Kiss '65 is a blisteringly cool song inspired by and interspersed with samples from Night of the Living Dead.


Okay, that's my 10. One mulligan ("Electric Gutiar" by Fluke, because I didn't really feel like talking about it) and two skipped score tracks (one from "Requiem for a Dream" and one from a video game.) Now it's your turn.

Album Reviews

Give Up - The Postal Service

You may ask yourself, "Why is he reviewing an album that came out in 2003? Is he that hopelessly behind the times?"

The answer is, of course, "If you're so cutting edge, get your own damn blog."

It only takes about one second for the average listener to misidentify The Postal Service as Death Cab for Cutie. This is an understandable mistake, since they share a singer and sound virtually identical. I'm only moderately familiar with DCfC, but what I've heard is very catchy a few times and then kind of annoying after that.

The Postal Service is most famous for the song "Such Great Heights," which was covered on the Garden State soundtrack by some hippie and both the TPS version and the hippie version have been featured in numerous commercials since then. This is too bad, because it's really a pretty good song. In fact, the whole album is pretty good, if a bit twee at times.

TPS, by contrast, has grown on me through several plays. The album is a mix of mild electronica and the same sort of cheerful-even-when-singing-depressing-lyrics sound of DCfC. The most notable feature of nearly every song is that it sounds exactly like the moment in a movie at which the protagonist realizes he really needs to turn this damn car around and go back to tell the girl he's not leaving after all. That's not to say the songs sound the same, because they do vary a bit, but the tone is somehow precisely evocative of that movie moment.

Highlight tracks:

• "Such Great Heights," though it may bug you on repeat plays.
• "Nothing Better," a weird duet in which the guy is singing about how great their life will be together and the woman is trying to calmly explain why he needs to move so she can get out the door.
• "We Will Become Silhouettes," in which (as far as I can tell), they cheerfully sing about a nuclear or biological disaster.
• "Clark Gable," in which the singer attempts to determine whether true love can strike like it does in the movies by making a movie of him kissing his ex-girlfriend while they pretend to still be in love.

White Noise - Alpinestars

Okay, this one's a little more current. No, wait. Apparently it's from 2002, according to Wikipedia. Thanks, iTunes -- you have destroyed my street cred.

I actually picked up this album by accident. I was reading reviews of an album by a German electronica band named Seabound and someone mentioned something called "White Noise" that they didn't acknowledge, made under a different name. I assumed that this electronica album was it, and a few iTunes sample bites made it sound pretty good.

Well, as far as I can tell, Alpinestars has nothing to do with Seabound. That said, the album is really very enjoyable. It's a mix of electronica and rock, with pretty noticeable disco influences. It has decent, non-industrialized vocals and some great beats.

Highlight tracks:

• "Nusex City," kind of a funky dance tune with fairly repetitive lyrics, but catchy.
• "Burning Up," a less funky track with a much moodier sound -- mostly bass and piano. The lyrics are pretty much nonsense, but they work.
• "Smash It Up," which sort of sounds like latter-day Tears for Fears.

The Bravery - The Bravery

Now we're talking! 2005, baby! I'm only two years behind the times, now. At this rate, I might be hip by 2013.

The Bravery is the debut album of the band by the same name. They are a sort of synth-rock band from New York and, yes, they sound a bit like The Killers. I hear echoes of the "Muse sounds like Radiohead" arguments of a while back, mainly because I like The Bravery better than The Killers, just as I like Muse better than Radiohead.

Like the average Muse album, The Bravery is a fairly eclectic selection of songs. At times, you can hear a bit of the band's ska background (mainly in "No Brakes"), while most of the other songs, like "Tyrant" and "Public Service Announcement," have a distinctly 80's New Wave sound. The latter song features the entertaining lyric:

Stop, Drop, and Roll.
Stop, Drop, and Roll.
Stop, Drop, and Roll.
You're on Fire!!

That made me laugh quite a bit, in a good way.

Other Tracks of note:

• "The Ring Song," in which the singer wonders when a nice girl will make an honest man out of him.
• "An Honest Mistake," in which the band does a damn good job of channeling Duran Duran.