Archive for the 'Music Review' Category

Music Review: ExHuman by Die Form

Hmmmm. This album cover reminds me of Madonna’s Like a Virgin cover. Am I wrong? It looks like music reviews are going to become a regular feature here, because I keep finding things I want to write about. I was familiar with the band Die Form from the ’80s. They are a French electronic band with a German name (“die form” in German means “the shape” (big surprise there)). Turns out, according to the somewhat brief Wikipedia page for the band, it is a multilingual play on words.

My rat army raided a used record store recently and brought me back a bunch of music, including some Skinny Puppy (Mythmaker), The Tiny, ohGr (Undeveloped), Black Angels (Phosphene Dream), and, at long last, the eponymous Matson Jones album. I’ve been listening to these albums for a couple of weeks, and this is one of the albums I keep going back to.

Scene from Metropolis by Fritz Lang

Picture the Fritz Lang movie Metropolis in your head. All the mechanisms, the light and dark, the steam, the architecture, the workers, and the robot. Now imagine some people in that movie going to the theater. This album is what music would sound like in the movie Metropolis. (Later note: Darn. Looks like I’m not the first one to have this idea.)

Ah! Brigitte Helm!

The album presents a dark, evocative soundscape. Lyrics are harshly whispered by a man or sometimes sung by a woman. My favorite track on the album, Hypnogramme, features singing that has been cut up and put back together again in jarring, mildly annoying ways that make my brain tingle. A monster can imagine a flapper ingenue in flight through a dark forest, watched by countless owls. Or something. The “hit” on this album (as indicated by Pandora) is Chaos Theory. One song in particular sounds like it came straight off of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, which was practically all I listened to for most of 1998.

The painful thing about music like this is that a lot of bands have done this kind of thing so horribly. I don’t know from experience, but I can only imagine that it takes a lot of careful work to pull it off and not sound like a bunch of people you might find in your back yard wearing capes and way too much eyeliner.

Here’s my diabolical plan for their future. I’m totally serious and I’m not saying this to make fun of anybody. I love Lily Allen. So I want Lily Allen’s people to contact Die Form and I want them to make an album together. I want Lily Allen to sing whatever poison or love she feels like projecting that day, and I want Die Form to run her crisp British vocals through their brand of Gibbytronix, and assemble a dark movement to frame them. After the album goes platinum, they can all send me a check for my consulting fee. Thank you in advance, future.

In the meantime, I suggest you give this album a spin. It’s either going to annoy the hell out of you, or you’ll really dig it. I think it’s pretty great.

Exhuman – Die Form – 2006 – Metropolis Records

Posted July 12, 2011 at 7:43 am in Music Review with Tags: creepy, dystopian, erotic, movie, music, Science Fiction. See 0 Comments

Music Review: Jagged by Gary Numan

Yes that’s Gary Numan looking like a thug there. There’s always been this slightly off-putting vibe about Gary Numan. Am I right, or am I wrong? Maybe thug fits the guy a little bit. Before I talk about Numan, unfortunately, I feel the need to complain about Pandora.

I’ve been using Pandora for a couple of months to try and track down new music. Whenever I get some time in my coffin, or have a serious period of digging to get through, I put Pandora on my iPhone and dial up some tunes. The most annoying thing about Pandora? They only play the hits, and often they’ll only play one song from any given artist. So you might get excited that Pandora is playing an obscure artist, but don’t get THAT excited, because you’re only going to hear the one song by that artist. That’s really annoying. Can we talk? Pandora isn’t supposed to be a music regurgitation service, it’s supposed to be a music discovery service. I can’t seem to get it to change its ways. Anybody with some advice can chime in on the comments, please.

OK back to Gary Numan and Jagged. As I was saying, Pandora has this bad habit of only playing the hits. On Jagged, that song is Halo. It’s a cool song, and when Gary Numan popped up on Pandora with a song off of an album released in 2006, I was kind of excited. I’ve been a Numan fan for a long time. But mostly his first handful of albums: Tubeway Army, Replicas, The Pleasure Principle, and Dance. I have to confess that in the intervening years I had lost track of Numan, and he was releasing albums the whole time.

Some fan I am.

So let’s talk about the album. The rest of the album is interesting, but I have mixed feeling about it. For one thing, fans of Gary Numan will know that his lyrics are legendary for being overwrought and melodramatic. With Jagged, Numan has turned that up to 11. I think that the only artist alive who I want to hear singing about his black heart is Robert Smith. OK so we got that out of the way. The other problem I have with this album is that it sounds like what would happen if Peter Gabriel did The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails. It’s got the atmospheric industrial sound of Downward Spiral with the world beat thing that Gabriel is known for. Throw in some death metal guitar chops here and there and you’ve got Jagged. OK OK I’m generalizing in a criminal way here, but…

Am I the only one who remembers reading that Numan got arrested for menacing people on a subway with a baseball bat or something? All I can come up with is him being arrested in India. Googling for this arrest brought up a page that claims Numan was diagnosed with Aspergers in 2001.

Back to the album. I’m still a big fan of Halo, but found the rest of the album disappointing. I think that one of the things a person looks for in new music is NEW. And there is something distinctly old about Jagged. It hits a sweet spot that I was really into in the middle of the ’90s, and maybe hits it too well. Someone with different tastes in music might think differently, but once I started hearing the Peter Gabriel and Nine Inch Nails thing, it became almost impossible for me to hear Numan, which is too bad.

Buy Jagged on Amazon

Gary Numan stuff on eBay

Posted May 25, 2011 at 9:50 pm in Music Review with Tags: creepy, dystopian, music. See 0 Comments

Insect Poetry – Share This Place

I’ve covered in this space how purchasing albums based on songs heard on Pandora can be risky. The problem being that Pandora tends to share the hits. (I find this surprising, but that’s a discussion for another time.) And yet, I keep buying whole albums with the hopes of finding more good music. And we have our next album that isn’t suffering from this problem: Share This Place: Stories & Observations by Mirah and Spectratone International.

It bears mentioning that this album does have the twin used CD warnings: a) There are a lot of copies for sale used. and b) Many of these copies are bargain-bin cheap. I usually avoid albums like this, and it was only the strength of their song, “Love Song of the Fly” that goaded me into purchasing it.

Like the rest of the songs on the album, “Love Song of the Fly” is sung from the point of view of an insect. In this case, a housefly. The fly isn’t expressing love for another fly. Instead, it is singing the praises of its human host, and bemoaning the cruel treatment it receives in return. The singing is sweet and clear, and the music is jazzy world music flavored. Heavier on the jazz, usually, but with strains of folk music or Latin music mixed in. People who cannot stand accordion music will want to avoid this, because there is a lot. There is also a lot of cello and guitar on the album.

The lyrics are brilliant. The insects sing poetically about the advantages of having six legs, communicating with chemicals, bio-luminescence, shedding skins, and even what life is like gestating in a ball of dung. Sings the dung beetle larvae:

My mother made for me this pear
A perfect womb, a mottled lair
Where I will grow and eat my share
Of pastry rich beyond compare

The vocabulary is splendid, and the subject matter is approached with a sly but very frank wit. This helps prevent the album from seeming like a bunch of Shel Silverstein songs, luckily. Sadly, it is not without flaws. The second half of Luminescence wants to play like a swinging jazz number, but singer Mirah doesn’t seem up to the task. She can’t seem to find the rhythm. Or something. On the plus side, it comes with a little booklet containing all the lyrics.

Of course, it’s hard to find an album where every single song is awesome. At worst, Share This Place will make your index finger itch for the fast forward button once or twice. At best, it will transport you to the experience and poetry of insect life, where you can forget your woes, trundle around on many legs, spray noxious toxins out of your abdomen, or stretch your wings and recall your favorite instars.

Posted April 21, 2011 at 10:06 pm in Music Review with Tags: fairy tales, insects. See 0 Comments

Music Review – Songs About Teeth by Cake Bake Betty

This is another band I discovered through Pandora in my search for new music for my ailing music collection. Unfortunately, Pandora has this problem where it only plays the hits over and over. So once again, we have an album with some really amazing songs on it, but also some not-so-amazing songs. And in the case of this album, the not-so-amazing songs are bad. Like folk singer at a piano bad.

The good news is that the good songs are awesome. As the name of the band would imply, the band features female vocals by the cake baker herself, who also plays piano. The vocals are sweet and melodic. Many of the songs are accompanied by bass, cello, violin, and other instruments.

You can’t look at this album cover without suspecting that the subject matter is going to be off the beaten path, and thankfully it is. The lyrics can be hard to follow, but topics include people being eaten, teeth, bones, fingers (see a pattern here?) and other topics suitable for fairy tales. The not-so-good songs mentioned above are pretty straight-forward emotion-filled ballads like you expect from any number of other piano-playing women. In particular, “Dear Mother” and “Brother” are like that. The enticingly-titled “Spine Song” is also sweet and earnest in presentation, and ultimately disappointing.

On the plus side, “One by One”, “64 Little White Things”, and “Doves” are deliciously weird. The least straight-forward song on the album is “Bears”. Bears is atmospheric and experimental. Cake Bake Betty pulls out the unsettling electronic drone and leans on a creaky screen door throughout. The song doesn’t get into the zone of orchestra-crashing-down-elevator-shaft-backwards a’la Corpses as Bedmates, but it is rigorously unsettling and very listenable. Everybody on the Amazon page compares Cake Bake Betty to the Dresden Dolls (yawn), but I like Cake Bake Betty most when they resemble Brian Eno around Here Come The Warm Jets. A little goofy and playful, but also menacing at the same time.

I love the lyrics to “Bears.”

Bears
There are bears,
In the woods.
Come and get me.
Come and get me.
There are bears,
In the woods.
Come and get me.
Come and get me.
Do as good bears should
Come and get me.
Come and get me.
There are bears,
In the woods.
Come and get me.
Come and get me.
Martha
Martha

Cake Bake Betty – Songs About Teeth – 2005 – Infinity Cat Recordings

Posted February 2, 2011 at 11:49 pm in Music Review with Tags: creepy, dystopian, erotic, fairy tales, music, psychopaths. See 3 Comments

Music: Welt by Ohgr

Recorded in 1995 and finally released in 2001, the album Welt is another gem I recently discovered via Pandora. Regular readers will remember that I’ve been really depressed about the sad state of my music collection. I’ve listened to about everything a million times. Welt isn’t exactly new. In fact, it sounds a lot like it was recorded in the mid-nineties. For example, it sounds a lot like Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land or Pigface’s remix album Below the Belt. So yes, it sounds a lot like hard Electronica from the mid-nineties. Seeing as how the band was co-formed by Skinny Puppy’s Nevik Ogre, it also has the other foot very firmly in goth-industrial music.

I’m actually kind of amazed that I hadn’t heard of this album or band before. It’s not like I wasn’t listening to music at that time. I’m actually trying to remember what I was up to in 2001. Let’s see… Zero 7, Radiohead (Amnesiac)… Marilyn Manson’s Holy Wood came out in 2001, and so did The Knife’s debut album. Mmmmmm. The Knife. Finally, Jill Tracy’s awesome and amazing score for F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, Into the Land of Phantoms, came out in 2001. If you haven’t checked that album out, I suggest you go give it a listen right now. NOW! I’ll wait for you to come back.

So you see, it wasn’t like I slept through 2001. At the same time, Welt definitely does sound like something kind of old, so maybe I missed it because my attention was focused elsewhere. Music fans whose tastes run on the dark side will find the album almost too comfortable. In particular the first track, wAteR, could have been played in any goth/industrial nightclub from any time in the last 30 years. It is dark and rather danceable. The second and last tracks of Welt are also strong. The beats are compelling. The electronics get into that delicious Pigface realm of borderline unlistenable. The lyrics are mostly delivered in Gary Numan deadpan sing-song. And yes, they have that Skinny Puppy paint-a-picture thing going on with the lyrics.

Sadly, the album isn’t particularly solid. Out of the eleven tracks, I think that three are really awesome. Four are aiming at something specific but not really hitting the mark, and to me the remaining four feel a lot like filler. I still think that Welt is a good effort and I’m not sad to have it in my collection. I’m also grateful to have something new to listen to, even if it’s old-new. I’m planning to check out Ohgr’s other two releases, Sunnypsyop
(2003) and Devils In My Details (2008). There are also some tracks up for listening at the official Ohgr band site, The Collidoscope (what an awesome pun). Check it out.

Posted January 16, 2011 at 9:26 pm in Music Review with Tags: 1990s, creepy, electronica, goth, music. See 0 Comments

Archive for the 'Music Review' Category

Music Review: ExHuman by Die Form

Music Review: Jagged by Gary Numan

Insect Poetry – Share This Place

Music Review – Songs About Teeth by Cake Bake Betty

Music: Welt by Ohgr

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