Coldfinger is back (sort of)

So, I am a big big big fan of Portuguese/UK electronica outfit Coldfinger, and it looks like thir lead singer, Margerida Pinto, will be putting out a jazzier, more organic solo album out.* You can download a zipped legit excerpt here.

The group itself may record another album in the next year, which is great seeing as they have the perfect blend of the best elements of groups like Portishead, Leftfield, and 60 Channels. If you can find any of their releases, consider yourself fortunate and pick those puppies up.

* in portuguese

CCM doesn't always suck.

I am a large advocate of not listening to CCM (Contemporary Christian Music), basically because 99.9% of it follows a simple premise: Get a sample of the top 20 bands doing well in the secular realm, then half-assedly do a knuckle-drag impersonation of them, but with cookie cutter Kumbayah lyrical content. Its utterly repetitively vapid and cheese-dipped production earmarks are so easy to spot its a wonder why the whole genre hasn't become the Pentacostal equivalent to Weird Al Yankovic style remakes. Wait a minute, it is.

Every once in a while, something great happens though, like King's X, but that is a complete anamaly (and even King's X has veered away from any association from CCM with the coming-out of singer/bassist Doug Pinnick, who felt abandoned by the community afterwards.)

I have however found a somewhat new band that does a good job of breaking slightly away from the CCM crappo script. MuteMath is apparently borne of the ashes of generally bad CCM band Earthsuit (they sucked pretty bad, akin to a complet implosion of random top 40 styles slapped together in a studio to sound like Jesus having a theological epileptic sound seizure), but this comes off as well crafted pop. Bits of the Police, Imogen Heap and Tears For Fears crop up in terms of whats borrowed, but the recording quality and the overal result are promising instead of stale. The lyrics are sufficiently inventive and sly that you can actually listen to them without feeling like a Gideon is trying to read to you with a bad backing track playing.

The House is Less crowded

Paul Hester, most famous for his role in the drum chair for 80s stalwarts Split Enz and Crowded House, committed suicide this week. He was a solid pop drummer with a good, warm tone. Rest in Peace, Paul.

And while it is easy to think in terms of Crowded House as one-hit wonders, they did rack up several other minor US hits and stayed quite popular outside of the US long after their light dimmed Stateside. I personally liked their later albums much better.

Mutated Audio

So my buddy Greg has some sound files up at Opsound. Some are remnants from his time at Damage Studios when we were both working on the Rekonstruction MMOG. The rest is just his usual brand of sonic fun. I am a fan of Pink Pepsi myself.

Excuses Excuses

Celine can come up with all the excuses she wants for people falling asleep at her shows, but the truth is her dessicated scarecrow of a frame and its disproportionately acrobatic-spastic voice gifted from the armpit of one of Satan's harlots is the entertainment equivalent to having a bowl of Sominex with milk.

You can't take this easy

I read this and thought to myself that the kid should have been expelled for suggesting Foghat. That is just inexcusable.

Never Let Me Down

There is no progress without failure. And each failure is a lesson learned. Unecessary failures are the ones where an artist tries to second guess an audience's taste, and little comes of that situation except a kind of inward humiliation.
-David Bowie


The latter sentence sounds like he's been watching U.S. Presidential politics on CNN and Fox again.

Thank You Jeebus (aka Adrian Holovaty)

So for those of us that have used the All Music Guide for any length of time, know that its recent erdesign is a testament to riduclously bad site functionality and user unfriendliness bar most. It's bad enough they are too lame to take my corrections to entries (nice due diligence there dweebs), but they really do some bass-ackward stuff. So Adrian Holovaty wrote this nice extension to a real browser to make using the AMG a more sane experience.

Very nice indeed.

Kino

So I am an admitted longtime fan of Marillion, and have also thought well of Porcupine Tree and It Bites. Now is a band that combines members from all three of those bands (Pete Trewavas, Chris Maitland and John Beck respectively.) Pete Trewavas you may also recognize from his work with another art-rock supergroup, Transatlantic (featuring members of Dream Theatre and Spock's Beard.)

The band is Kino, the album is Picture, and they have a downloadable mp3 sample of 5 tracks from the album available. I have to say it sounds quite promising if the rest of the album is like this. It has some catchy hooks interspersed with some rather arty quirks that doesn't come off as dated or offensive to those who like tunes you can follow. Truth be told, none of it is more pretentious than the last Radiohead album, although it is ballsier and closer to a mix of Porcupine Tree and Rabin-era Yes.

Rush - Power Windows

Rush
Power Windows
Mercury Polygram
1985

Produced by Peter Collins & Rush

Personnel:
Geddy Lee - Bass, Bass Pedals, Synths, Voclas
Alex Lifeson - Guitars (electric and Acoustic)
Neil Peart - Drums, percussion (electronic and acoustic)

Additional keyboards by Andy Richards
Synth programming by Jim Burgess and Andy Richards
String arrangements by Anne Dudley
Choir arranged by Andrew Jackman


Rush is one of those bands that people either love or hate (usually due to recollections of vocalist Lee's banshee wail during their entire 1970s catalogue of releases), and from a critical standpoint, they have been mostly castigated by the music press as a kind of mainstream pariah. I have generally felt that while the bulk of their early material is well below par, by the time the 80s rolled around, the band had shifted into a full fledged power trio that found out how to mix a slick cocktail of above average cerebral wordplay, precise arrangements, and Geddy apparently reached puberty and started singing in a register that wouldn't confuse any sonar-using mammals in the area (it's ok to come out now Flipper, the bad man from Canada won't hit those high notes anymore).

Power Windows was probably the apex of their 80s efforts. It was a hard rock core welded to a progressive (almost jazz-fusion) frame and shelled with a super polished song-oriented exterior. Peart -the band's main lyricist- had fully shifted from obtuse space and fastasy themes to more grounded narratives about society and the people that occupy it. Lifeson came into his own as a more in-your-face version of Andy Summers, with heaping portions of strange chord structures and short bursts of angular solos and textural work thatseemed to hold endless possibilities musically. He basically found the magic middle between the use of space like the Edge with the super clean soloing of a Kazumi Watanabe or Robert Fripp. Lee, to his credit, did really sing and entire album in a listenable register, and his basslines in this album are all some of his very best ever (the fact that he could sing and play the ridiculously convoluted bassline to the opening track, The Big Money is a testament to how good of a player and performer that he is). Peart uses an ample amount of strange percussion noises on The Big Money (Geddy can't have all the fun), and his use of sampled ethnic percusion on Territories and the stunning tribal Mystic Rhythms catches the ear immediately. He also shows he can use electronic drums in an innovative way, rather than just as an ornament. He is the only highly visible drummer during the 80s to do so, with the exception of Bill Bruford, who was the vanguard. Of course, he was the modern descendant of Keith Moon, so he could overplay like a bastard and still seem to fit in, a style now carried even further by players like Carter Beuford (Dave matthews) and Danny Carey (Tool).

The album lacks no technical punch, as every track is approachable by the general rock enthusiast, but note-monkeys who like intricate instrumental passages will not be dissappointed. And therein lies the charm. It is accessible. Not in a watered-down way, but in a well-crafted and produced complete album. There isn't a bum track on it. They managed to expand their palette a bit with some more keyboards -which thankfully do not sound too dated these days- and strings (courtesy of Ms. Anne Dudley, who some may know from soundtracks, but was also a member of the Art of Noise, and performed on albums by the Pet Shop Boys, and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour.) The songs are fully formed and have a real emphasis on standing on their own instead of being a concept album, with the unrecognized gem being Middletown Dreams, which I would place as one of the best songs of their entire 3 decade career. It was never really played after the 1986 tour that followed this album release, and never given much play since. It is a melancholic anthem to diffuse aspects of middle-class life.

You might like this if you like:
The Police - Syncronicity
Genesis - Duke
Peter Gabriel - So
U2 - The Unforgettable Fire
King Crimson - Three of a Perfect Pair

Curve R.I.P. 1989-2005

I still remember the first time I heard Curve. It was on 120 Minutes (back when MTV was worth a damn and actually showed videos and shows about videos instead of the pop-culture Velvetta they are now) as the closing video to Coast is Clear from one of their first EPs.

It was a claustrophobic, dense track set to an ethereal, unnerving video. I immediately fell madly in love with Toni Halliday, the Sade of shoegazing filth-pop, and never looked back.

As announced on their website recently, Halliday and her co-conspirator Dean Garcia, have called it a day. Always a bit of a combustible pairing, they produced the kind of sonic blueprint that was later turned into a multiplatinum formula for bands Garbage (which while certainly a formidable act, actually owes it's entire sonic repotoire to Halliday/Garcia), as well as lesser knowns like Joydrop and Lush. They were melodic, atmospheric, dirty, desperate, reflective, cryptic and blunt in ways that made them far more interesting and primal than their contemporaries and followers, who took the sound and made too often a vehicle for the emotionally underdeveloped adolescent angst demographic.

Garcia has a new site, The Doglab, and hopefully he will have some new material soon (his most recent work was with Jeff Beck, and the results were sublime), but Toni, as is always her nature, shows no signs of how to contact/see where she is going. She will appear at her whim, which matches her distanced, diva-like profile. Curve.co.uk actually still has a free download of an otherwise unreleased track, as well as ordering info for their more obscure releases (you can usually find their classic Anxious Records releases in the shops).

Bless you both Toni & Dean, and may whatever you do next come out soon, so that I can act like a complete fanboy again. It has been a wonderful 15 years.

Bits and Pieces

Well, this is amusing, as it looks like one media cartel is accidentally borking another with copyright. You would have thought with their current habits of fusing all manner of artists they are trying to promote by using their songs in TV shows that they would have worked out a framework for dealing with these kinds of issues more smoothly.

In news that no one should give even a remote damn about (but it amusing enough to mention I suppose), 50 Cent -a rapper whose rhymes are not even worth a wooden nickle and a kick in the crotch- apparently is booting one of his associates out of the homie clubhouse for "disloyalty" (I guess showing intelligence is a handicap in the mainstream hip-hop arena) and not helping him out when he picks fights with other rappers. Hi, I would just like to inform you all, that your careers will all be over the hill shortly anyway, so you really should hold on to each other as a support network while you still can.

In news that should surprise no one but should annoy everyone, the labels are at exactly what folks (myself included) predicted would happen...they are trying to jack the prices of downloads up now that products like iTunes have proven they can have markets worth respecting. Here is what I will tell you:

1. If you do that, you will piss off a lot of the same consumers you are now trying to bilk out of some more cash for yourselves (not the artists, because we know where the money historically goes)

2. Watch P2P trading spike up again, and watch it start to take shape with things like Waste and even Imeem, which make random trawling a bit more difficult/nigh untenable. Aggravate the consumers at your peril.

What the hell am I saying? You idiots haven't understood anything at all for at least the past decade with your idiotic price gouging of cd costs and utterly retarded lawsuits over file sharers, why should I expect anything resembling a clue now is beyond anyones guess.

Amusing Cameo Appearance

So the missus and I caught the movie Be Cool last night with the Rock, Uma thurman and Cedric the Entertainer among others. There are quite a few small music cameos in the film, Fred Durst, being the most unecessary (but he doesn't have to speak or otherwise open his mouth, so he was playing a role he could do -- a prop), but the presence of Sergio Mendes playing piano with the Black Eyed Peas just put a smile on my face.

Thanks are in order

When Acid Jazz Records lost its soul with the departure of label founder Gilles Peterson in the early 1990s (and subsequently turned into a quiet storm fizzle of its former self by 1996), one wondered if any label would ever hold the kind of consolidated talent pool and consistent quality of releases. Well, I am happy to say that I think that is currently being held by Compost records of Germany. Their stable includes Kyoto Jazz Massive, Truby Trio, Jazzanova, Beanfield, Joseph Malik, and one of my current faves in regular rotation, Fauna Flash. The quality of the recordings and the baseline quality of the material is stellar. A great bouliabaise of jazzy grooves and funky soul. If you want a decent sampling, try any of the releases on their Fueled For the Future series (currently up to Volume 5), which compiles DJ sets by the likes of Michael Reinboth and Toshio Matsuura (of United Futire Organization).