Tiny us – Photo of the Day #19

December 28th, 2009 • photography
Tags: music, photo of the day, photography

My girlfriend holding up a print out of a concert floor plan of the last 311 concert we went to. Just found this while we were cleaning up last week. Those printed mini-figs are supposed to be us in the front row.

Billboard has willingly made itself entirely irrelevant

December 17th, 2009 • chatter
Tags: economics, music

I’m going to choose to use the National Post’s exact headline runner for this, because of the sheer absurdity:

Nickelback: ‘Band of the decade’, according to Billboard

Yes, they deemed Nickelback as the band of the decade based on one analysis point alone: sales. And they somewhere throw in and derive “importance”. Who are they important to besides their record company? I have exactly one friend that actually likes Nickelback, basically on the same premise why everyone else dislikes them: they suck. I don’t know about you but I’ve found their last 5 or 6 singles to sound exactly the same — musically, they are — and that’s what is making them money. I’m glad they found a formula to keep the cash rolling in and they have no need to innovate or progress in their music. Frankly, take their first album and compare it to their latest album, you’ll hear that it’s basically the same album, rearranged differently and with different lyrics. Instead of writing songs that might be insightful to someone at some point, they’ve simply delved into writing radio songs about sex. Only sex.

I love this quote from the NP article:

“We’ve just accepted that we’re never going to be the critics’ darlings, and we’re OK with that,” frontman Chad Kroeger told Billboard in 2007.

He’s OK with it because his label is shipping them off for tours around the world and bankrolling them. The subtext of this is pretty simple: they’re completely content with being lowballed by critics and other reviewers (who help to get their music sold) because they’re making money. Truck loads of it. Kroeger knows economics well.

I find the comments equally funny because it shows just how many people, myself duly included, despise such a terrible band. However, I find it even more sad that Billboard would actually come out and say this even though I understand completely what their own metrics models are based on: sales. Although, Billboard is also used to trend popularity and where the market is going, musically. They have a hue bevy of data at their disposal about this stuff and they chose to home in on a single vector. Why? I have no idea, but I’m sure it was done in good intentions although, they did not think about what they were doing to their own reputation in the process.

Uninterested reading

September 23rd, 2009 • chatter, education
Tags: education, music

So I’m over halfway done with Disorderly Women by Susan Juster and I’m still struggling to become interested in the book. The actual content is fascinating enough, sure, but Juster has failed at every attempt to grab my interest by simply being a boring writer. Maybe it’s that I find her style of writing-via-quotes-and-citations boring/annoying. Unfortunately, I’m still trying to figure out the actual point/hypothesis of this book and I’m over halfway through it already. Separating her own information from the flurry of quotes (other writers and church documents) is both difficult and time-consuming given that I’ve found most of the content of the book itself is quotations. I don’t find this occurring as often in anthropology books or in most history books I’ve read, so perhaps this is some kind of women’s history schtick? I have no idea how I’m going to write a three page paper on a book whose point I still haven’t understood (or found). This is why I don’t take subjective history classes. I hate wasting my time wading through ego or fluff information to have to discern a minuscule point.

On another note of annoyance, I don’t like Leaves’ Eyes new CD Njord. I can’t say this CD is boring however, it’s definitely not that good to me. The content of the CD has swayed far from Vinland Saga‘s stories and elegies to the Scandinavians of old and was put together very well musically. However, Njord seems to have kept the musicality of the first CD while stripping out any interesting stories from the songs. This CD is another album about Nordic conquests however, I really fail to see what Vikings and Scarborough Fair have in common since they would not have been frequenting Scarborough in the Middle Ages. I understand this is a cover song but really, it belongs as a bonus track or the end of the CD as it interrupts the flow of the CD. Most CD arrangements are either a V or a descending plateau arrangement. This means that in a V arrangement, the CD starts off strong, has an average/weak middle, and a (hopefully) strong end. A descending plateau is just as it sounds: starts off strong and flutters out as the album goes on. Having Scarborough Fair at track 5 of 12 smacks this straight into V territory as it’s simply in the wrong spot on the CD. The rest of the CD has strong, upbeat tracks and this is just a very odd arrangement especially for Leaves’ Eyes whose last few EPs and last CD had excellent arrangements.

Intervals

October 21st, 2008 • metal, music
Tags: music

Today, See You Next Tuesday‘s newest album Intervals is released. I’m waiting on my preorder+t-shirt to arrive but what I heard on their site and on Myspace is blistering. From their first demo that I received through Parasite, SYNT has really changed musically. The demo, Summer Sampler, was blistering in pace, must closer to slow powerviolence than it is the deathcore on their newest album. Parasite was something of a mixed bag for me. I enjoyed the remixed songs from the 2005 EP but some of the other tracks I didn’t find enjoyable but I did like the direction the band was going in, although I wish they would’ve stayed in that powerviolence/grind genre as it really worked for their insane speed and Bear’s insane vocals.

That said, Intervals should be an interesting mix of deathcore. I’m usually not a fan of deathcore (which is death metal and elements of grindcore, mixed) because I always feel the songs are far too long. After all, most of deathcore bands start out as grind bands, with songs that are extremely fast and extremely short. So when I’m listening to a 4 minute song that should be at least less than half that long, it gets really boring. I know most people will find something like that difficult to understand but once you listen to a lot of grind and powerviolence, song length is very important to the feel of the track and album. Summer Sampler, for example, was less than 5 minutes long and it was three tracks. I can’t even listen to it and smoke a cigarette without it repeating at least two songs. I’ve got albums with 20 or 30 tracks and they’re still under 30 minutes, some are less than 20. As you can imagine, it’s fast.

I want my preorder shipment to get here so I can start blasting this thing! And I’m eager to see the new t-shirt, which is a colored imprint of the album art — which is black and white.