Non-Prog Album Reviews

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^^^ you guys are into Australian iconic bands! I am impressed. Midnight oil are awesome i have all their albums, best ones being Blue Sky Mining, 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 and Red Sails in Sunset

catfood03 wrote: TheGazzardian wrote: Rating: Overall, an excellent album that I would rate as a masterpiece (5 stars). Good choice! For me it's a tie between this and Diesel and Dust as fave Oils album.

TheGazzardian wrote: Rating: Overall, an excellent album that I would rate as a masterpiece (5 stars).

Good choice! For me it's a tie between this and Diesel and Dust as fave Oils album. 

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Tom Waits

Bone Machine (1992)

An album made by the spirits of everything dead or dying.

Album Rating: 9

Overall Rating: 13

Best Song: It's a complete journey, but for personal reasons, I DON'T WANNA GROW UP.

Tom has channeled most every dark emotion a body can experience, at this point. He's usually tackled tons of varying emotions all in one package, oft times with a bare-bones central theme, such as in Closing Time, or tied together by a coherent atmosphere, like with Small Change, but never before has he so thoroughly, so hauntingly, so f**king sincerely channeled the aura of death and dying than on Bone Machine. Where his singing is normally dirty as hell, and rough like drinking hot ash, here it's almost as if he's taken it to a new level, with a sort of despairing gospel howl. Atmospherically, it's like walking across a desert wasteland, littered with animal bones and decaying husks, all littered about, just barely visible with your eyes.

It's not that he just shoves DEATH in your face as if you have to accept it all, whether you want to, or not. No, he puts the big D right under your nose, so you get the actual urge to look for it, thinking it might be some hidden desert treasure, but when you uncover it, i's just more DEATH, same as everywhere else. Upon uncovering said bone gems, you might let out a frenzied shriek similar to how Tom belts out the chrus to the opening track. It's almost this dreary spoken word piece about all manner of bleak imagery, then from out the bowels of hell he roars with pure anguish. It's creepy, 'cause you can sing along with it.

As usual, he packs the album with loads of shorter songs (barely over two or three minutes, on average), so there are plenty of ideas present. All of 'em got the cold rub of the grave over them, but there's diversity here, dammit. You'll get a few tracks that could have fit snugly on Small Change, such as Who Are You, with the somber and melancholy piano lines bleeding under his weepy moan. The greatest positive element of having all these songs at such short running times is, as usual, to keep the listener from getting bored, because in all honestly, the songs here aren't too complex or varied, but good god, what an atmosphere!

As with most later Tom Waits records, you'll get the melancholy ballad pieces, the pseudo-spoken word poetry beat sessions, the jazzy, gruff rockers, and the big fusion of differing rootsy styles, all drenched in the disturbing percussion that, fitting well with the album's title, sounds exactly like a bone machine. You'll get your religious rebukes, odes to murder, and ghstly images of rot and ruin. Amidst this is a song that instantly hits my heart, and takes me to my emotional knees. I Don't Wanna Grow Up hs to be the most upbeat song here, but for some reason it feels like the most bleak and depressing to me. It feels like the most sincere rejection of the horrors of adulthood, from the eyes of either some poor kid who doesn't want to grow up, or, more even more frighteningly, someone who has already grown up, and reaches into his deepest soul to try and fight back the pain, knowing that it's futile in the end.

The melodies are all haunting. Some are low key, ohers are right visible, but most folks will still have to dig pretty deep to see the beauty of this record, and believe me, it's truly beautiful when you look at the topic like he does. For those of you who think this is all just a little too much darkness, the guy has the decency to include one of his notable "uplifting" tracks, as the finale, which acts as a sort of internal coping method for all the oppressive musical hollows. I happen to think it fits everything, masterfully, and only a guy like Tom could pull it off so convincingly. If this collection lacks anything, it's real rich diversity, and a couple of the linking tracks start too feel a little too much like filler. Still, I've yet to find such a grim depiction of death and decay in music.

*****

The Antlers



Hospice is The Antlers' third album, released in 2009. It's a concept album, and the story is about a man who falls in love with a depressed and abusive cancer patient at the hospital he works in. The patient ends up dying beside him, and he is stricken with grief and regret.

The music itself is a beautiful melancholy, packed with raw emotion and sorrow. The main features are the powerful use of piano, Peter Silberman's beautiful echoing voice and the band's soft instrumentation and use of distortion. Hospice is the most emotional album I've ever listened to, and is quickly becoming one of my all time favourites.

1. Prologue - It starts with a haunting piano, and horror movie-ish background noise. Ghostlike whistling leads into the next track.

2. Kettering - (Named after the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre) The background noise is gone, and there is only piano, such solemn, heartwrenching piano, and a soft high voice. All the emotion is spilled out in a depressing minimalistic style. The drums and guitar come in, but the piano is still at the forefront, preaching the sad message. And the song finishes with a lone whispering voice, howling silently into the night.

3. Sylvia - Starting with distorted bleeping background noise, the vocals are as emotional as the previous track, until the introduction of guitar. Everything bursts into life, it briefly turns into a rock song with melody for the chorus then back again to a slowly building verse, before another chorus. It finishes with soft acoustic guitar and an even softer voice.

4. Atrophy - More piano/vocal introduces this song, and slowly, gradually builds up, with a few lightly tapped cymbals adding to the tension. Helicopter blades and bells are introduced before ending with an acoustic/vocal verse.

5. Bear - Piano/vocal theme again, it's incredible how such a simple method can produce such an effect, it's just one of the wonders of good music. The acoustic guitars come in briefly and the vocals pick up, constantly changing the song's tempo and structure, swinging back and forth from minimal emotion and melodic rock, similar to Sylvia.

6. Thirteen - Merging seamlessly from the end of Bear, Thirteen starts with an echoing, ambient sound and moves into an undescribable and grand piece of music.It ends with a high, long drawn voice and slow paced piano

7. Two - Starts with an acoustic/vocal arrangement again, but a more delicate sound, that is until the electric instruments come in. The voice picks up too, with a hint of anger and a few cusses accentuating that. And so it continues through the rest of the song, making this one of the more upbeat songs on the album.

8. Shiva - Shiva starts with piano, but quickly moves to acoustics and has a warmer feel than the previous songs. A glimmer of hope, even. There's some brass in the background, and it finishes as it started with piano and acoustic guitar.

9. Wake - Distortion and a solemn howling set the tone back for the penultimate track, and the first few verses are sad ones. The soft thud of a bass drum starts a slow buildup, the howling all the while casting a bleak yet beautiful portrait. An intermission of piano leads into another verse, and the music builds up, and builds up, and builds up into a chorus of anguish, raw emotion and power. The sound is absolutely massive in scale, and it is a grand force of a song, before it slowly fades into silence.

10. Epilogue - An acoustic/vocal only reprise of Kettering with different lyrics, which ends in a simply haunting distorted piano riff. What better way to finish, then with a chilling rendition of the best song on the album.

Rating: 5 stars. This piece of music impacted me emotionally more than any other music has done, and for the sheer effect, I personally feel it's earned full marks.

Prog Appeal: Although it's a concept album, musically it's not very progressive. Although I don't know much about time signatures, it's got a pretty slow paced tempo. The most noticable feature would be the use of various bells, effects and distortion.

About to do something odd here- that is, to review an album that was never actually released in this form. I've created my own version for review. Read on to the review itself for an explanation :)

Emotions are very very important for me in singing and music as such too (and I love Gabs!).  If you noticed, I used the words "compositional device", not "demonstration of technical skills".  There is a difference between hitting notes simply because you can hit them even when they don't befit the song (*cough* Mariah Carey *cough*) and carefully developing the music through the voice (instead of instruments).  It is a pervasive aspect of Indian classical music and not to be confused with technical w**k, because Indian classical music combines virtuosity with emotion, aesthetic beauty and spirituality (and no, I am not being partisan here! ).  Barring Jeff and Annie Haslam (more in live performances), I haven't heard any other Western singer consistently incorporate this in their singing (who am I missing!), so as I realized today, maybe my origins made it much easier for me to perceive the worth of Jeff's singing and what makes it so unique, which may have been alien and possibly cold for Westerners...I don't know, it's all conjecture.    Anyway, my point is yes, I can enjoy a singer who keeps it simple (relatively!) and soulful in the same way I would enjoy blues guitar but if everybody had to sing or play only like that, Holdsworth or McLaughlin could never have moved forward. Virtuosity AND emotion is the ultimate and it should not be as elusive as it is in rock guitar because perfection is supposed to be beautiful and awesome, not cold and self indulgent.

Edited by rogerthat - May 21 2010 at 07:12

Actually I wasn't really trying to defend Jeff, I am just baffled when I hear people saying he's overrated.  Cmon, a few internet idiots overrating Hallelujah doesn't make Jeff the singer overrated, the appreciation he's received so far is grossly disproportionate to his talent.  And I have also not heard who are these people who mourn his death incessantly, maybe I could relate to the Cobain parallel better then because my admiration for Jeff has absolutely nothing to do with his untimely death.

I know all about Rodgers and that he sang for Queen, just never got around to listening to him.  By the way, Jeff was American.  I was in fact referring to those rock critics and fans with what I said, not you.  They just browse through the popular bands and pick the best singers from them.  Which is fine, but when somebody suggests an underrated name, they go, "Yeah, right, whatever, LOLZ".  It's that arrogant attitude of the mainstream press and circles that I hate.

I am not as a rule blown away by female singers but Annie Haslam, Karen Carpenter and Minnie Riperton are high up in my favourites.  Among the dudes, Stevie, Jeff, Ronnie James Dio who has recently left our world and Daniel Gildenlow.

By the way, what you said about not finding lot of complicated phrasing to your taste was a good insight. Not that I am of a similar view, but maybe I understood better today why Jeff is underrated.  I am Indian and in our classical music, the singer reigns supreme and becomes a compositional tool rather than just an emotional vehicle to recite the verses so I was completely blown away to see a Western singer try to approach singing in a similar way .  But I guess that's not how Westerners like it.




Edited by rogerthat - May 21 2010 at 00:11

motrhead wrote: rogerthat wrote:   I stand by what I said about that and your post proves it. You are referring to what you like to hear in your singing, not the skill of the singer.  Obviously, Jeff's phrasing would at places be more inaccurate because they are often far more complicated.    Okay, I can accept that.. but...look at the simplicity of Paul Rogers phrasing-yet he is often called the best voice in rock. For me complicated doen't necessarily mean better. But again, it's only my opinion.

I haven't ever heard Paul Rodgers but as such I don't even want to get into this best voice of rock business. It's very biased and favours only popular - and, usually, American - singers. Daniel Gildenlow never comes up for mention in these circles because he's singing and playing prog metal and is from Sweden.