The Benja-man Is Verbose

Past exposure to this artist/album:   I am already familiar with  Under The Veil Of Madness .     I got confused back in 2023 when I first heard this record.  I did know that I was impressed.  This was before I was a blogger, but I did do annual rankings for friends, and I ended up ranking it as my #10 record of the year.  The thing that threw me was that my first impression was the record's heft.  Veil  seemed like serious big kid metal, heavyweight stuff.  Yet, when I read reviews, even those who liked it a lot tended to emphasize, often in a positive tone, the cheesiness.  The excesses.  The melodrama.  The, well, power-metaliness of the whole thing.   Listening with that in mind, I could hear it, and get why others might consider Ascension cheesy.  My ears don't, and never have, heard them that way.  Why was power metal such silly shit, but this power metal not, to Benjamin?  You could say...

In my runthrough screening of '70s records that influenced power metal, I ended up picking Fröm The Fjörds (hereafter  Fjords  so I don't have to do those damn ironic umlauts), the sole release from the American band Legend, for further study.  I loved the frenetic energy of the bass in the songs I sampled, the whimsical sense of storytelling, and the way the record so interestingly anticipated at least certain strains of power metal, especially the early form of so called "epic metal" embodied by Manilla Road's "Manilla Four" group of mid-'80s releases (of which I've personally only really sat down with two... so far).  I've decided that my picks from the speed dating pool merit a really deep dive.  Like, track by track.   Fjords  seems to generally be viewed as one of those interesting little curios that delights the relative few who get delighted in the sense of having discovered an obscure gem, whilst also having a vocal minorit...

I've mentioned the impossibility of separating reactions to Zevon's last few records with knowing his eventual fate.  For  The Wind , one doesn't need to bother.  This was always going to the be the last album, and was always going to be the one in which everyone recording it and every last listener would be fully aware of the mesothelioma thing.  In his non recording artist life, it sounds like our man was full of the usual contradictions - the pain and wasting away, obviously, but it sounds like a relapse on alcohol and a lot of solitude, with a mix of self-pity and cheerful indifference depending on the day.  Still, Zevon wasn't alone -alone at the end.  He had a professional best friend to the end in Jorge Calderón - whose rare absence from a Zevon album I probably should have noted on  My Ride's Here  - as his musical comrade in arms, performing on every song and cowriting most of them.  Zevon had both of his adult k...

A few weeks late, but it is once again time for my increasingly out-of-place writeup of a movie festival on what is otherwise exclusively a music blog.  Plan is to continue doing this every year until either I or the festival dies.  Ms. Tweet and I often mockingly proclaim the internet-ism "so tired, y'all" when describing how we're doing.  Well, there are some B-Fests where my main lingering impression is less the fun we had so much as the exhaustion it bore.  This was kinda one of those.  For the first time of which I'm aware, the festival was pushed to March, leading to some schedule scrambling.  I was in the throes of a busy month that wasn't over yet in the midst of a time of great uncertainty, however much I slept it wasn't enough, and I showed up already about ready to nod off in my chair before the first movie had started.  At every chance to talk to those around me between films, I was bothered by the fact that I was dazed, feeling my least in...

I just accomplished a major - task? challenge? - today * , and wanted the sort of song that proverbially makes me want to run through a brick wall.  At the moment I can't think of a better candidate than "Awakening."  Talk about propulsive.  Listening to the chorus reminds me of exactly what power metal does well.  Ye gods, do I ever feel like my dreams and memories will be immortal when listening to the song.  Since this band shamelessly writes songs about  Chrono Trigger , *** I'll say that they've given me the metal equivalent of the  Chrono Cross  intro **** , mixing adventure and wistfulness into one. So as the killer riff of "Divine Providence" started around listen #5 or so to Ascension , I finally sorted out why, listen after listen, I was having a hard time maintaining interest in these songs all the way through.  Because so many of them are so clearly good stuff.  At first I thought maybe they lacked hooks, and I was...