The Benja-man Is Verbose

Remember how in my last post about  A Pleasant Shade Of Gray  I noted being frustrated by the lack of forward momentum, the way I'd want in a concept album?  And I hinted that I'd have a longer discussion about the contrast between proper rock operas that talk in complete sentences, have characters, versus this record offering basically a series of samey poems about rumination?  I was going to quote some typical lyrics, like: Stare from the darkness Hear the silence call Devise divisions; * delay decisions Watch the hours crawl Let nothing bleed into nothing, and do nothing Let nothing bleed into nothing, and do nothing at all And follow up with a pithy comment like "do nothing, indeed." Well, you can go ahead and forget about all that.  My stance now is that in its way,  Pleasant Shade  is absolutely an epic, on equal footing with whatever your other favorite prog-rock/metal records are serving up. Prog being prog, it was around listen #4 or #5 tha...

After just a few listens, my categorization of a record isn't going to be crystallized, and I may or may not know how much I like it  - that's kinda the whole point of these "early impressions" posts.  Those posts in which I'm uncertain what I'm hearing aren't all the same.  Sometimes you get something as entertaining (to me, anyway) as that time I came into a Wuthering Heights record without context and just had no idea how to even process what I was hearing.  Other times, it's more that I have some broad impressions but I can't say exactly why.  Main impressions of  A Sultan's Ransom  - I like it, and it seems somehow unusual. The part about liking it is pretty easy to explain - it's good solid metal.  Lively energetic songs, good vocal performance from Russ North, numerous hooks that I'm pretty certain are going to grow on me big time.  Boom, that's my early impression.  This'll be a short post! But not quite that short.  ...

3:  "Seduced, Fucked" In what seems to be a clearer assocation in his mind than it is to this reader, Lanegan starts this chapter about getting fucked over in the music industry machine by talking about sex a lot.  Here it's nice that he favors vignettes rather than limiting himself to just generalities about his life as a low-wage grunt in a tense relationship, and then living in squalor due to need to get out of said relationship.   Notwithstanding some somewhat freewheeling anecdotes about the formation of the band Earth, and going out of his way to shit-talk one of (future collaborator) Dylan Carlson's friends and contradict some ancient allegations about him that nobody has ever heard or cared about to begin with, we get a fair amount of detail, by this book's standards, about the creation and release of solo debut  The Winding Sheet.   That story really begins with Lanegan's surprising chill warehouse job and his discovery of "mainly acoustic, perso...

We haven't even gotten to all of the slagging the Screaming Trees' indie records get in Lanegan's book.  The next chapters of Sing Backwards And Weep , that I haven't written about yet, just keep piling on the abuse.  Besides continuing to go out of his way to emphasize that his "only contribution to Screaming Trees songwriting had been attempting to change the most egregious of Lee Conner's lyrics to something less embarrassing to sing," he has a few more digs at how his perception that their work was second rate shaped everything that he did at this point.  He describes mortification every time he hears one of their songs in the wild, hammering on his involvement in this band as a source of humiliation.  Pretty strong stuff.  This is what he's reacting against when talking about trying to make something that was authentically his with  The Winding Sheet .  So given that Lanegan himself is almost violently dismissive of his own breakthr...

Just a little standalone ?Classics? Of Metal reaction for you me.  I've been wanting to do this one for awhile, * ever since discovering  Awaken The Guardian  as a little side trip during my ?Classics? Of Power Metal series.  I don't know that I loved (or love)  Guardian .  I'm listening to it again in the background as I type this up, and my impression remains that it's definitely an interesting record full of good stuff that doesn't quite sound like anyone else, and that I don't quite get it.  Well, a cursory summary of info about the act responsible for that record told me that hey, not only did this band teach the world that you can do something more than the obvious with a power metal riff, but that this band kinda invented prog-metal.  Further, apparently they got a new singer and made a bunch more records, evolving into something that sounds nothing at all like  Guardian , leading up in some people's opinion to an alleged masterpi...

When writing about one of the standards of the subgenre like a Keeper  record, one would think that my niche as a relatively newer fan - discovered Helloween less than ten years ago, and really started picking apart the history of power metal less than two years ago - would be to divorce the album from its context and listen to it simply as a piece of music.  It's impossible, though.  The retroactive narrative that Helloween invented power metal as we know it with this record is too pervasive.  So listening to Keeper II , I spent a lot of time wondering when it became obvious to listeners at the time that Helloween were, well, what they were. I envy the astuteness of those who talk about Helloween's early work - confidently called by Wikipedia "speed metal rather than power metal," although I know many would dispute that - as having immediately stood out to them for its sense of melody and/or its sense of humor.  How and when would the average bear have realized...

I was aware coming in that Riot were literally a different band before Thundersteel , with only one member in common with the act that bore that name prior to going on a five-year hiatus.  Actually hearing it play out is still something, though.  By stream numbers and sales, their most successful record seems to have been their 1981 release, the embarassingly titled Fire Down Under .  I dabbled with that one as much as I could stomach, and went back and forth on whether it should be considered metal at all.  I don't necessarily object to lumping it in with metal, but the overall sound is way more reminiscent of the rock of the '70s to me: pulsating guitar riffs, warm production filling all channels with the same note, and the very simple choruses.  The stuff that was still part of the Riot's sound come  Thundersteel that I compared to Thin Lizzy in the last post?  Definitely a major emphasis in the early stuff.  A slower blues-based number li...

1986 is the "year" in question; all of their output on that label, such as it was, was from 1986.  By the time I got to listening to the Trees' first couple of releases, I'd recalibrated my expectations from viewing them as key steps in the evolution of Mr. M. Lanegan's songwriting to knowing that by his report, he had no creative hand in them beyond being the guy who sings.  It was still interesting to first listen to Other Worlds and realize that, at least at his point in their life, Screaming Trees are not about the vocal performance.  Like, at all.  Anyone could be the singer on a song like "Like I Said," and it really wouldn't matter very much.   At this point Lee presumably didn't know the kind of tool he had in his singer when he put these tracks together.  Honestly, even after he figured it out, knowing that the guy in question was constantly threatening to quit, it still might have still made sense to keep his songs from getting too voc...