The Benja-man Is Verbose

Previous exposure to this artist/album :  Half-listened to a song once on YouTube, had to hear more. None of us multitask as well as we imagine we do.  I know for a fact that my retention of music is basically zero unless I'm devoting time to listen to it.  Yet I do imagine that half-listening to something during work is a useful "initial screen" to decide if something's worth devoting actual music time to.  That's where I kinda fell in love with the  idea  of Paladin.  I was sampling one of their songs, can't remember which one, and was struck immediately by the immediately catchy heft that, as half of my brain told me, so neatly balanced power metal and death metal.  There have of course been loads of power/death bands and that crossover started way before 2019, but how often does a song catch the aesthetics of both equally convincingly, with its two singers playing off each other?  Hearing that Paladin only had managed ...

In my personal imagined Zevon career arc, the  Mutineer/Life'll Kill Ya  duology was always the glorious return to form, perfectly setting up the swan song of  The Wind .  And then  My Ride's Here  was kinda... there, in between the two records, interfering with the narrative.  So, I've listened to the record before, but really only a few times, mostly in passing.  It was fun to finally dive deep into it, in context. Track One:  "Sacrificial Lambs" I think on some level Zevon was keen to show that he was still a rock and roll singer who could make music with a bigger rock feel.  Not that "Sacrificial Lambs" is a super heavy song or anything, * just that it returns to the rollicking full-band feel that was once Zevon's stock in trade but was less pronounced on the records that lead up to  Ride .  Very straight-ahead song with a vocal melody that sounds, well, like most of the other Zevon openers.  P...

Now that I've had some time to sit with Awakening From Abyss , you know what I notice more than any individual element?  Well, in other entries in this series, I've frequently brought up the vaguely described feeling that some songs' disparate elements don't come together.  I don't always have the right words to "prove" anything, but I frequently try to evaluate whether or not something has that coherence that makes the difference between a great song and a song that has a bunch of cool elements haphazardly mixed together.   Artists with grand musical visions, musical virtuosity, or both, are prone to the latter.  I've even floated my little unfounded pet theories that certain bands with multiple hands in the songwriting had different members trying to write different albums and were thus, musically speaking, at war with each other, whether they knew it or not.   Lovebites' debut stands out to me as the antithesis of that.  Whet...