Of course, the $64 question is: after toning down the experimentation, just what kind of sound did Thrice settle on? The answer is a little hard to place. It’s a credit to the band, don’t get me wrong; they’ve carved out such an effective niche that it seems like they’re a genre unto themselves sometimes. But the prevailing sound on Beggars tends towards rootsy yet heavy alternative rock with occasional hints of the band’s post-hardcore past. “Talking Through Glass” and “At The Last” are the album’s fastest, heaviest tracks, and it’s here that their past musical tendencies peek through the most. On the other hand, the album’s slower, more expansive songs (such as “Circles” and “The Great Exchange”) contain the kind of atmosphere and sonic experimentation exemplified on releases like Vheissu and The Alchemy Index (particularly the latter’s Water disc). But the band seems to strike its best grooves on the mid-tempo songs, like album opener “All The World Is Mad” and “In Exile.” It’s clear that the majority of the material here was based around the results of four guys in a room jamming out, rather than any lofty, cerebral concept like the one behind The Alchemy Index.
All four of those guys turned in great performances for Beggars, but the one that stands out the most by far is that of vocalist/lyricist/guitarist Dustin Kensrue. Thrice has always been known for featuring Kensrue’s great lyrics (or at least I’ve always loved his work, and I doubt I’m in the minority here), and on Beggars, he turns in some of his best work yet. Kensrue has become a master at fitting his lyrics perfectly to the cadence of the song; barely a word on the whole record seems rhythmically awkward or out-of-place. His sense of meter is almost Shakespearian. And yet his words carry true emotion and meaning behind them - just look at “The Weight” and “Wood And Wire” for examples of Kensrue’s incredibly poignant lyrical work. His vocal delivery has taken leaps and bounds as well: he’s clearly taken a lot of the bluesy influence of the band’s recent work to heart (not to mention his acoustic solo record, Please Come Home), evidenced by his soulful, husky inflection on a lot of the material here. Of course, on the heavier tunes, his raspy hardcore bark comes back for a bit; by and large, though, it seems that Kensrue has evolved into nearly a full-fledged blues crooner. Which works surprisingly well with the music backing him up; the four-piece has clearly developed into a well-oiled machine that’s comfortable with playing a very wide range of music, and Beggars displays just enough of that versatility to prove that there’s still a whole lot of uncharted territory left to hear Thrice explore. And I, for one, can’t wait to hear what they decide to do next.
Rating: 4/5
Standout Tracks:
“The Weight”
“In Exile”
“Wood And Wire”
“The Great Exchange”
Release Date: September 14, 2009
So I went on a road trip last week. It should go without saying that it was one of the most enjoyable things I've done in quite a while - I mean, who doesn't love a good road trip? Of course, I had the chance to do all kinds of fun stuff: I got to hang out with lots of old friends from school, I made some new friends and forged some very strong bonds with people I had previously only known a little, I got to see some amazing live music, I had some time to walk around and explore a city (Louisville, KY) I had never been to . . . but none of those things really have anything to do with what Relative Pitch is about (except maybe the live music part, but I'm saving that for a potential future post).
One thing that goes hand-in-hand with a road trip, though, and that I enjoyed getting a chance to do almost as much as all the things listed above, is simply the act of driving and listening to music. Rocking out behind the wheel of an automobile is something everyone enjoys at least every once in a while, and doing it for an extended period of time is something I look forward to every time I schedule a vacation for myself - cramped legs, sore neck, and high gas prices be damned. Even if you're not on a big road trip, it's still exhilarating - whether you're cruising around town at 30mph with the windows down or setting the cruise control for 75 and barreling down the interstate, the sheer act of movement combines with the energy of what you're listening to and really gives you a rush, if you're doing it right.
Of course, you can't play just anything to get this effect - you have to make sure you have the right tunes for driving. Just like anything involving musical taste, this is vastly different for any given human being. What gives one person that adrenaline rush of combined music and momentum may very well bore or annoy the next person. So, with that caveat in mind, here's a breakdown of my favorite road music and why I love it:
- Instrumental, very guitar-driven progressive rock/metal. Being a guitarist myself, this kind of stuff is always fun to listen to (whether or not it's over-the-top enough to be lumped into the "shred guitar" category), and the energy behind the virtuosic playing is what makes it really satisfying to crank up in the car. Sometimes the urge to play air guitar interferes with the need to steer, but this hasn't resulted in any accidents yet. Examples: John Petrucci - Jaws Of Life; Scale The Summit - The Great Plains
- Catchy, melodic alternative rock/indie rock. Ideally, the best of this stuff combines an energetic, driving instrumental factor with great vocal melodies and good lyrical work - making it perfect to sing along to. This is great for getting weird looks from other drivers. Examples: Silversun Pickups - There's No Secrets This Year; The Airborne Toxic Event - Sometime Around Midnight
- Heavy - and I do mean heavy - metal. For similar reasons to the first genre mentioned, but instead of technical proficiency (or, in many cases, in addition to it), the driveability comes from sheer heaviness. Detuned guitar riffs, double-bass drumming, screamy/growly vocals (as long as they're performed with some degree of talent) . . . there's nothing like headbanging behind the wheel to a great metal band. Examples: Lamb Of God - Contractor; Opeth - Ghost Of Perdition
- Relatively ambient, mood-inducing music. Let's face it, sometimes you're not in the mood for headbanding or sing-alongs; on a rainy or cloudy morning, something more subdued will make your drive just as enjoyable. All kinds of genres fit the bill here, from trip-hop to post-rock - the most important factor is the vibe it sets. (Of course, you have to be careful here - you don't want to put in anything so chilled-out that you fall asleep at the wheel.) Examples: Massive Attack - Everywhen; Explosions In The Sky - It's Natural To Be Afraid
Naturally, this is an incredibly subjective list, so your ideal driving music might be completely different than mine. Therefore, you are hereby encouraged to leave a comment with the type of tunes that make your commute all the more enjoyable. Whether it aligns with my tunes perfectly or stands as a polar opposite to my picks, I'm looking forward to seeing what other people like to crank up behind the wheel. Post away!
The trouble is, Porcupine Tree have never made particularly grandiose music. It’s not that the music isn’t complex enough, or that it doesn’t carry the emotional weight of the band’s peers’ output - on the contrary, Porcupine Tree’s music tends to be some of the most moving material you’re likely to find in the genre. However, the mood prevalent in most of the band’s music tends to swing between downcast, shoegazing melancholy and biting, acidic outbursts of vitriol, neither of which lend themselves to the epic-sounding Overtures and Grand Finales that bands along the lines of Dream Theater have trademarked. Steven Wilson doesn’t have an operatic bone in his body, which makes his songwriting refreshingly free of bombast. So it really shouldn’t be that surprising that, hot off the heels of recording his first solo album, Insurgentes (you can read my review of that one here), Wilson penned a fifty-five-minute-long suite that covers much of the same emotional territory as his previous releases. That’s not to say The Incident isn’t musically adventurous; between the 14 tracks the title-suite is split up into (henceforth referred to by their individual track names; only in prog-rock does something as simple as naming songs become this complicated), a lot of stylistic ground is covered. “The Incident” and “Circle Of Manias,” for instance, are some of the heaviest material the band has recorded to date. On the other hand, “The Yellow Windows Of The Evening Train” and the suite’s conclusion “I Drive The Hearse” are positively tranquil. The best material in the piece seems to rest comfortably between these extremes: “The Blind House” is a high-energy rocker that charges along mostly in 5/4, while “Time Flies” is almost an epic-within-an-epic, stretching out for nearly twelve minutes of acoustic verses, a chorus featuring some of Wilson’s best vocals yet, and a suitably indulgent guitar solo. The problem is pacing: the placement of something as somber as “I Drive The Hearse” at the end of an epic composition such as this is a big part of why the whole piece doesn’t sit as well as it should; it seems that something so ambitious deserves to go out with a bang, not a whimper. It’s great music when taken at face value, though - Wilson knows how to take a melody or a lyric and twist it, knife-like, right into your heart. It simply seems anticlimactic as part of the bigger picture.
It’s definitely worth noting that The Incident also includes a second disc of material that wasn’t composed as part of the suite (confined to the CD release’s first disc). They’re not b-sides, though - the four songs on the second disc are high-quality Porcupine Tree in their own right, especially the atmospheric “Flicker” and the bitter but somehow smirking “Remember Me Lover”. In a way, the quality of the songs on the second disc further underline the weaknesses of the first. Porcupine Tree seems much more comfortable writing music that’s self-contained into reasonably-sized capsules. Even the specific sections of the first disc that stand out seem to work better when viewed as their own individual songs instead of being forced into a larger concept. Who knows - maybe if the band had focused on developing all the ideas contained in The Incident as their own separate songs instead of pigeon-holing them in as sections of an epic, some of the shorter, almost interlude-like pieces (such as “Great Expectations,” “Kneel And Disconnect,” and “Your Unpleasant Family”) would have been fleshed out further into much more satisfying individual compositions. Food for thought. Really, though, Porcupine Tree is an incredibly talented band, and a lot of the music contained in The Incident is some of the best they’ve released. Their music is just more powerful when delivered on a slightly-smaller scale than the standard prog-rock epic. Maybe in their case, “less is more” really is advice to be followed.
Rating: 3.5/5
Standout Tracks:
“Time Flies”
“Remember Me Lover”
“The Blind House”
“Flicker”
Release Date: September 14, 2009
The album starts off with the fairly straightforward “Uprising,” a classic Muse track which serves as a cover for the amount of grandiose musical statements to come later. The simple guitar-bass-drums-vocals approach to this first track (notwithstanding a few requisite synth fills - after all, this is Muse we’re talking about) is a somewhat deceptive way to kick off the album - after this point, the band starts pulling out one over-the-top idea after another, resulting in tracks as wide-ranging as the Depeche-Mode-influenced dance grooves found in “Undisclosed Desires” and the rock-opera-worthy, Queen-worshipping “United States Of Eurasia (+Collateral Damage),” the latter complete with full orchestral accompaniment. Many of these ideas work, especially when the band indulges its classical side: the album ends with a three-track piece titled “Exogenesis: Symphony” which also features an orchestra, and makes for a very satisfying conclusion to all the craziness and genre-jumping. In fact, the “Exogenesis” suite is so good that much of the rest of the album seems just okay by comparison. The scattershot approach to genre and influence works against the band here; many of these tracks, while enjoyable on their own, simply can’t stand up next to one another and create a viable whole. One of the other main drawbacks of the album is that, when the band simplifies their approach as on “Uprising” and a few other tracks, they seem to go on autopilot, as if their creative energy was expended on the more out-there tracks. Overall, though, The Resistance is a good album, and what it lacks in cohesiveness is almost made up for by how much fun it is to listen to. Only a band with the confidence of knowing they’re one of the biggest acts in the world would dare create music this bombastic and over-the-top; if they focus their confidence on a more unified vision, they may yet create another truly fantastic album. Until then, though, The Resistance should be enough to tide their new-found legions of screaming fans over.
Rating: 3/5
Standout Tracks:
“Exogenesis: Symphony” (Parts 1-3)
“United States Of Eurasia (+Collateral Damage)”
“Undisclosed Desires”
Release Date: September 14, 2009
I was listening to my iPod on Shuffle the other day, and something came up that I hadn't listened to in years. This in itself isn't remotely noteworthy - I have a ton of music on that thing, a lot of which is pulled from CDs I've owned since high school or earlier and that I haven't sat down and paid proper attention to in quite a long time. But the particular song gave me pause, because it used to be one of my favorites. It was "And All That Could Have Been" by Nine Inch Nails, and as a lad of about sixteen, it had encapsulated my angsty little world almost perfectly. Here's a link to the song if you're curious enough to listen. (Be warned, though - it's pretty damn depressing. You might want to have a box of tissues close at hand, or alternatively, make sure there are no razors or other sharp objects within arms' reach before clicking Play.)
Now, I was a pretty angsty sixteen-year-old. (Then again, who wasn't, right?) A song like this, one that forces the listener to share in whatever incredibly miserable experience inspired it in the first place, seems perfect favorite-song-ever material for a kid with tons of negative thoughts and emotions swirling in his adolescent psyche but without any sense of perspective on any of it, much less any way of expressing anything more complicated than deep, malignant sorrow. Screw looking at things from different angles, this is my angle, and nobody but Trent Reznor understands me. Of course, even at that young age, I was a budding musician, and I appreciated the compositional and production aspects of the song too, such as its masterful use of atmospheric effects to create mood and its clever switches in time-signature. All in all, I had thought "And All That Could Have Been" was pretty much the epitome in songwriting, musicianship, and storytelling-through-lyrics. And it was, like, deep, man.
Listening to the song again eight years later, my impression was decidedly different. For one thing, it's so oppressively dreary and dark that listening to it really wasn't that much fun. I guess in the intervening time since I was a dark and brooding high-school sophomore, I've gained more appreciation for major-key songwriting. Plus, Reznor's complete lack of musical or lyrical subtlety leaves nothing left to interpretation - it's like getting whacked in the face with the gloomiest sledgehammer ever. I guess I don't feel like I completely share his outlook on things as much as I thought I once did. But what made me stop and think the hardest was the fact that, when I was the kind of kid who listened to this stuff all the time, I'm sure I was just about as depressing to be around as the music I listened to. (For what it's worth, though, I still think the song is cleverly produced and arranged from a musical perspective. I'm still a NIN fan, and for all his lyrical shortcomings, Reznor was - and arguably, still is - a damn good musician overall.)
When you get older, though, you learn that things aren't so cut-and-dry. You learn to view situations from other people's perspectives than your own. You learn that there are better ways to get a message across than screaming it in people's faces - in other words, that subtlety can be a very good thing. Most importantly, you learn that an isolated instance of heartache or angst isn't the end of the freaking world, and you'd probably be better off getting over it than wallowing in self-pity. From the perspective of a 24-year-old who's done at least a little bit of growing up since 2002 (then again, maybe I'm flattering myself unduly here), it seems pretty damn silly and immature to put as much emotional stock into a song like "And All That Could Have Been" as I once did.
Chevelle have been fairly consistent in output throughout their career, with each album taking a modest step in a different direction from the previous one. Added up over almost a decade, though, this means that the band has come a long way. Today’s Chevelle is, on average, quite a bit more up-tempo and energetic than the plodding, moody alt-metal that made them famous in the first half of the ‘00s. Sci-Fi Crimes definitely continues this trend, started in earnest on their previous full-length, Vena Sera. One of the other things that sets this album apart from what came before it, paradoxically, is that it really isn’t all that heavy. Sure, there’s a good amount of super-low-end riffing, but it’s used a bit more sparingly this time around, interspersed with a wider variety of guitar tones, lyrical vibes, and general changes in mood and dynamic. Opener “Sleep Apnea,” “Jars,” and “Roswell’s Spell” are classic Chevelle, not completely terrible by any means but bordering on the upper end of average. However, tracks like these coexist with surprisingly subdued songs like “Shameful Metaphors” and the entirely acoustic “Highland’s Apparition.” These two tracks, along with the driving “Letter From A Thief,” showcase some of Pete Loeffler’s best vocal work and most memorable melodies to date. The album does drag a bit towards the end, however; a few tracks seem tacked on as filler, and the unnecessary and unimpressive instrumental “Interlewd” adds a couple minutes of running time that the album really didn’t need. Sci-Fi Crimes is a spotty, inconsistent album, but the best material on here is really very good, and for a band currently in the modern rock scene, that’s praise to be cherished.
Rating: 3/5
Standout Tracks:
“Letter From A Thief”
“Shameful Metaphors”
“Highland’s Apparition”
Release Date: August 31, 2009
(Note: I actually wrote most of this review over a year ago, before the Great Relative Pitch Drought, so what you see below is my largely unaltered opinion of an album that's over a year old. I know, I know, like I said, I'm behind and I have a lot of catching up to do. But I still do like the album, and for most of the same reasons I initially wrote about. Keep reading to find out what they are.)
As its title would suggest, Black Clouds & Silver Linings is all about contrast: dark and light, fast and slow, intense and soothing. Take the opening track, “A Nightmare To Remember,” which kicks the album off with one of the darkest, most menacing passages in Dream Theater’s catalog. The next six minutes are mostly standard Dream Theater, though definitely showcasing their heavy side. The song soon takes an abrupt left turn, however, giving way to a calm, atmospheric midsection with soothing guitar arpeggios and vocal harmonies. This respite (which would have worked well as its own song) doesn’t last, though - the mayhem soon breaks loose again, bringing the song full circle with some of the band’s most headbanging passages yet. These musical twists and turns add up to one of the most satisfying musical journeys Dream Theater have created. The album’s other extended-length suites - “The Best Of Times,” a touching tribute to drummer Mike Portnoy’s deceased father, and the dramatic album closer “The Count Of Tuscany” - display similar ups and downs in dynamic level. The overall impression of these three tracks is of a band truly stretching their songwriting limits and branching into new territory, perhaps acknowledging the complacency of their last couple releases. The album’s pair of shorter, “radio-friendly” tracks, “A Rite Of Passage” and “Wither,” are much more standard fare for the band. Though they may not be as groundbreaking as the rest of the material here, they’re still fun to listen to, and should satisfy listeners looking for something easier to digest than 15-minute-plus epics.
After all, though, this is a Dream Theater album, albeit a very good one - and no DT album would be complete without the requisite amount of over-the-top solos and generally dramatic displays of virtuosity. Critics of the band’s technical self-indulgence will find just as much to complain about here as on any previous release. Questionable lyrical choices have also popped up in the band’s catalog in recent years, and a few clunkers slipped through this time around as well. But Dream Theater’s strengths have always been geared toward the big picture rather than the minute details of songcraft, assembling roller-coaster-rides that leave the listener with the feeling of having gone on a journey, of having really experienced something. In this regard, Black Clouds & Silver Linings is more than satisfying, and DT fans should embrace this album as one of the band’s best in a long time.
Rating: 4/5
Standout Tracks:
“The Count Of Tuscany”
“A Nightmare To Remember”
“The Best Of Times”
Release Date: June 23, 2009
