Filed Under (Heavy Metal, Metal) by admin on 23-11-2008
 It’s been a long time since Guns N’ Roses have released an album of new material. Everybody knows this, but it’s a fact that bears repeating. If you purchased a kitten on the day that Use Your Illusion I & II arrived in stores, it’s probably dead by now. As a consequence, there has been a great deal of pressure on Axl Rose to deliver a record that would validate a 15-year, $13 million wait. There is really only one way for Chinese Democracy to avoid utter and absolute failure: It needs to be the greatest rock album ever made.
Chinese Democracy is not the greatest rock album ever made.
Oh, it’s certainly awesome, but I don’t think it’s “15 years awesome.” Had Axl released his album after a silence of, say, 11 years and two months (at a cost of, say, $11.5 million), Chinese Democracy would be an undeniable masterpiece, but considering the circumstances, some of this work seems shoddy. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed Under (Metal) by admin on 23-11-2008
 Some things are as sure as the amen in church. You just know how certain things are, and what to expect from them. As it seems, Unearth fit in there quite well. If you can count on one thing with this lot, then that they do the things they start right and straight forward. And it’s the same with their newest album, and it might possibly be the best thing they have written so far. First things first though, so let us go through this step by step.
It’s been about two years since Unearth’s last studio output ‘III: In The Eyes Of Fire’ . Along with producer Terry Date the band ventured into more thrashy regions of their sound, and although this fitted the development of their own sound quite well, something still felt amiss. Overall the album fell behind the others the band Read the rest of this entry »
Filed Under (Alternative, Metal) by admin on 23-11-2008
 Same old game is more like it. Over four albums, these new-metal rockers have remained on message, churning out poor-me songs that build from a whine to a godforsaken yowl. Their latest begins promisingly with “Fish Out of Water,” which opens with a stuttering guitar and funky double-time falsetto vocals by frontman Chad Gray. But then the song hits the chorus and devolves, as Gray bellows nonsense like, “Who do you wanna be?/The summit of integrity/Or the bottom, the filth/The dichotomy?” Mudvayne write some decent guitar hooks (check the title track), but their imagination is parched, with most songs hewing to one formula: riff, whimper, shriek, repeat. Read the rest of this entry »
 Lower Definition isn’t a band that you’re going to hear about through a television commercial or an online advertisement. Matter of fact the only reason I got interested with this band was because of a sampler CD where they were placed right on the middle of it. The song I heard was “The Weatherman” which still sticks out to my listening taste buds as an intriguing song. Thinking up a math formula to really get in depth with this post-hardcore act really leads me to three bands that really are similar in different aspects. The vocals seem to be inspired by GlassJAw which works well for the most part (if not a tad too whiney). The song constructions remind me of Hopesfall, very fluent and active as it is slow and moving as well. The interesting guitar work by the band takes a lot of cues from the old material from As Cities Burn. It’s fast and bi-polar with lead riffs entangled with one and other. If any of these bands have caught your attention before then it’s almost Read the rest of this entry »
 The Dream has some of the same elements of In This Moment’s first CD, but the melodic quotient has been increased quite a bit. They’ve mostly abandoned metalcore and moved toward rock. There are some heavy songs, but the majority are really mainstream sounding.
What makes these songs more accessible and mainstream is the decreased amount of screaming by Maria Brink. She still wails on a few tracks, but they are usually brief parts and she quickly returns to melodic singing. Most songs have no screaming at all. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed Under (Alternative, Gothic) by admin on 10-11-2008
 It takes a lot of effort to remain fresh and vital after twelve studio releases; no matter how successful and groundbreaking the band has been in the past.
That definitely holds true on the new album from The Cure. 4:13 Dream (out Oct. 28th) is the group’s thirteenth proper album, and it sees the band treading over some fairly familiar ground.
The creepy surreal gothic tracks on 4:13 Dream don’t conjure the same vivid imagery as previous works like say “100 Days”. It’s hard to tell if that’s because the songs aren’t as striking, or whether The Cure’s oeuvre has become so familiar to the listener.
Poppy is the best adjective to describe much of the album. In fact, “The Only One” bears and almost too close resemblance to the smash hit “Friday I’m In Love”. The single “Freakshow” sounds like Robert Smith Read the rest of this entry »
Filed Under (Alternative) by admin on 10-11-2008
 There is no denying the fact that Marcelo Camelo is a respected figure in the new crop of Brazilian musicians. Since the (perhaps) extinct Radiohead, the music simple, beautiful and raw barbudos of musicians has a legion of fans. “I” is the name of the first solo disc of Camels (the seal itself Zé Pereira), which provided the cover is already showing its main feature: the simplicity, the disc is for those you do not hear very high on your ipod, during a travel by bus. With arrays and calm, the disc is relaxing, nice to hear.
Two songs I drew attention in particular: “Teo and Seagull” has a beautiful array of guitar - raríssima thing these days - and perfectly evokes the mood and title of “Dinner” that has the participation of Mallu Magalhaes, who gave a Tone “folk” to the already beautiful beautiful piece. (ps: this is the first time I heard Mallu sing in Portuguese). Read the rest of this entry »
Filed Under (Alternative, indie) by admin on 10-11-2008
 “You don’t know it yet, but this is your favorite album of the year,” AbsolutePunk says of FF5’s newest release, Dance Or Die. And while you might think they’re just saying that, they’re not.
They still continue their original sound, but there are some changes. Going for more of a 70s and 80s vibe, the album is overall more mature. Sure, they still have their dance-floor rock anthems (”Rip It Up”, “Get Your Back Off The Wall”, “Fever”, “Dance Or Die”), but they also have a couple of love songs. The lovey-dovey “The First Time” and the more rock “D-I-E 4 Y-O-U” are sweet (literally). But their polar-opposite “Share It With Me” while catchy, is a very emotional, dramatic heartbreak song, with lines such as “The memory of our first kiss/Is taking me to the verge of tears” and “Now that you’re gone it’s killing me”, which you wouldn’t expect to hear from this band. In fact it sounds like it was put on here by accident. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed Under (brit-pop) by admin on 10-11-2008
 It’s five years since Life for Rent, Dido’s nine-million selling follow-up to 2001’s 12-million selling debut No Angel, so you might wonder what’s been taking so long. The answer, judging by her third studio album Safe Trip Home, is that Dido has been taking some time to mature, both musically and emotionally. Where Life For Rent was a series of snapshots from the life of a newly single girl (one reviewer called it the musical equivalent of Bridget Jones’s Diary), Safe Trip Home is overwhelmingly coloured by the death at the end of 2006 of her father.
Not that it’s a gloomy album, but these songs are noticeably more reflective, their themes of longing and absence rooted deeper than the caprices of romantic love, and consequently it feels more serious than her previous work. The outstanding song of the album is the piercingly beautiful, Celtic-flavoured ‘Grafton Street’, a six-minute hymn to loss co-written with Brian Eno and featuring Mick Read the rest of this entry »
Filed Under (Heavy Metal) by admin on 07-11-2008
 In the world according to AC/DC, sex, money, politics and other trappings of adulthood are a sick joke — but rock is sacred. No one this side of Chuck Berry has written so many great rock & roll songs about rock & roll, and no band short of the Ramones has so militantly refused to reach beyond the basics of the form. AC/DC offer a vision of the Stones if Keith had won every argument: no concept albums, no keyboards, no disco, no ballads, no gospel choirs. And Black Ice is their best argument in years — maybe decades — that evolution is for suckers.
Keeping your sound static places all the pressure on your songwriting. And for the first time since 1990’s The Razor’s Edge reached Generation Beavis, guitarists Malcolm and Angus Young have written tunes worthy of their musical muscle Read the rest of this entry »
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