Log #219 - New Pleasures With Others Remaining Unknown

OPETH'S STILL LIFE AND DAMNATION

A continuation of my discovery of Swedish group Opeth this week proceeds with one of their classic early albums - their fourth Still Life (from 1999). As an early record from their "death metal" days I wasn't expecting to like it so much as their later work. But actually it was great. The growl vocals are used relatively sparingly and I didn't mind them too much once I'd tuned in. 

Furthermore when lead singer Mikael Åkerfeldt sings cleanly he has a great voice. And the music (and the musicianship) is amazing. Most prominent is the super fast guitar riffing. 

This has got to be one of the band's most powerful albums (but then again there are plenty of gentle acoustic guitar interludes too including the lovely Benighted which has that gentle interlude feel of the quiet tracks on Black Sabbath's massive Master Of Reality album with its reverbed vocal and jazzy finger picking). 

The cover would also indicate a certain Black Sabbath influence and I guess if you played a Sabbath album on 45rpm it could sound like this - Sabbath on speed if you like!

The Damnation album is an odd entry in the Opeth catalogue even in the history of a band not afraid of change. Apparently originally conceived as part of a double album recording sessions were eventually released as two separate albums (Damnation following 5 months after Deliverance in 2003). 

The split made sense as both albums are very unlike each other - the former (which I haven't yet heard) more metal, the latter more mellow prog (you might have thought the titles of each might have suggested the opposite). As such the latter album is a revelation with In My Time Of Need the most beautiful Opeth tune I've heard and the whole album my favourite by the band to date. 

Considering this album came out nearly 20 years ago it is a surprise to me to still read about Opeth fans bemoaning how the band have gone soft relative to their metal days; it would seem they've been "progressive" for a lot longer than they've been "death metal". To be fair it's not like the early albums were devoid of progression (far from it) and the later albums are certainly not soft!

THIS WEEK'S FULL SELECTION:

~

Opeth - Still Life
Opeth - Damnation
Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
The Enid - Something Wicked This Way Comes 
Eloy - Silent Cries And Mighty Echoes
Pink Floyd - Atom Heart Mother

~

JOY DIVISION'S UNKNOWN PLEASURES

It's not a massive jump from Opeth to Joy Division. They are equally dark, well even darker actually. JD were a band I held in a lot of contempt when I was at school in the late '70s for no good reason apart from I thought they were laughably bad musicians (in that respect you couldn't get further poles apart between Joy Division and Opeth). But of course I was missing the point entirely. I was coming from a point of view of liking (or more to the point admiring) the fancy musicianship of prog bands like King Crimson and Yes. The tuneless singing of Ian Curtis, the one note bass playing of Peter Hook, and a guitarist who had to look at his right hand to pick out feeble 3 note leads, therefore didn't do it for me. 

However seeing old footage of the crazed elbow dancing Curtis fronting the band is pretty mesmerising. How did they come over on record though? I'm about to find out with a spin of Unknown Pleasures.

Mmmm, not sure I've been missing much. Save for a few more fleshed out songs on side 2 of the album like Wilderness where the band approach a Doors sound (Curtis was a fan) and the atmospheric I Remember Nothing the majority of the record sounds very basic almost to the point of amateurish. That's not necessarily a bad or unexpected thing (think Velvet Underground) but it just doesn't sound like the band particularly had much chemistry together: It sounds like four young guys jamming in their bedroom each playing slightly different tunes in slightly different keys and time signatures on cheap instruments they've only had a few weeks. It begs the question whether Joy Division would have become so iconic without Curtis's death.

The drummer sounds pretty good though which is no mean feat at a time when electronics were just starting to infiltrate drum beats. I know this album (and band) is a bit of a sacred cow but here I am 40 years later and I'm still not really feeling it. Christ, if I ever come back to this record again I could be 90 years old! That's a grim prospect too. 

Were New Order, who rose from the ashes of Joy Division in 1980, any better? Different as I understand it, not knowing much from them save for Blue Monday of course.

Oh, by the way, the film Control is excellent. The lead actor really pulls off Curtis. It's pretty grim as you'd expect, and just had to be shot in black and white. And one other thing, I saw Peter Hook's current band a few years ago at a festival and they were a highlight of the weekend.

Iconic cover too of course (see top) which is now much more famous than the actual music. A classic of minimalist artwork and fitting for the contents. Those contours make me think of the Misty Mountains in Lord Of The Rings.

THE ENID'S SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

Apparently The Enid's Something Wicked This Way Comes was the band's first album with vocals (and their fifth released in 1983). This makes their mostly instrumental music even more "stageshow". The album's lyrical content is apparently about a post apocalyptic reality and not based on the well known Ray Bradbury 1962 novel although the carnival setting for the latter would fit well with the music. 

ELOY'S SILENT CRIES AND MIGHTY ECHOES

The most remarkable thing about Eloy's Silent Cries And Mighty Echoes from 1979 is how similar the opening is to Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond (1975). I mean, really similar! Give it a listen. Is it a deliberate homage? It seems too similar to be a coincidence.

After the opening guitar sequence Astral Entrance jumps into that galloping sort of rhythm also favoured by Pink Floyd (particularly on Animals I'm thinking but also think of One Of These Days). Eloy to be fair are often compared to Pink Floyd. Or Pink Floyd with Arnold Schwarzenegger on lead vocals I read from one online reviewer (perhaps a little unfair). The Acopalypse continues the Floyd sound with Clare Torry (The Great Gig In The Sky) like vocals and long Rick Wright synth string chords.

PINK FLOYD'S ATOM HEART MOTHER

To complete this little tangent final record of the week was a revisit to Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother. This came out in 1970 and was already the band's fifth album. It's still Pink Floyd in development: The sound moving slowly towards a fuller fruition on the follow up Meddle. Indeed the side long title track could be viewed as an Echoes forerunner. However Atom Heart Mother is more baggy round the edges. It has a nice main theme but with it's brass section and choir is somewhat overblown. The best part is a central section where the core band groove (as they do in the central part of Echoes).

Side two, like Meddle's side one, contains some catchy more acoustic numbers - a rock song, an acoustic picker, and a piano track (with some more brass), plus a classic early Floyd piece of avant garde whimsy in the literal form of Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast complete with "found sounds" from Alan's kitchen. Who was Alan? He was Pink Floyd roadie Alan Styles as pictured (left) on the back of the Ummagumma album cover.

Read More

Log #217 - Splashdown (Into the Ocean from the Stratosfear)

After the success of Lateralus last week I doubled down with TOOL's most recent album Fear Inoculum.

Invincible sounds very much like Rush with the picked guitar and latter period Geddy Lee like vocals.

7empest is epic and the opener is very powerful.

The drumming is obviously very busy and front of mix in this style of full on nu-metal and the guitars are generally of the chugging variety - not an awful lot of soloing even in such lengthy songs.

Could it be a bit samey after a while? Not so far, plenty to enjoy here, and I think I even prefer this album to Lateralus. These boys should go far.

Tool - Lateralus
Tool - Fear Inoculum

Tangerine Dream - Stratosfear

The Enid - Aerie Faerie Nonsense

Eloy - Ocean

Van Morrison - Into The Music

I was slightly disappointed with Stratosfear though coming as it did (1976) slap bang in the middle of TANGERINE DREAM's "heyday". It doesn't seem to develop their sound much and gives me the impression of treading water with "random" synth melodies over trademark pulses. 

The title track which kicks off the album is one of the band's most commercial pieces with a predictable melody and one of those Edgar Froese guitar solos which sound a bit random to me without adding anything to a track.

I respect their synthesizer textures in theory, but these guys should leave the accessibility to Kraftwerk. When they program in received semiclassical melodies and set the automatic drummer on 'bouncy swing,' the result is the soundtrack for a space travelogue you don't want to see.

Robert Christgau 

Stratosfear points the way towards the more developed rock sound TD would master on Force Majeure 3 years later.

Years ago I had an album by English classical prog group THE ENID called Six Pieces (1980). I can't remember much about it apart from it didn't really grab me (by definition presumably). 

Aerie Faerie Nonsense was the group's second album released in 1977. It's an oddity. It actually sounds like symphonic classical pop music (the emphasis on pop meaning the music is awash with upbeat melodies). I can't even tell if they actually recorded with an orchestra (there doesn't seem to be a mention of this in the sleeve notes but it certainly sounds like it). Other than that the music centres around founder keyboardist Robert John Godfrey, with some rock guitar and drums, but it's mostly orchestral and entirely instrumental (the slimmed down parts consisting of just a conventional rock band appeal to me more than the overblown orchestral flourishes). 

There are moments that remind me of some of Camel's instrumental work, especially The Snow Goose. Perhaps this was the sort of music the naff instrumental "supergroup" Sky were striving for?

Apparently some of their albums did have vocals and I'll source one of them before filing the group away in the "tried that once" drawer.

The ELOY album is more to my liking. This German prog rock band is, surprisingly, new to me. Of course I've heard the name but this is the first time I've ever heard any of their music... and it's pretty good. 

It isn't massively new or different - many comparisons to Nektar and Pink Floyd can be made (and Grobschnitt too but I'm undecided if that is just because of the vocals), but nevertheless Ocean (their 6th album, also from 1977) is excellent at what it does and can take its place proudly among the offerings of those 2 (or 3) contemporary prog bands.

Both Eloy and The Enid are still going in various forms. Two bands I'd mixed up together in my mind's eye (most likely just because of the similar names, as the actual music is quite different).

VAN MORRISON is currently my second favourite artist (as judged by frequency of plays in my CD player!). However I am yet to hear all of his albums and at my age time may be running out (I should at least commit to hearing everything up to the end of the '80s). I came to Into The Music (his 1979 offering) after reading an album ranking that, surprisingly, put this at No.1.

There is no doubt that Van, as always, has a crack band behind him as they race through these jaunty tunes - both of the string (Astral Weeks template) and brass (Moondance template) variety, often employed together in these tracks.  

I prefer Astral Weeks to Moondance and generally therefore like his stringy folky albums (like Veedon Fleece) more than his souley brassy ones (more prevalent in the '80s and beyond). In fact the strings on this album remind me of the raw fiddle playing of Scarlet Rivera from Bob Dylan's superb Desire album especially on one of my Van favourites the life affirming And The Healing Has Begun, albeit they do dip into The Chieftains territory on one or two of the lighter weight songs..

He's in fine voice too, a little more age and gravel, supplemented by abundant choir.

Into The Music is a good "later period" more commercial Van album, but certainly not his best.

Read More