Journal sielwolf's Journal: Innocent Magic 1
Children, you're going to have to wait for the 2005 Year in Music Review. For one Nico gets to sit until then (which will be apparent when we get there). For another I did a little hipster shopping back in NE OH and I haven't been able to listen to these new discs while at the parents' so I'll run them through the skullbox before I can give the final read (of course neither of these are '05 releases but then the YiMR will focus a bit on statistics of my buying habits). 'course the general rule is that This Is not Burger King: you do not get it your way. This is one of those fascist food dictatorships.
Like Wendy's.
And this is always a weird time: back home, end of year purchases coming in the mail, finding stuff online, and getting gifts. The latter is what happened when my brother was dismayed to find out that I still did not "own" Metallica's Master of Puppets. Growing up with who I did really makes the question of ownership kind of moot. See, Master of Puppets for me is Side B of one of those super-long Memorex tapes that I had crafted from my brother's collection back in '91.
I took that tape everywhere. Track meets, fieldtrips to museums, walking down to the bus stop at the end of the street (where we stood in the doorway of a car dealership while waiting for the big yellow to pull up). Heck, for that reason I still think of that tape's tracklisting is the "correct one". Master of Puppets then starts with "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" followed by "Battery" and the titular track. This is when Metallica was really snapping as a band. Looking at their work on this album (and in Justice) I can't help but thinking James, Lars n' them were almost on a Tool-like tear at this point. The were on these opus length metal tracks without any of the populist compromises of most of their peers. And not just having "the slow jam" but even when it comes to the construction of the songs. There is no Gn'R style jams on here; the digestible introductory track (Metallica would go on later to write "Enter Sandman" however). What about the weird biomechanical grind that leads of "Orion"? Or the three movements of "Master of Puppets" (damn. So much history with that disc. My brother and I have seen Metallica eight times between us and we've never seen them play the last part of this cut. And that's where it goes off on that big riff). Sure, their material might be read as a bit juvenile by some (though the Cthulu Mythos doesn't get enough credit by many) but those same critics listen to often inane abstract moaning and write it up like Basquiat high art.
You can see what Metallica had here that lent them to crossing over. The above is an uncompromised vision but it never tries to couch itself in jargon. Like the best of popular music it is satisfying, it pops at all the right moments. It's hard to find fault in music of this caliber. There's a panacea quality to it, that anyone can find whatever they need to cure their sickness. And there's something interesting about the human condition where we can all feel the themes of covert manipulation and isolation. It hits on all cylinders.
So why didn't I own it? Well, shit, this is sort of a Led Zeppelin IV thing. You've heard it in some configuration or another. The only thing that changes is the specifics in which it came to you and how it lays down in your history.
Deadboy and the Elephantmen is a similar thing with how it lays down through Dax Riggs, Acidbath, local radio and a dozen other bits that I've covered a dozen times before.
Of course We are Night Sky left me a little pissed just because I kept going back to what I thought was their website (it seems there are two and the one I was looking at wasn't updated nearly as much as the other) only to find no new information. It was only when I digested that their management was at fatpossum.com I realized "shit, I should check the Fat Possum website" and sure enough their debut* has been out since October. Fuck! How can I not hear about this? I usually consider myself pretty savvy in terms of music but then this sort of thing slips through my fingers. And for a group who rides on a history of subterranean releases they gotta know the word must get out. (*it isn't a true debut since there was an original Db&tE release that was closer to the collective rock effort of Agents of Oblivion. Now their just a boy-girl combo ala the White Stripes, the Kills, the Ravenettes, etc).
And since I was so jazzed to get this, I had to let myself cool on it a bit like I did with Boards of Canada. I'm reflexive as anyone else and any combination of The Familiar with The New and I'm happy. But then I found myself coming too much from the opposite end, becoming too critical. The sort of bitchy needling that bored couples subject each other to.
At the core of We are Night Sky are the four tracks from the Song Mechanism demo I really liked. Three of those tracks ("How Long the Night Was", "Dressed up in Smoke" and "Misadventures of Dope") are cut and pasted here: same production, hell, probably the same takes. What is different is the cleaner take of "Blood Music" with the guitars pushed up a bit on the mix to give the sort of gothic folk lyrical material ("this is a song called blood") and making it into an accessible A-side. Here they then make a change that just irks me: replacing the doo-wopish ooh-oohs with hooting. If I didn't know better, the choice wouldn't bother me much but I can roll over on my iPod and listen to the original cut. But that's like the cuffs on a shirt being wrinkled when you're going to roll them up anyway.
So how's the rest of the album? More of the same. Which means an extremely enjoyable fascinating juxtaposition of blues death metal material with rock folk conventions. That's what separates Deadboy from what would be their genre contemporaries. This isn't white boy rehash of bluesman standards. Dax gives as he's always given: his operatic Mississippi Delta pretty doom vibrato that sells a poetry that's a icepick love. Bored boys and girls that find their Saturdays filled getting fit with coffins (you know; for kicks). The music has three tempos: the acoustic guitar first gear, the slow rumble of second and the sharp chop of third. So to go with "Dressed up in Smoke" you also get "Evil Friend". "How Long the Night" has "What the Stars have Eaten". Again my bitchiness arises with the seemingly baffling layout of the disc.
We are Night Sky shoots out of the gate with "Stop, I'm Already Dead" which is a perfect summary of what you are going to get: vicodin relaxed pleas for recognition of our mortality combined with peppy yelps. Compared to your new blues/rock combos, the content is both darker and yet less serious in execution.
So then why follow this with the longest and one of the slowest tracks on the album? The track order kind of undermines the tracks and you feel like you're slipping gears on a Lotus. Didn't anyone realize this at Fat Possum? Great albums are 10% good structure. One of the duets demonstrates Dax's opposite has similar vocal and drumming steez as Jack White's (there's one note that hits so flat it just breaks the inertia). But standing back this album is one of those that is most frustrating only because it comes so close to excellence. Few tracks rumble like "Kissed with Lightning". For those familiar, this is exactly what you had hoped for. For those new there's something here that we all like to see. The worst thing that someone might have is to let any cursory reaction guide their opinions.
Metallica Master of Puppets *****
Deadboy and the Elephantmen We are Night Sky ****1/2
Master of puppets (Score:2)