Listening to the album was a little unpredictable, I had trouble with the first few tracks. After listening to this album for a month (a clear sign I have enjoyed the album, aside it sky-rocketing to the #1 artist in my last.fm profile) I have never found myself revisiting the early tracks. The first (Critical Acclaim) is far too angry for my tastes. After a bland organ intro, it drops into some unimaginative rhythms. A very provoking vocal style, almost yelling, feels like a violent street brawl, I just want to get out. The chorus is almost redeeming, until Matthew octaves up the final note, destroying the relief.

The second (Almost Easy) has a mix of elements, both good and bad.

• Some really interesting vocal styles.
• The chorus (mother) brings back some of my favourite elements from previous albums, the vocal harmonies, and contrast of vocal styles.
• Terribly boring driving snare.
• Unclear, and therefore untidy sounding fast rifs.

Scream begins with a Disturbed (band) inspired intro. And carefully builds with the aid of small details like piano fills. It tops it off with a carefully created chorus, with a very slightly pop rhythm feel that I find very present. The vocal harmonies were a slight acquired taste, but well worth it.

0:00-Critical Acclaim; 0:41-Almost Easy; 1:01-Scream

Afterlife is where this album begins to come into its own. A string intro that magically transitions into a traditional Avenged riff. A killer sounding bass brings in the verse. The bridges are fun, with heavy emphasis on the offbeat. The strings make a re-appearance in a short interlude, but continue after the guitar solo acting like a Latin horn section, emphasising the staccato rhythm. Non-existent outro, but then it would be hard otherwise to transition into the next track.

Gunslinger starts with a acoustic (steel string) intro, which they seem to find room for every album, and do a fine job, before rocketing into the track with an unforgiving power-chord riff. I love the subtle guitar soloing behind this track when it extends away from simple a arpeggio, that and the spirit-raising female backing vocals.

0:00-Afterlife; 0:40-Gunslinger

Tack 6 “Unbound (The Wild Ride)” is indeed the start of a wild ride, an amazing four tracks.
A song of tremendous contrast within itself, dueling guitar guitars followed by beautifully intricate piano runs, the quality of vocals, between clear and gruff, the double kick, which serves this song well, to the melody toms, small choir, and the childlike vocals that take out the track.

Brompton Cocktail is easy to like. It makes heavy use of my favourite 4-beat bar subdivision, the 3-3-2 pattern. The string highlights in the verse are lovely, but builds the song to a slightly empty chorus.

Lost was a bit difficult to judge, the shock of the vocal auto-tuner in the chorus took a while to get over, but after several listens I grew to like the way the effect was used. With previous albums the big selling point for me were the occasional multiple vocal harmonies, especially the slides from note to note. While some might argue the musicality of the individual voices, the combined effect was a win for me. While the auto-tuner removes the ability to create slides, it was carefully added to allow slides where required. The slight vocorder effect also for me provides an extra layer of expression, when selectively used. I think of it as an alternative to a gruff vocal style, just another tool in the kit.

0:00-Unbound; 0:53-Brompton Coctail; 1:23-Lost

A Little Piece of Heaven has been my addiction for weeks. First I want to list the instruments from the liner notes:

• Strings, Horns & Choir Arrangements – Steve Bartek
• Piano & Organ – Jamie Muhoberac
• Upright Bass – Miles Mosley
• Cello – Cameron Stone
• Violins – Caroline Campbell and Neil Hammond
• Viola – Andrew Duckles
• Choir – Beth Anderson, Monique Donnelly, Rob Giles, Debbie Hall, Scottie Haskell, Luana Jackson, Bob Joyce, Rock Logan, Susie Stevens Logan, Arnold McCuller, Gabriel Mann and Ed Zajack
• Alto Sax – Bill Liston and Brandon Fields
• Clarinet – Bill Liston and Rusty Higgins
• Tenor Sax – Dave Boruff and Rusty Higgins
• Baritone Sax – Joel Peskin
• Trumpet – Wayne Bergeron and Dan Foreno
• Trombone – Bruce Fowler and Alex IIes
• Additional Vocals – Juliette Commagere

This of course, in addition to the normal vocalist, guitars, bass and drums, and for me sets the stage for an exciting piece. The content of the song is quite graphic in parts, dealing with greed, lust, murder, necrophilia, reanimation/undead, and mass slaughter, but for those not offended may prove somewhat humours.
The musical content is absolutely thrilling, displaying a magically created wide ranging collection of sounds, tightly woven to help tell the story. For example, the piece starts with clarinets/piano builds with bari sax, tenor sax, and choir into a violent double kick driven rif, supported by sax and clarinets. Follows is a very rhythmic passage of percussion and clarinet, introducing guitars and horns, leading into some lovely rhythms and horn crescendos. A comic section consisting of a strong bari sax bass, a taunting clarinet and organ, and offbeat horns. Shortly after a strong guitar and choir section, with staccato strings magically transitions into a beautiful string passage lead by the bands vocal harmony. A strength an aspect that is a particular favourite of mine.
The song makes tremendous use of dynamics, something becoming a lost art, even among metal, where there are often only 2 settings, gentle crescendos and diminuendos can be so powerful in the right places.
The song certainly is a magical ride. I feel the the Bari sax provides subtle but crucial support to this song, and the uniquely wide range of instruments allows a powerful range of tones and expression, which was masterfully used.
YouTube has several several videos, many of which use the song in its entirety as a backing.

The album winds down with a pleasant country/blues track, a tradition for Avenged Sevenfold albums to include one on every album.

Dear God

This album I’m sure will still remain a favourite throughout the year, and I hope I find even just one or two albums that come close to matching this. If so it will make for a magical year of listening.

Check Wikipedia for more information on the band and their albums.

Cryptopsy – The Unspoken King

Never having heard this band before, I was enticed by a review on the cover; “…time signature blasphemy… bouts of unpredictable musical passages…”. These words are quite true, but unfortunately far more literally than I had expected. I’m not sure the use of “musical”is a complement, if only parts are musical, what fills the other 42 minutes of the album? OK, I have found it hard listening to this album, listening to it in the car while travelling, and while working did not reveal anything worth hearing, but now listening to it with a good pair of headphones I’m coming to grips with this album, but I’m still not impressed. It all started when in the opening seconds of the album I heard this:

Blast beat is something I can rarely tolerate. It overpowers any attempt to create melody or harmony, and fatigues the ears, making more than a few songs hard to tolerate. But alas, it remains for much of the album.

The first track holds no merit in my mind, the second has a solid groove in parts, but is totally unsupported, with no depth to make the song memorable. The short guitar solo is one of the few short passages where the listener is granted a reprieve from the wall of blast beat.

The rest of the album is much the same, walls of unmelodious sound, with occasional pauses from the drummer while a guitar plays a short melody. The album has some good rifs, some nice sounds, good material for contrast, but its assembled haphazardly, with no structure, building of ideas. I love bizarre time signature changes, but this album creates nothing from them. They’re there, but they do not convey anything to the listener.

If I had to recommend two tracks from this album, it would be 10, and perhaps 5. They have a fair variety, and at least some flow and structure.

This from track three is also one of the more enjoyable

On the whole I don’t see myself revisiting this album, Its been hard enough to get through to pull out the few bits I do like.

Nevetherym – Rendezvous

This was an interesting album. I had no idea what to expect. It was a 3 track album for $10. Its a self published album (the first) from the Central Coast. With only three tracks I figured there had to be something worthwhile there to warrant publishing a short CD. It must be “Interesting if not good” I said to myself, and the proprietor as I purchased the CD. The 26 minute album had me hooked immediately. Its amateurish, I cringe with every bad decision made in building the album, but there is so much promise that I find myself listening over and over.

Mix and recording wise, the album is a little awkward, over distorted and unclear in parts, but that is to be expected. The technical ability leaves some to be desired, phrasing, dynamics and timing aren’t perfect, but these can, and I’m sure will be worked on.

A violin features in all three songs, and baring the previous comment, sits very well. The vocals are the biggest disappointment. Conceptually they’re fine, but in execution, some vocal training is much needed to keep the voice on pitch.

The guitar rhythm in track one is very top 40 rock/old school Nickelback, which I like. It has a very different feel when layered with the violin. Great contrast between light and heavy sections, and great transitions. Slightly repetitive (a complaint I often have), but at least it helps to build the feel throughout the song by allowing you to become used to one feel before dragging you into another. Fantastic light section. Slight awkwardness in parts of the violin melody, but largely OK, great feel from the guitar, invoking an image of bells in my mind.
Slightly over-enthusiastic leading into the lifts, with the timing slightly off. Some poor melody choices in the violin back in the heavy section. Additionally the violin should NOT play the same riff as the guitars, it weakens the position of the violin to create emotion, and adds nothing to the feel. Some great chords thrown in towards the end to throw the listener off balance, before returning to the driving riff to finish.

Track 2 really shows the cracks in the vocals and the tone of the band, but still remains a solid effort. A shorter piece, less depth, but action packed. Again, terrific contrast, and very aggressive, and super moody. Bass guitar solo is muddy, and again, I’d like to see the violin do its own thing, or nothing at all.

Beautiful entry to track three, few tweaks to the mix would make this perfect, reverb on the pizzicato violin doesn’t sit right. Song is longer than it needs to be, with the main riff repeated. The violin again needs a bigger dose of originality. This song again does not have the depth of the first, but shows more variety, and certainly a lot of promise for their next album.

This album, with all its flaws, is a super original, promising album, I will certainly keep Nevetherym on my radar, and I wait in anticipation for their next release. To hear the full recordings of these songs, see Nevetherym on myspace.

So, this year I will endeavour to listen to at least one new album every fortnight. That is, as soon as I have some new music to listen.

Living in a small country town, its hard to find new music. Radio gets tedious, favourites are few and far between. For discovery I rely mainly on podcasts, such as NPRs All Songs Considdered, No Idle Frets, Coverville, and Brasscast.

With the nearest music shop (that sells anything outside top 20 pop) 50km away, music is hard to get hold of. Online stores have been little help over the years. Being a Linux user without an iPod, DRM-free mp3s are really the only option I will accept, and those options are still few. So for this year, I’m relying to having music mailed in.

I finally got an email informing me that JBHiFi are shipping part of the order I made at the start of this month, So I’ll be able to start in earnest soon. Just need to decide which album to start with:

• Krallice – Krallice (Still Waiting)
• Bon Iver – For Emma, forever Ago
• Death Cab For Cutie – Narrow Stairs
• Mgmt – Oracular Spectacular
• Sigur Ros – Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust
• Son Lux – At War With Walls & Mazes (Still Waiting)
• Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
• Sparks – Exotic Creatures Of The Deep
• Saboteurs, the (The Raconteurs) – Consolers Of The Lonely
• Elbow – Seldom Seen Kid
• Jeff Hanson – Madam Owl (Still Waiting)
• James Galway – O’Reilly Street

I am keeping a spreadsheet of possible music to listen to, what I’ve ordered, and what i’ve listened to. Any suggestions of music to add, or what to listen to next will be much appreciated.

To keep the brain ticking over I will attempt to write a short review on each album as I listen to them, thought I’m not making any promises.

As for this month… On my first trip to Wagga for the year I dropped by my favourite music shop and picked three albums off the shelf. I have been listening to two of these, Cryptopsy – The Unspoken King, and Nevertherym – Rendezvous. I will review these soon.

deb ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

I manually installed thunderbird from their website, and after changing sources.list thunderbird broke. updated thunderbird from synaptic, and worked fine.

Spent hours trying to get thunderbird working in the first place. I have a thunderbird profile of about 1Gb, which i didn’t want to loose. Ended up having to manually editing prefs.js to update all the paths from my windows setup. After that, and upgrading thunderbird it seems to be working fine, except the fact i am unable to access postoffice.csu.edu.au from this IP address. Its getting rather annoying.

Been going back through the histories music-wise. Found a stack of albums at leading edge, Gene Pitney, Hank Williams, Bee Gees, Carpenters, and Beach Boys. Also found a very nice album from Sydney musician Lior. Very impressed with Gene Pitney, and was already fans of Carpenters and Bee Gees. Also got my hands on Motown Remixed, which I saw advertised in Sain magazine (for Sanity Music). Eleanor and her father are big fans of motown artists, and although i know some of the songs on the album, i don’t know them well enough to compare them to the originals. Also finally got a Jackson 5 album (only took me 2 years), and loving it.

Just about ready to tie up my ITC382 assignment, want to get the bulk of that out of the way tomorrow. Also have to investigate where to find ear plugs for the next concert I go to, and try and get a copy of JWDs CD.

Continuing to work back through Dream Theaters discography, I’m quite impressed by their 1997 album “Falling Into Infinity”. Quite a relaxing mix of songs, plenty of different styles, every song is unique.

The text book for operating systems arrived (surprisingly), so I can now make a start on that.

Working back through Dream Theatres albums, I found a very nice piece in Train of Thoughts called Vacant. It starts with a familiar piece of music, which I haven’t yet been able to identify. I think John Williams may have played it somewhere, or it could be a classical piece from somewhere else. I don’t know my composers well enough to narrow it down any. Vacant introduces a well worked vocal melody over the original piece. The 2:57 piece is followed by the instrumental Stream of Consciousness (11:16) which presents variations on the original melody, I’ve been playing the two most of the day on repeat, and starting to work out some of the pieces on piano/flute.

Got a very quick response from my query on the forum, probably enough to infer the answers to my major queries, I’m a lot more confident about starting the assignment now.

TV Production screenings are on tonight, always good to watch. I don’t know anyone else who is planning to see them tonight, probably be some of the ButlerC proddies from first year there.

A coding session has been planned for tomorrow in JCCC working on out 307 project. Will be good to get the ball rolling again in session, I don’t think any work has been done on it the last 2 weeks.

Been listening to Dream Theaters (wiki) new album Octavarium (wiki). As much as I have read about Dream Theatre, this is the first I’ve heard, and I’m impressed, very well balanced, and plenty of progressive elements. Listening to it I can hear a lot of Jeff Wayne, Pink Floyd, Andrew Lloyd Webber and a little Korn, System of a Down, and even U2. I was going to start playing some (more seriously than just picking out bits by ear), but powertabs.net is temporarily off-line, so will have to wait till another day.

Bought text books today, the one for my distance subject (262, Operating systems) is on back-order, and isn’t expected for at least a month. Shame, was looking forward to getting my hands dirty in that subject. I’ll have to see if the library has a copy, and chase up the recommended resources. There should be plenty of online resources too.

Was supposed to take the bass back today, couldn’t find dave tonight, so I’ll take it back tomorrow (after another quick play ).
Found a page providing a nice definition of “progressive rock”. It has a list of progressive metal bands, many of which I’m not familiar with, so I have found myself some research to do. Pain of Salvation and Opeth (who I saw last year in Melbourne) are big favourites, also know tool, but the rest are largely unfamiliar. Its always fun to explore.

Found a useful screen capture program today. Windows XP will do captures to clipboard by pressing print-scn on the keyboard, however i’m not sure if older versions of windows will. CapturePlus saves shots to a file (bmp or jpg), and also allows captures from a single window rather than the entire screen. Personally i’ll stick with the old faithful Corel Capture (comes with corel draw suite, i only have the ancient version 7). Its much more flexible, but capture plus is a tiny (90k) but functional free alternative.

Wore out my fingers again today playing Opeth on bass. Only 30 days until their next album. I have it pre-ordered, but not sure what to expect. For a band described as a “classical, jazz, folk, progressive rock, death metal band” (original site no longer available), theyre a bit hard to predict.