There are a couple of reasons to begin with this video:
1.) This song has been haunting my thoughts for the last week.
2.) I believe it adequately sums up my relationship with this blog.
Maybe its the recent release of Dethklok’s “Dethalbum II,” but for whatever reason, music and murder (“Murmaider?”) have been on the brain recently. I have kind of a sick fascination with songs with violent lyrics that come from unexpected sources. If Cannibal Corpse pens a song about a shotgun to the face, we’d have to categorize it among their least imaginative in-song deaths. But if Elton John sang similarly gruesome lyrics set to the same sort of chords, rhythms, and melodies as “Crocodile Rock,” then color me intrigued.
Speaking of Elton John, and to get some sense of the type of dissonance I’m looking for in this list, take a listen to “I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself.” It was an early contender, but I had to disqualify songs about suicide, since wow there are a lot of upbeat songs about suicide. No, for this list, it’s 100% “I-shot-a-man-in-Reno-just-to-watch-him-die” murder.
I was aware of Muse for awhile, but didn’t start listening to most of their catalog until the end of college. The first few songs to catch my attention were some of the odder ones, namely “Apocalypse Please,” a densely layered arrangement of piano, guitars, high-pitch vocals, and high-speed drum fills. These weren’t the songs that made me a fan though. Songs like “Hyper Music,” “Plug In Baby,” or “Knights of Cydonia” had unbelievably catchy main riffs that weren’t terribly hard to play and sounded great. That’s what hooked me on the band — guitar-driven rock that was just plain fun to play. That was really all I ever wanted or expected from the band. Read more…
I’m weirdly not bothered by most accusations of musical plagiarism. I can appreciate the Chili Pepper’s “Dani California” and Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” on their own merits, in spite of the nearly identical chord progression and strum pattern of the verse. I had no real opinion in the whole Coldplay vs. Joe Satriani vs. Cat Stevens debacle, because hey, there a millions of musicians and billions of songs, and every artist is inspired by everything else he’s heard before. Riffs will repeat themselves.
Depending on how litigation happy the former members of The Jam are, I wouldn’t be too surprised to see Weezer’s newest single get slapped with a lawsuit. Compare Weezer’s “If You Are Wondering If I Want You To” with The Jam’s “Town Called Malice.”
vs.
Disclaimer: As long as we’re talking about plagiarism, I should point out that this discovery was not my own. The similarities were pointed out to me in the comments on the UltimateGuitar.com news feed.
Maybe we’ll have some content to go with these youtube videos one day!
Jack White must be the musical equivalent of a shark: He must keep swimming or he’ll die. Tuesday will see the release of Horehound by The Dead Weather, his second side-project’s first album, as well as a pair of shows at the 930 club to kick off the band’s first tour. This means that in three years, he’s released three albums with three different bands, toured with all of them, and wrote a (somewhat disappointing) theme song to a (definitely disappointing) Bond movie.
While The Raconteurs sometimes hewed a little too close to sounding like a four-person White Stripes, The Dead Weather will invite no such comparison, mainly because Jack’s role within the band has shifted. He touches on everything in the album — guitar, rhythm, and vocals — but dominates none of them. Alison Mosshart (The Kills) handles the majority of the vocals, alternating fairly seamlessly between a sultry, bluesy moan to a rocker’s wail. The guitar work, mostly from Dean Fertita (Queens of the Stone Age), is almost completely draped in a heavy fuzz, a mixture of “Icky Thump” and “Sick, Sick, Sick.” The two Jacks, White and Lawrence, stay mostly in the rhythm and supporting section, giving a bluesy base for the other two to build on. (I do suspect a few of the solos are White’s doing, however.)
The album is blues-rock played deliberately messily and heavily. As a whole, it’s a lot more interesting than The Raconteurs’ output, though not as memorable or flawless as The White Stripes. If we must compare it to the band members previous work, it’s probably closest to the Kills, so Mosshart might be more of a creative force here than White. That’s not a bad thing at all; the Kills are a great band.
The album is at it’s strongest when it leans hard in either the blues or the hard-rock direction. The album’s best song, the brilliant opener, “60 Feet Tall,” manages to do both. It’s is a slow escalation with spare instrumentation and crooning vocals that leads to a pair of loud and distorted solos. This structure resurfaces in “So Far From Your Weapon,” with slightly diminished returns (still worth listening to). Other stand-out tracks include the heavy, instrumental “3 Birds” and the slow pseudo-surf rock of “Rocking Horse.”
Jack White is normally a master of the pop-hook, but the album’s main attempt at a more accessible track falls mostly flat. Certainly don’t judge the rest of the album by the first not-terribly interesting single, “Hang You Up From the Heavens.” Also try not to be distracted by the fact that the opening seconds are identical to Weezer’s “American Gigolo.” “Treat Me Like Your Mother” is much more likely to be a hit song. It’s more energetic, Mosshart and White both share the vocal spotlight, and it doesn’t sound much like anything either of them have done before, much less like most things on the radio.
As with any supergroup like this, it’s hard to tell how committed the members will be to expanding the project, but I’d be happy to hear another Dead Weather album a few years down the road.
The point of Satanic rock was to scare the Normals while fucking with the minds of its pimple-faced, predominantly male (nerdoid) audience, who needed to create a counter-world, with counter-morals and counter-aesthetics, to empower the nerdoids against the cooler, more successful jocks. But metal had its rivals for the hopelessly angry nerdoid: punk, hardcore and metal’s own competing mutations. The competition forced metal’s leading edge to metamorphose into harder, faster and more violent forms, reaching its apex with the rise of Death Metal in the mid-80s. Death Metal was as violent, Satanic and musically inaccessible as metal could go, or so it seemed.
And here is where Norway, the comic straight-man character in this dumb, bloody saga, comes in. Norway is not only a completely humorless society (it banned Monty Python’s The Life of Brian for being too offensive, leading to ads in rival Sweden boasting that the movie was “so funny it was banned in Norway!”), but worse, a deeply oppressive society, in a recognizably bland, caring, pious, Social Democratic way. Which raises an interesting question: Do boredom and blandness “count” as real suffering, and if so, do they justify murder the way other forms of oppression make murder seem a likely, even understandable response? The Black Metalists of Norway think so.
The humor and empty boasts inherent in Death Metal were lost on Norway’s youth. They took Death Metal literally, and quickly discovered that it wasn’t “evil” or “authentic” enough. There were too many “poseurs.” And more important, too few genuine corpses for a scene that claimed to be so obsessed with death and violence. So Black Metal offered up one of its own as its first sacrificial corpse: the lead singer of Mayhem, who ingeniously had changed his name to “Dead,” offed himself with a shotgun. His friend and lead guitarist, Euronymous, discovered Dead’s brains splattered all over their apartment. So the first thing Euronymous does is run down to the village store to buy film, run back, snap a whole bunch of photos of Dead’s corpse, boast to all his friends about it, then call the cops. Now that is fuckin’ cool, dude.
…
Where as the nerdoids in Lords of Chaos were vainly trying to recapture the lost, centuries-old glory of their Viking ancestors in a diminished modern Norway, uber-nerdoids Richard Perle and David Frum seem hell bent on destroying contemporary America’s glorious imperial war machine right at the very peak of its power. Their plan for leading America, lemming-like, over the cliff of self-destruction is laid out in their sparsely-worded manifesto, An End to Evil. The title alone shows how very Black Metal these grown-up war nerds are.
(via)
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