"Nothing but the rain"
I honestly have no recollection of purchasing this album. Considering there is only ONE Motorhead album worth owning I’m surprised I’ve got this one. Maybe I got it to have the studio versions of some Lemmy classics:
That’s it. That’s the great songs on this album. It’d be better to just have the ONE album.
NO SLEEP ‘TILL HAMMERSMITH
Strictly speaking this is an EP and so does not qualify for my “Album information” section but I am going to write about it anyway.
Icon of Coil are one of the projects of the main protagonist of Combichrist, Andy LaPlegua. I am still in a phase of really enjoying the “hellectro” and “aggrotech” sound and Icon of Coil were listed on Wikipedia as an influence on Combichrist. So I downloaded this EP. What struck me firstly about it was it has much more of a clean dance feel to it that the Combichrist material. The EP consists of two songs and three re-mixes of Accerss and Amplify. I don’t often listen to the EP as a stand-alone source of music but I do hear the songs now and then while I’m listening to an aggrotech shuffle when I’m on a run. Ultimately it’s well constructed music but just not quite my type. It’s not so bad that I’ll skip the songs when they come on though!
As music is quite a large part of my life and the things I like to do I thought I would start a series of communications extolling my thoughts on the albums I own. I am only going to cover albums, no CD singles or anything like that, I wouldn’t want this to be an unmanageable project!
All of the albums listed in this section are currently on my iPhone. There are some that are not and I might get around to writing about them one day but not in the next while. My iPhone informs me there are currently 444 albums in my library, but some of those contain single songs, again, I will only cover whole albums I have bought.
AC/DC Live – AC/DC
This live album was recorded at the 1991 Monsters of Rock festival at Donington Park. I bought this album because I was there in the crowd with my sister. It was a great concert. AC/DC were (and still are) a fantastic live band.
This recording was the first live recording of AC/DC since “If You Want Blood” with Bon Scott on vocals. I think it would be fair to say that this recording of AC/DC has become iconic. The twin CD pack included 23 songs and proved that AC/DC were masters of the universe. Hearing “For Those About To Rock” with 21 real guns going off in the background gives a real sense of what the concert was like. This album gives a sense of the peak power of AC/DC. It was the tour to support “The Razor’s Edge” album and finally AC/DC had returned to the good form that was missing for a bit of the 1980s.
Personal highlights from this album have to be:
It’s great to hear newer versions of these classics. It puts a real energy back into the songs. Oh, and it reminds me of a great day in the summer of ’91!
Saw KMFDM at the O2 Academy in Islington. Small venue but nice and close to transport.
KMFDM were very good. Loud and funky the band played a good mixture of old and new. I’m not sure about some of the music being samples and recordings but I think I can cope with it if it’s occasional. They started with DIY and played Kunst third. Many hits followed and the atmosphere was as expected.
For someone used to the heavy metal crowd it was quite clear that I had crossed into a newer and different genre. Some members of the audience were not metal fans and were a little more extreme and edgy in appearance. The very tall man in the dress and make up, the other man in a dress and pink hair and the man who looked like a stereotypical butch lesbian with orange hair. I’m just glad these people have somewhere to call home.
The support bands were:
Sheep on drugs were ok but Explore were awful, just not my scene or anyone else’s I think.
In my last communication I stated that I thought the difference between my two relative frequencies was not significant. I think I have now performed a test, but whether it is valid or not can be up to you.
If Heavy Metal focuses on the dark side of life then there should be many references to to Hell in the song title. Conversly, there should be only a few references to the term Heaven in song titles. If this is the case then it could be expected that the frequencies of each would be independent of each other, assuming the subject matter for songs is random and the use of words follows this.
My Calculations follow, but essentially I have found that, at a 5% significance level, the distribution of Hell and Heaven is random and that the frequency of hell is close enough to the frequency of heaven for this to be so.
I am fully aware that I have really pushed the limits of my significance test and it probably doesn’t even work properly for this type of problem. But, my happiness about this communication remains about 75% (+- 3% for 95% confidence level).
I’ve been thinking about the dark nature of heavy metal music and I am not sure that the reputation is deserved!
My hypothesis is that heavy metal music and hard rock is not at all as bad-ass as people think. I predict that the number of song title references to Hell will be fewer than those that reference Heaven. At the time of writing this is just a confirmation bias speaking.
Assuming that my music tastes for heavy metal and hard rock are reasonably consistent with the music genre and assuming that I have a random collection of this type of music in my library I will perform a count of the words in the song titles of my library.
This really is being done live. I don’t know the results at the moment. Here goes:
Heaven:
So that’s 21 song titles that include the word Heaven out of around 5000 songs in my library.
Now for Hell:
So that’s 26 references to Hell in a song title out of about 5000 songs in my library.
Now, I have no idea if that a significant statistical difference. It doesn’t seem so to me. It also appears from the titles of some of these songs that perhaps the context in which the title is used might be more important. A couple of the Heaven songs seem more to do with the dark side that good stuff and some of the Hell songs come from sayings.
I don’t think any conclusions can be drawn from this initial study. Perhaps with a research grant I’d be able to investigate the context of these words within the Heavy Metal form and get a good answer.
Rock On!
Went with my best man and best pal to watch Testament at KoKo in Camden on Fri 30 Nov 2012.
They were good and very good fun to watch. Not a great front man but the music was hard and fast.
Liked the venue. Small and intimate.
Here are my photos:
