Tag: music

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Nine Inch Nails – The Eden Project

This weekend has been pretty awesome. Smith and I drove down to Cornwall yesterday to see the band Nine Inch Nails. There aren’t many bands that would have the draw to get us to travel the width of the country but NIN are one of them. Firstly we stayed at a hotel in Okehampton which was on the route and far enough away from Eden to make the journey home this morning less by an hour. While waiting in Okehampton I persuade Smith that we should try and see a viaduct!

Meldon Viaduct - Okehampton
Meldon Viaduct – Okehampton

We parked near the reservoir and walked down by the river to the viaduct. Climbed up and walked the length of the bridge/viaduct. On the return journey we saw Dartmoor ponies and they were rather cute. We also got up close and personal with the dam holding back the reservoir waters.

Meldon Reservoir - Okehampton
Meldon Reservoir – Okehampton

After the walk and some food we drove to Eden. Parking was at the top of the project but there were shuttle buses up and down before and after the concert. It was lovely wandering through the biomes with 6000 other metal fans. It was absolutely pissing it down outside at this point with a lightning storm. The noise of this inside the biomes was like a small jet taking off, quite spectacular.

First band on were Yves Tumor. Not really my thing. Listened to a couple of songs but left it at that. Wandered around for a while.

Yves Tumor - Eden Project
Yves Tumor – Eden Project

Nine Inch Nails were quite spectacular. There wasn’t much interaction with the crowd from Trent Reznor. But is was still an amazing show. I hadn’t noticed until right towards the end of the concert that the biomes had lights and lit up as part of the show. The sound quality was really good and the fact there were only 6500 people attending made it quite an intimate venue. It’s the largest concert I’ve been to for years (mostly because of covid).

NIN - The Eden Project
NIN – The Eden Project

Andy disappeared into the pit on the second song which was “Wish” from The Downward Spiral. I maintained my composure until they started playing March Of The Pigs and I joined in with the pit. I didn’t stay there, I just hovered on the edge and enjoyed the show.

At one point Trent spoke and said there were two things that happened this evening that had never happened at any other gig. First, he made a mistake playing one of his songs and secondly, there was a rainbow. The rainbow was enjoyed by the crowd, it was quite life-positive-affirming.

NIN Rainbow
NIN Rainbow

It was a great concert. As we left and walked up the winding path to the main entrance my niece called both of us and drunkenly chatted which was pretty funny. Also, the biomes were lit up thus:

Eden after Nine Inch Nails
Eden after Nine Inch Nails
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What hits!? – Red Hot Chili Peppers

This album was one of my first CDs! I recall getting a CD player in somewhere around 1993. Before then I had used vinyl records and cassette tapes. I think I knew about the song “Under The Bridge” and that was on this album so I bought it. There were a few CDs I had bought before I even owned a CD player because I knew I would get one. I really enjoy this album. It is a good collection of the best songs this band produced in the days before they got mainstream and super massive. I’ve always considered the band to be a great rock show. I’m also really impressed with the bass playing because bass was meant to be my thing but I didn’t practice enough to become great at it. I consider myself “good enough to play a song”. I am not musical.

I’ve just looked at the track listing and I could have sworn that Give It Away was on this album but it isn’t and now I need to go and re-evaluate all my memories!

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We Are Not Your Kind – Slipknot

I’ve been listening to this while doing some other things on the computer and this is a very good album. I enjoy it a lot and there are some great songs. But the problem, as always, with this new music is that is has to get into my brain on top of all the old music and I think the old dog struggles sometimes to learn new tricks. I can remember playing this album in the car quite a bit and I liked it.

Slipknot are great.

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W.A.S.P. – W.A.S.P.

I’ve been trying to see this band for about two years! It’s all been messed up by Covid-19. I missed this band in the late 80s and early 90s for some reason. There were stories of Blackie Lawless throwing raw meat into the audience and I wonder just how true those stories are? It doesn’t really matter. This band cemented their reputation with the song “Animal”. I love the sound of this album but it’s not one I’ve played loads as I prefer the live album which has many of these songs on it. This is proper 80s cock rock.

  • Fuck Like A Beast – AKA “Animal”, a brilliant song and really quite funny.
  • I Wanna Be Somebody – a galloping song of excellence.
  • Love Machine – another galloping song and it’s great.
  • The Flame – Pretty good.
  • B.A.D. – a little slow for my liking but a generally good song.
  • School Daze – Blackie’s voice is so classic. This song is ok. Funny cow bell like sounds.
  • Hellion – I’d love to mosh to this one. It has a good speed, the crowd would be amazing.
  • Sleeping (In The Fire) – a great slower song.
  • On Your Knees – Nice up tempo song. Classic W.A.S.P.
  • Tormentor – Excellent.
  • The Torture Never Stops – Proper galloping.
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Welcoming iTunes Back

I have been using CopyTrans for over ten years to manage the music on my iPhone. I found in the distant past that iTunes mostly hated me and it would crash/hang/takeforever to do anything and was a complete pain to use when synchronising with my phone. So I move to a free piece of software that did exactly what I wanted CopyTrans. I could upload songs to my phone and edit their details. This worked well because some music I have been buying from Bandcamp rather than through iTunes because the artists get more money. I was still using iTunes to collate all my music on the NAS drive and for the Sonos system. It made sense as it organises the music nicely into directories and allows the creation of playlists. The thing I couldn’t do was synchronise my phone.

All of that changed when I got a better computer. But it has still taken around two years to actually take the plunge and delete the music from my phone and allow iTunes to do its job. There were a couple of things that made me do this. There were two albums which CopyTrans consistently – or maybe my phone – had the wrong artwork even though it was correct in the iTunes library. I really couldn’t figure out how to correct this. I also wanted to synchronise a playlist onto the Sonos system, one I had created on my phone. I took the plunge yesterday and for the first time in over ten years I plugged my phone into the computer and opened iTunes at the same time. I clicked synchronise and left it to do its job.

Three hours later, after transferring around seven thousand songs, it was done and I opened the music app to see what had happened. It had worked! After deleting some albums a second time around I synchronised again and it took a couple of minutes. Well, that is a timeframe I can live with. This makes it a lot easier to buy music and keep all the content nicely aligned over time. I’m quite happy and it feels like a decent achievement. Sad really, but I do feel smug sometimes over music.

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Walk On – Boston

This has been playing while I take a flight in X-Plane.

I need your love – well constructed but bland!
Surrender to me – starts really well. Decent riff. Pretty much maintained this until the end.
Livin’ For You – slow and boring. probably a good song.
Walkin’ At Night – somehow missed this when it was playing or it was a short song.
Walk On – Amazing guitars after a slow start, very rock ‘n’ roll.
Get Organ-Ized – Decent organ solo instrumental. Very operatic.
Walk On (Some More) – Decent reprise of Walk On to make the last twenty minutes one song.
What’s Your Name – Another pretty decent song that’s written really well.
Magdalene – Look, this is a good song, but it’s boring.
We Can Make It – It’s an ok song.

Here’s the thing I’ve said before about Boston. It’s absolutely really well written music and it’s great for the car. I would imagine that if you know the songs then they would be brilliant for singing along to.

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Vulgar Display Of Power – Pantera

There are those people who fixate on a couple of bands and then there are others who just like lots of slightly different same sounding stuff. I’d like to think I’m in the second group but I’ve obsessed over bands in the past and some I’ve seen multiple times. Anyway, that’s a really boring way of saying that Pantera are OK but they never really hit home with me for some reason. I got this album and really like Mouth for War, Walk and Fucking Hostile. I think I remember being at a concert in Brixton (?) when Fucking Hostile came on in the before the gig music selection and I really enjoyed it. But, that’s about it. For some reason I never quite got into Pantera.

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