Tag: music

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All Beauty Destroyed – Aesthetic Perfection

There are two bands I consider to be the lead players in the aggrotech / hellectro sound. Combichrist and Aesthetic Perfection. One of the saddest things about me finding this style of music is that I started with the best two bands and the rest just don’t quite match up. More in later editions of album review.

All Beauty Destroyed is an awesome album. The beat is perfect for running. The tunes are memorable and the lyrics freak me out. It’s perfect. Favourite songs are:

  • A Nice Place To Visit
  • Hit The Streets
  • Mother*

If you don’t want to kill yourself before listening then this could help you on your way. It’s a fresh approach to dance music with catchy upbeat tunes and samples and then some sick and gravely vocals over the top. It’s all rather over the top and brilliant. It’s emotional gone crazy.

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Alice In Chains – Alice In Chains

I bought this album from iTunes during a “catch up with bands I used to like” phase. I had already downloaded the album “Black Gives Way To Blue” by Alice and decided to see what else they had. I like the slowness of the songs and the haunting vocals. This album didn’t disappoint but it’s not one I know backwards.

I’m pretty sure that all the new music I listen to just sits in the top of the memory part of my brain and I find it hard to deeply learn these songs! All the stuff I’ve been listening to for the last thirty years is stuck in there, unwilling to budge. Maybe my brain has filled to the point of only superficially remembering new things and only long learnt memories are able to be retained.

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After The War – Gary Moore

After The War by Gary Moore was bought for me as a vinyl album for my seventeenth birthday by SJR. Not sure why some album gifts and purchases really stick in my mind but this one does. Obviously, I taped the album so I could listen to it on my Walkman cassette player while at school and work and eventually I bought the album from iTunes to digitise my collection.

I don’t like the iTunes album because it starts with a non-vinyl appearance of Dunluce, Pt 1. This kinda ruins the opening of the album for me, although I won’t delete it. I don’t think this album has a bad song on it. I like them all. Interestingly I had never really heard any Led Zeppelin before this album and the song Led Clones which was meant to sound like them started me investigating who Led Zeppelin were and what their music was like.

This is just a good British rock album by an excellent artist.

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Ace Of Spades Best Of – Motorhead

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:

  • Bomber
  • Iron Fist
  • Metropolis
  • No Class

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

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Access and Amplify – Icon Of Coil

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!

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KMFDM

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.

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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.

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The support bands were:

  • Sheep on Drugs
  • Explore the TV

    • Sheep on drugs were ok but Explore were awful, just not my scene or anyone else’s I think.

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    Testing Heaven And Hell

    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.

    hell1

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    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).

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    Heaven and Hell

    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:

    • Heaven’s Dead
    • Heaven Sent
    • When Heaven Comes Down
    • In Heaven
    • Heaven Can Wait (Gamma Ray)
    • Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
    • Heaven Can Wait (Iron Maiden)
    • Stairway To Heaven
    • Heaven Help
    • Heaven For The weather, Hell For The company
    • Heaven Can Wait (Meatloaf)
    • Good Girls Go to Heaven
    • Christmas In Heaven
    • I Wish U Heaven
    • To Be With You In Heaven
    • South Of Heaven
    • Heaven’s Gate
    • Super-Charger Heaven
    • Heaven and Hell
    • Heaven Tonight
    • Heaven Beside You

    So that’s 21 song titles that include the word Heaven out of around 5000 songs in my library.

    Now for Hell:

    • Cold Day In Hell
    • Right Next Door To Hell
    • Highway To Hell
    • Go To Hell
    • Heaven for the Weather, Hell for the Company
    • To Hell We Ride
    • Hell Child
    • Bat Out Of Hell
    • Into The Lungs Of Hell
    • Green Hell
    • Hotter Than Hell
    • Help Me I Am In Hell
    • Hellraiser
    • Run Like Hell
    • Come Hell Or High Water
    • To Hell And Back Again
    • Hell Awaits
    • Hellbound
    • Hell Raisers
    • Heaven and Hell
    • Hells Bells
    • Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To Be
    • Hell Or High Water
    • Private Hell
    • Hell To Pay
    • Earth On 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!

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    Testament – KoKo

    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:

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    Reaper

    This is not a communication about the TV show Reaper, although I thought that was good fun. It is also not about Mr Grimm as what could I say about death? It is definitely not about the rock classic “(Don’t fear) The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult. This communication is about the rare ambiguity that occurs in iTunes.
    I rather like the music genre of Aggrotech or as it is also known – Hellectro. There is a band called Reaper who have released some music and recently it appeared that is was quite cheap on iTunes so I downloaded all of it.
    The problem is that when I played back the EP “Monsters in my head” it was quite clearly a different genre of music. It was more electro than hellectro. Perhaps this was an early Reaper piece but I had my doubts. A little bit of Internet research and I discovered that there were two Reapers of similar music but different enough for me to spot. Bugger. “Monsters in my head” is a little too clean for me.
    So I checked the other Reaper downloads and it turns out that the Reaper album “Gardens of Seth” is by a metal band and definitely not anything whatsoever to do with Aggrotech. The ban might be Italian, definitely not from an English speaking country. As it stands “Gardens of Seth” is rather outdated and has a rather late eighties sound. It is quite good at what it is but not quite what I want. Perhaps I will listen to it more when I’m having an Iron Maiden revival.
    The moral of this communication is that you should check discographies on the Internet before downloading songs by an artist whose tunes so far you have rather enjoyed.

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