100% Wolf

To avoid the last day of this heatwave, there have been seven days with temperatures in excess of 30C, I booked in to the cinema. The main reason was to enter an air conditioned building for a few hours and relax without sweating all over everything. I went to see 100% Wolf.

On the way to the cinema I noted that the tide was very low. All of the mud banks were visible and the little boats were stuck in their tiny channels that keep them from beaching. After the film I thought about the rating and then did that and tweeted the result:

I gave this film a 4/10 because I fell asleep for about twenty minutes and then proceeded to figure out exactly what had happened to the characters once I’d woken up. I only watched until the end just to see what happened. This is possibly not the fault of the film but the fault of the hot weather and me not sleeping great. Without doing some control experiments I won’t know about which cause it is.

This film surprised me at the beginning as it was an Australian production and I don’t think you see many of those, especially animations. Maybe I’ll try and watch something slightly more highbrow over the next few days. I’ll let you know of course. In the mean time, while the world awaits MSFS 2020 here’s a clip of me going Gatwick to London City for giggles.

Ritual de lo Habitual – Jane’s Addiction

I bought this album because I felt that I should like Jane’s Addiction. I bought Strays by Jane’s Addiction and I think I remember liking that. We will find out once we get to the “S” section of these album reviews. I have to say I have played this album one and a half times and I don’t like it. It has no good features. Yeah, I know it was raved about but I don’t like it.

Album Reviews News

Over the last year or so I’ve been writing album reviews for this site as a way of adding content easily. I’ve been doing this in the knowledge that anything I’ve bought in terms of EBM would be reviewed once I had completed my pre-2011 albums.

The very first album reviews were written in April 2013. I started adding them because it’s a way of expressing myself and writing communications on this site. I also thought it would be interesting to see what I would write about the music and how it affects me.

For the last few years I was missing all the electronic albums off when going through the music on my NAS drive. I thought that my original plan was to write reviews of metal stuff and then start again on the EBM stuff. Last night I found out I was wrong.

I was watching Aesthetic Perfection with my niece and looked up on this site when I had seen AP before and whether she was with me or not. As part of the search results where were some album reviews of the AP stuff. I was a little surprised as I didn’t think I had written them.

Now I’m stuck. I’m going to have to go through all the album reviews to see where I finished the EBM stuff and then eventually, once I’ve finished my current plan of only metal reviews, I’ll go back and fill in all the music that I’d started but thought I’d not done.

Revisiting Mother!

I have been and read three reviews about the film Mother! which I saw yesterday and didn’t like. I’m curious as to what it is about the film that was liked so much by the critics.

Mark Kermode in the Observer wrote:

. . . . I found Mother! an increasingly exasperating experience – a claustrophobic exercise in ghastly black comedy; relentless, ridiculous, and occasionally panic-inducing. Yet give it time to settle, and the labour pains of watching Mother! produce something that you could grow to love.

Apparently this film is an observation of the world as a whole. I did feel claustrophobic, I wanted to see outside, to escape the house, but I will not grow to love it.

Robbie Collin in the Telegraph wrote:

Aronofsky’s film is . . . . a fevered allegory of humans versus nature, a grotesque, Goya-channelling creation myth mash-up, a parable of artistic obsession, and a psychological horror set inside an introvert’s worst nightmare.

Well, that’s OK then. If you decide to interpret it non-literally then you can impose any scenario entirely on it. Here’s one for you: it’s an allegory of the life and times of Lady Diana. See, easy. You see what you want to see.

Chris Hunneysett in the Mirror writes:

Employing biblical allusions with tremendous finesse and huge ambition, the director unleashes apocalyptic fireballs of condemnation on his targets. These include the control organised religion exerts over women, the cult of celebrity, and the vanity of the male creative process.

So, not about earth but control.

So, I like artistic films. I like clever films. But I did not like this film. Also, Aronofsky made Noah, which was bollocks too!

I’m reminded that Hollywood loves films about Hollywood. Want to win an Oscar? Then write a film about Hollywood. I think one of the reasons critics love this film is that it gives them the chance to place upon it all the anguish, threat and allegory that they learnt about in school.

Garage Inc – Metallica

I do own both CDs of this double album, but I have no idea what is on the first one. I didn’t want to listen to it. I was more interested in having a digital version of Garage Days Re-Revisited. I used to listen to a tape of these songs when I was younger and I was always impressed by the songs and the sound. The songs are cover versions, played to introduce Jason Newsted to the band.

Garage Days Re-revisited:

  • Helpless (Diamond Head)
  • The Small Hours (Holocaust)
  • The Wait (Killing Joke)
  • Crash Course In Brain Surgery (Budgie)
  • Last Caress / Green Hell (Misfits)

All of these are great songs and I am happy to have seen Diamond Head play and also Killing Joke.

Other songs of note on this CD are:

  • Am I Evil?
  • Blitzkrieg
  • Breadfan
  • The Prince
  • So What

The rest are boring.

All of these written in this communication are worth listening and playing over and over obnoxiously loud.

Fire – Electric Six

I bought this album so I would have access to two songs:

  • Danger! High Voltage
  • Gay Bar

Upon listening there are some other pretty good songs on here. I would recommend the following:

  • Dance Commander
  • Nuclear War

This is an album full of fun songs. The videos are hilarious too. Worth owning.

 

Another reason for liking this album is that it contains two songs played by Ca$hback, a band from the early 2000s. Check out the concert list on this page.

Discovery – Daft Punk

I think I’ve listened to this a couple of times. I’ve been getting into electronic music since I saw Combichrist with Rammstein a few years ago. I don’t think I could tell you anything about any particular song on this album. However, given it is Daft Punk I assume it to be quite a good album. Not one I regularly play but am happy to have in my collection.

Wolfmother – Cosmic Egg

Cosmic Egg is the follow up album to the eponymous Wolfmother album. These guys are a cheeky threesome from the land down under. There’s a story behind me getting the first album but this is about the second.

I like it, it’s not quite as good as the first album but it does contain some lovely rock. These guys are crazy mix of Zeppelin, Sabbath and Deep Purple. It really works.

Get it. You won’t be disappointed.

Contraband – Velvet Revolver

So they had a big hit with the main song from the album although I’m not sure which one that was now. I even listened to this in the car about 3 days ago in preparation for writing this but nothing really sticks in my mind.

It’s well written, played and produced but it lacks a certain something! Maybe the hate and angst of teenage song writing?

Close To Human – Aesthetic Perfection

This album is quite clearly the product of a band who are finding their ground. It’s good but unfortunately it’s not as good as their later stuff. This was the last album by this band that I downloaded and probably just as well. Had I got this one first I wouldn’t have carried on. As it is I consider Combichrist and Aesthetic Perfection to be at the peak of their music genre.

As this is a recent purchase and I’ve only really listened to it on runs I can’t be sure about stand out tracks. Just having a look at the titles doesn’t help apart from noticing that the second song on the album is missing. How does that happen?