[Music] The Grand Music Discussion Thread [2]

[Stryker]

This is pimpin'

[Alaska Slim]

and nobody gives a shit about bass.

Say what you will, the bass provides both the backbone of the rythym and more depth to the sound. You may not notice when it's there, but you will perceive its absence.

Also, people do give a sh*t if you play it right.


But as for Shinji's chosen instrument, where the Bass is concerned, I agree that the Cello is better. Not because of what the Cello may signify, but that Shinji is always shown to be something of a minimalist and spartan when it comes to his belongings, a tie-in to his wish to influence the world as little as possible.

Lunging around an instrument the same size as he is would sort of undermine that.

[backseatjesus]

If nobody gave a shit about bass, then nobody would like Primus.

[Bomby von Bombsville]

Nobody gives a shit about bass... until they hear Motown.

[InstrumentalityOne]

I love the bass as an instrument.
Curtis Mayfield is awesome.

I constantly use it as a benchmark to measure "music enthusiasts".

E.g.:
"I just love the bassline in that song."
"What, you mean the guitar part?"

[backseatjesus]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFQjxHi0_3M
Can't get this song out of my head.

[Trajan]

I just bought an album of Japanese flute music. Perfect for my meditation.

[Kenshin Sephiroth]

From the album of the year:

CunninLynguists - Stars Shine Brightest (In The Darkest Of Night)

Lyrics in the description. LOVE CunninLynguists.

[Oz]

After discovering it a few months ago, I have listened to Southern All Stars' Tsunami tirelessly. Kuwata is a damn genius.

[Stryker]

The Menu Theme for Battlefield: 2142 is a fantastic listen. At first, you will find it a little boring, but if you go far enough, you start to realize that it's atmosphere is very... interesting. I cannot describe it.

Also Andrei's Theme - Armand Amar is a very beautiful track. Please, take the time to listen to it. That is also the DL for it, if you want it.

[Alaska Slim]

I Love This Song, but it doesn't love me back (yet). Scary how those Norwegians imitated Americana so well...

[AngelNo13Bardiel]

Alright, it's that time again.

The Bloodhound Gang - Show Us Your Hits (Well, it is full of catchy stuff...and it pretty much gets all that's worth hearing from Hefty Fine.)
Creedence Clearwater Revival - Chronicle Vol.1 (Dusted one off I haven't heard in a while. Still a damned good collection.)
Incubus - If Not Now, When? (Another good one, not a surprise really.)
Kittie - Spit (Another something dug out from the archives. Is it bad if I find Morgan's "growl-voice" sexy and/or arousing?)
KMFDM - WTF!? (You heard any of their albums since Attak? Then you've heard this one. Still pretty good, though.)
Sonic Youth - Bad Moon Rising (I always did like its dark, spooky, highway-somewhere-in-Middle-America-at-night vibe.)

If nobody gave a shit about bass, then nobody would like Primus.

A-frickin'-men to that.

[Born of Lilith]

I took it upon myself to write some shitty reviews of albums released this year, in celebration of the coming of Fall or something like that. Read if you want, ignore if you want, it's all gravy baby.

Lady Gaga - Born This Way: Mainstream pop music really didn't need one of its only remaining artists reliable to bring songs that are at once a guilty pleasure, unabashedly lightheaded and quality becoming so pretentious and bombastic. Her attempts at LGBT rights activism seem trite and self-glorifying to me, and when she goes for that high-minded "arena rock minus the rock" thing it just seems like the same singer who was at her best when she was singing about disco sticks and "bluffin' with her muffin" is biting off more than she can chew. But above all, her attempt to become a more serious artist actually inverts what was previously her most vital quality as a songwriter and performer: taking a niche of pop music usually reserved for the most banal of artistic consciousnesses (*cough*Fergie*cough) and somehow making it self-aware and bubbling with (if more than a little repressed) intelligence. On this album it seems like she's filling up a more pretentiously "sophisticated" premise with less substance, more intent on wowing the unconvinced than artistic expression for its own sake.

Morbid Angel - Illud Divinum Insanus: For those of you who aren't in the know, on this album one of death metal's earliest, most celebrated and most consistently aggressive bands took on a glammy electro-rock influence. This led to an uproar from fans who considered those new influences cheesy and also protested the lyrics (the song titles, like "Radikult" and "Too Extreme!", are a good indication of what to expect from them), comparing them to Limp Bizkit (which is sort of the metal community's equivalent to Godwin's Law). I initially despised the album as well, until I had a friend who's also a die-hard metalhead give it a listen. I chuckled as the song started, and he looked at me the same way a missionary might look at you upon admitting that you wipe your butt with pages ripped out of the good book. When he was done listening to the song he told me "I like it... it's catchy." And somehow that insight resonated with me; it didn't change my opinion of the album much, but it did shed a new, less pessimistic light on it. What remains of MA's signature death metal is still pretty solid, if disappointingly streamlined, and the pop-industrial pastiches are fairly well-integrated, albeit still cheesy. I would've expected a band as dark and heavy as MA to plum the depths of eardrum-piercing underground industrial if dabbling in the genre at all, rather than going for synths that Manson or Rob Zombie would've declared too cheesy to use in the 90's. But it is catchy, and decently put together for what it is. Thus, I can totally understand why someone would like the album and respect them for it. But I'd rather go back to headbanging to Altars of Madness.

Suicide Silence - The Black Crown: Again, for those who don't know, Suicide Silence are basically the patron saints of deathcore. Deathcore is, in a nutshell, death metal mixed with slow, crushing breakdowns derived from hardcore punk music. Deathcore has undergone a backlash similar to that of nu metal bands like Limp Bizkit in the late 90's, and thus many practitioners of the genre have transitioned to a pure death metal (or pure hardcore) sound with recent releases. Job for a Cowboy, Bring Me the Horizon, The Faceless and Annotations of an Autopsy are among deathcore's many apostates. But it would be unthinkable for Suicide Silence, a band whose style is so par for the course for deathcore that they've become the poster boys of it for that reason, to completely abandon the genre. And on this album they don't... they just gut it of its more interesting traits. The trudging, blastbeat-led death riffing of old has mostly been jettisoned in favor of grooves ambiguous enough to slip their way into a proverbial Pantera, Slayer or Cannibal Corpse song with equal ease (the most notable exception to that being "Smashed", an unexpected detour into scorching old school death metal featuring guest vocals from Frank Mullen of the legendary DM act Suffocation). And instead of singing about disfiguring a sorority slut's face for the lulz as they did on their debut, The Cleansing, or waxing philosophical, as they did on No Time to Bleed, their sophomore album, here the lyrics alternate between unbelievably corny "positive" lyrics (one song counsels "you only live once, so just go fucking nuts") and a level of sophomoric angst utterly untouched by any major nu metal band of the days of yore. It all amounts to what is clearly a calculated effort to subdue the anxious expectations of the band's pre-established fan base while reeling in new ones at the same time. Problem is, instead of zeroing in on a certain point of appeal that could help them achieve that, the band here has merely gone for vanilla ambiguity; I suppose the line of thinking goes that there's less chance of disappointing if you don't do much to begin with. Oh sure, there are a couple sonic experiments manifest by way of guest appearances, but only one - Frank Mullen's aforementioned cameo - works very well: on "Witness the Addiction", the potential of a guest appearance from Korn's Jonathan Davis is wasted on an unspeakably bland Breaking Benjamin-esque hook, and the accenting female vocals on "Cross-Eyed Catastrophe" just feel eerily disembodied, not doing much to mesh with the crunching guitar riffs at all. Suicide Silence will probably succeed in attracting new fans, many probably from the nu metal camp, but as for me, someone who really liked them before for their surprisingly catchy and original blasts of sonic carnage and spite, I am disappoint.

[backseatjesus]

http://www.examiner.com/beach-boys-in-national/smile-sessions-box-set-art-revealed
GLORIOUS

[THE Hal E. Burton 9000]

^that took them more than long enough

[CorporalChaos]

Say what you will, the bass provides both the backbone of the rythym and more depth to the sound. You may not notice when it's there, but you will perceive its absence.

A million times this.

Speaking of bass, I was relistening to the White Album the other day, and listened pretty closely to the bass in Helter Skelter. I'd never really paid too much attention to it before, but when I really listened to it, I realized that it really made the song.

[Azathoth]

Sunn O))) - Monoliths & Dimensions:

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It was never true that Sunn O))) sounded like a refrigerator, but this album proves that it was never even much of a joke. The first time I listened to this was probably the most remarkable sonic experience of my life. Everything on it just comes together so perfectly: the crushing guitar, the choir, Attila Csihar's terrifying Ungrish, and the orchestral stuff on "Alice". There's more than a few nods to 2001 here, so I suppose it's appropriate that the sixteen-minute closer sounds like Ligeti's Requiem if it were drowned in an amplifier and god's own trombone ensemble. Pretty much the only thing that's lacking is Csihar's throat-singing, which was certainly considered at some point - the Agharti live album, which I would also recommend the hell out of, features like fifteen minutes straight of Csihar just doing completely crazy shit with his voice, throat-singing and sustained death growl and creepy whines through his nose and this fucked up barking sound, all of it following out of a version of one of the M&D tracks. Unfortunately it's absent from the album. I suppose they're better live anyway...

[SaltyJoe]

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This linguistic contraption is about the last word i expected to turn up in a post on an English speaking forum.

[THE Hal E. Burton 9000]

what is that, Esperanto?

[Stryker]

If you like feeling majestic, epic and so on, Sprint Music - Path Of A Warrior is the perfect song for just that.