On Underrated, Obscure Music

I recently (read: a month ago) was introduced to the band OSI. I’ve fallen completely in love with their debut album, Office of Strategic Influence.

Their sound is certainly “progressive” in the sense that it’s complex, powerful, and weird. It’s hard for me to categorize them well, but I think Wikipedia does a fine job:

Genres: Progressive rock, industrial rock, electro rock, post-metal, avant-garde metal

It’s hard to not like at least one of those.

New Headphones

Well it’s just about that time again.  In January I posted about my new iFrogz headphones. I lamented the fact that I need to replace my headphones quite regularly.

True to form, I managed to break my iFrogz headphones the other day. I say “break,” but really it was the headphones that pooped out on me; the right audio channel just completely died. I imagine the fault occurred somewhere in the wiring where some important thing got disconnected from another important thing. I’m not really sure.

Long story short, I bought new headphones today. In previous headphone purchases I used rather loose search parameters (e.g. they must fit a 1/8 inch jack), but this time I focused my search on quality headphones.

I examined numerous brands: Sennheiser, Bose,  Sony, Razer, and others. I finally decided on the Bose over-ear headphones (pictured). They’re half the price of the “Beats by Dr. Dre,” but still provide gorgeous sound.

These new headphones are easily the best and most expensive headphones I’ve ever owned. They certainly sound the best, but since I’m not a very good audiophile I can’t really comment on their relative quality. What I am amazed by, though, is that they have an impedance of just .

That is, the power delivered to these monoliths is the same as that delivered to crappy iPod headphones. In practical terms, this means I can listen to loud music with a low-power device like an iPod.

Sweet.

Chickenfoot Review

So I’ve spent, admittedly, not very long with Chickenfoot’s self-title Chickenfoot. Honestly, I’m probably not the sort of person who should be reviewing it, but I am anyway. What I mean is that Chickenfoot, as you may know, is a rock supergroup comprising musicians from Van Halen and Red Hot Chili Peppers, and I’m not really that into mainstream rock.

The Van Halen influence is certainly detectable. As for RHCP influence: I honestly cannot say; I can’t force myself to listen to enough RHCP to really know what they sound like. Chickenfoot just sounds to me like really uninspired, mainstream rock. Sure, some of the tracks are a little catchy, but they’re mostly forgettable.

I forsee Chickenfoot going down in my personal record books next to Black Stone Cherry’s self-titled as sorely and quite intensely mediocre.

Criticism aside (and hey, this is Critacracy), I do actually like some of the songs. The fourth track—and their second single—”Oh Yeah”, despite its unimaginative title, is pretty good. It’s good in the way Black Stone Cherry’s “Rain Wizard” is good: good enough to probably be in one of my playlists somewhere for like jogging or something.

Ilosaarirock: First Impressions

Having spent a solid 3 hours now with Porcupine Tree’s Ilosaarirock, I feel confident calling myself an expert on it. If you don’t want to read my more thorough description of each song, here’s the TLDR version: Finland sucks, Porcupine Tree rocks.

• Fear of a Blank Planet: Yes. This sounds just like it did when I heard them for their US FOABP tour. It’s everything I dreamed of.
• Lightbulb Sun: Actually, wow. This is my favorite recording of the song; I like it even more than the Warszawa version. I find something really appealing about its hardcore-ness.
• Open Car: Probably my second favorite rendition after the Arriving Somewhere… version. Nothing special–at least compared to “Lightbulb Sun”
• Anesthetize: Really? I really wanted to love this. In fact, I love 99% of it. But at 7:13, he sings:

“The dust in my soul makes me feel the weight in my legs / my head in the clouds and I’m zoning out / my hand’s on a gun and I find the range, God, tempt me / I’m totally bored, but I can’t switch off”

The text in bold is supposed to be sung in the second verse. He should have sung “I’m watching TV, but I find it hard to stay conscious.” The rest of the song is fine. In fact, the rest of the song is great. But somehow this is one of those things that tickles even my subconscious because I know the song so well.

As an aside, I have similar feelings about “Futile” on Rockpalast. At about 2:15, right after the chorus, the correct line is: “You were the one collecting space.” What Wilson tries to sing is “You were the one just saving face,” which should be the second line. Instead, what comes out is “You were the one jollecting space.”

• Blackest Eyes: Nothing special here.
• Way Out Of Here: This one’s pretty solid; I didn’t really think much of this song until I’d heard it live, and this version does nothing to diminish my opinion of it. I have to say though, the Finns clapping at the beginning is fucking annoying. They clap a lot for every song, but this is ridiculous.
• Sleep Together: Samesies, but the clapping is more acceptable.
• Trains: Goddamn Finns fucking clapping at the fucking wrong time. I mean, really? There is exactly one segment of this song in which you are supposed to clap, and that segment is not the entire song. Fuck you, Finland.
• Halo: Possibly my favorite “Halo” yet. I’m not a huge fan of the song, but, again, when I heard it live I thought it rocked. This one sounds a lot like the one I heard, so I dig it.

Radioactive Toy = Weissensee?

They even look alike!

Ok, maybe the title is a little misleading. Porcupine Tree and Neu! are very different bands. Obviously, Steven Wilson has found much inspiration in Neu!’s work. He notes in the album sleeve for Insignificance:

“Signify” was supposed to be P.T. play Krautrock, so much so that the demo actually starts off as a faithful (reasonably) cover version of the Neu! Classic “Hallogallo” (one of my top 5 desert island discs) – however clearly something went horribly wrong about 3½ minutes in and “Signify” was born

And the musical resemblance between “Hallogallo” and “Signify” is pretty obvious. But I was listening to Neu! the other day, and noticed a pretty strong resemblance between Neu!’s “Weissensee” and Porcupine Tree’s “Radioactive Toy.”

In particular, the base lines sound almost identical. They plod and pulse in basically the same way. Interestingly, I did a quick Google search, but no one else seems to be thinking about this.

Funny, that.

Residents Of A Blank Planet ‘Ilosaarirock’ Ships

The long-awaited (or at least long-anticipated (or at the very least long-thought-about-even-though-you-aren’t-a-member-of-ROABP)) Porcupine Tree live album, Ilosaarirock, has shipped! Porcupine Tree posted the news on their site today, as well as the track listing, reprinted here for the lazy:

1. Intro
2. Fear Of A Blank Planet
3. Lightbulb Sun
4. Open Car
5. Anesthetize
6. Blackest Eyes
7. Way Out Of Here
8. Sleep Together
9. Trains
10. Halo

I guess that’s cool. The entire FOABP album makes an appearance, which is great, but the rest of it… Lightbulb Sun, Open Car, Blackest Eyes, Trains, Halo — really? I know they played them for the FOABP tour, but that’s not all they played. It’s not like I need another live recording of Trains. I already have four: XMII, Rockpalast, Arriving Somewhere…, We Lost The Skyline.

In fact, ignoring FOABP tracks, the song on Ilosaarirock that I have the least live copies of is Lightbulb Sun. I have just one, from Warszawa.

I shouldn’t complain though, it’s free and it has all of FOABP.

No Twilight Within The Courts Of The Sun

Because I’m so fascinated by this song, I decided to try my best to decipher its lyrics. Here, I use decipher to mean two distinct things: first, I had to decipher the actual words — the distortion Wilson applies to his voice makes him nigh-unintelligible; second, I wanted to understand the actual meaning of the lyrics in the way one might understand a poem.

Let’s start with the lyrics (see more Insurgentes lyrics). They are, clearly, incomplete, but there are some lines I’m pretty sure about:

[[No Twilight Within The Courts Of The Sun]]

Draggin’ a lake
Find the owner of the voice
I zip in the bag
And drove all across the noise

Examine the hairline
His archives in the strands
He turned into something
That puts the weakness in my hands

I see what I suppose
I breathe what I dispose
Black wheels get yellow in the sand
I steal every idea that I can

(something something) shadows in the lake
(something) she (something) beside (something)
(something something) in a car
(something something) in the dark

Interpretation

The first line, draggin’ a lake at first seemed incorrect to me. But I realized (read: was told by a friend) that “dragging” is the process that law enforcement uses to search bodies of water for… stuff. For example, you could “drag a lake” for a murder weapon. So if this is indeed the first line of the song, Wilson is setting a somewhat mysterious tone and we should be thinking about crime.

The second line, find the owner of the voice, is then related to the lake-dragging: the lake is being dragged to locate, presumably, a corpse. We might also suppose, on a very direct level, that the “owner of the voice” is a person who screamed and then died (and now we drag the lake for his body). But, since this is Steven Wilson, we can also hypothesize that he has something more fucked up in mind.

Specifically, lines 1 and 2 might not be directly related. Instead, since Wilson is into surreal stuff, it could be that the narrator of this song hears a voice in his head. This second interpretation will make more sense later on.

Line 3 I’m somewhat less clear about. I also hear I zip in the bank, which completely throws off my entire interpretation. If line 3 is indeed I zip in the bag, then this, for me, produces images of body bags. This is consistent with my guess that someone is dead in a lake, the lake is dragged, and the corpse is then placed into a body bag.

Verse 2 lines 1 and 3 only reinforce this: examine the hairline / his archives in the strands means, to me, nothing other than identifying someone by looking at the DNA (archives) in their hair (strands).

Lines 3 and 4 of verse 2 are puzzling, though. He turned into something / That puts the weakness in my hands might mean that he, the corpse, is so mangled that the narrator’s hands are weak. This is a pretty big stretch though, and so here I reconsider my secondary hypothesis: that the narrator has a voice in his head, and it is the owner of this voice that “turns into something.”

Verse 3 is even more troublesome. It may even be inappropriate to call it a “verse”; it functions more as an interlude than anything, and I have trouble deriving any meaning from the lines. The last verse is almost completely incomprehensible, so I won’t bother trying to interpret that either.

iFrogz Fallout – A Review

Due to some magical mystery force that pervades the universe, my headphones always seem to have a life of 6-12 months. No matter how cheap or expensive, no matter what brand, they always start to decay and eventually stop working.

The latest casualty, a pair that lived for almost an entire year, will remain nameless because I can’t find any brand logos or text on the headphones. I’m pretty sad to see them go. They provided solid sound quality, a comfortable design, and even a microphone for voice-chat stuff. I noticed they were starting to go a couple days ago when the audio on the left channel would sporadically die out then come back on (albeit with some crackles). I immediately began searching for a replacement.

A friend recommended iFrogz to me. iFrogz is somewhat peculiar in that they allow you an unbelievable amount of customization for most of their products. I went over to the headphone section and began coming up with schemes for their Fallout headphones (because I like over-the-ear sorts of headphones).

Customization

I highly recommend clicking the above link and trying it out for yourself. It’s incredible. Some quick combinatorics reveal that there are 32,208 different Fallout headphones that can be designed. Of course, not all 32,208 designs look good, but it’s a wonderful way to create a unique pair of headphones that you can be comfortable with.

I went for a somewhat conservative black and yellow scheme. Here’s the preview from the site:

A couple days later, I received them in the mail, they look like this:

Taken with a Macbook built-in webcam

In case you can’t tell because of the crappy quality of my photo, the headphones look perfect! They look almost exactly like the preview. Not bad for $28! (with a 20% discount — they’re normally $34.99)

Audio Quality

Since I’m a bit of an audiophile, visual aesthetics wasn’t the only test these headphones had to pass — they have to provide decent quality audio too.

The first thing I noticed was the bass. Or really that should be in bold: bass. I’ve quite honestly never owned headphones that can pump out the low frequency ranges like these BAMFs. The mid- and high-ranges aren’t nearly as impressive as the bass, but they’re more than passable and far better than you’d expect for a $35 pair of headphones.

The only real drawback, as far as I’m concerned, is the cord length. The site advertises the length as 1.2 meters, which is true, but I didn’t really understand how short that is. It’s like the length of the standard iPod earbuds cord.

In short, if you haven’t managed to understand my review so far, I highly recommend the iFrogz Fallout headphones. If I were to rank them on a scale from 1 to 5, I’d give them a 4.5. If I were to rank them on a scale from 1 to Awesome, they’d probably be a Samuel L. Jackson.

On Albums That Don’t Suck

Psycho clown? Fuck yeah

As any sane person would tell you, Dirt is a fantastic album from Alice In Chains. This post, however, is targeted toward the less sane. I am here to tell you that Facelift is not only another fantastic album, it is also arguably superior to Dirt.

Note: I’m not actually going to make the argument that Facelift is better than Dirt; both are too fantastically awesome for that to be achieveable in a reasonable amount of time. The real objective here is to remind people that Alice In Chains is still an awesome band even without their most famous album.

Track 2 of Facelift, Man In The Box, is obviously the real zinger of the album. Very little in this world is better than screaming “Jesus Christ… deny your savior” while rocking out to the ultimate headbanging riff, but tracks like Sea Of Sorrow, Bleed The Freak, and Love, Hate, Love never fail to impress.

I guess my beef is that there are some people in this world who, when asked about Alice In Chains, say, “Oh, they’re the guys that do that one about the unhappy chair, right?” People need to be more exposed to the awesomeness that is Alice In Chains.

Insurgentes Lyrics

I have, after more than a month with Insurgentes, been sorely disappointed with the lack of song lyrics on the internet. I have made it my personal mission to provide at least somewhat accurate lyrics for every song on the special edition. Some of the following, notably No Twilight Within The Courts Of The Sun, are more guesswork than anything.

[[Harmony Korine]]

Rain, come down, and fall forever
Drain the dirt into the wasteland
Pray for sound to quiet the howling

Feel no shame to break
Feel afraid to wait forever

Kneel, to fade — the day’s corrosion
Crawl, depart towards perdition
Gray, the part**, that moves within you

Feel no shame to break
Feel afraid to wait forever

Forever

Feel no shame to break
Feel afraid to wait forever

*too brave is suggested by the good people at songmeanings.net, but I personally hear to break

**I’m not sure if the part quite makes sense, but it definitely starts with a p and rhymes with art

[[Abandoner]]

The other half is somewhere else
A play in the dark
Whines like dogs

I am restless, I am lost
Time freezes up*
Flawless eyes

The rope you used to tie yourself
Dreams enter planes
Scatter remains

I reach for you, belying** your touch
Snow starts to glide***
I confide

*songmeanings.net suggests all, not up

**Ibid. suggests denied, but I hear a definitie b at the beginng of the word and belying is the only word that fits

***Ibid. suggests blind

[[Salvaging]]

What was the point of making you trust?
You live in a lie, the pain in the dust

God always shouts, and you always kick
Through passionless hours, yeah you make me sick

Your* secret is told, but the body rejected
Your* smile’s a question, but the end is expected

A truce is attained**, excuses are given
Time to assess
Now the nails have been driven***

Time to assess, now the nails have been driven (x2)

*Your is suggested by songmeanings.net, but I’m not sure it isn’t a or the

**Ibid. uses obtained, but attained is more grammatical

***Thanks to “Will”

[[Veneno Para Las Hadas]]

When you’re young, you’re sleepin’
With the love you’re feelin’
Waking up to evenin’
Check* the pulse, you breathe in**

Nothing left, just ember***
Only we remember
A bottle not for sharin’
Poison for a fairy

*songmeanings.net suggests to, not check

**Ibid. suggests you’re breathin’, not you breathe in

***Ibid. suggests slumber, but I find that unlikely

[[No Twilight Within The Courts Of The Sun]]

Draggin’ a lake
Find the owner of the voice
I zip in the bag
And drove all across the noise

Examine the hairline
His archives in the strands
He turned into something
That puts the weakness in my hands

I see what I suppose
I breathe what I dispose
Black wheels get yellow in the sand
I steal every idea that I can

(something something) shadows in the lake
(something) she (something) beside (something)
(something something) in a car
(something something) in the dark

[[Significant Other]]

Pullin’ back from the precipice
Feel so small now, stars shine bright above
Don’t know why
Receive a better life for a song
Can’t but try, other leads apply*

Lookin’ up at tragic rush on underground**
Birds will turn and fly
Don’t know why
Passin’ through the day, only child**
Breathe a sigh, other leads apply*

Raining all day, trying to reach you
Feel so helpless, can’t stop counting time (but in)
Don’t know why, hands (something) stealin’ my heart***
Graceful dives†, other leads apply* (rain down from the sky)

*other leads apply is suggested by some random blog I found, but I find it unlikely because it makes no sense

**Blatantly stolen from Ibid.

***I think hand upon a steel in my heart as suggested by Ibid. is almost certainly incorrect, but I can’t come up with anything better. The last syllable, though, sounds like it starts with a b to me

†Graceful dives is also probably incorrect, but Ibid. suggests gray smoke dies which seems less correct. I’m almost positive the first word is graceful

[[Only Child]]

A raven holding to narrow wrist*
Pull it tight
Clothes are torn and the body twists
A single light

The worse the the struggle the more you fail
Strands fall down
The more you like it the more it hurts
Why stop now?

An only child
A winning smile
A killing trial

A broken rib and a bloody lip
All in hell*
The fire’s gone and your pride is stripped
A private hell***

You never know why it is** this way
Leave here now
Live through this on another day*
Tonight sleep sound

An only child
A winning smile
A killing trial

*Denotes a line I’m pretty unsure about

**Might be ends

***Updated 1/22/09. Changed from “Pride in hell”

[[Get All That You Deserve]]

Open the car door slow
Don’t think that you’ll ever know my name*
Get all that you deserve in this world

Love more than you can know
Have more than you’ll ever need from me
Get all that you deserve in this world

Get all that you deserve (x3)

*Doesn’t quite sound like name, but whatever

[[Insurgentes]]

Holy Mother of the simple one
When you smile at me you bring me down
You betray your thoughts
All your prayers to naught*

Now out death you speak in tongues**
And out of breath your work is done
And your dream absolves
And your path dissolves

And your dream absolve***
And your path dissolve***

*to naught makes sense here, but it also sounds like too low

**Also sounds like you speak in turn

***I used absolves and dissolves (that is, third person singular conjugation) the first time, but not the second (where I’m thinking second person singular imperative: absolve your dream, dissolve your path) because that’s how it sounds. It’s probably actually just one or the other

[[Puncture Wound]]

Streets, like Prussian blues*
Split the cells in my blood

Black like the outer eye
Adrenalized by love

The glow of a cigarette
Illuminates from above

Push, push down the earth
Feel my hand through your glove

Slump in the other door*
Skin belongs to both*

Point in perfect form
A puncture wound results

*These lines are almost definitely incorrect

[[Insurgentes (Mexico)]]

Holy Mother of the simple one
You can smile at me and bring me down
You betray your thoughts
All your prayers to naught

And out of breath you speak in tongues
And out of death, your work is done
And your dream absolves
And your path dissolves

When your cradle rocks, her love comes down*
All the pretty lies you (prance?) around
And your dream absolves**
And your path dissolves**

*Just a guess

**See *** for Insurgentes

[[Untitled]]

Discarding love today*
The North** will soon become
I lost too much today
So myth will now become

I threw my life away
And for what?
I blew my chances too
I see the bitter truth
I give up

Relinquish our connection
And be myself for once
Distrusting in summation
So thank yourself for once

I threw my life away
And for what?
I blew my chances too
I see the bitter truth
I give up (x2)

What seems so real today
Will soon enough become
The thing you always craved
Will surely not become

I threw my life away
And for what?
I blew my chances too
I see the bitter truth
I give up (x2)

I threw my life away
And for what?
I blew my chances too
I see the bitter truth
I give up (x2)

*discarded love and discord enough also fit here
**For naught is possible

Additional Notes

The other songs on the album (Twilight Coda, Port Rubicon) have no English lyrics, so I excluded them. I also want to continue updating these lyrics until they’re perfect, which means correcting every little error (of which there are probably several), but most importantly I want to fix:

• All of No Twilight Within The Courts Of The Sun
• The third verse of Only Child
• The last verse of Significant Other
• The first and fifth verses of Puncture Wound
• The third and fourth verses of Untitled
• Figure out all the lines by Clodagh Simonds in Significant Other (the ones I’ve figured out already are in parentheses)