What's Wrong with "Scream"

As small a victory as it is, I'm proud that, as of right now, the highest rated review of Chris Cornell's single "Scream" is mine. I rated it one star and sarcastically titled it "Congratulations Timbaland" and went on to admonish him for making one of the strongest, most unique voices in Rock and making him sound like a really sulky Justin Timberlake.

I still stand by that, by the way. It annoys the crap out of me because, I'm a fan of Cornell, and I'm also a fan of innovation and something as counter-intuitive as a Grunge Lord with an electric R&B pop mastermind sounded at least as promisingly nutty as a rock god and a bluegrass angel, and that latter pairing produced something exquisite and utterly unique. I'm a staunch advocate of taking brilliant people out of their comfort zones and seeing what they come up with. So believe me when I say that I WANTED to like it.

And it breaks my heart because I read the touching, insightful blogs Chris has written about how much he appreciates fans going along with this new thing he's doing and I just wanna tell him just because it's new TO HIM doesn't make it NEW. I wanna tell him that the reason why he keeps having to insist that he actually contributed to the work in the press is that even his most ardent fans can't HEAR him under all the layering. Oh they hear the voice, sure, but there's almost nothing of Chris discernible in there. He could be anyone of the many singers Timbaland's worked with over the years.

Chris and Timbaland set out to revolutionize a genre and make a great record. And in doing so, they got caught up in their own egos and now the work languishes in limbo for unknown reasons. Release it already to the world can buy like eleventy billion copies, Cornell becomes an "overnight" pop sensation, he goes on to make sixty more records with Timbaland and rock is killed just that much deader. We all know what's comming, so lets just get it over with.

There's one thing that gives me hope though. Cornell played a couple of the "Scream" songs LIVE when I saw him perform a few months ago. And I gotta say, when they're played live, by a real band, with real instruments, they're not that bad. That's a hopeful sign.

A Night at the Angels Roadhouse

Thank goodness, my hometown isn't quite so devoid of culture as I feared. A scan of the local paper today revealed a local band, Dionysos, playing somewhere called the "Angel's Roadhouse Bar and Grill" around a half-hour's drive from my parents' place. I myspaced the group, found it was some pretty heavy psychedelic stuff that was polished but humdrum, eh, they might be better live, so I roped my mom into comming with me and we took off through the thick, unseasonal fog into the wild unknowns of Yukaipa, California.

Angel's Roadhouse is exactly that. A Roadhouse. It was kinda seedy, it was full of rednecks and drunken regulars and the odd fan actually there to listen to the music. "Roadhouse" was also the name of the first band of the night, and funnily enough, they also happened to be the best band of the night. Bluesy, heavy southern rock, and four excellent musicians, but what was unique about them was that they were the only group of the night that felt like a GROUP. They really fed off eachother and read eachother's minds the way only the tightest rocking units do. One memorable moment was when the bass player, a massive blond with even more massive hair, broke a string and the duo of lead singer and lead guitarist teamed up on a delicate two-man peice to cover for him while he changed it. The lead singer was also a blond with big hair, loose limbs and the most by way of stage-crafty leaps and bounds. The guitarist was a brunette, not a blond. He handled his instrument effortlessly and the guy oozed the blues, clearly wriging all the glory he could out of his solos. He took over lead vocals for some songs and his voice was true, but unlike the other standouts of the evening, he didn't leave his band in the dust: he complemented them, they complemented him back, and the four of them rocked like they shared the same mind. Well done, boys, I am now a fan of yours.

After such a display of unity, the next act, "Stage IV Sleep", was a bit jarring in their disjointedness. I have a soft-spot in my heart for the classic rock four-peice line up: one singer, one bass player, one drummer, one guitarist, and these guys had some fans in the audience, cheering along and shouting back, but there was something off about them. The singer in question looked like he would have been more at home in a football jersey, sprinting towards the ten yard line then prowling the stage shouting profanity at the imaginary punk club moshing in his head. And I'm supposed to buy this buff jock is screaming about existential angst? The bass player was huge and sported a bleached mohawk, so he looked like he maybe could be wierd enough to actually be musical, but there was nothing really special about his bass playing either. The drummer was an Asian in glasses and a ski cap who chewed on his upper lip the whole time. The guitarist was a skinny, ropey, left-handed, bespecticled who looked for all the world like the kind of guy the Lead Singer would, ideally, be shoving face-first down a toilet. The guitarist was the stand-out of that band, standing with his skinny leg perched defiantly on the amplifyer, churning out the buff, punk-metal riffs that gave the songs their character. But like the restless pacing of the singer symbolized... I just couldn't figure out what they were doing there. Their fans liked them. I didn't.

The electric something machine. I wish I could remember their full name. The band itself? Meh. But they had emotion, and it seemed sincere. The singer was a hairy mountain creature, thrashing his vocal cords like any self-respecting metal fan. But they had the best musician of the evening. Their drummer was nothing short of a marvel: two of his drums were painted with a mountain scene, and ya know, given his expansive ten-arms-at-least sound, it was an apt metaphor for his playing. I couldn't have told ou about the string section, or about what songs they played (except a Rage Against the Machine cover which just revealed how short a guitarist can fall when compared to Tom Morello) but that drummer? Brilliant. All I can think is how he really deserves a better band then he's currently in.

As for the headliners, the ones I came to see? Dionysos? I really wanted to like them. They were polished, professional, and excellent musicians, in fact, if the drummer had competition for the runaway best musician of the night, it was that fluid, virtuosic bass player. But they had no chemistry. And their music had no personality. They were putting my mom to sleep. I felt sorry for them, because they played last, the place was empty, and no one seemed to be listening, and they had all the right ingredients, including heart; they WANTED to do well. And it just didn't work.

It was a late, late night. It's time to sleep

New myspace find + Old Friend

This pint-size teenage Chinese-Canadian girl has an axe, and damn, can she ever wield it. This is woman-kind's answer to Joe Satriani. A plugged-in Kaki King. It just took the span of one song for me to become a fan of hers. Her music's delicate and shimmering and yet full of heavy electric crunch.

And my longtime friend Frank. I recently did a favor for Frank: I bought a $5 guitar strap and painted it with a design inspired by a conversation we had about guitar straps and a blog he made about Korean dating.

He finally paid me back, in form of this video. It's about time is all I can say.

The House of Bernarda Alba - BADA in London

What's this? A rock fan reviewing a play? Since when are they supposed to have any culture?

Suck it up, I like rock and I like the symphony and I like plays. So this is my review/write-up of the British American Drama Academy's production of "The House of Bernarda Alba" a play about an abusive mother and oppressive gender roles set in some inspecific "past" probably the 1800s or so.

First off I'll say it was a student play. What this meant was, to maximize the experience for the young actors, the entire cast (save the title character) would switch their roles at the end of each act. This, and the simularity of the costumes to each other, made it hard to keep the characters straight. This made the majority of the cast largely irrelevent: it sent the message that casting didn't matter and counted on the writing itself to keep the audience informed about who was who, and I'm not sure how successful it was. You form a bond to one character given a good scene or moving moment, and next thing you know, the character is literally someone else. It made the crucial suspention of disbelief really hard.

Two characters didn't have that problem: the vicious title character, played with a dark brand of bitchy that went beyond the pale... Sonia Acosta might have some momma issues, but she sold the audience on a brand of evil and opression born out of utter desperation and heartbreak. Bernarda's mother, Maria Josefa, was the gem of the show: the madwoman with a playful side, who'se nurosis is her answer to the stiffling confines of her world and who'se gentle affection for her family provides the contrast to the dark storm of Bernarda's rule.

This is a play all about that storm. But the storm itself is also the problem. It's a play full of characters who are trapped: by circumstance, by rules of gender and society and since it's well illustrated that death awaits any who break the rules, the sensation of being stiffled is tangible. It gives the story it's edge, but it also means no character, not even the wicked Bernarda, has any power over it's outcome. The most powerful force in the story is Pacco, the handsome young suitor who plans to marry the oldest sister for her inheritance while sleeping with the youngest; his influence is what drives the story to it's conclusion, and he's never actually seen in the play. The overall effect is a plot that isn't really a plot, it's a series of events that can only really end one way. The voice-of-reason housekeeper comments sadly that the problem is that "They are women without men," and all the girls yern for the release of sex and for freedom from their house, both of which can only come from a marrige. I'm glad I didn't live back then.

It's one of those plays with an awkward curtain call. No one wants to cheer once the inevitable has happened. Thought provoking as it is, it's not what anyone would call uplifting. Though I guess I can be thankful that I didn't live back then. The age of drawing rooms and dowreys sounds utterly miserable.

Dir En Grey at the Grand Ballroom

I normally don't go to shows like this. I was on the way back from shopping when I saw this huge long line going around the block. Turned out the cause was a visit from a Japanese hard rock band called Dir En Grey, which I'd actually heard of. I don't know much about them except that they were a Visual Kei band, they sing ONLY in Japanese, and I've been unable to really get into what I've heard of them...

But hey: I knew of them. They were right there. They're a Japanese band, so who knows when they'll be in town again, and besides, I havn't gone to a show in a few weeks: after the lackluster night at Kimos, in fact. I can't let that stand, can I?

So into the line I went, shopping goods and all. The dude directly in front of me was a douche. The lady he was with (?) wasn't. He spent the whole time chatting someone's ear off about everything. It took ages. The crowd was mostly young-ish goth kids, nerdy looking j-pop or anime fans and their parents. The group wasn't particularly friendly, and after finally getting inside, stashing my stuff at the coat-check, and heading into the dark grand ballroom, I was fully prepaired to not like this scene, just as I didn't like it's denizens.

That said, I actually went home fairly pleased.

An American band opened for Dir En Gray; "The Human Abstract" was a typical six man lineup with a singer who'se haircut was so emo it made Pete Wendz look like Lars Ulrich, though he sounded like a demonic Chester Bennington. He was a remarkably pure-voiced tenor when he wasn't bellowing like a demon. This group were plainly very used to touring, and they were a tight rocking unit: the keyboardist was a little waif of a guy with another emo cut who headbanged at his keyboards so hard it was like his joints were made of rubber. He got some decent solos, and he gave the band some class in it's quieter moments, which I thought had more character their usual metalic bombastic onslaught. This was a band of almost schizophrenic contradictions, but it's an experienced kind of schitzo, and it was full of forceful personalities. The bass player was a huge slab of humanity with a mohawk who handled his massive, six-stringed instrument effortlessly and looked as proud as a lion. The dreadlocked lead guitarist spun his hair like a weapon and provided the more forceful back-up roars that the lead singer's voice was apparently too sweet to handle. The other guitarist was taller, blonder, and kept vanishing from the stage. The drummer had fizzy hair and a black t-shirt and looked relatively normal, for a drummer, and he was definatley one of the hardest working members of that band. That guy got no breaks and by the time the set was over he was so drenched it looked like he'd been swimming. The sound alternated between sweet Linkin Park-esque interludes and high-pitched metalic thrashing. They never relent long enough for the hook to take hold, and I'm not sure how much the stone-faced audience was feeling them, despite the fact it was a good show.

Time for Dir En Grey. I didn't know much about them, besides that they were part of the Visual Kei movement in Japan in the 90s, so I imagined gender ambigity and flamboyant outfits. What I got were five long-haired and thin but normal-looking Japanese guys in black t-shirts and jeans (on the band) and green track-suit (on the singer). So they've changed their image somewhat from the days of fishnets and eyeliner. Maybe it's because they don't want to wierd out the new American fans, or maybe they've just outgrown that stuff. But these guys can rock. They rock very hard and very loud, and in a more balanced way then their opening act.

Their backdrop logo is a big eye with a Mayan calender in the center of it, and it actually fits, because their sound-scape plunges primal a surprising number of times for a brand of rock this heavy, though I should have seen it coming when I saw that their drum kit looks like a fighting cage with, well, drums all over it. And the lead singer can only be described as a human jaguar: prowling, glaring, and yowling at inhuman pitches. I swear he even produced a perfect feminine scream at least a couple times. Dude has got some serious pipes, and he's quite a showman: doubling over and singing from the gut, even taking the stage (almost) solo twice to enact musical scenes: a man possessed, alternately pathetic and vicious, and a shaman beconing you to ruin, both aided by the lighted table his short self climbed on so that the audience could see him. His lyrics aren't in english, but since I've yet to attend one of these shows were the lyrics are at all coherent anyway, that didn't make much of a difference. Stage banter was limited to the "rast songu!" repeated in increasingly frantic voice until, well, the band launched right into their last song of the night which, like all the songs before it, full of roaring guitars, relentless percussion and that inhuman catterwalling that was just melodic enough that the song itself wasn't lost in all of the volume. These guys can play.

In spite of, or perhaps because of this band's lack of English, the communication between the crowd and the musicians was impeccible. Dir En Grey is a Japanese band with Japanese lyrics, which means radio play isn't in the cards for them, and if they want to break the American market, they've got to do it by relying on the rock powers that transend language. Not only do these guys play loud and hard, they play with personality: the bassist made one part of the audience his own and kept looking to them during the performance, grinning and spinning his hair every time they answered his beconed calls for more noise. He would throw up his long, thin arms for applause, shrug off his bass strap and hold the instrument above his head like a triumphant warrior, even sat down on one of the speakers, took his bass into his lap, and played directly to us in a very winning way. Since he was right in front of me and so engaging, I had to remind myself sometimes to look at the other band members from time to time, which was as rewarding.

Because they don't sing in english, radio play and local promotion will be limited, but if they keep up this kind of transendant communication, they might well break here in America.

Another Night at Kimos

This show was free, since I still had the wristband from the night before. My conscience didn't put up too much of a fight. I am a cheap bastard.

Going to this place on your own, if you're seeking to enjoy the music and not socialize, is a bit awkward. I gotta say, this place attracts some colorful characters, and not all of them are the types you want to talk to, but avoiding contact with them in a place this small? Not the easiest thing in the world. Still, no one was really threatening and it was relatively simple to set up a base camp where you could keep watch over your stuff and still check out the music.

It was a four-band night but I missed the first act. The last three were serrial nightmares, in ways both good and bad.

I am perceptive when it comes to art. I can usually read an artist's intention and subtext with reliable accuracy. JEALOUSY, the group, clearly operates on some level I simply cannot grasp.
One relatively-normal looking musician guy in a hat, playing with delay and reverb and a whole plate of effects pedals, doing some spoken-word thing so heavily echoed that I couldn't make out any of it, backed up by a woman in a 1950s style polka-dotted dress, red nylons, and some 1920s-1960s era porn projected on the wall upside down. That was their backdrop. A tall blond girl was also apparently part of the band?... She was so drunk she couldn't stand up straight, she almost fell on me while I crouched to get a better look at the spectacle onstage, offered me a sip of her drink as an appology, walked onstage, collapsed against the wall and, it looked like...fell asleep? Then got up, wandered over to the guy playing the effects-bass, threw her arms around him and warbled into his microphone. I assume she was..part...of...the show? I'm not sure. And there was a lanky drag queen in colorful cleft-palate style make up eating bananas while posing elegantly on a folding chair right there in front, right onstage. The bananas had been painted black. That was all he did. It was all very...artistic? Yeah. I don't even know. After that I hoped the next act would be a bit more straightforward.

It was, but only a bit. Aunt Dracula are a Philadelphia psychadelic band that suffers from a severe lack of a rhythem section. Two guitarists, one pale and red-headed with a striped polo shirt, the other with a silver plaid shirt and a hat that matched, and a long-haired guy who'd qualify as a giant bent over a PC clicking a mouse to produce bursts of drum noises. Guys.... you're great with the effects. It's all very trippy, but without a real rhythem section, the whole thing feels rootless. Not a very memorable set.

I gotta say this about The New Thrill Parade: they were memorable. They were also the most serreal nightmarish brood of the night. Think CAKE's rythems and diverse instrumentation, but with the tempo slowed to a funeral march and a singer who spends each song sobbing and begging and sucking on his microphone. That was when he wasn't wearing his pink pig gimp-mask. This whole line-up looked like the cast of some dark Wonderland type fable. The big percussionist on the floor, banging out on a pair of cymbols and a drum, actually rocked back in forth, miming like he was sobbing his heart out, dressed in a flesh-tone apron criss-crossed with strips of color, like some sort of color butcher throwing a tantrum. the saxaphonist was a girl in a hoody wearing what looked like a net made of torn gray sheets and a full-face gorrilla mask. A huge bass player had a fringed cape and a round old-man bubble mask. The keyboardist/violenist wore a cardigan and a steady expression, looking like a cousin of Steve from Blue's Clues and just as unphased about his unreal surroundings. The Guitarist stood out just because he was a guy in a t-shirt and jeans.

Guys, either everyone in the band should wear the crazy, or no one in the band should wear the crazy. When one guy is wearing homemade overalls and fashing his nipples while begging for his life through a pig gimp-mask, and one guy looks totally normal, it just dysrupts the band visual synch, and you SHOULD be visually in synch. Figure out the cast of characters you want and stick to it.

That said, this group will haunt me. I'm not even sure if I liked them or not, but I know they unsettled me. Which might have been their aim.

I gotta get better at this art thing, maybe.

A Night at the Kimo

Not the worst five bucks I've ever spent.

Kimos has a reputation as a dive full of shady characters, so bring a friend to keep tabs on you. Besides, you'll enjoy it more if you've got a sidekick.

The upstairs room is low and narrow, the walls painted red and adorned with bills. The bar will give you ice with your free tap water. The doors open at 9, relatively late, but the actual show didn't start until almost an hour after that. The stage was so small that the lights, rather then the edge, seemed to dictate it's real parameters: you stayed out of the band's light, and you stayed out of their space. It takes someone with real guts to enter that sphere, which a friend of mine did: gutsy, but gutsy is what listening to the Ferocious Few makes you, so I didn't blame him.

The Ferocious Few are a two-piece southern-rock/Rockabilly group, getting street-famous for gate-crashing other people's big gigs and poaching several hundred members of the audience for themselves. There's always more then a few converts after a Ferocious onslaught: they were the single best group I saw at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and they weren't even formally booked there. Even on a formal stage you can see what makes this pair special: they play like every eye has to be won, that they could get kicked out at any moment, and everything depends on playing with everything they've got NOW. Their drummer is a madman with a tiny drumset, a stone-wall pout and a tamborine. The singer has a dark, brooding presense, a southern twang in his voice, and a really loud amp. This is an expression of hope and a kind of faith: at a time when the music industry doesn't know how to make stars anymore, these two won't stop until THEY'RE as big as the people they poach their audiences from. You catch these guys once and you don't forget them. Check them out here. As is often the case with this band, they were the best set of the night.

Rollar Coaster was up next: a three peice consisting of a bassist with a tattooed neck, a lot of sinew, and a back leather leather cap; a drummer with a long John Kerry type chin and a strawberry goatee, and a singer with authentic British vowels, a green military-style jacket, an orange slab of a guitar, and a vendetta against microphones. Really: he threw his to the ground not once but twice. All my friend and I could figure was that that must have been a really good move at some other show, but in the Real World when you throw your microphone to the ground, and your hands are occupied with your guitar, you gotta fumble to get it in position again before you can again sing into it. I can understand mistaking this once I guess, but twice? The rhythem section were pros about it and played right their their frontman's fumbles, so there's no way the song was going to fall appart, but there are quite a few kinks to work out in this live show. They were good musicians, and they've got some catchy tunes with some meaty riffs, and the finale with the twin feedback squeels between the bass and the guitar were pretty classic, but they've got some ways to go before they're a tight rocking unit.

The Revealers are probably big White Stripes fans. I can't think of why I'd say that except their frontman's androgenous bangs, white face and scarlet eye-shadow and all-black garb. He strutted the stage, but sensitively and delicately. He was the first of the night to leave the stage, turn his back to the audience, servay his bandmates and then walk back. A keyboard filled the bass's part and lead vocals were handed off between the guitarist and the keyboardist. It didn't matter though: they have the same sort of pure young-man type voices, and the mix or the mic or the reverb or something was so bad that no one could understand a word of the lyrics no matter what happened. My friend called them bluesy; I say their songs were interchangable and ran one into the next. They were also good musicians, especially for dudes who looked as young as they were (I swear that frontman has BRACES!) but they didn't grab me. They'd be worth a look though.

Three bands for five bucks and none of them stunk. Not bad, not bad at all.