Waitin' for the Ball to Drop and, ah Jack, getting into mischief AGAIN!

"Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable." :)

~Plato

Happy New Year...

WSJ.com:

"Dow Finishes 2009 With Nearly 19% Gain"

^_^

with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff

...and 12012, A9, and Angelo learned that no, they were not going to Disneyland.

So spending the last ten days trawling through ten years of CDs you've only listened to half-of-once will put you in a housecleaning frame of mind.

I was trying to come up with some easily enforced ironclad rule to help me decide what to throw out.

One idea was "if you don't know how many members are in the band, delete that album." Because if none of the songs moved me to google them, then fuck 'em, right?

So I opened my collection, deleted a band called 7 Days, then I came across 176Biz (yeah, AFTER 7... doesn't 1 come ~before~ 7?) but I know they have one cool song I like, but I know nothing about them at all, so I'd have to delete that single if I'm really gonna follow my rule. Yuck.

I really want to cut my collection in half. There's just so much stuff by bands I KNOW/LIKE that I ain't explored yet, that to have crap by all these technical death metal and prog metal and VK bands that I'll never listen to, bands that put out crap like five, six, seven years ago and ain't never been heard from since... get offa my lawn, yannoooo?

And these are things I listened to a little bit, and decided were worth spending time tagging, which is only like 25% of the stuff i'll hear any given month; the other 75% gets trashed instantly!

So if you have a good rule of thumb, or if you've done this type of massive cleanup, GIVES ADVISING ONEGAISHIPLEASE

also, i am SO hot girl'd out... here's a happy elephant [points up]

The Best Albums of the Decade Part 9: 2009

and finally...

Dora:

• more 9goats and 12012 collecting dust.
• Amorphis' Skyforger has some hook-laden mini-epics, including "Sky is Mine" and "Majestic Beast".
• Angelo's Metallic Butterfly was neither metal nor buttery but flew into the trash.
• The Beatles' remastered box set was mostly skippable.
• Brian Setzer's Lonely Avenue was too much clowning around in a safety net, not enough heart. Take a risk, Brian!
• There's a lot of beneficial adaptations to D's Genetic World.
• Danger Gang hit a glass ceiling on Ambitious.
• Dead End stopped traffic with Metamorphosis.
• Despairs Ray's Redeemer soared.
• Gazette's Dim was didn't light up my life.
• Geist's Grotesque was pretty cool. For a VK band based in Maryland.
• I still can't tell if they're SNSD or Girls Generation, but the "Gee" PV & song was cute.
• Kagrra's Shu fit! Their best disc in years.
• Ah! Ken's solo album, In Physical, was snake-a-licious! "S" the most.
• Kylesa's Static Tensions fuzzboxed my head off.
• Lynch, eh.
• Mastodon's Crack was more like a plumber's than the sky's.
• Matenrou Opera's Anomie was a lightning strike. Check out that title track!
• Megadeth's Endgame was unclear.
• I wrote Mucc's Kyuutai was good, but "nothing to shit your pants about."
• Nanase Aikawa's Reborn, meanwhile, was an abortion.
• Nightmare's Majestical Parade was titled accurately if your definition of "majestic" is the opposite of most people's.
• Nogod's Goku Saishiki was a monster!
• Pelican's What We All Come to Need required a kick in the pants.
• Priestess' Prior to the Fire was a lady killer.
• Every time I type "Rammstein" now, I get flashbacks to that horrible porn PV they made. Liebe
• Russian Circles negotiated Geneva well.
• More Sadie, Sel'm, and Siva, none of it memorable at this juncture.
• Tommy Heavenly 6's Gothic Melting Ice Cream Darkness Warbringer Machine Eats Scary Chocolate Monsters Thing had its charms. :)
• Vamps failed to beguile.
• The Wildhearts had Chutzpah, but only "The Jackson Whites" will go down in history.

Diego!:

Crucified Barbara
Til Death Do Us Party 2009
Grabs you by the balls and never lets go, and you don't want it to. It's amazing to me that these girls haven't outsold every other metal band in the world yet, because these songs are so fucking catchy and riffin', and hard hard hard! And clever in its deployment of tone; the record sounds soooo goood. The chorus alone to "Pain & Pleasure" alone should have sold a quarter million copies of this disc!

&

another tie!

I couldn't choose between Dead End, who showed Yoshiki and the rest of us what a motherfucking comeback looks like Metamorphosis; or Despairs Ray, who reinvigorated their franchise after what felt like a couple years of commercial confusion with Redeemer; or Matenrou Opera's debut full-length Anomie and its all-to-rare combination of youthful energy with mature musical prowess; or Ken's solo record, with it's attendant class... so...

... ~they're all winners~ YAY!

Jrocknyc is officially ten years old today (started http://i.am/jrocknyc back on Dec 27th 1999, three days before Lo/Rez's first gig...) and ten years is a loooooong time. Was thinkin' of making this my last entry. It's been a lot of fun.

OOoh my shit from Newegg just arrived!!! (i5 etc) so see you in a day or three....

The Best Albums of the Decade Part 8: 2008

TigerDirect:

• 9goats black out - eh.
• Akado's Oxymoron No2 was the first foreign VK band to really nail it.
• More bands should do what BtBaM did with Alaska -- namely, re-release it a year later sans vocals. Instru-metal FTW!
• Beyonce had the greatest single of ALL TIME, of ALL TIME! (or at least for the year) with the one-two punch of "Single Ladies" and "If I Were a Boy."
• CoB's Blooddrunk showed too little evolution.
• Crucified Barbara's Sex Action Plus EP tantalized!
• I didn't listen to Dali's A Rope is There and Hope is There as much as I would have liked.
• Danger Gang's St Beast was charmingly indies and I loved it at the time, but I'd be such a liar if I didn't confess to having completely forgotten about its existence a month later.
• The production on Danko Jones' Never Too Loud was a little loud... like, everything was loud, so nothing was. Or something. The guitars didn't punch you in the face. Still some great songs (the first four, but esp. "Code of the Road")...
  
• Deathgaze's Awake ~Evoke the Urge~ was pretty fuckin' intense and sounded great.
• Ah! Deluhi! This was really their year: four singles and the Surveillance EP, none of it yet Pro-Tooled to death.
• Dir en grey found a new path on Uroboros, darker, introspectiver, the kind of album to slide deep in to, like your bed's blankets on a cold winter day. If you're new to Kyo & Co, start with "Sa Bir" & "Vinushka", then skip over to "Toguro" (my favorite track).
  
• Exist Trace's Recreation Eve was just a repackaging of their Annunciation EP with a few extra tracks.
• I still say Gackt's Jesus single packs more verve and punch than the album version.
• Oh that's right, Axl released Chinese Democracy last year... sorta like Microsoft putting out Windows 98 in 2008, but, oh well... better late than never? Or maybe not.
  
• Hurts' self-titled wasn't terrible.
• Inoran's Apocalypse quoted Chuck D in the intro, and made me wish i wasn't such a fucking completist.
• J's Ride sounded pretty much like every other J album, maybe a little dirtier.
• Kagrra's Core had something old, something new, something boring, something purple, and I don't listen to it anymore.
  
• Luna Sea's Complete Best (Remastered) remains the most well-balanced best-of album ever. Everything belongs, nothing's missing (except "Hurt", but I get the feeling I like that song more than most LS fans).
• Marty Friedman's Future Addict transformed Megadeth's near-perfect metal masterpiece Tornado of Souls into some sort of SoCal punk abortion that could only be made worse by the addition of unicorns. Unicorns? Wtf!? Those handheld air-organ things at Oktoberfests, what the fuck are those see this album destroys your fucking vocabulary it's so lamp! I mean dog!?
  
• Thank god Matenrou Opera appeared on the scene with a trio of cool singles.
• Megadeth's Blood on the Water live show (aired on HDNet) remains their greatest live recording, surpassing even the legendary Rust-era Rock in Rio.
• Metallica's Death Magnetic remained listenable for a long time; I was just spinning it last week. (The Guitar Hero III edit, of course...)
• New Motley Crue is new.
• Mucc's Shion had "Flight" and "Libra" and... I forget.
• New Nightmare: avast, here thar be horns!
• Nogod wins. (Mugenkyou)
• I'm sure I've heard Opeth's Watershed all teh way through multiple times, but every time I play it, I feel lost all over again.
• Protest the Hero's Fortress was just as cool as its predecessor, but not out-of-nowhere like Kezia, so it impressed us all less.
• Russian Circles' Station was ... station!
• Jeez, another Sadie album? (Undead 13+2)... and Sel'm! And Siva! All of which I'll get around to listening to someday!
  
• Sex Machineguns (or Anchang anyway) released the worthless Cameron, which functioned much like a bad toupee, attempting to cover that which was not there.
• I *still* airdrum frenetically to Sonata Arctica's "Weballergy", which came out in (unnecessarily) remastered form on the 2008 remaster of 2001's Silence. "Web" is one of my top ten songs of the decade, IT'S THAT GOOD (especially if you spend too much time on the web...)
• The Studs do sheet rock.
  
• Sugizo's Cosmoscape best-of disc is missing "No More Machineguns" and makes me long for a Luna Sea reunion. The bulk of Sugi, Ino, J, and Ryu's solo work seems to have that affect on me, actually...
• I confess to enjoying my tv audio rip of Taylor Swift & Def Leppard's Crossroads performance on CMT way more than a man who claims to possess testicles should.
• Toshi polluted w/ T-Earth.
• Trivium's Shogun won't be getting enshrined at Nikko anytime soon.
• Ugh, Vamps!
• Ugh, Versailles!
  
• Viored conveniently released a best album before calling it quits.
• Vistlip popped up with the attention-getting title Revlover (they must be Bleatles fans)...
• The X Japan Memorial Summit was.
  
• And how can you not adore the songs on Yo Gabba Gabba's season 1 soundtrack? ~Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!~

Newegg:

Straight Line Stitch
When Skies Wash Ashore 2008
I know, I know, you're thinking it's just another metalcore band -- from Tennesee for chrissakes -- making another metalcore album. And it's vaguely Christiany too!?! What's "best" about that?!

All true, all true, but Skies has been on my Zune, surviving thru sheer Darwinian might (I've only got 8gigs, shit's constantly getting put on and taken off), getting played regularly, for an entire year now. I still mosh along on my morning walk listening to the brooootal melodies of "Never", "What", "Eucharist," and the mellower "Gone"... I love this album. All the way through. Unapologetically!

Nogod
Mugenkyou 2008
Now here's an album to make you happy. This guy's voice, Dancho, I dunno, it's like sunlight, pure joy... These songs have such an amazing ability to brighten my day. But they can be heavy too, and the guitars show off just enough, and they rarely become cloying or too-sweet.

I thought about choosing Dir en grey again, but while Uroboros has some great tracks, and depth and feeling, it doesn't MOVE me. Mugenkyou moves me. (It's a "reading for school" vs. "reading for pleasure" sort of relationship... even in classes you like, some of that stuff can be LABORIOUS.)

The Best Albums of the Decade Part 7: 2007

Anago:

• Abingdon Boys School was such a pleasant surprise -- professional writing, performances, and production, NOT neutered for maximum, lowest-common-denominator commercial appeal. Crackin' good rock, with "Howling" far and away the best song. Of the year, even.
• Angelo's Rebirth of Newborn Baby was Pierrot, recycled and devoid of life.
• Carla Bruni's No Promises is routinely spun during Sunday morning breakfast. "I Felt My Life with Both My Hands" stands out.
• Collapsar's "King Kong Died for Your Sins" off their s/t is only okay. Post-metal with sloppy prog influences.
• Daath's "The Hinderers" brutalized me for a while, but I liked the not-so-produced leaks better than the flat, lifelessy final product.
• Dali had a couple neat singles that combine to form an EP you could call Dessin.
• Despairs Ray had Mirror. I don't listen to it much anymore.
• Dio (Distraught Overlord) did some Byakuya-izing and helped usher in a new era of hard VK that's now over.
• Marrow of the Bone has no charms to tempt me back. Ain't spun it in forever.
  
• Galneryus had a good year with four release -- an album, an EP, a single, a live dvd... all of which were flush with derivative, hackneyed '80s posturing without even a trace of a wink or the slightest effort made at interpretation.
• Neither Gazette's Stacked Rubbish nor Gilgamesh's Gilgamesh had much of an impact on my life. Even just two years later, I'd be hard pressed to hum a line or even come up with a title.
• Justice's Cross was pretty fuckin' awesome. That's what you get when a couple classic Metallica fans get together and pump out a dance record I guess. Phantom (Parts 1 & 2) was most diggable.
• Kagrra's decline was official starting with San.
• L'Arc's Kiss polished off the '00s triptych (w/ Smile & Awake) that I never got into.
• Lareine put out a best-of (Fleur) that saved me from having to gather and tag all their singles, praise Jeebus.
• Rin Toshite Shigure blasted into my brain with the brilliant car crash that is "Nakano Kill You" off Inspiration is Dead.
• Lynch did The Avoided Sun, which I ended up avoiding shortly after it came out.
• Mechanical Poet went for the brass ring with Creepy Tales for Freaky Children, the most Tim Burtonesque prog-metal album you'll ever hear. "Bubble Bath"'s chorus is like a bird taking flight, and "A Rose for Michelle" rocks.
• The songs on Megadeth's United Abominations were mostly as bad as the abomination of an album cover they came wrapped in; I dug "Washington is Next" more after hearing it live, tho. Don't forget to check out the UN rep who smacked down what I called "Dave's high-school-dropout-level comprehension of world events and the attendant artless vocabulary" here!
• Lol, Dixanadu. God, no wonder my hard drive has been giving me problems! MANA!
• Morningside's The Wind, The Trees, and the Shadows of the Past EP reminded me of a slightly more accessible and refreshing Opeth.
• The Best of Mucc and Worst of Mucc and the live album Psychedelic Analysis were overwhelming.
• Nightmare's The World Ruler returned the band to their suckier roots, and was the crap attempt at albumosity that I expected Anima to be.
• NoGod started the application process for Best J-Rock Band of the '00s with Atria, Batsu, and Ten.
• Northern Kings took a bunch of '80s hits and Sonata-Arctica-ized them (having Sonata singer Tony Kakko onboard helped) -- with painfully earnest honesty, not the usual jokeyness. Good stuff. Called it Reborn.
• Pelican's City of Echoes kept intact the long tradition of bands delivering a disappointing follow-up to the awesome album I discovered them through (Thaw).
• Wow, Schwardix Marvally's seven-track opus really hurts like an ear infection!
• Screw was promising once, with Venom and Virus.
• Still ain't made it through Shiina Ringo's bathtub-loving Heisei Fuuzoku.
• Syndrome's convenient Best Collection is a must-have.
• Unsraw was still together, cranking out the metal on 2007's Calling and Kein and Abel.
• Quick shoutout for The Orange Box soundtrack (V.A.).
• Versailles's Lyrical Sympathy wasn't that bad, but made me wish I had invested in Orchestral Hit generators. (Dunt dunt! Dun dun dunt!)
• Vidoll's 12-track Bastard, I totally forgot about. Proposal was decent.
• Viored honed their skills with Created Perfect New Vision ("Mad Doll Party"!) and on the Kusabi and Cold Ruby singles (both earned green smiley ratings). At the time, I wrote, "Unless they self-destruct, expect to see these kids filling the Budokan in a couple years." Whereupon they promptly self-destructed. :(
• X Japan put out their Jealousy & Blue Blood remasters, as they tried to build up some steam for a comeback...
• The gothic pop on Yousei Teikoku's Metanoia was as ethereal as cotton candy, and even less nutritious.

Unagi:

The Wildhearts
The Wildhearts 2007
Finally, Ginger & Co. get on the board! At turns heartbreaking, raucous, angry, and fun, their 2007 s/t'd platter got mah booty movin', but the best track was the epic, sorrowful, anti-RIAA half-ballad, half-rocker Slaughtered Authors. ("And those lost Sons and Daughters / of a dying industry / will now choke upon the water / When you die, they're happy.")

Rentrer en Soi
The Bottom of Chaos 2007
I almost chose Abingdon's debut album, but Satsuki and the boys made "The Abyss of Despair" as an awesome little brother to Dir en grey's "The Final"... and a lot of this album combines the sounds of early-Deg with the beats of mid-Deg in pleasing ways: "Amongst Foolish Enemies" goes in especially interesting directions. (Meanwhile, Deg overshot the mark with the too-extreme Marrow.)

The Best Albums of the Decade Part 6: 2006

Grass Roots:

• I feel obliged to mention 12012 and maybe Alice Nine, though neither deserve it. I will mention 176biz's "Dekiai", which is a totally prosecutable direct copy of that first Mucc song I ever liked...
  
• Anna Tsuchiya earned her keep with Strip Me.
• Aural Vampire's only solid release, the Death Folder single, was killer.
• Clan Destined's In the Big Ending was cheesy but i loved it.
• Creature Creature's Light & List failed to deliver on the promise of their awesome singles. It contains none of those awesome the awesomeness of those singles... except for the three singles on it! That's convenient. Satisfies your Morrie fix tho. (It's not a crush, it's ~admiration~!)
• Def Leppard is such a disappointment this year. Again.
• Darth Metal'd "New Hope" demo deserves a plug. (Star Wars, death metallized!)
• Eight's Illational was pretty ballsy & chunky. What happened to them?
  
• Sugizo's The Flare was herpes-like.
• Gilg's 13. Still listenable.
• H&MC, Gou on Progressive, eh.
• Hyde's Faith required some to make it through.
• Inoran's Photograph was underdeveloped.
• Iron Maiden's A Matter of Life and Death suffered from a glut of titles with the word "The" in it. It sounds and feels like an album with too many The's in it. Yanno?
• I wanna mention Karma Shenjing's Ruten Rinne only because it's the only thing that even approaches a Kagrra-like sound. Unfortunately it also sounds like '70s disco.
• I *think* The Great Cold Distance was the album that got me liking Katatonia's mellow death metallish Pink Floydianism, but it seems too recent.
• Kayser's Frame the World... Hang On the Wall, featuring Spiritual Beggars' awesome old singer, is an underappreciated gutbuster; check out "Evolution."
• Leroy Carr's Whiskey is My Habit, Women is All I Crave is a positively ancient recording, remastered (not so much, but whatever) from the, like, 1902 "demo tapes" or wax cylinders or whatever the hell they recorded shit on back then. Everybody needs at least one ancient blues record to drink depressively with. Might as well have one with an awesome title.
• Should I acknowledge Mastodon's Blood Mountain for bonus cred? Even if I ain't listened much to it?
• Or Maverick's A Counterfeit Heart and My True Intentions (Mosquito), which has the scoopiedest guitar tone ever put to record?
• Christ, Mucc's 6 is this old?! AND Gokusai too! "Utagoe" is one of their best, and marks a new era (of international touring!) for the band.
• Nightmare's Anima was a shock -- a really good album! "There's actual melodies and notes on most of these songs -- "Livevil" and "Speeeaker" and "Gianism" and "Mahora" and "Message" all show off a respectable amount of songwriting skills and an understanding of how instruments should work together instead of fighting each other like on every other Nightmare song i've heard..." wrote I four years ago. FOUR YEARS. >_< style="font-style: italic;">Tenbatsu Enban comes out and, while pretty standard fare, hints at the awesomeness to follow.
• Priestess' Hello Master's "Lay Down" conjures yellow, red, green, and blue fret buttons and sends them flying at my eyes, and makes me palpitate with glee.
• Queensryche tried to come back from the dead with the abominable Operation Mindcrime II.
• ReS's s/t'd was a shot in the arm. Oh, 'ello! You're all grown up and stopped sucking, ain't choo!
• Russian Circles' Enter is a jewel. Three guys doing more work than six. Post-metal at its finest. You can't not love the galloping intro and heroic buildup of "Death Rides a Horse"!
• Sadie's The Trend Killer didn't kill, but tried.
• Sulfuric Acid overstretched with Kyosei Inyou.
• Tourbillion...
• Vidoll's VID was a fun romp for the week that it was on my radar.
• Viored's Chaos was the standard-bearer for a new wave of VK that studied grammar and vocabulary under western metal greats.

ESP:

Exist Trace
Annunciation... The Heretic Elegy 2006
This was E+T's announcement to the world that they were for real. Viciousest, rockingest girl band yet. "Water" sounds like the guitars are vomiting, "Sacrifice Baby" is an egyptian rite, "End-less"'s pieces fit just right. They won't win any production awards, but that's part of the charm; they're all heart!

Meanwhile, Crucified Barbara's In Distortion We Trust tied with Danko Jones' Sleep is the Enemy. Both are the mythical:

Crucified Barbara's "Play Me Hard" ("You hand me over to your friends, it's always when you're drunk, you're such an ass" might be one of the coolest lines ever sung, if you know the context) is just one of eleven gutsy, bootstrappin', motorcyclin' tracks. There are NO crap tracks.

Meanwhile, Danko Jones' quick, cocky-as-fuck three-minute bitchslaps tear it up with bravado: check out "First Date" for the fun riffin', then "When Will I See You" for pretty Thin Lizzyin'. If you've got girl troubles, this CD will help you revel in 'em and turn everything around.

The Best Albums of the Decade Part 5: 2005

Merry Xmas!

Captain Ahab:

• More Alex Skolnick, more metal-turned-jazz, with '05's Transformation.
• Aural Vampire! Vampire Ecstacy! Only problem is the album version of the title track is vastly inferior to the single version... oh and "Freeze" gets annoying FAST... o hyeah and all the other tracks with the possible exception -- if you're feeling charitable -- of "Preservative Woman" suck ass.
• Alaska is the album that got me hooked on the progressive metalcore of Between the Buried and Me. If by "hooked" I mean "vaguely familiar with."
• Blood Stain Child's Idolator is a CoB photocopy (bad) except for the "True Blue" Luna Sea cover (yay).
• Capricorns' Ruder Forms Survive is sludgy british instrumental non-commercial post-metal coolness.
• Still ain't made it throughGood Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV (Coheed & Cambria) despite my best efforts.
• D's Name of the Rose burns sweetly. "God's Child", "Kyoujin Butoufu", "Sleeper"... decent stuff. Not best-of-the-year-type stuff, but decent.
• Danger Gang has a hot drummer and little else. Blinded by lust again, Go!
• Death's The Sound of Perseverance got remastered, and I haven't mentioned all the other catalog remasters so far this decade (Megadeth, Queensryche, Bruce Dickinson...) but this one's special, so... fuck yeah.
• Riot on the Grill has bouncy happy fun songs ("Red Hot") and grindy little growlers ("Snake Fighting")... Ellegarden is Japan's best pop-punk band ever.
• Gilgamesh's Goku... still great! It's like a different band.
• And: another year, another god-awful Kagerou disaster (Gurou Shoku).
• Kagrra's San was okay, but reveals a mild uptick in the band's eagerness to gain a wider audience, and suffers as a result.
• Kirito's Hameln rots brains.
• L'Arc's Awake bests Smile with ease, with a more heartfelt vibe ("Hoshizora"), and an eagerness to experiment, just a little ("Trust", "As One").
• I cannot believe Lynch's Greedy Dead Souls is nearly five years old. Brootal!
• I think Metalchicks is interesting.
• Metis Gretel's Another Hell anyone? [grins] Soooooo Nineties! [grins more]
• Mors Principium Est's The Unborn was pretty rippin', in it's sheeny-shiny, techy melodeathy way.
• Mucc's Hoyoku has a nice clean album cover but I have forgotten all the contents within.
• Nevermore hits their peak with This Godless Endeavor, a swirly-twirly thrash fest if e'er there was one. The first two songs are the best ("Born" and "Final Product"). So many parts! So hard to play! THose aren't the only things that make a song great, but they help. :)
• I'll just put Phantasmagoria's Splendor of Sanctuary on here as a joke. Whereas Metis Gretel knew it was the mid-00s, Kisaki and friends seemed blissfully unaware that music had moved on at all. That said, I wouldn't kick Pixy False outta bed.
• Protest the Hero's Kezia blew my mind. A band so fast and tight they fly through the air like a ... fast ... tight ... thing.
• Scar's 01 had a lot going for it, dunno what happened to those guys. Too metal for the pop rock fans, to pop for the metalheads? One of the more talented VK bands to come out in the last five years.
• System of a Down's Hypnotize & Mesmerize werent' bad. Fuck, I forgot to mention Toxicity on the Part 1: 2001 entry! But every song on it is brilliant! I must go remedy this situation immediately. Ahhh, later.
• Trivium's Ascendency, on the other hand, came out in '05, and was the bees knees -- "the new metallica!" i may have prematurely wrote -- with killer broad-range-appeal metal tunes like "Pull Harder on the Strings of Your Martyr," another top-ten track for me this decade. Sadly, the magic was unrepeatable.

Captain Crunch:

Pelican
The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw 2005
The Chicago quartet kills all comers with the post-metal masterwork The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw. The cover & title might make it seem off-puttingly high-falutin', but really it's all about the riffs and jams, tensions and releases. Beautiful, beautiful stuff, like the girl you're introduced to at a party who only looks average at first, and seems like a chore to have to socialize with, but the more you talk with her, the more you realize how off-the-charts awesome she is, and the more you look at her, really seeing her now, the more you realize holy shit I'm talking to the most awesome girl in the entire city... and she doesn't even know (how awesome she is)!

For Japan... Withering or Coll:set? Coll:set or Withering?! I can not decide.

Oh wait, "The Final" is on Withering to Death. Nevermind! ("Kodou" is no slouch either.)

Sorry, Despa!

The Best Albums of the Decade Part 4: 2004

Epiphone:

• I lurv "Deadly Sinners" off of 3 Inches of Blood's Advance and Vanquish in the same way I love Judas Priest's "Painkiller" in all its redonkulous over-the-top metal glory.
• Anchang's The Maintenance needed work.
• Circuit V Panther's Sexy Finger II was a prostate exam.
• D! Paradox! Still their best work.
• Despairs Ray's Born [blows off thick layer of symbolic dust] doesn't even sound familiar to me... except it's got a new version of "Murder Freaks" on it? Did I even know that?
• Honorable mention for Dir en grey's Blitz5Days dvd collection and the single for The Final.
• Oh haha Drop! Shit, I'd forgotten, and I was so in love with them back then. >_<
  
• Dustar 1, 2 & 3 pissed on SMG's grave.
  
• I have not listened to Gazette's Disorder since the day it came out. Madara is where it's at.
  
• High and Mighty Color could still pretend they hadn't sold out with Goover...
• Hyde's 666 was pretty well received, with the fun rockers "Hello" still worth listening to five years later.
• Kagerou pooped Rakushu into the toilet that is their fans' brain cavities. "XII Dizzy" was the barely-edible corn in that turd.
• Killswitch Engage's seminal The End of Heartache came out in '04, but I still couldn't hum a single song off it.
• L'Arc's Smile didn't make me grin. "Ready Steady Go" rots teeth!
• Ah ha! Mechanical Poet!! Smartly unique prog with earnest Alice-in-Wonderlandy abandon! Woodland Prattlers was a bubbly change of pace from the usual angry/flashy metal that dominated my diet back then.
• Moi Dix Mois's Nocturnal Opera deserves the forgottenness that has enveloped it. (When's the last time you even thought of Mana? Yeeeears ago.
  
• Mucc's Kuchiki no Tou seems alright, but failed to click with me.
• Nanase Aikawa recruited Marty Friedman, Shinya, and Pata for the recording and subsequent touring on 7, but apparently not for the writing. Nonetheless, she hadn't rocked this hard for years. "Ai no Uta ~ Magenta Rain" is purty.
• Nina Gordon did "Straight Outta Compton" all mellow-hippie-songstress style, and it packs a bigger wallop than a hundred NWA albums.
  
• Ugh, Noiz's Zero no Keifu is on my hard drive.
• Ugh, so is Pierrot's Freeze.
  
• Citing Rachel Yamagata's pianoey Happenstance will give this list the appearance of diversity.
• Rammstein's Reise Reise features "Keine Lust", which could easily be my favorite song ever if "The Final" had never existed. I FUCKING LOVE "KEINE LUST." The rest of the album can go die in a fire.
• Rentrer en Soi's Yurikago is 7 or 8 tracks (depending on your downloading skillz) of brittle, mosquito-like VK, and no one could have predicted their ascension to very-good-ness based on the evidence provided here.
• Whoa, Shulla's XII. I think it was a singles-collection sort of thing to close out their contract, 'cos didn't they break up soon after? They're like, if you boiled off all the personality and unique style of a dozen VK bands, and plugged in all the lowest-commonality-denominators, you'd get Shulla. Fuck you, Shulla!
  
• I am compelled to mention Sulfuric Acid's Sulphur Drug but cannot not point out the inconsistencies in spelling between the band name and EP title.
• In '04, Therion put out Lemuria and Sirius B, a pair of metal albums that are as pretentious (flutes, opera singers, more echo than the Grand Canyon) as they are bloated (in an "all our songs sound like Lord of the Rings making out with Star Trek" way). But by the mini-epic one-two punch of "Son of the Sun" and "The Khlysti Evangelist" forgives a lot of mistakes.
  
• Lastly, Tomoyasu Hotei put out Electric Samurai, from which "Battle without Honor or Humanity" is pulled. (Oh, that song! Thanks, Go!)

Gibson:

Kagrra
Miyako 2004
It's a Kagrralicious tour de force, but we can all agree that Miyako didn't have the time-traveling impact of Gozen ~Dead of Human World~. But since Gozen got squeezed out by Kisou a couple posts ago, this should even things out.

There was no better j-rock album in '04... it was a pretty dry year in Japan, the scene having blown its load in the previous 24 months and finding itself in a state of flux, with stalwarts like Deg & Pierrot having peaked and the new Gazettey style ascendent. Remember how many bands were around that sounded like Gazette? Jeez.

&

My Chemical Romance
Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge 2004
This disc was a revelation, mostly for the storytellerific titles and lyrics, but also for the rockin'. Every track on here is a blast: I still get Helena flashbacks watching Band of Brothers clips, the intro riff on "Thank You for the Venom" rips, and the tumbling "I Never Told You What I Do for a Living" is better than a Bourne movie. Also, I hope to have pissed at least a few of you off with this choice. :)

The Best Albums of the Decade Part 3: 2003

tired:

• Backyard Babies' Stockholm Syndrome are like a Nordic (or wherever) Wildhearts sans Ginger's supernovaline charm, with one really good song, "Minus Celsius."[y]
• Children of Bosom's Bodom's Hate Crew Deathroll is their first album I don't really know all the way through.
• Circuit V Panther's Sexy Finger isn't.
• Fortunately, there were numerous alternatives to Deadman's No Alternative.
• Evanescence lol...
• Still haven't listened to Gackt's Crescent. (Not helping, the shitty opening track.)
• Can't believe Galneryus' The Flag of Punishment came out this long ago... I mean, it *sounds* like it came out two decades ago, but it only feel s a couple years old....
• Iron Maiden's Dance of Death remains the best Maiden album since Seventh Son... love "Montsegur", "Paschendale", and the title track.
• Kagerou put out their shit-eating self-titled debut album and it was all downhill from there.
• Loudness put out Re-masterpieces, which is a fantastic title (says "greatest hits, remastered" so eloquently) but dumping a large keg of reverb all over your engineer and the mixing desk is not what I call "remastering".
  
• St Anger. Grr.
• Moi Dix Mois' Dix Infernal set j-rock back a decade, calling into question the taste and sanity of anyone who purchased it. So ridiculously robotic, unmelodic, and just plain DUMB, it is to musical history what the Dark Ages were to European history.
• Pelican's Australasia and the self-titled EP came out in 2003, tho it'd take me another three years to discover them...both still makes my heart swell with EPICNESS (check out "Nightendday" and "Pulse").
• Pierrot's ID Attack was a gaping gut wound that even the Kijutsuteki best-of/remake album couldn't bandage.
• Porcupine Tree's In Absentia introduced me to a new style of non-flashy, non-bombastic progressive rock.
• Sikth's The Trees are Dead and Dried Out was a mindfuck. Like Mr Bungle, but good.
• Sugizo's C:lear -- featuring the singlularly Sugozian "No More Machineguns, Play the Guitar" -- was okay.
• The Wildhearts Must Be Destroyed was an inspiration. The blitz that is "Nexus Icon", a bassier "Vanilla Radio", the merry "So Into You"...
• Yellow Generation's Carpe Diem was a classier brand of girl-pop, but only "Kitakaze to Taiyou" elevated itself to greatness.

wired:

The Darkness
Permission to Land 2003
This album is the very definition of the year 2003. Seems like everyone everywhere was kickin' it, karaoke-ing and air-guitaring to" Get Your Hands Off of My Woman" (mother fuuuuuuckerrrrr~!) and "I Believe in a Thing Called Love"... They were all over the telly and radio and in-store music systems in Japan, just totally inescapable. The fact that they'd be one-hit wonders and vanish within a year was a foregone conclusion, so everyone wallowed in the decadence of it all. But maybe in 2013 there'll be a peep...

&

Dir en grey
Vulgar 2003
From one of the old jrocknyc Blitz5Days live reports:

A short break to rescue crushed, asphyxiated fans, then Kyo mentions, "Hey, new album," and gets cheers. Behind him on the screen, "Vulgar" and "9/10". So there's your album title and release date.

I have fonder memories of the announcement of the album than of its actual existence; "R to the Core" faded fast off the radar, "Obscure" got better over time, but not that much; "Red...[em]"'s solo is still buttery.

"Drain Away" and "Kasumi" I'm sick off, because those were the first Deg songs that I was in a position to tape off the TV (the PVs, or the CMs, or the special programs that only aired at 3am on TV Tokyo) and encode and attempt to upload, and it took so many tries, and doublechecking (this is pre-Youtube!) and arghghg -- so I now associate them both with uncooperative codec technology. Most of the other songs are forgettable. "Child Prey" is still bitchin'ly hellacious, tho -- shoulda put it on Six Ugly!

The Best Albums of the Decade Part 2: 2002

Close but no cigar:

• Alex Skolnick Trio's Goodbye to Romance reinterpreted metal classics into jazzness, and their version of "War Pigs" is better than FNM's and the originals!
• Darkane's Expanding Senses fuckin' RIPPED. SHIT. UP!
  
• Dream Theater's Six Degrees was the last album of theirs I attempted to take seriously.
• Hide's Junk Story is a best-of, but still worth a mention, ja?
• Hyde's Roentgen (do you have both the Japanese and English versions?) was a mellow, hippie-ish, sixties-ish affair. "Shallow Sleep" is still a beautiful little gem.
• J's Unstoppable Drive, starring the bombastic "Feel Your Blaze" and eleven other rockers (plus four intro/interlude tracks) represented his best shot at earning an award... but he got stomped by you know who...
• And it wasn't Kagrra, although Gozen -- "omg an entire album of Kagrra!" -- remains their best full-length.
• Mucc's Houmura Uta was their best for a long time, til they started cranking out the awesomeness again a year or two ago... "Zetsubou" just effin' POUNDS.
• Phobia's self-titled best-of came out in '02... ahh, what ever happened to those guys? I predicted them rising up with Despairs and Kagrra and Gazette... check out "Saezuru Meido", "La Rouge Fil", the HORRIBLY TITLED "'" (yes, that's a single quote between two double quotes!), "Vi x 2 section", "Dear", and "Puppet Master". Great songs!
• Fuck, Pierrot's Heaven came out in 2002 as well! Too bad it was a little too happy-crappy. "Dramatic Neo Anniversary" was a beaut, tho.
• The Postman Syndrome's Terraforming is Between the Buried and Me performing Porcupine Tree tracks. AND they have TWO songs called "Hedgehog's Dilemma" for you Evangelion fans...
• Seo Taiji's Volume 6 is the only volume I cared to keep. "Internet War" 'salright.
• Oh shit, Star One, lads! Space Metal is a shiny, euro-proggy ode to scifi films lie... well, it's best to listen to the lyrics and guess for yourself (it's not always obvious!)...
• Soilwork kicked some ass with Natural Born Chaos, their best disc.
  
• 2002 was also the year of Syndrome (the beta version of D), with the black & white Core CDs. The kuro one is fierce, the shiro one is ballady... combined they make for a better album than anything D has done in the last three years.
• Lastly, I thought The Wildhearts were gonna win this year with the Riff After Riff After Motherfucking Riff CD, but really only the sing-along fusillade of "Stormy in the North" and karate-chop bombast of "Vanilla Radio" merit one's undivided attention; the other tracks are b-sidey.

Win:

Dir en grey
Kisou 2002
Every song on here teeters on the edge of masterpiecedom. "24ko", "Filth", "Valley", "Keloidmilk", "DFF", "Mushi," "Jessica", "Karasu"... god I love this disc. All the way through, even the interludes.

There's an attention to detail and a presence dedicated to making great songs greater: sadder, achinger, rockinger, crazier... only the Zan-ian "Pink Killer" seems out of place is its over-the-top desperate go-for-it-ness; all else is perfection. And even then, "Shinsou" apologizes for "Pink"'s faux pas and closes out the album on a note of breathtaking beauty.

&

Sentenced
The Cold White Light 2002
Transcendant.

Great metal songs with great metal production. "Cross My Heart and Hope to Die", "Excuse Me While I Kill Myself" and especially "You Are the One" should all be metal radio staples, so catchy and metally and heavy-yet-fun are they.

With beautiful tones and cozy, lived-in melodies in the vocal and guitar departments, I want to make a "high school is to grad school as pop metal is to Sentenced" metaphor, but it's NOT POP AT ALL. Just intelligently hook-laden... Think Metallica covering Morning Musume.

The Best Albums of the Decade Part 1: 2001

God damn I love goin' through the ol' back catalog like this! It's just hours of memories and awesome rockin' and the blessed curse of having too much good stuff to choose from. :)

For those about to lose, we salute you:

• Arch Enemy's Wages of Sin (the first one with the chick singer Angela Gossow, right?) did not win because the only song I could hum off this disc is "Ravenous".
• Brian Setzer's Ignition lit me up ("'59" is at least as good as "Summer of '69"), but, eh.
• Dope Headz' Primitive Impulse sucked. Good work Pata and Heath!
• La' Mule released Climax in '01, but listening to it now... argh! There's no hits! (There's a song called "D" tho...)
• Madeth Gray'll released Higeki no shuumaku, a best-of album, but best-of albums and live albums aren't allowed to win! (Otherwise The Final Act would be #1!) But, fuck man.... Madeth fuckin' Gray'll. There has never been and shall never be a VKzier name.
  
• Mucc's Tzuusetsu doesn't win because I've never been able to listen to it all the way through.
• Opeth's Blackwater Park remains too dense for me to have fully mapped yet... probably never will. (By 2001, they were competing with more easily digested melodeath.) "Leper Affinity" remains awesome as shit, but there's a lot of too light, too boring, folksy stuff on here too.
• Sads' five-song Appetizing 4 Songs EP and full album The Rose God Gave Me have lots of hard swagger-rock, and "Rosary and Roser" is the best song Kiyoharu's ever done. But like a J album there's lots of dross too.
• Sex Machineguns' Barbe-q Michael was the second of many disappointments, with only "Aikoso Subete" and, less so, "Tabetai Nametai Kikenchitai" delivering anything resembling the awesomeness of their '98 debut and '99 follow-up.
• And Tenacious D's Complete Masterworks came out in 2001?!

Winners:

Andromeda
Extension of the Wish 2001
A great antidote to Dream Theater's Microsoftianism. New century prog metal at its best, exploring unexpected but non-obnoxious directions. And an album so good they released it twice! (Tho I'll continue to prefer the 2001/Mackrory version...) I must confess, however, that this album was only the best of a bunch of so-so choices; I barely spin it anymore. But on the Japan side of things, we have...

&

A TIE!

Despairs Ray
Terrors 2001
This five-headed dragon remains my favorite release by them, regurgitating fond memories of a time when VK was still new and exploring different arenas of sound and groove and texture... everything was so thick and clobbering! And grooved, making your whole body jacknife like Karyu still does on stage... great shit. Must've spun this one a hundred times... but...

Kagrra
Irodori 2001
...Kagrra's Irodori EP cannot be ignored either! Even after all these years, the band's lush neo-Japanisme and command of ancient lyrical vocabulary has yet to be successfully imitated.

Between these two giants, you get a lifelike representation of what wild new tangents VK was pulling itself in at the time, a couple years after the thrashy style had played itself out, before everything started copying everything else again in the mid-00s. What a beautiful time!

The Best Albums of the Decade Part 0: 2000

This is it, guys, the countdown begins...

Albums that did not win:

• L'Arc~en~Ciel's Real, 'cos only "The Nepenthes" and "Finale" attained the greatness of L'Arc albums past.
• Iron Maiden's Brave New World, because even with Adrian's triumphant return, it was gummy.
• Dir en grey's Macabre, as a bunch of great parts (the "Hotarubi" interlude, "Wake"'s intro & solo, "Rasetsu Koku"'s riffing, and "Taiyou no Ao"'s sunny disposition) don't make up for all the lulls and noise this album suffers from throughout.
• Children of Bodom's Follow the Reaper, which feels older than it is.
• Pierrot's Private Enemy, partially due to the fact that the album version of "Creature" sounds like it was run through an sandpaper factory. But "Enemy", "Agitator" and "Shinkei ga..." remain must-haves.
• Nightwish's Wishmaster, despite the title track being one of the mindblowingly metallest songs to ever make it to tape.
• Plastic Tree's Parade, because I harbor only a mild appreciation of the toe-tapper "Slide", and "Juujiro", and "Bloom", and "Sink".
• Spiritual Beggars' Ad Astra because not even a song as ballsy as "Angel of Betrayal" or as oozey as "Mantra" will get your guys' attention!

Drum roll, please!

And the best albums of the year 2000 (one east, one west) are:

Luna Sea
Lunacy 2000
Between "A Vision", "Sweetest Coma Again", "Tonight" (one of the best!) and the slightly overloved but still gorgeous "Gravity" lay a bushel of other wonderful songs. Sugizo & Co. have always been one of the few j-rock bands who make great albums, and this, their last, stands up to a critical ear even ten years later, and so needed to be on this list.

&

In Flames
Clayman 2000
You guys may not remember, but the 90s were a shitty time for metal. For me, this album (in conjuction with 1998's Colony, which I didn't hear til 2000) was the wake-up call to the existence of a reinvigorated genre. Though they've stumbled in recent years, "Pinball Map" will forever be a favorite, and hell, every song on here is killer!

next up: 2001...

OMG

BLABBERMOUTH.NET:

According to Reuters, British hard rock veterans DEF LEPPARD are working on a cartoon TV show as part of their wide-ranging deal with music publishing company Primary Wave.

The project is still in the early stages, and has not been pitched to the networks, but it will depict the five members of the group in a fictional, adventurous setting, Primary Wave CEO Larry Mestel told Reuters.

[drops coffee cup, wets pants]

(Does anyone here have any manga chops, and could doodle up a pic o' the band? the internet needs some def lep manga right now.)

The Manga Guides

The Manga Guides to Everything:

Ain't read any of these, but flipping through them, they seemed worth a mention :)

review: matenrou opera | "murder scope" (2009)

matenrou opera
murder scope
2009

The title track is three and a half minutes of progressive power metal all the way, with only the warbly japanese vocals and a subconscious je ne sais quoi exposing the non-Euro-ness of the band.

"Cocoon" is an epic ballad straddling the VK and metal genres.

Four live tracks maintain an authentic rawness and serve to prove that the band's abilities aren't limited to the studio.


This PV is so slow it almost makes the song go in reverse.
And not for the first time do they (the vocals at least!) feel Raphaelian to me, so you old-school VKers may wanna take a peek. Traditional western metalheads seeking to (slowly) broaden their horizons to the east might wanna check this out too.

Skilled players, decent songwriters... good stuff.

But I really only have time for rulebreaking, mindbending greatness these days, so:

rating: :\

RedLetterMedia's 70-minute Review of "The Phantom Menace" is Effing Brill

via reddit

You'll think, "I can't listen to this guy for 70 minutes!" But you'll be wrong.

Intelligent, accurate, insightful, true, and SO HILARIOUS IT GAVE ME A HEADACHE FROM LAUGHING SO HARD, SO MUCH.

You, too, can show off your lack of aesthetic judgment!

DIR EN GREY's MySpace Blog:

Dir en grey SKATEDECKS
COMING FRIDAY 12/18!

We are pleased to announce an extremely limited run of Dir en grey "Dozing Green" skateboard art-decks! There are only going to be 100 of these skateboard decks in THE WORLD this holiday season.

thx bobert!

Skatedecks make cool bookshelves, but not with this bland design.

review: gilgamesh | "now" (2009)

 

gilgamesh

now

2009

These crushingest thing about this album is the cover art.

The art does effectively illustrate the band's continued move into a more commercial vein, tho, using the ol' "heavy riff, publicly digestable chorus" blueprint that they've employed on past albums. Nearly every track follows this pattern.


UGH! DOUCHES!

There's also lots of Pro-Toolsy staccato stop-start-stoppyness, lots of rapping, lots of dancepop beats that have no business being on what's ostensibly a "metal" record...

In short, NO.

rating: :(