Dream Theater: A Dramatic Turn of Events- Review

http://scan.lusu.co.uk/carolynne/culture/2011/09/16/album-review-dream-theatre-a-dramatic-turn-of-events/

My latest album review, Dream Theater's latest work, A Dramatic Turn of events, read and enjoy. (Also, the name's wrong in the article, I know. My editor does'n know the band at all. :-P

Generation Why?

http://scan.lusu.co.uk/carolynne/culture/2011/09/05/album-review-diamond-plate-generation-why/

I've just finished my latest article for my uni newspaper. A review of a new band called "Diamond Plate" have a look and see what you think.

Another Little Bit

http://www.youtube.com/user/heavymetalmaniac616?feature=mhee

My youtube channel if anyone's interested in what else I may be screwing up

A Little Bonus

Goooooooooooooooooood evening people of the internet. I've been a bit lax with these recently, so here's a little bonus. I write as a music critic for my university newspaper (Lancaster University's SCAN), recently, I was given the new album by Thrash Metal band Evile (Yes, I'm a metalhead) so, here, in it's unedited and complete glory, is the review that I wrote for it.

Thrash is Back!

Evile – Five Serpent’s Teeth (Produced by Russ Russell)

In a world where metal is seemingly defined by doom and black metal, it is a rare thing to see an album that seems so influenced by some of Metal’s golden years (i.e. the early-mid 80’s), and “Five Serpent’s Teeth” the latest offering from Yorkshire Metallers Evile is exactly that, a back to basics piece of heavy metal gold. After their first album, which was produced by Flemming Rasmussen, who was involved in the making of arguably one of the best Thrash (if not the best Metal album of all time) Metallica’s Master of Puppets, the band has lost none of their classic, mid-80s Thrash sound. The influences from this collaboration are definitely still present and very obvious to all who know their old-school Metallica. With catchy, head banging riffs that make you want to raise your fist in the air, fast guitar solos and an all-out metal attitude, this is an all round great album with none of the stereotyped metal “doom and gloom”.  

The opening title track ‘Five Serpent’s Teeth” sets the scene for a consistently heavy album, it’s intense riffage is classic thrash at its best: Anthemic, and grabs you in a vicelike grip that refuses to let you go until the album’s well and truly over. ‘In Dreams of Terror’ continues in a very similar vein, which is one of my major criticisms of this album. From time to time it is hard to distinguish one track from another, as there are times when any let-up or subtlety in the song writing and playing are few and far between. ‘Cult’ is a great track, with a groove that occasionally seems to be missing from the other tracks.  ‘Eternal Empire’ and ‘Xaraya’ both follow the same formula of no holds barred, in-your-face metal. The Track ‘Origin of Oblivion’, if anything show a slightly heavier side of Evile, suggesting that they have their ears tilted ever so slightly towards more modern metal and aren’t just stuck in the 80s. ‘Centurion’ begins with an evil intro that leads into a slower song, but no less powerful. ‘In Memoriam’ shows a softer side of the band, as a musical tribute to bassist Mike Alexander.  It’s slow, melancholic melodies show a beauty of playing that the previous 7 tracks barely hint at. In my opinion, the best track on the album. The calmer atmosphere doesn’t last long however, as ‘descent into Madness’ returns straight back to the thrash mould. The closing number, ‘Long Live New Flesh’ is a killer anthem which ends the album as a call to arms for all young metal heads out there.

 Vocally, there are no soaring melodies or songs about demons and monsters, the singing is all deep and gravelly, without sounding growly or too guttural. Lyrically, there are great divides, with the song ‘In Memoriam’ dedicated to their late bass player, ‘Cult’ dealing with cultism, and ‘Origin of Oblivion’ dealing with globalisation and capitalism. The dual guitar assault here sounds huge and tight, with fast riffs and technical, lighting-fast fret board wizardry abound, so the air-guitarists out there (myself included) should be satisfied. The influences of these two guitar playing brothers (rhythm guitarist/vocalist Matt Drake and lead guitarist Ol Drake) are rarely hidden from the surface, with the odd moment of guitar harmony that could be taken straight out of any classic Judas Priest album. There are reasons why the metal community are going wild about this band, the whole album sounds like something that could have come out of the same San Francisco breeding ground that Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer emerged from.  Appropriate then that this band has, amongst many other achievements, toured with Thrash Metal titans Megadeth, won a Kawasaki Golden God Award for being “Metal as F**k.” They have played at many of the huge metal festivals in the last couple of years, including Download, Sonisphere and Wacken.   

Overall, this album, although at times a bit samey, shows the metal community that all is not lost.  Riff based classic thrash metal still exists.

The record label that has produced this have advertised this band with one simple tag-line: “Thrash is back” and is it? Hell yeah!

8/10

That's it. A little review for you. I hope y'all like it.

Keep the peace internet folk.

And all that Jazz

Gooooooooooood evening people of the internet! Contrary to what my previous two little rants may suggest, this was never really meant to be a current affairs, political newsy blog. It was meant to be a little record of whatever I like, about music mostly, so I've decided that it's about time I started on that.

What people I know know about me is that I'm a bit of a struggling musician. I play a great number of instruments on various styles, however, as I'm not really a stunning guitarist, or a singer/songwriter, then I'm not really in much demand popularly on the university circuit. I have the strange affliction (as it seems to be) of being a *cough* jazz nut *cough* This means that I'm a bit of a pariah, there being very few other young musicians, at least where I am, who are interested in this kind of music. Despite a great many guitar based, rock bands pretending to do poor quality impersonations of the Rock bands of yore, Jazz from a few years before is still seen as something that is listened to only by old pretentious artsy fartsy people or that your grandparents danced to during the war...

There seem to be very few oppertunities for small jazz groups as there used to be back in the 50s, the only things that people are interested in are the odd possibility for big bands, however, my major gripe with this idea is that the music ends up becoming something that defeats many of the original jazz ideals, such as freedom of musical expression, there were many famous musicians, such as the great innovator Ornette Coleman, who were unable to read music at all. Improvisation and self expression seems to be a very limited and, by many, sneered upon aspect of popular music- all people want to do is be able to play pieces and solos exactly how they were played by the original artist. Although replication may be useful from an academic point of view, it defeats the reason why the solo was created as a section of a piece in the first place. Creation as a part of performance, to the musical circle of people that I know, seems to be unacceptable and abhorrent- whether they see it as being too self-indulgent (isn't showing off part of music?) This, I feel is more of a regression on the part of music, rather than a progression. Improvisation was part of music for centuries, Mozart and Back improvised when playing live, and now people decide that it isn't musically acceptable to put a personal stamp on pieces that you play.


This is a very personal rant to me, so if anyone has their own views/differing opinions, then please feel free to comment.


Keep the peace internet folk.

The Jazzman Commeth.

Goooooood evening people of the internet. I'm not entirely what I'm going to write in these blogs. They'll probably be a mixture of angry rants, random ramblings and bizzare observations about life, the universe, everything and a couple of bits and pieces in between.(Also, if the grammer or anything starts to get sloppy, then don't get mad as I'm just typing this all out as a stream of thought kind of thing...) I'll keep these as short, to the point, and as clean and insulting to as few people as I can be. However nothing said in any blogs from this point on is meant to be hurtful to anyone and should be taken as nothing more than a joke and an irritable person letting off some steam. Anything said here is also my opinion and has nothing to do with anyone else (unless specifically mentioned). (and yes, I do have a thing about brackets. :-P )

So, I suppose I'd better kick these things off with a little bit of info about myself (yes, I am a self centred, arrogant show off from time to time. I guess this is a way to get rid of my need to have people listen to what I have to say). I'm currently in the summer holidays in between my second and third years at University. I'm studying Music and History (Not the History of Music, or Musical History. But Music AND History as a combined honours degree). I'm largely a performing musician. Playing Saxophone, Clarinet and un petit peu du guitar. My life seems to revolve around a mixture of rehearsals and essay writing. At the moment I seem to have no idea what I want to do after uni finishes. Ideally I want to do something to do with performance, however it's not what you know, it's who you know with that kind of stuff right...

So, first rant. Watching the news and it turns out that the all-powerful facebook seems to be trying to alter the chat service. So you can do group and video chats... Why would they do this when the bog standard, basic chat where it's just a simple box with text. So how do they expect to make this one work? The deal with Skype, although a good concept will either never work, be very slow, or will crash all the time. A video message service takes so much bandwidth etc that it'll make the whole site run excruciatingly slowly. It's also unlikely to work most of the time there would be too many people trying to use it at once, therefore overloading the service and making very few people able to use it at once around the world. I therefore reckon that the computer whizzes should sort out the ordinary chat before trying to expand it.

Well, for the moment I guess this is all that I have to say for myself. I hope this has been readable and not too self-obsessed or anything.

Keep the peace internet folk.