Trollheart

Final warning --- Neural Mass --- 2010 (Label unknown/unclear)


Neural mass are a heavy rock band from Canada, and let's be honest, we don't get too many of them! Their sound is classic heavy rock/heavy metal, with a good dose of prog rock and even some classical influences thrown in for good measure. This is their fifth and latest album, and though information on them is hard to come by (even their own website doesn't advise what lavel they record on, thus the above note), they would appear to be at core a three-piece outfit, consisting of Gary X Floyd (the “X” is important, apparently!) on vocals and keys, Sylvain Rodrige on drums and Mark Tremblay on guitar and bass. Although their own website credits this last as “guest musician”on this album, he seems to have been with them for four albums, including this, going back to 2002's “Sunshine hill”, so I would have considered him as more a full member. Perhaps therein lies a story, but if it does, I don't have it.

Opener “Monoxyde world” is a very impressive, nine-minute instrumental that never gets boring or overstretched, with great keys and synths from Floyd, solid drumbeats from Rodrigue and some really good guitar, although this appears to be credited, for this album, to Steve Otis. I'll come back to Tremblay later, as I think I may have pieced his story, at least partially, together.

There seems to be some sort of war going on in a dystopian future here, and the narrative, I think, follows the progress or afermath of this war, or attack. Hard to say which.”Trailer by the swamp” has a nice bassline opening, accompanied by a fluid organ sound, with intermittent drumming from Rodrigue. Vocals finally come in on this track, but to be honest I think I preferred it as an instrumental. Perhaps it's just the way the vocals are phrased, but on this track they don't sound too great.

“Female disaster” goes back to the narrated vocals, for want of another phrase, and it's a sort of jazzy, mid-tempo number with nice piano and keyboards, while “Cold temptress” seems to be the first time we get a ballad. It's a nice slow track with jangly guitar, but again the vocals seem at odds with the quality of the playing. Whoever's singing sounds European, like perhaps German or Danish: I guess there's no reason these guys can't be from Canada but of Euopean extraction. Lovely guitar solo in this track, really smooth.

“3 days”, a short, mad instrumental track sounds like Neural Mass captured Tom Waits and put him in a box, forcing him to play odd instruments for them! Very eclectic. “My death girl” proves that the vocals are definitely not up to scratch. They sound flat, expressionless, and kind of remind me of the lead singer from Tiamat, except he had a lot more emotion in his voice. Pity. If the vocals had been left off, this would have been a really good album. As it is, the singing is totally below par and ruins the songs it features in.

So, about this Mark tremblay then. It seems that he started off with them on “Sunshine hill”, as mentioned, playing guitar on five of the eleven tracks. On follow-up album “Opposite control” he was again playing guitar, this time it would seem the whole album, but by this album he has been tasked with bass duties as well as guitar, although Steve Otis (who now seems to be their permanent guitarist) is also doing guitar, and Tremblay is, as I mentioned, only given a “guest” credit. So you would have to assume he has at this point left the band, but either returned temporarily for this album, or else played on tracks which were already recorded before he left. That's how I see it, anyway.

“Actions in the nervous system” is, quite frankly, all over the place, with drum solos, instrumental, taped vocals, some out-of-control death vocals, and frankly it's one of the weirdest tracks I've heard in a while. Can't decide whether it's genius or rubbish. Interestingly-named “The undertaker's last customer”, the longest track on the album at just over eleven minutes, is a great baroque keyboard solo for the first two minutes or so, then changes to a nice proggy synth with guitars kicking in, with some nice drum machine sounds and some boppy keyboard. This is Neural Mass at their best: instrumental wonderland, with a few mad “sales talk” announcements, which are in fact quite good and well written, particularly the dire warning ”Other types of payment/ Will be met with violence!” I'm sure if you're “tripping” this sounds excellent --- sounds excellent to me, and I've never taken a drug in my life! I love this: track of the album for certain.

The title track, and closer, is another instrumental, and it's very seventies prog, very epic and dramatic. Some minimal vocals here to close things out, more of those taped reports, newsreel-style, spoken and narrated. I prefer these to the actual singing vocals, as these add an extra dimension to the instrumental pieces, whereas the singing itself becomes a distraction from them, and on the face of it, totally unnecessary.

As an instrumental album this works beautifully, and if Neural Mass can either keep the vocals to a minimum, or out altogether, or else vastly improve their singing style (or get someone who can), this band could be one to watch. As it is, a flawed masterpiece, but certainly worth listening to.

TRACKLISTING

1. Monoxyde world
2. Trailer by the swamp
3. Female disaster
4. Cold temptress
5. 3 days
6. My death girl
7. Viral zoonosis
8. Actions in the nervous system
9. The undertaker's last customer
10. Final warning

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Random Track of the Day
Saturday, November 5 2011
Oh God, oh God! I really can't avoid it much longer, can I? Soon, very soon, I'm going to have to gird my loins, bite the bullet and descend into the cesspit that is boyband music! I am not looking forward to it, but I have to prove a point. Face your fears, isn't that what they say? Not that I'm afraid. No, not at all. Just, well, a little queasy....

As if to slap me in the face and remind me of the promise I made a little while ago to explore in detail music I am not naturally familiar with --- and starting with the murky, sugary, vacuous world of boybands --- the random-o-meter has grabbed one of their tracks, and well, here it is. Excuse me for just a moment...

Everybody (Backstreet's back) --- Backstreet Boys --- from "Backstreet's back" on Jive


Don't be afraid... nothing to be afraid of... Be strong ...

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A classic example of hearing one song and thinking the album would be great, though in fairness the single was excellent. Sadly though, as we've seen with the albums featured here, often it seems all of the effort has gone into the one song that you heard before buying the album, leaving the rest of it empty, dull and uninspiring. Such indeed was the case when I foolishly went ahead and purchased this album, hoping that there would be more tracks on it like the single I had heard, which was being played all over the radio, but it was to prove, as we'll see, a bad idea.

All that jazz --- Breathe --- 1988 (A&M)


I suppose I should have been wary of this album from the beginning, as it has the word “jazz” in it, and I am not a fan of that style of music. However, I assumed it was just the old saying, and didn't mean that the music actually had jazz influences. But it does, not that you'd know it from the single I had heard at the time, which was a huge hit for them, “Hands to Heaven”.

It's a beautiful, soulful ballad, reeks of class and did in fact almost hit number one in the charts, so so far so good, yes? It was followed by another track which had been their first single, but not very successful, however after “Hands to Heaven” stormed the charts they re-released it, and it did very well. As it happened, the copy of the album I bought had not got “Don't tell me lies” on it, although I'm informed later pressings did. It's a faster, boppier song, which I felt would do really well, but it failed to get into the top forty, even on second release.

The final decent song on the album is yet another single, another chart-topper and indeed another ballad, the closer from the album, “How can I fall”.


Unfortunately, that's it. The album opens with “Jonah”, which I found too jazzy and funky for my tastes

Then there's the title track

“All this I should have known” (was this album trying to tell me something?)

“Liberties of love”

And the less said about “Any trick”, the better!


In fairness, it's not that “All that j!zz --- sorry, JAZZ!” is a terrible album. If you're a dance/funk or even jazz fan you'll probably like it. But on the basis of the singles I had not expected that kind of music, and so I was sorely disappointed with what I got. Just proves the old adage: “Listen before you buy.”

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Oh, the worm has a great one for you today! Going all the way back, back to 1967 for a true classic, one of the few songs the worm knows that ends with whistling (anyone know the others?), it's the late Otis Redding, and “(Sittin' on) The dock of the bay”.

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Nice boppy track for you to try to get out of your head today, from the Cars, taken from their millions-selling album “Heartbeat City”, it's “You might think”.

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Random Track of the Day
Sunday, November 6 2011
Random Track of the Day today comes from a band fast becoming one of my favourites, Jadis, from their album “More than meets the eye”.

This changing face --- Jadis --- from "More than meets the eye" on InsideOut
A great progressive rock band, just about everything I hear from Jadis is great, some quite phenomenal. This is another excellent track from them, it's called “This changing face.”

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In the days before itunes, the Interweb and ipods and playlists, we bought albums when we wanted to hear them, and because we had bought a physical product, be it CD or vinyl LP (ask your parents) we felt the need to listen to it right away. So generally, the cycle would go thus: into record shop, see album(s) we want, buy, bring home, take out of bag, stick on stereo, listen. And listen all the way through too, no such thing as playlists in my day, cough cough wheeze where's me zimmer?

But in recent years, this behaviour has changed, and I too have fallen victim to it. With the advent of torrents, free music sites like the sadly-missed Napster and Audiogalaxy, not to mention those websites selling music which are based in certain, shall we say, ex-Iron Curtain countries (ahem!) music has become so much easier not only to buy, but to amass. The result is that it is now possible, indeed even preferable, to download a band's full discography almost in one mouse click. But as we do that, and the music mounts up and takes up ever more space on our straining hard drives, the days still have the same amount of hours, and it becomes nigh-on impossible to listen to everything in our collection.

The result of that situation is, of course, that we end up with hundreds, perhaps even thousands of albums on our PCs that we always mean to listen to, but never get the time somehow. There's always something else to do. From time to time, we note as we pass down the directory, “Oh yes, I must go through the Dio catalogue”, or “I really should find out what that band Helloween are like”, or similar, but then we just move on. There is, quite literally, not enough time in our day to listen to everything we would like to. But we will, we promise ourselves faithfully. Some day. Just not today.

Well, today is that day. Or at least, today is the day I'm going to try making some sort of inroads on my as yet unlistened to collection. I'd like to say I'm going to try to listen to an album a day, but of course there's no way I believe I can keep that sort of promise. Maybe an album a week. Let's start with that. And review it here.

So, the only real criteria I have is that the album I listen to must be either a) by an artiste whose work I haven't heard yet or b) one of their catalogue I have yet to hear. I could end up hating it, or loving it, or being singularly unimpressed by it. It may make me want to devour the rest of their discography, or cause me to never listen to anything they record again. Who knows? But at least I'll be chipping away at the sizeable mountain I've created.

So, how to choose what to listen to? Well, there's a real plethora of progressive rock bands on my disk waiting to be discovered, so let's give one of them a go....

Juggling 9 or dropping 10 --- Enchant --- 2000 (InsideOut)


These guys will do. I like the name of the band, and I'm intrigued by the title of this one. I've never heard anything at all from Enchant prior to this, not even a Random Track of the Day, so this is a total punt, as they say in “Dragons' Den”. Let's see if it pays off.

Opener “Paint the picture” doesn't disappoint, with its warbly keyboard intro backed by powerful guitars, a long track to start the album at just over seven minutes, and when the singing starts I'm put very much in mind of Jadis, who feature in today's RTOTD. Vocalist Ted Leonard does sound a lot like their mainman, and looking at the lineup on the album it's clear why there's right away such a lush, luxuriant and full sound, as Enchant employ up to four keyboard players, two of which seem to be multi-instrumentalists: Paul Creddick also plays acoustic guitar, bass, strings, drums, percussion, guitar, piano, harpsichord and mellotron, while Doug A. Ott plays close to the same: acoustic and electric guitar, bass, piano, mellotron as well as keys. Ted Leonard plays the bass in addition to singing, and there's another bass player plus two more dedicated keysmen, so no passengers here!

“Rough draft” is a heavier, more dramatic piece, almost as long as the opener, with nice picked guitar and driving bass and some great keyboard flourishes, while “Bite my tongue” is more guitar led than previous tracks, rocky and with a good hook. Leonard certainly has a strong vocal range, and as no backing vocalists are credited I must assume the harmonies I hear on the songs are his own voice multi-tracked, and it works very effectively.

“Colours fade” starts off slowly, as if we've arrived at the first ballad on the album, but then it picks up pace a little, becoming a mid-paced rocker, with some quite heavy guitar from, well, one of the four candidates! Hard to know who's playing what, which would be the only small criticism I can level at Enchant's lineup: some of the playing is so good you really want to credit the guy doing it, but as so many of them play more than one instrument, it's next to impossible to know who to praise. Even the bass playing is shared by up to four people! Never heard of that level of instrumentation before.

Nice little acoustic ending to “Colours fade” before “Juggling knives” comes in, a similar sort of song with some very nice guitar and some powerful vocals from Leonard. The song puts me in mind at times of the best of It Bites. This song actually serves as the title track, as during the lyric Leonard sings ”Now my choice is / Juggling nine or dropping ten”. Great keyboard work here too, very seventies or even eighties Genesis, though again I couldn't tell you who's behind the keyswork.

I really like this album on first listen, although I would admit that in essence there's very little new or innovative here, save the abovementioned multi-instrumentation. A lot of Genesis, Jadis, Marillion influences, sort of leaning rather hard into the Jadis area of the spectrum for me, but none the worse for that. I would like to see a little more individuality from this band though, an identity of their own.

“Shell of a man” has a strange sort of distant vocal, almost as if Ted Leonard is standing away from the mike, at least at first. Great intermeshing of the sound, no doubt about that: each member is a craftsman on his own chosen instruments, and it's quite an achievement. I can't even play the piano! To be able to master so many different instruments is something to be applauded, and it certainly does create a deep and varied soundscape for Leonard to sing against. Nevertheless, the more this album goes on the more astounded I am how similar to Jadis they sound.

“Traces” is a real tour-de-force, with just about everything put into the song by all band members, and in total contrast the closer, “Know that”, less than a minute and a half long, is a fragile, gentle acoustic treat which takes you completely by surprise but ends up being about the strongest last track to an album I've heard in quite a while.

So, what are my impressions, both of this band and of the album? Well, I have to be completely honest and say I'm not blown away, but neither am I sorry I listened to “Juggling 9 or dropping 10”. I'll be listening to more of their material in due course to see is there any real identity to the band, but at the moment I see them, as I've said more than once now, as a sort of poor man's Jadis. Whether that's a compliment or insult depends, I guess, on what you think of Jadis, but the similarities are too close to the bone for me to see Enchant any other way.

Not a bad start then. One down, only about fifteen hundred to go!

TRACKLISTING

1. Paint the picture
2. Rough draft
3. What to say
4. Bite my tongue
5. Colours fade
6. Juggling knives
7. Black eyes and broken glass
8. Elyse
9. Shell of a man
10. Broken wave
11. Traces
12. Know that

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Random Track of the Day
Monday, November 7 2011
Great track to start us off on a new week, it's one from one of the albums that really divided Yes fans when it was released: some loved it, some hated it, but one thing is for sure --- it was certainly different to anything they had produced up to that time.

Hold on --- Yes --- from "90125" on Atco


I'll be honest: I'm not a huge Yes fan, but I loved this. Not a single bad track, and some simply astounding ones. This is called “Hold on”.

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Was there ever a weirder band than Sparks? That guy who just stood at the keyboard with the one expression on his face, and looked like a cross between Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and Yosser Hughes! Out there, man, out there! And who could tell what the lead singer was saying? Can you? Anyway, this was their biggest (only?) hit, “This town ain't big enough for the both of us”. Oh yeah? Whatcha gonna do about it?

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I watch the coastline nervously as it comes nearer, and a trick of perspective seems to make it bob up and down on the water. I know of course that it's me, or rather, the ship that's carrying me, rising and falling on the swell of the ocean as I approach this new and daunting land, but my brain refuses to register that. Perhaps that's due to the trepidation I feel on making this journey. I look at my ticket and heft my shoulder-bag, and not for the first time ask myself why I'm doing this, why I'm putting myself through this torture?

Then I remember my promise to myself, and to the good readers of my Journal, back at Music Banter. I have decided to, Jackhammer-like, do my very best to try to ensure that I know as much about genres with which I am only peripherally acquainted, in order to fulfil, in a way, that old adage, know thine enemy. I do not expect to get into this music, but I want to be sufficiently informed that, the next time I slag it off, I can at least feel that I know what I am talking about. It's very easy to say “I hate reggae” or “All rap is awful”, or indeed “Punk is all noise”, but if you haven't listened to any of that music in any real depth then you're just as guilty of bias and ignorance as someone who has seen Genesis play “Follow you follow me” on TV and maybe heard Marillion's “Kayleigh” on the radio who says that all prog rock is rubbish. They don't know that, haven't taken the time to find out what the music is like, have based their opinion on the tiniest examples of that music, and so have come to a totally uninformed and biased conclusion.

My aim, over the next I suppose year or more, is to travel to the most foreign musical countries I can, sample the local music, and try to if not understand it, at least take the good parts out of it, or if they can't be found, relate why I find that particular music so unappealing. At least the next time I say, for instance, Bob Marley is rubbish (sorry, Marley fans, just an example!) and someone says you know nothing about reggae, I will be able to quote albums, artistes and songs to back up my assertions. Of course, these voyages could do the opposite, and change my mindset, so that I will in fact get into these bands, these different genres, or if not get into them, at least get them. That would be interesting, to say the least.

And so, my first, purposely-chosen as perhaps one of the scariest genres to be explored is the clinical, cold, empty and formulaic world of the Boyband. At least, that's how I see such music. Whether this trip will change my mind, whether I will begin to see some good in this genre, or whether I will be able to appreciate with a new ear the music of such bands as Boyzone, Nsync and Backstreet Boys, is open to question. But at least no-one will be able to say I didn't try.

So, I remind myself, that's why I've come all this way, and as the coast comes ever closer into view, my heart begins pounding faster, and I reach for an anxiety tablet to calm my fracturing nerves. As the ship gets closer, and I can now make out the garishly coloured buildings that dot the coastline of this pristine country, a strange sound comes to my ears, borne on the wind, which itself sounds like nothing less than a frothy digital piano playing the same chords over and over again, till it is surely enough to drive hardened sailors mad and cause ships to dash against the rocks. How the captain stands it is beyond me.

I start to clap my hands to my ears, to shut out the awful sound, but then remember my promise, and grit my teeth and endure it as it becomes louder as we drift nearer and nearer. The sound resolves into a low, vibrant hum which seems to maintain the same level while at the same time appearing to rise in pitch. I shake my head, fish out a sandwich from my bag for energy as I stand at the rail of the ship, in the bow as we nose into the harbour, and with trembling hands quickly run up the last prog rock track I will be able to listen to before I have to turn my full attention to the simpering, poe-faced adolescent pap that passes for music from the residents of these islands. Sorry, that wasn't very open-minded, was it? Well, I'm not on their land yet, so sue me.

Before I know it, I'm leaving the ship on shaky legs, my ipod surrendered to the purser to eliminate any temptation to listen to other music, and making my way down into the docks and up into the many small villages which dot the area around the coastline. I realise with mounting horror now what that sound is, and it almost sends me screaming back to the ship, which I realise with hammering heart is gearing up for departure already. Understandable: few if any journey to these dark islands; this trip cost me, and no-one would stay here longer than they have to!

But the sound! Yes, there it is again, higher-pitched and stronger than when we were coming into the harbour, and now that I'm on dry land I can make out the incessant, frenzied, almost overpowering sound of thousands upon thousands of female teenage voices just screaming, almost as one, at the top of their voices. There are no words can be made out, just an endless, indecipherable cacophony that hurts the ears and threatens to shake the brain loose from the skull.

I have arrived in Early BoyBand Land.

(note: my thanks to the designers of the maps used here. I have no way to contact you --- or even determine who you are --- in order to ask permission for their use, so hope you will not mind this somewhat irreverent use of your fine work, which is not meant in any way to denigrate or make fun of it. Just Boybands.)


The truly scary thing about this country is its size! Boybands have been around since the Dawn of Time (well, the late seventies) but only really came into vogue with the emergence of New Edition, and on their heels New Kids on the Block, generally accepted as having been the first “real” Boybands. But just what is a Boyband? Well, in the unlikely event that there are some of you out there blessed enough not to know what I'm talking about (World War 2 ended almost seventy years ago, by the way!) here's what Wikipedia, the online Encyclopedia of Everything, the web's version of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy --- though without the amusing voiceover and graphics --- has to say on the subject.

”A boy band (or boyband) is loosely defined as a popular music act consisting of only male singers. The members are expected to dance as well as sing, usually giving highly choreographed performances. More often than not, boy band members do not play musical instruments, either in recording sessions or on stage, and only sing and dance, making the term somewhat of a misnomer. However, exceptions do exist. In many cases boy bands are brought together by a producer through an audition process, although many of them form on their own.”

(The above was copied and pasted directly from the Wiki entry, the only time I have ever done this. I usually utilise Wiki for much of my information, but none of it is ever copied down verbatim. This once, I felt it was right to do so, given the largely false and insincere makeup of these bands. No dubbed vocals, though!)

So, definition confirmed, it seems to be agreed that the first two real boybands were these two, and although there was of course the Jackson Five, I don't really consider them a boyband, mostly due to the fact that some of them could, and did, play instruments (Tito played lead guitar, Jermaine bass and Randy played both keyboards and drums) and the teeny-bopper sensation of the 70s, Scotland's own Bay City Rollers, but again, they played instruments, at least some of them, and to my knowledge did not engage in any of the choreographed routines endemic to Boybands nowadays, so I'm not including them.

Onward, brave heart! The fire awaits! Or something...

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