Trollheart

Well, they're just meant to be autumn leaves, but whatever makes you happy and keeps you reading...

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Trollheart

Title: "My cosmic autumn rebellion (The inner life as blazing shield of defiance and optimism as celestial spear of action)"
Format: Track
Written by: The Flaming Lips
Performed by: The Flaming Lips
Genre: Dreampop/Psych pop
Taken from: The Flaming Lips album At War with the Mystics
Year: 2006
Acclaim: I think none. The album won a Grammy, but this was not one of the three singles released from it. Of course, I know nothing about The Flaming Lips, so maybe it's one of their best loved songs. If so, please let me know.

With a title like that, it's probably fair to assume that this really has nothing to do with the season, but it does have autumn in its title so it qualifies. Has a beautiful dreamy opening, on organ, piano and with twittering sounds that I think are meant to be birds. The vocal is very relaxing and it looks to be a really beautiful ballad which I'm already falling in love with. Really didn't expect this. Reminds me very much of The Alan Parsons Project. Now it's taking a bit of a leap and a powerful guitar is soloing as the percussion drives it along in a much harder, yet still somehow laidback vein. Back to the singing we had at the beginning, and it looks like it's going for a powerful end. Another fine solo, and I think I may need to start listening to this band more.

Things I like about this : Everything. I love the soft but passionate vocal, the organ, the guitar solos, the way everything comes together, the whole dreamy feeling the song gives me.

Things I don't like about this: Nothing.

Rating:

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Trollheart

Some time back, JosefK suggested I try this band and this song. To be fair, he may have meant the whole album, as this is the title track of same, but I'm not quite ready to leap into that yet, so let's just do that title track and see if he is on to something.

Title: Fourteen autumns and fifteen winters
Format: Track
Written by: Andy MacFarlane and James Graham
Performed by: The Twilight Sad
Genre: Post-Punk, Indie, Shoegaze
Taken from: The Twilight Sad album of the same name
Year: 2007
Acclaim: Again, although the album was feted I don't see anything about this particular track. It must be popular though, because when I typed in “The Twilight Sad” to YouTube it was the first result to come up.

Sounds like a steam train or something at the start, which sets up a nice ambience, then the guitars come in kind of slowly, coming and going, staggered and rising then falling back. Reminds me a little of what I heard of British Sea Power. Think it may be an instrumental. Very ... what's the word ... ethereal. Yeah. Ethereal. Very ethereal. Gives you a kind of surreal feel, as if your'e not quite sure what's going on but are enjoying it anyway. Some sort of familiar melody sliding in and out there, though I can't quite pin it down. Think it may be “Spanish eyes”, would you believe? Now it's fading out with a kind of swishing motion. Hey, that was really pretty nice.

Things I like about this : The ambience, the mood set, the way the instruments are used and the way there kind of is no real melody; there is, but it's fragmented and never fully developed, which actually plays to the track's strengths.

Things I don't like about this: Not really anything. Very impressed.

Rating:

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Trollheart

I've also been talking about doing this one too, and apparently (though I must admit I don't recall) I listened to the album already, so let's see if I can refresh my slowly deteriorating memory.

Title: “Autumn sweater”
Format: Single
Written by: Yo La Tengo
Performed by: Yo La Tengo
Genre: Indie Rock
Taken from: The Yo La Tengo album I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One
Year: 1997
Acclaim: Again, although the album is highly respected and regarded as the band's best effort, and this time the song I'm looking at was released as a single, I have no details as to how well or otherwise it did, so can only assume it's probably liked by YLT fans but otherwise mostly unknown? Again if I'm wrong, please set me straight; this is another band I know nothing about.

Once more I find this is first up in the results for YouTube, so must be well known. Heavy beating drum at the start (reflecting the album title?) then a thick organ comes in (shut up!) before the vocal starts, quite restrained and sort of low-key. The tempo is definitely mid-paced, then the bass cuts in and the song gets a little more intense, sort of conga percussion too. Takes on a sort of marching, almost militaristic feel in the drumming but the vocal remains more or less the same all the way through. Interesting that there seems to be little or no guitar; this is almost totally driven on the keyboard.

Things I like about this : Again, pretty much everything. I liked the vocal, I loved the organ and the way the percussion changed was cool. The laidback feel of it was really nice.

Things I don't like about this: Again, nothing I can point to.

Rating:

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Trollheart

Time to do something totally different now, and head all the way back to the end of the 1960s, to the summer of love. Maybe.


Title: "The Autumn stone"
Format: Track
Written by: Steve Marriott
Performed by: The Small Faces
Genre: Rock/R&B
Taken from: The Small Faces retrospective album of the same name
Year: 1969
Acclaim: For this particular song? None I think, as it was apparently an unreleased song from the sessions for one of their other albums. This retrospective was released after the breakup of the band, so I don't see any great acclaim accruing to this track at least. Nor was it released as a single.

Nice soft acoustic guitar opening, sounds a little folky to me with a kind of echoey vocal. Love the flute solo, so sixties! Really gentle the way it slips along, then out of nowhere we get a harmonica and a jews harp, and it starts to up the tempo a little just before it ends. Bit odd.

Things I like about this : The vocal, the guitar, the soft relaxed way it slides along. The flute.

Things I don't like about this: The kind of jarring change just at the end when it goes for me a litlte off-track and I feel ends badly.

Rating:

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Trollheart

Gonna cheat a little here! Both these albums fit the criteria I set out here, but both have been already reviewed by me in my main journal. Was a long time ago, so I think I'm justified in reprinting them here. If not, tough: it's my journal...



Title: Forever Autumn (Yes I know I've already had a song by that name. Your point?)
Format: Album
Written by: Daniel Brennare
Performed by: Lake of Tears
Genre: Gothic Metal
Year: 1999
Acclaim: Unsure; don't think it's terribly well known outside of their fanbase.

Lake of Tears are, apparently, something of an enigma. Beginning in the early 90s as a black/doom metal band, this four-piece from Sweden scored critical success with their second album, 1995's Headstone, which was an all-out doom/gothic metal album, but then for their third recording, 1997's A Crimson Cosmos, they evolved progressive metal and psychedelic styles into their music, weaving in fantasy and mythological imagery to their songs. Much more melodic than doom metal, this was followed two years later by their fourth offering, which seemed to eschew the original influences entirely and is a far more laid-back, introspective album with hardly a whisper of black metal anywhere.

This is immediately apparent from the opening track, “So fell autumn rain”, with its mournful cello intro, picked up by piano and then crashing guitars, but keeping very melodic as the keyboards slide in, the vocal initially very low in the mix, almost an afterthought but still clearly audible and discernible. For the verses, vocalist Daniel Brennare kicks it up slightly so that you can hear him better, but it's the music that really carries the track: it could almost work as an instrumental. The intensely melancholic nature of the album is due to the fact that it's dedicated to the memory of Juha Saarinen, whom I have to assume is some relation to keyboard player Christian, though I can't confirm who he/she was.

“Hold on tight” opens on acoustic guitar, then the electric screams in and the song picks up, still mid-paced, almost a cruncher, but in the mould of a very heavy ballad with growling then crying guitars from Magnus Sahlgren, slipping back into the acoustic variety for the low-key ending. The title track then is another with an acoustic opening --- there's very little evidence of Lake of Tears' previous life as a doom metal band here --- and another ballad, with some very nice keys and introspective guitar. Brennare's vocals are clear and clean on this track, and you no longer have to strain to hear him. More beautiful cello here really adds an extra layer to the song, thanks to Henriette Schack.

The first real time the guys rock out on this album then is when “Pagan wish” hits, a mid-paced heavy rocker, with solid guitar from Sahlgren and swirly organ from Saarinen, then “Otherwheres” is a beautifully piano-constructed instrumental with slowly fading in acoustic guitar, with some nice sound effects --- rain, thunder, children laughing in the distance --- and some truly lovely and dramatic strings with choral vocals, to take us into “The Homecoming”, where Bo Hulpheres' flute makes its entrance and the song is another slow-paced rocker, nice keys in the background, almost unnoticed and an impassioned vocal from Brennare, measured drumbeats from Johan Oudhuis keeping the pace perfectly.

Another mid-pacer is “Come night I reign”, which you would probably expect to be a thrash rocker, but it's not: in fact, just about nothing on this album is headbanging material. It's mostly slow or mid-paced, often acoustic or partially acoustic, and indeed the best description of the music on this album would have to be “introspective”, as it certainly makes you think about things, like your own mortality. Lots of lyrics about death, sorrow, loss and loneliness. Christian Saarinen's keyboards almost seem to be crying on this track.

The enigmatically titled “Demon you/Lily Anne” again starts with deep, mournful cello, then Brennare lets loose with perhaps his most powerful vocal performance on the album, and even the music speeds up just a little tiny bit in response, the guitars heavier, the drums a little louder, even Saarinen seems to be stabbing the keys with a little more fervour. And then we're into the closer, the longest track on the album by a considerable way, clocking in at just over eight minutes.

“To blossom blue” kicks in with nice guitar, heavy drums and accordion --- yes, you read that right: accordion! --- with lush keyboards drifting around the melody like a ghost haunting the song. But the song is really a showcase and vehicle for Magnus Sahlgren's expressive and at times almost unbearably emotional guitar work, some of his best on the album. The final word is, though, reserved for Schack's sorrowful cello, and “Forever autumn” ends as it began.

Unless you're in a very depressed mood already I wouldn't look too closely into the lyrical content, as this is not a happy album, nor is it meant to be. But neither is it a typical doom metal album. It's hard to pin this down: it has elements of prog rock and prog metal, certainly, ambient music in there, classical, straight-ahead rock and even some folk elements. One thing it is not in any way is predictable, and even if you're a fan of Lake of Tears and think you've heard everything from them, this album will most certainly change your mind about them.

If, like me, you're just getting into the band, Forever autumn is likely to come as a very pleasant surprise.

TRACKLISTING

1. So fell autumn rain
2. Hold on tight
3. Forever autumn
4. Pagan wish
5. Otherwheres
6. The Homecoming
7. Come night I reign
8. Demon you/Lily Anne
9. To blossom blue

Things I like about this : The slow, melancholic mood, the cellos, the unexpected instruments like accordion, but most of all, the surprise. This is like when I listened to Antimatter for the first time, and was totally surprised by what I heard.

Things I don't like about this: Pretty much nothing really.

Rating:

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Trollheart

Time to get my arse back in gear and sort this journal out. I guess at this point we'll assume we've done enough on autumn, so it's time to move on to a new theme. What could it be? Let me see ... oh yeah. What about this?

Although I've never seen one, and would in all likelihood run a mile if I did (though they'd be hard-pressed to get much of a meal out of this skinny nine-stone walking skeleton! Oh wait: dogs like bones, don't they? Drat!) I've always had something of a fascination with wolves. In a fantasy world, I'd love to have one as a pet. Imagine the stir it would cause if you were to walk down the main street with a wolf on a leash! But anyway, yes, wolves is the new theme, so let's get underway.


Title: R “Run with the wolf”
Format: Album track
Written by: Ritchie Blackmore and Ronnie James Dio
Performed by: Rainbow
Genre: Heavy Metal
Taken from: Rising
Year: 1976
Acclaim: None; it's just an album track, albeit from one of the seminal heavy metal albums of all time...

While there's no question it's among the weaker tracks on Rising, which is pretty much defined by the two tracks that made up the B-side, “Run with the wolf” is still an early pointer to where not only Rainbow, but also Ronnie's later band, Dio, would go with many of their compositions. There's a sort of medieval feel to it, the idea of wolves prowling the forest, on the lookout for unwary travellers, and the guitar riffs that underpin it remind me in an odd way of “Sixteenth Century Greensleeves” off the previous album. There's also some nice magical/mythical lyric here – ”There's a hole in the sky/ Something evil passing by”. I like the idea of nature – savage nature, not tree-huggers, though there's nothing wrong with them (gotta hug something) – being allied with dark forces, magic and primal powers. Great stuff!

Things I like about this :
1. The raw energy and power in the guitar riffs
2. The very melodic chorus
3. Ronnie's powerful growl of a voice
4. Tony Carey's sonorous keyboard that backs the whole thing

Things I don't like about this:
1. Not crazy about Blackmore's solo; it's a little tepid I feel


Rating:

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Plankton

Well, aren't you a busy body with all these journal entries... welcome back my friend.

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Trollheart

Title: “Hungry like the wolf”
Format: Single
Written by: Nick Rhodes, Simon LeBon, Roger Taylor, Andy Taylor, John Taylor
Performed by: Duran Duran
Genre: Pop/New Wave
Taken from: Rio
Year: 1982
Acclaim: Reached number five in the UK, helped break the band in the US through rotation of its video on MTV

You'll be totally unsurprised, I would imagine, to find I was never a fan of Duran Duran. I tended to see them as a scrappy pop band who were just pretty boys, and to some extent I still hold this belief. However it has become clear with age and the passing of time that they did in fact have, and write (to be fair, they wrote most of their own material) some pretty good songs. You might chance to catch me on occasion humming a badly off-tune version of “Rio”, “Girls on film” or even “Save a prayer”, though I'd never admit to it. “Hungry like the wolf” was certainly a popular song, though it could be argued that at this time Duran Duran were already long-established, at least in the UK and Europe, having already had four hit singles and two successful albums, though Rio, their second, from which this single is lifted, was without question their commercial breakthrough, and introduced them finally to a rabid horde of American fans. Still, it could also be argued that without the constant running of the clever video for this song on the then very influential MTV (a show that could quite easily be said to have made more than one artiste's career) they might have struggled to have crossed that transatlantic divide.

At its heart, of course, it's a vapid pop song. It doesn't have a lot to say. Whereas previously featured Rainbow's song likened the wolf to an ancient figure of savagery and nobility, and hinted at dark magic, Duran Duran here go for the idea of the wolf as a romeo: ”I'm on the hunt/ I'm after you” gives no impression that the hunt will end with the prey being eaten, rather it's the age-old pursuit of a lover for his woman that we're talking about here. It's undeniably catchy though, and you can't help yourself singing ”Do do doo-doo do doo-doo” at the end of each verse. The song also used emerging advances in synthesiser technology, putting Duran Duran at the forefront of what would be generally regarded (by me anyway) as “synth bands” and thereby pushing the poor old dependable guitar firmly to the background.

I suppose for the time its very weakly sexual imagery in the lyric could have been seen as being slightly risque, though it's hardly Slayer or Metallica, is it? There's a very boppy “Popcorn”-like synth riff running through most of the song, and to be fair the guitar does get to strut its stuff a little so it doesn't sound as bland as many of the new wave synthpop bands would. Interestingly, the song was all written over the space of one day, and I have to admit, it doesn't sound like it, does it?

Things I like about this :
1. It's a catchy song; can't help singing it
2. It's not too twee
3. It has a certain amount of balls

Things I don't like about this:
1. It's Duran Duran, and I retain a legacy bias against them from my younger days which I've never seen any reason to change or challenge
2. It's pretty repetitive

Rating:

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Trollheart

Thanks man. Good to be back. All this work, though: it's really piled up. I can't even see my desk for the contents of the "in-tray"...

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018