Micshazam's album and song picks

Trollheart · 04-10-2018, 12:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MicShazam

Thanks for a thoughtful, well written review

I did think there would be a decent chance that you would like the album, but I didn't expect this positive of a reaction, so that's great!

I'll attempt to give my thoughts on why this should indeed be classified as melodic death metal and what, in my eyes, makes that sub-genre what it is.

From a compositional and 'music theory' sort of standpoint, there's a lot this has in common with regular 'ol death metal.

1) Heavy reliance on down tuned guitars and palm muted "chugging".
2) Death metal style growled vocals.
3) "Dark" lyrical themes about death and other ominous stuff. Although usually with a more sincere angle and less of an intent to be extreme (although a lot of regular and progressive death metal these days has more thoughtful lyrics than in the early years of the genre).
4) Like regular death metal, riffs are usually tied together and repeated in clusters. Could be something along the lines of; play riff A 4 times, then play riff B 4 times, play riff C 2 times, repeat A and B, but do a variation, then transition and play a new section of the song with new riffs and a similar "chunky" structure. The trick is to make it seem fluid and like a logical progression, but it's really quite simple from a song writing standpoint.
5) Double kick drum patterns and generally powerful sounding, propulsive drumming.
6) Lots of changes of rhythmic patterns.

The tendency to have more lead guitar lines is one of the things that separates "melodeath" from just death metal. On top of that, instead of going for this Schöenbergian atonal feel of regular death metal, melodeath tends to rely more on minor chords, similar to how, say, ballads or "sad" movie scores do. This lends the sub-genre a melancholic feel (especially a band like Be'Lakor, who rides this approach for all it's worth), but if you simply shifted the chords and note-scales around a bit, it would sound a lot like normal, scary sounding death metal.

These are the main things that make melodic death metal/melodeath what it is, I'd say. For the record, I'm not sure why this album is labelled as doom. That's a bit weird.

Spoiler for slightly nerdier observation I'm probably not explaining too well:

Hmm. I get some of what you're saying - I can definitely see they were going for a kind of one-speck-in-the-vastness-of-the-cosmos kind of thing, very epic and dramatic. The compositional details, sadly, are mostly lost on me. I did play - keyboards - really badly, but I have little clue as to how music is made up or played, and I haven't played (to be extremely generous with the term when applied to my dabblings) for decades now.

But I really enjoyed this and I've gone ahead and got their discography, so I'll be listening to them more. Thanks for the rec.

We'll see what happens when I give Tori a shot. I'll let you know when I have my review written on that. Thanks for the opportunity to contribute; even if I've sworn off journals, it's nice to write and post the odd piece, keep my hand in, as it were.

~~MicShazam~~ · 04-10-2018, 01:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trollheart

Hmm. I get some of what you're saying - I can definitely see they were going for a kind of one-speck-in-the-vastness-of-the-cosmos kind of thing, very epic and dramatic. The compositional details, sadly, are mostly lost on me. I did play - keyboards - really badly, but I have little clue as to how music is made up or played, and I haven't played (to be extremely generous with the term when applied to my dabblings) for decades now.

But I really enjoyed this and I've gone ahead and got their discography, so I'll be listening to them more. Thanks for the rec.

We'll see what happens when I give Tori a shot. I'll let you know when I have my review written on that. Thanks for the opportunity to contribute; even if I've sworn off journals, it's nice to write and post the odd piece, keep my hand in, as it were.

I dig all of their albums, especially the 3rd album "Of Breath and Bone". I often blast the two first tracks off that album for a quick melodic death metal fix. I've got a few other CD's more or less tied to this genre, but Be'Lakor sit on 95% of my listening time with melodic death metal.

I'm looking forward to your reaction to that Tori Amos album. I still remember how you were less than impressed with her 2009 album, which you reviewed a few years ago. I'm hoping this one (From The Choirgirl Hotel) turns out to be more your thing, but I'm not betting on it

~~MicShazam~~ · 04-12-2018, 12:51 PM

Terrible Music Challenge: The full discography of Britney Spears: Part 2

I've been going through the rest of Britney's discography, so let's jump right in!

Blackout

Immediately better than the previous four albums!

Blackout jumps from catchy dance pop tune to catchy dance pop tune, with both more memorable hooks and more inventive musical arrangements than most of what I found on those previous albums in Britney's discography.

The general style of the album is that of modern, R&B influenced dance pop. As such, it could fit right in with the current crop of pop-diva albums in 2018.

A song like "Break the Ice" shows the style that makes for the meat and potatoes of the album, while a song like "Heaven On Earth", with it's Madonna's Ray of Light, Ace of Base-ish, disco-tinged backing music show how there's some variety too.

The catchy songs keep coming all the way through the album, so it seems like this is a fairly strong one, actually. However, I'm still not quite sold, but I'll talk about my gripes when I sum everything up after going through the rest of her albums, as those are general gripes I have with Britney as an artist.

As a little note; there's a lot of incredibly video gamey sounding synths on this album.

Another small note is how the very last song on the album ("Everybody") sounds incredibly much like it's a leftover from a previous album, since it's got that unmistakable the-year-2000 feel.

Circus

While the album does have a different sound than Blackout, I think it's fair to consider it as a sort of follow up to that style. An attempt to carry on in that
direction to keep riding of the success that album probably had (not bothering to check out sales and such). Why repeat it if no one wanted it?

"Out From Under", the third track on the album, ensures that I'm almost immediately worried about how strong this album will be, since it's a pretty lame ballad and since the previous album was so kind as to not have any ballads at all. Even the pop divas I like tend to sink their own ship whenever they do ballads. Just keep those things away from me, please.

I'd say the track on Circus are a bit more hit and miss than what Blackout had on offer. "If U Seek Amy", for example, has an overly insistent but allright sequence of verses and choruses, but the underlying music sounds cheap as hell and really thin.

Actually, it strikes me that this album generally doesn't sound great. There's a feeling of low-res samples running through all of it and I'm not sure what the idea was, from the side of the producers. Maybe they were going for grit? What they got was a trebly, thin and unpleasant sounding album. I find it increasingly less appealing the more time I spend with the album.

"Unusual You" is a mostly pretty bland, overly auto-tuned half-ballad. "Blur" is also pretty limp - and repetitive to boot. There's some more unimpressive tracks, but overall the album is not bad. Not on that account at least.

I really do feel like the general sound of the musical arrangements on Circus sabotages it's potential. I'd have a hard time finding a blander sounding mainstream pop album - purely from that perspective of musical arrangements, instrumentation, synth choices, production choices, etc.

Basically, Circus is Birtney trying and failing to out do or replicate Blackout. Hopefully the next album tries something different.

Oh, and by the way, "My Baby" is completely awful. Plus there's a confusingly inecessary remake of the song "Radar", which was on the previous album. Why?!

Femme Fatale

Kind of more of an R&B influence in some of these tracks.
Also a sudden influx of various pop clichés of that time, seemingly aimed at making the album soud current - which it would no doubt have at the time.
More whoah oh oh oh's in the choruses and more pulsating club synths and tense build ups, etc. I can't shake the feeling that the album is sort of faceless, honestly.
These songs generally don't resonate with me at all. The backing tracks feel both gimmicky and under developed, placing all focus on Britney's unimpressive singing voice.

There's also some real stinkers here. Check out "How I Roll" for an example.

Around the time, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and more did stronger albums of this sort. Femme Fatale, in hindsight, comes off as a hurried, trend hopping effort that doesn't have much to recommend it over the records it seems to imitate.

Britney Jean

I don't know what to say. Seems marginally better than the previous album, but it also feels sort of bland. It's a bunch of standard template tunes with no real character. I'm also learning a bit more about what I see as being Britney's limitations, but I'll talk about that soon, when I'm done with her last album.

This one is just sort of there. I guess it's ok, but it's like why would you listen Evile when Slayer and Metallica exist, unless you're just desperate to listen to
all thrash under the sun, no matter how bland.

Glory

This album seems a bit more inspired than the previous two. It's hard to say why. Just an all-round more appealing sound to it, some better songwriting and perhaps Britney's voice even seems a bit more matured here.

Can't say I'm blown away, but it's the second best Britney album after Blackout, as far as my opinion is concerned.

What I Learned:
Allright, so that was the entire Britney Spears discography. What surprised me was how much of this was really just very vanilla and lacking in any sort of personality. It's hard for me to really describe Britney's personality and style as an artist. Middle of the road pop sadly seems to get closest to hitting the mark. She's a chameleon, but in a bad way, where she seems to blandly imitate rather than innovate and/or follow trends with flair and personalized style.

What really defines Britney as an artist is her voice, but it's also exactly what keeps me further at arms length. She's a very limited singer and clearly needs every songwriting and production trick in the book to pass as a vocalist. She does her trademark vocal fry a lot, she's got a sort of squished, sweet sounding, somewhat nasal voice and seems comfortable inside a very limited tonal range only. She's also extremely limited in terms of expressiveness. She's got basically one mode, and that's it. She can't sell any of her sexy and seductive tracks and she doesn't have any grasp on how to sell harder edged tunes either. She just trudges along, doing her "thing" as usual, no matter the lyrical context and musical style of the song. Name any big-name pop diva and I'd probably argue that Britney is a weaker singer.

If you just like her voice for some reason, then it will work for you, but I find her thoroughly unimpressive.

Basically, Blackout is the only album I could see myself going back to again... but even that's a stretch, to be honest. I just don't really see what Britney's "selling point" is, basically.

That was it for the Britney experiment.

This one took a while... I don't think I'll take this approach again in the future. Instead of slavishly writing about each album in a discography one by one, it's way more meaningful for the purposes of this series to do an overall reaction to the output of the artist, with zoom-in's on key albums. I'll remind myself of that for future posts about various supposedly terrible artists.

Trollheart · 04-12-2018, 04:52 PM

From the Choir Girl Hotel - Tori Amos

Okay, I'm going to stop here. I can't get past the basic aping by Amos of Bush. Her inflections, her pronunciations, her wails, her intakes of breath: it's all Kate Bush and I don't want to insult you by giving this a very biased review, so I'm going to pass on it. I doubt I'll listen to another Amos record. All through the first listen to this all I could think of was how much I would prefer to be listening to a Kate album. I'm sure it's not deliberate, but it's like she's capitalising on Kate's style to such an extent that she's a poorly watered-down copy of her, and I don't like that, even if it's only my own perceptions that are doing it. **** it: even her "quirkiness" seems put-on, as if she's read all there is to read about Kate and thought "I'll have some of that" or "It worked for her, so it'll work for me." I want the real thing, not a cheap and very obvious knock-off.

I'll do one of the other albums, but I'm passing on this.
Sorry.

~~MicShazam~~ · 04-13-2018, 12:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trollheart

From the Choir Girl Hotel - Tori Amos

Okay, I'm going to stop here. I can't get past the basic aping by Amos of Bush. Her inflections, her pronunciations, her wails, her intakes of breath: it's all Kate Bush and I don't want to insult you by giving this a very biased review, so I'm going to pass on it. I doubt I'll listen to another Amos record. All through the first listen to this all I could think of was how much I would prefer to be listening to a Kate album. I'm sure it's not deliberate, but it's like she's capitalising on Kate's style to such an extent that she's a poorly watered-down copy of her, and I don't like that, even if it's only my own perceptions that are doing it. **** it: even her "quirkiness" seems put-on, as if she's read all there is to read about Kate and thought "I'll have some of that" or "It worked for her, so it'll work for me." I want the real thing, not a cheap and very obvious knock-off.

I'll do one of the other albums, but I'm passing on this.
Sorry.

Holy cow, that's not the reaction I was expecting. I know she rubs some people the wrong way, but still. Fair game anyway. While I don't quite see the Kate Bush aping, it's at least a bit easier to kinda understand what you mean with this particular album, as it plays up the arty poppiness a bit. I definitely feel like Tori very much has a singing voice all her own, with a distinct Southern twang that only seems to get more pronounced with age.

If you still want to do another, then that Helloween album, Better Than Raw would be fun to see your take on. For some reason, this album and the one before it are not on Spotify. It seems they belong to a label that have not agreed to the same contract as Nuclear Blast - who probably owns all of the other albums of the band at this point.

If you can't find a good quality upload on Youtube or elsewhere, I could upload it myself. Just let me know.

Trollheart · 04-13-2018, 05:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MicShazam

Holy cow, that's not the reaction I was expecting. I know she rubs some people the wrong way, but still. Fair game anyway. While I don't quite see the Kate Bush aping, it's at least a bit easier to kinda understand what you mean with this particular album, as it plays up the arty poppiness a bit. I definitely feel like Tori very much has a singing voice all her own, with a distinct Southern twang that only seems to get more pronounced with age.

If you still want to do another, then that Helloween album, Better Than Raw would be fun to see your take on. For some reason, this album and the one before it are not on Spotify. It seems they belong to a label that have not agreed to the same contract as Nuclear Blast - who probably owns all of the other albums of the band at this point.

If you can't find a good quality upload on Youtube or elsewhere, I could upload it myself. Just let me know.

No that's cool. I own all the Helloween discography. I'll do that one and another one from your list. I'll take a look. Sorry about Tori: guess we'll have to split the divorce proceedings.

~~MicShazam~~ · 04-14-2018, 02:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trollheart

No that's cool. I own all the Helloween discography. I'll do that one and another one from your list. I'll take a look. Sorry about Tori: guess we'll have to split the divorce proceedings.

Allright cool. Didn't know how familiar you would be with Helloween.

If you're gonna do an additional one, then can I change which Dir En Grey album it would be? If I can, I'd pick Withering to Death instead. If not, then I'd rather you did the Céu album that I mentioned (Vagarosa). Totally your choice of course

Trollheart · 04-14-2018, 09:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MicShazam

Allright cool. Didn't know how familiar you would be with Helloween.

If you're gonna do an additional one, then can I change which Dir En Grey album it would be? If I can, I'd pick Withering to Death instead. If not, then I'd rather you did the Céu album that I mentioned (Vagarosa). Totally your choice of course

Yeah, I'll do the Grey dudes, sure. Why not? Hell, I'll do that other one too. I have a lot of time on my hands now. Might as well make meself useful.

~~MicShazam~~ · 04-14-2018, 11:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trollheart

Yeah, I'll do the Grey dudes, sure. Why not? Hell, I'll do that other one too. I have a lot of time on my hands now. Might as well make meself useful.

Great! I seriously can't quite make a qualified guess what your reactions will be, so that's going to be fun to see.

Trollheart · 04-15-2018, 11:49 AM

Better Than Raw – Helloween (1998)

Hah! Love the tongue-in-cheek orchestral intro, and the title. ****ing great. Ah shoot though: there's no Kiske and no Kai. Darn: I really preferred Helloween with those two guys in. It's kind of a little generic really, though “Time” perks me up, and “I Can” has a lot of commercial appeal about it (hence its being released as a single, though not a successful one) – in fact, the album gets a lot better after that. Even so, it's a pale shadow beside the likes of Seven Keys, Walls of Jericho or even Master of the Rings. Then again, how do you make a power metal album stand out? Not so easy, though I do like the humour Helloween use here on some of the songs. Nice to see they don't take themselves all that seriously. But I wouldn't consider this one of their better albums, to be honest.

Track Listing
Deliberately Limited Preliminary Prelude Period in Z
Push
Falling Higher
Hey Lord!
Spit On My Mind
Revelation
Time
I Can
Handful of Pain
Laudate Dominum
Back On the Ground
Midnight Sun

04-12-2018, 12:51 PM	#153 (permalink)
~~MicShazam~~ Account Disabled Join Date: Aug 2015 Location: Aalborg Posts: 7,634	Terrible Music Challenge: The full discography of Britney Spears: Part 2 I've been going through the rest of Britney's discography, so let's jump right in! Blackout Immediately better than the previous four albums! Blackout jumps from catchy dance pop tune to catchy dance pop tune, with both more memorable hooks and more inventive musical arrangements than most of what I found on those previous albums in Britney's discography. The general style of the album is that of modern, R&B influenced dance pop. As such, it could fit right in with the current crop of pop-diva albums in 2018. A song like "Break the Ice" shows the style that makes for the meat and potatoes of the album, while a song like "Heaven On Earth", with it's Madonna's Ray of Light, Ace of Base-ish, disco-tinged backing music show how there's some variety too. The catchy songs keep coming all the way through the album, so it seems like this is a fairly strong one, actually. However, I'm still not quite sold, but I'll talk about my gripes when I sum everything up after going through the rest of her albums, as those are general gripes I have with Britney as an artist. As a little note; there's a lot of incredibly video gamey sounding synths on this album. Another small note is how the very last song on the album ("Everybody") sounds incredibly much like it's a leftover from a previous album, since it's got that unmistakable the-year-2000 feel. Circus While the album does have a different sound than Blackout, I think it's fair to consider it as a sort of follow up to that style. An attempt to carry on in that direction to keep riding of the success that album probably had (not bothering to check out sales and such). Why repeat it if no one wanted it? "Out From Under", the third track on the album, ensures that I'm almost immediately worried about how strong this album will be, since it's a pretty lame ballad and since the previous album was so kind as to not have any ballads at all. Even the pop divas I like tend to sink their own ship whenever they do ballads. Just keep those things away from me, please. I'd say the track on Circus are a bit more hit and miss than what Blackout had on offer. "If U Seek Amy", for example, has an overly insistent but allright sequence of verses and choruses, but the underlying music sounds cheap as hell and really thin. Actually, it strikes me that this album generally doesn't sound great. There's a feeling of low-res samples running through all of it and I'm not sure what the idea was, from the side of the producers. Maybe they were going for grit? What they got was a trebly, thin and unpleasant sounding album. I find it increasingly less appealing the more time I spend with the album. "Unusual You" is a mostly pretty bland, overly auto-tuned half-ballad. "Blur" is also pretty limp - and repetitive to boot. There's some more unimpressive tracks, but overall the album is not bad. Not on that account at least. I really do feel like the general sound of the musical arrangements on Circus sabotages it's potential. I'd have a hard time finding a blander sounding mainstream pop album - purely from that perspective of musical arrangements, instrumentation, synth choices, production choices, etc. Basically, Circus is Birtney trying and failing to out do or replicate Blackout. Hopefully the next album tries something different. Oh, and by the way, "My Baby" is completely awful. Plus there's a confusingly inecessary remake of the song "Radar", which was on the previous album. Why?! Femme Fatale Kind of more of an R&B influence in some of these tracks. Also a sudden influx of various pop clichés of that time, seemingly aimed at making the album soud current - which it would no doubt have at the time. More whoah oh oh oh's in the choruses and more pulsating club synths and tense build ups, etc. I can't shake the feeling that the album is sort of faceless, honestly. These songs generally don't resonate with me at all. The backing tracks feel both gimmicky and under developed, placing all focus on Britney's unimpressive singing voice. There's also some real stinkers here. Check out "How I Roll" for an example. Around the time, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and more did stronger albums of this sort. Femme Fatale, in hindsight, comes off as a hurried, trend hopping effort that doesn't have much to recommend it over the records it seems to imitate. Britney Jean I don't know what to say. Seems marginally better than the previous album, but it also feels sort of bland. It's a bunch of standard template tunes with no real character. I'm also learning a bit more about what I see as being Britney's limitations, but I'll talk about that soon, when I'm done with her last album. This one is just sort of there. I guess it's ok, but it's like why would you listen Evile when Slayer and Metallica exist, unless you're just desperate to listen to all thrash under the sun, no matter how bland. Glory This album seems a bit more inspired than the previous two. It's hard to say why. Just an all-round more appealing sound to it, some better songwriting and perhaps Britney's voice even seems a bit more matured here. Can't say I'm blown away, but it's the second best Britney album after Blackout, as far as my opinion is concerned. What I Learned: Allright, so that was the entire Britney Spears discography. What surprised me was how much of this was really just very vanilla and lacking in any sort of personality. It's hard for me to really describe Britney's personality and style as an artist. Middle of the road pop sadly seems to get closest to hitting the mark. She's a chameleon, but in a bad way, where she seems to blandly imitate rather than innovate and/or follow trends with flair and personalized style. What really defines Britney as an artist is her voice, but it's also exactly what keeps me further at arms length. She's a very limited singer and clearly needs every songwriting and production trick in the book to pass as a vocalist. She does her trademark vocal fry a lot, she's got a sort of squished, sweet sounding, somewhat nasal voice and seems comfortable inside a very limited tonal range only. She's also extremely limited in terms of expressiveness. She's got basically one mode, and that's it. She can't sell any of her sexy and seductive tracks and she doesn't have any grasp on how to sell harder edged tunes either. She just trudges along, doing her "thing" as usual, no matter the lyrical context and musical style of the song. Name any big-name pop diva and I'd probably argue that Britney is a weaker singer. If you just like her voice for some reason, then it will work for you, but I find her thoroughly unimpressive. Basically, Blackout is the only album I could see myself going back to again... but even that's a stretch, to be honest. I just don't really see what Britney's "selling point" is, basically. That was it for the Britney experiment. This one took a while... I don't think I'll take this approach again in the future. Instead of slavishly writing about each album in a discography one by one, it's way more meaningful for the purposes of this series to do an overall reaction to the output of the artist, with zoom-in's on key albums. I'll remind myself of that for future posts about various supposedly terrible artists. Last edited by MicShazam; 04-12-2018 at 01:00 PM.

04-12-2018, 04:52 PM	#154 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,996	From the Choir Girl Hotel - Tori Amos Okay, I'm going to stop here. I can't get past the basic aping by Amos of Bush. Her inflections, her pronunciations, her wails, her intakes of breath: it's all Kate Bush and I don't want to insult you by giving this a very biased review, so I'm going to pass on it. I doubt I'll listen to another Amos record. All through the first listen to this all I could think of was how much I would prefer to be listening to a Kate album. I'm sure it's not deliberate, but it's like she's capitalising on Kate's style to such an extent that she's a poorly watered-down copy of her, and I don't like that, even if it's only my own perceptions that are doing it. **** it: even her "quirkiness" seems put-on, as if she's read all there is to read about Kate and thought "I'll have some of that" or "It worked for her, so it'll work for me." I want the real thing, not a cheap and very obvious knock-off. I'll do one of the other albums, but I'm passing on this. Sorry. __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

04-15-2018, 11:49 AM	#160 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,996	Better Than Raw – Helloween (1998) Hah! Love the tongue-in-cheek orchestral intro, and the title. ***ing great. Ah shoot though: there's no Kiske and no Kai. Darn: I really preferred Helloween with those two guys in. It's kind of a little generic really, though “Time” perks me up, and “I Can” has a lot of commercial appeal about it (hence its being released as a single, though not a successful one) – in fact, the album gets a lot better after that. Even so, it's a pale shadow beside the likes of Seven Keys, Walls of Jericho* or even Master of the Rings. Then again, how do you make a power metal album stand out? Not so easy, though I do like the humour Helloween use here on some of the songs. Nice to see they don't take themselves all that seriously. But I wouldn't consider this one of their better albums, to be honest. Track Listing Deliberately Limited Preliminary Prelude Period in Z Push Falling Higher Hey Lord! Spit On My Mind Revelation Time I Can Handful of Pain Laudate Dominum Back On the Ground Midnight Sun __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018