From: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org (loud-fans-digest) To: loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Subject: loud-fans-digest V8 #219 Reply-To: loud-fans@smoe.org Sender: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk loud-fans-digest Wednesday, November 18 2009 Volume 08 : Number 219 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: [loud-fans] From CassetteFromMyEx.com [Dave Walker Subject: Re: [loud-fans] From CassetteFromMyEx.com On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 9:38 PM, Andrew Hamlin wrote: >> who took a flyer on the latest Muse album, and two >> plays later is now very glad he didn't spring for the deluxe >> version > > THE RESISTANCE? Don't know much about the band; figuring a person's > reaction to a bonus DVD would depend on one's reaction to the main > course. So I don't think I've ever heard them, but judging by the charts on last.fm they seem pretty popular. My impression was that Muse is a band for kids that would have been really into Marillion had they been born 20 years earlier, or am I completely off base? -d.w. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:51:14 +0000 (GMT) From: Richard Blatherwick Subject: Re: [loud-fans] From CassetteFromMyEx.com When they were coming up through the ranks Muse were always seen by the UK music press (or big chunks of it anyway) as being the NEW Radiohead. They've moved away from that over the years in heavier and proggier ways (though not prog in the 70s sense). I have to admit that as they've done so I've got less interested in them, although a friend reckons the new album is the best thing since sliced bread. I've not heard it so I couldn't comment on that one.One early song of theirs that I really love is called Plug In Baby, from their debut Origins of Symmetry. Maybe there's a clip of it on YouTube, or somewhere similar.As for the Marillion idea - yes in the proggy sense, but Marillion were far prettier in their melodies, well the Fish-era Marillion anyway. - --- On Tue, 17/11/09, Dave Walker wrote: From: Dave Walker Subject: Re: [loud-fans] From CassetteFromMyEx.com To: loud-fans@smoe.org Date: Tuesday, 17 November, 2009, 15:26 On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 9:38 PM, Andrew Hamlin wrote: >> who took a flyer on the latest Muse album, and two >> plays later is now very glad he didn't spring for the deluxe >> version > > THE RESISTANCE? Don't know much about the band; figuring a person's > reaction to a bonus DVD would depend on one's reaction to the main > course. So I don't think I've ever heard them, but judging by the charts on last.fm they seem pretty popular. My impression was that Muse is a band for kids that would have been really into Marillion had they been born 20 years earlier, or am I completely off base? -d.w. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:15:47 -0500 From: glenn mcdonald Subject: Re: [loud-fans] From CassetteFromMyEx.com I was a huge fan of _Black Holes and Revelations_ (my 2006 top 2 were Mew and Muse!), which sounded to me like a band pulling out all possible stops, and then inventing a few extra ones just to have some more to pull out. Early Radiohead impulses toward anthemic grandeur by way of Queen even more than Marillion. But I admit that the new album sounds to me like a band desperately trying to artificially replicate something that was organic and unplanned the first time, and in doing so losing essentially all the appeal... g ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:51:22 -0800 From: "Joseph M. Mallon" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] From CassetteFromMyEx.com On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Richard Blatherwick wrote: > As for the Marillion idea - yes in the proggy sense, but Marillion > were far prettier in their melodies, well the Fish-era Marillion anyway. I find the first 2 Marillion albums almost unlistenable because the band hadn't yet learned to write vocal melodies that went with the songs - Fish would just sputter & wail above whatever was happening. MISPLACED CHILDHOOD is the first album where they showed that skill. - -- Joe Mallon jmmallon@joescafe.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:29:07 -0800 (PST) From: "Tim Walters" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] From CassetteFromMyEx.com > I find the first 2 Marillion albums almost unlistenable because the > band hadn't yet learned to write vocal melodies that went with the > songs - Fish would just sputter & wail above whatever was happening. That's exactly my objection to the Smiths. - -- Tim Walters | http://doubtfulpalace.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:15:56 -0800 From: Andrew Hamlin Subject: Re: [loud-fans] From CassetteFromMyEx.com > That's exactly my objection to the Smiths. Ah, but did the Smiths show improvement come THE QUEEN IS DEAD? Ailments, perhaps, owing simply to singer/lyricists who never mastered an instrument? (Not simply, so long as Messrs. Morrison, Lyon, and Osbourne stay off the chopping block), Andy "Blue magic helps man to act like a hero in bedroom." - --from some spam I got the other week ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:15:30 EST From: Markwstaples@aol.com Subject: Re: [loud-fans] From CassetteFromMyEx.com In a message dated 11/17/2009 8:43:55 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, andrew.hamlin@gmail.com writes: > That's exactly my objection to the Smiths. Ah, but did the Smiths show improvement come THE QUEEN IS DEAD? Ailments, perhaps, owing simply to singer/lyricists who never mastered an instrument? (Not simply, so long as Messrs. Morrison, Lyon, and Osbourne stay off the chopping block), Andy "Blue magic helps man to act like a hero in bedroom." - --from some spam I got the other week This made me think of the interview with Morrissey regarding Jerry Finn I read in the liner notes to the deluxe (puff, puff) edition of SWORDS, culled from Ireland's HOT PRESS magazine, by writer Peter Murphy (no "blood" relation, I suppose): How crucial is a producer as collaborator, de facto A&R man, psychiatrist, friend? Oddly, very. Jerry was a friend, foremost. We got on from the second we met, as if we were meant to. I'm a nonmusician so a bit mentally constipated in the studio--it's hard to find the right words to explain sound. When we first did the track 'Irish blood, english heart' there was nothing much happening behind the line "I've been dreaming of a time when..." and I asked Jerry if he could give Alain's guitar a Nordic retch--as if rising from the ocean bed--and eleven seconds later there it was. Moments like this would justify Jerry's indifference on other tracks. I think a producer's role is to create order--even chaotic order, but order nonetheless. There are so many considerations flying around a studio during the time of recording--vanity, inferiority, ambition, the practical approach, anxiety, and the producer is the link to making all of these considerations unified, otherwise everyone is more-or-less just making their own solo album in their head. The blue magic thing makes me think of hearing "Black Magic Woman" in a convenience store while getting coffee yesterday, and I always sing "Gotta black magic marker" every time I hear this--the clerk lady laughed at me. - --Mark, who found his 4th grade scrapbook today (right next to my Sesame Street 45 of "The Subtraction Blues")--inside the book was the response to a letter I wrote to WSPA in protest of them pulling The Mickey Mouse Club off the air in the afternoons in 1975, written to "Master" Mark Staples--jeesh, my mom kept EVERYTHING--though lately it feels more like Servant Mark Staples (it's a lot, it's a lot, it's a lot like life....) ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:37:28 -0800 From: Matthew Weber Subject: Re: [loud-fans] From CassetteFromMyEx.com Re : Marillion's first couple of albums, I'd nuance the evaluation a bit. SCRIPT FOR A JESTER'S TEAR might actually have been a strong record if the drummer hadn't been so crap. There are some good things going on there; "He Knows You Know" and "Garden Party" are good singles with tight lyrical concepts (and a minimum of self-pitying whining). It's a shame the looseness and poor time of the drumming prevented them from being more tight and incisive. The title track is a grab-bag of song ideas, though, as is "Forgotten Sons", and "Chelsea Monday" is just interminable. But in all, it's the sound of a band that had been gigging for some time, and knew more or less what they wanted to do and to sound like. And I would have replaced "The Web" with "Market Square Heroes," which is a much stronger song, but there you go. FUGAZI, on the other hand...you know what sophomore slump really is, right? When a band is signed, they've often been together for several years and have honed at least one set's worth of coherent material. Most of the time, the first album is the cherry-picked best of what they have to offer, and so the band puts its best foot forward in the attempt to grab the brass ring. But the second album is usually put together under circumstances which afford less leisure : they've been touring in support of the first album, the first signs of tension are starting to pull at the fabric that binds them together, and generally there are only a few new songs to choose from, plus whatever didn't make it onto the first record. FUGAZI is just such an example. The sound is better and worse than SCRIPT; there's a new drummer who actually seems to know his way around a kit, and the studio sound is a bit less murky, but unfortunately Mark Kelly seems to have spent a lot of his advance money on fancy new digital synthesizers which scream "80s!" to all and sundry, and his harmonic imagination doesn't seem to extend beyond major or minor triads. And Fish--he seems to have pulled out the Rilly Meaningful Pomes he wrote in his adolescence and just shoehorned the lyrics into whatever studio jam the other guys cooked up while he was out having a drink. Joe's criticism of his spluttering and spitting is right on the mark for most of this record. And honestly, that keyboard riff in "She Chameleon" is just stoopid, and not in a good way; the sort of thing a precocious 10-year-old might torture his parents with on the home organ. MISPLACED CHILDHOOD was a great improvement, though--no argument there. Sadly, the next studio album was kind of a snoozefest, and there my association with Fishy and friends ended... For what it's worth, - -- Matt + While there's life, there's hope. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.), Ad Atticum, IX, 10 ------------------------------ End of loud-fans-digest V8 #219 *******************************