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The Top 25 Songs of 2015: Part III

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7. “The Serpent” by Sisters of…: Album The Serpent, the Angel, and the Adversary

We have reached the part of the list  where the order of the top tracks almost doesn’t matter; at this point they are *all* monster, heavy-rotation superstars. So it is apropos to begin with a beast of a track from an insanely heavy album;  it also illustrates the kind of stuff I have lately found to be what greases my wheels most — blistering full-on prog/black/metal/post-metal…man when that is done right, it just doesn’t get much better. And these guys do it right.

 

 

6. “YANA” by Dead Letter Circus: Album Aesthesis

The album is a bit inconsistent, for some reason Dead Letter Circus have trouble living up to their enormous potential.  But this  soaring alt/post-punk track never fails to give me chills. Just one of those songs I inexplicably love.

 

 

5. “Oko” by Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster: Album Wires/Dream\Wires

An absolutely epic track from a long-anticipated album; these guys can pull off some of the best, heaviest, most thoughtful instrumental post-metal out there, and this is just a taste of what they can do.

 

4. “Planck Length” by Au4: Album And Down Comes the Sky… (2013 release)

The album this song is from came out in 2013, but I only discovered it this year. And it is an absolute *killer* of an album, it is by far the best thing I heard this year and then some, it really is my album of the year, except I can’t make it official.
It is hard to pull a favourite track from it, I could have listed four or five, but this one snuck up on me.  Industrial trip-hop about physics — and really, any song that can use “One point six times ten to the negative thirty-five” as a lyric, and make it work  — well, that’s some awesome songwriting right there.

 

 

3. “Annabelle” by Sisters of…: Album The Serpent, The Angel, and the Adversary

Another track from one of the best most intense albums I have heard this year. “The Serpent” was face-melting in intensity…and somehow “Annabelle” manages to take it up a couple of skull-cracking notches from there. This is the kind of stuff that eviction notices are made of.

 

2. “Everyone is Everyone (and Everything is Everything)” by Au4: Album And Down Comes the Sky… (2013 release)

Yes, this album is so extraordinary it supplied two songs in the top 5 of 25. Believe me, if there were songs from 2015 as good, I’d stick ’em here. But there aren’t…or at any rate, since the album can’t qualify for Album of the Year I’m going to promote it this way. You can find my review of the album here:

I cannot get enough of this track.

 

 

1.  “Caterpillar and the Barbed Wire” by Riverside: Album Love, Fear and the Time Machine

The album might not be their best, but this song…!! I really cannot stop listening to it; there are days when I think it just might be the greatest song Riverside ever created. Everything comes together in this track for me: the great martial rhythm compliments of Piotr Kozieradski’s drumming; Piotr Grudziński’s beautiful and nuanced guitar themes, the organ, the bass lines, the words, the singing…man it just hits every sweet spot, it digs deep into my soul where transcendence lies. It goes beyond mere words.

The Top 25 Songs of 2015: Part II

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14. “Saturate Me” by Riverside: Album Love, Fear and the Time Machine

The most purely prog track on the new Riverside album, just effortlessly done without ever sounding derivative or neo- or like anyone else in prog today, and probably the heaviest track on the album. And besides — this track just kicks *epic* ass live.

 

13.  “Discovery One” by Eschar:  Album Nova

A mighty track from the first album by Eschar, post-metal that is imaginative and heavy and melodic all at once, and performed with confident aplomb. Unfortunately it seems as if the videos of the Nova tracks have been removed.  For a taster, here is a live version of “Monolith” from the same album.

 

12. “The Drifter” by Klone: Album Here Comes the Sun

This is a beautiful album, rich and atmospheric, and I could have chosen a number of tracks from it. The video is worth watching for the drum playthrough.  All the members are great musicians.

Continue reading The Top 25 Songs of 2015: Part II →

The Top 25 Songs of 2015: Part I

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This is the first year I have decided to compile a Songs of the Year list, but then 2015 has been a rather good year for music.   It was hard to restrict the list to just 25 tracks; there could have been many more.  Not only could most of the year’s best albums have contributed more than one, there are several songs from earlier years that I have included in the list, because I only discovered them this year, and they are too great to leave off.   Most of the tracks do have associated videos, but not all of them do.  I will note that when relevant.

So: starting at No. 25 and working my way up:

25. “He Is” by Ghost: Album Meliora

A great sing-along track from an album that is definitely fun and listenable but not truly “great” (at least in any real meaning of the word).

 

24.   “Beyond Metropolis” by Shriekback: Album Without Real String or Fish

The 80s are back…in a big way this year, and 80s alternative icons Shriekback do it the best.  The cleverly post-apocalyptic track “Beyond Metropolis” is the one that grabs me most from this album, but there is no video for it alone.  Start at 17:33 in the link below, or listen to the whole album.

 

23.   “Happy Returns” by Steven Wilson: Album Hand. Cannot. Erase.

Wilson does pop.  Or something like that.  This track does have its poignant moments, but I simply cannot muster up the interest to place it higher.

Continue reading The Top 25 Songs of 2015: Part I →

Shrine of New Generation Slaves (SoNGS)

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Released January 2013 Europe; Feb. 2013 RoW

Tracklist:

  1. New Generation Slave
  2. The Depth of Self-Delusion
  3. Celebrity Touch
  4. We Got Used to Us
  5. Feel Like Falling
  6. Deprived (Irretrievably Lost Imagination)
  7. Escalator Shrine
  8. Coda

Bonus Disc:

  1. Night Session Part 1
  2. Night Session Part II

Confession time…and some context. I will say right off the bat: I struggled mightily to review this album when it first came out.  I made a few attempts, and even posted some, but frankly none of them ended up worth the time it took to launch Word.  It pains me to say that they were pretty much the sort of hagiographic piles of adulatory crap I deplore reading from others, and deep down, even at the time I wrote them, I knew it.  But I chose to ignore my gut.

What I think happened was this: Shrine of New Generation Slaves was the first album that Riverside released after I discovered them and became a fan, and I had just spent most of the preceding year immersed in the band’s (and Lunatic Soul’s) discography, listening to almost nothing else, stunned and exhilarated by the discovery of music I had been waiting for all my life.  Naturally I had a huge emotional stake in the new material.

When the special blue vinyl pre-order arrived (the first of the several versions to hit my doorstep) and the playing began…well, things started to go south from there.  My immediate reaction was: This is not the album I have been waiting for.  But because at some level it had to be that album, and the accolades began pouring in from all directions…I suppressed my instincts and spent the next year trying to talk myself into loving it. Even the video accompanying the first single, “Celebrity Touch”, didn’t dismay me as much as it should have.

…But now a couple of years have passed, and I hope I am far enough distanced to deal with SoNGS fairly. The truth is, I don’t love the album, and that is tough to admit.  So let’s get this party started.

Continue reading Shrine of New Generation Slaves (SoNGS) →

Memories in my Head (EP)

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Released June 2011

Tracklist:

  1. Goodbye Sweet Innocence
  2. Living in the Past
  3. Forgotten Land

After the release of Anno Domini High Definition, four long years passed before the fifth full-length album appeared in 2013. However, the guys were not idle: Mariusz Duda released two albums for his Lunatic Soul solo project:  Lunatic Soul II in 2010, and Impressions in 2011, and the band continued to work on new material.

As it turned out, 2011 marked the 10th year of the band’s existence, and the Memories in My Head EP became part of the celebration of their first decade.  It certainly seemed as though the band had reached a high water mark: Their label in Poland, Mystic Productions, released the 6-cd Reality Dream box set (combining the first three albums with additional material), and Inside Out released several limited edition coloured vinyl versions of their first four albums.  The band then embarked on a “Jubilee Year” tour of Europe, which culminated with the release of this EP; they also began talk of a new album.

“When something ends, something else begins/We are moving on”. 

Memories in My Head was intended as a farewell nod to the foundational Riverside sound of the Trilogy years (and perhaps to placate the fans impatient for a new album): as ADHD (and subsequent albums) demonstrated, the musical intentions and direction and of the band had shifted, and would continue to do so.  Still, the EP may well be one of the band’s most beloved releases, and it is not hard to see (or indeed hear…) why.  MiMH truly is a magnificent little album, a consummate distillation of everything that made the Riverside sound unique, an almost perfect summing up of ten years of musical and lyric artistry, inspiration and influences, writing and touring.

Clocking in at a shade under 33 minutes (and by now the numbers game should need no explanation), the three glorious tracks merge seamlessly into each other, creating a musical flow that makes the EP feel almost like one long, magnificent song.  Driven by Piotr Grudziński’s hallmark melodic winding guitar themes, and Mariusz Duda’s powerful leading bass and fine vocals, it is packed with musical metaphors and classic Riverside tropes and themes, lushly atmospheric, full of the vast, cinematic soundscape that is so fundamental to their sound.  Lyrically Duda is very much on the ball; there is some excellent word-smithing here, at least on the first two tracks, evoking both nostalgia for the past and hope for the future.  “Forgotten Land” does break the continuity in that regard, being one of the very few songs he has written (for any of his projects) that is not from an intimate first or second-person perspective.  However, the track was used in a trailer for The Witcher 2 video game, so it works in that respect.

Memories in My Head looks back to the more expansive, more progressive, much-beloved sound of the band’s origins, and winds up that era of the band’s history in an almost perfect fashion.  There could hardly be a better way to commemorate their first ten years.

Anno Domini High Definition (ADHD)

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Released: June  2009 (Poland); July 2009 (Europe and RoW)

Tracklist

  1. Hyperactive
  2. Driven to Destruction
  3. Egoist Hedonist
  4. Left Out
  5. Hybrid Times

And then there were four….

Mariusz Duda, when interviewed, often likes to draw attention to a couple of things: that Riverside has a recognizably distinctive sound, and the band does not like to remain stylistically static.  These facts are abundantly clear nowadays, but I warrant that even after three albums, the second point was not so obvious. The Trilogy introduced an unmistakable Riverside-ish musical Gestalt, one that essentially defined them and even though there were some differences from album to album (especially in regard to how heavy they became), there really was a unity of sound that likely has helped pigeonhole them in the “progressive” category from which it is proving difficult for the guys to extract themselves (in fact, anyone who has paid any attention at all to interviews and comments over the past couple of years will realize that being styled “progressive metal” is somewhat of a Duda bugbear).

Anno Domini High Definition (ADHD), their fourth album (with its four-word title and double-entendre acronym) was the first album where this desire for stylistic change became undeniably manifest.  And what a change it was.  It must have seemed as if they were not just abandoning their lush progressive roots, but dropkicking them into the next solar system.  The guys took their sumptuous atmospheric sound and slammed it head on into a heavy metal wall; they embraced it so enthusiastically one might even suspect they were eager for a change.  The keyboard sound acquired a much harder edge.  The guitars are dense and raunchy and full of relentless energy, the bass punchy and riff-heavy, taking the lead like it had never done before. Piotr Kozieradzki must have been in drum heaven on this one, with his extensive death metal background.  No acoustic guitar, no ballads, no real soft pieces except the start of “Left Out”.  For all that, Duda’s first point stands: There is no doubt we are listening to Riverside—their distinctive core remains untouched.

Continue reading Anno Domini High Definition (ADHD) →

Second Life Syndrome

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Released October 31, 2005

Personnel:

  • Mariusz Duda: bass, vocals, lyrics
  • Piotr Grudziński: guitar
  • Michał Łapaj: keyboards
  • Piotr Kozieradzki: drums

Tracklist

  1. After
  2. Volte Face
  3. Conceiving You
  4. Second Life Syndrome
  5. Artificial Smile
  6. I Turned You Down
  7. Reality Dream III
  8. Dance With the Shadows
  9. Before

This is probably the first Riverside album I heard all the way through.  I do know that the very first song I ever heard by them came from this album, and quite by accident.  I think we all pile up those free cds that come with each issue of Prog Mag, and (confession time) I pretty much never get around to playing them.  This time though the cd was a “history of prog ” compilation, so I gave it a shot.

Insert cd…<stuff plays> Yeah this old stuff is good…what about this new prog? <listens> Meh; okay; meh; meh; meh…<”Conceiving You”>  Oh wow who the hell are these  guys?  <jawdrop> And who the fuck is that singer???

I sure found out, because my immediate and subsequent digging around on Youtube for Riverside inevitably turned up Lunatic Soul, and that was the music…but anyway, that’s a different set of reviews. As it was (and I discovered them late: they were a year away from releasing their fifth album) I spent the next six months listening to almost nothing else but the Riverside and Lunatic Soul back catalogues.

Second Life Syndrome is the album where Riverside became complete, as it were, and its release must have quelled the apprehension of many fans eagerly awaiting the follow-up to Out of Myself: were these guys really going to be able to fulfill the enormous promise of that first album?

Continue reading Second Life Syndrome →

Voices in My Head

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Welcome to the second in my Riverside reviews series.

Voices in My Head (EP)

Released March 2005

Personnel

  • Mariusz Duda: bass, vocals, acoustic guitar, lyrics
  • Piotr Grudziński: electric guitar
  • Piotr Kozieradzki: drums
  • Michał Łapaj: keyboards

Tracklist

  1. Us
  2. Acronym Love
  3. Dna Ts. Rednum Or F. Raf
  4. The Time I Was Daydreaming
  5. Stuck Between
  6. I Believe (live)
  7. Loose Heart (live)
  8. Out of Myself (live)

The second Riverside release, Voices in My Head, was offered as a sort of placeholder for the fans, after the excitement of the first album and while they waited for the next. It is brief, as befits an EP, presenting five new tracks and three live performances of songs from Out of Myself.  It showcases the gentle, acoustic side of the band, and is notable for being the first studio appearance of their new keyboard player Michał Łapaj, who had taken over from Jacek Melnicki.

The new tracks on Voices in My Head are all ballads save one (which is exceptional in more than this), essentially acoustic and electric guitar, keyboards, and Duda’s lovely voice.  The three live tracks were taken from a show played in Warsaw in 2004, and maybe can be regarded as a road-test to see how well Łapaj was going to fit in.

Overall the EP is pleasant, the tracks short, beautiful, acoustic guitar and piano; but too many ballads in a row leads one to perhaps forget that this is (theoretically) a Riverside release and not a Mariusz Duda solo effort with guests.  Still, these songs arrow straight for the heart, taking full advantage of the delicately intimate side of Duda’s voice and lyrics, silky and yearning. “The Time I was Daydreaming” and “Acronym Love” (which would re-emerge a decade later as a somewhat re-worked live showstopper) are the best songs along that line.

And then…the remarkable “Dna Ts. Rednum Or F. Raf”, with its too-clever-by-half backward title, charges headlong into the middle of this otherwise rather sedate set: a rocking, chugging track with a rumbling bassline and compelling hypnotic rhythm (no live drums, but drum machine), it thunders along powerful and unique, and remains one of the outstanding tracks in the entire Riverside canon.  I don’t know if it ever got played live, but it might be worth seeing—this track at full bore has roof-raising potential.

Overall, Voices in My Head lacks the stylistic variety and signature sound associated with Riverside as a band; it seems more a Duda/Łapaj effort, with some Grudziński thrown in.  I tend to sample this EP rather than listen to it through:  “Dna Ts. Rednum Or F. Raf” has become a staple, and a couple of other tracks get play depending on mood.  I think what we have is what it was intended to be:  a collection of extra tracks assembled to help fans endure the wait between albums.  It certainly does not have the status or quality of the band’s other EP, but more on that one later.

Out of Myself

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Welcome to my series of reviews of the Riverside catalogue.   You can read my intro and initial rankings here.

I hope you find them interesting, and I would be pleased if you’d leave a comment or two…even if you disagree.  Hell, especially if you disagree, because hearing your opinion is more interesting than just having an echo chamber.

Besides…if too many people agree with me, I’ll suspect I’m doing something wrong.

Out of Myself

Released: Poland 2003 with original cover/2004 rest of world, cover by Travis Smith

 Personnel:

  • Mariusz Duda: vocals, bass guitar, acoustic guitar, lyrics
  • Piotr Grudziński: guitars
  • Piotr Kozieradzki: drums
  • Jacek Melnicki: keyboards

Tracklist:

  1. The Same River
  2. Out of Myself
  3. I Believe
  4. Reality Dream
  5. Loose Heart
  6. Reality Dream II
  7. In Two Minds
  8. The Curtain Falls
  9. ok

Out of Myself  is the album that introduced Riverside to the world…and for a first album, this is as grand an entrance as can be imagined.  Imbued with an astonishing sophistication of sound and vision, it is confident and forward-looking; call it what you will — prog rock, prog metal — this album married the various band-member influences (and inevitable comparisons to Certain Other Bands) into one glorious progressive bundle.  Influences aside, Riverside marched into progressive consciousness as an entity unto itself, and the band has managed to maintain its unique sound throughout its subsequent stylistic incarnations.

As it turns out, an early version of their music, raw and unrefined, exists on a 7-track “demo”.*  A couple of the tracks from this made it onto Out of Myself more or less intact (just cleaned up), but others are very differently conceived (such as “The Curtain Falls”), one has completely disappeared into oblivion (never rerecorded as anything that I have found), and one reappeared much later as a track on the “Conceiving You” single.  This bit of history provides a fascinating glimpse of the wobbly first steps of what would eventually become one of the most polished and professional musical outfits around.

Out of Myself pulls no punches: it kicks off with “The Same River”, a 12-minute prog opus, and from there manages to encompass an impressive range of styles: delicate acoustic ballads, pure face-stomping instrumental metal, screams and growls, the willingness to wander off in different musical directions and back again.  We discover Mariusz Duda’s intimate, introspective lyric style, and his lovely distinctive voice.  And behind it all what would become Riverside’s hallmark sound: Piotr Grudziński’s great winding guitar themes and melodies and Duda’s intricate bass playing, anchored by solid drumming and the vast soundscape wash of the keyboards.  It would take another album and a new keyboard player for all these elements to coalesce, but this first album is remarkable for how thoroughly it introduces us to the essence of Riverside.

Continue reading Out of Myself →

Blowing the Dust Off: Tumbleweed Connection by Elton John

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Welcome to the first post in a new occasional project: revisiting music that has sat, unplayed, in my vinyl collection for so long I don’t remember what it sounds like. Often these are albums from artists whose other work I like, or that I bought because a song or two caught my attention, or that thought I “should” have for whatever reason. I think we all have managed to accumulate a few of these albums.

So I’ve decided that this blog is a perfect excuse to haul them out, dust them off, give them a spin, and write up short reviews to tell you about them. With luck, I will discover some forgotten treasures. On the other hand it may inspire me to get rid of stuff and open up some much-needed (Much. Needed.) space for albums I might actually want to own.

Tumbleweed Connection by Elton John

Released 1970

Tracklist:

  1. Ballad of a Well-known Gun
  2. Come Down in Time
  3. Country Comfort
  4. Son of Your Father
  5. My Father’s Gun
  6. Where to Now St. Peter?
  7. Love Song
  8. Amoreena
  9. Talking Old Soldiers
  10. Burn Down the Mission

Tumbleweed Connection is Elton John’s 3rd album, a follow-up to his self-titled second that provided him with his first major hit (“Your Song”). It did well in the charts, reaching No. 2 in the UK Albums Charts and No. 5 in the American Billboard chart. As with most of his albums, John wrote and composed the music and Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics.

I was never much of an Elton John fan, he was far too pop and mainstream for my taste. But for some reason this album struck a chord—or more accurately, one track from this album dug itself in deep, even if I never much listened to the rest of the album. The beautiful, poignant ballad “Where to Now St. Peter?” resonates with me in a way that few songs do; whenever I work up a list of my favourite songs of all time, it always manages to find its way there. That must mean something.

 

Tumbleweed Connection is vaguely a concept album, wherein John and Taupin try to capture the Gestalt of some sort of mythic American West. Lyrically it is replete with the themes and tropes of “America”: home and hearth, the old west, The Gunfighter…. I can’t really comment on how well they managed to accomplish that, but musically there is a real western flavour and tang to these tracks, country-rock and bluesy ballads, lovely gospelly vocal harmonies, harmonica and steel guitar and honky-tonk piano…they have pulled off an album of nicely evocative, gentle, country-style songs.

I’m happy to say that this is an album well worth listening to, and I plan to hang on to it. Maybe “Old Soldiers Talking” borders on maudlin, and the piano theme for “Amoreena” is essentially a major-key version of the theme for “Where to Now…” but overall this is an album of fine country rockers, lovely ballads, and very pleasant soft rock time-fillers. And the packaging is vintage ‘70s album-cover: a well-designed gatefold where the album opening is inside at the fold, and a large format book with lyrics and photos. And they manage to put all that quality on a plain-bread 120 gram pressing in a sleeve that doesn’t occupy a half-inch of shelf space the way the modern crazy-thick vinyl covers do (this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine…).

Note: The track “Country Comfort” was written for Rod Stewart, which appeared on his second solo album Gasoline Alley, also in 1970.