Blog On The Motorway Swan diving off the tongues of crippled giants

Cross Blogination 5: Dashboard Confessional – The Places That You’ve Come To Fear The Most

Cross Blogination is a project I’m doing with twitterthon hero Diary Of A Ledger, the idea being every week one of us will recommend to the other one of our all time favourite albums, which we will then both write a review for.  This week it’s Gray's turn again.

I approached this week's challenge with a certain amount of trepidation. I've never been familiar with the work of Dashboard Confessional, except to know one thing: They are properly emo.  And not in an old-school Far/Quicksand kind of way. No, these guys are the sort of band that leads tweenie girls in bad mascara to leave videos of themselves crying on YouTube, the sort of band whose boyishly good-looking lead singer will instantly break the hearts and melt the panties of any girl who sees their photo.

In other words, I hated them on sight and never looked any further.  So I cringed a little when Gray suggested this, and immediately started plotting a revenge scenario which would involve strapping him into a chair and blasting him with non stop Pig Destroyer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed to the point where he'd be begging for another 48 hours on twitter.  But the point of this is to remain objective, and so I gritted my teeth and added it to my collection of proper music.

I started listening to this on the bus on the way to work a few days back.  It was morning and I hadn't woken up yet, so I expected to be knocked about by a lot of bleating lyrics and discordant guitars.  But opener 'Brilliant Dance' starts with a perfectly pleasant acoustic little ditty. The vocals are a little overwrought and nasal, but nowhere near as bad as I had feared. Pressing play I had had images of me wresting the steering wheel away from the bus driver and forcing the bus into a building just to avoid listening any more.

Come the next track and the tirrade of screeching emo still fails to appear, as the acoustic vibe continues, 'Good Fight' being another emo pop acoustic ballad, replete with a nice backing from quiet drums and underlying piano.  The album continues in this way, and when I look it up later it seems that Dashboard started off as a side project for singer Chris Carrabba.

It's this acoustic approach that saves this album from becoming yet another emo-pop stereotype.  The songs are all well crafted, the lyrics a little hackneyed but nowehere near as bad as the likes of Gerard Way.  The simple production allows the songwriting to shine, and Carrabba clearly has a way with a chorus.  His voice does grate after a few tracks, but that's as much to do with the over-exposure of his vocal style by bands that followed as it is to do with his performance.

'Screaming Infidelities' with its rather hideous line 'But as for me, I wish that I was anywhere with anyone making out.' is a bit awful, but 'Again I Go Unnoticed' is a cracking little tune. And so the pattern goes for the rest of the album. Some songs are excellent little pop songs (the title track, 'Saints and Sailors'),  some are bland and boring ('This Ruined Puzzle').

Despite how much I was fearing listening to this though, it's nowhere near as bad as all that. It's a perfectly pleasant little album that leaves you feeling a little bit like a character in the OC.  Sun washed and well crafted, the best thing I can say about it is that it is utterly unlikely to drive you to a murderous rage and force your carriage of transport to become a flaming box of death. Which is more than I can say for Fall Out Boy.

3/5

Now, if you are offended by this review, head over to Gray's place and hear him talk about it in a more positive light.  Unless you are Gray, in which case, sorry mate!

Cross Blogination 4: Tool – Ænima

Cross Blogination is a project I’m doing with Diary Of A Ledger, the idea being every week one of us will recommend to the other one of our all time favourite albums, which we will then both write a review for.  This week it's my turn again, so it's time for my favourite album of all time.

This is to me the greatest example of what a band or artist can do within the confines of the 'album.'  It is the album I recommend more than any other to random people when I meet them, or even to indie loving people I meet on the internet. It is the album that taught me the possibilities of what 'heavy' music could do. Hell, it even got me into the late great Bill Hicks. Trying to sum up how I feel about this album will be pretty difficult, and even harder in a short space. So apologies.

I had heard of Tool but not heard any of their stuff when my friend who worked in HMV in Sunderland recommended this album to me with such gusto that I felt I couldn't refuse. I took it home and by the end of the first track, 'Stinkfist', I was absolutely blown away.  Sounding unlike any other band I had heard before they melded the thick riffs of Adam Jones with a deftness and subtlety I hadn't heard before in 'Heavy Rock'.  The drums alternate between jazzy tribal rhythms and thunderous attacks, with the bass and guitar layered over the top to create a clinical and yet warm sound.  Technically Tool are amazing, but never 'showey.' And then there was the voice of one Maynard James Keenan.

All great bands need a great front-man, but Tool have one of the most unique talents in Maynard. With a range that would put every contestant on every X Factor to shame (check out the note he hits on 'Pushit') coupled with a wonderfully comic playfulness and a deadpan delivery, there are several times when his voice makes all of the hairs stand up over my whole body.  And then you work out what he's singing about and you can't help but smile.

For instance, take opener 'Stinkfist', which has to be the world's most beautiful peon to anal fisting, with the immortal lines 'Elbow deep inside the borderline. Show me that you love me and that we belong together. Shoulder deep within the borderline. Relax. Turn around and take my hand.' These are delivered with a straight deadpan voice over clattering great riffs.

Next up is Eulogy, which starts with a bewildering and tender instrumental lead in, which is soon shackled to a dirty great riff.  As it twists and turns it builds slowly around Maynard's lyric, which initially seems to be about his late friend Bill Hicks, but then morphs into a quasi-religious allegory about how the people we worship will let us down.

Bill Hicks was a huge influence on this album.  Maynard and Bill had become close friends in the period leading up to Bill's death, and this album was recorded in the period just afterward. The artwork has a bizarre paining of Bill, and his act is the basis of many different strands of songs, most notably the title track, which is based around Bill's sketch about LA falling into the ocean and leaving only Arizona Bay, and the last track Third Eye, a fifteen minute sprawling epic about the joys of hallucinogens.

The band are at their most mischievous during the several interludes which tie the album together.  'Message To Harry Manback' is a surreal piano line over which the band overlay a real message left on their answerphone by a crazed Italian fan, while the sound of birds plays softly in the background.  'Die Eier Von Satan' is downright creepy though, as pre-Rammstein industrial music is overlaid with an austere German voice.  Slowly it builds and builds, with crowd noise greeting more and more enthusiastically the words spoken. When the line 'Bei zweihundert Grad für fünfzehn Minuten backen und KEINE EIER!' is barked to a massive cheer, I must admit I found myself wondering exactly what the intentions of this band were.  That was until I went online and found the lyrics translated to a recipe for vegan hash brownies.

By far my favourite moment of the album is the centrepiece of the album, 'Hooker With A Penis' the heaviest song on display, and the best comeback to an insult ever committed to record. Having been told by a fan that they had 'sold out' Maynard spits out a diatribe as to the idiocy of this argument.  (After all, they remained signed to an independent label, made no advance copies available for radio and plastered the cover with a sticker saying 'No number 1 f**king hit singles'.) I could print the whole lyrics, but I'll try to limit myself to these choice lines;

"All you know about me is what I've sold you, dumb fuck.
I sold out long before you ever heard my name. I sold my soul to make a record, dip shit, and you bought one.

All you read and wear or see and hear on TV is a product
Begging for your fatass dirty dollar so...

Shut up and buy my new record send more money
Fuck you, buddy."

There is a wonderful flow to this album, where little interludes build into huge slabs of guitars, and the mood fluctuates constantly between the surreal and the divine.  Take the way 'Intermission' leads into 'Jimmy' by taking the main riff of the latter and turns it into a carnival theme.

There are no bad songs here, and while it is indulgent throughout the course of its whole run, it never comes across as pious or boring.  Throughout, Maynard's voice swirls and dazzles, its fragile beauty elevating the music underneath it to a wider scale.

If there is ever an argument for the prefect album I will state the case for this album even if I have to kill every Beatles and Beach Boys fan on the planet to do so.  That's how much this album means to me.  Uncompromising and uncompromised, this is a truly unique moment in music, and one that even the band themselves have never been able to match.

5+/5

So I guess you could say that I like it.  Now go over to Gray's blog and see what he makes of it. If he didn't like it, I'm going to subject him to some of the heaviest brutal metal I can find next time.

Tool - Ænema [uncut version]

Cross Blogination 3: Miles Davis – Kind Of Blue

Cross Blogination is a project I’m doing with Diary Of A Ledger, the idea being every week one of us will recommend to the other one of our all time favourite albums, which we will then both write a review for. We have since amended this to allow recommendations every third week from one or our readers.  This is the third review in the series, suggested by @butterflygrrrl on twitter.

Our first suggestion from someone else, and we couldn't have been handed anything more outside of my comfort zone.  I dabbled a little in Jazz back in University, but it never really took. My main problem is that it is hard to shake the stereotype, and sure enough, within about 30 seconds of opener 'So What' the image that pops into my mind is of the Fast Show jazz sketch, old men with black jumpers sitting on stools saying 'nice.'

For the first half of this song all I can think is that I'd rather be listening to just about anything else, when all of a sudden, without me even noticing, that feeling leaves and is replaced by a kind of serenity as the trumpets and the wandering double bass click together. Suddenly I'm not in the Jazz club any more, but instead I am in a Chandler novel.  And then it strikes you, this is a brilliant album.

It's not hard to see why this album is held in such acclaim. 'So What' and 'Freddie Freeloader' are sublime and interesting pieces of mood music, but it's really when the centrepiece to the album 'Blue In Green' rolls around that this becomes truly spectacular.  From the first blow of Davis' trumpet the evocation of emotion that shines through is heartbreaking, Bill Evans' piano underpinning everything with such a wistful melancholy that it's almost impossible to do anything else than listen.

'All Blues' takes the tempo back up slightly (but not a huge amount, the stately pace of the album is maintained throughout) but injects a strange menace to proceedings, the piano again setting the mood, before 'Flamenco Sketch' rounds things off with the sort of vibe that seems to call to mind a lonely old drunk marking the passage of time with a bottle of bourbon. But, you know, in a romantic way.

I don't know what I was expecting from this album, having heard so much about it, and especially given its iconic status as 'one of the greatest albums ever made' but it certainly doesn't disappoint. If I'm brutally honest, I doubt I've found an album that I'll listen to every day, but certainly it's a keeper, something to be saved for special moments and certain moods.

4/5

I must admit, I'm really curious to see what Gray makes of this as well, so don't forget to head over to Diary Of A Ledger and see. Next week it's my turn, and to my mind one of the most perfect rock albums ever made!

Cross Blogination 2: Rival Schools – United By Fate

Cross Blogination is a project I’m doing with Diary Of A Ledger, whereby every fortnight one of us will recommend to the other one of our all time favourite albums, which we will then both write a review for, one from a fanboy perspective, the other from a neutral standpoint. This is the second review in the series, suggested by Gray.

It was inevitable that over the course of this project, one of us would suggest an album that the other is already familiar with, and so it is with great pleasure that I discard my neutral standpoint and once again review one of my favourite albums.

Emo is a dirty dirty word. Over the course of this decade it's become more and more alienated from the 'emotional hardcore' it started as and worked its way into the mainstream, ending up with the likes of MCR and Fall Out Boy playing to stadiums of screaming teenage girls.

Emo has run the same course as any other big scene, but for once it was not the founders of  the scene who made it big, save for the likes of Jimmy Eat World. But here Rival Schools provided the blueprint for a scene still in its infancy, and to me it's never been bettered.

Frontman Walter Schreifels is no stranger to this phenomenon. He was in one of the great early hardcore bands, Gorilla Biscuits, then moved on to perfecting Post-Hardcore with Quicksand. But with Rival Schools he allowed melody to overcome the riffs and created a pop-punk masterpiece that swaggers with emotion without ever feeling overly angst ridden or cliched.

From the epic chorus of 'Travel By Telephone,' the Weezer on steroids pomp of 'Everything Has Its Point' and the post hardcore sheen of 'High Acetate' the start of the album is peerless.  But it's when the pace slows for 'Undercovers On' and Walter's cracked voice shimmers with emotion that you really understand what a perfect piece of work this album is.

After the four opening songs come the two singles, 'Good Things' and Used For Glue' both of which have the punchy swagger of Walter's previous band, married to epic choruses that most bands would kill for.

If there are any complaints to be had about this album, it would be that the second half of the album doesn't quite live up to the promise of the first half.  While still good songs, 'Holding Sand' and 'Favourite Star' never quite pack the same punch, although 'The Switch,' with it's beefy downtuned riff, is excellent.

But any album that holds seven or eight instant classics over the course of thriteen songs cannot really be called a disappointment, and it's telling that since then Walter has struggled to find a band that he feels lives up to his standards, going back occasionally to his previous outfits rather than starting new ones. Indeed Rival Schools are currently reformed and touring, so one can only hope that the promise held by this debut can one day be realised with a sophomore effort.

As always, please now go and go HERE to find out what Gray thought of it all.