Short music reviews

AC/DC - Black Ice
Angus Young is a great guitar player, a riff-writer extraordinaire, and a great showman. Why this band bothers releasing albums (even if every 9 years), is beyond me. This thing sucks. Just tour until Brian Johnson's wheeze gives out for good, and be done with it. These songs took 9 years to "perfect?" Godawful.

Rise Against - Appeal to Reason
This, on the other hand, is very good and rapidly growing on me. I've only been through it three times so far, but there will be more. Vital, political punk-rock that engages from start to finish except for one poor attempt at a ballad at track 10. Fortunately, 11-13 pick it right up again. It's funny that as I get older, my rock actually needs to rock harder. Anything less (see above) is just a waste of time. I want my ass hammered and some lyrics at least two steps above pure drivel. This delivers. Big time.

Kaiser Chiefs - Off With Their Heads
These guys are critical darlings, and each of their albums has at least two fucking outstanding, addictive, catchy, hooky masterpieces. The rest, though not bad, just doesn't grab me for some reason. I don't know why. Solid tunes, solid melodies and hooks, nothing generic/boring, and yet it doesn't stick. I'm looking at my iTunes now, and here is the "Play Count" for this album, in 4 days: 2, 12, 2, 3, 4, 9, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2. Yup, pretty much like the other albums: two songs that'll be in my road trip playlists forever, one of them in my "Kick Ass" playlist, and some other songs that are just fine but that I'll forget about soon enough.

Rachel Yamagata - Elephant... Teeth Sinking Into Heart
She was featured in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, and it sounded like something I'd like. Not even close. If I remember correctly, the article even used the word "rock." ¿Que? There is no rock here. I put the thing aside for a couple days to regroup. Obviously, I had been mislead, and my expectations were not met in the slightest. Not her fault, I'll try again later. {Tries again} Fucking terrible. Boring and self-indulgent.

Kings of Leon - Only By The Night
An astounding collection of songs, but my enthusiasm has been tempered by the compression. Not as bad as Metallica, but still, muddy. I'll be buying the remasters in a few years. I'm not sure where they land yet, but this band is in my top 5, without a doubt. I've been too tongue-tied and too busy to put the time into a full-on review, but I will soon.

Metallica - Death Magnetic
Arguably the second-worst sounding album of the compression era. It's neck-and-neck with Rush's Vapor Trails, but I give the nod to Rush because they're better musicians, and make better music. They should be producing perfect, bell-clear albums. Metallica, on the other hand, is mostly noise. Good noise, but noise. If you bought the CD or iTunesed this, I'm sorry. Of course the band doesn't give two shits, they're rich already. Maybe if they deem you worthy, they'll sell you the remastered version in a few years. Meantime, go torrent the GH3 version. Orders of magnitude better. Sad, but true.

OK, on to the songs themselves. I've never heard Load, Reload, or St. Anger, but from what I gathered, I didn't miss much. This new one is decent, though only a couple songs have truly impressed me so far. I really like All Nightmare Long and End of the Line; powerful, razor-sharp riffs that take you back to the old days. Those are keeprs. On the other hand, did we really need Unforgiven III? Signs point to no. I'll pop it in every now and then, see if anything else sticks.

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I've also been getting into everything Josh Homme does. You're probably familiar with Queens of the Stone Age's Little Sister:


Or maybe In My Head:


Heavy, filthy, sexy, booty-shaking grooves are Homme's stock in trade, and few do it better. In fact, the stated goal "is to create a heavy sound based on a solid jam, and just pound it into your head." Mission accomplished, sir. On all five albums.

I delved into another of his projects over the weekend, The Eagles of Death Metal. That stuff is quite good too, but horribly produced. Those need to be not just remastered, but re-recorded. They have a third album coming out soon that's been well-reviewed, and I wonder if they hired a real producer or not.

Here are a couple TEoDMs:

I Want You So Hard (Boy's Bad News)


(yes, Homme is on the drums in this band)

Cherry Cola


Is that the most fantastically awful video or what? It makes Warrant's Cherry Pie seem like a feminist tract. Maybe it's something about the word "cherry."

Anyway, good times. No pretense, just rawk.