Journey Through The Unheard…With A Vengeance!

It’s about that time again. music had been listened to and now you’re gonna hear about it.

Like Adele once said..hello, it’s me¹. It has been far to long since we’ve done this (a couple years to be more precise) but what can I say…time flies when you’re having fun or when you’re rebounding from a catastrophic pandemic. And if you’re like me, the last two calendar flips were adorned with periods of bliss (like when I got my Ron Swanson on at St. Elmo’s Steakhouse before a transcendent outdoor concert by The National in Indianapolis) while also pockmarked with moments of agony (torn Achilles tendon back in March of ’22. 0/5 stars, DO NOT RECOMMEND).

And while many things have changed since we’ve last spoke, namely the price of well…everything and *gasp* even my Detroit Lions who are inexplicably good, one thing that remained the same was my insatiable appetite for listening to and collecting music. Nearly one hundred albums were removed from my backlog, each one painstakingly consumed over a span of several weeks. Since I started with 1,316 unheard albums that should leave me with 1,218 left to go. Progress!

Wait. Hang on a sec…I forgot to add the albums I bought this past two years. Let me break out the old abacus and see what we got.

(feverishly calculating…)

Ok, so it appears that somehow I must have acquired 252 more albums². 1,470 records to go. I think I might actually have a problem.

Ah, what are you gonna do?…ON TO THE MUSIC!

While most live events resumed sometime in mid 2021, it felt like 2022 things really ramped up to pre-COVID-19 levels. This meant that, of course I was grabbing tickets to every show that I could conceivably attend without going broke or coming home to find my very understanding wife decorating the front yard with my possessions. And despite having a twenty-five plus year resume of concert-going, ’22 still managed to hand me a couple of firsts. March brought my first show on crutches (Daughtry and Tremonti, Royal Oak Music Theater). In May I saw my first show where the headliner wordlessly and unceremoniously walked off-stage while his band continued on to play a marathon performance of one of his biggest hits³ (Van Morrison, Detroit Fox Theater). I experienced Phish for the first time in August and my first indie rock show weeks later when I caught The Shins in Detroit.

What does this have to do with Pavement you ask? Their show at Detroit’s Masonic Temple in September marked the first concert I attended alone. I ALWAYS can find someone to tag along to my multitude of shows, but this one for whatever reason drew less than lukewarm interest. And what a show it was⁴! They played twenty-seven slacker anthems to a sea of flannel-clad, smiling forty-somethings and one empty seat, dead-center about ten rows back.

Several songs came from this record, their debut and the Platonic ideal of the disaffected, alternative rock sound associated with Generation X. One such song was “Summer Babe- Winter Version,” the lead track and perfect introduction to lead songwriter Stephen Malkmus’s borderline stream of consciousness lyrical style. Noisy and fuzzy, it’s a love song of sorts dedicated to a particular shiny-robed beach beauty who spends her days “mixing cocktails with a plastic-tipped cigar.” Next comes “Trigger Cut/ Wounded-Kite At :17” which perfectly blends a sloppy punk-rock sensibility with traditional pop tendencies via a “sha-la-la-la-la” chorus. This dichotomy is also evident when Malkmus “ba-da-la’s” his way through a rocky relationship on “Zurich Is Stained” just a few tracks after screaming unintelligibly in our faces to open “No Life Singed Her.” “Two States” is punchy and simple. “Fame Throws” is beautifully confounding.

This highly influential record⁵ dropped in April of ’92, or about seven months after Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten and it lacks both the former’s immediacy and the latter’s classic rock sensibilities. This is why Slanted And Enchanted never climbed to the heights of those records, but what Pavement does here, perhaps better than any record ever has, is encapsulate the spirit of an entire generation. What a shame I had to witness them alone!

And…I hate to say it but this one is just a shame. Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely, indubitably, unequivocally down with the sickness! I’ve seen these guys live too many times to count and each and every time they deliver. Here’s proof from the 2019 Detroit stop on their Evolution tour:

Ya see! Ok, now that I’ve established my Disturbed bona fides, let me give you a succinct, detailed and thoughtfully curated description of this record.

Meh.

That’s what it is! It’s meh. The riffs, the well-trodden lyrical themes, the lack of Simon and/or Garfunkel covers are all just a little disappointing.

It starts out OK with lead single “Hey You,” an uptempo and mildly inspiring rocker aimed at getting us to ditch our media sources that are only feeding the (wait for it…) divisive political climate we find ourselves in. Not tremendously memorable, but serviceable. It will slide nicely into the middle of their live set list without any push-back. But then there’s “Bad Man” where singer David Draiman toothlessly calls out an unnamed politician for his misdeeds with the same moniker a finger-pointing toddler might affix to The Count on Sesame Street⁶.

Don’t get me wrong. None of Divisive is necessarily bad, man. “Unstoppable” pummeled me into submission. “Won’t Back Down” and “Feeding The Fire” both imprint their catchy choruses in your memory while featuring some of Dan Donegan’s best fretwork (though the latter could have benefited from a “Stricken”-esque guitar solo). And possibly the album’s highlight is power ballad “Don’t Tell Me” where Draiman trades vocals with a game Ann Wilson from Heart.

So why is it meh? It’s definitely heavier and angrier than Evolution (which leaned a little too much on the soft stuff) as promised by Draiman in a pre-release interview with Loudwire, but that anger falls flat without specificity. On their debut, when “mommy” was famously and somewhat controversially labeled a “stupid sadistic abusive…” umm, let’s say lady of the night, the weighty topic of abuse, either physical or metaphorical, landed hard. Here, the feeble dressing down of vague political and media-based targets breezily skips by like a pebble on a placid lake.

And if I want placid, I’ll throw on some early-seventies singer songwriter stuff, and early-seventies singer songwriter stuff doesn’t get much better than Joni Mitchell’s Blue. At least that’s what I’ve always been told. On the most recent iteration of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list, this record placed third.

Third!

Needless to say it was high time I got my listen on. And now that I have I can say with extreme confidence that it is a masterwork, exceptionally blending the bleak and the beautiful, the joyous and the wistful. But it is almost certainly not the third best album of all time. I mean, how could it be when Limp Bizkit’s first three albums have to go 1,2,3 in some order?

Honestly, what keeps this exquisite study of the melancholy from climbing to those heights for me are the first two tracks, “All I Want” and “My Old Man.” In both, her vocals are giving strong older sister from Dirty Dancing vibes and the lyrics…(“I hate you some, I love you some, Oh, I love you when I forget about me,” and “My old man keeping away my blues. But when he’s gone me and them lonesome blues collide“) well, they come off a little clingy. Contrast that to the the achingly gorgeous “Case of You,” where she tells the tale of a lost Canadian love (Graham Nash or possibly Leonard Cohen) sounding both forlorn and hardy in equal measure.

Musically, the album is sparse, with few tracks featuring more than just her acoustic guitar or piano, but it lacks for nothing. “Little Green,” which features only Joni, said guitar and a heart-wrenching tale of a child given up for adoption, is emotional carnage. The opening “Jingle Bells”-like piano notes on “River” suggest yuletide fun, but only briefly. It is not long that the memory of another failed relationship squashes any holiday joy and Joni is plunged back into a profound sadness she longs to escape. And on the title track, it is piano as life-raft, keeping her afloat during the seemingly unending waves of depression that could not be beaten back by “acid, booze and ass, needles, guns and grass.”

So yeah, I guess this record is worthy of its exalted status. I’m kind of ashamed that prior to this, my only exposure to Joni’s work was the “paved paradise and put up a parking lot song,” but that was mostly due to the putrid, soulless Counting Crows cover⁷. Like Braveheart said, that’s something we shall have to remedy, isn’t it?

What didn’t need to be remedied, I might argue, is Black Sabbath’s iconic debut album. The self-titled 1970 release essentially spawned the heavy metal genre⁸ and has inspired likely millions of wannabe guitar gods to first wield their axe. One such wannabe who actually achieved god-tier status is Mr. Zakk Wylde. He first made his name in the eighties and nineties shredding for Sabbath front man Ozzy Osbourne himself before blistering our eardrums through a multitude of projects, with Black Label Society being his main chick. Currently, Zakk’s touring the world with Pantera⁹, attempting to pull off the near-impossible task of filling the late Dimebag Darrell’s shoes.

But three years ago, Zakk along with bassist Rob “Blasko” Nicholson (Ozzy, Rob Zombie) and drummer Joey Castillo (Danzig, Queens of the Stone Age) dropped this nearly note-for-note copy of Sabbath’s masterwork. It essentially updates Sabbath’s debut with modern-day production values while Zakk paints over Tony Iommi’s guitar blueprint with some colorful finger-tapping pyrotechnics and a healthy dose of his patented harmonic squeals.

Is any of this necessary? Well, no. Does it render Sabbath’s original a redundancy? Ha! No. Does it rock insanely hard? Yes. Yes it does. Will I be at St. Andrew’s Hall in January for Zakk and Co. to melt my face with this timeless riffage??? You betcha!

And I betcha don’t know who Shooter Jennings even is. That’s ok. Unless you’re heavy into outlaw country or caught some of the online discourse earlier this year about celebrity “nepo-babies,” I wouldn’t expect you to. Shooter, the son of country music royalty (Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter) caught my attention back in ’05 when he released his debut solo album Put The “O” Back In Country (great title) shortly after the dissolution of his rock band, Stargunn. Lead single “4th of July” featured guest vocals from none other than The Possum, George Jones. How did a relatively unknown young singer land Mr. No-Show Jones, Nashville royalty in his own right, for his first record? Well, it helps when No-Show Jones isn’t No-Show to you. He’s just daddy’s friend George.

But that means it also hurt Jennings more than the average fan when Jones passed in 2013. To pay homage to his mentor, he released this lovely little five-song EP featuring two originals and three covers of George Jones classics. The opener and title track is a good ol’ fashioned cheatin’ song which would have suited Jones’ voice just fine as would the simple two-minute acoustic ballad, “Living In A Minor Key.” The three covers are all transformed by Shooter in one way or another. Synths and programmed percussion in the vein of Vangelis’ “Chariots Of Fire” render “She Thinks I Still Care” almost unrecognizable to Jones’ version and “The Door” gets torqued-up with a bit of heavy metal guitar.

This project, obviously a labor of love for Jennings, never overstays it’s welcome and in fact may leave you curious what else he could have done with Jones’s expansive catalog. A fun listen.

Oh, look! Another covers album!

This one is fine, I guess. Of course no sane will person will argue that Rush is anything but fantastic and they sound like they really enjoyed themselves recording this batch of songs, but after one or two spins I was over it. None of these versions would I ever prefer to the originals and they didn’t really “transform” any of them at least not in the way Shooter did with George Jones’s stuff. And that’s ok. Like that teal Weezer record that came out a while back with “Africa” on it, sometimes a covers record can just be a band playing through a batch of songs that inspired them without veering too far from the source material.

The songs themselves are all classics, though it would have been a bit more joyful for me to see Rush go swimming in a bit of a wider pool. Of the eight songs here you got two Buffalo Springfield songs, two that can be attributed to The Who, and two Yardbirds. And they all can be dated back to the period from 1965 to 1970, or roughly when the band members were entering their formative years.

So…if you like that era of rock n’ roll and/or your a fan of this Canadian trio, give it a listen when you get a chance. I just wouldn’t…you know…hurry.¹⁰

I would hurry to check out Sleep Token’s Take Me Back To Eden, though. Who are Sleep Token you ask? That’s a great question. I have no idea. Very few people do actually. The masked outfit has heretofore remained anonymous with the lead singer going by the handle of Vessel and the remaining band members referred to as II, III and IV. All I know is that they’re British and they captivated the hell out of me with this, their third full length release.

They first caught my attention when I stumbled upon “The Summoning” which was the second single, dropped just under a year ago. The over six minute track starts out with a few seconds of ethereal, almost alien synths, dulling your senses before some metallic riffage and crashing cymbals provide an adrenaline jolt. Vessel joins the festivities twenty seconds in, his accent untraceable, his baritone clean and slithery and emanating from that place just behind the tongue. His words are cryptic, ultimately amounting to a sort of love song, albeit carnal, dangerous. The chorus hits at roughly one minute when he unleashes the falsetto:

“Raise me up again
Take me past the edge
I want to see the other side.”

It’s hooky and immediate but what happens next is what really grabbed a hold of me. He repeats the last line first at just above a whisper before transforming into a violent, guttural howl. The guitarist’s¹¹ djent-like palm-muting teams up with the drummer’s double-bass attack to relentlessly pummel the listener into submission for a good thirty seconds until a groovy and efficient guitar solo leads us back into the chorus for round two with Vessel. Baritone, falsetto, pure unadulterated rage…the vocal range is truly impressive. The track then fades back into those alien synths for a little over a minute before further transforming into a bass-driven, funk exercise for a ninety second coda.

That unexpected schizophrenic genre hopping is what I find truly spellbinding. And the whole record offers surprises like this. With “Granite,” Vessel offers more of a hip-hop delivery over what could almost be described as trap beats before the guitars finally return for the last minute. “Aqua Regia” has no metal characteristics at all, opting instead for synths and a piano bridge. “Vore” is almost death metal. “Are You Really OK” is an alternative rock power ballad. The epic length title track, which I was fortunate to hear live this past month at their stop in Berlin, gives you a little bit of everything.

Is Take Me Back To Eden a little over-produced and sterile? Perhaps. Is the whole masked and anonymous thing a little silly and played out (hello Ghost, Slipknot…KISS)? Ehhh, maybe. Does any of it matter if the songs are good? No.

And the songs are good.

1. Or Todd Rundgren, for those of a certain age.
2. This does not count the 26 I just purchased that are in transit.
3. The song was “Gloria” and it seriously went on for a good ten-plus minutes. He was long gone.
4. I loved it despite it landing during a crippling, week-long indigestion that was a harbinger of the gall bladder attack I would endure days later. Man! 2022 sucked!
5. Pitchfork gave it an unheard of 10/10 and Rolling Stone has it at 199 on their best 500 albums of all time yet I had no trouble getting someone to come with me to listen to Neil DeGrasse Tyson talk about the movie Armageddon for two hours!
6. Come to think of it, Draiman’s opening “ooh-wah-ah-ah-ah” on “Down With The Sickness” isn’t that far removed from The Count’s signature laugh. “Ah-Ah-Ah!”
7. I mean, I like Adam Duritz and his Crows, but their “Big Yellow Taxi” was pure blecchh.
8. Jeff Beck’s Truth, Blue Cheer’s Vincebus Eruptum and even The Beatles “Helter Skelter” have also been suggested as metal’s progenitor. I say it’s Sabbath.
9. There is no Pantera without the Abbott brothers.
10. You thought I was going to say rush, didn’t you.
11. I think the guitarist is II, though it could also be III or IV. Who knows?

Art design: Erik Belcarz. Credits: Red Brick Wall, Sourced at https://www.patternpictures.com/red-brick-wall-2/