Things have been at a bit of a standstill here, for a few reasons. One is that I am moving at the end of the month, and woefully behind on getting this place packed up. Second, said new location is a new house, and I’ve had to sign my name probably 8,000 times in the last few weeks, and I have reams of paper I will probably never read, which I must read by May 1.

And in other good luck, I managed to get in a car accident about a week ago. I am fine, but I managed to do $10,000 of damage to my car. (this is what it looked like.) It’s going to get fixed, but in the meantime, we’re scrambling to function as a one-car family.

So: things are busy, and somewhat on hold. I will look forward to getting back into the swing of things after I get moved. Until then, sit tight.

Thanks,
Jon

The band, who has not returned to the studio, plans to find another album of lost songs for release this summer.

No word on what brave individual will fill the drummer’s throne for this night, although David St. Hubbins said the evening will be a tribute to “all of our drummers who have passed on, either to their reward or to middle management at Sainbury’s.”

The opening act will be The Folksmen (documented in the film A Mighty Wind.) Somehow I don’t think both bands will come out at the end of the night and jam together.

(Thanks musicradar.com)

It turns out this isn’t a bad piece of work. The band decided to celebrate the 30-year mark since their debut album by dipping back into their influences and cranking out eight tracks of classic/60s/brit-rock. They start the 27-minute fest with a replay of The Who’s “Summertime Blues”. This isn’t a jokey stab at a cover, like a tongue-in-cheek attempt a band would throw on a b-side or a fan club giveaway disc. It’s an honest attempt at capturing the spirit of Townshend’s execution of the Eddie Cochran original. The guitar is awesome! This rocks in a Zep-blues way even more than the earliest Rush. There’s tons of feedback pouring off of the heavy riffs, thick bass lines, and pounding drums. This doesn’t sound like a band that’s been doing their own thing for three decades - it sounds like a garage band slamming out old-school rock in a bar.

There’s more Who, two cuts by the Yardbirds, two by Buffalo Springfield, and one each by Love and Cream. All of the cuts are more of the same straightforward jamming. Geddy is not Neil Young vox-wise, but “Mr. Soul” is decent. It’s odd to hear “For What It’s Worth” (i.e. the song used in every other Vietnam protest montage in a film), but the mellowness gives you a nice breather from the rest of the scorching on the album.

I dig their take on “The Seeker”, which shows Alex Lifeson’s ability to channel Pete Townshend and really windmill through the power chords. There’s also a good Love cover of “Seven and Seven Is”, where Neil takes off on the drums. (It’s funny that on the original recording of this, Snoopy Pfisterer couldn’t keep up with the 30-some takes needed in the studio, and frontman Arthur Lee had to take over for him. Peart, of course, has no problems with this.)

The hottest cut on the album is “Crossroads”, the old Robert Johnson classic best known for its coverage by Cream. Alex does just as good a job as Eric Clapton on the feedback-laced fretwork for this one. You can tell the band had a lot of fun with this EP by the way they blast through these songs, and this is no exception. It’s funny that many panned Rush’s first album as being a Zep/Cream ripoff, and thirty years later, they’re covering a prototypical Cream song. What’s even funnier is that they sound so much like a bunch of 19-year-olds playing this stuff out at a local gig, and not a trio of multi-platinum artists who have spent decades filling stadiums by playing odd-meter geekfests of songs about nuclear war and talking trees.

I really enjoy this album, although it started a bad precedent. They toured in support of this EP, and a few years later, they’re releasing a live album for the tour supporting the live album they released when they recorded a DVD of a tour they did supporting an EP that they… hey, when is a new studio album coming out? Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but I think we all wish they would get back on the four studio albums/one live album rotation. I’m glad they had fun with this one though.

Rating: 8.5

My observations:

• It was cool that they played one pre-black song.
• Flea inducted the band, and talked about how he was blown away when he first heard the band back in 1985.
• Cliff’s parents was there, and his dad (who is very reminiscent of Ross Perot) spoke, which was cool.
• The artwork on Kirk’s guitar was pretty bad-ass.
• Lars acted and looked like a total douche.
• Two bassists are cool, but are still about half of what Cliff Burton was.
• Dave Mustaine was invited to be in the induction, but turned down the invite, because he was touring in Europe.  I wonder if there’s more to that story.

 
Video after the jump:

After 1999’s Q2K, we learned that the departed Chris DeGarmo must have been a major contributor to the band’s songwriting success, because things definitely lagged without him penning tunes for the album. This time around, Kelly Gray was given the boot, and the original lineup with DeGarmo returned. It was unclear what DeGarmo’s status was with the band, however. He did co-write four of the ten tracks on the album, but there were no solo shots, and most of the material continues in the same vein as Q2K. Also, DeGarmo did not tour with the band, and it was largely rumored that his appearance was nothing but a session musician publicity stunt to revive the band’s image.

This is the first post-Atlantic studio album by the band; beginning with 2001’s Live Evolution, they moved to Sanctuary Records. Prior to Sanctuary’s absorption into Universal Music Group, they were well-known for releasing new albums by once-popular bands that toured the “where are they now?” bar circuit with half of their original members. The kind of budget involved with such a change in label, plus the band’s decision to self-produce the album, results in a significant drop in production quality over the last few albums. It’s not horrible (that would come later), but it doesn’t have the depth or brilliance that Q2K or HitNF had to them.

The ten tracks, weighing in at an anemic 41:37, don’t wander much from the same formula, which could best be described as “mid-paced introspective look at our world today, with a slight AOR hook”. Any one of those things could work well, and have in the band’s past. (Mid-paced = “Della Brown”; Introspective “Promised Land”; AOR hook = most of Empire.) But there are few surprises here, and no dynamics. With a few minor exceptions, very little stands out in the muddle. “Rhythm of Hope”, “Doin’ Fine”, “Open”, “Tribe”… most of these songs are largely interchangable, and about as interesting as an album of commercial jingles from a 60s Eastern Bloc country. As much as I try to get into this, it’s just a jumble of blah.

I mention a few standout areas. “The Art of Life” hints at the band this once was, and almost sounds like a lost Promised Land track. There are a few good riffs scattered in other songs, but just when something starts to get interesting, it gets repeated ten times and dragged out, like a kid trying to pad a one-page book report into four pages with creative font and margin choices.

Last summer, I saw the Seattle Mariners play the Angels in Anaheim. At the time, the Mariners were something like 30 games behind the Angels in the AL West, and watching a team with a $117-million dollar payroll and the most talented Japanese player to ever come to the US and play get beaten so severely was a lot like thinking back to Empire and then listening to this. Maybe their next album would not be stellar, either; and maybe the 2009 Mariners will still end up 40 games under a .500 record. The one saving grace of a “rebuilding year” is you can keep having them year after year with no marked progress, and at least some of your fans will still come back and hope for something better, eventually.

Rating: 4.5

If you look at Satch’s stuff in the last decade, he’s wandered off the beaten path a bit with either electronica-influenced experiments or jam-band diversions, neither of which I particularly care about. Slater’s work sounds more like the “classic” Satriani, and sticks to the core concepts that have made him great: incredibly emotional, story-telling instrumental guitar. He’s not formulaic in his song structure or approach, and seems well-versed in the ability to construct a solid number without repetition or formulaic redundancy. A few songs offer a soft and almost ballady approach: “Melodie” is a good example of this. I particularly liked how “Looking Back” worked some well-structured piano riffs off the smooth fuzz guitar. Also, “Reflections” features a start with a ballad approach that blows the doors off with a minute to go in the song. It’s very moving and smooth stuff, with a spot-on execution on every track.

And it’s not all slow, moody stuff. One way that DC Slater pulls away from Joe is his ability to lay in some heaviness and speed. “Rebel Jam” shows a good metal edge and some quick chops. But his best example is “Pendulum”, which mixes some mythical spookiness with an all-out high-viscosity thickness that slaps on some low-end power for a decent payoff. And don’t think this is just another “really fast or really slow” album, because Slater does dance around other areas, be it the bluesy “Black Bandana” or “December Dawn” to the poppy “Miles Away”. A lot of ground is covered in the 41:55 total time of this album.

Aside from the guitar and songwriting, one of the truly satisfying aspects of the album is the production. I didn’t have any liner notes on the lineup of musicians behind this album other than Slater, so I don’t know if it’s a group of buddies, session hired hands, or if he covered the bases himself. But the bass, drums, and occasional keys all fit well into the overall mix. And what’s even better is that it’s not always the SAME drums. From track to track, there are variations in sound and setup, giving each number its own feel. There’s not the tiniest trace of self-production crud evident anywhere here - it’s all very much a pro job from start to finish, with a very seamless sound and credible mix. I’d like to hear some of the other bands Slater has produced to see if his work rings as true on other albums.

I feel bad making so many comparisons between this artist and Joe Satriani, though. He has such a truly unique sound, and I don’t mean to imply that he’s just a rip-off, like the endless number of 14-year-old kids you see hanging out at Guitar Center playing “Eruption” note-for-note. It’s not that I see his music as following Satriani’s; it’s like he took it from a certain point, maybe around Blue Dream or so, and improved it, drove it even further in a different direction. It’s like one of those speculative fiction pulp novels where the US never went into World War I and now we’re all living on a colony on Mars because the time-space continuum was altered in some odd way. I listen to this album and feel like the guitar world went through a wormhole in 1990 and when we all came out, it was easy to find stuff this cool.

Enough of my babbling. Head over to dcslater.com and check this one out. I hope we hear more from this guy in the near future.

Rating: 9.25

The reason this really works is that it’s a timely message: televangelists ripping off old ladies; politicians ripping off the people; corporations ripping off the government. It’s every late-eighties demon from the Reaganomics era wrapped up in a nice little package. But unlike the metaphorical one-song stories of earlier albums, this one is set in present-day, and directly follows a protagonist. It doesn’t preach like later albums, which is a minor complaint I’ve had about Tate’s lyrics since Mindcrime. It’s the old Creative Writing 101 first lesson (and a song by Rush): show, don’t tell. If you write a song that says “the federal government doesn’t like black people” (”Empire”, sort of), it isn’t interesting. When you pull me through a story of a heroin junkie turned mind control puppet assassin, I get it.

Okay, so who killed Mary? This is left ambiguous, with at least three possibilities: One is that Nikki killed her, while in a trance. Another is that Doctor X or another mindcrime zombie killed her, and Nikki was set up to take the fall. Or, maybe Mary killed herself, either to get out of the futile situation, or because Doctor X commanded her to while she was in a trance. The lyrics of the album don’t make this clear, although (to ruin it for you), on the 2004 tour when the album was played in its entirety, it was made very clear that X called her and told her to shoot herself, and she complied. But for years, this wasn’t clear, and people micro-analyzed the lyrics like people micro-analyze the bible to find quotes that support video games and hybrid cars as being evil. (Check out this for a well-done example of this.) This was further confused by the Video: Mindcrime collection, which people also overanalyzed for clues. I remember following the metal usenet newsgroups back in the early 90s, and there was still an ongoing debate about this well after Empire was released. That drove me batshit at the time, but I have to admit it was somewhat genius to leave this ambiguous, and it’s a minor letdown to actually know the answer now.

(Another story line that is more ambiguous than you might think is whether Nikki and Mary were actually sexually involved, or just pals. For some reason, I always assumed they were, but as the site above mentions, it’s not explicitly mentioned in the lyrics. It’s one of those things like how you can read between the lines in the bible and see whether or not Adam had a wife before Eve. )

Mindcrime’s sound in general is pretty lofty stuff. Produced by Peter Collins, it’s pretty dynamic, with a lot of power behind it, and ranges from the very mellow (”My Empty Room”) to downright speedy (”The Needle Lies”). The sound isn’t as thick or produced as Rage For Order, but there’s a lot more going on. Add to this the intros and performances that stitch together the album, and you’ve got some pretty impressive recording work. The production would be an order of magnitude better on Empire, but it’s pretty damn good here.

(Aside: the start of the album, in the hospital, has a sample of an announcement that says “Dr. Blair, Dr. Blair; Dr. J. Hamilton, Dr. J. Hamilton.” This is a stock sound effect and has appeared everywhere over the last few decades. I just spotted it last week in an old AT&T commercial. I’ve heard it in TV shows, movies, commercials, and it even showed up in an intro in a Motley Crue album, which was pretty stupid to me.)

Another great addition to the album is that of Mary herself, played by Pamela Moore. Moore is a singer also from the Seattle area, who has since flirted with a pop/technica career over the years. For years I heard the rumor that she was Tate’s vocal/opera coach, but I’ve since read the band heard her in a commercial and recruited her for the album. She sings a duet with Tate in the song “Suite Sister Mary”. It clocks in at 10:41 (the entire album is just shy of an hour long) and features a mix of neo-classical elements and latin chanting with rock elements for a slower but very sinister and dramatic number, and Moore’s performance is absolutely spot-on and punches up Tate’s operatic abilities much more than was present in any solo work previous to this.

This album has a lot of personal meaning to me. I remember getting it the day it came out in 1988 and spending an entire weekend listening to it nonstop, trying to find clues. From the first second of the blasting beginning to “Anarchy-X”, I was absolutely hooked. I spent the summer of 1988 listening to this album constantly, and it carried over as a frequent listen well into the summer of 1989, too. (The album took over a year to gain popularity and reach gold status.) In my freshman year, when I started using the VAX mainframe computers, I set my process name to “Doctor X” and kept it that way for the majority of my time in college. For a while, this album seemed dated, and then suddenly, around 2000 or so, all of the lyrics made total sense again. That’s probably why they made a sequel, but it was nowhere near the quality of this masterpiece. As far as concept albums or examples of progressive metal, it does not get any better than this.

Rating: 10

Also, there’s now a sneak peek at the last six tracks of the album:

7. Middle Of Hell
8. If I Were King
9. Man Down!
10. Remember Me
11. Home Again
12. The Voice

Quicktime
http://rhino.edgeboss.net/qtime/rhino/listeningparties/517967/517967_1888.mov

WMA
http://rhino.edgeboss.net/wmedia/rhino/listeningparties/517967/517967_1888_100.wax

Real
http://rhino.edgeboss.net/real/rhino/listeningparties/517967/517967_1888.smi

The movie is a buddy comedy about a guy with no buddies (Rudd) who suddenly wants to make male friends before his wedding, so he’ll have a best man. He meets Segel, and the two hit it off, spending long hours in Segel’s man-cave, talking honestly and playing Rush songs religiously. The two later go to a Rush show, and at the end of the film, at the wedding, they (along with a wedding band) play the song “Limelight”. (Stay for the credits…) They also (try to) play “Tom Sawyer” early in the movie, and the entire subplot is littered with Rush references. And it helps that the movie itself is funny as fuck.

Not much of a review as an endorsement here - it’s worth checking out. If you want to hear the Rudd/Segel version of Limelight, check it out here.