Bill's Hyperbolic Music Reviews #13: Harvey Milk- Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men

Harvey Milk are the best fucking metal band on the planet. Though many asshole music critics desperate to pigeonhole even the most unclassifiable of bands have compared them to other "sludge metal" acts like the Melvins, who they kinda sound like sometimes, and Neurosis, who they don't resemble at all, the Milk are a singular entity unto themselves. After all, what other metal band could have performed a live set consisting solely of REM's Reckoning, and another comprised entirely of Hank Williams tunes, and also have released this utter mindfuck of a record? Well, alright, I'm sure the Melvins could have done so as well, but I promise you, Harvey Milk sounds as little like them as a band that falls under the same umbrella of genre classification possibly could. I mean, Meshuggah and Dream Theater are both ostensibly "prog-metal", but how often are those bands compared to one another, except to say, "Meshuggah sounds nothing like Dream Theater"?

Alright, poorly-structured rant over. Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men is, as I said earlier, an utter mindfuck of a record. It is a double album encompassing epic-in-both-scope-and-awesomeness sludge/post-metal, 16 RPM classic rock, avant-garde meanderings, a Leonard Cohen cover, percussion pieces (guitarist/vocalist Creston Spiers majored in percussion at the University of Georgia at Athens) and Swans-as-garage-band ballads, generally featuring Spiers' froggy howl/croon and massive guitar, Stephen Tanner's presumably-strung-with-bridge-cables bass, and Paul Trudeau's Neanderthal-mathematician drumming. The whole thing lasts over 70 minutes and you have to pay really close attention, but it's goddamn well worth it, you fucking ADHD baby. Get with the program and worship Harvey Milk, especially this album, their magnum opus as far as I can tell, or I will fucking find you (says the guy who's missing half their catalog, but I MEAN WHAT I SAY, FUCKER!!!)

Cameron's Record Reviews #2: The Devil and Death and Me by Run Forever

I would love to talk about how great this album is, but something ain’t quite right. It’s got plenty of the things I look for in a pop-punk record – catchy melodies, visceral lyrics, and the “bass-snare, basssnare” drum beat we’re all too familiar with. And while these things have been done a million times before, they still haven’t gotten (too) old; bands always seem to manage to keep punk rock interesting (at least if you’re an angsty teen who just wants to mosh and forget about your oppressive parents AND GOD DAMMIT MOM I DON’T WANT TO CLEAN MY DAMN ROOM).

So it’s not the simplicity of the record that’s off-putting. I’m tempted to say that there’s something insincere about it, but that’s definitely not it: The Devil and Death and Me has got sincerity in spades.

Take, for instance, the chorus to “A Sequence of Sad Events”: “A bad dream, this can’t be happening/I’ll wake up, and you’ll be there laughing/A brother, a best friend/A true love left with a loose end/A sequence of sad events that keep repeating/Over and over and over and over again.” It’s powerful, poppy as hell, and delivered perfectly. So why am I bitching?

It just seems like this sincerity is… manufactured. It’s almost like Run Forever looked at a bunch of other bands and said, “how can we sound as genuine as them?” The whole thing ends up coming off as not just derivative, but downright untruthful.

Now, I’m probably wrong about that. It’s very possible that whoever wrote these songs (probably the singer-guitarist dude, I can’t be bothered to look up a name) wrote them in a heated passion out of necessity, purging his emotions into music. But when the whole thing sounds like the Thermals trying desperately to write a Bright Eyes record (or something along those lines), I’m left feeling like The Devil and Death and Me isn’t really sincere, but just trying to be.

I guess that’s it. Run Forever makes some great tunes, but I can’t listen to it without hearing them try to be other bands. I’m still not entirely unconvinced that Conor Oberst didn’t write “When It Won’t Leave” before Run Forever added some hammer-ons and slides to the guitar part.

Now, I’ve been really harsh on this album so far. I don’t mean to be: besides this one (glaring) issue I have with it, The Devil and Death and Me is a wonderful record. It’s been in my car for the past few days and I’ve gotten a lot of kicks out of it, and I look forward to future releases. Let’s just hope that Run Forever can channel their songwriting talent into a sound they can call their own.

Favorite Tracks: “A Sequence of Sad Events,” “The Devil And Death And Me”

(As an aside: after writing this, I wanted to see what some other reviews thought of this album, and the first one that popped up started with the line, “Forever running from Conor Oberst substantial similarity lawsuits must be a tiring life…” One day I’ll be that clever.)

Bill's Hyperbolic Music Reviews #12- Cheer-Accident- No Ifs, Ands, Or Dogs

NOTE: Expect an even-more-subjective-than-usual review for this installment, as I am the biggest Cheer-Accident fanboy imaginable. I believe them to be the greatest progressive-rock band of all time, an opinion I share with approximately no one. Now that I've made that clear, onto the review.

Cheer-Accident are not a band to rest on their laurels. After more than twenty years of being a spastic math/noise/avant/comic-prog unit whose albums were distributed on micro-indies like Skin Graft and Pravda, they streamlined their approach into one of neo-Rock in Opposition, signed to Cuneiform Records, and released the most focused and critically acclaimed album they had ever made, Fear Draws Misfortune, which exposed them to a whole new audience. Pitchfork reviewed it, Cameron "I only like folk-punk and ska" LeViere tolerated it, and, had their new record mined identical territory, no one could have blamed them. But No Ifs, Ands, Or Dogs is not Fear Draws Misfortune 2: Fear Harder. It is not quite like anything they've ever done (though you couldn't mistake it for any other band), and it is, in my opinion, the best record they have ever made.

The album opens with "Drag You Down", which nearly disproves the point I made about No Ifs' uniqueness in their catalog in the last paragraph, because it sounds like it could have come off either of their prog-pop albums, The Why Album and What Sequel? However, I don't care, because "Drag You Down" is fantastic. The verse is a trademark inscrutable C-A groove (it sounds sort of like it's in 13, but I really don't have any idea), the chorus is catchy as hell, and, well, it fuckin' rocks. 'Nuff said. However, it is immediately bested by the sharp stylistic left turn that is "Trial of Error", which is one of the strangest songs I have ever heard by anyone. It opens with garish synths and multiple drum machines hammering out bizarre polyrhythms, gradually calms down into a muted verse featuring what I believe the lowest singing bandleader Thymme Jones has ever tracked, swells back up into a crazier version of the intro, and finally resolves with some dissonant piano stabs. I was left thinking, "What the fuck?" the first time I heard it, but I've truly grown to love it.

There are 15 tracks on this album, so I'm not going to bore you with a description of all of them. However, I will let you know that the first two songs are far from the only standouts. "This Is The New That", "Sleep", and the two-parter "Life In Pollyanna/Death By Pollyanna" are fantastically complex, utterly unique, and prog as FUCK. Elsewhere, "Barely Breathing" and "Cynical Girl" are terrific pop songs skewed slantways by bizarre arrangements and occasional RIO flirtations. Finally, scattered throughout this album are five or so interludes, some of which revisit themes from past C-A albums, and all of which are very cool and help greatly with the sequencing of what could have easily been a very schizophrenic record (like the band's earlier double album Enduring the American Dream, which, though great, is possibly the worst-flowing record I have ever heard).

If you are a pop fan, or hell, even a prog "fan" whose knowledge of the genre doesn't extend further than Yes, ELP, or Jethro Tull, I can't foresee you enjoying this album very much at all. If, however, you are at all an adventurous listener, you owe it to yourself to check No Ifs, Ands, Or Dogs out (as well as the rest of the C-A catalog). And, of course, if you are a Cheer-Accident fan, you should have this one by now (EDIT: I just realized this is "officially" released May 31st, so let me amend that to "you should have pre-ordered this one by now"). I never thought they'd top The Why Album or Introducing Lemon, but they have, man. They FUCKIN' have.

Bill's Hyperbolic Music Reviews #11- Yakuza- Transmutations

Since I've written a lot of metal and/or noise-rock reviews lately, I told myself that I wasn't going to do that for this installment, because these write-ups were always intended to showcase a broad range of genres, and I didn't want to get bogged down in reviewing any particular style.

Then I heard this album.

Yakuza is not your run-of-the-mill metal band, let's make that clear. Vocalist Bruce Lamont also plays a mean saxophone, showing off the band's clear jazz influences on many tracks. In addition, while so many tech-metal bands focus on machine-like precision and rapid-fire, jump-cutting changes, these guys take some cues from Eastern music and psychedelia and establish a slow-burning, drifting mood before eventually pummeling you into submission with odd-metered blastbeats and discordant riffs that, far from being robotic, splatter all over the place with madcap abandon, somewhat like Gorguts' incredible Obscura. Don't be misled by that comparison, though- Obscura had none of the hazy post-metal atmospherics somewhere between Om and Isis that are all over this rekkid (and most of the band's output, if the other two albums I've heard by these cats are any indication).

My only complaint about this album is that, because this band has such a signature sound, it starts to get a little formulaic near the ending of its hourlong running time. The songs don't diminish in quality, really- two of the last three songs are probably the best of the bunch- but Lamont's voice, though quite good (he's also in a Led Zeppelin cover band, after all) starts sketching out very similar patterns in the melodic parts (and it doesn't help that many of these sections are at very similar tempos) and the rave-ups start to feel a little calculated. This is honestly a pretty mild criticism, however. This album is an experience, and its two-track focus generally just helps that experience linger. Buy/steal the FUCK outta this thing, and enjoy. (Also, be sure to get their albums Way of the Dead and Samsara- WotD has a 43-minute song!!!)