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New Music 2012


Xann

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Digby and the Lullaby

Very nice if you like chilled music. I recorded this a couple of months ago at my friend's birthday party. They are releasing their 1st album this year, working with the producer of Angus & Julia Stone, and last time I talked with them they said it will be featured by Bon Iver's string quartet.

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  • 2 weeks later...

any idea on what the Neil young one is supposed to sound like?

I'll have to have a listen to Joe walsh's album he is off his rocker but he's great...actually I mite have to stick on 'lifes been good' now, hmmm that would mean switching jimmy the Hendrix off though

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any idea on what the Neil young one is supposed to sound like?

Well it's with Crazy Horse so it should be back to a rockin' style

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New Sigur Rós album Valtari is out. Not heard it myself yet (and that may be the case for quite some time), but it's getting farily lukewarm reception - it's more of the same and that trick appears to be running out of steam.

Certainly, if it's anything like the last album, that doesn't surprise me. Nothing wrong with it, but I still play more songs from Von, Agaetis Byrjun, () and Takk than I do anything from the last one with the stupidly long name.

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New Sigur Rós album Valtari is out. Not heard it myself yet (and that may be the case for quite some time), but it's getting farily lukewarm reception - it's more of the same and that trick appears to be running out of steam.

Certainly, if it's anything like the last album, that doesn't surprise me. Nothing wrong with it, but I still play more songs from Von, Agaetis Byrjun, () and Takk than I do anything from the last one with the stupidly long name.

Having listened to it a couple of times I think it's way closer to ( ) and Ágætis byrjun than Takk and Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust.

The tempo has been brought back down on the majority of the tracks and the overall sound is more of an understated soundscape/ambient feel.

Have to say even though I enjoyed the last two albums, this is an improvement for me.

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Having listened to it a couple of times I think it's way closer to ( ) and Ágætis byrjun than Takk and Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust.

The tempo has been brought back down on the majority of the tracks and the overall sound is more of an understated soundscape/ambient feel.

Have to say even though I enjoyed the last two albums, this is an improvement for me.

I've been listening to a few tracks on youtube since I posted that. I know that with Sigur Rós it's often very much an album experience so I can't draw too many conclusions but of the few tracks I've listened to, only Varúð strikes me as something really special (and it is bloody good, even stood alone). The rest has felt a little... dull. They seem to have more of the ambient about them than I've come to expect of Sigur Rós usually. And I've nothing against ambient, I rather like the genre... but I expect a little more of Sigur Rós.

I'm surprised to hear you weren't as sold on Takk, it's held by a lot of people as their best album now I noticed. I liked it (a lot) but I still reckon Agaetis and ( ) are stronger all round. Which makes me all the more interested in hearing the whole of the new album given that you feel it closer to those albums than the post Takk stuff...

I wasn't that sold on ...endalaust in the long term. It's a messy album, has some spectacular moments but on reflection it ponders about too much and lacks a little cohesion. As good as, say, Ara Batur is, it's a highlight of an album that doesn't stand next to something like Untitled #1 or Vidrar vel til loftarasa on their respective albums.

I think I need to listen to this new album, then.

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Currently listening to Fear Factory's new album The Industrialist. I actually prefer it to Mechanize so far, contrary to what most people seem to be writing about it. For me, it sounds like more of a return to their older stuff, which is great.

That's not to say it doesn't have its issues. Firstly, some of the songs are little weak, and the 9-minute 'here's some industrial noises' track is irritating as it comes prior to the final 2 songs. Put that kind of crap at the end so we don't have to skip through it.

The other thing is that apparently Gene Hoglan didn't play drums on the album - they recorded with a drum machine! Seems like a bizarre decision for me, but it does still fit with their sound. Wonder how much of that caused Hoglan to leave, or if they were having issues with him that caused them to make that decision. Hell, they should have just called up Dave Lombardo or something to see if he could have helped out.

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Eagerly anticipating the new Rush album, Clockwork Angels...

Martin Popoff reviews it

But the concept nature is not the least of why this feels like the most unified and purposeful Rush album since Vapor Trails and before that, Signals and its pastels – it’s the baffling music, an almost new invention, or new is old, or “the future as it’s meant to be” in steampunk parlance. Gone is Alex’s trinket of layering in acoustic to accompany the riff (I always thought this sounded like a tear in the woofer), and also gone, then, logically, is any of the tinkle in Rush production, the brightness, which started with Grace and then reared its head to varying degrees and with often enrageable persona throughout, on every album, save I suppose for Vapor Trails.

No, what we have here is Rush’s bassiest production quake ever. Neil’s drums have never sounded so fat, warm and powerful, and Geddy and Alex storm on along with him, through track by blustery track, many neo-Maiden- and Death Magnetic-like in their sodding of conventional verse/chorus structure in redefinition of the word “break.” The boomy resonance of all this was captured inside of three months at a brand new/one-year-old studio in Toronto called Revolution Recordings, and through an approach that had Geddy and Alex writing their crazy musicks, then handing it to Neil to make sense of. The Professor then supposed for himself a pile of spontaneity (an oxymoron, until you hear how much exertion is necessary through the album’s 66.6 minutes), literally conducted with a drumstick by producer Nick Raskulinecz, who would and obviously could suggest fills by singing them like a Three Stooges routine (which makes him the fourth Stooge).

The result is Neil’s grooviest playing ever, groove being the one area Neil, by necessity of Rushwriting, rarely bothered himself with – I think he’d have to admit he’s a white man playing the drums. Ergo, he gorgeously falls off the end of bars all around Clockwork town, helping to create a hot mess of a ‘70s prog album, the type that would never sell, but to fellow English cynics born out of tyme, squelching through the moors.

My friend Kevin J. Anderson was among the pioneers of a genre of science fiction that came to be called “steampunk”—a more romantic, idealistic reaction against the “cyberpunk” futurists, with their scenarios of dehumanized, alienated, dystopian societies. Our own previous excursions into the future, 2112 and “Red Barchetta,” had been set in that darker kind of imagining, for dramatic and allegorical effect. This time I was thinking of steampunk’s definition as “The future as it ought to have been,” or “The future as seen from the past”—as imagined by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in the late nineteenth century.

The guys seemed receptive to the idea, and I started working on a story and some lyrics set in “a world lit only by fire” (title of a history of medieval times by William Manchester). Influences were inevitable, but still unexpected to me—a lifetime of reading distilled into a dozen scenes, and a few hundred words. The plot draws from Voltaire’s Candide, with nods to John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, Michael Ondaatje and Joseph Conrad for “The Anarchist,” Robertson Davies and Herbert Gold for “Carnies,” Daphne du Maurier for “The Wreckers,” Cormac McCarthy and early Spanish explorers in the American Southwest for “Seven Cities of Gold.”

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