Outer Music Diary

Hate Eternal - Conquering the Throne

I passed on this when it came out a few years ago, despite the Eric Rutan/Morbid Angel connections, but after seeing it on the list referred to a few posts back, I figured it must be worth a listen anyway. Unsurprisingly very close to Morbid Angel in riffing style, this is what I’d call a rather typical death metal album in the techy direction. I played it when a friend was over and it clearly added a nice and intense, claustrophobic vibe to the proceedings. There are a few moments when there are almost Iron Maiden-like guitar solos, which I quite like in Maiden, but find a bit too sweet for this format, part of the great appeal of the genre is the harmonies and dissonance that a lead guitarist has to adapt to. Overall, one that falls about in the middle, there’s definitely some decent riffing going on, but by the end there were few single tracks that stood out as exemplary.

Sammy Hagar - Standing Hampton

A friend of mine grabbed this recently mostly out of nostalgia, for people our age and at the time, not yet old enough to have really explored music much, and for those who listened to classic rock radio circa 1982, this was something of a pivotal album. In playing it, it began to trigger old brain patterns in a bad way, reviving memories of junior high school dances and such. I was actually quite pleased that when I went to see if it had been added to Gnosis, that it hadn’t. Because some of this is so bad it’s almost painful. There were at least two times I’d be talking to my friend both for us to kind of dart looks at the radio with that “what the hell are you PLAYING?” look, only to remember what it was again all over. Sure, there are some bearable moments, the song “Heavy Metal” from that movie is decent and one or two of the pop songs are craftily written. But with the early 80s you get atrocious DX7 or DX7ish patches, cheesy choruses and well, it’s not a hell of a surprise Hagar went onto Van Halen soon after as both of their later styles dovetailed in some ways. Were this on Gnosis I think I’d be wondering whether I’d give it a 3, 4 or 5. But multiple listens could take it into the negatives.

Deicide - The Stench of Redemption (666)

While Deicide managed to create a couple classic death metal albums in the early days, it seems for the most part that they’ve moved in a more populist direction with it and I can’t count how many times someone’s waved me off from checking out the next four or five releases. It’s not hard to be waved off, after all, as this band’s almost juvenile satanism, relatively unchanged during their career, makes it easy with songs like “Death to Jesus.” What’s the point, doesn’t he just come back from the dead anyway? It reminds me of the old Nocturnus song about the time traveller going back to take Jesus out, it’s like really bad pulp writing, what Trey Azagthoth once referred to as “Hammer Horror Satanism.” The irony, as always, is that you can’t really understand what they’re saying, and I gave up reading Deicide lyrics in the booklet around “Legion” due to the ridiculous and grammatically poor writing. Musically, Deicide still strike me as being a rather straightforward death group, this isn’t a band that likes to do a lot of experiments with riffing, so that when the inevitable tap-mad solo comes up, it’s some basic theme going behind them that never changes. It’s all terribly dark of course, surely dark enough to send most of the religious cowering in terror, and definitely not as bad as I’d have expected. Not one I’d recommend to anyone but the converted really.

McCoy Tyner Trio with Bobby Hutcherson - Kimball’s East, Emeryville, CA 8/30/92

T-Mac tends to work from a rather finite set of songs, I’ve been noticing both from seeing his band on several occasions and hearing live shows that many of the same songs pop up over the various gigs, many of them tracks I don’t mind at all hearing over and over. It was kind of a surprise to go back about a decade or so and see what’s about the same set as I see now, although his rhythm section here is usually different from the one he uses now, seems like T-Mac likes playing with the youngsters quite a bit and who can blame him. This a nice set, although one much longer than I’m used to at his Yoshi’s stints which seem in retrospective to be about the perfect length. Like always, there’s something about the recordings that takes out a bit of sting from Hutcherson’s vibes, but he’s always in amazing form and I’m beginning to love the Tyner-Hutcherson pairing quite a bit. I do prefer the rhythm section of Charnett Moffatt and Eric Harland to the old band, but the earlier duo still get it done.

Happy Family - Silver Elephant, Tokyo 2/10/96

A decade or so ago, I used to be pretty excited about Happy Family, they were a band I wrote one of my earliest articles (in Audion) on, just based on the number of live shows that were floating around. Happy Family had avant-rock sophistication and a punk-rock sensibility and tended to blister through their compositions. This appears to be around their peak period, they’re in fine form while still mostly concentrating on s/t compositions, heavy, tight and manic. I’m actually surprised that such a hard gigging band never put out a live album, even after the band broke up and went their separate ways. Yeah, I suppose there was a cassette release, but they’re hard to count in the digital age. Something like this gig would have worked much better.

Dave Douglas - Aufttragskomposition der Jazzredaktion des SWR, Donaueschinger Muzikstage 1999 (10/15)

Douglas is a terribly versatile trumpet player working in territory anywhere from John Zorn to Miles Davis and beyond. This ended up being something even more different, what sounded almost like a long classical piece or euro-flavored big band jazz group, something very compositional. Like anything like this, I wasn’t expecting some of the volume variations so I didn’t get a really perfect listen, but I liked what I heard, it sounded almost like it could have come from an ECM album.

Henry Cow - NDR Jazz Workshop, Hamburg 3/26/76

Like many Jazz Workshop shows from the 70s, the source sounds pretty good, maybe lacking a bit of luster and showing some age, but still remarkably clear. This is a two-discer that contains a long continuous, approximately 55 medley and then three pieces on the second. The medley is astonishingly brilliant and the band’s inspired from Krause’s vocals to Frith’s guitarwork, in fact there’s one solo on there that blew me away. One might expect Frith to be an experimentalist at all times, but he does have some mighty fine chops. Overall this just had the sheen or aura of a band in about the finest form they were ever in, and, actually, for my money (or maybe ratio), this blows away the Concerts album by a mile. I’m just jazzed to have many more shows from this band to go through.

Aka Moon - The Fourth Festival of Arabic and Jazz Music, Krieger Hall Haifa, Palestine 6/6/03

Unlike the Cow show, this features a band not at their best, but there seem to be some obvious reasons as to why this is so. One of the bandmembers gives a long speech at the beginning of the show, the band’s clearly honored to be playing in Haifa. It does seem to be an augmented version of the group, although I forget with whom at this point, but the whole thing sounds like they’re somewhat out of practice. A month or so ago I reviewed a small video clip of the band with an African drum group. They do the same song here (I’m only vaguely familiar with Aka titles) but at a much slower tempo as if they’re trying to play at a speed everyone could match rather than blowing it over the top. Add a rather dull performance to the fact that so many of these Aka shows are mastered at a very low volume, this title hardly seems necessary.

National Health - Lawrence Opera House, Lawrence, KS 11/19/79

Now if I have my history right, thinking back to Dave Stewart’s fabulous essay in the “Complete” booklet, the band took off without him and with Alan Gowen for their American tour, the premier document of which is, in part, the Playtime disc. I’ll come out and admit that by this point, there’s something I find tacky in Stewart’s compositional work with NH, and the first album was mostly lost on me, no matter how much I played it. So where Queues would be the obvious favorite, I actually find this Stewart-less National Health to be far more to my liking, no small thanks to bassist John Greaves who is just amazing in this show, with a presence like he just came from Magma. The show sounds quite good and fills up one disc to the brim as it winds its way around all the thorny compositions, many of them either rearranged or totally new to the band. Pretty awesome overall, by this point this live show marathon was delivering me a royal flush.

Decapitated - Organic Hallucinosis

Possibly the best metal band to hail from Poland and undoubtedly their best technical death metal group. Decapitated take the Morbid Angel lineage and turn it up a notch in all areas, brutality, technicality and, especially speed. Listening to the dexterity and technicality of the riff work was an adrenaline rush as the guitars create these amazing patterns, closing in on the light speed barrier. It might have been the system I played it on, but the vocalist seems to be a bit back in the mix. Anyway it’s a good thing death metal albums are short as this was an almost exhausting listen. Definitely one of the most impressive metal albums I’ve heard in a couple years and it won’t be long before I grab their earlier releases.

Glass Casket - We Are Gathered Here Today

By comparison to Decapitated, Glass Casket are definitely less relentless and noticeably underproduced, but on the other hand they’re a little more diverse with their formula. One obvious different is their obvious desire to get away from the typical death metal artwork and presentation, this comes with a slip case that looks a bit like a cardboard or wood package around the jewel box and even that doesn’t have the usual dark cover with logo. The production, as already alluded to, is somewhat thin and presenceless, which took a little away from the first listen. On the other hand, without such a direct approach it almost begs a few more listens to understand. So more on this one at a later date…

Tim Berne’s Caos Totale - Knitting Factory, NYC 2/23/93

This is the first of about a dozen avant/free jazz live recordings I listened to over the weekend and started a very fun and exciting run of really great shows. This 93 recording, sounding quite good if clearly a straight soundboard or FM recording without much embellishment, features the band in a mode similar to their name and a mode that takes advantage of the listener’s lack of knowledge in determining how much of this is composed or improvised. The chemistry of the band is a joy to listen to as the group takes the sound to one noisy crescendo after another. Sheer bliss. More Berne please.

Machiavel - Jester
Machiavel - Mechanical Moonbeams

*Rubs hands with glee* Marillion gets quite a bit of credit for the jester cliche that haunts some of its knockoffs, but Machiavel was there first and might even be a better model for some of the insipid garbage that followed in the wake of all this dreadful Peter Gabriel worship. While Marillion right off the bat had their sound right out there, Machiavel seem fairly tortured by whatever pressures would impose on them the need to modernize these early 70s influences and even abrogate them entirely. The trend is particular bad on Mechanical Moonbeams where one moment you’ll be hearing a (groan away) proto-neo prog shortie only for the band to blaspheme the muses with some awful boogie style rock n roll. Mellotrons can do a lot of neat things, but playing the choir tapes over bar blues rhythms in a major key is possibly among the most offensive uses of the instrument in history. I tend to laugh off most crap but whatever that was truly chafed. Even at their best, and there are a couple decent tracks here and there on both, the band’s MO is terribly anachronistic, bands like Styx, Asia and the like probably had their fingers on the pulse of the death of 70s progressive rock in a much more lucrative manner. While these aren’t quite as funny as a band like Deyss or Chandelier, they’re good examples of the terrible excesses that followed in the wake of early Genesis. Good riddance!

Magma - Studio F, Bremen 2/6/74

Rather fine classic era Magma show from the Bremen vaults doing stuff like MDK and Soi Soi. I spent some of the list pondering on the differences between this band and the current one and while I’d love it if the new band had a bit punchier of a bass tone, the new band, by far, has the better vocals, richer and more mature. Then again, the old Magma has the youth and occasionally the naivete of the era.

Cattle Decapitation - Karma Bloody Karma

I nabbed this death metal title on the recommendation of Dave Kerman at Progressive Ears who provided a rather impressive list of bands on one of the threads. Identifying that there were at least a dozen things on the list I loved, it was a nobrainer to start picking off the other stuff, it’s been at least a couple years since I did metal buying and research and such a list saved a hell of a lot of time. Anyway, unsurprisingly, the Cattle Decapitation album delivered in every way, an album working right in the progressive death metal lineage with experiments in song structure, riff development and harmonies, all delivered at rapid fire pace and severe brutality. Obviously this sort of thing is only going to appeal to those who aren’t made apathetic by the vocal style, generally people who are sympathetic to the lineage of death metal from Morbid Angel to the modern day. But this is exactly the sort of thing I like to hear, some of these bands are so twisty and turny they’d give you whiplash. And this one comes with a great cover and some surprisingly good lyrics at times.

Enslaved - Ruun

Enslaved keep makin’ them, and I keep buying them and I think I’ve given the last six or sevens the 11 grade and it sounds like this one may get it as well. Enslaved are like a perfect cross between viking/black metal and prog rock and for this album they actually move a little more strongly in both directions. It’s actually amazing, given the band’s “musical equation” that the albums sound so different to one another, while remaning so similar from a writing perspective. For me, maybe it’s that the epic nature of prog tends to work pretty well with the epic nature of the Bathory-inspired stuff and that for some reason Enslaved never really strike me as pretentious with their scope.

Spheroe s/t

A very average and somewhat redundant fusion album by the French group, sitting in the style molded by Weather Report and Return to Forever, but without the virtuosity or energy of either. In fact this reminded me quite a bit of the Napoli Centrale album I reviewed a little while ago, except for the vocals of course. I do like the fact that the musicianship level does have to be at least competent for them to pull this off, but given their proximity to their influences I have to wonder why such an attempt is necessary. 8ish rather than a 7, possibly due to my love for jazz, or possibly because it’s not entirely bland.

Steve Roach - Holding the Space: Fever Dreams II

I’d been a rather staunch supporter of the music of Steve Roach since the 80s, he’s one of the few musicians who has had two or three substantial peaks in his career and of the very few who managed to release two to three classics in one year. However, since the new century has been under way, I’ve gotten the impression the long and varied career has begun to repeat itself in various ways. It’s true, I do tend to prefer the longer, spacy droning stuff over the percussion-oriented titles like this one, but I think if you compare this album to classics like Dreamtime Return, Artifacts and Origins that there’s absolutely no question at all which are the superior releases. In fact, ever since he started collaborating with Byron Metcalf, who’s basically his right hand man on the long 19 1/2 minute “Tantra Mantra” (which is just part of this long trend of silly new age titles), a lot of the color and diversity seems to have gone out of the mix. Comparing this to an album like “Artifacts” which is like a virtual menagerie of different sonics, really shows “Fever Dream” up for being rather monotonous. I’m probably being a little harsh, but with about 20-30 Roach titles on the shelves, releases like this seem redundant and unnecessary.

Ozric Tentacles - Swirly Termination

I seem to remember this getting fairly short shrift at the time, I think it may have been finished hastily as a contractual obligation or something. I might have the details wrong, after all it feels pretty silly to talk about the differences between Ozric albums, as they’re one of the obvious groups when talking about a style and the repetition thereof. However, I was kind of surprised when listening to this because it did have kind of a different flavor to it, still recognizably Ozric, however it struck me that the almost trademark, noisy, squirtin and bleepin synthesizers are well toned down here. Maybe there’s something a bit overstated about all the Ozric albums being so similar, after all I’ve given their albums anything from a 13 or 14 on Erpland to an 8 on Jurassic Shift.

Flasket Brinner - The Swedish Radio Recordings 1970-1975

I haven’t seen too many reviews of this set, but has it been mentioned how utterly impressive the discography section is for all the various musicians related to this band? It would keep Pete Frame busy for years! Everything from Bo Hansson’s Lord of the Rings to Oriental Wind albums with the great Bo Stenson. Anyway I can’t remember if I talked about this much here, I know I did a few times when we were a yahoogroup. One of the more impressive and somewhat obscure box sets in recent years, it features three concerts from the 1970-71 incarnations of the Swedish group and a later one from 1975 that melds the Brinner sound with that of Algarnas Tradgard. It could be argued that the first two discs of this set are filled with jams that are a little meandering, often the band just throwing down a couple of chords and chopping. It’s a good thing the musicianship is so strong as these could have been deadly boring in the wrong hands. The latter two sessions are a little better, closing in on the 11 from the 10, although the first of these is still a lot of jamming. The psychedelic nature of the final show makes it probably the most unique of the set, the merging of the two bands makes for a fantastic and unique document. Overall, well worth owning.

Caravan & The New Symphonia (Complete Concert)

 ”If I Could Do It All Over Again…” has long been a favorite of friends and I, it’s something of a pivotal record in our musical development. But for some reason, I’ve haven’t had much luck with anything after the next album In the Land of Grey and Pink, and have bought and sold the next two albums previously. I don’t even remember if I’d heard Symphonia, although my memory tells me I’d spun the record aeons ago and hated it. I’m not sure quite what it is, but the poppier, shorter numbers, that the band has always done since the beginning, went south for me, and the word “twee” comes to mind. For some reason my memory of these seems to largely outweigh the better material on these albums, particularly the long suite-like songwriting that began with “For Richard” and has been part of each album for the next several.

Anyway, Symphonia in remastered form is almost a totally different animal, much more coherent at the very least, featuring Caravan + symphony performing work from previous albums. Adding orchestral musicians to rock albums is generally not a good idea, or at least it’s an idea whose execution is often off, and I can’t say my opinion is much different here. But for the most part it’s not too cloying and as the band works through the shorter and less interesting material, by the time the longer suites come around, proceedings have gotten much more interesting. I guess I still think of Caravan as that rather naive, hippy band of flower children who created psych masterpieces (I’ve never been able to separate “For Richard” Caravan and “Low Spark” Traffic), but their mid-70s incarnation isn’t exactly a slouch.

Procol Harum - Bilzen Festival, Holland 8/26/67 (DVD)

While I’m probably much more excited about the recently “upped” 1969 Bilzen festival, possibly one of the coolest torrents in recent memory, this little 20 or so minute document of a terribly early Procol Harum back when they still looked like a beat group is extremely interesting. For many bands such an early document would be lost or such bad quality it might as well be, but this is rather beautiful black and white footage. While this seems to be before the intense changes that would end up in a much more progressive take on things later, it’s also a lot more charming. “Conquistador” and “Whiter Shade of Pale” are both here along with a few others.

Dave Holland Quintet - Live in Frieburg (DVD)

Far more accessible/available than many of the DVDs discussed here is this legit hour concert from an earlier version of Holland’s Quintet. Steve Coleman, Robin Eubanks, Kenny Wheeler and Marvin Smith are the rest of the band in 1986 and they’re in fine form here. Honestly, if you’re still reading this and sympathetic to the names here this is just a no-brainer, in fact it’s no surprise Steve Coleman has had such a varied and extensive career since, as he’s absolutely incredible on this. True, much of Holland’s music can occasionally leave me a bit cold, due to the almost resolution-less quality of the melodies at times, but they’re always in their element on this stage and this is a perfect example.