Midyear Music Review [2009]

Preface:

For quite a while I sat back and watched as the art of communication was made more and more impersonal, starting with Facebook and ending (for now) with Twitter. Yes, I have a Facebook page, which was initially made with professional uses in mind, as it is said that many employers utilize Facebook in their searches for employees. And I introduced myself formally to Twitter a few days ago, moreso to say, "I tweet," so as not to feel left out and to avoid being shunned by my generation. Texting, on the other hand, is something I refuse to engage in, no matter my extreme dislike for talking on the phone; my lack of a cellphone goes a long way in keeping me from engaging in and becoming addicted to that nasty habit. If only I had a driver's license and a car, because it has been proven, undeniably, that simply talking on your cell phone can be just as bad, if not worse, than driving drunk; texting is another matter altogether: a deathwish. That would be more than enough of a deterrent for any member of the rational minded public that I consider myself a part of.

Yet, although I have no qualms with blogging, I made a Twitter account before starting up some sort of blog, oddly enough, driven by the need to express, in detail, my thoughts on what is turning out to be the greatest year for music in recent memory. Please keep the following in mind: I do not, nor have I ever, considered myself an authority on music, nor even the music I listen to; oftentimes I struggle putting what I think about a particular artist into words. But, if you have no issue with reading through my amateurish ramblings on the year in music (so far), then by all means read ahead.

Midyear Music Review [2009]

At the begining of the year I compiled a list of bands of note that were set on releasing a new album sometime during the year, rattling off my tried-and-true bands - Dream Theater, Devin Townsend, Porcupine Tree, etc. - with few darkhorses and ending up with a list that made me giddier than I ever was as a kid during the holidays. These bands that I would have readily staked money on not disappointing, even though I am not a betting man, have delivered up to this point with quite a few still set to release their album or, in the case of Devin Townsend, more albums. And yet, this year has become the year of the dark horse for me, whether it be an unexpected solo release from a familiar artist (Jordan Rudess of Deam Theater) or a band so new to the fray that Last.FM does not list their latest album, as of this moment, on their artist page (Days Before Tomorrow).

Between old favorites, and new contenders threatening to overthrow them, I have found myself plagued with the genuinely wonderful problem of simply having too much music to listen to. Lately I've been stuck on one classic after another, listening to each album more in a couple months than I have most albums since I started using Last.FM. Devin Townsend's latest project, aptly named the Devin Townsend Project, has only released one of the planned four albums to date - Ki - but, miraculously, it only took a few months for DTP to find itself situated as the runner up to Opeth (8 albums, inc. one live) in play count on Last.FM. Ki was but the first of many albums that would skyrocket up Last.FM's leaderboard at record pace, one after another after another.

Sadly, as a result of being inundated with albums bordering on perfection, so many others fell by the wayside: Animals as Leader's self-titled debut, The Beneath's City of Light EP, The Dear Hunter's latest Act II: Life and Death, Gazpacho's Tick Tock, Isis' Wavering Radiant, Long Distance Calling's Avoid the Light, Mastodon's Crack the Skye, Nemo's Barbares, OSI's Blood, Stream of Passion's The Flame Within, and Umphrey McGee's Mantis. This line-up of 2009's veritable rejects shames the line-ups of recent years, with maybe an exception or two. Within time these albums will get their opportunity to introduce themselves to me properly, and I will review them year, but until then I will stick with reviewing the albums that I am as a familiar with as my own anatomy. Put no stock in the order these albums are in, as it means nothing; these are simply listed in the same order they happen to be in the iTunes playlist I made to mark this wonderful year in music.

Ben Folds
Ben Folds Presents: University Acapella!

Here is the first album that never graced my list, surprisingly enough considering it's Ben Folds or, more accurately, acapella covers of covers, including a couple by Folds himself. After one of the many reformats my computer has had to go through this year I was going about recouping my music and in my search for the Ben Folds/Ben Folds Five albums of note the album showed up and the title is the sort that catches your attention. I mean, it has an exclamation mark! The only punctuation that is more eye catching is the interrobang, the name of which alone is eye catching.

Naturally, I was skeptical of an album of university choirs singing acapella versions of Ben Folds hits. Part of me was worried this would be Van Canto all over again, except instead of covers of Metallica full of comical vocal versions of guitars ("Chugga chugga") the album would have more subdued hilarity due to the stripped down nature of most of Ben Folds music.

But, wouldn't you know it, this album takes Ben Folds songs and gives them that infectious brand of acapella heard in Lionel Richie's "Don't Worry, Be Happy." That is, minus the lyrics that make you want to send a drillbit through your ear canal, through your skull, and into your brain. Unlike with Van Canto, where the feeble attempts at vocal representations of guitar licks were painfully obvious (and altogether painful), the vocal representations of Ben Folds chaotic piano playing are not intrusive. It was not until I listened more attentively that I could separate the luscious acapella covers into their parts and discern which was meant to play the part of Ben Folds' driving piano melody. Each cover is beautifully layered, like Devin Townsend's music with his patented wall-of-sound technique; no layer takes center stage and/or drowns out the other layers, although listeners undoubtedly find themselves paying particular attention to the lyrics more than anything else (but that is to be expected).

Not a dull moment can be found on this album with each song representing a Ben Folds classic. Two songs from his latest album, Way to Normal, even snuck their way onto the album with Ben Folds being the one giving them the attention they deserve with his personal acapella renditions.

Admittedly, University Acapella! is a mood album of sorts. As with any album as unique as it there is the potential for it to wear on you because of its uniqueness. That said, the album still deserves a listen from any fan of acapella and/or Ben Folds/Ben Folds Five.

Days Before Tomorrow
The Sky is Falling

More often than not the bands that send the Mike Portnoy forum into a tizzy are not all they're made up to be. Even if the band lives up to the set expectations in the least they still fall short of being anything all that revolutionary. Last year, for example, Seventh Wonder's Mercy Falls was played up to be a unique prog album for the ages; however, while it cannot be denied that the vocalist has pipes, the concept of this particular concept album was dull, plagued by horrible voice actors, and the music does not strike me as anything new or extraordinary. If it were not for Mercy Falls' ballads, and the soaring performance of the vocalist, Tommy Karevik, I am almost certain I would have passed over it without a second listen.

Days Before Tomorrow, like Seventh Wonder, made noise on the forum with a concept album of its own, theirs being science fiction and, thus, more intriguing and unique, at least to me. Little did I know that it would be the first of two epic science fiction concept albums that I would encounter this year. But that I will get into later.

The overwhelming opinion was that Days Before Tomorrow sounded reminiscent of Styx. Not being familiar at all with the band, I cannot confirm or deny that. What I can say about Days Before Tomorrow's sound is that the album has shades of Rush, except with a notable Neo-Prog tinge to those shades.

No differently than with Seventh Wonder, upon first listening to Days Before Tomorrow you are first taken aback by the vocalist, Eric Klein, yet that is where the similarities end. Klein, unlike Karevik, does not simply fall in line with the usual suspects of prog metal frontmen - the general operatic type - but rather has a unique voice and style. He still posses an impressive range, but never breaks into the screachy upper register most prog metal singers like to utilize to varying effects. Though there is one instance where Klein belts it out, his voice still not losing its clear quality, as best he can and it instantly became my favorite moment on the album.

All in all, the album has an impeccably clean sound without sounding over-produced and I cannot say enough about it.

The Decemberists
The Hazards of Love

Odd to see a band I am so fond of performing on The Colbert Report. Sure, Rush has performed on the show, but Rush never clicked for me on that great a level. My interest is still as much a passing one as when I only knew and avidly listened to "Tom Sawyer." Also, every trip to Giant Eagle is not complete without hearing at least one song of theirs on the store radio. Rarely am I not perplexed by a band's popularity nowadays, but The Decemberists, like Muse and Dream Theater, have broken into the mainstream against all odds. For that alone I respect and admire them. Their tenacity is admirable.

Now The Hazards of Love was the first of what would be many concept albums that overtook my listening. Regrettably, it fell out of favor pretty quickly once albums began to stockpile, including my potential album of the year, Ki. No matter. Here is a concept album that feels cohesive without becoming samey. Instead of growing tiring as a result of repetition, the album's motifs are a welcome return to what has come before, serving to tie the album together seamlessly, often as wonderously utilized interludes.

On my first listen through I was underwhelmed by the album (or should we say whelmed as it means the same thing) but the more I listened to it the more it gripped me. Casual listeners likely won't gleam much from the album. As a result, my suggestion is to pay close attention to "The Rake's Song," most notably the lyrics. Either The Decemberists' penchant for making sensitive topics, infanticide in this case, nearly comic, or at least entertaining, will hook you, as it did me, or not. Ambition, as I noted when speaking of University Acapella!, can be a terrible crux, meaning this unique amalgam of influences (folk, mainly) with its quirky concept (the concept gets its start with a maiden being ravished by a shapeshifting demon) and remarkable cohesiveness could as easily strike a listener as brilliant as it could as something else entirely, possibly pretentious or overblown. Here's to (hopefully) seeing that the masses do have some sense now and again.

Devin Townsend Project
Ki

For those unfamiliar with Devin Townsend, he is a bipolar Canadian multi-instrumentalist that popularized the skullet. Look that up if you are blissfully unaware, no one's stopping you, though I would not specify Devin Townsend. Devin is not what we would call a man blessed with the looks to match his talent; artists in the rock genre usually are not blessed with the looks that sell so many records. If musicians had to vie for the public's attention in some sort of quasi-beauty contest, rock would become extinct in record time. However, Devin's image, at best, is exacerbated by his quirky looks. They become part of the package that includes an odd sense of humor, most prevelant in his album Ziltoid the Omniscient which is about an omniscient alien that comes to Earth in search of the finest cup of coffee, then raises Hell and enslaves the human race when the caffeinated beverage they give him is subpar. "Fetid, foul, how dare you present this to me, Ziltoid the Omniscient."

All of Devin's idiosyncrasies take a backseat to the music on Ki. Prior to starting up the Devin Townsend Project he disbanded The Devin Townsend Band and Strapping Young Lad, mostly to allow himself more time to spend with his new son, Reyner Illiam Townsend. Before being officially dissolved, Strapping Young Lad was, as Devin put it, contrived, fake. SYL came into being as an outlet for Devin's frustration. The depressive side of this manic depressive. To match the headspace he was in during the writing of the first two albums he went so far as to string himself out on drugs and alcohol; he simply was sans angst, having to fake it to fulfill the five album deal SYL had with the record company.

The end result of SYL's demise is seen most clearly on Ki, arguably Devin's most subdued (non-ambient) album. Devin doesn't let his vocal range go to waste, still showing he can scream and growl with the best of them, but, like Opeth's latest, Watershed, Ki is mostly mellow. Present as always is Devin's wall-of-sound (known to his fans as the wall-of-Devys), but in this instance it is not the onslaught on the senses that it was on previous albums. Every instrument is given a chance to breathe and resonate. Rather than enlisting either Ryan Van Poodren of the defunct DTB or Gene Hoglan of SYL fame, a master of the blast beat, Devin goes a surprising route: Duris Maxwell, an elderly gentleman with more groove than chops. Even considering all of this, Ki still has its moments of brilliance, be them reigned in or not. The title track builds up to a terribly satisfying crescendo. "Trainfire," a strange little song about what you'd least expect (porn obsession/addiction) works in spite of being jarring, out-of-touch with the album's overall sound. And Che Dorval's vocals provide the perfect counterbalance for Devin's, ranging anywhere from carrying on where Devin left off to being the antithesis of Devin's vocals, resulting in the vocals of both Devin and herself being set off from each other in a great way.

Ki is an album perfect for exposing the masses to the never ordinary Devin Townsend. Gone are all the usual distractions, enjoyable as they may be, resulting in an album that presents Devin not as the comedian or the manic depressive metal God, but as the consumate professional and musician. His singing and guitar playing shine, and he masterfully holds back, never quite giving in to the temptation to tip back into SYL range, and oftentimes, as is the case here, when a musician knows how to simplify without sacrificing quality it is the mark of a true musician.

Dream Theater
Black Clouds & Silver Linings

After hearing the album's first single, "A Rite of Passage," unedited, I must admit my unnaturally high (given the album that preceded it, Systematic Chaos) expectations for the album plumetted. What was most unnatural, I must say, is that the edited version of, "A Rite of Passage," outclassed the unedited version by a wide margin, remedying the one and only song I had any issue with.

Dream Theater albums are generally not without their faults, instrumental wanking being the worst and most common. Black Clouds & Silver Linings too has such faults, but those faults seem minor in this case.

"A Nightmare to Remember" has some of Mike Portnoy's best drumming and it took me little more than a couple listens to come to terms with his growls near the end of the song.

"A Rite of Passage" becomes a song once more with the exclusion of the unnecessary and gaudy solos.

"Wither," the lone non-epic on the album, is on par with Dream Theater's best ballads.

"The Shattered Fortress," the final song in the Alcoholics Anonymous Suite, rehashes the previous songs, all the while tweaking what it rehashes and sprinkling the song with new material. Even if it doesn't work all too well by itself, that was not its purpose.

"The Best of Times" is probably Dream Theater's most emotional song and the longest period of time the band has gone without trading solos and the like.

"The Count of Tuscany," though a bit disjointed, with two halves more or less separate slapped together, and the quality of its lyrics is questionable, and yet it more than makes up for it with the musical ground it covers. LaBrie takes subpar lyrics and makes them gleam, that voice of his sounding more like a fine tuned instrument than ever before.

With Dream Theater you know what you're going to get anymore. Quality is variable, but the essence of the music remains the same. Dream Theater is a band comfortable in their own skins doing what they do: record, release, tour in support of the release, jump back into the studio, wash, repeat. At their age, this dog won't do any new tricks or even ones it tried once: bring in a new set of ears to refine the album or let an album develop over the years, going through trial by fire during its development in concert ("A Change of Seasons"). All that said, while the package never changes its colors, what is found contained therein goes through enough change to at least continue listening and enjoying the band's output at the same time as you mourn the departure of the Dream Theater that used to be and still should be (Images & Words, Awake, Scenes from a Memory).

dredg
The Pariah, the Parrot, The Delusion

Here we encounter the loosest concept record of the group. PPD has no telltale thread that brings it all together under one obvious header. If that were the case then it would not be PPD. Variety rules it, through and through. Variety and the best lyrical output from the band yet.

"Oh, delusions
Are meant to justify the things we do

Oh, delusions
Never really qualified as an excuse"

Maybe, just maybe, I am a tad biased. PPD has become, in essence, the soundtrack for the novel I am hard at work on currently, Autumn and The Fall. If all goes according to plan snippets of dredg's poignant lyrical offerings will find themselves interspersed throughout the story, the one above prefacing the work and serving as a succinct summation of it. First I must finish the story, get the band's permission, find an agent, and get published, but that's all too far in the future to be concerned with at the moment.

What I am concerned with is this album. Like so many other albums this year, the first listen through did not leave me shocked and/or awed, simply complacent. Happy with the experience, but not about to go off on a tangent in which I scream my praises of the band to the hilltops and beyond. Singles previously released via the free Coachella concert download were just as much like musical crack as the first hundred times (approximation of how many times I listened to "Saviour" on my iPod; the playcount must have befuddled Last.FM because it never scrobbled any of the plays onto my profile). I gave it the good college try, running through it every now and again, but it wasn't until I immersed myself in the album, listening to it on my iPod, that it clicked. Or perhaps it was getting my hands on a lossless copy of the album, rather than a measly 192 kbps. No matter what did it, PPD successfully coupled Catch Without Arms' accessibility with El Cielo and Leitmotif's experimentation in the perfect package.

dredg is without a doubt a band that always seems to be balancing precariously on the brink of fame, but never falls onto that double edged sword. PPD should, in a perfect world, impale them on that blade.

Jordan Rudess
Notes on a Dream

Dream Theater fans and Dream Theater detractors lament the departures of former keyboardists Derek Sherinian and Kevin Moore to this day, wishing to have Kevin Moore's ear for emotion or Derek Sherinian's combination of Moore's emotion with Rudess' technical ability back. Seems Jordan took offense, because Notes on a Dream is made up largely of "covers" of songs from the Sherinian and Moore eras of Dream Theater with the flourishes Jordan is known for. Notes on a Dream oozes emotion, maintaining enough to keep the Dream Theater ballads recognizable while adding his own input, both showing what makes him unique and what puts him on the same level as the other two.

Jordan got his start as a piano prodigy, entering the hallowed halls of Juilliard at the age of nine. This Dream Theater fans often forget. He has taken pains to state that he feels a little out of his realm in Dream Theater's heavier material. Notes on a Dream is a piano album on which Jordan seems to channel the classical composers he learned his craft playing.

Be you a Dream Theater fan or a Jordan Rudess fan, Notes on a Dream is a gateway album for both.

Kalisia
Cybion

Eight years. Kalisia did not waste that time crafting this masterpiece of a sci-fi concept album. They went so far as to hire outside help to create a new language, albeit used very sparingly, for the album, lending further credence to the work. Future bands should take note of Cybion. Songs were released prior to Cybion, yes, that much is true, but they were more previews of things to come, Cybion in particular, than stand-alone tracks. Patience is said to be a virtue and it is one that is extremely beneficial in the music industry; no reviewer has had so much as one biting remark for Kalisia and what might as well be their debut album, Cybion.

Best described by me as the love child of Between the Buried and Me and Ayreon (ironically so given the guest performance of Arjen Lucassen, the mind behind Ayreon), Cybion is a diversified modern-day sci-fi epic on par with any other album of its kind. Guest artists galore aid Kalisia on their path to whatever constitutes stardom in France. Aside from Arjen, Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy and Paul Misvadal of Cynic lend their musical talents to the album, with Angela being most prevelant, heard on nearly every track. Andy Sneap, the acclaimed producer of Nevermore's This Godless Endeavor and Dead Heart in a Dead World cleans up any lasting imperfections in the guitar work.

Original music aside, the second disc of the limited edition is a masterpiece in its own right, covering songs of the bands that influenced them most, from Cynic to Dream Theater. Their cover of Dream Theater's "A Fortune in Lies" retains what made the original so popular while making it noticeably a Kalisia track. Moments from multiple Dream Theater songs are transitioned seamlessly through to begin Kalisia's interpretation, and what follows dances back and forth across the line between cover and interpretation, doing so as masterfully as Mikael Akerfeldt transitions between the two sides of Opeth. At times "A Fortune in Lies" sounds like the product of the mother of all Dream Theater cover bands. The rest of the time Kalisia flicks the switch effortlessly and makes "A Fortune in Lies" sound as if it were originally their song, complete with growling vocals, not operatic vocals, and all. It's not so often that the influences a band is most talkative about seem so in line with the band's idenity as Dream Theater was with Kalisia; there is a reason those previously released tracks had people calling them a "death metal version of Dream Theater."

Thus ends my midyear look into the music that has gotten eerily familiar to my ears. Whatever blog entries follow this one will, for your, my readers' sake be infinitely more pithy.

-TJ