Lemmy - a skew loose?

So we’ve learned that some bands have pretty obsessive fans. It’s nice that they’re listening to a lot of Opeth’s music, but are they just getting gooey over one album or even a single track? Let me demonstrate what I mean at its most extreme – the one hit wonder. This is not a phenomenon that’s particularly prevalent in the metal genre, so we’ll look to the genre most susceptible: pop. When I think of one hit wonders, one track always seems to spring to mind: Deep Blue Something – Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s a nauseating ditty that seems to blight the airwaves still, even 17 years after its release. Let’s see what Deep Blue Something’s last.fm listener profile looks like shall we?

Breakfast at Tiffany's and some other tracks

Oh dear, a staggering 83% of Deep Blue Something’s overall listens were from that one track that you doubtlessly find occasionally looping round in your brain, eating away at your soul. In statistical speak this effect is broadly referred to as Skew or Skewness. According to Wikipedia “In probability theory and statistics, skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable.” Ummm, yes. Put more simply, and in the current context, if folks are listening to 1 or 2 songs from a bands catalogue lots, and hardly anything else, then that band’s playcount would be considered to be skewed. In last.fm circles, the calculation for this is often referred to as AEP (I won’t bore you with what it means, other than it’s a fairly arbitrary statistical calculation) which gives an indication of skew across a band’s top 50 tracks. The AEP is a value of between 0 and 5 that indicate skewness, where 5 is not skewed at all (all tracks listened to exactly that same amount of times) and 0 (or less) is very skewed. Thanks to that wretched track, Deep Blue Something’s AEP is -13 (yes minus 13), compared to, to pick another more successful pop act, Michael Jackson, whose AEP is a respectable 2.7.

So, how does my list of metal acts fare in the AEP stakes? Let’s have a look:

So here we see a different picture again. These are very high AEP’s, which indicates that the bands’ top 50 most listened to tracks are listened to a comparable amount of times. What this suggests about a band is that they’re not just a 1 trick pony – their fans love a wide variety of their tracks rather than listening to just a couple before moving on. Predictably, In Flames make a reappearance, Opeth remain strong, and we all knew that Devin Townsend fans were an obsessive bunch (this incidentally, doesn’t include all the numerous variations on Townsend’s solo band names, or SYL, who are #32 in this list). This is a respectable list – Neurosis, Tool, Cathedral, all at the top of their game and widely respected, and there’s a real mix of genres here. Perhaps this is a demonstration of a quality all round band, no filler. Albums bands, career artists.

This may all be true, but things get a lot more interesting, and confusing, if we consider the other end of my (far from exhaustive) list:

Yeah, a bunch of flash in the pan, one hit wonders – non-players. Oh wait…those would actually be some of the most revered and respected bands in the rock/metal arena! What went wrong? I’ll give you 5 reasons: Smells Like Teen Spirit, Crazy Train, Paranoid, Black Hole Sun and last, but by no means least, Ace of Spades. If you don’t know exactly what those 5 labels refer to, then you must have been living in a cave for the past 40 years. Now, for many of these bands, these tracks are the worst, but not the only, offender (Come as You Are is a close second for Nirvana for example), but each bands have significant skew thanks to these BIG hits in their back catalogue, something that few of our least skewed acts have. So we’re still missing a dimension here…

Let’s take Mötorhead, who are skewed into minus numbers by their ‘classic’ (quoted as Lemmy doesn’t reckon it’s their best track) Ace of Spades. Now, as we saw earlier, Breakfast at Tiffiny’s accounts for 83% of DBS’s overall listens, so what of Ace of Spades? Well, it clocks in at a modest 10% of Mötorhead overall listens. So where are all the other listens going? Well, remember that AEP is calculated across a band’s top 50 tracks, so the majority of listens of Mötorhead’s tracks must be happening outside of their top 50. Given Mötorhead’s rich and voluminous back catalogue this is hardly surprising.

So, there’s another calculation that will tell us which bands benefit from this sort of listener attention, it’s called the Long Tail and we’ll discuss this in the next article.

Related articles:

A long tail of a critical discrepancy

Numbers of the Beast #1: Love you long time

last.fm's top metal artists

In this digital age of seemingly infinite choice of music that’s easy to access and at low cost (or free) it would easy to assume that the music listening masses would broaden their horizons a little. The Long Tail economy surely applies to music as much if not more than any other popular media. Not so according to various sales and download figures which suggest that in the current market, music sales are showing a higher propensity to the more popular tracks/artists than they did 5 years ago. There are various possible reasons for this (the paradox of choice, pack mentality, an explosion in poor taste) and it would be easy to dismiss this as this as mere statistics, but with recording artists struggling to cover costs and labels slashing rosters the harsh reality is only too obvious for some. What’s even more depressing is that there’s evidence in the movie and book worlds higher selling items often get better reviews, even when they suck. This is a known phenomenon:

In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

Could this be the same for music and more specifically metal? My apparent snobbishness leads me to automatically assume that it doesn’t. Metal is a hugely diverse genre, and metal fans, despite being somewhat cliquey, are a diverse and contrary bunch who positively revel in the lonely outposts of the long tail. But is this really the case? I decided to do a little research on the matter. This lead me on a bit of an odyssey. I’m a closet stats junkie, and I’m easily distracted by trivia, so this is more of a journey than a destination, but I thought I’d share what I found anyway.

So firstly, do metallers show a propensity to rate popular music more highly? I headed off the social review site rateyourmusic.com and pulled the charts for the highest rated metal album of all time.

1. Black Sabbath – Paranoid
2. Metallica – Master of Puppets
3. Black Sabbath – Master of Reality
4. Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath
5. Metallica – Ride the Lightning
6. Megadeth – Rust in Peace
7. Kyuss – Welcome to Sky Valley
8. Tool – Ænima
9. Slayer – Reign in Blood
10. Death – Symbolic
11. Opeth – Still Life
12. Opeth – Blackwater Park
13. Tool – Lateralus
14. Iron Maiden – Powerslave
15. Judas Priest – Painkiller

(full chart here)

Now, I’m not going to get into the relative merits or shortcomings of this list, I don’t really agree with it, however it seems reasonable and everything there certainly warrants a mention in the context of the best ever metal albums – there are no real stinkers here. The caveat here is that folks who write reviews on this site will tend to be self styled ‘critics’ rather than the casual listeners.

So, how does that compare to what people actually listen to. I pulled a (somewhat patchy) chart of overall listens of metal bands from last.fm.

Well, that’s a bit of a difference! Only 4 of the critics’ choice bands appear in the top 20 most listened. This is far from scientific, but it would seem that (Metallica excepted) metallers have a somewhat different perspective on what they think is of ‘quality’ and what they actually listen to. Clear critical favourites and genre instigators Black Sabbath are right down the rankings with 32,298,137 listens, lower even than perennial noughties favourites Opeth with 35,744,109 listens. And what’s with Korn in the top 15, I really didn’t think anyone seriously listened to them any more. And Nightwish? Really? The European influence I guess.

There’s quite a few caveats around this list, for example last.fm attract a certain demographic that’s perhaps not universally representative, plus song length will play a part (you can listen to 4 AC/DC songs in the time it takes to listen to 1 of Opeth’s), and this is last.fm’s lifetime list, so more established bands are more likely to appear, but it’s still indicative.

Anyway, I couldn’t make last.fm give me any data on overall lifetime listening stats for the metal genre, so calculating the long tail was impossible, and by now I was being distracted by the list I had compiled, and its various curiosities. For example, why the hell are In Flames so high? I realise they’re a pretty influential band, but they’re above Iron Maiden for gawd’s sake! The answer to this conundrum is in the listener figures. If you divide the total listens per band by the listeners you get a rough indication of listens per user. Order list by this value and you get a somewhat different picture.

As you can see, certain bands have more modest numbers of ‘fans’ with a propensity to listen to their music a hell of a lot. In Flames fans seem particularly enthusiastic about the band’s music. You’ll notice also that the list is considerably less ‘commercial’ with the likes of AC/DC, Slipknot and System of a Down disappearing from the top 10. This is explained when you look at the track play volume profiles of In Flames vs AC/DC:

In Flames

AC/DC

The slope on the AC/DC is much more pronounced. Essentially, many more people are listening to a much smaller selection of AC/DC tracks, probably hitting Back in Black in their collection every so often, amongst Lady GaGa or U2. In Flames fans listen to a much greater selection of tracks, and probably favour albums over single tracks, thus driving the overall play count per listener up.

What’s also curious is that Black Sabbath, who dominate the critics album list, have a somewhat low plays per listener count of 27. Coming into this with no knowledge of the Sabbath you may assume, on viewing the critics’ list, that  they are an albums band, which is true to an extent, however, Sabbath’s profile is insanely skewed towards Paranoid and Iron Man which suggests that they attract a lot of casual listeners:

Anyway, I could noodle about with figures and stats all day, but where is this getting us? Well, we could surmise that the critics and fans aren’t really in agreement when it comes to voting with their feet. This is also evident in the public arena – Terrorizer Magazine’s albums of 2009 put Converge and Cobalt at the top and Behemoth somewhere in the 30′s, whereas the fan survey put Behemoth at the top of almost every category. On the other hand, Metalsucks famously triggered a minor insurgency when their poll of the top 21 albums of the 21st century – voted for by critics, bands and industry types – was mauled by their more discerning readership.

I’m really keen to understand whether metal is a long tail genre in comparison to, for example, Pop which I assume is by definition a populist genre, but decent stats are hard to come by. It’s a murky picture and one that dominated by dodgy data, countless caveats, spurious statistics, cliques and fraternities, but my quest will continue, to understand what makes the metal world tick.

I’ve no doubt that Matt Pike and team occasionally partake in the odd herbal pleasure, but stoner band they ain’t. Yes, Snakes for the Divine may contain monstrous, dowtuned riffs aplenty and an obvious debt to Sabbath but there’s so much more here.

Largely eschewing the progish meanderings of Death is the Communion, Snakes is a much more meat and veg metal affair, and my my does it work – it’s immense! High on Fire didn’t really change as a band, they just got faster and more aggressive, galloping gleefully between caustic stoner (Bastard Samurai) and unapologetic thrash (Ghost Neck) effortlessly working in guitar solos and the even the odd reference to Maiden. The polished production really shows the shine of the scales underneath and is what immediately distinguishes it from the both the stoner crowd as well as High on Fire’s previously releases. Pike’s growl cuts Dalek-like through the wall of guitar/bass roar. Purists will chastise them for distancing themselves from their stoner roots, but this has the distinct air of a band becoming its true self

This may well find High on Fire their deserved wider audience and 2 months into 2010 we find our first diamond in the rough.

I’ve spoken about those “why didn’t anyone tell me about this band before?” moments that are actually, “I was told, but I just wasn’t paying enough attention”. The last time was Baroness, this time it’s a band very much of their ilk – Welsh rockers Taint. It’s perhaps a symptom of the fact that I’m by default deeply suspicious of melodic rock (no matter how heavy), especially if it comes from punkish roots (see this thread that goes some way to explaining why). I’m so easily bored by the stuff as it’s so often disposable and shallow. At a quick pass Taint could be bundled into the once glorious but now eternally soiled sub-genre uncomfortably labelled post-hardcore. Taint however are a different beast entirely, and All Bees to the Sea is the very case in point.

Taint clearly have a keen ear for melody. All Bees to the Sea, comprising of 4 tracks, is immediate in that sense. However, rather than shelter in cookie cutter naval gazing like much of the rest of the modern post-punk crowd, Taint have clearly been bathing in the sludge-groove experimentation of the likes of Baroness and Mastodon. These 4 razor sharp tracks display a deceptive amount of complexity that never overshadows the melodic punch. There’s a psychedelic air that at times evokes the spirit of 90’s psych-punk underdogs Warrior Soul, others the post-hardcore of Prong or Helmet. However, the EP’s true Baroness inflected beauty comes to fruition on the 12 minute prog-out that is the title track – super-sized and utterly satisfying.

All this in four songs – it’s quite remarkable. All Bees to the See is the sound of a band enjoying themselves and really flexing their creative muscle – I can’t wait to hear what they come out with next!

It may not be very metal to admit this, but I’ll pretend to be kvlt and not give a f*ck what you think – I go running several times a week. It’s a pastime that I actually quite enjoy. I do it as much for getting rid of anger and aggression as the calories I accrue from regular consumption of booze and lard, and for this reason heavy music is the perfect accompaniment to this solitary activity.

However, not any old heavy music will do for a good power jog. I listen to music while running for several reasons:

1. Distraction – it really helps me to forget about any pain or exhaustion and get into the meditative state
2. Noise – I find hearing my own breathing is a real reminder of the energy I’m expending which makes it feel more taxing
3. Passing the time – simply, it makes the time pass more quickly
4. Keeping rhythm and pace – it’s this I want to discuss in more detail

The music best suited for running needs to be a fairly constant, driving mid-tempo. This is because I tend to subconsciously match my pace to the beat of the music. Too slow and the effect is lost, and I generally find slows me down overall. Too fast and I risk tiring myself out too quickly, or simply not being able to match the pace. So Cathedral’s Forest Equilibrium is out, as is Slayer’s Angel of Death. Also, a very changeable tempo renders the overall effect useless. Subtle tempo shifts across longer tracks, or between tracks are very welcome (especially if you’re doing aerobic/anaerobic alternation), but spazzy stuff like Grindcore or the constant ebb and flow of Opeth is simply not up to the job, no matter how much I like it at any other time.

The other attribute I find helps immeasurably is aggression. Yes I could stick on a dance mix and achieve roughly the same effect with regards to tempo, but nothing beats balls to the wall angst to get you pounding the pavement.

What I’ve discovered is punk/hardcore is great for running to, as well as standard old school heavy metal and some hard/classic rock. Avoid anything drone or extremely down tempo and most doom, stoner, death, black.

Here’s my playlist for a 25 – 30 minute power jog. I start off slightly down tempo to get warmed up, and slowly wind up – this is how I like to structure my run (I find it easier to push myself at the end when the endorphins are flowing). The idea is to match your footfall to the tempo of the track.

The moderate start

High on Fire – Fury Whip

Ghost of a Thousand – Bright Lights

The mid-paced midsection

The Dillinger Escape Plan – Milk Lizard

Refused – Summerholidays vs Punk Routine

The sprint to the finish

Carcass – Heartwork

Black Sabbath – Neon Knights

(Disclaimer: I’m neither a fitness expert nor a personal trainer. I accept no responsibility for any damage you may do to yourself while using this playlist during recreational exercise. If you’re not an experienced runner, you should probably try and find other tracks of a similar tempo to tracks 1 and 2)

If anyone else has any recommendations of songs to run to then please let me know!

Revocation’s hype stateside has failed to translate into a particularly big splash either side of the Atlantic. Their confusing mix of thrash/death and guitar god faux-eclecticism may go some way to explaining this. Broken into its constituent parts it’s very convincing indeed, and perhaps this is why Cosmo Lee mistook them for “the next great metal band” – they may well be at some point, but they ain’t there yet.

There’s some riffery to die for here driving some brutal thrash that will turn the head of even the most sceptical. But from beneath the maelstrom seeps a latent melody that sets them apart from the Death pack, although it’s often flattened by unsubtle sub-death vocals – competent, but perhaps the least impressive part of Revocation’s armoury.

Then there’s the godlike guitar virtuosity from new kid on the block David Davidson who any point he sounds like Satriani, Petrucci, Vai, Bettencourt (yes, you heard me right) among others, each with their respective stylistic ensemble. This is lovely, it really is. However, on too many occasions these virtuoso passages are clumsily tacked on the end of, or shoved into the middle of songs that they have no right to be in. Occasionally this works, but for the most part it just makes you think “That’s really cool, but why did you put it there?” This is not a merging of styles, it’s different songs being clumsily selotaped together, and it’s just a distraction from the main event – state of the art metal.

I commend Revocation’s efforts to do something different, however it just doesn’t hold together. Davidson needs to go exorcise his frustrated guitar god and make a solo album, then concentrate on making Revocation the great band they could be.

I’m not ready to publish my top 10 albums yet – I have to torture myself over this for a little while yet, plus there’s some bits and pieces that I’ve not heard yet that I wish to hear before making my choice.

These are my favourite tracks recorded this year as they stand right now. I have no doubt that this will change within minutes of me hitting publish, but I’ve got to stick a stake in the ground somewhere. They are in no particular order, as attempting to do so would certainly prove too much for my fragile musical sensibilities.

Here we go:

• Pelican – Glimmer (What We All Come To Need) – A gorgeous instrumental slow burner
• Om – Thebes (God is Good) – Hypnotic, epic, looooong
• Alice in Chains – Looking in View (Black Gives Way to Blue) – Like being sat on by a house
• The Devil’s Blood – The Anti-Kosmic Magik (The Time of No Time Evermore) – A guitar duel to die for
• The Devin Townsend Project – Heaven Send (Ki) – Wacky, but in a mature way
• Griftegard – Charles Taze Russell (Solemn Sacred Severe) – The album title pretty much describes this perfectly
• Photonic – Customer Loyalty (Recorded Contact) – Randomness from New Zealand
• Mastodon – The Czar (Crack in the Skye) – Epic, schizophrenic, progressive and loud
• Middle Class Rut – I Guess You Could Say (25 Years EP) – It’s shallow but cheerful
• No Made Sense – The Epillanic Chorigi (The Epillanic Chorigi) – Neurosis style progressive heaviness

Notable omissions:

Various other tracks from both Black Gives Way to Blue, Recorded Contact and Crack in the Skye could have made it in there, but I didn’t want to clutter it with multiple tracks from a single band. Baroness’s Blue Record deserves a mention – as a whole it’s a brilliant album, but individually none of the tracks stood out enough to warrant inclusion. Other top tracks include:

Lamb of God – Reclamation
Extreme – Run
Pixie Lott – Boys and Girls
Dycian Maze – The Hand Inside
TrippyWicked – Movin On

This is all very nice, but the fact is, I’ve had a year of musical discovery, so much of the stuff that I’ve loved this year wasn’t recorded this year, which is why I don’t feel very satisfied with this list…but I’ll save those for another post.

Calling British three piece TrippyWicked doom seems a little beside the point. Here there be big riffs, a singer that sounds like Ozzy bathed in the fountain of youth and given back his balls, and thundering laid back grooves. However, TrippyWicked & the Cosmic Children of the Knight (to use their full, somewhat silly, name) conjure the true spirit of early Sabbath – heavy heavy blues. The exclusion of pre-requisite occult posturing really slots this more into stoner territory, and indeed the spirit of Sleep and Monster Magnet lurks within these giant slabs of bluesy rock.

With monstrous, down-tuned riffs and melodic hooks aplenty, this presents a lighter, more mundane (in the lyrical sense) side of Doom. Indeed, at times TrippyWicked could be mistaken for a pure blues band, but creative flourishes like the brass section on Southern set them apart from either genre.

This is impressive stuff for a debut and is all the more so given that Movin On is entirely self released (check out this article on their blog for some tips on doing this). So lighten up brethren of doom, and allow TrippyWicked to introduce themselves.

Listen on Myspace

Buy on TrippyWicked.com

Supergroup. Say it out loud “Supergroup”. Does that word leave a bitter taste in your mouth? So many enterprises of exquisite promise, so much shattered hope. Approach all supergroups with scepticism, you say, and rightly so.

So is (Wino+Om+Neurosis+Melvins) > (Wino+Om+Neurosis+Melvins)? That remains to be seen, however it does add up to a stoner/doom/post-rock/prog party to which we should all turn up and revel. Shrinebuilder is a real meeting of minds. The various styles weave in and out of each other and melt, blend and bend to fit a new mould that overall is not quite any of them. It is at times, however, each of them. With Wino, Kelly and Cisneros all taking turns on the mic, you sometimes feel like you’re listening to 3 different bands, often in the same song.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t hang together. Some how they’ve made it sound like these 3 wildly different styles belong together. Underpinned by Cisneros’s hypnotic bass, and sheened with Neurosis style atmospherics and post-hardcore aggression, Wino’s trademark psychedelic guitars drive us through this eerie landscape. However, it’s the southern tinged post-rock soundscapes that really define the sound here so it transcends the component parts.

Almost a genre it itself, this is a singular debut and delivers the sort of quality and creativity that you’d expect from such an influential posse. It’s still too much of a sketch to really be the collective masterwork that these guys should be capable of, but if there’s a sense that Shrinebuilder are still finding their feet with this first offering, I absolutely can’t wait to see what happens when they do.

Buy on Amazon

Listen on Myspace

I found myself recently lecturing a non-metal fan, who harboured a preconception that metal is a narrow and one-dimensional genre, on what a diverse bunch we metalheads are. And boy does this show on this, the first ever Inevitable Nose Metal Mixtape. We have Classic Metal, d-beat punk, brutal thrash, doom, grunge, industrial, and even Nu-Metal.

Despite the overall washed out homogeneity of mainstream metal, the underground once again proves itself diverse and challenging. There’s something for most tastes here and perhaps a little something to broaden your horizons.

All tracks can be streamed in their entirety and most can be downloaded via the Soundcloud media player. Please post comments on what you thought of the tracks as I’m sure all the bands would value your (constrictive) criticism. Also, the Soundcloud player has a commenting function that allows you to comment on particular parts of the song that you liked (or hated).

Anyway, enough of this pointless chatter. Go forth and consume of the mixtape and feel your life infinitely enrichened.

The Inevitable Nose Metal Mixtape Volume 1