I’m not a demanding person. I have simple needs: my wife and kid, something to occupy my (slightly defective) brain, beer tokens, my iPod and a constant supply of new music. Please don’t upset the balance.

In the UK, no-one can hear Cave In scream

It is the final ingredient in this most subtle dish that is making my world pie taste a little sour today. It is important that I hear the new Cave In track Retina Sees Rewind (from the forthcoming EP Planets of Old) that Hydra Head records proudly announced is available, right now, on iTunes. Bloody marvelous, thought I, on hearing this news. Cave in have produced some of the most deftly challenging, commercially orientated music of the past decade. When they disappeared on indefinite hiatus in 2006 we were all sad. When recently they reformed we all cheered.

Cave In have tantalizing talent for reinvention and the question on everyone’s lips is “what will they do next?” Well I’m bloody well going to find out, thought misguided me. Arriving at iTunes I discovered, to my intolerable disdain, that it’s only available to US iTunes users. Steve Jobs you bastard, give me my music! Undeterred, I went on the hunt.

It is a wonderful thing the modern interweb. When I want to hear a track, 95% of the time I can find it, or at least bits of it, even if it’s some dodgy mobile phone recording obscured by some twat telling his mate to “check out the guitarist’s gnarly stack”. Most of the time, some copyright ignorant hoodlum has posted it on Youtube helpful adding a static sleeve scan for our audiovisual entertainment.

But is seems that the tech savvy hoardes are not Cave In savvy. I could not find the track anywhere. I can’t buy, borrow or steal. It’s not up on the musical promotion phenomenon that is Myspace either. Presumably, the limited edition EP will be similarly difficult to obtain. Meanwhile, thousands of smug Americans bask in the song’s glory.

What is going on? I really thought we’d transcended the age where if you wanted to hear the latest Lawnmower Deth track you’d need to get your mate to tape it for you.

The new age of the musical internet is democratic. You listen to new bands/albums/tracks because you can, and you support the bands by seeing them live and actually purchasing their tracks. If you don’t like what you hear, don’t pay. This is how it works now whether the record industry likes it or not. Music spreads like a virus electronically, just as it always did in the real world – this is because music is about connections in our brains, and between people, and has nothing to do with distribution formats.

So given that I am unable to even listen to this track, even once, just a snippet, I can only assume that the internet is broken and that Google will fix it soon. Then I can listen to Retina Sees Rewind and tell you all (both of you unlucky souls who arrived here accidentally) all about it.

Hydra Head assure us that UK  (and I’m presuming international) fans will be graced with this tune’s availability imminently. Too late, but let’s hope it’s not too little.

In the meantime, here’s a bit of the internet that isn’t broken.

Cringeworthy

A bunch of never-had-beens (two from some irrelevant incarnation of the mighty W.A.S.P) formed a band and thought it appropriate to call themselves Five Finger Death Punch – clearly a name chosen from Cringeworthy Band Names For Dummies. The founder member is a bloke named Zoltan Bathory which is obviously not his real name, and if he thinks that using the word ‘bathory‘ will endear him to the snobbish Black Metal fraternity then he’s got another thing coming.

Having heard some Nu-Metal in the 90′s they have set about pretending they hadn’t and have re-created Nu-Metal, which didn’t need doing. There’s some Nu-Goth influence here, and guitar solos (how very modern!) but mainly just posturing, pop-metal nonsense.

Over produced, over styled, over the hill.

http://www.last.fm/music/Five+Finger+Death+Punch/_/The+Bleeding

Struggling to keep up with Metallica‘s creative frenzy – 3 devastatingly original and critically lauded albums – and failing to live up to former glories of the genre defining Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying?, in 1990 Dave Mustaine finally managed to assemble the dream team and record the album of their career, and the first great metal album of the 90′s.

Thrash Metal - serious business

Rust in Peace is a pounding epic of fiercely technical speed metal displaying some of the best musical prowess seen in the genre. As guitar solos go, there’s many to choose from. Mustaine enlisted solo guitar prodigy Marty Friedman to great effect sparring from one guitar duel to the next. The guitar is king here – indeed, track 2, Hangar 18, is practically all guitar solo.

It is Friedman who has the finest moment on the exhilarating Tornado of Souls. Unlike many metal solos, which  often trade-in melody for technical trickery or brute force, there is beauty and subtlety here, and it is the very heart of the song. Often cited as one Friedman’s best solos, it’s probably one of the best ever recorded.

If I had to sum up my thoughts on last night’s Mastodon gig at the O2 Islington Academy in less than 5 words, they would be “It is not cool”. Allow me to elaborate.

Mastodon't

When Iron Maiden, touring to promote their (admittedly excellent) album A Matter of Life and Death they played the whole album, note for note, in its entirety from the beginning of the gig. That was not cool. However, in the fullness of time we forgave the Maiden their misdemeanor as, as they rightly put it, they had earned the right, after 2 and a half decades, to play their prized and critically acclaimed new album from start to finish live, should they so wish. Or to put it another way “we are Iron Maiden, and we can do what we want, so f*ck off!”. Fair enough as they did conclude the gig with some time honoured classics, but it still spoilt my enjoyment of the gig.

When The Mars Volta did the same thing, on their debut tour, celebrating their debut album, it was also not cool. But in fullness of time we learned to forgive them as, at that point it was the only material that they had ever recorded. They could have jumbled up the order a bit to make things a bit more exciting, but Deloused in the Comatorium was a concept album which threads a narrative, so playing it out of order would have seemed a little strange.  Fair enough, and the quivering afros did enhance the entertainment value somewhat.

When Metallica chose to perform their seminal album Master Of Puppets (1986) while on tour in 2008, this was cool. This album had earned its right to be performed in its entirety live. I would have killed to have seen that.

When, last night, Mastodon decided it would be appropriate to perform their (admittedly excellent) album Crack in the Skye in its entirety (I can only assume as I left half way through track 6) IT WAS NOT COOL! It still is NOT COOL. Neither band nor album had earned that right, and they had plenty of other astounding musical ditties to choose from.

You see, live music is all about spontaneity. If I want to listen to an album I can stick it on my iPod anytime and listen to it. I can even jumble up the order so I don’t know what’s coming next. I don’t need to spend 15 quid to breath in other people’s sweat and queue at the bar for overpriced beer – I just put my headphones on. Unpredictability cannot, and should not be taken for granted. Part of the mystique of the live experience hoping, nay praying that they play your most prized track, watching the clock thinking closing time is drawing uncomfortably near. Will it come as part of the encore? Will there be explosions or and extended space jam (thank you for this many times Queens of the Stone Age)?  Sculpting a set list is a different discpline than putting together an album’s running order. Knowing the setlist of AC/DC’s phenomenal gig at the O2 arena earlier this year actually detracted from my enjoyment of it, despite the fact that they always play the same stuff.

Hear me now Mastodon (or should that be Mastodon’t), it is NOT cool!

I can only thank Valient Thorr, last night’s support, for an electrifying and highly amusing performance in which the songs were in a random order and from multiple albums. Your beards are truly inspirational. Valient Thorr, that IS cool.

(1.5)

What do you mean track 7 doesn't sound like you expected it to?

I always derive a noodle of amusement when bands announce the title of their forthcoming album. Usually a couple of weeks after announcing the impending glorious advent, which came a few months after they embarked on the booze addled studio sessions. What are we to make of this tantalizing tidbit of information?

For example, Dillinger Escape Plan recently announced that the title of their new studio album to be “Option Paralysis”.  Being in the unenviable position of not having heard this audio treat, I can only speculate on what this means. Fanboys out there will cling on to this tiny slither of information using it to derive a sense of what the new album will sound like. It seems clear to me that the clue is in the title; the title of the band that is. This is TDEP – it’ll sound like a troupe of free form jazz musicians being kicked in the face. Although ever obstinate they are, it has a similar probability of being a Justin Timberlake covers album.

Something that will no doubt tantalize the metal community is the announcement that the new Slayer album will contain the word “blood”. Does this mean that it will be a return to form of the seminal Reign in Blood? Who knows, although it’s about an exiting piece of news as hearing that an Iron Maiden album has the word death in it’s title – I will actually be more surprised if the new Maiden album doesn’t!

Next on the new album continuum is the track listing. Now we can speculate on what each and every song sounds like! I think track 3 will be gothic hip-hop, while 7 is clearly a funk-doom-country fusion. It’s slightly less ridiculous than when football fans preciently assert, before the match, that the first goal will half way through the 26th minute. Well obviously! I predict that the ball will be round, there will be very few goals be scored, and that that any given track on the new Slayer album will sound like a runaway tube ride through an abattoir.

Since Faith No More reformed I’ve been musing on whether their legendary status means that I should like them (or at least as much as I did 10 years ago). So I embarked on a audio oddesy, trawling through their back catalogue, to analyse what I really think of them.

Listening to Faith No More is like listening to a mishmash of pretty much all mainstream rock that came after them. This is sometimes a little off putting. For example, there were times when listening to Angel Dust that I felt like I was listening to Linkin Park…eeek! This is not an uncommon problem, and is a testament to their influence. The problem is, a lot of the music that the inspired (not least the turgid rot of Nu-metal) is utter toss. I don’t want to listen to it, or even feel like I’m listening to it!

This is not all bad news. Some of my favourite bands are heavily influenced by Faith No More (The Dillinger Escape Plan for example). Also, due to their effortless ability to churn out stonking tunes, their somewhat less talented offspring are left confounded in their ability to write and record sogs such as Falling to Pieces and A Small Victory.

Conclusion: Faith No More are still ace, even if they have been tarnished by their own success.

Anyway, today’s forgotten tune is off King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime
. Like all the best Faith No More songs, it obstinately doesn’t do what you expect it to:

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