Catching up on New Music

Given my complete gap in coverage last year, I'll quickly catch up a few music releases from the last year that I wanted to comment on. 

Dream Theater - Dream Theater - **** 4 Stars

Released last September, this newest album by Dream Theater was named for the band.  I always find this a strange approach for an established artist, but I see that it's rather common when changing labels.

I'm a relatively new fan of Dream Theater, having gotten onboard the bandwagon with the release of A Dramatic Turn of Events.  Since then, I've also purchased their original 1992 Images and Words, as well as Octavarium (2005).

The engineer on this album has a long history working with Rush, and I was quite surprised to find John Myung's bass sounding amazingly like Geddy Lee in a few tracks.  The tone was great, and relatively uncommon, but it kind of threw me.

This new album carries on the tradition of the Dream Theater music without any dramatic changes of approach. The songs are solid, and reminiscent particulary of Images and Words, I think.  The singing is solid, and of course the rest of the musicianship is really great.  In my view, this album is of similar quality to the others... the only one I have liked any better than this is A Dramatic Turn of Events, which I think is a completely amazing album (the rare "5 Stars" from me).

Rush - Clockwork Angels - **** 4 Stars

This album was actually released in 2012, and I had repeatedly seen references suggesting it's a great album... one of their best.  So I finally caught up with it last Christmas.

I liked the whole package quite a lot.  It's consistent and interesting.  The singing and playing is very good across the board.  I found that there were a few quite memorable tunes, particularly including Caravan and Halo Effect.  The title track is memorable, but I'm not convinced I really enjoy it that much.

I haven't nearly owned all the Rush catalog, but have been a longtime fan, and saw them live a number of times in the early 80s.  I have enjoyed a number of their albums, but always felt 2112 was the masterpiece.  I have seen comments suggesting this album rivals 2112, but I don't think it's quite that rich.  I do see the similarities, particularly in terms of it being a concept album (such a rare thing these days).

Overall, I think it's nearly a 4-star album in my rating system.

Ed Sheeran - + - **** 4 Stars

I'm sure I wasn't the last to actually listent to Ed Sheeran, but I took my time looking into his music.  I'd heard of him for awhile, and was seeing on guitar magazines, etc.  In the end, it was pressure from my 13-year-old daughter that got me to buy the album, though the disk is from 2011.  And yeah, disk... bought it on CD.  Go ahead and tell me I should buy vinyl instead.

I was surprised by this "Plus" album (I see it referred to occasionally as "The A Team", which is the first song on the album).  I didn't really have any pre-conception about what his music would be like, as I'm sure I never heard him on the radio (I don't listen often). It's mostly quite subtle... delicate and moving.  Ed's voice is high and he sings with a lovely tone and quite strong English accent in places. It's captivating, and my daughter agreed.

I don't generally buy much in the way of singer-songwriter stuff, but I'd say that's what this is, for the most part. It occasionally builds a decent groove, but most of the songs are downbeat. I particularly like the songs Grade 8, Wake Me Up, and the beautiful song of fatherhood: Small Bump.

Regardless of what sort of music you like, have a listen to "Plus" if you haven't heard it.  I'm glad I did.

Imagine Dragons - Night Visions (Deluxe) - *** 3 Stars

This is another album I bought at the suggestion of my daughter, and it was equally surprising to me, though not quite as inspiring as Ed Sheeran's. At least I'm reviewing a recording released this year!

I had heard one or two singles when I bought this, but hadn't listened much to the band.  I was quite surprised at the solid level of the songs, throughout the album.  The ubiquitous Radioactive is a pretty great song, and in fact I think it identifies the key aspect of the production across the entire album: the heavy drums.  Nearly all the tracks are dominated by really solid and heavy/echo-y drumming.  This brings the music a compelling drive that it might not otherwise manage, but I also found the drums a bit overwhelming.

Good songs, solid playing, and the singing is quite good.  If I had seen the performance on the Grammy Awardsbefore buying, I probably wouldn't have bought the album, but in fact the singing is great and the songs are really enjoyable.  Pop isn't my genre in general, but this album comes with my recommendation anyway.  Will I still be playing it 10 years from now?  Maybe not, but I'll get back to you.

Hopefully that's enough of a "catch-up" and I'll start looking forward to finding some new music to entertain me. In a subsequent post, I'll try to catch up on musical instruments that have come into my life over the past year as well.

Groove onwards...

Moving on...

Wow, I can't believe I let this narrative stagnate for a whole year.  Life is busy.  And then it's not... or at least you think it might not be.

I was recently canned from my employer of 9 years because they're restructuring where the work is done.  Old story, even for me.  However, before my last day there, I and a number of teammates got a renewed lease on life, working for the company in a different product area.  It's a good opportunity for us in a number of ways, so I'm still "there", but it's all new.

As part of moving to this new role, I'm also temporarily working in a different city, far from my family, friends, and bandmates.  An opportunity to explore places, technologies and musical inspiration, and hopefully to spend a bit more time with family who live closer to my new temporary home than to my permanent one.

The new location is Montreal, which is somewhere I worked for more than a year a long long time ago, before I moved to Vancouver. As a fitting first dinner last evening, I had Montreal smoked meat, which was excellent. Montreal is an interesting, ethnicly diverse city, and I'm looking forward to lots of great meals.

I also hope I can find my way around the local music scene, as I also think of Montreal as vibrant in that area. And meanwhile, back in my "bachelor pad", I have a minimal setup for making music, and hope I can make it work well for me.

I've written previously about how I find business travel both frustrating and inspiring.  I expect this experience will be no different, but am looking forward to the inspiring part... there's a LOT of possibilty there. For the rest... hopefully FaceTime will help keep family close.

Music and Lyrics

I meant to write about this pair of new albums from electric bass master Victor Wooten a couple of months ago. This past week, I failed to go see him perform live in Seattle, and I'm disappointed about that. Procrastination mixed with being too busy. In the end, I didn't really want to leave the family for the evening when this overseas trip got added to the mix.

Anyway, Victor concurrently released a pair of albums in September 2012. They form a really interesting concept, by releasing much of the same music in two forms on complementary albums.

Sword and Stone is a mostly instrumental release. Its complement is Words and Tones, which presents mostly the same songs with vocals. Victor points out in interviews that the two titles are formed from the same letters, rearranged.

As an aside, I hadn't seen any mention of this, but when writing this article I realized that Victor is known for playing a Yin/Yang style bass (such as shown at right), and that this pair of albums really does represent the Yin and Yang of instrumental and vocal performance.  Very cool.

At the time of the release, I wasn't willing to pay for two albums at once from the same artist. I test listened to the tracks of both, and ended up instead buying half of each album. For the most part I bought the same songs in both instrumental and vocal forms.

My music friends know me as the guy who really doesn't listen to vocals. I'm pretty satisfied with instrumental music, but I have to admit that it gets a bit boring, and vocals add something significant to the experience. I still don't necessarily listen to the meaning of the words, though.

After listening to both sets of music, my conclusion is that I quite like both. Frankly the singers on some of the Words and Tones album are barely good enough, but I found they grew on me. After all, most of the great 70s rock that I loved was sung by less than perfect voices.

Anyway, Victor's playing is excellent, as always, and the music is pretty great. My one peeve is that there is an extended bass solo in the middle of one of the best tracks on the album Keep It Low. In my view it's the sort of thing you can get away with live, but it detracts from the studio album.

Check it out. Feel the groove...

Long Hair and Mid-Air

I haven't written many blog entries in the past year, and I'm finding it odd that the reason is that I haven't been doing much business travel.

Well maybe this year will bring more. I'm once again writing from 37,000 feet in the air, over central Greenland.

This is my first flight to Europe since late 2011. And I have been growing my hair since the last time I was there. I've gone from a short-haired computer geek to a rock star wanna-be in that short time.

After watching two movies it seems time to settle down during the dark of the winter night. Sadly, I started the trip with a discharged laptop battery and the Lufthansa A340 I'm in has no seat power (at least not in economy). So although I had hoped to put in a few hours of office work, I'm out of luck. And I'm thus writing another blog entry on my iPhone.

The soundtrack to this blog is Peter Frampton's incredible Grammy-winning Fingerprints album. It's now been a top pick for me for a few years. Not yet at the level of Miles' Kinda Blue, but getting there.

In the past few weeks I had arrived at the point of feeling like I needed new music, and have been a bit disappointed in the process.

First off, I had been waiting quite awhile for the North American release of an album I'd seen buzz about on Twitter. Sweet Billy Pilgrim (@sweetbillyp) is an indie band from the UK, and I found myself oddly compelled by their latest album Crown and Treaty. In the end, they did not release it on iTunes in Canada, and I waited while their website finally got able to sell direct.

Now, I can understand the view that you'll make more money per sale when selling direct. But honestly, my opinion is that this is creating a barrier to entry that will not maximize total sales. The same reason that iPods took over the digital music player industry holds for music sales as well. On a whim, anywhere I happen to be, I can buy a track in the iTunes store for a good price and have it immediately available to listen to. I have a few examples from past business trips where I bought music on the plane before we left the gate.

In the case of the Crown and Treaty album, when I finally got access to their store, there wasn't even a simple way to buy the whole album. You had to select each track separately, at a total well above a typical album purchase for me. So in the end, instead of buying the album, I bought only the one song from it that had been haunting me: Archaeology. If the album had been available on iTunes, they would have made $7 or so from me. Instead they got probably $2. And frankly I'm sorry, but that's business. The album's tracks can be streamed from sweetbillypilgrim.com. Check it out.

So, the other "new" music I bought was intended to re-inspire me, but has been less than totally awesome.

Beth Hart released a new album recently called Bang Bang Boom Boom. It's very good, but a bit further from my favorite tastes than the previous one with Joe Bonamassa. I think the new one feels a bit more "country", but my wife disagrees. And she is quite keen on this new one. Beth's voice is fantastic.

I truly loved the last Dream Theater album A Dramatic Turn of Events. That was my first Dream Theater, so knowing they're again recording a new album, I thought I'd buy something from the back catalog. In the end, I bought the previous one, Octavarium. It's quite good, but I found it "less" interesting than the Dramatic Turn one. It didn't floor me on initial listen, and although it's grown on me, I'm still not enjoying it as much.

I got in the mood for some ragtime and bought The Very Best of Scott Joplin, which was very cheap on iTunes and includes dozens of tunes. Very solid, though a bit much to listen to all the way through in one sitting.

Then Joe Bonamassa has teamed up with a different sort of outfit and released a Funk album with a group called Rock Candy Funk Party. The album is We Want Groove, and it's actually pretty good. I'm a bit of a funk fan, and feel so vindicated that Joe has validated this love. Maybe I'm not the only one who thinks of his influences as Blues-Rock/Jazz/Funk. I still find it disturbing that Funk isn't a category on iTunes, actually. I'd probably find lots on speculation if I could search for it by category. Anyway this album reminds me of early 70s funk in many places. Feels like low-ceiling rooms, dark lighting and cigarette smoke. There are a few real grooving tracks, though. Overall, probably the best find of the lot here.

Then I bought the brand new Steve Lukather Transition album. I really liked his last one All's Well That Ends Well. This one is decent, but feels a bit less inspired. I think I'll queue it up for another listen next, hoping that it keeps improving for me. The singing, in particular, seems weaker than his last album, which is too bad. There are really some very excellent guitar parts, which isn't a surprise from this guitar legend, much-demanded session guitarist, and member of Toto.

Well, from the north coast of Iceland, I'll call it a night. Rock on...

A Stratocaster After All These Years

I started playing electric guitar about age 15.  My first guitar was a rather cheap Telecaster copy, which did the job of getting me going in the world of rock and roll.  I didn't much care for that guitar after I had used it for awhile... somehow it wasn't really "me", and I eventually bought a band-mate's Les Paul copy and lived happily ever after.

I've been a firm "Gibson guy" for pretty much all of the ensuing years, although as noted in an earlier blog post, maybe I'm not quite as Gibson as I thought.

Anyway, a few years ago I started paying attention to the interesting unique tones of the Fender Stratocaster, which is of course ubiquitous in rock and blues music.  I wasn't really serious about getting one, but I thought it interesting that in all my years of playing, I had never owned a Strat, and in fact hadn't played one other than picking up one or two in guitar shops.

On a recent trip to Seattle to catch Marcus Miller in concert, my buddy Andy and I dropped by the local Guitar Center to check out the scene.  It's a pretty good store, and overall we were pretty impressed.  I have visited Guitar Center in San Jose, CA a number of times, but thought the Seattle shop was perhaps staffed with more helpful employees, at least on the day of our visit.

I went there determined not to come home with a guitar, since I have a bit of a "problem" in that area.  In the end, I was successful.  Sort of.  I didn't come home with one... but I did have one shipped to me later.

The doll in question was a used red Stratocaster, made in Mexico.  The guitar was very pretty, and priced well below what I figured it would cost in Vancouver.  It sat next to a similar Mexican Strat for the same price, and the other one was not at all nice, which made this one stand out all the more.

I pointed out the guitar to Andy as we walked by... pretty.  Later on another stroll past, I picked up the guitar and tried it out acoustically.  I like an electric which is lively when played acoustically, and this one was that.  Andy played it too, and he said it felt very nice.  He has a Strat at home, so I felt I was getting solid advice.  On yet another walk-by before we left, I figured I should plug it in and just see how it felt electrified... and the answer of course was "it sounded great," played through a Mesa Boogie Mk4.

So I took it to the desk and said I'd like to buy the guitar.  The hitch was that as a used guitar in Washington state, the vendor has to hold onto it for 30 days before allowing it to change hands.  This is part of a pawn shop law to control the sale of stolen property.  So they took my shipping address and said they'd send the guitar after another 3 weeks had passed.  And they did just that, sending it promptly, well packed, and in the end apparently at no cost to me.

Overall, I was very impressed with the transaction, and the unique tones of the Stratocaster are welcome within my stable of mostly humbucking guitars.  And it only took me 35 years to get around to it.

Play on...