Posts tagged with "music"

Dreamtheater: Train Of Thought

I’ve been giv­ing Train of Thought a fair chance, and now I can’t stop lis­ten­ing to it. I’m thor­ough­ly impressed. They’ve real­ly devel­oped as a band, and are def­i­nite­ly more con­fi­dent as com­posers. They can stick to their key sig­na­tures with more cre­ativ­i­ty now, and I’m glad that almost every song is giv­en the time to devel­op all the motifs that they intro­duce (most are over 10 min­utes long). There’s only one song that sounds like filler, because it uses a lot of the same lit­tle tricks from oth­er albums, such as Portnoy’s exact syn­co­pat­ed snare roll from Scenes From a Memory or oth­er such riffs. The lyrics remain a tad sim­ple though; these guys are def­i­nite­ly music majors and not English majors.

Music like Braces and Bruises

Whenever Trolley and I hang out togeth­er, whether it’s a car ride or a ses­sion of tow­er defense, we queue up albums that we both enjoy. Billy Talent, The Artist in the Ambulance, Sing the Sorrow, Give Up. However, there’s one song that he nev­er queues up, that he always skips with­out any­one else know­ing.

He knows that I can’t lis­ten to that one song off guard. As much as I want that song for myself, to mean noth­ing more than a frail voice and bounc­ing beats, I can’t give up the mem­o­ries that I asso­ciate with it, I can’t let go of what the song has come to mean.

And it’s only now that I real­ize that it’s bet­ter this way.

Fuck Jewel

I caught Jewel’s video for Intuition yes­ter­day, and had to delete the song after­wards. When I first heard the song, in Darren’s car when we were baked, I thought it was cool that she was try­ing some­thing away from her acoustic roots. It’s too bad she’s such a mon­ey slut now, because I could tell that her first album was actu­al­ly inspired and tried to say some­thing.

Concert: Billy Talent, Crowned King, Death From Above

The Billy Talent con­cert was pret­ty decent. There were quite a few peo­ple who seemed out of place there such as 10 year old girls and women beyond the cougar idiom, I’m guess­ing because BT is more of a main­stream band, but I’m not sure. I did­n’t real­ly know any­thing about them besides the fact that they have four mem­bers and that they have a sin­gle out (even though I know the entire album like the back of my hand). I’ve nev­er even seen one of their videos so actu­al­ly see­ing what they looked like, to put a few faces with the music, was pret­ty inter­est­ing. They played about half the songs from the album, and Benjamin was able to work the crowd up pret­ty well.

A band called Crowned King opened first and they had a fun ska derived sound with a lot of well com­posed har­monies, but the lyrics that I heard were a turn-off.

The best part of the show, how­ev­er, was the sec­ond open­ing act by a band called Death From Above, who used to be on the Sound-Virus label and are now on the Ache Records label (which also hap­pens to be the label for Hot Hot Heat). It’s a band with just a drum­mer (the vocal­ist) and a bassist, but the sound is extreme­ly full and well round­ed. It’s extreme­ly blood pump­ing, adren­a­line rush­ing, great sound­ing music and I would have bought an album at the con­cert if it was avail­able. They’re com­plete­ly a no-bull­shit band who tried to start shit with secu­ri­ty for kick­ing some peo­ple out dur­ing their set. They start­ed talk­ing about how much of a big­ot Glen Danzig is, and then mak­ing fun of the crowd for hav­ing no fuck­ing clue about who Glen Danzig is after cheer­ing from a men­tion of the Misfits. Just goes to show how many peo­ple at con­certs are com­plete poseurs. I’ll def­i­nite­ly be look­ing into Death From Above because I believe that they’re Canadian as well.

Charge

How odd that the themes of my writ­ings have most­ly shift­ed in one direc­tion. I always won­der what peo­ple think of what I say. I would imag­ine that peo­ple think I’m being melo­dra­mat­ic, that I’m look­ing for some sort of pro­tag­o­nis­tic pathos, or that I’m being some pre­ten­tious fuck.

It’s as if a sin­gle inci­dent has shift­ed my mind­set, that I just can’t seem to com­plete­ly get over what has passed. The hurt­ing has stopped, to be sure, but the think­ing isn’t done. I still get inspired by mem­o­ries, ideas, emo­tions, almost any­thing I’ve expe­ri­enced through this.

I was once scared that I would nev­er fall in love again, and I used to be emo­tion­al­ly numb. Perhaps all of this was sim­ply a result of a life of stag­nan­cy, of bore­dom. Now I can write again, I have things to think about, I have emo­tions to expe­ri­ence, I seem to have things to look for­ward to.

Can heart­break be so ben­e­fi­cial? I know that I can feel. I don’t need to force my artis­tic writ­ing. My mind seems to be filled with new end­less thoughts. I can even appre­ci­ate cer­tain music on anoth­er lev­el now. This com­plex­i­ty, this mys­te­ri­ous­ness is so inter­est­ing.

My only wor­ry is that this new vital­i­ty will lev­el off into noth­ing­ness.