Entry 064: "Suitable for Framing"

Dear Internet,

                I think we need some space, Internet.  I have been talking too much with you recently.  Perhaps a little time away?  No?  Well, I guess not, but this is the last time I am writing to you today, and it is going to be the shortest correspondence of the day.

                "Suitable for Framing" is the second album made my Three Dog Night.  The rock band performs a variety of songs.  After doing a little bit of digging, I found that half of them are covers of other groups' songs.  This is mentionable because I felt a clear distinction between the first half of the songs and the latter.  I even wrote down, when listening, "weak on second half."  Does this reflect the quality of the songs the band made themselves in relation to the ones that their peers created?  You bet your vinyl it does.  Three Dog Night does make their covers unique.  They blend in a mix of soft rock, funk and gospel.  That last bit I say because of the band's use of the organ or keyboard, I cannot tell which.  There is also a bit of early pop sounds if you listen hard enough.  "King Solomon's Mines" feels out of place for being the only instrumental, and is significantly heavy with its drum usage.  "Celebrate" is about the only song on the album that I was able to recognize, which is a testament to its popularity over the years.   It is a good song, but the repeating lyrics at the end can get to be grating before the song ends.

                I do not have much to say about this third album.  This is partially because it is the third one I am writing about for the day after having burned out after two.  At the same time, "Suitable for Framing" did not do much to stun me or get me to remember anything particular about it.  That is not to say that it was bad, no, that would sick in my mind.  This album just falls in that ambiguous middle area that is hard to define and admit there being to no ill will against it.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Tomorrow is "Wii Play Motion."  Hopefully I can get a stream up at around 10AM EST.

Entry 063: "Thunder Seven"

Dear Internet,

                Hello, again.  I feel like I just talked to you.  Maybe it is just my imagination.  Perhaps I should just go straight into telling you about Triumph's album "Thunder Seven."

                Thankfully, "Thunder Seven" is the seventh album put out by the heavy metal band.  Otherwise, the first question would be "What happened to the other six thunders?"  Well, I do not have an answer for than anyway.  I think this might be the only album I have of Triumph.  At first I though the band's name was the name of the album and the album's name was that of the band.  At the risk of sounding like an old man, the title of the work is more important than the name behind it.  Music albums and books as well have a tendency to randomly choose if the title or artist is more important from one entry to the next.  It gets even more confusing if you approach a book at the store and the title of the book is a character's name.  Music albums are definitely worse when it comes to this because the bands can name themselves and their albums after any little thing to strike their fancy.  But I digress and should be talking about "Thunder Seven."

                The music is clear metal rock.  I did not say clearly metal rock because there is a difference.  Unlike Pitbull Daycare which almost prided itself on making as much noise as possible, Triumph knows how to mix the various sound levels.  The guitar does not drown out the drums, nor do the drums beat so hard to kill the synthesizers.  The vocals are clear and understandable, which is important especially when lyrics are no longer cared about.  You do not believe me?  Then how did a South Korean pop song become an international sensation despite the works being in Korean?  "Thunder Seven" has a high level of technical skill which is apparent n the instrumental tracks like "Midsummer's Daydream," but that should be expected from a band that had been financed for six previous albums.  

                The good part of "Thunder Seven is that it is good old rock and roll.  There are no gimmicks or tricks to the music.  There are no audio samples playing from a computer, no Auto-tune robotic voices hiding poor singers, and definitely no "WUB WUB WUB."  However, describing what it is by what it is not is a poor way of saying nothing.  The core of "Thunder Seven" is the lyrical songs.  The songs deal heavily with the passing of time and having to keep up with it.  Three of the ten songs have "time" in their name.  The album for the most part approaches the problem of keeping up appearances and having to deal with the world forcing broken molds upon people.  Having to change oneself to fit the passing and illogical moods of the time is something that is just as foolish as the trends that are followed.  "Stranger in a Strange Land" makes a nice dig at a specific artist that ate and fed into that idiotic plate.

                The songs are all enjoyable to an extent.  The only strike that I can have against it is that I want more specific things after having listened to the album.  I wished "Midsummer's Daydream" to have lasted longer because it is such a beautiful acoustic guitar solo.  Other than that song and "Stranger in the Strange Land" the second side was not as strong as the first.  This album is good, very good, but for some reason, there is a missing element that the album lacks.  I wish I could place my finger on it, but I cannot.  Maybe if some of the band's other strong songs from other albums were here, I might say otherwise, but I cannot since I do not know what those other songs even are.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Entry 062: "Music for Dancing: Cha Cha"

Dear Internet,

                I said yesterday that today would be a mix day.  Whenever I draw a music album, I try to do something else with the excess amount of time on my hands.  Albums have a tendency to be only about a half hour to fifty minutes.  There is also very little that can be said unless you are trying to sell the album as a public relations agent.  It would be cheap of me to listen to a short music selection and pump out a review in about the same amount of time and then sit around all day.  So to try and not appear as the lazy bum I am, this is the first of three reviews for today, all being music albums on vinyl.

                Arthur Murray was a dancer, dance instructor, and clever businessman.  Even today, his name is synonymous with dance to the point that even the high-art culture of dance must acknowledge his influence in the world.  There are still some 200 or so studios that bears his name.  If you were to go through your grandparent's things, you might find dance instruction sheets that could be laid out on the floor to teach you the steps.  If you could not find those sheets, you might find the albums that were made to teach you to dance to a specific music type.  "Music for Dancing: Cha Cha" is one such album.  If you were to have only the vinyl record and not the packaging, you would be missing the whole experience.  On the back of the jacket is a step-by-step instruction detailing how to do the cha cha.  Even as a usually passive listener, I attempted to learn the dance.  I will spare you any embarrassing understandings of my ineptitude for upright shuffling.

                The album has got twelve songs, each having nearly the same tempo and rhythm.  The songs are slow but the melodies are not.  As a teaching aid, this works very well.  The student can learn how to move their feet to the beat at a leisurely pace without being discouraged by facing a rapid pace.  Having the songs move too quickly would cause the student to make mistakes because it would be placing emphasis on the speed rather than the technique.  Learning to do the cha cha is more important than the listening selection.  That being said, listening to this album without the intention of learning how to dance can produce a somewhat opposite effect.

                The songs are fun, but they can get repetitive since they are supposed to have the same beat.  The only break out song would have to be "Arruverderci, Roma" which has more to do with the fact that it is one of the few tracks that has vocals tied to it.  All of the songs are similar Latin American dance songs that have since been replaced with pseudo-Jamaican pop now-a-days.  Jazz sneaks in every now and again, but the band plays on.  I cannot help but describe the sound as being a slightly faster paced muzak.  If I was not such a fan of both elevator music and Latin flair, I would say that this album makes me want to push all the buttons on the lift.  The whole thing tries little to reach beyond the scope of ballroom dancing, but it is not meant to.  The album is meant to help people dance.

                Overall, I liked "Music for Dancing: Cha Cha" but that does not allow me to think it is anything spectacular.  As a training aid, it does a good job of selecting a collection of songs to learn to dance to.  As a standalone album, it would be nothing extraordinary or even notable.  While the songs are fun and airy, they are a reflection of their genre rather than a unique track.  

Yours in digital,

 BeepBoop

Entry 059: Pitbull Daycare Discogrophy

Dear Internet,

                I mentioned a few entries ago about a friend of mine who would ask me to find music for him.  This occurred a number of times, so I have accumulated a few albums that would fit his tastes a lot more than my own.  Pitbull Daycare would have to be one of those groups.  There is no way that I would have gathered their three albums together or even listened to them if my friend did not ask for my assistance

. 

                Pitbull Daycare was a Texas based electronic industrial metallic punk rock band.  If you can saw that all out loud, try swallowing it next.  The nature of the music from their albums was not eclectic, which one might assume with that first line about their genre.  No, the band played exactly electronic industrial metallic punk rock music, and they played it often.  They made three albums before their apparent disassembly.  I was able to find an official Myspace page for the band, but the group has not logged on for almost three years now.  The three albums were "Six Six Sex" (1998), "Unclean" (2004), and "You, Me, and the Devil Makes Three" (2006).  As you can tell by the titles of the albums, the group heavily pushes their songs to the depressing, darker themes.  Listening to the sings themselves, one realizes that the band has "edge" to them.  In fact, there is so much "edge" in these songs that it makes a truncated cuboctahedron look like a two sided dice.

                When I began to listen to the albums in the order of publishing today, I was reminded of how my friend had described the band and their songs.  It was something like "Music to be downright be pissed off to."  That pretty much sums it up, but I suspect that you want to know a little more than that.  Between the three albums, the majority of the songs are very similar.  It is to the point that nothing changed over the course of the eight years from the first album to the third.  I can make sweeping generalization about the band because they were stagnant for the entire time.  The problems of the first album spilled over into the next.  It became a constant repetition through the three albums that only when the band tried to do anything different did they actually succeed.  

                The albums are filled with elements of the various genres that I mentioned earlier.  These genres do have distinct sound to them despite being closely related.  Electric will be filled with synthesizers and computer made sounds.  Industrial will include rhythmic beats that sounds more in place at a steel mill than in a song.  Metal can be directly tied to industrial as an influence if not a parent genre.  Punk and rock go hand in hand in most cases.  A band can belong to one group and not another, although I imagine they would most likely all be grouped under "rock" at a store.  Pitbull Daycare makes use of all these genres all of the time.  A song will start off with an electronic melody or random synthetic sounds, and then it will make way for the industrial percussions, which will lead into the metal guitar riffs, which overshadow the punk lyrics.  Eventually the song will reach a closing point where everything becomes mute short of the electronic sound samples.  About 80% of the songs on the three albums play like this.  The songs are painfully repetitive once they actually begin.

                The lyrics of the songs are not going to win any awards.  A number of the songs just constantly repeat the same four or five words over and over.  Most if not all of the songs are depressing, moping, pity party songs.  That is except for the rage filled ones throwing insult upon a supposed third party.  I do not mind songs about a cheating woman or about some other calamity thrown upon the unsuspecting fool.  I love old county-western songs.  Pitbull Daycare, however, does very little to make one song feel unique against its peers.  There are a few lyrics at the beginning, but they all stand aside for the two minutes of insult throwing, which is screamed out.  The benefit of making screaming lyrics is that there are no notes to hit.  There is no melody to keep the screams within a specific range.  It is all just shrill sounds.  It takes no skill to scream at the top of your lungs, only to cream longer and louder than others.  

                The only times that I found the tracks good was when they were covering songs from other bands.  "Sheer Heart Attack," "Ace of Spades, "It's the End of the World As We know It (And I Feel Fine)" are all well done.  The band's take on each one feels unique because they are applying a plethora of genre techniques to songs that have proven their worth and ability.  On top of that, those same techniques work very well for those selected songs.  That is another thing that the band does seem to do well.  The instrumentals are well done to the point that the lyrics are in the way.  Even the ways the levels are mixed place the words well behind the guitars and drums.  If the albums were composed of more cover versions, I might have liked them better.  

                The only thing that I can do is highlight the few songs that I liked, which were "Hold On" and "No Compromise."  The rest, like I said, are repetitive angst filled tracks that would appeal mostly to teenagers.  Maybe after finally getting through these albums I should wonder about the musical tastes of my friend.  I can question the compatibilities of our tastes, however.  It really is not much of surprise that Pitbull Daycare was only around for a little while and never quite got above a limited level of popularity.  There are plenty of indie, underground, or amateur bands around that can learn a few genre techniques and spit out mediocre albums.  A listener might be willing to have a go at these albums, maybe even work out to the hard hitting beats and shredding guitar riffs, but listening to these songs on headphones or ear buds will make their lackluster lyrics seep through, and listening to this on a speaker system will get you stares and maybe a knock on your door by the landlord.  The whole thing is stuck in the middle, between problems that come from a mess of genres and actual skill with the instruments.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next will be "1001 Nights" (1969).

Edit: The next Backlog item is incorrect and is addressed about in the next entry.