Where Worlds Collide

What I’ve been listening to over the last couple of days. Unlike the iPod generation with their song-based playlists, I’m a still luddite who listens to albums all the way through

After Crying - De Profundis
Prog-rock sung entirely in Hungarian. There’s as much violin and brass as guitar, resulting in something closer to orchestral chamber music that to rock’n'roll. Hauntingly beautiful in places, and quite unlike anything else in my record collection.

Ayreon - The Human Equation
Multi-instrumentalist Arjen Lucassen’s most recent rock opera concept album, featuring (as usual) a whole host of guest performers. This one has Ken Hensley of Uriah Heep fame, and vocals by Mostly Autumn’s Heather Findlay, Dream Theater’s James Labrie, and Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt, among others. Like a lot of Ayreon’s work, it’s a bit patchy, but best bits shine.

Renaissance - Novella
I picked up this album because I’ve heard it said that Mostly Autumn sounded like them. I have no idea whether or not it’s one of their best or not, it was the only album of theirs I could find. I’m afraid I have never really been able to get into this one. I’d be interested to hear from Renaissance fans who might either confirm that Renaissance are not for me, or point me towards other more accessible albums of theirs.

King Crimson - The Power to Believe
KC’s most recent work, a good listen even if parts of it are a something of a retread of parts of Larks Tongues in Aspic and Starless and Bible Black given a modern production job.

Savatage - Dead Winter Dead
Savatage are another band into pomp-metal rock operas. The plot is about a love story during the Bosnian war. The music is pretty good power metal with classical flourishes, especially the multi-part counterpoint harmonies in the middle section of ‘One Child’, something I’ve never heard any other metal band attempt.

Rainbow - Long Live Rock and Roll
Third and (possibly) weakest of the three Rainbow albums with Ronnie Dio. By now Blackmore was moving in the more commercial direction that ultimately let to Dio’s replacement by pop singer Graham Bonnet. This album suffers from a couple of filler tracks, and too much lazy and lacklustre guitar playing. Still, the dark epic Gates of Babylon makes up for it. The medieval style “Rainbow Eyes” gives an early foretaste of what Blackmore would be doing a decade and a half later.

After too long a hiatus, everyone’s favourite goth-metal band are back on stage

Karl gives Steve the “You are going to announce this song to the audience and tell them what the hell it’s supposed be about” look. Not that any explaination has ever made sense, with all those Martian words…

The audience has been slow tonight. People seemed to want to dance rather than listen, which means they did get to play the acoustic ballad “When the Madness Came to Stay”, as well one or two songs in strange time signatures that it’s impossible to dance to.

The song begins with a long instrumental intro, with Karl playing an orchestral wash of keyboards while Ravila plays some very spooky electric violin. Then they switch instruments as the rhythm section cuts in, with Ravila taking over the keyboards and Karl playing that dark and menacing guitar riff, evoking primordial Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.

After two minutes, the band reach the point where the vocals come in. Steve starts singing, building up intensity bit by bit, at first what he is saying not audible, and then becoming moreso.

All the while, the master of the stretched-skin percussion let his sticks do the talking, providing the rhythm for Karl and Steve to wield their musical magic…

Karl puts the nightmares about squid to the back of his mind, and concentrates on the music. His instrumental break turned out to be one of those solos, unrecognisably different from the solo he played in this song the night before, or the version on the album.

He played, possibly literally, like a man possessed.

Karl didn’t so much play the guitar, as form a living conduit for the music to flow, seemingly from somewhere else. The notes and phrases sounded unlike any other guitar player on earth. Not quite the blues-based scales of Eric Clapton. Not quite the neo-classical shredding on Yngwie Malmsteen. Not quite the abrasive style of Robert Fripp. Bits of all of them, perhaps. But there was more.

Is sounded like it came from another dimension. Was it from Heaven or from Hell?

Or from somewhere else entirely?

He winds down to a hypnotically repetitive figure behind Steve’s vocals for the call and response chanting section.

Steve grins as he moves forward. This part… was fun.

Very much fun.

His voice sounds like it belongs to something out of a nightmare, the words as if they were being ripped from an unwilling throat. .

Ph’nglui Mglw’nfah Cthulhu R’lyeh Wgah’nagl Fhtagn
Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fthagn!

This time Karl doesn’t break into the old Black Sabbath riff he started playing the night before. Instead turns the reverb all the way up to Eleven as he repeats the previous four-note figure again and again. With Ravila playing a subtly different four-note figure equally reverbed electric violin, there’s a hypnotic wall of sound behind Steve’s unholy and alien chanting.

Sometimes it creeps the audience out, and they don’t respond.

Ph’nglui Mglw’nfah Cthulhu R’lyeh Wgah’nagl Fhtagn
Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fthagn!

Sometimes they pick up and repeat the chant. Then it creeps Karl out.

Ph’nglui Mglw’nfah Cthulhu R’lyeh Wgah’nagl Fhtagn
Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fthagn!

What will happen next? Follow the thread in Dreamlyrics to find out.

The above quote is an edited compilation of postings from Art in the Blood, AJ and myself.

“J Nelson Kwango” of the KFA Forum is rangly.

Comrades!

I am terrored! A film has just arrived on the markets of Cameroon, this film the American Police Team or some name that is similar. My nephew, purchased this and asked me to watch because he said is had something to do with DPRK. The shock I see! The general, beloved general, Kim Jong Il is a puppet character in this film and speaking the most offending things! He swears in English, kills his interpreter, and turns into a small insect at the end. They make the Dear Leader to be evil man, and lonely man. They find risible the undying love of the Korean people? They think the leadership of DPRK and the revolution is a joke? Forgive me for saying but makers of this film are bastard people! I denounce them and curse them! Bastard people!

Can we not complain to someone about such slander? Why has not the KCNA denounced this piece of capitalist propaganda? To think that they make light of the general and debase his greatness!

Some of the followup comments are well worth reading too. Nowadays it’s getting harder and harder to tell what’s parody and what isn’t. (Link from Samizdata)

If you live outside London, decent rock gigs are like buses. Nothing for ages, and then a whole load turn up at once. So it’s looking like a truly progtastic late November/early November in Manchester.

I’d already got my ticket for Marillion, but now I’ve got myself tickets for The Mars Volta and Van der Graaf Generator. There’s also Mostly Autumn in Crewe in December. And coming up this week is the goth-metal of Paradise Lost.

I’m wondering about the Asia/Uriah Heep double bill, and also Porcupine Tree, both shows around the same time. But I’ve seen all three bands in the past year, and I’m not sure that I could cope with five gigs in two weeks! (And none of them on Friday or Saturday nights either!)

The Warley model railway exhibition at the NEC falls in the middle of that lot as well.

Last weekend Crewe Works hosted an event called “The Gathering”.

More than sixty preserved locomotives were present, brought in from all over the country, representing steam, diesel and electric. Star attendees included The Flying Scotsman, a pair of Stanier pacifics, “Olten Hall” still in Hogwarts livery (which was giving rides), a Woodhead line EM2 and the sole surviving Metrovick Co-Bo, which was displayed suspended from the workshop’s overhead crane. The representative of the group restoring this veteran told me that getting it’s first bogie lift for 40 years was the condition of it’s attendance.

One fenced off corner contained crash-damaged rolling stock, including the burned-out class 143 railbus which caught fire near Bristol a few months back, fortunately without fatalities. Rather more disturbing was the misshapen carraige covered in tarpaulins, which I realised must have been the wrecked restraunt car from the Hatfield derailment four years ago.

I didn’t take many photographs of the day, partly because the weather was dull for much of the day, and partly because my camera batteries ran out shortly after it did brighten up.

It makes me feel old to realise that this locomotive has now been a museum piece for 28 years. I remember waiting at Slough on a cold February morning way back in 1977 to see the passing of the last “Western”, an enthusiast special hauled by this very locomotive, D1023 “Western Fusilier”. The Warship class locomotive on the right has been preserved even longer, since 1972.

Star “Kettle” was the unique No 71000 “Duke of Gloucester”. It’s BR career was even shorter than that of the Warships, lasting just eight years from 1954 to 1962. It then spent as many years languising in Barry scrapyard in south Wales, before being preserved and restored to main line working order.

Believe it or not, all three of these locomotives are now preserved. The A4 Pacific “Union of South Africa” was preserved when the two electrics in the foreground were built.

There was also a small display for road vehicles, including a couple of Scammell Mechanical Horses. These strange-looking vehicles with three-wheeled tractor units used to be a common sight around railway goods depots.

<Norwegian Football Commentator>
Kylie Minogue, Rolf Harris, Sir Les Patterson, Angus Young, Dame Edna Everage, Bouncer, Skippy! Your boys took one hell of a beating! One hell of a beating!
</Norwegian Football Commentator>

Commiserations to Norm and Michael Jennings.

Sweden’s Opeth are a band of contrasts. Half their music is extreme death metal, all piledriver riffs and growling ‘Cookie Monster’ vocals. But the other half is mellow progressive rock influenced by the likes of Pink Floyd and Camel.

The band’s two previous albums, “Deliverance” and “Damnation” sounded like the work of two completely different bands. Actually recorded together, though released several months apart, “Deliverance” was uncompromisingly heavy, while “Damnation” showed the band’s lighter side, all ‘clean’ vocals, plenty of Mellotron, and not a powerchord in sight.

“Ghost Reveries” takes the approach of the earlier “Blackwater Park” and mixes the contrasting styles on one album, and in many cases even combines them within individual songs. It actually works quite well; one moment there will be mountainous riffs or complex heavy guitar passages topped with growling death vocals, then it will drop away to a quiet acoustic section with clean vocals or a bluesy solo.

They’ve expanded to a five-piece with the addition of keyboard player Per Wiberg, who plays a lot of Mellotron, as well as electric piano and organ. No cheesy synths here! His playing is mainly adding atmospheres and textures rather than widdly soloing, but he certainly adds a new dimension to their sound.

Overall, a good album, though I would have preferred a bit less of the Cookie Monster. In one or two places Mikael Akerfeldt sings clean vocals on heavier sections; those work well, and I wish he’s done more of the vocals like that.

One of the first completely new items of rolling stock produced by Bachmann since taking over the old Graham Farish range has now been in the shops for a while, the so-called “Super BG”.

The prototype for this model is the 1990s conversion of Mk1 full brakes with roller-shutter doors for use on mail traffic. They were relatively short lived, due to EWS losing the Royal Mail contract.

Bachmann’s new product, while still a long way behind the standard of continental or American models, is a step forward from what has gone before; with finer detailed underframes, well reproduced bodyside detailing, and a good semi-matt finish with well-printed lettering. Speaking of lettering, there are four different variants available, representing different branding they’ve had over the years; the Rail Express Systems version with the blue flashes (the leading vehicle) comes with or without Royal Mail logos, and the debranded post-privatisation version comes with or without the EWS “Three Beasties” logo.

The two biggest faults are a lack of weight which increases the risk of derailment, and the excessive gap between the coaches. The close-coupling mechanisms of all major continental makes, which still go round 8″ radius curves, isn’t rocket science nowadays, and I’d like to see Bachmann do the same on British stock.

They make a nice complement for my CJM class 67, and an 8 car rake in full cry is an impressive sight. Not that they ever ran in Switzerland, though.

Octovarium is the New Jersey progressive metal band’s eighth release. Although I’d been a fan since hearing 1994′s “Awake”, I’ve had trouble getting into the last couple of releases. I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that the band had peaked with 1999′s magnificent concept album “Scenes From a Memory”, and it was all downhill from there.

Octovarium, though, is a significant improvement on it’s rather mediocre predecessor, 2003′s “Train of Though”. The complex, widdly, and sometimes self-indulgent instrumental sections are still very much present, but this time it appears in the context of some actual songs.

They’ve been accused of ripping off Muse in one or two places; I can’t hear that much of a resemblance myself. Saying that, the piano-led ballad “The Answer Lies Within” skirts the edge of Coldplay territory, and “I Walk Beside You” sounds more like U2 than U2, with James Labrie doing an uncanny impersonation of Bono. The rest of the album is much better; songs like “These Walls” and “Sacrificed Sons” typify the sort of epic progressive rock that made the band’s name in the first place, while opener “Root of All Evil” and “Panic Attack” show the darker and more metallic side of their music. The awesome musicianship is evident all the way through; although DT might not be the best progressive rock band in the world, they’re certainly the band with the best chops.

The album closes with the sort of 24 minute monster that only a prog band would attempt. The quiet opening section does sound a little too much like “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” for it’s own good, but it develops into a well-structured epic. There’s a frenetic instrumental passage, not so much a solo as all four instrumentalists going at it hammer-and-tongs with intertwining guitar, bass and keyboard lines. Finally the song ends with a majestic orchestral climax.

Overall verdict; not their best, but far from their worst. They may have peaked, but there’s plenty of music left in them, though it’s one of those albums you need to spin many times before you can fully appreciate it.