Brad is a Whore
OK, here’s the premise for this page here: Band on small label needs exposure. Band sends me their CD. I review it. Pretty simple, huh? And the great thing about it is, like, it’s win-win here! Artists get exposure, and I get free music! Tell me, where’s the bad in that? Except if the album is terrible and the exposure they get is my saying “this album is terrible, don’t buy it?” And that could happen, y’know. This ain’t no payola operation here, no sir, even if I am poor. I have MORALS, you see. YES! So all you bands in need of exposure, send me your CD’s, and I shall review them! For the three people that read this site, I mean.
Albums Reviewed:
8mm:
Ahab Rex:
Rollin’ With The Ahab Rex Quintet
Alien Breed:
Todd Bogin:
Mr. Mama:
The Spinning Plates:
8mm:
Opener EP (2004)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Save Yourself”
I’m making an exception to the no EP rule
for the WHORE page because it’s my site and I can do
whatever the hell I want. If you wanna get reviewed, but all you have is an EP, please send
it on in. But also try to provide me with
a square picture of your album cover somehow, so we
don’t confuse people into thinking I’m reviewing a cassette. Just picture some more,
like, black stuff on the sides of the photo and you have a square, I
guess. My copy has big white strips on
the sides that say “For promotional use only.”
So you can picture that too, if you want, but bear in mind your copy won’t have that cool little addition unless you’re a WORLD-FAMOUS
web reviewer like yours truly. You need
a site readership of at least, like, three or four people before managers start sending you promotional copies of stuff (and
you begin getting roughly one email per week from someone named “Clayton Bushong” promoting the comeback album by Dokken). That’s all
I have, so I’m just assuming that’s all you need.
Anyhoo,
this here project is mainly the brainchild of Mr. Sean Beavan,
former producer of such luminous acts as Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails and No
Doubt, and his wife Juliette. Juliette sings, and
Sean does pretty much everything else, I’m led to believe. Any other contributing studio hacks who come across this site, please send in scathing emails
directed at Sean Beavan, and I will happily post
them. Why these people, who clearly are
actually known quantities to a degree in the music business (as well
as their manager, who discovered and managed Garbage (apt name!) originally)
chose to send their debut EP to ME when real, reputable music critics are
probably on their Rolodex is a mystery to me, but eh. They have obviously overestimated the scope
of my influence, which extends, essentially, to Al and my sister. So if I loved this record, Al and my sister
would have considered going out and getting it, and
everyone else would have just asked themselves why I haven’t reviewed Pearl Jam
yet (later this summer they’re coming, by the way).
As it turns out, this EP
is…mediocre! Two of the tracks here are
quite good, but outside of them…total mediocrity! OK!
The best part about getting this thing is that I also received a press
release and another review from some other guy (who either a) was paid by these
people or b) loves Garbage and this kind of droney
chick-pop in general). Because what I
hear here (ooooooo, play on words!) is “generic droney chick-pop that wants to be artsy but is really no
more than generic droney chick-pop.” Juliette Beavan? Nice
voice. Not very expressive, but very
nice and feminine and hits all the notes and stuff. She sounds pretty hot (and is!), but listen
to this quote from the enclosed review (from Jeff Penczak
of Fakejazz.com): “Juliette is the aural equivalent
of the virgin and the whore…the lady and the tiger…the wife and the
mistress…all rolled into one. Her
alluring pin-up looks will draw you in and the emotional static electricity
generated by her half-dozen twisted tales of romance, regret and neglect will
have you cowering at her feet, drooling for more. A mouthwateringly
delectable debut.” Hey! Somebody throw a bucket of cold water on Mr. Penczak! He’s
H-H-H-H-H-HOT for Juliette! For some reason.
I’m not, though. Just, as I said, generic droney
girl-pop. Like a slow, moody version of
Garbage or something. But a couple of
these songs are pretty good, principally the opening duo of the title track and
“Save Yourself,” very nice little slow pop songs that subtly build with added
layers of nice, non-intrusive instrumentation.
Good melodies, too. I especially
like “Save Yourself,” with the pseudo-scratchy-LP beginning and superb harmonized “la la la
la!” bridge thingy.
Good songs there. “Never Enough” isn’t much different than those two, except not
quite as good or memorable (pretty good, though). At times it actually sounds sort of like a
mediocre Smashing Pumpkins D’Arcy song from Adore or the mellow disc 2
section of Mellon Collie. “Nothing
Left to Lose,” with guest spots from Mike Busse and
someone named “back ted nted”
(whoever the hell those people are) is an atrocious attempt to be
“hip” by adding shitty guest rappers to melody-less piece of shit “song.” “Crawl” is a pretty weak attempt to be
“critically hip” by making the song a spoken word story load of crap like the
worst avant-garde tendencies of the Velvet Underground, but the guitar work in
the second half of the song is the EP’s most interesting, so that sort of makes
it half-decent. Finally, “Give it Up” is too long, slow, and electronic-ish,
but Sean provides some more interesting guitar work at points (he’s a
not-half-bad guitarist. Not flashy or anything, but adds nice little subtle touches and
tones here and there that I appreciate), so again, half-decent. And there you go! 25 minutes.
Two quite good songs, one sort-of-good song, two mediocre/decent songs
that would suck ass were it not for some nice guitar work, and one flaming pile
of rap FECES. A mouthwateringly delectably decent-but-no-better debut.
To learn more about 8mm, go to their
website www.8mmaudio.com. I’m sure you can find all the usual goodies
there, but to tell you the truth, the design of the site confuses and frightens
me. I thought I had accidentally
stumbled across the official Memento movie site for a second or two. Maybe they could make it less hip and flashy
and more pragmatic and serviceable, but that’s just boring, old, unhip me talking.
Rene Moncayo
(moncayo@gmail.com) writes:
regarding 8mm, you're not entirely off track. The man can do
better I'm sure.
But it's sad that use Garbage for reference and not Curve, Too
anglophile but still shoegazer+ alt electrorock tie in.
www.curve.co.uk
I'm sure that facts like this won't improve your sex life though.
Ahab Rex:
Rollin’ With The
Ahab Rex Quintet (2004)
Rating: 3
Best Song: “To Whom It May Concern”
If anyone sends me another CD to review after this one, I’ll be shocked. Ahab Rex is a guy whose real name is both unimportant and probably very boring, or else he wouldn’t have renamed himself with such an absolutely ridiculous moniker. I mean, Ahab Rex? The hell? So he likes Moby Dick (which I HATE, by the way, but that doesn’t factor in here at all), he thinks he’s the shit, and he knows a modicum of Latin. Big forking deal. Rex, regis, m. – king. Whoopety-doo! Can he form the pluperfect subjunctive of aufero?
This CD sucks my ass. And it’s not the type of music I would obviously dislike. It’s just done poorly, recorded in an annoying fashion, and riddled with clichés. Mr. Rex likes to describe his band as “Nine Inch Nails vs. the White Stripes,” and I guess I can see what he’s talking about, because we do have elements of both bands contained in this record album. The guitars are very, very distorted and deliberately lo-fied (I’ve made up a word, and I’m sticking to it), there are occasional interludes of pretty-but-not-really pseudo industrial, moody “hipness,” and Mr. Rex’s vocals are generally treated and distorted to hell, leaving him sounding vaguely like Trent Reznor when he gets really pissed off and writes songs like “Big Man With a Gun.” However, all of these things are done very, very badly. The guitars are treated in such a fashion as to give me a pounding headache in nearly every song, even if the riffs are occasionally half-decent, though maddeningly unoriginal (I’ve heard every riff on this album BEFORE somewhere! I HATE that!). The occasional interludes are, well, dumb and useless. And who is that chick that goes “la la la” like an idiot in one or two songs? Are they going for a Nico thing? Or a Meg White interrupting this gravelly-voiced asshole thing? I don’t know or care, and let me use my recent description of Mr. Rex as a “gravelly-voiced asshole” to address the final ingredient in this White Stripes/NIN stew, the vocals. They are HORRENDOUS. Just pathetic. He does not sing. Once. At all. He either a) yells or b) slowly screeches in a low, faux-threatening manner. But he sounds like a fucking idiot when doing both, 1) because he can’t fucking sing, 2) because his songs suck, and 3) because he treats his voice with the same ultra-distortion pedal piece of total annoyance that he rapes his guitar tone with, so most of the songs here have TWO ingredients that give me a pounding headache instead of one. Fantastic. Fucking fantastic.
But PUTTING ASIDE the annoying-ness and the unoriginal riffs, the songs on this record are, for the most part…bad. Cliched. Atrocious. Not good. There’s not a single real melody on the whole damn thing. He just, as I said, yells and pseudo-raps and not-menacingly-at-all growls. And doesn’t sing. The verses to “Undertow no. 5” directly rip off (and I mean NOTE FOR NOTE) the verses to the Stone Temple Pilots’ “Big Bang Baby,” which, if you’ll remember, has a chorus that directly rips off (and I mean NOTE FOR NOTE) the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” The verses were cool and original, though, and now they’ve been directly lifted for some song by this idiot! Great! Fuck me. And how about “The Surgeon’s Photo?” I knew I had heard that intro somewhere before, but where? And then it hit me. “When the Levee Breaks!” The bass plays the exact same riff as the slide guitar in that famous Led Zeppelin piece of goodness except for like one note it changes at the end, and the drums PLAY THE EXACT SAME RHYTHM AS JOHN BONHAM, with bass drum kicks on the same upbeats and downbeats and everything. To directly rip off such a famous song so egregiously is one thing, but then to put “idiotic treated-voiced snarling moron” on top of it performing some sort of avant-garde poetry and asking the audience to “suck the lust” just makes me hate this song with every fiber of my being, which is a shame, because Ahab fires off a nice guitar solo during the tune (something he does a few times, and the only thing about the record I can say I enjoy).
But a song
doesn’t have to directly rip off something else to blow, see. It can have awful, cliché-ridden lyrics! Like “I wanna
feel your disease! Oh, baby baby please! You
bring me to my knees!” in “Cheer Up,” which also decides to rip off Cheap Trick later on with the lyric “I
want you to want me like I want you! And
I want you! I only want you!” You see what I’m talking about? I could write better lyrics like this in the
time it takes me to take a dump. And how about “Plastic People?” First off, the song is horrendous. The guitars are idiotic and too fast, and
there’s no melody at all. But the
shouting about “plastic people with their plastic lives eating plastic food and
reading plastic magazines!” or whatever the hell is going on in there is the most
sophomorically liberal thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Ahab also tries
to go System of a Down on us in “The National Anthem,” singing “General’s orders, kill everyone!
We pledge allegiance to bullets and guns! We are the DEATH PILOTS!!!” And again, see, that’s just idiotic. I’m as violently left-wing as the next guy
who spent four of his formative years living in
Now, let it not be said that there’s nothing worthwhile on this record. I’ve mentioned the occasionally tasty guitar soloing, and there’s actually one song here I kind of enjoy. “To Whom it May Concern” takes a bouncy little bass riff, a nice, subdued guitar part, a pleasingly off-key guitar solo, and Ahab being a little less ridiculous than usual and creates a song that I don’t dislike. Good for Ahab! But what is he doing on “Dope Sick?” WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS PIECE OF SHIT??? Jazzy cabaret music? A bass clarinet? The fuck? I actually thought this was a welcome change from the annoying awfulness when I first heard it, but then I realized that there’s not a single note in the song, outside of Ahab’s gravelly monotone narration that’s supposed to qualify as “vocals,” that I haven’t heard before, and it’s not like I go around listening to dark cabaret music all the time. It’s so fucking underdeveloped it’s sickening. The bassline and bass clarinet part are such “dank, smokey jazz bar in a mediocre ‘50’s movie” clichés that they make me more than slightly angry.
The songs I haven’t mentioned yet are nothing to write home about, either. “Dummy” is probably the 2nd best one here, but I hate the chick singing “gasping for air!” in the chorus. Go away! She ruins “Vertigo” too (not that it’s good anyway, but it could be tolerable), and the cover of the Cure’s “Cold” is very, very subpar. This is just not a good band. Ahab probably thinks he’s cool because his style is objectively “hip” and he’s not cheesy or commercial in any way, and I admit he would definitely have indie-rock “cred” from indie hounds that care only about how “indie” a band sounds, and not whether they can write a goddamn song or not, but I’m gonna say this one more time: This is not a good band. At all. They have interesting guitar solo-type work in a number of songs, and “To Whom it May Concern” would probably get a 6/10 or 7/10 from me or something, but everything else about this record embodies the word “cliché.” And how can a band this subjectively “hip” go about shamelessly ripping off melody lines from the fucking Stone Temple Pilots, anyway? Simple! They can’t write any melody lines themselves.
You can learn more about Ahab Rex at their website, www.ahabrex.com. You can buy their record, learn more about the band, and read a whole bunch of reviews by people who don’t think this album is terrible. I have a feeling my review won’t be showing up there any time soon.
Alien
Breed:
Antidote (2003)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Colorblind”
Blasting out of London, England, but then moving to California because, goshdarnit, THERE JUST WASN’T ENOUGH SMOG IN LONDON, Alien Breed consist of guitarist/electronics programmer guy/chief songwriter Ben Astrop, bassist/extraterrestrial lookalike Ed Pepper, and drummer (Really good drummer, too! Really! Neat jazzy fills and such!) Matt Bayne. Charmingly, they actually think more than two people read this website on a regular basis, and so they sent me their debut album, Antidote, for FREE! You hear me? FREE!!!! There was a catch, ofcourse, and that is that I had to review it, instead of doing what I really wanted to do, listen to Zooropa again (Yes! That album RULES! If by “RULES” you mean “REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY SUCKS BORING, USELESS TECHNOTRONIC GOAT TESTICLES FROM A GOAT WHO IS COMPLETELY CLUELESS AS TO HOW TO WRITE INTERESTING ELECTRONIC MUSIC!!!!!! YEAH!!!!!!”).
Truthfully,
the type of music that these guys are sporting around isn’t really my bag of
Ramen Noodles. Their website says their
aim is to “create a hybrid of rock and hard dance beats,” and, funnily enough,
that’s exactly what they do! Lots of
crunchy guitar riffs mixing and mingling with electronic doodats
and whatchamacallits with occasional moody backing synth washes to, um, be moody and stuff. If this sounds sort of like what Linkin Park tries to do (but MINUS THE RAPPING,
thank god…except for that one song, I guess…), HOOOOOOOLD your horses, there,
big fella, because, even though I was originally
turned off by the “oh my god, this sounds very, very vaguely like a Linkin Park song, so therefore it must BLOOOOOOW” feeling
the album gave me, repeated listens reveal that the record doesn’t actually
suck. See, unlike
Plus, beyond the cool rockin’ techno dance beats and diddley-doodley electro-gadgets and occasional background synth washes, my boy Ben DOES lay down some interesting guitar bits here and there, and those are the things that really get my gander up. The suprisingly tasteful soloing sections in “Evil Twin” and “Come Alive” are GREAT, the acoustic-techno-overdubbing crap in the second half of “Stealing Sunshine” is NEAT, and that pseudo-middle-eastern guitar riff he lays down a few times in “Slither” is BITCHIN’. A lot of the guitar parts ARE just basic chords and whatnot (with the occasional acoustic pickin’ as well, most notably and best-done in the aforementioned “Stealing Sunshine”), but the chord sequences are somewhat more interesting than you’ll find all over that modern rock radio the kids love so much, and they’re nearly always underpinned by Mr. Astrop’s suitably interesting drum ‘n’ bass knowhow, and thus remain, usually, very cool.
I do dig a lot of this record, truthfully, but there’s one place (and a rather important one, actually), that I find this puppy painfully lacking, which leads to the pretty average 6 rating up there, and that is the songwriting. I’ve listened to this album something like 8 or 9 times, and, STILL, when I look at the track listing, I can only remember how the choruses to TWO of these tracks go, and the second one is actually just a remix of the first one. So Ben has managed to write only one truly memorable song to go with the neat, super-busy production he’s splattered all over everything. Thankfully, that song, “Colorblind,” RULES! And, also thankfully, it’s the first single off the record. Thus, the band clearly chose their single wisely (which is important, because I think part of the reason the Toadies’ second record tanked so badly was that the single, “Push the Hand,” is the weakest song on the album). The song has this bitchin’ “doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, YEAHHHHH! You gotta taaaaake it aaaalllll away!” chorus that’s been stuck in my head for days, and the second half of the tune features this goofy section where Ben’s vocals are all treated and fucked-with to hell, and it’s REALLY REALLY COOL. I also think the remix, “Colorblind V2.0,” that comes at the end of the record, is FASCINATING, with all these strings and faux-eastern-sounding plinky instruments and super-duper vocal overdubbing underpinned by a subtle electronic backing and goop. Good poop.
Nothing else is that memorable, though, like I said, which is a problem. Most everything else here, melody and songwriting-wise, is just so overwhelmingly okay that I NEVER remember ANYTHING beyond the chorus to “Colorblind” and some of the neat instrumental bits. The flip side, ofcourse, is that very few tracks are BAD, though there are a few exceptions to that rule as well. I don’t like “Slither” because Ben actually tries to RAP in it (ewww), though it’s partially redeemed by the cool riff I mentioned before that pops up halfway through, “King for a Day” features the mentally retarted “moon, June, soon” (Hey, look at me! I sound like a real critic!) rhyming triplet “You can’t knock me down! Like a clown! With a crown!” and “Pick Me Up” is just boring and mediocre in every sense of both of those words. I think that this lack of memorability partially has to do with Ben’s sort of whiny voice, which isn’t bad, per se, but isn’t very good at carrying a melody, and in its worst moments sounds like a bizarre mixture of Raine Maida and Chester Bennington. Better than Geddy Lee, though. And Gary Cherone. And Nico, too, that fucking Kraut bitch. Fucking bitch singlehandedly ruined three songs on the most overrated album in the history of fucking mankind (Note: I’ve finally come around on it. It’s STILL overrated, but not bad. I haven’t come around on Nico, though, and thus she is a…). Bitch.
I do hope these guys manage to do well, though. It’s not the best music I’ve ever heard in my life, but a lot of it strikes me as the type of music so many piece of shit acts (like, oh, I dunno, Linkin Park) are TRYING to do, but CAN’T, because most rock bands have no fucking idea how to use electronics to good effect in their songs. This band does. Now they just need some better songs.
To find out more about Alien Breed, visit their website, www.alienbreed.com. You can order Antidote there (It’s not being sold in US stores, so there’s nowhere else you can get it. Plus, they only charge you $10 for a copy! What nice guys!), and you can also verify my claim that Ed Pepper looks like he’s hiding an anal probe in that big, frilly fur coat of his.
Nick
Collings (crawlaway@lycos.co.uk) writes:
Hello
Brad, it's Nick here again offering his opinions to your frequently funny
reviews. Damn, how many hits
do you receive? You deserve decent exposure based on your prolific updating
alone.
I also received the Alien Breed CD on my "Alternative Rock Review"
website and gave my own thoughts in
published format.
I think the production is first-rate, use of technology incorporated in the
ROCK sound reminisant of
Pitchshifter (good underrated band - check 'em out) but yes, the songwriting is slightly lacking.
Most band's music I receive (and I've received 12 CD's to date plus the odd
DVD) aren't on same level as say,
The Who or U2 (swipe at your drastic opinion of each U2 album), but I believe
Alien Breed have potenital to
harness their talents and rise above the level in which thousands of bands
occupy. Out of all the bands I
reviewed as a "media whore" this is one of the most listenable. Check
out The Smartest Monkeys they
impressed me most. Oh and Superfine are pretty decent as well. Stay clear of
Rush though, I heard Geddy
Lee isn't a very good singer (so I'm led to believe).
--Nick—
Todd Bogin:
The Midwest Fables
(2006)
Rating: 3
Best Song: “Outburst”
I am officially an asshole. I tell people to send me their CD’s, that I’ll review them and give these people a little exposure, and I act all friendly during the email exchanges I have with these budding young artists. Todd Bogin seems like a very nice guy. He was extremely considerate and polite in his emails asking to send one of his CD’s to me. He sent me a lovely package with notes and pictures and his background and influences and everything. Even a handwritten, personalized little thank-you note! Nice guy. Hell, he’s my age! Shouldn’t I be trying to help nice, considerate, struggling young men in their mid-twenties? Isn’t that what I am? Unfortunately, this album sucks total ass.
Anyway, Todd Bogin
is a young man from
Unfortunately, the melodies, riffs, and chord sequences are unoriginal and uninteresting to the point of pissing me off, and both the vocals and lyrics are atrocious. This truly had the potential to be a tolerably mediocre album, if only Todd had limited himself to rhythm guitar and hired someone else to, you know, sing and write lyrics for him. If I sound mean, well, no shit I am, but a random search of the lyrics listed on his website give me such wonderful rhyming nuggets as “Ever wonder why one and one always makes two? Ever wonder why we all do the stupid things we do?” (from “Relax”), “I know I said I loved you, but that was before I knew you. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to be your friend” (from “The Confusion of Thaddeus J. Snead”), and (in one of those ultra-cliched “I don’t care if any of this makes any sense…it just has to rhyme” lines) “I walked past a store with products for your best, cream for complexions and pill enhancements for your chest, and intelligence in school is defined on scantron tests, but all my useful knowledge is from my Television set” (from “Going Back to Chicago”). Right. He even tries to give his dumb novelty tunes clever, self-referential names like “T.J. Bogin’s 21st Delta Blues Dream As Seen Through the Eyes of Byrne Klay and Hadley Tassinari.” When someone is good, I call song titles like this “fun” and “silly.” When someone sucks total ass, I call song titles like this “fucking retarded.” That may be unfair, yes, but it’s just the way it is.
Lyrics aside, though, Todd’s vocals are just horrific. He’s a terrible singer. He’s high and whiney and overemotes way too much to both cover up for his shortcomings and try and give his voice some personality, and not only does this overemotiveness fail on both counts, it actually makes his voice sound worse. He’s not even on-key half of the time! You know, basic, bouncy country-folk-rock with acoustic guitars and personal lyrics depends a whole heaping shitload on the quality and personality of its vocalist (for examples of this, see Todd’s purported influences Bob Dylan and Neil Young, which means it’s obvious Todd knows this and probably doesn’t need me to tell him he has a shitty voice), and to say Todd fails in that department would be a massive understatement. His vocals are pushed way up in the mix, too, which ofcourse means the two worst components of the album (singing and lyrics) are also the two most obvious. I think “Outburst” is my favorite because it has loud, distorted guitars that actually kick a fair amount of ass and thus become the focal point in the mix of the song, meaning that it’s the only song where Todd’s vocals are not the focal point of the mix. And it’s not even that good of a song! It’s just loud and grimy enough that Todd’s vocals piss me off less. Otherwise, acoustic guitars (that admittedly have some nice jump to them) are the dominant instrument on a lot of the album, so be prepared to mutter repeatedly to yourself “man, this guy really can’t sing.”
There are a handful of songs that break the “country-folk-rock” mold, but, like the embarrassing scratchy piano experiment “The Karma of Abbot Bernard,” they’re actually worse than the generical, annoying crap that fills up the bulk of the album, so it’s not like I need to talk about them. Again, Todd Bogin seems like a very nice guy. It’s just too bad his album sucks.
For more info on Mr. Bogin, visit his website at www.toddbogin.com or his myspace page at www.myspace.com/toddboginmusic. You can read about upcoming shows or download your own Todd Bogin wallpaper or whatever else you want. I mean, I won’t be doing any of these things, but maybe you want to. Or not.
Mr. Mama:
Fikkas (2004)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Down”
And so begin the shameless plugs for other web reviewers’ bands. Guy Peters is a very nice “guy” (Ha!) who runs a very nice music and live concert review website here. He lives in either Belgium (I think?), but still manages to write in better English than most web reviewers (including a Harvard-educated classics retard who will remain unmentioned) and has a site layout MUCH better than any other web reviewer. He is also in a very nice band, Mr. Mama, and one day he emailed me regarding my “Brad is a Whore!” page and the possibility of having his band’s record reviewed on said page. I said “Sure! Cool! Music sent straight from a little European country where people speak silly languages like ‘Flemish’ and ‘French!’ Send it along!” And thus he did, like six months ago or some crap, and now I’m finally getting around to reviewing it. And even though this is the first update in three weeks and it’s only two measly albums, one of which is a “Brad is a Whore!” review, there will be no further updates of any kind until August. When you’re 23, dirt-poor, and living in a strange land where people drive gigantic armored Hummers with license plates that read “MY EGO 1” and you have to drive past Billy Joel’s compound to get to your friend’s apartment, real life tends to fuck you in the ass now and again.
And so, the strangely named “Mr. Mama,” consisting of Patrick on drums, Roel on guitar, Danny on bass, and our good friend Guy (whose action photo in the liner notes makes him look disturbingly like the guy from Modest Mouse, but batshit insane…OK, even more batshit insane) on vocals. And yes, it’d be nice if they gave their last names. I suppose the best way to describe this music would be “stoner rock” or some such designation that makes one think of Kyuss and other like-minded bands, although that’s more from Guy’s own characterization of his band than my impressions of it, since I don’t know all that much about Kyuss (ofcourse, there are three separate tracks titled “Wasted,” so maybe that “stoner rock” designation was onto something). Basically, what we have here is, besides the first “Brad is a Whore!” record I’ve bothered to review that I actually enjoy listening to, is somewhat monotonous yet surprisingly creative heavy music. The guitars are detuned, fuzzed-out, and generally grimy like my shower walls. They do not play anything that I would characterize as “speed metal” or even “metal,” really, because the sound is more indebted to heavy, grinding sludge than anything “metallic.” Although the same exact damn guitar tone in every song, combined with Guy’s at-first-annoying pseudo-cookie monster grunt vocals, was a little tough to take upon first listen, subsequent spins revealed to my happy ears some real nice riffs, creative song structures, and general musical skills that I had not expected from the band of some dude with a website just like mine. I mean, the odds of my ever being in a decent band are about one in 8 gazillion billion million, so what the hell?
Despite the lack of real songwriting skill (try finding a hummable hook in here, I dare you!), the musical dexterity and creativity of these four Europeans is at times quite impressive, like how the three “Wasted” tracks pretty much kick my ass, the intros to tracks like “The Race is On” are effectively atmospheric (nice change of pace from the riffage!), and the detuned grime sludge knocks out interesting riff after interesting riff after interesting riff instead of grimily strumming on three goddamn chords all the time. The average track here consists of a loud, grimy guitar playing a simple yet interesting riff over a distorted bass (tasty!) and nicely intricate drumwork, over which Guy yells mostly incoherent stuff about nothing I can understand in a voice that sounds like an angry, stoned metalhead. The slow, hypnotic parts in songs like “Fikkas Must Vanish” and “That Knife is Rather Blunt” (fantastic song title, by the way) are very nice, and the subtly building and then kick-ass little two-minute number “Down” just totally rocks my testicles. The weird ending experiment “Cropdusting For Dummies” may completely fall flat, but by that point I’ve already decided that I like this record anyhow. Again, it’s not great, since there are exactly zero hummable melodies, it’s very monotonous, and Guy’s vocals can begin to grate after a while (sorry!), but for a bunch of random dudes in Belgium, it’s really far better than I expected (although considering Guy’s excellent taste in music on his site, perhaps my expectations were too low). Just a nice album of heavy music quite unlike the heavy music you hear on the radio today. I say pretty good. Not that you can get it anywhere in this country or anything.
For more
info on Mr. Mama, hit up their website, www.mrmama.com. You can also get there from Guy’s reviews
website. You can order their album there
(I think) and have it sent straight to you from whatever country it is they’re
from! Like
Guy Peters (guy@guypetersreviews.com) writes:
Hey Brad
Just read your review. Thanks, I like it. You certainly made a bunch of good points, and i can totally understand the "monotonous"part too. Heh.
Also some nice descriptions of the guitar sound, etc.
Thanks a lot!
The Spinning Plates
Exposure (2003)
Rating: 4
Best Song: “Eidolon”
OK, so you see my little remark at the top of this page that says “this ain’t no payola operation here, no sir?” Well, it’s not, and even though Dave Tompkins seems like a nice guy, that’s not gonna prevent me from being honest with what I think about his band. The Spinning Plates (by the way, memo to Radiohead: you know you’re huge when bands start naming themselves after your random album tracks), who sent me this album a loooooong time ago and most likely totally forgot about me in the meantime (which is probably a good thing, seeing as how I’m about to trash it), are the aforementioned tall, blond Mr. Tompkins, who handles all guitar, bass, and drum programming duties (yup, a drum machine! Yeeeeeehah!!!), and his partner in crime, short, goateed (not that there’s anything wrong with being goateed…) Gary Simonian, who handles all keyboards and “effects,” whatever that means. Dave is a Ph.D. student in English at USC (Al!) right now, and Gary’s a lawyer, so clearly this is not a band that has any plans of “making it big” or “whoring themselves to TRL” or “being anywhere near a reasonable definition of ‘hip.’” And that’s a very, very good thing. Because they will never, ever, EVER be any of those things, if only because an Armenian George Costanza with a goatee has about as much chance of ever being seen on MTV as, you know, a good band.
Anyway, the music these guys are producing is weird, but not in an avant-garde way. Just in a goofy, messy, “what the fuck are they trying to do?” way. It’s an amalgamation of cheesy ‘80’s AOR late period Police/”Comfortably Numb”/lots of really shitty bands ballads and overdramatic prog-rock. Both members list Marillion as one of their favorite bands, and Dave says he was inspired to originally take up bass after being “blown away” by the Police’s Synchronicity. That should give you a pretty decent idea of what we’re dealing with here. And on top of that little bit of information, the songs here are a mess. At their heart most of them aren’t prog-rock. They’re late-period Police and “Comfortably Numb” via-prog-instrumentation (dumb, cheesy keyboards! Tony Banks’s clearly being a big influence on Mr. Simonian for some reason!) pseudo-ballads, and there are very few appearances of discernable songwriting talent. In theory, I guess the songs here have verses and choruses and middle-eights, but I usually can’t even delineate between them, which to me suggests nothing but a lack of tight, focused songwriting. The middle third of the record provides at least a few half-decent hooks, especially in “Match Girl” and “Her Art,” but 2/3 of the former just about completely blows my ass (pretty much everything except for the harmonized “for the little match girl!” sections does, actually) and the latter is so completely and annoyingly boring and cheesy (complete with ridiculous ‘80’s “heavenly” background synth washes and poo) that, despite the mildly memorable hook, I still give the song a definite thumbs-down in the Ebert and Roeper system.
There are occasional interesting sections in songs, but there’s honestly not a single song here I can say I like for its entire duration. “When My Angels Came” has a completely out-of-place funk/slap bassline. “Kick for Speed” has a very tasty proggy keyboard section at the end, which is the only place that Simonian’s soloing doesn’t remind me of a drunk Tony Banks, and instead reminds me of a much less talented Rick Wakeman. The ten-minute (*shoots self in head*) “In the Blood” has these farging WEIRD sections where Dave attempts to sound creepy and threatening, but instead comes out sounding like Geddy Lee, and that’s fucking horrible, but I do think the musical backing to those sections is pretty neat and UN-STUPID, which is a change from a lot of the record, because most of it comes out sounding like an overproduced (I have no idea how an album these guys probably made in their basement can sound “overproduced,” but it does), over-busy, samey mess. Some of these songs actually start out with a pretty tasty musical idea (some pretty acoustic guitar in a few, a complete rip-off of the opening to Pink Floyd’s “Run Like Hell” in “Eventide”), but by the end there are so many useless keyboard washes and swooshes and crappy Tony-Banks-but-much-worse “solos” piled on top of the drum machine (which actually sounds completely organic, thank god), bass line, and half-assed guitar part that it’s just ANNOYING, and the fact that Dave Tompkins is completely incapable of writing a catchy vocal melody AND has a ridiculous “wanna-be overdramatic prog-rocker but can’t pull it off” voice doesn’t help matters. I’m nominating “Eidolon” as my favorite track not because it’s a good song, but because the duo lets the main acoustic strumming part be and doesn’t pile too much crap on top of it.
You may now
be asking why I’m giving this record a rating as high as a 4 (which means a
record definitely out-and-out sucks, but not RANCIDLY, on the rating system)
when it has no good songs, poor instrumentation, and sub-par singing. And no, it’s not my being nice to these
guys. It’s a lack of being offended. See, I’ve described so much of this record as
“cheesy” and “stupid” and “annoying,” and it truly is all of those things, but
at the end of the day it comes out “funny and ridiculous” instead of “offensive
to Brad’s tastes.” These are just a
couple 30-something guys with sketchy musical tastes, a lot of spare time, and
a desire to make heart-wrenching, overdramatic AOR prog-pop
ballads. They just blow at it. Not their fault. The album’s not trying to be commercial or
anything. It’s just silly. And the lyrics are so bad, they’re
funny! “Your dreams are not as hopeless
as the razor you hold in your hand!”
“Once the stillness elapses, the family collapses!” Deep!
Or not, at all. But it wants to be deep.
And I end up laughing. I don’t
mean to mock these guys or anything. I’m
sure they put lots of effort into this record and all. But I can’t help it if my main reaction to
the record is “now that’s silly.” Plus,
there’s probably like 10-15 good minutes of music on this thing, out of
60-whatever it is, which is a better ratio than any of, oh, Creed’s albums, for
instance. It’s just like a minute here,
two minutes there, etc., instead of being anything close to a continuous song
(for instance, the second half of “Kick for Speed,” which I mentioned before,
is playing right now, and it kicks ass!
It’s just too bad the first half is completely atrocious). See?
It’s funny, ridiculous, overdramatic, totally amateur, bad music, but it’s not a TOTAL waste of time…
For more information on The (Like)
Spinning Plates, refer to their website, www.thespinningplates.com. You can listen to samples of the songs from
the record, check out lyrics, buy copies of it, etc. Not that I’d recommend you do any of that,
but if you were intrigued by my general description of the music before I
started making fun of it, it’s something you might wanna
check out.