Deals & Steals: That’s a Lotta Vikings!

  Bit of a Nordic influence this time out (again!), and certainly some good tunes found at good prices. This first lot was found at Second Spin:

Leaves Eyes – Vinland Saga $8.99. Moody conceptual stuff about Leif Eriksson’s travels and exploration.

Soilwork – Stabbing the Drama $8.99. Slowly filling in my back catalogue of these Gothenburgers and In Flames BFFs.

At the Gates – Slaughter of the Soul $4.49. Speaking of Gothenburg, there wasn’t an identifiable scene until this album melted everyone’s faces.

Dark Tranquillity – Character $2.49. One of their best.

Destroy Destroy Destroy – Battle Sluts $5.00. Actually an American band. But that title! Sounds like Cradle of Filth meets Manowar. Perfect touring partner for 3iob.

Not Viking but a bit Scottish (and awesome):

Murder Inc. – Locate Subvert Terminate: The Complete Murder Inc. $3.99. So nice to hear a remaster of this marvelous Killing Joke side project with Chris Connelly. Behold, Scot-industrial rap:

And in the super-bargain category, some finds from the local thrift store. Each were only one or two bucks apiece!

Green Day – American Idiot. Overplayed? True. Overplayed because actually very good? Also true.

Promonium Jesters – Time and Place. I once saw these Ontario industrialists open for Hanzel und Gretyl. Their recorded output has a steal-from-the-best quality to it, including some spot-on Skinny Puppy influence.

  Kraftwerk – The Mix. Worth it just to find out I’ve been singing the chorus wrong all these years. Still, fun fun fun!

 

Deals & Steals: Viking Swords and Mixing Boards

  Hey all, a big backlog of interesting finds from the past couple of months. All prices $US, Shipping about $15  altogether.

3 Inches of Blood – Battlecry Under a Winter Sun $5.59. Old school 3IOB is good times.

Dark Tranquillity – Haven $4.88. I’m trying to like it. Really. The riffs are there, but so is the baritone crooning. At least I didn’t turf it out the window like I did with Projector.

Lair of the Minotaur – Evil Power $4.19. This is currently one of my favourite things; a sludgy, fudgy Melvins-like fuzztone with an Entombed’s worth of aggression. Heavy, heavy shit.

Lonely Island – Turtleneck and Chain $9.99. The perfect thing for chilling and sippin’ on a lite beer.

Landmine Marathon – Sovereign Descent $5.99. Recent changes to the band can’t take away the power of this massive recording.

Imperative Reaction – Minus All $4.49. IR are that rare animal nowadays – traditional electro industrial.

Arch Enemy – Anthems of Rebellion $2.99. Their most ineffectual album to date, but the price was right.

Evanescence – The Open Door $6.99. File under stuff that I know is bad but listen to anyway. So terrible, so in my car all the time. I think it’s because Amy Lee’s voice reminds me of happy times chasing girls in college using Sarah McLachlan as bait.

And lastly, a record that reminds me of a fun concert story:

  Hanzel und Gretyl – Uber Alles $2.00. I have a soft spot for these Fako-Fascisto Funsters. They played my area with Slick Idiot last year (during Oktoberfest, no less) and blew out the sound system in the club about 20 times in a row. The result was terrible, but I’ll never forget mock-dominatrix Vas Kallas turning to Kaiser von Loopy, completely dropping character, and honking in pure Brooklynese: “This is gonna be one of them nights, eh Rob?”

Thank you, Rob and Betty.

Deals and Steals: Ladies Up Front, Gearheads Live

  Live industrial sounds and female-fronted bands for the first shipment this year, along with some great TV. All Prices $US. Only $5 shipping but I was dinged with a $17 customs bill thanks to a random inspection. Boo!

Dimension Zero – Silent Night Fever $3.19. Awesome Marduk/In Flames supergroup thrashback.

In This Moment – A Star-Crossed Wasteland $5.59. A perfect mix of their earlier aggression and new lush production.

Wicked Wisdom – S/T $2.54. Jada Pinkett Smith has a metal band. They warned me, but I needed to know. Meh, it’s not terrible.

KMFDM – WWIII Live 2003 $3.20. Basically because I wanted to hear Lucia Cifarelli sing “Juke Joint Jezebelle”. I could have lived my life without it.

The Corner $11.99. This is the TV miniseries that The Wire was based on, and The Wire is the best thing to happen to television since they decided to put a screen on one side. Can’t wait to dig into it.

Rome: The Complete Series $60.99. I needed something to fill that Deadwood void. Came in a nifty book-binding type of case, like a history text full of gore and manipulation.

And the funnest deal of the bunch:

  Ministry – In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Showing Up $3.58. Indispensable live document of their glory days!

Album Review – Dark Tranquillity “We Are the Void” 2010

  Dark Tranquillity’s 2007 release Fiction was very well received, and therefore a hard act to follow. Taking a leaf from the book of their Gothenburg brothers In Flames, DT have  given us more of the same good stuff.  We Are the Void bears much the same relationship to its predecessor as Reroute to Remain does to Clayman, taking the same songwriting ideas and recording techniques and running with them largely unchanged,  serving up slightly shorter and simpler songs delivered at a crisp, professional pace with a strong thematic and tonal unity amongst the tracks.
 
Opening with surgical slasher “Shadow in Our Blood”, followed by pounder “Dream Oblivion”, the Swedish sextet manage to maintain the line of tension throughout the record. Even when operating at differing tempos, the band hold firmly to the thread of our listening attention right up to the droning fade-out of sleepy, Fear-Factory style closer “Iridium”. Alas, current market forces dictate that all releases must have bonus tracks, so we only have a few seconds to appreciate the album’s true ending before we’re hit with a couple of decent B-sides, number and selection depending on your geographic location and/or method of purchase.
 
The inimitable Martin Popoff has pointed out that Master of Puppets is essentially a remake/sequel to Ride the Lighting, and that there’s nothing wrong with that. We Are the Void works the same way, striking no new iron but fixing none of the perfectly unbroken concepts we’ve been enjoying since Fiction. 8 out of 10  

Album Review – In Flames “A Sense of Purpose” 2008

Times were when you knew what you were getting with In Flames. As one of the Gothenburg originals, they could be counted upon for bright, wide open spaces in order to give the soaring melodies room to duel. On the page would be a story of the evils of mankind, or maybe just the Man. All that changed in 2002 with Reroute to Remain, as the band experimented with shorter, quicker structures and a more introspective storyline of the evils within. 

People reacted well to the evolution, reasoning that this band needed room to grow, and if they had a yen for cover paintings featuring the biomechanical denizens of red-skied wastelands, there were other people mining that vein. 

Encouraged by the inch given, In Flames veered away the full mile on Soundtrack to your Escape, and things got a little too Korny and weird. Either they got it all out of their system or took a peek at the reviews, because Come Clarity was a much simpler record which set the tone for this one, managing to steal away scot-free with a whole new demographic in the process. The masters of melodic death were filling venues with hardcore, of a sort. They’re not quite Possessed to Skate, but you do see awful lot of Jesterhead stickers on Jeep FJ’s these days. 

A Sense of Purpose is more or less Come Clarity II, and that’s not a bad thing. This is the logical progression of the tighter, compressed aesthetic begun with Reroute, with all the focus on brief, intense moments. Acoustic bridges with whispered vocals dot the terrain here and there, but overall it still has the same hurried vibe of Clarity. The fencing exhibitions of the 90’s have become a 4-round boxing match: twenty seconds of moshpit madness and then it’s time to throw up your hands and sing along big and clean with Anders. Repeat and ring the bell!  

If you’ve followed In Flames out of the Citadel of Spikes and up the Ski Hill of Chronic you won’t find anything wrong here. Maybe nowadays we know where this band is going after all. 7 out of 10