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Chad Kroeger and his Nickelback chums are experiencing a bit of a backlash at the moment. Apparently they’ve been rumbled as being both boring and generic.
Funnily enough, I was listening to their Silver Side Up album during the week and I couldn’t help thinking that they weren’t as clever as we all imagined when How You Remind Me came out.
I wonder what Steven Adler’s bandmates think of his constant assertions that he’d love to reunite the original Guns N’ Roses lineup.
Let’s face it, Adler’s Appetite would probably run out of steam pretty quickly, leaving the other members just an over-glorified tribute band. And I don’t understand where he’s getting the idea that the other Gunners are buying into the idea. None of them seem to have commented publicly so far.
Which - I think you’ll agree - leaves the most washed-up member of the classic Guns N’ Roses lineup craving a reunion. Hmmm. If you were Adler, would you rather be in a tribute band to GNR or be back in the drum stool behind your old compadres? Read more & comment »
One of the most hotly anticipated albums this year was Linkin Park’s latest, Minutes To Midnight. Tipped as a new direction for the band, there’s noticably less rapping from Shinoda. So, naturally, Chester Bennington features more prominently on this album.
Rather than doing a straight review, I’ve trawled the web to bring you some of the best reviews of the new album.
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I heard on the grapevine that Metallica are plotting a new album for sometime in 2008.
Big yawn. Didn’t Metallica play themselves out of musical relevance years ago? I haven’t bought a new Metallica album since Load, and I never properly warmed to that one. Then they took a little sabbatical to sue their fans for copyright infringement. That was clever. Even fans who hadn’t downloaded copies of their albums balked at the thought of being taken to the cleaners by Hetfield and Ulrich. Read more & comment »
Ha! Discovered via my new favourite blog, sassy old Pink gets up on stage with a band called Metal Skool and blasts out an impromptu version of Skid Row’s classic 18 & Life.
Alright, she stumbles over the lyrics, but the singing is amazing. I don’t know how she does it, but Pink manages to hold her vocal style while hitting all those Sebastian Bach high notes! I really wouldn’t mind hearing a properly recorded version of this tune.
Kudos to Metal Skool for keeping the old tunes alive. Sort of!
On a whim, I dug out my old copy of Pantera’s Vulgar Display Of Power album a few weeks back. Admittedly, I was much fonder of Cowboys From Hell, but I decided to take the less worn-out disc for a spin.
Vulgar Display Of Power features a load of well-known Pantera tunes, such as Walk, This Love and A New Level. But the song which struck me most was the album closer, Hollow.
You’ve gotta hand it to Linkin Park - when they arrived in 2000, Limp Bizkit ruled the rap/metal scene with an iron fist. Linkin Park were great and everything, they just couldn’t garner the media attention that Fred Durst seemed to effortlessly command.
Fast forward a few years, and the Bizkit are all but gone and Linkin Park are pretty much the undisputed leaders of mainstream metal. They’ve attained God-like status in recent years, despite a very slow release cycle. For my money, that mostly boils down to quality over quantity.
Sometimes when you’re listening to mainstream music, you get a craving for something a bit more aggressive. Something with a bit of kick. So, discovering Throw The Fight on Virb the other night was just the tonic.
Throw The Fight are a 5-piece from Minneapolis, and they produce a brutal but melodic brand of metal that I really enjoyed from listening to their Virb page.
The songs the feature on Virb (and MySpace) are taken from their EP The Fire Within. Endless Struggle takes a Maidenesque twin guitar attack and mixes it with a driving metal track. Sort of Sum 41 on steroids. If this type of metal is your thing, you should also check out These Apologies and Our Horizons, both fantastic tracks.
From what I hear, Throw The Fight are gaining popularity in the US:
selling over 5,000 copies of their first self-recorded e.p. Current stats for the band include over 100,000 plays and over 24,000 friends on Myspace.com, 54,000 plays on Purevolume.com
These guys are definitely worth keeping an eye on!Throw The Fight are
I got friended on MySpace this evening by Californian rock/metal band 1RKO. I was impressed with their latest release One More Time, so I listened a bit more. Now it’s time to tell you a bit about them…
The group consists of vocalist/guitarist Simon Daniels, co-founder Bryan Spang on bass, guitarist Derek Stephens and Rich Sacco on drums.
The name 1RKO comes from the notion and the mission of re-creating the original larger than life experience that rock n roll is supposed to bring,an explosion of strength,and emotion.When asked to describe their approach to their work,they see it as a process of discovery,where you are naked,authentic,ignore trends and take the bull by the horns.
While their approach to metal isn’t exactly mould-breaking, the group are heavy hitters. They replicate that smoothly distorted, melodic rock sound that I loved as a teenager and still do today.
I was looking at Google’s Music Trends this evening and noticed that Linkin Park’s In the End was at the top of their chart. Bizarre, I thought, that’s been out for ages. As it turns out, the single was released in 2001 (the Hybrid Theory album came out in 2000).
Naturally, I headed on over to YouTube to catch the video, and I was not disappointed. The interplay between Chester Bennington’s vocals and Mike Shinoda’s rapping is absolutely fantastic, far better than anything Limp Bizkit were doing at the time. I sometimes wonder why Linkin Park didn’t go further. Fred Durst was certainly more media friendly and controversial, while the Linkin Park guys maybe come across as a bit geekier? What do you think?
Whatever, I really love this rap/metal fusion stuff. Shinoda is definitely the cooler of the two vocalists, but Bennington really wails on the chorus. In The End is simply a great song to scream whenever you’re in a terrible mood and you need to let out your frustrations. I heartily recommend it!
A bit about the video. Very sci-fi! The band are playing in a surreal desert landscape and on top of a mysterious obelisk. It’s a CGI masterpiece, gloomy and dark and brooding. The thing I loved about this type of music was that it was straightforward, heavy hitting, and no messing around with extended guitar solos. Not that I mind guitar solos!
Anyway, if you missed In The End first time around, or you haven’t heard it in a while, time to check it out again!
