Here to Mars by Coheed and Cambria in 500 words (Including the title).

“This is the best straight rock song of the last decade,” Said Andy Leddington in a podcast we had done earlier this year. At the time I responded with a pained ‘Errrr… are you sure?’ I mean it’s a cracking song, Coheed and Cambria do big, epic songs very well, it’s their bread and butter at this point. Their new album, The Colour Before The Sun is one that I recommend the first half of very highly*. It was nice to hear them pull the scale of their music down a few notches; their songs on this album lacked that epic scope and just went for a more straight rock sound, which I found to be very pleasing to my ears.

The exception to the rule was Here to Mars, where Coheed bring the epic scale back to do something that’s still quite simple, a love song. No huge war or planet shaping events to be sung about here, just the lead singer telling a girl that he loves her very much and this song does it for me.

The song starts off with a distorted cello riff with carefully placed drum and bass stings, giving the song a very active pulse which a lack of could of easily made this song unbearable.  Then it ramps up to then chorus masterfully, half way through to the verse they start chugging the riff on guitar and then cutting the backing entirely just to hit you in the face with that chorus.  The chorus on this song is near perfect… if not for the titular lyric. Claudio Sanchez as a vocalist divides people**.  On the one hand it is very impressive he can sing that high, but on the other hand, the wrong lyric can really make him sound very childish. This song doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of having him swear, something which can ruin a Coheed song for me just because it’s that cringe inducing to hear, but the line ‘You’re my everything from here to mars,’ sounds like a child wrote it for his first band. Which is a shame, because the other lyrics are very heartfelt and Claudio delivers them in a way that sells you on the emotion behind them.

I wouldn’t say this is the best rock song of the last decade (See True Trans Soul Rebel by Against me! and ‘45’ by the Gaslight Anthem for my contenders for that title) but I do think this could very well become a modern classic. Masterfully put together, fantastically produced and quite simply epic. But honestly, despite the excellent composure and genuine sweetness, I can’t say it’s perfect, although I do absolutely love this song. So, to sum it all up in a single word: ‘Quasi-perfect.’

*As a matter of fact, here’s the very podcast where I talk about the album with a couple of friends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di6WgnPXb70

**Divides me, Andy and Richard at least.

Attack Attack’s Stick Stickly in 500 words.

If you’ve never heard of Attack Attack! Then good news! You missed the template that Asking Alexandria* stole off. Attack Attack! dropped Stick Stickly a year before Asking’s debut, making it quite clear who ripped off who. But in Asking’s defence**, Attack Attack! were waaaaaaaaaaay worse. The video alone drew a lot of ire from metal fans for popularising crab core and being a shining example of mop-headed teenagers ruining the genre. I’m not going to talk about music video though, the song is way worse than video ever could be.

The electronic elements are shameful. They’re bad and Caleb Shomo*** should still feel bad for writing them. Just whirring uninspired synth sounds blaring over generic riffs, which wouldn’t be so bad if a) Enter Shikari hadn’t done it so much better a year prior and b) not for those auto tuned vocals. I don’t know where this officially started and but it needs to be banned from Metal. Some people try and pass it off as a stylistic choice. Those people are in plain faced denial because it’s like saying not being able to sing in key is a stylistic choice which is what resorting to auto-tune is. If you like the sound, fine, but don’t pretend it’s a bold artistic choice, or that a non auto-tuned performance wouldn’t be better.

The guitar work sucks. Just chugging to give a ‘B00tal’ feel, no nuance to it. On another song it could be a basis for something interesting, but here they’re the basis for the horrible electronic elements. The screaming is technically impressive, but I’m not a fan of Austin Carlile’s vocals. There are no levels to it, it’s the same wail every time and there’s no variance to them. That’s on his more tolerable stuff, here, it’s that wail, along with generic guitar work and those terrible electronic elements.

One thing that’s never talked about this song when it really should be, because it makes it so much worse are the lyrics. Without going into detail, it’s a song about god. One of the most infamously bad metal-core songs, is a Christian metalcore song. Metal isn’t about worshiping Satan, but I’m not too sure how many church carols would be improved with screemo and techno elements. This song is a lazy and failed experiment with a tenuous religious link, which just so happened to ruin metal core for a couple of years to come. To sum up in one word: Blasphemous.   

*You know? One of the most popular metal acts of the last 6 years?

** Not that their early stuff deserves it by any means.

***Yes the same Caleb Shomo from Beartooth. Started as keyboard player for this band and was promoted to lead vocalist after Austin Carlile (Yes that Austin Carlile) left and remained so until the band spilt. If you like them, you should pick up Attack Attack!’s last album This Means War, it’s pretty much Beartooth’s blue prints.

That's the Spirit in 1000 words.

I like Bring me the Horizon. This is where the conversation should end when talking about an opinion, but given a lot of the stigmas attached to like this band, I feel I should clarify this statement. While the less that’s said about their first album* the better, their second and third album’s really caught the attention of my brother who then tried to ram them down my ears. At first I thought that the singer sounded like a 13 year old with a sore throat and was lyrically on par with said 13 year old’s diary. Eventually I got down with the torturous vocals and came to adore those two albums, Suicide Season having more good standalone tracks,  But it’s successor** having better songs in general. Then the fourth album Semperternal hit and blew the previous two efforts out of the water. Tighter song compositions, fantastically produced and lyrics that weren’t torture. It’s one of the best albums of this decade and will hopefully stand to have quite a legacy…

…And now for the hideous electronic mess that's That’s the Spirit, their fifth album. I wasn’t going to write about this because I covered it in a podcast. But a month or so down the line and arranging my personal pics for our awards show (which should be going up on Wednesday, go on Youtube and look up Thrash Talk), I realised since that podcast my feelings had changed. I now hate it more.

Let’s run it track by track shall we?

Doomed: Reminds me of the first track from Semperternal… in the sense that the intro track was the worst thing about that album. You can hear the shift to a far more electronic based sound from this track, even when compared to the previous album. The guitar sound has lost a lot of definition and has become quite washed in with the drums and bass and apparently guitar melody became a dirty phrase during the writing process.

On this album, Oli Sykes does two things with his vocals, cut back on the scratchier screaming sounds, which pretty much is 60% of BMTH’s identity, and started ‘cooing’ certain parts of songs. If that didn’t make you cringe, then listen to the album. It certainly should. This is called dialling back your personality in order to sell more albums. Also, I like how in attempt to still keep some hard-core cred that at the beginning of this song it starts with some ominous grunting to add some atmosphere. The lyrics are standard. Nothing particularly offensive, except for that ‘you can have my heart’ line. It’s a bit wince worthy to hear the man who once wrote a song which consisted of the lyrics ‘And after everything you put me through I should have F^@king F!$ted you,” suddenly writing this schmaltzy nonsense.

Happy Song: Why was this a single? It’s not terrible. Nice to hear that Producer Jordan Fish can actually track heavy guitar, would have been nice to hear that more, Especially in a heavy rock album. It’s a pretty jumpy riff that sounds like it would be a lot of fun live, in a crowd. I just get the feeling that on a better album it wouldn’t have been featured off of the main release.

Throne: YES! More of this please! Anthemic, huge sounding, heavy! The electronic elements fuse seamlessly with the heavier guitar and sounds orgasmic. Lyrically, not too bad, helped by the fact it’s quite a simple song so there’s less room for lyrical anomalies. Why isn’t the rest of the album like this?

True Friends: Could have been ok, if not for two factors. 1) Composition. Basic Four Cord structure on the guitar, no melody line with any melody coming from some generic and basic sounding synth strings. 2) Vocals/Lyrics. Whiney and Oli Sykes proves why he doesn’t normally do conventional singing. It sounds very babyish and it’s hard to listen to.

Follow you: WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS!?!?!?! Oli Sykes coo’s the entire song, which should never be allowed in a humane society. It sounds like a boyband ballad, which would be painful enough, but the fact that it’s Bring me the Horizon is particularly painful. Lyrically it’s got everything  wrong with these kinds of songs, overly mushy, corny and designed to make prepubescent girls fall in love with them. It’s offensively terrible.

What you need: Jordan (producer) are you ok? You’re recording a metal album, this sounds like it’s off of a rejected Killers demo. It’s ok. Nothing particularly good about this song.

Avalanche: Definition of an album track. Just take a snippet of what the album sounds like and avoid being interesting.

Run: Boring. Lazy. Like my review of it.

Drown: … I like it. Sappy lyrics aside, the production is very good, Oli’s vocals are bearable and the guitar is finally given some room to have melody lines. Athemic, like this album should have been.

Blasphemy: Production murders this song entirely. If the guitar sounded anything like it did on Drown or Throne this could have been decent. But it doesn’t. It sounds like garbage and any impact or stompy ominous feel to the song is washed out with the tone and that horrendously wimpy singing.

Oh no: See Follow you for my comments.

To conclude, in attempt to sound like their previous album but more commercially viable, they’ve completely gutted their sound and have tried to put it back together with love songs and electronic elements. It’s an utter failure, and sadly it’s sold like hot cakes. So, be prepared for not only more of this from BMTH, but also the imitators that are bound to come. So summed up in one final word: Abysmal.

* Which from what I understand according to the insane people who like Deathcore was to that genre was what Solja Boy is to his

**Didn’t use the title to stick to my word-count. (It’s longer than this footnote)

Dear Makers of Fan4tastic.

Two nights ago I saw the reboot of the Fantastic 4, or Fant4stic as it’s being called, because it’s been too soon since the last one so if you didn’t distinct it somehow people would say it’s been too soon and realise movie studio’s don’t have a single creative brain cell in their heads.  Needless to say, like many comic book fans, movie buffs and people with self-respect I wasn’t best pleased by what I saw. As someone who has never owned a comic book in his life and as someone who doesn’t have the time of day to listen to all the copyright politics, I felt I should write you these instructions in order to for you to avoid a similar catastrophe in 5 years, when you inevitably reboot it again because of the previously mentioned copyright disputes.

I’m also going to put a spoiler warning in this letter, because nobody who saw this movie should want to claim responsibility for making it.

You can start by not even touching on Dr Doom. You made the same mistake twice in a row, trying to make up a simpler back story for the part time dictator, part time mad scientist, part time wizard, only to end up with a back story for a character that isn’t engaging for new audiences and makes the fan boys rattle their teeth in sheer nerdy rage. Next time, choose a simpler staple villain of the Fantastic Four’s or the Fant4sic’s. Yes I know that Dr Doom is like THE villain of the Fantastic Four’s, but doing him a backstory that would do justice to his comic origins is near impossible if you’re going to try and include him in the origin of another character. To establish him, you need to establish Latvaria, his origin in both magic and science and if you’re going to establish him in the same film as you’re establishing the heroes, you are just going to hit the hat trick with fucking this stuff up.

Which leads me to my second problem, that this film is all first act, show this film to someone who has no idea what it actually is, bleep out the names of the characters and see how long it takes them to realise this is a Fantastic Four film. Hell, get someone with no idea what the Fantastic Four is, see how long it takes them to realise this is meant to be a superhero movie, if they ever realise what it’s meant to be. Character origins are important, don’t misunderstand me but this isn’t effective in quickly establishing the heroes of our story so they can do the fun stuff that super heroes can do;

Kid Genius and friend make gate to other world by accident> Kid genius shows off at science fair> Genius gets scholarship> Genius tries to impress Female>  Backer has trouble in board room> Backer gets Brody Genius on board> Backers son does illegal stuff> Backer blackmails son on board>

I gave up trying to give you this films entire origin story for the Fantastic Four, because it’s the whole movie, padded to a degree that gives you the impression that pacing was a naughty word for this films writers. Either that or the film was trying to get as little of the Fant4stic in there as possible, which given that this film is basically selling you on the fact that there’s going to be super heroes is incredibly shameful. Sam Ramey’s Original Spider Man film did a far better job of this, closely following the comic book origin so the fan boys don’t go moo;

Nerdy boy is nerdy> Gets bit by spider> Realises he’s changing> Trys to profit off of it> His uncle dies due to his hubris> gets guilt complex.

SIMPLE! Now Spiderman can do all the fun things that he’s meant to do as a super hero, which people love and want to see in a movie about them.

Speaking of Spider Man, The reboot of that, Fan4tastic and Man of Steel all share a similar problem and I spy the new Star Wars film making the same mistake as well. VARY UP THE FUCKING LIGHTING! I’m sick of seeing films shoot everything in this dark blue hue and even film things in out door area’s like the sun itself didn’t want to be too badly associated with this film and so it made itself scarce. It doesn’t make your film adult or clever, your writing does that. I know decent writers cost more than the time it takes to put a blue filter on in post, but it leaves you with a product that looks abysmal and because so many other films are doing it, makes it look exactly the fucking same.

However, good writers are a fifth of the key ingredients to making a film. Two of the others are good directors and good actors. I’m not too sure who shit the bed here, weather the actors are complete incompetent sods or the directors are the ones to blame. Miles Teller as an actor is never a good choice, but as your ‘lead’ it’s downright suicidal.  The guy brings no life to his character, adds no flair or charisma and Miles Teller doesn’t work well with the neutral mask theory, so you’re left with a wad of cardboard masquerading as the protagonist.  I would try to criticize Kate Mara as Sue Storm, but her performance struck me so little that I can’t really say anything nice or mean about it. However you have Jamie Bell as The Thing, who was in Snowpiercer and gave a good performance there and I think Kebbell could have been a good Dr Doom if he was allowed to be good with it, that and given some baffling story beats and cinematography that offers about as much artistically as a pot of yogurt, you have to think the direction was lacking too.

But Ultimately, I think the real kicker in this film was the budget. Whether it be the lack of properly noteworthy names working on such a popular intellectual property or the effects that would have embarrassed the earliest uses of CG or the fact that the majority of the film is filmed in the same stupid white room, or the relative brevity of the experience. This strikes me as a very cheap film and there’s nothing wrong with a cheap film. Horror or comedies can be made really interesting on the cheap with a touch of good direction and competent acting and I am most certainly not saying that with the films lack of both that a stronger budget would have improved the product. But if this film is only being made so that someone or other can hold on to the film rights, maybe the rights aren’t worth keeping if you aren’t willing to take risks and spend a little more money on a good movie.  

If I’m wrong, you have nothing to worry about.

Sincerely

Will.

Linkin Park Crawling in 400 Words.

Opinion of Linkin Park has been split down the middle amongst metal fans, they’re either the worst thing that ever happened to rock music, or one of the best Nu-metal acts of the 2000’s which then became the worst thing to ever happen to rock music with the abomination that scientists have theorized to be their 4^th album, but others have believed to be an attempt to create a musical product that required less effort to make than white noise. To the outsider however, they’re that one band with that very stereo typically emo song that occasionally gets played by MLG montages momentarily. 

Crawling, off of the Hybrid Theory album, is rather distinct because it’s the one song that non Linkin Park fans all know about, yet it’s by far their one of their weakest songs. Well, until they started making songs that sound like they were written for last night’s dish water. One thing that used to make Linkin Park’s songs good was the seamless combination Mike Shinoda’s strong and catchy rap flow mixed in with the intensity of the metal segment of this whole Nu-Metal dealio. So Crawling is already the runt of the litter by relegating the rap to a single sentence that gets repeated twice. I’m not saying that Shinoda rapping the verses would have turned the song terrific, but at the same time not utilizing one of your best assets is like trying to use a video tape of Richard Dawkins whining to entertain children when you have a DVD of happy feet knocking about.

A problem with this song is that it’s all intensity with no energy. Chester Bennington is (or was at least) a very talented vocalist, but he works best on soaring up-tempo numbers (See Bleed it out or Paper Cut), where as his work here, although equally technically proficient, does make him sound like a teenager screaming about unfair life is, which is not helped by the lyrics being overly vague even by their standards. The instrumentation isn’t a great deal to write home about ever, no one will ever call Linkin Park shredders, but the term phoning it in does spring to mind. So to sum it up in one word: Regrettable. While it does capture a mood that only one with bleached hair and eyeliner will understand, look back closely and the sloppiness of the product becomes quite clear.