• MOST IMPROVED •

The Mars Volta / Octahedron

I’ve always tried to like The Mars Volta. Each album has had some interesting, memorable moments, but as a whole I found each of them to be damn near impossible to sit through. And don’t even get me started on the bullshit jam-session live performances. But Octahedron finally sees the band craft more focused pieces that can actually be called songs. The lyrics are still artsy-fartsy stoner baloney, but that’s fine in this case. I can sit all the way through this album, and I did so pretty often this year.

• WASTED HYPE •

Them Crooked Vultures / self-titled

If this was a debut album made by three guys that you’ve never heard of, it would not be getting anywhere near the kind of reviews or hype it has gotten. It’s a decent album at best, with a fairly dull lead singer. Everyone that loves this band loved it before they ever heard a single song.

• BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENTS •

Chris Cornell / Scream

This was simply the biggest wrong turn that a great artist could have made. What the fuck Chris was thinking here is completely beyond me. I just hope it was a very short-lived phase that never rears its head again. I hesitated to even put it on this list because I want to just forget about it and pretend it never existed. Horrendous.

Green Day / 21st Century Breakdown

I loved American Idiot, so I was eager to get into this album. Unfortunately I never could. It sounded weak from the first time I listened to it, and nothing grabbed me. Fail.

• HONORABLE MENTIONS •

Alice In Chains / Black Gives Way To Blue

There’s a certain faction of people that just aren’t willing to get over the whole “It’s not Layne so I don’t like it” bullshit. And trust me, I was skeptical coming in. Layne was special, and can’t be replaced. Luckily William Duvall never pretends to be Layne. He fits the aesthetic of the music, and he does it with skill and class. Does this rank up there with ‘Dirt’? No. But neither did the last album with Layne. This is a very good Alice In Chains album, powered mainly by Jerry Cantrell, just like all Alice In Chains albums.

Pearl Jam / Backspacer

Pearl Jam can do no wrong in my eyes, so admittedly, they have an easy ride onto any list that I create. Despite being the shortest album of the bands long career, Backspacer never disappoints. The band managed to pull out maybe the most hard rocking PJ song ever, “Gonna See My Friend” and one of their sweetest ballads, “Just Breathe”. Yet another great album from our finest living Classic Rock band.

AFI / Crash Love

It took AFI some time to settle into being a great rock band, which is what they are now. Crash Love is a timeless rock album. I don’t know that it can touch ‘Sing The Sorrow’ as the pinnacle of the bands creativity, but it far surpasses ‘Decemberunderground’. AFI have grown up and found their true voice. Great album.

• ALBUM OF THE YEAR •

dredg / The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion

Not only is this the album of the year, and very possibly the decade, but it will likely go down as one of my favorite albums of all time. It really is just about as perfect as an album can be. The production is absolutely flawless. Every nuance of every instrument is crystal clear, and mixed beautifully. The songs are all well-crafted, intelligent, and touching. This is very possibly the highlight of one of America’s finest, most creative bands ever. If you haven’t given this album your undivided attention for at least a few spins, you are really missing out on something special.

It took a long time to actually get on a focused path for this new album. The future of DDC was pretty uncertain after the Human Condition version of the band ended. I wanted some new challenges, but I also wasn’t feeling overly confident. Eventually, I got collaborating with some folks (Anthony Orsino, John Bozzuto, Tom Roller) and the new music started to take shape.

Aside from the staggered start to the making of the album, the biggest issue was the decision to do all the vocals myself. There were a few potential singers in the mix, but none really hit the spot. It was just time to step up and take a shot at using my own voice to convey my ideas for what Dark Disco Club is right now. That also meant I was responsible for all of the lyrics as well. Yikes!

Now that the new album (EP, whatever) is about 96% complete, I can start to get an idea of what we’ve created. And it is surely something I’m proud of. Until an album is complete; mixed, mastered, packaged, etc. you can’t really get the full picture. But it’s moving along well and should be in peoples ears on schedule.

The inspiration for this album came from real life, as usual. I’m not the kind of person that writes elaborate fictional stories or invents characters to populate my songs. I’m also not a person that gets inspired to write much about happiness, joy, or anything positive really. Now, this album does have a bit of… I dunno, cautious optimism, maybe. For example, the song “One Blood” is about a true love and finding a real bond that lasts (hopefully) forever. And while it’s lyrical content is pretty sparse, “Sonrise and the Fall of Man” is just about noticing that one speck of positivity in the midst of a whole world of shit. The other songs touch on sex, hatred, regret, and placing blame for all kinds of good stuff.

Musically, it actually sounds like what I wanted The End to sound like. It’s more “live” and hard rocking than The Human Condition was, but way more diverse and interesting than The End. I’m sure I’ll write more about it when the time gets closer.

The following statements are true:
21st Century Breakdown is a great album.
21st Century Breakdown is a shitty album.

In creating the follow-up to American Idiot, Green Day made the respectably ambitious choice to go really big. They created another full-blown rock opera that follows a young couple named Christian and Gloria through life in the United States following the presidency of George W. Bush, as they “deal with the mess our 43rd president left behind”. All good.

The good news is that there are a ton of extremely well-written songs here. And really, that’s what the core of any great album has to be. You get plenty of the up-beat rock that Green Day does so well, along with a good mix of epic rockers that would make Queen proud, and some very well executed ballads. If there’s any weakness in the songwriting this time around, it would be some vague lyrics. I think Billie Joe went a little too universal in order to help with the whole grandiose vibe. An issue, but not the end of the world.

Now the bad news. They chose Butch Vig to produce the album. Despite his work on some classic albums from Helmet, AFI, and L7, this turned out to be a horrible choice. Without question, the production killed what this album could have been. It sounds generic and lifeless. Tre’s drums could be a drum machine set to the default rock kit for all I know, and Billie Joe’s voice is just all too sweet and layered. There’s no grit. There’s no humanity. You can’t actually hear any of the playing, if that makes sense. You just hear this too-well-balanced end result. There’s nothing worse than an album being ruined by something that isn’t the music. Ugh.

I love Chris Cornell. I think he’s one of the most capable singer/songwriters ever, and he was a driving force behind what was probably the greatest American rock band of all time; Soundgarden. These facts made it all the more heartbreaking when I realized I hated his new album so much, and that it would probably get the most brutal review I could ever give an album. Luckily, I gave the album another couple of spins before writing it.

Do I love this record? No. Will most long-time Chris Cornell fans love this record? I seriously doubt it. I started feeling nervous about this album months ago when I learned that he had made an entire album with Timbaland. Having heard it, it’s pretty close to what I had imagined. Take everything you’ve known Chris to do in Soundgarden, Audioslave, and his previous solo work, and forget it. This could not be farther away from that. Imagine that Timbaland went about producing a record just the same way he does for Justin Timberlake, and had Chris Cornell sing on it. No shit, that’s what this is.

Under no circumstances do I approve of this musical direction for Chris Cornell. Having said that, both Chris and Tim are very good at what they do. In reality, it’s a fine album. There are good songs, and the production is certainly up to par within the genre. If this were a debut album by some R&B crooning white boy named Chris Cornell, it wouldn’t seem unusual at all. It’s his history that makes this thing so damn confusing. It’ll get some spins, but hopefully he doesn’t waste time in making another album, and it had better sound more like Euphoria Morning or Seasons.

There’s some additional discussion about this review over here.

• PLEASANT SURPRISE •

Darius Rucker
Learn To Live

The odds were pretty stacked against me digging a Country album, no matter who was singing it. But solid songwriting and a great voice made this a no-brainer for the Pleasant Surprise award.

• MOST IMPROVED •

Kanye West
808s & Heartbreak

As I said in my review of this album, Kanye had been a disappointment to me over the last couple of years. This record took him at least temporarily, in a new direction. I love when artists aren’t afraid to try something new.

• BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT •
Oh joy! We get two disappointing albums for this category instead of just one. Yay!

Erykah Badu
New Amerykah Part One

An occasionally wise lead singer once crooned “Fuck retro anything.” Well, I have to agree with him. Seriously, what the fuck was this record, and what the fuck happened to Erykah Badu? She totally went for that contrived retro bullshit that makes so many bands lame. Mama’s Gun came out way back in 2000 and still stands tall as a fabulous album all the way through. 2008 would mark 5 years since her last album; the kinda not great Worldwide Underground. This bitch better come out with a seriously great album if she wants to leave any kind of cool legacy behind. And she better not wait 5 years to do it.

Ashes Divide
Keep Telling Myself It’s Alright

Speaking of Maynard Keenan, Billy Howerdel better find him, and start kissing his ass. The reason Billy didn’t sing for A Perfect Circle is because he’s a horrible, boring, personality-less singer. Somehow this album even managed to make Josh Freese’s drums sound lifeless. What a disaster.

• SONG OF THE YEAR •

Far
Pony

Far broke up in 1999 after releasing their best album; Water & Solutions. There wasn’t much talk about the band until this awesome cover of a Ginuwine song appeared on myspace under the moniker Hot Little Pony. The band got back together in 2008 for some small tours, but so far, no new album is planned. Even if they never record another note, hearing Jonah Matranga sing these lyrics is ridiculous enough to make this song rock for a long long time.

• HONORABLE MENTIONS •

The Sound of Animals Fighting
The Ocean and the Sun

Technically, I guess this album would be classified as “progressive rock”, but a better description would be “some seriously wacky cool ass shit”. An amazing, original album done by dudes who are in other bands. Dig it.

Nine Inch Nails
The Slip

You can’t beat Nine Inch Nails. You just can’t. Sobriety has worked wonders for Trent Reznor. Since getting clean, he’s maintained the level of intensity and creativity that garnered endless complementary adjectives over the years. Now, prolific can be added to the list. The Slip is compact, heavy, danceable and kickass. It doesn’t exactly count towards the album, but the tour(s) in support of this album were the best the band has ever done.

Guns N’ Roses
Chinese Democracy

No Slash, no Duff, no Izzy. Who gives a shit!? This record is jam packed with really good songs. Yes, it took way too long. But it’s here now and it’s better than 99% of what get released every week. I think the long wait coupled with the lack of promotion and absence of any interviews, video, or anything at all from Axl made the release seem a bit anticlimactic. Sonically, albums don’t get much better than this one.

• ALBUM OF THE YEAR •

Metallica
Death Magnetic

The CD version of this release was marred by a horrible mix/mastering job based on a decision to participate in the Loudness Wars. Despite that fact, the album rules. We all waited a long long time for a kickass Metallica record, and we finally got it. Bang your head.

When I first heard “Through The Wire” in 2003, I fell in love with it. The song itself was great, but the fact that Kanye recorded the song with his jaw wired shut 2 weeks after having his whole face smashed in and surgically reconstructed made it just that much cooler in my eyes. It was a real slice of life. It was genuine, which is something that music (Hip Hop especially) is sorely lacking these days.

Since then, as sad as it is, Kanye has proved to be a disappointment to me. Sure, he’s had a few cool jams here and there, but much of the stuff was simply average, and his odd outbursts were a bit of a turn-off. Well, all that has changed. The sumbitch has outdone himself.

808s & Heartbreak comes after a year of losing his mother, breaking up with his fiancée, and generally struggling to deal with his relatively new, insane lifestyle. And it shows. I think it’s safe to say this is still very much a Hip Hop album at heart, but… it has heart. The overwhelming vibe of the album is quite sad. Like, real life sad. He tells tales of missed family events, overbearing women, and the broken heartedness that so many of us can relate to. Admittedly, I was turned off ahead of time when I heard that he used a heavy Auto-Tune effect on all the vocals, and it’s true. It’s on every single track. While I really do hate the effect and wish people would stop using it already, I have to say, it works. It grew on me really fast, and it fits. Although there’s still plenty of rapping on the album, there’s considerably more singing than you might expect to hear from Kanye, and again, it really works.

I was very pleasantly surprised by this album, and I highly recommend it, even if you haven’t been a Kanye West fan before.

Listen to: Say You Will

I had a whole in-depth track-by-track review of the album written, but I scrapped it. When an album takes as long as this one, and gets talked about and over-analyzed as much as this one, it’s hard to get a clear perspective. The only way this album should be judged is by the sound it makes when you play it. Forget the years it took, the millions of dollars, the huge list of musicians come and gone, and the fact that Axl is the only original member of the band. Leave all that behind and listen to it for what it is; a Rock record.

Luckily for us, it happens to be a very good Rock record. Among many other things, detractors of this album (haters) will call it “overproduced”. I would call it “noticeably produced”. There is extreme attention to detail, and the album sounds great. It sounds like an album by one of the biggest bands in the history of music, not a garage band. It doesn’t have a single bit of that disgusting retro vibe that so many bands are trying to pull off these days, and it doesn’t suffer from the blatant overmastering that Death Magnetic or the newest Coheed and Cambria album suffer from, and thank god. I was really concerned that it would.

One of the most surprising things to me was just how different so many of the tracks were from one another. You get through at least the first five tracks, each with significantly distinct flavors. Right now my favorites are “Better”, “If The World”, “Scraped”, and “Sorry”. There are a couple that could be compared to Use Your Illusion era GnR, but for the most part these songs are a giant leap ahead for Axl and his new bandmates.

And if the comparison even needs to be made, this album kills anything Velvet Revolver has done.

If you wanna download it before buying it, here you go.

My friend Kookeroo Kate had some tickets to see Nine Inch Nails at the lil House of Blues in Atlantic City. It’s a small club inside the Showboat Hotel & Casino. Needless to say I was pretty excited to see this, especially after seeing them at the big Wachovia Center with the full out-of-this-world production. This was described as a more intimate, stripped down performance. And man, was it ever! After scratching my head through the opening band Health (who I actually did not hate, like everyone else did), I was thrilled when NIN took to the bare stage.

The crowd surged forward quite a bit, which I expected, and at that moment it was time for me to make a decision. It’s actually something that’s crossed my mind a few times in recent months, especially after seeing Coheed and Cambria in NYC. Through my teen years and early twenties, I went to a ton of concerts and I spent most of my time rocking out right at the front of the stage, or spazzing my way through whatever wacky mosh pit or clusterfuck was in effect that night. In recent years, for whatever reason that just hasn’t been the case. Nowadays I hang back to get a clear view and keep peoples nasty sweat off of me. Sometimes I’ll even chill up in the balcony. Anyway, I made a choice to stay in the mix on this night. I decided that I would rock and roll my way straight to the front of the stage, regardless of how many tattooed meatheads stood in my way. I danced and yelled and sang along, throwing and absorbing elbow strikes all along the way. It one point during the set, one of my own songs actually sprang to my mind. In fact, it’s my masterpiece! Without question, the greatest song I’ve ever written or played. Obviously I’m talking about Ground n Pound! Everyone assumes this song is about an actual street fight or some bullshit like that, but if you pay attention to my amazing poetic lyrics, it becomes clear that the song was written about my love of experiencing shows in this way. Dig it:

if you’re lookin’ for a fight
you found one
you found a pit full of energy just like yours
flowing in circles, thrashing about
if you wanna get to the front
ground and pound

ground and pound

if you’re lookin’ for a fight
you found one
you’re full of sweat like the first time you got laid
pushing and pulling, screaming aloud
if your body’s not sore yet
ground and pound

ground and pound

Needless to say, NIN was awesome. They proved that they don’t need any outrageous stage production to be one of the most awesome bands ever. They plowed through an amazing set, and even brought out Peter Murphy to sing Reptile! How cool is that!? Being that close to the band reminded me of seeing them in 1994, which has always been a very fond memory. Every bulging vein, drop of sweat, broken guitar string, all clearly visible right before my eyes. I could actually hear the sound of Trent and Robin singing, from their mouths, not through the PA. And man, Robin Finck is 10 times more entertaining from up close. That dude makes some hilariously wild faces when he plays.

NIN SETLIST:
Pinion
Love Is Not Enough
Terrible Lie
1,000,000
Letting You
March of the Pigs
Piggy
The Frail
The Wretched
The Collector
Survivalism
Reptile (with Peter Murphy!)
Closer
Discipline
The Beginning of The End
Ghosts 31
Wish
Head Down
Gave Up
The Line Begins To Blur
Only
God Given
Down In It
Hurt
Starfuckers Inc.
The Hand That Feeds
Head Like A Hole

The NIN show was more than enough for one night, but I still had one more thing planned. I wanted to win some free money while in Atlantic City. Unfortunately, the casino at the Showboat sucked and didn’t have any live table games, just slots and computer bullshit. I needed some roulette. It wasn’t a problem since the good ol’ Trump Taj Mahal was right next door. So, we got to the Taj and located the roulette wheels. After waiting for Kate to get over her irrational fear of roulette tables, we started the gambling. I could go into detail about each bet that was placed, but who gives a fuck really. I got to the casino with $60 in my pocket, and I left with $200. About 30 seconds after leaving the casino, I found another $10 laying on the sidewalk. I picked that shit up and pocketed it without even breaking stride.

By the time I got home I was already pretty annoyed with this irritating and occasionally painful cough that I’ve had for a week now. I really didn’t sleep much in part because of that annoying hacking. Whatever! It was all cool aside from the retarded coughing.

With very, very few exceptions, I can confidently say that I don’t like Country music. I recently came across some mention of Darius Rucker having the number one album on the Billboard Country charts. I was intrigued. I’m a huge fan of the first Hootie & the Blowfish album; Cracked Rear View. In fact, I would say it’s one of my favorite albums, and features what might actually be my favorite song in the whole world, “Not Even The Trees“. Anyway, despite it being called a Country Album, I decided to give it a chance.

As I started the album I heard… well, that thing that makes Country what it is. That twang. That guitar sound, you know the one. I was scared. But I closed my eyes and let the song move forward. And you know what, it wasn’t so bad. The second song had a similar twang, but again, it was a good song. After that, the twang didn’t seem as prominent. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of finger pickin’ to satisfy your average shit-kickin’ good ol’ boy, but just like that awesome Hootie record, this album is about the songs. And these are all great songs. Darius sings stories from a more direct first person perspective than usual, but that’s all part of this genre.

There’s a solid balance of uplifting songs, heartbreaking sad songs, and just enough humor thrown in. Like I said, there are a scarce few exceptions for me in the Country genre, but thanks to this record I can never again say “I don’t like Country music”. Because I do. I love at least one Country album. Thanks Darius!

WORK: I lost my job. The school jerked me around all Summer, never giving me a straight answer as to when I would start, what my hours would be, and how much I would get paid. Then, at the last minute, they cut the program completely, leaving me unemployed. Needless to say, this is a devastating loss. Not only did I enjoy the job and the kids I worked with, but I also have rent and bills to pay on my own. To say I’m completely fucked would have to be an understatement. I have no idea if/when I’ll get any work from Penn, so yeah, things are pretty dire.

ART: I have a solo show coming up in December. It’s my first show since that little group thing I did in 2006, and the first showing new work since early 2005. I’ve been working on some new prints, with plenty more germinating in my brain and sketchbook. Hopefully I’ll finish a good amount of new stuff in time for the show. The opening will almost surely be on Saturday, December 6 from 6-9 PM. I’m telling you all now, so you have plenty of notice. So if you aren’t there, it’s because you choose not to be, and are an asshole.

MUSIC: As I’ve said many times, I am rarely able to be creative with my art and music at the same time. Regardless, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. While I’m working on new art for the show, I’ve also started working on new music for the final Dark Disco Club CD. So far things are going well, but I’m sure we’ll be well into 2009 before it’s complete.

LIFE: My car is damn near dead and has a range of maybe 10 miles before it dies for the day. My Batcave still pretty much sucks, mostly because I can’t afford to get it going, and also because my slacker landlords still haven’t replaced my carpet. Also, I think I should get a big tattoo on my chest.