Some new music

I got some new music lately, and by new I mean out for a few months already. Anyway, the first is Looking Glass by The Birthday Massacre. There are three things that attracted me to this band: the name, the title track from the first album of the same name, and that I actually did a double-take while listening to said song and had a, "Did she just say murder-tramp? Neat." moment. They are a female-led rock band with some electronic elements, or as they call it in Merry Old England, electro. Points are automatically earned for having a keytar player, an instrument that died out, much like the dinosaurs, when everyone decided for some fucking reason Devo wasn't cool anymore. And while I still don't see a whole lot that is really special about the band's music, it is at least different in a music industry that happily shovels shit and piss down the gaping maw that is MTV, only for it to regurgitate all over the crying faces of 16-year-old Myspace kids with too much money like a giant mother bird.

::cough - social commentary - cough::

Anyway, the new album has an interesting 80s Asian rock quality to it, particularly the title track, with some nice bleeps and bloops that remind me of "I Think I'm Turning Japanese" or anything done by Wang Chung - don't you fucking telling me you don't know who I'm talking about! However, they do fall into that heavy-as-the-planet metal guitar snare drum sound trap that almost all metal bands do, and given that it is a female singer they have to sound like that crappy E-something band that got that one song on Daredevil a few years back. That would ultimately be their downfall, as it would rocket them to fame for roughly the same amount of time it would take to be put into a giant slingshot and shot up into the stratosphere, only to come crashing down and turn into a greasy spot, with accompanying YouTube set to equally bad metal music.

Seriously, what the fuck is up with those people? When I sign into YouTube, I just want to watch some Thundercats. What kind of poor taste do you have to think that goes with Slipknot, what!? If you see a weird ass cartoon of yesteryear and the first place your head goes is to images of burly men in jumpsuits and scary masks with lots of blood-painted pentagrams and screaming in the background: GET! HELP! YOU! WANKER!

Overall, I like the new album. Since I first heard them I developed a soft spot, a small one, but a soft spot nonetheless. It isn't very deep and the high school aged whining feels like riding down a kiddy slide made of cheese graters naked, but it is one of the few instances where I'll say the originality of the sound and execution makes up for it. A little.

The other is The Slip, the new Nine Inch Nails album. I thought Mister Reznor's first two albums were pretty interesting, and anyone who can come out and say that God is dead and no one cares is okay in my book. However, there isn't much I can say about the new album because it is pretty bad. At ten tracks it's a bit brief, a fact that I should be thankful for. I have always found NIN albums to be a self-deprecating to the point of being obnoxious and while I will concede that all of them are brilliant musically, The Slip well, slips.

::da-dum-phsssssss::

The entire thing is short and repetitive and sounds very lazy. I will give Senior Trent that his new album is totally free via their website, which is pretty awesome. I'd give him more credit if he were anyone other then Trent Reznor and didn't have enough money to buy real estate on Mars and could have used proceeds from the album to eat, but what the hell. One cannot exactly fault philanthropists for being wealthy, and the more free shit there is out there, the better.

Even if it is shit.

So, Birthday Massacre's Looking Glass and NIN's slip. Good for a listen, not worth the money, but, counterpoint; it isn't like anyone pays for music anymore anyway.

NOTE: There is no scientific correlation between the extinction of dinosaurs and the popularity of Devo.