Wasting Light gets off to a noisy start, with Grohl growling “these are my famous last words” before kicking into a thunderous guitar riff that retains the band’s signature melodic trim. The first single “Rope” and the following “Dear Rosemary” are classic Foo Fighters tracks that welcome old listeners to the album. What follows is what I assume Grohl was talking about when alluded to the band’s heaviest work thus far; “White Limo.” The vocals cannot be deciphered, the drums and licks fly by at a rapid pace, yet it’s strongly melodic, even amongst Grohl’s shrieks and screams. Later in the track list, the slow burner “I Should Have Know,” which features Grohl’s former Nirvana band-mate, Krist Novoselic, continues the anti-formulaic vibe that enhances the record.

Overall, the album contains little filler with “Arlandria,” “These Days,” “Back and Forth” and the album closer “Walk” urging heads to nod and hands to start air-strumming. In what is a true testament to the power of the songs on Wasting Light, although the album was recorded in a garage, I can imagine it would pack much of the same punch streaming out of an arena’s massive speaker system.

“Little Hell” sees Green joined by Daniel Romano of Attack in Black, Dylan Green and Scott Remila of Raising the Fawn, Nick Skalkos of The Miniatures, Misha Bower of Bruce Peninsula and Anna Jarvis and Jordan Mitchell of The Rest. The result is a fuller, lusher sound that other City and Colour outings. The title track “Fragile Bird” and “Weightless” are great examples of this. The album also sounds less produced, but the imperfections and the squeal of guitar string only add to the album’s sorrowful musical and lyrical landscape. Case in point, the track “The Grand Optimist” does not convey any of the feeling its title suggests.

Overall, the album acts as a continuing step in City and Colour’s releases. While “Bring Me Your Love” built on “Sometimes” acoustic guitar driven sound with folk influenced banjos, harmonicas and drums, “Little Hell” takes it one step further by offering the listener an even more layered recording.

Catch City and Colour at the Burton Cummings Theatre on February 3^rd, 2012.

There were a lot of great music releases over the last year and I’m going to get right down to business, posting as many of them as can, as well as writing the odd off-topic post. Great to be back!

Steven Luscher of the Vancouver band “Lakefield” writes a compelling essay on the effects of The Loudness War and it’s destruction of the dynamic range of a recording.  He makes an interesting anology:

The race to “loud” has resulted in a loss of something called dynamic range in audio recordings. Dynamic range is a hallmark of a quality recording in much the same way that it’s a centrepiece of music composition, arrangement, and performance. To explain why this characteristic is so important to music lovers, let’s go back to your grade school classroom. Imagine that the highest that a student can raise their hand represents the loudest sound on a recording, and that the level of their shoulder represents the quietest sound.

Remember that restrained, mysterious kid in your class? Imagine that he’s the only one around who can bend his arm at the wrist, elbow, and shoulder. The teacher asks the class to comment on the events surrounding the beatification of Joan of Arc in 1909, and he readies an answer consisting of an obtuse reference to the birth of Leo Fender. His hand, at rest on his shoulder, shoots high into the air, folded into the sign of the horns. As his hand shot into the air, it travelled a great distance and achieved great airspeed before snapping to a halt at the end of his reach. Making this powerful and sudden gesture required him to use the full range of motion afforded to his arm by his shoulder, elbow, and wrist. It had impact, and it got him noticed.

Now, let’s consider another one of your other classmates – the teacher’s son. He’s leaning back in his chair trying to play it cool, with his arms behind his head, bent at the elbow. The spectre of favoritism looms large and heavy on his horizon; caught between wanting to impress his parent, and wanting to avoid the ire of his classmates, he sits on his answers for a requisite 5 seconds before shooting his hand into the air. Rotating at the elbow only, he raises his hand with only half the fervor of the first kid.

That annoying keener kid in the front row has had his arm up this entire time, letting his hand flop down at the wrist like a wet noodle between questions, ready to answer the next one as soon as it leaves the teacher’s lips. The problem with his approach is that so little motion happens between the wet noodle position and the five-fingers-spread-like-a-starfish position that it barely commands any attention at all.

As they raise their hands, each one of these kids’ hands reach the same height, but they move through more or less of their available range of motion to get there. The greater the distance that their hands travel, the more emotion, surprise, intent, and impact they convey.

Here is where the analogy circles back to recordings of music; the range of motion of a kid’s arm, from low to high, is like the dynamic range of an audio recording, from quiet to loud. Recordings that feature great distances between quiet and loud have the potential to convey a maximum of emotion, surprise, intent, and impact, as only a mysterious, devil horn pumping young scholar can. Recordings with little or no distance between the quietest sound and the loudest sound end up playing like a wet noodle. Critics call this phenomenon “wimpy loud sound.”

You can read the entire essay on his band’s website at http://lakefieldmusic.com/the-loudness-war-stops-here-high-dynamic-range-audio-recordings as well as listen to their latest album “Sounds from the Treeline” which as you may have guessed, makes excellent use of dynamic range.  It was engineered by Bob Katz, the author of “Mastering Audio: The Art and the Science.”

To simplify the plot – its a vampire movie.  Wait! Come back!  Its good, I swear!  The plot device that makes one of the main charecters a vampire is used to delve deep into human phycology.  The charecters are mostly childen, yet they don’t act like children.  A vampire doesn’t age on the outside either.

I never have high hopes for remakes.  The early reviews for this one, however, seem promising.  But, I have been let down so many times before.  The atmosphere, the subtle naunces and the charecters really elevated the original movie and I can only hope that these elements are not lost on North American audiences.  The new trailer bothers me, as it paints the film as a scary movie.  ”Let the Right One In” was not scary, it was unsettling.  Yet, it was also quite nice.  Both trailers are posted below.  Check them out.

“A Thousand Suns” is made up of 15 tracks, six of which are are under three minutes long and comprised of intrumental interludes or sound clips.  Recordings of Martin Luther King and atomic bomb developer  J. Robert Oppenheimer rise seamlessly amidst the layers of organic and technology-inspired sounds.  The most jarring moment of the album features a clean crisp recording of one of King’s emotionally-charged speeches.   His words are repeated, eventually being distorted until the emotion is gone -replaced by metallic screeching.  It begs the question: Do King’s words ring true as they once did, or have we (technology) replayed them and distorted them until the are monotonous and irrellevant?  Its a fair question, and a very subtle yet smart way of exploring the idea.

It is hard to review the album song by song, as each track plays a part in the overall picture, however standouts include ‘Burning in the Sky,’ ‘When They Come for Me,’ ‘Wretches and Kings’ and ‘The Catalyst.’  Even though the album is a collection of sounds and ideas, the noise speaks universally.  There are tribal beats, heart-shuddering basslines, raw rap verses, quiet acoustic moments and ear-shattering guitars and shouting.  It seems Linkin Park has made a album that transverses continents, cultures, and genres.  It’s fitting.  The scare of nuclear warfare knows no boundries, so neither does this piece of commentary and art. 

On a side note, forums and YouTube comments abound about how the band has lost it’s edge;  that they’ve gone soft.  It’s true that Linkin Park sounds nothing like the rap/rock band of ten years ago.  If they did, nobody would care.  Although, I challenge anyone to listen to the track “Wretches and Kings” off the new album and tell me it’s not hard enough for them.

“I find it completely frustrating and off-putting and it turns me off of the punk scene really because people are very closed minded.”

Gabel isn’t standing down from his comments on the band’s new disc White Crosses.   The lead single “I was a Teenage Anarchist” laments on the falls of the anarchy scene and the misshapen politics and revoultions it embraces.  It’s fitting, however, that by taking a staunch very un-mainstream stance in the eyes of his old-school followers, Gabel closly follows the same ideals that the group he is trying to distance himself from holds.

Immediately following “Teenage Anarchist”, the Springsteen-esque “Because of the Shame” is another stand-out track on the album.  The lyrics are honest and the emotion runs high as Gabel rasps and growls about a painful meeting at a friend’s funeral.  The friend in reference, interestingly enough, is the same subject of Againt Me!’s previous single “Thrash Unreal”  The shame in question, turns out to be that very song. 

 ”Suffucation” evokes memories of Against Me!’s earlier work, it’s ready for crowd shout-backs and urges fists in the air.  “Ache with Me” proves Against Me! cannot be pigeonholed.  At the end of the day, it’s all the band wants to prove.  They’ve shown they can write folk-punk songs as good as the next guy.  They’ve proven their punk-rock stylings.  It’s time to move on to the next project.  White Crosses isn’t quite there, but it’s pretty damn close.

So today, I listened to the album again, hopefully with fresh ears.   “Suddenly” is still a killer track.  Glitchy beats, soaring guitars and mutilated vocals.  It is fresh exciting music.   “The Emergency”,  the second track on the first disc, turned me off.  It is too generic and too repeative.  BT is a pioneer.  This song is not the work of a pioneer.  “Every Other Way”, on the other hand, is an epic track.  The eleven minute song was built for a movie soundtrack, which may not be an outlandish remark considering BT’s work on film scores.  JES who BT collaborates with on ”Every Other Way” and the following “The Light in Things”, has an amazing voice.  The element her vocals bring elavate the two songs.   “The Rose of Jericho” is this album’s “Flaming June” but the comparision is really unfair.  The original BT standout track is hardly touchable.  “Forget Me” is well, forgettable. 

Disc two starts off slower than the first disc with a collaboration with vocalist Kristy Hawkshaw, who BT has worked with on previous albums.  Her work on ‘Running Down the Way up” off BT’s Movement in Still Life was my favorite track from that album, so I had high expectations.  I didn’t remember anything great from the first listen, but on the second run I was drawn into the song alot more.  The song would not sound out of place on a Tiesto album.  “Love Can Kill You” and “Always” don’t offer much in the way of outstanding material, but “Le Nocturne de Lumière” (which my rough translation gives me Light in Darkness) evokes memories of BT’s  instrumental disc This Binary Universe.  ‘The Ghost in You”, a cover of The Psychdelic Furs is a good album closer, which wouldn’t sound out of place on BT’s Emotional Technology album.

By the time I had listened to the album again, I feel as though I could come to grips with my feelings.  I adore BT.  Brian Transeau is my favorite electronica artist, and someone who really fits the bill of an “artist”.  Throughout his work, I have felt as though he has been on the cusp of new sounds.  These Hopeful Machines unfortunately is a mixture of elements from his past work, with the exception of a few select tracks.  I like the sounds, but they don’t give me the same chill I felt when I listened to his previous work the first time.

It got me to thinking.   Jimmy Eat World, a four-peice alternative rock band from Meza, Arizona, has released a consistantly good and growth-filled album with each outing.  The Jimmy Eat World of the nineties sounds nothing like the Jimmy Eat World of present, but is still entrancing in its own way.  As well, each song on pretty much each album deserves to be there.  I started thinking about other bands that I could say the same thing about.  There are very few, and certainly not many with a catalog as large as Jimmy Eat World’s.   

With Clarity ushering in the new mellenium, the band released Bleed American in 2001 (re-named after the 2001 World Trade Centre attacks to Jimmy Eat World).  The album notched up the tempo on most of the tracks and proved that the band could create a mean hook-laden pop-rock song.  “The Middle” caught on with radio-listeners the world over and pushed the band into mainstream success, 3 albums after their first outing.  Which leads me to one of my peeves about the band: many judge JEW by “The Middle”, as this is the only song that comes to mind when they hear the band’s name.  The song, however, does not accurately portray the band’s sound.  It is simplistic up-temo pop-punk track whereas Jimmy Eat World’s signiture sound, I feel, is a much more slow burner rocker, characterized by deep personal lyrics.  But I digress, “The Middle” still rocks.

The rest of the 2000′s brought Futures (2004) and Chase this Light (2007).  The two albums grow on the band’s already easily accesible sound.  It’s amazing that these hook filled, middle of the road rock albums by a band that garnered such indie cred with Clarity are produced with the same feeling, attention, and love.  Plus, the original indie fans don’t accuse the band of “selling out”, as they should not.  Jimmy Eat World has earned their right to play their music.  This wide appeal is one of the things I pondered as I listened to their music again this past week.  From the 3 minute pop-rock ditty of “The Middle”, to the 7 minute powerful plea of “23″.  From the indie kids, to the mall kids, to their older fanbase that remembers the Static Prevails days.  Jimmy Eat World delivers.

Jimmy Eat World is real music.  Not overproduced, not overwritten, not overthought.  I  don’t believe many other bands have brought as many smile-inducing, toe-tapping, yet intelligent songs to the masses as this band has in the last 10 years. 

 Jimmy Eat World for Band of the Decade.  With talk of a new album in 2010, I hope it is a sign that we will see many many more years of entertainment from this band.  In the mean time, I take comfort in the fact that when lead singer Jim Adkins croons  “they’ll say, Lord give me the chance to shake that hand,” that I already have.