Moroni's Review of Metric's "Synthetica"

Right off the bat, I have to say that I am totally obsessed with this album.  This one of those albums that I am lucky to come across that I am able to listen to over and over again.  But that is not the first time that Metric has done this to me.

After I downloaded this album, my wife Martha came into the bedroom while I was listening to this.

"Who is this?" she asked.

"Metric," I answered.

"Are they very big?" she asked.

I shrugged.  "Yes.  I guess they are now.  One of their songs was the main song in one of the Twilight movies.  That kind of put them in the spotlight.  But they have been around a long time, and I was into them way before Twilight."

"I've noticed that you and the lady who wrote the Twilight novels are into the same type of music," Martha observed.

That annoyed me.  But it is true.  My Chemical Romance, Muse, Metric, Blue October.  These are bands that Stepenie Meyer and I both share in common.  And although I really HATE the Twilight series, I am forced to admit that they have pretty good soundtracks.  Muse (whose new album I will be reviewing soon) was a special jewel of mine that very few had ever heard of until Twilight came along.  I remember my teen daughter raiding my music library, picking out music suggestions that Stephenie Meyer had made on her website.  Suddenly, every teen girl knew who Muse was.  I don't know why that annoyed me so much.

So it was with Metric.

I was browsing new music and stumbled across Metric's third album "Fantasies".  I bought it without ever having heard it.  Throughout the summers of 2009 and 2010, while I was working the fair circuit, this album played constantly - over and over.  I did not get sick of it.  I am still not sick of it.

When Metric released their fourth album, "Synthetica", I was worried that they might not be able to do it again.  But I was wrong.  This album is very good.

From the first sad tones of the first track "Artificial Nocturne", I was hooked.  "Youth Without Youth" is the first single off of the album, and it is not even one of my favorite songs.  In truth, there is not a bad song on this album.  Once again, Emily Haines breathy vocals blend perfectly with the effervescent, dreamy quality of sound that pervades this whole album.  It is a great concept album.  They take "New Wave" to a level it never quite reached in the '80s.

My favorite tracks are "Speed the Collapse", "Dreams So Real", "Lost Kitten", and "Synthetica".  But really, the whole album is very good.  I would suggest this album to anyone.  And just ignore that whole Twilight thing...

Moroni's Review of Imagine Dragons' "Night Visions"

One of the great things about my relationship with my oldest daughter Sophie and me is music.

I never really had music in common with my dad.  He couldn't really understand the '80s alternative music that I listened to as a kid.  He was into old time country, Mexican rancheras, and '50s rock and roll.  It wasn't until I was an adult that we shared some musical tastes.  For instance, I was into bluegrass, and we both enjoyed the soundtrack to "O Brother, Where Art Thou".

I don't know what I am.  I guess I am one of those "cool dads" who likes new music.  Maybe?  But Sophie and I are always introducing music to each other.  She is now in college and recently posted a link to Imagine Dragons to me.  So I downloaded the first album from this Las Vegas quartet - "Night Visions".

I'm going to be honest.  After my first listen, I really didn't like it that much.  Even after several listens, I have to admit that it is not too terribly original.  This is the kind of generic music that record studios pump out that is "marketable" and designed to get radio airplay.

But after listening to it, it is kind of starting to grow on me.  There are still some songs that annoy me.  But the album is kind of catchy.  This album is not going to win any Grammy's. but it is good  music to tap your finger to for a while.

The album starts out with "Radioactive", which is a haunting melody.  But then they have to throw that wobble bass in there.  I understand that the masses still like dubstep.  But this is a rock band.  I am wondering which engineer or radio executive decided to make this a dubstep song instead of a straight up rock song.

The next song - "Tiptoe" - is equally catchy.  But I disliked the Casio keyboard sound in the '80s, and I dislike it equally in 2012.  "It's Time" and "Every Night" are ballads, and they don't do much for me.  "On Top of the World" and "Underdog" are so annoying that I almost never want to listen to this album ever again - just because of these songs.  However, the album is redeemed by my favorite songs - "Amsterdam", "Hear Me", "Bleeding Out", and "Nothing Left to Say".

It is hard to listen to this album without hearing its obvious influences - the Killers, Neon Trees, Vertical Horizon, Coldplay - and I even heard a little Gene Loves Jezebel in there.

All in all, a decent album.  But I don't think I will be holding my breath for their sophomore effort.

Moroni's Review of Ingrid Michaelson's "Human Again"

For our thirteenth (and final) anniversary, Temple and I got each other simple gifts.  After all, we were going to New York City.  Temple bought me books - a thick copy of the third "Game of Thrones" novel and two Conan graphic novels.  (I was pleased.)  I ordered her the new Ingrid Michaelson album from Amazon.

The album had been out since January, and, every chance we got, we would scour any store that carried CDs for it.  We never found it.  I offered to download a digital copy, but Temple refused.  When she got this album, she wanted a physical CD that she could hold in her hands.  So, for our anniversary, I ordered a copy - a $13 parting gift.

It arrived on our anniversary, and I dropped it off at her house, complete in the bubble wrap.  A week, or so, later, we took our trip to New York.  The entire drive to the airport in Phoenix, we listened to the album.  I asked Temple if she liked it.  She said that, right now, it is her favorite album.  She listened to it constantly.  She said that it was Ingrid Michaelson's best album.

And Temple has all of Ingrid Michaelson's albums.  Temple loves Ingrid Michaelson, has for years.  And - as with most of the music Temple listens to - I got her into Ingrid Michaelson.

In 2007, I was remodeling a hotel in Pittsburgh.  One morning, while I was getting ready for work, I was watching Good Morning, America.  The night before was the season finale of Grey's Anatomy - a show that I have never watched to this day.  There was a poignant scene, and they chose the music of an unknown musician named Ingrid Michaelson.  She had not released an album yet, and the producers had discovered her music on MySpace.

They interviewed Ingrid.  She was a brainy beauty with tortoise shell glasses who still lived at home with her parents.  There was an innocence and honesty about her, and her music was great.  She made me wish that she wanted to become a sisterwife.  That day, I became one of her MySpace friends.  

A year later, her single "The Way I Am" became a hit on the radio, and I would say with pride that I was a "friend" on her MySpace page before anyone had really heard of her.  I introduced the music to Temple, and she loved it.  She bought every album afterwards.  For a long time, her ringback tone was  "Everybody".

As I listened to the album on the way to the airport, I had to concur with Temple.  The album is the best album by Ingrid Michaelson to date.  The sound is clear.  The music is well written.  And Michaelson is a superb lyricist.  ("We hate the rain when it fills up our shoes/ But we love it when it washes our cars.")

The album starts our great with "Fire", which is a typical song for Ingrid Michaelson.  "I'm Through" is a very touching song about dealing with life after a breakup.  "Blood Brothers", "Ghost", and "Palm of Your Hand" are very catchy.  "In the Sea" is my personal favorite.  "End of the World" is a love song about the zombie apocalypse.  In truth, there is not a bad song on the album.

On our trip home from New York, we listened to the album for the four hour drive home, and I am still not sick of it.  I would recommend this album  to anyone.

Announcement

Breaking News: After 13 years, Temple and I are ending our marriage. It may seem cliche, but we really love each other and are still the best of friends. We will continue raising our children together, just no longer as husband and

 wife. It is a very sad time for us, and yet I wish her the best. There are reasons for it, but I won't discuss it on a public forum. I won't tolerate people badmouthing Temple or dragging her name through the mud. There are reasons for the split, but honestly I have to take responsibility for this. If it is anyone's fault, it is mine. I will likely blog about this in coming days, but without embarrassing her. My thirteen years as a polygamist are over, and I will still defend this Principle until my dying day, as I will defend Temple. This photo was taken the evening it became final. I LOVE YOU FOREVER, TEMPLE!! ♥

Moroni's Review of Dead Can Dance's "Anastasis"

I have to admit.  I have been waiting to do this review for a long time.  I never thought this day would come.  It has been sixteen years since Dead Can Dance came out with a new album.

There are times in my life when - the first time I heard certain music - it changed me forever.  A sort of "WTF" moment.  The first time I heard AC/DC.  Rick James.  Korn.  And one of those moments was the first time I heard Dead Can Dance.

It was 1986.  Sixteen years-old.  Their album "Spleen and Ideal."  When I first heard the name "Dead Can Dance", I assumed that it was gothic music.  And it was, kind of.  But it transcended that label.  World music.  New Age.  It went kind of beyond all of them.

The majestic sweep of "De Profundis" with the crashing voice of Lisa Gerrard.  She wasn't singing words.  It sometimes sounded Latin.  Sometimes it sounded Arabic.  In truth, there weren't any words to it at all.  Like the speech of an infant, it was the pure expression of emotion.  The next song was "Ascension" - a duet of trombones that literally made me imagine climbing the face of a snow-capped mountain peak.  To this day, I can think of no better song than "Avatar".  It is so stripped down - a drum, a bass guitar, and a scintillating hammered dulcimer with Lisa Gerrard's wavering, Stevie Nicks-ish voice building to such an emotional crescendo that it still brings tears to my eyes.

Of course, Lisa Gerrard is only one half of Dead Can Dance.  The other half is Brendan Perry.  His smooth, collected baritone was the antithesis of Gerrard's voice on songs like "The Cardinal Sin".  Truthfully, I much preferred Lisa Gerrard's songs and would find myself fast-forwarding past HIS songs.  As I have grown older, I appreciate Brendan Perry's songs much more.

This album changed my life.  It changed the way I looked at art.  It influenced my poetry.  I got more into classical music.  I even started reading French poet, Charles Baudelaire.  (The name "Spleen and Ideal" is taken from his poetry.)

I also got into Dead Can Dance's back catalog - one EP and one self-titled album.  Dead Can Dance came out of the punk movement in Melbourne, Australia in the late 1970s.  They lived in a communal house and made music with whatever they could find in their house.  In fact, "Frontier" - from their first album - was recorded by banging on oil drums filled with water frosted with Lisa Garrard's spooky voice.  They were  not musicians and taught themselves to make music on whatever they could find.

Soon, they relocated to England and signed to the prestigious 4AD label.

When I was seventeen, they followed up with "Within the Realm of a Dying Sun", which was all orchestral, all recorded inside of a cathedral.  I bought this on vinyl - except that I only had a record player that didn't work.  On my first listen, I spun the record my hand, listening to the faint sounds coming out of the needle and grooves, with no aid of speakers, or even electricity.

My senior year of high school, I had my parents drive me to the nearest record store 40 miles away to buy "The Serpent's Egg".  By now, Dead Can Dance was steering towards a more tribal sound, with lots of percussion.  My sophmore year of college was dominated by "Aion", which sounded like a pagan Renaissance Fair.

When Dead Can Dance broke up around 1997, I was devastated.  Apparently, the marriage of the creative geniuses of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry was more than just musical.  They were a couple, and when the relationship ended, so did the band.  This band had been an important part of my life for more than a decade.

For the next ten years, I followed both of their solo careers.  One of the strangest moments for me was listening to the end credits of the movie "Gladiator" and hearing Lisa Gerrard's voice.  In the glorious days of the '80s, in the age of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen, I was listening to stuff like Dead Can Dance.  No one had even heard of it, thought it was weird.  I played "Song of Sophia" in my college Music Appreciation class as my selection to share with other students.  And now, as people filed out of a movie theater, I was listening to Lisa Gerrard sing for a Holywood Blockbuster.  It was ironic.  She has since gone on to do several movies, including "The Whale Rider".

In 2005, the band reunited for touring purposes, and earlier this year, when they announced a new album called "Anastasis", I was ecstatic.

What can I say?  The album is excellent.  None of them have ever been as magical and as entrancing as  "Spleen and Ideal".  But it is still good.

As usual, the songs are split up into "His & Hers".  The album opens up with "Children of the Sun".  From its first strains, I gave a sigh of relief - it was good to hear them again.  It sounds just like Dead Can Dance - except with better engineering.  Lisa Gerrard's songs "Anabasis", "Agape", and "Kiko" sound very much like her solo efforts.  When I listen to them, I picture myself in a caravan with Marco Polo, traveling across the Gobi Desert..

Brendan Perry's songs are very good as well.  "Amnesia" - which is the first single off of the album - and "Opium" are very moving to me.  "Return of the She-King" is a collaborative effort between the two of them.  It is a nice Celtic tune that makes me think of Queen Boudica.

It is nice to see Dead Can Dance back and in good form.  It is good to see that age has only improved their talent and not diminished it.  I would recommend this album to anyone.

Without Purse or Scrip

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Moroni's Review of "Rock of Ages"

It was Father's Day, and, after a kind of hard week, I was ready for some lighter fare.  So when the girls told me that they would take me to a movie, I picked "Rock of Ages".

I didn't regret it.

The movie is cheesy.  But it is funny - sometimes unintentionally so.  All in all, it is great fun.

It seems that "Glee" has changed the landscape of our entertainment culture, making a musical like "Rock of Ages" possible.  All of the songs are big-hair anthems that I grew up with in the 1980s, and I couldn't help but finding myself singing along.

Who cares about the story when you have got great music like this?  Based on a Broadway play, the story tells the story of two young aspiring musicians - Drew Boley (played by Diego Boneta) and Sherrie Christian (played by the annoying Julianne Hough) - who move to Los Angeles in a 1980s that barely resembles the '80s I knew and grew up in.  They both meet at a rock club on the Sunset Strip called the Bourbon Club, owned by two rockers played by Russell Brand and Alec Baldwin (both of whom stole the show).

The story is centered around the final show of Arsenal, an imaginary rock band headed by Tom Cruise as the Axl Rose-esque Stacee Jaxx.  Cruise's performance is beautifully incoherent.  (All my wife Temple could notice was Jaxx's abs.  LOL)  There is a fiendish plot by Jaxx's sleazy manager (in a brilliant performance by Paul Giamatti) to take all of the proceeds for himself, and the mayor's wife (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones) who believes that rock and roll is Satan's music and is bound and determined to clean up the Strip and close down the club.

Every other tune is a rock classic from the '80s, and the characters break into song every couple of minutes. However, to me, having grown up in the '80s, it seemed a bit incongruous.  When did headbangers ever belt out "We Built This City" with passion?  The rockers I knew would have puked at the thought.  And the story takes place in 1987.  Which rocker was into Foreigner by then?

There were a couple of cool things.  I fought back waves of nostalgia when one of the scenes took place in Tower Records, one of my inner sanctums as a youth.  Rather than paying attention to the movie, I looked at the vinyl collection in the background.  Some set designer placed such gems as Christian Death and Killing Joke in the background.

The other fun part of the movie were the mash-ups.  Rarely was an '80s anthem sung by itself.  It was brilliantly combined with another classic.  "Juke Box Hero" with "I Love Rock 'N' Roll".  "We Built This City" with "We're Not Gonna Take It".

And the best part of the whole movie - a duet between Russell Brand and Alec Baldwin singing "Can't Fight This Feeling".

This is a movie that laughs at itself.  Hence, it is fun.  My wives and I loved it.  A few days later, my wife Temple bought the soundtrack.