Construction, CDs and Mamet

Today's post will be a bit of a collection of things. None of them were really enough to warrant giving any of them their own post, so I'll just kind of mention them all briefly. (Of course, I find that when I attempt brief, it usually ends up not being that.)

Last night, I went to a meeting for Cleveland-area bloggers with my new friend Jaclyn (introduced to me by friend/former coworker Gail; Jaclyn's blog is linked in the righthand column of other people's blogs). The meeting itself was fairly informative, and the people there seem very nice. I'm not sure if I'll be instituting many of the techniques talked about during the meeting, since I'm fairly lazy and only at a novice level when it comes to tech stuff. (I would like to get a site meter, though. I'm always curious as to who's actually reading my site.) I hope no one found it too terribly rude that I decided not to join the rest of the group at the after-meeting gathering, but to be quite honest, I'm just not into bars. Aside from that, I hadn't eaten dinner yet and Taco Bell was calling my name. (I know it was a bad idea to get Taco Bell after having had half a can of Pringles and four cookies for lunch that day. Perhaps if the Healthy Choice dinner had been either A) filling or B) good, I wouldn't have had to resort to heavy snacking. But someone had mentioned Taco Bell the other day, and I was in the mood for it.)

As I tried to find my way back to I-90, I went back more or less the way I had come. The street I had taken to get there from I-90, West 41st, was one-way, so I knew I would have to take West 44th to get back. A block away from the I-90 westbound entrance, I saw a sign for a detour of some sort. Unfortunately, I saw it a little too late and went straight through the intersection. I soon found out that the detour sign was not put up just for the hell of it, as the entrance for 90 west was completely closed for construction. It took me several minutes to get back to where the detour sign had told me to go, thanks to all the stupid one-way streets. (I mean, really, what's the point of those?) I eventually got back on track and began to follow the signs which were presumably leading me to another entrance to I-90. And as I reached the entrance ramp the signs were leading me to, what did I find? Another closed entrance with a detour sign that seemed to be directing me to go back the way I came. I began to wonder if perhaps it was some cruel joke being played on less intelligent drivers. They would follow these detour signs and go in circles all day and all night, wondering why they couldn't get onto the interstate. Well, damn their game! thought I. I got onto 90 eastbound, got off on West 25th St. and immediately got back on in the opposite direction.

And then I had me a double decker taco and a Cheesy Gordita Crunch. Man, that was tasty.

Lucky for me that, during this whole thing, I had the new Coheed and Cambria album to keep me company. To those who haven't heard the title yet, allow me to educate you. It's called Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume I: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness. In case you couldn't tell, Coheed and Cambria is a progressive rock band. But they're not just any kind of progressive rock band; they're a progressive emo band. Normally, I'm not that into emo. I've enjoyed stuff by Thursday and At the Drive-In, but it's a subgenre in which I find myself more or less disinterested. In fact, it was this element, exemplified by songs like "Blood Red Summer" and "Three Evils (Embodied in Love and Shadow)," that initially turned me off to C&C (no, not Clivilles and Cole). What brought me back were the extended epic songs like "In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3" and "The Crowing." (The latter of the two has a really great use of counter-melody at the end of the song. I'm always a sucker for a well-executed counter-melody.) After a while, I even learned to like the more emo-sounding material. (Maybe it's the fact that a title like the above-mentioned "Three Evils..." is so prog it's not even funny.)

I had been afraid that their new album would be a disappointment, not because of anything I'd heard from it. On the contrary, both "The Suffering" and especially "Welcome Home" sounded like the band at the top of their game. Instead, it was because there had been two albums released this year that I had been anticipating highly that had both been big disappointments.


The first of these was Mudvayne's Lost and Found. The math metal quartet played it safe on that album, eschewing complex rhythms and challenging lyrics for more radio-friendly tunes that featured angsty, whiny lyrics. Any successful band that still complains about how much their lives suck just comes across to me as a bunch of guys play-acting at being miserable.

The second actually came out the same day as Good Apollo..., and that was the new Disturbed album, Ten Thousand Fists. Had Fists come out in between The Sickness and Believe, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more. Instead, it just sounded like a major step back from the previous album. Believe showed a band that was trying to evolve, incorporating more melodic and even progressive influences into their songs. (In short, there was more music in their music.*) I was hoping for a similar evolution on the new album, and "Stricken," the first single, while still not up to the level of "Prayer," didn't seem to contradict this hypothesis. Unfortunately, the rest of the album did. Many of these songs are very simple and don't contain a lot of variation. It's especially maddening in the lyric department, as several songs consist only of one verse that is repeated two or three times. Others follow the third-verse-same-as-the-first pattern. (There are a couple songs like that on Believe, but for some reason, I don't find them as grating.) Okay, maybe I should give lead singer and lyric writer David Draiman the benefit of the doubt. After all, I'm sure there are only so many synonyms for "pissed off," but I guess that's maybe a sign that one should start varying the content of his songs. Angry lyrics seem to have become just as trite as those for your average pop radio love song. And his over-reliance on the grunting noises? I dont' feel as though I really need to go into that.

This isn't to say the album is without merit. The title track is one of the best songs they've recorded, as is "Stricken." On top of that, I think their cover of Genesis's "Land of Confusion" is as good as if not better than their cover of Tears For Fears's "Shout" ("Shout 2000" from The Sickness). (Of course, I'm a bit biased. The classic lineup of Genesis is my all-time favorite band, and I even love a lot of the post-Gabriel music as well.) It's just that the rest of the tracks sound like filler material. In short, it's just another Disturbed album. It certainly won't be staying in my car stereo for months to come the way Believe did.

That said, Good Apollo... is probably my second favorite album to be released this year, right after Frances the Mute by The Mars Volta. It builds on the incredibly dorky mythology of the previous albums, Second Stage Turbine Blade and In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3. A lot of the emo influences have been better incorporated with the prog influences. (On In Keeping Secrets..., you could go song by song and say, "This is an emo song. This is a prog song." It's not quite as cut and dry on this one.) It even features a song that, had I heard it completely out of context (and without knowing what the band's music normally sounds like), I would have thought of as the crappiest pop tune this side of Savage Garden. Somehow, it works. (It makes me wonder, would I have liked "I Knew I Loved You" had Savage Garden not been a shitty, shitty band?)

Is Good Apollo... a better album than In Keeping Secrets...? That will probably take some more listens to figure out. At this point, I'd say it's just as good, but the best way to discover that sort of thing is to wait until the newness wears off. All I know is that I'm relieved that it didn't turn out to be a disappointment, since people always say that bad things come in threes. (Not that the other two albums are bad; the fact that they're disappointments is bad.) Unfortunately, it makes me fear that Tool might release a new album soon and that it will suck.

In other news, I read David Mamet's op-ed piece from the L.A. Times, and I have to say I find it to be more or less on target. Mamet is a very insightful writer, and that makes me very eager to see his upcoming TV series The Unit. (I'm sure conservative commentators have already started calling the show Anti-American propaganda.) I must admit, though, that this is in spite of the fact that I've heard rumors that Amy Acker was fired from the show. Dammit, you don't do that! Not to Ms. Acker and not to those of us who have liked her since she became a regular on Angel! But it's Mamet (and Shield creator/former Angel producer Shawn Ryan), so I have to watch it.

So I'm thinking that there was something else I had planned to write about, but I find myself at a loss to think of what it could have been. I guess I'll just have to make it a separate post if I remember what was so damned important.


*That phrase was inspired by a line from Say Anything..., when Joan Cusack's character scolds her brother (John Cusack) on his eating habits, saying, "There's no food in your food." Back