The Guitar Hero generation.

A couple of weeks ago one of my favourite websites brought the following video to my attention:
Attack Attack! - Stick Stickly


I'll leave it to Buddyhead to make fun of the awfulness of the song (and video). They do a great job, and I'd just be repeating them.

"Do you realize how many friends and family members could have pulled these clowns aside and been like 'Dudes, your band already sucks, let’s maybe not compound the problem by playing like you’re shitting a guitar out of your mangina'? Apparently no one felt like doing that."

But the other thing that struck me about this video/song is how much it made me think of the Guitar Hero episode of South Park. Look at these kids, they look exactly like the kids you'd see at arcades playing Dance Dance Revolution. Like the kids in South Park, their first musical influence came not from bands, but from video games. When asked if they like this music, Kyle replies "Yeah dude, it's Guitar Hero!"

The song itself combines elements of the fairly pedestrian emo-core, metal and rock music that is a staple of Guitar Hero. Like game music it also changes often, and dramatically. And some of the elements seem like they don't belong together - Auto-tuned vocals in the style of T-Pain combined with screaming? Many record labels see video games as a lucrative source of song publishing these days and many songs are released in this media first. In this context such a combination not only makes sense, it's inevitable.

The biggest evidence of the video game influence on Attack Attack!'s musical development comes with the song's biggest change at 2:46. All of a sudden we go from a hardcore breakdown to DDR style dance pop. Right on cue the whole band starts to run on the spot too. Take away their instruments and put a mat with coloured lights on the floor, and it kinda looks like this:
DDR Tournament


I'd say most of their dance moves have their origin in DDR.

Personally, I'm not a fan of Guitar Hero. I was attracted to the concept, but I've tried to play it, and I suck. I find it's nothing like playing a real guitar, and being able to do so seems to make it harder. I do especially bad on songs that I actually know how to play. In fact, I'm pretty much like Randy Marsh:
Randy tries to play Guitar Hero


But then I've never been a big gamer anyway. You could follow Sharon Marsh's argument that "if they spent half the time learning a real instrument as they do playing that game, who knows what they could accomplish". But the fact is the majority of people who play Guitar Hero are gamers, not musicians. They love playing the games, but have no interest in playing music. Sure there's going to be some crossover. Two other members of my band love the games (in the last 2 weeks they've made me play Guitar Hero Metallica at least 3 times, despite sucking at it and not being a Metallica fan). But then music is so universal that there's bound to be a percentage of any culture who will become musicians - even gamers. And that's where we get Attack Attack!

The problem with this song for me is not that it attempts to mash so many styles together. I'm a big fan of bands who take risks and allow themselves to be influenced by styles of music outside their own. It's just that in this case the whole thing seems so forced. The changes sound like they've taken snippets of many different songs and pasted them one after the other. Games may have influenced their musical tastes, but they haven't taught much in the way of songwriting. Other bands like The Dillinger Escape Plan jump around as much, if not more, than Attack Attack!, but their transitions are smoother. And no matter how weird or unexpected the change, there's always a sense of purpose to the song. Bands like Attack Attack! and brokeNCYDE seem to just be trying to shove all their favourite things into the one box, whether they fit or not. For now, this seems to be the influence of games on the music scene. For better or worse, the Guitar Hero generation have arrived.

Awesome mail times.

Fun things I have received over the last week in the post:

• 2 limited edition Dillinger Escape Plan t-shirts and a note from Greg
  
• mini-cd by Bare Arms and a note from Trini Arms (who is also Trini Thaw)
  
• 2 Split 7"s from Murder by Death/Amanda Palmer and MBD/O'Death

lots of funs.

Various Artists - The Best of Taste of Chaos

The Taste of Chaos tour attempts to bring together some of the most bands of the post-emo-hardcore spectrum. Despite only featuring about eight bands on the tour (only five made it to the local version which just recently hit our country), The Best of Taste of Chaos gathers forty bands together on two discs. And it does a surprisingly good job of giving an overview of the current state within these related sub-genres.

Loosely split into the more poppy bands (disc one) and the harder edge (disc two), there is a fair bit of ground covered here. All the bands who made the Australian Taste of Chaos are present, such as The Used, Story of The Year, Killswitch Engage, Funeral for a Friend and Rise Against, but some of the bands from the US tour such as Atreyu and My Chemical Romance are absent. Matchbook Romance provide the most emo moment with the mainly acoustic In Transit, but things are mixed up a bit with tracks like Our Time is Now from Story of The Year who combine the emocore verses with an eighties hard rock aesthetic in the choruses and riffing. They also put on one of the best visual performances at the tour, but seem a little lacking without this on disc.

From First to Last’s Note to Self is a nice little catchy ditty, with some heavy kick thrown in at the end to raise things. But to be honest just about every track on disc one has a chorus with the potential to get stuck in your head. Thursday’s contribution is a touching contemplation about life in a world obsessed with the terrorist threat. It’s clear that they have many of the same influences as the other bands that surround them, but there’s something about the way they combine them in War All The Time which makes it the stand out track on disc one and shows off the musical understanding of the band.

Disc two kicks off with the heavy assault of Avenged Sevenfold, Killswitch Engage, Every Time I Die and Shadows Fall all in a row. Every Time I Die’s Kill The Music is probably the best example of what’s in store with this disc: more growling, harder drumming and more technical guitar work. And I have to admit at this stage I got more excited about disc two than I had been about disc one. Norma Jean also offer Bayonetwork which is another slice of heavier, less straightforward music and quite impressive. Oddly enough Saosin provide the only live track for a release that’s supposed to celebrate a tour.

With a compilation which relies so much on the genre relation to bring all these bands together, it’s not surprising that some of them start to sound the same (remember, there’s forty bands on this disc). But there are a few surprises lying around still. The Dillinger Escape Plan provide us with Unretrofied, which is almost the inverse of the typical hardcore song. Uncharacteristically catchy for the band and featuring harmonies and synths, it switches around in the middle to give us a dose of distortion, odd chords and screams, then go back to where we started. Opiate for The Masses bring a bit of breakbeat electronic drumming into their mix, while Chariot add a bit of dark metal to their hardcore sound and some grind style vocals, And Then Came Them is possibly one of the darkest songs here.

But the most different is closer Flaco 81 by the Street Drum Corps, a rhythmic percussive piece featuring drums of many types and some really interesting rhythms. It’s a change from the rest, but still retains the same headspace as everything that’s come before it, and thus makes a nice way to end out the set.

(Originally published on FasterLouder)

random thoughts from watching rage

i'm just gonna put any random thoughts that come into my head in here, since nobody's reading it yet anyway.

so watching rage last night, i came to the conclusion that still remains are what happens when the people from the oc form a metal band. the song was pretty average (although i only came in halfway through), but boy are they perty:

i also came to these conclusions:
the following bands and songs suck:
Minion - BLEED THE SKY Riot
Loyalty - AMERICAN HEAD CHARGE Shock
Stabbing The Drama - SOILWORK Riot
Rewind It All - DISBELIEF Riot
We Wait 4 No-one - LUMP Independent

especially lump.... oh boy do they suck. it was cheap amatuer dodgy video work, with five older guys doing their best to look TUFF METAL with leather vests and no shirts and tight pants etc. but the funniest part was, the song just wasn't tuff... AT ALL. if you're gonna be a metal band, at least put some bite into your guitars so you don't just sound like an average rock band with a dying cat for a singer.

the following songs and bands are AWESOME:
The Hand That Feeds - NINE INCH NAILS Universal
Panasonic Youth - DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN Riot
My Enemy - COG Independent

surprise, surprise, they're already bands i like.
it's hard to impress me these days. (i'm such a jaded little rock kid).

The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Stockholm Syndrome @ The Corner, 04/03/05

Three shadows on stage start making noises, which slowly build into a song, and soon the crowd realises that The Stockholm Syndrome have begun their set.The instrumental introduction is indicative of the atmosphere The Stockholm Syndrome set up. Straying into very heavy territory, that at times verged on grind (especially when joined by their vocalist), the quality of the musicianship kept a strong sense of melody and competent song structure at all times. Even when flowing through changing time signatures. Interesting use of notes and static effects on the vocals added to the impression that this band is not content to be your average hardcore band, and should be one to follow.

But from the beginning The Stockholm Syndrome were pushing uphill. This crowd were here for The Dillinger Escape Plan. We wouldn’t have been content with an average hardcore set, and while these youngsters put on a worthy display, we were waiting for the masters.

Dillinger also hit the stage with an instrumental, the aptly titled Proceed With Caution, from their self titled first release. The arrival of vocalist Greg Puciato on stage led straight into Panasonic Youth, a 2 and a half minute assault which opens the bands third and most recent full length album Miss Machine. It also saw Puciato’s prompt exit from the stage as he ran straight through and launched himself into the crowd for the opening lines. “We wrote these plans, took the order, the architecture, and followed them to the end until the gears ground cold and relentless. There was no remorse.” Once again, the opening set the tone for the show. Relentless, complex, and absolutely no remorse.

It is an incredibly physical experience too. Both for the fans and band alike. Puciato and guitarists Ben Weinmann and Brian Benoit spent much of their time leaning directly over, if not on top of the crowd. Technical problems plagued the bass rig of Liam Wilson, but weren’t enough to hold him back. Drummer Chris Pennie meanwhile provided more power and complex rhythms from his minimal set-up than most drummers could do with every drum in the world. How the band managed to throw themselves around with such force while also focusing the required energy on classics like 43% Burnt, Sugar Coated Sour and the technical tour-de-force that is The Mullet Burden – songs which created the math metal/jazz hardcore fusion genres – is something that has to be seen to be fully comprehended.

Puciato in particular was not content to remain on stage, at times hanging off the speakers suspended from the roof of The Corner, swinging them until they looked in danger of falling off, then launching himself into the sea before him. The fans were only too happy to support him and relished the chance to sing along as he pushed his microphone into their face. One lucky punter even got the opportunity (an probably lived out the dream of most in attendance) to sing the opening line to When Good Dog do Bad Things, the only song performed from the bands EP collaboration with Mike Patton Irony is a Dead Scene.

I had the pleasure of meeting the band at Missing Link earlier in the day and having a brief chat about what they had in store to make this show different from their last appearance at The Corner just under a year ago. Both Weinmann and Puciato promised more tracks from Miss Machine, the album which has seen the band retain the strengths they so perfectly displayed on Calculating Infinity, while also expanding their horizons. This promise was well and truly delivered on, with the industrial tinged Phone Home and the epic Baby’s First Coffin proving to be two of the highlights. Other notable tracks included The Perfect Design, Sunshine The Werewolf and Setting Fire to Sleeping Giants.

The Dillinger Escape Plan don’t do encores. And the entire set took just over an hour. But when you watch the amount of effort the band put into that hour, it feels like a lifetime. It’s hard to imagine them backstage doing anything other than collapsing. Relentless, complex, and absolutely no remorse.