Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Music Reviews - Secret Machines, Trivium, Be Your Own Pet

Oh, much as loathe Apple and wish them ill, the convenience of the purchasing system is as tempting as a cheerleader with a big bag of sweeties and beers...

I went onto the iTunes Music Store last night with the intention of buying The Secret Machines' 10 Silver Drops, and came away laden down by five albums, most of which I am pretty pleased with.  Here are a few notes on the first three I've listened to (I'm saving Takk by Sigur Ros as a treat for myself til later).

Be Your Own Pet's eponymous album was released in the last week, and is a fun, frenetic and fresh record that owes huge debts to Blondie, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Kills.  They do indie punk pop as well as the Jesus and Mary Chain did rock and roll, which is very well indeed.  Some of the riffs wouldn't be a million miles out of place on a Dead Kennedys album, although if you want to know what they sound like, you can't really find a better example than Daisy Chainsaw's Love Your Money, complete with bouncy, half-spoken-half-squealed female singer.  The sparse guitar-bass-drums-vocalist sound is pretty homogenous throughout, but you don't have time to get bored when most tracks don't even reach three minutes.  Won't work if you don't like female singers who are a bit, erm, wilfully kooky.

The Secret Machines' 10 Silver Drops was released here last week as well, but in everything else but a shared membership of MTV2's playlist, it is a world away from Nashville retro-punk.  The sparse, edgy production of Be Your Own Pet is a world away from the gentle, rich, deep sound of the opening track, Alone, Jealous and Stoned.  By track two we have cellos and backing vocals and the prog influences really become apparent.  Track three is the clincher: Lightning Blue Eyes.  It bears resemblances (in tempo and use of a semi-quaver-paced, repeated figure in the bass) to their excellent track Nowhere Again from Now Here is Nowhere, but in true prog style it moves on towards glorious excess, with occasional suspended fourths, and a chord sequence in the chorus that will yank at your heart if you have one.  By track four we have songs breaking the eight minute mark  Keith Emerson would applaud such behaviour.  The producer really had a field day here: gating, sustain, delay and chorus effects everywhere.  Obviously, hugely varied throughout in the progressive tradition, which demands displays of musical virtuosity through a mastery of all forms*.  This is a real cracker of an album and should get the band some decent mainstream exposure this year, if they are not smothered by a hundred, horrendous Coldplay clones.  My absolute favourite of the three.

Finally (from this bunch) is Trivum's Ascendancy.  Easy to nail this one down: it's Metallica from just over a decade ago, with vocals straight from Pantera: the ones that sound like they must be incredibly painful to perform, requiring a healthy growth of vocal polyps, and much beloved of Norwegian death-metal and grindcore.  I actually rather like this album, but I liked Pantera and early-90's Metallica so it's nice to have another album along those lines to see what they'd have been like together.  They even start off with the traditional piece of vaguely classical intro.  I can see Trivium making it quite big with time - Metallica did, after all - and they do have one of the more wonderfully pompous names in metal at the moment, making reference as it does (intentionally, I gather) to matters medieval and curricular.  Basically Metallica to Avenged Sevenfold's Iron Maiden.

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* The current masters of such wilful eclecticism are System Of A Down, who will gaily chuck a gypsy folk song or a large choral section into a song for 30 seconds, completely out of any context at all.  I foresee the possibility that one of their future albums will display a mastery of the polka form, alongside a piece of minimalist techno inspired by Aphex Twin and guest-produced by Autechre.  It should be remembered that two members of System Of A Down are utterly and completely mad.