Stevie Wonder

After hearing that Michael Eavis has basically confirmed Stevie Wonder as one of the headliners for Glastonbury this year, I thought I would give Songs In The Key of Life another spin. Everybody has heard the classics like Very Superstitious and I Just Called To Say I Love You, but songs like Part Time Lover, I Wish and Sir Duke, while instant hallmarks of classic motown and soul, aren’t as recognised by our generation. This is especially true when Very Superstitious gets played in the disco room in the club over the previously mentioned tunes.

Well, that’s a bit of a lie. Our generation will have heard them, but not in their original form. Many of Stevie’s songs have been sampled one way or another by current artists. See if you recognise the main beat and riff of this song -

You hear that? Will Smith sampled this, as well as the rhythm for the chorus, for his song Will2K. While I totally adore Will2K, this song is where it all came from.

What about this one:

Dont think many people will realise that the Coolio’s Gangster’s Paradise sampled the above song.

The day I hear I Wish or Sir Duke in the disco room in TigerTiger is the day I die. Now that I’ve said that, they’ll probably play it on Monday. Here’s hoping.

Jamie T Review

Fans have been waiting for this gig with baited breath after cockney singer/songwriter Jamie T was forced to reschedule this date from October. Four months have passed since then and it seems that Jamie T’s voice is now better than ever.

Support act Chester P seems like a jack of all genres, master of none. He raps over a selection of generic beats and gets all manner of friends on stage to play acoustic ballads and straightforward rock songs. The highlight of the set was a dubstep remix of Pharoahe Monch’s classic ‘Simon Says’.

Jamie T says that it is best to start gigs with lots of energy, and he does just that. Everybody is jumping up and down as soon as the first string is plucked on his guitar and the gig seems like a one and a half hour sing-a-long from the crowd more than a Jamie T set. Highlights include If You’ve Got The Money, Chaka Demus and Sticks and Stones. The intense heat in the venue, especially towards the end, didn’t put off the masses from singing their hearts out. Jamie T is welcome back in Southampton anytime.

Stylo

I fucking love Gorillaz. There I said it.

On the surface, they are a cartoon band who have made a  few commercially successful singles like Feel Good Inc, Clint Eastwood and 19-2000. However once you look past (the frankly awesome) singles, they have an incredible wealth of variety and depth to their albums. Rock The House, November Has Come, All Alone, O Green World…a mix of hip-hop, intelligent pop, dark doomy bass and catchy choruses which will stay in your head for weeks. Their new single Stylo, taken from their upcoming album, Plastic Beach, is no exception.

Gorillaz – Stylo (ft. Mos Def and Bobby Womack)

Incredible. Damon Albarn = absolute genius.

BTBAM Poster

Taken from MetalSucks:

I just love this poster.

As you were.

Whole Lotta Led Review

I’ve started to review gigs for the Portsmouth News again and here is my first one of the new year – the fantastic Whole Lotta Led.

The remaining members of Led Zeppelin all have their own side projects now. However, their live legacy will live on forever through tribute band Whole Lotta Led.

Tonight is a special show for the tribute act as they perform two sets – one full of Zeppelin hits like Kashmir, Black Dog and the infamous Stairway to Heaven and the other is the bonafide classic ‘Led Zeppelin II’ played in full.

Every single note is spot on tonight as the band rip through ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘Achilles Last Stand’ with ease in their first set. It would be unfair to criticise lead singer Lee Addison for not having the vocal range of the late 60’s/early 70’s Robert Plant as that seems impossible to emulate. However, he absolutely nails Plant’s eccentricity and stage presence. He rightly says that “every track is a winner” about the album Led Zeppelin II and they perform a magnificent rendition of ‘The Lemon Song’.

I genuinely feel sorry for those who, as Jack Black says, have never “got the Led out.” If there is a better way to spend your Friday night than with a few beers and Whole Lotta Led, then I don’t want to know.

Attack Attack…Attack!

An absolutely hilarious and spot on parody of the musical abortion that is Attack Attack – Stick Stickly. You have to give them a round of applause simply because of the great lengths they went to to take the piss out of them. Unused car park, the lighting, the filming, the clothes and hair…magical.

Cynic

Below, in the review of Ihsahn – After, I mentioned how some of parts of that album nodded in the direction of Cynic. Some, almost all of you, won’t know who Cynic are. I sure as hell didn’t until a few years ago. Now, they are probably one of my favourite bands of all time.

I remember asking a friend on MSN to send me some music as the boredom of sitting around the house listening to the same music over and over was making me consider how to tie a solid noose (okay an exagerration, but it highlights just how desperately in need I was of something new to listen to). He wings over Cynic – Veil of Maya and I press play.

“What the fuck is this shit,” I said to myself.

Some robot soundalike motherfucker (whom I imagined was wearing some sort of Daft Punk costume at the time) starts warbling over some heavy shredding. I switch it off immediately and go back whatever I was listening to at the time. At this point in my life, I never really listened to heavy metal or any particularly heavy music. Before this happened, I remember putting on Thrice – The Artist In The Ambulance on my hi-fi and just being horrified at what started playing. Safe to say, I’m a bit more musically aware now than I was (still don’t listen to Thrice though). But anyway, I listened to the beginning of Veil of Maya, pressed the stop button and never went back to it.

Time passed, and my ears became more and more aware to various strands and subcategories of rock and heavy metal. Bands came and went, yet this mp3 of Veil of Maya was still on my hard drive. A particularly dull Summer’s day ignited a spark in the back of my brain telling me to go back to this song. I was cynical (har har) about going back to it because of my reaction upon the first listen.

Something suddenly clicked. Like pieces of a jigsaw finally fitting together to reveal the full picture. It all just….worked. The celestial vocals, the otherworldly nature and harmonisation of the guitars, the deathly screams/growls/whatever…everything just seemed to work perfectly. I went on from listening to Veil of Maya to acquiring the whole album, Focus.

I also went and did some background research on the band while Focus played in the background and noticed that this was their only release. I couldn’t believe it – a band who created something this masterful only limited themselves to an 8 tracks on an album released in 1993. I was only 4 years old when they released Focus, I started listening to it at 17/18, and they still hadn’t released anything within that period. Thanks to Cynic, I craved other progressive tech-death – Atheist (who actually preceded Cynic with their magnificent album Unquestionable Presence) became a firm favourite, but Cynic – Focus always had a place in my heart as the very best.

Then came the reunion and new album. Fuck.

Fuck.

I couldn’t believe it. A band that I had grown to love and had almost zero chance of reforming and making new material….had reformed. And made new material. The exciteometer had hit critical levels. Defcon 1. Code red. Awwwww here goes. But what if the new material wasn’t that good? What if they took a steaming dump over the legacy that was Focus? I wouldn’t want Cynic to be that band that made an album which is looked upon as one of the pioneering tech-death albums and also made a piece of shit 15 years later.

Luckily, ‘Traced in Air is absolutely incredible. Sure, it’s not as heavy as Focus was, but perhaps making a carbon copy wasn’t the way to go. They had already hit the dizzy heights of ‘one of the most influential albums of all time’, so perhaps evolving rather than making Focus 2 was the right choice. Cynic has always been about progression, so standing still and making music from the past just didn’t seem to be an option. The vocoder vocals are still there, the death growls are present and the intricate harmonies and dizzying bass fills are all accounted and checked for. It just seemed different.

There are loads of critics who put Traced in Air in their Top Ten of 2008 lists and rated it very highly – 9.5 from Terrorizer, 5/5 from Sputnikmusic, 9/10 from blabbermouth.

I can only hope you enjoy these songs as much as I do and that it gets them to tour more often. They are currently on a wanktasticly good tour with Between the Buried and Me, The Devin Townsend Project and Scale The Summit in the US. Fingers crossed that something similar is brought here to the UK.

Ihsahn – After

I was expecting a lot from Ihsahn’s third album, After. His previous two albums have been progressive metal of the highest quality and his work with Emperor…well, it’s easy to hear why Emperor have been deemed as one of the greatest black metal bands ever. It’s a lot to live up to and it would be understandable if After wasn’t one of his finest works.

Good news people! After is incredible. Warbling bass interludes, saxophone solos (a lot of saxophone solos) and some fantastic progressive rock – particularly noticeable on A Grave Inversed and Austere, the latter having more than a few shades of tech-death maestros Cynic about it – make this a listen for any progressive aficionado.

Ihsahn’s soft, harmonic vocals suit the slower paced parts beautifully and contrast nicely with the heavier, riffier sections where his death/black metal vocals up the ante.

What is surprising is how the saxophone sections, even the droning introduction to On The Shores, mixed with the guitars and harsh screams from Ihsahn work so well. You’d immediately think that brass instruments and extreme progressive metal wouldn’t go hand in hand, but it works very well. However, there comes a point where I thought ‘okay, maybe thats a little TOO much from the old brass there’ but it’s clear he is experimenting with the other instruments involved so he can be forgiven for going a little over the top.

At a healthy 53 minutes, After doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s only 8 tracks long, with 2 of them being 10+ minutes, but it definitely doesn’t feel like you’ve clocked an hour of listening after it’s final track finishes. One of my main problems with progressive music is that some album drags on and on and on – it’s not a good listen when you have 13 or 14 tracks which last 7 minutes each.  Thankfully, After doesn’t tread this ground at all.

Overall, this one of my favourite albums of 2010. Granted, it’s only 7 days into the year and it’s probably the ONLY new album I’ve heard this year so far (:P) but other albums released later in the year will have to reach a high standard to knock it off that perch.

Iron Maiden

There was a thread on the Sonisphere forums recently  giving  budding music journalists the chance to send in a biography of a band currently announced for the festival. These biographies would then be chosen by some of the Sonisphere team to actually feature as the band’s biography on their website. Thousands of rockers would be looking at these biographies over the course of the next 6 months, so I thought I would try my hand at writing one for NWOBHM giants Iron Maiden. Wanting to be a music journalist myself, my fingers, toes and various other gangly limbs are crossed in hope that my particular text will be featured and seen by people around the UK. Not that I’m getting my hopes up!

Iron Maiden

Quite possibly the biggest metal band in the world. One of the most influential musical artists of all time. 100 million records sold. 2 young teenagers from the USA imported their tapes from the UK and spent hours listening to them – they then went on to form Metallica. They are the kings of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. They are Iron Maiden.

We should thank our lucky stars that many of the most famous rock and metal bands – Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Led Zeppelin and The Who – started in the UK. We could consider ourselves truly lucky on 25^th December 1975, as that marked the day bassist Steve Harris formed Iron Maiden. However, little did he know that on that fateful Christmas day, he would form what is to be the gigantic heavy metal machine that is Iron Maiden. Countless anthems – Run To The Hills, Fear Of The Dark, 2 Minutes to Midnight, The Trooper, The Number of the Beast – and a back catalogue so big that they tour specific eras of their legacy and still bring in capacity crowds wherever they play. India, Brazil, Ecuador, Japan, Canada, Mexico…all of these countries held sell out shows. No other band has a bigger worldwide appeal than Iron Maiden.

Kerrang! awards, Metal Hammer Awards, Classic Rock awards…they’ve had ‘em. Even been nominated for a few Grammys too. But it’s not about the awards. It’s about huge stage shows, it’s about blistering solos, it’s about intricate riffs and meandering melodies, it’s about thousands and thousands of like-minded people singing along to every word, it’s about screaming your heart out to every single note, it’s about grabbing the shoulder of the person next to you whoever they are and singing along.

This band is what will make Sonisphere 2010 a very special event. Up the Irons.

2,500 visitors!

The big 2,500 has been reached. Cheers guys, a great way to bring me into the new year. Hope you all enjoyed your Christmas. 2010 will be an even bigger year for LBEMD so please keep looking and I’m going to try and get lots more interviews and do lots more album reviews. To celebrate, I’ve made a cheeky banner. You can post it anywhere you like, on forums, on your myspace, whatever:

All the best,

Ash