I had planned to do this feature on the 17th, actually, but real life started hitting hard and fast. That weekend, one of my cousins from California visited. The next weekend, I went to see one of my brothers who flew over from his post at the Pentagon. I have also been desperately making vacation preparations. Next week, I'll be flying off to Dublin to go stay with my sister for a week. Since I won't have much internet access over there, I figured I needed to get something out ASAP. So, here I am. Let's get down to business.
This week, I'm featuring The Protomen. Oh boy, where do I even start with these guys. Well, they're a rock group hailing from Nashville, Tennessee and have been active (in some form or another) since 2003. The band currently contains a whopping nine members whose real names are unknown. Their claim to fame? They've crafted a rock opera inspired by the original Mega Man games on the NES. The Protomen have released two parts of the planned trilogy (their eponymous debut, and its follow up "The Father of Death"), and are working on the third. Each album forms a coherent story (The Father of Death is a prequel) with the musical genre shifting as appropriate. The apocalyptic Act I plays out like a lo-fi, punk rock, chip-tune take on Queen. Act II opens as a Western musical but closes as an 80's rock concert (the transition occurring during the instrumental "How the World Fell Under Darkness," and symbolizing the mechanization of society under Dr. Wily's rule).
I'll grant that the band is far from perfect in terms of technical skill. Some of their guitar leads in Act II are uninspired at best. There are moments where the vocals in Act I are uncomfortably off pitch. Act I also contains some audio artifacts (including a particularly jarring one somewhere in the middle of "Due Vendetta") that should have been eliminated somewhere in the process. Additionally, while Act I is intentionally lo-fi, the audible peaking (especially with the drums) can be headache inducing at sufficient volume.
Despite their flaws (which are certainly fewer in their recent output), The Protomen have created a convincing and emotionally compelling dystopian imagining of freaking Mega Man. Why? I have no idea, but I'm glad they did. Even in tracks where their musicianship falls a little short, their vision manages to still shine through. It's the strength of the band's vision and their storytelling that makes their epic such a captivating listen. You don't have to be a fan of Mega Man, driven by nostalgia (like me), to enjoy this. You just have to be interested in hearing a story told through songs. It's a tale of a man whose noble aims end up the undoing of all that he loved. It's the tale of cynicism versus idealism, of hope versus pessimism, of brother versus brother. At the end of the day, it's a tale that asks if humanity, jaded and indifferent, is truly worth saving. Give it a listen, and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Yes, I basically just reused one of my older titles. No, I don't care. I promised an update this weekend, and I have to wake up in about eight hours to go to work. Not ideal writing conditions, but I'll roll with it.
Remember that band Blackwater Fever I featured a while ago? They were the slow, dark blues band hailing from Australia. Well, tonight's band is basically their foil. Introducing The Fumes.
Hailing from Sidney, Australia, The Fumes are a blues rock band with a very special place in my heart. They three albums under their belts at this point, but their debut opus, "Guns of Gold," is what I'd like to talk about today. The Fumes started out with a fairly simple plan of attack: use delta blues as a foundation, play with a punk rock attitude, and turn the fuzz and distortion to eleven. It's a winning formula that keeps Guns of Gold relevant a decade after its initial release. Guns of Gold is quality blues-based hard rock from start to finish, sprinkled with a refreshing amount of variety. You get acoustic numbers like Postman's Inn, the nearly-seven-minutes-long heavy stomp of Tell Your Story Walking, the long-lost ZZ Top crunch of Down River, and the epic closer Johnny the Lion Slayer. The album does get a little long in the tooth, with a total runtime over an hour, and with three of the fourteen songs going for more than six minutes. They definitely could have made more of an impact by trimming some of that fat, but I'm not going to complain too long about too much of a good thing here. Guns of Gold is certainly worth your time, as is the more "mature" follow up, Sundancer. I haven't listened to the third album, Bloodless, yet, but I'm a little hesitant after the stinker single "Dance in Costume," released after their second album. Then again, I didn't see that song on Bloodless, so I think the coast is clear. Think they learned their lesson (the song was really quite bad).
Anyways, so that's The Fumes. Go check them out if you like blues and/or hard rock. There's plenty of both in their catalog. I'll see if I can get another feature out next weekend. Wish me luck!
Is it really July already? Considering I've been AWOL from ROTGM for so long now, I feel I should explain my absence. Some time in February, I was let go from my internship at an advertising firm. Long story short, they finally ran out of work to give me and we parted on good terms. That internship was only supposed to last through the middle of August, so I was really just happy I managed to hold onto it for more than twice as long as planned. Granted, this meant going back to job searching, which (combined with finals in May) really clamped down on the time I could use to track down music for ROTGM.
Once I got back from college for the year, I started working at a temp agency in my home town. The temp agency connected me with a factory gig working on prosthetic limbs. Not exactly my cup of tea, I thought, but hey it would pay the bills. Unfortunately, this job goes from seven am three-thirty pm, and is carried out basically in silence. We all wear earplugs on site, so idle conversation isn't particularly easy to pull off. There's a radio playing somewhere, but it's so distant that it's mostly drowned out by ambient noise. As a result, I basically sit at a table all day hoping that A.) I don't set myself on fire (a fairly common occurrence there) and B.) that I don't go insane from lack of music. It's not so much a difficult job as it is an utterly soul-crushing one. Silence for eight hours, interrupted occasionally by the sounds of me freaking out because I set my hand on fire again with the blowtorch (we don't change gloves between rubbing shoulder supports down with alcohol and using a blowtorch to melt scratches on those supports, so our hands are extra flammable). Basically, I've been too bloody drained these days to think of much interesting to say on ROTGM.
Regardless, I wish to make it known that I do have some updates planned for the next few weekends. I have some bands I'd like to feature here, and it's just a matter of having enough time to do those spotlights properly. I'll be back in a few days with more than just a status update.
Hello everyone. I've been running this little blog operation for a few years now, and I've been growing increasingly uncomfortable that it hasn't been living up to its name Ramblings of the Guitarman. Sure, I'm still Guitarman, have been since high school and will be until the day I'm pushing up daisies. However, I'm not sure I've done much in the way of rambling here. I didn't intend this blog to be just an intermittent stream of music recommendations (although I certainly enjoy doing those posts). Instead, I initially intended this blog to be a resting place for my musings that I could never (before) find an audience for. I'll still post band recommendations and music spotlights, but expect a few more unfocused posts on music, politics and philosophy from here on. I really like doing things like my political conversation etiquette post, so you'll be seeing more of that kind of stuff here. Now then, it's time I stopped beating around the bush. I promised I'd talk about "music and the generation gap" in the title, so here we go.
First, some background to this discussion. I live in Washington state and go to college in Texas. Since food on campus is grotesquely expensive, I prefer to have my car with me when I'm at school. That way I'm not stuck with three dollar packages of instant ramen (those prices are basically highway robbery). I could whine more about Aramark's harmful monopoly on campus cuisine, but I digress. My home in Washington state is a good 2,200 miles away from my college in Texas, which makes for some rather extensive road trips. Every spring, my dad books a flight down to meet me and we begin the several day process of driving halfway across the country back to Washington. I pride myself in my car's music collection, so we can drive four or so days without listening to the same song twice. Choosing music for these road trips, however, is something of a challenge.
There's a rather large age gap between my father and me. Furthermore, my dad basically stopped listening to the radio sometime around 1980, as he came back from deployment in the navy to discover that radio stations developed a fairly unhealthy obsession with rap music. As such, it's a bit of a struggle finding music that we can both appreciate on equal terms. This isn't to say that I dislike the classics. My silver briefcase of CDs is filled with pages of the Doobie Brothers, the Guess Who, Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, all that good stuff. My father also really appreciates AC/DC, which is a godsend on road trips since they make perfect driving music. The problem is that so many of my older albums don't make for particularly good driving music. If I put on something like the greatest hits of the Quicksilver Messenger Service, it doesn't matter how much we both like the band. When you're staring down three-hundred miles of straight road with no buildings or cars in sight, half an hour of that stuff and we're both out like a light.
Once I run out of classic hard rock, those albums with universal appeal and boundless energy, things start getting somewhat tense in the car. My natural inclination is to start playing metal. I have a large assortment of metal albums in my car since the stuff makes for phenomenal phenomenal night driving music. I don't think it's really possible to fall asleep to Carcass, after all. However, this is my dad I'm riding with. Death metal and black metal aren't going to cut it here. I needed something with clean vocals and melody, maybe a nice groove too. On this latest voyage back to the evergreen state, I put on some Goatsnake and Gloryhammer to serenade us with bluesy doom metal and cheesy power metal respectively. Here, I'll post some samples. Give them a listen before you continue reading.
It would suffice to say that these albums did not go over particularly well. However, to stop with such a cop-out description would defeat the point of this post. When both albums were done, my dad turned to me and started speaking with that most loaded of opening statements: "Now, don't take this the wrong way, but..." Oh boy, I thought, here it comes. What he ultimately said (after the usual cries of "where's the melody," "metal is too Satanic for me," and "that guy is just chanting 'I killed him' (was actually saying 'a killing floor', which is both the name of the song and a classic blues motif), etc.) was the inspiration for this blog post.
The general idea of my dad's argument is that we will forever gravitate towards the music that sounds familiar to us, which varies based on both life circumstances and one's date of birth. My dad prefers bands like the Beach Boys and Bob Seger because they remind him of his childhood. That kind of music was instrumental in developing his musical tastes, which have solidified with age. The end product is a sort of generation gap for musical appreciation. If something sounds too different to what we listened to growing up, we reject it as just noise and then precede to bemoan the state of the music industry. After all, he argued, we all just really pursue our comfort zone.
Unsurprisingly for longtime readers of this blog, I balked at his suggestion that I too would one day become a musical dogmatist asserting that music died the day it stopped sounding like the soundtrack to my halcyon days of youth. I certainly saw kernels of truth in his argument, what with my adamant rejection of things like dubstep and autotuned pop music. However, I have enough self-awareness to be able to identify this revulsion at modern music as something other than reluctance to accept the next generation. It's not that I dislike so many modern bands because they differ from what I listened to as a youth. In fact, many of the trends I so dislike in music nowadays have their roots in the stuff I listened to naively as a child, wondering why I wasn't able to "get" these artists so popular with my peers. I may be a musical dogmatist, but for reasons that have nothing to do with my musical generation.
In appreciating music, I am first and foremost a connoisseur of instrumentation. In particular, I greatly enjoy a well-played guitar part. I am, after all, a guitarist; can you blame me? This, not any generational divide, is responsible for my under-appreciation of so many modern artists. I go where the riffs are, and the riffs are often in music that predates me. I gravitate towards songs like Aerosmith's Walk This Way and Carcass's Heartwork because, man, those are some GREAT riffs! They aren't really my generation's riffs, they're just timeless. If I seem like a musical curmudgeon, shaking his cane at all the pop-rock and dubstep kids marching across his lawn, it's because I just can't sate my hunger for guitar riffage from those kinds of music. I don't think it matters quite what generation you come from, your first taste of Hendrix should still be something like a religious experience. I hunger to hear the next distant horizon someone will take us to through the guitar. Hopefully, when that happens, I won't miss it from wallowing in nostalgia. I don't want something like a generation gap to stop me from appreciating the next great step in rock, in metal, in blues. Admittedly, if the guitar ever stops being given its due as the king of instruments, as the face of rock, then you'll see me eating these words. I'm happy with whatever generation's music appreciates the guitar, and I want a rather large gap between myself and any generation that seeks to ignore it.
