chevelle

Saw Zeal & Ardor/Baroness/Deafheaven on the 5th which was pretty incredible, and sold me on Z&A's material big time. Then last week on the 13th I saw Periphery and Dance Gavin Dance together, which, despite not being that heavy of a show, was fucking intense crowd wise. Thought my neck was broken when a crowdsurfer fell on me, and the crowd crush didn't even stop between sets lol. Those are my favorite kinds of shows though, I love that kind of energy.

Beyond that, I might catch Stone Temple Pilots again next month, and in June I'm seeing Coheed and Cambria for the fourth time, with Every Time I Die and Mastodon (doing Crack the Skye in full!!!) playing with them. That's gonna be a great one.

I'm willing to put a little more trust in this since Duff actually said it instead of Fortus. I'm tired of the nostalgia touring, bring on new music please.

I can't believe there's 63 pages of this with literally no actual concrete info 

Definitely would've preferred hearing the rest of the Chinese material. The reunion is cool, but it came about a decade too late and it seems like the only thing we'll ever get out of it is touring, touring, and more touring (and considering how Axl sounds these days...meh). I'm glad I got to see my childhood musical idols on stage together in person, but I truly loved the direction Axl wanted to take GNR with the CD stuff.

Brand New's The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me is one of the most downer albums I've ever heard. Tons of themes about death and loss and losing your sense of who you are, it's a struggle for me to get through sometimes but I love it.

The Black Queen - Thrown Into the Dark

Man, those were weird and frustrating days, but I miss them. Reading that article made me super nostalgic for when GNR was my end all, be all band and I spent time here searching for every leak and bit of news possible. I still think CD is a good, if flawed record, and I'll always wish that Axl had ran things like a normal band and released more of that experimental music under the GNR name. Seeing Slash and Axl play together on stage last year was awesome, bucket list worthy, but I always wanted more of the artistic growth Axl showed with his very limited amount of CD-era material.

I had a real soft spot for Bumblefoot's Normal, Duff's Beautiful Disease, and Buckethead's Colma back when I was a massive GNR fan. Colma is still a great record, Normal is a decent listen but it's mostly nostalgia for me now, and I don't think I've heard Beautiful Disease since like 2007.

EDIT: Oh, and how can I forget VR? I loved both records, but Libertad is kind of special for me because I listened to it a TON during my sophmore year and have some really nice memories associated with it. And Contraband is just a great, sleazy almost-GNR rock record.

Looks something like this:
 

1. Daughters - You Won't Get What You Want

2. The Armed - Only Love

3. Between the Buried and Me - Automata I & II

4. Dance Gavin Dance - Artificial Selection

5. Kanye West - Ye/Kids See Ghosts

6. Mac Miller - Swimming

7. Kero Kero Bonito - Time 'n' Place

8. The Black Queen - Infinite Games

9. Underoath - Erase Me

10. Haru Nemuri - Haru to Shura

Just got back from seeing Steven Wilson tonight. I knew almost nothing of his music, but I went with a good friend that's tagged along with me to shows of bands HE doesn't know well, so it was my way of returning the favor. As luck would have it though, I really enjoyed most of his set and I'm really looking forward to exploring his music from here on out.

Other than that, I caught a Thom Yorke solo show a little over a week ago. Totally different vibe from Radiohead, considering how electronic-focused his music is, but I loved it and got a lot of my favorite solo tracks, plus the live debut of one of his newest tracks. I can't believe I went from never seeing Radiohead/Thom in the entire ten years I've been a fan to seeing them twice in the span of a few months.

Damn...1998 Axl bears a decent bit of resemblance to myself, lol.

I actually like a handful of songs on this album, which is more than I can say about most of their work from The Resistance on. Overall though it just feels very forgettable to me, there's nothing I'd want to hear over anything on their first 4 albums. 

On 10/9/2018 at 4:50 PM, ChineseDemocracy2004 said:

I know of them but I haven't really listened to them before. A friend of mine told me the album's fire so I gave it a listen.

Unheavenly Creatures is one of my favourite songs of the year so far.

The album's alright too.

Superstitious by Europe.

When that song dropped as a single, I wasn't feeling it. But as soon as I heard it on the album it refused to leave my goddamn head, lol. I wish this album had a little more of their prog side, but it's super consistent and after a few listens you're sure to pick up a few more favorites too.

Radiohead - The Gloaming

8 hours ago, ChineseDemocracy2004 said:

True Ugly by Coheed and Cambria.

I've been listening to the new album a lot, what's your thoughts on it?

Between the Buried and Me - Automata II
Queens of the Stone Age - ...Like Clockwork

Snagged a ticket for a NIN show the day after my birthday in a couple weeks. Gonna be my second NIN show after last seeing them in 2014, and this tour sounds incredible.

18 hours ago, appetite4illusions said:

Lets look at things in retrospect:

Who was managing Axl in 2006? Merck.

The album needed to be completed and they were short on funds, so, maybe the business people got their foot in the door to suggest that a few reunion shows would shower them with income and provide a ton of publicity so that when Chinese was to come out, it would have both a high profile and some of the sting removed from it.

Having given the masses the reunion they wanted, nu-GN'R would have a less hostile critical reaction to Chinese Democracy.

 

Obviously, Axl never went for it and I doubt that it was something he wanted. Both of those goals ran contrary to each other, but in the run up to the album release, I'm sure there were people saying "look at it from this perspective...you're helping Chinese Democracy by doing this..."

Honestly, I think the reaction to CD would've been worse had they done that. It probably would've been a "oh look, they can play some shows together but can't make music together?" kind of thing. Giving people a taste of the thing they truly wanted and then going back to the nu-Guns line up would've been very weird, imo.

17 minutes ago, Gordon Comstock said:

Yea the hooks are the low-points on several songs, I wish he'd utilize Yelawolf on a hook or two (he's still on Shady Records for now). I'm hoping the rumours of more music are true and he just puts out like 8-9 songs including an MGK diss and adds a few skits and keeps "trying 2 not overthink this 1". Outside the last 3 songs, Kamikaze is the most cohesive of his albums since his prime.

That actually brings me to something else, too. Every album of his since his comeback has been absolutely overstuffed with music, and most of them could be very excellent albums had the fat been trimmed appropriately. Kamikaze works so well because, like you said, it's cohesive, but also because it doesn't last long enough to overstay its welcome.

18 minutes ago, Gordon Comstock said:

Pretty much this. He even says things on the album like 'Denaun and Royce tell me that I should take the high road', 'Paul wants me to chill', basically since his comeback he's tried to be this persona that he's not, said he tried to have 'something for everyone' on Revival, and it's refreshing to hear an album where he's basically like 'fuck it, I'm just gonna vent at everyone for 45 mins'. The Ringer kinda reminds me of Rabbit Run (my favourite Eminem song) in its 'stream-of-thought' style, but it's still very 'modern-Em'. Greatest kinda sounds like an updated 'GOAT', Stepping Stone has the perfect early-2000's kinda beat for the subject, the album as a whole brings the nostalgia factor way more than MMLP2 did. But even the songs that are purely modern-Em sounding are good, Lucky You and Not Alike are among the best songs on the album, and Normal is growing on me. I wrote him off after Revival but he's definitely got my attention again.

Spot on man. It's refreshing to hear a decent balance of older-sounding Em plus some modern, updated production on some of these songs, it's way better than hearing him aim at an audience that really isn't even out there for him. And man, Stepping Stone made me feel nostalgic on first listen because it sounded straight off of Encore, he really nailed that one mood-wise. I hope he keeps this same fire and fine-tunes some of the missteps (like some of those god awful hooks on Greatest and Venom) of Kamikaze, without wasting time tinkering around in the studio. 

I saw Radiohead at the very end of July. I've been a fan of this band for a decade now, and they're my all time favorite, yet I've missed out on every single tour of theirs since 2008 for one reason or another. This time, I lucked out and an online friend had an extra GA ticket he sold to me at cost, so after finally accepting that I would never get to see them, I ended up about 20 feet from the stage. The lighting was subtle but super fitting and the cues were perfect, and the setlist touched upon a LOT of my favorite songs, some really rare cuts, an ever rarer b-side, and hit just about every album of theirs over the course of two hours. Despite all the years of waiting, it was still better than I expected it to be, and it's easily the best show I've ever gone to as of this moment.

Here's a picture I took that night that I really love!

Besides that, in the last few months I've seen a good few shows. I saw My Bloody Valentine the night before Radiohead, Godspeed You Black Emperor a few weeks later, and in May I caught Stone Temple Pilots, Dance Gavin Dance, Underoath, Protest the Hero, and a J-pop band called Fhana. Right now I don't have much coming up, but I might go see toe (a jazzy, math-rock influenced mostly instrumental Japanese band), I have a ticket to see Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park in October, and I might catch a Steven Wilson show with a good friend of mine.

I've lost the ability to be objective about Eminem, but I really dig this album. I fucking hated Revival and I got bored of MMLP2 very fast (despite enjoying it a lot while I did), and even though he's super bitter and lashing out against his fading relevance on this album, it's refreshing to hear him speak those thoughts honestly instead of pushing to be a pop star he'll never be. Eminem's worst enemy is his desire to stay number one forever, if he could step back from that and focus more on putting the projects together for himself first and foremost, I think we'd get some really great stuff from him again. This album isn't perfect, but it kind of proves that to me.

3 hours ago, El Guapo said:

A stealth release would be absolutely the way to to go and it would be cool as fuck.

So, no, probably.

I'm completely down for this. It's the only way to really subvert the massive expectations on it - instead of building up a promo cycle for four months, getting people's hopes up for it to be something it might not, just drop it and let everyone make sense of it all at the same time. It worked when Brand New took an 8 year break from making new music, and it landed that relatively minor band a number one album, too.

Absolutely. I feel like I could take them at least a little more seriously if they were actually being a creative force instead of just milking the nostalgia circuit on tour every once in a while. I think Axl's long past the bullshit that made him fumble the CD process so badly, but now it's a question of whether he actually has the spark to create music for public consumption again. 

This was always one of my favorite NuGuns songs, and it was part of why I was willing to support the new band. Had Axl kept pushing forward with this different, unique (to GNR) sound, he might've ended up making something really special and that didn't have to live in the shadow of the old Guns sound. 

2 hours ago, Draguns said:

First off, SMKC was already working on this album before the NITL tour. They had to finish this and tour. The question is: what will be next  after this? I doubt that they will come up with new material after this album.  Just like SMKC had unfinished business, so does GNR.

Second, I really don't think SMKC had traction after WOF was released. They played at a food festival in Clark, NJ in 2014 when I saw them. To me, that's not gaining any traction. For this fall tour, they are playing at the Wellmont Theater in Montclair, NJ (I'm attending) and South  Street Seaport in NYC.  Not exactly gaining traction. 

Just some things to think about. 

Yeah, I saw SMKC at a smallish theater near me in a B-market two years before I saw GNR pack a 15,000 seat amphitheater. It was definitely surreal to see the difference between the levels of success so close together, and I think SMKC can only go down in terms of traction at this point, essentially being a supergroup and all.