Mike's Weblog :: Mike Neir's Page

Over the past few weeks I've been quite the "consumer whore," as Gene would say. With my recent transition back to bachelor status and a nice raise at work, I've had a lot more cash laying around. Because of this, I decided to splurge on some music that's caught my attention. Over said few weeks, I've picked up three albums by Amorphis, two by Meshuggah, and one each by Megadeth, Killswitch Engage, Demiricous, and Iced Earth.

Out of all of the albums I picked up, the Iced Earth album ("Framing Armageddon") was the only one I had any plans on picking up. It's the first half of a sci-fi-ish narrative Jon Schaffer has been brewing up for some years now. He laid the foundation of the story quite a while back with the "Something Wicked" trilogy, and things have come to fruition. I was kind of thrown off by the style of the album. It has a lot of the signature Iced Earth elements like Jon Schaffer's robotic-arm triplet-riffing and a strong vocal presence, but the music has a distinctly different feel in many places. I'm not saying it's bad, but its not what I expected out of Iced Earth. Since the story is divded into two parts on separate CD releases, it's my guess that the first CD is a more subdued lead-in, kind of the calm before the storm. We'll see once the second half is released I guess.

I'm really digging the two Nordic components of my purchases - Amorphis and Meshuggah. The former used to be much more of a doom/deah metal band, but they've expanded on the typical musical palette of those genres greatly and incorporated clean vocals and an assortment of typically non-metal instruments (such as saxophones, flutes, and sitars). The result is a very cool blending of styles, and it's quite pleasure to listen to. Meshuggah, on the other hand, could probably be quite painful to listen to if you weren't into their particular way of doing things. They're abrasive, intense, and their compositional style is downright weird. The current last.fm description probably says it better than I ever could.

Among the band's most recognizable qualities are lead guitar player Fredrik Thordendal's abrasive, chaotic and dischordant solos, singer Jens Kidman's vocals, which resemble manic screams and shouts; the churning, dissonant rhythm guitars and the polymetric drum beats. In a typical Meshuggah song, drummer Tomas Haake plays two separate rhythms: a standard 4/4 beat with his hands, and a completely different metrical subdivision with his feet. The guitars mostly follow the bass drum work, creating an awkwardly pulsating rhythmic pattern to work as the basis of the song.

To give an example, the main riff of the song "New Millennium Cyanide Christ" from their 1998 album Chaosphere follows the aforementioned blueprint. Haake beats a rather slow 4/4 rhythm with his hands, while the bass drums and guitars play a repetitive 23/16 rhythm pattern on top of it. As the subdivided pattern is repeated, the pattern's accents shift to different beats on each repetition. After repeating the 23/16 pattern five times, a shorter 13/16 pattern is played once. These patterns sum up to 128 16th notes, which equals exactly 8 measures in 4/4 meter.

Speaking of "New Millenium Cyanide Christ" - its music video has to be one of the funniest I've ever seen. A band air-guitaring to their own song on their tour bus. Genius idea. Anyway, I digress. Dispite its chaotic nature, I find their stuff quite easy to work to. I found myself getting quite a bit done the other day when I was listening to it at work. Strange.

The remaining three albums have been outshined by the aforementioned works, but I'll listen to them more eventually. The new Megadeth CD ("United Abominations") is pretty good. I've come to expect their newer stuff to be much more hit-and-miss than their defining works, and this is no different really. There are some pretty fine moments on the CD, and some others that are less stellar. Overall, I'd have to say that its more consistently better than its predecessor ("The System Has Failed"), though. I'm completely in love with Demiricous' style. A lot of people seem to dog them because they sound a lot like Slayer, but what's so bad about that? They have certain aspects that sound similar, but overall I think there's enough differences to keep them from sounding completely derivative. They've got a new album coming out in a few weeks, which probably means my trend of CD purchases won't stop soon. The Killswitch Engage CD I picked up has really been eclipsed by all the other stuff I've picked up. I'll listen to it more, I swear!

It was a dark and stormy night.... Er, wait. It was a cold and stormy night.... Nah, that's not right either. It was a cold and windy night... Now we're cookin. It was certainly cold and windy, but I didn't care much since four of my favorite bands were going to share the same stage. I went with a few guys from work, Gene and Nick, and their buddy Aaron. We all made the pilgrimage to Pine Knob, one of my favorite spots to check out a show.

The four lesser-known bands that opened the show were all decent-to-good, the best being Overkill. They've been around for a long time from what I gather, and easily had the largest following of the opening four. They brought an old-school metal sound into the mix, with a lot of New York attitude. A huge sod fight also broke out on the lawn during their set. I can't remember if it was as spectacular as the one that took place during the Jerry Cantrell/Metallica show I saw at the Knob in '98, but it was a sight nonetheless. It also got old pretty quickly, but the teenager types thought it was a riot to pelt the people further down the hill with tufts of sod. I didn't think it was all that fun, but I remembering having a lot better time back in the day when I was the one throwing the grass. I guess grass-throwing loses its appeal with age.

Arch Enemy was the first of the larger bands to play. With eight bands playing, even the bigger bands had pretty abbreviated sets. AE probably played a good 45 minutes I would imagine. They played a good mix of songs, and the crowd was enjoying it, mostly because of Angela Gossow, their singer. Yep, she's hot. And her vocals would scare small children. Both are good qualities for a woman fronting a metal band. Given that they could only play for 45 minutes, they made the best of it. Definitely a good showing. Grade: A

Opeth was up next. They were the band I wanted to see most, by far. I had seen the other three big bands there at least once, but I hadn't seen Opeth yet. They made the most of their 45 minutes as well... by playing four songs. Opeth songs tend to be quite long, to say the least. They opened up with "Ghost of Perdition," followed by "Windowpane," "The Leper Affinity," and "Deliverance." It was a pretty good mix considering the curcumstances, but I really wish they had another fifteen minutes so they could have fit another song in there. Hearing something like "Blackwater Park" or "Serenity Painted Death" probably would have forced an accident in my pants. I was cracking up a decent amount during their set though. There were quite a few people there that knew Opeth and their style, but there were also a bunch that didn't. They were easily identified by the "WTF?" looks on their face whenever Opeth would drop into a clean section of a song, or pretty much through all of "Windowpane." These sections don't exactly fit in a stereotypical metal show. I don't care though - Opeth rules. The only bad thing about their set is that one of the guitars was barely audible, which made the songs sound pretty funny in places. Grade: A-

Lamb of God occupied the next-to-last slot, and because of it, they had a longer set, probably on the order of an hour and a half. They're a force to be reckoned with nowadays, and it was evident as soon as they came out. They showed up Slayer when I saw them together a few months back, and they were aiming to claim this show as their own as well. They easily had the tightest and most well-mixed sound of all the bands that played, and they weren't taking prisoners either. They played quite a few older songs, including my personal Lamb of God favorite, "Vigil." They also played a good three or four songs off the new album "Sacrament." They were on throughout their whole set, and the crowd was loving it. They definitely achieved their goals and stole the show. Grade: A

Gigantour is Dave Mustaine's baby, so it's natural that Megadeth headlined the show. This was my fifth time seeing Megadeth, but sadly, it was probably the worst show I saw them put on. I'm not sure why, but Dave Mustaine just wasn't on. He seemed visibly agitated for the first couple songs, walking off to the sides of the stage to talk to stage hands between songs and during long instrumental breaks. It may have been due to time restrictions, because he made a point of announcing that they had to rush through their set due to the hard kurfew present at Pine Knob. In any case, he just wasn't on his game. His vocals were pretty weak through most of the songs. He sings with a few distinct styles, and it didn't seem like he was hitting any of them. The mix was also really bad. The vocals and drums were noticiably quiet, while the guitars were way too loud. I like loud guitars as much as the next guy, but they shouldn't drown out the rest of the band. The set list was pretty strong, and they played a new song off the album they're releasing next year. It sounded pretty good. Not "Rust In Peace"-era Megadeth good, but good nonetheless. Grade: B

Another string of sweet concerts just came down the concert news wire, and all in a ten day span. It would seem that my hearing is going to take a beating... :)

2006/09/24 - Gigantour 2 at Pine Knob (a.k.a. DTE Energy Ampitheater), Clarkston, MI

I just saw Mastodon a few weeks ago, but they were in an opening slot and didn't get to play that much. They're headlining this tour, and should have ample room to play a ton of their songs, which will make for a sweet show. It's totally neat that Clutch is playing right here in town, so I won't have to go very far to see this one. The Temple Club isn't that big, so tickets may be hard to come by. This year's Gigantour has another round of sweet bands, including Megadeth, Opeth, Arch Enemy, and Lamb of God. Those four bands are probably enough to force an accident in my pants, but the idea of Gigantour is to have nothing but technically excellent bands who know how to rock, so I'm sure I'll find more bands to enjoy as well.

It would seem that I've been lax on my site updates again. It's easy for me to tell that I need to update more when my mom tells me that I need to post something.

The past week has actually been somewhat eventful, unlike the weeks before it. Last wednesday the Gigantour came into town, bringing much sweet music our way. Three of my favorite bands were there - Fear Factory, Dream Theater, and Megadeth - plus a few others that I wanted to see. We arrived at the show at about three, and after a short time we found that we had missed Nevermore's set due to a misinterpretation of the scheduling between the two stages. We were rather pissed, but we got over it I guess. Symphony X was pretty sweet, and all of the main stage bands were awesome except Dillinger Escape Plan. I thought they sounded like a steaming pile of dung. Matt says they're a lot better on CD. I hope he's right. They didn't impress me at all live. Fear Factory was sweet, as usual. Dream Theater was awesome as well, but to me their mix was too loud before the amplification, and it was causing their sound to be overdriven a bit. Megadeth was totally on, and Dave Mustaine sounded great. In the previous Megadeth shows I've seen he's always seemed to struggle with some of his more snarly vocals, but this time around he nailed them all. Excellent show all the way around.

My friend Annie got married this weekend as well. Unlike last year, where I lost nearly a dozen close friends to marriage, this wedding season has been rather tame, which is good. It makes me feel old when people my age bow out of the game. Anyways, I'm normally somewhat bummed when I go to weddings, because it seems like I'm always one of the slim minority of single people. Everybody is always so happy at weddings, but it always seems to remind me that I'm single, and have been single for a loooong time. Well, this wedding turned out different! I'm not going to go into detail here, because it involed me dancing, and nobody should ever hear a detailed description of said events. It's just too traumatic. Regardless, I had a *great* time, and who knows, there may be more great times in the future!

I've been on the midnight shift this week, which is never fun. I think the only good thing about this shift is that I don't have to wake up to an alarm clock. Oh well. I volunteered for it to help a buddy in a bind, so I have nobody to blame but myself. I'm dragging ass right now because I went out to the Peanut Barrel with Kate before work and had a few beers. Mental note: Drinking before a night shift is bad. You tend to want to sleep, and that can't really happen at work.

Shit, I meant to write up this post like two weeks ago, but Galeon ate it about 2 minutes before I was done writing it up, so I just said "screw it" and went to bed instead of typing it all up again. I guess I forgot to retype it. Well, here it is.

This summer looks as though it will be sweet for concerts. Ozzfest has a lineup that I definitely want to check out. Iron Maiden, Shadows Fall, Mastodon, and Black Label Society will be there, along with a few other bands that I want to see. I've never been to Ozzfest before, so it should be interesting. Dave Mustaine of Megadeth is putting together a similar show this year called "Gigantour", and its lineup excites me even more than the Ozzfest lineup. Dream Theater and Fear Factory will appear with Megadeth, which means 3 of my favorite bands will all be present in one place. It should be quite awesome.

I recently picked up a few albums that are worth mentioning. I grabbed "The Art of Balance" and "Of One Blood" by Shadows Fall. They're both really good, but the production quality on "Of One Blood" is a bit worse than "The Art of Balance." You can tell they hadn't hit it big yet. The good thing is that the songs have been better and better as the band matures. Lots of bands tend to lose their creative spark after a few good albums, but, thankfully, Shadows Fall doesn't seem to have done that. They've done nothing but get better. They give me faith that good metal isn't an art that has been lost upon my generation.

The other two albums I picked up were "Hatebreeder" and "Hatecrew Deathroll" by Children of Bodom. Their vocals still suck pretty bad, but they still seem to mix the albums so they're not as prominent as they could be, which is good. They're both sweet albums musically, with tons of energy and some crazy solos. The latter album is better in my opinion, but the former jams too. COB also is following the pattern of improving with each album released, so I can hope that the best is yet to come.

Being one of my favorite bands, I had anticipated seeing Iced Earth for quite a while. I caught about the last 10 minutes of one of their shows when they opened up for Megadeth at St. Andrews a while back, and that 10 minutes planted the seed that made me want to look into them more. I did, and the rest is history. I went to the show with Jon, Matt, and Alex. We did the fasionably late thing, and missed the great majority of the first band's set. That's fine, because they didn't sound that great.

I'm not sure what the second band's name was, but when they said it, I couldn't hear exactly what they said. Chalk that one up to metal-show-ears. We think it's something like Bound or Mound or Pound. Whatever it is, they were pretty sweet. I don't know if they were local or were on the whole tour, because they're not listed on the Iced Earth site. Oh well. They kinda made us nervous for their first song... the singer came out and just started belting out the ball-grabbing shrieks that can turn your ears to jelly in no time, but that was the only song he did that in. They sported the 5-man power lineup - a singer, two guitarists, bass player, and a drummer. The drummer kinda looked like the main guy from Radiohead, which was kinda funny. They had a really heavy sound, and were very tight and crisp, which caught our attention right away. They did a decent amount of traded leads between the two guitarists, and they did some cool harmonies as well. There were also a few songs with really cool off-beat rhythms, which is always neat when you can pull it off, and they did. I'd like to find out exactly who they were, because they were really solid, and I'd definitely check them out further. Grade: B+

The third band was Evergrey. From what they said and what I saw on their website, they're from Sweden. The first thing we noticed was how freakin tall the frontman was... the dude had to be at least 6'5". The guitar looked like a freaking toy in his hands. They had a really cool sound. They could thrash with the best of them, but they also had a very melodic side, which is very cool. There were a few songs where they would combine both aspects - opening up with a insanely fast sequence, then calming down and doing some really cool melodic stuff. They also had a good amount of dual lead responsibilities between their two guitarists, with a lot of harmonies. Since I know who they are, I'll definitely give these guys some further attention. Grade: B+

The last in a long series of opening bands was Children of Bodom. They were pretty sweet musically, but their singer/lead guitarist had a vocal style that grated on me pretty heavily. It just sounded like a bark, and he didn't vary it at all. He should definitely stick to his guitar playing, which was very sweet. He did tons of crazy lead stuff, and in most of their songs, did some awesome harmonized lead lines with their keyboard player, who was also pretty damn good. I may check these guys out further, but the constant barking vocals kinda turned me off. These guys had a pretty large following in attendance, which kinda surprised me. A good portion of the crowd was chanting for them before they came out. It must be pretty cool to be a Finnish band having people chant your name in Detroit before you come out on stage. Grade: B

After 4 opening bands, Iced Earth came out, probably around 11:00pm. They opened up with Declaration Day from The Glorious Burden. Following that (in no particular order) were Angels Holocaust, Violate, Vengeance is Mine, Burning Times, Melancholy, Dracula, When the Eagle Cries, Greenface, and Red Baron. They closed out the 'main' portion of their show with the Something Wicked This Way Comes trilogy (Prophecy, Birth of the Wicked, and The Coming Curse). They finished that portion of the show and said goodnight at about 12:15, so we knew there was more in store. We weren't disappointed. They came back out shortly after, with Jon Schaffer in a Confederate soldier's jacket, holding a Les Paul with a Confederate flag painted on it. Ralph Santolla (I assume it's him) had a Union Jacket on, with the US flag of that time painted on his Les Paul. They proceeded to play the entire Gettysburg Trilogy (The Devil to Pay, Hold At All Costs, High Water Mark), which was a treat. They closed out the show with Iced Earth, which is pretty much a staple as far as I know. It was insane though - somewhere during one of the changes between a heavy part and a slower melodic part, Tim Owens belted out one of his trademark ball-grabbing screams, but he held the note for at least 30 seconds. It was insane. Everyone in the band was just standing there looking at him. Jon Shaffer was just staring at him with this awestruck smile, Richard Christy stood up in his drum kit and did the Wayne's World "We're not worthy" thing about half-way through, and the bass player (James MacDonough I assume) brought up a bottle of water and put it next to his mouth after about 20 seconds of the wail. It was great.

Overall, I think Iced Earth played very well, but the mix seemed a bit off from our vantage point. Jon Schaffer's guitar was a tad loud, and Ralph Santolla's guitar was a bit quiet, but only in the higher ranges. When he let a power chord fly, it smacked you in the stomach, but his leads sounded quiet to me. Also, the bass drums on the drum kit seemed too quiet, but the rest of the drums were fine. Tim Owens was at a perfect volume, and he was very clear and discernable, which is a credit to his voice. My suspicions about Jon Schaffer have to be true after seeing him play his triplet-riffing madness style in person - he's either got a bionic right arm or he's superhuman in someway. He played every song flawlessly, nailing every part that would turn the right arms of mere mortals into jelly in 10 seconds flat. Tim Owens sounded awesome. I had my reservations on how well his voice would make the Matt Barlow era songs sound, but he did an excellent job with them. The older songs (pre-Matt Barlow) sound like they were made for him, so there was no problems there. The song selection was really cool, and seeing both the Something Wicked and Gettysburg trilogies played in their entriety was a treat. As sweet as it was, I'm not convinced that the Gettysburg trilogy was a great choice for a live show. They played all of the orchestration and the miscellaneous sound effects as a track, while the band played the rather simple (for the most part) rhythms and leads. Owens nailed the vocal parts for it, but in my opinion, those three songs would be better suited to stay in their CD form, where they're nothing short of excellence. All in all, the show was very sweet, and well worth the 4 opening bands and the 6 hours of standing. Grade: A+

Nothing really noteworty to report on the events of today except that Matt proved to Steven and I that it is possible to sniff packets over a switched network even if the traffic isn't directed towards you... Guess that shows our naievity. I guess Steven and I were living in the land of THEORY where sniffing anything but your own traffic isn't possible, but in practice it is due the lovely layers of the TCP stack. You can't sniff switched layer 2 traffic unless it's directed to you, but you can fool layer 3 into directing traffic to you, which makes it real easy to sniff. Oh well... Matt wins, this time.

On a completely different subject, I've been noticing a different trend as of late when it comes to the guitar and what I've been playing on it. Ever since I started playing the guitar, I've always been quite content just playing rhythm stuff, laying down the foundation that the song is based on, not really choosing to be flashy in what I play. I've pretty much pulled a 180 in the last few months though. Every time I pick up the guitar and plug in, I'm not really interested in playing the same old power chords over the same old songs anymore. I've been playing completely random stuff off the top of my head, and it's mostly lead-type stuff. I wouldn't believe for a second that I'm actually good at playing in that style or that I have 1% of the musical knowledge and passion that I would need to actually sound good, but I'm doing it anyways. Perhaps it's just because I'm so incredibly bored with playing the same old Metallica and Megadeth songs that I've played hundreds of times... bored with the small palette of sounds that I've made on an instrument that's capable of so much more. Who knows. I'd like to get back into a more regular habit of playing since I've kinda become lazy with it. It's hard to believe that I couldn't be more creative with the music that I play if I worked at gaining some more knowledge and skills. I had a glimmer of originality when I was playing today... a lead lick that sounded very cool to my ears and wasn't something that I just mindlessly replicated from some other song. It would be sweet to be able to do that with regularity.

Yup, fell asleep on the couch watching Family Guy again. I was supposed to do laundry tonight, but alas, it doesn't look like that was meant to be. Instead I slept, and then rummaged all over my room looking for a piece of paper with the PID for my Student Loan account with Uncle Sam, only to later find out that the information was saved in the form on my computer, rendering my 45 minutes of searching and frustration completely unnecessary. Fun.

For anybody that is cool and even for those that are not, there are two sweet concerts rolling around Southeast Michigan way in the coming months, and yours truely will definitely be there sacrificing my hearing up on the altair of sweet music in order to see them. Dream Theater is playing the State Theater in Detroit on March 22 and Iced Earth is playing Harpos on April 24. Dream Theater is touring by themselves and playing a two-set show with an intermission, so that should be crazy sweet. Not too many bands can play for that long, but they definitely can. I may be more pumped about the Iced Earth Show though... I've only seen them briefly in a live setting, at one of the Megadeth shows I caught in 2001 before Megadeth broke up. That's what got me interested in them, and it's all downhill from there... ;) It should be sweet to see them, and even cooler since they're headlining. I can't wait.

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