The Grinder Diary, Oct. 1-15

Listening to...

• Aqua by Angra. Another masterful album from the most talented band ever in the power metal genre. They actually transcend the genre these days, putting so much and varied material in their music that they have developed a style pretty much unique to them.
• Miss Potter - original soundtrack. Nigel Westlake's score creates a wonderful aural image of Beatrix Potter's era in England. Excellent music for excellent but curiously overlooked film.
• John Adams, again. Christian Zeal and Activity is a strange and mesmerizing work! Wonder about the story behind the piece... El Dorado I need to return to, the circumstances for concentrated listening were far from optimal.
• Eternal Idol and Headless Cross by Black Sabbath. Very good heavy rock (this is not metal, really) from Tony Iommi's short-lived "Project Sabbath". Stylistically close to the Dio-era stuff, with singer Tony Martin faithfully reproducing Dio's phrasings and mannerisms. There are some pretty Rainbow-ish passages as well, especially on Idol. Good songs, good playing, bad timing; these albums are now well worth a critical reappraisal.
• Selina Martin's all three albums. The very talented young Toronto songwriter is only in the early stages of her career, so stay tuned. I'm certain there's going to be a lot of good music coming her way in years to come.
• Nathan Barr's scores to True Blood - what a find! This probably works well even if you never watch the show. The low-key, organic, intimate and yet forceful soundscape of chamber, early and ethnic/folk influences is simply stunning. An instant favorite.

Watching...

• The Big Bang Theory - I love it! This is the 2nd run of the show in Finland; I completely missed out first time, so thank you whoever decided to give it another go.
• The original Planet of the Apes movies - this is our family's weekend watching now that we have worked through the entire 007 catalogue. Our older kid enjoys the philosophizing and ethical dilemmas present in the films, but how did the folks 40 year ago handle the snail's pace of these movies... *yawn*.

Reading...

• Blueeyedboy by Joanne Harris. Ambitious, clever and somewhat overreaching in its overall cleverness. But I respect her a lot for not standing still after her initial successes. This one is not a between-the-eyes, bull's eye novel, but there's lots to admire.
• The Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson. The Swedes have already adopted the late Larsson's social/political thrillers as their national treasure, and I confess being as hooked. Larsson, a journalist, was not artistically very skilled as a novelist, but the directness and rawness, combined with the minute details of Sweden's everyday life, is impressive. And his over-the-top (anti)heroine, Lisbeth Salander, is an unforgettable creation.

Otherworldly, worldly and underworldly music

I finally managed to hear the 2007 release of the entire Jerry Goldsmith score to Alien. The film's 30th anniversary was last year, but the score seems totally timeless. It's a bold, brave piece, especially for film music, filled with majestic and ethereal sequences and these absolutely furious, outright grotesque sound sculptures. It's Goldsmith's genius that the score somehow combines these two dimensions and comes across as an integrated piece instead of haphazard moments. Stunning.

The strength of the original comes clearly into focus when you consider James Horner's score for Aliens. Horner uses Goldsmith's signature Alien motifs tastefully, but the original parts in the score pale hopelessly in comparison. Action has never been Horner's forte, anyway, and his best action movie scores musically emphasize mood rather than aggression. His Apocalypto score, for example, is actually a pretty wonderful combination of ethnic instruments, vocals and synthesized soundscapes. Too bad the film the music appears in is utterly repugnant.

Elliott Goldenthal faded Goldsmith out almost completely on his Alien 3 score, and with great success. His creation is almost atonal and destructive, a formidable orchestral version of very black metal, and one of my lasting favorites.

Back on planet Earth, I dug up Yes frontman Jon Anderson's first solo album Olias of Sunhillow, a record I return to every now and then. Initially (in 1975) it was considered difficult or impenetrable, but in 2010 it sounds like a slightly more complex than usual world music album, nothing too challenging there. It's pretty spheric stuff, though, and some of the synth sounds are very reminiscent of Vangelis' sonic arsenal, as if anticipating the Jon & Vangelis collaboration that took place three years later.

Sounds from the underworld to close this posting... One of my metal favorites, Norway's wonderfully inventive Dimmu Borgir, recently released their new album called Abrahadabra, and... I'm slightly at a loss here. With their previous album, In Sorte Diaboli, they reached a maturation point in combining the sound of a full symphony orchestra to the blast of the band. The result was simply great, powerful, merciless but also very stylish and nuanced. This time around, though, the orchestra dominates the proceedings so much that I cannot but wonder what's this going to sound like live. They must either drop the orchestral stuff (which may leave the band arrangements sounding bare) or they play the orchestra tracks from a hard disk (which may look kind of silly since there's really a lot of sound). The album's material is OK but I feel it's a bit less brilliant than on the last couple of records, and the band is really overshadowed by the classical dudes (who play fiercely here) in lots of places. I love both classical and metal, but in this case the result is an uneasy tightrope act, a case of "to be or not to be". Hope they can get the material work live, because they are an excellent band and I hope they will keep experimenting.