Metal from the East

Orphaned Land at 02 Academy Islington on Nov. 11, '10.
Photo by yours truly.

Me and my wife had the immense pleasure of attending Orphaned Land's gig at the 02 Academy Islington in London. OL supported our countrymen Amorphis, who gave a fine and reliable performance but, in my ears at least, came in a good second to OL's vibrant, rich and joyous performance. I have in my mobile a video clip from the show, with OL's singer Kobi Farhi leading the bouncing crowd in a Middle Eastern chant while the band blasts away sheer metal.

A very odd-seeming combination, but oh man... a totally different experience! The Arabic/Jewish grooves simply sway, creating a different, elastic framework to the metal assault, while the non-Western scales and harmonies give everything a unique coloring. And to top it all, we got to meet Kobi, Yossi and Matan after the show, so... pretty perfect, thank you guys :)

OL are not the only Oriental Metal masters around, it seems. About a week ago, I made first contact with the Mesopotamian Black Metallers Melechesh and was left wondering what hit me. With band HQ in Israel, Melechesh are actually a multicultural bunch, but the band sound is most certainly Eastern-tinged. And they are destructive: I don't recall hearing a band this tight in the genre since... about never. Not only do they play extremely well, their songwriting and the varied instrumentation are top notch.

None of this takes away from their essential fury; at times they sound like Sumerian wind demons with instruments. Very impressive, very skillful - the best extreme metal I have heard, period. When might you guys be coming over to Finland...?

Holly and Coraline

MUSIC

Holly Cole's self-titled 2007 album (released as This House Is Haunted in some corners of the world) is sheer joy. I've long enjoyed her relaxed, sensual but not cheesy readings of both standards and less-known material. On this album she stays close to lounge/club jazz but somehow makes it sound fresh and exciting. Good stuff for those long dark candlelit nights here way up north...





FILM

Finally caught Henry Selick's animated film version of Neil Gaiman's Coraline. Not an easy book to convert to film by any standards, but Selick and his team do a stunning job with both the screen adaptation and the technical side of things. The gloominess and sense of paranoia of the novel are livened up a bit to keep things going for 97 minutes, but not at the expense of Gaiman's essential ideas or storyline.

There is some CGI animation but mostly Coraline is done in painstaking stop-motion, and it's by far the best I have ever seen in the genre. Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride were masterful, but this is mind-blowing stuff. The almost psychedelic, mock-Disney colorful moments (ie. The Other Dad's magical garden) are made even more effective by the minute details and washed realism of the everyday, real-life environments (for example, a medium close-up of a laptop, featuring the weirdest context for product placement as far as I can recall).

And if that was not enough, the (somehow very French) score by Bruno Coulais sprinkles a different kind of pixie dust over the proceedings! I love the contemporary score masters, but oh how refreshing to do without a Zimmer, Horner, Elfman, or even a Newman, for that matter, for a change. Marvelous stuff!

Return to The Dreaming

I did a retrospective round of the entire Kate Bush studio album catalogue. For a fan, this is always like revisiting an old friend. You've heard the music so many times that you may actually spend a few years not listening to the material at all and then come back to it with open ears.

This time around, the strengths of The Dreaming came to the fore with force. Even the then genuinely groundbreaking  Never For Ever now feels a bit uneven and markedly transitional - Egypt and Violin  probably appear on very few "Kate's Best" lists. But The Dreaming, for all its eccentricities (the cinema-like soundscapes, the screeching vocals and such), is carried by a unifying, brave vision, wonderful musicianship and a sense of a leap of faith - faith being, perhaps not by accident, a dominant theme in many of the songs, along with alienation.

The raw, naked emotion Kate displays throughout the album is stunning, whether in aggressive mode (Get Out of My House), subdued desperation (All the Love) or a combination of the two (Night of the Swallow). There are very few albums in the history of popular music that so easily map the entire range of human emotion and use so many musical styles to create a coherent whole.

And for the first time, I identified Pull Out the Pin, a song that for years eluded me, as the center of the album, and perhaps Kate's entire output. The tableaux of a young soldier confronting his essential kill-or-die moment and all its implications illuminates life's unsolvable paradoxes is put out in a low-key performance that nicely hides the high existential drama of the moment. "With my silver Buddha and my silver bullet... Just one thing: it's me or him, and I love life (pull out the pin)..."

The Dreaming was something of a commercial failure at the time in 1982, another watertight proof that in the world of so-called pop music, qualities like innovation, originality and courage are rarely what it's all about, sadly enough.

The Grinder Diary, Oct. 16 - Nov. 2

Nothing staggering to report...

MUSIC:

• I'm. stuck in the letter "B" in classical composers. Bartók has become a permanent favorite, Bach is a given by now, likewise Beethoven. Samuel Barber I seem to enjoy a lot, too, for the most part. My 10-year old son reacted to the Medea Suite with "what's this weird music?" and I can't blame him - it must sound pretty freakish to him.
• The American prog band Glass Hammer surprised me in a pleasant way with their mostly non-prog album Three Cheers For The Broken Hearted, from 2008, if I remember correctly. I wasn't impressed with their early efforts and lost sight of them for a time, but this is good stuff: impossible to label, very organic and humane. There are outright jewels on the album, too. A Rose for Emily, Mid-Life Weird and the stunning closing track, Falling, are simply the best popular music to come from the USA in a long while. Such a pity only a handful of people will ever hear it :(

TELEVISION:

• Watching both Nurse Jackie and Hung, now that they're on Finnish channels. They're fine, but I can't get too excited over either, at least not for now. I like Hung a wee bit more because it shows signs of developing a stronger dramatic arc; N.J. relies a bit too much on its offbeat factors.

BOOKS:

• Having finished Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, I started on John Keane's The Life and Death of Democracy, but 900+ pages on political history was just a touch too heavy for the moment. I settled on something lighter but decided to read Keane a portion, or historical period, at a time in between other books.