Week In Review Week #51

Heyyy and welcome to a week in my life. I’m new to the site but the concept is simple in that, every week I watch films, read books and listen to music. Here is where I review them and where I kind of talk for a while. I’ll also list some of the things I’ll be talking about so you can see if anything interests you.

Features:

* Prelude to my drunken Christmas
* Radiohead ‘The Bends’ review.
* BJ Penn vs Diego Sanchez
* A PS3!?!?
* Rage Against The Machine defeat Simon Cowell and why we should care.
* Coheed & Cambria ‘Second Stage Turbine Blade’ review. Kind of.

Well it’s almost christmas time, so what have I been doing? Well I’ve been drinking and writing music most of the time. Made the trip back to Hull just so I could bring my guitar home – there hadn’t been enough of me to carry it back on the train. However, the journey coming back home at the weekend allowed me to listen to some of my favourite albums and a few new albums. Started the journey off by listening to the first album from prog-rock – sometimes they get called ‘emo rock’ but oh well – group Coheed & Cambria: ‘Second Stage Turbine Blade’. I first listened to Coheed in 2004 I believe, and it was definitely a grower. Until this weekend I hadn’t listened to Coheed, aside from the odd song, since mid-2008 maybe, a few months after ‘No World For Tomorrow’ was released I assume. But yeah, some really cute songs on here like ‘Time Consumer’ and ‘Neverender’ (in parts) and just some brilliantly riffs across the entire album. I think it’’s definitely the emotion and passion that Claudio has which makes them so accessible for me. This sort of music isn’t really something I’d listen to very often from any other band, yet Co&Ca are a quality group who I’m planning catching when they tour their next album – and presumably the last – since I couldn’t go to their Nevender tour earlier this year.

If, for some reason you haven’t had the chance to listen to this band then they have some good songs on their myspace (http://www.myspace.com/coheedandcambria) – my favourite of the available four is Neverender, but Welcome Home seems to be the more popular. Mother Superior is also a brilliant song for storyline reasons and more melodic songs – another reason I can’t wait for the new album in April/May.

But as I was saying, ‘Second Stage Turbine Blade’ is where everything started for the ‘Amory Wars’ story – basically a comic/graphic novel that has lots of weird things happening and is kind of star wars-y. The graphic novel has never really interested me, but I imagine for those into that sort of thing would be able to derive more from the music perhaps, although mystery behind lyrics is always fun. The album is the most story based of the first three albums in my opinion, almost as story driven as the fourth album. The band have managed to become incredibly good at writing strong riff driven songs and mixing it up with experimental breakdown’s and solos, melodic verses and passionate vocals. Of the few metallish bands I listen to (I refer to the tendencies of bands like these who use metal styled structures and things like different time signatures), I think the thing that gets me is the lack of a formula and the pleasant vocal lines where screaming is used to convey anger and upset. I personally don’t understand growling and anger-infused drumming that a lot of metal bands suffer from, but there are a few out there who slip into my boundary for listenable bands.

Then again, I’m big on Radiohead – admittedly a new recruit to the fan base, but we all start somewhere – who aren’t exactly the most musically consistent band I know, and quite weirdly diverse in every single album. Pablo Honey was where they found their roots in alternative rock before The Bends and OK Computer solidified them as one of the most inventive bands ever. Beautiful songs like ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, ‘Street Spirit’, ‘Let Down’, ‘Paranoid Android’ and ‘No Surprises’ were juxtaposed with messages to get healthier ‘Fitter Happier’ and with unorthodox arrangements and sound effects like in ‘Climbing Up The Walls’, ‘Planet Telex’ and ‘Bullet Proof…’. Only for them then to bring out ‘Kid A’ in 2000 – massively experimental and minimalistic.

Anyway, I re-listened to a Radiohead Album that I absolutely loved when I first started listening to Radiohead – and I still do love it – because it was just so creative and different, but they could still make you really listen to the songs. Fake Plastic Tree’s is such a simple song and yet it could easily bring you close to tears given the right (or wrong?) mood. Street Spirit and High and Dry are both good examples of this. It holds up brilliantly almost fifteen years on. I usually skip ‘Bulletproof’ because I just love ‘Black Star’ so much. If it had been between ‘Just’ and ‘My Iron Lung’ then maybe I’d give it more time because those songs overstayed their welcome a while back, and I only listen to them if I’m after an angst-driven guitary throw down in the form of ‘My Iron Lung’.

If I was to recommend only three songs to listen to from this album it would HAVE to be ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ aaaand ‘Black Star’. Or ‘Just’, but that’s not a personal favourite more one that caught on in the radio station world. You may have heard it in either the Radiohead form or the Marc Ronson form, Radiohead weren’t using wind instruments at this time to my knowledge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwpW9oH9taw

I also listened to some old Los Campesinos! albums (not exactly old, but the new album is officially out in February – I say officially because it’s already been leaked) but I’m not going to review them because I’ll leave that for Matt to do. Don’t want to steal that from him! Instead, I shall discuss another brilliant UFC Pay Per View with BJ Penn/Diego Sanchez, Kenny Florian/Clay Guida and Frank Mir/Cheick Kongo on the card.

Going into this PPV I wasn’t THAT excited. I love watching Penn fight but I was just expecting the match to go about one round where Diego exploded and failed resulting in his world being rocked inside out. I was also pretty worried for Mir because I didn’t really know if putting the weight on would help him as much as it did in the end – he had previously claimed that he wasn’t going to put on the weight, but that was prior to losing to Lesnar in such a dominating fashion. I wasn’t too fussed about Guida/Kenny because I just know that the Kenny Florian curse is still running wild, and he’s going to beat people but fail at become champion. Comparable to Yushin Okami’s failure to defeat top fighters and just waste away in obscurity. Although some people seem to quite like him, I’m not too sure why.

The reality? Frank Mir knocked Cheick Kongo on his ass before proceeding to choke the guy out with a guillotine in the first round. BJ Penn and Diego Sanchez ended in the fifth round when a head kick just tore open the forehead of Diego. It was the most one-sided title match that I’ve seen go past the second round, but it was brilliant. I always love BJ’s matches because I’m usually so hyped from his wacky catchphrases before the match. The sad thing is, is that who is next? Frankie Edgar? Kenny Florian? I guess you can do Diego/Florian because Kenny has been looking for a rematch since he lost to Diego four years ago from a ref stoppage and he keeps getting better. The loss to BJ may have helped him and next time he goes in with more of an idea of what to expect. Regardless, I assume they will go with Edgar/Penn, but there’s really no exciting matches that come to mind unless they steal Aoki from DREAM.

So, I was planning on posting this a lot earlier today but ended up buying a PS3 today along with the latest instalment of Smackdown vs RAW (The wrestling fan in me is almost all but gone, but I do still enjoy the games), Metal Gear Solid 4 (A game I have been desperate to play since it was released last year) and Grand Theft Auto IV, just because it’s an amazing game. I’ve not played the last one yet, but SVR10 is the best version of the next-gen series that I’ve played. I’ve always missed the two player season from Smackdown 1, as simple as that thing was. If THQ were to just say ‘We’re re-releasing Smackdown 1 for the next-gen consoles’ then I would be a very happy man. Although, it would need to feature some of the awesome features that come with SVR10 such as; Create A Story, Road to Wrestlemania, all the new match types and an updated roster – oh and downloadable content (DLC). If you gave me that, I would never need to buy a new Smackdown game except to wrestle as new guys. I haven’t had too much time to actually play these games tonight, what with present wrapping and talking to people I haven’t spoken to in a while, just because wishing someone a Merry Christmas is the world’s most festive ice-breaker. So I’ll save recapping these games for next weeks edition (which I may throw up on New Years Day along with my top twenty albums of the year, it depends how hungover I am).

Finally the last thing I wanted to discuss is supposed to be quite the, well, I don’t even know what to call it. Triumph? Success? It doesn’t really scream success for many people aside from RATM fans who will end up being allowed to the free gig that has resulted due to this. A lot of people I know weren’t too happy with Killing In The Name becoming number one because ‘It’s just a lot of noise’, which it is, although it happens to be a lot of noise that has been put together in a manner that I do quite enjoy. Still, number one? I think that the songs charm might end up taking a hit because of this. Anyway, the Simon Cowell music machine moves on even stronger and I’m sure that come this Sunday we will have a new number one as the X-factoroids go and buy the single from Olly is it? Or is he the one who looks like Andy Dufresne (or Tim Robbins if you haven’t seen The Shawshank Redemption)? Anyway, to wrap this up, no matter what you may dislike about Simon Cowell, he is a smart businessman. Sony profited BIG from this venture and I would hope that for their sake they would try and recreate this next year with another ‘cult classic’ that they happen to own the rights to.

Anyway, thank you for reading (or skimming) through my thoughts on the fifty-first week of the year. It is now christmas morning for me here, but before I go…

A woman of thirty-two writes into a men’s magazine wondering what to do about her ‘all-talking no-action’ relationship. She explains that she and her boyfriend of two months decided to have sex a week ago. Her boyfriend had been talking big but couldn’t back it up in the bedroom. She wondered just how she could approach him with this. The response?

“With your tits out, love.”

God I love sexist men. Merry Christmas and goodnight folks.