Friday, September 27, 2013

Korn by Korn (1994, Immortal/Epic Records)



WHY I NEVER GOT AROUND TO LISTENING TO THIS ARTIST/ALBUM

  • There have been a few periods in my life when I have been compelled by aggressive music. I guess some lingering anger from my relatively happy, suburban childhood would pop out every now and then. As previously documented in this space, my aggressive musical choices were heavy metal, gangsta rap and industrial music. But for those with birthdays in the late 1980s and well into the 1990s, the phenomenon called nu metal is the drug of choice for the angry and distant kid. The mix of heavy beats, monster riffs, and highly emotive lyrics of the genre should have attracted me immediately, but it just didn't. It's as simple as that.
WHAT I KNEW ABOUT THE ALBUM BEFORE THIS PROJECT
  • It was arguably the record that launched the nu metal movement.
  • I met many Korn fans while I lived and travelled through South East Asia and Australia between 1999 to 2002. They were mainly surfers and young musicians.
  • I distinctly remember Mike Clark playing Korn on his car stereo while we drove to the Finger Lakes in upstate New York a few years ago for Matthew Clark's bachelor party weekend. I still think the reasons why we were delayed at the US-Canada border crossing for so long was not because “I am a brown guy” (my guess), or because “there was an arrest warrant out on another Micheal Clark” (the actual reason), but because Mike wouldn't turn down the music as the border guard asked us some questions. I doubt that particular border guard was a fan of nu metal.
AFTER A WEEK OF DIGESTING THIS ALBUM
  • I have dropped-tuned the bottom E string of my classical guitar to B.
  • These songs are bigger than life, and the dynamics and riffs of “Divine”, “Ball and Tongue”,“Predictable” and “Fake” had me jumping up and down on subway platforms, in line at the local bakery and while doing my laundry. The lyrics on this record are very upfront with issues such as bullying, depression, homophobia, and abuse, which Jonathan Davis' vocal performance exemplifies in “Helmet in the Bush”, “Need to”, “Clown”, “Phaget”, “Lies”, and in particular “Daddy”, which is very disturbing.
  • I'm not too sure if it's Ross Robinson's sound production of his record or my digital copy of the recording, but this album sounded a bit off to me. At times, I found David Silveria's drums too upfront in mix for my liking and after awhile, it was all I heard. Conversely, I could not hear the bass at all, which is curious, considering Fieldy's bass playing style plays a big part in Korn's trademark sound.
  • I now have a better understanding of the allure of nu metal. Korn is an interesting mix of the band's musical influences and it has, through the passage of time, become a very influential record in its own right. But understanding the nuances of nu metal does not mean I necessary want to listen to it on a daily basis.

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Monday, September 9, 2013

Pink Flag by Wire (1977, Harverst Records)



 
WHY I NEVER GOT AROUND TO LISTENING TO THIS ARTIST/ALBUM
  • I did not grow up listening to punk. I don't even front like I did. It was not because I was very young during the first punk wave of the mid-1970s – not at all – I was already into contemporary music by the time I was three yeas old. But it was more on a Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Santana vibe, as my dad used to let the older kids from down the street use our basement as the rehearsal space for their rock combo. And I didn't get into punk because I  was not an angry kid – I certainly was. But my release of aggression came from watching pro wrestling and listening to Iron Maiden and Judas Priest records really loudly. Maybe it was because I did not really start feeling disconnected from the world until I was in my 20s and only then did I get into punk; call me a late bloomer.
  • The punk music I did know (and liked) was rather mainstream – as mainstream as punk could get in the late-1970s and early 1980s – the Clash and the Monks, as well as the local, southern Ontario punk bands the Diodes and Teenage Head. I knew about the New York City CBGB's scene of the late 70s, but I never considered Talking Heads and Blondie (two bands I really got into) to be punk music. In high school, I bought the first two Ramones albums on cassette; three-chord pop ditties played very fast, and I dug the minimalism. It was also around this time I tried to figure out why all the fuss about the British bands like The Damned and Sex Pistols. In fact, that's something I still wonder about to this day.
  • It was not until 1995, when I moved to the top two floors of a house on Montrose Avenue in Toronto's Little Italy, that I discovered punk. One of my roommates in that house was Neill Cunningham; a collector of vinyl records, a reader of many, many books, and a bona-fide punk who was old enough to have come of age during the heyday of the genre. Every morning for the year that we were roommates, Neill would put on some coffee, smoke cigarettes, and loudly play music on the stereo. Little did I know that what he was doing (other than waking me up much too early for my liking) was educating me in punk and post-punk. For the first time, I heard the music of many bands that, up until that point, I had only read about: the Buzzcocks, the Stranglers, the Heartbreakers, Television, the Voidoids, Pere Ubu, Stiff Little Fingers, Magazine, and the Slits. Several months later, Dwayne Slack and his record collection moved in and further supplemented my punk education. In retrospect, I'm sure either Neill or Dwayne played some Wire during my time at the house on Montrose, but I guess I slept in that day.
  • By the way, you can buy your assorted punk rock albums (and any other kinds of records) at Pandemonium Books & Discs, Neill's shop at 2920 Dundas St West in Toronto's Junction neighbourhood.
WHAT I KNEW ABOUT THE ALBUM BEFORE THIS PROJECT
  • While I worked with Jonny Dovercourt and the Toronto independent arts collective Wavelength as an editor for their zine in 2003 and 2004, I remember many of the bands playing Wavelength's Sunday night music series would cite Wire and/or Pink Flag in their zine interviews and press kits as being extremely influential. That should have steered me in the direction of this record, but somehow it didn't.
AFTER A WEEK OF DIGESTING THIS ALBUM
  • Even after the first listening of the record, let alone a week digesting this album, I totally understand why Wire and Pink Flag are cited by so many musicians as inspiration for their own art. Pick up any record by Fugazi, Pixies, Arctic Monkeys, or the Strokes (among thousands of others) and you will find Bruce Gilbert, Graham Lewis, Colin Newman, and Robert Gotobed's collective fingerprints all over them. Just give a listen to “Reuters”, "Lowdown”, “Straight Line”, “Mr. Suit”, and "Commercial" and tell me I'm full of shit. You can't.
  • While being a punk record, Pink Flag goes in musical directions which many records from the era – punk or otherwise – do not go. The musicianship is raw, yet they still play their instruments extremely well (perhaps a lingering misconception I will always have about punks is that they could not play their instruments – I blame Sid Vicious for that). The songwriting is intelligently sparse, yet vast in its presentation, exemplified by the album's title track, “Strange”, “Fragile” and “Mannequin". This album is “all killer and no filler", no easy feat for a 21-song recording. 
     
  • I usually deem a record as a My Album Project success if it leads me other musical works that I might not have otherwise picked up. I have just procured Chairs Missing, Wire's 1978 follow-up to Pink Flag. So, shit yes, success!

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