Avenged Sevenfold - The Stage

After Vektor's Terminal Redux I thought I had had all the sci-fi metal I could take this year. Luckily Angry Metal Guy's blurbs about the surprising quality of The Stage, both from a songwriting and a production side convinced me to give it a guarded listen. The last time I heard an Avenged Sevenfold song Guitar Hero was popular and Bush was still president, so I'm not what you could call a fan of the group and was honestly more than ready to hate this record. Right out of the gates with the title track, though, I was hooked on A7X's new spacey sound and have been listening to The Stage on repeat more than I could ever have imagined.

I'm not familiar with Avenged's catalog outside of their big hits ("Bat Country", "Almost Easy"), but I can't imagine the compositions on this album are anything worse than the best they've ever written. The opening salvo of "The Stage", "Paradigm", and "Sunny Disposition" alone is one of the most enjoyable three song runs I've experienced in some time and offer an excellent serving of high-quality melodic... prog-thrash-metalcore? Whatever genre this technically falls under, the playing is tight as a vacuum seal and groovy to a fault with guitarists Synyster Gates and Zacky Vengeance (I did not make those up) locking in with new blood drummer Brooks Wackerman perfectly. Besides the freshly progressive numbers on display there is a good deal of variety scattered throughout The Stage that keeps things from bogging down too hard: "Sunny Disposition"'s jeering brass horns, "Paradigm"'s high-speed blastbeat chorus, and my personal favorite "Creating God"'s Layne Staley-esque vocal melodies and grungy beat all contribute a piece of the puzzle alongside a couple of slower tracks: "Roman Sky" is reminiscent of King's X's "Pleiades" in subject matter and slower tempo while "Angels" is pretty full-on power ballad. Despite the technicality and lofty subject matter (AI, Simulation Theory, space exploration, post-humanism) song lengths are wonderfully succinct and largely in the five-six minute range and the lyrics are actually pretty damn interesting.

While The Stage isn't necessarily breaking any new ground in the progressive metal arena the high level of musicianship coupled with the band's known skill at crafting hugely catchy, accessible metal mesh excellently here on this album. It's not quite flawless and it does drag a bit towards the end (and M. Shadow's vocals are the definition of love-it-or-hate), but not many metal bands can convince Neil Degrasse Tyson to write and perform a unique piece of prose on their album - and if he thought it was worth doing, I think we all can agree that The Stage is worth a listen.

C+ 

Dream the Electric Sleep - Beneath the Dark Wide Sky

I remember how I first came into contact with Dream the Electric Sleep's music in the summer of 2014 on the pages of some random blog tucked away in a far corner of the music web. They had released a new album earlier that year called Heretics and the eye-catching cover artwork combined with their sound being described as "Pink Floyd meets shoegaze" led me to give the recommended track, "Elizabeth", a song that immediately hooked me as did the rest of that fantastic Heretics record. While the Pink Floyd comparison turned out to be not super dialed in, Heretics blended an indie-style production and sound with shoegaze atmospherics and unabashed prog ambition as the record is a concept album about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the rest of the Suffragette movement - not exactly your usual topic for this type of music. Now that I've finally given follow up CD Beneath the Dark Wide Sky some spins I'm happy to say that this Kentucky-based trio has delivered the goods here.

Working with noted producer Nick Raskulinecz, Beneath the Dark Wide Sky exchanges some of the group's progressive inclinations for a cleaner, more refined sound across the board. The songs here are all noticeably shorter with only two tracks moving past the six minute mark, while the album as a whole runs a quarter of an hour less than its predecessor did as the band has done a great job of distilling their sound down to its core elements, trimming the fat without stripping out any of the meat. This new approach is felt from the first note as opener "Drift" accomplishes in five minutes what took them over eight on Heretics' initial piece, before pivoting into the very Foo Fighters-esque rocker "Let the Light Flood In", again swapping out long-winded atmospherics for straight ahead hooks and a huge chorus. The rest of the material on Beneath the Dark Wide Sky follows the direction of these first two songs, trading big on guitarist/vocalist/lyricist Matt Page's better-than-ever vocals and an entire disc of spectacular drumming from Joey Waters, particularly on album highlights "Flight" and "Headlights". If you're worried that Dream the Electric Sleep have gone full-on pop then you'll be comforted by the presence of the dark and excellent instrumental "We Who Blackout the Sun" as well as the longest and most overtly progressive track on offer here, "Culling the Herd". Just like with Heretics the band has managed to write and pace Beneath the Dark Wide Sky so that not only does it not lose any steam after the halfway point, some of the best songs on the record are tucked back there: the chunky anthem "Hanging by Time" (Matt Page does an excellent Dave Grohl impression on this song), the grunge-laced "Black Wind", and the other ballad-type song on the album, the wonderfully Southern-flavored "The Good Night Sky", as the boys seal things up with the dreamy closer "All Good Things".

Just like King's did with Dogman with the help of producer Brendan O'Brien, Dream the Electric Sleep was able to achieve a similar reevaluation and reinterpretation of their sound with Nick Raskulinecz's help and have successfully retained the songwriting abilities and ear for genre-blending that helped make Heretics such a great album for Beneath the Dark Wide Sky. Catchy as hell, surprisingly heavy at times and without a second wasted, this album is hopefully the one that helps Dream the Electric Sleep break out of their niche and into the mainstream spotlight.

B

Mad Max: Photo Road

Some choice screenshots from my time with Mad Max, one of the most gorgeous games to release this generation. Enjoy.

Metallica - Hardwired... to Self-Destruct

Of all the things that happened in 2016, Metallica releasing a new album after almost a decade was not something that was particularly high on my musical radar. Metallica at this point is more of an American institution or cultural touchstone like McDonald's or Reaganomics than 4 dudes that make music. Their popularity and legacy have all been written and talked about to death and you would hard-pressed to find someone out their who hasn't already made up their mind about liking them or not. Regardless of your (or my) particular opinion on their material, this past year was full of enough strange/horrible/depressing shit to make some good old fashioned Metallica seem like just the comfort blanket we needed.

The band makes their presence felt right out of the gates with opener "Hardwired", which burns through its 3 minute runtime without a second wasted before moving into the first disc proper. The quality of the riffs here are way higher than they have any right be from a thrash group who have been going for 35 years, and Disc 1 of Hardwired... bangs past with only one major pothole in the drawn out closer, "Halo On Fire". The songs all run past the 5 minute mark (and frequently cross to 7) but the sheer quality of Hetfield's riffs (ahem) manage to keep the foundations from sinking into the quicksand of 10 minute instrumentals or power ballads. "Atlas, Rise!" and "Moth Into Flame" are, simply put, some of the best songs this band has ever written and the beefier production from Greg Fidelman really bring Hetfield and Ulrich into the spotlight, and depending on who you are that may or may not be a good thing. Ulrich's playing is fairly rote throughout Hardwired... unfortunately, and he tends to repeat his fills a lot which is probably news to no one. He isn't Pete Webber or even Jerry Gaskill but the compositions here mostly give him enough space to not drag the foundations down too much. Trujillo's bass is too quiet as usual but it's the absence of Kirk Hammett that really sets this record apart from the rest of their discography, as his solos are few and far between (almost.. tastefully spaced out?!) and I have to admit I lost track of him a couple times and wondered where he wandered off too as James and Lars chugged on without him.

And then we get to Disc 2 and the whole frame starts to warp and sag. Outside of the phenomenal "Confusion", "Here Comes Revenge", and "Spit Out the Bone" we have 3 6-minute chug-fests that just don't hit the same marks as the rest of the material. "ManUNkind" is probably the strongest of the bunch but major points deducted for that pun. "Murder One" is an ok tribute to Lemmy but its weirdly inoffensive and tame, whereas "Am I Savage" just doesn't fit the rest of the songs here and sounds like it was ripped from their Load/Reload era. In the end its more good than bad, but it is interesting that they considered the material here to be worth including in the end despite the higher costs passed on to both them and the consumer as shaving just one of these songs would've given them plenty of room for a single disc release. The whole thing ends as suddenly as it begins without a moment of hesitation and the overall impression I get after popping the disc back in its sleeve is of a band doing what they genuinely love to do. No, they aren't pushing any boundaries. Yes, the songs are probably too long across the board. Yes, Lars' drum sound and style is just as restrained and thin-sounding as ever. Ultimately though, Hardwired... to Self-Destruct rises above its brickwalled dynamic range and scattergun stylistic focus to deliver some truly excellent material that I think will be remembered for a long time as some of Metallica's best pieces of music. And amid all the death and suffering and flat out weirdness of 2016, it is cathartic to be able to enjoy a big, dumb, overlong album from one of music's remaining legends. Let's enjoy them while they're still around, huh?

C+

Bonus:
The artwork and packaging design of Hardwired...to Self-Destruct deserves special mention, I think. After seeing it for the first time you probably either reflexively laughed or sighed in disappointment, as I did. After looking at it more and more, though, it's started growing on me and now I believe it's one of the more interesting pieces of album design work that I've come across recently as it balances this stark black and white negative space with this bizarre, aggressive photoshop mishmash. Your eyes can't help but be drawn in to it and its almost hypnotic, like an optical illusion - you keep thinking you're missing something hidden in there but nope, thats really all it is. Obviously its not any kind of virtuoso display in a traditional sense, but it does a good job of catching your eye and fitting the tone of the album.

The packaging of the CD sleeve and booklet are very similar in tone, but just as "your mileage may very" in terms of effectiveness. Some of the image design work is actually pretty cool looking, but to me about 40% misses the mark and coupled with the very minimalist black-font-on-white-background motif, it doesn't leave much to grab onto if you didn't like the main design dominating each page. Definitely subjective, but whether you like it or not I think the artwork accomplishes at least some of its goals by making it stick in your mind.

Titanfall 2: More Thoughts

I'm 40 hours in to Titanfall 2's multiplayer and since everyone seems to either fellating its excellence or lamenting its release date, I wanted to put down some thoughts about the meat-and-potatoes gameplay itself, mostly balance, also because the developers themselves only refer to changes they make in very vague statements that make community discussions about balance and mechanics difficult. FYI I'm incredibly consistently mediocre at these twitch shooter Call of Duty games so I could definitely be off base/wrong about this stuff.

The titans are easily the best part of the game and definitely the most successfully implemented. Divided into distinct RPG-ish "classes" with individual loadouts and progression, I don't really have any problems here besides how weird and floaty melee attacks feel (tough to do in a normal FPS, I'd imagine it's much tougher with big robots) and the balance of some of them. Tone is the current bogeyman as she's very intuitive to use and her abilities fit together in a more complete way than most of the other titans, but it's not a catastrophic issue and truthfully just highlights how patchy some of the other titans' loadout designs are, particularly Northstar with her ultra niche™ tether mines and a core ability that is completely at odds with her playstyle and strengths and Ronin's hilarious vulnerability to melee attacks while his core is active, despite being the designated hand-to-hand fighter of the group. Other titans like Legion, Scorch, and Ion (once they fix vortex shield) have kits that largely complement their strengths and feel largely solid and well balanced, with Tone only standing out because of the degree to which her abilities feed into each other and aid her intended use. I would personally like to see a total reworking of Northstar's core ability and some hefty adjustments made to Ronin instead of nerfing Tone again, but since that's probably out of the cards at this point the best middle ground is a tweak to Tone's particle wall ability so that the cooldown only goes into effect once the shield is used up.

This weaponry of the game is tougher to meaningfully critique because so much of it depends on personal preference, as some weapons and tactics just click with certain players more than others while other, sometimes allegedly OP pieces of equipment are completely ignored. Case in point: the spitfire is pretty universally dismissed as one of the bottom three worst weapons in the game, but I do better with it than nearly any of the other weapons I've tried, which is all of them minus three or four. In my mind its pretty clearly got an edge over something like the devotion, even though the whole playerbase cries about the latter weapon. That said, I think that something can be done to bring the current top tier weapons down a bit to the rest of the arsenals level, those being the volt, the devotion, the alternator, and the car.

• Volt: Give this thing some recoil. It would still be a ridiculous laser beam but would hopefully be inferior to the assault rifles at long range.
• Devotion: Also needs some recoil, and that's all I'd be willing to change. No need to make it useless but it higher recoil would let it keep its niche as the rapid-fire LMG while making the spitfire preferable for long range fights.
• Alternator: More recoil would let this thing keep its close-range dominance while giving it an actual drawback.
• Car: This one actually feels fine, honestly. 

As for the abilities and combos like devotion + amp wall, cloak, stim, etc., I think they're fine. They're all on reasonable cooldowns and offer something to do outside of the usual "pick an SMG and wallrun all over the place" strategy. I personally don't enjoy standing behind a wall and holding down the trigger, but more power to those that do.

I also have mixed feelings about the maps in this game. I like Eden the most, but even that one gets on my nerves sometimes, and the design of certain gems like Homestead and Drydock make me scratch my head in total confusion. There's a mix of urban sprawl and traditional CoD three-lane design here that I find difficult to come to grips with, and after forty hours I think I should be past this stage. Like I said, I'm not particularly competent at Titanfall 2 and frequently am amazed at both the ability of my opponents to track my fast-moving character model with such precision and my inability to pick that skill up. While I'm sure that I have a lot of gitting gud to do, I think the game definitely has room for improvement in the balance department.

Fates Warning - Theories of Flight

Hold up. I don't think that's the right...

That's better!

Fates Warning is one of the more interesting bands in the progressive metal scene. Their first couple of albums in the mid 80's leaned further towards the power metal spectrum, particularly thanks to their vocalist John Arch's distinctive high-octave lines, often mirroring the guitars along a winding path that eschewed traditional song structures. After Arch was "let go" (fired) in '87 the band shifted into a more conventional heavy/progressive metal style with replacement (and still current) frontman Ray Alder taking over as they managed to piece together some success thanks to a couple of minor-league hit singles in the early '90s.

After '94s low point Inside Out, the band popped the clutch again and dropped into full-on progressive metal beginning with their '97 watershed A Pleasant Shade of Grey and continuing on into the present day, with their latest record Theories of Flight. Despite the cover art weirdly mirroring Chroma Key's Dead Air for Radios, keyboard maestro Kevin Moore was unfortunately not involved with this album despite his past work as a defacto member of the band throughout the 90's and 00's after his ejection from prog metal kingpins Dream Theater.

What's odd about Fates Warning for me is that I'm only really a fan of their later work in the late '90s and onward. Usually when I decide that I like a band, I slowly get acclimated to all of their material and grow to appreciate it, at least a little bit (Psalm 9, looking at you). Not so much with these guys. Between the awful production, twisty-turny-look-how-cool-these-songs-we-wrote-are quality of the material, and John Arch "Arching it up" all over the first three albums I really have no interest in trying to get through that stuff again. Their "commercial" period albums never grabbed me either as Ray Alder is wailing just as hard as Arch was while the songwriting was... well, you decide if you like it or not. No judgements, just "if you're listening to it, it's for you" and I'm not listening to it anytime soon. Their releases from A Pleasant Shade of Grey and onward, though, have really put the hook in me, especially after finding out that Kevin Moore played keyboards on several albums during this period. I'm a huge fan of OSI so going back to this Fates Warning material is kind of like reading a book backwards, I guess, so I already know the ending and I'm just trying to figure out if I like the rest of it.

Theories of Flight, then, arrives three years after Fates' return with Darkness in a Different Light, which broke a nine year silence that was welcomed with open arms. Continuing in the same vein as that record, Theories is a OSI-esque blend of thick riffs, heavy riffs, and crunchy riffs that will be familiar to anyone who listened to Darkness. In all seriousness though, Theories is on the whole much more cohesive and sharply written than its predecessor, doing an excellent job of blending guitarist and overall band mastermind Jim "Jimmy" Matheos' piercing axe work and progressive ambition, especially on the shorter and punchier tracks like "Seven Stars" and "Like Stars Our Eyes Have Seen". Vox man Ray Alder sounds better here at 49 than he has in decades as his lower, almost soulful range complements the more mid-tempo material beautifully. Special notice has to be given in particular for his frankly breathtaking performance on the second disc's acoustic materials, especially the cover of Toad the Wet Sprocket's "Pray Your Gods" and Uriah Heep's "Rain". Mainstay bassist Joey Vera continues to act as the quiet anchor of the group, capable of delivering both a dirty lead and a full-throated foundation to Matheos' leads apparently effortlessly. Bobby Jarzombek makes a much better case for his spot in this band on Theories than he did on Darkness, but it seems that much of the blame rests on the shoulders of both albums' mediocre production that is all too common in modern metal. Guitars and vocals are overpowering loud in the mix while the bassist struggles to maintain audible volume as the drums are reduced to a horribly compressed, flat sonic register that detracts from the listening experience here more than any of the material.

Like Darkness, Theories skips the ballad stuff and delivers instead several tracks of straight-ahead crunch ("Seven Stars", "Like Stars Our Eyes Have Seen", "White Flag"), knotty prog ("SOS", "The Light and Shade of Things"), and the Last Song on the Album Epic™ "The Ghosts of Home". With a runtime of just over fifty minutes and with only seven actual songs the whole thing is over surprisingly quickly - either a quirk of the material or the production, but in any case appreciated over Darkness's bloat (imo). The lyrics are vague and non-cringey, the writing is tight, and the second disc of acoustic stuff is almost worth the price of admission by itself.

B+ (with acoustic disc, A-) 

Fair to Midland

Still discussed and kept in piam memoriam in the alternative/progressive scenes today over half a decade since they quietly stepped out of the industry entirely, Texas-based Fair to Midland achieved through the run of just four albums seems pretty special. Managing to secure a high-profile record deal with Serj Tankian's label before dropping one of their two most notable discs Fables From a Mayfly, they seemed to have done everything right until then, laying a strong cult following foundation in their home state while cutting their teeth on stage with years of gigging marked by the release of two independent albums.

Plucked from the edge of insolvency and disbandment by Tankian's call, they combined freshly written material and reworked pieces from their earlier releases into an amply funded, lushly produced debut that started their unfortunately short run at mainstream success, Fables From a Mayfly: What I Tell You Three Times is True. A rich draught of alt-metal and hardcore-tinged power pop, Fables cemented the band's reputation as up and comers to watch as they began their largest tour ever to support it.

Four years later saw the release of their fourth and ultimately final album, Arrows and Anchors, in 2011. Darker and more progressive than Fables with less of a fixation on high-flying choruses, it was (and probably still is) their best-selling effort. As you probably have already figured out, though, is that Fair to Midland didn't last long after dropping this album as mounting debt, family and scholastic obligations, and the large physical distance between the members all contributed to a quiet curtain call elaborated on by just a Facebook post from the drummer.

At this point hopes for a reunion don't seem to be running high anymore since the radio silence of the band members for the last several years began, but it took the Galactic Cowboys nearly seventeen to get back together after their last record, so we might just be in for a long wait. While the group itself may no longer be active, that doesn't change the fact that they produced some excellent music in their time together.