To be honest, it actually feels good to be wrong.

King Crimson - The Power to Believe

Release: 2003
Genre: Progressive rock, things that kill Nick's faith in modern music
Label: Sanctuary Records
Length: 51:11

Nick's Rating: 3/5

I had a really shitty day today when I wrote this... so I ask in advance that you all please excuse me if I'm being more of a jackass than usual. But really, now. I'm a fan of King Crimson, too, and this album just makes me want to bash my head into a bank vault's door.

I am a big fan, by the way, of the reviews of George Starostin. In the old version of his site, he had separate little pages for every band whose music he reviewed. Each would have a series of some albums marked with headers like "Best album ever," or "Most underrated album." If he had it, surely The Power to Believe would get King Crimson's "Most overrated album" title. I don't get how this album can be called a massive slam dunk when The ConstruKction of Light gets shit upon relentlessly. They. Are. The. Same. Fucking. ALBUM! About the only difference is that Power is significantly more confident. Better quality, though? Not on your life.

Let me immediately sort out every unnecessary song from this album. "The Power to Believe I" is a throwaway, as is the "Facts of Life Intro" that is indexed as a separate track on what remains of my copy (I sold it back to the used shop I bought it from, just so you know, I was that fucking disappointed in it -- but I still have the MP3 rip because the album sports some nice tunes.). Worthless throwaway, too. "Power I" is pleasant enough, I guess, but it's not something you'll come back to. "Eyes Wide Open" fares much better... but I wouldn't notice it if it were gone. It's an attempt to milk the beauty of "Walking On Air" from THRAK for all it's worth.

Next on the chopping block: "Happy With What you Have to Be Happy With" -- fun, yes. Fun once. After that it's the musical equivalent of a child saying "Are we there yet?" every three seconds in the car. Is it a parody on nu-metal? It sure is awful enough for it. But, parody or not, this is way too repetitive for the Crim I know. Even then, why? What does this band need a nu-metal parody for? Is Robert Fripp that jealous that he doesn't get radio airplay that he needs to resort to smarmy quasi-fuck-the-man posturing? I guess there's a reasonable amount of power to it, but with the sound of the album, replete with near brickwalled masters and electronic drums, of course there's power. Everything has power (or at least faux-power), even "EleKtrik"'s flute opener.

"EleKtrik," by the way, is a good song. Saving grace of the album? Hell no. This eight minute instrumental juggernaut does not leap out and grab you, unless it's to drag you to the skip button. At least, the first few times. The reason for this is a mix of the Two Ps of why early-2000s Crim suck so much -- Production and Pat (Mastelotto, the lone drummer for King Crimson as of their ConstruKction-era reconstruKction). The production, like many modern albums, is such that you could commit a war crime with the contents of the disc. It's yet another hapless victim of the "loudness war," albeit not on level to fight with Vapor Trails or similar. However, it makes the already crappy-sounding electronic drums sound even crappier. Pat Mastelotto, credited with "drums, traps and buttons" played basically just these. I guess the traps and buttons are like vampires and bit the drums somewhere along the way, turning them into more crappy electronics to invade all of the songs that didn't already have non-electronic drums. I have nothing against electronic drums. I'm a big fan, for instance, of Kraftwerk, Rammstein, and Depeche Mode, all of whom use electronic drums extensively. The difference is, they make them sound good because they mesh with the band's sound. They don't mesh with King Crimson, though, so they sound hopelessly out of place and drag the album down.

"EleKtrik," though, is still a good song. It's very well-arranged, which is about all you need out of King Crimson. Well-performed? That goes without saying. Even on a bad day, King Crimson can outplay 99% of bands if all they had to play with were their big toes. "Facts of Life" is easily the best of the vocal songs, but the lyrics do tend to err on the dippy side. "Six billion ants / crawling on a plate / none of the them give back / as much as they take?" Ixnay on the Ooltay, guys. If I wanted crappy post-grunge quasi-punk teenager-friendly "social commentary," I'd listen to bands who actively specialize in it. Mostly facts, indeed, of life, though, so I can't knock them for possibly passing off bullshit as truth to the gullible. Someone said the arrangement is bluesy? My experience with the blues is a little limited, but if you put Pat Mastelotto into a box somewhere far away and let him not play electronic drums, I might give it to you (after you replace the drummer, that is. I hear Vinnie Colaiuta is busy recording an only half-decent album for Megadeth ca. this time. Sic 'em, boys!). Still a cool song despite the sheer sonic ugliness.

"Dangerous Curves," then. Interesting. A high-tension, electronic, dark instrumental with a great buildup. It doesn't go much of anywhere, but who cares anymore? The song is definitely good, and going nowhere seems to be customary for a lot of King Crimson extended dick-arounds. Is it my favorite song on this album? Uh, I'd rather you didn't ask that. That would require me to actually think about this more, and probably go find the used record shop where I sold the album and re-buy it again. It would probably still be there, too. Even if the store had been demolished two years ago. Look up at the cover art: would you want people to know you bought something that looked like that?

So, final count: Three good songs (all long), three pieces of pointless shit (all short), and a lot of middleground (longer). Even if this album were unequivocally bad in terms of arrangement and production, it's King Crimson. It's still pretty good. But it's not worthy of the praise piled onto it by some of the fanbase. It'd make an okay addition to one's CD collection and is an interesting curio. It's not worth the $16 that it's being sold for on the band's site. For a dollar more you can get the far superior Absent Lovers (a 2CD live album from 1984) and get your Fripp/Belew fix. And really, I think I'd be least distressed by the existence of a Steven Wilson-remastered version of this album.

I seem to have gotten off-track, but. Buy it used, I guess.

The worst part is that it took me three years to form a solid opinion on this.

Metallica - Death Magnetic

Release: September 12, 2008
Genre: Thrash metal
Label: Warner Bros. Records
Length: 74:48

Nick's Rating: 3/5

It's hard to believe that this record is this good if all you do is listen to cranky metalheads who lament about selling out and just generally hate on Metallica for doing it so often, as if they're implying that popular music is bad. It doesn't surprise me that they believe this way, considering how they seem to make a contest of listening to the hardest-to-listen-to song. But why are we hating on Metallica for releasing a "throwback" record? You'd get more accomplished by giving Hosni Mubarak grief for stepping down as President of Egypt. Fans had been clamoring for a return to thrash for years!

Well, to say it's a complete return to thrash is bullshit. The album is far too heavily informed by alternative rock and, at times, nu-metal (gag! vomit!) to be a real return to the thrash of yore... but at the same time thrash fans pretend it has no worthwhile musical ideas. Nonsense! The album is actually not half bad, as far as the arrangements and performances go. Another thing entirely, though, is the production; this album sounds like a cat turd after being digested by a dog. It's really not all the fault of Rick Rubin, who finally produced a Metallica album after producing at least one album by every other band ever; by some reports, the tapes arrived to sound engineer Ted Jensen brickwalled already. Translation: recorded too loud. Sounds like shit and would have sounded like shit anyway without some serious work, the kind of thing that Rick Rubin doesn't seem capable of, going by the sheer dryness of his Red Hot Chili Peppers productions.

So, what are the good songs? "That Was Just Your Life," "All Nightmare Long," and "Cyanide" are the obvious ones. "That Was Just Your Life" is fast and strong, complete with slow-moving intro like the band's other album-opening thrash masterpieces, although it is significantly slower in pace than songs like "Battery" or even "Blackened." It still is pretty quick with nice riffs, and features lead singer James Hetfield singing fast. Maybe this is borrowing a little from nu-metal and trying to resemble rapping? Although it's not quite there... which is part of why I can look at this as not being complete ham. Sure, it is hammy, but it's sung by James Hetfield. Of course there's going to be some ham, especially post-...And Justice for All.

"All Nightmare Long," then, is quite similar arrangement, but much different in vocal style (much slower with the words actually being enunciated!) and with, in my opinion, more interesting riffs. Right at the beginning: bass. Heavy bass. So much for this being a successor to Justice. Either that or the Metallica guys have gotten older and more mellow with age and don't feel like fucking with Robert Trujillo, the band's new bassist. So, the intro excites me for pointless reasons, but it does introduce a very cool theme that doesn't get reused as much as it should in the song. The riffs in the vicinity of the chorus remind me of battle music or something -- pretty appropriate, then. The lyrics don't make sense, but this is Metallica, they don't need to make sense. They make the Beatles' "Savoy Truffle" look not-silly and about something resembling a weighty philosophical topic by comparison. I'm still wondering how "zombie apocalypse" became the theme for the video, then. Joke must be on us.

"Cyanide" is different. Cyanide is legitimately catchy, one of the shortest numbers on the record, based around actual hooks. It even feels like they were thinking about funk during initial writing (eventually probably just said "funk it," though). The lyrics are trite, though, unsurprisingly. I guess it has something to do with depression and being near suicide? Metallica aren't good with this subject. Shock, I know. You could get more interesting lyrics from a sleepng garbageman. But I'll take it over generic death-growl crap any day. Like I said, the riff is an excellent one. Probably comes alive in concerts nicely. I should note, though, that I really hated the song at the time of release, so tread lightly.

But what else is left? None of the rest is that interesting... but I can't say I hate any of it, save "The Judas Kiss." Did any ideas go into this song at all? Because, if so, I cannot find them. At all. At... all... Add to this that it drags on for eight minutes and is totally forgettable in every way, and you have good cause to be deeply disappointed in this gilded turd. I guess that "Suicide & Redemption" isn't too great, either, but in the end it qualifies, even if it drags on forever.

The rest? Average all over. "The Day That Never Comes," a "One" knockoff, would probably have been better had it not been run into the fucking ground by radio before the album's release. Not to mention, the guitar solo seems to really drag on. The lyrics are a tad lame, though. "Love is a our-letter word?" Very clever, Little Jimmy. This may be why people say your songwriting sucks.

"Day" is eight minutes long. There, we've found the main problem that's not the abominable production -- the length! Every song needs to have a few minutes cut off. We get it, Kirk Hammett is a good guitarist. But really, now, there is a limit. A good guitarist knows when he's broken it. Unless he's Kirk Hammett, apparently. The album is just too bloated to be called anything other than average-good. End of story.