Couldawouldashoulda: March 2011

Hey guys. Here’s the first of a series of segments I want to do for Check Your Mode. When we see the lists of the top 20 or 50 albums of a given year, we may also see something called the “Honorable Mentions” section, a place to note albums that were great, but not quite great enough to make it to the final cut. Seeing that I had quite a few “couldawouldashoulda”’s in my greatest fifty albums list last year, (about fifty more to be exact), I decided to have a monthly showcase of five albums that just barely fell out of the running for being in my top fifty albums of the year. Of course, initially, the Couldawouldashoulda’s will not be particularly good, but, as we near the end of the year, my guess is you’ll see some pretty contended releases pop up in this section, of which, of course, there may be plenty of debate.

In No Particular Order…

Amplifier – The Octopus

Original Review Here

The sophomore release from this British prog rock group is nothing if not ambitious. At nearly two hours, The Octopus has a vague concept involving the eponymous cephalopod and houses songs that frequently exceed the 8-minute mark. However, its songs are not loaded with the superfluous genre experiments and masturbatory guitar solos that one has come to expect from albums like these. In fact, the songs of The Octopus are surprisingly straightforward and tempered. But, alas, a ten-minute piano ballad is still a ten-minute piano ballad, and it isn’t long before the album begins to seriously sag. On a track-by-track basis, The Octopus is bearable, but as a dense whole, it’s far too much waiting for very little payoff. While not quite on the same dreadful level of Judas Priest’s concept album, Nostradamus, The Octopus does very little favors in digesting an album that is both too long and too boring; one of the most potently disparaging combinations in music.

Wanda Jackson – The Party Ain’t Over

Original Review Here

Anyone expecting another Van Lear Rose was sorely disappointed. Hell, anyone expecting another Consolers of the Lonely was disappointed. Jack White’s 2011 musical clock-in was an unfortunate musical accommodation for a singer who, admittedly, did not have much of a strong voice to begin with. Amidst White’s trademark fuzz and a rather intrusive horn section, Wanda Jackson sounds uncomfortable throughout The Party Ain’t Over, awkwardly shuffling through the blues (“Thunder on the Mountain”), bosa nova (“Rum and Coca-Cola”) and Amy Whinehouse covers (“You Know I’m No Good”). This isn’t the worst thing that White’s put his name to (The Stripes’ tactless genre stretch, Get Behind Me Satan, is a tad worse), but it’s a genuine surprise to see someone as talented as he finding so many ways to tamper with an album that could have been pretty good despite its innate weaknesses.

Minks – By the Hedge

Original Review Here

As background music, it’s pretty innocuous, but when closely inspected… it’s still pretty innocuous. Which I guess is fine, but I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t have the time to listen to the kind of nebulous shoegaze that I could find in the records of far more talented bands. Sure nothing on By the Hedge is outright offensive and “Indian Ocean” is a very pretty instrumental, but I’m seeing the forest for the trees here and all I’m seeing are the sprouts of what could be passable shrubberies.

Rise Against – Endgame

Original Review Here

This is an unfortunate way to break this to all you Rise Against fans out there, because my review for this album has yet to be posted, but Endgame, the sixth album from Illinois punks Rise Against, is the band’s worst. The good news, though, is there is a reason for this, and it is for lack of trying. When Rise Against experiments, at least something good comes out of it (the good tracks from The Unraveling and Siren Song of the Counterculture), but Endgame finds the group treading some serious water, trying to scrap up the remnants of the near-perfect Appeal to Reason and coming up with something crass and uninspired. Rise Against sound rudderless on the album, something that I can imagine would be incumbent upon a band coming off two fantastic releases. I just hope the group can shape up for the new decade, because their type of firebrand punk rock is still a necessity in these increasingly trying times.

Social Distortion – Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes

Original Review Here

And speaking of underwhelming punk stalwarts, what was Social Distortion doing in the seven years since they released an album? By the sound of Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, it was a steady diet of lollipops, rainbows and Teletubbies reruns, because Social Distortion sound downright peppy on their newest release. A choir? Optimism? Last time I checked, I was a lazy, smelly, unemployable loser with nothing to hope for but a pair of jeans and a beer when I’m twenty-one, not the fucking light of the Earth Mike Ness pretends to purport me to be. Although, overall, pretty decent, Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes is a startling turn for a group that laid such a large claim to making passive rebellion sound genuine.

Couldawouldashoulda: March 2011

Amplifier - The Octopus: B-

"Minion's Song"

For The Octopus to be truly worth your time, its length would literally need to cut in half. At about two hours, the album is Manchester’s Amplifier serving up a plate of prog rock that’s really prog rock in length only. The first musical instrument heard on the album, at the end of the positively virile introduction, “The Runner,” is a piano, which is later revealed to be manned by a singer with a strangely ordinary voice playing what would appear to be a very ordinary song. Sel Balamir, that singer, resembles The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon for sounding particularly self-referential and particularly British, qualities that do not fit with the vast scope of The Octopus. That first actual song, “Minion’s Song,” sounds like a wry send-up of Industrial Age theatrics that Hannon did very well on his 2010 effort, Bang Goes the Knighthood. The difference between Amplifier and The Divine Comedy, though, is that Hannon can get his point across in less than four minutes; “Minion’s Song” needs almost six. This is a trend that becomes quite prevalent as The Octopus continues.

To Amplifier’s credit, The Octopus is not a customary concept album that’s bloated with senseless instrumentation or an intrusive narrative. However, if you’re going to have me listen to an album whose length spans the entirety of the Ramones ‘70’s output, there needs to be something for me to latch onto. There are some cool parts to momentarily treasure (I could name them, but nitpicking with an album this large would take up far too much space), but, for those who even finish the damn thing, Amplifier will come off sounding like a wannabe Porcupine Tree that thought they could one-up the prog factor in all the wrong ways. I’ve never felt trapped listening to an album, but, when you realize somewhere between “Trading Dark On the Stock Exchange” and “The Sick Rose” (which both might as well be recordings of appliances humming they’re so unmemorable) that you’ve still got another hour to go, it’s hard not to wonder how many better things you could be doing with those sixty minutes, an option of which may very well be doing nothing.

The Octopus doesn’t receive an F, because, on a track-by-track basis, it is a lot easier to digest, and, thus, a lot easier to appreciate. However, it’s rather daunting to be placed in front of those irrevocable two hours when planning to listen to it, and I’m here to tell you that, unfortunately, it’s as tough getting through them as it appears. Amplifier have the potential to be an excellent rock band, as evidenced by The Octopus, and the album certainly sounds better when you give it the chance, but it’s an unfortunate possibility that so many will choose not to hear it, because of its rather unnecessary length.

Amplifier - The Octopus: B-