music reviews

[rone]

A Perfect Circle, eMOTIVe: APC's cover album, with two original tracks.  The arrangements on most of the covers are quite good and the band makes the songs their own; the album flags in the middle where the covers fall flat (Black Flag's "Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie", Depeche Mode's "People Are People", and Devo's "Freedom of Choice"), but overall it's better than you'd expect from a cover album.

Helmet, Size Matters: The boys are back... well, Page Hamilton is back, and so is Chris Traynor, who toured with Helmet for the Aftertaste tour but didn't actually play on that album... and that's it.  This album is OK, but it sounds familiar in spots.  "Last Breath" recalls "Insatiable".  "Surgery" sounds like "Speechless".  Page puts two tracks from his recent band, Gandhi, on Size Matters: "Enemies" and "Everybody Loves You" (the Japanese edition of SM has two bonus tracks which are also from Gandhi, "Black Light" and "Just Like Me", which only leaves "Money Shot" unaccounted for).  The rest is uneven, and i blame the drummer, who is extremely unimaginative and makes me desperately yearn for John Stanier's layered and pitiless percussion.

Throwing Muses, House Tornado/The Fat Skier: an edition that combines the Muses' first Sire album and their hard-to-find EP.  After all this time, i've finally heard "Garoux des Larmes".  And that's a good thing.

Comments

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

The covers in the middle that fall flat; is it because they aren't very good covers, or because of what they're covering? I might have to check it out myself; I quite like some A Perfect Circle stuff, and People Are People is probably my favourite Depeche Mode track. In the top 3, at least.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

The former. "GGG" is noisy and messy, "PaP" is lame and boring, and "FoC" should've probably not been attempted, because the original does the job just fine, both musically and lyrically.