rock

Common Courtesy Review (1 of 2)

~ seetalrihal ~ 1 Comment

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“FUCK YEA!”
This may well be one of the best first lines for an album, ever.

City of Ocala is the opening track on the highly anticipated album Common Courtesy, by post-hardcore band A Day To Remember, and let me tell you now, this song alone made the long (and at times stressful) wait for the album worth it. The guitar riff that opens the album is just typically ADTR, but somehow sounds incredibly fresh and new.

The seamless blend into track two Right Back At It Again is just plain perfect – I love it when songs do that! I was actually lucky enough to hear this live back in June (I was just pretty wasted by this point, and completely forgot about the new song a few days after the gig… till I heard it on the album, and then ALL the memories came flooding back!) It’s the underlying bass that makes your head/hands/feet just naturally do ‘The Thing’* when you listen to it!

Sometimes You’re The Hammer, Sometimes You’re The Nail echoes the quiet-at-the-end song structure of You Should’ve Killed Me When from debut album And Their Name Was Treason – a natural occurrence for the band, and an occurrence that’s welcomed with open arms. It’s these moments in the song that the heartfelt, compassionate lyrics come out.

Dead & Buried highlights the hardcore side of the band, with the screaming/growling vocals that we all know and love in the verse. I can almost hear the crowd singing along to the chorus chant of ‘dead and buried’ (who’da thunk that they’d be the lyrics?!) I have a feeling that this will be one of the heaver crowd songs, where all pits will essentially form one giant “super-pit”.

ADTR are good at writing songs that people can relate to. Especially for teenagers, when insecurity is at an all time high (a topic close to my heart, and I’ll probably write a post on it, we’ll see how things go, shall we?). Best of Me is one of those songs. Certain lyrics jump out, and hit close to home; for me this is definitely one of the more ‘feely’ songs on the album.

Acoustic ballad I’m Already Gone is not a current personal highlight, but I’m willing to listen to it. I don’t know, maybe it’ll grow on me.

The acoustic is quickly forgotten, however, with the screams in Violence. Again, not the best they’ve done, and it seems to be more of a filler track for the album, however it fits. Knowing me, this’ll turn into a favourite of mine by next week; I’m just that obscure.

*The Thing – any action/feeling that comes to you, but you have no words to explain said action/feeling perfectly enough. It is an action/feeling where words do not do it justice, therefore ‘thing’ is the only appropriate word.

To read part two of the review, click here!

Misfits: Danzig V Graves

~ seetalrihal ~ 1 Comment

Misfits have always been cited as one of the most influential bands for bands today. Boasting fans as massive as Avenged Sevenfold and Metallica, the Misfits are most definitely a band that every metal head and punk needs to know, and there’s no denying the impact they’ve made on music today. However, with the number of line-up changes and new singers, the band as it stands today is even more unrecognisable than Guns N’ Roses. The only band more warped than Misfits as far as line up is concerned is probably the now defunct Sugababes – where not a single member is an original ‘babe’.

With the different line-up’s of the band, the two most prominant era’s are the Glenn Danzig era, VS the Michale Graves era, and this is an argument that every Misfits fan will have atleast once. “True” fans will be adamant that Danzig was the greatest singer for Misfits, because he founded the band, where the more “musically minded” fans would argue that in fact Graves is the better singer. With two very different styles of singing, this is one of those arguments where you can only be on one side or the other.

Glenn Danzig is… indescribable. Misfits, as an image and lyrically as a band made him come across (to me atleast) as a complete bad ass. His singing that sounded so brutally punk, yet something that you could definitely sit there and want to hear more of, made him seem terrifying to me, especially when he sang that “if you don’t shut your mouth, you’re gonna feel the floor” line from Attitude. *gulps* But then I watched him in an interview. I swooned. He was so.. adorable in that interview, and came across as one of the truest, most humble punk rock stars, which totally contradicts EVERYTHING that punk supposedly stands for.

People generally love Danzig for the ever lasting argument of “he created the Misfits”. Yes. Yes he did, well done. While it’s true that without Danzig there would be no Misfits, is that really argument enough to prefer him? Surely his vocal’s should be the deciding factor? The truth is, Danzig’s vocals are everything that punk is. Nobody cares whether or not you can truly sing, as long as the guitars and drums are loud enough. You could, theoretically, just be standing there screaming utter bullshit, but if the guitar’s are tight enough people will like it. And this isn’t just the case for punk music, but for any band (you need only listen to Bring Me The Horizon’s first album for proof. How that sold, based on his vocal’s, is beyond me). Getting back to it, Danzig has a good voice, which fits in with the sound of the Misfits. It’s rough and gritty, but has an amazing melodic tone to it; it’s not annoyingly dark, and is a voice that you could definitely learn to love.

Then we get to Graves. The voice of Misfits that was cleaner, and more melodic. Graves has the voice that made my jaw drop when I heard it first, and then proceeded to turn me into a pile of goo. Never will the phrase “dig up her bones” sound so romantic, unless Graves sings it. He has the ability to actually SING, and not just speak or shout lyrics at the audience, but he can make it sound grittier when it needs to. He can do clean vocals, and punk vocals, meaning he already has a wider range than Danzig. I could quite literally sit and listen to Graves sing for days on end, and never tire of it; he has a soothing effect when he sings, but some songs can still make me want to just get in a pit and fuck bitches (I can’t pull that phrase off, can I? It may be the lack of penis I have).

Even when I hear Graves acoustically, he manages to captivate me with just his voice. It’s so clean, and just so gorgeous, that it feels good to just sit there and listen to him sing. The acoustic sessions he’s done take the music, and strips it back to it’s bare minimum of an acoustic guitar, bass, drums and clean vocals. It just makes it that much more sweeter when you listen to an acoustic song, especially when the original is so heavy and fast. The single greatest example I can give of this is ‘Dig Up Her Bones’. The original is one of my favourite songs; it’s fast, loud, and something that inspires a fat pit with whiplash-inducing headbanging, while you scream along until your throat bleeds. But the acoustic version.. that is something magical. It manages to strip everything punk away, replacing it with something beautifully simple. The horror-punk aspect is shied away from, replacing it with a much more prominent romantic aspect. Basically, if a guy sang this version of the song to me, I’d marry him.

While Graves has the amazing vocal range, Danzig has the swagger and the punk-as-fuck vocals. I personally prefer Graves as a vocalist, but appreciate Danzig far too much to let anyone say he did little for the band, because that’s just not even a little bit true. Danzig is the brains behind the band, and gave a brilliant image for it. I fucking love them both!

This is an old post from my Tumblr account (which has since been deleted), and I promised something a bit more substantial in my last post… So, here you go. This is literally just to get this blog started and give you something to read while I get my bearings around this new website!!