log

March 30, 2006

normality

As the morn­ing grinds on my music gets more angsty.

One of my favourite bands of late is 30 Sec­onds to Mars. I loved a lot of the tracks from their first CD. When the sec­ond album came out I bought it from Ama­zon as soon as it came out. It’s a fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent CD from the first, in scope and style.

I’m a great fan of Tool and A Per­fect Cir­cle, some Tori Amos stuff, most of Garbage’s work (Bleed Like Me was ter­ri­ble), and pret­ty much every­thing Evanes­cence has put out. To be hon­est, a lot of the music I lis­ten to is clos­er to main­stream than woah-out-there music, but then even the term main­stream depends on your loca­tion and the kind of demo­graph­ic you asso­ciate with. I avoid most tech­no, hate jazz, can­not stand any homie rap shit and R&B makes me want to hurt pup­pies. The dying strains of boy bands just make me shake my head in dis­gust (well, with the sin­gle excep­tion of Maroon 5’s Hard­er to Breathe, which I’m not very proud of). Friends of mine lis­ten to ambi­ent trance, euro pop, The Bea­t­les, ABBA and Korn. We’re an ecclec­tic bunch.

The first 30 Sec­onds to Mars album had a sci­ence-fic­tion bent that influ­enced the lyrics and the emo­tion­al feel of the music. I’m not sure of the gen­e­sis of the whole theme, but it made the band unique and gave a strange ‘remote­ness’ to some songs. Some­times it felt as thought the singer was com­plete­ly out­side the song, look­ing in from the per­spec­tive of the lis­ten­er. I still don’t pre­tend to know what Bud­dha For Mary is all about, ignor­ing the obvi­ous reli­gious ref­er­ence. A very pol­ished rock/electronic album with great vocal tal­ent, but a few songs a lit­tle hollow.

The sec­ond album lost the sci-fi theme and became much more emo­tion­al­ly con­nect­ing, with a wider vari­ety of mate­r­i­al and more qui­et vocal moments. Of course, the lead song from the album is the loud­est and most emo of the lot, but once Attack fin­ish­es the two star songs of the album come out: A Beau­ti­ful Lie (also the album’s name) and The Kill. I heard the first on the band’s web­site before I bought the album, and kept going back to hear it again.

It’s a con­sis­tent album, with the excep­tion of Was it a dream, which is an imme­di­ate let­down after the first three tracks. I’ll admit that it took a while to warm to the whole thing, unlike the first CD, but then I’m pret­ty finicky and music has to have some­thing spe­cial to get a thumbs up from me. I gen­er­al­ly need more than a beat and words to be inter­est­ed, and I don’t pre­tend to under­stand peo­ple who say things like “I love all music!”, because that’s entire­ly alien to me. I have to feel empa­thy in the tonal struc­ture or the lyric’s mes­sage to enjoy it.

I start­ed this post just to talk about music, and it’s some­how turned into a review, or even worse an adver­tise­ment. Not inten­tion­al. It kin­da shaped itself.

—- 

so I run and hide
and tear myself up
start again
with a brand new name
and eyes that see
into infinity

—- 

lie awake in bed at night
and think about your life
do you want to be dif­fer­ent
try to let go of the truth
the bat­tles of your youth
cause this is just a game
it’s a beau­ti­ful lie

—-

Well, it’s 9:47am. Time to go fin­ish Foot­fall. :P