Sitting on the floor drinking tea

Katatonia – Dance of December Souls

I was revisiting all my Katatonia albums leading up to the release of Dead End Kings and their concert in San Francisco. I’ve never managed to get into the band's early death metal material. The couple songs I’ve heard from Brave Murder Day sound good, but listening to Mikael Akerfeldt fronting a different band is kind of like watching Kiefer Sutherland in The Sentinel. I'm sure he still saves the world. As for Dance of December Souls, it’s just never grabbed me one way or the other. Seems about time to figure out whether it’s any good.

Last night I was walking around outside listening to it a little drunk and decided that it just wasn’t interesting and I should give up continually trying to get into it. But then today it seemed kind of promising. So the jury is still out for now. I’m a little jaded towards some of the melodies and acoustic noodling that’s scattered about. But all my old melodic death metal albums remain favorites year after year, so maybe it's my attitude that's the problem.

Today is the Day – Pain is a Warning

Although I’ve still never heard the first 3 Today is The Day albums (which are supposed to be some of their best), I’m a pretty massive fan of the ones I do have. Pain is a Warning was a huge departure from their previous albums, which were twisted and complex – both musically and structurally. Then Steve Austin decided to do a 180 and release a stripped down, nearly minimalist work which feels a lot like a rock and roll album, albeit one that’s been charred over an open flame.

I felt like I was being really creative with that description until I realized there is a big flame on the album cover…

As much as I love (and may even prefer) albums like Kiss the Pig or Temple of the Morning Star, economical writing and conceptual simplicity goes a long way towards making an album feel cohesive. This is the one Today is the Day album which always holds me until the end, even when I didn’t plan to listen to the whole thing. The aggressive parts of the album are broken up by more restrained songs where Steve Austin actually let’s loose some tortured crooning. Never saw that coming, but it really works. These songs (title track, Remember to Forget, This is You) are a few of my favorites. The other clear highlight is “Slave to Serenity”. I think there’s a total of two riffs, with one of them making up 80% of the song. But I literally can’t get enough. Epic.

Strapping Young Lad

I saw The Devin Townsend Project with Katatonia the other night, and I didn’t like it very much at all. A major feature of the performance was a backdrop video of Ziltoid, the omniscient alien who demands Earth’s greatest cup of coffee and attacks when it fails to meet his expectations. During the soundcheck he was singing songs about mangos and interviewing people.  Couple this with the rest of Devin Townsend’s crazy/weird/ironic shtick, and I just wasn’t taking it very seriously. It didn’t sound very impressive – but in retrospect I think this was partially the bits of foam stuck in my ears because to be fair, I wasn’t picking up the subtleties of Katatonia’s compositions either. I just happen to already know what those are.

I listened to some of Devin Townsend’s stuff yesterday and I actually thought it seemed pretty decent, so I was inspired to revisit Strapping Young Lad which I previously thought I had grown out of (after a very short affair with it  some 8 years ago). Well, it’s actually not bad at all! I ended up listening to most of the album. Funny that thinking the concert sucked is the thing that's getting me to listen to Devin Townsend again.

Incantation – Onward to Golgotha

Not much to say about this one – it’s one of the all time classics of death metal. It’s the music that I most associate with my year studying at Cambridge, along with Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans. Yes seems like a slightly more conventional association. But what can I say? Nothing spells Onward to Golgotha like walking by this all the time:

I’m kidding, relax. I’m not going to go all Varg next time I’m there. Wood stave churches are a lot easier to deal with anyway.

Enslaved – Vikingligr Veldi

I kind of like the progressive-black metal thing Enslaved does these days (I have Isa and Vertabrae). Haven’t listened to this very much, and it didn’t score itself any extra points today. Like Katatonia, Enslaved is yet another in the list of black metal and melodic death metal bands who went onto broader things, but whose early work is raved about on Metal Archives. I can’t tell if it’s just the elitism and tunnel vision of death and black metal purists, or if there really is some genius in these albums which I find relatively inaccessible or superficially uninteresting.

Dark Tranquillity – Haven

If there’s anything the keyboard work on Dead End Kings reminds me of, it’s late period Dark Tranquillity. I think Katatonia does it more tastefully – as proficient and enjoyable as albums like Fiction and We are the Void are, they’re always served with a touch too much cheese.

Haven was their first album to fully integrate keyboards, and it’s more midpaced than everything that came later. I’ve always liked it but never felt the magic. I have a feeling it may have more to offer – and now that I’m revisiting it I hear some subtleties I hadn’t previously noticed. It’s possible that I haven’t heard this since I started using decent headphones a few years ago.

Incantation – Primordial Domination

I know I was kind of dismissive about this album in a recent post, but I keep wanting to listen to it so obviously it can’t be that bad. I do think John McEntee's vocals were better on Decimate Christendom. A lot of people wish Craig Pillard was back so they probably like his deeper tone on this album, but I find them less expressive this way. Otherwise, I just wish the guitar tone wasn’t so clean and that the bass was more prominent. Diabolical Conquest was the album that made me love this band, and a big part of the reason was because of the prominent, popping bass tone which to my ears adds a lot of color to the sonic palette. I feel like I'm always walking this fine line between being descriptive and sounding like a douchebag. 

Anyway, I’m not a fan of the homogenous thick wall of bass and guitar that most bands use – sure, it’s “heavier” but it’s also less interesting. I’ve revisited a number of death metal albums that I love and eventually realized that the distinct sonic presence of the bass was unconsciously playing a huge role. Cryptopsy’s None So Vile comes to mind. I always thought the album sounded awesomely chaotic and it's not just the slightly sloppy drumming that does it.

Anyway, just to harp on the point a little more, in retrospect Diabolical Conquest might even be the single album most responsible for bringing my focus in death metal away from the riffs themselves and towards a more holistic view.

Incantation has a new album coming out this winter - Vanquish in Vengeance. I just came across this track they released last year as part of a split that I didn't know about. I actually think it sounds awesome so hopefully that's a good sign for their next one.

Mayhem – Live in Leipzig

This is the only Mayhem release to feature the vocals of the infamous Dead, and I won’t deny that I bought it for that reason. Apparently he would do things like bury his clothes and then dig them up to wear on stage, and carry around a plastic bag with a dead bird in it and smell it so he could sing with the “stench of death in his nostrils”.

Obviously I was hopeful that this would be the pinnacle of black metal vocals, but if I’m honest they seem kind of run of the mill.

I used to buy every live album by bands I liked as a completist, but I never listened to them much. I always looked at them as collections of tracks from other albums, but I try to approach them as standalone musical statements now. Live in Leipzig is a good one for that considering it’s a lineup that never recorded in the studio. It’s a pretty messy and lo-fi affair, but in a different way from how second wave black metal studio albums are lo-fi. The aesthetic is slowly growing on me.

Vader – Live in Japan

Live in Japan seems competent but I don’t see a real reason to listen to it over the studio albums. But even as I’m typing this I realize I’m not following my own dictum about how I should approach live albums. I don’t know that I’ve ever listened to this without comparing it to the studio recordings. To be fair, most death metal bands just go up there and parrot their albums. On the other hand, contrary to popular opinion I think successful death metal is just as reliant on atmosphere and aesthetics as black metal is. Basically I just need to listen to this a bunch of times before judging it. I’ve owned it for long enough, it’s about time. It's not as bad as Neurosis’ Live in Stockholm though…I don’t know if I’ve heard the complete album once. I used to be such a moron about buying CD’s.

Nights before Years Past Matter

Krallice's self titled album was kind of a revelation when I first heard it, being as interested as I was in Mick Barr's playing style. His work with Orthrelm and his solo projects is challenging to say the least - so hearing his trademark shrill, geometrical, pick heavy shredding in a more accessible setting was a welcome change. But even though many of the songs had a sort of "big payoff" in the form of a sweepingly epic torrent of melodic shards, much of the album consisted of a hazy onslaught of tremolo picking and blasts which failed to leave much impression. In short, it was just plain hard to remember the individual songs.

With Dimensonal Bleedthrough, the effect was only amplified with ever more complex rhythms and three-voice polyphony (if not more). While the rhythm section had certainly improved, the token accessible riffs seemed to have been phased out. It was kind of a wash, and I ended up treating the album as a replacement rather than a new installment in their discography.

With two albums already being more than I could chew, the logical thing to do would have been to pass over Diotima until I eventually digested the previous work (if ever). But my inexplicably enduring attraction to this band prevailed, and I ended up getting in over my head even further.

......

Krallice is a pretty polarizing band. On one hand you have a good portion of the black metal scene who think the band is musically unremarkable, compositionally forgettable, and overrated by "hipsters" who don't actually understand black metal. On the other hand you have music critics and a large number of non-traditional metal fans who rave about the band to no end, claiming that the black metal purists are set in their ways.

More than most people, I can relate to both sides of this debate. Clearly I have had trouble remembering and distinguishing between the mass of tracks that Krallice seems to add to by the year. On the other hand, I've always felt something intriguing and progressive about their dense layers of tremolo picking, bubbling bass tones, droning feedback and sustained chords.

So here we are in 2012 and Krallice IV has arrived: Years Past Matter. Driven by my inability to keep the last two albums straight, I was pretty apathetic about hearing this. Then again, the album cover was sweet. And maybe this would finally be the time that everything just clicked for me with one of their albums.

As I'm twiddling my thumbs waiting for my copy to arrive, I have to admit that I simply haven't invested the necessary time into the last couple albums. Surely I should be able to recognize and describe the differences between Dimensional Bleedthrough and Diotima, if nothing else.

All this has raised an interesting question for me: in music, how much effort should be expected or required from the listener? Clearly from the standpoint of popularity and success, the listener should not be expected to invest anything substantial. But from an artistic standpoint, is there an "appropriate" amount?

In the case of Krallice it seems to me that the diverging opinions of your Deathspell Omega and Nightbringer fan from your Pitchfork-reading Liturgy dweeb might really be a question of how much time was invested. Technical music could be likened to staring at clouds in the sky: if you focus, you often see something unexpected and downright impressive.

Luckily for my musings, Mick Barr has provided the perfect case study: Orthrelm's Asristir Vieldriox. It consists of 99 songs over the course of 13 minutes, where each "song" is a fleeting burst of guitar shred accompanied by some hyperactive drumming. It seems like an exercise in permutations. And while I've certainly listened to it more times than any reasonable person, it won't be a shocking admission that I can't tell you anything about track 34.

I've actually toyed with the idea of painstakingly studying the album: listening for the subtle differences between tracks, coming up with some rough categories to divide them into, cataloging them until I can consciously differentiate each one. It would be pretty nauseatingly nerdy. I don't know whether I'll ever do it. But the interesting thing is, my ability to perform this exercise is completely independent of how much forethought went into the "compositions". Even if Mick Barr recorded 99 tidbits of guitar at random, I could get a lot of value out of the exercise of categorizing them - if I should care enough to do so.

I don't think there are many people out there who are going to find Years Past Matter to be an easy album to digest. For the most part, the ones who rave about it will be the ones who went into it with an expectation of depth and value. They'll be spot on about the album's complex structures and sonorities. The ones who call it another overhyped salad of directionless riffs and unmemorable songs will likely also be right on the money. By the time the fanboys have listened to it 30 times in a row, they may have a hard time acknowledging that superficial reality.

So what makes us care enough to invest effort in music? Allmusic reviews of albums from 1968 may seem far removed enough to possess a sort of objectivity. But here in the present, it can be uncomfortable to admit the influence of critics and popular opinion. It might be the nod from the New Yorker or the mumblings of fans at a metal club. Choosing to invest something of yourself in an album is the most critical step to enjoying it - and we never make that choice in a vacuum.

No matter who you ask, no one really contests that Krallice is a band of formidable skill who can paint in rich sonic colors. But are the obscure, labyrinthian structures a sign of the band's failure to create a viable, engaging narrative in their songs? Or are they a call to the listener to rise to the challenge?

I don't know how I came to the decision. But this time I'm going to give Years Past Matter my most rapt attention.

Saturday night

My motivation to write in this blog seems pretty lackluster. Maybe the "cd review" format is too formal. I'm always sitting around drinking and listening to my CD's, so I'm going to try out just randomly narrating those two things.

Can - "Halleluhwah" from Tago Mago. Only Can CD I've listened to. Fucking awesome song, that's all I'm going to say. I need to listen to this album more.

Continuing the krautrock thing, Amon Duul II - "Phallus Dei", title track. I can see how this would be a great album to namedrop for some street cred. Kind of obscure, sweet album cover. Really experimental for 1969. And it's called Phallus Dei. It hasn't done a lot for me yet though. Sure it has a really cool aesthetic but it just kind of meanders. When the vocals come in with lines like "They broke my magic stick" I get annoyed. For me, the tongue-in-cheek aspect breaks whatever vibe they were building up - I much prefer bands to take themselves overly seriously. See Yes and Jethro Tull.

Then again, Faust has the line "Daddy, take the banana. Tomorrow is Sunday". And that definitely grew on me. I probably haven't listened to "Phallus Dei" enough to judge, but as of now I find it pretty comparable to "Faust So Far" and think the latter is a lot more focused and just better.

Samuel Adams Dunkelweizen

I don't know that I've ever had a dunkelweizen before but it tasted pretty similar to the Bavarian hefeweizens I've had, except darker in color. It was OK but seemed pretty one dimensional by the second half and I got pretty sick of the taste. Maybe I don't like wheat beers enough to enjoy anything other than really great ones.

Everybody always says bavarian hefeweizen tastes like banana and clove. I have to wonder how much of that is just people jumping on the bandwagon. I can't be the only one who doesn't know what the fuck a clove tastes like. As for banana, I don't know, I think if my beer tasted like that I would spit it out. I can see where someone would find a faint resemblance to banana but somehow in the world of beer geeks this leads to tasting apricot in your PBR. Whatever.

Obviously I have an inferiority complex about my beer palate.

Jethro Tull - "A Passion Play", part 1. Kind of the rambling younger brother of Thick as a Brick. There are some good parts but it seems kind of cut and paste rather than a thoroughly conceived 20 minute song. The same thing could be said about Thick as a Brick to an extent, but the individual sections of that album are just way more enjoyable. But again, I haven't listened to this exhaustively.

Tool - "Third Eye" from Aenima. I first got into this album back when CD burners were new, and my friend's apparently couldn't do the full album so he left off this track. So it's the only one I don't know that well now that I own the CD. Pretty great, and the Bill Hicks quotes about drugs are preaching to the choir.

Incantation - a few tracks from Primordial Domination. I just found out they are putting an album out this year for the first time in 6 years, so I wanted to revisit their latest album. It's kind of like I remembered; not that great. Definitely their worst release. The songwriting probably isn't drastically different, but the atmosphere was always what set this band apart and Primordial Domination is just too clean and contained. Hopefully this upcoming release will be a return to form. In the right mood, I'm a drooling fanboy for most of their stuff.

Tom Waits - a few tracks from Mule Variations. The only Tom Waits I've listened to. Started with Eyeball Kid; that was musically more interesting than I remembered. Picture in a Frame was just boring. Chocolate Jesus...I don't know. Is this supposed to be funny? Generally when I listen to this album I just don't see the point to any of it. Not that I think music should have a point.

I only decided to do this blog thing halfway into the night. The whole time I've been writing the above I've been listening to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. I haven't been paying that much attention, but it seems like something I could probably get into. I'm really into listening to important and influential albums lately.

Samuel Adams - Hazel Brown

I thought this beer was fucking gross. It says "ale with natural flavors added" and it tastes like the natural flavor was a mixture of sugar and ass. 

Now I'm drinking bourbon to get these weak flavored, 5% abv beers out of my mind. It's the last of my bottle of "Old Weller Antique 107 proof". Really good stuff - it's the "house bourbon" of K&L wines in Redwood City (awesome store, maybe I'll blog about it later). The guy at the register was raving to me about how creamy and sweet and full bodied it was. I guess it's all relative but I don't know if I'll ever get used to describing bourbon like it's a glass of milk. When I first opened the bottle I thought it was unbearably strong but I must have gotten used to it. By now I can taste more of the sweetness behind the alcohol. Full bodied and creamy, not so much. Baileys is creamy.

Sunn 0))) - "Ra at Dusk" from 00 Void. I fucking love Sunn 0))). I know a lot of people don't. But with most of their songs, within 5 seconds I'm thinking "they could do this for 20 more minutes and I wouldn't even get tired of it". And then they do.

In all seriousness, it's a really good album. About an hour of nothing but droning guitars and swirling ambience. Their later stuff gets more eclectic but it's kind of nice to hear an example of their music stripped down to its essence. I actually only bought this because it was packaged with a remix album from Nurse with Wound. I thought it would be awesome to hear the aesthetics of Sunn 0))) coupled with the compositional quirks of Steven Stapleton. As it turns out, the remix album is literally unrecognizable from its source material. Oh well, still a nice ambient/experimental album.

P.S. Ugh. I hate when a reissue has a different cover than the original album.

As I'm droning out I'm drinking Old Rosie cloudy scrumpy cider. Got introduced to this while I was in Cambridge, and it's the only cider I've had which I really like. It's pretty sour and has 7.3% abv. I only found some after filling out a survey about how annoying and incompetent BevMo employees were. The manager emailed me back and said he would personally drive over the last of the Old Rosie from his other branch (I had also mentioned they were out of it). I pick it up and they're like "oh you're that guy". Hell yeah bitches.

God, I got sick of that stupid droning shit that I previously said was awesome. Trying to get drunk and be witty is not the right mentality for that music. This is always my dilemma about writing a music blog.  The intention to write about it inevitably changes the way I approach and perceive music.

Anyway, Swans is awesome and they have a new album coming out on tuesday, The Seer. It's nearly 2 hours and undoubtedly very artistic. But I'm not going to have much time to devote to it with Katatonia's Dead End Kings coming out the same day. Addictive prog-pop-metal ear candy brilliance vs Michael Gira bleeding onto my face. There's the album I would wear the t-shirt of and there's the album I'm going to wear into a plastic stub. Sad but true.

Also both bands are playing SF the same weekend in September. I already saw Katatonia but they didn't get to play very long because we needed to devote the time to an Opeth set which was seriously boring enough to drive me to the bar just to avoid listening. It reminds me of 7th grade algebra when I would go to the bathroom mid-class for the hell of it. This time Katatonia is headlining.

As for Swans...from everything I've read, it seems like their show will be unbelievable.

Anyway My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky was a damn good album. I feel like a fraud that I haven't even listened to their iconic early albums yet - Cop, Holy Money and so on.

I got Surrealistic Pillow the same day as Loveless. I don't think I had a single pink yet album so two in a day had a few ounces of symbolic weight. I haven't listened to most of the album yet, but damn the first song smokes. That droning guitar line, the counterpoint between the two vocalists. In a weird way, the biggest effect of hearing this song was to make me value The Velvet Underground & Nico a little less. It's that realization that arsty but accessible rock was not unheard of in 1967.

Listening to old albums like this is weird because you can come across a song like Somebody to Love which you've always been conscious of but didn't give the time of day. It's pretty nice other than the number of times that damn chorus is repeated. Typical "single" in that sense.

Full disclosure: I only got this because I thought the album title was cool. I also kind of hate myself for saying "full disclosure".

(edit: thinking back on this later I guess the comment didn't make total sense considering Revolver was already out. And this is closer to The Beatles than The Velvet Underground anyway.)

One of my earliest memories relating to Jimi Hendrix was when I briefly had lessons at Guitar Center, probably 8th grade. It was metal or death for me back then, and I remember asking my kind of nerdy guitar teacher who he thought were the best guitarists. Dave Mustaine was the right answer. He went with Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. It's just so stereotypical and to this day I kind of think: you're just giving a textbook answer.

Well, at 25 I've finally realized that Jimi Hendrix is mind-blowingly awesome. It's one of the first times in many years when I've listened to someone and really felt that it was a fundamentally different way to view the guitar. I guess I'm just discovering what lots of people already knew. Doesn't make it any less a revelation though.

Balast Point "Sculpin IPA". Possibly a bad idea to drink this so late in the night, but I already poured it. Besides the 7% abv, it's a pretty assertive and hoppy IPA. Sometimes that kind of thing can taste almost sickening when I've already been drinking for a while. According to some connoisseurs out there, this is a masterpiece. But I don't know, to me it's just a pretty good IPA. 

I'm always looking at beeradvocate ratings and generally if something is in the high 90's it blows me away as well. But it seems like my tastes don't run with the consensus when it comes to California IPAs and double IPAs. Pliny the Elder is another good example - infamous beer around here, and Justine loves it. I have this great desire to "understand" the hype, but maybe I should just accept that DIPA's are not my thing. Then again I had Stone's Ruination IPA the other day and surprisingly really liked it this time.

I definitely like the beer, but there are tons of IPAs floating around, and they all kind of blend together. The ones that actually stand out to me are Racer 5, Ninkasi Total Domination, Anderson Valley Hop Ottin' IPA, and Deschutes Inversion IPA. I need to do a big comparison of all those because it's been a while for most of them and all I really remember is that I liked each a lot.

Epilogue

Prescient comment about that beer being a bad idea, but not for the reason I thought. I passed out in my chair some time after pouring it, apparently only a few sips in. Someday I'll learn. Back in college knowing my limits meant not puking in the dorm hallway.

Now it's 9:30 AM and I'm faced with a tough call...drink it or dump it?

Tool - Aenima

"Albums I should have bought years ago", Part 2.


There's only one album that I was more overdue on buying than Reign in Blood: Tool's Aenima. It holds the distinction of being the only music that I was equally infatuated with as a 13 year old as I am as a 25 year old. Most of the songs on here were played on the radio at the time - "46 and 2", "H", "Eulogy", "Aenema", "Stinkfist". I loved all of them. I have particularly fond memories of hearing the long intro to "Eulogy" come on the radio. But, combining the fact that I already knew half the album with the fact that for some reason it always cost $17-$18 at the CD store, I never ended up buying it.


I don't really know what finally pushed me over the edge this year. I know I was listening to Meshuggah a lot the previous week - maybe because they have the same sort of self-important fanboys. Either way, I'm glad I stopped being such a tool.


It's pretty lame how many people out there don't take Tool seriously because of their image and their fans. On the other hand you've got underground metal or prog fans who would act like this or that obscure band blows Tool out of the water, and you would realize this if you had heard of them. It's all a bunch of crap. Indisputable band.

Slayer - Reign in Blood

"Albums I should have bought years ago", Part 1. 

The first time I ever heard Reign in Blood was in middle school, in my friend's basement. Ah, middle school. That was the only time all my friends liked metal. The start of my lifelong journey, and little did I know it was just a phase for all those other preteen dweebs.

At this point in middle school I had recently discovered Sepultura and Obituary, and after all the hype about Slayer I think I just let out a big fart. It was no heavier than Metallica. I wasn't interested.

The next phase of my relationship with Slayer was high school, when my best friend Jimmy would constantly try to argue that they were better than Megadeth. I wasn't having it. He said it just depended on which band you "grew up" on. I said he was an idiot.

I appreciate Slayer more now than I did then. But I still can't imagine any of their albums usurping Rust in Peace, So Far...So Good...So What?, or Peace Sells...But Who's Buying? at the top of my thrash list (or Beneath the Remains). 

I actually bought South of Heaven last year and I still think that album may be better. But either way, Reign in Blood is a classic and everyone knows that. It's kind of laughable that it took me this long to add it to my collection.

The Beatles - Revolver

I grew up on The Beatles - mostly albums like Rubber Soul, Hard Days Night, and Help! - but until now I had never saw down and listened to an album properly. I decided to pick up Revolver, which I was pretty sure was another that I grew up on, but apparently I was only familiar with about half the tracks.

One of the tracks I had never heard was "Tomorrow Never Knows", and coincidentally I bought this only a week after hearing that song featured in Mad Men. I'd been thinking of buying a Beatles album for months, but who knows, maybe Mad Men unconsciously pushed me to it.

It's not like I'm going to add anything to the written discourse on The Beatles here, but I was interested to realize that for the most part all the songs I recognized the most were from Paul McCartney, but all the songs I liked the most were from John Lennon or George Harrison.

Paul's songs: "Eleanor Rigby" is indisputable, and most of his others are very good. But you've also got "Good Day Sunshine;" pretty much a cheesefest. And "Yellow Submarine". I guess it's endearing, in a sort of...fuck it, I might as well listen to Raffi.

George's songs: 3/3, some of the best songs on the album. 

John's songs: "Doctor Robert" is cool but doesn't blow me away. Otherwise all of his songs destroy."And Your Bird Can Sing" is definitely the best song on here that I didn't already know (and one of my favorites period).

I'm pretty glad I've finally broken my cherry on buying cliche, iconic albums. I recently met someone who said he makes a conscious effort to avoid listening to bands everyone has heard of. Most people aren't so transparent about it, but I think it's true that some people treat a band's fame as a license not to explore their back catalogue. You get a false sense of familiarity with a band based on a few famous tracks. Personally I've always felt that you need the context of an album to fully appreciate a song anyway.

Erik B & Rakim - Paid in Full

Paid in Full was the third hip hop album I got, after 36 Chambers and Fear of a Black Planet. I immediately thought I made a mistake in buying it. The beats were simplistic and super repetitive, and literally every line of the entire album is about how good Rakim is at rapping. They were also (apparently) one of the first groups to start the obsession of hip hop with materialism - as seen by the cover. Paid in Full is definitely a "true" hip hop album - not a lot of obvious crossover appeal.

There's something to be said for musical shock treatment, because after a couple days of listening to this, I started to really like it. It's completely true that Rakim talks about the same exact thing the whole time, but he's such a good rapper that you don't really care. As for the music, it's full of 80's sounding samples and scratching. That actually gives it a cool atmosphere (at least for someone who's heard only one such album). Erik B was apparently influential and very good at what he did, but I'm not in a great position to judge that. The stuff is pretty memorable though. On certain tracks the beats sound kind of jagged with the scratching and accents not always falling right on beat, which I liked. There are also a couple instrumental tracks on here which are relatively complex.

Ultimately, my experience with Paid in Full is the reason why I like buying albums on the strength of reputation without heavily listening to them first. If I had downloaded it, I probably would have listened to Paid in Full a couple times and then written it off.

One last thing to say about Paid in Full: it reminds me of John Cage.