Sometimes it’s hard for me to suppress my headbanging roots. My friend Craig isn’t any help as every time a classic thrash band comes through town he inevitably buys two tickets, looks at me with his big brown eyes and says, “But dude…I don’t have anyone else to go with.” So there I am, rocking like it’s 1989.

The so-called “American Carnage Tour” (*sigh*) was supposed to come through town back in February, but was delayed due to Slayer’s Tom Araya having back surgery, giving me a stay of execution for around six months. But it wouldn’t be delayed forever – you can’t stop metal, you know – and Saturday night there I was, pushing my way down a smelly corridor, making my way to my seat in the balcony of the Roy Wilkins Auditorium in downtown St. Paul, about to settle in for nearly four hours of classic thrash. And yes, I said “seat”. I’m thirty-four years old, have two kids, and am about as interested in participating in a mosh pit as I am attending a Justin Bieber concert; which is to say not at all. (Fuck off Moe).

In all fairness to the genre and the bands involved, I do hold a soft spot in my heart for thrash metal, if only out of nostalgia. Plus, surviving a Slayer concert just seems like a “bucket list” activity, doesn’t it? I touched on the subject earlier in my Big Four of Thrash article, and after having experienced a taste of it in the safety of a movie theater, seeing it live was too much to resist.

As I took my seat in the dingy auditorium known mostly for boxing events and broken seats, the lights went down. I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and prepared myself…
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I had the chance to see Rush at Jones Beach Theater over the weekend and just thought I’d share some impressions. Rush is my favorite band and this is not the first time I was seeing them, but I thought the show was enough of a stand out to warrant a little writing.

I cannot quibble with the guys performance. For a band that formed in 1968, these guys still seem to be at the top of their game. I can’t imagine they have many decades left to tour, but I also can’t see them quitting anytime soon either. They rocked the place and the crowd loved it.

On a less positive note, and I’ve seen this mentioned on the boards, there seemed to be sound issues. Before the intermission, I noticed instruments drifting in and out, sonically. They would never go mute, but the levels seemed to be moving up and down a lot, which was very distracting. Also, it seemed like Geddy’s keyboard had even more trouble, I think it was during the song Marathon (but I can’t find a Youtube video to confirm so it could have been another one). Anyway, it got so quiet you almost couldn’t hear it and he seemed really pissed and missed a vocal cue by a few bars, almost as if he was trying to make his crew notice his displeasure. Neil and Alex just kept playing, and I assume, waiting for him to start singing again, which he eventually did.

Later, Alex completely missed one of his vocal cues in the song Subdivisions. You could tell he was embarrassed but totally laughed it off with the guitar techs.

After intermission, they seemed to have fixed whatever sound problems had plagued the first half of the show, and there were no more sound problems. It was still a little too noisy to my liking, but fairly good. Of note was how strong the sub bass signal was, almost like being in a dance club with a really good system. Every bass drum hit or bass guitar pluck hit you squarely in the gut.

There were two major highlights in the show for me. One was the performance of The Camera Eye in its entirety. Since they were playing the entire Moving Pictures album, I knew this would be in the set list and that was a major motivation for me to attend the show. If you are not familiar with this song, it’s very New York and London centric, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been walking around the city when it comes up on the old iPod and I get chills. Anyway, Saturday night, Geddy seemed to put extra emphasis on the words New York and Manhattan and the crowd ate it up. I just settled in for the ride, and was a bit beside myself that they were really playing it after all this time.

The second highlight was the inclusion of La Villa Strangiato in the encore. Again, for those unfamiliar with Rush tunes, it is a super complicated song which they couldn’t even record in the studio the first time without first breaking it into three different takes. It was such a momentous recording, it cause the band to change their whole direction with the following album and lead to the development of the band I like so much. It’s also one of those songs I never expected to hear live, so it was a real treat to see them bring it back.

Neil’s drum solo was great. I didn’t see the Snakes and Arrows tour, so I don’t know if this version is new for the Time Machine tour, or if it’s what he played last time, but it was very different from any of the solos I’ve heard him do before, like he’s evolved it again into a new direction. Same quality as ever, but with a new composition.

As to the crowd, everyone around me was very well behaved. Others have noted the young kid in the second row, and I noticed him too, air drumming in unison with all the adults around him. One can’t imagine he’s had the time in his short life to get so familiar with these old tunes, but clearly he has. I’d love to know his story, but imagine one or both of his parents must be huge fans. Like me, lol.

It was a great show. I didn’t even mention the filmic bits that tied the whole time machine theme together, or the walk-on performances of the rubber chicken man or the Beir Madchen who were ‘moving pitchers’ of beer, or the updated video graphics used throughout the show, because that’s all just icing on the cake. The band played great, reaching deep in their catalog at the same time playing their latest releases and everyone seemed to have a blast, and I was one of them.

As a way of saying thank you to the very many of you who have been listening since the beginning, we’ve put out this disc of music from the first two years or so of the Team Fremont Live podcast.

We’ve had a bunch of people over the last year ask if there was any way to get certain songs that we no longer use, and I think most of them are here. I’m sorry if a favorite of yours didn’t make the list. There’s no other reason than it was lost or deleted by me. Despite that, I hope there’s something for everyone in this collection.

There are 26 tracks in total. The last five or six of those are things that I started working on in 2005-2006 but never released or never finished. Also included are some liner notes, giving some of my thoughts on the songs.

You can find the collection by clicking on the banner at the top of the RobotPanic main page.

We hope you enjoy the collection and once again, thanks for listening.

Travel back in time with me…

The year was 1990, and I was fourteen years old, living in a small town in Central Wisconsin. I had been learning how to play drums for two years and had just joined my first band. So in short: an adolescent boy and all that entails, mixed with middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin. Got all that? Elsewhere, Metallica had recently released their …And Justice for All album, along with their first ever video for MTV. Dave Mustaine’s Megadeth had just released their masterwork Rust in Peace, and – almost simultaneously – Anthrax put out the brilliant Persistence of Time and Slayer released their seminal Seasons in the Abyss.

You still following? Okay, let’s put all this together…

Impressionable-teen-wannabe-musician + the culmination of thrash metal. Yeah, my life was changed.

There’s something about the genre that speaks to my most primal and base instincts. Twenty years have passed, and I’m now an “adult”, father of two. Yet every time I hear Charlie Benante pound out the thunderous opening of “Time”, the fourteen year-old inside of me can’t help but raise the devil horns to the sky and whisper, “Aw, fuck yes!”

Metal is a curious genre, always lurking just below the thick crust of popular music and rarely ever poking through. In fact, the years of 1990 – 1993 are the closest it ever got to mass acceptance, what with Metallica’s “Black” album, Megadeth’s Countdown to Extinction, and Anthrax’s Sound of White Noise. Each of those albums featured shorter, simpler songs, which seemed designed to appeal to a wider audience. But even then, it only lasted a short while. Megadeth and Anthrax wandered aimlessly for the next decade, while Metallica went on to greater fame and fortune through their newfound “metal-lite” formula, only recently remembering what it was that made them great. And, it seems, along with that revelation, also came the realization that, “Hey! People still love that music!” And it’s true: though never really seeing any success on the charts, each of these bands enjoys huge popularity throughout the world, selling out clubs, theaters, and even arenas wherever they go.

Thus: The Big Four of Thrash tour.

The story goes like this: Last year, Metallica was inducted into the Hall of Fame. For the celebration, they flew out all their friends who helped them get to where they are, including members of the other “Big Four” bands. Apparently, all the nostalgia got to Lars Ulrich (Metallica’s drummer), and he floated the idea of doing a full-blown tour with the Big Four. It took some doing, but nearly a year later, the idea finally came to fruition with some dates in Europe and Australia.

But what about the States, where this movement was born? Apparently, they’re still working on that. But, in the meantime, they found a way to show the Sofia, Bulgaria concert in movie theaters all around the country through Fathom Events. The first showing was on Tuesday, with an encore presentation on Thursday, which I was able to attend. The footage was (mostly) uncut, featuring – in order – Anthrax, Megadeth, Slayer, and Metallica, with short behind-the-scenes footage in between. Let’s break it down…
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In the opening song on Neil Young’s Greendale album, a tune called “Falling from Above”, Grandpa says to Cousin Jed, “Seems like that guy singin’ this song ‘been doin’ it a long time. Is there anything he knows that he ain’t said?”

Indeed, Neil Young’s been doing his thing for around forty-five years now, and in a world of disposable pop stars, that sort of career is almost unheard of. What keeps Neil Young vital and, more importantly, what keeps him relevant is something that I think we could all learn from. The guy does what he wants to do how he wants to do it, not giving a good God damn about what anybody else thinks. And, okay, it helps that he’s damn good at just about every thing he does. But rather than following a trend or trying to earn the maximum payout, Neil Young just keeps doing his thing (sponsored by no one), going where his mind takes him. And people keep following along.

I bought the Greendale album the day it was released in 2003, not knowing exactly what to expect. I had read that it was a “concept” album, which gave me flashbacks to Trans, the oddity in his catalog that involved using a vocoder on his vocals so his son, who has cerebral palsy, could hear him better. But no, Greendale, as it turned out, was an album telling a story of a multigenerational family called the Greens, who lived in the small town of Greendale, CA. At the center of the story is the young daughter Sun Green and her cousin, Jed Green, two kids who are around the same age and whose lives are going in very different directions. Grandpa figures prominently, as does the side story of Officer Carmichael. While there’s a fairly clear narrative present in the music alone, the accompanying DVD and booklet (complete with notes from Young himself), really flesh out the goings on.

But Greendale isn’t just a simple tale of an American family whose lives are overturned. The story is also infused with what more cynical folks might refer to as “idealistic, hippy, tree-hugging propaganda”; a sentiment that I do not share, but can easily see. And remember, the album was made at the outset of the Iraq war (of which we’re celebrating the seventh anniversary. Go America!), so there’s a strong anti-War message in there as well. But really, would you expect anything else from the guy who wrote Ohio? So if you have strong feelings on the “other” side of the issues, you may want to pick up this album instead.

Okay, so now you’re up to speed and you know what the album’s all about. What about the graphic novel? As you’d guess, this book includes all sorts of details and fills in the story much more than did the album, which is a scary proposition is you’re a big fan of Young’s original work. Fortunately, he collaborated with the folks at Vertigo/DC, giving his approval and insights along the way. And thanks to the medium, you’re able to more clearly discover out what drove Jed to his pivotal moment and the learn the mystery behind Sun’s “gift”. In addition, you get the complete Green family tree and the history of nearly all the family members. Cliff Chiang (the guy behind Human Target, Green Arrow & Black Canary, and various Batman titles) draws the world of Greendale wonderfully (and almost exactly as I pictured it), and Joshua Dysart takes Young’s story and fills in the blanks in a tasteful way, including many lines straight out of the album.

Young already turned Greendale in to a feature film, and Hilden and I saw the live Greendale show when Young brought it to town. But, to me, this book is almost an essential companion piece to the album and is definitely worth owning. Again, the artwork is beautiful, the storytelling is mysterious, and the book itself is a nicely-crafted hardcover, which sells for $19.99, though Amazon’s got it for around $14.

If you like Wilford Brimley as much as I do (and my wife apparently), then you owe it to yourself to check out this video.

An impromptu performance of the ZomBOOsical! classic Aim for the Brain from our live show a few weeks ago. And then we sing a song about TokenGirl. It’s subtle.

See if you can guess which part Moe wrote. It’s like a game.

It feels a little odd to say this but I’ve never really paid attention to the Rolling Stones as a musical group. As many people my age can attest, I’ve known about the Rolling Stones for as long as I can remember. They’ve been such a permanent fixture of my pop culture world that when it came down to it, I didn’t really need to pay attention to them. They were simply always around. In the same way that I give no thought to the song “Happy Birthday” until it’s time to sing it for someone, whenever I hear “Brown Sugar” or “Paint it Black” I simply notice that a Stones song is on and continue with my day. From the constant jokes about the drug use of Keith Richards to the spot-on Mike Meyers impression of Mick Jagger on Saturday Night Live, these were how I knew the Rolling Stones.

Over the last year or so I’ve been revisiting bands that I missed out on over the years and the classic rock of the 1960′s and 70′s has been a major focus for me. After hearing that Exile on Main St. was getting a re-issue along with some bonus content, I grabbed the album and gave it a good listen. Now, I not only understand why people call this the Rolling Stone’s masterpiece, I finally get why the Rolling Stones are a great band.

Exile on Main St is a curious album, to be sure. On one hand, it has the uneven quality that makes mastering engineers run for their faders and a few heavy duty compressors. On the other, it is full of such down to earth roots rock that you can’t help but feel a more polished album would have lacked the very heart and soul that makes Exile a masterpiece of rock and roll. The Rolling Stones’ music has always been described with adjectives such as “swagger” and “dirty”. Exile on Main St is the personification of this feeling and the dirt and attitude reach down to its very core. From the basement production elements to the rambling and gutsy songwriting, Exile becomes a testament to what makes the Rolling Stones great. It gets to the heart of what their music is all about. Exile on Main St. speaks.

Not every tune is golden and this is the least “radio single” filled Stones album that I can think of. In fact, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have both commented on how surprised they are that this album is as popular as it is. Taken on an individual song basis, it’s not hard to agree with them. However, it’s when the whole album is absorbed that the real brilliance is revealed. Young artists at the top of their creative game, producing music outside of the normal studio system for the first time in ages. It’s raw, full of anything goes and has that powerful glow that only true artistry can provide. Sometimes it’s difficult to see exactly where its coming from but you feel it when you step back and let it take you away. If there was ever an album that was done a disservice by our current iTunes inspired “one-track-at-a-time” world, this is it.

Originally released as a double album, the current reissue manages to pack all 18 original tracks onto one disc. Having never heard the original LP, I can’t comment on the quality of the re-master but I know that Exile on Main St. Sounds amazing overall. Some careful and heartfelt work went into making sure that everything could be heard in the mix while retaining the character of the original.

In addition to the main disc, a second disc is full of alternate takes and a few new songs that had been hiding out in Mick Jagger’s basement. The stand out track, for me, would have to be “Plundered My Soul” which has the fortune of a newly recorded vocal along with some new Richards guitar work. Far from feeling like a quick cash in, this song captures the spirit of the band from 1972 but adds the gusto of two performers with a lifetime of experience to bring to the table. It’s a stand-out track on the whole album, let alone the second disc.

Exile on Main St. is truly a great work and should be a part of any music fans collection. While I struggle to recommend it at the $30.00 price point many stores are charging, if you find it on sale or wait for a price drop, you can’t go wrong.

Our thanks to SimpleNate for sending us this review. You can find more musings by the great and mighty SimpleNate over at his website: Who Is SimpleNate.

LCD Soundsystem’s newest (and supposedly last) album hit today. This is Happening is the fourth full-length from the NYC-based brainchild of DFA Records co-founder James Murphy and re-establishes the label’s dance/punk supremacy.

Taking hints from the recently popularized chillwave indie movement, This is Happening mixes old-school synth sounds and layered drum beats with Murphy’s alternating laid-back then over-the-top vocals. The major thing that has always set LCD apart from others in the genre is still at the center of the new release. I’m talking, of course, about the inherent danceability and catchy loops that will stay in your head for days after just one listen.

The album kicks off with the building-block track “Dance Yrself Clean” and its hard to ignore Murphy’s request. As dreamy synth explodes into a high energy party with Murphy flexing his high notes, you’d have to be dead to not at least tap your foot. The single, and clearly the black sheep of the album, “Drunk Girls” follows with its more-punk-than-not attitude and turns out to be a bouncy romp filled with guitar and background call-back vocals.

As the album spreads it’s wings with tracks “One Touch” and “I Can Change” it sets you up for the wonderfully energetic and apathetic “Pow Pow Pow”, truly a classic LCD Soundstem track.

Some people have said This is Happening has strayed too far from The Sound of Silver and it’s more listener friendly attitude. I disagree. This is Happening stays true to the LCD Soundsystem roots of their self-titled debut and pushes the boundaries of the genre. With new bands like Chromeo and Avi Buffalo becoming more and more popular, and older bands like Hot Chip (also on the DFA label) seeing themselves rise to fame, its only natural to have this new LCD release bridge the gap. That said, if you’re unfamiliar with the band, This is Happening is a great place to start. And really, if you aren’t familiar with LCD Soundsystem, you really should be.

From our live DGR show on Saturday.

Please excuse the ending.