ARCANE: Chronicles of the Waking Dream

Produced by Jesse Higginson and Arcane
Released: September 21

As unfair as it can be to accuse one band of sounding like another, sometimes there’s just no denying it. In the way that Airbourne sounds like AC/DC and ‘neath sounds like Opeth, Brisbane’s Arcane sounds like Pain of Salvation. Being compared so immediately with such a prominent band in their field can have its drawbacks, but really only if your interpretation is second-rate.

Therefore, Arcane don’t have too many problems, because here is an extremely well-played and well-crafted concept album of melodic progressive metal that would easily stand beside any other album by any better known band of their ilk. Indeed, if there’s a major difference between the two bands, it is that Arcane’s concept clicks much easier than those of PoS, and isn’t cluttered with that band’s odious pseudo-intellectualism. This isn’t to suggest that Arcane don’t make intelligent music; far from it. It’s more like a comparison between Umberto Eco and Richard Dawkins – one no less intelligent than the other, but one is far more readable.

One of the album’s best tricks is that it doesn’t include a lyric sheet, thereby forcing a greater level of concentration on the listener to follow the story of Acolyte Zero, a man obsessed with May 26. Such a theme is dark, of course and with their sweeping arrangements, Arcane match the music to the words. Their hour-long drama mixes in flute-like melody lines in rousing folk-metal sections such as during “The Malice” and, very late in the piece, throw up some clashing, truly heavy riffs in the latter half of “Asylum: Acolyte Zero” and each main movement is broken up with an interlude piece. The highlight is the majestic “Fading”, the twelve-minute centrepiece that represents Zero’s final tipping point. Arcane fills it with dark and luscious melodies and harmonising guitar and keys, a signature of their sound.

Like Voyager's album, Arcane’s Chronicles of the Waking Dream is clear proof that Australia’s progressive metal scene is the equal of that found anywhere.

1. Glimpse
2. The Seer
3. The Malice
4. The First Silent Year
5. Secret
6. Fading
7. The Second Silent Year
8. May 26
9. The Third Silent Year
10. Asylum: Acolyte Zero
11. Whisper

Rating: 87%

THE POOR: Round 1

Produced by The Poor & Greg Clarke
* Produced by The Poor, Greg Clarke & Billy Thorpe
Released: October 19

The last half of this year has seen a veritable plethora of bands reforming for some reason. While some have obviously been nostalgic one-off reunions (Sadistik Exekution, Nitocris, iNFeCTeD, Candy Harlots), others are clearly reformations (Tumbleweed, Segression) that intend to continue. The Poor falls into the second category, and before even playing any shows (not counting the tour they did with W.A.S.P. last year), they’ve already released the first of what is apparently going to be at least two new albums.

The Poor is a band whose initial success should probably never have happened in the first place, a hell-raising heavy drinking hard rock band who scored a hit single and album at a time when such things had been made redundant by grunge. Fifteen years on from that 18 months or so of near-stardom, The Poor’s second album is a rather uneven collection of songs that for the most part sound like cast-offs. It would be presumptuous to expect a band that gets back together after 8 years to sound the way they did when they split, of course, and The Poor do not.

The first two songs play around in the familiar, brash hard rocking territory of old, but as an old fan it feels like something is missing. As the albums progresses, it becomes clear what that is. The tracks on Round 1 aren’t bad, but they lack the memorable hooks and raw, rocking power The Poor once had. In places I’m reminded of Lump, Skenie and drummer Gavin Hansen’s post-The Poor outfit that played around with grunge and nu-metal. While Round 1 never gets that far into those areas, there is a feeling that The Poor has tried to modernise their style a bit, perhaps a strange thing to do when their original style is currently enjoying a new surge of popularity thanks to the likes of Airbourne.

Round 1 isn’t bad and it’s good to have a pure rock band like The Poor back, but it probably just isn’t the comeback album some will expect, or want. When they start playing live again, most of the crowd will only want to hear their old stuff, so it probably doesn’t really matter anyway.

1. Kill My Faith
2. Death of Me
3. Last Laugh
4. House*
5. No One's Home
6. Prisoner of Fools
7. Don't Know What You're Missing
8. Love Isn't on Again
9. Guardian Angel (demo)
10. Can't Feel a Thing (demo)
11. Goodbye (demo)

Rating: 62%

SUMMONUS: Summonus

Released: 2009

Track five of this EP is one of the finest representations of diabolus in musica since the first song of the first Black Sabbath album. The main riff of "Two Lane Blacktop" is resoundingly similar to Iommi's evocative original with a sinister ringing note like a death knell as it creeps, builds and creeps again along its nine and a half minute length. With this track, Summonus creates the very epitome of down-tempo metal, and their five-cut self-titled debut is like a crash course in sludge: a newcomer to the genre could use this as a primer but they could well come away wondering if the Devil himself had somehow had a hand in it.

At almost six minutes of repetitive, reverberating guitar, the instrumental "Saturnus" is admittedly just a little too long, but Summonus makes up for it immediately afterward with Rod Hunt's caustic vocals carving through the distorted-guitar rocking vibe of "Down on the Reeperbahn". This clearly marks Summonus as a kind of less-chaotic Eyehategod, perhaps something in the vein of Iron Monkey but without the tortured shrieks of Mike Williams or Johnny Morrow. Hunt's vocals are still unsettling, however, the same inimitable mixture of hardcore rasp and death metal screech that he brought to Sydney metal pioneers Persecution. This is certainly not easy listening, even for those who may have an idea of what to expect. The songs are thick with droning bass and jarring dissonance but equally fat with hook-laden if bone-rattling riffs, and the glacial pace also adds to the daunting and uneasy atmosphere of imminent doom.

At 32 minutes, it's only slightly shorter than Master of Reality, and in the annals of Australian extreme doom should be just as certifiably a classic.

1. (Intro) Summonus
2. Down on the Reeperbahn
3. Grey
4. Two Lane Blacktop
5. The Gallows

Rating: 88%

SLAYER AND MEGADETH LIVE IN SYDNEY

Hordern Pavilion, Sydney
October 8, 2009

With two of the greatest thrash bands of all time playing together here for the first time, it was pretty unsurprising that not only was this show sold out weeks ago but the line to get in stretched right around to the back of the venue and halfway down Driver Ave. So it was impossible to catch opening act Double Dragon, who got a twenty-minute warm up set, and in fact Megadeth had already begun by the time I made it inside.

The sound wasn't the greatest it could have been, but Megadeth didn't let this impede them as they ripped through a bunch of their best-known songs, having kicked off with "Set the World Afire" that somewhat appropriately set the place ablaze. Each new incarnation of Megadeth seems to reignite the band, and after pulling the strings with Jag Panzer for a decade, new guitarist Chris Broderick was setting about showing how he fit into the machine. The closing trade-offs of "Hangar 18" were a perfect way to do so and the crowd were treated to a tight set of favourites with only "Head Crusher" making the cut from new album Endgame. Indeed, that was the only concession to post-2000 material made for the whole set, as Dave Mustaine led his men through a choice set of cuts from the classics (oh, and Cryptic Writings), keeping both the energy levels and the shred factor high. Mustaine's voice wasn't always up to the task, but he's never been much of a singer and the rest of the band made up for it with a dynamic and engaging performance. "Tornado of Souls" and "Head Crusher" were killer and for the encore they worked "The Mechanix" into a medley with "Holy Wars" for a rousing climax to the set.

Slayer took the stage after a minimal changeover and were as omnious-looking as always. For some reason they opened with the title track to the new album, a song that's only been out for about a week and one that almost no one yet knew. Even had they known it, the mix was so uneven and awful that it didn't matter. A band of this stature playing in a room like this should not sound so diabolical: the guitars were unevenly matched, with Kerry King blowing Jeff Hanneman offstage, Tom Araya's vocals were buried and Dave Lombardo was louder than everyone. Once the glue that held Slayer together, tonight the drummer was part of what made them come unstuck. He was all over the place like the mix itself. And really, Slayer seemed to be just going through the motions. It was obviously more than enough for their fans, possibly the most fanatical in metal, but their uninspiring and uninspired newer songs only got in the way of the classic catalogue, and even they seemed half-arsed. By "Dead Skin Mask" they were starting to warm up like the jets of fire shooting from the lighting gantry but the set was two-thirds done by then. Something wasn't sitting well with the Slayer lads tonight, but leaving off the scream in "Angel of Death" could well have been a precursor to Araya's laryngitis vocal blow-out in Melbourne the next day when he could barely sing at all.

The Slayer nuts won't agree, of course, but Megadeth won the night.

Megadeth setlist:

1. Set the World Afire
2. Wake Up Dead
3. Hangar 18
4. Skin o' My Teeth
5. She-wolf
6. In My Darkest Hour
7. Devil's Island
8. Tornado of Souls
9. Head Crusher
10. Rattlehead
11. Symphony of Destruction
12. Peace Sells
13. Holy Wars/The Mechanix (encore)

Slayer setlist:

1. World Painted Blood
2. War Ensemble
3. Jihad
4. Born of Fire
5. Psycopathy Red
6. Mandatory Suicide
7. Chemical Warfare
8. Ghosts of War
9. Hate Worldwide
10. Disciple
11. Dead Skin Mask
12. Hell Awaits
13. Angel of Death
14. South of Heaven
15. Raining Blood

MEGADETH: Endgame

Produced by Dave Mustaine and Andy Sneap

Released: 2009

Tonight Sydney plays host to one of the best double bills of metal ever seen in this city as Megadeth and Slayer unleash their hell one after the other, so what better time than now to take a look at the latest album from the first of those bands? Megadeth was always the most technically gifted and perhaps the most honest of the Big Four --Dave Mustaine has made no secret of the fact that when his band went corporate in the mid-90s it really was at the behest of his label. All that seems like so long ago now (which is true), since over the last decade of new label, a split, a reformation, another new label and several shifts in the second guitar department, Mustaine has drawn closer and closer with each new release to the ultimate vision of technical thrash metal excellence that he achieved with Rust in Peace. Endgame probably isn't quite the masterpiece that album was, but it is the closest they've come so far.

Megadeth leaves you with no illusions about what to expect. The first track is a three minute shred battle between Mustaine and latest recruit Chris Broderick, formerly of Jag Panzer, one of the most shred-obsessed metal bands of all. From here they lock straight into "Time Day We Fight!", another blazing riff and shred fest that pretty well points the way for the entire album. While Mustaine has never completely disappointed in the guitar hero stakes (even his worst records are saved by some blistering fretwork), Endgame is positively ablaze with glorious soloing, probably outdoing even the Friedman-era albums in that respect, and that's saying a lot. For those who love Megadeth purely on those grounds, Endgame will certainly not disappoint.

On other levels too, Endgame succeeds. In general, the songwriting is up there with Mustaine's best. "Headcrusher" is one of the best thrash tracks to have surfaced this year without question, "Bodies" embraces old-school thrash with the chugga-chugga riffs of Countdown to Extinction and "Bite the Hand" and "The Right to Go Insane" are backed by a wicked groove. Lyrically, there's a few clunkers (I'm not particularly fussed on "44 Minutes", for example), but it's clear in tracks like "Endgame" and "How the Story Ends" that the Mustaine worldview is no less pessimistic than it's always been. By the same token, he can still find a place for a song about top-fuel dragsters; the balladesque "Hardest Part of Letting Go... Sealed With a Kiss" really jars the listener out of the experience however. It really seems out of place on an album otherwise crammed with scorching thrash.

This is Megadeth's best album since Rust in Peace. It remains to be seen if they can top it next time, but we can hope they will match it at least.

1. Dialectic Chaos
2. This Day We Fight!
3. 44 Minutes
4. 1,320º
5. Bite the Hand
6. Bodies
7. Endgame
8. The Hardest Part of Letting Go... Sealed With a Kiss
9. Head Crusher
10. How the Story Ends
11. The Right to Go Insane

Rating: 90%

PORCUPINE TREE: The Incident

Produced by Porcupine Tree
Released: September 2009

With The Incident, Porcupine Tree continue to their affirm their status as the pre-eminent progressive rock band in the world today. While their style continues to creep closer and closer into metal territory thanks to Steven Wilson's growing obsession with that genre's more experimental outfits like Opeth and Gojira, they remain a band with a style uniquely their own and one which refuses to be pinned down.


Porcupine Tree paint with a broad palatte and over the course of its 55 minutes the 14-part title track journeys through rock, folk, metal and industrial elements. This part of the album is an exploration of the modern media phenomonon of dehumanising traumatic events, a suite of tracks about the beginnings and endings that erupt from sudden and often violent life-changing events. Musically then, this first CD is like a modern reimagining of Pink Floyd's Animals album crossed with Hemispheres by Rush, blended with bombastic guitar outbursts and grooves borrowed from TOOL ("Occam's Razor", "Circle of Manias") occasional Reznor-ish electronic moments ("The Incident") and extended introspective passages like "The Seance" and the middle section of the 12-minute "Time Flies", a track that in itself represents a microcosm of the entire album. After erupting with explosions of guitar, the first part of the album closes with "I Drive the Hearse" drifting quietly away on rafts of synths and electric pianos. Throughout, Porcupine Tree ties everything together virtually seamlessly by relying on the power of Wilson's songwriting rather than overindulgent displays of their obviously vast musical ability, and while it's very apparent that "The Incident" is very much Wilson's project, he never overplays his hand, always allowing his fellow bandmates plenty of space to add their own individual touches.

The album's second CD contains four songs totally unrelated both of to "The Incident" and to each other, however they all share the same sense of weary foreboding. They also explore Porcupine Tree's heavier and (if that's possible) even darker side, particularly "Bonnie the Cat" with its menacing guitars and Wilson's equally threatening, whispered promise: "I know what will be". These tracks, while never approaching the same level of heaviness, to some degree do reflect Wilson's Opethian muse and prehaps foretell the coming of an even heavier and bleaker Porcupine Tree to come. Whatever the case, The Incident maintains the band's place at the forefront of intelligent rock music and easily matches it with the best releases of this year.

CD 1:

1. The Incident - i. Occam's Razor ii. The Blind House iii. Great Expectations iv. Kneel and Disconnect v. Drawing the Line vi. The Incident vii. Your Unpleasant Family viii. The Yellow Windows of the Evening Train ix. Time Flies x. Degree Zero of Liberty xi. Octane Twisted xii. The Seance xiii. Circle of Manias xiv. I Drive the Hearse

CD 2:

1. Flicker
2. Bonnie the Cat
3. Black Dahlia
4. Remember Me Lover

Rating: 95%

STEVE VAI: Where the Wild Things Are

Produced by Steve Vai
Released: 2009

Albums from shredders have been problematic for me in the past. As someone who isn't a guitar player, they often come across as little more than showing off with minimal substance and no real appeal to anyone other than aspiring guitarists; rudderless, ego-driven wankfests that boggle the mind with skill for a while until you realise the guy is really just playing scales backwards through an upside-down vocoder or something silly like that.

Having learned his craft from mentors and friends like Frank Zappa and Joe Satriani, Steve Vai is a very different proposition. With his vast array of stylistic ability and influences, Vai is an instrumentalist that even people who aren't flash guitarists can enjoy, a man who understands that the demonstration of ability is more than filling every space with as many notes as possible or showing off every trick you learned at guitar school at every available opportunity. Recorded live in Minneapolis in 2007, Where the Wild Things Are confirms Vai's status with a consummate virtuoso performance, ably supported and abetted by a superb five-piece band that includes members of prog groups like Dali's Dilemma and Mullmuzzler. A blend of cuts from his studio works -- mainly Real Illusions: Reflections -- and new tracks being played for the first time, the album tends to highlight Vai's blues and jazz-fusion sides. For outright shredding, there's the eleven-minute centrepiece "Freak Show Excess" but on "Fire Wall" he steps out with a heavy, bluesy shuffle featuring his smoky vocals and "Tender Surrender" shows a more lyrical side to his playing. Vai of course also lets the rest of his band to add their own instrumental prowess and when the entire sextet kicks in together they truly shine.

As engaging as the set is though, by the back half of Where the Wild Things Are, I did find my attention wandering a bit, but at 78 minutes, it is quite a long haul for most but the truly dedicated (and the DVD is longer still). Nevertheless, Steve Vai once again shows that rather than just being a flash guitar player, he is an outstanding and gifted musician and entertainer.

1. Paint Me Your Face
2. Now We Run
3. Oooo
4. Building the Church
5. Tender Surrender
6. Band Intros
7. Fire Wall
8. Freak Show Excess
9. Die to Live
10. All About Eve
11. Gary 7
12. Treasure Island
13. Angel Food
14. Taurus Bulba
15. Par Brahm

Rating: 85%

NUMBER ONE IN HEAVEN: The Heroes Who Died for Rock N Roll

by Jeremy Simmonds
Published by Penguin

I've been away for a couple of weeks, and returned to find a big mountain of new CDs waiting for me to listen to and review. Since I've yet had time to give them more than a cursory ear, today's post is a book review I did a couple of years ago for a massive title called Number One in Heaven. Jeremy Simmonds' enormous volume is an indispensible resource for anyone with an interest in rock and popular music as one of the main cultural phenomonons of the last half-century. In its 500-plus pages, Simmonds collects hundreds of rock obituaries, presenting them in an easy-to-find month-by-month format for every year between 1965 and the end of 2005 and in doing so creates an engrossingly readable, occasionally humourous and often sad book.

This weighty tome unveils a lot of the mystery and myths surrounding the passing of some of the world's greatest stars and gives column space to many, many lesser known ones. It also reveals which group boasts the most dead members (doo-wop vocal group The Inkspots, as it turns out, although Lynyrd Skynyrd and T-Rex must come close by now), which group lost the most members in one go (Reba McEntire's backing band, who lost seven at once in a plane crash in 1991), and plenty of strange co-incidences, bizarre suicides, accidental deaths and murders. He also includes small snapshots of people who came remarkably close to death but somehow survived, like Nikki Sixx' monumentally stupid double overdose and Rick Allen's limb-severing car smash. The end of each year's section also features a small round-up of other lesser-known figures. This allows Simmonds to include even lesser lights who would otherwise be completely forgotten, but it also reveals a strange and confusing omission that will be elaborated upon shortly.

Often books like this will gloss over or even completely ignore many of the those who have fallen in the metal world, but Simmonds (for the most part) doesn't forget them either. From this perspective, most of the bigger names are included: Dimebag, Cliff and Randy, of course, the Mayhem pair of Dead and Euronymous, plus Steamin' Steve Clark from Def Leppard, Cozy Powell, Randy Castillo, Razzle from Hanoi Rocks, Gary Driscoll from Rainbow, and Piggy from Voivod. Paul Samson, Paul Baloff, Rhett Forester from Riot, Megadeth's Gar Samuelson, Somnium from Finntroll, David Wayne from Metal Church and all three of Body Count's growing body count also get space. Savatage's Criss Oliva and Dave Pritchard from Armored Saint even get mentions.

Simmonds loses significant Brownie points, however, for the incomprehensible omission of Chuck Schuldiner. That such a highly influential character from the development of metal could be totally ignored in such an otherwise excellently researched and all-encompassing book seems not only inexcusable, but inexplicable, especially when he's thought to include Steve MacDonald from Gorguts, two members of Hallow's Eve, a bloke from a band called Doom that even I've never heard of and some guy who was in Blue Öyster Cult for about ten minutes in about 1971 and never recorded anything. Even if Simmonds knew very little about Chuck, a music journalist of his reputation should have at the very least known both who he was and that he'd died, and when. This is Number One in Heaven's unforgivable flaw, and the thing that stop this otherwise brilliant book from scoring the highest mark possible.

NB: There's an associated website address given in the introduction that the author has included for readers to suggest corrections, but when I tried it so I could prod him about Schuldiner, it didn't work.

Rating: 90%