With December upon us theartsdesk on Vinyl has been kept busy with sacks full of fantastic plastic, so much so that we’re saving the poppier stuff for a pre-Christmas blow-out in a week’s time, so watch out for that.
Evanescence have been away for a while, and fans looking for a whole album of new material will be disappointed. There are only two proper new songs on Synthesis (plus a couple of instrumental interludes). Instead, it’s an album of operatically-inclined orchestral interpretations of music from the band’s previous three albums, tinted with a light touch of Gary Numan-esque gothic electronica. If you like the idea of Finnish symphonic metallers Nightwish having it out with Canadian mezzo-soprano balladeer Sarah McLachlan, then, hey, Synthesis is for you. Everyone else should stay well away.
Evanescence has long been the vehicle for lead singer Amy Lee, but she’s been off doing solo stuff, TV and film soundtracks, etc, since the band’s last tour finished five years ago. She does not, after all, need to work if she doesn’t want to. Evanescence’s 2003 debut sold enough to provide for her over the course of four or five lifetimes (or more!). So Synthesis is a labour of love, it’s Lee finally embracing her middle-of-the-road aspirations, assisted by Hollywood composer/arranger David Campbell. The tone has more in common with Celine Dion than her stated heroes such as Björk and the like. It’s the bombast of Sarah Brightman attached to the template of goth-pop hits such as Evanescence's globe-dominating chart-topper “Bring Me to Life”.
There’s something stentorian about it, headache-inducing, and not in that good ol’ heavy metal way, just in the sense that it’s teeth-jarringly histrionic. Take “The End of the Dream”, originally on their last eponymous album: it starts out moody and intriguing, Lee’s plaintive vocal emoting over a grumbling electronic tone and some bells but, about two minutes in it explodes into a dirge that then, in turn, blows up into truly preposterous Wagnerian pomp. Of the new tracks “Hi-Lo” and “Imperfection”, the former is forgettable but the latter has a certain gothic electro-pop bounce before it goes completely OTT like all the rest.
There’s a market for this kind of music, a big one, which is great news for Evanescence, but not for music lovers the world over.
Overleaf: watch the video for "Imperfection" by Evanescence
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.
SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017
Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★ The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary things
Marilyn Manson, the man and the band, have maintained impressive global success for over two decades. Their albums – this is the band’s 10th - continue to shift by the bucket-load, and they can still sell out a worldwide stadium tour. Partly, their appeal is tribal. In the age of the beige hoodie and jeans, they don’t kowtow but continue to offer a studded, debauched black-splatter of Hollywoodised punk-goth kitsch. In recent years they’ve also undergone something of a musical renaissance. This continues on Heaven Upside Down.
As with 2015’s The Pale Emperor, film composer Tyler Bates is co-producer. Bates’s sense of drama and the epic, honed on Zack Snyder’s films and the Guardians of the Galaxy series, fits well with Marilyn Manson’s OTT sensibilities. This time round, though, after the bluesy theatre of their previous album, the band return to the attack of earlier works, but with the wannabe-Nine Inch Nails traits polished into something slicker and larger.
It doesn’t always work but there’s plenty to enjoy for both fans and newbies. “WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE” has a doom-funk pulse that propels its hammy punk fury along, “Saturnalia” contains guitar work that truly sneers, as well as a cracking chorus, and the closing slow-stomper “Threats of Romance” sounds like something The Sweet might have written for a musical, which turns out to be no bad thing.
The band’s eponymous singer-lyricist still has a way with words, ever-ready to kick up a stink, notably with the catchy “KILL4ME” and its chorus “Would you kill, kill, kill for me?”. However satirically this is intended, it’s bound to cause raised eyebrows, appearing so soon after the Las Vegas massacre. Manson has, after all, been blamed by tabloid fools for gun atrocities before. More entertaining are the opening lines of “JE$U$ CRI$IS” where he claims he writes songs to fuck and fight to, then offers the listener out for both.
Entertaining is the word. Marilyn Manson still deliver on the promise of their look and attitude. Heaven Upside Down is not quite in the league of its surprise swamp-rockin’ predecessor, but the best of it belts out of the traps with a pop-industrial panache that’s unarguable.
Overleaf: Watch the video for Marilyn Manson "WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE"
Immediately before recording their first album in 1977, Motörhead were on their last legs. They went into the studio after playing what was initially conceived as their farewell show. Appropriately, no one then could have predicted that the band formed by Hawkwind’s former bass player in 1975 would become integral to rock’s rich tapestry. It wasn’t even their first attempt to make an album: one begun in 1975 had been shelved.
September and October see a deluge of new releases. Everybody and their aunt puts out an album as autumn hits, so theartsdesk on Vinyl appears this month (and next) in a slightly expanded edition. As ever, the fare on offer is as diverse as possible, from black metal to Afro-funk via film and TV soundtracks. All musical life is here, ripe and waiting.
VINYL OF THE MONTH
Foo Fighters are a global superstar act. And why not, as the late film critic Barry Norman used to say. After seeing them at Glastonbury, they strike me as an irresistible proposition; their Sonic Highways TV documentaries, about music in American cities, are superb; and Dave Grohl, even after decades in the spotlight, still seems like a top fellow. Someone said to me recently they didn’t like him because he was “too nice”. That’s stupid, isn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to share a beer over a barbecue with him?
Concrete and Gold involved a lot of barbecuing. Recorded at a studio complex on Sunset Boulevard with pop producer Greg Kurstin of Adele/Sia/Lily Allen fame, each day would end with a big old meat-fry and booze-up. Others in nearby studios would join in. Thus, this is likely the only rock album to feature a member of Boyz II Men (as well as backing vocal appearances from Justin Timberlake and Alison Mosshart). It comes across as a shiny, giant stadium rock event, so polished it glimmers, like ELO having it out with Cheap Trick or, on the monster-riffing “La Dee Da”, The Sweet. The enjoyment in its making is more than evident.
Grohl always wants to challenge himself, and recent albums have had parameters set to achieve this, but his band would benefit enormously from a complete musical rethink. They’re so talented and engaged with what they do, yet while they're masters of the vast melodic chorus, and of filling every inch of sonic canvas to build a MASSIVE sound, the format for their songs is predictable. And they also drift into vintage rock pastiche, especially on the title track, which is, in essence, a tribute to Pink Floyd's “Comfortably Numb”. Never mind. Songs such as the Queen-meets-Muse monster “The Sky Is a Neighbourhood” are air-punching gig-slayers, while “Happy Ever After (Zero Hour)” showcases Grohl in Cat Stevens-ish catchy campfire mode.
Concrete and Gold is fun, it’s good-natured and full of verve, and there are parts of it that zing, but this is Foo Fighters' ninth album. Don’t they ever feel like really changing things up? Maybe not. It works for them, after all, and they enjoy it. Then again, someone just popped their head around the door and said, “Is this Foo Fighters? Why do they always sound the same?”
Overleaf: Watch the video for Foo Fighters "The Sky is a Neighbourhood"
The cover of Alice Cooper’s first album in six years shows the erstwhile Vincent Furnier with two heads. This, one assumes, is supposed to provide a neat little illustration of Paranormal’s musical content which is spread over two discs.
If there’s a downside to the resurgence of vinyl, it’s that all that’s left in most charity shops these days is James Galway and his cursed flute and Max Bygraves medley albums. Then again, there’s always new stuff coming in so it’s down to everybody to get in there quick, before the local record shops hoover up all the gems. And there it is. Many small towns now have local record shops again. That’s surely something to celebrate.