Oh, Geoff, no.

From Blabbermouth.net:

In a new interview with Tom Leu of the “Sound Matters” show, former QUEENSRŸCHE frontman Geoff Tate was asked which album from his career he thinks is the best representation of who he is as a singer, songwriter and an overall artist. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Wow, that’s a tough one. I’m really, really partial to the last album that QUEENSRŸCHE did together with me [2011’s ‘Dedicated To Chaos’]. That album had something incredibly special about it. It was an album that everybody in the band contributed so much to, and we were really in a high-level writing mode at the time. And I love the way the album sounds. I think Kelly Gray did an amazing job on the production on that record. And I think it’s a well-rounded record; it has a lot of different kinds of songs on it. It shows the depth of the writing of the band, and really where we were at that point.”

An album that everybody in the band contributed to? That’s not the way I remember it from reading all the court documents in the wake of Tate getting fired from Queensryche. I don’t know where all the guys’ declarations could be found on the Internet anymore, but they all spelled out quite clearly that by that point Queensryche was pretty much the Geoff Tate Show. I remember reading that Michael Wilton interview in Guitar World and being quite flabbergasted, and that was before I had a clue of the discord in the band at the time (although that interview certainly hinted at it as far as he was concerned). I don’t even know why Tate’s saying all thmis, or what he thinks he has to gain by doing so.  I don’t know to what extent he’s rehabilitated himself in recent years — but I for one will give him credit for having made an absolutely stunning turnaround as a singer, at least, and I talked as much shit about him as anyone. And I can’t be the only one. Does he really want to squander that goodwill to try to rewrite history?

Friday music musings, 19.03.2021

Oh hey, I knew I had more to say the other day but was drawing a blank.

Boy, Eddie Trunk sure was pissed at NARAS over the Grammys…

And I’m over here like, “he seems surprised, and damn if I know why.” I mean, yeah, a Grammy isn’t all that. Hell, all you need to know about the Grammys is that Tenacious D won more of them than Ronnie James Dio, and they won theirs for a cover of a Dio song. 

But see, the thing is, the Grammys have always been behind the curve when it comes to hard rock and metal in general. Everybody remembers Jethro Tull’s Crest of a Knave winning the Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance in 1989 over Metallica’s …And Justice for All. And yeah, that was something. But the bigger thing about that was, 1989 was the inaugural year for that award. So there had been a good 20 years of genre-defining stuff that had already gone unrecognized. And NARAS can’t do like Rolling Stone did (with their re-reviews of all the metal albums they gave shitty reviews to the first time around) and go back and retroactively recognize all the music for which the awards didn’t exist back then. I have said before that I don’t put much stock in awards in general anymore, but this sort of thing is why I don’t do it for the Grammys in particular. It’s just so emblematic of what’s wrong with them.

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Charley Crockett’s James Hand tribute album, 10 for Slim, is pretty killer.  I’ll have to listen to it more, but upon first listen, this song here is my favorite.

Tuesday music musings, 16.3.21

Oh, hey, it’s been a while!

Every so often I have to see if a given artist is as bad as one or more of my favorite music bloggers makes them out to be.

SPOILER ALERT: Niko Moon is every bit as bad as Farce the Music makes him out to be.

Song: “Yeah we pickin’ on them guitars just right, everybody singin’ ‘Dixieland Delight’…”

My literal reaction: “Oh, AS FUCKING IF.”

What really burns my ass about this, though, is that East Coast pop music writers will talk about country music being racist, but they won’t say anything about country radio driving this bullshit white-boy R&B to No. 1 (and they’ll talk about “country music’s ‘Next Emo-Rap Star,'” who is — SURPRISE! — yet another suburban rich white kid) while the likes of Charley Crockett, who in addition to his illustrious catalog to date just released a tribute album of the songs of stone-country Texas troubadour James Hand, continue to go ignored.

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This, on the other hand, is pretty spectacular.

I heard “Unbreakable” from this same album (2013’s Nemesis) on one of my Spotify daily mixes some time ago and decided to take the album for a spin, and I was not disappointed. You really can’t go wrong with any kind of power/symphonic metal from that side of the pond. What makes this even more remarkable is the current lineup of the band — the lineup that recorded this album — comprises none of its original members.