Honestly, I don’t really see anything being released today that interests me. The lists I’ve seen are short in general compared to other weeks. Sure, the Black Eyed Peas are releasing something, there’s a couple of greatest hits coming out, a Glee album and a three disc Heaven 17 reissue are coming out, but nothing’s really catching my fancy.
It seems to me that this is still prime time to be churning out stuff in preparation for Christmas. I expected to see more greatest hits collections or box sets coming out. Traditionally as the end of December draws nearer you see less and less coming out but it seems to me like this has come up faster than it has in previous years. Has the recording industry shot its wad for the year? Once Black Friday’s over, is it not even worth bothering with until next year? I’m not sure.
Something a little curious did come out today though - the Lambchop Box Set. It’s an eight CD collection that Amazon has for $107.00. Allmusic describes it as “chamber pop” which I find incredibly interesting, just not $107.00 interesting.
So for Black Friday I ended up just getting this and the Jimi Hendrix Christmas EP. Love Garden didn’t have any copies of the Sinatra album and the Black Keys 2-LP set was $40, but I still might end up going back and picking it up.
I’m still not 100% sure why I got this. Metallica’s a great live band, sure, but I’ve got a buttload of live material from them and this didn’t really have any songs I couldn’t find elsewhere. I suppose I was hoping playing for the small crowd (~150) would result in a looser performance with some suprises. To a certain extent I suppose it is but not as much as I had hoped. There’s a lot of chatter in between songs where the band tries to act like an up and coming act, but they go back to the well too often for that and it becomes tedious.
The album has the following songs:
- No Remorse
- Fuel
- Havester of Sorrow
- Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
- For Whom the Bell Tolls
- Master of Puppets
- Sad But True
- Motorbreath
- Seek and Destroy
At the end of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” there is an impromptu version of “The Frayed Ends of Sanity” with what sounds like an audience member singing.
Metallica’s another band who has a pretty tight sound based on lots of touring and that’s on display here. Despite the size of the crowd, they don’t half-ass it and play just as hard as they would for an arena. With the exception of “Fuel”, every song on here is a favorite of mine and I like that they left out overplayed songs like “One” and “Enter Sandman”.
Overall a pretty solid effort and since most of the recent live stuff I have is digital, it’s nice to have Metallica live material in a physical format. It’s definately cool of the band to offer something like this to independent record stores, I feel like they went above and beyond on this one.
Well first thing’s first, I just discovered that Maestro Alex Gregory has a website now. He also has a new album Bach on Steroids with a great cover though it doesn’t compare with Paganini’s Last Stand. I also saw that you can purchase MP3s of his four albums on Amazon. I would love to get all of them but for not I’ll pick up the new one and Paganini’s Last Stand.
I really love this song - it’s one you don’t hear much about any more. It was such an odd selection as a single and the video’s pretty bizarre, although it has the same vibe as “Undercover of the Night”. Undercover isn’t one of my favorite Stones albums, but I really like this as a departure from their usual stuff.
“This speech is my recital, I think it’s very vital”
Two thirds of the way into Jackyl’s set at the Midland theatre, DMC (of Run-DMC fame) launched into a version of “It’s Tricky” and received the loudest reaction of the night. For me this was completely unexpected - this was a crowd of die-hard rock fans although the vast majority were around for Run-DMC’s rise in popularity. The fact that he received such an incredible response shows what an impact Run-DMC made in the music world. The songs DMC performed with Jackyl (”It’s Tricky”, “Just Like a Negro”, and “Walk This Way”) were the highlight of Wednesday night’s sold-out Jackyl concert at the Midland Theatre.
The rest of Jackyl’s set was solid. They mixed songs off their new album, such as “My Moonshine Kicks Your Cocaine’s Ass” and “When Moonshine and Dynamite Collide”, with old favorites like “Down on Me” and “I Stand Alone”. This is a band that has spent a lot of time honing their live show on the road and it shows. The crowd was completely into it from beginning to end.
Opening the show was the Nigel Dupree Band featuring the son of Jackyl singer Jessie James Dupree. They put on a good show back when I saw them open for Cinderalla back in July and the delivered another good set on Wednesday. The major difference between the two performances was that Nigel Dupree now sounds more like his father than before. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or not, just something I noticed.
