Category: Uncategorized

4 Year Anniversary Massive Party Extravaganza

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This kind of snuck up on me, but it’s time to celebrate this blog’s anniversary. It has now been four years since I started this up. I didn’t know what to think when I started it, how long I would be into it or what I wanted to “get” from doing this. I guess I can now answer that I’ll go at least four years.

I did have a few extended and unplanned quiet periods late last year and through part of this year. That was due to a new job and then a new house. The house is fantastic and everything is going great with it. The job is also well, though as I creep closer to 50 years old my body is telling me it might be time to do something besides drive a forklift for a living. There will be some kind of occupation and schedule change in the near future, but I can do all that at the company I work for now so it shouldn’t be too big of a deal. I don’t expect it to impact this site much, if at all.

As for the site – I had a big celebration of 1984’s music last year on its 40th anniversary. That kind of sputtered out toward the end when I changed jobs but I got through the bulk of stuff. This year I haven’t had any grand designs on anything and I don’t have much in the pipeline. I am still planning a massive tribute to the music of 1991 on that 40th anniversary, but that is still years down the road.

I do also have a plan for a very long review series, one that will take about a year with a post a week. That series likely won’t get rolling until later in 2026 or even ’27 but it is one massive thing at least on the edges of the radar.

Beyond that I have no big plans or grand designs right now. Posts will be albums, songs and the still-running series where I pick five songs from a year. I’ll have more on that come Friday, as I’ve decided to kick that series into gear and get it out of the way by year’s end.

One thing I will start doing in the near future is shifting focus on my album posts. I can pull out albums I’ve heard a bunch and write about those, that’s easy. I can also occasionally go after a record I don’t like just to say I don’t always cover stuff I like, which is fun but not something I want to do all the time.

Another avenue is to take on albums I haven’t heard much, if at all. I’ll start that up pretty soon and make it a semi-regular thing. These posts will be the “album of the week” posts, this isn’t a new series. But I figure it’d be worthwhile to spin some albums I don’t really know and give thoughts on them. I probably won’t do individual track grading when I do those. Hopefully I’ll take to this new idea and it will catch on as a new thing to do, kind of change things up a bit.

I have also been without an Iron Maiden series in awhile. I won’t revisit the singles series anytime soon as I am still very slowly collecting the ones I don’t have. I’ve landed a handful more but I’m entering territory where the stuff I still need is scarce and pricey. I might go ahead and start going through my bootlegs, though I’ll likely just do those here and there, not as a full-running series.

That is about all I have to say, thank you all who read, comment and all that. You will want to be around Wednesday because I have a whopper of a story I had never heard before and it is absolutely hilarious. See you then as I hit the road toward year five.

A Quick Update

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Obviously I didn’t post anything this week. There has been a lot going on and I’ve had a ton of stuff constantly on my mind, no real time to sit and iron out some posts.

Long story short, I have a new job nailed down. I’ll get a call early next week to finalize my start date and all that, which will be at least a few weeks from now.

The thing is this – once I start this new job, I’ll be working. It’s a lot of hours and on a night shift, so I will have to rearrange my time and see how things go to figure out how to keep posting here. It’s a lot of work but we are going to buy a house in the next several months so more money and more work only helps that cause.

Once I do get switched over and going at the new place, things might look different here for a bit. I don’t know if I’ll be able to hack posting an album every week, I simply may not have the spare time. Again, I’ll know more in the near future. I can handle doing the weekly thing I’ve been doing on Fridays still, that takes very little time. And I should be able to crap out another post per week, what exactly that will be remains to be seen. I do want to keep the site going and I’m a bit disappointed that I won’t be able to post in the way I have been, but all this new stuff takes precedence, of course.

Now, I won’t be switching over for a few more weeks so I’ll have time to slam out some posts for more of the 1984 albums I want to talk about through the remainder of this year. I may switch that format up a bit and go brief on them, that was a change I was considering down the line anyway and this whole series of life events serves to accelerate that nicely. But I should still be able to hammer out those 1984 posts, and still do stuff like a “best of 2024” list and all of that.

And also I’ll have more time to read other peoples’ posts and watch videos too. I haven’t done much of that this week, all of this job stuff has been consuming my mind and it’s been hard to focus on anything else. But everything is winding down now so it shouldn’t be a big deal going forward.

Enjoy your day and I’ll see you next week with more of my bullshit.

1984 Overdrive

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So the year is sort of winding down, we’re now into the final third. It will have implications on how I run things through the remainder of 2024.

I have been on a year-long quest to pay tribute to the music of 1984, I’ve discussed an album roughly every other week and also included a song on the weeks when I haven’t been doing albums. But as we are approaching the calendar flipping to ’25 I am going to adjust my approach.

As it stands, I have about enough albums I want to cover for the remaining weeks I would need to fill spots. So it will be 1984 from here until January. There is one exception baked in as I’ll have a Best of 2024 post sometime in December. And I may have one or two free slots where I might also discuss an album from this year. But beyond that I will kick the 1984 celebration up a notch to close it out with a bang.

As for songs I will still have some from ’84 that I want to talk about. But outside of that, my focus running out the year will go to this year. There are a fair few preview tracks from upcoming albums I want to discuss and also some songs already released this year, so ’24 will be my primary focus on the song front.

Now – once 2025 hits, I am closing the book on the 1984 celebration and I won’t be running any themes through the next year. I will simply choose albums I want to discuss, as I did before ’24. I won’t do another year-long theme again until 2031, which would mark the 40th anniversary of 1991. That was by far the most significant year in music to me so I will commemorate it in a huge way – that is, if I’m still running this in six years. We will see.

On another note – with the 1984 thing and also with me generally choosing albums that I tend to like or love, my reviews are often pretty glowing. I’ve probably given out more A grades than anything and in the past few weeks I’ve even handed out S’s like candy. That’s somewhat unavoidable with the 1984 thing going on – if I’m going to talk about those albums, they are often the ones with super high marks.

But next year I won’t be on any rails as far as album selection. So I will make a point to dig out some stuff that doesn’t quite clear the bar grade-wise. It will be a nice change of pace from what’s been going on lately, though again it’s understandable based on my theme and also that it’s far easier to talk about stuff you like. But I do look forward to going the other way and having at a few albums that maybe shouldn’t have been recorded.

That’s about all for this little update. Enjoy the rest of the year and I’ll see you with some bags of crap on the other side of it.

3 Year Anniversary Extravaganza

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Last Friday marked three years of this site, or at least three years of me actually using it. Three years is nothing “special” in the grand scheme of things but it’s nice that I was able to get this actually going and keep it running for that long. I wasn’t sure if I’d have the desire to truly do this when I started out, it was a roll of the dice.

And while I haven’t had the time or energy to put effort into improving things in some areas, I’m pretty well content with how things are going so I’m not going to make a huge push for anything soon. I might actually tweak a few design things and all that but I’m in no rush, things will happen as they may.

Posting will remain fairly consistent. Three posts a week works out nicely for now, an occasional fourth post might pop up here and there with other things I’d like to discuss but don’t fit the weekly templates I have going right now.

The 1984 celebration will continue until the end of this year. There are plenty more albums and songs to talk about and I’ll have a few more special posts about ’84 before the end. I don’t have much else huge planned for now, the albums of 2024 will come up as we get to the end of the year. But not much beyond that.

I won’t be doing the same scope of a thing for 1985 that I’ve done for 1984. I might do a few posts looking at the year as there was plenty of great music then too, but 1984 was pretty special and I wanted to truly commemorate that one. The remainder of the ’80’s will mostly just get looked at as time rolls on, there won’t be another in the style of what I’ve done this year.

That said, IF this site is still going in seven years, that does bring up 1991. I would do a year-long commemoration of it as I’ve done for ’84 as 1991 was easily the most significant year in music in my life. But that’s all dependent on the huge IF of this site still going in seven years. This is purely a hobby for me, I don’t have enough traffic to make money off the site so there’s nothing there in that respect. And eventually one day I’m going to get bored with doing this. If the 40th anniversary of 1991 comes along before I get bored enough to quit, then it’ll happen. If not, then obviously not.

I think that about covers it for this three year mark. Not much else to do but continue to celebrate the forty year mark of 1984.

Gojira impresses as heavy metal invades the Olympics

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I’m altering my post format this week due to what was breaking and ground-shaking stuff from Friday.

Friday was the official launch of the 2024 Summer Olympics, being held in Paris, France. This was obviously going to be a big deal from the jump, with Paris being one of the world’s most renowned and historical cities, the place has more culture in the cracks of its sidewalks than some entire nations have. But boy howdy I was not prepared for just how impactful it would be.

While some sporting events get going days before the festivities, the true start of the Olympics is the opening ceremonies. This usually involves the athletes marching into a stadium, some pageantry associated with the host country, some speeches and lighting a fire. I do personally love the Olympics but I often pass on the opening ceremony, generally nothing there for me.

But Paris went out of their way to command attention on Friday. The ceremony was not held in a stadium – rather it was spread out across the city, mostly along the River Seine where the athletes floated in a boat parade. The ceremony was a series of performances, filmed pieces and other bits strung together over a few hours.

Among the performances was that of long-running heavy metal act Gojira. They have been an active unit since the mid-90’s and rose to prominence in the metal scene in the mid-2000’s, and through the 2010’s became one of the biggest and most revered acts within metal. But their performance on Friday put them on a stage no act that can be considered extreme metal has ever been anywhere near.

Gojira did a take on a song from the French Revolution called Ça Ira, which translates to “it’ll be fine.” Gojira also teamed up with singer Marina Viotti, who has performed both opera and heavy metal through her career.

The performance was held on the Conciergerie building, which was once a royal building but was used to house royal prisoners during the Revolution. Marie Antoinette was a famous resident of the prison, and a headless guise of the former queen kicked off the performance.

Gojira played while standing in various windows of the Conciergerie, with other headless effigies of Antionette in other windows. Viotti was on a mock ship that was “floating” by the building, though not actually on the nearby river. The performance was of the highest production and also bombast, with flames shooting and a red mist of fireworks let off at the end, likely to symbolize the beheadings famous during the Revolution.

The entire Opening Ceremonies have been the talk of the world since Friday, with many in awe of the sheer craziness of the show, and others critical of certain aspects. Some, perhaps rightfully, were down on the somewhat disjointed nature of the whole thing and how it didn’t really play out watching in person, it was much more of a TV event. Others found less logical arguments to stew in, I won’t bother getting into those.

For Gojira this was a huge moment. Sure the band are well regarded across the metal landscape and are one of the more successful bands in heavy metal, but this was the Olympics. It’s one of the biggest stages anyone could ever perform on and is seen worldwide by many millions, if not billions. The US ratings indicate at least 26 million people watched.

Heavy metal has never been on a stage that big. Some bands have played massive festivals, but those shows didn’t really have a worldwide audience watching all at once. And especially for anything that can be classified as extreme metal, this is by far the biggest spotlight any band has ever been under.

Now, what will all of this translate to? It’s hard to say. I’m sure Gojira will get a nice bump out of all this. I don’t know if this will carry over to the scene as a whole and I don’t know if this will be any lasting sort of thing or if it’s just a plot point on a timeline, but it is as big as anything ever has been in metal.

Whatever happens, Gojira and Viotti’s performance on Friday was epic. Heavy metal has often been the red-headed stepchild of music but on a day full of talk, this performance stole the show in the eyes of many. I don’t know if this will translate to metal being more incorporated into big time events in the future and I doubt it will, but this was certainly something to behold. Bang your head or lose your head.

NBC and the Olympics famously lock down their footage of this stuff. A YouTube video is available but embedding is not permitted. Follow this link to watch the performance – https://youtu.be/TgzDfVfn6w8?si=FlObnwZuepNOFVFo

A Short Update and a Smooth Song

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I wanted to drop in real quick and provide an update. This wasn’t planned but I haven’t posted in about two weeks now.

Nothing terribly drastic has happened. The short of it is that we were looking to buy a house and it took up a ton of our time. Also we were running into various issues that were slowly sapping time and money away from us, so we made the call to pause our house search until the beginning of next year when we’ll have a bit more money to play with. Things are totally psycho in house-buying land right now.

Suspending our house hunting leads me to some unfortunate news for you, the reader – I will be back to posting next week. I am going to switch up the format a bit for one week. I’ll have four posts and each will be on a song. The songs will hail from 1984, 1994, 2004 and … well, I’ll let you guess the fourth one. After that I’ll resume my normal posting and also get more into the year-long celebration of 1984.

And on that note, let’s go ahead and use the rest of this post to talk about a song from 1984, that being the hit single Smooth Operator from Sade.

Smooth Operator hails from Sade’s debut album Diamond Life. This was the third single from that album. The song was originally written by Sade Adu and Ray St. John in their prior outfit Pride. St. John did not follow Adu into her new namesake band, but the song did.

This single would be a hit, scoring spots on a great deal of international charts but showing especially well in the US, where it landed at number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and took the top spot on the Adult Contemporary Chart.

As a quick note before I go on, the name Sade clearly references singer Sade Adu, but she very much intended for this group to be considered as a band unit, something she was adamant about through the years.

I’m not going to get too much into it, let’s just kick back and enjoy this great song. It’s a smooth, jazz-based track that gathered about as much crossover appeal as an artist could manage. The song’s about a con artist who gets by with their double crossing ways, though in some extended versions of stuff featuring another song from the album, the perpetrator does get busted. The song would help launch Sade’s career internationally, and the band would go on to have massive sales in the decade after. Cheers to a fantastic cut from 1984.

A Quick Site Update

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This post is just a quick update sort of thing for what’s going on and what’s to come in the summer and so on.

I will say this – life has been a bit nuts. It was last year and it’s had its moments so far this year. Nothing is bad or horrible or anything like that – but there are things going on that require attention and time and it detracts from time spent on this site and other stuff. I do think things might calm down by this fall but it’s gonna still be a bit of a bouncy house between now and then.

I haven’t been posting as frequently as I want to, but since this is just my own hobby blog I don’t guess it’s any huge deal. I would rather have a consistent schedule but it’s too tough to commit to right now. I don’t have to pause or quit or anything, but I do need to reel back my ambitions and just post the things I know I can get out with not a ton of time to do it in.

I am going to press forward with doing an album, a song and another kind of post each week. Something else may trickle in a bit later that is actually kind of easy to work on but even that will require a bit more time for me to set up, that might not hit till July or so. But I think I can pull off three posts a week if I limit my scope a bit and just stick to that.

I will be shelving any kind of long review series I’ve had planned and have been working on to some degree. I was going to do a deep dive through the Nevermore albums but I honestly just don’t have time for it. It’s something I can pick up later once time becomes more available. I had massive plans to actually sit and review every Neil Young album – it is something I want to do one day but that shit isn’t happening anytime soon. And I was going to rank every Iron Maiden song – I have bits and pieces of this going but it’s too big of a project right now and I’m going to set it to the side for the year.

Instead I will focus on my usual posts and my continued celebration of 1984. I can keep with that pretty well and offer up stuff on a consistent basis. My reach is often further than my grasp, just as a demon, and my plans are often more lofty than my realistic ability to execute them. Peeling back a bit should keep things on the level and let me get through the next few months.

I do want to thank everyone who drops by and spends a minute reading. I know many of you who comment and engage have your own sites and have had your own challenges with engagement and such the past year or two. I appreciate you all who comment here or discuss stuff from here with me in person, probably wouldn’t be much point in doing this without some level of feedback. I hope to keep seeing you around and I’ll also make more effort to keep up with your own works as well.

I’ll wrap it up here – though tonight I do have a special evening in store. I’ll see Uriah Heep and Saxon in concert. I was shocked earlier this year when the show was announced for my town, the venue is literally two miles away from my house. I’m not massively familiar with Uriah Heep but I’ve been jamming them a lot lately in prep for the show and they are fantastic, I’m looking forward to seeing them. Saxon I am a big fan of and this is a bucket list band that I finally get to see, it’s still crazy to me that they’re playing right down the road. I’ll take that in tonight and give you all a full report next week. Until then, enjoy the weekend (holiday for the US), and see you down the line.

Nevermore – Gold CD Remasters

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First things first – I clearly haven’t been posting this week. I was off work the week before, then when I went back this week I walked into an absolute meat grinder. My job gets busy this time of year but this week was insane to a degree beyond what I expected. Things are going to calm down some next week so I decided just to punt my posts to a week beyond in order to keep my time free.

So to the point of today’s post – recently I had to make a few “money moves,” and in the end I came out a hair ahead of the curve. It allowed me to shop around for a few things I’d wanted to buy and, all of a sudden, I noticed this set of gold-disc remasters of the Nevermore catalog on sale for a great price. These were done by Brutal Planet Records and seem to be the only licensed, in-print version of the Nevermore albums available now. Their former label Century Media doesn’t have any Nevermore stock on their site. But that’s fine, as these remasters are well worth the money.

So what’s sitting here is the seven full-length Nevermore albums, as well as two solo albums from guitarist Jeff Loomis and the first solo album from singer Warrel Dane. This is nearly a complete collection, but not quite. It does give me the idea to run through a series on the Nevermore albums and associated solo works. I won’t include Sanctuary in this as I feel they should be treated as a separate entity.

There is an EP, In Memory, that wasn’t a part of this bundle but is also available in the gold remaster series and I have it on the way. Nevermore also issued one single in their career, which seems odd but hey, it is what it is. I was able to find that for a decent price and it’s also en route to my mailbox.

There is another Warrel Dane solo album, Shadow Work, released in 2018 after his death. He was working on the album when he died and this was compiled from the recording sessions. I don’t own this yet but it is pretty easy to get so I’ll pick that one up soon too.

There is one other Nevermore piece – the 2008 live album Year Of The Voyager. I had this on both CD and DVD back when it released but they wound up parting ways with my CD shelf at some point. And as it would turn out, they are out of print and pretty hard to get right now. The DVD is unobtainable but the CD seemingly can be found within some reason. It is on streaming services so if worse comes to worse I can play it on there if I can’t hunt down a copy.

After I gather the rest of the stuff I will take some time to evaluate it and then later on in the year I’ll throw together a series going over everything in detail. I might as well since there is no hope of adding to the Nevermore catalog. The only component that might add to this series later on would be another Jeff Loomis solo album, which I can happily add in if and when that comes.

So all that will come later this year, I would guess it’ll be an after summer thing. I wasn’t planning on doing it but having all these nice gold remasters got the idea going for me. Something to look forward to later on in the year.

One other thing about the reissue set – each CD also came with a cool trading card in it. It’s a bit of a tricky collectible to be inside of a CD case, but luckily I have some protective sleeves for trading cards laying around so I can keep these in a spot where they’ll stay minty fresh.

Iron Maiden – The Band Index

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This post will offer up a series of links to the various posts and series I’ve written about Iron Maiden. They are my favorite band and I’ve covered them extensively here, with more to come, so I thought it’d be wise to create a central hub for easier navigation between all of the stuff I’ve posted over the years.

This will be updated with new posts as they come. Also I will eventually use this as a hub for any Maiden associated acts, such as Bruce’s solo albums, Blaze’s stuff or the wealth of side projects and other solo albums out there.

Albums

I have covered a handful of Maiden’s studio records and eventually will get to them all. I’ll just post a list of all the albums and link up to the posts for those already done.

Iron Maiden

Killers

The Number Of The Beast

Piece Of Mind

Powerslave

Somewhere In Time

Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son

No Prayer For The Dying

Fear Of The Dark

The X Factor

Virtual XI

Brave New World

Dance Of Death

A Matter Of Life And Death

The Final Frontier

The Book Of Souls

Senjutsu

The Studio Album Ranking

Here lies the post where I ranked all of the albums. Simple enough.

The Album Cover Ranking

I have also ranked the album covers. That is in two parts – Part One here, Part Two here.

The Singles Series

I’ve ran through my collection of singles and discussed the ones I presently own. I am planning on restarting the series to fill in the gaps at a future point in time when I’ve bought more.

This is the first post in the series, and this is the last post. Links to each entry in the series are contained in each post for your navigational ease.

The Live Album Series

I did a full run-through series in the same vein as the singles series. Here is the first post of that series and the, for now, most recent live album. There is also a live album ranking and a wishlist for stuff I hope gets released officially at some point. This series also has links to each post in the series within it.

Unplayed Songs Live

This two-parter looks at the songs Maiden haven’t played on a live stage. The post was heavily updated to reflect the current Future Past Tour, which knocked the list down a fair bit. Part One is here, Part Two is here.

Songs

I occasionally take a look at a specific Maiden song. I have not done a great deal of these yet but this list will grow over time.

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Alexander The Great

Charlotte The Harlot (this is all four songs in the saga)

Aces High

2 Minutes To Midnight

One-off Posts

This section will compile various posts I’ve done regarding Maiden. I am still putting this list together and will update it soon.

Other updates will come as I scan through my old posts to identify anything I missed. I hope this assists readers who want to check out the scope of things I’ve done.

For questions, comments or other concerns, use the comment form below or use my contact page to reach me.

Two Year Anniversary Spectacular Bonanza

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Last Wednesday, August 2nd, was the big occasion, which I missed for reasons spelled out here. But I’ve now been at this site for two years. A late party is still a party, no?

It has been an interesting year – I’ve changed my mind a lot on stuff I want to do. It’s no big deal, this site isn’t big stakes or anything so I can pretty well do what I want. I may switch a format up again in the coming months but as of right now I’m totally undecided on that, and if so it won’t happen any time soon.

I was pleasantly surprised a few months ago to find my posts being dumped into the Google mobile feed, whatever that deal is called. In April of this year I got more views than I had for all of 2022, and that new monthly trend has largely held. While a number of posts have been pored over on it, the Iron Maiden singles series was the main focus of all of that. Perhaps the numbers will hold, if for nothing else than to feed my ego.

One thing I do want to start doing is focusing more on social media – it’s the one area I haven’t generated a great deal of action. Someone buying and then messing with his new toy was the main culprit. Social media is a slog and it can be tough to get any kind of buzz on there, but I won’t get anywhere without putting in some kind of effort.

I will divert for just a moment and talk about music in 2023 – man, there just isn’t a whole lot hitting me real hard this year. I’m sure I’ll be able to fill out a top 10 list at year’s end and there are a few pretty anticipated releases still coming, but this year has seemed kind of quiet compared to the last few. Nothing necessarily wrong with that but it’s kind of hard to write “yeah, that was ok to hear” over and over again. But there’s always the boundless past to explore.

As far as what’s coming up in the rest of 2023, be assured there is more Iron Maiden on the way. Hell, I could probably run various Iron Maiden series for a few years (and I probably will). The Maiden live album series will be up in September and I’ll let that close out the year, then I’ll open 2024 with the psychotically ridiculous song ranking. I’ll also have a new review set coming soon, probably also sometime in September. It’s not huge but it also should run through the next few months.

There will also be a handful of gig recaps on the way as I’m actually going to a few shows in the next little bit. I’m not certain if I’m attending a few more big-ticket concerts (though I’m going to try), but there are a few smaller club shows I will certainly be at. I also totally forgot to run down a show I went to earlier in the summer so I’ll try to get my lazy ass on that soon.

One other thing that will pop up relatively soon – I’ll start doing more one-off album reviews, these with actual scores and all that. There’s no great “system” to it, stuff will just show up when I have it ready. There’s also a fair chance a lot more of the heavier stuff will be included in these, it’s a more suitable format for that than my typical “Album of the Week” presentation.

That probably wraps up all I wanted to say. As always, thank you to all who read these piles of words. I know time is a fleeting thing and there are millions of other things to read, see and do, and I really appreciate everyone who stops by to spend a moment here.

It’s on to year three for this site. And yes, tomorrow’s post is related to Iron Maiden. No great mysteries here.