Nickelback...?

Yesterday I was asked why I hate Nickelback so much. It must be said that what followed was purely my viewpoint and not a definitive article on the merit of the band.

The roots of this start around 1999-2000 when I worked in a Sydney office where the radio was always on, with the dial welded on Triple M - the station for all things rock. At the time Post-Grunge was a "thing". Bands mining this sound were a dime-a-dozen. 3 Doors Down, Stonesour, Staind, Matchbox 20, Live, and a bloody awful but thankfully short-lived band called Default were all given gracious amounts of airtime. Nickelback were also part of this esteemed group.

The problem with these bands is that, after a while, if you shut your eyes and listen you'd think they were all the same band. Such was the lack of personality they all shared. Add into the mix the constant repetition that commercial radio have turned into an art form and you have a recipe for disaster with me. If familiarity breeds contempt, what does ubiquity breed? Pure hatred?

All these years later, a new Nickelback record sounds like an old Nickelback record. As I think their sound was contrived to start with the fact that they haven't evolved their sound in 15 years leads me to think that they have designed and calculated their sound for maximum sales potential. You might think there is nothing wrong with that, and maybe there isn’t. Personally I just don’t think there is any integrity in it, and that is not what I look for in music.

I'm looking for bands and artists who create music as the purest expression of their souls and emotions. I want to hear musicians playing at the peak of their powers, as opposed to creating something that adds up to less of the sum of all the parts. The counter argument is that the players in Nickelback are very talented. I agree, but they don't demonstrate it on their albums. If they're that talented, they are capable of far more than the mediocrity they've shown us already.

Still, Nickelback are resilient enough to ignore the haters. They're rightfully not going to care what I think. And more power to 'em for that.

Again, this is one writers view and not a definitive statement. Like everything else on these pages, it is the start of a discussion. Counter arguments welcome as long as they are tastefully supplied.

Remake/Remodel #6: Charlie Hunter Trio does Nirvana

In what appears to be a perfect fit for a segment titled "Remake/Remodel", today we look at Nirvana's "Come As You Are".

Much has been written of Nirvana's sound, how they intended to sound like the Pixies, emulating the soft quiet of their verses mixed with shrieking loudness in the choruses of their songs. It has even been mooted that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has a guitar riff that is a knockoff of "More Than A Feeling" by Boston. That is a statement that is not without credibility.

But Kurt Cobain had a habit of recycling and regurgitating. The riff to "Smells..." does have the same rhythm pattern as "More Than A Feeling", but the chords are different. It was different enough to avoid trouble, but "Come As You Are" was not so lucky.

The riff for this song was the subject of a lawsuit from British alternative band Killing Joke, who claimed that the riff to "Come as you Are" was a slowed down version of the riff in their song "Eighties". To my ears, Killing Joke appear to have a winning case.



It has also been speculated that this was one of the reasons that Kurt was so depressed before he died. He loved Killing Joke and didn't intend to rip them off. But we'll never know for sure. What we do know is that Killing Joke dropped the lawsuit in the wake of Kurt's death.

Musically it is a slow burner of a track, with the dark, heavily processed run of notes in the verse, with the heavy guitars making an appearance in the bridge section "Oh I swear that I don't have a gun...", giving a bit of light among the shade.

In the wake of Kurt's passing in 1994, there were a huge wave of tributes and covers. One of the more interesting ones, in my view, was a cover of "Come As You Are" by the Charlie Hunter Trio. Charlie Hunter is a jazz guitarist and this track was my first introduction to his work.

Charlie Hunter is amazing from the point of view that he plays a hybrid guitar with 3 bass strings and 5 guitar strings, enabling him to play lead guitar and bass lines all at once. It is truly remarkable what he does. In the intro to his version, he plays "Come As You Are" in the bass line, and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in the guitar line - all at once. I don't know how he does it, but it blows my mind.

VERDICT: I don't really have a favourite of the two. The original is great as it is. Charlie Hunter does a version that takes the bare bones of the original and takes it to a new place entirely. It does amazing things that I never though could be possible and is makes my head spin every time I hear it.

What do you think? Drop us a line in the comments below.

A Reflection on Grunge, 20 Years On

I tweeted on the weekend:

Nirvana never intended to change the world. But I'm bloody glad they did. #20years #RIPKurt
— Sound and the Fury (@sound_fury_pod) April 5, 2014

Kurt Cobain has been dead for 20 years now. And it is with some trepidation that I remember his passing. It is a contentious one that has confused, upset and infuriated people for years.

Kurt, and by extension, Nirvana, were not particularly innovative. Nor were they the most talented band in the world, nor were they the flag-bearers of any particular cause, mission, concept or idea.

What they were, however, were the right band at the right time. Music in 1991 was boring. If you lived outside of any capital city in Australia there was very little alternative media to amuse you. Triple J, the lone bastion of alternative music and culture, was only starting to go national, but most regional centres didn't have it yet. There was no internet as such. You had to make do with what the radio commercial stations fed you.

What was the prevailing musical fashion of the day in rock music in Australia?

Hair metal.

Motley Crue. Guns n' Roses. Skid Row. Aerosmith. Metallica. Poison. Warrant. Bon Jovi. RATT. WASP.

The music, the imagery, the costumes, the gimmickery, the wankery, the cookie-cutter feel to it all. It was stale by then. I was bored. Many, many other young people like myself were feeling the same.

Nirvana's "Nevermind" album, was issued with little fanfare in September 1991 around the same time as Metallica's self titled "Black" album and Guns 'n Roses' colossal ego-trip "Use Your Illusion". The industry wasn't expecting much from it: maybe it might sell gold (500,000 copies in the US). By January 1992, it had taken Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" off the top of the US Billboard album chart and the lead single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" hit number 1 on the Australian Singles chart, and stayed there for a number of weeks. Nobody saw it coming.

What was the net result of this? Michael Jackson struggled to have a number 1 album ever again. RATT, Motley Crue, Skid Row, WASP, Poison, Warrant and other hair-sprayed confections were blown out of the water. Independent music was given greater exposure, and a lot of people heard a lot of great music they would never have heard otherwise. Guns 'n Roses and Metallica survived it all. But G'nR failed to deliver a timely follow up and were quickly forgotten. Metallica did change their image and were pilloried for it. Bon Jovi changed their sound to be more commercial radio friendly and survived. Rock became alternative, and the alternative scene is still defining music trends to this day.

They'd changed the world without really trying.

The down side? Kurt Cobain himself really struggled to be the one everybody wanted a piece of. He struggled to reconcile this age-old facade that mega-selling bands have no artistic credibility. He couldn't reconcile the need to starve for your art with working to live. His depression got worse. The tortured artist became even more so. The illicit drugs messed up his mind until...

...that fateful day.

Kurt didn't need to go to the lengths he did. He had the world at his fingertips, the ear of music fans everywhere. The record company would have given him carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wanted to. I've always said he could put out an album full of elephant farts and still have a million selling album: such is the amazing cache that the Nirvana/Cobain name carries. Everything he committed to vinyl is pure and honest - it was real, never contrived. He should never have worried about his artistic integrity: only when you become a parody of your former self on record do you need to worry about that. And there was no sense that that was on the horizon.

Kurt was a hero to people because he gave of himself - probably a little too much. Millions of people knew he was the real deal, and his honesty - in his lyrics and his songs - spoke volumes to people who were fed up of the manufactured idols on MTV; the useless politicians, and the self-indulgent wankers in hair metal bands singing about unattainable (for us, at least) women and other shit that has no relevance to us.

The problem was, he never wanted to be an idol. He was not a spokesperson for a generation of disaffected teenagers, and he knew it. He felt like a fraud. The public wanted him to be something he wasn't prepared to be. He was an average bloke in a rock band. The public knew that, but they wanted more.

No-one knows what goes through the minds of someone in such a low depressive state like that. It feels odd to celebrate someone who ended their life in the way they did. But that doesn't take away the value of the contribution they made to music during their lifetime.

I'm glad Nirvana and "Nevermind" changed the world. We're almost due for another one...

Alice In Chains Unplugged

It's interesting evaluating an artist's work after his or her passing. Especially one whose life and work was so heavily marked and affected by their own life choices.

With Alice In Chains, of course I'm talking about the late Layne Staley, whose heroin addiction was the prism through which his world view was seen, and as such that is the prism that, for better or worse, his lyrics and music was filtered through.

Ultimately, it was this addiction that claimed his life, but it also incapacitated him, and effectively ran the band off the road, right at the height of their career in the mid-1990s.

When I first heard the band's breakthrough single "Would?" in 1992 at the insistence of a schoolmate of mine, I hated it. As the band's legend grew, and their reputation as hard drug users, my interest in the band was killed off.

It was this unplugged show that changed my mind. Hearing it purely in audio format, the power of the music is what shone through. The songs are uniformly strong and almost always feature the bands trademark harmonies, which are almost always a perfect fifth, lacking a major or minor tonal centre.

The beauty of the "Unplugged" format was that you got to see and hear the artists without the layers of effects and distortion applied to their instruments. This didn't work too well for Nirvana (in my view) but in the case of Alice In Chains, it was a perfect demonstration of their strengths while removing the aspects of their sound that they would usually hide behind.

This album proved to me that here was a band with a strong back catalog with talented musicians who can blend their various talents in an impressive format.

The band obviously draw heavily from their two acoustic EPs "Jar of Flies" and "Sap", but they treat us to acoustic arrangements of songs from their heavy albums too. Of particular note is the acoustic treatment of "Down In A Hole" which sounds like it should have been acoustic all along.

Recorded in 1996, it turns out that this was one of the last public performances by Alice In Chains. It was the first for some time, and one of the last with Layne, who died in early 2002. As such, Layne looks like he spent the entire show in a typical kind of narcotic haze that makes you wonder how he managed to play this show at all. Still, it is great to have such a wonderful souvenir of the band's talents in their rawest form.

Apparently, tickets were extremely hard to come by to this show, and were offered up at something like US$300 a pop (unheard of at the time). The four members of Metallica had front row seats. Bassist Mike Inez wasted no time getting stuck into the Metallica lads and their (then) brand-new short haired look (it's a heinous crime to cut your hair if you're a metal band, apparently) by scrawling "Friends don't let friends get friends haircuts..." (sic) on his bass.

Anyway, here below is the full performance of Alice In Chains unplugged, complete with between-song improv stuff, and a stuff-up and retake of "Sludge Factory". There is a few choice words in this broadcast that would make it somewhat Not Safe For Work and small children, just so that you are warned.

Enjoy!

Sunday Sessions: Neil Young and Pearl Jam

In 1993, at the height of the grunge era, the MTV Video Music awards happened and, as expected, a whole heap of alternative rock bands scooped the pool of awards. Pearl Jam don't usually turn up for awards shows, but I'm glad they did this time. They went on stage and performed a song that hadn't been released as of yet, and then, they introduced a special guest...

Once upon a time, Pearl Jam could be intense and fiery, as well as pensive and angsty. In 1993, they were full of sprite and energy. The track they played at the 1993 VMAs was "Animal" which was to appear on their forthcoming second LP "VS". They plowed through the song with their usual fervor, and then they welcome Neil Young to the stage to jam with them. They play Neil's social justice anthem "Rockin' In The Free World", a song from his 1989 LP "Freedom".

It seems like an odd pairing, but in retrospect, Neil had been working semi-regularly with a very grunge-y styled band for about 20 years (by that point) called Crazy Horse. Crazy Horse specialised in massive volume, feedback squalls, long jams and ragged but tight playing. The bands of the 90s grunge movement considered him "The Godfather of Grunge". In this performance, Neil out-grunges Pearl Jam with more noise and feedback than they ever did. The band turned in a solid, thumping performance of the song before Neil puts on a masterclass in amplifier torture that would have made Kurt Cobain jealous. Here's an old troubadour showing the young-uns how it was done, and they loved it.

This pairing was both timely and poignant, as less than 12 months later, the self-deprecating leader of the grunge movement, Kurt Cobain, was quoting lyrics from one of Neil Young's heaviest, grungiest songs ("Hey Hey My My (Into The Black)" from the "Rust Never Sleeps" LP) in his suicide note...

This match-up of young (no pun intended) and old led to a full scale collaboration LP in 1995 called "Mirror Ball" which featured 11 new Neil Young tunes played by Pearl Jam as a backing band. It's too bad that the new material Neil supplied for the album wasn't as strong as "Rockin' In The Free World".

This is Pearl Jam in their prime, playing with a passion that has all but dissipated from the band, both on record and on stage. It's thrilling to watch (it's too bad they didn't play with anywhere near this much energy when I saw them in Sydney in 1998). And then, to see ol' Neil come on and play one of his greatest songs with the band is a real treat. Pearl Jam regularly use this song to close the encore of their stage show. Take a look below.

NOTE: apologies for the poor audio fidelity. The uploader transferred this clip from an old VHS cassette.

Enjoy!