Good morning, class, and welcome to “Remedial Noise Rock 101.”
\nI’m Mr. Thelen, your instructor. Today, we’re going to review the
\nmajor mistakes a group can make when releasing an album and how
\nthey could have been avoided.<\/p>\n
Our subject for today’s discussion is Georgia grind-rockers
\nNorma Jean and their sophomore release,
\nO God, The Aftermath<\/i>. Now, I’m not forgetting that this was
\nessentially a re-birth for the group, as they had replaced their
\nsinger and bassist since their previous release
\nBless The Martyr And Kiss The Child<\/i>, so a bit of uncertainty
\ncould be expected — even forgiven — from Norma Jean. But they are
\nstill an established band, and they make several big mistakes with
\nthis release. We’ll try to cover them all in one class period, so
\ntry to save your questions until the end of class.<\/p>\n
First things first, the cardinal mistake made: Don’t piss off
\nthe reviewer by making things difficult for them. I’ve been doing
\nthis gig long enough to know that occasionally we get sent material
\nthat is still in the “final polishing” phase, and I can live with
\nthat. But to send a reviewer a disc with copy protection that you
\nhave to install (sorry, I don’t install programs I don’t know
\nanything about), and each track broken up into 30- to 60-second
\nsnippets to prevent copying or posting to file-sharing services —
\nJesus, I needed a fuckin’ schematic to figure out which track I was
\non, and by the end of the disc, I really didn’t care. Memo to Solid
\nState Records: if this is how you send review copies out, don’t
\nbother sending me any more. (And, for the record: I have
\n
\nnever<\/i>
\n<\/b> posted any pre-release CD on any file-sharing service. I don’t
\nlike the inference a disc like this sends to me — namely, that I,
\nas a reviewer, am to blame for the file-sharing mess the industry
\nfinds itself in. How dare you.)<\/p>\n
Okay, now that I’m off my soapbox, lesson two: I admit that I’m
\ngetting old and that each new generation is supposed to have music
\nthat confounds the previous. But would it kill anyone to include a
\ncopy of the lyrics so I could at least pretend I was able to follow
\nthe songs? (Keep in mind, I’m working off a pre-release copy;
\npossibly the commercial release does include them.)<\/p>\n
Lesson three: unless you have music that really backs up your
\nwhimsy, giving songs double-meaning names doesn’t mean shit. Even
\nglancing at the track listing on the disc, I had to groan a bit
\nwhen I saw song titles like “Bayonetwork,” “Disconnecktie” and
\n“Charactarantula.” Using clever names like these doesn’t make you
\nmore like Tool.<\/p>\n
Lesson four: when you’ve lost the listener’s interest due to the
\nfirst three faults, you really need to have music that slams home
\nthe point that you’re a band to be taken seriously. And, I’m sorry,
\ngang, but I didn’t hear much of that on
\nO God, The Aftermath<\/i>. The listener goes from the atonal
\npounding on “Murderotica” to some semblance of musicianship on
\n“Bayonetwork” and “Delemmachine,” but Cory Brandan’s undecipherable
\nscreams keep me from gaining any new insight into this band. The
\nonly real glimmer of hope comes on “Disconnecktie,” which features
\nsome of the best songwriting and playing on the disc, and did get
\nme interested in this disc again for a few minutes.<\/p>\n
Granted, most of these criticisms will fall on deaf ears, and
\nfans of the noise-rock genre will get a thrill slam-dancing to
\nO God, The Aftermath<\/i>. But Norma Jean has a long way to go
\nbefore I hold them up in comparison to such bands as, say, Nine
\nInch Nails or Pantera.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26993,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[7140],"rating":[11204],"class_list":["post-38311","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-norma-jean","rating-rating-c-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=38311"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=38311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}