Porcupine Tree

So Porcupine Tree came and went, Metropolis September 29th. It was a hell of a show. Everyone was on the ball that night.

King's X:

Pretty boring generic rock band, I said to myself a few times; Get off the stage, I want Porcupine Tree. The singer's bass sound was too loud and, well, bass-filled, but not in the common misconception that bass should be low in the mix, in the way that the guy had the "bass" knob on his amp turned WAY too high. They finally finished their set and Porcupine Tree came on.

Porcupine Tree:
They played a double set, the first being the entire first side of The Incident, the new recently released album and I must say it is so much better live than on the album. Some truly great performances leading one to head-bang and raise their lighter in the air. After a 10 minute break they came back on and played the second set, which was mostly older stuff. I was surprised to hear Russia On Ice, and they played it off excellently. Steven Wilson's guitar was really cool, as it had a screen built into it playing some kind of visualizer, kind of trippy, making me wonder how many stoned people were locked into it at that moment. One thing that bugged me a tiny bit about their set was that they played Normal (essentially Sentimental Part 2) as well as Trains (Sentimental is basically Trains Part 2). Apart from that I had no problems with their excellent show with perfect stage presence as always.

A great show.

Children of Bodom

So, on September 23rd I went to see the Children of Bodom Concert.

I was thoroughly unimpressed. It was at the Metropolis in Downtown Montreal, and I must say once again the Metropolis has failed to meet my basic expectations for proper sound mixing. Each band had the exact same sound, which was a loud mesh of mostly guitars drowning everything out, making it extremely painful to the ears.

The bands:

Skeleton Witch;

Fairly generic Black/Thrash Metal, nothing interesting or new to me, other than the lead singer pounding his fists on his chest to the beat at some points. Also he very much turned me off even giving them a chance from recordings by saying, on the second song, "This song... Is about... SATANNNNN!!" which is just juvenile and idiotic. Sure, write about whatever you want, you can even tell the crowd, but not in such a gimmicky way.

The Black Dahlia Murder:

They have some pretty good studio songs, and they did play a much better set than Skeleton Witch, but really the sound was just so bad it was giving me a headache at this point. Good stage presence, didn't need the fairly heavy-set singer to take off his shirt though. Better on CD than live from what I gathered.

Children of Bodom:
The band of the evening, came on around 10:00pm, Alexi is damn short. They had the worst sound of all, every song sounded exactly the same, Laiho was boring and drunk, shit band live, that and they're only alright on CD, I left at 10:30pm, couldn't take it anymore.

Overall:
Terrible Concert.

Starting off

So, this is my first post.

I've decided to start a blog criticizing music of all genres, and from all places. This idea came to me (quite originally, considering the obvious lack of independent, blogging music critics) because I realized that I do know quite a bit about music, having studied some and being a musician myself. I will be judging these pieces of music as individual songs, or entire albums, however they come to me, whether they are well known bands to underground freestyle rap.

I will give these albums/songs/bootlegs/shows/etc scores based on a system of scores:

"Creativity: /5

Use of Instruments/Samples as a whole: /5

Use of Each individual instrument (including vocals): /40

Overall: /50

Final Thoughts:"

I will also write my impressions upon first hearing the song, as well as subsequent listens.

There will be other things but I just can't think of them right now, so they'll pop up in other posts.

-N

P.S: I'm also very open to take suggestions on what song/band etc I should do next, so send me messages!

Edited 05/10/2010, 01:42am: Wow, so much for that rating system, haha oh well