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Archive: September, 2007
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Heaven & Hell is what they’re calling the re-re-re-reanimated Black Sabbath — this time with Dio, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler (with Vinny Appice on drums). The band comes with a little bit of a push, in the form of a Black Sabbath: The Dio Years best-of and this DVD/CD set which compiles a big gig from earlier this year.
Ten Things I learned while watching the Heaven & Hell DVD
1. Ronnie James Dio looks like Vigo mixed with Roberto Benigni.
2. Dio is exactly what Jack Black was going for with his whole metal persona. It’s not just the hellacious shrieking, it’s the ridiculously free-form evil-lite lyrics:
We made the mountains shake with laughter as we played
hiding in our corner of the world
Then we did the demon dance and rushed to nevermore
threw away the key and locked the door
3. These just aren't the same kinds of songs that Ozzy used to sing. It's a different era.
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| Dio |
4. Tony Iommi shreds in any era.
5. The metal accoutrements are there, but kinda understated: silver cross inlays on Iommi’s axe, the cross-shaped cymbal on the drum kit (does that even work, acoustically?), the slick screen above the stage showing stained glass and smoking angels and lots more crosses, the cemetery-ish gates on either side. Dio occasionally punctuates his between song banter with a straight-fingered metal salute.
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| Vigo, master of evil |
6. “Lady Evil” is hilarious.
There's a place just south of Witches' Valley
where they say the wind won't blow
and they only speak in whispers of a name
There's a lady they say who feeds the darkness
it eats right from her hand
With a crying shout she'll search you out
and freeze you where you stand
and here’s your chorus….
Lady Evil, evil!
she's a magical, mystical woman!
Lady Evil, evil in my mind!
She's queen of the night!
all right!
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| Roberto Benigni |
7. Geezer Butler’s still holdin’ it down on bass, too.
8. “The Sign of the Southern Cross” is supposed to be some kind of epic masterpiece, I guess, but it’s really this endless, redundant bore. A new one, “The Devil Cried” fit right in with the old stuff until Vinny Appice started into a big stupid drum solo. Just when you think it’s over he stands up and does some more.
9. The song “Heaven & Hell” sums up this sexless faux-evil era of metal neatly: Killer riffs, haunting vocals, meaningless lyrics, sing-along parts for the crowd.
10. Black Sabbath: The Dio Years was better. The songs just get longer and wronger in concert. And Dio can still wail like a metal demon god whatever but I am so tired of looking at him.
22 tracks, (Sub Pop)
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Wackity Schmackity Doo. Listen to Patton Oswalt's Werewolves and Lollipops and see if you don't find yourself uttering those seven nonsense syllables for the next week (or month, or more). It's Oswalt shorthand for "This is funnnnnnyyyy!" and the punchline of W&L's best bit, "Wackity Schmackity Doo," which skewers Hollywood (one of the hands that feeds him — he does punch-up work on scripts) while pushing the boundaries of whether it's okay to joke about, say, 9/11 or the holocaust. The putty-faced Oswalt has existed at the crossroads of cred for a while now. He's a renowned Comedian of Comedy. He was also Spence in The King of Queens. I'm not really sure where voicing the rat falls on that continuum. On W&L, Oswalt's first album on Sub Pop (which doesn't really settle anything), Oswalt kills, skewering such American idiocies as racism, KFC Famous Bowls ("A failure pile in a sadness bowl"), the executive branch as the Dukes of Hazzard ("And they fuckin' jump the Gereral Lee over the bill of rights…") and cleaning up dirty jokes for family TV ("I'm gonna fill your hoo ha with goof juice!"). Yet he does this without coming off cooler-than-thou, throwing in jokes about his Star Trek/Star Wars geekery and penchant for overeating to remind you that, hey, he's not David Cross, he's a regular guy. Yet through it all, Oswalt's pushing boundaries. His characters and voice-work — such as when he gets a time machine and goes to kill George Lucas — are vivid. He'll tackle any subject, from 60-year-olds giving birth to the long-delayed release of "Death Bed: The Bed that Eats People" with bald, blunt honesty. Perhaps the best moment is when Oswalt goes off script: Interrupted in the middle of a slow-building story by an audience member who's compelled to break the tension by yelling out "Wooo," Oswalt goes into a tirade, concluding with "You're gonna miss everything cool and die angry!" Which is about as poignant a rip on the sort of douchebags who yell "Woo" in the middle of quiet rooms (and most of the guys I went to high school with, for that matter) as you'll find. Wackity Schmackity Doo, indeed.
Funny, I always thought hoo-ha was hyphenated.
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| This is not a shot from the Philly show. |
| Photo | Petenema.com |
Jane’s Addiction is the missing link between the hair metal ’80s and the alt-rock early ’90s. Their music tapped and popularized the underground sounds that commercial radio ignored and layered them with vibrant and surreal lyrics that dealt with more than sex and drugs (although there was still plenty of both). But while alternative rock, particularly grunge, really wasn’t much fun (admit it), Jane’s frontman Perry Farrell stayed true to the decadence of Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip. Can you imagine Eddie Vedder shaking his locks and celebrating the enslavement of humankind to Martians, or Trent Reznor wishing an audience to find love so they can experience the biggest orgasm of their lives? Well, maybe the latter, but it would certainly involve latex, a ball gag, and a lot of tormented weeping.
With his latest venture Perry’s still partying like it’s 1989, revisiting songs from his previous bands and reveling in the crowd’s adoration. For 90 minutes at the TLA, Satellite Party dashed off Jane’s hits (“Been Caught Stealing,” “Mountain Song”), the best-known Porno for Pyros tunes (“Tahitian Moon,” “Pets”), and tossed in a couple newbies for good measure. Time has added a few lines to the alternative icon’s face, but the man still looks like he’s been chiseled out of marble, and his grin was indefatigable. No doubt marital bliss helps a little as Perry and wife/backing vocalist/dancer, Etty, smooched between numbers to the hooting of the crowd, shielding their faces with a top hat to preserve their modesty from the populace paparazzi’s camera phones.
Ending the encore with “Jane Says,” there was hesitation in Perry’s eyes as the crowd yelled for one more (and “3 Days”). Finally the group hug broke and the party ended. But for an instant, we almost had him.
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| He was standing very still, but my hand was shaking. |
| Photo | Patrick Rapa |
Maybe it's the suit (complete with vest!), but Paul F. Tompkins even sounds like a good guy when he's yelling "fuck" or confessing to prolonged string of video cassette thefts. Of course, it's easy to root for him, he's a Philly guy. And he made good use of his local expertise by riffing on drinking at Dirty Franks, working at Hats in the Belfry and living among the elderly on Fitzwater. Laughed my ass off.
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| Focus on this Nectarine |
I guess I'd seen a nectarine before, but I didn't recognize it when I saw it in the hands of City Paper copy editor Caroiyn Huckabay. I found myself intrigued by this nice looking fruit, with its gentle white-yellow-red gradiant and comforting buttocks like shapleyness. The nectarine was discussed for a short while. But only a short while because we're not freaks.
Today Chucks brought me one.
Damn this is good. Smells a little like a peach — and has a pit — but the skin and consistency of its innards remind this writer of a Red Delicious apple. The taste is somewhere in between, a bit pear-like, not too sweet but certainly desserty. The more I eat it, the more I wonder what this pit looks like. It's kind of gross, red as lung blood and the shape is hard to make out. I just stared at it for a while and now I feel strange.
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| Photo from Classic Brown's MySpace. That's where you'll go if you click on it. |
With a new bassist, dwindling crowd and no soundcheck, South Jersey’s The Classic Brown could be forgiven an off night. Instead, frontwoman Stacey Brown concentrated on her keyboard and let her band punch up songs like “Americana” and “Little Kensington.” Slow and pretty in their recorded forms on last year’s Down with Fun, they lost none of their intensity for the subtle switch in gears. Only fools left early, and they missed Brown’s solo outro, a twitchy take on “In the Air Tonight.” She’s too smart to try to replicate the drum sound — hell, even Phil Collins must realize it’s more effective to leave that to the imagination when he plays the song in concert — but Brown’s melody made it more alienated than accusatory. No extra punch necessary.
Bonus: Video of Stacey Brown doing "Beat It."
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