July 23, 2015

REVIEW: "Bees & Trees" by Numb Bats

Numb Bats Play Through the
Heatwave on Bees & Trees
The music of Numb Bats is a little like surf rock, one could say, if the waves that were being surfed upon were made of grease and glue. It’s punk rock dumped in a Gatorade cooler of molasses.
   Numb Bats is a three-piece all-girl group from Phoenix, Arizona where the sun shines harshly seven days a week. Mo Neuharth whacks on the kit, Sophie Opich makes the bass tremble and Emily Hobeheidar croons in the dark. All their voices are heard, though, piping up in the background.  
   On July 14, on their Bandcamp page, Numb Bats self-released their new 6-track EP, Bees & Trees. The collection opens with “Runnin,” a side-winding slog of sleepy-eyed punk with reverb that washes through the sewers and drains. The second song, "Rainbow," begins with dreamy arousal then wades into an ascending drum punch.
   Bees & Trees, their second EP, is the follow-up to last year's full-length album, Gentle Horror. It's hot and it’s humid. The structure of these songs is very disorderly, thrown-against-the-wall and unpredictable. They fill in the spaces where the song loses steam with a heavy fog of languorous drone. This is what it feels like to live and breathe in hundred-plus degree heat.
   And the temperature continues to rise with "Then I Went To The Refrigerator." The strands of feedback come together slowly. It’s the score to a house without air conditioning, the sound of your heavy eyelids deflecting the sun. It picks up, rupturing into Ren & Stimpy punk, before falling under again.
   Hobeheidar snarls and barks from the quicksand on “U R A WINNER.” “I feel so weird inside,” she intones again and again against a fire-pit pounding drum cycle. She sounds fed-up and bleary, caught in a downturn. But, all ends in fairness with a cheeky shout-out from all the girls singing and laughing, “You are a winner!”
   The most distinguished song here is the longest. "Dog Poncho," over five minutes, opens with voices in motion like a mirage on the distant highway. Steady thread of junkie guitar and effects that move from ear to ear like a wasp move the track along. It waltzes and loops through shifting bridges before crumbling into something that sounds like the B-52's after huffing a fair amount of rubber cement.
   Easy comparisons would be Dum Dum Girls or a less buzzy and distorted Raveonettes. But there is definitely a heavier DIY appeal and a bouncier bubblegum attitude. They’re definitely sculpting their own post-rock sound.
   The looseness and fragility on Bees & Trees is part of its charm, but is also a reminder that Numb Bats’ best work could be stuck up in the pipes somewhere, ready to spill out. The group are currently skinning the west half of the country on tour. Find them.

Key Tracks: "Dog Poncho," "Rainbow," "Then I Went To The Refrigerator"

source: http://imp

July 22, 2015

"the dog w/ da lazer eyes"

the dog w/ da lazer eyes (2015)
old paint on cut up piece of wood
eb

REVIEW: "Star Wars" by Wilco

Wilco Casually Drop New Album,
Star Wars, into the Web (Lucky Us)
   They’ve been celebrating twenty years of making music this summer with deluxe releases and discography-browsing setlists during a special anniversary tour. New music from Wilco felt somewhere close, not quite in reach, but somewhere on the distant horizon. Then, by way of Internet surprise, the Chicago band released Star Wars, their ninth album, for free.
   Eh, here you go.
   Main songwriter Jeff Tweedy and crew give us something to remember the summer by.
Stars Wars opens with a pile of rusty strings on the very loose, very cross-eyed, "EKG." The album quickly warps into "More..." a folk funk jam with oceans of noise settling onto the shore. By the third song, "Random Name Generator," a heel-hammering nugget of rock, it's clear that Wilco are back in the front seat as one of America's greatest bands. Ain’t no foolin’.
   In fact, Star Wars might join Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Sky Blue Sky as some of the most perfectly sculpted albums in rock and roll. For now, maybe, too soon to tell, but it feels right.
Nearly every song lasts right around the average length of the classic pop song--some two minutes and thirty seconds. Within the short time span the songs are just as evolutionary, tightly-wound and gusto-filled as Wilco's greatest tracks. The held-back restriction of Sky Blue Sky mixes with the full-range expansion of A Ghost Is Born.
   Slip into the casual breeze of “You Satellite” as it rises to a rushing wind. Ride the range on wisps of steel guitar during “Taste the Ceiling.” Get your shoulders up and shimmy along to the egged-on guitar of “Cold Slope.” “I know, I know and you know that I know / It’s a powerplay,” Tweedy sings in perfect gyration with the notes.
   Tweedy’s streaming sense of lyrical weirdness is fully intact on “The Joke Explained.” “I stare at the eyes staring at my face / It always ends in a tie / There is no meeting the divine / I cry at the joke explained,” he sings over the whirling electric guitar.
   "Pickled Ginger" charges forward in electric calm like a palm-muted version of Wire with sudden groove outbreaks and keyboard fallout. Tweedy warns in a low mumble, “No one tells me how to behave.” Star Wars is wrapped up neatly with a sweet, straight-forward love song that slips around. "Magnetized," is an ode to the realization of the love that stands before you.
   Since releasing their debut album, A.M., in 1995 this band has gone through one of the most exciting transformations in music, shedding old sounds, embracing new tones, letting the old sounds resurface in another genre, but always finding a way to make it sound cohesive, intentional. Star Wars continues the trend with a large arched step forward.
   As Wilco continues to tackle these new songs on tour through the fall, it ought to bring them even further out of whatever comfort zone they thought they had. Star Wars gets the physical CD release August 21 with a vinyl release on November 27 from Wilco’s own label, dBpm.

Key Tracks: "More...," "Random Name Generator," "Cold Slope," "Pickled Ginger"

source: http://imp

painted can all angles

July 21, 2015

REVIEW: "The Monsanto Years" by Neil Young + Promise of the Real

Neil Young Feeding on Corporate 
America with The Monsanto Years
   Neil Young has kept himself busy in this post-divorce era of his career. In 2014 he released two albums, A Letter Home, a lo-fi selection of covers, and Storytone, a solo album with an extra orchestral version attached.
  For Young’s thirty-sixth (gasp) album, The Monsanto Years, he aims his guitar and pen at Monsanto, the company genetically engineering seeds (or GMOs) that are found in plenty of American products. But that’s not the only major company caught in his flame. He chips away at the facades of Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Safeway and Chevron, a list that reads like most teenagers’ first places of employment.
   Unlike Young’s more recent statement of protest albums--GreendaleFork in the Road and Living With War--this one sounds more put together, less slapdash and hurried than the others. In Young’s last five-year or so late career dash, it’s his best album.
   California band, Promise of the Real, were enlisted as Young’s backing band for the album after the two played at last year’s Farm Aid. The group features Willie Nelson's boys, Lukas and Micah. They bring a wall of rumbling sound, not too dissimilar from Young’s main band of grizzled beasts in Crazy Horse.  
   The Monsanto Years opens on a hopeful note with the revitalizing “The New Day.” Young comes right out proclaiming, “It’s a bad day to do nothing,” setting the progressive tone of the album. A beer mug-swinging chorus follows with everybody’s arms around one another, swaying to and fro. Young closes with a stunted guitar solo that fades out with the song.
   "Wolf Moon" is a sweet serenade pulled from Young's classic Harvest-Harvest Moon era. He sings with a vulnerable quiver to our tortured atmosphere over an acoustic strum that moves along calmly like dripping rain.
"Big Box" rolls in like a hurricane with mists of Crazy Horse feedback. In the fog are Young's red eyes as he spews down on corporate America and its unjust strangulation of the American worker. "From the capital to the boarded-up main streets / Big Business is there at every turn," he sings, painting a gloomy vision of impossible odds. The rhythm feels like being chased through streets that never cease.
   Young doesn't mince his words. The lyrics could be the frustrated screed of a part-time worker written on a napkin during a fifteen-minute break. "People working part-time at Walmart / Never get the benefits for sure / Why not make it to full-time at Walmart? / Still standing by for the call to work," sung as matter-of-factly as can be.
   On "Rock Star Bucks A Coffee Shop" Young pierces Monsanto all the way through and pokes into Starbucks with the spearhead on the other side. He uses straight-speak lyrics to discuss the intertangling of the two companies sounding as though he’s singing words from a pamphlet handed out at a rally.
   Surely, the jumble of “preachy” words will turn off a lot of casual fans, but the song still has a pulse. It’s a whistle-while-you-work jingle that rails against the mislabeling practices of Monsanto. The chorus is a heartbreaking helpless plea to the GMO giant. Young ends the song with two simple lines that cut out all political pretense. "Mothers want to know what they feed their children," he implores. "Let our farmers grow what they want to grow."
   Neil Young continues to be the amplified bullhorn for the people, using his artistic merit to sing songs about the many discouragements of modern life. Long may he run.

Key Words: "Wolf Moon," "Big Box," "Workin' Man"

source: http://imp

May 21, 2015

REVIEW: "The Waterfall" by My Morning Jacket

Jim James Takes a Few Hits off the
Aurora Borealis on MMJ's The Waterfall
If you’re planning to grow out your hair and stare profoundly into the sky all summer long, My Morning Jacket’s seventh album, The Waterfall, is the soundtrack you need.
The rollicking "Compound Fracture" would be a perfect opening song for your summer road trip mixtape. "In Its Infancy (The Waterfall)" is the song most bands hope to write in one career. It shifts from mood and tone with one count off the hi-hat, blending Classic Rock interpolations with thick-fingered shots of prog. The stunted falsetto of Jim James rises like mist from the instrumental downpour.
Since hitting it big time in 2003 with It Still Moves My Morning Jacket have strived not to settle into the same grooves and guitar crescendos that gave them their platform. Veering outside their formula worked magnificently on the follow-up, Z, two years later. Continuing the trend, however, backfired on the next two, Evil Urges and Circuital. Those albums are still decent additions in MMJ’s musical scope, but they're lumpy, overinflated and only truly good in sections.
The Waterfall hones in more closely on the band's strengths, but finds a newer psychedelic expanse where they have not yet been before. Their own Kentucky landscape still anchors their rootsy, woodsy, in-the-weeds sound, but here they find a more ethereal space to extend to. James gets high off Aurora Borealis fumes and it sounds so sweet.
James released his first solo album, Regions of Light and Sound of God, in 2013. The album finds James in a deep drift of meandering, drawn-out songs. That creative offshoot was a positive thing for this album. The songs on The Waterfall are more compact (save for the final two epics) and they find their hypnotic power instantly.
James looks inward on the well-wishing acoustic, “Get The Point.” He strums a hushed melody and sings directly to a true love that has since shed its truth. "I'm trying to tell you plainly how I'm feeling day to day," he admits, "And I'm so sorry now that you ain't feeling the same way."
"Spring (Among the Living)" comes echoing off the canyon walls. Guitars twinkle like the opening lights of spring after an agonizing winter."Thin Line" and the first single, "Big Decisions," will both snuggle warmly into the setlists of the band’s tremendous live show.
By the time the contemplative "Only Memories Remain" falls into the tracklist The Waterfall has moved beyond the cliffs and rocks, downstream into a calming river flow. The album ends with the whiskers in Jim James’s beard burning down like dynamite fuses on "Tropics (Erase Traces)" and after ten songs, it’s time to find the path home.

Key Tracks: "Compound Fracture," "Thin Line," "In Its Infancy (The Waterfall)," "Tropics (Erase Traces)"

source: http://imp

May 04, 2015

LOOKBACK: "Diamond Eyes" by Deftones

On this Date Five Years Ago Deftones
Re-emerged with Diamond Eyes
   Five years ago today Deftones hurled back with their sixth album, Diamond Eyes. “Let’s drink with our weapons in our hands,” frontman Chino Moreno suggests on “Rocket Skates,” the first single. “Let’s sleep in this trance.” Then, with the scream where you can actually hear the throat tear, “Guns, razors, knives!” With that Deftones announced a return to form in the wake of tragedy. 
   In the years leading up to Diamond Eyes, the structure of the group had nearly come undone. Their previous album, Saturday Night Wrist, came four year earlier in 2006 during a somewhat creatively stagnant time for the band. The album still had some great songs (“Rapture,” “Beware,” “Rats! Rats! Rats!”), but something about it felt over-labored and ultimately garnered little enthusiasm from critics or fans. It easily cemented its place as the lesser of all Deftones’ near-perfect albums.
   The abyss that followed left the group looking like they may go the way of their pre-9/11 metalhead brethren: a scorching burn with a quicker fade to mediocrity. (See: Korn, Staind, Godsmack) Then, the fall of 2008 brought the devastating news that founding bassist Chi Cheng had been the passenger in a car wreck and was put up in the hospital, deep in an uncommunicative comma.
   Eros, it was learned, was the name of the album they were working on at the time of the accident. It would be shelved as the group sought to find perspective of their misfortune. When it became clear Cheng wouldn’t wake up with any sort of ease, the band decided to soldier on without their brother in song.
   Sergio Vega, who previously played in Quicksand, was a longtime friend of the band and would fill in for their live shows. Eventually he would add his flex to the muscle of Stephen Carpenter’s riffs and Abe Cunningham’s scatter-shot drum blasts in the studio. The band rediscovered themselves amidst the darkest chapter of their creative lives. With Cheng heavy in their hearts they began to record new music.
   On Diamond Eyes, the songs got leaner, louder and tighter. Cunningham ascends into another level of drum genius, matching the subtle twists in Carpenter’s meaty riffs. Just try to air drum to “Diamond Eyes,” “CMND/CNTRL” or “Rocket Skates” and not look like a fool.
   “You’ve Seen The Butcher” turns a clunky guitar burble into a slithering sexual come-on. Moreno weaves between the riff. “You slowly enter ‘cause you know my room,” he sings. “And then you crawl your knees off / before you shake my tomb.” After lyrically phoning in it on the last album, Moreno gets back to cunning ambiguity, painting lines that point in different directions.
   Vega brings a new lockstep groove that immediately qualifies him to fill the legacy of Cheng. Hear him creep around the crunch and scream of Carpenter and Moreno on “Prince” and “Royal.” Gone are the empty atmospherics that started to pervade the previous album. Frank Delgado adds touches of keyboards to wrap it all in a wave of dark radiation.
   Sometimes a tragic moment can lead to unearthed expression. For the band and their fans the loss of Cheng will never be forgotten, but for those same people the music had to continue. Diamond Eyes is a testament to the group’s longevity and maturity. Their follow-up two years later, Koi No Yokan, would be even better.
   Cheng would never wake up. He remained in quiet unknowing solitude until his death in 2013. On “Risk” Moreno sings out to his brother. “I’m right here just / Come outside and see it / But pack your heart, you might need it.”

source: http://imp

April 27, 2015

REVIEW: "Kintsugi" by Death Cab For Cutie

Kintsugi Tries To Piece Death Cab
For Cutie Back Together
Everybody leaves Ben Gibbard. It’s the very crutch of his art. Fittingly, then, that Death Cab For Cutie’s eighth album, Kintsugi, arrives in the aftermath of his divorce to New Girl Zooey Deschanel and, more recently, the departure of longtime member and producer, Chris Walla. Those twin departures can be read on every song. Their last album was 2011’s Codes And Keys.
   Kintsugi opens with promise. “No Room In Frame” grabs the reins with a polished version of the group’s past. Ben Gibbard does his usual straightforward moping sneer in climbing reverb. The drums shuffle the song along through each subtle transition.
   When I first heard the album’s first single, “Black Sun,” I was filled with hope for the upcoming full-length. The song spreads out with a stuttering drum beat and Walla dropping in heavy doses of orbital keyboard. There is an extra tinge of hopelessness, of darkness here that hasn’t quite been heard from Death Cab. Most of their songs’ emotion stems from sadness, regret, loneliness, but never do they creep into the darker flip side of those emotions, vengeance and despair. Basically, it’s a Death Cab song, but with all the sap cut out.
   Walla, who has been at the helm of Death Cab with Gibbard for 17 years, quit after the recording of Kintsugi was finished. As he makes his exit, Walla shows on “Black Sun” how this band could evolve into a tighter, more exploratory rock group. Unfortunately, the rest of the album follows the group’s recent two-album (or so) decline.
   “Little Wanderer” should have been passed onto Josh Groban. (You still would’ve been paid, Ben.) Sounds like Gibbard lost his Internet connection and now misses some girl. Maybe the riff sat unused on a harddrive and so they decided to force this very skippable song. It’s a weak sequence of verse, chorus, verse, chorus. But, somehow it’s the only song from this album to get stuck on the trackmill in my head.
   “The Ghosts Of Beverly Drive” and “Everything’s A Ceiling” are just flat out boring compositions. Gibbard, though, still nails the tragedy of life’s constant creation of distance from everything you know and love on the spare acoustic number, “Hold No Guns.”
Kintsugi finally finds a groove on “Good Help (Is So Hard To Find).” The drums and bass swivel to a disco beat while Gibbard plays guitar like he’s in the Dire Straits. Drummer Jason McGerr doubles down on “El Dorado” with a pummeling beat while Gibbard’s voice floats up into the California sun.
   The final song, “Binary Sea,” plays on the waves of piano keys and sounds like a B-side from Transatlanticism, the album that continues to stand as Death Cab’s artistic peak. Kintsugi looks up at it and has to quint only a little to see it.

source: http://imp

Key Tracks: “Black Sun,” “Good Help (Is So Hard To Find),” “El Dorado”

April 14, 2015

REVIEW: "Strangers To Ourselves" by Modest Mouse

Modest Mouse Spend Eight Years
to Sound Like Modest Mouse
Isaac Brock has spent the past eight years sputtering in the wilderness of his creative mind crafting Modest Mouse's sixth album, Strangers To Ourselves.
   The title track slips in casually with the opening seconds. Brock's depleted quivering lisp mixes in with strings in a swirl and brushes on the snare. It's a slow-rocking somber opening, but the second song and first single, "Lampshades On Fire" kicks the mood up into the sky.
   In its three-minute presence the perfect recipe is heard from a band that's been cooking since 1993 when they formed in their native state Washington. There's the hearty drum beat, Brock's spittle on the microphone and harmonic guitar squalls that poke from the rush of movement. In 2015, one could call this the classic Modest Mouse sound.
   Strangers to Ourselves is the group’s first with the absence of bass player and founding member Eric Judy. The album is the follow-up to 2007’s We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, a mostly uneven set of songs, that fell from the aftermath of “Float On,” the single that catapulted them into new heights. It was 2004 and suddenly everyone and their mothers were singing “Float On” and “Hey Ya” by Outkast on the way to school.
   Nearly every song on Strangers To Ourselves is busy, working like a village of tiny lemmings and packed front to end with full instrumentation. The band’s earlier records had more space to breathe, while their more recent releases jerk the listener around.
   On "Sugar Boats" we hear an oddball chunk of New Orleans funk with horns dodging Brock's wound-up guitar. "Shit In Your Cut" is weighed down by a chunky drumbeat and a bassline that teeters left to right. Brock's vocals fall into his lower register, monotone and spectral, for the haunting chorus, "I guess we'll ride this winter out." The song slips away like the sunlight on a winter day.
   On "Pistol (A. Cunanan, Miama, FL 1996)" Brock sounds like your drunk uncle talking at you after downing a bottle of cough syrup. It's a froggy demented party-time track. "The Ground Walks, With Time In A Box" locks into a Modest Mouse groove with guitar sparkling at the edges. The hi-hat hits consistently on the offbeat through a wavy, woozy chorus that spins around from ear to ear. The songs stumbles into an avalanche of guitar crunch and harmonic flurries before leveling off in the wake of quaking horns and glass bottle tops.
   The album’s best song is "Coyotes." Its simple acoustic strum leads the way as Brock addresses the disappointment of what it means to be human. He suspends his drunken bard's croak to whisper warily on the wind, "Mankind's behaving like some serial killers.” Not only the best here, but since anything off The Moon & Antarctica.
   Strangers To Ourselves is a good time, and better as their last, but it fails to make much of a lasting impression after an eight-year wait. Modest Mouse is still one of the great live acts of the current day, but on their sixth album they only cements their formula further.

Key Tracks: "Lampshades On Fire," "Shit In Your Cut," "Coyotes," "The Ground Walks, With Time In A Box"

source: http://imp

January 10, 2015

ALEX LEN IS A PEEIIIIIMP!

   It was a rebel yell in enemy territory and it could be heard from two states away. Phoenix Suns center Alex Len, with the ball at center court, made a quick move to the right, shaking off a lumbering, swatting Tim Duncan. He dribbled the ball once, then cradled it with hepped up, childlike ambition, moving with intent and purpose.  The lane was his. It never mattered how many grey jerseys were in the way. 
   As Len slammed the ball, one-handed, with legs kicking outward in a perfect v-shape, he let out a warring cry and suddenly everyone in San Antonio knew what we in Phoenix have been lucky to witness this season: the expedited evolution of Alex "Steal My Sunshine" Len.
   The move, as Suns commentator Eddie Johnson pointed out, had "nasty intentions." Rolling past the Suns bench, Len pounded his chest and everyone overflowed with ecstasy.
   Allow me then to make a prediction: Alex Len, in three seasons' time (starting this year), will be on the shortlist of the game's best big men. It is only a matter of in-game experience before this Ukrainian Gumby is on the same level as the Gasols, Howards and Duncans of the league. And he will be a major factor in helping keep this young Suns team in the win column.
   In every game Len has improved his skills little by little. Early on, he seemed nervous, a kid amongst professionals. His rookie season last year was cut short by injuries, putting his much-touted potential on standby while Miles Plumlee came into his own.  
   After the first few games of this season, the fifth overall pick, began to find his rhythm. First his ball handing excelled; he wiped the butter from his fingers. Then, his defensive presence in the paint started to hobble opposing plays. At 7-1, it's not difficult. All he's got to do is put his long arms straight up and the blocks will come. But he's not just an immovable force; he looks for the shot, times it right and slaps away the potential point. We're only ten days into January and he's already averaging 3.6 blocks per game.
   Len's hard work hasn't been lost on Coach Jeff Hornacek. He's kept him in the starting lineup, making Plumlee a second thrust of defense off the bench. Between their four giant palms the Suns are on track to become a major defensive threat in the league.
   In a game against the Sacramento Kings, on December 26, Len and Plumlee each tallied five blocks--the first Suns duo to hit that mark since Amar'e Stoudemire and Shawn Marion did it in 2007. Anything that harkens back to the days of Nash will always bring a source of light to Suns fans.
   And Len's game just keeps expanding. In recent games he's found a jump shot and made a few quick passes to a cutting Goran Dragic. At this rate--even at his height--Len can't see the ceiling of his game.

January 08, 2015

REVIEW: "The Pale Emperor" by Marilyn Manson

Marilyn Manson channels
Hexxus on The Pale Emperor
   On Marilyn Manson’s ninth album, The Pale Emperor, the unholy, self-proclaimed God of Fuck sounds more like the God of Slow-Groove. Set for a January 20 release on his own Hell, etc. label, it is Manson’s most straight-forward rock album in years.
   “Killing Strangers” opens with a snotty bass line and a boot-kicking groove that’ll shake the caked mud from your face. Manson, in his devilish croak, makes the case for killing strangers as a way to keep from killing those we truly love.
   It’s a typical Manson sentiment, grotesque and callous, but one he’s built a career on defining. If this were Manson’s cultural heyday, he’d have the Religious Right all in grumbles over a pro-murder chorus. Luckily, neither party crosses paths anymore and a Marilyn Manson record can be heard for what it is. The man doesn’t stray from the ugly, he spreads it apart and thrusts himself inward, no apologies.
   The slithering “Deep Six” moves like a snake across the swamp. “You wanna know what Zeus said to Narcissist?” Manson asks in a warning squall, “You better watch yourself.” “Third Day Of A Seven Day Binge,” one of rock and roll’s great song titles, was the first official single from the album. Manson breathes through clenched jaws as a sullen bass creeps along a dark tunnel with no light at the end. He sounds weary and on the cusp of a paranoiac outbreak as he wonders where he’ll be in four days’ time.
  Manson’s vocals are low and burble like melting tar, but every now and then, his scream hits like scorched Earth and evokes unprovoked fear. “Slave Only Dreams To Be King” greases the albums up with a grave-digging guitar crunch and Manson’s screech slipping around. The awesome refrain of “Slave never dreams to be free / Slave only dreams to be king” pounds into any skull within earshot. “The Mephistopheles Of Los Angeles” flips the oft-used marching drum beat of “Beautiful People” before falling into a rousing chorus.
   On “The Devil Beneath My Feet” Manson walks a path in the light of Satan and wears his affiliation proudly. “Don’t need a mother fucker looking down on me,” he seethes before exiting back into total darkness. Manson then takes the listener on a long sprawl through the underworld where he has many acquaintances. “Birds Of Hell Awaiting” sounds like something Hexxus from FernGully: The Last Rainforest would get down to.
   Manson’s slight production adds a layer of twilight, not too dissimilar from frenemy Billy Corgan’s work on The Smashing Pumpkins’ brilliant album Adore. The songs are minimal with the tempo stuck in place throughout. They’re evil and heavy, but come out sounding more bluesy than metal. The Pale Emperor is a sturdy album from one of the most polarizing figures in popular music and quietly reasserts Manson into the fold.

Key Tracks: "Third Day Of A Seven Day Binge," "Deep Six," "Slave Only Dreams To Be King," "Killing Strangers"

source: http://imp