Whoa whoa whoa.
I didn’t publish this and it was just sitting in the “drafts” folder.
OOOOOPS.
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BoooOOOooOoOOooooOOOOo!!! It’s HalloweeEEEEeeEEEeeeEEEEEEeeEEEeeen!!!
Please enjoy the ghastly, ghoulish, griiiiiiiim state of popular BOOOOO-sic.
Lady Gaga – Joanne
LA LA LALALAAAAAAHHHH
GA GHA GHA GAHAHGHAAAAAA
Lady Gaga is back. She has brought an adequate but generally uninteresting 80s-style pop banger with her. This song only really gets good at the key change. Even then, it sounds like the kind of generic pop that would have been featured during a montage segment in a movie in the 80s. Probably a scene where someone has realized that they need to train harder to prove everyone wrong at the big tournament, especially the romantic interest who has foolishly rejected them. Also: Who’s Joanne?
Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker
It’s a pretty strange thing to click on a link to listen to the new Leonard Cohen single and get treated to an extended trailer for Titanfall 2 beforehand. Nothing says “mindlessly killing each other with giant robots” like latter-year LenCoh.
I’ve had a lot of love for much of Cohen’s work, but have a limited amount of patience for the cheesy “oompah” lounge sound that typifies the last 20 years of his recorded output. That being said, this song is a depressing and grim slice of vintage gloom that is made all the more compelling by Cohen’s unbelievably raspy croak and the artist’s recent admission that he’s totes ready to kick the bucket. I won’t listen to this often, but if this winds up being the swan song for mope music’s crown prince, I’m not sure that anyone could rightly be disappointed. Gloriously downbeat.
Korn – The Serenity of Suffering
Ahh, Korn. The godfathers of grunt. The kingpins of krap. The band hasn’t been much more than a joke to most people for well over a decade. Their sound, which was legitimately jarring and unique at the time of their 1994 debut, hasn’t changed all that much over the years. Considering the musical era that they ushered in, I’m not sure that it’s reasonable to say that the world is a better place for Korn having existed. But to the proper audience – angry white teen boys, specifically – this music still packs a punch and serves a purpose. This album sees the band hitting harder than they have in over a decade, which is really just a nice way of saying that it seems like somebody put a fresh coat of paint on a pile of turd. I would have loved this when I was a teenager, but when I was a teenager I also idolized Tom Green and thought that I could make a living writing horror movies.
Teenagers are idiots. Idiots will probably be the only people stoked on the fact that Jonathan Davis is doing his barking dog scat routine again.
Wovenwar – Honor Is Dead
Wovenwar is for fans of a band like Imagine Dragons that also thinks that they like metal, so it’s got a bunch of sub-Lamb of God chugging in it to break up the tired mid-tempo semi-anthems that make up the bulk of their compositions. I can’t imagine thinking that this is exciting material on any level.
The Fraudsters' Almanac 