:: theLogBook.com Music Reviews ::

Seth Sternberger, the indie remix guru behind the sublime 8-Bit Weapon, also does the modern thing - and does it well - in Unfortunate Brain Chemistry. Seth’s jams run the gamut from traditional techno to the 2001 entry in the “Fifth Element Diva Dance competition” (something I award to the first person in a given year who sticks a beat on top of an operatic female vocal). The operatic track in question, “Venus”, is a beauty, and its placement early on in the tracklist nicely subverts whatever expectation you might have of what you’re listening to. Other favorites on here include the childlike-but-mechanical “Robot Kindergarten”, some retro kitsch courtesy of “Trite Little Disco Bunnies”, and the drum-heavy “Agonizing Truth About Love”.

There are some so-so tracks as well, namely the bits-of-recorded-conversation-over-breakbeats tracks “Chicks Dig Me” and the eyebrow-raising “My X Is A Whore”. (Erm…okay, Seth. Thanks for sharing!) “Chicks Dig Me” sounds like a lo-fi recording of someone’s phone sex conversation under a funky rhythm track. If you’re into that sort of thing. (Probably says more about me than it does the CD, but I’ve actually gotten to like that one with repeated exposure.)

Unfortunate Brain Chemistry is a bit of a mixed bag, but it shows Seth Sternberger’s ability outside of the blip-tone genre, and certainly makes for an interesting contrast.

1. Coal (4:28)
2. Venus (2:45)
3. Femachine (5:00)
4. Chicks Dig Me (2:47)
5. Frequency Push (4:12)
6. Robot Kindergarten (2:28)
7. My X Is A Whore (3:12)
8. Waiting Remix (3:17)
9. Trite Little Disco Bunnies (3:17)
10. Agonizing Truth About Love (4:59)
11. Don’t Play This Backwards (2:40)

Released by: Brainscream
Release date: 2001
Total running time: 39:05

For the re-invention album that it’s supposed to be, the Moody Blues’ A Question Of Balance really seems to be less about re-inventing the seminal ’60s band’s sound and more about changing how the band achieved that sound. With some of their more eloquent numbers approaching the point where they couldn’t be duplicated outside of the studio, the Moodies tried to return to a more guitar-based sound that they could achieve on stage (keep in mind, this was over three decades ago, before they could get anyone’s symphony orchestra to back them up in front of Red Rocks or any other rocks). And yet there’s still a whiff of the epic here, largely thanks to early sampling/loop-based keyboards and synths like the Mellotron. Hence, not a huge change in the sound, but it was becoming easier to pull it off live.

And you couldn’t get much more of an epic opening to an album than “Question”’s bam-BAAAAM! opening if you tried. That song in particular is one I’ve always loved from a lyrical standpoint, with the underlying question of “why are these things happening?” tackling the “hate and death and war” that outlasted the 60s peace movement. Hayward’s lyrics don’t bother asking where we went wrong, but instead asks why the question can’t be answered. “Question” = rock music + metaphysics. (Ed. note: theLogBook’s Assistant Editor Dave Thomer has since informed me that this is more a question of epistemology than metaphysics. And y’know, I bet he’s right.) Either way, it’s hard to beat.

And as much as I like that track, there’s a bonus - nine whole other songs! The metaphysical bent continues with “How Is It (We Are Here)?”, a nice follow-on from “Question”, and then things get a little more personal with “The Tide Rushes In” (a song, according to the liner notes interview, written by John Lodge in the wake of a fight with his wife at the time). I’m torn on “Tide” - I’ve never felt that it was up to much lyrically, and yet the vocal performance in and of itself is worth the price of admission.

“Don’t You Feel Small?” brings back the philosophical feel, with an unusual combination of the Moodies’ trademark harmonies and the exact same lyrics being whispered loudly. The harmonies return for the catchy “Tortoise And The Hare”, a classic bit of Moodies rock. Things get a bit southern-fried with the bluesy opening guitar riff of “It’s Up To You”, another song worthy of inclusion on any best-of anyone might care to put together. “Minstrel’s Song” belongs on there too, by the way, with its enchanting, last-gasp-of-the-60s “everywhere, love is all around” chorus.

“Dawning Is The Day” doesn’t stand out quite as much as the spate of excellent songs before it, but lulls the listener into a false sense of security before Mike Pinder’s haunting “Melancholy Man” kicks in quietly. This leads us into some Graeme Edge poetry in “The Balance” - y’know, it’s almost a clichè by now, but it’d almost be a crime to have a Moody Blues album that didn’t close on some of Graeme’s spoken-word poetry.

A Question Of Balance is one of the Moodies’ strongest early offerings, with not a single dud in the bunch. If the worst thing I can say about “Dawning Is The Day” is that it’s a fine song that just simply doesn’t stand out among a batch of positively stellar songs, that’s not bad. Highly recommended.

1. Question (5:43)
2. How Is It (We Are Here)? (2:44)
3. And The Tide Rushes In (2:57)
4. Don’t You Feel Small (2:37)
5. Tortoise And The Hare (3:22)
6. It’s Up To You (3:11)
7. Minstrel’s Song (4:27)
8. Dawning Is The Day (4:21)
9. Melancholy Man (5:45)
10. The Balance (3:28)

Released by: Threshold
Release date: 1970
Total running time: 38:35

I’ve been meaning to review this album for two or three years now, and it’s such an odd beast to get a grip on. This is Genesis in flux, and yet Genesis finding its feet. Several years after losing Peter Gabriel to a solo career, the remaining trio of founding members soldiered on, and yet sometimes you’d think they were clinging to the past. Abacab is an album full of good songs, but it’s also an album with something of a serious identity crisis.

The title track - edited down to little over half of its original running time - received healthy radio airplay at the time of the album’s release, but along with songs like “Me And Sarah Jane”, “Keep It Dark” and “Who Dunnit?”, “Abacab” represents the majority of this album’s personality. Phil Collins, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford seemed to be trying to hang onto the prog-rock sound of the Gabriel era, with meandering song structures (”Sarah Jane” in particular can’t seem to latch onto any one particular melody, trying out several melodic lines and discarding them in turn - it’s almost like early Split Enz). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - I quite like “Abacab” and “Keep It Dark”, and they demonstrate that, when he used to try to emulate Gabriel’s throat-thrasing vocal style, there used to be a raw power to Phil Collins’ voice which his latter-day career has carefully buried.

It’s in songs like “Man On The Corner” and especially “No Reply At All” that one finds hints of the future Genesis sound. The latter in particular is bouncy, with some Motown-style brass work and a lighthearted lyric. “Man On The Corner” is again somewhat brooding and dark, with just a hint again of the Peter Gabriel influence, but it’s indicative of my favorite era of Genesis - songs better suited to Collins’ vocal range and style, but falling somewhere between the Gabriel-era Genesis sound and Collins’ later self-styled reinvention of himself as a soft-pop balladeer. It may not be the original sound mandated in the Gabriel/Hackett era, but it was the best possible style for the Collins-led Genesis.

Abacab, in retrospect, is a bit of a mixed bag - but, being a bit of a transitional piece (despite having been preceded by two other albums with the Banks/Collins/Rutherford lineup), it was bound to be. They were really starting to get it here.

1. Abacab (7:02)
2. No Reply At All (4:41)
3. Me And Sarah Jane (6:00)
4. Keep It Dark (4:34)
5. Dodo / Lurker (7:30)
6. Who Dunnit? (3:22)
7. Man On The Corner (4:27)
8. Like It Or Not (4:58)
9. Another Record (4:30)

Released by: Atlantic
Release date: 1981
Total running time: 47:04

So there’s this guy, and it seems like he writes the music for half the trailers that unspool in the theaters before a movie starts. And all he has to do is sorta emulate someone else’s music, only not enough that you can really tell (or sue over), and make it a couple of minutes long. This guy must have the easiest job in the world, right?

Ha! No, actually, he doesn’t, but he’s damn good at it, and this is where we get this double CD devoted entirely to music from movie trailers and TV spots. As incongruous as it may sound - to mainstream listeners, this would be as unfathomable a listen as picking something out of a production music library at a TV station - it’s well worth a listen, and you’re almost guaranteed to hear something that you found catchy under the coming attractions. John Beal’s been at it for over 25 years, and bless the internet, the man whose job it is to score the movie trailers has his own honest-to-goodness fan following. If you’re ever gone hunting for a specific piece of movie trailer music, and it didn’t wind up being Enigma or some recycled Jerry Goldsmith, it may well have been John Beal.

Each of the two CDs is filled to the rim with very short cues. If anyone has a complaint about Coming Soon, it’s not going to be a lack of variety. Everything from Black Beauty to Quiz Show to Judge Dredd to Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie to The Mask to Basic Instinct is included here, and then some. Beal keeps the job he’s got by having a pretty good sense of what’s needed for the two-minute mini-movie that the marketing department has kindly carved out of two hours of actual movie. With this wide selection of cues, you’d be lost without some decent liner notes pointing out what was used where, and fortunately this is what the booklet accompanying the CD gives you, though in a few cases there seems to be some legalese getting in the way. In the cases of cues like “Broke Arrow” and “Unmarried White Woman”, you can probably make an easy guess of it, especially when the description of the latter, rather than naming the movie, says the cue is for an unspecified movie about “women seeking roommates” (am I the only one thinking this is probably also a Bridget Fonda movie?). In some cases, there’s even some interesting history to the trailers, as in the case of an early cue from the 70s which went over so well that it also became the movie’s end credit music.

Even more of a specialty item for film music buffs than most soundtracks are, Coming Soon can offer you at least one thing: if you don’t like what you’re hearing, it’ll probably be changing in about a minute and thirty. And if you think John Beal’s job is easy, consider that every piece heard on these two CDs all came from the same guy, and as many tracks as there are is about how many changes in style there are. Beal is among the best in Hollywood at what he does, and enough producers and studios have thought so as well, keeping him busy enough that Coming Soon represents a tiny fraction of his portfolio - but it’s also some of his best, and quite a bit of it is certainly listenable in its own right.

Disc one
1. Black Beauty trailer (1:20)
2. Angel - Almost (2:19)
3. Beautician & The Beast (2:14)
4. Alaska trailer (1:57)
5. Black Rain trailer (1:32)
6. Broke Arrow (2:21)
7. Casualties Of War (2:06)
8. For Sir Charlie (1:59)
9. Beal’s Con Theory (2:21)
10. Pseudo Cool World (1:44)
11. Courage March (1:03)
12. The Cutthroat (1:17)
13. Dead Again (2:08)
14. Blessed Dead (2:16)
15. Nothing To Lose (1:40)
16. Erased (1:34)
17. Eye To Eye (2:00)
18. Intruder (2:21)
19. Ghost trail (2:04)
20. Ham’s Prologue & Epilogue (3:01)
21. Three Blind Elfmen (1:51)
22. The Hunt (1:39)
23. I Know What (0:34)
24. In The Line (2:25)
25. Independence 2 (1:06)
26. Dead Solid Perfect (1:51)
27. Sarah & Jack (2:15)
28. Hollywood Latin (2:25)
29. Jen 8 (1:02)
30. Judge Dredd teaser (0:55)
31. Last Man (1:02)
32. Last Dogman (1:41)
33. Tate Jazz (2:24)
34. Deadly Sin (0:34)

Disc two
1. Magic Of The Theater / Strawberry & Chocolate (2:20)
2. Medicine Man trailer (1:49)
3. Invisible Memoirs (1:54)
4. Morph Men (1:47)
5. Miracle trailer (2:50)
6. Woody’s Manhattan (1:50)
7. Manhattan Night (2:05)
8. Noises Offstage (1:35)
9. Nothing Much (1:27)
10. I’ll Always Fall In Love With Love (1:57)
11. Pagemaster trail (2:17)
12. Passed (1:21)
13. Academy March (2:20)
14. Lyle / Ennio / I’m Not Hoffa (2:30)
15. Stunt Person (0:31)
16. Schooltie (2:11)
17. Unmarried White Woman (2:21)
18. Skatetown USA trailer / end title (3:45)
19. Basic Instinct Theme (2:21)
20. Solo’s Solo (1:57)
21. Two Billion $ Off Switch (1:01)
22. Species Too (2:10)
23. Sweet Magnolia (1:25)
24. Supercop promo (1:00)
25. Karen’s Love Theme (1:04)
26. The Grift (1:58)
27. Somebody Stop Me (1:51)
28. If They Come At You (3:00)
29. Three Wishes teaser (2:41)
30. Ocean Song (1:23)
31. Starnever / True Lies overlay (1:37)
32. Under Siege Too (1:41)
33. It’s Warshawski! (1:39)
34. Beal’s Volcanic (0:56)
35. White Out (1:20)

Released by: Sonic Images
Release date: 1998
Disc one total running time: 62:04
Disc two total running time: 67:01