While their self-titled EP sounded like some kind of generic heavy metal, this Seattle once-covers band started down the path of prog-metal with their first full-length release. This nine-song album features some great long-form metal pieces, excellent sound, and the beginning of the formula the band grew with over their career.

The band headed to London to record their album, and hired James Guthrie as producer. He’s best known for his engineering and producing work on pretty much every Pink Floyd album that matters, plus producer credits on Judas Priest’s Hell Bent For Leather. Mix those two bands together, and you’ve pretty much got Queensryche; it explains how he captured the mystical, ethereal quality of the band, without losing the metal edge. Also add in arranger and conductor Michael Kamen, who wasn’t a super-soundtrack-ultrastar like we know him today, but he did work with everyone from ‘Floyd to Johnny Cougar to Jim Croche to the Eurythmics to David Bowie, and it seems odd that he picked this little-known metal band to work with. But you can find his symphonic touch on the album, which is a cool feature with the songs here.

The album starts with “Warning,” which seems to trod a bit, without really bringing things up to pace. It’s a much thicker texture than the EP, and ties in with the album artwork, a mystical hand selecting a tarot card with a titular reference. (The press kit uses the tarot as a theme, showing a very cool one for each song on the album.) But the slow pale of the album is immediately brought to speed with “En Force,” a more conceptual piece about surviving an apocalypse and fighting for the survival of a future. It begins with these Kaman-esuque chimes that follow the song, like gothic church bells, then hands it over to the guitars. The song doesn’t have much as far as actual meaning or context, but it does have a lot of guitar hooks that take it at a gallop and show that Queensryche can mix a longer song like this and still make it rock. “Deliverance” follows this theme with a slightly more straightforward guitar-oriented song. It’s worth mentioning that Tate’s operatic lyrics are used to full effect, and he’s hitting high notes and using excellent vibrato and sustain all over the place.

“No Sanctuary” slows the tempo down considerably. It’s almost a ballad, but not the hair band sort of arena rock ballad, but more of a clean, acoustic guitar sound, finishing with a bit of an up tempo melody. It’s a great demonstration of Tate’s lyrics, and it shows that the band doesn’t just need to play faster-faster-faster. It’s very well done, although at just over six minutes long, it does drag a bit.

One of my favorite songs on the album is next, “NM 156”. It’s sort of an Orwellian, anti-technology piece like something Rush would do, but with much more of an epic metal edge. It starts with some computer-type sound effects and some synth sound and vocoder work, and breaks into a faster number, with some great guitar solo work. The only real complaints I have with this song is that 1) it’s only 4:38 long, and by the time you tack on the digital intro/outros, it’s too short for me, and 2) there’s not another song on the album that has this kind of raw energy and futuristic vibe, although some songs have brief bits in them that are this cool. “NM 156” is one of my favorite old Queensryche songs, and I must not be the only one, because the band still brings this one out for their live shows. In fact, the Live Evolution double CD from 2001 opens with it. And  this album was supposed to open with it too, but EMI changed the track order against the wishes of the band, putting the title track first. Oh, and a trivia hint for fans born after 1985 or so: the sound effect at the end of the song is called a “dot-matrix printer.” Old people used to use them before laserprinters were invented.

The next track (first song on side B for those who remember tapes and LPs) is also the only single from the album, “Take Hold of the Flame”, a sort of power-ballady song that both features Tate’s swooning vocals, plus had enough of a rock edge behind it to sound cool. There are two more songs after this, “Before the Storm”, and “Child of Fire,” that are mid-paced and longish songs similar to “En Force” or “Deliverance.” Both are good, but nothing special. The only unique thing here is that the first song pretty much stops about 45 seconds from the end, and then leads up in this dredge bit that goes right into the next song. The album ends with the almost-ten-minute “Roads to Madness”, which trudges on at a very slow speed, and builds a bit, but at about five minutes in, it all but ends. But some haunting string synth pulls the music on a bit as the drums start up and keep the theme going. With about two minutes left, the whole band suddenly picks up again, Geoff Tate screams out an impossible note, and then the whole thing picks up in this total balls-out refrain that rips through the album at the very end. It’s an unexpected ending, and very rewarding if you stuck with everything up until then.

A lot of this album is like that. This is probably the first album I ever got into in which the phrase “rewards repeated listens” was completely true. Individually, not many of these songs (with the exception of “NM 156”) are that interesting on their own. But if you invest the 50 minutes to really go through this album, and spend the dozens of listens to let it really grow on you, it brings out a sum greater than the parts. And this seriously showed me that a band besides Rush or Yes could take on this progressive rock label and do it in such a way that was so non-Rush or non-Yes-like. This album isn’t for everyone, and by their next release, they were doing similar stuff but in a more accessible way, but it’s an excellent first shot for the band.

Rating: 8

I have moved. Well, mostly. As of Saturday, the place in Playa Del Rey is stripped bare, the shelves wiped clean, and the keys turned in. With the help of Sarah’s dad, we drove the two-car convoy up to San Francisco with no major incidents, feline or otherwise. The new place, which bears a strong resemblance to the old place, now has a new Ikea mattress, a new Ikea computer cabinet, and a bunch of clothes, minor kitchenware, and other crap that came up in a total of four carloads, plus the usual Target and Costco ventures. Tomorrow or the day after, we are supposed to get the big truckload of everything else, which will be great fun.

I got a new job. As per the normal drill, I won’t mention it here, but if you are curious, you can email me. It’s going to be an interesting venture, which means I might not post again for another six months. And it’s 45 minutes away, so even if it was banker’s hours, that’s a huge hit. But I am excited about it, so we’ll see.

Right before we left LA, I reached lifetime status at Weight Watchers. That means I stayed under my goal for long enough, and now I don’t have to pay. (I posted about this in LiveJournal.) I have not eaten as well since, because I have either been on the road or have not had a kitchen available to me. But I think I am still maintaining, and now need to get in the groove of eating correctly in the new office situation. I still don’t feel thin. And I am afraid to go buy new clothes, even though my current ones are hanging off of me.

There are two new phones in the family. Sarah got an iPhone, and I got a Samsung Blackjack 2, which is a Windows Mobile phone. They both have interesting features to me, but the 3G speed is a huge wonder to me. It’s strange to hold a tiny device that’s smaller than a box of cough drops that can download files twice as fast as my first DSL connection. I’m still working on using a Windows Mobile computer while syncing to a Mac, but I have that almost figured out with Missing Sync. I’m almost at the “so what do I do with it?” phase, and I will need to adjust my data hoarding accordingly. The iPhone is neat, and I like the Mac-centric interface, but I can’t type at all on the virtual keyboard. If it had a slide-out, it might be more viable for me. Oh well.

Time to go install more crap I don’t need on the phone. I have almost two weeks off until work starts, and it starts with me flying to Dallas for training. Maybe I should buy a memory card and fill it with ripped and shrunk DVDs for the trip.

Well, I am moving again. This time I will be going up to San Francisco, and in short order - with luck, we will be out of our LA place by the end of this month. Because we are transferring apartments within our current company’s system, it is going faster than usual, and there were no deposits or background checks or whatever else. I looked at places last week, found one, signed a piece of paper, and we are now underway.

My mission as of late is to further compress my life into fewer boxes and shelves. My office has six bookshelves, and my goal has been to eliminate the tallest one, which I got made for me when I lived in Astoria. It is falling apart, looks like hell, and is always in danger of falling over. I also would like to free up that space and reduce my bookcase footprint. A huge pile of books have gone to Amazon for resale, and a bunch more have been recycled or wait to be donated. I also moved a bunch of DVD box sets off of one shelf and into plastic tubs for storage in a closet. I don’t need immediate access to every single DVD I own, and although at one time I felt some need to have every spine displayed of every DVD in my collection, I’d now rather have every single thing hidden in a storage unit of some sort. With that shift, there are now no longer any books on that shelf, and it will go to the chipper soon.

I also have a bunch of “misc” boxes that have followed me across the country ten times over, at least since college. When I got to LA, I had this down to two printer paper boxes and six smaller plastic tubs. I managed to eliminate one of the paper boxes yesterday, which was a major triumph. One of the problems, aside from that I’m wasting entire days trying to eliminate half a cubic foot of storage, is the nostalgia aspect of the whole thing, and how hard it is for me to let go of some things that meant so much to me at one time.

Some of this isn’t hard. I have ten copies of every death metal zine that passed through my hands in 1993, and I really don’t give a shit about any of them anymore, so they all went to the recycler, unless I wrote something in them. I have a lot of zines and papers in which I had a review or short piece in a column, and it was easier for me to tear out that page and chuck the rest than it was to keep hauling around the whole thing. But there were other things. I found this shirt in a box, a polo shirt that I wore a lot in 1992, and I mentioned in Summer Rain frequently. I don’t know why I kept it, except that in 1999 when I was writing the book, it was easy to pull out this shirt and think of 1992. Now, I can pitch it. It’s hard to do, but sometimes keeping just the memory is better than keeping the associated hardware.

I also went through all of my photos yesterday, meaning that every single analog photo I’ve taken from 1982 to 2000 passed through my hands. There was a lot of low-hanging fruit to pitch, like pictures of blackness or a flash against a glass window. I eliminated doubles when I could. I threw out photos of people I never met in person. All of the blurry artistic stuff went in the garbage. All of these decisions were helped by the fact that I scanned in all of my negatives a year ago, and all of this old stuff was in iPhoto. I managed to remove about 25% of the space in my photo storage area, which is huge.

It was also weird. I am an overly nostalgic person sometimes, so to look at all of these photos from 1983 and 1988 and 1993 and 1996 made me feel weird. I had some severly negative feelings about my prom in 1989, but I found dozens of photos from it. In all of them, I looked the same, this deer-in-headlights look, like someone at a blackjack table who just bet too much and watched the dealer with a ten showing turn over an ace. I found pictures I took in 1983 with my Kodak 110 camera of the state Future Problem Solver’s competition, on the big giant metro campus of IU-Purdue at Fort Wayne. Twenty years later, I’d be standing on a beach in Hawaii, trying to shake a long plane ride out of my head, but at that moment, 90 minutes in a stationwagon was like a trip to the moon. And there’s a stack of pictures (and doubles) from a trip to Canada in 1988, my first, in which it looks like I spent the whole trip saying “wow, they have 7-Eleven in Canada! Let me take 100 pictures of it! I wonder if Geddy Lee ever shops here?”

Another task as of late is rating or re-rating thousands of songs in iTunes. I figure I have at least a couple of six-hour drives ahead of me, so it would be good to get some playlists and podcasts and new ratings in my iPod for that. So if you see anything weird in my playlist to the right, that’s why.

Back to work…

I’m in San Francisco right now. I went to my (probably) last baseball game of the year, Rockies versus Giants. This was both a really great game, and a bit of a bummer, especially since the Rockies lost, and it really summarizes the so-so year the team had.

Okay, so I walk to the stadium, and there’s an area at the right field wall that looks out at this small cove and the water, and it’s a nice little place to walk and get some water and nature and bay views in before you go into the game. And this wall has a metal gate where you can go up, even during a game, and look into the field for free. Granted, you’ll have to fight off a thousand other people for a look, but it’s one of the only ways to get a free glimpse of major league baseball without investing in a helicopter.

I went up to the gate, and it was Giants batting practice. But, right against the gate, throwing catch with the bullpen coach, was Jeff Francis. He was literally 20 feet away, throwing and throwing, all of his motions perfectly aligned for each pitch. I stood there for a while and watched, because it was almost hypnotic. Also, at the open bullpen was Jason Hirsh, throwing full-speed to a geared-up catcher. The first thing I noticed about him, is he’s a monster - he’s 6’-8 and 250 pounds, and is pretty fast-moving for his size. He pitched low, and his giant gangly arms hurled the ball like a medieval siege weapon. But he was erratically off target and out of rhythm. He ended last season with a broken leg, then ended this one before it started with a messed up shoulder. Looks like the shoulder is healed, but he’s out of sync. Oh well - the Rockies could use another good pitcher.

For this game, I bought a dugout club ticket, which was $75, but something I probably wouldn’t do again, so it was worth it. At AT&T park, the first level of seats extending up from the field have no concourse behind them. You can go up to the first concourse for a drink, but the concourse behind the first level is actually the cinderblock access tunnel that connects up with laundry rooms, equipment storage, the press room, and the two clubhouses. To alleviate this, there is a large club area hanging off of this concourse, which you can access if you have dugout club tickets. And the first part of the experience: this section has its own entrance, its own line, and it’s own access, so you don’t have to go through the main gates with the rest of the savages.

I got into the club area, and got to work on dinner. The club has a half-dozen restaurant stations where you can buy food and drink. I thought there would be some eclectic choices, but it was pretty basic: burgers, hot dogs, fries, chinese, tacos, BBQ. I got a bratwurst and the signature garlic fries, which are supposed to be a big deal. The first Rockies game I went to this year, I got a bratwurst from the Sandlot brewery, so it seemed like a natural bookend. This one, not that great. I also wasn’t into the garlic fries, and only ate a few of them. I don’t know if it was the garlic, or the fact that I never eat fries. I found a place selling fruit salads and got one of those instead.

When I got done eating, I went toward my seat, and I had to go through one of those tunnels, the kind where players run through when taking the field at football games. When I got through this, the Rockies were taking batting practice. And… I realized I could go right up to the field and watch. Normally, I always wonder who those people were, who sat at the rail and talked to the players. And now, with my magic ticket, that was me. I went right up to the front, and was a dozen feet away from the plate. All of these players that I’d been watching for the last two years were all right there, like the distance from my desk to my fridge, and they were all joking around, warming up, and hanging out.

I noticed a lot of little stuff. Troy Tulowitzki is a lot taller than you’d think. Omar Quintanilla is really short. Matt Holliday doesn’t look as huge as he does on TV. Ian Stewart, who just took over third base from Garrett Atkins, now has grown his hair out and sortof resembles Atkins. Yorvit Torrealba was eating a sucker while he was playing catch. Brad Hawpe spent a lot of time batting, popping up, tuning how hard he could hit and the angle he could catch. Matt Holliday hit a homer high into the bleachers in the deepest part of center field. I thought everyone would congratulate him, slap high fives, or whatever, but nobody even acknowledged it.

The weirdest part of all was that I saw someone playing catch, and realized it was Todd Helton. He’s on the 60-day DL for back problems, but he was still out there in uniform pants and a warm-up jacket, lightly tossing back and forth with Chris Ianetta. And then as he walked up to the cage to talk to Clint Hurdle, he saw me standing there in a Rockies jersey, probably the only one there, and he sort of half-nodded a “hey” to me as he went by. So to see him made it worth my $75. Plus I got a shitload of pictures.

So the game started, and all I can say is that it went slow, totally shut out until the Rockies manufactured a single run. And in the 7th, the whole thing fell apart. The game dragged on from there, and it ended at 4-1 Giants. And then I had a one-mile walk home.

Anyway, that’s the baseball season. Maybe I will get some damn pictures up now.

This weekend, my sister-in-law was here from Wisconsin, and we all hung out and saw LA and saw Hollywood. And then on Saturday, we went to Chavez Landfill and saw ten innings of Mannywood. Here’s the bulleted list:

• Aside from the Rockies, the Brewers are one of my favorite teams, and although you miss a lot of the fun when you’re watching them at an away game at Dodger Stadium (sausage race, Bernie Brewer, Miller Park, indoor plumbing, a stadium that doesn’t suck complete shit) it still stood to be a fun time.
• Our seats were in the Loge level, first base side, just a bit over from the plate, and a couple rows from the top. For Loge seats, they were pretty good. But of course, the rip-off at Dodger Stadium is that you can’t touch seats closer than that for under $200 or so.
• I had a three taco plate at the Mexican food place. They were those little tiny tacos, which I hate. Tasted okay, but I wanted another nine of them.
• There was an endless parade of pre-game crap. Anthony Kiedis, of all people, threw out a pitch. Then some random bank employee threw out a pitch. Then a bunch of little kids came out. Then, a group of 25 doctors from a cancer research place came out and all threw first pitches, Then a dozen Dodgers players from the 1990s came out. Then Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon came out with his entire band in center field and played a horrible few songs. Then, 50,000 people wondered aloud, “where the hell am I?”
• One of the former Dodger has-beens was Tommy Lasorda. I decided if I ever met him, I would try to get him to sign a can of Slim-Fast. It would probably be better to get a signed jar of his spaghetti sauce, but I think they landfilled that shit when the company went bankrupt.
• There were a LOT of Manny shirts. A couple of people had Manny wigs. I went to the t-shirt booth and they had a ton of stuff, so I bought one of the Mannywood shirts. I don’t know why - maybe it will be a collector’s item when he leaves LA and goes to play for the Yankees, in like 15 seconds from now.
• When Mr. Ramirez did make his appearance, he got a HUGE reaction. HUGE. I knew he was like the savior to the NL West, but it’s amazing how quick everyone in LA embraced him. It’s also weird to see him in a brand new Dodger blue and white uniform - I’m so used to seeing him in Boston garb.
• It was good to see the Brewers on the field. The Fresh Prince is still pushing 300, even after the vegetarian diet. I still enjoy watching him play defense and run bases - it’s like watching a stampeding boar.
• The Dodgers led most of the game, but as far as pulling further ahead, they got robbed by some very astounding catches. Gabe Kapler went over the rail and into the seats to catch what should have been a home run into left field. But there were also some astounding errors on the Brewers’ behalf.
• The Brewers pulled ahead, and then Manny pulled a sacrifice fly in the 9th to tie it. In the top of the 10th, J.J. Hardy added a run. Then at the last at-bat, Manny struck out, and the game was over, 4-3.
• I should add that people were LOUD. People have this annoying practice of beating the seats in front of them, and getting way too charged up. Sometimes I think Dodger stadium should stop serving alcohol after like the 3rd inning or something.
• After the game was a fireworks show, which I think was the first time I’ve been to a game where the home team lost and they had fireworks, but they plan these things out months in advance.
• Because they were letting people on the field for the fireworks, we ran down there and I walked out onto right field. I’ve never been on the turf of the field of a baseball stadium (just the warning track) but there were so many people, it wasn’t much of a photo op. We started heading back out as the fireworks started, so we could get a jump on traffic.
• Lots of guys selling bootleg Manny shirts in the parking lot.

Anyway, sorry for the boring report - not working on much sleep here. Once again, photos… someday.