Get out the metal detector

The News Review:

- Get out the metal detector
- Blast Beats Dark Harmonies and Monstrous Melodies
- 2006: The Year in Music
- The Best of 2006: Music
- Metal Health – Music – The Pitchpage 1 – The Pitch

Get out the metal detector
Toronto Star – Dec 28, 2006
Ben Rayner Pop Music Critic A recurring theme amongst these retrospective essays recently has been that it gets harder and harder with each passing year to pull a defining sound movement or thrust from the preceding 12 months in popular music. Beyond release schedules and balance sheets it doesn’t make much sense to artificially bracket one calendar year as the ideal time in which to detect and measure musical trends anyway… Record sales are strong. And a couple of nice Canadian boys Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen scored a surprise international hit with their doting indie documentary Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey. A blood-and-corpse paint-smeared death-metal band Finland’s Lordi even won the Euro-Vision song contest with a guttural assault entitled "Hard Rock Hallelujah. "A band like Lamb of God is already halfway there; it won’t be long before a seriously extreme metal band of the Finnish-church-burner variety crosses over with a mainstream hit. r who knows?Nobody could have predicted that a couple of costumed comic-book weirdos like Gnarls Barkley’s Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green would have had one of the year’s biggest hit records in their charmingly off-kilter St. Elsewhere at the start of 2006.

Blast Beats Dark Harmonies and Monstrous Melodies
C Weekly – Dec 28, 2006
Bands who play a hybrid style of metal that is not thrash speed death black metal hardcore grindcore or some amalgamation thereof were not included. What follows is pure metal… As fans know that’s saying a lot about a band that could never keep still. After an initial rush of energy in the first two songs that resurrects classic thrash with breathtaking production clarity the reunited Frost proceeds to make short work of expectations. It’s slow and at times even plodding but this music rewards the faithful. More than ever Celtic Frost captures the despair rage and tragedy of a human race marooned in a universe with an absent god. As if to grasp the infinite sprawl of this solitude the band seems to reach into space itself and returns with a picture as beautiful as it is bleak. Mastodon Call of the Mastodon(Relapse)Though press and fan anticipation was no doubt concentrated on Mastodon’s Warner Bros. debut this year the acclaimed band managed to top itself via this reissue of some of its earliest recordings (essentially the Lifesblood EP expanded to include four songs from the same sessions).

2006: The Year in Music
Riverfront Times – Dec 28, 2006
CSS Cansei De Ser Sexy (Sub Pop): With Le Tigre on hiatus the Brazilian sextet CSS stepped up for booty-dancers staunch feminists and electro-pop fanatics everywhere with their high-energy debut. “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above” begs to be blared during a Jazzercise class for hipsters “Art Bitch” sounds like a deconstructed Yeah Yeah Yeahs song stitched back together with diagonal big-beats and the bubble-bath-synth groover “Fuckoff Is Not the nly Thing You Have to Show” resembles Ladytron trash-talking with Cyndi Lauper. Def Leppard Yeah! (Island): Critically maligned arena-rockers Def Leppard sure sound like they have something to prove on their fantastic covers record Yeah! And who can blame them? They’ve always drawn inspiration from seminal UK glam and metal bands but they can’t seem to escape being seen as poof-rock hacks. Which is too bad since their faithful (but not derivative) renditions of classic cuts from Bowie T. Rex Roxy Music Sweet EL and even the Kinks — the gorgeous copper-burnished “Waterloo Sunset” — more than cement their musical talent. Nelly Furtado Loose (Geffen): Furtado who’s notorious for being a hit-or-miss performer live is perhaps the year’s biggest example of how studio gloss and the right production team can revive (and reinvent) an artist’s career — and create Top 40 gold in the process… CSS Cansei De Ser Sexy (Sub Pop): With Le Tigre on hiatus the Brazilian sextet CSS stepped up for booty-dancers staunch feminists and electro-pop fanatics everywhere with their high-energy debut. “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above” begs to be blared during a Jazzercise class for hipsters “Art Bitch” sounds like a deconstructed Yeah Yeah Yeahs song stitched back together with diagonal big-beats and the bubble-bath-synth groover “Fuckoff Is Not the nly Thing You Have to Show” resembles Ladytron trash-talking with Cyndi Lauper. Def Leppard Yeah! (Island): Critically maligned arena-rockers Def Leppard sure sound like they have something to prove on their fantastic covers record Yeah! And who can blame them? They’ve always drawn inspiration from seminal UK glam and metal bands but they can’t seem to escape being seen as poof-rock hacks. Which is too bad since their faithful (but not derivative) renditions of classic cuts from Bowie T. Rex Roxy Music Sweet EL and even the Kinks — the gorgeous copper-burnished “Waterloo Sunset” — more than cement their musical talent. Nelly Furtado Loose (Geffen): Furtado who’s notorious for being a hit-or-miss performer live is perhaps the year’s biggest example of how studio gloss and the right production team can revive (and reinvent) an artist’s career — and create Top 40 gold in the process. Loose is the most consistent and innovative pop-diva disc of the year from the Latin-flair of “No Hay Igual” to the digi-funk bodyrocker “Maneater” and of course the playful ’80s-glitter all over the Timbaland-featuring synth-swerve “Promiscuous.

The Best of 2006: Music
Washington Post – Dec 28, 2006
Low and Death Vessel at the Black Cat Feb. Low’s performance of Neil Young’s "Down by the River" was breathtaking but the Minnesota trio was almost upstaged by opener Death Vessel’s captivating croon of "Break in the Empress Crown. Josh Ritter "Girl in the War… We all scored a lot of great deals during its going-out-of-business sales but this overpriced overbearing chain was long overdue for its play date with the dodo. Pitchfork Music Festival Chicago July 29-30. This festival had it all: a killer lineup affordable tickets and reasonably priced food and water. I’m surely a bit biased (my name’s on the masthead) but it’s great that music’s indiest webzine still lives by the DIY spirit. Gnarls Barkley had the song of the year with "Crazy.

Metal Health – Music – The Pitchpage 1 – The Pitch
Pitch Weekly – Dec 28, 2006
She wails and screeches growls and keens chanting a saga of death and loneliness that festers in the pit of your stomach. Plotkin’s guitar spurts and staggers into blind corners scrapes against beslimed things splinters fingernails on the unyielding stone of the sarcophagus that the duo has built in the cold heart of a lost barrow. Motorhead Kiss of Death (Sanctuary): Lemmy is 60 years old and an admitted Viagra user and still — still! — the most metal person on the planet. Consider Kiss of Death: rude lyrics killer riffs Phil Campbell’s finest guitar work in his long tenure with the band and the boozy rasp that is Lemmy’s head-toward-Valhalla vocal style. Fuck Dick Clark and his antiseptic “eternal teenager” shtick; Lemmy is the eternal teenager. Almost every song he writes is about booze pussy fighting or rock and roll itself — all gloriously raucous and loud. In 2007 let’s discard the term rock and roll entirely and simply say Motorhead.