I am constantly amazed by what I choose to remember and choose to forget. The small, vital factoids that push me through a conversation drift like breath in 20-degree temperatures. The key word on the very tippity-tip of my tongue never gets out without the serious throwing of shapes and much anguish, yet I can still recall a Datsun commercial from sometime around the 1980s, featuring two Asian men calling themselves The Wong Bros. and announcing a year-end sell-a-thon. In Steve Martin-esque fashion, they shouted at the camera, shaking various degrees of late ’70s bling, “We’re the Wong Brothers! We are two party guys!” I’m dead serious about this.
Clearly this ad wouldn’t have a chance in hell if it was aired today. Even Six Flags came under fire last year for commercials with a barking Asian man rating “fun” situations – One Flag! Six Flags, more fun! This year, he was replaced by their creepy old (meaning younger person in old man prosthetics) dancing man character. If Nissan Motors resurrected those wacky Wongs, it would trigger a thermonuclear public relations implosion. This isn’t about political correctness or incorrectness, though. After several decades, the Wongs are still with me. As a piece of advertising, that means it was highly effective. As anything more than a jumping off point for this piece, though? Not so much. (more…)
It’s hard for me to believe that the band’s older fans couldn’t find it in their hearts to forgive Katatonia. They’ve been far away from their black metal roots for a long time, have reached personal best levels with 
and 
, and have done it again with their latest, 
. The word from the studio sessions was that this would be an extension of 
, read by Jeffrey Tambor (2009)
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Instrumental sludge metallers Pelican return with what may yet be their most surprising disc, What We All Come to Need. The changes are not immediately apparent if you’ve been following the band, as their heavy guitar attack and midtempo advance remain consistent from earlier releases. However, the album’s newer, smaller details eventually come to the fore.
Bad news for all the fans who thought that this, finally, was Knopfler’s return to Dire Straits-style rock and roll: Those days are gone, and have been for awhile now. Get Lucky, Knopfler’s debut for the Warners heritage label Reprise (ugh — “heritage” — it has all the cache of a Revolutionary War reenactment troupe) is tonally more of a cousin to his 
album, gambling iconography and allusions intact. That Warner Bros. kept him within their ranks at all is baffling. His songwriting is as elegant and elegiac as ever, and there are few that will ever approach his skill at the guitar, but they’ll never get 
, L.A. Law and 
and, unlike the diehard loyalists, I don’t think the last couple seasons of 
were anywhere near the level of the first three. But there’s no doubt in my mind that without Leno shoving his chin into that ten o’clock dike, the dam would burst forth with edgy cops with hearts of gold, horny doctors still adherent to the Hippocratic Oath and lawyers who’ll do anything to win, but they won’t do that (No, no, they won’t do that.) 
Out of the rarefied list of truly classic progressive rock bands, King Crimson stands as the thorniest of the lot. You can ask someone on the street to name a Genesis song and they should be able to oblige. A Yes song, maybe. King Crimson? Not hardly. And yet of those three names, it is Crimson that has had the heaviest impact on modern music, specifically metal. You can hear the threads of building, breaking down and then rebuilding a song in groups like Tool and Porcupine Tree. The sinister heaviness underneath Robert Fripp’s guitar constructions was a major component for the downtuned nu-metal of the late ’90s and early 2000s, even if Black Sabbath and Tony Iommi got most of the lip service. Even so, they never had a top 10 hit, which given Fripp’s somewhat contrarian nature, probably pleases him to no end.
If Ray Bradbury decided to form a prog metal band, it would sound like Jupiter Society, and that really wouldn’t be a bad thing. There are several things in common: Bradbury was never one for believing in the benevolence of the unseen, a perspective shared by main Jupiter Society songwriter and keyboardist Carl Westholm. Bradbury enjoyed a sense of dark grandeur in his stories — a tainted nostalgia, if you will — and was not at all worried when his space stories went a little noir, with bad things happening to good people. Westholm’s musical bombast loves the dark corners of minor notes, big choral backups, dramatic shifts from quiet to loud. Both creative minds can be a whole lot of fun.
(2001)