Likewise, the fans do not want something that is so foreign and relatively experimental that none of this artist or group’s DNA finds a way to peer through. To make a return to the spotlight even marginally successful, one has to straddle these two. Copy your hits and you’re cynical and lazy. Go way the hell over yonder and you lose sight of whatever it was they loved you for in the first place. This was the fear that hung over Van Halen Mach IV’s A Different Kind Of Truth, an album that returns David Lee Roth to the mic and finds Eddie Van Halen’s son Wolfgang manning the bass.

The group never was the sentimental type anyway, as evidenced in early tunes like “Bottoms Up” and “Everybody Wants Some.” The thought of these elder statesmen of rock (and stare at that phrase awhile…let it burrow into your psyche like a parasite) preening and prancing about and lusting after girls who could be their daughters was not a pleasant prospect. But then again, neither was the concept of a slow, loping drag of a collection that snuggled into those flannel jammies, sipped tea at noon with a side of Nilla wafers, and casually bragged about “what we was.” What was the way forward? Was there a way forward at all or was this merely, as many in this crowd assumed, so much cashing in that famous namecheck, trotting out the oldies on tour, and purporting that it wasn’t really that way because, hey, we’ve got a new album, right?

Right. Very right, in fact.

Van Halen has a new album out and the hopeful pessimists like myself are breathing a sigh of relief. It is not a chaste volume of old timey recollections and boasts, nor the most inappropriate series of jailbait come-ons ever devised half-drunk at three in the morning. It walks the whisper-thin wire of being both and neither, and most importantly, it presents the hardest, wildest boot up the bum these people have produced in decades. As a matter of fact, if one said in the past that VH was a hard rock-pop group (and they were for the most part), they would need to recalculate for A Different Kind Of Truth. This is about as metal as the band has ever been and I, for one, am not complaining.

There are nods to the past, but they remain only nods. The first couple listens to the track “You And Your Blues” recalled “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” but refused to linger there, and Roth’s voice showing the age and abuse of many hard-partying years fits the mood of the piece extremely well. His gruff be-bop on “Stay Frosty” is meant to trigger thoughts of “Ice Cream Man,” and they do. When the band punches in, however, the tune becomes a barnstormer and fully allays any fears that this was going to be the softer AOR bow on an otherwise quite aggressive set. On the track “China Town,” Wolfgang Van Halen earns his rank by tearing through a bassline more complex than anything this band has ever done on the low-end. “Big River” has a thunderous, feel-good stomp and a simple sing-along hook of a chorus, and closing “Beats Workin’” applies dumb smiles to faces as it winds its way to conclusion.

Is this the perfect comeback? Well, I can’t say that entirely. Sometimes Roth attempts some lines he just hasn’t the stamina for anymore, and brother does it show. Several years back when Wolfgang joined and Roth came back for the reunion tour, comedian Jim Norton did a parody song called, “We’re Back (And We’re Better Than Ever!)” which slathered on every awful reunion trope conceivable. A Different Kind Of Truth features the rather weak “Blood and Fire” that unfortunately brings Norton’s prediction to fruition. It’s not awful, but it remains the limpest of the bunch, and of the thirteen tracks I heard on the disc, it’s the one that easily nominates itself for exclusion.

With that in mind, the impressive detail is that the rest of the songs do not falter as easily. The band itself goes for the proverbial “it” at every turn, and Eddie Van Halen hasn’t sounded this alive since OU812. The perennially underrated Alex Van Halen shoots up fireworks all through the album. When it needs groove, he grooves. When it needs to boogie, he boogies; and when it is just plain time to be mean to the kit and destroy, he aims to maim. For a frustrated one-time drum student like myself, it is a joy to listen to him flip the rhythm as he does on the opening of “As Is.”

In the past few years I have had the greasy-faced teen in me built up and torn down, over and over, by old favorites who returned to the stage, each time promising things only partially delivered if at all. Chalk it up to the onset of a midlife crisis, where I want to feel like I did without retreating into the dark recesses of regression. Can’t the bands of my youth just get back out there and make good records again? Is that so hard to do and too much to ask? Apparently not because, while it’s not a perfect record or even a perfect Van Halen record, A Different Kind Of Truth is wonderfully cathartic, full of the pyrotechnics of a younger band, but not in denial of where they stand in the present.

Download A Different Kind Of Truth from Amazon.com.

It is said that if you wait long enough, a trend will fall out of fashion, be ridiculed, then wind up being a trend all over again. I suppose it is true, only one is hesitant to start lumping musical forms in as “trends.” It feels very dismissive and something dictated by whim and not by need. For example, I found myself missing the primacy of rock guitars during a recent viewing of the Cameron Crowe-assembled Pearl Jam Twenty.

Let me just say how weird it is to watch a documentary set in the times in which you have lived. Many of us see the documentary as the expression of times long gone and people now dead—just think of nearly everything Ken Burns has ever done and you’ll get where I’m thinking. But here is a film that immediately drops me into a time I remember living through, those last days of hair metal where longhaired, mirror-shaded miscreants danced funny and sang of getting drunk and screwed sloppy. We also had the pop acts that, when they were still making headlines, were also most reflective of an illusion of the 1980s than the actual era. Into that came the feedback of guitar played loud, angry, not flashy but with a lot of energy.

It was kind of weird, really. A brother of mine who is dyed-in-the-wool metal appreciated Nirvana’s Nevermind for all of a few months. I recall us driving to my grandmother’s for Christmas with the tape playing through a half-dozen times. Pearl Jam’s Ten stuck around longer than that, but it too eventually went by the wayside. My brother Dan would drift back to Metallica, Overkill and Testament, but the larger populace would stay with the alternative rock acts for a longer time. We didn’t know how good we had it.

Matter-of-fact, we did an awful lot of complaining during that period, about who was true and who was selling out, about what the difference between an artist and a rock star is, about who was good, great, or sucked. And sure, there was a lot of music that truly was horrible at that time; they came, they saw, they went home and whined into microphones and slammed barre chords into their Sears guitars, and they wound up with recording contracts. That may be too simplistic an assessment, but it felt that way. We probably should have been grateful, even for the wanna-bes.

The music scene, such as it is, is so automated that even jokes about auto-tune no longer apply. Most pop songs are so over-produced and over-processed; to hear a guitar strum somewhere in the mix seems like a really big deal now. And even so, there’s still some good stuff happening, even if it is 90% synthetic. I refuse to fall into the trap of saying “everything made now is garbage,” because it is just not true.

But I have lived through a few musical cycles now where the guitar was the dominant force: most certainly the 1970’s was the most pervasive, followed by the alterna-90s. After that, the 1980s had enough guitars in tow to remind you it existed in the first half of the decade (bunched up against a whole lot of synth that has aged extremely poorly). The hard-rockers were rather in their glory for the second half, but only small portions of their efforts seem to reach me now. I listen to it still for memory’s sake, but some of it is just so silly and embarrassing. How did we ever think girls would like us just because we liked that stuff?

Finally, we had the early 2000’s microburst that was, really, nothing at all. In it there were White Stripes, Strokes, Hives and Vines, but darn little of lasting consequence (only the White Stripes has lasted long enough for anybody to get too gooey about the band’s eventual demise. The Strokes still exist but, right now, does anyone care enough to acknowledge it?) Where we stand now is mostly a guitar-free zone so far as the major pop charts are concerned.

And even the underground seems vastly different. Remember when blogs like Pitchfork seemed to revel solely in the most arch of independent music, and those who liked anything else were as stupid as the artists they liked? Today, they are a friendlier environment, which in itself is not a bad thing. They’re no longer the bitchy arbiters of what is good and what is worthless. But look at the stories that get the most frequent coverage on the site and you’ll recognize the change immediately. Odd Future with Tyler The Creator, a rapper, tends to show up the most, followed by singers who are far more glamorous than what used to pass for Pitchfork’s oeuvre. Remember Courtney Love’s streaked makeup or Donita Sparks staring down a camera lens in contempt? Now see Lana Del Rey, Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine, and Elizabeth Harper of Class Actress, all of whom are magazine-shoot ready. That’s not necessarily a bad thing either, but when you recall that whole ‘90s “underground manifesto” aesthetic, glamour can be quite disorienting.

The overriding point is, of course, most of this music is key-and-sample driven with, at times, a guitar adding color, a world where O.K. Computer came and went, but Kid A stayed forever. Often the beat is a disco pulse and not a thunder drive. One more time: not a problem if the song is good, but I cannot help but miss that electric downstroke, the voice that belts out into the microphone, through the wires, ultimately out your speakers and into your brain.

So what is it then? I guess what I really miss is that communal aspect of the majority, or at least the majority I was in closest proximity to, liking that sound. Right now, the guitar just isn’t all that welcome, and by inexplicable extension, I don’t feel welcomed either. I recall different time frames where I could flip on a radio and what came out had a 50/50 chance of being instantly accepted. Now I just feel old, having seen the alternative realm overtaken by the Oonts-Oonts club kids, and no matter how hard I try to pump my fist, I can’t track the rhythm.

So if I could go back to the early 1990’s, I’d tell myself a few things. First, when Pearl Jam starts getting weird with Vitalogy, just roll with it and don’t be so critical. Appreciate Kurt Cobain while he’s here because it won’t be long. Sponge isn’t awful so quit complaining, and more often than not, Stone Temple Pilots is better than you first thought. Bush still sounds like bad Nirvana ripping-off, but Gavin Rossdale will marry Gwen Stefani, she’ll eclipse him with hyperpolished electropop, and he will be relegated to the world of being Mr. Stefani so, ha ha, joke’s on him.

Enjoy the ride, already. We may yet see the next wave of six-string slingers or we may not. But let’s try not to ruin the party before we even get there (he said to himself tentatively).

In came their imprint Power Records. You think the battle lines between D.C. Comics and Marvel Comics is airtight, but at Power there was all kinds of inter-philanderin’ détente going on. Batman, Superman, Captain America, Spidey and, heck, let’s throw Conan The Barbarian, Star Trek and Space 1999 in there too, how ’bout it?

Now it is 2012 and “book” and “record” seem as compatible as “yoga position” and “wheat thresher,” but two people remember. Way Out Wednesday’s kiddie record guru Tony Redman and resident regressive and altogether suspicious subject Dw. Dunphy jump headlong into the jagged pile of vinyl from their collective youth…with Power! Read along with us, kids! Okay?!! (download PDF)

“Stacked Cards” from Batman (download)

Tony – I’m eager to hear this first story featuring the Joker. Is this silly Joker or scary Joker?

Dw. – Well, this came out more than a decade before Tim Burton’s Batman movie, but there is a slight similarity, story-wise, so let’s go with scary.

(0:00) Tony – I like the jazzy music at the start.

Dw. – It’s just like the beats all over again, bongos and everything. Ginsburg in blue tights. Ferlinghetti killing people. Exactly the same.

(0:31) Tony – Jeez, was Chief O’Hara too busy to hang around?

Dw. – Whenever there’s crime to solve, you know where Chief O’Hara will be…hiding in the mens room with Catwoman’s mugshot.

(0:39) Tony – So does he know his vandals by the kinds of rocks they throw?

Dw. – “When you’ve been the law as long as I have, you’ve seen a lotta rocks lobbed at you…except for the ones that put you in a coma.”

(0:55) Tony – Nice shout out to Arkham. They at least know a little bit about the comics.

Dw. – Yeah, and the original book that came with this seems to have been drawn by Neal Adams. We should get confirmation from Johnny Bacardi on that one.

Johnny Bacardi – Judging by what I’ve seen after Googling it, I’d say it sure looks like Adams, unless some of the Crusty Bunkers (a collective of assistants he had in the mid-70′s) pitched in. Looks like Adams with (Dick) Giordano inks to me, though.

Dw. – Thanks, JB! (It’s so good to have experts on the staff…)

(1:09) Tony – Do you think the Joker really had to sign that note? I mean, it was pretty obvious who it was. And with all the bad guys around I’d think the Gotham City Police Station might have bulletproof glass (or at least rock proof).

Dw. – That was just Power Records teaching kids to be polite. Always remember to sign your death threats, kids.

(1:26) Tony – Oh yeah, a 306. What’s a 306, anyway? I couldn’t find that number specifically, but it would be between 288 (Lewd Conduct) and 311 (Indecent Exposure).

Dw. – It appears to be “Liability for conduct of another; complicity.” Wasn’t Complicity J.J. Abrams’ first TV show, with the pretty blonde with the long curly hair that always drove the getaway car?

(1:50) Tony – Wait a minute. Didn’t he contact the Commissioner already?

Dw. – Ain’t nothing funny about Alzheimer’s, you Peter Pan Records bastards…

(1:59) Tony – Where have I heard Robin’s voice before? It sounds like someone from a cartoon, but I can’t place it.

Dw. – It’s not Casey Kasem, or as I refer to him, America’s Gielgud…which reminds me. I have to go shut off the oven. You have to let your Gielgud rest for fifteen minutes so the juices redistribute.

(2:06) Tony – Didn’t they have Aunt Harriet around to avoid that kind of thing?

Dw. – Sure, but boys will be boys when you’re off tenting your Gielgud with foil.

(2:21) Tony – “What? No, I’m not interested in free dance lessons!” (How old a joke is that?)

Dw. – I won’t dance; don’t ask me.

(3:17) Tony – *spit take* Did he say “frontal lobotomy”? Well, thanks for that diagnosis, Dr. Grayson!

(3:33) Tony – No wonder the Joker will be able to get away with it. Huckleberry Hound’s watching the museum!

Dw. – Oh yes, “Guernica,” “Starry Night,” and “The Scream” are all in safe hands. Yes, this schlub’s hands!

(4:32) Tony – I guess they can’t say “dead” on a children’s record.

Dw. – He’s sleeping. Very soundly. I SAID, HE’S SLEEPING VERY, Oh, screw it. He’s dead.

(4:37) Tony – It never happens to the guys that have another ten or fifteen years before retirement, does it?

Dw. – That’s how they get out of paying pensions. They send Mike Bloomberg down with a shiv. (I’m NOT inferring that billionaire Mike Bloomberg kills people to keep from paying police pensions. Just that, y’know, it could work!)

(5:36) Tony – Yeah, excellent detective work, Mulligan. Especially since the Joker threw a rock through the window earlier that day.

Dw. – Be nice, Tony. Throw him a Mulligan. Hooh-haah!! T’ank yah, ladies and germs!

(5:58) Tony – Robin seems a little too preoccupied with “action.”

Dw. – He’s a growing boy hanging around a grown man in blue tights. Bound to happen.

(6:00) Tony – “In spades”? Nice one, Robin!

Dw. – Bruce Wayne is kind of like the guy who finds out that he had a teenage son from a random booty call fifteen years earlier, now he’s on his doorstep and, worse, he’s about as funny as a punctured condom.

(6:39) Tony – “Duh, I tripped on something!” Idiot.

Dw. – Excuses, excuses. You know damn well Robin’s getting drunk in the morning to hold his demons down. “Tripped…” Hah, he wishes!

(6:45) Tony  – Wow, I guess they can say “dead”. That’s the second corpse today. Man, the Joker doesn’t fool around. I remember back when he was perfectly content throwing rocks through the Commissioner’s window.

Dw. – And here’s where we have that similarity to the movies, because whatever The Joker’s using, it sure acts a lot like Smilex. Or he told them a funny joke and beat them to death with a rock. He loves rocks.

(7:01) Tony – Wait, so the Joker’s used this hideout before, and he was surprised that Batman remembered where it was? I don’t even think Cesar Romero would have made that goof.

(7:29) Tony – Apparently they’re exploding clubs.

Dw. – That’s why they issue liquor licenses. (What? Too soon?)

(7:55) Tony – Then why didn’t he just say “Holy Smoke!”?

Dw. – Where’s the Tea Party when you need ‘em? Someone should declare war on Holy Smoke.

(8:22) Tony – Arkham Asylum has a swimming team?

Dw. – An effective one too. They all take turns trying to drown each other. Last one alive is champion.

(9:11) Tony  – Well, sure. A super villain who’s already killed two men is completely helpless in three feet of mud. Go get ‘im, officers!

Dw. – Felled by grime! Curse you, Batman! You’ve summoned two of the elements against me!

(9:47) Tony – I thought I heard somebody singing “Clementine”!

(10:17) Tony – Of course it’s hot. It’s been stolen! (Rimshot)

Dw. – It’s so sad that, by comparison, the museum guy makes Mulligan look like a genius. Oh, Mulligan, you drunken Irish dunce, what would we do without you and your convenient stereotype?

(11:11) Tony – I don’t remember there being a Joker in the Game of Life. Just a cool spinner and those little cars that you couldn’t stick all your peg children into.

Dw. – Imagine the possibilities though. “Batman, you sank my battleship!” or, “Yahtzee, Caped Crusader!” or, “Why I’d love to play a round of Naked Twister with you and Robin.”

(11:58) Tony – Yeah, frontal lobotomies solve everything!

Dw. – Indeed! Frontal lobotomies for everyone! First brain-scramble’s on me!

Tony – What a fun story, but I was disappointed that we didn’t get any good jokes from the Joker though. No exploding jack-in-the-boxes or joy buzzers that actually shock people or anything like that. For an arch criminal, he didn’t do anything very arch, did he?

Dw. – No, but he did off a couple people with a powerful nerve toxin so, there’s that at least. Speaking of which, I just sliced off some Gielgud. We’ll see how it turned out.

(Chews. Grimaces.)

Yuck. A slab of Kasem probably would have been less salty.

X-Men: First Class carried through on the promise (threat?) to go back to the franchise that was dulled severely by Brett Ratner’s third installment, and tarnished even more by a loud, brainless Wolverine spinoff. With original X-director Bryan Singer back on as an executive producer, the need to tell a good story beyond lots of flashy effects (of which there were many) was put at the forefront again where it belonged. What hurt the movie a bit, on two fronts, was that there was an overall brutality to it that was off-putting. Even some of the “good guys” came off like terrible people, deserving of the bigotry and shunning that is the crux of X-Men’s allegorical construction. It’s easy to forgive a good bad guy, but hard to forgive good guys that are jerks.

The other thing that held the movie back was that even though it was necessarily set in the early-1960’s, and the production design kept insisting it was so, the viewer never could truly feel the time period was correct. It felt like a post-Matrix movie, not post-James Bond like the EPKs kept insisting. These were things that kept coming to my mind even though I was enjoying the movie for what it was. It’s what they call the “Uncanny Valley” effect that the viewer knows what is a real person and what is a computer animation even if it is stunningly realized in CG. When the visual effects in First Class take over, it’s hard to go with the story being set in the handmade, sometimes clunky Sixties anymore. It looks like the times but feels far too new, go-go boots and mutton chops be damned.

Yet I will say that, of the comic book flicks of 2011, X-Men: First Class stands out above the equally anachronistic Captain America, the formulaic Thor, and the just-plain-awful-and-ugly Green Lantern. It’s a good movie that could have been better if, only once in a while, the makers would have forsaken the mouse for the practical effect.

So that brings us to Fox’s other preboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and of properties that could have been resurrected for new audiences, this is one that felt the most necessary, the most “right.” Leaving the property to the infinitely silly Tim Burton revamp seemed like such a waste of good assets, and so this story regarding the first of the sentient apes Caesar, played so well in a motion capture performance by the talented Andy Serkis, works on that fundamental story level. That story, of how a pharmaceutical organization embarks on a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease, uses lab animal simians as test subjects, and winds up playing god and setting the wheels in motion for their evolution, and man’s fall from grace, is smart and plays into the mythology novelist Pierre Boulle, original screenwriter Rod Serling, and director Franklin Schaffner conceived with the first Apes.

Had the filmmakers of today relied on such a strong foundation and rejected easy outs, my review would not now be heading into negative territory, but here we go. The script becomes so leaden with in-jokes and nods to the original story, those in the know can’t help but fall off the haycart to start looking for storyline easter eggs. Also, one of the “baddies” who is just more greedy and officious than pure evil, is Idris Elba who has a British accent. This convention, even though Elba is a very good actor, does some damage to the factor of suspension of disbelief. These can be glossed over when the character of Caesar takes the spotlight, but only to a point.

See, here’s the thing. Even though Serkis is giving his all for this part, and the interactions between him and the lead, played by James Franco, are alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking, I as the viewer could never get past the feeling I was watching a special effect. Forget the Blu-ray’s special features that tout the effects as revolutionary and spellbinding. They’re actually some of the worst effects I’ve seen in years.

The awfulness is that, one assumes, because the movie makers were shooting for that 3-D sweet spot, there’s a lot of separation between the digital apes and the live action actors. With the glasses, sure they may pop from the screen but even without, they are uncomfortably apart from the narrative. At times, the apes feel like Colorforms stuck to the TV screen, floating above the story world and never living in it.

Moreover, the designs of the apes range from indefinably simian but not sentient to weird, hairy children that have no monkey-like attributes otherwise. Seldom if ever does effects powerhouse WETA Workshop strike that middle path where you believe these creatures are a) actually a part of the movie, b) the next evolutionary phase inflicted by the ‘disease’ of a radically altered consciousness, or c) not just there to add 3-D jolts. Again, were it not for Serkis’ very heartfelt performance, there would be nothing to recommend these characters for.

And that’s pretty sad, really. The story is full of potential and hits it on a number of occasions. That the demise of humanity as dominant species was caused by the liberties they take on the natural world is a very Twilight Zone/Serling-esque P.O.V. and makes the conceptual aspirations of Rise of the Planet of the Apes perfectly aligned with the series it hopes to meld with. It was our species’ hubris that was our undoing, as well as a kneeling before some technological deity and not considering what such a pact entailed. The story gets that. The realization, however, misses it entirely and hits that digital effect chord way too hard and way too often.

Would the movie have been better with real apes? Well sure, but that defeats the point of the story of animal exploitation. What about putting people in ape suits? Yeah, but nobody would have taken it seriously; not by today’s audience standards. No, what was really necessary for both Rise of the Planet of the Apes and X-Men: First Class was that they tried a little harder. Both movies were on the right track but both got caught up with what the digital Buddha could give them, and not remembering that you also have to work harder to earn it.

In 1972, I would only have been three years old. My memories of that time would only have stuck around thanks to the re-enforcement of repetition and reminder.

My best friend is an atheist and he is a thoughtful, sensitive humanist. I have several close friends who are dyed-in-the-wool Christians and they conduct their lives without malice or bigotry. They believe in a supernatural presence and they deem him God. I also consider myself a Christian, believe in the validity of the Bible, but am not a literalist. I see the story of Jonah and the whale as those hearing Jesus’ parables would. They are legends with instructional purpose because we, as creatures of great intellect and free will, tend to be most receptive to stories. As you can imagine, either side has at times expressed great tolerance of my median viewpoints.

Richard Dawkins, the noted British biologist, is a highly intelligent man, capable of writing with both eloquence and elegance, and I have been fascinated by his work although there are large swaths of it that I don’t align with. Many of these are found in his book from 2006, The God Delusion. In the book he lays out point after point, argument by argument, why there is no deity, attempting to appeal to the marvelous core of human reason, and he succeeds…mostly.

When Dawkins rails against the hatred several religious types spew, verbal horrors vomited by so-called “Children of God” at the funeral sites of soldiers, or at the sidelines of parades, or a general intolerance to other viewpoints, he is correct and righteous in his disdain. I know of many people, in every religious persuasion, that are in equal agreement. Is it not the same broad brush he paints people of faith with, that is the brush those who claim to be of faith paint others?

In 1972, my aunt Florence Dunphy was lonely.

I cannot apologize for atrocities committed in the name of the Lord, but neither can I say that all that lean on the crutch of religion, faith or spirituality are cowards and deluded. I believe that the threat, and let me say that is exactly how I mean it: as a ‘wrath of God’ threat, is all that separates some in our society from being incredibly dangerous people. These are people who have been raised alongside the shallow pool of Narcissus, confident in themselves alone and, without the presence of something greater, would not be hesitant to tear through society to fulfill whatever it is their brain fixates on at that moment. They raise rhetoric that would otherwise have been a knife or a gun, and the haphazard randomness of the uncreated, unstructured natural world would be license to destroy. There are merely more amoeba in the puddle, they may assert, so they can disappear with no effect on society.

I do believe that for many, the loneliness of a world starving for father figures is eased by the spiritual equivalent, and that the teaching of Christ that “He who is without sin has the right to cast that first stone” was meant to erase our desire for holy one-ups-manship. We are all failed enterprises in the guise of mankind, and our myriad judgments must be taken against ourselves in kind to be truly considering ourselves ‘children of God.’ Love should conquer all, concern for all should be pre-eminent, and our prejudices should be swept aside because none of us are truly the hottest (expletive) in the outhouse.

In 1972, Florence Dunphy went to the local bar to find a man that would love her. She found a man.

I suspect that if Mr. Dawkins ever reads this, he would dismiss it as just one more tract of apologist nonsense. There are points in The God Delusion that are highly dismissive, to the point of being downright confrontational, and it’s a suit that fits Dawkins extremely poorly.  It sometimes reads like a shootout rather than a rational argument, with Dawkins standing atop a metaphorical mountain of bodies proclaiming, “Where’s your messiah now?” These moments are, however and blessedly, few. Although he approaches the subject with fervor, only occasionally does he become the zealot he so seemingly disdains. He’s trying to get mankind on board with the concept of the miracle of the natural world, that there is greatness in what simply is, and that a creator (real or invented) should not be imposed upon the greatness of what is.

But like I said earlier, sometimes that greatness in the human as the independent creature, freed from the shackles of an almighty overseer, is hard to find. I don’t remember my Aunt Flo. My memories of 1972 are fixed only because of the family that helped glue them in place afterward, the places we went to and went to again, the stories, all the post-it notes of shared history and “remember the time when we…” reminisces. On an early morning in 1972, my father was awoken by a phone. It was the Long Branch, NJ police. He was being summoned to the morgue to identify a body.

My aunt met a man who killed her, ditched her body in a dumpster like so much trash, then lit it on fire to destroy the evidence. I have often wondered if he believed in a god, or anything, while he was doing this. Did he not believe in a god and just saw others as the conduit or obstruction to his personal pleasures, just amoeba in a puddle, insignificant and expendable?

I am a sinner. I do my best not to be, and I do have a respect for the ‘wrath of God’ such as it might be, and part of my hope for a deity and the sin that bogs me down is because, whoever her killer was (and was never found), I hope he’s dead by now. I hope there’s a god, and I hope this person, for robbing me of her in my life, is burning in hell. Of my many transgressions, this one is never far from me.

It’s most difficult during the holidays with so many of my family members gone though, thankfully, not as violently as how Aunt Flo passed. I have no memory of her, yet I wonder what she would have been like if she lived. Would our families have been close? Would she be here Christmas Eve? Would she sing with my Dad? Would she and my mom, when she herself was alive, have been friends? If she finally found her knight in shining armor, would he have been a good man, and would I have been close with my presumptive cousins? If her heart had gone in another way, would her friend and I also been friends? I believe we would have, just as surely as I believe we were robbed from knowing.

And therein lies my biggest gripe with Dawkins’ book. God exists for people who love and don’t love, but mostly God exists because we need Him to. There are those who do not believe in a god do not need him to exist, and they are within their right to feel this way. I have no right to impose my belief on the author just as he has no right to denigrate me for mine. If we were right, we may yet meet Him. If we are wrong, and our brain kicks out and we decompose as all organic material is destined to, it won’t matter what we believed so long as it got us through life, forced us to consider if what we were doing was right or wrong, and perhaps taught us that we are born to love, not to hate…

…But that I got from Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” a story for another day.

Related articles

• Dw Dunphy On…”Crying” (popdose.com)
• Dw. Dunphy On…Spockchant! (popdose.com)
• Popdose 2011: Dw. Dunphy’s Best Of (And The Rest Of) (popdose.com)
• Richard Dawkins says David Cameron is ‘not really a Christian’. But is Dawkins a proper atheist? (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)

We ran this for two years straight but it would appear people are looking for it again. Who are we to argue? But we do have one request…if you have a favorite musical moment from a holiday special (not this one, that’s for sure) let me know at dw.dunphy or in the comments area. We’d like to bring other Christmas special music moments to you this season (instead of the holiday hell we usually inflict).

It is solely through bias that I consider Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol the best version of Charles Dickens’ oft-interpreted story of a miser who, through the efforts of the supernatural, comes to recognize the validity of not just the holiday, but his fellow man. It’s a tall order, considering there are three hundred bazillion versions of this story out there, including a de-holiday-ized Matthew McConaughey chick flick iteration in the form of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. My affection goes way beyond that, however. I’ll go out on a limb to say it’s easily one of my top five holiday specials.

Historically, Magoo’s is the first animated holiday special, airing all the way back in 1962 and sparking something of a golden age of television. Magoo’s presence begat Rudolph, Frosty and my number one, A Charlie Brown Christmas. That one, like Magoo, doesn’t get bogged down in the modern Christmas iconography and manages to tell a story of redemption, humanity and forgiveness, but where Charlie Brown has become an annual tradition, Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol sort of hangs by the wayside. It’s a shame, really, because not only is the story relatively faithful to the source material, it’s also funny and genuinely moving. It also benefits from having stellar songs from the writing team of Bob Merrill and Jule Styne, elevating the musical theater concept of the special beyond mere likeness. These were pros doing what they had on shows previously and would famously do in Funny Girl.

Sincerely, I don’t know how a tune like “Winter Was Warm” could fall through the cracks. Did the association with being in a “cartoon” keep it from becoming a standard? I suspect the lack of a soundtrack album has something to do with that. Also, Jim Backus’ vocals as Ebenezer Scrooge are faithful to the Magoo persona, meaning that voice is not really meant for musicals, but it comes across perfectly, embittered in one song and broken-hearted in the next. It’s fortunate that the show is on DVD, since there are handfuls of specials I vaguely recall that have never even shown up on VHS, let alone DVD. Not only is it great that you can pick this classic up and share it with your friends and family, but the DVD allows the slightly tech-savvy to pull together something like what you’ll find below.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present the songs of Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, written by Jule Styne with lyrics by Bob Merrill.

Overture

It’s Great To Be Back On Broadway

Ringle Ringle

The Lord’s Bright Blessing

Alone In The World

Winter Was Warm

We’re Despicable (Plunderers March)

Alone In The World Reprise

Ringle Ringle Reprise

The Lord’s Bright Blessing Finale

Credits (Winter Was Warm)

And, of course, if this is your first experience with the show, you might want to pick up Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol from Amazon.com.

On November 18, Nick D’Virgilio announced he was leaving the band Spock’s Beard. D’Virgilio has been the band’s longtime drummer and, in 2003, assumed the role of lead singer upon the departure of Neal Morse from the group. In his statement, D’Virgilio said that it was a fully amicable split prompted by sheer financial need. His work with Cirque Du Soleil’s company band was paying the bills and taking more time. Spock’s, even with his admitted love for the group and being a part of it, could not compete with the requirements that a growing family’s finances demand.

The new lead singer, only recently announced, is the vocalist from the band Enchant, Ted Leonard. Leonard’s uncanny Steve (Kansas) Walsh-like range makes him the perfect candidate for the position, and the fact that Enchant hasn’t released new material since 2003′s Tug of War album provided all the impetus one could ask for. It has not yet been announced whether Enchant’s extended hiatus is now permanent or not, but I suspect we will find out soon enough.

In the meantime, it is probably a fair bet that Popdose listeners have heard neither the D’Virgilio Spock’s nor Leonard’s Enchant, so we’ve set out to remedy that. As always, if you like what you hear, go out and buy the music and put some bucks into these bands’ collective pockets (after all, lack of bucks is why D’Virgilio left, right? Left? Right? Company, halt.)

Spock’s Beard – Nick D’Virgilio

Looking For Answers (Snow,2002)

Onomatopoeia (Feel Euphoria, 2003)

Ghosts Of Autumn (Feel Euphoria, 2003)

She Is Everything (Octane,2005)

Enchant – Ted Leonard

Traces (Juggling 9 or Dropping 10, 2000)

Under Fire (Blink of an Eye, 2002)

Follow The Sun (Blink of an Eye, 2002)

Sinking Sand (Tug Of War, 2003)

Related articles

• SPOCK’S BEARD Singer Quits (bravewords.com)

If 2011’s musical harvest represented anything, it was that you can unite, re-unite, and de-unite but if the songs aren’t there, none of it matters. That was true overall, from the Cars reunion I was hyping for the first quarter of 2011, to the breakup of R.E.M., to Kanye and Jay-Z’s Watch The Throne. Configurations mean nothing if the material doesn’t work.

That’s not to say the music was bad necessarily, but it does mean that it wasn’t sticky—there have been so many albums that flew into and out of the car stereo this year, many being appreciated in its short-term state and subsequently forgotten afterward, that my main choice criteria has been whether I came back to the records. Did they have any kind of staying power?

The Cars Move Like This is a good record for what it is, being at heart a Ric Ocasek solo record. Some will say it is an unfair knock because he was always the songwriter for the band and, if we’re being picky, it was always his vision. The album still lacks that group dynamic and one may have underestimated Ben Orr’s contributions, which are sadly in need here (where are all the backing harmonies?) But the album is enjoyable nonetheless, with songs like “Too Late” and “Soon” springing immediately to mind. “Soon” is a perfect illustration of what I’m talking about though. It would have fit perfectly on Ocasek’s Quick Change World, but would never have fit on other Cars recordings.

Urge Overkill had a more satisfying return with Rock and Roll Submarine. On first listen it sounded too raw and seemed to lack the hooks I’d come to expect from UO, but the record stuck with me. Perhaps the best reunion disc was Yes’ Fly From Here, and I attribute my enthusiasm partly to my extremely lowered expectations. There was no reason for the regrouped Drama lineup to deliver as fully as they did, but I think they went far above and beyond. It could have been an awful mess. Instead, they provided tunes that really felt like they were a part of the group, not apart from it.

Adele came roaring back with 21, and as I groused behind the scenes that it sounded like New York radio was only playing “Rolling In The Deep” (A LOT), the collection was fully aware of the difference between music that sounded like “Soul” and music that was full of soul. This one is squarely in that latter category.

I heard Dawes’ Nothing Is Wrong playing over a record store sound system, specifically the track “Little Bit Of Everything” and had to have it. I asked the clerk what album was playing. He gave me the wrong album, title, band, and completely failed the brick-and-mortar record store test. I took the snippet of lyrics I recalled to the Popdose Staff and asked if they knew what this was. They did. Most of us have been positively infatuated with the album since (although I was late to the party).

The Olympus Sound by Pugwash is not the band’s best album (that remains Jollity) but is still a fantastic piece of pop comfort food. The E.L.O.-ness of “Be My Friend Awhile,” the melancholy of “Dear Belinda” and the sheer repeatability of “Fall Down” represents a block of music that stayed with me for months and I have yet to truly grow tired of. That said, I felt the album had a sameness across the songs that probably required a couple more tunes in between; things with a punchier, more rocking attitude. Even so, in the midst of the summer heat, this was the record that got me through.

The debut from duo Kerosene Halo (Mike Roe and Derri Daugherty) may have been mostly comprised of covers, but each song is so lovingly chosen and rendered, without the nagging obviousness that hampers most efforts of the kind, that the takeaway is that of two old friends just playing music they love. Their choices are mostly deep cuts from Tom Waits, Richard Thompson, fellow Lost Dog member Terry Taylor and Leonard Cohen, and no, it is not “Hallelujah.”  If only everyone took as much care with this sort of project, it might not be such a throwaway category such as it has become.

The album that really met my expectations this year has to be Tom Waits’ Bad As Me, which was everything you could expect, and Waits has not sounded as clear as he does on so much of this record. He still has moments of sounding like the trash compactor from the underworld though (like on album highlight “Hell Broke Luce”) but this album presents an invigorated Waits and yet another solid entry in a very strange musical journey.

(Check out our Popdose Year End wrapup for a listen to “Hell Broke Luce”)

Related articles

• Kerosene Halo – Happy Campers (castleqwayr.wordpress.com)
• The Popdose Podcast – Popdose Presents: Songs of Freedom, Episode One (popdose.com)
• The Popdose Podcast: Episode 20 (popdose.com)

Last week it was announced that GWAR guitarist Cory Smoot, also known as Flattus Maximus, was discovered dead on the band’s tour bus. Details of Smoot’s death have not been determined yet; pending autopsy results, but it marked an altogether strange reality in the highly unrealistic world of the theatrical metal band.

GWAR as a group can be offensive and bizarre. They dress in outrageous masks and costumes, perform satirical songs that extolled the virtues of the substance “jizzmoglobin” among other less-than-Sunday-School-ready fare, and they were not afraid of looking silly sometimes, ugly most of the time, and off-putting all of the time. They are a loud fireball in the face disguised as a performance art collective and you either got it or you didn’t.

I’ll admit that I didn’t get it. Call me crazy, but I like to enjoy my music even when it is nasty and aggressive, loud and offensive, without feeling uncomfortable. GWAR makes me uncomfortable even though I know it is based in part on a joke. The band itself is not a joke even when the material is at its most unhinged, and therein sits the reason for this piece.

Smoot had portrayed Flattus Maximus since 2002 when Zach Blair left the group. The characters mostly remained even when members portraying them shifted out; kind of how Kiss will always have a “Space Ace” even if Ace Frehley is not in the band anymore only, because of GWAR’s excessive accoutrements, who could ever tell? Smoot was not the second Flattus in the band either. The character had been played by Dewey Rowell, Pete Lee, Tim Harriss, Blair and Brian Fechino, but up to this point these were all the standard shifting of tectonic plates underground. Some just leave, others clash, and still others produce disconcerting waves across the surface and create instability that cannot be tolerated.

Yet Smoot would seem to be a different story, and there seems to have been a friendship between him and frontman Dave Brockie (Oderus Urungus) that made him more of a Scumdog-In-Arms than his predecessors. This is evident in two actions after Smoot’s demise. The first was the announcement that, while Flattus Maximus existed before Smoot in so many ways, the character would not afterward. GWAR is retiring the character in his honor.

Perhaps more touching was the news that the band performed live without their headgear as a tribute. Even as a non-fan of what GWAR does, I was oddly moved by this. The band is seen with that costuming being the whole purpose, the reason for existing, and to remove it for this instance said a lot about the situation. It indicated: we are human. We are mortal, and we are hurting. The show must go on. Let’s do this as we are, not as what we pretend to be.

As coarse and uncomfortable as GWAR can be, at that moment, they were the most sensitive metal band on the face of the earth. That might not be seen as a compliment by some, but in an age where humanity keeps getting blunted in so many ways, GWAR should wear it proudly.

Related articles

• Gwar Pay Tribute to Cory Smoot With Maskless Performance, Announcement of the Smoot Family Foundation (metalsucks.net)
• R.I.P. Cory Smoot, Gwar Guitarist (stereogum.com)
• GWAR Guitarist Cory Smoot (A.K.A. Flattus Maximus) Found Dead on Tour Bus (blippitt.com)

This generation does not have its Roy Orbison and is, therefore, deprived. Oh sure, we still have songs of pain and heartbreak, and singers that are trying to get across the extremity of their miseries, but it just isn’t the same. When you hear Bruno Mars sing that he would smother a grenade with his own body for love, but his love wouldn’t do the same, or the Bieb-dawg repeats how his baby, baby, baby broke his heart, a very young audience might get a whiff of sincerity out of these performances.

But performances they remain, and from Mars’ stifling of tears a’la Michael Jackson’s inward breathing, and down an ever-expanding list of tricks to convey these raw emotions, they are carried forth with a precision that betrays a separation from the material, a lack of feeling, or the “tear” in the voice.

Why I should be such a proponent for Roy Orbison is, I guess, a mystery. My musical life really began in the 1970s as a little kid, and on through the ‘80s with the standard teenage awkwardness. Orbison was long off the radar by then, until he was a Wilbury and Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, George Harrison and Bob Dylan venerated him as, clearly, he deserved to be. Yet I knew full well of Roy’s music. It could be attributed to my mom’s incessant listening to the oldies station WCBS 101, but I’d prefer to believe it was Roy himself that made that mark.

“Crying” is probably his most famous track, covered with insane frequency, sometimes for better and often for worse. It comes down to feeling and while the song is nearly an aria, its soul is the blues. If you haven’t really had the blues, you can’t really sing the blues. You can ape the moans, groans and wails, attest to having “woke up this morning, feelin’ like I’m gonna die,” and can pigeon-toe-stomp the rhythm like the devil was trying to escape through your feet, but if you’re just hitting your marks, the listener knows. They can hear it; rather they can’t hear that “tear” in the voice. You might as well have liked to buy the world a Coke to keep it company.

You have to have lived in parallel to get “Crying” on its deepest level, and by that, I mean that you must have walked beside the person you love, worked beside them, waiting for the day those parallel lines intersected only to discover not only will this not happen, but their path is straying farther and farther away…and there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it. It is intrinsically a state of masochism to want to love, knowing it is a doomed scenario, and to witness that other person is so happy and so well without you. It would appear that the person she is with gives her everything she wants and needs, but all you’ve got is you. This is the brilliance of the song.

A screenwriting rule is: never say it if you can show it. The lyrics of “Crying” do that exact thing, for while it would be terribly easy to verbalize these feelings in endless lists of unrequited and spurned emotion, Orbison reduces all of it to, “For you don’t love me, and I’ll always be, crying over you…” Simple, almost simplistic even. You could write it on the back of a valentine and still have room to draw pictures. Orbison instead shows it through sound, the build in his composition, the release of the pain in “crying over you” which sounds incredibly close to crying itself, without a loss of clarity. It is, in so many ways, like the mournful Pagliacci and has roughly the same emotional punch.

When I say that this generation is missing out, it is only with a slight degree of facetiousness. They wouldn’t miss out if they could break from this ever-crushing need for the new, even if the new is old. We turn our gaze to the long-gone summer movie season of 2011, noting with a sense of glee that the majority of remade, revamped and rebooted concepts failed to grab the audience’s attention, and we secretly hope that it puts a death blow to the trend. We are then made aware of what’s coming in 2012 and 2013 and realize that this changes nothing. Television shows are returning after years, sometimes decades, of being away from broadcast, all glammed up, sexed out, and spiced for the tastes of the iPhone generation.

Frankly, if the reboot can perform, there’s no reason to not embrace it, but mostly it doesn’t. Mostly it tries to grab a pre-existing fanbase and feed it the same old business dolled up as new. And in the process of all this shape-shifting, these alternates and substitutes present the shell of emotions rather than emotions, the duplicates of something rather than the real thing, in pristine digital approximation when all one needs to do is walk outside with a camera and take a picture. We are a generation enamored with the digital representation of sunshine, shuttered away to hide from the actual sunshine.

That is the main problem because all one needs to do is dial up Roy Orbison on Spotify or, God forbid, buy the song off of iTunes to get it and hear it in its most perfect original form. Instead, a new artist with a bagful of digital emotion will need to redo the song, tie it to an ironic and unnecessary beat, and pound us over the head with it until we pretend to like it just to make it go away. Why did we need the digital emotion when we had the real thing all this time?

Orbison was the real thing and still is. “Crying” is for lovers and losers and will always be. It’s our aria.