I haven’t done one of these in a while — not since around the middle of June, actually. And not because I haven’t had my eye on any new music. It’s mainly because my birthday is within three months of Christmas, so I figured I’d hold off on this until after the holidays. (For purposes of this post, or at least based on when it was posted, “holidays” includes New Year’s and birthdays for my mom and my sister.) The result is what could be one of the longest Colin’s Collection lists ever, as I ended up getting eight new albums over the last couple months. The list is coming up after the jump!

Bon Iver: Bon Iver, Bon Iver

Mastodon: The Hunter

Thrice: Major/Minor

Wintersleep: Welcome To The Night Sky

The Strokes: First Impressions Of Earth

TV On The Radio: Return To Cookie Mountain

Minus The Bear: This Is What I Know About Being Gigantic

Battles: Gloss Drop

Well, that just about wraps up this edition of Colin’s Collection. I think 2011 turned out to be a pretty good year for music. Here’s hoping 2012 will be even better!

That album was released at a time when soft rock was all over the charts (Kenny G has a song on the ’87 year-end Hot 100 – seriously). Hair metal had transitioned from its hard-rocking virtuoso beginnings (think Van Halen) to cheesy party rock stuffed with aimless shredding and mandatory power ballads (think Poison). Bruce Willis scored a hit single back when he was probably better known as a singer than an actor (he hadn’t even made Look Who’s Talking yet, let alone Die Hard). A teenage singer from Hawaii won a local talent contest and got a nationwide hit single basically via word of mouth (Glenn Medeiros, “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You”). An Australian new wave band became a one-hit wonder by covering a one-hit wonder (Pseudo Echo, “Funkytown”). And yes, I got all of that from Wikipedia and Todd In The Shadows. Still, it was an odd time for music and the alternative rock boom of the early ‘90s was a few years away.

But none of that stuff really mattered to me. I was about six months old when the album in question was released. And by the time I was around five years old, I was listening to this record so much I practically had it memorized. So what was that album? The Joshua Tree by U2.

Now, I’m not here today to pull a BLAST FROM THE PAST and reevaluate this album to see how well it still holds up. Of course it still holds up. It’s The Joshua Tree. It’s one of the four U2 albums that everyone seems to agree are masterpieces, the others being War, Achtung Baby, and The Unforgettable Fire. You’ve probably heard the first four tracks from this album so many times you know them all by heart. “Where The Streets Have No Name.” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” “With Or Without You.” “Bullet The Blue Sky.” That’s a 1-2-3-4 lineup that’s pretty hard to top unless you start talking about the 1927 Yankees. And from there we get album cuts like “Red Hill Mining Town” and “One Tree Hill.” These are the kind of songs people think of when they think of U2. When U2 announced they wanted to return to their roots after the critical and commercial disappointment that was Pop, they meant, “We want to make more albums like The Joshua Tree.”

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with this album. I used to listen to it all the time on my dad’s living room stereo. Sometimes I’d even put it right back on after the last notes of “Mothers Of The Disappeared” gave way to silence, and I’m pretty sure I drove both my parents crazy in doing so. (Actually, I know this to be true because they’ve told me, even though they both like U2.) I remember how I used to wonder why two guys had normal names like Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, Jr., while Bono and the Edge were called… well, Bono and the Edge, and it made me curious to learn their real names (Paul Hewson and David Evans, respectively). I wanted to sing along with the songs even though I didn’t really understand what they were about. And “Bullet The Blue Sky” used to scare the crap out of me, especially the Edge’s guitar solo. In fact, years later I kicked off a Listen Up! Halloween special with a one-two punch of “And The Gods Made Love” by Jimi Hendrix and “Bullet The Blue Sky,” and that guitar solo still sent a chill down my spine.

Over the years, of course, I stopped listening to The Joshua Tree all the time and started branching out and listening to other stuff. One could make the case that my musical taste as a 5-year-old (I also listened to the Police, XTC, London Calling by the Clash, and classic Motown pop back then) was better than my taste as a 15-year-old (I requested albums by Nickelback and Puddle of Mudd for that birthday), but that’s for another time. I would still listen to Joshua Tree songs now and then, and of course I still knew those first four tracks in particular like the back of my hand, but I didn’t obsess over it anymore. I still enjoyed the band’s music, eventually developed a stronger interest in their experimental ’90s output, and downloaded a few songs from their Double-0s albums here and there.

Then during the summer before my last semester of college at the University of Maryland I was looking around for Muse tour dates. They were set to release The Resistance a couple weeks before my birthday and I knew a tour would be coming soon too. There was nothing scheduled in the Philadelphia area during the summer, and they would play at the Giants’ stadium in New Jersey in September when I’d be at school in Maryland. Then I spotted a show scheduled for two days after my birthday at FedEx Field, home of the Washington Redskins. Sounded good to me. But why FedEx Field? I knew Muse had gotten pretty popular here in the States over the past few years, but were they really already big enough to play stadiums?

I did a little more digging for information, and then I found my answer. No, Muse hadn’t gotten big enough to play stadiums in the Fifty Nifty. They were opening for U2. And when I told my mom I wanted to go, this was her response: “Colin, you have to go to that concert! That’s going to be awesome.”

So I went, and it was an awesome show. The commute back and forth kind of sucked though – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more tightly packed metro/subway/trolley car than the DC Metro the night U2’s 360 Tour stopped in Landover, Maryland. I remember joking that the next time I took the metro to a concert I’d pick a more obscure artist to see; the irony of course was that I’d already taken the metro to see lesser-known bands and also that this turned out to be the last concert I would take the DC metro to see while in college. But the thing I remember most about that night was when U2 played this…

And just like that, I was five years old again. Thanks, guys.

Who's a good little award statuette? YOU ARE! Come here and let me scratch you!

The fun begins, as always, after the jump. Bring on the first award!

MOST RIDICULOUS ALBUM COVER

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Lady Gaga, Born This Way

Words cannot possibly express how unbelievably stupid this cover is, so I won’t even try.

RUNNER-UP: 311, Universal Pulse

It was a very, very close battle between this and our winner. Just look at this thing. LOOK AT IT. What the hell is going on here? It’s like Storm Thorgerson took a bunch of his worst ideas for album covers and threw them into a blender because they couldn’t stand on their own. And then someone tried to turn it into a Trapper Keeper from 1992.

RUNNER-UP: Limp Bizkit, Gold Cobra

There are so many things wrong with this cover I’m not even sure where to begin. The giant cobra isn’t even gold, and it still isn’t the worst thing about this picture. What’s with the random guy picking his nose? Is that a pirate ship in the background? And don’t even get me started on those girls’ faces…

RUNNER-UP: The Strokes, Angles

Pitchfork joked about how this cover looks like a secret level of Q-Bert. I’ll take it one step farther. This cover looks like a secret level of Q-Bert as designed by M.C. Escher and constructed on top of a crossword puzzle.

MOST AWESOMELY RIDICULOUS ALBUM COVER

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Sebastian Bach, Kicking & Screaming

I’m not sure how seriously I’m actually supposed to take this cover. All I know is that I can’t stop staring at it. I was about to make a joke about how he’s posing with Sheeva from Mortal Kombat, but she actually has a few too many arms.

RUNNER-UP: Beady Eye, Different Gear, Still Speeding

Why do people keep reporting this girl’s parents to Social Services? Everyone knows only the coolest rock n’ roll moms and dads let their children ride alligators.

BEST SONG TITLE

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Mastodon, “Octopus Has No Friends”

Anyone who’s picked up a copy of Mastodon’s new album The Hunter has probably asked the question: “Why is that song called ‘Octopus Has No Friends’?” Well, allow bassist Troy Sanders to elaborate:

“Octopus Has No Friends,” musically, watching Brent [Hinds, guitarist/vocalist] play that song, it sounds like you’d need eight tentacles to play that guitar riff. After visiting the Georgia Aquarium months ago, Brann [Dailor, drummer] came back and said, “Man, I don’t think the octopus ever has any friends, ‘cause he’s always in the tank alone. There’s a starfish in there, but it’s far away. Does the octopus have friends, or does he enjoy his recluse environment?” These are just questions we have, and we’re not ashamed to put those into songs and let that be known.

BEST ALBUM TITLE

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Weird Wives, Some Motherfuckers Gonna Be Walking ‘Round With A Size 9 Diehard Up Their Ass, ‘Cause Apparently They Ain’t Never Seen A Short AC Man Get Bad Ass On Methadone

Weird Wives is the side project of at least two members of Surfer Blood, and that’s about all I know because I haven’t heard their stuff yet. Well, that and the fact that this album has a crazy title. It almost sounds like a line of dialogue from a hypothetical sequel to Malibu’s Most Wanted set in Atlantic City. And now I’m afraid I may have given Adam Sandler ideas. Adam, if you’re somehow reading this, please don’t ever make that movie. I don’t want to find out if the bottom of the barrel sinks any lower than Bucky Larson and Jack & Jill.

RUNNER-UP: Coldplay, Mylo Xyloto

My hat’s off to Coldplay for christening their follow-up to Viva La Vida with a title that was about as easy to find on Google as it was to pronounce. For the record, I’m pretty sure it’s MY-lo zee-LO-toe.

FUNNIEST SONG OF THE YEAR

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Design The Skyline, “Surrounded By Silence”

There’s a band called Emmure who are the masters of what I like to call “binary code metal.” I call them this because if you look up their guitar tabs you’re probably going to find a lot of zeroes and ones. Their guitars do more chugging than a freshman rushing a frat during Hell Week. Their songs are short but feel like they go on forever because they use way too many breakdowns and their lyrics are bad enough to make Fred Durst cringe. And yet they’re still not the worst band on the Victory Records roster.

Meet Design the Skyline, an experimental deathcore band from Corpus Christi, Texas that exemplifies every “Hot Topic scene kid” cliché in the book. They’ve got screams and synthesizers and indecipherable pig squeals and melodramatic lyrics and AutoTune and lots of breakdowns and chugging for good measure. If you’ve ever wondered what the Dillinger Escape Plan would sound like if they sucked, this is the band for you. Their debut single “Surrounded By Silence” is the stuff of legend for all the wrong reasons. This is the funniest song of the year because there are seven guys in this band and I can’t find two of them who sound like they’re playing the same song. If you can make it past the hilariously messy first minute of this you deserve a medal.

MOST OVERPLAYED SONG OF THE YEAR

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Adele, “Rolling In The Deep”

My opinion of “Rolling In The Deep” in January of 2011: “Hmm, this song is actually pretty good. Isn’t she that one who did ‘Chasing Pavements’? No, ‘Chasing Pavements,’ not ‘Chasing Cars,’ that was Snow Patrol. I wonder whatever happened to those guys. They were a pretty decent band. So where was I? ‘Chasing…’ um, Chasing Amy? No, that was a Kevin Smith movie. Not sure how I got thinking about him. What happened to that guy, anyway? Cop Out was stunningly terrible. What was I thinking about again?”

My opinion of “Rolling In The Deep” in March of 2011: “You know what? This song is one of the best pop singles of the year. It sounds like a slice of classic Motown soul, starting with (but not limited to) Adele’s powerhouse vocals. But why the hell is it being played on the local alternative rock station?”

My opinion of “Rolling In The Deep” in June of 2011: “Jeez, for all the acclaim her new album’s been getting, you’d think she would have released another single by now. This is getting kind of old. Still a good song, but I’m ready for something else. Hey, the NBA Draft is coming on soon…” (turns on ESPN) “Really? They’re playing it here, too?”

My opinion of “Rolling In The Deep” in September of 2011: “Oh God, this song is on again? Doesn’t she have any other songs? I could have sworn she picked another single months ago. Change the station.”

My opinion of “Rolling In The Deep” as of November of 2011: “If I hear that song one more goddamned time, I am going to KILL somebody.”

WORST SONG OF THE YEAR

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Cher Lloyd, “Swagger Jagger”

I didn’t think it was humanly possible, but somebody has out-sucked the god-awful “Run The World (Girls),” which combined all the worst characteristics of Beyonce’s music into one hellish package. Cher Lloyd is an 18-year-old UK X Factor castoff who was given permission by an actual professional record company to pollute British airwaves with this nonsense. Her debut single “Swagger Jagger” combines some of the most annoying trends of the last few years of pop music into one super-irritating singularity of suckitude.

AutoTuned vocals? Check. Obnoxious schoolgirl chants straight out of Gwen Stefani’s unforgivable “Hollaback Girl” and every song where Fergie tries to rap? Check. Ranting about the haters in a song that only justifies their hatred? Check. Chorus ripped off from an older, much better song? Oh hell yes. Get a load of this – you remember that really old song “Oh My Darling Clementine”? The one Huckleberry Hound always used to sing? (Come to think of it, do you even remember Huckleberry Hound?) Well, that’s the chorus melody here. And nobody can sue her for it because that song was written in 1884.

Despite all of these things going against it, “Swagger Jagger” still managed to hit #1 in the UK. I suppose if Crazy Frog can do it, literally anyone can.

BIGGEST POP STAR I’VE STILL NEVER HEARD OF

THE HARLEY GOES TO: One Direction

Who the hell are these guys and why can’t Twitter shut up about them? Well, here’s the answer to one question. One Direction is a boy band from the United Kingdom who came in third on… oh, you’ve got to be kidding… The X Factor. And they were on the same season that blessed us with the talents of Miss “Swagger Jagger” up there. Well, that sounds like a great sign.

I don’t know anything about these guys or their music beyond anything I just wrote up there. I only know about them because every few days there are trending topics started on Twitter about either the group or at least one of its members. Which brings me to that other question – why can’t Twitter shut up about One Direction? Because apparently there are a lot more tweeting 12-year-old girls than I realized. And considering how often they all tweet about Justin Bieber, you’d think I would have realized this about five minutes after I joined Twitter.

WORST COLLABORATION

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Lou Reed and Metallica, Lulu

I’ve already written more in-depth about Lulu, so have a look at my review right here. It’s only been a few weeks since I wrote it, but my opinion still stands. It’s still a terrible album and I still don’t understand why James Hetfield thinks he’s a table.

MOST BAFFLING SUPERGROUP

THE HARLEY GOES TO: SuperHeavy

Mick Jagger is the lead singer of the Rolling Stones. Joss Stone is a 24-year-old soul-pop singer who caught her big break with a gender-swapped cover of the White Stripes’ “Fell In Love With A Girl.” Damian Marley is a reggae artist and the son of the legendary Bob Marley. Dave Stewart is a multi-instrumentalist who is best known for his synthpop work with the Eurythmics. And A.R. Rahman is an Indian composer and singer-songwriter.

These people don’t really sound like they’d have compatible styles at all, do they? Well, apparently they didn’t get a copy of that memo because they started a band called SuperHeavy.

MOST BAFFLING SONGWRITING TREND

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Taking your chorus from the public domain

Toward the end of 2010, Ke$ha scored a hit with “Take It Off,” a song that I only remember because I’ve heard that chorus melody a billion times before. You ever hear that old song about a place in France where all the naked ladies dance? Even if you don’t know those lyrics, you’ve heard that melody before. Hell, I think They Might Be Giants used that melody for a line in “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” Ke$ha’s allowed to use it because it’s in the public domain, which basically means the source is anywhere from 95-120 years old (depending on when it was first published or created) and copyright laws don’t really apply anymore because the creator is dead, barring a miraculous discovery of either the Fountain of Youth or the Elixir of Life. What a convenient way to avoid the legal hassles of trying to license a sample!

While K-E-dollar sign-ha certainly isn’t the first person to do this, she’s the first I noticed doing this. Lately I’ve noticed a couple of other songs that did this. Theory of a Deadman took “The Cat Came Back,” which was written in 1893, and turned it into “Bitch Came Back” (shown above) for their new album because they think they’re clever. And then there’s the twice-aforementioned Cher Lloyd (why does she keep popping up today?), who turned “Oh My Darling Clementine” into “Swagger Jagger” because she wants us all to suffer.

RUNNER-UP: References to Mick Jagger

Oh look, another stupid miniature trend that we can all blame on Ke$ha.

Over the last few years pop stars have become increasingly obsessed with bragging about their swagger, or “swag” as it’s frequently abbreviated because pronouncing two syllables is apparently too much work for the human mouth to handle. Then in 2009 Ke$ha made the revolutionary discovery that “swagger” rhymes with the surname of the legendary lead singer of the Rolling Stones. Which means that line about “kick[ing guys] to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger” was doing two horrible things at once. It conjured mental images of a girl who looks like she lives in a dumpster doing the nasty with a wrinkly rail-thin geriatric rock star, and it inspired other pop stars to compare themselves to the guy who brought you “Sympathy For The Devil.”

So now we have apl.de.ap from the Black Eyed Peas boasting, “All these girls, they like my swagger/They calling me Mick Jagger.” We have Maroon 5 and Christina Aguilera teaming up to promote The Voice – er, I mean write a song called “Moves Like Jagger.” And then – oh, sweet freaking Jesus, NOT AGAIN – we have Cher Lloyd, whose “Swagger Jagger” actually doesn’t even bother making a reference to Mick, which is the whole damn reason this trend exists. If she called it “Jagger Swagger” it might make sense, because the next line of the chorus is “You should get some of your own”; in other words, “be more like Mick Jagger.” Instead she calls it “Swagger Jagger” because WHY AM I STILL TALKING ABOUT THIS?!?!!?!?>@<#$>m/&^%$~!?

MOST BAFFLING MUSIC VIDEO

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Lady Gaga, “Born This Way”

Gaga’s seven-minute cinematic opus is actually a tale of two music videos. Most of it is just your typical “Gaga dancing around in wacky outfits” fare. But it begins with two and a half minutes of thoroughly incomprehensible over-the-top weirdness called “the manifesto of Mother Monster.” Not one second of this makes even a lick of sense, so I won’t bother trying to describe or explain it. What is this, a cult? Is Lady Gaga going to lead a Million Monster March on Washington and have everyone drown themselves in the Potomac River so they may join their fearless leader on a spaceship to Planet X?

MOST BAFFLING OVERUSE OF THE WORD “BAFFLING”

THE HARLEY GOES TO: This blog post

MOST INEXPLICABLE ATTEMPT AT A SINGING CAREER

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Rebecca Black

We get it, people. “Friday” is a terrible song. Every joke that could possibly be made about this song has already been made a billion times by absolutely everyone. It’s just not funny anymore. And now, because too many people love irony too much and downloaded that song on iTunes, Rebecca Black has somehow been allowed to make cameos in Katy Perry videos and release not only a second, but a third single. And those songs are much better than her first, but they’re still not good. It’s like she and her producers and handlers have all completely missed the point of the “Friday” phenomenon. “Friday” is like the Plan 9 From Outer Space of pop music, so laughably incompetent that it becomes enjoyable. If she kept doing songs like that she could have carved out a unique niche as the musical Ed Wood. Now she’s just another face in the crowd.

THE “FREEBIRD” HECKLER AWARD

for the Douchiest Concertgoer

THE HARLEY GOES TO: That guy who threw a shoe at Arctic Monkeys

I don’t understand why people do things like this. Why would you pay money to go to a concert just so you can throw stuff at the performer? At least this guy waited until near the end of the Arctic Monkeys’ show in Atlantic City in October to toss a shoe onstage, and he missed so he didn’t disrupt anything, but what’s the point? I mean, I don’t like Nickelback, but I would never waste the time or money it would take to go to a show and throw stuff at them. I’m not sure whether it makes less sense to do this if you like the band or if you don’t. And if you hit the people on stage, you just screw up the show for everyone who actually wants to be there.

WEIRDEST CONCEPT ALBUM CONCEPT

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Wayne Static, Pighammer

Allow the Static-X frontman to explain his solo debut himself:

The Pighammer concept conjures up bizarre images. It’s about a mad plastic surgeon, with a pig fetish, that likes to convert hot chicks into pigs. It is the total opposite of what a plastic surgeon would do. He has this crazy hammer device made from a pig foot. The images of the surgery in the CD package are only a dark comedic visualization of the real theme of the album, which is my transformation.

Um, okay.

BEST NON-EXISTENT ALBUM

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Radiohead, The King Of Limbs Pt. 2

One of my favorite things about being a Radiohead fan this year was seeing other Radiohead fans inventing theories about when their next album would arrive.

First there was the theory that because Radiohead pushed up the release of The King Of Limbs, they must have had something more planned for the original release date. Nope.

Then there was a theory that something new would be coming with the physical release or the newspaper album. Nope.

There have been all kinds of theories involving the eight arms and 35 fingers displayed on the CD and vinyl disc (seven more EPs and 35 combined songs to be released this year, a new album arriving exactly eight months or 35 weeks after The King Of Limbs, and so on). None of them has been proven correct.

There have been theories involving the seasons and the phases of the moon. Yeah, I’m not really sure how that stuff came about. And none of those was right either.

There was even a theory that Chieftan Mews, a character the band invented to host The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth Of All Time and is a self-proclaimed “compulsive liar,” was counting down to something big on Twitter because of a series of tweets posted around the same time once a week each week and numbered in descending order. Hilariously in retrospect, #2 in this “countdown” read, “Why does everyone assume this is a countdown instead of a quiz?” I say “hilariously” because there was no new album at the end of the countdown. Or the rest of the year, for that matter. There was that remix album, the new songs premiered in their From The Basement performance (“Staircase,” “The Daily Mail”), and the “Supercollider/The Butcher” single, and that was about it.

Although now that I think about it… get out your calculators and let’s add this up. Eight tracks on The King Of Limbs. Nineteen tracks on the remix album, and those had been spread out over seven EP-length releases. Plus another three remixes on an eighth EP (there’s your “eight arms” thing coming into play) that came out after the remix album. Plus the four new Radiohead songs that appeared after The King Of Limbs was released. Let’s see… if my math is right, that should be about 34 songs. So we’re one track away from those theories being right after all, while still kind of being wrong. Does that make any sense? It probably doesn’t.

MOST CONFUSING BACKLASH

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Lana Del Rey

If anyone who caught their big break in 2011 can truly say they’ve had a meteoric rise to fame, it’s… well, actually nobody can say that because meteors fall. So maybe it’s more like a Space Shuttle – a sudden explosion and before you know it you’re blasting upward through the stratosphere.

Lana Del Rey certainly experienced something like that over the last few months, seemingly coming out of nowhere with a viral hit called “Video Games” that earned a Best New Track distinction from Pitchfork and all kinds of hype on countless other music sites, and even a Q Award. I say “seemingly” because she’s actually been around for a few years; about two years ago she released an EP and one under-promoted full-length album under her birth name, Lizzy Grant. So now that she’s adopted a stage name, switched to a different pinup hairdo, and gotten some lip injections (that she really didn’t need), music blogs are all abuzz with debates about her appearance and her authenticity or alleged lack thereof. Last time I checked there wasn’t a rule saying a cute girl with a fake name isn’t allowed to appeal to the Pitchfork crowd; a good song is a good song no matter who or where it comes from or how it’s promoted.

But beyond the obvious increase in marketing and attention she’s received, is she really doing anything all that different from before? That’s one of her old music videos up there. Even back then, she still performed cinematic old-school pop. Still sang with that sex-kitten purr like she’s about to burst out of a giant cake and sing “Happy Birthday” to JFK. Still wore that crown of multicolored flowers. Still made music videos comprised mostly of old-timey stock footage and grainy video clips.

I guess I don’t get why she keeps getting ripped for reasons that have nothing to do with her actual music. Nobody’s saying you have to like Lana Del Rey, but I’d like to think the increased puffiness of her pout should be pretty far down the list when you explain why you don’t.

THE AXL ROSE AWARD

for the Artist Most in Need of a Long Break between Albums

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Rihanna

Rihanna is quite possibly the most omnipresent person in the current pop scene. To think, after “Pon De Replay” first came out all the way back in 2005 and then wasn’t followed up by another big hit, I thought we’d never hear from this girl again. This week marked the release of Talk That Talk, her sixth album in the last seven years. When she isn’t releasing another album, she’s re-releasing “deluxe editions” of her most recent album so she can put out even more singles. And when she isn’t doing that, she’s making guest appearances on other people’s hit singles (coming soon to a Hot 100 near you: Coldplay’s “Princess of China”). And when she isn’t doing that, she’s popping up in music videos for songs that she doesn’t even sing at all.

All of this has helped her maintain a stunningly prolonged cultural ubiquity, one that I grew weary of a long time ago. Can’t she take a break even for a little while? Do we really need a new Rihanna album every year? She’s reached that Britney Spears level of fame where she can go completely insane and stop making music for four years and marry some douchebag (one could argue that she’s already dated one – BURN!) and somehow manage to stay famous enough that she can still pump out hits when she inevitably comes back.

One last award, and then we’re done!

THE KANYE WEST AWARD

for Excellence in the Field of Being Kanye West

THE HARLEY GOES TO: Drake… wait, WHAT?!!?!

Let’s see… a rapper who doubles as an AutoTune-friendly singer, receives critical praise for his introspective lyrics, and even co-produces a few tracks on his new record? I have a feeling I’ve heard that somewhere before.

Well, that just about does it for the 2011 Harleys. Until next time, remember – even if you didn’t win, Harley still loves you. Or at least he will if you give him a nice long belly rub.

You see, Halloween is just around the corner so I figured I would do some kind of Halloween special, or at least the Internet blog equivalent of one. The question was what I was actually going to do. I’ve already done a post about the scariest songs in my collection, and since I’m doing my Top 5 lists in the same order in which they appeared on my show, the Top 5 Songs To Scare Trick-Or-Treaters Away From Your House is still a long way off.

And then it hit me: Do a post about the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark series.

When I was a kid, the Scary Stories books were responsible for more sleepless nights than just about anything else I’ve ever encountered. But it wasn’t the stories themselves that creeped me out. To his credit Alvin Schwartz tells these stories right, using simple language without excessive detail and short, punchy paragraphs so the stories are easy to follow and when the scary stuff hits it hits fast and hard. Some of the stories Schwartz collected for the books are genuinely disturbing. Others are funny – the stories in the last chapters in each book are usually meant to “make you laugh, not scream.” Some are actually tragic and sad – basically, any story about a guy falling in love with a woman who turns out to be a ghost, and there are several. And a few of them have been told so many times they have no effect on you. Ever hear the one about the babysitter getting disturbing phone calls from inside the house? Of course you have.

But let’s face it, people… the real reason you remember these books, and why they kept me up at night, isn’t the stories themselves. Oh no. It’s the illustrations. And I’m not talking about the new ones in the latest editions of the books. I’ve got nothing against the new artist, but the books don’t pack the same punch. The new pictures are not why we’re here today. No, no, no… I’m talking about THESE.

I don’t know what the hell inspired Stephen Gammell to create these images, and frankly I’m not sure if I even want to know. His grotesque black-and-white imagery is arguably more disturbing than anything in any of the stories. Even the way the drips of black ink run from some of the objects he draws makes all of them look like they’re bleeding. Guys, there’s a reason these books were re-released with new illustrations. It’s because Gammell’s pictures have scared the crap out of thousands of kids. The Scary Stories books were actually the American Library Association’s most challenged book series of the ‘90s, and the 7^th-most challenged of the Double-0s. To put that in perspective, the last book came out in 1991, and the other two are older than I am. Truly, Gammell’s illustrations are masterpieces of horror imagery that continue to stand the test of time.

So the way I see it is, what better way to celebrate the coming of All Hallows’ Eve than by traumatizing my readers the same way I myself have been scarred for life? I’ve delayed the inevitable long enough. These are the Top 15 Most Disturbing Illustrations from Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. Sweet dreams, everyone. If it makes you feel any better, I won’t be getting much sleep tonight either.

15. “Cold As Clay” (Scary Stories)

You see that? Someday, that’s going to be you. And me. And everyone else. Ever since I first grasped the concept of death, I have feared it. Dreaded it. The fact that it’s inevitable, that we all become the man in this picture, is perhaps the scariest thing of all. And the Scary Stories series makes no effort to sugarcoat that either. Then again, how could you?

14. “Rings On Her Fingers” (More Scary Stories)

This picture isn’t all that creepy until you have the context of the story to go along with it. “Rings On Her Fingers” is about a comatose woman who is pronounced dead and buried, only to wake up when a grave robber digs her up and tries to cut her fingers off so he can take her rings. So here she is, walking back home to a house full of people who still think she’s dead. And it’s unclear whether she’s a zombie or if she was buried alive because the doctor made a horrible mistake. I’m not sure which is worse. Oh, and what you don’t see in this picture is the thief lying in her grave, bleeding to death after falling on his own knife.

13. “The Red Spot” (Scary Stories 3)

Spiders are creepy. I don’t know anyone who likes them. I’m not as arachnophobic as other people are (though bigger ones really freak me out), but even if they don’t scare you at all “The Red Spot” is pretty disturbing. Unless you’re okay with having dozens of spiders suddenly BURST OUT OF YOUR FACE.

12. “Wonderful Sausage” (More Scary Stories)

Everything you need to know about how gruesome this story is can be found in this picture. “Wonderful Sausage” is about a butcher who turns just about any living thing he comes across – cats, dogs, men, women, children, you name it – into sausage meat. So now we have a piece of Soylent Green sausage with a human hand holding a fork like it’s feeding itself to you. (Or possibly even trying to eat itself because it just tastes so damn good.) Which means not only was this person still alive while going through the meat grinder, but he/she is still alive as a sausage and will still be alive when you eat it. That’s it. I’m becoming a vegetarian.

11. “Bess” (More Scary Stories)

I may not be an expert on horses, but I am least 95% sure their skeletons don’t look like that. The skull seems right. The rest of the bones look more like lightning bolts. And come to think of it, where are the hind legs? It looks like this horse had all four legs in the front part of its body. Once you get past where the knees were probably supposed to be, things get even stranger. Each of the legs seem to be split into multiple feet that are all joined at the same knee. This horse is anatomically impossible. Couple that with the backdrop, where everything has drops of ink trickling down in that “bleeding ink” style I mentioned earlier, and you’ve got one seriously unsettling image.

10. “Sam’s New Pet” (Scary Stories 3)

“Sam’s New Pet” is a story about a family that somehow mistakes a rabid sewer rat for a small Mexican dog. The story itself isn’t very scary – I think it’s kind of funny, actually; I mean, how do you not know the difference between rats and dogs? But look at that… um… uh… I don’t even know what the hell that is. Honestly, I’m not sure if it makes the story funnier or more unsettling. It certainly isn’t a dog, but it doesn’t look like any rat I’ve ever seen either. It is a creature that only exists in Stephen Gammell’s twisted imagination. And suddenly the veterinarian telling the family it’s a rabid sewer rat sounds less like a punch line and more like his way of covering up the fact that he has no idea what this thing is either.

9. “No Thanks” (Scary Stories 3)

This is kind of similar to “The Thing” in the sense that you’d run the hell away from anyone who looked like the guy in the picture. But “No Thanks” earns a spot on the list because of how horribly wrong this man looks. His skull has a bizarre and inhuman shape, his eyes are looking in two different directions, he only seems to have one ear, and there are rays of light shooting out of a gaping hole in his stomach. Oh, and when you read the story you realize this guy is trying to sell you a “nice sharp knife.”

8. Title Page (Scary Stories 3)

One of the most grotesque landscape images I’ve ever seen. Why does that tree have a face? For that matter, why does the ground have a face? In fact, why does the ground have multiple faces? Where is that arm coming from? What the hell is that bloated thing lying on the ground in the lower left-hand corner? And what’s with the disembodied eyeball floating in the sky staring right at me? How is it that the sky is the only thing in this picture that doesn’t have a face, and yet is somehow also the only thing with eyes?

7. “Harold” (Scary Stories 3)

This is one of those images where the “bleeding ink” effect seems to work most powerfully. It’s like Gammell is giving you a clue that the scarecrow is alive. But you want to know the real reason this picture makes the list? Look into Harold’s eyes. He is pissed off. And he’s planning to do something horrible. And he will carry it out.

6. “Oh Susannah!” (More Scary Stories)

No, this story doesn’t have anything in common with the illustration at all. But between the weird thing on that person’s leash and that hellish demon bursting out of the sky at the top of the page, maybe that’s a good thing. And this is a story that ends with the main character realizing that whoever cut her friend’s head off is very close by. Can you imagine what a story that actually matches that illustration would be like?

5. “The Dream” (Scary Stories 3)

Man, Stephen Gammell really stepped his game up for Scary Stories 3. It’s like he knew this would be the last book in the series so he pulled out all the stops. Some people actually consider this the scariest image in the series. And if I saw someone who looked like this in my dreams, I’d probably try to stay awake for the rest of my life. Especially when she starts blinking and moving. Why in God’s name did someone think it was a good idea to animate this picture? (Note: I AM NOT LINKING TO THAT ANIMATED GIF. It creeps me out way too much.)

4. “T-H-U-P-P-P-P-P-P-P!” (Scary Stories 3)

Believe it or not, this is actually supposed to be one of the funny stories. It ends with the ghost blowing a raspberry, for God’s sake. But look at that picture. Look at that hideously misshapen thing materializing out of nowhere over that bedroom furniture that could easily be yours. Even if the ghost turns out to be a harmless prankster, good luck sleeping again after that.

3. “Is Something Wrong?” (Scary Stories 3)

Hell yes there is something wrong! You are a 20-foot-tall God-Knows-What with a giant head and six legs and a tail! AND YOUR EYES ARE MELTING OUT OF YOUR SKULL!

2. “The Haunted House” (Scary Stories)

I know it sounds crazy, but there is actually one image that freaks me out more than this. What’s even crazier is that she isn’t nearly as scary in the story, even though the illustration is based on the story’s description of her appearance. All she wants is for the man who killed her to be brought to justice. And who could argue with a face like that? Miss, I’ll do anything you want as long as you don’t kill me and eat my brains.

1. “The Dead Hand” (Scary Stories 3)

And now, brace yourselves. It’s time to show you my choice for the #1 most disturbing Scary Stories illustration of all time. It accompanies a story called “The Dead Hand.” And I’m pretty sure there is an actual picture of a dead (and disembodied) hand dangling from a wire somewhere in this story. Or maybe I’m thinking of “The Dead Man’s Hand” from More Scary Stories. Either way, that’s not the picture at #1.

Sometimes things that disturb you stay with you. No matter how old I was, no matter how many times I borrowed one of these books from the Garrettford Elementary library as a kid, I almost always skipped “The Dead Hand.” And whenever I was reading through the books and I had a feeling I was getting close to “The Dead Hand,” I would double-check the table of contents just to be sure of where it was so I could skip it. And if I did read the story, I would do everything I could to keep my eyes focused on the text and nothing but the text.

Why did I do this? Why did I go to all this trouble? Because I knew what was coming, and I didn’t want to come face-to-face with THIS.

WHAT.

THE HELL.

IS THAT.

Don’t even try to tell me it’s human. I know it isn’t. I don’t even think that thing used to be human. I think it’s an Eldritch abomination from hell that ripped off most of someone’s face and put it on like it’s supposed to be a mask. Or to distract you from the nightmare fuel that is the rest of whatever it is. It’s like some kind of shapeless black mass that has dozens of tendrils and tentacles extending from its body.

I mean, look at this thing. This came from the mind of a human being. He conjured it, decided it was a good idea for a scary stories collection for kids, and then sat down with some ink and paper and put it on the page. When I’m lying in bed tonight, I am going to see this thing every time I close my eyes. And it’s all your fault, Stephen Gammell. Damn your wonderfully vivid and horrifying and brilliant imagination! Now my readers will have no choice but to hide under a blanket and cower in the corner until all the monsters go away…

Just like I’ve been doing this entire time.

I’m not familiar with the work of Lou Reed. I know him as the guy who did “Walk On The Wild Side” and inexplicably thought it was a good idea to release a double album filled with nothing but guitar feedback; I wouldn’t know a Velvet Underground song if it pulled a Mike Tyson and bit my ear off. Meanwhile, I see myself as a casual fan of Metallica. I dig their first five records, I like a few of the Load/ReLoad era singles, I think St. Anger is irredeemably flawed and yet still an honest artistic expression, and Death Magnetic is a step in the right direction. I was only somewhat curious to hear what Reed and Metallica would sound like together. But that curiosity was especially piqued when early reviews proclaimed that Lulu was now officially the worst thing Metallica’s name had ever been attached to – yes, St. Anger had finally been bested (or is that worsted?). I simply had to experience this thing for myself.

Let’s get my verdict out of the way right now: Lulu is an absolutely terrible album. It’s still streaming online as I write this, but please take my word for it. Don’t listen to this.

I mean, say what you will about St. Anger. Make all the jokes you want about lyrics like “My lifestyle determines my deathstyle.” Compare Lars Ulrich’s drumming to the intricate rhythmic creations of a child banging on cookware. Complain about how Kirk Hammett never plays any solos, or how the bass is inaudible (maybe they should have hired Rob Trujillo before they made St. Anger), or how James Hetfield’s voice sounds completely shot, or how the riffs sound like they borrowed Korn’s guitars and recorded some tracks in a garage. The producer (Bob Rock) said he wanted the record to sound like “a band jamming in their garage for the first time,” and, well… that’s exactly what St. Anger sounds like, for better or for worse.

But at least those songs had structure and energy. At least those songs sounded like they were going somewhere, like they had a point to them. The songs on Lulu often reduce Metallica to playing the same riff over and over again for five minutes at a time. After the acoustic intro, “Brandenburg Gate” is one guitar riff played over Reed’s tuneless ramblings; it sets the tone for this album in all the wrong ways. “Mistress Dread” has some thrashy rhythms, but the band just keeps on playing the same boring two-note riff. “Iced Honey” sounds like ‘90s Metallica, but once again the guitar parts are way too repetitive. Every potentially interesting musical idea or guitar part gets overused so much that you get tired of it halfway through every song. And no, Hammett doesn’t play any solos on this album. And if you thought the lyrics on St. Anger were laughable… man, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.

Lulu is a concept album inspired by Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904), a pair of plays by a German writer named Frank Wedekind about a dancer (later a prostitute) named, well, Lulu. Wedekind’s plays were notable for their depictions of sexuality and violence – Lulu has several affairs, including one with a lesbian, and Jack the Ripper’s murders figure into the plot (he’s also presumably the Jack Lou Reed “beseeches” in “Pumping Blood”). I’m not familiar with these works at all – in fact, I’d never heard of them until I did a little research about this album – but it certainly sounds like a potentially compelling concept for an album. But as Roger Ebert says, it’s not what a work of art is about, it’s how it is about it. What this album is about is the least of its problems. For all I know about Wedekin’s plays, the Lulu this album is about might as well have been the black magic woman from Final Fantasy X.

To this day, science still can't explain how she keeps her boobs from popping out of that dress. Take THAT, gravity!

Listening to the songs through which the concept is executed is like eating ice cream on pizza – Lou Reed and Metallica are great on their own, but when you put them together it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Reed tries to pull off the same levels of shock and awe that the plays had in his lyrics, but it just doesn’t work at all. Especially when you consider how sexually liberated our culture is now as compared to when Wedekind wrote his plays. Or even when Reed and Metallica were at their respective creative peaks, for that matter. Lyrics like “I will swallow your sharpest cutter like a colored man’s dick” (at 5:15 in “Pumping Blood”) or “My small dog, he want what I’ve got/Wants to run his tongue over my hot spot” (at 4:06 in “Little Dog”) or the part where Reed refers to a vagina as a “Kotex jukebox” (at 5:47 in “Dragon”) are already pretty laughable, but when you consider that they’re meant to be taken seriously they’re even more cringe-worthy. And poor James Hetfield, the one guy involved in this project who can actually carry a tune, is left to occasionally chime in by repeating the phrase “small town girl” or straining to hit the high notes as he sings “Why do I cheat on me” or bellowing the inevitable Internet meme “I AM THE TABLE.”

That soon-to-be immortal lyric comes from “The View,” which was chosen as the lead single (relatively speaking) from this album. And when you listen to this entire album it’s not hard to understand why. It’s the only song here with a conventional verse-chorus-verse structure (everything else gets repetitive and monotonous) and the only one that uses Hetfield as a co-lead vocalist. Reed, despite his voice sounding shot and his delivery sounding like he can’t decide whether he wants to talk or sing, assumes lead vocal duties everywhere else on Lulu. This has led people to consider it a Lou Reed album featuring Metallica as the backing band, as if that’s supposed to excuse Metallica for their part in this debacle. The cover and credits give equal billing to both names; Reed wrote the lyrics and the music was a collaborative effort. To their credit Metallica tries their best to add some life to these songs, but they still can’t save the album from being tedious, overlong, and at times nearly unlistenable. It’s hard to imagine anyone outside of Lulu’s creators enjoying this record or even listening to it twice.

So what have I learned from the whole Loutallica experience? I learned that if Lou Reed waggles his ass like a dark prostitute, I would think less of him and his coagulating heart (actual lyric from “Pumping Blood”). I learned that I will one day start a band called Kotex Jukebox. I learned that it is in fact possible for Metallica to out-suck St. Anger, though at least Lulu is better than Metal Machine Music.

But above all else, I learned that James Hetfield is the table. And now I can die in peace.

High Points: The first ten minutes of “Junior Dad,” which contains the most pleasant and atmospheric music and least embarrassing lyrics Lulu has to offer (the closing orchestral instrumental is nice too, but it goes on too long). Also “Iced Honey,” which (as previously mentioned) sounds like something from the Load/ReLoad era. Old-school Metallica fans, I bet you thought you’d never be so happy to hear anything that sounds like Load or ReLoad.

Low Points: Pretty much everything else. This could be the front-runner for Worst Album of 2011. It’ll probably win the coveted title of Least Essential Album of 2011, though the AV Club could always surprise everyone and pick… oh, let’s say… the Justin Bieber Christmas album. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

I was never a hardcore fan of that whole late-‘90s, early-double-0s scene, but I did get my feet wet. I liked Korn’s singles back then, but never bought any of their albums. I could never really get into the Deftones (and still haven’t, even though I’ve heard lots of good things about them) or P.O.D. I flat-out didn’t like Disturbed at all (and still don’t). System Of A Down? They were okay, though for some reason I thought Serj Tankian kind of looked like Osama bin Laden. I didn’t hear anything by Slipknot for the first time until long after the nu-metal craze had hit its peak, though I’d seen plenty of their merchandise around school. There was a brief period where I actually considered getting that Crazy Town album with “Butterfly” on it – yes, I once thought the guys who horrifically mutilated “New Noise” by Refused were at least competent musicians. I was totally ready to buy Kid Rock as an “American Bad Ass” until I found out that he took that riff from an old Metallica song (for the record, I’m usually OK with sampling as long as you make interesting alterations or additions to the sample; leaving the sample as it is comes off as lazy, like all you did was make up new lyrics to someone else’s song). And who the hell were Primer 55 and Ill Niño? I certainly didn’t know.

Really, there were (and are) only a handful of albums in my collection that probably qualify as nu-metal at all: the first three Limp Bizkit albums, Infest by Papa Roach, The Lonely Position of Neutral by Trust Company, and of course the required soundtracks for any angsty teenager’s life from 2000 to 2004, Hybrid Theory and Meteora by Linkin Park.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when I started drifting away from the genre for good, but if I had to guess I’d say it would be some time during my freshman year of college. Which is interesting (though probably only to me), because this was right around the middle of Linkin Park’s four-year hiatus between 2003’s Meteora and 2007’s Minutes To Midnight. A lot of things changed for me during that time – I graduated high school, went to college out of state, started living on my own for the first time, went to more parties, spent more time with friends, and totally failed to act on every crush I ever had on any girls. (Okay, that last one hadn’t changed. Should I really be revisiting my old teenage angst music right now?)

I also, as I’ve mentioned before, started exploring the Internet and finding out about a lot of interesting music that I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise. If you told 17-year-old Colin that by the time he graduated college his favorite band would be Radiohead and Minus The Bear, the National, Mastodon, and Bloc Party would round out his top five, he’d laugh at you, say “Whatever, Radiohead’s overrated and I don’t even know who those other guys are,” and go back to listening to Linkin Park.

You know what else changed a lot during that period? Linkin Park. At some point during that hiatus they apparently also decided that maybe the whole rap-metal thing wasn’t so cool after all. By the time Minutes To Midnight came out they’d morphed from one chart-topping beast into another. I still remember hearing “What I’ve Done” for the first time and being a bit surprised at their sudden new direction. There was no trace of their old hip-hop and electronic influences to be found at all. Their nu-metal distortion was gone too, as was the call-and-response between singer Chester Bennington and rapper Mike Shinoda that had been a staple of their early work. And what’s this? A guitar solo? A guitar solo in a Linkin Park song? It made me wonder if I’d fallen into the Twilight Zone. Not that I was all that upset by it since I hadn’t listened to them in a long time. Nor was I all that impressed by it either, because “What I’ve Done” is just a generic arena rock song with an incredibly basic guitar solo and (I must give proper credit to Entertainment Weekly for this one) a piano part that sounds kind of like the theme from Halloween.

This edition of BLAST FROM THE PAST is going to be a little different from previous (and future) entries in the series. Normally I take a look at one album I own by an artist I don’t listen to anymore and then briefly summarize what that artist went on to accomplish later in their career. This time I’ll be revisiting two albums by the same artist that I played to death as a teenager and then giving a more in-depth investigation than usual into the artist’s future output. This is because while other bands I’ve covered in this feature have typically stuck to the same sound, today’s featured artist has completely reinvented their music – not once, but twice. Linkin Park, come on down – you’re the next contestant on BLAST FROM THE PAST.

THE ARTIST REVISITED

We begin, of course, with Linkin Park 1.0 – the rap-metal superstars who came charging out of the gate with the hugely popular Hybrid Theory, an album that has sold over ten million copies in the United States alone. And they followed that up with the also-hugely-popular Meteora, which sounds less like the title of a rap-metal album and more like the spell Sephiroth casts in hopes of destroying the world toward the end of Final Fantasy VII.

A typical Linkin Park song from this era begins with a short and soft intro, then erupts with loud power chords that make up the main riff, and then softens up again for verses filled with angst-ridden lyrics. From there the song sometimes builds up with a pre-chorus featuring some call-and-response between Bennington and Shinoda. Then we get the chorus, which is always sung (well, except “Papercut”) and sometimes features more back-and-forth between the two vocalists. The band lathers, rinses, and repeats for the second verse and chorus. The bridge is always the heaviest and angriest part of the song (come to think of it, “Papercut” doesn’t do that either), usually with lots of screams. Sometimes it can be effective (“SHUT UP WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU”; “YOU’RE GONNA LISTEN TO ME LIKE IT OR NOT!”), and sometimes… well, it just doesn’t work at all (“I’m gonna run away… and never say good-BYE!”). Then we hear the chorus one more time and either the song abruptly ends right there or we hear a short and soft outro to ease us out of the song.

The typical Linkin Park song from Hybrid Theory or Meteora is always over within three and a half minutes. Not one guitar solo is ever played. Nor are there any acoustic instruments to be found, not even just to mix things up a bit. No profanities are ever uttered either, making these guys the anti-Fred Durst, who drops F-bombs the way a teenage girl says “like.” There is little to no deviation from the formula I just outlined in any song on Linkin Park’s first two albums except the instrumentals.

It doesn’t help matters that the guitar work on these two albums is… um… well, let’s just say Brad Delson, also known as “that guy with the headphones,” isn’t exactly an Eddie Van Halen-esque virtuoso. For every listenable riff on Hybrid Theory and Meteora, there’s another that’s completely dull and uninspired. Let’s use an example, shall we? The first two tracks on Hybrid Theory are “Papercut” and “One Step Closer,” two decent songs that were released as singles and feature some of the more memorable guitar riffs on the record. Then along comes “With You” at track 3. “With You” has a terrible two-chord chugfest of a main riff that’s so hookless I can’t believe Bennington was able to write an actual melody to sing over it. Then we get to the chorus and Delson introduces us to one of his favorite tricks of the LP 1.0 era: the chorus riff where literally all he does is let power chords ring. In other words, basic chord progressions played with the easiest chords to play on the guitar and uncomplicated strumming patterns. He probably doesn’t do this as much as I think he does, but it just feels like he does it a lot.

To his credit, this doesn’t happen nearly as often on Meteora. But we’re talking about a guitarist who often has little to nothing to do during the verses and doesn’t come up with very creative parts when he does get to play. The riff in “By Myself” is another two-chord chugfest, and this time it sounds like Delson recorded a full guitar part and then the band took a snippet of that part and built the song around it. “Hit The Floor” uses the same guitar parts in the verse and chorus – and come to think of it, “A Place For My Head” does that too. “Numb” relies far too much on that “sustained power chords” trick; Delson’s parts in that song consist entirely of whole notes and half notes and nothing else.

But the absolute lowest point actually came when I was 16 years old and I listened to “From The Inside” for the first time and realized that it had the exact same damned riff as “Faint,” the song that made me want Meteora in the first place, the song that arrives three tracks earlier in the album’s running order! How is that even possible? How do you write two songs with the same riff during the same recording sessions and put them on the same album – again, just three tracks apart (“Faint” is #7, “From The Inside” is #10) – without anybody noticing that they sound exactly the same?

Hell, these two songs were both released as singles! And I’ve never even seen a review of Meteora that mentions what I consider a blatantly obvious similarity. The only differences are that “From The Inside” is slower and removes that last chord from the “Faint” riff. Other than that, it’s the same freaking thing. Back then it drove me nuts to the point where I actually made my friend Kevin listen to these two songs just to see if he’d notice. The exchange went something like this:

COLIN: Hey, I got a couple songs I want you to listen to.

KEVIN: Uh, okay.

COLIN: All right, here’s the first one.

(I put on “Faint”)

KEVIN: Oh, I know this one! I’ve heard this on the radio. I actually kind of like this song.

COLIN: Cool, cool. Well, since you already know this one, I’ll just put the second one on now.

(I put on “From The Inside”)

COLIN: Now, tell me if you notice anything about these songs.

(Kevin listens to “From The Inside” for less than thirty seconds before giving his answer.)

KEVIN: You mean aside from the fact that they sound exactly the same?

It was nice to know that, while I may be crazy, I wasn’t completely out of my mind.

So now let’s move on to the lyrics. And oddly enough, as much as I’ve complained about the uninspired guitar work so far, this was actually the biggest reason I started moving away from Linkin Park. It’s not that these guys are awful lyricists (they’re like the second coming of Bob Dylan compared to the Limp Bizkits and Crazy Towns of the world); it’s that I never really understood what their songs were about. Yeah, it’s pretty clear that these guys are upset about something. The question I started asking was, “What is that something?” I mean, there are songs on both albums that mention “wounds that will not heal,” but what are these wounds, where did they come from, and why won’t they heal? And the more I paid attention to the band’s lyrics, the less I thought I would ever really find an answer.

I once told my sister that Linkin Park songs are about everything and nothing all at once. It seems like they’re trying to write lyrics that anyone in any situation can relate to, which is probably why you see so many Linkin Park songs in YouTube AMVs paying tribute to pretty much any TV show, movie, anime, video game, or anything else you can imagine. They write about how they feel but never even try to explain what is making them feel that way. On one hand, this means their songs could be about anything, which in theory would make them easier for people to connect with. On the other hand, as someone who believes in music as a means of reaching out to other people and making such connections, it actually makes me feel less of a connection with Linkin Park. I feel like these songs could have been written by anyone about anything.

Like, one of the reasons I think Weezer’s Pinkerton is a great album is because the things Rivers Cuomo wrote those songs about actually happened to him and he seems pretty honest about the details of those situations. So while I’ve never fallen in love with a lesbian or been shot down by a girl I invited to a Green Day concert or developed a fetish for Japanese stationery, I still feel a stronger connection with Weezer’s songs than Linkin Park’s. I’ve always felt that at its heart Pinkerton is a record about an awkward guy who wants to be loved but has trouble finding it. And maybe it’s because I’m kind of like that myself, and I don’t want to accuse Linkin Park of being dishonest or un-genuine, but I feel there’s a level of… character study, I guess you could call it, that Pinkerton has but Hybrid Theory lacks. It’s all about the details you’re willing to share, I suppose.

So anyway, my continuing search for the possible source of all Linkin Park’s angst has led me to do a little research on the band members themselves and see what I can learn. See what kind of experiences they may have had that influenced their lyrics. See if anything about that kind of stuff can even be found at all, really. I’ll start with one of the faces and voices of the band, Mr. Chester Bennington. Let’s see what makes him tick. From MTV.com’s artist biography…

A victim of sexual abuse, Bennington had a childhood that was far from picture perfect, and when his parents divorced at age 11, he turned to drugs to deal with his pain. By the time he was a teenager, Bennington had gotten heavily into cocaine and methamphetamines, supporting his drug habit with a gig working at Burger King.

…

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Holy shit, dude.

I did not see that one coming.

So, um… I guess now I think I might have a better idea of where some of the angst comes from and why the lyrics on Hybrid Theory and Meteora are so vague about the source. I can’t imagine it’s easy to write songs about that kind of stuff. Especially not when your band has just been signed to a major label and you realize that if your album is a hit then millions of people you’ve never met could be learning all about your deep-rooted traumas and personal tragedies. But it’s only a guess, really. I don’t know how much of Linkin Park’s songwriting is influenced by these things, and frankly it’s probably not my place to even speculate. For all I know their lyrics could either be totally unrelated or a perfect way to release the pain caused by such events, at least from the band’s perspective.

Moving on from all that… I’ve been pretty hard on these albums, but I still don’t think they’re bad. They’re okay; the band clearly has an ear for hooks and occasionally comes up with some interesting ideas. The instrumentals “Cure For The Itch” and “Session” are standout tracks on their respective albums, both in their own right as short-but-sweet electronic experiments and as the only break from the band’s typical (at the time) rap-metal fare. The singles from Hybrid Theory are still pretty listenable (albeit massively overplayed), and “Points Of Authority” and “Forgotten” rank at the top of the non-single cuts. The second half of Meteora is home to three of Linkin Park’s best songs – “Faint,” which makes good use of a string sample and was perhaps the most energetic LP song until “The Catalyst”; “Nobody’s Listening,” which is built around a Japanese pan flute loop, DJ scratches, and muted guitars; and especially “Breaking The Habit,” which is perhaps the best song LP 1.0 ever delivered. If they didn’t stick so rigidly to their songwriting formula and gave themselves more space to flesh out some of their ideas, could they have delivered some topnotch material?

WHAT CAME NEXT?

I wasn’t originally planning to lump Linkin Park’s first two albums together, but they sound so similar to each other that it’s pretty hard not to. A lot of the tricks the band uses on Hybrid Theory are pulled out of the bag again for Meteora, right down to the Mr. Hahn instrumental in the second-to-last track. It was a wise commercial decision, but it also made the band look like a one-trick pony. Everything they’ve done since has been in response to the criticism of Meteora as “Hybrid Theory Pt. 2,” as Minutes To Midnight and A Thousand Suns are pretty obvious attempts to make anything but “Hybrid Theory Pt. 3.”

Minutes To Midnight, which was released after a four-year break from making records, saw the introduction of Linkin Park 2.0: the arena rockers. They toned down the distortion a lot – I’d say Minutes To Midnight is easily their softest album – and started bringing in more influence from U2, to the point where “Shadow Of The Day” sounds eerily similar to “With Or Without You” and Chester Bennington started going around rocking Bono sunglasses. And imagine my surprise when I listened to the opening instrumental “Wake” and heard soft electronics and a bass line that didn’t just go along with what the guitars were doing. Too bad that song ends just when it’s starting to come alive.

While the Linkin Park of Hybrid Theory and Meteora sought to make loud and angry rap-metal, LP 2.0 also tones down the rage and the rap influence. Minutes To Midnight still has a couple of old-school “angry LP” songs, most notably “Given Up” with its breakdown of “PUT ME OUT OF MY MISERY” and Bennington’s climactic 17-second scream. But when I say “a couple,” I mean a couple – the only other song that still has their old heavy sound is “No More Sorrow.” Oh, and the rap stuff has been almost completely shoved to the sidelines – Mike Shinoda handles lead vocals on just three of the twelve tracks here, and only two of them (“Bleed It Out” and “Hands Held High”) are rap songs. He was once Bennington’s co-star, and on this album it’s like he’s been reduced to character-actor status.

Though his rap role is practically an afterthought in LP 2.0, Shinoda does find other stuff to do. He handles the piano parts, introduces us to his singing voice, and chips in as a second guitarist, presumably freeing up Brad Delson, now known as “that guy with the headphones and the afro,” to branch out into a lead guitar role. And so it was that Delson was able to play not one, not two, but three guitar solos on Minutes To Midnight – a short one in “What I’ve Done,” some tapping exercises (!!!) during “In Pieces,” and one in “The Little Things Give You Away” which I’ll get to in a moment. His rhythm work is still pretty unremarkable, but at least he avoids putting the same riff in two songs this time (though the breakdown in “No More Sorrow” does remind me of the breakdown from “Given Up”). His part in “Leave Out All The Rest” consists entirely of him strumming the same note over and over like he’s Johnny Ramone playing the solo in “I Wanna Be Sedated.” Similarly, his verse riff in “No More Sorrow” uses only one chord and lots of chugging. That said, “In Between” features a decent harmonic hook and “Valentine’s Day” has a nice guitar melody that kind of reminded me of the Edge only without all the effects.

The highlight of Minutes To Midnight has to be its closing number “The Little Things Give You Away.” Even with Linkin Park going softer than usual and starting to branch out of their comfort zone on this album, I wasn’t expecting a song like this from them. It begins with acoustic guitars and soft electronic percussion that gradually builds into a soaring ballad with a firmly established and well-executed melancholy. The second half of this song is a thing of surprising beauty. Delson’s guitar solo is simple in technique but fits the mood perfectly, and the closing vocal harmonies with Bennington’s mournful wails and Shinoda and bassist Dave “Phoenix” Farrell each adding their own distinct parts works really well. If only the lyrics were up to par – this song is very obviously about Hurricane Katrina, and while I commend Linkin Park for writing about something specific for a change there are a few lines that rub me the wrong way. Especially the chorus: “All you’ve ever wanted was someone to truly look up to you/And six feet underwater, I DO.” Do you get it? HE’S DEAD. And he died because George Bush didn’t care about New Orleans… or because FEMA screwed up, or because the Louisiana state government screwed up, or something. I get what they’re trying to do, but lines like that just strike me as melodramatic.

There are actually several places here where Linkin Park’s lyrics have some clarity to show you what they mean, to borrow a phrase from “Breaking The Habit.” “In Pieces” is a breakup song; “Shadow Of The Day” is about how either the protagonist wants to run away (and never say good-BYE!!!!!!!!) or kill himself (why he feels this way remains, as usual, a mystery); “Bleed It Out,” despite the title hinting at self-mutilation, is actually about struggling with writer’s block and perfectionism (“I won’t lie/Doesn’t matter how hard I try/Half the words don’t mean a thing/And I know that I won’t be satisfied”); “Valentine’s Day” is a reaction to the death of a loved one; and “The Little Things Give You Away” and “Hands Held High” are pretty direct screw-yous to George W. Bush. Even “No More Sorrow” seems to be attacking Bush and the war on terror (“Your crusade’s a disguise/Replace freedom with fear/You trade money for lives/…/Your time has come to be replaced/…/I see liars and thieves/Abuse power with greed”).

Of course, Minutes To Midnight came out in 2007, toward the end of Bush’s tenure and about three years after the anti-Bush musical movement really hit its mainstream peak with Green Day’s American Idiot and the Vote for Change Tour. And it featured a song about Hurricane Katrina two years after the storm hit New Orleans. It would be easy to say their timing was off by a few years, but hell, Rise Against just released a video about Katrina about five months ago and I haven’t heard anyone complain about that. If nothing else, it did help Linkin Park start writing more focused lyrics, though their trademark vagueness was still present in songs like “What I’ve Done,” which for me at least only raised the question of “What did you do?” So while the band took a dramatically different musical approach on their next album, that increase in focus provided them with a stepping stone toward the concept album that A Thousand Suns turned out to be. Whether or not this was a good thing is of course up for debate.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

Minutes To Midnight was named in reference to the Doomsday Clock, a symbol created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago to estimate how close the world is to a global disaster. The minute hand moves closer to midnight whenever any country develops nuclear weaponry and farther away whenever countries sign treaties or make agreements to reduce their arsenals (note: today scientists also favor accounting for global climate change in these estimations). The closest the Doomsday Clock ever actually came to midnight was within two minutes back in 1953, when the United States and the Soviet Union both tested thermonuclear devices. It was at its farthest – 17 minutes to midnight – in 1991 around the end of the Cold War. The clock is currently set at six minutes to midnight.

In 2010, Linkin Park announced that their follow-up to Minutes To Midnight was to be called A Thousand Suns. The title was taken from a line in Hindu scripture that had been quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer in reference to the atomic bomb. So when considering the source of the title, the mysterious blurry image on the cover that almost looks like a mushroom cloud when viewed from a certain angle, and track titles like “Burning In The Skies,” “Waiting For The End,” “Fallout,” and “The Catalyst,” it would seem that the band had made a sequel to Minutes To Midnight, so to speak. It appeared that Linkin Park had dared to envision an answer to the long-dreaded question of what happens when the Doomsday Clock strikes midnight.

The theme of nuclear holocaust hovers over A Thousand Suns from the very beginning. The first two tracks, both of which are introductory interludes, start things off by asking God if we will “burn inside the fires of a thousand suns” and playing a clip of Oppenheimer quoting another passage from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This is some pretty heavy subject matter for anyone to be tackling, let alone a band that had spent the last few years soundtracking Michael Bay’s Transformers films. And all the while we hear this eerie pseudo-industrial background music that keeps building up and getting progressively harsher and noisier, creating a sense of dread for what’s to come. We seem to be in for some seriously bleak stuff here, people.

And then we get to “Burning In The Skies,” the first proper track, and all that stuff goes straight out the damn window.

You know how every disaster movie always has that “human interest” subplot about the main character being separated from his/her loved ones in the middle of the apocalyptic event du jour? “Burning In The Skies” is kind of like that, at least in terms of its lyrics. They seem to evoke images of someone trying to survive in a decimated world as a backdrop while the theme of alienation comes across more prominently. It’s not a bad song at all, but after those first two tracks I was expecting something much more hard-hitting from a song called “Burning In The Skies” than this. It sounds more like it would have fit on Minutes To Midnight.

Perhaps I went into this album with the wrong expectations. See, “Burning In The Skies” is the last song until (depending on your interpretation) “Iridescent” comes along nine tracks later to even attempt to address the whole “end of the world” theme. “Robot Boy,” despite its title practically screaming “MAKE ME THE NEXT TRANSFORMERS THEME, MR. BAY,” is more about allowing yourself to embrace your emotions and accept love… or something like that. “Blackout” feels more like if the old-school “angry” Linkin Park showed up for the lyric-writing session. “Wretches And Kings” could be looked at as an attempt at a “rebel anthem,” like it could be John Connor’s pump-up music before he goes off to battle the Terminators, but then I hear Chester Bennington sing the chorus in what sounds like a fake Jamaican accent and I laugh.

And even the song called “Waiting For The End” sounds at times like the band’s usual brand of vague angst or sadness. When I read a line like, “All I want to do is trade this life for something new,” I understand how it could be interpreted as being about someone who’s ready to die and looks forward to what the afterlife will bring. But when I hear Bennington sing that line, all I can think is, “Okay, Chester. I’ll take you up on that offer. I’ll be the lead singer of one of the most popular bands on Earth and get my songs played on the radio and MTV all the time and sell millions of records. And you can be the depressed college grad who can’t find a job, can’t get a date, and has lost touch with all of his friends.” Also, whenever I hear that opening drum beat all I can think is, “If you havin’ girl problems I feel bad for you, son! I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one!”

On an album that seemed to present itself as a concept album about nuclear holocaust, it turns out that the most powerful statement Linkin Park delivers has absolutely nothing to do with that concept. That statement arrives on “When They Come For Me,” which is a crystal-clear middle finger to every fan (or ex-fan) who complained about the band ditching rap-metal. Mike Shinoda would like you all to know that he’s not “the same person telling you to forfeit the game” (a reference to the Hybrid Theory fan favorite “Points Of Authority”), and if you don’t like that you can either listen to something else or “try and catch up, motherfucker!”

“When They Come For Me” finds Shinoda – and in fact Linkin Park as a whole – in rare form. This is a Linkin Park song that sounds genuinely pissed off, and for once you can understand exactly where they’re coming from. The band’s decision to change their sound proved to be quite divisive among their fan base. It’s the eternal dilemma for musicians – do you keep pushing yourselves and trying new things while risking the alienation of your fans, or do you play it safe and stick with your tried-and-true sound to keep your fans happy? Well, not only did Linkin Park choose the former, but they then changed their sound again and made the most challenging record of their career. There’s less guitar here than ever before, but plenty of noisy industrial electronics to go around. Oh, and lots of pianos too. And you hear Shinoda sing almost as much as Bennington does. And it ends with an acoustic ballad called “The Messenger” that would actually be a pleasant little tune if Bennington didn’t oversing it so badly. Most of A Thousand Suns doesn’t sound like anything Linkin Park has ever done before. The only clue that anything like this was coming was probably the 15-second industrial breakdown about two-thirds of the way through “New Divide,” a song that otherwise sounds like a “What I’ve Done” rewrite with new lyrics and vocal hooks.

After listening to A Thousand Suns I think I now understand why “The Catalyst” was chosen as its lead single. It may not have the catchiest hooks, but it sums up the album and Linkin Park 3.0 in one tidy little six-minute package. It’s half electronic experiment, half soaring stadium rocker with pianos. The first half is probably the most chaotic and energetic thing they’ve ever put on a record; the second half is arguably the most grandiose. And of course it also sticks the closest to that apocalyptic theme that I thought this album was going to have. This is the song the rest of A Thousand Suns has been building up to, even that interlude track where the lyrics are Japanese phrases meaning “lift me up, let me go.” If “Iridescent” marks the point where the bombs start going off (which I think it does in the context of the album, especially in the verse lyrics), then “The Catalyst” seems to be what happens after everything’s been destroyed. Or perhaps it’s a vision of the future since “The Messenger” shows up immediately afterward to end the album by basically saying, “You know, we can stop that from happening if we just start treating each other better.”

So in the end, what do I think of Linkin Park? I think they’re a textbook definition of a hit-or-miss band. I think they hit about as often as they miss. They have an ear for hooks and come up with some intriguing ideas, but they also have a lot of forgettable songs and sometimes don’t flesh their ideas out as much as they could be. And I have absolutely no problem with these guys playing around with new sounds. It’s not easy to try new things and it’s even harder to do it well, especially when you’ve made two hugely popular albums with an established sound. Their experiments don’t always work, but I give them credit for not resting on their laurels and churning out Hybrid Theory sequels every couple of years. They’re an odd case where I don’t feel compelled to get any more albums, yet still find myself at least a little bit interested in what they’re up to.

Who knows? Maybe there’s still something left of 17-year-old Colin lurking somewhere inside me after all. He’s gotten much quieter over the years, but he probably won’t completely disappear for a long time… and that’s assuming that he ever will.

The week before that I went to volunteer at the Philadelphia Union match against Everton and ended up hospitalized with heat exhaustion, which is a pretty crappy experience that I don’t recommend for anyone. I had to stay inside for a few days during the recovery process, but I wasn’t really in the mood for blogging. It made me miss out on the Union’s match against Real Madrid, which sucks because I really wanted to go to that one. But enough about my, um, awesome life. This is a Picks of the Week post, and this week’s picks are all brought to you by the letter P.

And it’s not even like I specifically chose this letter for a POTW post. When I was putting together this little list, I noticed that the songs on it were all by bands whose names began with the letter P. So I figured I might as well make that the theme. But first, check out a couple new tunes from Radiohead and Mastodon.

The Picks of the Week are coming your way after the jump, as always.

Plates Of Cake, “A Band Of Partisans”

I’m not even entirely sure if I remember how I first heard of Plates Of Cake. I think they were mentioned in a thread on the Rotten Tomatoes forum about new music in 2011. This in turn led me to a positive review from Tiny Mix Tapes, which describes them as “the National if the National sounded like everyone says they do” – that is, they’re an indie-rock band from Brooklyn with a baritone-voiced lead singer. And I love the National, so color me intrigued. Of course, they don’t really sound much like the National at all. Their music actually reminds me of early to mid-‘90s indie rock, like Archers Of Loaf or something. Then again, I only really know about Archers Of Loaf from seeing the “Web In Front” video on Beavis and Butt-Head.

Parades, “Hunters”

I first read about these Aussie alt-rockers in a review on Sputnik Music. Their debut album Foreign Tapes earned pretty high marks, so I figured I’d listen to the samples on iTunes, which remains the only place where I’ve ever found this album (though it hasn’t occurred to me to check websites like Amazon and Insound and whatnot). “Hunters” was the first song that really grabbed my attention; it effectively bounces back and forth between chilly piano riffs and male-female vocal harmonies and bursts of downright thrilling energy. Whenever I hear this song it just makes me want to go running as fast as I can, and I don’t even know where I’d be going but I probably wouldn’t care because this song would be playing and it would feel so awesome.

Pinback, “From Nothing To Nowhere”

Okay, this one’s actually kind of funny. I first heard this song in a YouTube video where someone dubbed it over that scene in The Breakfast Club where Brian puts a record on and everyone starts dancing around the library and somehow they don’t get caught. I guess the principal’s office at Shermer High School is soundproof. And while I’m on the subject, I’d like to state for the record that I think Ally Sheedy looked hotter before she let Molly Ringwald give her a makeover.

But anyway, I’ve had “From Nothing To Nowhere” stuck in my head ever since. It’s full of catchy hooks and riffs and maintains a fast pace that keeps your head nodding and toes tapping. This is just a really fun song to listen to… and probably also to dance to, but my high school library is a half-hour away from my house and doesn’t have any railings or statues or even record players, unless they’ve done some serious remodeling over there.

Pavement, “You Are A Light”

Pavement, “Major Leagues”

I knew Pavement would probably pop up on this list, and it came down to a couple songs from their 1999 swan song Terror Twilight. I wasn’t really sure whether I wanted to include “You Are A Light” or “Major Leagues,” my two favorite songs from that album, so I figured I’d include them both. I really like the guitar work in both these tracks; the melodic lines featured in these songs always stay stuck in my head for a while after hearing them. And Stephen Malkmus kind of reminds me of Beck in the sense that I never understand what his lyrics are about, but they’re pretty creative and always seem to fit what they’re doing.

Pearl Jam, “Man Of The Hour”

Pearl Jam is best known and will probably be best remembered for their harder-rocking affairs like “Even Flow” and “Do The Evolution” and all that. But damn, do I ever love “Man Of The Hour.” It was written for the movie Big Fish and plays over the closing credits, though I hadn’t really noticed it (I don’t usually sit through closing credits) until hearing it on their best-of compilation Rearviewmirror years later. I’ve said numerous times on this blog (and on my radio show) that I’m a sucker for pretty songs. Well, the guitar line in “Man Of The Hour” is absolutely beautiful, so much so that Eddie Vedder doesn’t even need to write a separate vocal melody; he just follows along with that guitar melody. I’ve tried to learn it and could never get it right.

Well, that’ll be all for this edition of Picks of the Week. Be sure to tune in to my all-Q-bands edition, where I celebrate songs by artists whose names begin with Q. You know, like Queen. Or Queens Of The Stone Age. Or Q-Tip, or Quiet Riot, or,  um… uh… oh, or the Queers, or… um… uh… hmm… er… uh… Quarashi?

Terrapins baseball: Interrupting my radio shows since 2009.

Of course, along with the 32 lists that made it to the airwaves, there were several list ideas that I never got to do. Most of the time it was because I had a hard time thinking of five songs with which to fill the list, which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole “Top 5” thing. But that’s what happens when you try to classify songs into excessively specific categories, especially because my brain isn’t quite the encyclopedia of music knowledge that I would have liked for it to be. It certainly would have made filling these lists a lot easier!

As always, the fun begins after the jump.

Top 5 Favorite TV Theme Songs

What Would’ve Been #1: The Seatbelts, “Tank!” (Cowboy Bebop)

There have been a lot of memorable TV theme songs over the years. Some provide a quick summary of what the show is about. Others are short but sweet instrumental scores that we can instantly recognize and associate with the show. And still others are songs that weren’t written for the show, but instead were chosen and licensed to be the theme because they suited the show for one reason or another.

It’s that last category that provided the biggest obstacle for me. After all, as I said, those songs weren’t written specifically for the show. Every week I liked providing some brief reasoning for why I made the choices I made for each list. But for this one I probably would have had to analyze how, say, “Next Year” by the Foo Fighters connected to this long-gone NBC show called Ed that I never watched and knew absolutely nothing about except that its theme song was a Foo Fighters song. I would have had an easier time with songs like “Superman” by Laszlo Bane (the theme from Scrubs), but I still couldn’t really decide whether I wanted to include that last group of theme songs in this list. This in turn left me with the unfavorable possibility of my intros outlasting the songs on the list, and I don’t usually like when DJs let their constant yap-yap-yapping dominate what’s supposed to be a music show.

On The List (?): Foo Fighters, “Next Year”

Ironically my #1 choice for this list was a piece of cake. If I were stranded on a desert island and I could only have one soundtrack from a movie or TV show, I would immediately choose Cowboy Bebop and wouldn’t even think twice about it. It has so much variety in both genre and mood and all of it is so well-composed that even if I didn’t like the show (which I absolutely do) I’d still be able to appreciate the music. But only one song could be played at the start of each episode, and “Tank!” is an excellent choice to open a show that routinely makes excellent musical choices. Okay, three, two, one – let’s jam!

Top 5 Unhappiest Songs About Happy Things

On The List: Radiohead, “Nice Dream”

The concept of this list was to counter the Top 5 Happy Songs About Unhappy Things list that actually did air on my show. Unfortunately I couldn’t really think of anything that uses this particular breed of dissonance. The closest I could think of was Radiohead’s “(Nice Dream),” which would have made the list – and in fact inspired this hypothetical list – mainly because this is the first verse:

They love me like I was a brother

They protect me, listen to me

They dug me my very own garden

Gave me sunshine, made me happy

Nice dream, nice dream, nice dream

But listen to Thom Yorke’s voice. The man sounds utterly heartbroken. I’ve never heard anyone sound sadder to sing lyrics about presumably happy things than Thom Yorke in “(Nice Dream).” And this is probably because… well, the song’s called “(Nice Dream)” for a reason, isn’t it? He’s sad about having nice dreams because in the end it’s just a dream, and real life isn’t as satisfying.

I can hear you saying already, “But isn’t this the guy from one of the biggest and most critically acclaimed bands in the world? How can he be so unhappy?” Well, first of all, this was written before Radiohead became that band. Second, this is the guy who openly rejected the biggest hit single of his career, the guy who nearly suffered a nervous breakdown during the tour supporting an album that was not only Radiohead’s most commercially successful but also one of the most highly praised albums of the last 30 years. There’s a scene near the end of Meeting People Is Easy, which documents the OK Computer tour, where Yorke almost loses it while talking to his bandmates about all the hype they’d been getting from the media. It’s like he either doesn’t believe that hype or he’s realized the pressure they’ll be under to live up to that hype in the future and is starting to crack under it. Or at least that’s how I saw it when I watched the film.

Top 5 Favorite Commercial Jingles

On The List: Fruit Of The Loom, “Blue”

The reason for not doing this list was pretty simple – I couldn’t think of a way to do this without making it seem like a glorified commercial break, and I’m pretty sure there isn’t one. Besides, how many jingles can you think of that would work on their own as songs, separate from their intended advertising environment? The only ones I can think of at the moment that could do that are Coca-Cola’s “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing,” which actually did become a hit single, and Fruit Of The Loom’s dead-on Coldplay parody “Blue.”

Top 5 Bands I Saw On Third Rail

What Would’ve Been #1: Solar Powered Sun Destroyer

I was a sound engineer on Third Rail Radio at WMUC for at least half my college career. It was a show where we brought in local bands or artists on indie labels and had them play a short live set on the air. We usually had two or three acts per week, so I saw a lot of bands. Seems like more than enough material for a Top 5 list, right? Well, unfortunately, there were a ton of bands whose names I couldn’t remember and so I couldn’t exactly look them up. Some were pretty obscure and I had trouble tracking down stuff that sounded okay. And it would have been too time-consuming to go through the multitude of Third Rail shows I’d worked and Google all those bands so I could refresh my memory for the sake of one Listen Up! show.

On The List: Double Dagger, “No Allies”

Here are a handful that made especially strong impressions on me. Double Dagger is a noisy punkish trio from Baltimore that somehow creates a ton of sound with just a bass, a drum kit, and vocals. The Flying Eyes, who appeared on Third Rail more than anyone else I’d seen, are a psychedelic blues-rock band whose singer’s voice bears a striking resemblance to Jim Morrison of the Doors. My favorite of the lot was Solar Powered Sun Destroyer, a space-rock group with a triple guitar attack whose sound is reminiscent of stuff like Planet Of Ice by Minus The Bear, Vheissu by Thrice, and Jupiter by Cave In.

Top 5 Drummers Who Should Be Allowed To Write Songs

On The List: Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Queens Of The Stone Age, and about 20-something other bands)

Dave Grohl once said that the reason he kept his songs to himself when he was the drummer in Nirvana was because he didn’t want to interfere with what Kurt Cobain was doing. He considered Cobain a great songwriter and didn’t want to go down as the guy who ruined Kurt’s songs. He mentioned an old joke about drummers that went something like this:

Q: What was the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band?

A: “Hey guys, check out this new song I wrote!”

Such is the reputation of drummers who attempt solo projects. Ringo Starr has the least celebrated solo output of any Beatle, Keith Moon’s covers album Two Sides Of The Moon was widely rejected (and that’s putting it kindly), and Peter Criss’s solo debut got one star from Rolling Stone and a whopping 0.0 from Pitchfork when they reviewed it over 20 years after its release. But every now and then a guy like Grohl comes along who proves to be a talented songwriter in his own right; his Foo Fighters have scored numerous hit singles and awards, and their new album Wasting Light has earned perhaps the highest praise of any Foo album since The Colour And The Shape.

The reason I ended up not doing this list was because I couldn’t think of enough drummers who’ve been renowned and successful songwriters. There’s Dave Grohl, of course… and, um… Phil Collins… jeez, I’m having a hard time with this even now. Phil Selway from Radiohead has released some solo material, though I haven’t heard much of it. Brann Dailor from Mastodon has a hand in writing lyrics and developing the concepts and themes for each album, but they don’t seem to have a dominant songwriter; Mastodon’s music is always credited as a group effort. I don’t know, I’m drawing a blank just as I did back then.

Top 5 Weirdest Radiohead B-Sides

What Would’ve Been #1: “Trans-Atlantic Drawl”

Radiohead has a lot of topnotch B-sides, which is a pretty remarkable achievement. If you were to construct an album consisting entirely of their B-sides, that hypothetical album would likely be just as well-received as the rest of their work usually is. If you include the My Iron Lung EP and the In Rainbows bonus disc, you’ve got an even greater wealth to choose from. I can’t think of a whole lot of bands I could say that about, but then again I’m not always compelled to collect all the B-sides and rarities.

Of course, they’ve also got a bunch of pretty weird B-sides from their Kid A/Amnesiac and Hail To The Thief sessions. I actually had a whole Top 5 list planned out for this category; in fact, this was one of the first Top 5 ideas I came up with. I decided not to use it because I didn’t think I could get away with devoting the entire fourth quarter of a show to one artist and me talking about that one artist, even that artist happened to be my favorite band. I don’t remember the order, but I remember that “Worrywort” and “The Amazing Sounds Of Orgy” (which I later included on a different Top 5 list) were definitely on it, “I Am Citizen Insane” and “Where Bluebirds Fly” were probably on it, and “Trans-Atlantic Drawl” was #1.

You know, now that I think about it, I could probably give this list a proper write-up since this is a blog and thus I don’t have to worry about radio station rules and FCC guidelines and whatnot. Stay tuned…

Top 5 Longest Songs In My Collection

What Would’ve Been #1: Intronaut, “The Reptilian Brain”

As I mentioned at the start of this post, one of my Listen Up! shows was an experiment to see how many songs I could squeeze into my two-hour time slot. The final count was something like 57 or 58 songs, with most of the final 20 being less than a minute long and capped off by Napalm Death’s 2-second-long “You Suffer,” the shortest song ever recorded. The flipside of this gimmick was to play the top 5 longest songs in my collection, and I have some pretty long songs. The top spot belonged – and still does, actually – to “The Reptilian Brain” by Intronaut, which clocks in at 16 minutes and 20 seconds. The rest of the list, which is also unchanged from what it was back then, is as follows: “Ants Of The Sky” by Between The Buried And Me (13:11); “Hearts Alive” by Mastodon (13:49); “White Walls,” also by Between The Buried And Me (14:13); and “The Lightning Strike” by Snow Patrol, of all bands, which comes just two seconds short of matching “The Reptilian Brain.” One of these things is not like the other things, one of these things just doesn’t belong…

On The List: Mastodon, “Hearts Alive”

And of course these are only the longest songs I have in my collection. There have been songs over the years that dwarf even these. Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” lasts about 26 minutes in total, though the song is divided into two separate tracks. The Mars Volta’s Frances The Mute closes with a 32-minute epic called “Cassandra Gemini” – and for the sake of comparison, Weezer’s Green Album is only 28 minutes long. The title track from Dream Theater’s Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence takes up the entire second disc of that album and runs for 42 minutes. Jethro Tull’s “Thick As A Brick” goes on for about 44 minutes and actually is a one-song album. And then there’s the 52-minute odyssey that is Sleep’s “Jerusalem,” which they somehow topped four years later with the hour-long “Dopesmoker.” So if I had any of that stuff, I probably would have run out of time!

Even as it is the Top 5 Longest Songs list goes for about an hour and 12 minutes. I ultimately decided it was just too much time to devote to five songs when I had so much music I wanted to play on my show. So even for that one week when I couldn’t think of a good Top 5 list, I still didn’t think this would have made for a good show. But then again, I don’t listen to a whole lot of epic-length music – I am, after all, the guy who devoted an entire blog post to complaining about Oasis songs overstaying their welcome at a mere nine minutes.

I think that just about covers all the Top 5 lists I didn’t get to do on my show, but who knows? Some of these lists may resurface on this blog someday. Not that I’m promising anything, of course.

Last year the title was pretty much handed to Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” the instant it was released. This left me to wonder if I was the only person on Earth who realized that “California Gurls” was a blatant rewrite of Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok,” a song that already irritated the crap out of me the first time around. Hell, I still have memories of being the only kid alive in 1996 who didn’t want to learn the stupid Macarena. And if I ever hear “Livin’ La Vida Loca” or “All Star” again, it will be too soon. I guess the lesson is that no matter what the song of the summer ends up being, by the end of that summer simply hearing the first new notes of that damn song will be enough to drive you utterly mad.

So with the summer of 2011 officially underway, let’s take a look at some randomly chosen contenders from this week’s Hot 100. The fun begins after the jump!

Is it too early to declare “Rolling In The Deep” 2011’s answer to “Hey, Soul Sister”? You know, that big hit song that entered the charts and the public consciousness early in the year and simply refused to leave? I mean, I’ve heard this song on the local alternative rock station. Everyone from TV karaoke contestants to Linkin freaking Park has covered this song. ESPN even made this the theme song for this year’s NBA draft for some reason, and while they tried their best to make that choice make even the tiniest amount of sense, they still failed miserably.

I think the worst part about the overexposure of “Rolling In The Deep” is that it’s actually a good song, thus making that “Hey, Soul Sister” comparison completely invalid and unfair. It always sucks to get sick of hearing a good song, but damned if the radio and MTV and VH1 and whoever else plays music don’t ruin it for you by playing it every ten minutes. This was already the song of winter 2011 and spring 2011, and it’s a frontrunner for summer 2011 too. Come on, Adele. Let someone else have a little glory. Or at least release a second single from that album already.

“I Kissed A Girl” was pretty much inescapable three years ago. Last year it was all about that stupid “Tik Tok” knockoff. Now Katy Perry is trying to establish herself as the one-woman New England Patriots of summer songs with “Last Friday Night,” a poor man’s version of her own “Waking Up In Vegas” (lyrically speaking) that tries to paint her as wacky and hilarious just like her husband Russell Brand. And hey, is that Rebecca Black in the video? OMG, it totally is! Isn’t that such a funny pop culture reference? I wonder if she ever decided where to sit in her friend’s car! (Almost as much as I wonder how the hell Rebecca Black managed to hit #42 on the iTunes singles chart this year. America, your love for irony has officially gone way too far.)

Finally, a new Gaga song (and video!) that doesn’t try too hard to be some kind of massive statement. “Judas” sounded like a “Bad Romance” rewrite that tried to shock people by being a love song about Judas Iscariot, the guy who betrayed Jesus and pretty much caused his crucifixion. And “Born This Way” was basically Gaga saying, “Gays! Lesbians! Bis and transgenders! And pretty much every other minority in America! Lend me your ears, for I am your Mother Monster and I, a rich white girl from New York, speak for ALL of you!” Meanwhile, everyone was like, “Wait, do we even need a spokesperson? And why does this sound so much like a Madonna song from 20 years ago?”

“The Edge Of Glory,” on the other hand, is just Gaga being Gaga and not Gaga being the self-proclaimed champion of the disaffected youth. This feels more like one of those early singles that got her so much attention in the first place, plus with a cameo from the late Clarence Clemons of the E Street Band. It’s as fun and unpretentious as she gets these days, and if any song has a chance to beat out “Rolling In The Deep” for the coveted Song of the Summer title, this is probably it.

What’s this? A Black Eyed Peas song that I can actually tolerate? Surely this is a sign of the coming apocalypse! Even “Meet Me Halfway,” the best of the hits from The E.N.D., was undermined by the fact that Apl and Taboo (aka the Other Guy and the Other Other Guy) just flat out didn’t even try; Apl’s verses sounded like the record was intentionally skipping and Taboo clearly took his lyrics from a preschool rhyming dictionary.

“Just Can’t Get Enough” is basically the anti-“Imma Be” in the sense that “Imma Be” was excruciatingly annoying until you got to Apl’s part, while this song is perfectly adequate and even somewhat enjoyable until you get to Apl’s part. Will.i.am’s rhyme scheme had me dreading another lyric like, “I’m-a be a brother, but my name ain’t Lehman/I’m-a be a bank, I’ll be loaning out semen,” but thankfully it never came. And did Taboo just make references to Florence Griffith-Joyner and Styx? Yes, he did! The first two-thirds of this song is what the Peas sound like when they actually try. Then you get to Apl singing like a malfunctioning robot – because apparently the Peas have to put something annoying in every song they release anymore – and all that goodwill the song’s been accumulating starts going out the window.

You know things are ass-backwards at American Idol when the judges’ singing careers get more of a boost from the show than the actual contestants. It’s not like Paula Abdul was suddenly able to start cranking out hits again like it was still 1987. But this year’s additions to the panel, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and Jennifer Lopez, have both released singles this year that can attribute pretty much all of their success to their singers’ new gigs. Steven Tyler’s stupidly parenthesized “(It) Feels So Good” peaked at #35 on the Hot 100 back in May, while J-Lo’s comeback single “On The Floor” is still going strong in the top 20.

What is there to say about this song itself, though? Nothing, really. It’s just another generic dance-pop song about going to the club and dancing and drinking all night, because Lord knows we’ve certainly had a shortage of those lately. Can’t we just put, like, a five-year moratorium on songs about the club so we can force all of our pop stars to sing about something else? Oh, and Pitbull’s on this song too. I don’t know what it is about that guy, but I cannot stand him.

And while we’re on the subject of random comebacks, can someone please tell me why Enrique Iglesias is suddenly popular again? I thought the rest of the world was finally done with Enrique. Yet there he is, telling all the ladies that he doesn’t mean to be rude but tonight he’s fucking them and they don’t really have a choice in the matter. Isn’t he just so charming?

Aww, isn’t this adorable? Chris Brown thinks he’s a rapper now. And he’s trying to keep pace with Busta Rhymes and the ever-ubiquitous Lil Wayne on this track. He does this by trying to mimic Busta’s motormouth flow, spitting out about a dozen words per second. In his mercifully short verse, Chris Brown rhymes “dick” with “dick”, then rhymes that with “dick” again in the next line, and then rhymes that with “dick” again in the line after that. In case you haven’t been counting, that’s four consecutive lines that end with the word “dick.” He’s got skills, and they’re multiplying.

This brings us to what is unquestionably the best part of “Look At Me Now” – the part where Busta steps in and says, “Yo Breezy, let me show you how to keep the dice rolling when you’re doing that thing over there.” When a guest rapper basically announces that he’s going to take you to school on your own song and then actually does it, you have failed as an MC.

Of course, when the guest rappers in question are experienced and respected veterans like Busta Rhymes and Lil Wayne, it’s not exactly hard to get owned. And it’s up to those guys to carry this song because Chris Brown fails at rapping and this beat is terrible. Like, this is “Laffy Taffy” territory we’re dealing with here. I wouldn’t be surprised to look up this song’s credits and find out that Soulja Boy produced it.

Okay, I know this joke I’m about to make is a total cliché, but seriously… I liked this song better the first time around when it was called “Sexy Bitch,” and I don’t even like that song. “Where Them Girls At” is literally “Sexy Bitch” played in a slightly different key. You can actually sing the lyrics from that song over this song and pretty much get the same damn thing. And yet there it is, right smack dab in the middle of the Hot 100 at #54 as I write this. Now I understand how Mugatu felt about Derek Zoolander’s modeling career. “It’s the same song! Doesn’t anyone else realize this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

John Fogerty once got sued for allegedly ripping off his own song; that case somehow went to the Supreme Court, who ultimately ruled unanimously in Fogerty’s favor. David Guetta actually did it and got a free pass and a hit single that peaked at #14 on the charts. We live in a stupid world. Yeah we do, yeah we do.

Coldplay is one of those bands where I’ll listen to their singles when they come on the radio, but I’ve never felt all that compelled to get an album. Viva La Vida was a different story. They hooked up with producer Brian Eno, who worked with their idols in U2 on several occasions including The Joshua Tree, The Unforgettable Fire, and Achtung Baby. And those sessions produced perhaps their most musically compelling and interesting album to date; Viva La Vida sounded like nothing I’d heard from Coldplay before, yet still sounded like Coldplay. So it makes sense that the band stuck with Eno for Viva La Vida’s follow-up, the lead single from which is “Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall.”

What doesn’t make much sense to me is why this song was chosen as the lead single. On the one hand, I do think it makes sense as an introductory track for Coldplay’s upcoming album, though mainly in the sense that “Life In Technicolor” opened Viva La Vida. On the other hand, it’s not nearly as memorable as any of the highlights from that last album – or really any of their other albums. When I first heard “Every Teardrop,” I started wondering if LP5 would be to Viva La Vida what X&Y was to A Rush Of Blood To The Head: an inferior attempt at continuing the sound that made its predecessor work. It’s not a bad song, but for me it’s easily overshadowed by the two B-sides included with it on the single, “Major Minus” and “Moving To Mars.”

Allow me to be blunt for just a moment: I hate this song. I really, really hate this song. I didn’t think Beyonce could ever possibly deliver a song that’s worse than “Diva,” but she found a way. My hat’s off to you for that one, B.

This is basically all the worst aspects of Beyonce’s previous singles all wrapped up in one tidy little package. Uncatchy chorus? Check – this entire song is aggressively uncatchy. Minimalist backing track that’s pretty much all percussion and no melody, thus giving Beyonce little to nothing to work with when composing the vocal melody? Check (yeah, I know it’s a Major Lazer sample, but they don’t really do anything interesting with it). Irritating one-note vocal melody that makes Beyonce sound more like she’s shouting at you than singing? Check. Standard-issue “girl power” lyrics that pretty much became old hat by the time “If I Were A Boy” essentially said that if you were born with a dick, you are a dick? Check.

“Run The World” is quite possibly the worst song I’ve heard all year. And in a year that has seen the Black Eyed Peas bastardizing the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, a domestic abuse victim scoring a hit with a song about S&M, Enrique Iglesias insisting that tonight he’s fucking you, and Nicki Minaj rapping about pissing and shitting on people, that is one hell of an achievement.

MY CHOICE: Lady Gaga, “The Edge Of Glory”

MY PREDICTION: Adele, “Rolling In The Deep”

All right, and now for the actual list of albums I’ve recently added to my collection. And yeah, I know… it took me TEN YEARS to finally get around to picking up that Strokes album. What can I say? It took me a while (not ten years, though) to get over the fact that Julian Casablancas kind of sounded like he was singing through a megaphone.

Elbow: Build A Rocket Boys!

Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues

The Strokes: Is This It

Arctic Monkeys: Suck It And See

My Morning Jacket: Circuital

Well, that about does it for this short-but-sweet Colin’s Collection update. So far 2011 has been a pretty sweet year for new music. I’ve probably bought more brand-new albums this year than ever before. I usually get a handful of albums released in a given year and a bunch of older ones; in other words, most of the albums I’ve bought in 2011 actually came out in 2011. And there will probably be many more to follow after that. Awesome.