Can you spell cacophony?

Carrying on from lasts week’s post. The last.fm group is up and running and even has a few members. I’ve started a thread where we can put in our recommendations for music others may not have heard. In the interests of saving me from thinking of something new to post, I have stolen my first recommendation from there to put here…

Apollo Up! are a fairly straight forward rock trio. To be honest, there is nothing particularly imaginative or inventive about their music but I have loved it ever since I first heard Walking The Plank when it was featured on some mp3 blog.

The music is on the heavier side but still firmly in the middle of a “Rock” genre. No metal influence, very little punk influence and no electronics. Lead singer Jay Leo Phillips has a voice very reminiscent of Elvis Costello (only harder) and it was that suggestion that made me want to listen in the first place.

They have their own band page where you will find a selection of tracks from their albums to download to get you started. There are also some on last.fm to stream.

If you like them enough to want to spend some money on them, their albums are available on Amie Street and are still very cheap there (cheap as in just over $5 would get you everything!).

To get you started, my favourite track is “The Job’s A Game” (a short but powerful song, not streamed or free I’m afraid) but of the free downloads, check out “Walking The Plank” and “Guilty Fever”.

I’m a bit slow with this one, but I thought I should give this a good chance before I wrote my review.

Last month, Roger Taylor (of Queen drumming fame, for those not in the know) released a single “The Unblinking Eye (Everything is Broken)”. I’ve always enjoyed the Queen songs penned by Roger and I don’t get much of a Queen fix nowadays, so I bought the mp3 from queenonline the day it was released.

I’m really sorry to say it, but… FAIL.

Here’s what annoyed me in detail:

• It’s understood that Roger’s voice is not Freddie’s (or even Brian’s for that matter). That doesn’t bother me normally, but the songs he sang as part of Queen (thinking “I’m In Love With My Car”) were so much more rock ‘n’ roll than this track and suited his voice better. He seems to be trying to do too much and fails badly.
• The music is all over the place. Was he trying to write a ballad, a rock anthem, a protest song (actually, I think he has said this was his goal), a symphony or what? I couldn’t enjoy the tune or the rhythm because it kept changing at inappropriate times.
• The lyrics. Oh dear. He was trying too hard to make his protest. Look at this: “This Kingdom’s not united; Just a complicated mess; Are we in Europe; Half in Europe; Not in Europe; We’re soulless, spineless, directionless” and this: “Why send our young men out to die in wars that we don’t understand; Why on earth should we be meddling in places like Afghanistan” and worst of all (the first line of the song): “God would weep if he existed”. God would weep if he existed? Please. It’s the same sentiment, though much less eloquently put, than “Is This The World We Created?”.
• The politics. Not that I necessarily disagree with all of what he says in the song, it’s just that he shoves so much of it into one song. And not even very well.

Out of what is probably misplaced loyalty, I tagged this track with 3 stars (it’s a reasonable song) in my iTunes library, just so that it stayed in rotation properly. It probably deserved 2 (keep only for completeness sake). I’m hoping it might grow on me like the Queen + Paul Rogers album from last year.

Want to make your own decision? It’s on youtube, I suggest you try before you buy. And I think I might be giving the upcoming album a miss.

I bought the new Queen album the other day and [as promised][1], here are my thoughts on it.

Like I mentioned the other day, the reviews were mixed. To be honest, they are mostly bad. But as a die hard fan, I was always going to buy it, so I didn’t worry too much about that. Mind you, today’s review by [Iain Shedden in the Weekend Oz][2] was (to put it mildly) scathing.

The album is, simply put, unispired. Not bad, just not much of anything. I’ve only had a few listen throughs, but nothing really strikes me as special. I’ve bought every Queen album as it was released since ["The Miracle"][6] and while some have taken longer to grow on me than others, they have usually at least sounded more impressive right from the start.

Let’s get a couple of things out of the way. First is the complaint that this “just isn’t Queen”. Come on, that is a no brainer. Check out the credits: “Queen & Paul Rogers”. No one has said that Paul Rogers is replacing Freddie. No one could and they are not pretending that he has. You can feel the absence of Freddie in this work, but I thought that about ["Made In Heaven"][7] too. Both albums sounded more like a Brian May solo album.

Now that isn’t a bad thing. I really liked ["Back to the Light"][8] (even though it wasn’t Queen). And you can really hear Roger Taylor’s influence on this album as well as Brian’s. I think that is important. Queen would not have been the same without the distinct musical influence those two put in (["'39"][9] and ["I'm In Love With My Car"][10] are two of my favourite tracks).

So to credit the album to “Queen & Paul Rogers” is fair. It is not Queen, it is not Free, but a reasonable mix of some of the elements of both.

But back to what I think… I love Brian’s guitar work (especially in “Call Me”), I love Paul’s voice and they work really well together. But the songs are just background noise. I haven’t concentrated on the lyrics too much, but there really doesn’t seem to be anything special there.

One exception to the rule is ["Say It's Not True"][4]. I bought this as a single previously (though I missed getting it for free off their web site when it was available) and it has already grown on me. I love the mixture of vocals in this and it was a really good start to their new collaboration. I just wish they could have followed it up with more of the same.

The iTunes bonus track “Runaway” is another great rendition (a cover of the [Del Shannon song][5]), but I don’t think it counts (firstly for not being part of the released album and secondly for being a cover). This will get high rotation in my playlists.

I’m going to like this album. I will listen to it a lot, and the songs will get stuck in my head and become part of the whole Queen experience for me. But not the best part. I give it [3 stars][3], but only for nostalgia’s sake. Any other band would have got 2 (but if I’d read the reviews I wouldn’t have even bought it in the first place).

[1]: http://shayne.powerlot.net/2008/09/17/new-queen-album-out/
[2]: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24355649-5016490,00.html
[3]: http://shayne.powerlot.net/2007/12/24/5-stars/
[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say_It%27s_Not_True
[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_(Del_Shannon_song)
[6]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miracle_(album)
[7]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_In_Heaven
[8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_To_The_Light
[9]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2739
[10]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_In_Love_With_My_Car#I.27m_in_Love_with_My_Car

I bought myself a lovely MacBookPro a couple of months ago and got myself a .Mac (now MobileMe) subscription at the same time (taking advantage of the reduced price available with a new machine).

I particularly liked the idea of having my address book and calendars synchronised and online, able to be used with the web mail. All the other features (iDisk, keychain synch etc) were all “nice to haves” but not “need to haves”.

Unfortunately, the mail app failed me miserably. It was just a lot less usable than gmail. I gave it a really good try, I really did. I even hoped that the change from .mac to mobile me might improve things, but I was disappointed.

These are the things that I considered deal breakers:

• No filters: Even though the Mail interface is much like mail.app (which is great as an aside), it is missing some critical features. Filters being one of them. I like to have my email filtered into its folders (labels under gmail) automatically. To have that happen with mobileme mail, I need to leave my mac on and mail.app open. That’s just silly. With gmail, I don’t even need to set up the filters in mail.app, because they are filtered at the server level.
• No indication of unread messsages: You can’t just look at the folder list and see which folders have messages to read. I needed to click on each one to find my messages.
• No “all unread” option: Under gmail, I can search for “is: unread”. In mail.app, I have a smart mailbox set up. Nothing like that in the web mail.

Before I opened up my .mac account, I had attempted to set up mail.app with my gmail account with very little success. I had problems with the duplication of messages related to multiple labels (and the “all mail” label), I had major problems with Time Machine trying to back up 2GB every time I read a mail message and lots of little niggly things that didn’t “just work”. Those things didn’t happen with .mac, but I was willing to put up with them (or even just use webmail fulltime) to get the webmail I wanted.

Having said that, since I have swapped back to gmail, I have managed to work my way around those problems. Perhaps google have improved their IMAP implementation a bit since I last tried, but I am perfectly happy with my desktop and web mail now, thanks to Google Apps For Domains and Apple’s mail.app. It is just disappointing that Apple couldn’t get their webmail right.