You can’t kill the metal!

You can’t kill the metal
The metal will live on
Punk Rock tried to kill the metal
But they failed, as they were smite to the ground
New Wave tried to kill the metal
But they failed, as they were stricken down to the ground
Grunge tried to kill the metal. Hahahahahaha!
They failed, as they were thrown to the ground
Aargh! yeah!

                     — Tenacious D, “The Metal”

That was never truer than last night, when Metallica rocked Seattle’s Key Arena.

Having perhaps staged the musical comeback of the year with their album Death Magnetic, the band proved that their potent blend of snarling lyrics, erupting guitar solos and jackhammer double-bass drumming carried over equally well to the live stage.

The interaction with the crowd was remarkable, starting with the unique stage planted smack in the center of the arena that put the band at the center of a huge 360 bowl lined with 17,000 fans. Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and new bassist Robert Trujillo prowled the stage, stopping to give fans in different sections a good view. James Hetfield strode about to any of eight microphones, and Lars Ulrich’s monster drum set rotated 90 degrees every few songs.

The thing I noticed most about the crowd was how diverse it was.

When I was a kid in middle school, the metalheads were the weird kids who dressed in black leather jackets featuring some freak named “Ozzy Osbourne” and hung out in the corner of the playground.

Although within a few years I was heavily into bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, I always kept my distance from the metal scene of the 1980s. It was too dark, too weird.

Yet last night there was a grandma with white hair a few seats down from us. There were several avuncular characters with white hair roaming the aisles. A woman in front of us brought a daughter who was 12, tops, and who sat on her lap during parts of the show.

At one point in the show, Hetfield talked to a kid in the first row who turned out to be 8 years old. “You have really cool parents,” Hetfield laughed. This morning on KISW, a 35-year-old woman called in and said she took her two kids, aged 16 and 14.

Metal used to be this scary subculture that had all the parents freaked out over devil worship and stuff like that.

Today, it’s just a night out for the whole family.

I generally like this trend. Were Harlan a few years older, I would have taken him. In the end, it’s all about the music, and more people appreciating the music is a good thing.

I suspect a large part of it also is the popularity of games like Guitar Hero, which have managed to instill a Spinal Tap-esque ironic detachment from some of the juvenile and pretentiously moody aspects of the genre while maintaining a great respect for the intricacy and power of the music.

But while I’m glad that band like Metallica aren’t demonized by ignorant social conservatives anymore, I wonder if something hasn’t been lost. Being a Metallica fan 20 years ago (which I wasn’t) carried a certain badge of defiance. Metal was something that shocked and outraged parents and authority figures, and thereby knit the fanbase into something that was almost familial.

I suppose some sub-genres of metal still possess the power to shock repel — I certainly don’t care one whit for the “Cookie Monster”-style of guttural signing that is popular among many leading metal bands today, and the extreme death metal I’ve read about in some parts of northern Europe strike me as pretty sick.

Ultimately, though, I’m pretty happy that more people are able to appreciate metal, and the Metallica concert was an unexpected example of a lot of different people coming together to get their faces melted off.

A couple quick observations on the show. The band played for more than two hours and tore through 18 songs. Do the math and you’ll find that’s not a lot of songs for that length of time. In fact, each song took an average of 7-1/2 minutes, which is probably pretty close to what their average studio track runs. Metallica is famed for its epic songs with their multiple tempo changes and many richly textured layers.

Here’s the setlist:

• That Was Just Your Life, Death Magnetic
• The End Of The Line, Death Magnetic
• Creeping Death, Ride the Lightning
• Harvester of Sorrow, And Justice For All
• One, And Justice For All
• Broken, Beat and Scarred, Death Magnetic
• Cyanide, Death Magnetic
• Sad But True, Metallica
• Wherever I May Roam, Metallica
• Welcome Home (Sanitarium), Master of Puppets
• The Day That Never Comes, Death Magnetic
• Master of Puppets, Master of Puppets
• Blackened, And Justice For All
• Nothing Else Matters, Metallica
• Enter Sandman, Metallica
• Die Die My Darling, (cover)
• Motorbreath, Kill ‘Em All
• Seek and Destroy, Kill ‘Em All

While I would have loved to see a couple more of my favorites — “Frayed Ends of Sanity” and “Ride the Lightning” come to mind — it’s pretty hard to argue with that set list. “One”, “Master of Puppets” and “Enter Sandman” were definite highlights, though the place was charged with high-voltage energy throughout the whole thing.

The light show was impressive, kicking off with a dazzling laser display that lit up the stage and rafters. There were these giant metal coffins, probably 30′ long, suspended from the ceiling. That was cool enough, but the awesomeness level was cranked to 11 when I realized the coffins were shooting out laser beams.

There was some pyrotechnic prowess on display as well: hot orange flames bellowed out of the stage during several songs, and during “One”, these wicked jets of flame shot up as from giant bunsen burners. Oh, and they changed color, too: blue, green red, etc.

I was pretty pleased to hear now fewer than five tracks off the new album, which is metal album of the year as far as I’m concerned. There’s a pretty interesting back story to this CD.

Turn the dial back to 1991 for a minute. That’s the year Metallica’s hit “Enter Sandman” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” both stormed on to the charts.

It was a turning point for rock music.

The former track marked the high point of popularity for a band that had dominated the metal scene for much of the previous decade with epic albums shot through with equal measure of dark lyrics and face-melting musicianship.

The latter song defined the young decade of the 1990s and launched a million garage bands who hoped that a surplus of angst and flannel would make up for their meager repertoire of guitar chords.

Within one year, Kurt Cobain’s catchy hooks and stripped-down act seemed to make the brooding extravagance of Metallica and other metal bands irrelevant.

The rest of the decade saw Metallica struggle to define itself and its direction. Although St. Anger was released in 2003, the album shared more in common with its 90s predecessors Load and Reload. The musical malaise of the 90s had carried over into the new millennium.

Fast forward to 2008. Death Magnetic hits shelves in September and the cosmos were set right again.

Under the mystic direction of producer/career resurrection druid Rick Rubin, the band crafted 10 songs that harken back to their glory days, when fans threw the horns to epic tracks like “And Justic For All”, “Master of Puppets” and “Blackened”.

This is also one of those rare cases of an album not having any bad songs. None. Even “Unforgiven III”, dismissed by many critics as “unnecessary”, would more than hold its own as a standout hit track on a lesser album.

There are, of course, genuine standouts, starting with the opening trio of songs — “That Was Just Your Life”, “The End of the Line” and “Broken, Beat and Scarred” — that form an intro that must surely rank as one of the best ever.

Other tracks of note include “The Day That Never Comes”, “All Nightmare Long”, “Cyanide” and “Judas Kiss”.

It’s clear that Rubin succeeded in drawing out the best in each band member. Hetfield’s urgent snarl is in full force, Hemmett’s intricate noodling proves he’s still one of the finest lead guitarists out there, Lars Ulrich’s dual bass drums are like twin howitzers blasting away at your eardrums, and Robert Trujillo proves his mettle by serving up meaty basslines that bind the songs like steel bands.

One of my favorite one-sentence summaries of the album was given by a DJ on Seattle’s KISW radio station: “It’s an album that punches you in the face repeatedly, and I mean that in a good way.”

This is an amazing album that instantly revives old-school Metallica and proves Tenacious D’s memorable adage: You can’t kill the metal!

Rock Band 2 tracks

I bought Rock Band 2 yesterday, my resolution to hold off a month until the bundle of new instruments was released lasting all of two hours.

Veryinitial thoughts: I loved how it quickly and seamlessly integrated all the tracks I’d downloaded for the original game. I haven’t yet transferred the songs that were on the Rock Band 1 disc, but the download transfer came off perfectly.

However, I’m a tad disappointed that the avatar creator didn’t get updated with more detailed models or additional choices. It’s basically the same graphical look as the original.

Of course, the real star of the game is the setlist. I’ve only played the first couple venues, but here are my impressions:

FAVORITE SONG SO FAR: “Alive” by Pearl Jam. One of the best tunes from the grunge era, the note chart on this song is interesting and rewarding.

FAVORITE PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN SONG: “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill. An angry yet catchy song from a grrl punk band out of Olympia, Washington, of all places. Wikipedia says they hit their heyday about the time I was in college, but I somehow missed them entirely.

FAVORITE FORGOTTEN SONG: “Hungry Like the Wolf”, by Duran Duran. Loved this staple of 80s rock when I was wearing topsiders and turning up the collars of my pink Izod shirts in middle school. Forgot how really good it is.

SONG I HATE THE MOST, SO FAR: “PDA” by Interpol. Unquestionably the worst piece of whiny emo garbage yet to be released on a music rhythm game. Yes, worse than My Chemical Romance. Even worse than AFI. Yes, that bad. If there was a way to delete songs from the game, this would be the first one to go.

Anybody else out there play the game yet? What are your thoughts on the songs?

Music tagging

Here is a complaint I have about every music program I’ve ever used, from WinAmp and MusicMatch back in the day, through Windows Media Player and now iTunes: Why isn’t it possible to label music genres in a more taxonomic fashion? What I mean is, these program have dozens of labels for music, from bebop to surf rock.

The problem I have is that I don’t want to balkanize my music collection like that. A lot of my music falls under multiple genres. Led Zeppelin is classic rock, metal, folk and blues. Ben Harper is rock, soul, funk, blues, R&B and folk. Sometimes I want to make an automatic playlist of blues, but I want that to include bluesy songs from Zep, The Black Crowes and The White Stripes. But sometimes I might want a catch-all playlist that will capture any 5-star rock songs and don’t care if it’s blues rock, alternative, grunge, or metal. Unfortunately, the single label system used in all this software makes that impossible.

So here’s what someone needs to do: make song labeling hierarchical and give users the power to control that hierarchy. For me, I would have a very few top-level genres: rock, folk, easy listening, jazz, rap and classical. Within rock I’d have classic rock, alternative, southern rock, metal, etc. You could even go a level deeper, for example by breaking down metal into speed, death, doom, and so on.

This would allow for easier playlist generation. Under the current system, a song tagged as metal isn’t going to show up in a rock playlist. Under my system, it would, as well as allow for a separate metal playlist.

Does anyone know if this has already been done somewhere?

Best American rock band ever

I told a buddy recently that I was increasingly certain that The Allman Brothers Band was the greatest American rock band of all time. It’s a question I hadn’t really considered before, seeing as how most of the really legendary acts have been British: the Beatles, Zeppelin, the Stones, etc.

In terms of sales, Aerosmith is the top U.S. band, with something like 65 million records sold. But if sales were our sole judge, we’d all agree that “Titanic” is the greatest film of all time.

Elvis certainly deserves consideration, as does Creedence and Hendrix. More modern picks might be The Ramones, Guns ‘N’ Roses and Metallica. The ’90s brought us Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and The Smashing Pumpkins.

But I’ve been listening to the Allmans as part of a Southern Rock kick I’ve been on (there’s a story in that, too, that I’ll get to sometime) and have been blown away. The band had it all: virtuoso musicianship, masterful songwriting, a legendary live act, and an unmistakable American feel.

I mentioned my thinking to a friend who instantly rained derision on me as though I’d claimed New Kids on the Block were the kings of American rock. He then rattled off a list of other and, in his mind, better candidates: Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Dylan, Prince, Tom Petty, and Van Halen. All worthy choices in some regards, but ones that fall ultimately fall short in my reckoning. And then when he suggested The Pretenders, I knew he’d veered off into crack-smoking territory.

Here is a summary of my thinking in bestowing title of Greatest American Rock Band ever on The Allman Brothers Band:

–They boasted two of the top guitarists of all time in Duane Allman and Dickey Betts

–They single-handedly created the entire genre of southern rock

–Their ratio of 5-star songs (as rated by me in a totally objective and authoritative fashion) to total output equals that of Led Zeppelin’s, and they have far fewer low-ranking songs.

–Their ground-breaking Fillmore East show not only created the concept of the double live album but set the gold standard performance-wise

–Songs like “Rambling Man”, “Jessica”, “Midnight Rider” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” feature an unmistakeably American sound, melding blues, rock, country and jazz

–Their best-of-breed muttonchop sideburns

So what’s your take? Which homegrown band do you think was the best of the best? Here’s a USAToday column in which readers voted and decided the winner was… well, check for yourself. I think it’s wrong, though the list overall isn’t a bad one.

Meaningless list: Top rock songs

Okay, what easier way to score a couple of cheap hits and comments than with a meaningless list of my favorite rock songs? This is actually just an cut-and-paste job for me since I’ve been hashing this out in an ongoing debate with a friend sparked by his shocking and completely unreasonable refusal to admit that “Free Bird” is indeed one of the great rock anthems ever written. Yes, I know, it’s one of the most overplayed songs of all time. But I’ve been going through a Skynyrd phase recently and exploring the rest of their catalog, and it really does stand out as an amazing song, all the more so when you realize it came on their first album.

Anyway, I’ll admit one shortcoming of the list is a lack of anything after the late ’70s. I’ve focused on classic rock tunes since those still form the bulk of my formative musical memories. But even pulling in the ’80s and ’90s, I’m not sure there’s anything that would crack the top 10. “And Justice For All”, “Paradise City”, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, and “Even Flow” are great, but do they beat any of the songs below?