So, you looking for some gifts that aren’t made by children in sweatshops that might actually promote an artist and maybe make a person think?  How about some books?  Here’s my list of books I’ve read lately that aren’t big-6 published, written by people without a massive marketing budget:

• Small Town Punk by John Sheppard – This is probably one of the best self-published books I’ve ever read.  All of John’s stuff is awesome, and maybe I’m biased because I published Tales of the Peacetime Army.  Make sure to get the original 2002 edition, and not the 1997 abortion. (It’s not in print, but there are many copies floating around for $5, which is the best five bucks you could possibly spend.)
• Mostly Redneck by Rusty Barnes – I only know him as a friend-of-friend through Timothy Gager, which was enough for me to put down the cash.  This is 18 short stories of hard living in rural Appalachia, and each one is so precisely crafted, with absolutely no waste.  He’s got a way of really haunting you, getting something wedged very deep in your head in a thousand words.  Great stuff.
• Treating a Sick Animal by Timothy Gager – Speaking of, check out Gager’s latest collection of flash fiction.  It contains 40-some shorter pieces, each just as lethal as the last.  What’s even more amazing than the quality of his writing is the tremendous speed at which he turns out this precision work.  He’s probably written four stories better than anything I’ve ever done in the time it takes me to finish this post.
• How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace – Lovelace is a writer in Indiana (he teaches at my sister’s alma mater of Ball State) and he has a blog that almost entirely talks about nachos.  There’s two things I like about this chapbook, aside from the quality of the prose.  One is that Lovelace has a way of coming up with very unique forms, twisting and clever structures that make me think, “god DAMN why didn’t I do that?”  (Example: the titular piece is a list of how famous people like their eggs.)  The other thing I like is that this is a real damn chapbook: a carefully designed, really printed on quality paper chapbook.  It’s not just a POD 6×9 trade paperback, which is awesome.
• Johnny Astronaut by Rory Carmichael and I, An Actress: The Autobiography of Karen Jamey by Jeffrey Dinsmore – These are both kindle reissues of the Awkward Press editor’s earlier novels.  He’s added bonus materials to both, and priced them at 99 cents each, so they’re well worth the look.
• Between Panic and Desire by Dinty W. Moore – This is truly awesome creative nonfiction, the telling of a person’s life in hilarious autobiographical sketches, knitted together in a way that tells more than the whole story, and then breaks to throw in some quiz questions or go off on a different tangent.  It’s like a mix of Vonnegut at his best, but replace the aliens with tripping acid at the top of the World Trade Center.
• Powering the Devil’s Circus, Redux by Jason Jordan – A collection from the editor of decomP, this is a dozen stories and a novella of experimental work, with plenty of mention of metal, which I of course like.
• Tomorrowland by Grant Bailie – The UPS guy literally showed up with this one as I was typing this post.  It’s a collection of interwoven stories, and looks promising.  I loved his books Cloud 8 and Mortarville, so this looks awesome.
• Fistful of Pizza by Jon Konrath – Most importantly, buy my damn book!  Nine twisted stories, and it’s only 99 cents on the kindle.  Break in that new Kindle Fire by reading about a parody of the Ben Hur chariot race, filmed with small breed dogs around a set designed like a 1970s Times Square filled with heroin addicts and pornographers.  Also available in print for you luddites.

I’m sure I forgot a few others, but check these out – thanks!

I mentioned in my other review that I’m always skeptical of these people who do a successful blog and then turn it into a book, which was all the rage a few years back.  It’s not that I think this is good or bad; it’s just that when people blog about their life and the biggest moment in their life and turn it into a good project, when you ask them to do a second book, it’s almost always garbage.  I mean, Citizen Kane might be the best movie in the world, but if it came out in 2011 and made bank, you know they’d do a CK2 with reporter Jerry Thompson played by Ted McGinley or some shit, and they’d do it in 3D, so there would be all these scenes of Chuck Kane throwing glasses of water or shoving spears into the audience.  (“Wow, that sled was coming right at me!”)  And half the time, the second book by a blog-to-book author is this whiny tome talking about the huge letdown of having to do talk shows and meet famous people and go to dinner parties and get their URL plastered on the sides of busses.  So I was seriously curious what would happen in this book.

Buzzell’s assignment was to take the great American road trip, to retrace Kerouac’s footsteps and head across the country and report what was going on in that big space between New York and LA.  He was told to “write a love letter to Kerouac”, and fortunately, he didn’t really do that.  I was hoping this would not turn into some overly academic circle-jerk that treated the Kerouac journey as authentically as Olive Garden turns out Italian food.  In fact, very little time’s spent talking about Kerouac, finding parallels between his work and the world today, or pondering why Jack looked for kicks.  That was all quickly brushed aside as Buzzell set out in his ’64 Mercury Comet, driving east and looking for his own version of kicks.

There are some strange parallels that Buzzell doesn’t consciously ponder here.  Kerouac and friends set out on their travels partly as a reaction to the Iraq of their generation, which was World War 2.  Jack struggled with the death of his father, and Buzzell talks greatly about the memories of his mother, who died from cancer right before he started his trip.  And like Kerouac’s attempts to reconcile his place in humanity, Buzzell wonders about his recent marriage, his new child, and how all of those pieces are supposed to fit together.

Probably the biggest takeaway from the book is that the middle class is dead, and the middle of America is a prime example of it.  He stumbles through various jobs at day laborer places, talks to people living on minimum wage, hangs out with guys stripping Detroit buildings of their copper pipes, and sees firsthand the abject poverty and lack of any hope in places like Cheyenne, Omaha, and the former motor city.  It’s like his own version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, except I thought her book was a pretentious slow-pitch to the NPR crowd, while his was more authentic.

Is this pure journalism?  No.  But that’s the struggle, and one that he acknowledges: you need some kind of plot or gimmick or device to provide forward motion in a book like this, and he struggles through the 297 pages to find that.  You can’t just load up a car in San Francisco and say “go!” and write down each place you stop for gas and call it a book.  There could have been many different ideas that would have propelled the book more, that he mentions but never returns to.  Like, what if he would have taken that book advance and drove from SF to NY and stopped at every VFW in between, hoisting beers and asking the patrons what they thought about America?  What if he did try to only survive on the money he got from those shit jobs?  What if he tried to look up every army buddy in his platoon, John Rambo style, and see what they made of their lives?  What if he pulled a Hunter Thompson and searched for “the American Dream”?  He has his motives and he ends up doing the work as far as remembering his mom and his past, but it’s not a focused effort toward any one thesis.

The writing in this book seemed a bit better than the last.  I don’t think he’s completely found his voice, and I found some clunkiness in places, but for every point where he violated the show-don’t-tell rule, there was another point with incredible detail and clarity.  Some of the best examples of this were his depictions of Detroit.  It’s easy for outsiders to simply say “Detroit == Somalia/Bosnia/Tripoli/whatever”, but there is some strange duality in the old houses versus the abandoned stores, the proud residents and the scared whiteys.  He explores a lot of the urban terrain, which is something a bit cliche now that every hipster doofus in a fedora is out wandering abandoned warehouses with their digital SLR, but it’s coming from this guy who was in the shit, who had the crazy experiences in Iraq and knows what real devastation is like.

This book is sure to piss off some people, because Buzzell isn’t easily pigeonholed.  He’s got some strange allegiances, like his odd infatuation with Wal-Mart and views on Fox News.  He didn’t drive a hybrid, instead choosing an old dinosaur V-8, and instead of being fiscally responsible, he spent his nights blackout drinking.  It’s not like his last one, where it’s easy to pitch it and say “read this if you want to know about Iraq”.  There are a dozen other books about cross-country driving or exploring the underbelly of poverty that I’d recommend over this one.  And yeah, the message is not cheery, from an economic standpoint. But this one was a good read, and I’d love to see what he knocks out next.

A nuclear warhead. It isn't the best anti-zombie weapon.

I just finished reading World War Z, which means I’m like three years late to the zombie party, right? Well, fuck you. I was like fifteen years early. I was memorizing the locations of balconies and gun-selling sporting goods stores in shopping malls in case of a Romero-like outbreak that would require me to hole up in the Scottsdale Mall probably around the time most of the country was still obsessed with the artistic masterpiece of Baywatch.

Really, it all started in high school with Faces of Death movies, and then segued into those classic Troma movies, Surf Nazis Must Die being a favorite, even though it wasn’t even a horror movie as much as it was a dystopian disaster movie filmed for like $17. (“Who rules the beaches?” / “The surfers!” / “Who rules the surfers?” / “The surf nazis!”) In college, I got into death metal, and every other letter I’d get from some freak in rural Georgia or Sweden or Japan would include a giant list of horror movies I was supposed to worship. So me and Ray spent a whole summer renting every conceivable horror movie we could find in our shithole Indiana town. This was limited somewhat by the fact that I worked two full-time jobs and during the week slept in two shifts of two hours each and pretty much walked around like a zombie, minus the brain-eating part.

Seems like some comparative lit class I took in college had a professor that told us that zombie movies were really about the communist scare. That still true? I don’t know. The Brooks book seemed to be pretty left-wing in some aspects, like the strange parallels between the zombie wars and Iraq/the war on terrorism. In both, you’ve got a military trained to fight the cold war in Germany, armed up for a giant thousand-tank battle, and a stealth bomber isn’t going to do much when you’re fighting an enemy with no radar, i.e. a zombie or an insurgent. But it’s appealing to right-wingers in the sense that it’s almost like military armament porn for chapters and chapters, descriptions of battles and weaponry and tactics and whatnot.

I don’t know why I didn’t become obsessed with zombies back in 1993 or whatever, but it’s probably because I’m always overly obsessed with things for a week and then it’s on to something else. I haven’t had my main computer for a week, and decided that would be a great time to take a writing holiday, partly because I’m burned out on this book I’m writing, and partly because I didn’t want to spend two weeks trying to recapitulate and resynchronize two computers’ worth of files and changes and additions and deletions after working on my spare computer for that week.

So I spent most of that time obsessed with the idea of building a PlayStation 2 portable. Not a PSP, but I mean buying a dead PS2 or ten, dremel-attacking the motherboard, scoring a surplus rear-view camera monitor from eBay, digging through my giant boxes of junk for some old camcorder rechargeable batteries I could repurpose, somehow duct-taping the whole business together into a little ball so I could waste infinite amounts of time playing SOCOM 3 instead of writing. A week later, and I realize this is the stupidest fucking idea I’ve had since I thought about building a serial killer-themed miniature golf course on my land in Colorado. Actually, that still sounds like a good idea. But you get the point here: I can only be gung-ho about this stuff for a week, maybe ten days. It’s why I don’t write five books a year.

I wrote a story about the zombie movie Burial Ground. It’s in Air in the Paragraph Line #13. I think it’s one of my best short stories ever. You have to go buy a copy to read it – I never put it anywhere else, and I haven’t posted a PDF of #13. If I had ten more stories like it, I’d bind them together in a little book and zap it straight to the kindle store. But I don’t, not yet anyway. But that movie, Burial Ground, is this bad/awesome Italian zombie movie that has a completely fucked and incomprehensible plot line, and although all of those horror movies have the one chick who somehow manages to get away, in this movie, the zombies totally win, and I like that.

Speaking of the dead rising, I’ve got new life and new batteries in the laptop. I’m writing this while sitting on the couch, and the battery is designed to hold 6900 mAh and it actually holds 7100. It was down to only holding 4800 and started freaking the fuck out and giving me a warning message that I should cut the shit and get to the Apple Store immediately. They sent my computer off to Tennessee (why? Apple’s just down the road.) and replaced the battery and the motherboard – I had a couple of random crashes, something with the video card. They don’t call it a motherboard anymore; they call it a “mainboard”. I think it’s some anti-sexism thing, like how you can’t say cables are male and female anymore, or how you can’t use master/slave in your tech writing. So I got freaked out by the whole thought of surrendering the machine and having it come back completely blank, but it’s fine now.

I remember one time in 1993, I stayed over at Ray’s when his parents were out of town, and we watched four or five zombie movies in a row, until they all melded into each other. (Actually, one was a vampire movie, called Vampyres, a bad 70s thing with some half-naked lesbian vampires that lured guys into their old house, then killed them and drank their blood. One of the dudes seriously looked like a late-70s David Letterman, and the movie used every conceivable excuse to get these two women out of their clothes and dyking out.  This was also before the whole vampire thing got co-opted by the cool kids and completely fucked over.  Go check it out on imdb and you can see a trailer that’s essentially three minutes of soft-core porn, prefaced by a stupid XBox ad.) Anyway, the next morning, Ray’s asleep and I knock open his door with my arms outstretched and walking slowly like I’m one of Romero’s Day/Dawn ghouls, and Ray wakes up and freaks the fuck out and immediately jumps out of bed and goes for a bat or a piece of wood or something he can use to bash my undead brains in with, until he realizes that the zombie apocalypse had not in fact arrived.

The only other time we got seriously freaked out by a movie was when we went to a midnight showing of Saw in the theater. I don’t know if it was because we went to the midnight show or because the theater was empty, but after the final credits rolled, the first words out of my mouth were “dude, we need to go to Wal-Mart and buy some guns and enough shit to board up every window of your house.”

One of the things I liked about World War Z was how the news of the living dead propagated around the world in such a distorted fashion. The whole book takes place as a series of interviews after the war is over, like one of those World War II/greatest generation books. And in every zombie movie, you’ve got this start-of-act-2 disbelief rap going on, like when the scientists land on the zombie island and the one idiot says, “what, is this a village of lepers?” and then gets eaten alive. There’s always that part where you are screaming at the screen “RUN YOU STUPID BITCH!” and you know if you were really there, you’d get the fuck up on the roof and nail shut every door and get the closest deer rifle and plant some 12-gauge slugs into the brains of the undead. But of course, you wouldn’t. You’d go to read what the hell happened on twitter to see if the zombie thing was real or just some viral social networking astroturf campaign to sell the new Nissan Sentra or some bullshit. News would get suppressed, or distorted, or spun. If the zombie apocalypse happened tomorrow, every idiot on Fox News would be blaming it on Obama. In WWZ, the outbreak spread through China because they kept their mouths shut. Israel was smart enough to close their borders, which of course made all of the Palestinians believe it was a big Jewish conspiracy. Etc. etc. It’s not like President Morgan Freeman is going to call a press conference to tell us all that we’re under zombie attack, and Bruce Willis is going to steer a nuke into the center of the zombies and save everybody as a shitty Aerosmith song plays.

So yeah, good book.  I was expecting something aimed at 14-year-olds, like a Mack Bolan book, but Brooks looked at a lot of different angles, and I enjoyed the hell out of that.  I’m not exactly going to retool and start cranking out genre fiction here, but I got at least a dozen good ideas thrown into the plot-o-matic over the whole thing.

Okay, so here is a partial list of the books I read in 2010 that you should read but probably won’t, because this post itself just broke the 200 word mark, and that’s way too long for anyone not on near-lethal amounts of ADHD medication.  Oh, in no particular order.

• Loner: Stories by John Sheppard – This is a story collection by my pal John Sheppard that contains three stories previously released in Air in the Paragraph Line, plus a story entitled “Loner” that completely blew me away.  John’s an incredibly underrated writer and the book is worth it for this one story.
• Meat Won’t Pay My Light Bill by Kurt Eisenlohr – Kurt is better known in these parts as the artist who painted the AITPL 13 cover, but he’s also an awesome writer.  This is a very Bukowskian novel about a punk named Lupus who wants to quit working and spend his time painting, and all hell breaks loose.  If you liked Post Office, this book is totally up your alley.
• There Are a Million Stories in the Naked City by Fiona Helmsley – This is a cool-sized pocket book that consists of 120 pages of creative non-fiction stories about Fiona’s days world of punks and strippers and heroin and a dirty, pre-Giuliani New York City.
• Awkward 1 – I first met Awkward Press editor Jeffrey Dinsmore during my brief stint in LA in 2008, which was right before he got Awkward up and running.  They’ve since done a more substantial second issue in 2010, which tells you something about my reading backlog.  This episode has five short stories about awkward occurrences, all of them great.  Each one is pretty innovate in how the story unspools, like Honor Rovai’s “Housesitting”, which starts off as a letter to a housesitter that quickly morphs into a crime confession.
• The American Book of the Dead by Henry Baum – A high-concept thriller about the end of the world as brought on by a far-right conspiracy by religious fundies in a Cheney-type style.  It’s a good plot that would (or will?) make a great movie, but is also noteworthy in that it was self-published and isn’t just another SKU number regurgitated from the entertainment-industrial complex.
• Air in the Paragraph Line #13 – I know I published it, and I wrote two of the stories, but I also read a metric fuck-ton of stories before selecting these, and I re-read everything here a million times during the production of the issue.  Todd Taylor’s “Banjo Alien Zen” is one of my favorites in here, as is Rebel Star Hobson’s piece about the insanity of working in a redneck-infested convenience store.

I didn’t buy as much this year because I re-read a lot of old books.  I moved, and in the process of moving, I tried to tightly prune my collection and dump books that had followed me across the country multiple times that I should have read but didn’t.  Also, I tried to nail down what I was supposed to be writing, or what I wanted to write, and a lot of that involved re-reading books important to me.  Here’s a partial list of what I re-read, all books worthy of purchase, if you’ve got that Amazon gift card from xmas burning a hole in your pocket:

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson – A panic Kindle purchase when I realized I was on the way to the airport for a cross-country flight and had nothing to read.  I practically inhaled this on the plane ride home, and it was just as good as the first half-dozen times I read it.
• The Risk Pool by Richard Russo – This is pretty much becoming an annual read.  Nobody paints a picture like this guy.
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick – Alternate reality we-lost-to-the-Nazis fiction at its finest, especially since all alternate reality fiction currently written is some right-wing wonk trying to get across some point about how paving roads is socialism.
• The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian – One of my favorite books about New York, even if there is a geographical goof about every five pages.
• Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno – I love how he captures the love-but-not relationship between a guy into heavy metal that sort of likes punk and the best friend girl who loves punk.  Every time I read this, I want to write my own book like it, and I usually start, and get five chapters into it and then quit, and then damn Meno for making it look so easy.

So what should I be reading in 2011?

It turns out this isn’t a bad piece of work. The band decided to celebrate the 30-year mark since their debut album by dipping back into their influences and cranking out eight tracks of classic/60s/brit-rock. They start the 27-minute fest with a replay of The Who’s “Summertime Blues”. This isn’t a jokey stab at a cover, like a tongue-in-cheek attempt a band would throw on a b-side or a fan club giveaway disc. It’s an honest attempt at capturing the spirit of Townshend’s execution of the Eddie Cochran original. The guitar is awesome! This rocks in a Zep-blues way even more than the earliest Rush. There’s tons of feedback pouring off of the heavy riffs, thick bass lines, and pounding drums. This doesn’t sound like a band that’s been doing their own thing for three decades – it sounds like a garage band slamming out old-school rock in a bar.

There’s more Who, two cuts by the Yardbirds, two by Buffalo Springfield, and one each by Love and Cream. All of the cuts are more of the same straightforward jamming. Geddy is not Neil Young vox-wise, but “Mr. Soul” is decent. It’s odd to hear “For What It’s Worth” (i.e. the song used in every other Vietnam protest montage in a film), but the mellowness gives you a nice breather from the rest of the scorching on the album.

I dig their take on “The Seeker”, which shows Alex Lifeson’s ability to channel Pete Townshend and really windmill through the power chords. There’s also a good Love cover of “Seven and Seven Is”, where Neil takes off on the drums. (It’s funny that on the original recording of this, Snoopy Pfisterer couldn’t keep up with the 30-some takes needed in the studio, and frontman Arthur Lee had to take over for him. Peart, of course, has no problems with this.)

The hottest cut on the album is “Crossroads”, the old Robert Johnson classic best known for its coverage by Cream. Alex does just as good a job as Eric Clapton on the feedback-laced fretwork for this one. You can tell the band had a lot of fun with this EP by the way they blast through these songs, and this is no exception. It’s funny that many panned Rush’s first album as being a Zep/Cream ripoff, and thirty years later, they’re covering a prototypical Cream song. What’s even funnier is that they sound so much like a bunch of 19-year-olds playing this stuff out at a local gig, and not a trio of multi-platinum artists who have spent decades filling stadiums by playing odd-meter geekfests of songs about nuclear war and talking trees.

I really enjoy this album, although it started a bad precedent. They toured in support of this EP, and a few years later, they’re releasing a live album for the tour supporting the live album they released when they recorded a DVD of a tour they did supporting an EP that they… hey, when is a new studio album coming out? Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but I think we all wish they would get back on the four studio albums/one live album rotation. I’m glad they had fun with this one though.

Rating: 8.5

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After 1999′s Q2K, we learned that the departed Chris DeGarmo must have been a major contributor to the band’s songwriting success, because things definitely lagged without him penning tunes for the album. This time around, Kelly Gray was given the boot, and the original lineup with DeGarmo returned. It was unclear what DeGarmo’s status was with the band, however. He did co-write four of the ten tracks on the album, but there were no solo shots, and most of the material continues in the same vein as Q2K. Also, DeGarmo did not tour with the band, and it was largely rumored that his appearance was nothing but a session musician publicity stunt to revive the band’s image.

This is the first post-Atlantic studio album by the band; beginning with 2001′s Live Evolution, they moved to Sanctuary Records. Prior to Sanctuary’s absorption into Universal Music Group, they were well-known for releasing new albums by once-popular bands that toured the “where are they now?” bar circuit with half of their original members. The kind of budget involved with such a change in label, plus the band’s decision to self-produce the album, results in a significant drop in production quality over the last few albums. It’s not horrible (that would come later), but it doesn’t have the depth or brilliance that Q2K or HitNF had to them.

The ten tracks, weighing in at an anemic 41:37, don’t wander much from the same formula, which could best be described as “mid-paced introspective look at our world today, with a slight AOR hook”. Any one of those things could work well, and have in the band’s past. (Mid-paced = “Della Brown”; Introspective “Promised Land”; AOR hook = most of Empire.) But there are few surprises here, and no dynamics. With a few minor exceptions, very little stands out in the muddle. “Rhythm of Hope”, “Doin’ Fine”, “Open”, “Tribe”… most of these songs are largely interchangable, and about as interesting as an album of commercial jingles from a 60s Eastern Bloc country. As much as I try to get into this, it’s just a jumble of blah.

I mention a few standout areas. “The Art of Life” hints at the band this once was, and almost sounds like a lost Promised Land track. There are a few good riffs scattered in other songs, but just when something starts to get interesting, it gets repeated ten times and dragged out, like a kid trying to pad a one-page book report into four pages with creative font and margin choices.

Last summer, I saw the Seattle Mariners play the Angels in Anaheim. At the time, the Mariners were something like 30 games behind the Angels in the AL West, and watching a team with a $117-million dollar payroll and the most talented Japanese player to ever come to the US and play get beaten so severely was a lot like thinking back to Empire and then listening to this. Maybe their next album would not be stellar, either; and maybe the 2009 Mariners will still end up 40 games under a .500 record. The one saving grace of a “rebuilding year” is you can keep having them year after year with no marked progress, and at least some of your fans will still come back and hope for something better, eventually.

Rating: 4.5

If you look at Satch’s stuff in the last decade, he’s wandered off the beaten path a bit with either electronica-influenced experiments or jam-band diversions, neither of which I particularly care about. Slater’s work sounds more like the “classic” Satriani, and sticks to the core concepts that have made him great: incredibly emotional, story-telling instrumental guitar. He’s not formulaic in his song structure or approach, and seems well-versed in the ability to construct a solid number without repetition or formulaic redundancy. A few songs offer a soft and almost ballady approach: “Melodie” is a good example of this. I particularly liked how “Looking Back” worked some well-structured piano riffs off the smooth fuzz guitar. Also, “Reflections” features a start with a ballad approach that blows the doors off with a minute to go in the song. It’s very moving and smooth stuff, with a spot-on execution on every track.

And it’s not all slow, moody stuff. One way that DC Slater pulls away from Joe is his ability to lay in some heaviness and speed. “Rebel Jam” shows a good metal edge and some quick chops. But his best example is “Pendulum”, which mixes some mythical spookiness with an all-out high-viscosity thickness that slaps on some low-end power for a decent payoff. And don’t think this is just another “really fast or really slow” album, because Slater does dance around other areas, be it the bluesy “Black Bandana” or “December Dawn” to the poppy “Miles Away”. A lot of ground is covered in the 41:55 total time of this album.

Aside from the guitar and songwriting, one of the truly satisfying aspects of the album is the production. I didn’t have any liner notes on the lineup of musicians behind this album other than Slater, so I don’t know if it’s a group of buddies, session hired hands, or if he covered the bases himself. But the bass, drums, and occasional keys all fit well into the overall mix. And what’s even better is that it’s not always the SAME drums. From track to track, there are variations in sound and setup, giving each number its own feel. There’s not the tiniest trace of self-production crud evident anywhere here – it’s all very much a pro job from start to finish, with a very seamless sound and credible mix. I’d like to hear some of the other bands Slater has produced to see if his work rings as true on other albums.

I feel bad making so many comparisons between this artist and Joe Satriani, though. He has such a truly unique sound, and I don’t mean to imply that he’s just a rip-off, like the endless number of 14-year-old kids you see hanging out at Guitar Center playing “Eruption” note-for-note. It’s not that I see his music as following Satriani’s; it’s like he took it from a certain point, maybe around Blue Dream or so, and improved it, drove it even further in a different direction. It’s like one of those speculative fiction pulp novels where the US never went into World War I and now we’re all living on a colony on Mars because the time-space continuum was altered in some odd way. I listen to this album and feel like the guitar world went through a wormhole in 1990 and when we all came out, it was easy to find stuff this cool.

Enough of my babbling. Head over to dcslater.com and check this one out. I hope we hear more from this guy in the near future.

Rating: 9.25

The reason this really works is that it’s a timely message: televangelists ripping off old ladies; politicians ripping off the people; corporations ripping off the government. It’s every late-eighties demon from the Reaganomics era wrapped up in a nice little package. But unlike the metaphorical one-song stories of earlier albums, this one is set in present-day, and directly follows a protagonist. It doesn’t preach like later albums, which is a minor complaint I’ve had about Tate’s lyrics since Mindcrime. It’s the old Creative Writing 101 first lesson (and a song by Rush): show, don’t tell. If you write a song that says “the federal government doesn’t like black people” (“Empire”, sort of), it isn’t interesting. When you pull me through a story of a heroin junkie turned mind control puppet assassin, I get it.

Okay, so who killed Mary? This is left ambiguous, with at least three possibilities: One is that Nikki killed her, while in a trance. Another is that Doctor X or another mindcrime zombie killed her, and Nikki was set up to take the fall. Or, maybe Mary killed herself, either to get out of the futile situation, or because Doctor X commanded her to while she was in a trance. The lyrics of the album don’t make this clear, although (to ruin it for you), on the 2004 tour when the album was played in its entirety, it was made very clear that X called her and told her to shoot herself, and she complied. But for years, this wasn’t clear, and people micro-analyzed the lyrics like people micro-analyze the bible to find quotes that support video games and hybrid cars as being evil. (Check out this for a well-done example of this.) This was further confused by the Video: Mindcrime collection, which people also overanalyzed for clues. I remember following the metal usenet newsgroups back in the early 90s, and there was still an ongoing debate about this well after Empire was released. That drove me batshit at the time, but I have to admit it was somewhat genius to leave this ambiguous, and it’s a minor letdown to actually know the answer now.

(Another story line that is more ambiguous than you might think is whether Nikki and Mary were actually sexually involved, or just pals. For some reason, I always assumed they were, but as the site above mentions, it’s not explicitly mentioned in the lyrics. It’s one of those things like how you can read between the lines in the bible and see whether or not Adam had a wife before Eve. )

Mindcrime‘s sound in general is pretty lofty stuff. Produced by Peter Collins, it’s pretty dynamic, with a lot of power behind it, and ranges from the very mellow (“My Empty Room”) to downright speedy (“The Needle Lies”). The sound isn’t as thick or produced as Rage For Order, but there’s a lot more going on. Add to this the intros and performances that stitch together the album, and you’ve got some pretty impressive recording work. The production would be an order of magnitude better on Empire, but it’s pretty damn good here.

(Aside: the start of the album, in the hospital, has a sample of an announcement that says “Dr. Blair, Dr. Blair; Dr. J. Hamilton, Dr. J. Hamilton.” This is a stock sound effect and has appeared everywhere over the last few decades. I just spotted it last week in an old AT&T commercial. I’ve heard it in TV shows, movies, commercials, and it even showed up in an intro in a Motley Crue album, which was pretty stupid to me.)

Another great addition to the album is that of Mary herself, played by Pamela Moore. Moore is a singer also from the Seattle area, who has since flirted with a pop/technica career over the years. For years I heard the rumor that she was Tate’s vocal/opera coach, but I’ve since read the band heard her in a commercial and recruited her for the album. She sings a duet with Tate in the song “Suite Sister Mary”. It clocks in at 10:41 (the entire album is just shy of an hour long) and features a mix of neo-classical elements and latin chanting with rock elements for a slower but very sinister and dramatic number, and Moore’s performance is absolutely spot-on and punches up Tate’s operatic abilities much more than was present in any solo work previous to this.

This album has a lot of personal meaning to me. I remember getting it the day it came out in 1988 and spending an entire weekend listening to it nonstop, trying to find clues. From the first second of the blasting beginning to “Anarchy-X”, I was absolutely hooked. I spent the summer of 1988 listening to this album constantly, and it carried over as a frequent listen well into the summer of 1989, too. (The album took over a year to gain popularity and reach gold status.) In my freshman year, when I started using the VAX mainframe computers, I set my process name to “Doctor X” and kept it that way for the majority of my time in college. For a while, this album seemed dated, and then suddenly, around 2000 or so, all of the lyrics made total sense again. That’s probably why they made a sequel, but it was nowhere near the quality of this masterpiece. As far as concept albums or examples of progressive metal, it does not get any better than this.

Rating: 10

Instead of covering socio-political topics through a metaphor or cautionary tale, as they had in their last three albums, this is the first time they discuss the perils and impact of our changing world directly, in songs that use their soundscape and direct feel as a vehicle for commentary. The lyrics discuss gang violence (“Empire”), struggling with disabilities (“Best I Can”), the environment (“Resistance”), and homelessness (“Della Brown”). But the balance of the album avoids preachiness, and mixes the message with a heavily introspective deep-dive into emotion and interpersonal relationships. And that’s mixed with this new sound: a more textured musical take, with smooth guitars and the occasional twelve-string mixed with a very up-front but laid-back bass sound, and Geoff Tate’s lyrics going from the all-out operatic to a more integrated and subdued yet effective part of the band.

This isn’t a concept album, in the strictest sense. But it uses many samples, intros, and outros to stitch together the first half of its its 63:20 length to be nearly seamless, and some argue that this makes it a loosely-coupled sort of concept album, although I’ve never seen a line-by-line explanation of what that story would be. But it adds to the depth of the album, making it something easy for me to visualize, and something more than just a collection of sounds.

Some of the best songwriting work on the album comes from guitarist Chris DeGarmo, who broadens his songwriting by heading inward to the more internal and emotional themes. An example (with lyrics about Tate’s future wife), is “Jet City Woman”, the typical tale of “I’m on the road a long time and have come back to my love”, although it’s a much more effective vehicle than the typical Motley Crue or Journey take on the same subject. And the title? The city of Seattle was once known as Jet City, due to the overwhelming presence of Boeing, who used to be headquartered there, and who built many of their passenger planes there. In the early 80s, the city held a contest and officially changed its nickname to the more pedestrian “Emerald City”, although many references to the old name still exist. I remember when I lived there in the late 90s, I used to often drive by a place called Jet City Pizza, which always used to be an unconscious homage (in my mind, at least) to this album.

One minor nit I’ve always had is the voiceover part in the middle of the song “Empire”, which laments the federal government’s spending on crime. Sorry Geoff, but the reason the federal government spends less on crime is because a huge amount of law enforcement is paid at the state and local level. One could use the same logic to lament the amount the feds spend on education, which is largely paid for by local taxes. I remember reading somewhere that Tate got the idea for this song based on a Vietnamese gangland murder spree in the Little Saigon area of Rainier Valley. I didn’t know this until much later, but when I lived in Seattle, this was the closest strip of fast-food joints, and I drove out in this area at least a few times a week. (It’s also the former location of Sick’s Stadium, where baseball’s ill-fated Seattle Pilots played their only season before moving to Milwaukee and becoming the Brewers. Both Elvis and Hendrix played outdoor shows there; it was torn down in 1979 and is now the location of a Lowe’s hardware store.)

And then there’s “Silent Lucidity”. I’ve got to admit, I clearly remember the first time I heard this song in my car, during the first listen of this album, and how I thought “what the fuck? They are totally going to get sued by Pink Floyd for completely ripping off their entire style!” This Michael Kamen-orchestrated ballad seems to talk about lucid dreaming, but Tate has always said it’s about a parent watching their child sleep. Like classic Waters-era Floyd, this song was one of my go-to numbers to listen to when I got in ultra-depresso mode around this era. And then, all of a sudden, it went from about nobody ever hearing about Queensryche to literally everyone praising this song. MTV played the video constantly (yes, they played videos then) and it even got airplay on mainstream FM radio. I’m sure it was played at many a high school prom, and it popped up on all sorts of “power ballad” compilation albums you could order at three in the morning from a K-Tel TV ad. Suddenly, a band whose last album took over a year to break into the gold level of sales status entered the Billboard top ten within two weeks, and ultimately went triple platinum. I’ve always wondered how many people bought Empire, listened to that one song for a month, and then went on to the new MC Hammer album or whatever else. This gave the band the level of success to headline tours and record their next album completely on their own terms, but I always wonder if this was the beginning of the end in some way.

Empire was remastered and re-released in 2003, with three bonus tracks. There’s the overly hammy “Scarborough Fair”, the ho-hum “Dirty Lil Secret” and the decent but doesn’t-fit-here “Last Time in Paris”. They’re all nice to have, but the 11+3 track version of the album just doesn’t seem right. If you’ve got the cash, you can hunt down an import gold disc version of the album, but it’ll probably cost you $50. I finally got a copy of the 24K version and ripped it with lossless encoding to iTunes; it’s a good way to go, if you’re into that sort of thing. I also have the original tape somewhere – it’s shell is worn clean, but it’s a nice reminder of that era.

This album has always meant a lot to me. When it came out in 1990, I was commuting about 45 minutes each way to school, which meant I listened to this album at least once a day for months. Coming back to it, this album reminds me so much of that year of my life, and takes me back to that period so directly. And when I was in Seattle, sitting in my tiny studio apartment, songs like “Another Rainy Night” created the perfect soundtrack for those few somber post-college years of depression and emotion. Not only do I consider this the master album for the band, but it’s one of my personal favorites of all time due to the history and emotion interleaved within it.

Rating: 10

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If you’re a fan of the Load-era Metallica, this is a win-win; you get all of the really old b-side stuff you never bought because you were either seven years old when it came out or because you were a Vanilla Ice fan back then and didn’t like metal until it became popular. As far as the new stuff, the song that got video rotation (yes, they made videos for covers on a b-side wrapup compilation) was the Bob Seger classic “Turn the Page”. As much as I loathe James Hetfield’s new “yeaahh yeahhh!” singing style, it works well on this, and provides us with one of those “the road is rough” moments like Poison and Motley Crue belted out consistently, except it feels much more genuine. If Lars Ulrich were killed in Cliff Burton’s bus accident and the band eventually slowed down to just doing songs like this, I’d probably still like it. I couldn’t get through the first side of the disc more than once or twice though, and admittedly, I only cared about having all of the rarities in one place.

The collection of b-sides is great, but it also shows you how far Metallica has fallen. It starts with Garage Days in its full glory, followed with “Am I Evil” and “Blitzkrieg”, before going into the …Justice singles, “Breadfan” and “The Prince”. That’s where I stopped collecting as a kid. Then you get the “new” sounding covers, which are so-so, and the four Motorhead covers from Lemmy’s birthday where Metallica dressed up as Lemmy, which are pretty sad.

If you need the old covers, grab a copy (read my separate review for Garage Days…) That’s the only reason to spend money on any post-black album Metallica, and it’s a bad trap to get you to buy a CD of crappy stuff along with it.

Review: 6