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Kid Rock "Rock N Roll Jesus" review
When it comes right down to it, what Kid Rock attempts is kind of tricky: he's trying to create new classic rock, songs to compete with Skynyrd and Seger as the soundtrack of choice for jukeboxes and pickup trucks across the country. This is the sound of the white-trash, downriver rocker in him coming through, triumphing over the jive rapper who brought him his fame. It was there even when he was aping the Beastie Boys and yodeling in the canyon, but once the country-rock of "Picture" revived the sales of the flagging ****y, he put all his chips on classic rock, beginning with 2004's eponymous platter, a good record without a single hit single. That lack of a hit was enough to scare Kid, to strip anyway his few lingering subtleties and turn out an album as big, bold, and brainless as 2007's Rock N Roll Jesus. Apart from a drum loop here and a chanted bridge there, this is classic white-trash rock through and through, but where his heroes were creating a blueprint, Kid Rock is doggedly following their path, and he won't ever let you forget it, either. He name-drops relentlessly, steals songs titles from both Alabama and Billy Squier, cribs rhyme schemes from Seger and melodies from Elton John ("Blue Jeans and a Rosary" is straight out of "Levon"), adopts John Fogerty's fake mushmouth Southern accent for his obligatory Big Easy salute, "New Orleans," and pays homage to Back in Black with his cover art. He works hard to evoke the ghosts of the past, hoping that all his allusions will give him classic rock cred by association, when it only winds up underscoring the distance between him and his heroes. Nowhere is this truer than on "All Summer Long," a spin on "Night Moves" built entirely upon the chords from "Werewolves of London" with a slight lift from "Sweet Home Alabama" on the chorus, which only brings to mind how much better those three songs are than this mash-up.
Kid Rock's problem on Rock N Roll Jesus is two-fold: his music is so cluttered with comforting clichés, it plays like music for a theme restaurant, and his words fall flat. Of the two problems, the music isn't as serious: splashy and silly though it may be, at least it gets the basic sound right, even if it's way too polished and precise. Kid chases after shopworn riffs without ever reworking them or infusing them with enough spirit to make them his own; they just lie there, crushed beneath the weight of classic rock history. Nor does he goose his conventional chords with his signature ribald humor, which perhaps is the most shocking and notable thing about Rock N Roll Jesus: he's lost all of his verbal facility, to the point where he can no longer tell a dirty joke. It's as if by leaving rap behind, he's also discarded any claims at being clever. The man who once saluted all his heroes in the methadone clinics now just lazily spits out profanities and rhymes "things" with "things," telling lowlife tales so generic they feel invented. It's not that his topics are tired — easy sex is as timeless a topic for rock & roll as true love — but he's no longer inhabiting a role, he's acting it, which makes his tawdry tales not only cheap, but disposable. There's one exception to this rule and that's his nasty, clumsy David Allan Coe-styled kiss-off to ex-wife Pamela Anderson, "Half Your Age," the one song that is truly steeped in the dirty grit of real life. It may ring true, but it's so mean-spirited, it strips him of any residual roguish charm — and when a rogue loses his charm, he just comes across as a prick, as Kid Rock does on Rock N Roll Jesus.
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Megadeth - That One Night: Live in Buenos Aires review
In the best scene of Metallica's overblown Some Kind of Monster do***entary, Dave Mustaine admits to Lars Ulrich that he feels like he's always coming in second place to his former band. But in reality, Mustaine has for many years fronted one of metal's most popular and enduring bands, Megadeth, who still release strong-selling albums and are able to headline large venues. Case in point, their first-ever live release, That One Night: Live in Buenos Aires. Originally issued as a DVD, this audio portion chronicles a performance from 2005 at Obras Stadium in Buenos Aires, before 25,000 rabid fans. As evidenced by several previous live rock/metal DVDs by other artists (especially Rush's Rush in Rio), fans way down south are an exuberant bunch — not only singing along to the lyrics, but managing to sing along to the riffs, as heard here on such standouts as the long-lost "Set the World Afire," "Wake Up Dead," and "Hangar 18." But they really go bonkers during the closing trio of Megadeth's best-known tracks — "Symphony of Destruction," "Peace Sells," and "Holy Wars." Long considered one of the most precise and tight thrash bands, That One Night: Live in Buenos Aires offers further hard proof to this claim.
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One Day as a Lion album review
Here it is...finally. One Day as a Lion are Zack de la Rocha, lead vocalist (and current as of July 2008) for Rage Against the Machine, and Jon Theodore, former drummer with the Mars Volta. De la Rocha and Theodore have been reportedly working on this project since 2006. The end result is a volatile mix of rhythm, noise, and radical poetry. De la Rocha is no stranger to the great political poets; his brand of rapping and freestyling has always been saturated with their influence as well as his own constantly evolving political thought. Many of these writers are cited in the set's acknowledgements — Jimmy Santiago Baca, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Junot Diaz, to name just four. The name of the band comes from a near mythic photograph by the great George Rodriguez published in 1970: "It's better to live one day as a lion, than a thousand years as a lamb." The slogan is a tag centered in a frame on a white wall in Boyle Heights. Knowing this, you might believe you have an idea of what these songs are about, but you'd be wrong; you only think you do. Yes, these five songs, clocking in at just over 20 minutes, are an intense racket of sociopolitical noise. Theodore's drums add the taut, tightly wound pulse of the lion, the phrase, the breath, the heart of the sound, while de la Rocha's keyboards blurt, pulse, and skronk a post-9/11 warning siren throughout. Some nonsense has been made of this entire project being influenced by Led Zeppelin — that seems to be the thing to write in 2008. Truth is, one track, "Ocean View," touches on Zep's mighty tune "The Ocean" in the melody of its refrain, but its lyrical content is in stark, even violent contrast to the former hard rock heroes as de la Rocha spits atop some mighty organic beats and squalling synths: "...Oceans of tears now rise aflame to tear them down/Oceans of past crimes now fill our hearts to tear them down...." It's poetry, it's political, it's mysterious — until you sit down and let this killer track knock you flat on your back with its rage, power, and knowledge of reckoning. The rest you are going to have to check out, save to say that all five of these cuts are essential, pure kinetic anger motivated by love for people (to paraphrase Che Guevara). This is a five-cut call to arms. No matter what ultimately happened with One Day as a Lion, we now have this do***ent, perfect in its short sparking length and raucous in its truth. Twenty minutes? How long was the first Sex Pistols album, 30 with some filler? How long was Grandmaster Flash's "The Message"? Eight? There isn't any filler here; it's all the aural ignition of a gasoline bomb going off in your ears.
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