A Boxful of Rock Sound CDs (Revisiting 2000)

[Cleveland Steamer]

Despite loathing nearly all of this type of music, both now and back then, I'm enjoying this thread very much.

Thanks jobotic. I think I hate it too, but I can't leave my scabs alone.

Anyway, I have to go on a holiday soon so I'll just wrap this thing up for now.

-

Quitter - Black Box. Did a cursory search for this and couldn't find it. Disclosure: didn't look too hard, it sucks! No matter. After the crushing glory of 5ive, this really does sound like the other 5ive. Not really, but there is a nasty whiff of chilli peppers about this, so maybe it's best that we don't link to it and stink this thread up some more.

What is surprising is how little of what I would class as "nu metal" there has been on this CD so far. As in, none. This is the first song that has any sort of vague FNM-inspired fumes wafting from its gatorade hydrated carcass. I don't feel bad sticking the knife into this because it sounds so confident and good at sports and in love with its own smell. It's shit.

[Cleveland Steamer]

Knut - Bite The Bullet. This is more like it. Some good old screamy pummelling angry wasp hive burlesque. Excellent for pouring lighter fluid into your eyes and shitting in a postbox.

-

The Last Drop - The Talons of Wong Chi Eng. I couldn't find this one either, but you're not missing out, scarecrow. Cock rock. Cock out rock. Cock sound. Sock down front of jeans rock.

-

Tree - Cold And Alone. Now we're cooking with gravel. Still cock rock, but its cock is in its cheek. It's got a riff you can drink to.
I could imagine this playing in a bowling alley while I sit at a bar in my clown shoes and drink cow-trough whiskey as my ex girlfriend bowls strike after strike with her new squeeze.

-

The Kennedy Soundtrack - Dark Days. It had to happen sooner or later. Actual rap rock nu metal. Already it sounds incredibly dated compared to the rest of the stuff on here and I'm wondering if nu metal was already on its way out by this point as the other CDs I've looked at were boiling over with the stuff and this has been largely "other", which is probably why I liked it. This song then, I won't bother looking for it or linking to it, is hugely in awe to Rage Against The Machine. It's even got record scratches on it. Ah, all those DJs in nu metal bands who just had to stand there and make wikka-wikka noises when required, where are they now?

Also, this Rock Sound CD is fucking long. It's like twice the amount of tracks as the other ones.

[Cleveland Steamer]

Mad Capsule Markets - Midi Surf. yes yes yes I LOVE THIS. Bouncy, hispeed slightly dust flavoured with a great pop chorus. It's like Polysics on street phet. Mad Capsule Markets were from JAPAN which is probably why it's got those crucial elements of fun and catchiness stitched into the brute ugly chuggery. Huge love. Song goes 1000 mph.

-

Old Man Gloom - Branch Breaker / Radio Crackles Spill Down My Face. Radical scream therapy and git chonk. Quality stuff, a swarm of fury that burns itself out after less than a minute and dissolves into fragments of smashed glass and broken sticks. A delight.

-

Isis - Celestial (The Tower). Come on now, you cats must know Isis. One of the top post-what-drone-rock-thing bands ever EVARR. Ten minutes of rapture and drag, pulled along through chopping waves on sickly pitiless riffs, feel those deep pulls in your stomach, screaming over the storm, in for the haul, drinking powdered rats bones, drunk on death, then the thunder cries off and you're just floating in your little fucked boat, eddying in nowhere, a blissful end to a shitty life.

So there we are. January, 2002. A pretty decent collection of sounds, minimal sports metal, big on the deep grimness of ugly guitars. Could have cut about four songs of boring beer bar rock but there's some properly good stuff on here - 5ive, Isis, Mad Capsule Markets, Old Man Gloom. Enough to give me hope. The future might unveil the past as something more than an obsolete wasteland of embarrassment and regret.

[Cleveland Steamer]

I was also introduced to 5ive (not that one) through a Rock Sound CD, although it was a remix of one of their tracks - https://www.discogs.com/release/2046770-Various-Music-With-Attitude-Volume-43

Ah yeah, remixed by James Plotkin no less! I think I have that one in the box somewhere too. Johnny Truant were also good, see their name there.

[Funcrusher]

Despite loathing nearly all of this type of music, both now and back then, I'm enjoying this thread very much.

Same here.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

Well hi, how have you been? Me, I've been fine. Oh, nothing special... I'm still here.

It's just, I don't want this thread to just be me hanging out alone and half-drunk on a week night grumbling despondently into a shoebox full of cds, so in an effort to encourage participation I will include links to the tracks (where I can) so you can jump in here with me.

I have also hand-picked a Rock Sound CD that I remember as being a particular favourite of mine two decades plus rewound. Hopefully it holds up and gets me all maudlin and introspective and buffs this stroppy surly cynical edge of me to a reflective polished surface. Otherwise I'm just taking the piss out of things I used to like.

Tonight, Music With Attitude Vol 33 - January 2002



Skipping a few years ahead now, we find ourselves in the incredible idyllic era of being, the year 2002. A pallindrome and a weird time of war. Some happenings mark off this time of living in a history: a bereavement-powered theme park is trialled in Kent. Inverness declares soft war on Budapest. Tony Blair sends his shimmering regards from Afghanistan. And we huddle around tin cups full of coffee and brandy and find solace in magazines with free CDs on the cover.

Tonight's programme:

The Distillers - Sing Sing Death House
Bad Religion - Sorrow
Division Of Laura Lee - Need To Get Some
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Rifles
Haven - Let It Live
Aereogramme - Zionist Timing
5ive - Nitinol
Quitter - Black Box
Knut - Bite The Bullet
The Last Drop - The Talons Of Wong Chi Eng
Tree - Cold And Alone
The Kennedy Soundtrack - Dark Days
Mad Capsule Markets - Midi Surf
Old Man Gloom - Branch Breaker Radio Crackles Spill Down My Face
Isis - Celestial (The Tower)

I confidently predict that these will all bang and I will have no regrets about starting this thread.

This one is rubbish apart from the last three bands, who are all great. Well Bad Religion were alright for a while i suppose but they were long past their best by this point.

[Cleveland Steamer]

This one is rubbish apart from the last three bands, who are all great. Well Bad Religion were alright for a while i suppose but they were long past their best by this point.

I sort of agree except for that 5ive track is great and Bad Religion absolutely suck.

[sevendaughters]

Great thread and will be back later this weekend to tell you EXACTLY where you were wrong!!!!

[jobotic]

I've got a Mad Capsule Markets song on something somewhere. Remember really liking it despite being put off by the "Mad" in their name. Still, who'd have thought Melt Banana would be any good, on that basis.

Isn't Old Man Gloom a Plotkin band too?

See, I'm joining in now. Get back to the horrifc nu-metal.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

First of all Melt Banana is an amazing name

[jobotic]

Nah, great band though.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

Yeah, it's a great name

[Vodkafone]

I have no interest at all in the music on these CDs but have really been enjoying the prose, so I'll keep reading.

[Al Tha Funkee Homosapien]

Not read this whole thread yet, will do in  a bit, but thanks! Used to get Rock Sound, Kerrang, Metal Hammer and anything else with free CDs. Rock Sound ones were often quantity over quality, but found some good stuff on there. And this was my prime era of buying Rock Sound (prob early 1999-2003).

Also the Free With This Month's Issue Podcast is good if you look a nostalgic look at old cover mount CDs.

[dbs]

I've got a Mad Capsule Markets song on something somewhere. Remember really liking it despite being put off by the "Mad" in their name. Still, who'd have thought Melt Banana would be any good, on that basis.

Great band.
Also at least on of Mad Capsule Markets is in Baby Metal now, and does at least some writing for them.

Isn't Old Man Gloom a Plotkin band too?

Not Plotkin, although I think he's done some mastering for them. It's one of Aaron Turner of Isis' other bands.

[Cleveland Steamer]

Great thread and will be back later this weekend to tell you EXACTLY where you were wrong!!!!

I waited all long weekend for a cerebral spanking that never came, you big tease!


Well never mind because

this train will not stop

... step back once more into the tremulous year of 2001: August, the heat lay over everything like a wet, dead Irish wolfhound. Blissful times, and to think just one month later "them slags flewed planes in t'towers" and we were all condemned to an age of war on terror. But tall buildings having shivering premonitions in the night wasn't all that was going on in Aug 01.

Stuffed into this iota of eternity: Aaliyah was taken from us via heavier-than-air craft; foot and mouth disease ravaged the beef industry; Klub Piłkarski Jaguar Gdańsk was founded in Poland; I slept in a pile of rodents bones; and it became crystal clear that there would be NO space odyssey, no black obelisk, no enlightenment...

however over in the world of music with a right cob-on up its arse:

SOUND THE ATTITUDE KLAXONS it's

VOL 22 - August 2001




Linkin Park - High Voltage
Throat - Crazy Horses
Rival Schools - Good Things
Biohazard - Last Man Standing
Rollins Band - Your Number Is One
Miocene - Fits Like That
Rocket From The Crypt - Straight American Slave
Zen Guerilla - Barbed Wire
Sulpher - Spray
Chimaira - Dead Inside
Rabies Caste - Prove Me
Alkaline Trio - Mr Chainsaw
Monkey Boy - Give The Man A Hand


guaranteed CRAP!

[dontpaintyourteeth]

I'd say there's four groups on there I'd be willing to defend

[Cleveland Steamer]

Linkin Park - High Voltage. Can I just shock you? This is rubbish. Not for me, Giuseppe. I was always too old for this, Linkin Park, it just seemed like babby's first rude word, little man's first sticky fingerprint on the mahogany armoire. Babybel rebellion.

I had a job during the Nu Metal Ages, a very menial and repetitive job with no mental input required, and so I knew bits of songs would get lodged in the gears of my brain during a 9 hour shift on the shop floor and I'd be driven bugshit by the endless looping halo of one tiny part of song forfuckinever, so to avoid ruining music that I enjoyed, I would try and deliberately get something "shit" stuck in there, so it wouldn't matter if it was degraded Basinski-style into a crumbled broken mental zoetrope of the same flickering four bars. The song I usually coaxed into me was Linkin Park's "Numb", which was on heavy rotation on Kerrang TV at the time, so I'd fill up on it before the minibus came to pick me up for work in the morning, I must have had hours and hours of the chorus carouselling round the closed-circuit of my skull as I pressed caps onto bottles, injected bubble-bath into novelty twat moulds and top-gunned pallets of arabian sex toys through a hellish wasteland of talcum powder and ethanol fumes.

This is not that song. This is something non-descript, a few years before that "vorsprung dork shit-heap" factory nightmare. It starts with some feeble rapping, some throbber on piano in back, really there's nothing here lads, very weak, not a guitar in earshot, hand signals of plenty, crappy. I suppose the band hadn't reached their full potential. Just when you're about to start knitting a chrysalis around your corpse out of boredom, the palest, most washed-out faded-denim guitar tone comes apologetically wandering through the song, while one of the chin stroke sages informs us "sometimes I feel like a chopstick".

[BeardFaceMan]

The cover of Crazy Horse by Throat is automatically great because it has Neil Fallon of Clutch on it cheers

[Cleveland Steamer]

Throat - Crazy Horses. As the beard faced man above me states, this is great. But you can hardly go wrong with a cover of Crazy Horses. Banging song, banging cover, bashed to pieces with wild theremin. A good one.

-

Rival Schools - Good Things. We're in emo country now, deep. Vaguely Eddie Veddery plum fuck singing with a chorus that glides. There's something obscene about this kind of music to me though, like a brand new toy car, so polished and cold. Crash Test Dummies but without a bus driver singing. Wah-wah pedals, can we make them illegal? Maybe this would make more sense twenty years ago smashed flat on shit resin in someone's over-heated second floor bedroom, some dip banging on about Bob Marley in your ear as you try and skin up with a page of the highway code.

-

Biohazard - Last Man Standing. At this point, Biohazard had already been around a long time (since the late 80s I think), gobbing on concrete walls, missing their tea, being late for their tennis lessons and so on. Was never a fan, far too macho for me. And they must take some responsibility for rap-rock and nu metal. This is really half-arsed though. A semi-buttocked complaint from the original O.G. hausu pain bringers. I suppose yeah alright I'll make a fist... punch something... sigh... jump up and beat your dick... the man is always tryin to... body bag... knee cap... something something... cops.

[sevendaughters]

definitely will be auditing this thread very soon, the grave has been dug

[Cleveland Steamer]

speaking of big tuff men

Rollins Band - Your Number Is One. Quivering slab of Billy Bear ham, Henry "I Got Tattoo" "Sensitive Boy" "Pedigree Chum" Rollins shares with us now a cut of his bench-pressing mix tape. Your number is ONE. Music for pulling your pud whilst sternly looking at the pulsating vein in the middle of your forehead in the bathroom mirror and berating your cock until it coughs up its regiment of conscientious objectors.

Henry "Ennui" Rollins, he lives in a shed and writes his lyrics on JD Sports receipts.

This song is funk baby, it's a jungle train through a drill sergeant's hangover. I have to give props to Hank though, his talking rap style is fucking high rise storeys above these other fools. This is a good track actually, as long as you don't take it seriously. Otherwise it starts sounding like a Zumba class and Hen's in a leotard demanding you give him fifty immediately as the full length mirror reflects his perfect glutes in a sparkling mirrorball of rollins ass.

Nah, I have a lot of affection for Rollins. My best bud and I used to watch his video "Talking From The Box" as depressed teenagers, it always cheered us up. And the tape of "Get In The Van" is a must listen. Your number is ONE!!! ONE!!!!! OOOOOONE

[sevendaughters]

great lines from Get in the Van pop into my head frequently. usually "Preston, England: what a dump."

[Cleveland Steamer]

Miocene - Fits Like That. Grey gruel. Quaker oats core. Porridge. Ner-ner ner-ner ner-nerner ner nerrrr, Helmet have a lot to answer for. Again with the whiny mouthful-of-biscuits emotive singing.

-

Rocket From The Crypt - Straight American Slave. I've got solid gold-buffered trains of love for Speedo and his crew and it's nice to see them here. From Paint is a Fragrance up to parts of Scream Dracula, that ace 10 inch they did with Human Torch on it. Party music. Brass instruments without anyone snapping their braces. This is fine. Another band I think were trying to chase their breakout hit (On A Rope), it's got the energy and some nice horn stabs but their back catalogue has so much beyyyyytter tunes, this is no where near something like Boy Chucker or My Arrow's Aim or Glazed.

-

Zen Guerilla - Barbed Wire. Disgustingly filthy guitar fiddlins ahoy, and possibly a m'fucking harmonica? Nonsense walrus vocals, never ending fretwank. Why does everyone in 2001 want to be either Chris Cornell or Mike Patton??

-

Sulpher - Spray. Industrial. Got to admire its bloody-fingered refusal to change chords. I'd rather listen to Babyland. It does get a big sloppy kiss from me though for only being one minute long.

[Cleveland Steamer]

guna speedrun through this last ones

Chimiara - Dead Inside. Chim-chimmeny chim-iary chim-chim cherr-ooooooh, intense double bass drum gravy dipped METAL oooh. It's got whiskery vocals and screamsy parts. Dead inside. You know, like a ghost, or a mummy. I have nothing to say else. You can hear it in your mind, chugging, wailing.

-

Rabies Caste - Prove Me. I decided to look these up on a whim and it turns out they have a ridiculously detailed discogs page which covers the long existence of this Israeli sludge trio, including specs on the recordings of such fine albums as "For The Vomiting Tractor Drivers" and "Children Can Fall In A Bucket And Drown".

I thought this was pretty good. A snakey riff, oil drum snares, sick vocals. Sounds a bit like Unsane.

-

Alkaline Trio - Mr Chainsaw Some pop punk and I don't mind that. Actually it's nice to have something a but more fun after all the thick phlegmy barking and plate smashing that's been and gone being done around here lately! Vocals in pop punk are always the deal breaker and I can't bear the whiny fucking whiny ones, the boys. I always prefer punk when there's a girl singing anyway. But this is fine. I wouldn't throw it out of a moving panzer tank. Wait, did he just mention Sam Allardyce?

-

Monkey Boy - Give The Man A Hand. Thank fuck it's the end. Monkey Boy again, who I dismissed like a cunt last time, and I'm sorry for that, because I enjoyed this a whole deal. Much more interesting than the majority ofthe rest of this rrrrr CD. This reminded me of - and I don't mean this as a pejorative - but this reminded me of Jacobs Mouse. And I liked Jacobs Mouse. And I like Monkey Boy. I tried to find this on youtube but nothing came up. CAN IT.

BYE

[iamcoop]

Insanely late to this amazing thread but the idea that Earthtone9, One Minute Silence and Melt Banana are shit?

Crying, puking, shivering. Told my family to fuck off whilst I sit in the spare room drinking whisky and sobbing

[Cleveland Steamer]

Woah hey hold up, no one's said Melt Banana are shit. There was a brief bit of business about if their name is shit or good, but that was it. Also all of my opinions should be immediately discounted as the pissed ramblings of a louse man trying to claw something back from two decades of arrested development.

[iamcoop]

Ok I forgive. Sick thread though, this is where CaB really excels. Please keep it going!

[iamcoop]

Buy Now...Saved Later is such a good album though

[jobotic]

Yeah I said I didn't go much on their name, but Melt Banana are ace. Hoping to see them this year, for only the second time.