The new album is excellent – a modern progression of their original sound and composition. As ever brave and somewhat disorientating it is wonderful to have Cynic back with their new album Traced In Air. It comes as little surprise that their jazz-fusion-metal approach sees them playing a cover of a Mahavishnu Orchestra track live.

Their sound and unusual jazzy chord progressions tend to leave me feeling rather mournful at the end of it all, rather than pumped up and ready to crack skulls, as when I listen to most metal. The album actually reminds me of a metal’d up Oceansize at times, and even strangely reminiscent of some Smashing Pumpkins.

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I always find their stuff hard to assimilate at first, but after four or five listens I’m in. This album is much more detailed than previous stuff. Lots of little scratches and buzzes buried in there, and my oh my Gil Sharone on drums is just insane. I thought Pennie leaving was a disaster, and Pennie is an amazing drummer, but Sharone has more of a groove rather than being completely robotic.

"When acting as a wave" is just stunningly spastic – check out the drum’n'bass sinewave bombs (you’ll need it loud with decent sized speakers) in that track, they had me laughing out loud in the car when I noticed them. "Horse Hunter" is just completely mayhem for the first 20s or so, how they do it I do not know. The final track is the biggest surprise… latin rhythms in metal? You bet. It shouldn’t work at all but oh my god it does. Possibly the best track on the album.

Get it. Listen to it loud. At least FIVE times before you make any judgement.

Thank you Ben Weinman and co.

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It is seriously rocking B-movie prog metal that once again showcases Devin’s distinctive sound and production. The guy is a genius and knows exactly how to press all the right "metal" buttons.

All the drums on the album are apparently programmed using some sample setup from Meshuggah. The drum patterns are insane in places, I shudder to think about the hours that must have been spent slaving over "grid edit" in his sequencer.

I was sad to read that he no longer plans to tour or record with Strapping Young Lad or the Devin Townsend Band… but family life always seemed to me rather incompatible with ROCK (that’s rock in captials man).

The highlight track for me is "Ziltoidia Attaxx!" which has to be the most bouncy and pounding not-taking-itself-seriously metal track ever. Other tracks are on the Ziltoid myspace.

Also for a few minutes of fun you can check out the Ziltoid transmissions on YouTube.

Most stupid rock lyric from a puppet in a metal song ever? "Aha! Surprise!"

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I’ve not spent much time in the past trying to work out why I have such eclectic music tastes. I love a few grind bands, a few metal bands, some hardcore, some classical, some contemporary, some progressive rock – but I seem to be very selective. Nu-metal or whatever they call the stop-start "let’s just make a grinding chugging tuneless riff" bands that are so prevalent these days in the metal scene are fine – but they don’t appeal to me. For 30 seconds I might think "ooh I like the sound of this" – but it is exactly that. The sound "feels" good. Interest is not sustained because the songwriting is not "out there" enough.

This is why I really like bands like Strapping Young Lad, Mastodon, Cephalic Carnage, Dillinger Escape Plan. Tons of energy, musicianship and … tunes. Remember those elusive things? That’s exactly why I just can’t sustain interest in the Meshuggah tracks that I’ve heard to date. I love their rhythmic complexity and the heavy sound, but I get so bored because there’s never a decent melody (that I’ve found) to occupy the melodic part of your brain. DEP for example have plenty of bluster and noise, but absolutely killer songwriting within. Heaviness and complexity with great melodic hooks is what separates the men from the boys, in my tastes at least. Pretty much anyone can sit down and write an aggressive and heavy-sounding song with a few chugging chromatic riffs.

Personally I do struggle with the sound at these "grind" gigs. Maybe its just my ears, but I am inevitably a bit disappointed as the mid-range of the guitars is typically lost out to bass rumble and the drum assault. On record its a lot better, but seeing a bunch of guys play such insane music while leaping around and generally having a great time is always invigorating.

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Tim Smith of Cardiacs produced some of their early material, and its great to see that Oceansize themselves are fans of Cardiacs… I did notice the lead vocalist doing Cardiacs “tiptoe bouncing” (when will Silvery be recorded?!) at one point.

Next day I immediately bought the album “Everyone Into Position” on iTunes and frankly it is brilliant. Really refreshing sound and with such truly epic songs. Ornament / The Last Wrongs has to qualify as an epic pop prog classic, if there were such an award. Annoyingly all online sources of it I can find, to attempt to back up this claim, are only 30s long and of just the intro which is very quite as it is merely the foothills of the mountainous 9 minute epic.

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Of course this is supposedly what DRM is meant to prevent, but while you can only hear 30s clips of tracks on iTunes Music Store (for example) you can’t use this to “sell” new music to your friends in the sense of getting them into the tracks so they might later purchase. Fans are the best salesmen for music, not record stores or radio.

What DRM needs is “viral” capabilities. If every iTunes purchased track allowed you to send it, complete with DRM, to anybody you like but they can only play it 3 times, then we have something much more powerful – especially if those people can also send it on to others with limited plays. Tricky to implement, that is true – I suppose the only way to achieve this is with some small communication with the server whenever it is played, so it can only be decrypted on demand, a certain number of times – and this might preclude copying such tracks to an iPod or similar device (until they too are connected to the internet).

Even though I think Apple’s DRM is pretty good and iTunes Music Store works well, as somebody who works closely with an established artist CARDIACS, it is painfully obvious to me that there is a long way to go before CDs are replaced with purely digital downloads in a way that is satisfactory to the artists and consumers. No matter that CD Jewel cases are perhaps the single worst invention hewn from plastic in the last 20 years.

Many people have covered this already, but the primary disappointment with iTunes Music Store so far is the lack of additional material that brings you closer to the artist:

• Extra art work (CD inner pages) and “liner notes”
• Lyrics
• Writing credits etc per song
• Band thank-yous

The silly thing is that this won’t be difficult to add to existing MP3 tagging mechanism. iTunes can even let you enter this data for your own tracks.

Having said this, adding such metadata in this form will not, I believe, be the right solution for the future. It relies too much on conventional CDs.

Why not just set a form factor (i.e. square) or slightly worse some standard dimensions (600×600 pixels) and have embedded browser in iTunes and similar players that refers to a URL associated with the track, and also a separate URL for the album itself.

This way artists can produce any web-based content any way they like (make it XHTML of course) to accompany their albums and tracks, and when playing a track you can browse a “page” specific to that track (which could be a whole micro site in itself) or browse to the album’s “cover” URL. What happens beyond there is up to the artist. This gives great flexibility in that for artists who want to break free of the album format and work on a basis of individual tracks or small collections of them, they can provide as much or as little content as they like, but can still have the option of linking them to a parent collection.

Linking from tracks to albums they are from is what is completely missing now – there is no data associated with an album apart from the album title. Embedding a URL to the album (rather than track) collateral in every track will solve this.

Albums won’t go away – artists like to produce works that sit alongside each other, and in a specific order. I think it very unlikely that all artists will be reduced to just trying to write “singles” in the future.

This kind of approach – especially if you just go for locking down the aspect ratio – means that applications can do nice and interesting things with the “artwork” and it leverages existing technologies, and only needs a couple of URLs in the metadata tags of files.

This approach can be implemented easily without changes to the existing MP3 tagging mechanisms. If the URL field is used to point to a snippet of XML that describes the collection of tracks, you can then include a bookmark reference into the URL that includes the track number/title/id… and the XML would then point the browser at the correct content to display for that individual (now playing) track.

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Anyway, I am now a little obsessed with Coheed and Cambria, especially their latest album “Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume 1: From Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness”. If ever there was a title to create intrigue… anyway they ply top quality pop rock prog and they are a spectacle to behold too, Claudio the frontman has plenty of unusual X factor.

At first play I found the record really disorientating, too much to take in, and wondered if I’d ever get to grips with it and be able to remember the hooks never mind the twists. Thankfully it only took another couple of listens and I had formed an addiction. I can now hear it for the pop that it is while appreciating the fancy bits. I listen to this record every day, usually several times, at the moment.

Just hop along to their web site to watch the cheesy video for “The Suffering” in the Media section, MySpace for some free tunes or iTunes Music Store. I bought the album from iTunes and to be frank, it was fantastic to have it in minutes to feed my newfound addiction.

The singles are by necessity lighter and more conventional than the album tracks – there’s lots of syncopation and twiddly bits on the album – but every track on the album is excellent in its own right… but it makes up part of a 4 or 5 album concept story. Who said prog rock is dead?

Ultimately this is an incredibly catchy album, really well produced – especially with all the backing vocals and harmonies – and it is a modern day classic I tell you. Really uplifting too – just don’t listen too close to the at times rather dark lyrics if you are faint-hearted!
Five things I didn’t expect to hear on this album:

• Claudio singing the notes of a guitar solo through a fuzz-box
• So many “wo wo wo”s, a pop staple!
• Use of hand claps – always welcome
• Lots of syncopated stuff and emphasis shifts
• Hammond (and other) organs

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Where to they get the audio streams from?!

Try it out for your self – www.pandora.com

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