Tiny Music...Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop (Stone Temple Pilots, 1996)

We've finally put enough distance between the early 1990's and the present day to have an understanding of the rise and fall of grunge, which catapulted the oddly-named "alternative" genre awkwardly into the mainstream, leading people to wonder what exactly this kind of music was an alternative to. Most of what we know as "nineties" music in the United States is actually post-grunge, bands that borrowed the sounds and styles of the grunge bands but without the self-destructive angst that killed off most of those bands. Among the "big five" bands, only one, Pearl Jam, is still intact and has never experienced a disruption. Nirvana, of course, died permanently with Kurt Cobain. Soundgarden and the Smashing Pumpkins was broken apart by and rebuilt around (respectively) one band member's force of personality. And then you have the Stone Temple Pilots, a band with an incredibly tortured history.

Although not from Seattle, STP were careful students of what was going on up in Seattle. In fact, their first album, Core, was derided by many as a Pearl Jam knockoff. At the same time, they could also drill in some Nirvana-level angst. Their second album, Purple, was a little more tightly arranged, with plenty of hits, and still kept much of the Eddie Vedder-style singing, sludgy guitars, and big beats so trademark of grunge. All seemed to be going well, but album #3, Tiny Music, would mark the end of the band's stability, both in terms of sound and cohesiveness.

The most striking thing about Tiny Music is how different it is from the previous albums. The Vedder vocals have been totally ditched and mood changed to a more retro-psych sound. Some of the musical elements of the old albums are there, but turned inside-out, upside-down, or what have you. The initial track, "Press Play" is a keyboard driven instrumental that makes the listener wonder if the hidden track "My Second Album" from Purple was actually heralding the new direction of the band. Thankfully, no, as the trio of songs to follow are characteristic of the new heavy retro-psych sound they are trying out. "Lady Picture Show" is the first song to emerge from the muddy sound of the previous tracks, but still sports a hazy feel. "And So I Know" shows off the new slow song style, which dumps the lo-fi approach from before for a slicker samba style. The next couple try to channel Nirvana with weird repeating angry-sound choruses and some lo-fi breaks, yet throwing in some funky fast playing not characteristic of that band. "Adhesive" is a slog of a track, mostly remarkable for having a little bit of trumpet, an instrument that a strangely large number of bands would later sneak into their music as well. Except for the instrumental "Daisy", the last tracks sort of hearken back to the old days of the band, unmistakably grungy, but with Scott Weiland continuing to so sing in his more Beatles-ish voice.

All in all Tiny Music just isn't that great an album. It suffers from a lot of uninspired tracks, and, if I may be permitted to go out on a limb a bit, it was probably due to the drugs. Heroin ravaged the 1990's music scene like no other, and it was finally catching up with STP. On one hand, it's admirable that the band seems to be pivoting away from grunge at a time with the genre was on the skids, but on the other it feels like the decision was made more out of boredom and aimlessness than trying to make any careful study of which way the musical winds were blowing.

As mentioned before, STP never regained its footing following the disasters that would follow Tiny Music, first with Weiland's drug problems spiraling out of control, followed by a creative split that resulted in a Weiland solo album while the rest of the band carried on as Talk Show with a new singer. The sum of these projects nowhere reached the old days of STP, which might have been what brought them back together again. Around decade's end they reunited for two albums and a greatest hits package, but the old problems resurfaced and another split ensued. This time the results were the modestly successful Velvet Revolver (Weiland) and the not-so-hot Army of Anyone (the DeLeo brothers with the guy from Filter). As the anniversary of Core approached, the band reunited yet again, this time yielding one more album before everything imploded and after years of threats Scott Weiland was fired from the band once and for all. Although all of these misadventures make for some powerfully interesting reading, I haven't listened to anything released by the band since Tiny Music, with the exception of "Sour Girl" from the fourth album, which is possibly their last truly memorable song.

Five Chiefs (John Paul Stevens, 2011)

With Five Chiefs, I've completed yet another chronological sweep of American history. I will cap it off with a book of counterfactuals, then a general book, then finally back to the beginning.

Justice Stevens's book is a little different than most of the titles read during this aforementioned "sweep", being more personally focused than an objective history monograph. The reader really cannot be blamed for thinking they are getting a biographical sketch of the last five Chief Justices of the Supreme Court (Vinson, Warren, Burger, Rehnquist, and Roberts), given the title. However, the book is far more reflective of Stevens's time spend in the vicinity or on the Court. He explores cases I have never heard of that made a big impact on him, leaving the big marquee decisions like Bush v. Gore for others to discuss. Some matter of minutiae are interesting, like the placement of the table during deliberations, and probably would not be examined anywhere else. He doesn't pull his punches when it come to decisions he disagreed with or his feelings about some of his colleagues. It is the kind of honesty you typically only see among the retired. Thankfully, Stevens sees the value in enjoying the last years of life in relaxing retirement and reflection, not keeling over at his desk like Chief Rehnquist, so we can hear Supreme Court stories with a bit of colorful perspective.

Roman Games (Bruce Macbain, 2010)

Among the various Roman detective series I'm been sampling, I didn't have very high expectations for Bruce Macbain's Pliny the Younger mysteries. It's on a smaller press (Poisoned Pen) and has the lowest ratings of any of the series among Goodreads members. Add to that my reluctance to have an actual historical figure holding down the primary detective role, and you can understand my reluctance going into Roman Games.

Happily, I came out the other side pleasantly surprised. Working in the book's favor is the setting (Rome, rather than the disproportionately represented Britain) and an unusual time period (the final days of Emperor Domitian's reign). While Macbain does bend the rules a bit (e.g. making it less historical and more fiction) it isn't too awful and he's upfront in the afterword, no pun intended, about the changes.

As far as being a mystery, it's a good one. It kept me guessing (incorrectly) right up to the very end. I daresay I had enough fun reading it that the anachronisms didn't have time to crawl under my skin. Now somebody phone up Conn Iggulden and give him some $%$%ing lessons on how to write decent historical fiction!

Catholicism (Robert Barron, 2011)

I've been good about reading this year, but not quite so with the book blogging, so a little catch-up is in order here.

Fr. Robert Barron's Catholicism is the companion book to the 10-disc documentary series. It's a fairly popular item here at the seminary as it ties into the New Evangelization, a movement designed to recover and retain Catholics in the faith, as opposed to the classic evangelization, which targets converting others outside Catholicism and Christianity. The data is pretty staggering, in that with the exception of Jehovah's Witnesses, no other Christian denomination is as likely to lose adherents born into that denomination than Catholicism.

With all of these realities in mind, Fr. Barron's book is definitely not a "get in the Church or go to hell" type of book, as he (correctly) understands that threats only serve to hasten the exodus from the Church rather than reverse it. So this book gives cradle Catholics, who may have wandered a great distance away through their lives, a warm invitation back into the Church.

Not being Catholic myself, I appreciated it on another level. Sometimes among Protestants there is a sense that Catholicism is bizarre and ritual-obsessed. In all fairness, as an Episcopalian, I tend to like my ritual and liturgy, and have always known that the Anglican Communion isn't that far removed from Rome. Therefore, I enjoyed reading about the things that make us so similar, but also learning about why certain things are done in a certain way and what makes Catholicism unique. While the Church isn't my church, it is my employer. While I wasn't moved at all to break ranks with my denomination*, the book did give me hope that one day there may be reconciliation and no need for me to live in two different (albeit very similar) worlds.

* - Nor should anyone read into Fr. Barron's work any attempt to convert non-Catholics, though if one was so moved by his writings I'm sure he wouldn't discourage them. In my particular circumstances, any kind of abrupt conversion would be deeply traumatic to my parish community and family, therefore ill-advised unless I was overtly unhappy in my own church for some reason, which I'm not. Therefore, it is best to stay right where I am, maintaining a healthy respect for Catholicism as a non-Catholic.

Reload (Metallica, 1997)

Apparently February, by virtue of random selection, in metal month. As with last week's focus on Megadeth, I've had a strong love-hate relationship with Metallica for most of my life. I was just getting into them around the time of their blockbuster self-titled album (a.k.a. the "Black Album"), but was listening to the earlier albums, mostly Master of Puppets. So when I finally got a taste of stuff like "Enter Sandman", it sounded just a bit disingenuous, trading aggression (musically and lyrically) for slicker production and a wider audience. Obvious my opinions didn't give the band any regrets about getting more commercial, as the album became and remains their bestselling album, as well as one of the bestselling albums of all time, a Dark Side of the Moon for the 1990's.

Any hope that Metallica would revert back to their old sound was shattered after the five year hiatus (in recording, NOT touring), with the release of Load. It was clear that fame and the 1990's in general had softened the band's sound and image considerably. For some reason, the band seems to like to "justify" the insanely long periods of time between albums by maxing out the running time of a single CD, as if to demonstrate that they actually were quite busy recording between albums. However, this usually just results in listeners never actually making it to the end of the album out of sheer fatigue. If you have Reload in your iTunes (or other comparable program) library, I bet you have more spins on "Fuel" than "Fixxxer".

I get ahead of myself, however. Since Metallica was unable to invent a disc that could hold more than 80 minutes of music, and unwilling to release a double album or do "twin albums" (think Use Your Illusion) they ended up releasing their seventh album just a year after the sixth, with the lightly-twinned title Reload. Not surprisingly it sounds a lot like Load, and if you played a random track from one or the other I probably wouldn't be able to confidently tell you which album it belongs on. However, as my two least favorite Metallica albums, I've rarely given either very close listens. Neither album is the work of a band hungry for success; they are the product of super-rich guys who decided to stop giving a crap about what people thought of them. Lars went going bald, James went going redneck, Kirk put on makeup, and Jason, well visibility was never his strong suit. The iconic covers of their 1980's albums were replaced with the kind of abstractions you see on the walls of the offices of corporate America.

So what can I say about Reload? It's a comfortable album, by Metallica standards. Even a past-paced number like the opener, "Fuel", doesn't particularly sizzle like a "Hit the Lights" or "Blackened". The band was very much under the spell of their producer, Bob Rock, notorious for pumping them full of questionable recording approaches. Guitar solos, which were the main attraction of early Metallica, are present but largely subjugated to the vocals. To help improve their image as a "mature" band in the eyes of the critics, guests like Marianne Faithfull ("The Memory Remains") and a hurdy-gurdy ("Low Man's Lyric") helped to distance the band from their speed-metal roots. The "metal" in the band's name, in spite of some "chunky" sections on the album, was beginning to feel more like aluminium than steel. Aside from some of the non-album stuff that followed Reload, this is about as lightweight as the band would get. While none of the stuff here is anything a regular rock band would be ashamed to record and release, it all feels very disingenuous for a band that perfected the art of metal and developed its fanbase of millions by 1986.

Thankfully the trajectory would change, brought on by a massive and very publicly displayed mid-life crisis in the band's history. Metallica would go on to fire Kirk Hammett and hire a steel drummer to back up Lars Ulrich for the next album, St. Anger. Of course I am joking, but I need to save my dissertation on St. Anger for the day that album turns up as the Random Selection of the Week.

Symphony of Destruction (Megadeth, 1992)

A friend of mine, circa 1992, told me Megadeth has officially "sold out" and that I should avoid their new album Countdown to Extinction at all costs. However, he did like the song "Go To Hell", featured on the Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey soundtrack but not on the album. Having no free thought of my own at this point, plus being cheap, I ended up throwing for this EP, rocking all of three songs: the "radio version" of Countdown's big hit, "Symphony of Destruction"; the oddball B-side "Breakpoint"; and the infamous "Go To Hell".

Later in life, I've encountered people that feel quite the opposite about the album in question, hailing it as their high point. Certainly success (and stability) were a long time coming for Megadeth. Initially born as a hybrid project of Metallica and Slayer, frontman Dave Mustaine cycled through a hefty amount of personnel through the band's first three albums. Hardly the epitome of clean living, Mustaine chose eclectic sidemen that were arguably even less stable than he was. By the time drummer Nick Menza and guitarist Marty Friedman had joined in 1990, at least ten others could lay claim to being members of the band at one point or another in the previous five years. Thanks to a newly-sober Mustaine and profession bandmates, Rust In Peace was a resounding success, and Countdown to Extinction, remarkably, sported the same lineup, which would troop on through 1994's Youthanasia before beginning a slow unraveling.

1992 was a challenging year to be metal. Two bands, Guns N Roses and Metallica, had effectively brought the house down on all the different veins of eighties metal from speed/thrash to glam with huge releases in 1991, while the grunge movement was starting to pulsate out of Seattle and usher in the 1990's for real. Just the previous year, it seemed like Megadeth had produced one of the purest speed metal albums of all time in Rust In Peace, and, in the wake of Metallica's more commercial drift, was becoming the standard-bearer for "real" speed metal. All eyes were on what they would do next, in response to their thrash metal peers.

In hindsight, knowing that far "tamer" albums like Cryptic Writings and Risk were yet to come, Countdown wasn't the end of the world. It would be difficult to deny that Mustaine was making a careful study of what was working for his old band and what he could offer as an alternative. This resulted in an album with a vastly scaled back speed metal sound, but retained the classic heavy metal image in cover art, band appearance, and so forth. The three songs of this EP follow in suit with their companion album. The musicianship is exceptional, but it is clear that the band is actively avoiding the old "thrash" sound that reigned over the first four albums, in favor of heavy riffs and centrality of lyrics and songwriting. It's no surprise that the new technique probably earned the band more new fans than they lost, mainly because the old fans were finding nowhere to turn, with bands like Metallica and Anthrax wandering even further away.

As noted elsewhere, most of these bands would experience some kind of epiphany and bring back their old sound to some degree. Some of them because they were losing their fan base altogether (Anthrax) and others because they showing off their mid-life crises in the studio (Metallica). While these aha moments were typically very conscious acts, facilitated by new producers, it seemed like Megadeth largely lurched around from one side to the other in the years following Youthanasia. That album was continued move toward more "song" style Megadeth, a trend that peaked with Risk in 1999. Maybe it had to do with the Republicans retaking the White House, but the next album, on a new label, unleashed some fire not seen since the Rust In Peace days, yet it was largely sandwiched inside the more comfortable style. What would have followed remained a question mark for some time. While Mustaine's arm injury was the official cause of the "breakup" in 2002, it was also the end of a band that had, by later accounts, become dysfunctional to the point of inoperability. Mustaine reformed the band with all-new personnel in 2004, ratcheting up the speed-metal sound with each release, though the sing-songy style still sneaked in throughout. I gave up on the band after United Abominations, as it seemed like conspiracy-theory Dave Mustaine was overtaking the music, and I heard the last album, Super Collider, was described as yet another move away from speed metal. I'm spending my time addressing the holes in my collection of the earlier material, which feels like a better use of my time. One thing I will concede to Mustaine, Ellefson, and Co. - they don't let too much time elapse between releases. With fourteen studios albums to their name, they are one of the most productive bands around, and that is certainly noteworthy.

At Fillmore East (The Allman Brothers Band, 1971)

Like capturing lightning in a bottle, the Fillmore East shows presented a band as the absolute height of their creative powers, before death and discord would bring them back down to earth. Thanks to success of early hits like "Whipping Post" and "Dreams" from their debut album, they recruited top talent, most notably producer-extraordinaire Tom Dowd, to craft their second album, Idlewild South, the next year. These two albums, combined with a hearty clutch of well-rehearsed and re-interpreted classic covers, provided the groundwork for their impressive 1971 live performances. Although the Allman Brothers Band would enjoy two strong selling albums in the wake of this release, creatively they were at their zenith at this early point in their career.

Some hail this as the best live album ever recorded. I think it depends on your definition of great live music. For me the Allman Brothers live have fallen somewhere between the Grateful Dead (yawn) and Deep Purple (white knuckles) on the live music spectrum. All three were notorious for going way off script, no doubt, with live versions of three-to-five minutes songs exploding out to more than twenty or even thirty minutes. Where the differences become apparent is in the process: to "jam" as a band, like the Grateful Dead, or take solos and demonstrate exceptional instrumental prowess, as was Purple's calling card. Having given Fillmore East a few spins this week, it's pretty clear the Allmans liked to jam, but there is clearly more instrumental fire than their colleagues in the Dead. So, naturally, as the Purple partisan that I am, I like this album far more than Two From the Vault, but not nearly as much as Made In Japan. For example, "You Don't Love Me" follows a fairly well defined structure with solos, while "Mountain Jam" is more of a band effort (across 33 minutes, no less), and the live "Whipping Post" falls somewhere between the two.

At Fillmore East has a complicated release history. The original problem was there was more material than a two-disc vinyl album could hold, so three songs that probably should have been here all along ("One Way Out", "Mountain Jam", and "Trouble No More" were kicked over to the double-LP live/studio hybrid album Eat a Peach. Those songs were later restored to renamed re-release, The Fillmore Concerts along with "Drunken Hearted Boy" and "Don't Keep Me Wonderin'", but also kept on Peach to maintain the original flavor of that album. Since "Mountain Jam" was too long to fit on a single side, it was re-stitched together in the CD era, and, yay, now I've got two identical versions hogging over 66 minutes of real estate in my music library. Anyway, a "deluxe" version of Fillmore took all of the original and added tracks, re-ordered them, and then added "Midnight Rider" to create what today passes as the "official" version of the album. Confused yet? Not to be outdone, a six-disc package containing all of the Fillmore shows was released, to the delight of those desiring four versions of just about every song.

The Allmans' relationship with Southern rock in general was somewhat unusual. Although they share a great deal of imagery with their Southern peers, sonically they come across a bit more progressive. There isn't a lot of "redneck" pride like you would hear on a Lynyrd Skynyrd album, something that probably started to work against them by mid-decade as tastes veered away from from long-form interpretive live performances. I listened to the 1973 Cow Palace show the other day and it was clear that the Grateful Dead were increasingly influencing them, turning "Whipping Post" into a 25 minute noodling snorefest nicknamed "Tripping Post". By 1975's Win, Lose or Draw, it was abundantly clear the cracks were all over the band, marred by two deaths and internal feuding among the band members, probably exacerbated by rampant drug use, an unfortunate "fringe benefit" of unstable touring partners like the aforementioned Grateful Dead. Like most people, I have little to no interest in the 1980's reformation of the band following the hiatus after that album.