ShareThis"NIGHT IS THE NEW DAY," Katatonia (Peaceville)
If Katatonia's "Night Is the New Day" is any indication, the apocalypse will be as beautiful as it is dark.
The Swedish band's eighth release packs the requisite metallic crunch and doom-obsessed lyrics of any standard end-times music, but the group layers in gorgeous textures and fetching melodies artfully airing out the mix into something as pretty as it is disquieting.
Although the two disparate tones are sometimes in a tug of war for attention, they usually overlap in a symbiotic relationship: Katatonia's prog-rock inclinations, indicated in polyrhythmic time signatures and spacious ambience, create a dignified canvas for the explosive guitars, which genuinely seem to weep (and wail) in the melancholy atmosphere.
Americans with no knowledge of the band might use Tool as a reference point of comparison, but with a caveat: Songwriter-vocalist Jonas Renske is not nearly as skillful a lyricist as the band is as musicians. Although his voice is fine, suitably somber if a bit cheesy, his lines are of the angst-high-school-outsider variety. "There is swirling dark shrouding my freedom," he complains on "New Night," while the lush elegance of "Idle Blood" is weighed down with observations such as, "Bringer of my despair, you are stagnation of hope and evil."
However, other bands are guiltier of cliches than Katatonia, and they don't offset their shortcomings with the kind of graceful, insinuating sounds as "Night Is the New Day."
As the group's audience is tenderly escorted to Katatonia's passive surrender to hopelessness, listeners might wish Renske would show more fight and more heft in the arrangements of sluggish late-album songs like "Nephilim" and "Inheritance."
Instead, the band merely goes gently into the "Night."
Rating (five possible): 3-1/2
"JACK AND COKE," Artie Lange (Shout! Factory)
It took Artie Lange long enough to release his first CD of his standup work, but the new "Jack and Coke" makes it hard to argue with the delay. If anything, it might inspire restraint in comics who too quickly turn out inferior releases built around only a few good minutes.
Lange's "Jack and Coke" is an embarrassment of riches spread out over a whopping 80 minutes. The 42-year-old New Jersey native brings extensive performance history and life experience to the stage at New York City's Gotham Comedy Club: He's been on TV (most notably "MADtv"), in films and a cast member on "The Howard Stern Show" since 2001. Also, he co-wrote his 2008 autobiography, "Too Fat to Fish," the title of which he attributes to an insult hurled at him by his mother. Lange also has had more than his share of troubles -- scandals, cocaine and heroin use, wild weight fluctuations -- which he mines for humor on "Jack and Coke" with lines like, "I'm the only guy who ever got fat on cocaine."
Lange's weathered enunciation and caustic observations come naturally, and even gently in a weird way, softening the blow of his vulgar commentary that seems less offensive than might be expected considering the crude sexual content plus bits that initially seem to be sexist, racist and anti-gay (although closer examination of the material shows it to be more blunt than inflammatory). He even works his way out of his opening line -- "I'm glad Heath Ledger died" -- by drolly explaining that Ledger was getting all the roles he wanted.
His drug-oriented humor stands out as the most honest. Lange says a recent trip to Las Vegas was "like a trip down memory lane. Last time I was in Vegas I went to my old coke dealer's kid's bar mitzvah." And his best advice for parents to give their boys: "If you give a hooker money to go and get cocaine, she will never come back with the cocaine."
Lange dwells a bit much on professional sports and athletes, which is perhaps too New York-centric (Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets) for most of America. But when the non-formulaic comic proclaims to the crowd, "You guys ain't at a Dane Cook show," it's easy to understand the responding swell of cheers.
Rating: 4
"KIDS AFLAME," ARMS (Gigantic)
If Todd Goldstein were a basketball player, he'd be a ball hog, the kind of guy who thinks he should do everything.
But he's a musician, a guitarist with the Brooklyn-based Harlem Shakes who has a side solo project called ARMS.
Goldstein's "skill position" is as a lyricist on ARMS' "Kids Aflame" (previously released overseas, newly released in America). His morbid, weird perspectives are often fascinating, or at least original. However, Goldstein's voice is mediocre, a thin instrument he employs with mixed results, and his abilities on guitar are muddied by the fact that he's an amateurish arranger.
Nevertheless, there are several highlights on "Kids Aflame." The song "Whirring" is reminiscent of freewheeling '80s guitar pop (delivered here as more of a demo than a polished final product), and the evocative "Fall" offers such vivid lines as, "Falling off of a sixth-floor window ledge/Broke my hip and the bones in both my legs." Meanwhile, the ukulele-driven title track sounds like a subverted Beach Boys song with its tale of children setting each other on fire, and "Sad, Sad, Sad" sounds like a subverted crooner standard with morose lines like, "Days alone are the days you dread the most."
Yet Goldstein frequently doesn't seem to know what he's doing musically, unless he really means to irritate with listless songs periodically blown apart by bracing cacophony. (And if that is his intention, then his self-indulgence would be a worse offense than accidental misfires.) Also, he often sounds bored as he purges his gloom, effectively transferring negativity from himself to his listeners.
Impressive as it is at times, "Kids Aflame" comes with too much baggage.
Rating: 3
(E-mail Chuck Campbell of The Knoxville News-Sentinel in Tennessee at Campbell(at)knews.com.)
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