alternative rock

Part 154: Cassettes Part IV – LeBrain’s Tapes (What Remains)

RECORD STORE TALES Part 154:  

Cassettes Part IV – LeBrain’s Tapes (What Remains)

I used to have a lot of tapes.  So many, that T-Rev converted my closet doors to shelving, just to store my numerous cassettes!  It was quite a feat of engineering on his part.

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If you’ve read the other three parts of this series on cassettes, then you’ve already seen some of the awesome artwork that T-Rev used to come up with for his tapes.  Doing those articles got me nostalgic, but very few of my own tapes remained.  A year or two before I met Mrs. LeBrain, I briefly dated this one girl who was getting into hair metal.  I had succeeded in replacing most of my tapes on CD (although still incomplete; I need a copy of Live Fast, Die Fast by Wolfsbane, and Phenomenon 1).  All my tapes were redundant, and I gave her boxes and boxes full of them.

God knows where those tapes are now.  I doubt she took them back home to Thunder Bay when it was all over, they probably ended up in a landfill.  No big loss really, the only shame of it is that, like T-Rev, I used to make a lot of my own custom artwork.

Mrs. LeBrain and I were visiting her mom yesterday, and I found some of my old Beatles tapes that I had made, at her place!  Her dad drove a delivery van with nothing but a tape deck inside.  He was more than happy to receive my old Beatles tapes, and he loved them.  And there they were, still at the house, complete with my computer generated J-cards.  Nothing elaborate, although I did paste the cover for Abbey Road onto that tape.

This inspired me to dig through some boxes here, and see if I had any of my own tapes left.  Surely there must be something here, with some of my own custom cover art!  There was just a handful left, stuff that I wouldn’t have parted with at the time, and lo and behold, there was my old artwork.  These sure brought back memories!

Back in the early record store days, cassette was my primary medium.  They were portable, you could leave them in the car and not worry about them getting banged up, so I recorded everything onto cassette.  It wasn’t until I had left the record store in 2006 that I got my first car with a CD deck.  Before then, I had one of those adapter kits to play a discman in the car, but it sounded shite.  I was glad to find the following treasures tucked away in a box!

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Ahh, Spinal Tap.  A Spinal Tap Reunion was recorded from a 1992 TV special.  Unavailable on DVD today, as far as I know.  That’s a shame.

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I bought Grande Rock by The Hellacopters on vinyl, to get that bonus track “Angel Dust”.  Or, more accurately, one of my record store compatriots got it for me at Orange Monkey Music in Waterloo.  I dutifully recorded it to cassette without making elaborate packaging, but I did put some effort into the cassette spine.

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You Fat Bastards by Faith No More was the full show that was released on CD in truncated form on the Live at the Brixton Academy CD.  This was from a VHS release.

Guns N’ Roses did a couple cool TV specials.  I recorded Live at the Ritz off T-Rev, who stuck on some demos for bonus tracks.  The cover was made by adapting an old Appetite For Destruction J-card.  I think this turned out pretty cool.  Invade Paris! was a TV special from 1992.

These two Maiden tapes were from VHS releases.  It’s a shame that Raising Hell was never released on a CD.  Here’s hoping the band will put that out on a future box set.  It was Bruce’s “final” show.  I just edited out the crap sections with “magician” Simon Drake.   Maiden England is also taken from VHS, but this is the full show.  The CD release omitted two songs:  “Can I Play With Madness”, and “Hallowed Be Thy Name”.  My cassette didn’t!  I thought my J-card for Maiden England turned out pretty cool, using an old Seventh Son cover as its basis.

Unfortunately, this is all that remains of my old cassette art.  I did some much more elaborate things, which Thunder Bay Girl probably tossed out.  One was for Savatage’s Dead Winter Dead.  When I recorded that one to cassette, I actually painted the gargoyle onto a J-card.  Wish I kept that one.  Rush’s Test For Echo may have been the most elaborate one I’ve done.  Using some old cardboard and a full-page ad for the album, I created my own digipack for that cassette.  It would be nice to still have.  Ahh well.

It seems funny, in today’s age of mp3 files and players, that a format as crappy as cassette was anyone’s main format.  But there you go.  Before I could play CD’s in the car, they were the best way to bring music with me.  I’ve always believed a music collection was for showing off as much as listening to, plus I enjoyed making the artwork.  I’m glad some still survives today!

REVIEW: Foo Fighters – Wasting Light (2011 CD, iTunes edition)

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FOO FIGHTERS – Wasting Light (2011 Roswell Records)

The much anticipated new Foo Fighters album was a big deal to us fans — for the first time, a five-man lineup, three guitar players, and the return of Pat Smear. In other words this album has the same lineup as the glorious Colour and the Shape era of the band, plus Chris Shifflet. Add on expert production by Butch Vig, mixing by Alan Moulder. It sounds glorious! What it lacks in the diversity from the previous two albums, it makes up with the sheer youthful energy from the first two.

Wasting Light hits you right away with the one-two punch of “Bridge Burning” and “Rope”, fast jagged hard rock songs with riffs and Grohl screams. Not totally immediate, but they set the stage for some of the best tunage the Foos have ever laid to wax.

The dark and powerful “Dear Rosemary” is the first bonafide classic on this album, and you can definitely hear the benefit of the three guitars as rhythm & catchy licks merge into one moving whole.  “Dear Rosemary”, features Bob Mould (Husker Du) sharing lead vocal duties.  What an incredible song.  It was a bit of genius inspiration, working with Mould on it.  The result is an instant classic, one of the best Foo tunes in the canon.  (A Foo-Du tune?)

“White Limo” starts with a brutally heavy metal riff, something that harkens back to Voivod, with Grohl doing his best distorted metal screams overtop. This is primo thrash metal, a total surprise for me. I always knew Grohl was a metalhead, but I didn’t expect anything this overtly metal to appear on a Foo Fighters album. But it’s a welcome change, and my current favourite song for pure adrenaline pumping energy.

“Arlandria” starts slower, but builds to a melodic, dramatic chorus with crashing chords and cymbals. By this time the album has begun to take shape: It has melody but the foundation is the guitar riffage. “These Days” is a total change of pace, a much softer song, but still propelled forward by the beats of Taylor Hawkins, and of course the guitars still crash come chorus time.

“Back and Forth” has a pretty crummy snare drum sound, but Nate Mendel’s bass rings clear and true underneath. It takes a while to get going, but the chorus is still solid. “A Matter of Time” is the weakest song so far, an awkward, jagged non-standout rocker.

“Miss the Misery” is a return to form, starting with a brief “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” drone before settling into an i irresistible set of melodies, punctuated by catchy guitar licks buzzing in and out of the mix. Again, you can hear where three guitar players is coming in handy, as there is a lot going on here guitar-wise. Fee Waybill on guest vocals! Next, Nirvana fans will be excited by an appearance by Krist Novoselic on “I Should Have Known”. Including Pat Smear, this is a reunion of the three surviving members of the final Nirvana lineup, a little mini-historic event in the annals of rock. It is a slow mournful song, with Grohl’s voice back in the mix, singing “I cannot forgive you yet”. It is a beautiful song, and a welcome change of pace. Novoselic’s bass, when it kicks in about halfway, just rumbles. It ends as dramatically as anything else on the album.

The standard edition of the album closes with a song called “Walk”. This is a brighter song, guitars chiming and ringing, and exactly the way an album like this needs to end. But suddenly the pace picks up, and the guitars cascade like the greatest Foo songs of old. This one reminds me, for a number of reasons including riffs, melody and pacing, of “New Way Home”, the awesome closer from Colour and the Shape.

The Foos have created another fine album, not an easy thing to do when you have albums like Colour and the Shape and In Your Honor under your collective belts. They certainly have lost nothing to age, and they have not exhausted their energies. I also think that, after two very diverse albums, it was exactly the right move to return to a predominantly rock direction for this album. It re-grounds the bands back to their roots.

It’s not over yet though, as the iTunes and Japanese editions of the album have bonus tracks. iTunes have an absolutely useless remix of “Rope” by Deadmau5. I guess people who like this kind of music will appreciate it, but it has no place on an album like this. It is monotonous and boring, a waste of five minutes of my time. Much more appropriate is another song called “Better Off”. “Better Off” is almost Beatles-y in melody, but with heavy layered guitars pummeling your ears. I love the lyrics as well — “You know you’re better off, you bastard!”

Wasting Light has been a great and pleasant surprise to me. I wasn’t sure what direction the Foo Fighters were going to take with this record, but I’m pleased that they took a step back to guitar-based basics, yet still retained all the lessons they learned about melody, songwriting and arranging.

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BONUS! Just to do something special and unique, and to make a point about recording this album straight to analog tape (no computers!), Dave Grohl has sliced up his original master tape for Wasting Light, and included a piece inside the first run of the CD. Cool, man.  Worth hunting down a first pressing for, if you care about such things!

5/5 stars!