Chris Anselmo, Singer for Anthrax

Scott Ian described new (or not so new...it's been going on 2 years at this point) Anthrax singer Dan Nelson as sounding like "Chris Cornell singing in Pantera" in an interview with The Quietus.  I'm not entire sure what to do with this information.  It might be because I can't get the image of Chris Cornell singing "Walk" - or its companion, Phil Anselmo singing "Outshined" - out of my head, but that image has pretty much broken my brain for the evening.  I mean, does Ian mean Badmotorfinger-era Cornell?  Or Down On The Upside-era?  Or crappy solo album-era?  Or something later?  I'm so confused...

More On Why We Love Trent Reznor...

...and as a side note, why Twitter is awesome: Trent's tweet on the new Cornell record:

You know that feeling you get when somebody embarrasses themselves so badly YOU feel uncomfortable? Heard Chris Cornell's record? Jesus.

Amen, brother. Amen.

The NINJA Tour and Tom Morello's Missing Credit

In a case of fun coincidence, I was listening to Audioslave's first album this morning and wondering whether or not last year's Rage Against the Machine reunion tour had produced any new material, and now I see that Tom Morello's new band has joined the NIN/Jane's Addiction tour as an opener.

Speaking of Audioslave, though: notice what band isn't listed in Morello's credits? Makes you wonder if the omission was accidental, or if Morello has written off that entire period of his life as a big mistake that only helped move Chris Cornell one step further down the road to legacy destruction.

Chris Cornell: Killing His Legacy, One Recording at a Time

I hate to say it, but it might be time for Chris Cornell to call it quits. Doing a lackluster singing job on a live version one of his classic recordings is bad enough, but doing it with Linkin Park - and having Chester Bennington and his flat-featured power whine stand in for Eddie Vedder - is the musical equivalent of ripping up the manuscript of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book you wrote fifteen years ago and using the pages to wipe your dingleberry-covered asshole. And then trying to sell it on eBay afterwards.

Years from now, we'll list Cornell's sellout as a giant amongst the great attempts, putting the hit-seeking ways of Metallica and Dave Mustaine to shame. Ass.

Fuck it, I'm not even sure I'd want to see a Soundgarden review now.

When New Knowledge Comes...

When I was in college, I did my best to form bands. It was not a particularly successful exercise, for a multitude of reasons - the college's lack of practice spaces, the limited number of musicians who were neither jam-band loving hippies or too-cool-for-rock jazz freaks, the flakiness of those I did meeting, my (in retrospect) inability to play either guitar or sing particularly well - but it did prove instructive, and contributed to my eventually moving to New York. The reason I bring this up: one of my more successful attempts at band forming occurred when I was sophomore, and met a drummer named Eric.

Eric was perfect for what I was looking for: he was an excellent drummer, liked similar music, and had a kit in his dorm room, which he'd somehow been able to play without causing firestorms on the other sides of the thin dorm walls. We met early in the Fall 2000 semester - which might explain his drumming in the dorm success - and I brought my stuff over to his room, where we jammed and we talked. This happened to be not long after I had seen Pearl Jam for the first time, and I was high on the band and all of their albums for the first time in four or five years. Eric happened to have gone to a show on the same tour, but his reasons for going had entirely to do with Matt Cameron, the ex-Soundgarden drummer who'd joined Pearl Jam for Binaural. Eric thought Cameron was one of God's gifts to drumming, and he'd gone to the show - even though he didn't particularly like Pearl Jam - just to see him live.

Ever since that day, I've listened a little closer to the drumming Matt did on Soundgarden's albums, and sometimes I dig far enough down through Chris Cornell's magnetic voice and mind-bending lyrics, through Kim Thayil's discordant power riffing, to get a sense of the deeper layers that make those songs really work. This morning, Badmotorfinger came on my iPod, and I got that sense again, diving through the sounds of "Jesus Christ Pose," prying apart the surface and diving to the chugging of Ben Shepard's bass, playing the same main riff through so much of the song, staying steady and true whether Kim joins him, plays a bridge, or just freaks out. Realizing in the process that Soundgarden was so good on Badmotorfinger and Superunknown that they could have the bass player keeping time and the songs still flow so well that you don't know that Matt's playing some mishmash of polyrhythms unless you listen for it. The 1 is in there somewhere, but Matt'll never tell you where - you just have to feel for it. And when you do feel it, and you know you're feeling it, you feel really good.

WWIII, or How I Learned to Practice Safe Rock

As I'm pretty sure I've admitted on these pages in the past - yup, there it is - I've been listening to my mp3/AAC collection chronologically. Because I have a 20 gig iPod and far more than 20 gigs of music in my collection (damn, when did that happen?), I've broken things up by decade - right now I'm on the 2000s. This morning's first selection on the way to work was the title track from KMFDM's WWIII, a song that always blows me away with its sheer power; it's the sonic equivalent of getting punched in the gut, then getting angry about it. Every time I hear "WWIII," though, I think about the last time I saw KMFDM live.

Boston, November 1, 2003. I had just returned to the city, caravan style, from Middlebury, VT after a journey of almost epic proportions: driving up to Woodstock from Boston on Friday to spend Halloween with my buddy Steve, going with him over the border to New Hampshire (Hanover, I believe) for a costume contest that we lost for reasons that still boggle the mind, driving back to Woodstock in disgust, then deciding to drive up to Middlebury in the middle of the night to visit friends at Middlebury College with the express intent of drinking heavily and running a radio show at 3 AM. All four hours I spent sleeping that night were on a floor, so it was probably a miracle I made it back to Boston, but made it back I had and - pounding, sleep-deprived headache aside - it was time to rock.

That night was one of the few concerts where I've viscerally regretted not bringing earplugs. Intellectually, I know I'm doing irreparable damage to my ears every time I go to a concert and don't (as Chris Cornell once put it) practice safe rock, but this particular show burned the message into my consciousness with the fury and precision of six-inch tall letters of fire burned into the inside of my skull.

After the opening band cleared the stage, I made my way to what turned out to be the acoustic centerpoint of the club, watched KMFDM take their positions, heard the countrified opening of "WWIII"...then felt my skull compress and my jaw drop as the machine-gunned guitar and heavy, thumping bassline crushed my eardrums into oblivion with volume I could not have thought possible, while the lighting rig went into an epileptic strobe, dazzling me with the sort of shock and awe then popular in Iraq. It was the beginning of the most physically possessing concert I've ever been to, one where the waves of sound were such a physical presence they felt tangible - something I've never encountered since. It also left a ringing in my ears that lasted for enough days afterwards I thought I was slowly going deaf, like Beethoven but without the composing ability. 'Point taken,' I thought afterwards, when my hearing returned to normal. 'Ear plugs from now on.'