Show: The Haunted/Dark Tranquillity

Venue: The Slim's, San Francisco

This was the first metal show I went to since 2001 (the last one was Pantera's Reinventing the Steel tour, with Morbid Angel and Static-X as supporting acts)

To be honest, I'm not familiar with these 2 bands at all. I learned about them from my new bandmates and we're covering their songs.

Dark Tanquillity is one of the best representatives of the "Gothenburg sound", i.e., the melodic death metal from Scandinavia. Their music striked the right balance between power and complexity, which was showcased perfectly in this show. What interested me the most was the vocalist looked and sounded very polite, which I totally didn't expect listening to his vocal. He kept asking if the crowd would mind hearing songs from their new albums. Of course I didn't mind since the new songs were pretty good. Another interesting thing was he joked about whoever have listened to those songs prior to the show gotta be pirate. However, he didn't show strong objection at all. I guess it's because Sweden is one of the more liberal place as far as P2P is concerned. Also, the band makes most money from touring. P2P is more of a problem for the record company.

Finally, a few words about the headliner, The Haunted: I didn't have too high an expectation about them since some of their songs I listened before sound kinda pop-ish or "soft" (more clean vocal, more metalcore-like than melo. death) And they indeed played a few "soft" ones at the show. However, the rest are better than I expected. The vocalist, Peter Dolving, shared some of his strong feelings against right-wing Christian and wars during the show. Check out his blog.

Album: This Is Metal's Most Covered Moments Of The '80s

Artist: Testament & Jake E. Lee
Track: Seek And Destroy (Rhapsody Link)

As I huge fan of Testament, I tend to think that I've heard of every song they played, but obviously not this one, which I discovered today! There are 3 reasons for me to like this song:
1) It's by Testament!
2) It's from the early days of Metallica, which did not suck (yet)
3) Jake E. Lee played guitar on this. He was Ozzy Osbourne's former guitarist. Typical 80's guitar hero style!


Artist: Ratt, Gilby Clarke and L.A. Guns
Track: Sweet Child O' Mine (Rhapsody Link)

This is another interesting track, with former members of Guns N' Roses covering GNR's most famous song.

Opinion: Can I find music I like on radio anymore?

Inspired by the story about WBEZ dropping jazz, I'm curious if I could still find music I like on air anymore. Turns out it is not that bad here in SF Bay Area.

On FM 90.5 KSJS, down in San Jose, there is a metal show "The Splatter Platter", from Tuesdays 10am-2pm. Check out its playlist. Very heavy stuff.

And FM 91.5 KKUP plays some blues and jazz. (Interesting story: a friend's friend played on this station during the blues marathon and that's how I knew about the station. The other day I was looking for it again but forgot the frequency and accidentally tuned into the above metal show on 90.5!)

And finally, in search of the great and probably non-existent jazz podcast that's supposed to displace jazz radio all over the country, I found Redjazz. The interesting thing is that it is broadcasted over the air on AM 1550 KYCY, the so-called "Open Source Radio."

As good as it is, there's no way it could replace the 24/7 jazz offerred by the local radio station KCSM. Here is the deal: if you could find me a daily podcast with 2 solid hours of jazz and classical music, I'll stop argue with you that jazz and classical are hogging public radio and should be taken off air.

Service: Jazz Radio on WBEZ

From this article:
"A Station Research Group multiyear study from 1999 through 2004 showed that of public radio's primary formats, jazz stations had the lowest average loyalty and lowest average time spent listening. The same study showed that the most dramatic audience growth came from all-news stations."

So, Chicago's radio station WBEZ replacing jazz programming by news seems like a very logical choice. It's sad news to jazz lover like myself though.

The same article also mentioned that iPod's popularity is another contributing factor to this decision, i.e., people'd rather listen to jazz on their own iPod than to radio. I'm not too sure about this one though. I recall there's something hugely popular before iPod and it's called Walkman.

[Update: apparently a lot of people care and discussed this topic]

Podcast: The Roadhouse

The name of this podcast is probably inspired by the song "Roadhouse Blues" and it is indeed a podcast about blues music. I recommend it because it strikes a good balance between well-known and lesser-known artists.

Here are links to its website and its podcast feed in case you want to use it with a Podcast client.

Service: XM Liquid Metal is BACK!

This is kinda old news. XM has put Liquid Metal back on air last month after about a year of hiatus (it was available online only during that period.) Hurray! I guess XM heard too many metal fans bitched about it. Power to the people! (well, power to metal fans actually)

What does it mean to me since I wasn't a subscriber of XM? I am a Directv customer and Directv switched their music provider from Music Choice to XM last year. Music Choice has fairly decent metal programming. When I heard that Music Choice's Metal channel would be replaced by XM's Squizz channel. I thought WTF 'coz Squizz is more of an alt. rock station and that's when I realized Liquid Metal was canned.

Now I'm one happy Liquid Metal listener rocking to "Are You Dead Yet?" by Children of Bodom!

Service: My experience with Napster-To-Go, part 2

If we take the To-Go portion out of equation, how does Napster do in general?

Let me start with its weaknesses:
1) Poor selection compared to Rhapsody in the genres I like (jazz, blues, classical, metal) Lots of artists have none or only few songs available. For example, Jimmy Bruno and Jimmy Raney aren't exactly household names but they are well represented on Rhapsody, not on Napster though.

2) Poor user interface: it just ain't user friendly. For example, on some artist's page, the top pane (list of album) is too big and makes the bottom pane (list of song) too small. Users like me are more interested in the bottom pane, which allows me to pick songs to download. Another examples are cryptic radio station names like "Crossroads." You would never know if you're not a blues fan already. Doesn't it discourage users to explore music they are not familiar with?

3) Poor classification/information:
For example, "Top albums" of Blues are Confessions by Usher and #1 by Destiny's Child!
And there is no consistency: following a certain navigation path you may see John Coltrane filed under Blues. Everytime I click on Top Artists under Blues I see a different list. Sometimes the album has a "download album" link next to it but I found that even if it doesn't say so, songs from the album might still be available for download when I click the album to drill down.

Nevertheless, it does have some nice features:
1) its radio feature actually generates playlists instead of streaming. Why is this a good feature? It allows listener to keep a record of what has been played so that (s)he could download all or some of them in a shot later on.

2) In addition to the "radio station" Napster created for every user, you could build custom station based on all songs in your library or your current playlist. This is more flexible than the more common way of setting up custom station based on artists/genre.

3) This is just me being nostalgic: the download window really reminds me of the good old days of the original Napster :P

The verdict? I don't think I'd switch to Napster since it charges the same as Rhapsody (and more than Yahoo) I do hope Napster will improve 'coz more competition in the digital music business could only be a good thing for consumers like myself.

Service: My experience with Napster-To-Go, part 1

Almost a year after last time I wrote about Napster-To-Go, I finally get to try it out (free trial of course) with my newly acquired Sandisk Sansa m240, one of the cheapest PlaysForSure Subscription compatible player out there. (Sidenote: I bet a lot of people would be surprised that Sandisk is No.2 in US MP3 player market They did it by building solid and competitively priced products instead of hype. I think there's something to learn from their approach.)

Remember I wrote the service sounded exciting? I still agree with that, but the keyword is the quantifier: "theoretically." Practically speaking, I ran into these problems:
1) sometimes I got errors for no explanation, during downloading of songs to my computer or transferring to the player.
2) songs are transferred to the player very slowly, much slower than copying DRM-less MP3s using Windows Explorer. I bet the overhead for handling the DRM (digital right management, or copy protection in layperson's term) is pretty big.
3) the Napster client cannot tell what is loaded on my player consistently.

To summarize, this is the exact opposite of good end-to-end experience like what you get from iPod + iTunes I am not sure if these problems are Napster only or it is universal across all PlaysForSure Subscription services (i.e., Napster, Rhapsody and Yahoo Music Unlimited) since I haven't tried To-Go with others. (In other words, how much could they blame on Microsoft, the vendor of PlaysForSure DRM technology?) In any case, simply copying iTunes' look and feel into Napster most likely cannot make it happen.

In the next part of this series, I'll compare the non-To-Go portion of Napster with Rhapsody.

Artist: The Rolling Stones

When I told my dad the Super Bowl performance will be broadcasted with a delay just in case they need to edit out improper scenes, in light of the now infamous wardrobe malfunction fiasco back in 2004, my dad asked what improper thing the Stones could do? I said maybe Mick Jagger might drop his pants.

Well, it turned out the Stones' performance was indeed censored, not for Jagger's pants though. The word "come" in the line "you make a dead man come" from "Start Me Up" and the word "cocks" in their new song "Rough Justice" were silenced. No wonder Jagger's singing sounded so weird to me. I wouldn't believe Jagger would choke for such a high-profile performance especially given the amount of "practice" they got from their extensive touring schedule.

I think this is really lame but that's just another indicator that America is ruled by ultraconservatives. Their mind was stucked in 1967, when the Stones' lyric was censored on the Ed Sullivan shows back then.

Podcast: Metal Injection Guerilla Radio

IMO Metal Injection has become a force to be reckoned with in the area of metal media. Its Guerilla Radio is a group of podcasts that gear towards different sub-genre of metal. My favorites are the Entropy League and MSRCast, both of them are mentioned in this blog before and just recently joined force with Metal Injection.

In addition to these 2, Dead Zone is growing on me too. If there's a podcast episode that I wanna listen to over and over again, this one for melodic death metal gotta be it. Prior to this my only exposure to melodic death was pretty much limited to Children of Bodom. The bands on this podcast might not be as famous but are equally awesome. BTW, I think the term melodic death is kind of a misnomer. Death metal as it was played by its forefathers like Death and Obituary sounded quite melodic to me! In any case, the return to more emphasis on good guitar playing (especially solo!) is definitely a direction I'm glad to see.

Service: Cellphone music download

For those who think it's outrageous to pay $2.5 per track to download music to your cell phone from your carrier, you haven't seen nothing yet!

According to Next Magazine in Hong Kong, a Hong Kong 3G service provider, 3, is providing a music service that allows you to listen to music 10 hours per month for a promotional rate of $2.3 (~HK$18) Sound like a good deal huh? Here's the catch: each song you download costs $1.15 (~HK$9)!

This is what I call greediness with a capital G!

Interview: Rob Glaser of RealNetworks

Check out this interesting interview of Mr. Glaser by EnGadget. Not that I'm a big fan of Real (in fact, I think most people became haters of company X whenever they become a customer of X these days. And I'm a subscriber of Real Rhapsody) but I think he made some very good points about the current state of digital music market. His takes on the virtues and shortfalls of Apple's approach (with iPods and iTunes) are fairly accurate and impartial IMHO.

One key point he made is the need to have a "good end to end experience" from the music service provider all the way to the device, which Apple did very well with iPod + iTunes. Judging from all those complaints on their message board regarding the latest version of Rhapsody (3.1) not working properly, I think Real really needs to work hard in this department.

Finally, regarding the web interface (Rhapsody.com) that he plugged during the interview, I'm happy that I could finally listen to Rhapsody on my iBook without using it as a terminal to a PC. Check out a detailed review by the Digital Music Weblog. I came to a similar conclusion: this interface needs lots of improvements (IMHO not a version 1.0 product as Mr. Glaser touted) My particular gripes are:
1) There is no way to reorder tracks in the client's current playlist.
2) I cannot cue songs to the current playlist without the player switching to play the new songs.
3) Dunno if it's just my iBook: sometimes the player window opens but sits idle without playing anything I asked it to play.

In any case, Mr. Glaser is definitely correct that the subscription model is a sound one. Just check out the math: At my peak I used to buy 50 new CDs a year. It has gradually gone down to ~25 CDs. You know how much I buy this year? 0. I don't need new CDs anymore as I got my fix from Rhapsody, which I spend $100 for a year of subscription. For serious music fan like you (if you read this blog then your are) and me, subscription IS a good deal.

On a related note, the latest stat from music industry says sales of CD is down by 8% in the past year. (Well, in my case it is down by 100%) I bet they won't be able to make it up by just sitting there and sending out their army of lawyers. The days of CDs being cash cows are over. Wake up and embrace digital music! These guys could surely use some advices from Mr. Glaser.

Service: Rhapsody

While we're on the topic of RealNetworks, I've got some advices for Mr. Glaser too.

He mentioned the editorial on Rhapsody as a differentiating feature from his competitors in the subscription market. I beg to differ. Artist info (incl. bio/discography/influences/similar artists) is everywhere on the web (Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia) What Rhapsody really need is a better recommendation engine and better personalization. It is sitting on a "gold mine" of user preferences (forget about 1-5 star ratings of songs. If I listen to the same song over and over, 5 stars. If I skip the song 10 seconds into it, 0 star. It should be that simple. Also, asking me to click on other people's playlist is not good enough. Sometimes people prefer auto-pilot) If they use it for social networking/correlation, they'll have one awesome recommendation feature. It might be easier just go out and buy a last.fm/Audioscrobbler.

Service: last.fm

Speaking of last.fm, it is the only free online music streaming service that I'm satisfied with as far as classical music is concerned. You just need to open an acct (free), download its player, type in a composer's name, say Mahler, and you're going to hear a whole bunch of late 19th century/romantic music, including those from Mahler and similar composers. It figures out what to play using social networking/correlation.

Of course, it works with other music genres too.

Artist: Death (Remembering Chuck Schuldiner)

Can't believe it has been 4 years since Chuck passed away!

Norway's Imhotep magazine interviewed a few current metal musicians for their thoughts about Death.

Track: RIAA Phone Call

If you're a music fan, you probably know all the bad deeds done by RIAA and I don't need to elaborate. This is a hilarious song (link) Please also check out the prank they pulled on RIAA.

Podcast: more Metal

MSRCast
This is recommended by The Entropy League, which I menitoned last time. The list of bands look impressive, right? Contrary to what the name stands for, Mainstream Resistance, it actually features some mainstream (in the metal circle) bands, i.e., the ones you might hear on metal TV shows like Metal Asylum or Headbanger's Ball, but of course it still beats mainstream radio. (BTW, if you visit www.msrcast.com instead of the above link, it might appear they have 5 episodes and no more new ones but that's not the case. )

Curt Shaw's Metal Show
It features some awesome unsigned local bands that you might have never heard of elsewhere.

The Entropy League
Yes, I have already recommended them before. The above links to their latest episode, which I find extremely interesting, as it played all covers. You'll hear lots of old school metal (or non-metal) being reinterpreted by the new generation.

Podcast: Jazz, classical and more

In my previous post I've recommended a podcast for metal.

For jazz, I enjoyed Red Raspus Radio, mainly about the Seattle jazz scene. It's a pleasant surprise that they've got some really good musicians up there.

For classical, the king of budget recordings, Naxos, has done a great job in promoting classical music once again. Check out Naxos Classical Music Spotlight

You could find both of the above podcasts at Yahoo! Podcast as well as Apple's iTunes Podcast Directory if that's how you subscribe to podcasts.

While I'm on the topic of podcast, I gotta admit I have a tendency to downplay or underestimate the usefulness of new internet paradigm. I've done it to Webmail (when Hotmail first appeared) and I did it to podcast again :P I blame it on the ineffectiveness of Podcast client/directory in sorting out the good stuff from the massive sea of podcasts. A lot of clichés about podcast still applies: like many people are still over-using sound effects (we don't need that much ECHO-ECho-echo or left-to-right panning) and most still sound like the podcaster was rambling on and on to no one but himself (or herself) Anyway, podcasting is ideal for enthusiasts of non-mainstream interests (in the case of music: jazz, metal and classical) to "spread the gospel" since the narrow audience cannot justify the use of more expensive technologies.

That said, we still need better organization/classification of Podcast, i.e., the equivalent of what Yahoo did to the early days of WWW. Podcast Alley and Yahoo! Podcast are in the right direction but still have long ways to go. For example, when I use the keywords "jazz music," I'm still getting a ton of irrelevant links.

Finally, I should probably answer the 1st question newbies would ask: "How do you listen to Podcast?" The minimal requirement is a computer that connects to the internet, preferably with broadband. Most of the Podcasts I recommend links to their website, which further link to mp3 files. You could simply right-click on your browser, download the files and listen in your favourite MP3 player. Or you could "subscribe" to the podcast so that you'll get the latest episode when it is published through podcast client software of your choice. Personally, I've tried the open source Juice Receiver before (formerly known as iPodder. BTW, the name changed because Apple didn't like the iPod part in it. I wonder why Apple has to alienate people who makes their products more popular. Maybe it has to do with the fact that your trademark will be weaken if you don't actively defend it all the time?) and I use iTunes now, just because I have iTunes installed for sync-ing with iPod already. Not that I prefer proprietary software over open source ones. For iTunes, you either find the podcast in their directory and subscribe or open the .pcast file with it. For other clients, you could specify the URL of the RSS feed of the podcast.

Now you should start enjoying the shows I recommended!

Genre: Metal (State of Metal Pt III: MOL)

Talking about Metal On-Line here.

In the old days my preferred way to read about metal was USENET newsgroups. With the ever declining signal-to-noise ratio, it's of course no longer desirable. It's ironic that the fall of metal's popularity coincided with the rise of WWW. That explains why there wasn't many must-visit websites for metal fans in the 90s, at least that's my experience. A lot of metal sites were created by amateurs/fans/students who eventually quit maintaining the sites, with the exception of BNR Metal, which is still going strong and serves as one of my favorite metal encyclopedia (BTW, I know it's kinda surprising but Wikipedia is also a good source of metal band info.)

RSS
With a resurgence in its popularity and the advent of RSS (a mechanism that make updates to websites appear on subscribers' client software automatically,) I've finally got back in touch with the world of metal again. For example, Death Metal News on Topix.net provides RSS feed (if you don't wanna install any RSS client, you could always use my.yahoo.com) Most of their feeds come from Blabbermouth.net, a metal news site provided by one of the most prolific metal label, Roadrunner records. The nice thing about it is that it also covers bands other than their own!

Online radio
You won't hear a lot of 24x7 heavy metal only radio station on the air. There's none, even in a "metal-active" area like the San Francisco bay area. Fortunately, thanks to internet, now metal fans have many choices.

First of all, major internet radio providers like AOL Radio and Yahoo Music all have 1 or more metal channels. While Yahoo Music delivers higher quality sound, AOL provides more channels, each dedicated to a sub-genre like Death Metal, Black Metal, even one for "hair"/glam/pop metal bands of the 80s! You could skip to the next songs if you don't like the current one on Yahoo though. And Yahoo do have 2 sub-genre station: Emo and Metalcore, but they're available to subscriber of Launchcast Plus only (If you use SBC Yahoo DSL, it's free)

If you wanna listen to less mainstream produced metal radio, you could find plenty of them on ShoutCast under the metal genre, for example, ChroniX Aggression, BrainGell, The Edge.

Finally, this is not free, but XM subscribers could listen to XM's Liquid Metal channel online (in fact, it's only available online but not thru satellite anymore.)

Podcast
I consider Shoutcast as the first step in the direction of liberation of radio from corporate conglomerates, giving normal people like you and me power to broadcast. All you need is setting up your PC as a Shoutcast server and play some music (or talk non-stop like a "real DJ".) Of course, you still need a high bandwidth upstream internet connection. With Podcasting, even this requirement is gone. You record your show as MP3, write an RSS XML enclosure for it, then upload to your webhost and you're done! So it's not surprising to see that lots of "niche topics", including heavy metal, get healthy podcast coverage, since it's very low cost.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of podcasts made it difficult to pick out relevant ones, let alone good ones. Podcast directories help to a certain degree but it's still a lot of trial-and-error. Or you could rely on word-of-mouth, like my recommendation of The Entropy League. Also, don't miss the accompanying blog: Be Metal

Hope you enjoy this 3 part series about the current state of Metal!

[Update: I just heard Metallica's "Damage Case" played on Yahoo! LaunchCast Radio and they bleeped out the swearing by Hetfield. Lame Lame Lame. Thumbs down from me.]

Genre: Metal (State of Metal Pt II: MTV)

Well, that's Metal TV I'm talking about.

All metal fans from the 80's in the States should remember "Headbanger's Ball," the all metal video show aired on MTV every Saturday night. And of course they remembered when the show was cancelled: after grunge "took over the world" (Hey, even the VJ Ricki Rachtman played the videos of "Smell Like Teen Spirit" and "Alive" during the dying days of the show!)

For the longest time there were next to zero coverage of metal on TV, let alone shows dedicated to metal. But slowly metal found its way back to the spotlight. First, Uranium, a 30-minute metal show hosted by charismatic VJ Juliya, appeared on MuchMusic (now Fuse TV) channel. Fuse TV also has a daily metal show named "Metal Asylum." If there's anything MTV knows how to do well, it's jumping on bandwagon. They brought back "Headbanger's Ball" on MTV2 at Saturday night, started May 10 2003. Many saw that move symbolized that "metal is back," officially! In addition, MTV's sister channel VH1 Classic has Metal Mania, which focus on mostly 80s and early 90s "old school" stuff.

These shows have become one of my major source of discovering new metal acts. That's how I learned about exciting bands like Arch Enemy and Shadows Fall. What are my other sources? Stay tuned and read the next and final episode of this State of Metal series.