Score one for Hans Zimmer

Via Cory Doctorow, this easter egg from the Inception score:



Pretty cool, eh?

A brilliant stroke from composer Hans Zimmer and a great example of how art can reference other works in interesting and creative ways.

Tuesday Tune-age: Apocalyptica

I recently secured tickets for Apocalyptica's upcoming show in 0Toronto. They are an interesting genre-crossing act featured in this week's Tuesday Tune-age.

In the mid-1990s, four cellists attending Finland's prestigious Sibelius Academy met frequently to perform Metallica covers. Their first studio album, Plays Metallica By Four Cellos (1996) consisted of cello arrangements of "Harvester of Sorrow", "Creeping Death", and "Master of Puppets" among others.



While hardly the first act to bring cellos into rock or heavy music, even as lead instruments, it's safe to say the vast majority of metal fans never heard string arrangements of guitar riffs and solos played by classically trained musicians before. As a long-haired adolescent who banged out covers of Iron Maiden tunes on the grand piano in between practicing scales and Kabalevsky pieces, when I first heard Apocalyptica's version of "Enter Sandman" I was both impressed and vindicated. With no drums, no distortion and no vocals (the vocal melody was taken up by one of the cellos), the quartet showed just how melodic thrash metal could be by stripping away its noisier adornments.

Arguably, Apocalyptica was an inspiration for the formation of Vitamin Records, a music label based around releasing dozens of albums of string quartet (and more recently, piano) arrangements of rock and pop music.

The quartet's second album, Inquisition Symphony (1998), contained more covers of Metallica and a few other metal acts, as well as three original compositions by bandleader Eicca Toppinen. This would carry over onto the third album, Cult (2000), which was almost all Toppinen original compositions, except for two Metallica covers and an interpretation of every heavy metaller's favourite classical piece, Edvard Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King". The group started using distortion and other effects for the first time.

Starting with the fourth album, Reflections (2003), Apocalyptica essentially settled on a sound of cellos (clean and distorted), adding a drumkit (Slayer's Dave Lombardo guesting on several studio tracks), and for some songs, guest vocalists including the Finnish frontmen of The Rasmus and HIM, Rammstein's Till Lindemann, Three Days Grace's Adam Gontier and Lacuna Coil's Cristina Scabbia.

Heavy metal musicians have drawn inspiration from classical music from the very beginnings of the genre. Less well-known in the popular understanding: serious composers have always been inspired by the popular and folk music of their day. Carl Orff's celebrated Carmina Burana is a cycle of arrangements of medieval drinking songs, while the hundreds of lieder composed by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and other German composers have their roots in medieval folk songs. It's not my intention to elevate these long-haired Finns to those heights (especially when history is the final arbiter of such things), but only to forestall a reflexive dismissal of their work. As more and more popular music sounds like it's all been done before, creative artists will plumb new wells for inspiration, even centuries-old material. If this helps bring older schools of music to the attention of new listeners, that can only be a good thing, right?

Tuesday Tune-age: Special Mercury Prize Edition featuring Mumford & Sons

As Canada's New Music guru Alan Cross writes today, , including our own Polaris Prize. Today, the short list was released:

BIFFY CLYRO
Only Revolutions

CORINNE BAILEY RAE
The Sea

DIZZEE RASCAL
Tongue N' Cheek

KIT DOWNES TRIO
Golden

FOALS
Total Life Forever

I AM KLOOT
Sky At Night

LAURA MARLING
I Speak Because I Can

MUMFORD & SONS
Sigh No More

PAUL WELLER
Wake Up The Nation

VILLAGERS
Becoming A Jackal

WILD BEASTS
Two Dancers

THE XX
XX

Haven't really had the opportunity to listen to most of these albums, but a friend has been listening to the Mumford & Sons album quite a bit recently, so they're being highlighted on this edition of Tuesday Tune-age. Here's the video for their single "Little Lion Man", from their debut album Sigh No More:

Netflix Streams into Canada

This fall, Netflix expands beyond the USA into the Great White North as noted here.

What will this mean for the Canadian home video market? Certainly struggling video rental chains have no chance of respite. And Canada's broadband penetration is higher than the United States, where Netflix is the leading Internet subscription video service. This Christmas shopping season should be telling for the future of the industry.

Tuesday Tune-age: The Creepshow

In the interest of adding regular features to this blog, and to keep me on track (I work better with clear guidelines or directions), I'm starting with Tuesday Tune-age! Ever Tuesday, I will blog about a musician, band, ensemble or music artist that has caught my attention recently. I'm hoping to focus on lesser-known artists, since the big names already have tonnes of mainstream coverage, but might occasionally mention a major star who strikes my fancy for some reason.

We'll start this off with The Creepshow, a psychobilly/horror punk band originally from nearby Burlington, Ontario. Here's the video for "The Garden" from their debut album, Sell Your Soul. It's a slower, calmer affair than most of their other tracks, but has a charm all its own:



Psychobilly is a genre that arose in the middle of the rockabilly revival of the mid-1970s. Rockabilly was one of the earliest forms of rock 'n' roll, the marriage of rhythm-and-blues and honky-tonk music, and during the punk movement's opposition to the kind of ossified, crafted, self-indulgent arena rock that dominated the music scene in the 1970s, mining earlier forms of rock music became an effective way to channel baser emotions like rage, despair, fun, and lust.

Psychobilly took the musical foundation of rockabilly, kidnapped it at gunpoint, threw it in the back of a black 1967 Chevy Malibu convertible, and took it on a wild ride through Transylvania. With lyrical topics like horror films, pulp science fiction, sex and violence, psychobilly tapped into the subculture of exploitation films thematically and aesthetically. Indeed, costuming, album art and band posters and where applicable, music videos, seek kinship with the lurid kitsch of "grindhouse" cinema.

Similarly, horror punk eats the brains out of punk rock and devotes its image and lyrics to zombie flicks and horror films.

The Creepshow are playing Hamilton later this week so I'm going to try and see them live.

Also check out the "Take My Hand" video for an example of their more rockin' work:

The Creepshow - Take My Hand - For more of the funniest videos, click here

UPDATE (16 July): I did end up seeing them last night, and they were excellent. Great musicians and they really got the audience involved. If they're coming anywhere near to you, I highly recommend them.

Launch the Polaris

The Polaris Music Prize is an annual award given to the best full-length Canadian album based on merit. It was inspired by the Mercury Prize awarded annually to the best British or Irish album. The Polaris' 178 jurors come from the ranks of Canadian music journalists, bloggers and broadcasters, each submitting their top five choices from the year's releases to compile the long list, then submitting their top five picks from the long list to compile the short list. A "Grand Jury" of 11 (I assume to break ties) picks the winner from the short list.

On July 6th, the Polaris Music Prize short list was announced (the long list had been announced earlier on June 17th).

THE BESNARD LAKES,
The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night
(Montréal, QC)

OWEN PALLETT,
Heartland
(Toronto, ON)

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE,
Forgiveness Rock Record
(Toronto, ON)

RADIO RADIO,
Belmundo Regal
(Grosse Coque, NS, Moncton, NB, Pointe-à-l’église, NS)

CARIBOU,
Swim
(Dundas, ON)

THE SADIES,
Darker Circles
(Toronto, ON)

KARKWA,
Les Chemins De Verre
(Montréal, QC)

SHAD,
TSOL
(London, ON)

DAN MANGAN,
Nice, Nice, Very Nice
(Vancouver, BC)

TEGAN AND SARA,
Sainthood
(Vancouver, BC & Montréal, QC)

The winner will be announced at the awards gala on September 20th. I'm not familiar enough with all the nominees yet, but I'll tentatively throw my support behind local boy Caribou. Good luck to all the nominees!

Dust in the Wind

Time to dust away the cobwebs and get this place up and running again. Going forward, I'm going to focus on my current professional duties as a collection development librarian with a media/non-print focus, since there seem to be so few of us blogging. I will still occasionally blog about other issues and news concerning librarianship, especially technology.

I will probably be experimenting with the layout for the next few weeks as well.

Back to the grind!