From asg at mvdbase.com Thu Sep 23 21:03:50 2021 From: asg at mvdbase.com (Alex S. Garcia) Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2021 01:03:50 +0000 Subject: [boc-l] BOC: Thoughts on "The Symbol Remains" Message-ID: Hey everyone, So I got my copy of the latest BOC a few months ago. I know, it's been out for a long time now, but it was constantly out of stock in my local record store and I never got around to ordering it until March or April, I forget now when exactly. You'd think I'd have listened to it then, right? Wrong. Because of a family emergency, I had to move in with my parents for a few months. Left all my stuff at my place, including the new BOC. Then when I finally got back, I was so behind with work stuff I just didn't even think about it anymore. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I finally got to listen to the album for the first time a few days ago. Gave it a second spin just now and, this time, I followed along with the lyrics. My first assessment is that this CD just confirms what I've noticed in the past: the songs I like the *least* tend to be the Dharma-penned ones. Not that they're necessarily bad, but they often tend to be too poppy for my taste. It really goes from plain dislike ("Box in my Head") to bewilderment ("Train True") to kinda cool but what's it doing on a BOC CD ("Nightmare Epiphany" being a prime example of that). It's a shame, too, cause Buck's a great musician and I even like his voice quite a bit, but as a composer he can be infuriating. OTOH, my favorite tracks on here tend to be those by Castellano... makes me wish he'd release some solo albums :o I'd definitely be interested. He seems like both a great composer and a great lyricist (here I'll rest my case by simply pointing at "The Alchemist"). Anyway, I thought I'd do a song-by-song breakdown of what I liked and didn't like... Here goes. 1) THAT WAS ME (John Shirley / Eric Bloom & Richie Castellano) Not Castellano's best, but still a pretty cool song with some damn good lyrics. Makes for a decent CD starter. 2) BOX IN MY HEAD (John Shirley / Donald Roeser) Ugh. No. Just no. Way too poppy. Typical Roeser material. What's this doing here? Ugh. 3) TAINTED BLOOD (Eric Bloom & Richie Castellano) Awesome track. Love the vampire-themed lyrics. 4) NIGHTMARE EPIPHANY (John Shirley / Donald Roeser) Sigh. It's not a bad song, but why? Is this really BOC? I dunno man. 5) EDGE OF THE WORLD (Richie Castellano) Very cool! With some more great lyrics from Castellano, this time about conspiracy theories. Love it. 6) THE MACHINE (Richie Castellano) Not as good as the previous, but still pretty decent. 7) TRAIN TRUE (LENNIE'S SONG) (Zeke Roeser & Donald Roeser) So this one starts kinda cool... but then it goes downhill from there. I was like WTF? This sounds like country western on crack. How is THIS a BOC song??? Seriously. 8) THE RETURN OF ST. CECILIA (Richard Meltzer / Richie Castellano) It's not the best song on the CD by far, but I still like it for a bunch of different reasons. Most obviously, of course, the historical/nostalgic aspect. Then there's Castellano's magic touch, giving the track a more modern sound. But (and you're allowed to laugh) what I like best is how the lyrics instantly made me think of Alison... Who is Alison, you ask? Well... Those of you who have watched "Pretty Little Liars" (which I'm currently in the middle of--which is why this struck me) should think of the Alison character from the show while you read the lyrics. Seriously, the similarities between Cecelia and Alison are freaky as hell LOL. 9) STAND AND FIGHT (Eric Bloom & Richie Castellano) Good song. Neither love nor hate. Just decent. Which, come to think of it, is annoying LOL. I mean, we all KNOW these guys can do better. 10) FLORIDA MAN (John Shirley / Donald Roeser) Another bleh one for me. Not bad, but again too poppy and kind of sticks out like a sore thumb. 11) THE ALCHEMIST (Richie Castellano) Then bam! This monster of a song lands. Granted, I'd already heard it, since I'd seen the video way back when. It had made me hope for more songs like this. Maybe that's why I was disappointed with the album. This song is just so damn good. In every possible way. The music, the vocals (Eric puts so much passion into his singing it gives me chills, just listen at him when he cries "I"! LOL) and of course the LYRICS. God those lyrics are amazing. I love epic fantasy, so this is right up my alley. Best song on the album, hands down. Castellano outdid himself with this one. God, I crave for an album where all the songs would be of this quality. Why can't they do that? Is it so much to ask for? I guess it must be. Sigh. 12) SECRET ROAD (John Shirley / Donald Roeser) An OK song from Roeser, but again it feels out of place. *Especially* coming right after "The Alchemist." Speaking of, I wonder who thought it'd be such a brilliant idea to sandwich "The Alchemist" between "Florida Man" and "Secret Road". Ugh. 13) THERE'S A CRIME (Jeff Denny & Jules Radino) Not sure what to think of this one. Didn't leave a mark, for whatever that's worth. Will have to listen to it again a few times. 14) FIGHT (Ira Rosoff, James Wold & Donald Roeser) OK, I'll admit I kinda like this one. It's damn catchy and fun. But... it's still as poppy as you'd expect from Roeser. So I find myself once again wondering why this song was included? CONCLUSIONS So my main gripe with the album is that it has more tracks that don't fit than tracks that fit. Though I suppose some could argue that if there are more that don't fit, can it truly be said that they don't? Maybe they do and it's just that the band has evolved... Perhaps I'm just pining for a band that no longer exists, that stopped existing years ago. But damn it! How can I not pine for them when I hear a track like "The Alchemist"? Riddle me that. It's like they can't make up their mind what they want to do. Which is baffling considering how long these guys have been around. And then I think back to "Fight" and how it made me think it would have been more appropriate on a Buck Dharma solo album. It certainly reminded me of his first solo. That's when it suddenly struck me what this album really was. It's just a collection of solo tracks from Bloom, Castellano, and Roeser. At least, that's what it feels like to me now. Which certainly would explain all of those discrepancies. So what do you guys think? Alex. ---------------------------------------------- Author - Translator - Lyricist http://alexsgarcia.com/ Free Fantasy & Science-Fiction short stories https://xenin.substack.com/ ---------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jjarrett at coriolis.greenend.org.uk Fri Sep 24 06:38:34 2021 From: jjarrett at coriolis.greenend.org.uk (Jonathan Jarrett) Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2021 11:38:34 +0100 (BST) Subject: [boc-l] BOC: Thoughts on "The Symbol Remains" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, 24 Sep 2021, Alex S. Garcia via boc-l wrote: > So I got my copy of the latest BOC a few months ago. I know, it's been > out for a long time now, but it was constantly out of stock in my local > record store and I never got around to ordering it until March or April, > I forget now when exactly. > Anyway, to cut a long story short, I finally got to listen to the album for the first time a few days ago. Gave it a second spin just now and, this time, I followed along with the lyrics. > > My first assessment is that this CD just confirms what I've noticed in the past: the songs I like the *least* tend to be the Dharma-penned ones. Not that they're necessarily bad, but they often tend to be too poppy for my taste. [...] > CONCLUSIONS > > So my main gripe with the album is that it has more tracks that don't fit than tracks that fit. Though I suppose some could argue that if there are more that don't fit, can it truly be said that they don't? Maybe they do and it's just that the band has evolved... > > Perhaps I'm just pining for a band that no longer exists, that stopped existing years ago. > > But damn it! How can I not pine for them when I hear a track like "The Alchemist"? Riddle me that. Dear all, Alex's post has made me remember that I never in fact did post my own thoughts on the new album as I promised/threatened some months ago, so thanks Alex for the prompt. Also hi! I have to say that my reaction to this album was a lot more positive than Alex's, for all that I do see his point about it being a bit disjointed. I do like Buck's songs, by and large, but CotHM was too much like a Buck solo album for me. Obviously he's now the main songwriter in the band, and I think that's just the evolution Alex mentions, but for ages it has frustrated me that they've also got these other younger members full of talent who weren't really getting their turn. For me this album fixes that, and I tend to agree that the Castellano pieces are more impressive, more like the pomp and circumstance of the old albums, while Buck still brings the agility and flip that they had, but without the grandeur. Maybe we can't get both of those together any more, but weirdly, when it comes closest to happening on this album (which I agree is probably 'The Alchemist', which is just fantastic), the secret ingredient turns out to be Eric in the writing credits. So part of me thinks that Alex's reaction is fair and that if they'd just hit whatever working methods produced that combination, we'd have more of a winner here; but the rest of me thinks that I listened to every song on this album expecting to be disappointed by Shirley's lyrics or the comfy-armchair sound of CotHM, and actually they never did disappoint me and even the quieter songs had twists I didn't foresee. (Perhaps I'm just impressionable, but the chorus of 'Florida Man' starts a sympathetic tear or two in my eye and I don't see those stories the same way now that I 'know' what the real deal is...) The other thing that struck me within minutes of the first play-through was that the B?C songs it had me thinking of and wanting to go back to were the 1980s ones, not the old ones. That's partly just because the album title conjures 'Shadow of California' whether you ask it to or not, of course, but in general this whole album has a lot more of tRbN about it, and some of the good aspects of CN (I know, I know, disputable that there are any). Given how much of tSR Shirley wrote, I think that's a really good sign. It didn't remind me of HF or (thank goodness) CotHM, bar a few echoes of 'Dance on Stilts'; it reminded me of the immediately post-Bouchard era when the band was damaged but still finding a creative way into its new form. Maybe that's not the good old days everyone would want B?C returning to, and I don't at all mean that this is fact a backward-looking or retro album; but that it has that flavour makes it a real B?C album that fits in the canon, at least for me. Also, for heavens' sake, it has at least one song about vampires, one about a biker rampage, several about weird doings in backwoods America and a massive epic about murderous sorcery extending over centuries. If this album was by anyone else B?C could practically sue for infringement! :-) Stay well everyone, yours all, Jonathan ObLP: Dark Sun - _Ice Ritual_ (still safely in my care, Carl!) -- Jonathan Jarrett, Keighley and University of Leeds "Says not the Wise One, `When two men cannot agree over the price of an onion, who shall decide what happened in the time of Yu?'" (Kai Lung, reported by Ernest Bramah) From cea at carlaz.com Fri Sep 24 11:40:31 2021 From: cea at carlaz.com (Carl Edlund Anderson) Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2021 10:40:31 -0500 Subject: [boc-l] BOC: Thoughts on "The Symbol Remains" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Well, you may want to keep up with Richie?s ?Band Geek? series on YouTube, and perhaps check out his (former, I think) band Morning Starlett (great name!) fronted by (former, I think) wife Ann Marie Nacchio (though she is still doing music with him in Band Geek ? for example, a recent complete cover of Yes?s Close to the Edge album). I think a lot of his time is taken up with touring with B?C or doing covers with Band Geek ? but, yeah, any time he wants to get back into a project focused on his originals, I?m ready to pay attention. Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson https://soundcloud.com/carledlundanderson/ https://carledlundanderson.bandcamp.com/ http://www.carlaz.com/music.html > On 2021/Sep/23/, at 20:03, Alex S. Garcia via boc-l wrote: > > OTOH, my favorite tracks on here tend to be those by Castellano... makes me wish he'd release some solo albums :o I'd definitely be interested. He seems like both a great composer and a great lyricist (here I'll rest my case by simply pointing at "The Alchemist"). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: