The Grouchy Gaijin's Thoughts on Music and Such

Hi Kids - the Grouch is back and I'm as irritated as ever.

We made the move from the US to Sweden and I'm writing this from our new digs.  The good thing is that I have blazing fast internet here for about 32 bones a month.  How fast?  I downloaded a 2 gig file in about 40 minutes.  Since I've been here I've learned a few words of Swedish.  One word is Skatteverket which is the Tax Authority.  I find it funny that they have the sound scat as in excrement, especially of an animal; dung in their name because frankly a lot of the stuff there is Bull-scat.  Grrrrrrrrrr.  I digress.  Over all the Skatteverket aside, everyone I've met so far has been really cool and very friendly.

Enough about me.

The other day I got an e-mail from a band out of Denmark.  It was simple and to the point which I like.  The guy didn't give me any bullshit like "we are kind of, you know, like the voice of Jim Morrison and the soul of Jimi Hendrix on quaaludes while jamming on some experimental new age mood music"  What the hell does that mean anyway?  This guy just wrote "How do I get my CD to you?"  Well put man, let the music speak for itself.

So I popped in the first of two CDs he sent to give it a listen.  In a nutshell it was an EP that was good enough I immediately put in the full album when the EP was over.

Can you guess what type of music this is? Did you guess METAL?  You're right!

Their My Space page says"Melodic Meltdown was a band from Aalborg, Denmark existing on and off with different line-ups from 1996 to the farewell concert at Skråen in late 2005."  That is too bad because these guys are really good.  Everyone on the tracks I've heard is a very good player and the singer actually has a good voice.

Had these guys been around when I was a kid I would have no doubt had a T-shirt.  I hear what sounds like old Metallica.  They are not an American R and B based hard rock band.  There are no nods to Zeppelin or any of the old black guys that first played what became Rock and Roll.  What there is on the album and EP I've heard is LOUD, fast, tight spasms of energy that shoot out of your speakers like some angry black fog waging war in the Ether.  At times the lyrics are a bit cheesy - singing about mosquitoes and the obligatory mentioning of Lucifer are all pretty stock, but that isn't what this band is about.  What they are about is a demon on the guitar that goes by the name of Michael Sobygge. The man can play and the rest of the band keeps up.  He can alternate from heavy to beautiful while the rest of the band does it's job - the breaks are complicated and clean.  I like these guys!  As I said above, the singer has a good voice so I really don't care if he is singing about insects, Satan or Fire and Ice - his voice doesn't detract from the music.

If you like blistering guitar, heavy bass and double bass rolls along with a singer who SINGS (albeit about some goofy stuff that at times sounds like it came from Metal for Dummies) then you would dig these guys.  The live show must be killer!

All in all I give them a Grouch rating of 4 scowls out of 5

Add your comment

Your name:
Subject:
Comment (you may use HTML tags here):
Word verification:
	Post Preview

yvComment v.1.21.1