Labor Day Weekend Schedule!

Hey guys. I just wanted to tell everyone that tonight will be my last night at CFO. I'm moving down to LA to go back to school (finally making music a priority). I'll be teaching the 6:00 and 7:00 classes tonight. CFO is an amazing place and I will miss alll the people I've been fortunate enough to meet. Keep up the strong work. I will be back at the end of September for a long weekend, so I'll be sure to stop in. I'll also keep posting here, so you're not getting rid of me entirely. If any of you are in LA, hit me up.

We'll miss you and Ann!

Good luck to the both of you. Thanks for the help with the Amp, I guess I will get that lesson when you start charging $100/hr :)

Bye Jonathan! Good luck, watch out down there, it's a whole different world in the land of plastic, cars and smog ;)

On another note, I am really glad that I no longer belong to the lame world of retail gym memberships. I went to 2 different Crunch locations today at the advice of the Lynx hand grips guy who said that they carry them, and it was not a pleasant experience. I guess if you don't want to play on one of their treadmills or take one of their "bootcamp training" aerobics classes they want you out! Or maybe I was talking too loud or asking too many questions while they were feverishly trying to lip sync to Kelly Clarkson while folding towels...

So, I went online today and ordered 5 pairs (Tamara, me, Brad Greenlee, Jed Hwang and one other pair if someone wants them). They're about $20 each with shipping and everything and they should be here in a couple days.

TomC - I love Metallica. Seriously. But when it comes to the rest of the genre you love so much, I am about as well informed as you are about tanning salons. I need some direction. Or, more accurately, my ipod is hungry and is asking for metal. Where does one start their journey in your land?

Thanks Lydia!

While others may argue with me, most metal is unlistenable. Many bands that receive critical accolades are not very worthwhile. They are extreme purely for the sake of being extreme. They don't write songs so much as they devise ways to punish their audiences with no hope of providing any kind of artistic reward. It is a genre that, in most quarters, has run out of anything meaningful to say. At its best, however, metal delivers the songwriting goods (concision, form, and direction) with a dose of aggression that would make Beethoven, Grieg, and Wagner proud.

So where to start? Metallica is an excellent touchstone. Modern metal would not exist without them. Master of Puppets is probably their finest hour, but almost anything from their catalog has some merit. Their most recent release, St. Anger, is pretty lacking, however. A new album is thankfully on the way this fall.

From there, you need to decide on what you are looking for in the music, especially with respect to vocals. If you don't mind some shouting, one of the great albums out there is Meantime by Helmet. This is, perhaps, the finest 37 minutes of metal recorded in the last 20 years. I listen to it frequently to this day. It can be a bit angry, abrasive, and repetitive for those not accustomed to it, however.

For something more recent, I really like Paradise Lost's latest offering, In Requiem. Wonderful songwriting, excellent vocals, and remarkable consistency throughout the album. Very moody and gloomy. It's also really hard to argue with Fu-Manchu's King of the Road, or California Crossing. This isn't metal so much as it is sun-drenched rock from Southern California.

Pantera's Vulgar Display of Power is also very worthwhile. They put together a great album with amazing songs and strong lyrics. Then they discovered heroin and went swiftly downhill. Be warned, their vocalist does a lot of yelling and that may not be to your taste. His vocals would qualify as gentle by today's standards, but consider yourself warned. Faith No More put out some great albums, although they were occasionally uneven. Mike Patton might be the most talented singer anywhere in rock. No one can touch him.

Lastly, let's not forget our Marxist friends in Rage Against the Machine. Every album they put out is good. I don't know that I can say that about any other band. They were innovative and angry. Phenomenal songwriters with a penchant for communist causes.

That should be enough to get you started on the road toward metallic nirvana. As I said, metal is about as bad as it gets. However, if you are willing to dig, you can find some gems.

Jonathan, we will miss you! best of luck in Hollywood. When you are a big star, don't forget about your old pals here at CFO!

Jonathan and I approach this from two very different perspectives. Jonathan has a much greater tolerance for really harsh stuff than I do. I have a useful metric that I like to go by: If you need to explain to someone why a band is cool, or why their music is enjoyable, then it's not cool and it's not enjoyable. Good stuff should stand on its own. That's not to say everyone will like it, but it should not require some kind of explanation in order to be enjoyed.

Gather a group of your friends in the room and put on a Meshuggah or Dillinger Escape Plan album. Among those that do not quickly develop headaches, ask them their thoughts. Most likely, they will request you turn off that awful noise. Try that same experiment with the albums that I suggested. Some folks will hate them, but some might actually be able to detect coherent song structures, melodies, or hooks. Almost no one cares how technically proficient a band is, or how many weird time signatures they can play in. The stuff that endures is something that you can hum along to - something that doesn't feel dated when you listen to it 5 or 10 years later.

I deliberately left Slayer off of my list. I rather like Slayer and Reign in Blood is a good album but it's also cartoonish. If you want an album that literally extols the joys of worshiping Satan for the entire thing with song titles such as, "Altar of Sacrifice," and lyrics like, "Praise Hail Satan!," then this is the album for you. I still like it, but it probably it's a bit silly. Fast, influential, and angry, but silly.

Black Sabbath is very influential, but they're honestly not that great. I realize that's heresy, but they have a lot of tunes that don't hold up well. Compare them to their contemporaries such as Who or Led Zeppelin and you quickly realize that Sabbath isn't all that swift.

Let the debate continue!

I'm a big fan of Tool, although some might argue they're more alt-rock than metal. I have limited tolerance for the endless screaming of the likes of Meshuggah.

Hey Jonathon and Ann! Thanks so much for your timeless inspiration: you two were my first 'leaders' at the last Crossfit gym with Connie, Annie and Angela. I still can see Ann in my mind's eye showing me how to back squat and telling me that I would some day get over body weight. By the way, I think LA is waaaaay cooool! and Hollywood, well it rocks. And Go UCLA! Also, enjoy waves! (The reason northern Californians are so irritated by LA is that they cannot admit that a nice warm water beach with big waves is far better than any cute orange bridge near a prison!)