There are things I won’t do. Things like mention Dustin Lieber’s proper name. It has become a personal abomination. You could call it beef or you could say I am jealous. Whatever you call it, I believe the social media give justice to who justice deserves. Instead, it gives justice to those who are able to raise the votes with numbers.

Just in, Rebecca Black! The female version of Dustin Lieber. She has been trending on Twitter worldwide. And her official video(which I won’t put on my blog) has 56million views. Imagine that beating Lady Maga’s youtube views too.

Okay, just for the records, Rebecca Black’s hit song ‘Friday’ has the same tune as Dustin Lieber’s ‘Baby’ song. Unlike his own song where he goes ‘Baby baby baby oooo’, she goes ‘Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday’.  Dustin features Ludacris in his own song where he raps toward the end. Rebecca calls on a guy who also adds the Ludacris fill to her own song.

What pisses me off is not only that she’s obviously trying to be like him or that she’s equally young and looking for fame through Youtube, it’s that the mediocrity can yield promising returns through the social media. All you need do is get enough tweets to support your mediocrity and then the world will start begging you to display some of your folly for a fee.

So with Rebecca Black, it most likely started as a Youtube video backed with tweets, now people are downloading her song from the iTunes Store paying MONEY for it. In a few hours, if not already, she’d be a millionaire in dollars.

My advice to others: If you’ve got real talent, get real social connections (online).

 

In the cause of writing this article,

• no animals were killed.
• Rebecca Black’s real name was written
• I refuse to put any links which will promote any of the mentioned characters
• Disgust for the Rebecca Black video was the driving force.

But for me, I consider music to be magic. And I reaffirm that opinion every time I discover uncommon blends of sound.  Amongst the finest, unique finds are bands like Deas Vail, Adam Young, Yann Tiersen, Flyleaf.

Two days ago, I stumbled on a CD for the band called Eisley, The Valley. Did some research about them and I just can’t deactivate the repeat all. Here is a video of a song of theirs below.

Top of the morning to y’all.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lci0pnWk7nM&w=640&h=385]

Tuesday morning  I decided to stick to this album, at least for the rest of the day. Slowly I was falling in love with the music.  In fact, I got used to the music that right now, I can tell his musical signature. A few days ago, I decided to do some research and I totally fell in love with his music.

A french composer who has gone to various music academies, his music and skills totally stand out. He plays the piano the violin, accordion, melodica, xylophone, toy piano, ondes martenot, harpsichord and typewriter. Yes, the typewriter. It was through this research I found out it *sigh* can be used as a musical instrument.

He actually plays the toy pianos on stage!

As far as I am concerned, he does art by blending different natural sounds.  In fact, I heard of a particular concert where they actually planned for a train to pass so they could capture the sound.

Yann Tiersen – Esther(clicking this link from a computer will pop out a video)

Watching this concert, I actually thought they were tuning the guitars at the beginning. Apparently, he was playing the guitar like it was a xylophone. Then he plays two toy pianos.  Then next they play till a train passes and adds a musical layer to the song.  Note how the other guitarist glides through the guitar string for the wooing sound.

In this video, Yann Tiersen uses for sound, water dropping from a tap, a spinning washing machine, the refrigerator hum, a spinning fan

When you listen to things like this, you can’t but think some men are just cut out for stuff like this.

I am personally inspired to do more. I have concluded that  Yann doesn’t wait for music to inspire us. He brings out inspiration from music.

Until We Have Faces is RED’s third album preceded by  End Of Silence and Innocence & Instinct. This last album takes its main inspiration from CS Lewis’ book with similar title Till We Have Faces. This theme  I have loved RED from their very first album, mainly because of the way they drive  orchestra into hard rock.  That totally captivated me.

I must say there was a lot of hard work put into this album. I don’t think there has been any other band whose activities I followed this much and I must say I am impressed with the work they put into this project. Awesome work! And I can say it paid off in the end. For the first time ever, I actually saw the music scores for a rock band.

I am still trying to get used to the tunes but I must confess I prefer Innocence and Instinct to this. Like I mentioned, the kick I get from listening to RED is the way they integrate violins, violas into guitar work. Their other albums in my opinion did more harmonious things with strings. For some reason, I didn’t ‘feel’ the mixing of some songs. I think some songs were ‘overmixed’.

The song starts with Feed The Machine and ends with Hymn for the Missing, a perfect selection of order. Feed The Machine starts the album with life kicked in by the powerful sound of Anthony Armstrong’s guitars. I loved the orchestra work on the opening of this song. You can view that on this video:

The next track, Faceless, which takes the theme of the whole album happens to be my favorite.

Michael Barnes sings “We are the faceless, we are the nameless, we are the hopeless until we have faces”. The concept of this album is derived from C.S. Lewis’ similarly-titled book, Till We Have Faces. Like Jonathan Anderson rightly said, “It challenges us to find our true identity, and to realize that life is empty if we don’t”.

All those who have listened to the album so far have commented on how hot Lie To Me(Denial) is. You can hear the influences of Breaking Benjamin’s former guitarist on this and quite a number of songs in this 11 track CD.

Let It Burn is another song with strong emotions: “How long can you stand the pain || How long will you hide your face || How  long will you be afraid || How long will you play this game || How long will you fight or will you walk away ||How long will you let it burn”.

The beginning guitar riff of Watch You Crawl is awesome; a good collaboration of the bass guitarist and the Joe Rickard, the drummer and the vocals hammering the words ‘I will fight until the end‘.

Just before the end, the track Best Is Yet To Come prepares ground for the last track Hymn For The Missing, a purely emotional track like Pieces from their first album, End of Silence. The violins roll in on this track. A few female back up vocals are also present making this a really soft track.

Michael Barnes’ voice comes really strong in this album carrying the deep meanings in his voice.  I will rate this album a 3.5 of 5.