Soundgarden - Burden In My Hand

I think all the opinions of this song are taking the song way too literally. If you know anything about Chris Cornell, his bout with heroin was his monkey on his back, and the "Burden In His Hand". He refers to the object of his addiction, (heroin), as "her", but that doesn't mean it is a woman or female creature. Below is a copy of the lyrics, and my interpretation. As a songwriter, lyricist and producer of 40 years, I have a good understanding of where the pain of many artists come to write about... and remember, this was in the days of the "Seattle Grunge Invasion", where most of the big musicians were into heroin. (Layne Staley, Kurt Cobain, others)

"Follow me into the desert As thirsty as you are Crack a smile and cut your mouth And drown in alcohol"

--- he's asking you to follow his story of desperation regarding his addiction, his "desert". If you "smile" you "cut" your mouth because the smile is fake. You are desperate too. Drowning in alcohol is only the legal "painkiller" you can buy freely, which is why the 30% of the world population can be considered alcoholics. Drowning in booze is just another path to self destruction he knows he's on, and his "go to" solution if he can't find his heroin fix. He never admitted to using "heroin" and made his comments about his addictions strictly about "alcohol", but this song was released after his friend Kurt Cobain committed suicide, and Layne Staley overdosed, along with several other close friends he saw dropping due to addictions.

"'Cause down below the truth is lying Beneath the riverbed So quench yourself and drink the water That flows below her head”

---the "riverbed" is the source of Life, and below that, even if the riverbed is dry, you can dig "below" for water and find "truth", but there is a "lie, a deceit" that "flows below her head". What is the first big hint at what the song is in this phrase, "her head" --it means the tip of the syringe needle. He's saying you think you'll find satisfaction and relief in heroin. You think you're drinking water of "truth", but notice it's "below her head". Who is "her"? Heroin. Also, take notice that the "truth" is "BENEATH" the riverbed. It's not the real water flowing in the riverbed, its the dried up riverbed that forces you to dig to find release to your emotional pain.

"Oh no there she goes Out in the sunshine The sun is mine, sun is mine --- I am shooting up, the day is not rainy because I'm high and the "sun is mine"... said TWICE.

"I shot my love today Would you cry for me I lost my head again Would you lie for me

--- then he actually states he "shot" (shoot up) his "love" (heroin or other drug). Will you cry for him and his lack of control, and spiral to these depths of self-destruction? He lost his head, and if you were his friend or "hanger-on", would you "lie" for him?

"Close your eyes and bow your head I need a little sympathy 'Cause fear is strong and love's for everyone Who isn't me

--- "close your eyes" to his addictions, his failures, bow your head and say a prayer for him because he "needs a little sympathy". His fear is strong, and he thinks everyone else gets love that "isn't him".

"Kill your health and kill yourself And kill everything you love And if you live you can fall to pieces And suffer with my ghost

--- If you follow his path, you will "kill your health and kill yourself and kill everything you love". If you "live", you will still "fall to pieces" and suffer with his own "ghost", predicting his own death, and if you're on his same path of self destruction, you will "suffer" with the memory of him dying, regardless of his rockstar status, he died unhappy, addicted, and his addictions will be his "ghost" following you.

From: https://songmeanings.com/threads/c/73016153927/

Hekate - Einarvollsgråen

Hekate consists of Silje Liahagen, Malin Alander and Synnøve Plassen. Each one has been showcasing their unique styles of singing on scenes all around Norway, and now they have come together to perform as a trio, wanting to use the traditional dance music as the base for their powerful sound image. After their debut-concert at a night club at Riksscenen in Oslo, Norway, they have become a hot name in the music industry. In the summer 2024, they won the open class contest at the Norwegian championship of folk music. They are releasing their debut album in June 2025 on Heilo Records.  From: https://www.hekate-trio.com/about

Arcadea - Silent Spores

A synth-rock record about a futuristic society from the drummer of Mastodon, you say? As elevator pitches go, it’s an intriguing one. Intriguing, yes, though not necessarily promising. Lest we forget, several of those hallmarks characterised Mastodon’s 2014 album, Once More ’Round The Sun, which, despite intergalactic expectations, is now considered a relatively by-the-numbers offering from a band known for continuously taking ambitious leaps.
Admittedly, this second album from Arcadea is Brann Dailor – joined by Core Atoms and João Nogueira – trying to avoid crossing the streams of his projects, attempting something more fun and danceable than their self-titled debut, released in 2017. In that regard, this is pretty successful, at least in its ability to provoke listeners to trip the line fantastic, thanks to tracks like Fuzzy Planet and 2 Shells. You’d have a hard time throwing shapes to Starry Messenger with any less than eight limbs, given how speedy its electronic undulations are.
It’s less proggy and po-faced than its predecessor. It’s certainly jauntier, with Gilded Eye and Planet Pounder seemingly relishing their own absurdity, sounding as they do like several video game soundtracks being played at the same time. Both tracks also benefit from being more suited to Brann’s vocals, which work best when darting in and out of big, busy arrangements.
The Exodus Of Gravity is an album of niche pleasures; despite sounding different to its predecessor, it is unlikely to appeal to many beyond Mastodon’s fanbase. It would be a shame if it doesn’t, as its brain-bending arrangements and eccentricities will appeal to those for whom music is for space exploration, not billionaire bellends like Jeff Bezos.  From: https://www.kerrang.com/album-review-arcadea-the-exodus-of-gravity

Katy Perry - Firework

This Fourth of July, we’re taking a look at the meaning behind Katy Perry’s apropos song, “Firework.” As much as you hear the popstar’s hit single during the holiday weekend, the song really has very little to do with America. Instead, “Firework” has to do with a more morbid concept: death, or more specifically, Katy Perry’s death. In a Billboard interview the singer said, “when I pass, I want to be put into a firework and shot across the sky over the Santa Barbara Ocean as my last hurrah.”
But where did Perry get this idea? She explained that she was inspired by the great American author, Jack Keuroac, and his 1957 novel, On The Road. “My boyfriend showed me a paragraph out of Jack Keuroac’s On the Road, about people that are buzzing and fizzing and full of life and never say a commonplace thing. They shoot across the sky like a firework and make people go ‘Ahhh.’ I guess that making people go ‘ahhh’ is kind of like my motto.”  From: https://americansongwriter.com/the-meaning-behind-firework-by-katy-perry/

Messa - Live at Nantes 2022

 Messa - Live at Nantes 2022 - Part 1

 

 Messa - Live at Nantes 2022 - Part 2

 

On March 11th, the Post-Metal world will and should be watching when Italy’s most elegant combination of Jazz and Post-Metal releases their third full-length onto a waiting world. Well, the VoS-lers surely can’t wait for Messa’s new record Close! And as we like to keep you on the edge of your seats we give you a detailed interview with the band conducted by our living library Knut who has gotten a lot of really good answers, mostly from singer Sara but also from her bandmates on several questions. Maybe this will make you as excited as Knut and us about this release because it is really a great release and another proof that elegance and force are not at all at opposite ends of the musical spectrum but really combinable!

Q: Congratulations on your new album! You have really developed your music further! After the two releases Belfry and Feast for Water, you now name your album Close. The cover of the first album has a picture of the famous bell tower in Lake Reschen, the cover of the second one is connected to water and now on this new one dancing women, I assume they are performing the Nakh dance from the video for the song “Pilgrim”. The covers on the previous album had clear connotations with the titles. So, what is the reasons behind the title Close that you have chosen for this new album?

A: The term “Close” has a lot of meanings. Actually, each of us in the band looks at it through different perspectives. We like to think that “Close” is a direct emanation of our yearning to escape. The main goal was transporting ourselves and the listener on a journey. We wanted to stand by the concept which lies behind the title of the record by creating and recording it while being physically in the same room. It is not a concept album but we always want to have that fil rouge, that thin red thread that ties the songs together, just like we did on our past albums. We came to read about Nakh once we found this 1930s picture by E. M. Schutz. The picture conveyed the sensations we wanted to express through the albums, so we decided to use that photo on the cover of Close.

Q: So, about the dance that is a traditional dance performed by women in Algeria/Tunisia and the distinct Eastern Mediterranean musical influences on this album. At the end of the second song, the heavy, fast and doom-laden music incorporates some sonics from traditional Eastern music, and the next song start with a Duduk, also connected to the Eastern music, the instrument spread through the Eastern part of the Mediterranean all through Armenia. And you incorporate Oud and Dulcimer in the sonics. And the name of the song “Orphalese” is connected to the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran. These Eastern musical elements are extremely well incorporated in your way of playing doom metal throughout the album. How did these inspirations find their way into your music on this album?

A: As previously stated, the whole idea behind Close is the journey. We did not want to repeat ourselves, so we looked for new sounds and instruments that are not typical within the metal genre. It was natural for us to search for inspiration in the musical heritage that we have as Mediterraneans. Arabian music is very evocative as it can transport the listener to a different place. Alberto had to learn how to play the Oud - which has 11 strings and is a fretless instrument, which allows you to play microtones – and it was not easy for him. Another challenge we had to face was incorporating these different acoustic instruments while keeping Close a metal album.

Q: Let us go back in time for some background. Six years ago, I found Belfry on Bandcamp, and it happened to me as with so many others; it blew me away. I tried to find other releases by Messa but discovered the jaw dropping thing that this exquisitely performed album in fact was a debut album, full-length even. So where did you come from, musically when forming Messa in 2014? What background of musical styles were fused into what became Messa? What did each of you contribute?

A: We have very different musical backgrounds and they all ended up straight into Messa’s cauldron. Alberto mostly played Prog, Rocco had many Black Metal bands, Marco played in a Dark Rock band and Sara played bass in Punk/Death Metal/Grind projects. In fact Messa is the first band Sara ever sang in. We all befriended many years before Messa started, though. In early 2014 Marco and Sara started developing some ideas, and soon Alberto and Rocco joined. None of us had played Doom before and we were curious to approach a genre that sounded new to us as musicians. Our songs are the result of our sensibilities mixed together. There are many personal elements that we introduce when we create music.

From: https://veilofsound.com/2022/03/02/Interview_with_Messa.html

 

Throwing Muses - Sun Racket (full album)

01 Dark Blue
02 Bywater
03 Maria Laguna
04 Bo Diddley Bridge
05 Milk at McDonald's
06 Upstairs Dan
07 St. Charles
08 Frosting
09 Kay Catherine
10 Sue's

2020 has been such a disaster of a year on so many fronts, we've got to take crumbs of comfort where we find them. And a brand new Throwing Muses album in 2020 was certainly a pleasant surprise to me. I got kind of obsessed with Throwing Muses a few years ago and have been working my way through their extensive discography, as well as Kristin Hersh’s solo material, ever since. Most recently, I’d been listening to their output from the late 1980s, to which Sun Racket sounds far more muscular and raw by comparison. What has not diminished one iota in all that time is Hersh’s fearless creativity; and the sound her band members kick out is as powerful and uncompromising as ever.
As always with Throwing Muses (apart from the sprawling double album Purgatory/Paradise) the record is punchy; most of the ten tracks clock in under four minutes so the whole thing is done and dusted in little over half an hour. In that time though, we’re treated to some of the most experimental tracks the band have recorded as well as a couple of thunderous rockers on a par with their early 90s heyday.
The album opens with the grungey Dark Blue, and the devastating pair of couplets, ‘If you were a sore loser, I'd be a better dreamer, And if I were a better dreamer, You'd be a dream come true’, proving the years have not blunted Hersh’s tongue - before descending into a crunchy choppy head-bobber of a tune.
As an ‘island band’, Throwing Muses’ music has always had a strong undercurrent of aquatic associations. The songs on Sun Racket were written in the aftermath of an incident where Hersh nearly drowned, having fallen asleep on the beach. This sense of slipping in and out of sleep - and dreams - and slipping underwater pervades much of the album. Bywater is particularly dreamlike, featuring a case of projected identity that only makes sense in dreams, as Hersh sings about a goldfish in the toilet...who happens to be Freddie Mercury, ‘a mustached amputee, heading out to sea’. Among such surreal poetry there's the occasional lyric that catches you with its directness, ‘Changing clothes in the kitchen’ - the context is left unexplained but it clearly implies unusual circumstances, maybe a sense of fumbling panic or of trying not to be discovered.
Bo Diddley Bridge is a song about the bridge where her son used to fish as a child and combines buzz-saw guitars over lock-tight drums and a snaking bassline. Midway through, the song breaks down, just as the real bridge also collapsed, as well as according to Hersh, their life at the time. Thankfully both have been rebuilt, as she says, “But we lived; we swam in a life sunshine somehow. And both bridges — the Bo Diddley one and the life one — were rebuilt around us.”
The trio of tracks, Milk at McDonalds, Upstairs Dan and St Charles are some of the most stark and unusual I’ve heard from Throwing Muses. As always there’s the juxtaposition of surreal imagery with the odd lyrical bolt from the blue. Kristin Hersh currently lives in New Orleans and it feels like elements of Southern Gothic have influenced her songwriting; Milk at McDonalds is a macabre bluesy dirge, one minute the lyrics have her imagining coyotes in the freezer, or turning into a pillar of salt, and then comes the naked admission, ‘I don’t regret a single drop of alcohol’ - the song manages to sound defiant yet regretful at the same time.
Frosting is a triumphant 90s-style rocker bringing the tempo back up and waking the album from its unsettled dream-filled slumber as Hersh rasps, ‘Then I wake up and see your smiling smile’. As always, we’re not sure if she’s happy to see that smile smiling at her, if the return to the ‘real’ world is relief or disappointment - as always it’s probably a combination of both.
Despite some of its more avant-garde moments, and the presence of tracks that recall their early 90s prime, Sun Racket sounds both fresh and unmistakably like Throwing Muses. The band have been through various line-up changes during their long career, and while Hersh is the creative glue that binds everything together, she and drummer David Narcizo and bassist Bernard Georges have been playing together for some 30 years. After that long it must be inevitable that they would share an intuitive sense of one another’s musical powers - and this shows in the way their free-flowing experimental tendencies are kept in check by super tight playing.
I've never heard a Throwing Muses album I don't like so I'm hardly an unbiased reviewer. Apart from 1994's University which remains a clear favourite, I tend to rate them all equally and Sun Racket is easily as strong as the bulk of their discography. Hersh's singing may have become even more gravelly with the passage of time, but her lyrical voice is clearer than ever.  From: https://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/82385/Throwing-Muses-Sun-Racket/

Beautify Junkyards - Aquarius

I had the great pleasure recently of interviewing João Branco Kyron from Portugal’s excellent Beautify Junkyards. Their lovely new album Cosmorama comes out in less than a week on 15 January. This interview was conducted over email and I got some great, thoughtful answers from João. Thanks again for this opportunity.

EK: Please tell us how the band formed.

JBK: Some of the members of BJ came from a band called Hipnótica (that released 5 albums between 1999 and 2010). We started playing covers of songs we loved (mostly from the Autumn Folk period), just for our own pleasure. Things evolved and suddenly we had enough songs for an album that we thought it was worth to release, and that’s when we decided to release it under Beautify Junkyards. It was an unusual way to start a band with a debut album made entirely of cover versions, but all of them had a sense of unity soundwise speaking.

EK: What have been your biggest influences, not just in music, but in art and literature too?

JBK: We are always absorbing new artistic expressions and sometimes we find some artists/works that we feel a strong affinity with, to the point of trying to incorporate some of their elements in our own musical and lyrical language. Things change through time but there are artists that are constantly present on our minds, for instance: Os Mutantes, Glauber Rocha, Incredible String Band, Derek Jarman, Czech New Wave cinema, Broadcast, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, United States of America, Zeca Afonso, Fernando Pessoa, Banda do Casaco, Ash Ra Tempel, just to mention a few. For this new album, we also searched in more depth the visionary works of Austin Osman Spare and Vali Myers.

EK: How integrated is Portuguese culture in your recordings?

JBK: Many aspects of the Portuguese culture are part of our musical identity, but the access to some of the more recent recorded material was not an easy task but for the existence of YouTube (thats works as our collective memory). During 40 years, Portugal was under a dictatorship, so everything from abroad was filtered through the regime lenses. During that period, many artists had to exile and others faced difficult times. With the Carnation Revolution in ‘74 came an “explosion” for the senses in all the artistic fields. Then in the 80s, we had a boom of local rock bands, and nowadays I think Portugal is one of the most exciting places in Europe in terms of music creation. We love to mix our Portuguese influences and also our language in the band´s music, it’s that fusion of influences and languages that make it unique. On our live sets, we also usually play covers from artists we admire like Zeca Afonso and Fausto, and we have plans to invite some of those artists to play with us.

EK: How did you cultivate your current sound? You play a unique blend of tropicalia, dream pop, and folk. Your songs are like wandering inside a dreamscape.

JBK: It’s not a conscious process, most of the base ideas for songs come from improvised sessions that are later worked in the studio. I think all of the influences I´ve mentioned and the fact that they are from different latitudes allows us to create music with many layers. There are some aspects we invest a lot of time on: the sonic textures and the instruments that better serve each song, sampling sounds from multiple sources and times and working on the lyrics.

From: https://bigtakeover.com/interviews/AVirtualConversationwithJoaoBrancoKyronofBeautifyJunkyards