I'm an engineer, and I pride myself on being able to figure stuff out. So, it was humbling experience when I installed Fedora Core 6 on my hard drive last week. I've been posting to different forums and searching for bits and pieces of information for about a week now, getting the thing to do what I want, and I am now almost finished. All I have left to do is to find a decent music player that can handle m4a. I've managed to get both of my monitors set up, the graphics and ethernet drivers installed, and figured out how to mount the ntfs partition that windows is sitting on (it's especially difficult on a raid 0). In fact, I'm posting from fc6 right now :)
So, in music, what does everybody think of the new MCR album, The Black Parade? Regardless of what you thought of their first couple of LPs. I, for one, was impressed. I don't like that every review references Queen (they may be pretty good, but they're not Queen), but aside from that, the glam and melodrama seem to work pretty well for me.
-prog
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I've played the album through once, on the recommendation of my teenage god son. As a man who was a teen when Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack were released, I don't quite see the parallels with Mr Mercury and chums, but I do think there's something interesting going on there.
Regrettably, I feel I'm perhaps too old to get into it, or rather that my day job as a music journalist for a magazine aimed at a 35-plus audience means that I'm spending most of my time on other matters. New music is something I try to fit in when I have some downtime, mostly I'm being commissioned to re-appraise the stuff of bygone years.
I would say, however, that My Chemical Romance are perhaps the first band I've heard for some time that suggest something new is going on, a feeling I haven't had since the emergence of Massive Attack or Portishead over a decade ago - I know there's no parallel to be drawn there, but I do think MCR are somewhat more adventurous than most. The last "young" record that excited me was Green Day's American Idiot, because it reminded of the early 70s protest of such diverse figures as Creedence Clearwater Revival and Marvin Gaye.
MCR strike me as a group who aren't in love with the idea of being famous, but rather want to create music of some substance. How successful they might ultimately be is still open to conjecture, but I applaud, nay celebrate, them for actually giving it a go. Lazy musicians should be made to eat their instruments, if you ask me.
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I double-dog dig the My Chemical Romance. I'm staring down 40, and had never heard them before, not one note of their music, but I do read a lot of rock mags and the Queen citations drew me in. I ran out last Tuesday like a little schoolgirl and snagged the CD. Not every track is a classic (I felt the same way about "American Idiot"; liked it, but the "Jesus of Suburbia" suite is so magnificent that it just towers over the rest of the album.) But I think the intro into "Dead!", "Mama" and "Teenagers" are all wonderful. Between Green Day, Muse and MCR, can the Rawk Opera - or at least the Concept Album - truly be back for good...? BTW, it's still amazing to me how Queen were so ridiculed by snob-ass, know-nothing rock critics in their day, and now they seem to be just about the most revered, referenced and influential band around...funny how that works. Anyway, cheers to MCR. They sure kick hell out of Crap Your Pants Say Yuck!
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PS - Mr. Terry Staunton, here you are again - I have GOT to know what mag you write for! Is it MOJO?
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AND you actually SAW Queen...in 1977? Ya bastid ya.
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What's with the GET UPS? I've been meaning to ask someone about that.
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It's "Sgt. Pepper's" but like...dark. Black, even!