The Blog That Failed

So since my purchase of the Creative MP3 player I’ve been listening to a heap of music (mostly thanks to Levi). The majority is stuff that I am relatively familiar with, however, I’ve discovered a few new gems along the way. For example, I have a new found appreciation of Metallica who I’ve been a "passive" fan of for sometime now and saw in concert coming up a couple of years back. Now of course I’ve heard their albums from time to time but I’ve never really listened to them. However, having played Ride The Lightening, And Justice For All, Metallica (aka The Black Album), Load, and Reload for the past couple of weeks or so, I have come to the conclusions that:

1. they are up there with the great bands - some of the compositions and performances are just brilliant and they have a total synergy going on

2. I have greatly underestimated Kirk Hammett’s abilities as a lead guitarist (I think this is mostly due to his very average tone, although this has improved with the albums). Some of his work is fantastic – The Call Of Klutu and the absolutely gorgeous harmonised solo on My Friend of Misery to name but two.

It is also very interesting hearing the progression over the years from the early thrash metal of the first four albums (these don't sound nearly so "alternative" today as they did back in the 80's which illustrates the huge part that they, along with certain other bands, played in bringing heavy music into the mainstream, which in turn makes it easy to forget how groundbreaking it was at the time) to the classic rock sound of Load and Reload, which are both absolutely superb albums (although the hardcore fans may disagree).

The other thing with listening to music through headphones constantly is that, (besides probably contributing to speeding up my hearing loss) you hear all sorts of things that you normally miss by just listening to a stereo. The subtle vocal, bass, guitar, drum – whatever, lines that are “hidden” away low in the mix are brought out and add that little bit extra to songs that often you have been listening to for years without noticing. The production is also highlighted as the stereo effect is brought to life by our binaural senses.

Anyway so what’s my point? Well, it's that you can see things in a totally different light by changing the way you do something, it’s like an old painting in a new frame.