Epic Tales of Epic Epicness Award
Florence and the Machine – Ceremonials
Another big, brash, over-the-top album from Florence Welch and company.  Big drums, lush orchestrations and arrangements, wailing vocals, but surprisingly much more cohesive and “album-like” than her debut.  It holds together well, but still manages to have single material like “What The Water Gave Me.” Also, the bonus tracks and demos on the limited editions are nearly as good as – in some cases, even better than – the album tracks.

Epic Tales of Epic Epicness Award II: The Epicness Strikes Back
M83: Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
This album is exhausting.  It’s great, in small doses.  Big gorgeous walls of sound, much more confident vocals than on previous efforts, catchy tunes, but at 22 tracks, it’s the sort of album you really need to set aside a block of time for.  Also the newfound love of vocal yelps and embellishments gets a little much after about 7 tracks. Still, it’s kind of an insanely breathtaking endeavor.

Rainbows, Suns and Moons Award
Above and Beyond: Group Therapy
A&B has always put out solid chunks of big room trance, from their collaboration with Oceanlab to the excellent Ajunabeats mix series.  But this is something…different.  It’s big, expansive trance, yes, but the instrumentals maintain a filmic quality (not the least of which is the track “Filmic”) and the vocal tracks do something rare for trance music: spotlight the vocals.  Instead of random Hawkshaw-esque sopranos dreamily singing about dreaming dreams over 4-on-the-floor beats, we instead get the sultry alto of Zoe Johnston front-and-center, and the crooning of Richard Bedford. It’s refreshing, and catchy.

If This Is Selling Out, I’ll Take It Award
Camo & Krooked: Cross the Line
C&K jump to the awesome Hospital Records for their full-length debut, and in doing so took a lot of flak from critics accusing them of commercializing their sound.  Yeah, their older stuff was harder, more neuro-funk stuff, and their new stuff is poppier and more in-line with what’ll get play on Radio One, but you know, I’m okay with that.  The title track is catchy as hell, “All Fall Down” dabbles in dubstep without devolving into bass-wobble cliché, and “Breezeblock” has an offkilter jump-up beat that helps keep the track interesting while guaranteeing hours of entertainment watching drugged-out club kids fall over.

Okay Music, Good Plugin, Awesome Advertisement Award
Dada Life
Dada Life has been making some waves in the electrohouse community, and they do write some bangers.  I wouldn’t consider them doing anything groundbreaking, but they’re fun.  However, they’ve teamed up with a software developer to emulate their processing chain to produce a plugin called “Sausage Fattener” (well, they ARE Austrian, so you knew a sausage was going to surface eventually).  The plugin is great, but likely to be overused to suck the dynamic range out of basslines for years.  Better still, though, is their promo video for the plugin, which shows racks of outboard gear patched into what I believe is a knockwurst.  Brilliant.

South London Party Music Award
Toddla T: Watch Me Dance
I don’t even know how to classify this album.  Elements of house, reggae, rock, old-school rave, breaks, grime, 2-step all sort of collide into a bunch of bangers, there’s not really a bad track in the bunch.  Not every one hits it out of the park the way the title track does, but every track would be at home on a boombox at a house party.

Dance Savvy Award
Katy B: On A Mission
The full-length by Katy B finally got a US release this year (even though it’s been out in the UK since mid-2010).  It’s all straight-up dance music.  A lot of it feels a bit calculated – hey look, here’s a UK Funky track with everything that entails – but whatever, it’s well-calculated, and she’s got a soulful diva voice that belies her young age and small stature.  She’s been smart enough to recruit top producers like Skream, Benny Ill, Benga and Geeneus to put together one banger after another, even if some of them are sort of cliché.

Next Best Thing Award
DJ Fresh Feat. Sian Evans: Louder
I’ve wanted a new Kosheen album for a while.  And I’ve wanted one with as much punch as their debut, but they’ve been busy trying to write rock songs and pop songs and the like.  So now their frontwoman is collaborating with dubstep/dnb artist DJ Fresh, and I couldn’t be happier.  “Louder” takes us through a range of tempos, glued together with Evans’ soulful croon.

Best Remix Album I Was Involved With (long player edition)
The Dark Clan: All My Ghosts
I mean, for real.  I was particularly pleased with the mix I was involved with, partially because I got to coin the term “Chaalstep” – but there are some mind-numbingly good mixes on this disc, including a frenetic stormer by a resurgent Boole, and mixes by Ego Likeness and Wade Alin that are mindblowers.

Best Remix Album I Was Involved With (extended player edition)
Little Red Wolf: If Only We Were Remixed
A sweet, all-girl country-folk-pop-americana band happens to have a fondness for electronica and related dance musics. So they recruit their friends in the genre to remix their tracks.  It’s kind of a brilliant move.  In the five tracks on the album, they cover indie-tronica, dubstep, bolllywood, symphonic metal, and industrial noise.

Production! Award.
Caustic: The Golden Vagina Of Fame and Profit
Matt was savvy on his debut for Metropolis, recruiting a number of his friends and connections to co-produce his tracks.  There’s still the manic energy and usual mix of rage, introspection and goofball humor, but with more polish than previous releases, thanks to Faderhead, Dan Clark, and others.

The Hell With Oversaturation Award
Ellie Goulding: Lights
It’s kind of fluffy, she’s got a vibrato that can cut glass, and she’s becoming ubiquitous enough to have toured with Katy Perry.  But dammit, “Lights” is just a hooky album. Good songwriting, good production, good performance.

Compilations I’ve Really Enjoyed
UKF Bass Culture (drum-n-bass, dubstep)
Hospitality Drum & Bass 2011 (drum-n-bass)
Shogun Audio Presents: Way of the Warrior (drum-n-bass)

The Bad:

Skrillex Fatigue
I like Sonny Moore.  I really do.  He’s getting a bit repetitive, yes, but he’s entertaining to watch, and knows how to write (for better or worse) the kind of twitchy bass drops that get the dancefloor moving.  But he’s EVERYWHERE, and not in a good way.  It doesn’t bother me if he’s remixing La Roux, but when he’s collaborating with Korn, well, that’s a bridge too far.  And he’s on the cover of Spin, Mixmag, and everywhere else.  Yawn.

“Complextro”
Did we really need a name for this?  It’s electrohouse guys who like chopping bits of basslines up.  We get it.  I think we’re on the 5th name for this genre in 15 years.

Katy Perry is a Brand
And not just Russell Brand.  The fact that she can host Saturday Night Live and NOT be a musical guest, despite any discernible acting talent, pretty much says it all.  Plus she was on the Simpsons making oral sex jokes.  Really?

Justin Bieber Has a Perfume
WTF.

“Friday”
Further proof that nobody has any idea why things go viral.

The Ugly:

The Resurgence of Twee Pop:
Look, I spent much of the 90’s listening to pop bands fronted by pixie-ish british girls, and the first decade of the new millennium with Imogen Heap and others like her, so I’m generally okay with the twee.  But it certainly feels like every new indie rock band is some guy with a sensitive neckbeard, a cardigan, and a ukulele trying to be “quirky” and writing painfully delicate, breathy, sugary, wispy melodies about nothing in particular.

Justin Vernon’s Goddamned Cabin.
I’m not a huge Bon Iver fan.  They’re decent at what he/they do/does, I admit, but it’s just not my thing.  But for the love of god, I cannot bear to read another piece of press about them, because it is rare to find one that doesn’t dwell on the fact that he recorded the album in a “cabin in the woods of northern WI.”  Oh my god, a guy recorded something in a home studio.  Quel surprise!  First off, they do have things like “power” and “internet access” and “indoor plumbing” in the outskirts of Eau Claire – just because he’s not recording in New York City doesn’t mean he’s in a Unabomber shack.  Second…so what?  Is that the entire narrative?  It was recorded in a cabin?  That’s all you got?

“Witch House”
Conitnues. To.  Be.  The. Worst.  Genre.  Name.  Ever.  Additionally, I generally dislike genres that as a rule spend an awful lot of time and effort sounding like they spent no time and effort.  Basically it’s a bunch of hipsters who found a 12” of “In The Flat Field” thinking that nobody else has done this since.  What’s interesting is that they seem to be reinventing goth and industrial from first principles, seemingly unaware of the existence of the years between 1980 and 1997.

Korn Invented Dubstep
No.  No they didn’t.  Just because you use half-time drums doesn’t make you relevant.  You still suck.

Prime Rib, with horrible tablecloth.

When you live in the upper Midwest, you quickly become steeped in the culinary tradition that is the Supper Club.  They’re peculiar places, usually on the outskirts of town or in rural areas, in somewhat unassuming and rather dated buildings, often near travelers motels advertising “free color TV.”  A brief revival has sent some of them into more upscale digs, and the nouveau supper club has become an entity of its own, usually offering fine-dining equivalents of the standard fare.  Sometimes, you will find one in a strange part of the city, nestled between warehouses or parked in the middle of an urban stripmall – these are places that doggedly hang on, that were there when the land was little more than trees and meadows, before urban sprawl built up around them.  They hang on either because of their reputations or because of a tenacious clientele, one that is progressively aging.  A supper club of that vintage rarely advertises, and if you visit one you’re unlikely to find anyone under the age of 70 at the bar.  You can count on such a place to have an inexpensive and at the very least serviceable menu.

And wood paneling.  These will always have wood paneling.

These menus are vast, and a tribute to culinary Americana.  While you may see an entry for “spaghetti and meatballs” or possibly some german specialty, this is not a place to go for ethnic or experimental food (although generally if you spot a northern European dish on the menu, it’s a recipe direct from someone’s grandmother and is likely to be good).  This is hearty, down-home fare, heavy on meat and every now and again some sort of cream sauce.  Roast (or sometimes broasted) chicken, steaks, and the less-adventurous fish.  Occasionally surf-n-turf.

However, one generally doesn’t go to order off the menu.  The nightly specials are the main reason one visits a supper club.  And these specials are nearly identical from restaurant to restaurant.

It is traditional, albeit not mandatory, to start the dining experience with a drink from the bar.  This is not a place to order a craft beer – although many places now stock them (especially if it’s local), most are purely decorative.  You get a can’s worth of an American lager, or if you’re lucky you have the availability of something from Leinenkugel’s.  Primarily, though, you order something in a martini or highball glass.  And if it’s in a martini glass, it’s a martini.  Not a cosmopolitan, not an appletini – just whatever you could picture Dean Martin downing in quantity on a Friday night.  Otherwise, you order an Old Fashioned.  Non-midwesterners will recognize this as a drink made generally with whiskey or rye and bitters.  This would be correct in about 90% of the country.  In Wisconsin, it’s similar, but made with the much-sweeter brandy, and usually garnished with a generous number of fluorescent-red maraschino cherries.  It’s a different beast, and an acquired taste.   In some areas you may find it called a “brandy old fashioned”, but if you order an “old fashioned” this is generally the default.

Anything you order will give you an option of a salad bar.  This is a nod to those iconoclastic individuals for whom french fries are not a sufficient serving of vegetables.  One should not approach a salad bar in a supper club expecting anything healthy.  They are all virtually identical – some iceberg-based mix of lettuce in a large bowl, shredded cheddar cheese, sliced cucumbers, sliced mushrooms, sliced red onions, a container of the world’s saddest store-bought tomatoes, an inexplicable container of large-curd cottage cheese, some distressingly uniformly-shaped croutons, and an enormous container of artificial bacon bits.  This is accompanied by several vats of creamy dressings, almost always including French, Ranch (or, for the older set, “house”)  and Blue Cheese, occasionally “creamy Italian”, and for the dietier an eye-hurtingly orange “lo-fat French.”  You will eat a salad, and it will be dressed in something artery-clogging, but this is only a formality.

Some of the more interesting supper clubs will have a large bowl of spinach, and near that a crock-pot of something.  This is the real salad bar gold.  The spinach serves as a carrier for the contents of the crock pot, a viscous, sweet, vinegary concoction referred to as “hot bacon dressing.”  It’s nominally a salad dressing but in reality it’s a small meal in itself.  This is possibly a reference to the traditional american “spinach salad” that originated in Pennsylvania Dutch country, but the resemblance is only superficial – it’s really just an excuse to eat loads of bacon wile convincing yourself you are eating greens.  It is rather brilliant in this fashion.

Friday night is a fish fry.  Despite Wisconsin being settled primarily by German and Scandinavian Lutherans, the fish-on-Friday rule still has a powerful grip on the collective Midwestern psyche.  Battered, deep fried cod or haddock, some sort of potato, and a trip to the salad bar.  This is what you get.  Often a bowl of coleslaw or something will be delivered to the table, but this is just to compete with local church suppers that serve additional foodstuffs.  Some rural places will also sell a fried version of whatever fish is popular in the area – lake perch, walleye, bass.  This is a trick.  Most times the fish is not caught locally, and simply imported with the supply of cod.  It’s usually good, but rarely is it as good as it could be, nor is it usually “all you can eat” as the cod usually is.  There is also often a “baked fish” option, for the health-conscious.  This is also a trick.  It may cost the same or even also be all-you-can-eat, but it is rarely healthy by any definition of the word, since it is invariably served in a deep pool of drawn butter.  It too is delicious, but ordering it will get you either a pitying look (since you are clearly not eating the fried fish becasue of some terrible heart condition) or a mistrustful glance (since you are clearly from out of town).

Often other seafood specials are available on fridays.  The very best will give you a dearly-priced crab leg or lobster tail as a seafood special with or without a steak the size of your face.  This is usually not the highest-quality seafood, but after a few brandy old fashioneds, you will not care and will readily spend the extra $20.

Stick with the cod.  You won’t regret it.  If they know what they’re doing it will be encased in a crispy batter, usually something beer-based, deep-fried, and served with a wedge of lemon and a substantial helping of tartar sauce.  On rare occasions the fish will be breaded.  These establishments are not to be patronized for their fish.

Saturday is, inevitably, Prime Rib.  This is the best reason to go to a supper club.

Often not actually prime, but always a rib roast, slow-roasted, usually served anywhere from blood-red rare to slightly less than rare, you order a cut and just pray you can eat all of it without going into cardiac arrest.  Usually there are two to three cuts – a “petite cut”, which is roughly 12 ozs, a “Queen cut” which is a barely-manageable 14ozs but named such that no truly masculine individual would ever order it, and a “King cut” which can be anywhere from 16ozs to roughly the size of a german luxury car.  Your choice of sides is a potato – baked, French fries, or hash browns – or a “steamed vegetable.”  The steamed vegetable is usually a somewhat sad-looking recently-unfrozen broccoli or green beans, and they are rarely appealing, so the best option is the potato.  If you order hashbrowns you will have the option of the addition of cheese and fried onions.  This addition is delicious, and would be perfect for anyone who has excellent health insurance and/or nothing left to live for.  The fries are usually large, fluffy steak fries, which serve to compliment the basket of rolls on your table as a method of mopping up meat juice.

The meat arrives, a juicy red slab roughly the thickness of a rural phone directory.  Your first instinct will be to search for a garnish or perhaps a side of something green.  This is a typical newbie mistake.  Parsley is superfluous at best, and an affectation of one of those fancy city places at worst.  A request for vegetables would be a suspicious sign that you are not a true, red-blooded American.  Your choice of condiments is usually horseradish sauce (either creamy, or sometimes just plain grated horseradish), something like A-1 or Heinz57 (although these are generally frowned upon), or you may be asked if you want your steak “with au jus.”  Linguistic purists may be quick to point out that this is a redundant phrase, since “au jus” already means “with juice” in French – in this case they would be incorrect, as this is not actually the raw juice, but some sort of brown clear sauce made from meat drippings, water, and the contents of a dry envelope clearly labeled “Au Jus.”

Not that it really needs any of this.  A properly done prime rib roast is a thing of beauty.  Despite the large quantites of fat on the cap and the line of gristle through the middle.  Simply seasoned, the crust is salty and occasionally laced with a few inoffensive spices, and beyond that the meat is generally simply meat-flavored.  It may need salt or the horseradish as a slight accent but not much else.

You will want to eat this slowly.  This is the sort of quantity of meat that would make even an Argentinian pause, and rushing said consumption can lead to a vicious protein hangover.  The potato serves as a nice buffer to the system, and the old fashioned will help give you the courage to face this epic slab of beef.

If you survive, the waitstaff will offer you dessert.  Accepting this offer is usually ill-advised, unless it’s homemade pie.  There’s nothing much wrong with a supper-club dessert, it’s usually a substantial slab of cake or an ice cream sundae, it’s merely that if you wish to remain ambulatory to return to your car, adding a few thousand more calories to your meal is not the best course of action.

This might lead you to believe I’m some sort of an Apple fanboy.  This isn’t strictly accurate. The fact is, I’m an Apple Fanboy the way I’m an Indoor Plumbing Fanboy – it’s simply something that’s been an omnipresent part of my life for so long that it almost doesn’t register anymore.

I learned how to use and program computers in 1980 on an Apple ][+, and ever since then, I’ve used and/or owned a variety of Apple products almost continuously, from the first golden era, through the dark Scully/Amelio times when even “The Simpsons” mocked their near-demise, through their second renaissance to today. Without the Apple II, I wouldn’t’ve discovered that I love programming, which led to many opportunities for me down the line. Without the Mac, it’d be a lot harder for me to write the music I do. Without the iPod, it’d be a lot harder to distribute the music I make. None of it would be impossible, but all of it would be a lot harder.

So to say Steve Jobs has had some impact on my life is pretty much a large understatement.

I’ve never aspired to be like Steve. He’s not really a personal hero to me. But then, neither is Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. They’re each guys who had many personal quirks that made them disliked or even feared, and they probably aren’t necessarily personalities to model oneself after. Nonetheless they each made huge contributions to the shape of modern technology and industry. They may not always have personally been the innovators coming up with the great ideas themselves, but they knew how to pick and choose ideas (and pick and choose colleagues and employees to develope those ideas) and bring them to the masses in a way that made the ideas seem self-evident, the resulting products ubiquitous, and their own names immediately recognizable. There were cars before the Model T; there were mp3 players before the iPod. The singular vision was not to respond to the needs of the market, but to anticipate them; to take “niche” ideas and use them to transform society as a whole.

One of Steve’s peculiar gifts was to not merely make these products, but make people excited about them.  What other company gets major-network news coverage from a new phone rollout?  When was the last time CNN speculated on a new laptop that wasn’t an Apple?  Somehow, he could make the ordinary seem extraordinary.  His much-ridiculed “reality distortion field”, that strange mix of charisma, geekish enthusiasm, and laser-like intensity, attracted interest in ways no mere list of product features ever could.

I cannot deny, ever, the profound effect Steve Jobs and his company have had on my life in particular. I owe a lot to Jobs (and Woz, too.  And Linus and Bill and Dennis and Bjarne, and…). Love him or hate him, cast him as angel or devil in the silicon valley story, nobody can deny the fact that Steve Jobs managed to make profound changes to the way we think about computers, helping transform them from intimidating beasts in the domain of eggheads in the back room to friendly appliances we hold in our hands.

Goodbye, Steve. It’s been Insanely Great.

This is especially relevant if you’re the kind of guy that buys a smoked hog jowl on a whim. Which I am. So I was forced to ask myself this question.

I’d originally considered using it to make a pasta carbonara, but guanciale this was not -  it had too much of a strong bacony aroma and would overpower basically anything that was served with it. However, after a delightful meal at 43North the answer came to me, presented on a white plate with a side of pickled vegetables: rillette!

Yes, that most old-school of charcuteries, that delightful rustic pate of pork. Seemed perfect.

Now, a classic way to make a rillette is similar to making a confit – a long slow cook of meat in fat, with a few flavorings. Since a) I previously had used Tony Bourdain’s recipe which simmers the pork in water and mashes it with cooked porkfat to great success b) the jowl itself really needs no fat added since it’s very fatty on its own and c) I am impatient, I fired up the pressure cooker, chopped my jowl into large chunks, and tossed it in with just some water.

It’s basically a bacon-style hunk of meat, so it didn’t need any additonal salt. I did, however, toss in a healthy sprig of fresh rosemary, some peppercorns, and some fresh thyme from the garden, just to broaden the flavor profile a bit (in theory, anyway. Smoked jowl sort of takes over).  I didn’t need to add much more – I’ve seen recipes with cognac or juniper or other manner of rustic seasonings, but I really didn’t feel I needed it.

After about an hour of simmering, I opened the cooker. Some fo the fat had rendered off into the water, sure, but I was still left with large, tender, disturbingly-quivering chunks of smoked pork and porkfat.

(in retrospect, doing this sous vide would be pretty awesome. But that’s another experiment)

I lifted those into a large bowl, grabbed some forks and got to mashing. It mashed sort of brilliantly. The fat pureed itself nearly instantly, and the meat fell apart. Deciding I wanted something a little smoother than my normal “almost pulled pork” version of this recipe, I hit the contents with a few blasts from my immersion blender, blending things into a nice, creamy-but-not-homogenized pate.  Maybe not completely traditional for a rillette, but hey, I’m already a bit off the reservation here, so I might as well keep going.

Next step was to pack everything into ramekins. This actually took a while, since I wanted to wrap every ramekin in cling wrap, but my cling-wrap box was missing the cutting edge and I had to try and portion out sticky cellophane film with a chef’s knife. This is more difficult than it sounds.

After a few hours of setting up in the fridge, I removed a lovely, smoky pate. The flavor lands somewhere between bacon and deviled ham, and the texture is rich and creamy, with a nice hit of meatiness in there.

I think perhaps there was a bit too much porkfat (Crazy, I know!) in the pate, and I could maybe alleviate that with some additional pork shoulder in future. Also, a pretty hefty jowl yields quite a lot of rillette, more than I’ll be able to eat without inducing some sort of tragic cardiac event. Perhaps I can freeze it.

This rillette really screams for a good crusty bread, and maybe a grainy mustard. Or perhaps a hit of something with chile pepper to cut through all that richness.

(the smoked hog jowl came from my friends at Fountain Prairie, who, while being best known for their grass-fed highland beef, also raise very delicious berkshire pork. And they also run a great B&B)

Here thar be spoilers, for the second-half-season-premiere of Dr. Who, “Let’s Kill Hitler.”  If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t read this.  Of course, if you don’t know what’s happened yet, and you’re a Dr. Who fan…get on that.  It’s been a week now and we’ve just had the second episode of this half of the series, so you should have had plenty of time.

Hey, look, I warned you…

So, we’ve had the big reveal that Melody is River, and we can piece together bits and pieces from there.  And despite the title of the episode, nobody kills Hitler and he’s not in the episode for very long.

It’s a Moffat-penned episode, so you know the dialogue is going to be snappy (he’s always been great at that.  Watch “Coupling” if you don’t believe me).  Rory, in particular, gets some great lines, from “Shut up, Hitler!” to “I’m trapped in a giant robot copy of my wife.  I’m trying not to see this as a metaphor.”  Brilliant.

What wasn’t so brilliant was the manner in which much of the plot gets resolved.

Let me start out by saying that my opinion is predicated on two things I strongly dislike in modern sci-fi: the use of ontological paradoxes, and the deus ex alien resolution.  They’re both storytelling shortcuts that border on laziness – while they may work in context, at the heart of all good scifi is a story, and if the audience can’t unravel the major plot points themselves or relate to the  situations, then the author hasn’t done their job (Stanislaw Lem’s alien inscrutability notwithstanding).

So within the first 20 minutes of the episode we get a bucketload of ontological paradoxes – things being their own cause.  Melody is named after their friend Mels, who is in fact Melody.  So she’s named after herself.   Not a huge deal.   That could be a goofy tossed-off line.

(Although I’d argue it’d make more sense if their long-time-since-childhood best friend had ever actually been mentioned before, but maybe we’re supposed to believe that she changed history a bit so she could be with her parents…which screws up the ontology because she was named BEFORE she went back and caused them to name her…well, you get the idea.  This is why I don’t like ontological paradoxes)

What’s more egregious is that she is the catalyst that causes her parents to meet.  So she exists, because she got her parents to meet before she was born.

See?  DO NOT LIKE.  At least Marty McFly got a guitar solo out of the deal.

And then everything gets sorted out with a Deus Ex River where we discover that a) not only has her pseudo-time-lordiness given her the power to regenerate, but b) hey, what do you know, she can apparently use her unused regenerations to heal someone else.  This raises more questions than it answers – can all Time Lords do this?  Why haven’t we ever seen this before?  Is this some crazy Keeper of Traken stuff here?  I suppose the answer is “because it was a convenient way to keep from killing the main character” but I am really starting to get annoyed with the current series of Dr. Who ascribing more and more godlike powers to the Time Lords as methods of plot convenience.  RTDavies did that a lot, giving us the Donna Noble Metacrisis, the Martha Jones Makes Everyone De-Age the Doctor With Their Mind Trick,  and the Kiss Rose And Absorb The Time Vortex Manoeuver.  The old series had moments like that, but they often felt a bit more organic in how they were built – “the Doctor’s really smart, here’s a machine, hey I bet the Doctor will use his smarts to make the machine defeat his enemies” even if we don’t necessarily understand why that worked or how, it still feels a little less pulled-from-a-showrunner’s-backside than “A wizard timelord did it.”

Another bit that bothered me was that, despite their desperation to find their daughter, Amy and Rory didn’t seem particularly despondent.  In fact, they didn’t seem particularly different from the pre-Melody-Pond Amy and Rory.  I mean, if you’d just met your grown daughter for the first time, and she was told to take you home from the future…wouldn’t you have some questions?  Wouldn’t there be some major emotional charge there, knowing that you lost your child and yet there she is as a grown woman?  That seems like it’d be pretty life-changing to me.  And…not only did we flash-forward past all that, but there appears to have been little in the way of long-term consequences to that knowledge, other than the Doctor not answering his phone in the prequel clip.

Finally, the time-travelling tiny aliens travelling around in a robot shaped like a normal-sized person reminded me way too much of that terrible Eddie Murphy movie.

So yeah, “Let’s Kill Hitler” had its moments, but I think also missed the mark in a few key areas.  Instead of character development we got some snappy dialogue and a convoluted plot twists that didn’t need to be so convoluted to be clever.

I think I had too much coffee.

I asked a friend, and I can’t remember which one, who this was. “Oh, this is Nine Inch Nails” she said. Huh, I thought. I vowed to remember the name.

And then I promptly forgot about it for about a year.

Luckily, by the time I got to college, “Pretty Hate Machine” was pretty omnipresent, and I rapidly accumulated NIN singles , remixes and imports, and bootlegs (including the occasionally-hilarious “Purest Feeling” demos); I was going to NIN shows and wearing Head Like a Hole tshirts.

Trent was, like me, a scrawny little nerd who liked synthesizers, had a lot of welled-up teenage angst, and wore a lot of black. I could associate. I could get behind it.

20-odd years have gone by, and Trent Reznor is a muscle-y Oscar-winner who married a Filipino supermodel and still likes synthesizers. Yeah, okay, so maybe Trent and I have drifted apart a bit. He still writes sort of whiny lyrics, though.

Last year, Pretty Hate Machine got a remaster and re-release. The remaster is nice. Very clean, adds a lot of clarity and depth to the mix without changing much of it.

So, now that I can hear everything clearly, how has the intervening two decades treated PHM?

“Head Like a Hole” gets off to a good start, although the drum machines have a bit of that late-80′s “sampled drum machine” flair to them, although that seems to be making a bit of a comeback itself, so while maybe that SP-series grittiness isn’t exactly timeless, it’s at least “retro-cool”. The instrumental hooks are strong, particularly that bass synth riff. It doesn’t sound like much of what’s going on in music today, but it also doesn’t sound like what was going on in pop music back in 1989, either. Where it starts to break down a bit is in the chorus – it’s recorded fine, but the guitar sound chosen is very much the late-80′s “roll-off-all-the-low-end”, solid-state rectifier sound. It fits in with the song, sure, not taking up too much sonic space, but it immediately marks the track as being produced in the late 80′s.

After a brief sample-loop interlude, which has since been aped by every neophyte electro band ever since at some point (“yeah! Gunshots as snare drums! Nobody’s thought of that before!”), we get “Terrible Lie.” In a lot of ways, this one track presaged much of what NIN was going to do over the next decade. Teen-angsty, almost balladic lyrics making some stab at religion, lots of loud/quiet contrast, an infectious but dissonant hook that doesn’t come in until near the end – this is basically the model for many of NIN’s subsequent singles. This one works fairly well, although the lyrics seem even more goofily overwrought now than they did in the 90′s.

“Down In It” was a single that, when it came out, I really liked. “Hey! A nerdy white boy doing hip hop!” I thought. Now, I think “oooh, a nerdy white boy doing hip hop.” While the attempt is admirable, this particular flavor of industrial hip hop had already been executed better (although when I first heard the song, I didn’t know it) by contemporaries like Meat Beat Manifesto, and the song is a pretty direct crib of Skinny Puppy’s “Dig It.” It’s not.bad, exactly.but at this point Trent wasn’t really Chuck D and The Bomb Squad, so it comes off a little stilted and, dare I say it, quaint. I think it’s the bassline, primarily – there’s the urge to add “in West Philadelphia, born and raised.” to the lyrics.

“Sanctified” doesn’t get off to a much more auspicious start. The sampled slap-bass didn’t sound great in 1989, and doesn’t sound better now. The programming of the percussion is surprisingly detailed, though, and the whole song makes really nice use of stereo pan. There’s a lot of fiddly sonic programming going on here, unfortunately overshadowed by that insistent slap-bass loop.

“Something I Can Never Have” is teenage therapy-poetry of the most overwrought sort. I admit to writing stuff like this on the back of my 10th grade chemistry notebook. It’s silly now, but man, when I was 18, Trent was speaking to my deepest soul – and he dropped the f-bomb so you knew it was really edgy and tormented. There’s not a huge amount of complexity to this song, but what there is is quite well-executed. The piano samples are a little clangy, but basically if you added a few Christian overtones to this song it’d be a chart-topping Evanescence track now. I expected this one to age poorly, but conversely it’s sort of surprised me.

We get back into a strange area with “Kinda I Want To.” The bassline is very late 80′s, and sounds a lot like the infamous “LatelyBass” preset from the TX81Z. But then again, that late 80′s FM sound is drifting in and out of vogue again, so while this doesn’t sound current, again we get this sort of retro thing going on. We also get a snatch of an alternate “Down In It” that amps up the aggression. And we get a lot of knob-twirly tweaking of effects – the lead line gets the ever-living crap ring-modulated out of it. In the end we get a song that didn’t resemble much of what was going on in late 80′s music (Skinny Puppy and company notwithstanding) and while imitators have come along since then, they’ve sort of vanished since. NIN basically stands alone in that regard.

When it came out as a single, I liked “Sin” enough to design a font honoring it. After 20 years, it’s really not emblematic of Trent’s best work, but it basically serves as the template for a lot of the more popular “industrial rock” of the next decade or so. The chugging, percussive bass, the buzzsaw guitars, the slightly off-putting vinyl-scratch samples, the frenetic dance drums.it draws a lot from EBM and a squeezes it in with some noisy alt-rock. By 1995 it seemed like there were a dozen bands on pop radio doing stuff like this.

“That’s What I Get” takes us back into more familiar territory, with the cold digital percussive synth (PPG Wave, I think?) and the now-familiar detuned hook lead. Chuggy FM bass, woozy synth strings, effectron-style shifting echoes.basically, this sounds like a song off of Skinny Puppy’s “Too Dark Park” with all the distortion effects turned off. Another case where we didn’t really hear another track like this again but it clearly influenced things for a while.

The regrettable slap bass sample resurfaces on “The Only Time” and while it’s not as irritating as on Sanctified, probably because it seems to be layered with something punchier. The squashed snare drum now reminds me of the similar snare from NIN’s later mega-hit “Closer”, and “The Only Time” structurally sets the template for that track – in fact the detuned hook isn’t too far off from the one that closes “Closer.” Huh.

Everything wraps up with “Ringfinger.” I remember at first not being impressed with this track, then being really impressed and then settling back into a sort of mild appreciation tempered by the fact that every DJ I heard kept playing the demo “Twist” to show how cool they were. This one is well-programmed, but I can’t shake the fact that a lot of sounds on it scream early 90′s. Sure, this was one of the first songs to use some of them, but a cadre of imitators in the interim have fixed the track to a certain period. Structurally the song is pretty decent – a nice buildup/breakdown sequence, to a final climax that caps off the album (with a similar riff to the one from “Kinda.” There’s a lot of little fiddly bits going on in the background that I hadn’t really noticed until doing some closer listening on it, and that helps the song a lot.

The remaster adds the B-side cover of “Get Down Make Love” to the album, which unfortunately doesn’t add much. It’s a decent enough cover, but it feels tacked on to the album (because, well, it is). It sounds like what you’d expect NIN covering Queen to sound like – noisy, distorted, dancy, with lots of little weird sounds thrown in. The chunkier guitars in the chorus are a bit of a switch up, and demonstrate that maybe his subsequent material is going to have a little more heft (which it did, but we didn’t know that at the time).

Overall, one thing I don’t think I’d really noticed about Pretty Hate Machine at the time, was just how melodic and “poppy” it was. It was abrasive and scary in 1989 but it had a very solid pop/rock structure at the core of every song. There are very clear vocal melodies and hooks, the lack of which had really prevented “industrial” music from crossing over into the mainstream until that point. It bridged a lot of worlds. A lot of the sounds sound sort of dated now, but that’s always a downside of being on the bleeding edge – once everyone else catches on it becomes a cliché of the era or the genre, like the Alpha-Juno “Hoover” sound for rave or the dubstep wobble. Pretty Hate Machine, on further review, may never sound as fresh and exciting as it did to me in 1990, and certainly years in now I can recognize the spectre of Trent’s influences looming over the album much more strongly than I ever did then, but I can also recognize just how important and influential this album actually was to subsequent artists. Certainly, it influenced me strongly for years.

In retrospect, I probably overengineered it.  It’s a heavy, rolling clay oven that I likely could’ve accomplished almost as well with a Weber kettle and a little cleverness.  But still, having a nice, big, bespoke “oven” for making kebobs and naan is pretty neat.  A bit of a unitasker but hey, I’ve always wanted one, and this turned out to be pretty cheap by the time I was done.

The first step was to find a container.  A little poking around on the internet led me to believe that the best container was a 55-gallon drum.

Turns out it’s pretty hard around here to find a used, metal 55-gallon drum.  Plastic?  Sure.  $5.  But I’m not building a grill out of plastic.  A metal one that used to contain something highly toxic?  Yeah.  Sure, $10 from a scrapyard.  But I don’t’ want to hang edible materials in anything that sued to contain used transmission fluid.  Brand new one that costs about $130?  Sure.

But a cheap used one?  Not so much.

I set aside my plans to build a dual-use 55-gallon tandoor/drum smoker, because…well, it probably wouldn’t’ve worked anyway.

Second choice for some people on the intertubes was a beer keg.  This was also too daunting to find.  Nobody who owns one wants to part with it, if only for legal reasons.  I guess both the breweries and law enforcement are not fond of people owning their own kegs.

So this left me with a quandary.  What to encase this in?

Firebrick in the Barrel

Whilst I was at home depot buying lightbulbs, I noted that their summer stock of grills was marked down. Way down. I ended up buying a cheap charcoal barrel smoker.  It wasn’t huge, but it was about $30, metal, had a nice window carved out of the side for airflow, and was already painted a not-terrifying color (unlike a 55-gallon drum came with no “DANGER” labels, and unlike a keg had no advertisements for Miller-Coors). And I knew it was going to be safe on the interior. And it came with a lid! This would work well.

The only downside is that being a smoker, it had a removable firebowl in the bottom and not any sort of solid surface.  I would deal with this later.Next, I needed a clay cooking vessel and a firebox.  Conceivably I could use one thing for both, but I wanted a little extra height and a little more insulation for the firebox.  So I purchased two sixpacks of firebrick – which were deceptively heavy – and a 15” terracotta flowerpot, and a few masonry wheels for my angle grinder.Using some scrap lumber I had at home and a couple of cheap metal casters, I built a wheeled cart to set the thing on.  I was a little concerned about using wood in a grilling rig, but I figured I was going to insulate this thing well enough that it wasn’t going to be a problem.

Also, I knew it’d be far too heavy for the measly aluminum legs it came with.

Next, using my angle grinder, I trimmed the firebrick so I could line the “bottom” of my barrel with them.  I then sliced the bottom off the flowerpot, creating a conical “chimney.”

Aside: I love my angle grinder.  It’s loud, dangerous, makes a terrible mess, and I’m ridiculously inaccurate with it, but, man, I carved bricks with it.  Bricks!

Anyway.

The firebrick "firebox." Note: I am inartful with caulk.

I poured an awful lot of sand into the barrel (now conveniently mounted on the cart) to both insulate the firebox from the bottom, and to raise the level of the firebrick to be even with the “window.”  I lined the firebox with the brick, and then with some stove/fireplace caulk, sealed them in place.  With my remaining bricks, I built “walls” for the firebox.  I upended the flowerpot over the walls, caulked that in place, sealed any remaining gaps with chips of firebrick and caulk, insulated the whole thing with sand, and then I was ready to go.

Laboriously, I pushed it out into the driveway.  It’s still heavy, remember.

I wiped down the inside of the pot with cooking oil.  I wasn’t sure if this was necessary, but why not season the thing, right?  Some nice hardwood lump charcoal went into the firebox, and I lit it.

And waited.

And waited.

Okay, I’d forgotten how long it takes to get charcoal started.  I’m spoiled by my instant-on propane grill.  And hardwood doesn’t have the chemicals one finds in your average briquette, so it takes even longer.

Tandoorinferno!

I soon discovered that in order to heat a lot of ceramic up to a good radiant temperature, you need a fair amount of fuel.  And a fair amount of time.  And a fair amount of air.  Once I figure all that out, I was able to get a pretty hot fire going.  I jumpstarted the process a bit with a hairdryer.  I think a good forced-air system will be the next addition to this project.  Once that happened the tandoor turned from a “reasonably hot ceramic grill” to “raging tandoori inferno”, as I hoped it would.

And it stayed hot for a loooong time.  The outside remained relatively cool – it heated up, but it wasn’t accidental-second-degree-burn hot, just “don’t hold your hand there for too long” hot.  Well, the bits of ceramic sticking out the top were really hot, but I’m not in the habit of touching a stovetop either so I doubt this will be a problem.

First up, my favorite tandoori dish: boti kebab.

A pound of cubed lamb
Two tablespoons of ginger-garlic paste
1c of drained yogurt (I like a good whole-milk greek, but that’s just me)
1tsp turmeric
1 tbsp cumin
1 tbsp coriander
chili pepper to taste
Squeeze of lemon
Salt to taste.

Boti kebab hanging in the tandoor

Toss everything but the lamb together in a bowl, forming a nice coating.  Add the lamb and marinate for an hour or two.  (You can cook this on a grill or under a broiler, I suppose, but where’s the fun in that?  Go build your own tandoor.)

I bought some cheap BBQ skewers, $4 at my local hardware store, and bent the tips so they were slightly J-shaped.  Threading the lamb cubes on, I made sure they wouldn’t slide off.  Using another skewer as a crossbar, I hung them in the tandoor and let them cook for about 3 minutes.

The result was pretty danged good for a first try.  The lamb was moist and done perfectly…except on the top two cubes of each skewer, where the tandoor hadn’t gotten hot yet.  This was my own fault – not enough patience and not enough charcoal.  But the parts that weren’t up at the top were juicy and delicious, stained a lovely orange by the turmeric.  Not quite the quality of my local Indian restaurant, but pretty damn close and pretty damn good for a first try.

More experiments forthcoming.

The other day

If this works, I may write a few more of these.

“Violator” was, at least to my mind,  really Depeche Mode at the height of their powers.  It was before the rock-n-roll excess and substance abuse tore the band apart in the mid 90’s, but after they had shed some of the boyish new-wave affectations of their earlier years.  Martin Gore’s songwriting was mature, admittedly drawing from his usual slightly-but-not-overtly-naughty well of religious and sexual imagery, but lacking the more dated cold war references or hamfisted political commentary.  While arguably Dave Gahan’s voice has improved in the intervening decades, it was really around this album that he found his voice for the material – he lacked the icyness (or boyishness) of his earlier works.  And when it came to sound design and production Wilder was at the top of his game, and the Wilder/Flood combination was near perfect.  Even the graphic design fit – their simmering relationship with Anton Corbijn was bearing fruit in more ways than just arty videos.

In short, it was a good time to be Depeche Mode.

So did this make a timeless album?  Well, mostly.  Some of the tracks hold up as well now as they did then.  A few tracks don’t.  And in some ways, the album was a victim of its own success – a track like “Personal Jesus” was so iconic and, frankly, popular, that legions of imitators have sort of dulled its shine.

The opener, “World in My Eyes” has several strong hooks, starting with the modular-synth bassline right out of the gate.  A straight-up dance drum pattern drives the song, particularly notable for its snare, a weird sort of choked electronic burp that manages to not be distracting while still being interesting.  Also interesting is the fact that overall, much of the track is pretty dry in terms of reverb and other effects.  In an era of pop records leaning heavily on lush processing, this comes across almost as dry as a hip-hop track.

Looking back, the track has aged fairly well on its own, but lives somewhat in the shadow of its own remixes and remakes.  20 years of remixes and some truly astounding live arrangements have left the original sounding a little empty by comparison.

“Sweetest Perfection” doesn’t fare as well over the long haul.  It’s still an interesting track, and has a few modulations of stereo pan  and reverb levels help give the track a sort of uneasy, funhouse-mirror feel.  Unfortunately both Martin Gore’s knife-like vibrato and two decades of angular electronic music have undermined the bits of the track that are actually interesting.

“Personal Jesus” is one of the more notable tracks on the album.  Partially because it’s been nearly omnipresent in dance clubs for 20 years, and partially because it just has a very strong (and very insistent) hook.  Up until this point in their career, dM had dabbled a bit with guitar-based rock, but never really formed a song around it.  Here, we get a sort-of-unfunky blues riff right up front and center.  The lyrics are pretty minimal and almost meaningless in many ways.  Interestingly, they’re processed with a slapback-y reverb that’s mixed very high, rendering the vocals almost unintelligible on anything other than a large, widely-spaced system – listening to the song on headphones garbles things a bit – reinforcing the idea that this is a big-room dance track through and through.  The drums sound enormous, but on closer inspection, actually aren’t mixed as high as one might think – the clever mix of a standard snare sample with Wilder’s samples of roadies jumping on flight cases in a stairwell gives this illusion of hundreds of drummers without actually needing to layer dozens of samples.  Clever, and while found-sound was sort of de rigeur for the time, it was still pretty novel, even by today’s standards.

Historically, this song basically became the template for a lot of electronic dance music to follow, particularly in the more radio friendly side of “electronic.”  The pattern of “looped rock riff”  and minimal repetitive vocals with a hefty dance beat and an extended outtro has dominated dance music for decades.  Norman Cook’s career is basically variations on this theme.  I don’t know if Mode was the first to do this (I rather doubt it) but they certainly were the biggest.

“Halo” in a lot of ways pairs with “World In My Eyes” – it has a lot of the same production styles and even opens with a similar bass sound and riff.  It lacks some of the hookish-ness of “Eyes” but builds up to a nice crescendo, with sampled strings that have aged surprisingly well.  It’s a bit overly awash in bombast, with big piano stabs punctuating important lyrics, and that’s a bit silly, but that’s sort of the point of the song.  Interestingly, Alan Wilder recently explained that one of the underlying drum loops is John Bonham’s classic “When The Levee Breaks” beat, and if you know what to listen for, sure enough, it’s there, but at the same time it’s cleverly processed and gated in such a way to not be an obvious classic loop – in a track like Bjork’s “Army of Me” it’s entirely the opposite – so it both borrows the muscular sound of the Zeppelin drummer without actually announcing “hey, look, we’re sampling Led Zeppelin!”

“Waiting For the Night” is the one that surprised me.  I had expected this one to sound more dated than any, but it surprisingly has held up better than a lot of the rest of the album.  Part of it is the sheer Spartan-ness of the arrangement – it’s basically the looped modular line for most of the song, with a big pedal bass, and a few effects floating in and out.  There’s not even a monster hook, but there is some very clever vocal processing going on.  Gahan’s lead voice is washed with a good bit of lush processing, setting it back into the mix, and then Gore’s countermelody and harmonies are brought in much drier and more up-front, inverting the standard mix-rules and giving the song a very unsettling feel.  Also, an intimate, almost claustrophobic song such as this following immediately on the heels of a big room track like “Halo” just amplifies the effect.  The weird and clearly artificial pitch-shifting during the runout of the song presages in some ways the modern love of weird, inhuman vocal effects, from the abuse of autotune to The Knife’s fondness for formant and pitch shifting.  These probably weren’t related, but the use of such effects in 1991 helps keep the track sounding modern.

Then we hit the biggie.  “Enjoy The Silence.”  I’ve touted this one as the perfect electronic pop song for a long time, and it still holds.  Parts of it, particularly in the area of drum programming and processing, sound a bit dated.  Still, what fascinates me is that despite it being a pop song, the underpinnings of it are clearly very much tied to the house and dance scenes of the era.  That bit of it is understated, but there’s a basic 4-on-the-floor analog kick, punctuated with a splatty snare on the 2 and 4; a basic disco beat.  The weird processed percussion loop running through the song is at its core a mangled version of the standard dance-music conga riff.  While those features peg the song as a 1991 dance classic, it’s really not until the sampled horns come in that there’s a smack in the face of “oh, right, early 90’s.”  It’s still got a great hook, and you can still dance to it.  Interestingly, even the recent mixes by Timo Maas and Richard X and other “superstar DJ” types have kept the core of the track pretty much intact, only updating a few drum sounds.  It’s a testament to the staying power of a good arrangement.

“Policy of Truth” is similar in that regard.  The song itself is a basic dance-pop track, with a good vocal hook.  Unfortunately, the sound I remember thinking was so cool back in 1991 now sounds like a bad idea.  Those sampled, processed saxophone quacks during the chorus now share the same part of my brain with those early dM videos that showed someone playing trumpet every time a vaguely brassy synth sound was going on.  It occupies that no-man’s land between “cleverly-used sample” and “interesting synth sound” and it’s kind of distracting for me now.  Still, the vocal harmonies are nice, and the slide guitar sample is immediately recognizable as a hallmark of the song.  Shame about the saxophones.

“Blue Dress” is…well, it was my least favorite track in 1991, and it remains so now.  The piano-ish sound in the chorus is a bit overly clangy and harsh, the bassline is sort of hammer-y, and the nasal analog pads in the background of the song just sort of bother me.  However, Martin’s vocals are surprisingly nuanced and there are some nice modulations in the chorus.  There’s also a subtle wash of distorted shoegaze-y guitars in the background that fill out the song nicely.  I’d never noticed that before.  I’d want those to be brought forward, but Martin’s vocals are a bit too delicate to fight with that.  While the song probably suffers a bit in terms of presence because of that, in the end it was probably the correct production choice.

The album closes with “Clean” which is an interesting song on many levels.  It feels a bit like a dance track, but it’s slow.  It’s in 3, but it doesn’t feel like it, and doesn’t fall into the “electro waltz” trap.  The arrangement and programming is downright kraftwerkian, all blippy electronic drums, minimal looping bass and choir pads.  The only thing that separates it from something like “Radioaktivitat” is Gahan’s nearly-histrionic vocals.   And the really brilliant bit is that the song ends, then starts up again with just the main drums and bass before going to the fadeout.  There’re two bars of weird resonant bleeps right at the end, which to this day surprise the hell out of me, even 20 years on.   It’s a good way to close out an album.

So has it held up?  For the most part, yes.  There are a few sounds and production tricks that haven’t aged well (primarily with the samples, which often sound dated) and there are a few that were far ahead of their time and set some standards.  Certainly this album’s influence is undeniable.  While Depeche Mode’s fortunes waxed and waned over the next two decades, “Violator” remained their touchstone album, and the reason for that is pretty clear.  It’s a very cleverly-produced album, polished without being overly-slick.

This is gunna be a repeater.  I have this sneaking suspicion that it might be even better when the meat is freshly off-the-grill (although it’s a zillion times easier to slice when it’s been in the fridge for a day).

I basically just ate all the other leftovers as they were.  I considered using the gazpacho as a sauce for something, but it was just too tasty on its own, so it became lunch.  And then I made another giant bowl of it, which became a few more lunches.