recent jamz

Deadstop- "Done With You" LP
doesn't sound as much like Negative Approach (or...uh...AC/DC) as you might like... kind of has a Youth of Today meets Cro Mags (YEAH) vibe that is not as blatantly dumb as that implies. It's totally hard-as-shit, but never panders.

Dodsdomd- "Seven Deadly Sins" EP
This record came out in English and Swedish versions, I actually got the Swedish version, but I put up the English title, because I don't feel like walking four feet to read the title in whatever goofy "spooky" font they have on the cover. This is a big improvement from their LP: more memorable, no longer sounds like Sweden via USA.

Katatonia- "Dance of December Days" CD
For some reason, they changed the art on this album to look like some horrible I-don't-even-know, but suffice it to say there is a baby looking sadly at a grim reaper, and they changed the band logo. It was so much better when it was just these dudes with moustaches hanging out really close to each other, wrapped in purple smoke. Anyways, this is really over-emphatic "doom metal" before that whole style got co-opted by the Southern Lord crowd and some drone/ambient idea.

Mountain "Nantucket Sleighride" LP
Sounds like Lynyrd Skynyrd. Songs about Moby Dick.

Stan Getz "Sweet Rain" LP
This is one of those examples of someone who is REALLY GOOD at doing a popular version of something showing that their genius in the popular format (bossa nova) is actually based on a real understanding of forms, that can be demonstrated at will. Of course, I also appreciate the converse of this, the abstract understanding being masterfully put to use in a popular form.
examples of the former (rarer): The Beatles "Abbey Road", Beckett "Waiting for Godot"
examples of the latter: Judas Priest "Point of Entry", The Cure "Head on the Door", Velvet Underground "Loaded" (albeit less successfully).

Normally, the Stan Getz move-- "look, I'm sophisticated"--- backfires, and is just pretension. "Sweet Rain" is incredible, but one need only look at the career of Metallica and see their disastrous relation to their avant-garde roots in NWOBHM, a relation they seem incapable of drawing on for inspiration, thus blacking out their entire 80s career from proper context. So when Metallica try to write "sophisticated" music now, it sounds like it comes from Mars (in a bad way).