...and just to confirm my suggestion there, I took a listen to it today on my commute back from the university...
Dio - Holy Diver (CD)
Yep, solid. It was even better than usual today, for some reason. It made me a happy commuter, tapping my foot to some of the best basic choruses and riffs around.
Also on the same commute -
Joe Satriani - Strange Beautiful Music (CD)
Another solid bit of rockin', though in a different direction. Shred, shred, shred. And man, does this guy know how to shred! Excellent shredding - for some reason the more unassuming stuff like 'Hill Grove' and 'Sleepwalk' stood out today (I always have trouble holding down laughter when that REALLY high sliding note comes in on the latter)
***
If you're wondering - this is an excellent illustration of how excruciatingly long my daily commute is
***
Post-commute, had dinner and went out to walk around along the Ottawa river (I live near a 90degree bend area of it also known as Lac Deschenes, a couple of miles wide. Nice sunsets - a conducive environment to music listening), and randomly grabbed some other favored listening from my menu...
...and was I ever not wrong to do that.
Peter Gabriel - Up (CD)
It hit. That's about the most accurate description I can come up with right now. And when it hit, it hit hard.
I've heard this one perhaps a dozen times before, but never quite the same way. Today I think the difference was that I made an odd exception of treating vocals as poetry rather than just another instrument while going about my usual active listening. And that really changed everything.
This one's gonna make a lasting impression on me. It's a very well-written piece of work. The music gives it an excellent, sometimes attractive and pop-like, sometimes not, texture, but the lyrics are really the centrepiece here. It's not written by a young man, and probably won't appeal to many of the younger listeners with the type of message it has. Ironically, it has a very similar underlying theme to another recent favorite album of mine - King Crimson's "The Power to Believe": 'Life is too hard. Do we give up?'. Both of these are from the perspective of men well past the half-century mark in terms of age, but they do take different musical angles, and "Up" is much broader in scope and more determined in its' resolution.
Anyways, recommended to anyone who favors active listening over passive background muzak, and doesn't mind looking at life in the context of a process that inevitable comes to certain checkpoints which must be accepted and dealt with...
Two lines of lyrics that hit me the hardest, first one just in the context that it was in (and I don't have a romanticized view of 'the end' at all, myself)
"And this all feels so absurd
To be flying like a bird
But I do not feel that
I have ended here..."
And the other one, in context and just in general, because of how in tune it is with my own personal philosophy
"Receive and transmit"
***
/end large and probably irrelevant rant I nonetheless felt obliged to write.
