As you might have read, a couple of days ago I received the Deaf Dumb Blind and Use Your Brain reissues. So now I will be reviewing Use Your Brain, Clawfinger‘s second album; once again by going through my favorite tracks. [Once again, I added links to YouTube.]

• Use Your Brain
  1. Power (3:14)
  2. Pay The Bill (4:10)
  3. Pin Me Down (4:10)
  4. Wipe My Ass (3:13)
  5. Die High (2:34)
  6. It (5:21)
  7. Do What I Say (4:25)
  8. Undone (4:11)
  9. What Are You Afraid Of (3:47)
  10. Back to the Basics (2:27)
  11. Easy Way Out (2:39)
  12. Tomorrow (4:09)
  13. Better Than This * (3:36)
  14. Three Good Riffs * (3:56)
  15. Armageddon Down * (3:36)

* Bonus Track + Videos:
Pin Me Down, Do What I Say, Tomorrow

The second song of the album is Pay The Bill. The lyrics are sharp on the topic of what certain people think and say, but it’s the guitar (and drum stuff) which really gets the party started. [Sharp…on the topic? Say what? I suppose I meant to add a conjunction, i.e. The lyrics are sharp, and address what certain people think and say … Perhaps I should have specified "certain people" a bit more precisely, since I'm not sure which "certain people" I was referring to anymore.] It inhabits a couple of my most favorite style of powerful chords combined with powerful rap. [I didn't use to be aware that a couple is meant more literally in English than in Dutch; I should have said a few. Inhabit doesn't seem like the right verb to choose here, either.]

Pin Me Down, the third track, is of a different class. If you’re still unsure whether combining ‘metal’ with rap is a good idea, listen to this. I can’t say much more about it than that this is just what Clawfinger is. [Seriously, was I on crack!? Did the pot my neighbors smoked affect me? This is just what it is, man! You know, what it is!! It is, man!]

Do What I Say, the seventh track has a really interesting start. [Nice to meet you again, Mr Fanboy.] A kid starts off by singing: When I grow up, there will be a day when everybody has to do what I say. Then the metal guitars bash in [I don't think you can bash something in. Maybe the guitars bash the poor child away? That doesn't seem to convey the intended meaning either, though. Let's just stick with "The guitars come in."] and Zak starts singing like he’s the father, telling the kid to do what he says. [I bet you didn't see that coming!] When I didn’t know Clawfinger very long, this was probably my favorite song. [I think I was obsessed with songs featuring children's voices at the time, since Eminem's My Dad's Gone Crazy was also among my favorites.] The coolest part of the song is probably even when the kid starts rocking too. [It looks like I was indeed on crack. I clearly wanted to write The coolest part of the song is probably even cooler than the rest of the song, and I barely managed to save myself from complete and utter embarrassment by changing it to tell people when the song is "coolest." Bet you didn't count on me analyzing your words in ridiculous ways when you wrote that, sucker!] I’ve introduced Clawfinger to my friends and this one, Nothing Going On and Vienna were probably the most successful.

What Are You Afraid Of (track 9) is a great song about stupid politicians and the crap they say. [Fuck yeah! Um—I mean, I was on crack, man!] Actually the whole album is pretty much politics related and some of the stuff in this song is just so damn cool. [Sorry, I got ahead of myself there. I was on crack, man!] But anyway, I think that if you don’t like this song, there’s some chance you don’t like Clawfinger at all. [Indeed there is. Any more insights, Captain Obvious?]

The bonus tracks on this album are good, but for me they don’t match a song like Profit Preacher. [Same here—wait, what?] Three Good Riffs is probably the coolest bonus track [I need to stop using the word coolest, don't I? Hopefully, I have since stopped using it this excessively. ], although it’s not really good in the sense of… well, good. [Pothead!] Anyway, Zak on two of them: [Yup, right on top of them.]

Three good riffs is a simple lyric about all the cliches in this great industry of rock & roll, we’re all contributing to it whether we like it or not & the more serious we try and be as artists the closer we come to being pathetic…but hell I’ll gladly treat people to that!

Armageddon down ha ha what is there to say, it’s just a pisstake on religion of all sorts and a play with words for the sake of being annoying and having a bit of fun, Armageddon down obviously means that everyone should get up on the dance floor and shake their booties, don’t really know what else to say about it?

The bottom line: if you liked Deaf Dumb Blind, this is a must buy. If you came into Clawfinger by means of the newer albums, it is something you have to check out. It’s the last of the classic Clawfinger albums. [Ouch!]

Yesterday, I received my reissues of “Deaf Dumb Blind” (1993) and “Use Your Brain” (1995): two classic, quintessential Clawfinger albums. In addition to the original tracks, they both feature three bonus tracks and the video clips of the released singles of the original CD in SVCD quality. Let me go through both of the albums by my favorite songs. [Use Your Brain will be reviewed in a later post: no, that's not because I split this post in two for this special occasion or some such.] My less favorite songs are a little less good, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad. But you’ll probably have to be more of a fan to appreciate them. [I added links to YouTube so you can actually listen to the songs.]

• Deaf Dumb Blind
  1. Nigger (3:47)
  2. The Truth (4:12)
  3. Rosegrove (4:02)
  4. Don’t Get Me Wrong (3:12)
  5. I Need You (4:58)
  6. Catch Me (4:39)
  7. Warfair (3:48)
  8. Wonderful World (2:40)
  9. Sad to See Your Sorrow (5:18)
  10. I Don’t Care (3:11)
  11. Get it* (4:43)
  12. Profit Preacher * (5:55)
  13. Stars & Stripes * (3:52)

* Bonus Track + Videos:
Nigger, The Truth, Warfair

The first track of Deaf Dumb Blind is Nigger. Nigger is a song which immediately steps out of the gray of bad songs out there because of the power it contains. [I understand what I was trying to say here, but steps out of the gray of bad songs? The gray what?] Some people might think it’s a racist song when they first hear it, but it is all but that. [I've all but finished this book, and it was anything but boring.] It is to be said that the chorus (repeating the word nigger a couple of times) is very easy to catch up with and some stupid racists might even like to sing along with it(!) Luckily that was all but the intention behind the song.

I would consider “Rosegrove”, the third song, sort of a ballad, although it doesn’t really sound like one, neither in lyrics nor in melody. It’s one of the more melodic sounds on the album and one of my favorite on the album. [Boy, I can sure eloquently express myself about one of my favorite songs on the album! Maybe you should have tried it in Dutch, just 19-year old self.]

Track 5 is “I need you”. It’s quite easy to play really, but it sounds just great and I did once meet a bitch this song perfectly applied to. [I did? I rather doubt that. Teenagers, eh?] So when you are in a sort of love/hate mood situation problem thing, just put this up loud. Very very loud. [I can't comment on that (anymore?), but it is nice while working out.]

“Catch me,” the sixth track of the album, is one of the more interesting songs lyrical wise [I think you mean lyrically.] (and considering the general level of Clawfinger lyrics, that means a lot [Fanboy much?]). When I listen to one of my current favorite songs (Horse With No Name by America), I can almost imagine being in one by listening to the music. [One what? A desert? Are you talking about a freaking desert?] My personal fantasy is quite alright and I have no problem imaging deserts [No trouble imagining the vastness, at any rate. You don't quite comprehend just how hot they are. And no, I still don't.], but that song captures the spirit and puts you in one if you listen, disregarding your own imagination. [Are you on crack!?] The same applies to “Catch me”: it’s like Metallica’s “Fade to black” on steroids. [Whatever you say.] It just seems to come from deeper within, or maybe Zak, Clawfinger’s vocalist and lyrics writer, is just more on one line of thoughts with me, I don’t know. Zak said the following on the song:

Well Catch me is pretty much a direct translation from a Swedish punk song which I wrote an additional third verse for so the idea was already there! In other words it’s not a personal song even if there have been times when I have felt those feelings!

My other favorite song on the album is one of the bonus tracks, “Profit Preacher”. I will just quote Zak on the bonus tracks.

Profit preacher is about the American TV evangelists who preach faith, love & beauty, the more money you give them, the more blessed you will be! Obviously they are vultures profiting on peoples need for something or someone to believe in! I got the idea from Frank Zappa who has made a few songs on the same topic!

Stars & stripes, damn I hardly even remember the fucking song, I guess it was just an excuse to throw some shit at the United States for how they choose to angle their news reports and sedate their people into believing they are being told the truth! I’ll read it sometime soon and get back to you with a more detailed answer!

In conclusion, despite this being their debut album and the Clawz having so much less experience than they have now, this album will still rock your house away. [Rock your house away? Whatever it will rock, it will most certainly not do that. Then again, I was probably just making up something as random as rock your socks off. Perhaps that's a better way to finish this entry. "Deaf Dumb Blind" will not merely rock your socks off, it will rock your fucking house away!]

All of that was about a month ago. I’ve only got a small selection of feeds in there so far, but since I’m still catching up on literally months of old material, that’s not an issue as of now. Aside from Wil Wheaton’s, my favorite podcast right now is Stuff You Should Know. But enough about that.

When I was younger, I usually listened to the radio news at 7 or 8 AM while eating breakfast. I have long since switched to doing some quick reading of my e-mails and feeds, but that’s not the ideal way to get a quick update on what’s currently going on. The radio news does a better job of that, but it just feels too much like a waste of time. Cue the podcast. I’ve known that Dutch public radio has had its broadcasts available as podcasts since 2005 or so. Selecting the podcast most relevant to me was easy: Radio Netherlands Worldwide, specifically the Nieuwslijn (news line) program. Of course there are competitors, such as BBC’s Global News and the German ARD Tagesschau, and I may have missed some other potentially interesting sources—which would presumably mostly mean American or Flemish—, but for now I’m sticking with this. Alas, there’s one small problem: there’s a news broadcast just about each two hours. This makes the new episodes available dialog look rather cluttered. I only want to listen to the news once a day.

New episodes available in gPodder

That’s where Yahoo Pipes comes in. When I start it, it complains about Opera, but I haven’t been able to discern any difference in functionality between Opera and Firefox on the site. In only a couple of minutes, I have something that only gives me the 8 o’clock news.

If I wanted, I could easily add the BBC and ARD feeds and also strip them to just one item a day. What I can’t do, however, is output the de facto standard <itunes:image href="http://some-picture" /> with the feed. Nevertheless, I can manually link up a picture in gPodder so it doesn’t look strange in the feed display list.

For things more complicated than such simplistic mash-ups, Yahoo Pipe’s graphical programming interface quickly becomes lacking, which is strange considering that it seems to aspire to be more than just a simple mash-up tool. Nevertheless, it certainly makes life a little easier.

The first track, Take a Bow, starts of as a classic Muse song, but then somewhere along the way the electronics kick in. While it starts promising, there is never a sort of climax and the song doesn’t stick to my head like with Apocalypse Please on Absolution.

The second track, Starlight, sounds a bit on the poppy side. The vocals never get truly interesting. Overall an enjoyable song, but no feeling of euphoria just yet.

The third track is Supermassive Black Hole, the first single. You might have heard it already. While I do like it, I noticed that it works far better as background music (to put up loud while doing the last Grand Prix in Burnout 2) than as actual listening to music, if you get what I mean. However I did notice that I put this track up more often.

The fourth track, Map of the Problematique, is different. It does sound a bit poppy, but contrary to the former tracks it doesn’t feel forced on Muse’s generic style. Perhaps I just got more used to it by now? Regardless of that however, it’s possibly the best track on the album. Later on in the track they go even more all out with the electronics and that’s good.

The fifth track, A Soldier’s Poem, is just some kind of intermezzo in a more classic style.

The sixth track, Invincible, doesn’t sound very good at all in my opinion. I suppose it sounds a bit like Absolution, but then… well, less interesting and on top of that not very new of course.

The seventh track, Assassin, was pretty good. It was almost metal-like at times, but the vocals were generic.

The eight track, Exo Politics I liked a lot on first listen. A catchy guitar riff to start off with, getting better and better towards the end. After listening it a few more times my opinion stands, however I now think it starts off fairly boring and repetitive.

The ninth track, City of Delusion, I really like.,It’s something really different and possibly therefore cool, but it just sounds good on all fronts.

The tenth track, Hoodoo, sort of continues the previous track (in feeling only) and therefore even the quite measly 3:42 seem too long for it.

The eleventh and last track of the album, Knights of Cydonia, is very nice and bombastic. The vocals sound Yes-like here, which is definitely not a negative thing.

In conclusion, I think that overall I’m slightly disappointed. But you should realise that when your expectations are high, it’s easy to be disappointed. I certainly welcome the change in style. Perhaps it is a forebode that if Muse decides to go further down this route, they will produce an absolute masterpiece in the future?

1 – How does the world see me?
Song: David Bowie – (Segue) “Ramona A. Stone / I am with Name
Comment: I am with Name? Too bad I don’t know whom I’m with then.

2 – Will I have a happy life?
Song: Korn – Here to Stay
Comments: I’m here to stay? That’s nice to know, but it seems to answer the question “will I have a long life?”

3 – What do my friends really think of me?
Song: Eminem – R.A.K.I.M – Rakim
Comments: They think I’m some ancient rapper? Hmm… interesting, I thought they saw me more as a somewhat metallish person.

4 – Do people secretly lust after me?
Song: The Dandy Warhols – The Coffee And Ten Wrecks
Comments: I guess not then.

5 – How can I make myself happy?
Song: Korn – Justin
Comments: I guess this means I’ll have to take off in space as the lyrics suggest.

6 – What should I do with my life?
Song: No Doubt – End it on this
Comments: That doesn’t sound too good.

7 – Why should life be full of so much pain?
Song: Radiohead – Creep
Comments: I’m a creep. Oh crap. Ah well, too bad. *headbangs on heavy guitar part*

8 – How can I maximize my pleasure during sex?
Song: Tenacious D – Friendship Test
Comments: Do a friendship test during sex? Hmm… kinky… NOT.

9 – Will I ever have children?
Song: Rage Against the Machine – Freedom
Comments: I will have freedom. So I might just leave my kids behind and be an asshole or choose not to have them at all. That sucks in a way.

10 – Will I die happy?
Song: Dr. Dre – Nuthin’ but a “G” thang
Comments: Doesn’t sound like it.

11 – What is some good advice for me?
Song: Samael – Telepathic
Comments: Yeah, reading other people’s thoughts would always be a good idea I guess.

12 – What is happiness?
Song: Anouk – Who Cares
Comment: Indeed, who cares what happiness is?

13 – What is my favorite fetish?
Song: Robbie Williams – Tripping
Comments: Oh yeah baby… tripping is shaggadelic!

14 – How will I be remembered?
Song: Die Fantatischen Vier – Bring it Back
Comment: Hell yeah, they’ll want me back.

Well, that was that… sadly the answers weren’t very funny for the most of it.

For this purpose I use this Picard rename script.

$if2(%albumartistsort%,%artist%)/%date% %album% [%_extension%]/%albumartistsort% -$num(%tracknumber%,2)- %title%

Which, as Picard puts it, results in Beatles, The/1965-08-06 Help! [mp3]/Beatles, The -07- Ticket to Ride.mp3

Everything following this is outdated.

To illustrate the procedure I use for ripping a CD, I will rip Heathen by David Bowie. I am currently in love with this album which has managed to somewhat hide from me, despite being in my CD collection for a couple of months. Everything I could find to download from the internet was low quality, so I had to rip it.

To do this I use CDex. Development is apperently dead right now and it would be smart to replace the included lame_enc.dll by a new one to gain the advantages it offers.

After having inserted my CD I queried CDDB (or FreeDB, I don’t remember what I set it up to do). It now shows up like this and you could start ripping right away. But first you’d better adjust a few settings.

As I mentioned I’m in love with this album. The settings I selected are pretty much the highest quality you should ever aim for before going lossless with something like FLAC. 320kbps CBR mp3′s simply aren’t worth the size they take as they’re still lossy, despite having very few artifacts. For a CD you do not wish to experience on high quality you should select a more reasonable VBR quality, like VBR5 (“normal” quality). Or something lower or higher, whatever you prefer. In any case you’re advised to use VBR to get the optimal quality versus size experience. As VBR method I used VBR-new, which is the same as VBR-MTRH, I just like the look of it better in the settings this way. In the past they were different things.

Apart from this it is important to set the ripping method to full-paranoia under the CD Drive tab. That way the chance for reading errors in your ripped file is minimal.

Now that my music is ripped I have to tag and rename it to make it fit into my collection. For that purpose I use Picard, which does most of the work for me and adds the MusicBrainz tags, which are important for integration of Last.FM with the MusicBrainz database someday. Little of my music includes this, as I only use it since recently.

After dragging it into Picard and telling it so search, it found the album I just ripped. So I click tagger and it associates my tracks to the data in the database. I let it write the tags in ID3v2.3 instead of ID3v2.4 because that is more globally compatible among applications.

Everything is ready and all I have to do now is let it write the files in their new directory structure and naming structure.

But what is this. Apperently the month and day of release are unknown. Luckily there are more sources for this kind of stuff, most notably Discogs (specialised in music) and Wikipedia (many fans of artists hang around and add data like this).

And indeed the data is available in Wikipedia.

So now I can edit the folder name myself. I also added the information to MusicBrainz so that people doing a similar process to mine can profit from what I looked up.

Now that this is done I use Tag&Rename to add some additional info, album art and album review to be exact. Both are grabbed from Amazon automatically.

Now I’m nearly finished, but I need to do a few more things. Firstly I wish the release date to display completely in foobar2000, so I add it to the DATE field like DATE=yyyy\ddmm, where the backslash separates two entries. Also foobar2000 tells me the exact average bitrate of the album, which isn’t that important as it’s just an average, but it’s a nice indicator for me to see that I don’t need to rerip it. For example my Eminem albums had @160 in the folder which allowed me to quickly see that I wanted them higher quality.

So now I add the bitrate to the folder name, manually.

And a final check in foobar2000. The album is now ready to move from my temporary folder (for albums which I yet have to prepare) to my music collection folder (which is all organised like this).

As a final note, I think I should have ripped this album in VBR quality 2, as the bitrate on this album was a little overdone.

I do specifically not follow the ÜberStandard, for various reasons. I do however follow a few of the conventions in there, although I reached them by myself, before I knew of its existence.

If you think this method eats time. All that ate some time I might have used differently was writing this down. The actual process is only very short and can be done while doing other things. For example while ripping the album I already typed the first few paragraphs.

Did you consider my explanation useful or just a bunch of crap? Leave your comments.

If a rock journalist uses 5 lines to sum up an album that is 40 minutes long, contains 11 tracks, has taken about a year to make and includes alot of love, dedication, personal opinions and food for thought from our side then I expect a little more than 5 fucking lines, what the fuck is wrong, don’t you love your job, don’t you burn for music, don’t you care anymore?

Speaking of five line reviews, I’m currently listening to the Arctic Monkeys which I avoided a little because of the hype around it, but it seems to be a well-deserved hype. Much more so to me than for example Coldplay of which I consider a few songs good, but a lot of songs on the albums just mediocre.

There, my five line wannabe-review of the Arctic Monkeys and Coldplay, without any indepth reasoning. But I, of course, am exused for just being a listener and not a journalist who gets paid to write.

I will just post a few of the lyrics of one of the Arctic Monkeys’ songs, by which you can decide for yourself wether you like it or not. They are from the song called “Fake Tales of San Francisco”, about a guy who tells about his moment(s) of fame in San-Francisco, which is all of course just utter crap.

Fake Tales of San Francisco
Echo through the room
More point to a wedding disco
Without a bride or groom

There’s a super cool band yeah
With their trilbys and their glasses of white wine
And all the weekend rock stars in the toilets
Practicing their lines

• Art Brut. Close calls for Agalloch and Atrocity.
• Billy Talent for being the coolest new punkish thing I discovered lately. Close call for The Bloodhound Gang and Boudewijn de Groot. The Beatles have some cool songs and especially their latter material is also quite experimental and cool, but they’ll probably occupy this spot on most of these kinds of lists anyway.
• Clawfinger. Perhaps Creedence Clearwater Revival if Clawfinger didn’t exist.
• David Bowie. If I’d have let him count for B then Billy Talent wouldn’t have had a chance and I like them. Doe Maar is also quite cool, but Bowie simply made too much good music to let anybody else have a chance. Or perhaps I simply shouldn’t make an A-Z list if I like Bowie and Billy Talent both better than Doe Maar.
• Eminem. Ennio Morricone as distant second for all of his brilliant soundtracks for westerns. Eurythmics as third for having this neat sound everybody likes (or should like).
• Feindflug. I don’t believe they are right wing as they’re accused to be, although I must admit that they make nazi material sound cool in a modern way. But they use such samples that if they’d mean that as support, then they’d be insane, nazi or not. They can only be meant as critisism. Fatboy Slim, Frank Zappa and Frank Sinatra very close calls as well.
• Gorillaz. Their sound is very cool and you can hear a lot of work goes into making each song sound just right. Garbage and Green Day fall off because I only really like one of their multiple albums.
• HorrorPops. They’re pretty cool and there’s no real contestant to the H-spot. Perhaps Harry Belafonte. But then he’d also compete to the letter B. That would make it too crowded there.
• Iggy Pop. In Extremo is close.
• JJ72. I really like their sound. Jack Off Jill and Jimi Hendrix Experience are close.
• Korn. I particularly like their first four albums and their latest, but all of their albums are good. There isn’t really any contestant either. Krezip is fun, but not great or anything.
• Lordi. Especially Blood Red Sandman is a great song. Led Zeppelin is something everybody will say (with good reason though) and Linkin Park or the lostprophets are a little bit too much of my musical past, although they are certainly cool. Ludwig von Beethoven is also a contestant, but strictly speaking that’s yet another one for the B, a seriously overcrowded letter.
• Metallica. I was going to say Marilyn Manson because there is nothing better until I realised there most certainly was. Michael Jackson and Muse are also considered.
• No Doubt. Nine Inch Nails is certainly the best, but I enjoyed No Doubt more the past few months. NWA and Nina Simone are also considered.
• Oomph! Possibly the band which most inspired Rammstein, but certainly much more than just good inspiration. Okkervil River is also very good, but sadly for them I am not that familiar with their music yet. Not that it matters much as I doubt more than ten people or so will actually do more than just give this list a quick glance and will actually read everything I wrote into it. The Offspring is a third, but would definitely have taken this position last year.
• Pink Floyd. There’s not much choice, is there? Papa Roach isn’t bad nor are the Pixies, but still inferior to Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
• Queen. I have to as except for Queens of the Stone Age I can’t think of any artist with the letter Q who has one song I like quite a lot.
• Rammstein. Rage Against The Machine very seriously considered.
• Samael. They are somewhat in the same genre as Shai Hulud, but better, are superior to Saliva’s rock & roll sound, Shania Twain and Shpongle also have to move over, leaving Star One and System of a Down as very serious contestants. Actually considering it a bit more it’s a definite tie with System of a Down
• Tenacious D. But Tool certainly isn’t bad.
• Underworld. I don’t want to say U2 and The Upskirts and Ultravox aren’t top class material.
• Van Halen. The Velvet Revolver isn’t my thing and the Vandals are quite cool, but not great enough.
• White Stripes. Close second for “Weird Al” Yankovic. Wagner isn’t bad either. Although following the method I used he should compete for J.
• Xzibit. Complete lack of competition however.
• Yes. For the song Owner of a lonely heart (and a few others) and because of lack of competition. Perhaps the Yardbirds, but I don’t like them.
• Zager & Evans. Better than Zebrahead, despite having only one song.