The Front’s latest endeavor is high quality awesome, so let’s just eliminate any ambiguity about that right now.

To be frank, I’ve had a hard time embracing MC Frontalot’s music prior to Zero Day, despite appreciating his stage presence at Nerdapalooza and PAX, and thinking he was a pretty cool guy based on repeated viewings of the Nerdcore Rising documentary and a short conversation at Nerdapalooza last summer. His peculiar delivery is often, let’s be honest, challenging and the non-lyrical elements weren’t all that compelling on their own, but there’s unquestionably a lot of cleverness and humor throughout every Frontalot album.

But Zero Day succeeds on all fronts (yes, I did that.)  All of the characteristic terse lyricism is still there but it seems like Frontalot has found a way to employ it without staggering through a murderously jagged syllabic rhythm that shakes off any but the most tenacious listener. The instrumentation has likewise been raised to a new level, with fun, interesting music backing every track.

Finally, the collaborators lacing this album all had fantastic contributions and I think Zero Day is so excellent as much due to their efforts as to the Front and his perennial cohort. The album would have been an altogether different creature absent their additions.

Though I have many expressions of wonderment I could continue to offer in service of Zero Day’s edification, every album has its warts, and I would not be me if I did not strive to make them evident alongside the features deserving of adulation. But my grousing may be easily confined to two topics here. I like John Hodgman and all, but his skit was sadly a clunker. Just not funny.

The other thing is …The Painstakingly Concealed Secret Track. Which only annoys me because it isn’t easy enough to just access the track if you’re not interested in playing a game to get it. Hell, it’s a miracle I managed to throw enough time together to make this post, I don’t really have the time or attention to play mini-games to access stuff I paid to hear.

Anyway, check out a couple of my favorites from the album and go buy it. Frontalot actually sells FLAC copies of his albums. Support that my friends, for it is far too rare a thing.

MC Frontalot – Zero Day
MC Frontalot – The Council Of Loathing

MC Frontalot’s official site

In hindsight, I’m still not sure how it happened.  Sure, I loved the original, self-titled Protomen album.  But it was a frenetic, metal-laced cannon shot of an album with only occasional moments of contrasting lo-fi, acoustic notes.  Act II is another matter entirely.  It retains some of the first album’s organic components, and rather than metal it features a fearlessly executed retro ’80s pop-rock style.

I have to admit, my age probably has a lot to do with my initial bias against that element of their composition, where younger listeners probably find it as endearing as I found ’70s rock when I was growing up.  Nonetheless, my initial reluctance to embrace Act II has been fully reversed.  I now find myself listening to the new Protomen album more than anything else in my collection, combined.

Yup.  It has me in a grip, no doubt.  I find myself wondering how many times I can talk about the Protomen before I annoy my wife enough for her to say something about it.  And my followers on Twitter.  And Facebook.  And IRC.  You get the idea.

It’s hard to say where the turning point was.  Certainly, I became more and more engaged as I worked out the lyrics and the story they tell.  And I suppose I’ve built up some immunity to the cheese factor through repeated exposure.  Regardless of the causes, I’m now free enjoy Act II for what it is: a thoroughly awesome concept album that tells an overdriven drama of heroes, villains, and the robots they create.

I am so sold on the new album at this point that I want everyone to hear it.  If you like robots.  If you like the hero’s journey.  If you like music.  If you have hearing.  If you have partial hearing.  Or even just a pulse.  You get the point; Act II – The Father Of Death is Essential Listening.

Official Protomen Site | Random Protomen Stuff on YouTube

If you read my PAX recap (I’ll understand if you didn’t) you’ll already know that I’ve taken a shine to Metroid Metal. Their performance at PAX was thoroughly enjoyable and I resolved to pick up their music immediately.

This album is good old-fashioned [metal] fun. The Metroid themes are easily recognizable, and the music is very tightly played. Listening to Varia Suite takes me right back to those red-eyed explorations of lonely, alien worlds scattered with abandoned structures and crawling with hostile life forms.

So much of the mood and atmosphere of the Metroid games is conveyed through its scores, and if anything, Metroid Metal’s translations not only preserve their message but amplify it. And where, perhaps, they deviate or embellish, I assure you it is always a successful attempt at more completely rocking.

Metroid Metal also gets kudos from me for using Bandcamp to allow a full preview of the entire album, and at least as important, offer the music digitally in all manner of formats, including Ogg and FLAC (yes!!) So I feel it would be redundant and perhaps a little rude to do my normal practice of putting up MP3 links when I can just allow you to check out their music directly.

So here you go, check it out for yourself! I particularly like these tracks:

4. Item Room (NES)
7. Ridley (NES)
8. Phendrana Drifts (MP)
14. Theme (NES)

Official Metroid Metal Site, MM on Bandcamp,

Maja (pronounced “MAY-ja” by the way–a surprise to me) isn’t incompetent, but I felt his even tone throughout each track conveyed boredom, and I could only echo that temperament when listening, often completely tuning out the music as it rolled on smoothly.

The lyrics are often clever or cleverly pronounced, but the lack of any emphasis at all made paying attention to them a chore. The one exception to this impression was “Hip Hop Daikou” which has nice, minimal beats, a fun chorus, and more of the punchy flow that I find engaging. If I understand correctly, it’s outside of the Bleach-themed set of tracks on the release, explaining the scattered references to other anime and video games.

The samples were totally lost on me. Not only did they fail to add anything to the overall composition because of language, but I didn’t recognize any of them, though one guy sounded a lot like Gendo Ikari in Neon Genesis. Wait, that was indeed the same guy. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Maybe a Bleach fan would get a lot more out of this album, but for me, the so-so musical aspect combined with complete lack of familiarity or interest in the theme made this a very hard album to get through, and after a few subsequent attempts it didn’t get any better.

However, I do look forward to checking out what Maja does next. I think if he were to create a more personal musical project, it would result in a very interesting and engaging album. As a whole, Bleach’d Out was not for me.

Maja – Hip Hop Daikou

Maja on ReverbNation

In all honesty, I was not expecting to like The Free Estate, but Karl Olson, aka Ultraklystron’s difficult-to-categorize new release turned me right around.  Before I knew it I had his sharp rhymes and clever hooks bouncing around in my head at all hours, unable to be exorcised without touring the tracks a few more times back-to-back.

My expectation has to do with Ultraklystron’s rep for anime and manga fandom.  While I was a rabid fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion when I was younger, that’s the only anime* I could ever claim to be a fan of, and as for Manga, well, I feel that the best work was done a long time ago.  So I don’t expect to catch any of the references, and I expect the music to be as …how to put this gently… juvenile (whoops, that didn’t work) as those influences.

*Anything Hayao Miyazaki does transcends its medium and any genre-boxing to become simply wonderful storytelling.

But either I was mistaken in my impressions, or I’m losing my perspective as an outsider of this music scene, or this release was a departure from previous efforts, as it rests so lightly on any of those undesirable influences that they are easily digested.  Indeed happily digested, as this is one of those nerdcore releases that strikes me as having strong cross-over potential.  With great production, smooth performance, and engaging material, this has everything and more that you could expect out of a good pop album.

I challenge you to avoid nodding and grinning along to the refrain of Webcam Girls or Greatest, or if you go ahead and download the full, free release, empathizing with him in Not A Criminal and Dumb Crush.  I expect that, like me, you’ll wonder how it went by so fast when the whole album has finished playing, and that’s because (and this is the best part) this free version of The Free Estate is a subset of the tracks from the full release.  Kudos to Karl for embracing the new methods of getting your music noticed.  I’ll be the first in line when the digital retail release is ready!

Ultraklystron – Webcam Girls
Ultraklystron – Greatest

Karl Olsen’s Website, The Free Estate on Rapidshare, Buy Ultraklystron Music

Update: Be sure to read the follow-up to this post!

Is it possible for me to describe how I feel about The Protomen’s long-awaited release, Act II?  I’m going to try.  Forgive me if it gets muddled, but that’s just the state of things here.

Before I awkwardly stumble about the page with haphazard and confused words about this album, let’s just take a good look at the cover art, OK?  It’s brilliant, isn’t it?  The whole noir aspect, the early vs. late 20th Century cities, bridged by Dr. Light and Emily.  Is that Wiley on the screen?  And who is that watching from the ledge?  Brilliant work.  Few album covers are as interesting these days.

Now the music, well, the music is hard to pin down.  It reflects the same division of culture depicted on the cover, varying between acoustic thrumming when describing the world Light grew up in, and heavy synthesizers and electric guitars when the setting shifts to the hyper-industrialized world where Light becomes a pariah and fugitive.

To be honest, I’m a little disappointed with the direction they took musically.  I was greatly excited by their Father of Death single, expecting it to be more representative of the whole upcoming release.  I admire their dedication to concept and think they did a fantastic job of executing on their ideas, but I should have heeded the warning that was their cover of “Danger Zone” when I saw them at Nerdapalooza this summer.  Half of this album is, unfortunately, just not for me.

On the other hand, I’m still dreadfully starved for more details of their story.  I think the mythology they’ve constructed around the thin skeleton of the MegaMan games is awesome and exceptional.

And if there’s any way you can make it to a live Protomen show, I highly recommend it.  They were great at Nerdapalooza and I still have some slim hope of attending their Act II CD release show in Nashville on the 25th.  If it’s even half as epic as they describe, missing this show will be a dreadful mistake.

The Protomen – The Good Doctor
The Protomen – Breaking Out
The Protomen – Here Comes The Arm

Official Site (includes links to buy)

My only strong complaint about this release is how far it goes into modern rap territories of violence and misogyny.  I understand these are character portrayals, but I still find it unpleasant and fail to find the humor in it that others do.

Basically it’s just the b-sides that wont be making my next pressed album, I actually asked the producers who contributed for throwaway beats to make this one.

Fair enough.  With that sort of expectation in place, even the occasional so-so production and sometimes “meh” lyrics in this teaser release, it can still be considered overall “good enough”.

Epic-1 – Lvl 99

Epic-1 on EMPulse Records, Epic-1 on MySpace, Good Enough: MP3, FLAC

While it’s true that the primary themes of this album (and most of the Velvet Acid Christ discography) are drugs and violence, the bounty of sci-fi movie sampling in VAC is almost overwhelming.  Back on ye olde Usenet, VAC frontman (and often solo artist) Bryan Erickson was often given a hard time by others about it.

But I always enjoyed the samples, both because I liked that about electronic and industrial music in general, and because I felt they were appropriately used in VAC compositions as strong, critical threads as much as lyrics and instrumentation were.

Other albums have their own notable sample sources, but this one features some sci-fi staples: Starship Troopers, Event Horizon, and a collection of Borg-related samples from Star Trek.

While I’ve never described myself as a fan of Velvet Acid Christ, and find myself repulsed by the saturation of drug and violence imagery, I find myself coming back again and again to hear a few stand-out tracks and this album as a whole.

Velvet Acid Christ – Futile ’98

Official Website, On AmazonMP3

I don’t imagine a lot of you nerdcore fans are going to understand this one, but some of you will in a big way.

Babyland, as I’ve written elsewhere, grew and matured alongside me over the years, making each album a snapshot I can look back on and remember myself and who I was at the time.  You Suck Crap was released way back in 1992 and as far as I was concerned upon my introduction to it in ’94, it was an instant classic.  It spoke directly to the teenaged outsider I was at the time, and to the rage he felt at himself and the world.

While later albums featured more mellow introspection or refined discontent, You Suck Crap was very loud and raw and offered an aggressive outlet to the feelings typical of so many nerds at that age.  And if the emotional resonance wasn’t enough, Hell, they did a song about an H. P. Lovecraft story and one about Logan’s Run too.

Babyland – Logan’s Run
Babyland – Don’t You Feel Lost
Babyland – Reality

Official Site, Releases on Amazon

I can’t say I understand the obsession with Mega Man in nerdy music.  I was just like most NES gamers back in the day and consumed huge quantities of games that were little more than copycats of each other.  In my memory, many of them are indistinguishable from each other, and Mega Man is one of those games.  A platformer where the player has a cannon for a hand?  Excellent, I loved that game when it was called Metroid.  Anyway, the music…

Random has a great, laid-back quality to his delivery that is hard to resist.  Calm, rhythmic, and smooth, he’s easy to follow and immediately engaging.  Paired with some mild, fun beats laid over what I assume are loops from the game, the whole package is unchallenging in the best way, easy to approach and appreciate.

There are a few smudges on the album that I’d feel dishonest leaving unsaid.  The vocal samples, from Mega Man cartoons I have to guess, are often jarring and feel forced.  Track 5, My Love (Go Shop), features Rufus Pipes and completely disrupts the good vibe of the album.  I realize I’m biased against any sort of ballad, but regardless, the discordant vocals just stick out like a sore thumb and challenge me not to hit the skip button.

There are some ups and downs, but if you liked Mega Ran, you’ll probably like Mega Ran 9.  I did.

Random – Splash Woman
Random – My Love (Go Shop) (Feat. Rufus Pipes)
Random – Endless (Feat. Storyville)

Official Site, Buy on Amazon