My wife is a Twilight fan. She’s read all four books in the series several times each, and she’s watched the first two movies countless times each. Note that she’s not one of those nutty Twimoms that scream like a 15-year-old girl when Jacob takes his shirt off – she just likes the story. Or so she tells me.

Anyway, part of her nuttiness obsession interest in the series is the soundtracks. She has the soundtracks for each of the two movies as well as the score (i.e. background music) for the first. She plays these CDs frequently in the car when taking the boys places, so they are now very familiar with them as well (I must say, hearing a 7-year-old ask us to play Death Cab For Cutie or Linkin Park is very cool). One of the songs that immediately hooked them is Supermassive Black Hole by a band I’d never heard of called Muse. (Stephenie Meyer is apparently a big Muse fan – there’s a Muse song on the New Moon soundtrack as well.) If you’ve seen the first movie, this is the song that plays during the baseball scene. As an aside, they really should have worked on Alice’s pitching style – she throws like a girl vampire. Anyway, I liked the song as well, and soon picked up Muse’s 2006 album Black Holes and Revelations.

My first thought was that they were similar to U2, though heavier. It turns out that they toured with U2 last year, so I guess I wasn’t far off. But as I listened more, I realized that some songs were nothing like U2 at all. “Invincible” has a Tom Morello-like guitar solo, though it turns out that’s not that unusual for Muse. Not on every single freaking song like Rage or Audioslave, but guitarist-singer-songwriter-chief-cook-and-bottle-washer Matthew Bellamy does some pretty funky stuff with the guitar here and there. “Map of the Problematique” keeps sticking in my mind, though not like an earworm, just because it’s a very cool song. “Knights of Cydonia” is more prog-rock, and there’s almost an “epic” feel to it.

I got to really like this album, so in mid-January, I picked up a couple more: Origins of Symmetry from 2001, and last year’s The Resistance. These guys are all over the map – you could call them “alternative”, though heavier at times than a lot of alternative bands. You could also put them in the “progressive” category, but some songs are more guitar-driven rock than many progressive bands.They have quiet sections with just piano and vocals, and others where Bellamy is screaming over his own guitar. On the other hand, if you had told me that “United States of Eurasia” was an recently discovered Queen track from the late 70’s, I don’t think I’d even question it.

Muse is one of those bands (like CCR, Big Wreck) where one guy is the driving force behind everything – Bellamy sings lead vocals, plays (excellent) guitar and keyboards, and writes all the songs. This is not to say that the other guys aren’t contributors – they are both excellent musicians as well, though the bass is a little more hidden on Black Holes and Revelations than on the other albums. Bellamy has an interesting and sometimes powerful voice (check out “Micro Cuts” on Origin of Symmetry) with a pretty wide range, and he certainly loves his falsetto.

I would never have heard of this band or had a chance to enjoy their music if they weren’t on the Twilight soundtrack. I guess the moral of this story is that if you are a band that has a chance to get your song on a movie soundtrack, do it.

I originally bought Pearl Jam’s Ten album in about 1991 and have loved it ever since. It’s one of my all-time favourite albums, is simply great from start to finish, and even contains one of my favourite guitar solos (on “Alive”). This past week, Pearl Jam released a new version of Ten which contains two CDs – the first is simply the album I have, the second (called Ten Redux) contains remixed versions of every song on the album, as well as a few bonus tracks. This basically means that I just bought two copies of an album I already had.

I didn’t plan on buying this new version, figuring it was only for serious die-hard Pearl Jam fans. But Alan Cross talked about it on the Explore Music podcast a couple of weeks ago, and said that the new remixed version is simply amazing, so I ordered it from amazon.ca.

Strangely, Cross said that the changes are “subtle, but obvious – if you listen to it off CD and NOT off a compressed MP3”. So on the way into work the other day, I brought the CD with me and listened to it directly, rather than plugging the iPod in. (Ironically, the CD wouldn’t play in the player at first. I had to eject it and try it again before it would play. I think the first time I put the disk in, it got caught in the cobwebs inside.) I was a little sceptical that I would hear any difference, given what Cross had said – I figured that if the differences were so subtle that you couldn’t hear them from an MP3, then the $69 stereo in my car wouldn’t allow me to hear the differences anyway, but it did. I’m not sure I agree with Cross’s assessment, since the differences I hear are obvious enough (to someone who’s listened to the album enough times) that even with a compressed MP3, you can hear them. I listened to the MP3 version from my iPod as well, and sure enough you can hear the changes. I rip all my MP3’s at a variable bit rate, which means that the compression isn’t as good (i.e. the files are bigger) but you don’t lose as much sound quality. Maybe Cross uses a higher compression rate.

The Difference

Despite sounding oxymoronic, Cross’s description of “subtle, but obvious” is exactly right. This not a “director’s cut” – there are no new verses, no new solos, and none of the songs are any longer or shorter than the originals. Nothing has been added or removed, and most importantly, Han still shoots first. Most of what they’ve done is modify the relative volumes of the instruments. In most songs, the rhythm guitar has been turned up during solos — in a couple of cases, it’s been turned up enough that it’s harder to hear the solo guitar. There were a couple of relatively quiet sections (like the first time you hear “Why go home?” in “Why Go”) where the drums and bass have been turned up a little. In some cases, the background vocals have been turned down. The most obvious specific difference I found was that the “hoo hoo hoo hoo” high-pitched vocals on “Jeremy” have been almost removed. There are a few other smaller changes:

• in “Even Flow” after the line “Where do I stand?”, the echo of “stand” is gone
• the bass at the very end of “Why Go” is a little louder, and is sustained just a touch longer, causing the segue into the brilliant “Black” to be a little less smooth than the original.
• the opening guitar on “Garden” has a different tone

There are also six bonus songs included, some of which were previously unreleased. “Brother” and “Just A Girl both” sound like they could have been on Ten, and I might even have included “Brother” over “Deep”. “Breath And A Scream” is kind of boring, and sounds like a bonus track, i.e. one that wasn’t good enough to make the album. “State Of Love And Trust” isn’t bad, and “2,000 Mile Blues” is cool – very Zeppelin-esque. “Evil Little Goat” is only a minute and a half long, but if Eddie Vedder ever sang for The Beach Boys, this might be what it would sound like.

Now if only Pearl Jam could remix their later albums (anything after Vs.) to make me care about them. I loved Ten and really liked Vs. as well but for some reason, I completely lost interest in Pearl Jam after that. No idea why. I have a couple of later albums (Riot Act and Pearl Jam) and I’ve listened to them a couple of times, but they seem kind of forgettable. But now that my interest in Ten has been rekindled, I’ll give them another listen.

I have recently been introduced to a progressive rock band from England called Porcupine Tree. Not only does the band have a cool name (very important), but they’re talented musicians (also very important). I now have three of their albums, and I’m really enjoying them. I’ll talk about the band itself in a minute, but I wanted to mention the way I discovered them, since it’s rather unusual.

While writing some internal documentation for some code I had written, I used a tool called doxygen, which reads specially formatted comments in source code and creates documentation from it. Very nice tool, and while perusing the acknowledgements on the web site, I came across this line:

[Thanks to] the band Porcupine Tree for providing hours of great music to listen to while coding.

I was intrigued by the name of the band, but never thought much about it. A little while later, I was on amazon.ca and looked at my personal recommendations (after having bought some Rush and Dream Theater CDs), and there was a Porcupine Tree album. I immediately remembered the name from the doxygen guy, and since amazon said that the album was recommended because of my interest in Rush and Dream Theater, I was even more intrigued. After looking at some CD reviews, I took a $10 leap of faith. Without ever having heard any of the band’s music, I downloaded their latest album, Fear of a Blank Planet, from puretracks.ca. After listening to that for a while, I went onto eBay and bought the two previous albums, Deadwing and In Absentia.

The boys in PT are big on eyes; of the three albums I have, two of them have covers that show someone with blank eyes – the Blank Planet one reminds me of the I Love It Loud video from Kiss, while the In Absentia one is so creepy that I don’t even like looking at it.

While researching the band, I saw a comparison to Queensrÿche, who I’m a fan of (well, the older stuff anyway). But Steve Wilson’s vocals and Geoff Tate’s are nothing like one another, so it’s kind of hard to hear the similarities. Musically, they’re not that far off, but Porcupine Tree is a little more… well, “psychadelic” isn’t the right word exactly, perhaps “ambient”. Having said that, they remind me a little more of Tool or Dream Theater than Queensrÿche. They all have frequent time signature and key changes and some heavy guitar work, though PT isn’t quite as heavy (well, usually – “The Creator Has A Mastertape” from In Absentia is pretty kick-ass). The vocals are quite different as well – PT’s Wilson, Tool’s Keenan, and DT’s LaBrie can sing cleanly and quietly at times and louder at others, though LaBrie and particularly Keenan can also scream with the best of them (listen to Ticks & Leeches from Lateralus for a good example) while Wilson doesn’t scream. However, PT and DT use a lot more acoustic guitar than Tool, and I’m pretty sure that neither Tool nor Dream Theater use a banjo on any of their recordings.

Amazon recommended PT to me because of both Rush and Dream Theater, but honestly, I don’t see a lot of similarities to Rush. Other than the frequent time signature changes, the music is quite different.  They’ve been compared to Pink Floyd as well, though their music is much heavier.

Anyway, they have six other studio albums and a couple of live albums as well, so perhaps I’ll peruse through the eBay listings again. I should probably take a break from eBay, though; I’ve bought 11 CDs (2 PT, one Nine Inch Nails, six Beatles, two Rammstein) through eBay in the last two months. I just love discovering new music.