Trollheart

Sorry for the late reply man, been trying to track down that disappeared post!


As it goes, I reviewed "Hot fuss" already. It was ok but I wasn't blown away by it and I doubt I would be in too much of a hurry to check out any other albums by them. I've a massive backlog which I'm adding to every day, and so much happening with specials, features, lists and ideas all over the place, I just don't have time for "meh" albums.

Thanks for the thought though!

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Trollheart

Hai hai --- Roger Hodgson --- 1987 (A&M)


After his amazing debut solo album "In the eye of the storm", released three years prior, it looked like big things could happen for this man. After all, he was the voice of Supertramp: it's not like people didn't recognise him when he sang. All the boppy, uptempo hit singles Supertramp released had him on vocals --- "The logical song", "Breakfast in America", "Dreamer", even the later hit "It's raining again", just before his departure from the band he had spent over a decade with, had his dulcet tones on it --- but he sort of shot himself in the foot a little by releasing an album that, while truly excellent, had only six tracks and none of those anything under five minutes. Didn't quite make for singles material, did it? So no hit singles from the debut. Had he learned a lesson? Well, perhaps. 1987 and back he came with his second solo effort, this time a more balanced album in terms of tracks, with ten in all, and nothing much over five minutes. More commerically appealing stuff too, with the heavy progressive rock feel that characterised the debut largely jettisoned in favour or shorter, more accessible songs, something similar to what Marillion did on "Fugazi", though they didn't change their sound, just the length and number of tracks, which worked for them, gaining them a hit single.

There is however a problem with this album. Unlike Marillion, who stuck for four or five years at least to their core sound, Roger Hodgson decided the time had come to change things up, so he mostly abandoned the clearly Supertramp-lite sound that had run all the way through "In the eye of the storm" and seems to have actively tried to write hit singles. Bad idea, Rog! Nobody out there who wasn't a fan of Supertramp knew him, despite his being gone solo in the game for three years at this stage, and those that did know him wanted --- demanded --- the Supertramp sound. He basically seems to have ignored this, and went his own way, resulting in an album that's not at all bad, but quite hit and miss, and not what you'd call a worthy successor to his first.

It starts off well, with the characterisic sound of Supertramp, the harmonica, and a bouncy beat as "Right place" gets us started, little tinkly synthesisers and a soaring guitar, but it's lighter than anything on the previous album. The lyric is a little lightweight and over-clever --- "Put it in the right place/ Get into the right space/ Don't turn into a headcase/ Move it at your own pace" and lots of other words rhyming with "ace". Thick growling snappy synth peppers the song but it's a good opener. Not so much so for "My magazine", where Rog tries to go all hard rock, with a snarling guitar (what? Supertamp never had snarling guitars!) and a sort of bluesy feel, and not a harmonica in sight. On this one I feel Roger tries to be Robert Plant, but fails utterly. Mind you, it's nowhere near as bad as the godawful "London", where he tries his hand at (oh no!) reggae! Now I don't like reggae as a genre, but even I know when it's done well it can sound really effective and this, well, just doesn't. It's almost like he said to himself, "we should have a reggae song on the album". Why? There's no justification for it, but that doesn't stop him, and he proceeds to perform one of the worst hatchet jobs on the music of the islands I have ever had the misfortune to hear.

Thankfully, things pick up after that, with the sublime semi-ballad "You make me love you", which has all the characteristics of the classic Supertramp melded with the best of the Cars. His mellifluous voice really comes through on this song, and the backing vocals (mostly his own) give a nice solid flavour to the track. The title is the close this album comes to progressive rock, with a big roaring vocal opening which recalls the opening of his debut album, then the welcome return of harmonica and some great Fairlight programming that sounds like fast, laboured breathing with bouncing synth bass hopping all over the place. Somewhat unfortunately though, after the promising opening the song breaks down into a fairly basic pop song, with all the prog rock --- or indeed, any rock --- removed from it. Well, that's not fair: the guitar is pretty rockin', but the synth really takes over the tune. It does however bop along nicely, even if the chorus is a little lacking, just the title repeated. There's some nice brass-like synthwork and the vocal is good, and there does at least seem like there's some real emotion in it.

The same can't sadly be said of "Who's afraid?", which is really quite weak, a soft pop ditty with an almost nursery-rhyme shape to it. Listening to this album, it's almost, though not quite, like witnessing Genesis slide ever deeper into pop as they abandoned their rock roots. Even the rhythm here is kind of a cross of Steve Miller's "Abracadabra" and Chris Rea's "I can hear your heartbeat". Again I stress, it's not a bad song, not at all. It's just a little fluffy and lightweight compared to what I had come to expect from this powerhouse of progressive rock. Mind you, one place where Hodgson will always excel is in writing beautiful ballads. The previous album had the lovely "Lovers in the wind" and the spectacular epic "Only because of you", and this time out we get two more, perhaps not of the calibre of the latter, but certainly superb songs. The first is "Desert love", which opens on a nice strummed guitar with a satisfied exhalation like "Ahh!" then brings in soft, silvery synth and trilling guitar as Roger launches into another great solo love song. The chorus, set against a grinding guitar and high-pitched synth, reeks of desperation and yearning.

"Land ho!" sounds just like a Supertramp song, and indeed it is. Written in 1974 with his then-songwriting partner Rick Davies, it's a boppy, happy, upbeat song that really lifts the mood after "Desert love" and even the lacklustre "Who's afraid?", but you have to ask yourself the question: if he's trying to make it on his own, put to some extent his Supertramp past behind him, why use an old song he wrote over fifteen years ago? Is he just playing to the Supertramp crowd here, or paying respect back to his origins? Either way, it's a great little track, replete with the hallmarks of his erstwhile band --- jumping, jangling piano, saxophone and killer hooks --- you can almost hear Davies singing it with him, and the quality just gets better with the standout of the album, in "House on the corner". Utilising a basic melody or rhythm I've heard somewhere before, but still haven't been able to identify to this day, it's a powerful, radio-friendly song that really should have been a single, and has a great chorus, with the verses almost elongated as Hodgson sings them. It just makes you want to move your feet, and the whistling keyboard running through it just adds the final touch. It could however finish much better.

After all that, the album winds down in somewhat of a low-key fashion with the second ballad, the morose and I would have to say bitter "Puppet dance", driven on piano and synthesiser which certainly recalls the Supertramp sound, though this is more a song I would expect to hear Davies sing, were it a Supertramp one. For an album that is generally more full of upbeat songs, it's something of a shock to hear this as the thing comes to a close, leaving you with something of a conflict in your emotions; the last few songs have put you in a good mood and you're ready to go out on a high, then the big comedown arrives in the form of this sad little ballad. Odd choice.

TRACKLISTING

1. Right place
2. My magazine
3. London
4. You make me love you
5. Hai hai
6. Who's afraid?
7. Desert love
8. Land ho!
9. House on the corner
10. Puppet dance

I wouldn't say I was disappointed with this album, but it does confuse. The debut was pure prog rock and hung together really well, whereas this jumps from pop to rock to pop and back, making it hard to get a real handle on it. I suppose in some ways it must have been an attempt to really get his career off the ground, after three years of nothing much happening, but if so then Roger Hodgson went the wrong way, in my opinion. His fanbase had come from Supertramp and they did not want to hear pop songs and love songs; he abandoned the basis Supertramp sound and tried to spread his wings, perhaps too far too soon, and sort of came crashing down. He didn't release another album until 2001, which surely tells its own story.

These days it seems he makes his money by returning to playing to the gallery, covering his own songs and other Supertramp ones in his concerts, and has issued albums of such material. Maybe it's best he stay doing that. For me, when I want to hear the Roger Hodgson who was at the time in my opinion on the cusp of greatness, with the world at his feet, I'll put on the debut album, and though I'll listen to this on and off, it will always be "In the eye of the storm" I return to.

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Plankton

So, no Zoetrope then ey? Tis a shame. They were a well revered metal band, and I would've liked to have seen your thoughts on them. Oh well. Life does go on.

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Trollheart

Sorry Plankton, you hit me with that just as I was winding up Metal Month, and to be honest I'm pulling back a little from metal for the time being, as you can see from the recent entries. I may indeed give them a go some time later, but for now I'm on a mostly non-metal diet...

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Plankton

No problemo.

When/if you ever do a review on em, I'll forward it to Pete (singer on Mind Over Splatter) who is a good friend of mine. We did an album together back in the early 00's. He's still trying to stoke the old fire.

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Powerstars

Ah okay. Sorry.

I'll be tracking that review down.

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Powerstars

Read that Hot Fuss review. Glad to hear you enjoy some tracks, but yeah, if you weren't blown away with that one, don't bother with the rest. Sam's Town is good, some prefer it, but I'm a Hot Fuss kinda guy. Their latest album failed to impress me at all. Some say they get worse with every album, but hey, maybe the next one will be better.

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djchameleon

What? Sam's Town and Hot Fuss aren't comparable though. They went for a different sound from Hot Fuss on it.

I'm more of a fan of Sam's Town.

Thanks for reminding me that I need to listen to their latest album.

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Fame, fortune, power, titties. People say these are the most crucial things in life, but you can have a pocket full o' gold and it doesn't mean sh*t if you don't have someone to share that gold with. Seems simple. Yet it's an important lesson to learn. Even lone wolves run in packs sometimes.

Powerstars

Yeah, you're right, they ARE totally different. Battle Born's all well and good, but really forgettable imo. I recommend the B-Sides compilation, Sawdust.

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Trollheart

… then why make it so hard to link to?

Goddamn it, in the past I’ve just found the image I wanted via Google and selected “Copy image location”, pasted that into my WP and away I go. Now it seems that two things are happening more and more frequently with images posted online. The first thing that bugs the living crap out of me is GI-NORMOUS images! I mean, who in the name of all things holy needs a picture to be more than 2000 DPI?? But more and more now when I go looking for a picture I’m coming across resolutions that are just ridiculous. Not only can most monitors not display such an image without resizing it --- in which case you’re not going to get the detail you would have wanted when you created/scanned it originally, so why bother? --- the files themselves are huge, so if you download one or try to paste it into a forum, like here, it annoys everyone because it slows down the less speedy computers and also takes up way too much space. There’s no need to make an image that big. The human eye can only cope with so much detail, and although YOU might want to see the sweat on every pore on Springsteen’s nose, or every individual blade of grass on a field, I don’t, and I suspect most of us are the same. As long as you can see the image in reasonable clarity, I’m happy with a smaller size. It’s almost like a pissing contest now though: I can make my image bigger than yours! Who the **** cares? Other people may want to use these images you’re uploading, and while yes, many people don’t like or agree with hotlinking (the practice of linking to an image on the site on which it’s hosted rather than downloading it and reuploading it to where you want it and then linking to there), you know, it’s a fact of life here on the internet. Most of us ain’t got the time or patience to redistribute your pictures, and anyway it’s only one picture so what are you bitching about? Not to mention that it could end up getting you visitors to your site, if you want them, as people may follow the link if they really want to. So what’s the deal?

Well, that’s bad enough. But then you have the real problem, the “invisible problem”, the one that only shows up AFTER you’ve tried to paste in the link on an increasingly large number of images. Most times you’ll get something like this

“https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/i...a46-VeCghD8”
which is fine, but then a lot of the time you’ll get this

“data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD/2wCEAAkGBhQSEBQUExQVFRQWGBoaGBgVGBcXFxsVFBgVGhgYGR oaHCYfGxkjGhgUHy8gIycpLCwtGh8xNTAqNSYrLCkBCQoKDgwO Gg8PGiokHyQsLCwtLzApLC00NCwsKSwpKSosLS8sLCwsLCwsKS wsLCwsLCopNCwsLCwqLCwsLCwsLP/AABEIALQBGAMBIgACEQEDEQH/xAAbAAABBQEBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAgMEBQYBB//EAEMQAAIBAgMFBQUECAQGAwAAAAECEQADEiExBAVBUWETIjJxg QZCUpGhB2JysRQjgpKiwdHwM7LC4RUkQ2OT8RZU0v/EABsBAAIDAQEBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEAgMFAQYH/8QANBEAAQQABAQDBgYCAwAAAAAAAQACAxEEEiExBRNBUTJx8CJ hgZGhwRQVQlKx4TPxBiTR/9oADAMBAAIRAxEAPwDw2iiihCKKKKEIooooQiiiihCKKKKEIoo ooQiiiihCKKKKEIorqrNXO7tzKwDM2QzIGkdTNcJpVySNjFuVO qE6ClnZ2+E/KtnuTdpvsy2EGFILuQcIJmNJJbX5Hzqfs3s7tD3r9pcGK1ZN0E AwwkYRme6zAtEjUR1rlnsk/wAbbywDXfUrzrszyrhFaLbt0XBbs3WM9vjwc/1bBT/Ecqib13M9i4UuphYeRBHMEZEa5g1200JRsVT0U9cs8qZrqtBtF FFFC6iiiihCKKKKEIorpNcoQiiiihCKKKKEIooooQiiiihCKKK KEIooooQiiiihCKKKKEIooooQiiiuqsmhCmbq3e166ltBLMQB5 n+5rQ7V7Lut+1ZtuLhuZDIouMEgiSSCBkcQOhGhypv2HfBtQjx G3dCH (And it goes on for about five pages, but you get the idea I'm sure).

Yeah. Annoying isn’t it? Imagine trying to paste THAT into your document, or worse, into a forum. I’ve had image links like this that have, on their own, exceeded the maximum character count, and that’s twenty thousand characters! Twenty flaming thousand! In one image!

The question I pose is: why? What’s the point? Is it to stop hotlinking? If so, then it works perfectly. Nobody in their right mind would paste this into anything. But if not, then what is the reason for the ridiculously long text string? What does it represent, and how come other images, often from the same site, have something more manageable, as in the first example, as their code?

I truly don’t get it.

And, with images using codes like this, I truly don’t get it. The image, that is. It is unusable. But even if it IS unusable, why is there no way (that I know of) to ascertain this BEFORE copying the damn link and trying to paste it? Why is there no way to read the code or see it beforehand, to know if it’s worth even trying? So far as I can see, it’s just pot luck. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve looked for a certain image, then groaned, raged and fumed, getting angrier all the time as each successive link turns out to be one of the “long” ones. Sometimes I’ve run out of examples: every single image of the type I need has come up unusable. Sometimes that means I have to go to the trouble of saving, downloading, reupping and relinking to my own site. I mean, I can do this, sure, but it’s a pain and why should I have to? Most people using these images didn’t create them; they don’t hold the copyright on them. So what gives them the right --- if it is them doing it, and I assume it must be --- to prevent others from using these images?

A picture may paint a thousand words, but if it has more than a thousand characters in its link, you’re not going to be creating any masterpieces with it any time soon.


“Adapt and survive?”

This had been meant to focus, as it almost always does, on one thing that really bugged me, but hell, it’s called “Pet hates” and this week has seen the emergence of another thing that has really driven me mad. So welcome to part two!

If you buy something in a certain territory, I think it’s not expecting too much that you should be able to use the damn thing! I mean, if you bought an iphone in the US you’d think it would be taken as read that you could connect to US networks with it, if you buy a ticket for Wembley Stadium you don’t expect the concert to be held in Dubai, and if you invest in a diesel powered car then you shouldn’t expect it to run on petrol, now should you?

All, I would think, reasonable and not unattainable goals. So why is it that when I opened my new (although I had had it for over a year I had never opened it) Western Digital external hard drive this week I should find that, despite the fact it was bought in Ireland (well, on an Irish website) the mains plug on it should be a two-pin, “battery shaver” style? I can’t use that. Over here in Ireland we use the three-pin plug, and have since we got electricity I think. So where’s the adapter I ask? Every electrical product sold these days seems to come with a plastic connector you can snap on to the plug to make it the one you want to use, and I think it’s this way in the US too: if you get a three-pin and need a two, there’s the option of changing it with just a few clicks.

But no adapter could I see, as I searched through the box. Even though --- and this was the bit that really bugged me --- the bloody quickstart guide SHOWS you one being fitted! How is it that Western Digital, famed for totally overpricing their hard drives --- how they haven’t priced themselves out of the oversaturated market yet I don’t know --- could not be bothered to include a small piece of plastic and metal that would have made my life easier? They’re selling the damn thing to the Irish market: why not make sure it can be bloody well used when it’s been bought? But no. I had to go and buy one (only cost three euro but that’s beside the point; I had to go into the city and it added an extra day on to my project) before I could use their wonderful drive!

No point in me writing to them of course --- they couldn’t care less I’m sure --- but it really turned me off buying their products --- which I had always had an aversion to: this one was just too reasonably priced to pass up at the time --- and more to the point, has made me think twice before I buy another drive, or anything with an electrical lead. From now on, I’m not handing over my money until I know there’s a plug on the thing I can use! Thanks Western Digital: you’ve made me become a picky shopper, all because you’re too tight to include an adapter that would make your product work in the country in which it’s sold.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018