Reviews
 Keep It Simple
Van Morrison
Roger McGuinn @ the Huntington IMAC, Long Island, NY - April 4, 2008
Emily Saxe @ the Allen Room/Jazz at Lincoln Center - April 5, 2008
Another Country
Tift Merritt
Be Your Own Pet
Get Awkward
Paul McCartney – The McCartney Years (DVD)
Juno – Music from the Motion Picture
Various Artists
Yes - Their Definitive Story
Day and Night Driving
Seven Mary Three
InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
Huntington, NY
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If the year were 1992, I probably would not review this CD so harshly. But it isn’t 1992 any longer, so here I go on my latest rant. If you listened to alternative radio even once in the past fifteen years, then there is nothing on this disk to surprise you. One run through “Truth Is Currency” (that is, if you can actually listen to the entire thing) and you’ll know that you’ve heard it all before, and you’ve probably heard it enough to realize that you stopped listening to music like this years ago, when your Alice in Chains CD got stolen. Sludgy guitars bash out chord-driven power riffs over heavily syncopated beats, all in support of some over-emotive howler ranting about some observed defect in his life. The song titles alone give up the game; “Loathe”, “Selfish and Cold”, “You Take Away,”…etc., etc. Sound familiar? It’s so familiar that it’s downright generic.
“Truth Is Currency” answers the question, “What would Staind sound like after both of their musical ideas were fully exploited?” I imagine that this is how Staind would sound if their career lasted for 9 or 10 albums (God forbid). There is virtually nothing here to distinguish one track from another. Each song features the exact same anguished vocal timbre, wailing over identically distorted guitar tones. I honestly believe that a good mash-up artist could edit all ten of these tracks together, and nobody would even know the difference. To sum things up, I’ll give Revelation Theory the final word, quoting their lyrics from “After the Rain”;
“There’s nothing left to give
There’s nothing left to prove,
There’s nothing left to say…”
…so why bother saying anything (sorry, I couldn’t resist getting in the last word for myself)? They might think they are on to something new, but this band’s concept of ‘revelation’ is apparently only a theory.
Grade: 
 
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