Author: August W. Zander

One-man alt. rock/grunge/indie outfit Empire of Gold, headed by Portland musician, Michael Jack Dole, has been on our radar for years.

But it was his recent 13-track, one-hour long album, The Devil Is In The Details, that really got our blood pumping.

Fuzzy guitars and drums, such as on the album opener, “Lying Through The Cracks of Your Teeth,” dominate the grungy record from start to finish, featuring dark, moody tracks arranged in interesting cross-genre mixes and overlaps, melodies and melancholy.

The hour-long gritty recording never tires. In an age when 13-track albums are a ballsy move. The vast majority of the tracks, less a couple, do not disappoint. Dole possesses an acute dark rock sensibility informed by his past and his musical influences and tastes.

Following the simmering starter track is the slow-burning dark rocker, “Dust & Bones,” a cathartic reveal of deep emotional memories set ablaze in an orange glow of sonic cider and smoke.

Dole also DIY-filmed an official music video for the track.  “I love the idea of this video having a dark, gloomy look with people wearing masks,” he says. “I didn’t want any faces shown at all.”

“Instead, I wanted images of churches and any religion tied into it as it depicts a person struggling to see any meaning in life – as if all we are is dust and bones,” Dole says.

“I wanted to incorporate ‘creepy’ worldly themes,” he insists.

When the third track, the inviting grunge-pop number, “Independence Day,” rolls around, it sets a different tenor and mood for a bit.

While the first two tracks have a life, and allure, all of their own, “Independence Day” is one of the more melodic and accessible numbers on the L.P. The screeching guitars and Dole’s emotive vocals fit nicely.

The ending of the song flows wonderfully and right into the firey, buzz-friendly, “Girl Like You,” that hits a wall of distorted guitars that is one of the best such walls we heard in 2019.

Following that first four-set of songs to open up the album is the mid-point of the L.P. and a string of melancholic, shadowy, gritty tracks marked with Dole’s buzzsaw guitars; tragic lyrics and versatile vocals, and well-arranged percussions.

These include songs like the guitar-layered slow-burner, “Dirty Minds”; the atmospheric mellow haze of the instrumental, “Retrograde,” and the original grungy biscuit, “Sitting On A Shelf.”

In the latter half of the album, the track, “Drunk & Alone,” blazes away precariously and at a smashed-face pace; just what you would expect from the title. It also sounds similar to “Dust & Bones” from earlier in the recording. However, we can’t help but wonder how terrific this track would have been if it had been made into a fast-moving rocker.

The thoughtful and heavily melodic, “These Thoughts I Have,” is yet another standout song and straddles the regions of alt rock and indie. EOG’s music has never been easy to pin to one genre. That’s a good thing. The song also has one of the best vibes, and guitar solos, on the L.P.

The Devil Is In The Details closes with “Words I Sing,” a sad, spacious track, and the most stripped-down, demo-sounding, guy-and-his-guitar recording on the album.

Dole had been in a number of bands over the years from San Diego to Chicago, and Los Angeles to Portland. Many years before all of that, he grew up in Tecate, Mexico until he was eight years old when he moved back to the United States.

Dole describes his childhood as “nomadic.” His lyrics, informed by his experiences as a child and young man are brutally blunt and gristly enveloped in musical expressions of angst and grind.

Altogether, the L.P. is an impressive foray into Dole’s emotional struggles, but more importantly, into his sonic expressions, woven together by a lo-fi style of grunge, alt. rock and punk elements. It’s definitely not your ordinary DIY recording (in a good way). So many albums are standard fare and boring. This one is not.

The album was recorded in Dole’s home studio using Logic Pro X and a lunchbox of pre-amps. Mixing was taken on by Portland engineer Kevin Carafa and later sent to Dirk Steyer of ACSY Sound in Germany for mastering.

Dole’s musical influences include Nirvana, Slipnot, Highly Suspect and Green Day. He was recently accepted to the prestigious Berklee School of Music.

Empire of Gold, he says, is “a concept playing with the thoughts, theories, and fears of human mortality. It plays back and forth with theology and atheist views about our dreams, hopes and eventual reincarnation into heaven.”

The Chicago rock band CrashDive’s encompassing sound stems from classic rock bands of the late 1960′ through the 1980s. The band asserts to have thus “created a whole new sound for rock” on their new EP.

Infusing sounds from brass and rock band instruments in a whole new way, with traditional classic rock guitar fervor, CrashDive creates a unique, high-energy, and entertaining vintage rock sound.

Their new four-track release, Top Brass, opens with the booming “A Million Goodbyes” – a power-chord driven multi-lingual track that adaptly expresses something that many people experience at one time or another: a relationship that doesn’t work out and yet coming to grips with that and saying goodbye is a lot easier said than done.

“Sometimes you just need to say goodbye and move on,” says songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist Richard Galime. “But to make that message clear you may need to say it in more ways than one.”

The more 70’s theatrical rock-oriented, “Evil Mistress,” captures the swagger of the era, even a bit reminiscent of bands Aerosmith. Throughout there are changes in sound, timing, rhythms, and melodies, leaving not a boring moment in the mix.

“On the surface ‘Evil Mistress’ may sound pretty straight forward,” Galime says. “But it uses the mistress to personify the adrenalin high that happens with on-stage performance and the emotional crash felt when it’s over,” adding that the ‘duality’ is also reflected in the “guitar and trumpet riff’s contrasted by a jazz section.”

“Save Me” is a tepid, and more melodic and harmonic, song, featuring heavy rocking guitars and plenty of rapid chord changes, matched key-for-key by the brass section and percussionists.

The EP’s closing track is the interestingly-titled and edgy, “Batteries No Bueno,” driven by buzzsaw guitars and a feverish brass ensemble, blazing through bar after bar.

A bit past the track’s mid-point, the mood changes and becomes more spirited with a 70s funk influence that is impossible to miss. You might just expect Shaft himself to come flying through the window.

The band says it’s the first time they used a trumpet on one of their songs. The instrument stands out front and center as a lead voice rather than as a background embellishment.

In 2016, we included CrashDive’s debut album as one of our favorite DIY debuts of the year.

You can listen to the other tracks here

The opening track of the Mike Bella Project’s compilation album, One, is the retro-rock single, “Turn You On,” which comes through with a flourish of rock-pop elements and even some country-rock touches before breaking into a full-blown chorus. A video of the song is expected to drop next month.

The next track on the compilation is “Until A Better Day.” Things slow down on this one but pick up with an especially fervent drum beat and standard-fare 1980’s rock radio guitar licks.

Singer Nana Petrossi’s vocals sometimes remind me of Pat Benatar, especially on this track, mixed with some Patty Smith. Petrossi is backed up on vocals by Federica Zavaleta.

The strutting, bluesy track, “Challenge The Sky,” follows a similar passion but lacks a real vibe to grab on to. The guitar solos delivered by Daniele Trissati are about the best part of this track and one of the few tracks where the guitar solos are not as canned-sounding. If that makes sense.

The song “Hot Stuff” picks back up with the band’s more signature sound of 80’s-influenced rock tracks, including the templated soaring guitars, riffs and high trebled keys from Mauro Scardini. Still, it is one of the better tracks of the lot.

“Unchain My Life” is perhaps a track that would have been better left off the album. Somewhat like “Challenge The Sky,” the song lacks passion, cohesiveness or a full commitment to make it as good as it could be.

“It Just Desire” has a mean keyboard solo but as with other tracks Francesco Isola’s drums sound flat and safe. Bassist Marco Pistone notes are often drown out and almost impossible to discern where preference is given time and again to the guitars, keys and vocals.

It is unavoidably the case that the lack of well produced percussions on the old recordings is a detriment to otherwise promising songs (if they were re-recorded in the modern era).

Moving on.

The song, “She’s A Dream,” buried way down at track No. 9, is perhaps the best and only song on the album that is different than all of the others.

It’s not even close genre-wise to the other songs on the album (which makes it an odd placment). What’s that mean? Well, it’s a curve ball alright – lounge jazz.

That said, it’s a solid track, especially for any folks who enjoy a good lounge jazz number in the vein of 1950’s New York. It’s also the best produced track on the album – with real sound quality of the modern era.

In fact, it’s hard to even recognize, listening to this track, that they are the same band (perhaps not because Bella’s bio is confusing) as is present on most of the tracks on the L.P.

If all of the tracks on the album received this level of care – in recording and mixing quality – it would be a much stronger compilation.

The compilation wraps up “Time” – which also sports a better overall recording quality than most of the other tracks (and similar in that way to “She’s A Dream”) – and ends with the more passionate, “I Won’t Follow,” a fairly solid track that should have been put at the top of the album.

Some observations become too hard to ignore, however. For example, on many of the songs, the canned, ‘drum machine’ approach to the guitar licks and the drowning out of any notable percussions, on song after song, does get old.

I can’t help but to feel it is forced and lacking creativity – the same outdated licks and riffs are splashed like paint on a canvas without much consideration to the overall picture. Unfortunately, it also distracts the listener from the lyrics.

In places, the instruments sound far apart from one another; the original recording, tracking, and mixing are missing key elements and standards of professional sound recording; it often sounds spliced together and incomplete. I really think that this could be a great lesson to other artists. Don’t dust off and release under-produced recordings from ages ago just because you can.

It is entirely pertinent for artists to respect and honor their own work by not undermining themselves for the flawed etho that to release something is better than to release nothing . That is just so not true.

In his bio, Bella writes about digging up old ADT tapes from the 1980’s for this recording. My guess is that all of the songs – except those noted above – on this compilation came from those old demo-style recordings.

This is one of the key mistakes Bella made. Either he should have let them be and moved on to focus his energies to creating new music, or he should have re-recorded, re-mixed and remastered a select number of the songs and left the old ADT recordings where he found them.

There are songs here that could be really solid if they were given the full and fair treatment they deserve and leave the gaudy 80s TV-theme guitar licks where they belong – on the trash heap of history.

Another issue on many recordings is Petrossi’s vocals – at times they are rough, out of key, off-timing and even screeching.

Sure there are some tracks where her vocals are much better (“She’s A Dream”), but for the most part, the album reminds me of a wedding band from 1994 who, rather than playing the covers everyone loves, make the bad decision to play a bunch of their own tracks. Too many of the recordings sound disjointed and half-hearted; like filler tracks.

On another point that the blog team here has made before: length of albums and the relevance of the long-play album in 2019.

It’s asking a lot of any music lover in today’s media-saturated world to listen to an 8-9 track-plus L.P., let alone an 11-track album. The best way for a musician or a band to reach an audience is to release a 4-5 track E.P. preceeded by singles.

It’s hard to understand of course exactly what Bella was thinking by re-releasing so many of these 30-year-old recordings. The best I can think is that he was so focused on releasing/re-releasing these old recordings that it may have blurred his judgement regarding their basic quality and relevence in 2019.

Another obvious observation is that the original recodings themselves were not very well done on a number of fronts which is evident in the ‘final’ product. It sounds like each instrument was recorded and tracked separatly. I am also guessing that they did not rehearse these songs very much together and were not-yet-matured musicians as well.

A good producer will work to make all of the individual instrument and vocal tracks sound (among many other things) like a band is playing together rather than a splintering and splicing studio effect that comes across in the release itself.

What I think is the issue here, especially when you listen to other Bella songs – like “She’s A Dream” – is that he, and others, knew the original recordings were low quality and for some unknown reason decided to put them out anyway.

It seems fair to assert that Bella must have had a gut instinct at some point, somewhere, that the bulk of these old recordings should remain unreleased (or at the least some be re-recorded).

That’s not to say that the project itself is a loss. Not at all. But it may have served Bella’s interests much better if he had taken one of the most promising tracks (like, say, “Turn You One”) and simply had them professionally mixed and mastered and released as singles.

Then, as is commonplace, he could have followed up a successful (however that would be measured here) single(s) release with a 4-5 track E.P. to include “She’s A Dream” and a few other refurbished songs.

For the majority of music lovers, 80’s rock radio and MTV videos (so many were so cheesy and bigoted and sexist) with the same old formatted, high-soaring, cliche-like guitar solos; the terrible music videos with large breasted women strutted around like objects; the tight black leather pants; neon pink headbands; metal belts and scarves; omg, the girl’s makeup, and flowing perms (on the guys!) – it’s all been a bygone era for decades and I haven’t seen anyone looking to bring it back (except at high school reunions).

In fact, of all of the genre and era revivals that have ebbed and flowed through popular, and indie/alt, music culture, the glitzy, shallow, guitar/keys rock of 1980’s is pretty much dead and gone, which is for the best. But that is not to say that’s what Bella is or was doing. It’s simply a larger point about ‘honoring’ that era in rock music.

More importantly, the backlash to the early-and-mid 80’s mediocre commercial rock, the androgonous hair rock bands, and the endless loop of MTV’s same 15 music videos all lead the way to an explosion.

That explosion was Nirvana and the revoluntionary track, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” This lead the way to the return to unpolished, dark, angry, raw and honest rock and roll in the name of a new genre called grunge, which led the way to a rock revival in the form of grunge and alt. rock in the Northwest and across the states.

In the U.K., the backlash spurred the Britpop craze leading way to new bands such as Oasis and Blur. The message was loud and clear – ‘don’t bring back 80’s misogynist, bigoted, predictable and self-indulgent guitar rock, please. It was an experiment that should have never happened.

Many of these observations were aimed at that era (can you tell?) not Bella.

Bella first started playing guitar at age 12 and formed a band shortly thereafter with friends. During the mid-1980s, he performed some successful shows in Rome and founded his first band, the Joint Stock Company.

In recent years, he founded the Mike Della Bella Project, which, honestly isnt’ the best name for a band and is a bit difficult, and much, to say. It’s even a bit silly. Sounds more like the name of a southern drag show host.

But seriously, folks, check out some of the other tracks if you wish on their Soundcloud or Spotify links.

The five-song E.P. from Los Angeles band The Unwoken involves themes of time travel, dark political and cultural moments of history, and a path for hope and a better future.

During much of 2018 and part of 2019, the band recorded a five-song EP, Some Lives Matter, at EastWest Studios in Hollywood. It was produced and mixed by Les Camacho (Chris Issak, Stevie Nicks).

The track “Electrical System” jumps right in, conveying the title of the song into the buzzing, almost dueling, guitars that lead the track.

However, the vocals – not sure of the two vocalists, bassist Alex Ramirez and drummer Max Cogert, who is singing – need some fine-tuning. Overall the track has a cinematic rock effect.

As for the vocals, the same is true for “Just To Let You Know” – potentially solid song but the singing misses the mark. There’s strong potential with this song accompanied by a stronger vocal tracking.

My guess is that it’s a different live experience. Ramirez writes about the track: “It’s a blunt statement to the listener that they do not matter in the eyes of the powerful, the ruthless, and those who see humans as disposable.”

The E.P. includes three additional tracks including the slowed-down, more melodic track alt. rocker, “Tin Man.” Here the vocals work better and flow with the song nicely. This may be the standout song on the E.P.

Closing track “Last Fight” and “Some Lives Matter” take on a darker, more metal sound. As these tracks demonstrate, guitarists Chris Alcala and Jonathan Eastly take it to the wall from start to finish on the E.P.

The Unwoken named their EP Some Lives Matter as “a thought-provoking title to set the tone of the music as it pertains to our national discourse and an increasingly dystopian world of “normalizing fascism, children in cages, mass shootings, profiling, and a police state in which some lives matter more than others.”

The bands’ influences are Rage Against The Machine, Queen, Nirvana, and System of a Down. The band held a packed release party last month at the Silverlake Lounge in L.A.