The News Review:

- From Uruguay’s Dylan to R. Kelly’s ‘Sex Planet’
- MUSIC: Down’s Star Power Has Band on the Way Up
- The Black Lips bring the grime to Logan Square
- … Kansas City Star Mo. Paul Horsley column: Eighth Blackbird…
- Energetic maestro sparks vigor in orchestra.
- Bands play Civil War music teach history of an era still alive in…

From Uruguay’s Dylan to R. Kelly’s ‘Sex Planet’
New York Times – Sep 30, 2007
When they became High on Fire I kept up with what they were doing. I’m a huge Black Sabbath fan and they’re one of the bands that has continued in that vein bringing blessed black-metal riffs full of doom and glory. The music is very spiritual. Each song is a mantra of its own very dirgelike it’s not speed metal. It’s like a meditation a prayer. They do this stuff the best of all the death- heavy- or doom-metal bands. “Death Is This Communion” (Relapse) is super-duper good.

MUSIC: Down’s Star Power Has Band on the Way Up
Kitsap Sun – Sep 30, 2007
That would have been so easy. But that wasn’t what the whole “Down III” experience needed to be about according to guitarist Pepper Keenan. “We wanted to rise above all the (stuff) we’d been through and really take the high road not using negativity as a source to write heavy songs” Keenan said in a mid-September phone interview. “A lot of bands harness that negativity to write heavy angry (stuff)… And the first bits of work on the third album began in the weeks that preceded the catastrophic event that was Hurricane Katrina. For singer Phil Anselmo (as well as bassist Rex Brown) this was also the first attempt at a musical project since their former bandmate in Pantera guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott was murdered during a December 2004 concert in Columbus hio with the band Damageplan. Whether they were emotionally ready to make new music was a question that definitely loomed as the band members first started preparing for the project. “He (Anselmo) had a lot of things to deal with personally in his life and we didn’t want to be dragging any baggage around” Keenan said. “We had to make this thing as serious and honest as we could and everybody had to have their (act) together. Phil knew that I knew that everybody knew that. This band was too creative and special to just throw something together.

The Black Lips bring the grime to Logan Square
North by Northwestern – Sep 30, 2007
This however is gravely misguided. As it turns out all those backwoods preachers were right way back in the 1950s. The Devil?s real tool it seems is not heavy metal but soiled sludgey moonshiney dancefloor-stomping rock-and-roll music. Which is exactly what The Black Lips brought to a loony Logan Square Auditorium on Friday night. The Black Lips’ music gives the impression that someone dubbed and overdubbed and re-overdubbed every song recorded from 1956 to 1964 onto one single Maxell cassette tape then shat on it stepped on it beat their mother over the head with it spilled beer on it and then finally played it back ?to see what the shit sounds like. ? They call the resulting sound Flower Punk. The outcome is on record unaccountably brilliant coated in a nearly impenetrable haze of hiss and filth.

… Kansas City Star Mo. Paul Horsley column: Eighth Blackbird…
Free with registration – Kansas City Star – AccessMyLibrary.com – Sep 30, 2007
Paul Horsley column: Eighth Blackbird performs new music. 30–If you’re going to play music whose lasting value is uncertain you might as well execute it to the n’th degree. Eighth Blackbird’s commitment to contemporary music is.

Energetic maestro sparks vigor in orchestra.
Free with registration – Miami Herald – AccessMyLibrary.com – Sep 30, 2007
30–Eduardo Marturet’s podium style can best be described as something between hyperkinetic Pilates and a grand mal seizure. He conducts the Miami Symphony rchestra with rapid violent movements and broad arm sweeps that often provide inadvertent metal percussion when he loudly clangs his baton against the principals’ music stands. Last season his uninhibited Terpsichorean direction more than once knocked stands over and sent scores flying leaving his players to scramble for their music. Yet while occasionally over the top Marturet’s Bernsteinian calisthenics usually elicit worthy musical results. In just two years the Venezuelan conductor has raised the performances of the perennially mediocre Miami Symphony rchestra to a higher level and much more consistent standard. Further he has imbued the playing with a passion and urgency that was distinctly lacking during the final years under the MS’s ailing founder Manuel choa.

Bands play Civil War music teach history of an era still alive in…
Prince George Citizen – Sep 30, 2007
“‘Mid pleasures and palaces though I may roam”Be it ever so humble there’s no place like home!”n more than one occasion during the Civil War those words – from the prewar hit “Home Sweet Home” – brought the two sides together an impromptu and peaceful battle of the bands if only for a few minutes. For the bored and lonely men trying to while away the evenings military bands provided much-needed comfort and entertainment. Now several dozen bands around the United States perform music from the Civil War era – often on authentic instruments and in period attire – but not just to entertain. By telling stories that go with the music they also provide a lesson in history a glimpse into the lives of the soldiers and their families as they fought to define the country’s future. “We read from the actual diaries of musicians so you can hear in their own words how they felt about what they were doing at that time” said Jari Villanueva an expert on music from the era who co-founded a band in Baltimore that has both Union and Confederate uniforms. The band whose members range in age from 16 to 58 plays Union music as the Federal City Brass Band and Confederate music as the 26th North Carolina Regimental Band. “When you play music from a given time period you can really look into what a society was all about at that time” said Villanueva who has pored over hundreds of the diaries at the Library of Congress in Washington… “To see it live and actually performed on original instruments that the musicians used 140 or 150 years ago you realize the sound is quite different it’s not as harsh” said Mark Elrod who co-founded the Federal City Brass Band with Villanueva. The softer sound comes from the way the instruments were made. The bells of the horns were hammered by hand and the metal is much thinner than that in modern instruments he said. That construction makes the old instruments more susceptible to environmental conditions – a change as slight as the sun going behind the clouds can change the pitch. Baccus whose band plays on period solid nickel silver horns – including rare over-the-shoulder horns whose bells point backward toward the troops – said the instruments are hard to come by. “You put your business card in every antique shop and make it known you are looking for them” he said. Though the bands that play Civil War music today have varying reasons why they do so the main motivation for all is pleasing the crowd.