RELEASED TODAY!Hard Rock: Mourning September's A Man Can Change His Stars

Hitting stores today is Mourning September’s new album, A Man Can Change His Stars. Fresh but classic. Take the elements of classic hard rock, grunge, skate rock, and today’s emo, but then give the band enough time to mix these elements into their own chemical combination. Emo anthems are broken up by full band, heavy metal percussive, power chords. Where growls should be is the skater-boy earnest vocals of Tony Chavez. Straightaway drives in hard rock get broken up by the off-beat, dance-track influenced rhythms of nu-metal.

A Man Can Change His Stars does tend to hit one pace. If the CD had been anything longer than its 37 minutes and change, this pacing would become a problem. As it is, let yourself be immersed in the waves of sound, kind of like a cruise control for your mind. Imagine standing on a bluff, overlooking dark valleys, staring up into the sun, singing along, as the video camera spins around you overhead in a giant helicopter shot. It’s vantage point music; it’s imaginary-vista-inducing music.

Two tracks, “Closer to Closure” and “Glorietta,” definitely bring Jimmy Eat World and Emo rock to mind. Not having Jimmy Eat World in my collection, yet, or really any bands that have been labeled as Emo, I haven’t had to consider where the Emo subset gets filed. Therefore, along with Everyday Sunday, I’ve started to etch out the Emo subset location in the Hard Rock category. I’m not inclined to call Emo a separate category simply because the lines are blurred—where do bands stop being Emo and just become hard-driven rock bands with more emotional capacity than sex and drugs? Of course, now that I look at the beginning of the Hard Rock section, I think it may be in for an overhaul anyway. (Remember this process necessarily labels bands/puts them into the categories, but the goal is for the CDs on my shelves to reflect a sense of how artists fit together according to sounds, styles, and influences.) Take a look:

Original Order of Artists in the Hard Rock Spectrum
Everyday Sunday
Mourning September
Everclear
Gun
Sons of Freedom
Ten Benson
Alice Cooper
Live
Blind Melon
Jane’s Addiction
Nirvana
Screaming Trees
Prayer Chain
Pearl Jam
Smashing Pumpkins
Living Colour
38th Parallel
P.O.D.
Tourniquet

The category is muddled. I want the Spectrum in this category to not only grow from the mellower to harder bands in the Hard Rock category; I also want the order of the artists to reflect the subsets of Emo, Grunge, Classic/Power Rock, Funkified/Rap Metal, and Heavy Metal. In the growth of my collection, I think these subsets have gotten interrupted. Therefore, here’s the new order as of today:

Revised Order of Artists in the Hard Rock Spectrum
Everyday Sunday
Mourning September
Live
Blind Melon
Everclear
Jane’s Addiction
Nirvana
Screaming Trees
Prayer Chain
Pearl Jam
Smashing Pumpkins
Gun
Sons of Freedom
Ten Benson
Alice Cooper
Living Colour
38th Parallel
P.O.D.
Tourniquet

The progression seems to be best from Emo to Grunge (a heavier, thrasier Emo) to Classic/Power Rock (the epicenter of hard rock) to Funkified/Rap Metal (taking hard rock to new places) to Heavy Metal (beyond which there is nothing harder). Again, this is not based on chronology but how do the sounds fit together linearly, so that as you move down the shelf, there’s an almost natural expectation of what comes next. Everyday Sunday is less Emo than Mourning September’s much more heart-felt guitar throw-downs. Live and Blind Melon’s self-consciousness to Everclear’s “able to party” self-consciousness. Jane’s Addiction artier side of what would become Nirvana’s defining Grunge. The Smashing Pumpkins blitz grunge that sort of builds to a episodic cliffhanger that takes you back to the Classic Hard Rock. Run that classic sound all the way to Alice Cooper’s most traditional hard rock which reveals the basic pieces on which Living Colour built the Funkified Hard Rock.

This gives you an insight into the building of the Music Spectrum. For the original description, please see the first posting here. Please leave your comments at the end of this post. How would you arrange these artists differently? How would this arrangement help you in selecting a CD from off the shelf?

Back to the Emo end of the Hard Rock category and Mourning September. Their Website answers my concern about Christian bands naming secular artists as influences, not just other Christian bands. The official press info says that the Tulsa, Oklahoma, band counts Pink Floyd, Jimmy Eat World, Pete Yorn, and the Foo Fighters as influences. Plus, the band tapped James Paul Wisner for production duties, who has worked with Dashboard Confessional, New Found Glory, and Further Seems Forever (FSF’s Jon Bunch is guest vocalist on 2 tracks). Wisner’s mark on the album means that Mourning September isn’t trapped in the normal, “too cleanly” produced Christian band sound.

Thanks to Mourning September and Floodgate Records for the review copy.