Tagged: rippleeffect

Waveriders! First of all, thank you all so much for popping in with us and checking out reviews on the "best music you're not listening to." Our goal is for our writers to find music that truly excites them, then unleash themselves upon their keyboards to write missives and spread the word. We've been growing like crazy recently, as we've crossed over 3,000,000 hits and our staff keeps on expanding so here's a preview of what each week has in store for you. Of course, sometimes things change because of schedules, but basically, here's the [...]

There are a number of ways people use to "get back to nature". Some grab some camping gear and pitch a tent in the middle of a forest for a few days. Some strap on a back pack and hike amongst the indigenous flora and fauna. And some, well . . . some commune in the great outdoors by themselves or a very small group and strum the kantele and chant to the stars. The latter example may be a little on the extreme side of things or a overly simplistic explanation of what Syven are all about, [...]

Ice Cream Cola [Redux] by Cloud. Bk producer "Cloud." most definitely a rarity when it comes to the style of craft this man posses'.. As he steps into the realms of the abstract jazzy soulful, raw hiphop..He makes a stain on the brain that really gives the true meaning...Of timeless pieces of audible...Throwing this out because it wasn't up at all and really needs to be...Ghea this is that WIB Golden Aged Reincarnation...If you succumb to slumber...might aswell crawl back in the womb...LOL! WIB SEE THE RIPPLE EFFECT THROUGH A PARADOX OF SOUND!! [...]

It's a rare occurrence for me to get excited about a hip-hop record. Over the past few years (decades?), hip-hop has come across more about the glorification of excesses than anything of substance, of fresh ideas, of empowering messages. The days of old, when Chuck D would wax poetic about the injustices of the world and the inequalities of the young black man; even the sometimes fantastical glorification of the thug life from rappers like Ice-T, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, et al had substance because they were narrating warnings of the do's and don't's of a depressed life and desolate [...]

Polarizing. That's the first word that comes to mind when I think back on my initial spinning of the new Opeth magnus opus, Heritage . Sure, the die-hards will love it because it's Opeth , and Mike Akerfeldt could fart and they would feel that it was as if the angels of Heaven were singing enlightenment. Those other Opeth fans who expect every album to sound like the same guttural belches from the album before will loathe the very existence of it. Of course, they also loathed everything after My Arms, Your Hearse [...]

Y'know, it's funny to me that I can have albums sitting in my collection for months, nay . . . years, before I recognize their brilliance. Waveriders, I have a hidden gem for you, specifically if you like your music dark, moody, and dipped in a healthy coating of depression, and draped in a heavy layer of gothic fabric. Katatonia 's Last Fair Deal Gone Down has been in my collection for a few years by now, though originally released in 2001 through Peaceville , and for some unknown reason, it didn't immediately resonate with me. [...]

In one of my numerous daily conversations with my writing/business partner and the musical savant Racer X, I made mention that I was kinda' digging this weird little niche of music that thankfully bears no title. As a description, I stated that it's like a bunch of ambient black metallers were going through their parents record collections and deciding that they wanted to play 70's style progressive and psychedelic rock . . . or maybe it's vice versa. 70's music lovers playing modern atmospheric black metal just seems like such a stretch, but hey . . . what the hell [...]

I'd like to start this review with an apology to Been Obscene . . . and to Elektrohasch . . . and to my cohorts in cohorts in crime at The Ripple Effect . You see, I've had this Been Obscene album topping my stack of CD's for easily six months and it constantly got shifted from one side of my desk to my car stereo, back to some other corner of my desk, then back to my car again, and so on, such forth, etc, etc. The Magic Table Dance [...]

I've got the love/hate thing going on with today's singer/songwriters. For me, it seems there's a lot of something going on, but there's really no substance. Almost like the soul has been sucked out of the songwriter. A lot of ego, a lot of faux sensitivity, a lot of rubbish. By today's standards, it seems that a singer/songwriter simply needs to know how to or attempt to tap into their sensitive side. Ted Garber takes that standard and crushes it, bringing back the elements of the craft that have been forgotten . . . storytelling that contains vivid [...]

Big, black, heavy, furry, and ugly. Loud, massive, beastly, foreboding. Devastating, gruesome, grizzly, and ominous. Words. All descriptors of a band called Death Wolf . All words that sum up in no small part the sonic brutality that makes up the band's self titled album. Is it a debut? I don't know. I don't care. The album is easily one of the most intense metal listens I've had in awhile. That doesn't mean that it's the most musically interesting or compositionally exceptional records out there . . . simply fucking intense. Pure, unabashed and uncompromising heavy metal . . [...]

To the Chinese, this may be the Year of the Rabbit . . . for the rest of us, let's make this the Year of the Goat ! When I received this promo, all I saw was something describing Year of the Goat as pagan metal. Not very descriptive, but enough to conjure images of blast beats, howling and screeching vocals, and walls of distorted guitars to purvey the [...]

As I continue down this path of punk rock discovery, one thing that is readily apparent is that, like most if not all other musical genres, there is wide range of styles. We have all this great crossover stuff, the early British punk, the New York hardcore, the O.C. stuff, and then there's this Boston punk scene that I've always known about, but never paid much attention to. That is, until Racer turned me on to Street Dogs and then it was like someone turned on a light in very dark and cluttered room. I could suddenly see [...]

After our whole Taang! experience, and listening to the Attitude Adjustment CD, The Collection , I got to thinking . . . and mind you, it wasn't the type of stop everything, I need to sequester myself to an abandoned shed for forty days and forty nights type of thinking. This was more of the casual thinking as I sit in a drive-thru waiting for my latest order of gut bomb in a bag to be handed to me. The thought racing around my noodle (mmm, noodles) was, what makes good punk rock? I'm sure [...]

Yeah, yeah, we know. Although we've had a Ripple Music Facebook page going for some time with some 1300 friends joining us, it took us a while to get around to launching a true Ripple Effect FB page . But the wait is over. Best of all, we're making a conscious effort not to make the FB page a carbon copy of The Ripple. Occasionally, we may cross-promote some really cool news, or tour dates, or reviews, but for the most part we're planning on making the Ripple FB [...]

When Racer makes his way down to San Diego, there's one thing that inevitably happens . . . wait. Make that two things that inevitably happen. First, we stop at a hole in the wall Mexican restaurant and load up on gut bombs in the form of carne asada burritos. The second is that we take our new found stink and astounding rotund-ness to one of several record stores in the greater San Diego area. Tuesday, March 29 th was no different. After filling ourselves with the delectable flavors of savory beef served up in a zesty salsa and [...]

Every time a new Gumshen CD is hand delivered to me by Postman Sal, I get overwhelmed by a mixture of emotions. First, it's elation. Sal inevitably cringes and recoils in fear as I burst from behind my desk, give the old dude a bear hug, and thank him for being conceived, his parents for conceiving him, and his parent's parents for conceiving them. He'll leave and I'll return to my chair, staring with that gleeful smirk that I get. Second, I'm overcome with this sense of privilege and power, for I have the new Gumshen [...]

If you're just tuning in, we have two outs, bottom of the ninth inning . . . bases are loaded and the home team is down by three runs . . . shuffling up to the plate with his head down in his typical shy fashion . . . number 666 . . . Dornenreich steps into the batter's box for Team Prophecy Productions . I tell ya' Racer, in all my years of watching the game, breathing in its subtle intricacies, I've never seen a team come through in the clutch like this Prophecy [...]

Travellers Early morning mist lingers over the calm oceans as we push our handmade wooden boat into the icy depths. We softly drag our oars through the placid aquatic field, pushing the water and the land behind us. We leave our homeland knowing full well that we may never see her again, that the families we leave behind may never lay eyes, lips, flesh to their husbands, brothers, and fathers again. Yet we steer our craft [...]

Gods . . . it seems like forever since I've had to use a seemingly lethal dose of heavy metal to get my ass roused out of bed, especially on a Monday morning (I love Mondays!) But nevertheless, this particular Monday morning, the bones were a little more stiff . . . the muscles that much more achier . . . the head crammed with more cobwebs than usual . . . it was a morning that just seemed best fit for the aggressive crunch of guitars set to hyper-distortion, drums cranked up to four times faster than the standard [...]

Well, here it is. Our first call for writers brought us the stellar talents of Penfold, who's been regaling us with imaginative tales from the netherworlds of music writing. Our second call brought us the wonderfully heavy world of Horn. But, we think we're still a bit short. The Ripple Effect is growing so big, so fast, there simply is no way for us to keep up with all the quality music that comes in. And now we could use just a little help. We've got openings for one or [...]