Where Worlds Collide

Nero

Female fronted Goth-metal band Closterkeller are a major act in their native Poland. They’re little known in the wider world, since most of their albums are sung in Polish. However, with their latest album, Nero, they’re released an international version with the vocal tracks re-recorded in English. This might just expose their music to a wider audience.

While some of the earlier Polish-only albums had a quite punky feel, “Nero” has a far richer multi-layered sound. Parts of the album are very metal orientated, heavier and more riff-based than older work. The closest comparison is probably to doom-metal bands like Paradise Lost or Anathema. But they’re by no means a straight metal band; the heavier songs are balanced by plenty of atmospheric material that sounds close to progressive rock. The keyboard-dominated title track in particular reminds me very much of Tangerine Dream.

Checking the liner notes for the past two albums, “Cyan” and “Graphite”, I see they’ve gone though a lot of lineup changes; indeed the only constant factor is vocalist Anja Orthodox, her powerful yet beautiful vocals defining Closterkeller’s sound. I was worried they’d lose something sung in English; but her strong Polish accent somehow gives the music an exotic appeal rather than merely sounding comical. After all, Vampires have Eastern European accents.

This review of mine originally appeared on Blogcritics some time ago, but never got posted here. That needs to be corrected

This release by the British six-piece progressive metal band actually came out last year, but I missed picking it up when it first appeared.

It’s another solid release, immaculately produced by Richard West and Karl Groom. All the trademark Threshold sounds are here; piledriver riffs, atmospheric interludes, time changes, anthemic choruses and fluid soloing. There are even some widdly synth solos. The overall sound is not unlike that of the heavier side of Dream Theater, only with DTs sometimes self-indulgent widdling reigned in a little.

The only real weakness is that it sounds too much like other recent Threshold releases; it’s all nicely done, but it doesn’t really break any new ground for the band. If you’ve liked their previous releases, you’ll probably like this one too. If you haven’t heard any Threshold at all, this one makes as good an introduction to the band as any.

Futher changes to the blog layout - I’ve now added a links sub-blog on the right-hand side. It’s an idea stolen from Making Light and Croziervision. It’s a place to put current links which don’t really warrant a full entry in the main weblog. Like the Amazon links (which anti-commerce freeloaders who block ads aren’t seeing), they’re category specific, so you’ll see different ones on different archive pages.

I’ve also been tweaking the individual archive pages. You’ll see the changes on newer posts, but not the older ones until I’m sufficiently satisfied with it to do a time-consuming full side rebuild.

Cold Spring Shops mentions the classic GM Nobab locomotives, once seen in Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg and Hungary, looking very much like a double-ended version of the classic EMD F-Unit.

I have always associated these locomotives with a family holiday in Denmark, when I was nine years old. They were the first foreign trains I had ever seen, and my first sight was one waiting to leave Esbjerg with what I presume was a boat train. They seemed pretty much ubiquitous in the country, with just about everything loco-hauled I remember seeing having one of these maroon beasts on the front. I even had haulage behind one, from Roskilde to Copenhagen and back.

Not exactly appropriate for Switzerland, but I couldn’t resist running one in the classic Epoch III livery of maroon with gold ‘go faster’ stripes. Unfortunately the Minitrix model is one of their older, cruder models. This is a iconic loco (a bit like the equally iconic SBB Ae6/6 visible in the background) that really cries out for a state of the art model.

Having played around with server side includes, and proved what I was trying to do actually works, I have now decided to bite the bullet and apply the new Amazon links sidebar to the main page of the blog.

All the CDs and books listed are those that I can thoughoughly recommend. Buy them all! Buy them for your friends!

When I apply the same changes to the category sub-blogs, and the individual archives, the Amazon links will be different dependent on the category; Music will have links to CDs, while Railways will have railway books. At least that’s the idea.

The format still needs some tweaking, and I’d appreciate some feedback. I’ll be keeping the three-column format, but I’m wondering whether to abandon the dark coloured sidebars, and use borders to differentiate the columns.

Update: One change I did have to make was to change the index file from a .html to a .shtml, otherwise the server-side include would not work. This means that http://www.kalyr.com/weblog/index.html has been torn up by the cat, and the new URL is http://www.kalyr.com/weblog/index.shtml. If you’ve bookmarked http://www.kalyr.com/weblog/, like you should have done, all should still work!

I haven’t made much more progress on Wöminsee, but here’s what I have been up to.

New scenic addition is the new Rix Models road bridge. Very nice if somewhat pricey kit, even if it’s intended for the American market. It’s intended to act as a scenic break, hiding the 180 degree curve. At the moment it’s not fixed down permanently, and will have to be painted to make it look as though it’s made of concrete rather than plastic. I also intent to ‘Europeanise’ the bridge by adding European-style guardrails. Once I’ve added a backscene behind it, it should succeed in hiding the ‘hole in the sky’ across both the main lines and the end of the yard. The ‘locomotive park’ at the back will also be hidden!

To scare curve-phobic American modellers, the inner track on which the train is running on has Kato R216 (8½”) curves at the centre, with 11″ transition curves at each end. It’s the only way I can get a 180° double track curve on a baseboard just two feet wide. The 9-car train of Roco 85′ coaches has no difficulty negotiating it, and the Fleischmann loco has no trouble pulling them either.

While it’s supposed to be Swiss layout, I do sometimes test-run British outline stock. This is the excellent Dapol class 73 electro-diesel I bought at the DEMU showcase exhibition last year.

And Bachmann’s latest offering, a class 158 DMU in the multicoloured livery of Wessex Trains. Both these models are far better than the rather clunky and dated Minitrix Ae6/6 in the siding behind, but rather left behind by recent European models.

Since I’m no longer associated with Blogcritics, I’ve decided to become an Amazon associate myself. From now on, this blog is likely to have links to Amazon.co.uk advertising my favourite CDs. When I’ve worked out the best way to do things there will be links on my reviews.

I’m still experimenting with page layouts. My first attempt is here. It’s a three column layout with Amazon links to carefully selected prog-rock albums on a new right-hand sidebar.

Let me know your feedback. This page is currently ‘live’, in that it gets rebuilt when the main page is rebuilt.

Matt Webb thinks the whole Internet is created in the image of San Fransisco

I caught sight of the dot com bubble half-way along, too late to get properly involved, and moved to London just in time to experience the crunch from the inside. Great timing. The whole boom looked pretty weird from London — was there really that much cash to be made in pet supply home delivery? Or in online services to invite people to dinner? There must be, I figured, since there was so much money being invested.

Visiting San Francisco for the first time in 2001, it all snapped into place. Here was a city cross-hatched by freeways that each felt just a little too dangerous to walk under. Coupled with a lack of decent public transportation, it meant there were loads of communities slightly too small to support really big stores or specialist shops. I was seeing, in short, a city in which home delivery made a ton of sense: pet supplies, groceries, late night snacks…

Unlike London, the apartments seemed to be big enough to have a decent number of folks over. Enough folks that you may indeed make use of some kind of online service to do invitations. The dot com boom made sense. In San Francisco.

The whole thing is well worth reading. One point worth making, though. The world may not be a gigantic San Fransisco. But it’s certainly not a gigantic London either. I realised that when I moved to Manchester.

Good news from Silkenray

After almost 7 months being detained by immigration, my beloved husband is now a free man! Yay!

Now to get onto the same continent again.

I think I’ll give him a few days grace before demanding a response to the seven month old GM post in the Kalyr PBeM

Ginger Stampley has a long post on suburban sprawl and it’s downsides:

Where my theoretical libertarianism often stops and my theoretical liberalism begins is in places where public bads and public goods need to be distributed. Unchecked development isn’t a public bad in Houston because my snarky inner-Loop self doesn’t like it. It’s a public bad because it gets me and my neighbors flooded and it makes me spend my time lobbying the state and the county not to tear up my neighbors’ homes to make it easier for folks from the Woodlands to commute downtown. If that’s not a taking and a transfer of value from me to developers and new homeowners that I should be able to fight, I don’t know what is.

Some folks act like outbound development is the way God intended things and it’s natural for inner-Loopers and in-town folks to get screwed. The idea seems to be that it was our own fault for being stupid enough to buy there. But I can remember when the Beltway and Highway 6 were smugly new and now they’re about to get the short end of the stick. I hope they, like the inner-Loopers, will insist that the county and state kiss them first.

Meanwhile Patrick Crozier wants to turn the whole of southern and central England into one massive American-style sprawl:

The other alternative is, if the old urban areas are found wanting, to build new ones. This is the big idea of South California academic, Peter Gordon. As he points out: people like sprawl (to use the pejorative term). They like it domestically and, as jobs move out of city centres, they like it economically. And because they are new developments they tend to have the right amount of road space.

The problem with sprawls (which just doesn’t occur to car-owning sprawlophiles) is that anyone who, for any reason, doesn’t have access to a car is completely marginalised. They’ll have trouble getting work, won’t be able to shop, and will have to forget about having any sort of social life. There may be some people who think this is a feature rather than a bug, who think reducing the mobility of the poor is a good thing. The latter group are probably the same sort of wingnuts who think gated communities are a good idea.

The real dilemma is that the optimal design of a city for car users and public transit users is completely opposite.

Public transport requires businesses to cluster around transit nodes, each of which needs a critical mass of homes and businesses within walking distance in order to be economically viable. This is best achieved through relatively high density.

Car users require the complete opposite; everything spread out, with no congested nodes. This requires a low density; often too low for public transport to survive without massive subsidies.

I’m sure it’s possible for a city to achieve the optimum balance of the two. But I don’t expect the blind god of Market Forces to build it.

I suspect America has gone the way it has not because of pure market forces, but as a result of political decisions to subsidise road usage and let public transport wither away. There are also geographical and cultural factors that don’t apply so much in Europe; the fact that cities have room to sprawl, and the implied racism of the ‘white flight’ phenomenon. (Not that Europe is totally immune to the latter).

Britain’s looming transport gridlock is caused by the fact that we’ve failed to invest adequately in transport infrastructure for decades, especially public transport. And when we have invested, much of the money has been wasted by bad management and stupid political meddling. Good examples are the 1955 modernisation plan, when they bought new trains like Imelda Marcos in a shoe shop. Or the more recent gross financial incompetance of Railtrack and Network Rail. Most European countries with equivalent population density not only have better rail networks, but have better roads as well.