Vomilicious lyrics booklets!

Well I seemed to have skipped a week in doing my post. Well I've got a few good excuses. A bunch of new toys! An MP3 player for my parents, a new guitar AND a new laptop which I am busy using right now (got Ubuntu Studio Linux on it, just got the screen resolution working, wireless with wpa aint >:[. Anyways enough faffing, while my shiny new laptop looks good the same cannot be said for some album lyric booklets I have seen. Well lets look at Whoracle by In Flames. While it's album cover looks quite good



One thing to note though, the (literally) faceless woman always cracks me up because it reminds me of Spitting Image ( remmember the bloke who had a question mark for a face instead of a nose and eyes? I've tried hunting for a picture of him on the net but I'll be buggered if I can find him. If anyone has/can get a picture please contact me and I'll update the post with it.) While the front cover looks kinda cool it's a different story for the lyrics booklet, just look at it!



EEEWWW... makes me vomit. Some freaky looking green marbled background and a horrible font for the text. It's seriously nasty, just take a closer look at some excerpt in it.



DOUBLE YEW TEE EFF DOES THAT SAY? inverting the fjord, imade the ny Lylinets? I really don't understand it what so ever. It just makes no sense, what a torturous font! Did nobody proof read it to check it was.... errr well, legible? It's just like that all the way through the booklet.

Well lets look at an example which does it right, something a little more pleasing and quirky. Darkane make some absolutely mad metal and it seems to be translated into the booklet design in Expanding Senses.



Already completely mad, JUST LOOK AT IT! Blokes in concrete! You think that's mad just look at the band pictures.



Looking mad in their white garb already, but wait there's an even more looney and amusing band picture inside with each separate member and they (somehow) manage to look even more fruity looped than on the back of the lyric booklet.



Good grief the're off their rocker. Looks like they should be in the asylum rather than keeping it. Would you let your mad friends and relatives be looked after by this lot? Just imaging the first day you leave your relatives there.

Yes... we WILL take good care of your relatives and no... we aren't patients like most people ask. People assume we are patients just because we are Darkane
OH BALLS... OK we're more mad than any of the patients so sue me!

Hope they keep making those records, the last one Layers of lies is also plain mad and Insanity is perfectly appropriately named. Oh yeah those two mad geezers on the left and right hand sides each have their own websites.

http://www.ChristoferMalmstrom.se/.

Don't be fooled by it's 1990's look it's full of good stuff including Darkane guitar tabs tabbed by Christofer Malmström himself and he's giving them away for FREE! ( my god what's this? Artists giving away tabs for free instead of shutting down websites like METALTABS.COM ? If that doesn't get him interned in the asylum then nothing will.
So Mr Malmström, what brings you here?
I errr.... created guitar tabs for songs from my band and.... gave them away for free.
WHAT! OMFG You ARE sick! QUICK, bring the straight jacket and prepare the padded cell! An artist giving away his own tabs away for free, what has the world come to?).

http://www.PeterWildoer.com/

This site has a few videos oh him performing some mad stuff. For example a bit of Darkane madness here.



And some more Avant Garde madness ( Avant Garde? what a weird term. Before being on on guard? Before standing to attention? Before watching? I dunno.. ) here with Peter Wildoer and Christofer Malmström performing some obscure mix of Jazz, Classical and subtle hints of ... errr ... Thrash/Death Metal



Hmm that's point. I've noticed that the band is actually on the front cover. Yep you've read that right, Darkane is on the front cover of Expanding Senses. The only album in Darkane's collection to feature the band themselves. Just look at this zoom up image below.





Talking of madness few are as mad as Devin Townsend and one of his many bands Strapping Young Lad. You though Whoracle's lyrics were unintelligible! Wait till you get a load of Strapping young lad's City album.



While Whoracle had a torturously nasty font that was unreadable City's font is just plain far too small! Just look at the first page!



See those white specs? Those are the words! It isn't dust! Here's a section zoomed up.



Can you read that? To me it's just blobs. This is as good as I can get it, any more and you just see the colour divering into little spots.

It certainly doesn't make a good impression when people cannot even read your lyrics book. Just make life easy and double check the average person can read the lyrics and doesn't throw up at the site of the inside.

How to get your song noticed

Ever had a band advertising a new song and it had some stupid title that just put you off bothering to download it? Out of a big list of free songs to download you notice you click on ones which catch your attention? Well with the use of the Internet in today's world more and more often people are finding out about new bands and songs by just seeing a downloadable version. The first thing they notice before clicking on an mp3 ( OGG ) is the band name and the song title and not the album cover like in the past. Put it this way would you download a song called "Sniff my pantyhose"? Whoops, everyone's pressed the back button now. See what I mean? Titles are very important and really should at least be given a second thought before emblazing it on the web.

Well let's see a few examples. In Flames have come back on form with their latest album Come Clarity after the slightly dull Soundtrack to your escape ( see, album titles are also important. Come Clarity? Oooo sounds intriguing, Soundtrack to your escape? ..... errr... ok.... ). WIth a quick scan of the song titles I see Take this life and Reflect the storm are one's that catches my eye and already get me curious as to what they are like. Now look abit further down and you have Your bedtime story is scaring everyone .... just .... what??? For a start it's so long it could be a Bal-Sagoth song ( eg The Dark Liege of Chaos is Unleashed at the Ensorcelled Shrine of A'Zura Kai (The Splendour of a Thousand Swords Gleaming Beneath the Blazon of the Hyperborean Empire Part II), no honest this is a Bal-Sagoth song. ). The fact that it mentions Your bedtime story is just plain off putting. MY bedtime story??? I'm sorry... just no.

Coincidently Take this life and Reflect the storm are actually really good songs while Your bedtime story is scaring everyone is just one of those bullsh*t tracks which aren't proper songs at all. Don't take that sentence to mean all songs can be guesses from their song title. An example is Peepshow by Sikth. Peepshow is probably the only really serious sounding metal song on Sikth's first album The trees are dead & dried out, wait for something wild ( yep, a dodgy album title. ) with the utterly macabre singing prevelant on most of the songs held back for this one as well as the guitars not going mental over the fret board too much. While when you listen to songs like Pussyfoot and Hold my finger they sound as mental as their song title implies while Peepshow just sounds like it's implying another nutty song but the actual song isn't particularly mad.

Now you can forgive bands who's mother's tongue isn't English for coming up with odd song titles but Sikth are British so they don't have an excuse... no wait... yes they do... THE'RE MAD, FRUITY LOOPED, DOLLOP OF MASH, OUT OF THE SPACESHIP.... Not like the guy who made Bloodshed dev C++ for Windows who had got complaints so he explains why he used the name "Bloodshed" ( admittedly slightly tenuously ). I especially like the bit Heavy metal / Hard rock music is not really my cup of tea.. Certainly telling of the general image of Heavy metal. It's like the GNU Image Manipulation Program ( previously known as General Image Manipulation Program. ) or GIMP for short. It you didn't know what the GIMP was and someone sent you a message or email saying go to this website www.gimp.org would YOU dare click it? I suppose on the flip side the amusing acronym does help you remember the GIMP. While I'm on the subject of proper free ( libre and gratis ) open source graphic applications and titles another program I really love is one called Inkscape ( see a webcomic that was done by my friend utilising the unique calligraphy tool present in Inkscape. The bloke without glasses is actually me. Right too much shameless plugging and drifting off subject, back to the fold. ). Inkscape is pretty much the perfect name for a graphics program for the Ink conjures up thoughts of familiarity with drawing while the scape gives you thoughts of a large open canvas with which to fill to you imagination's content. Now Inkscape is a fork ( bit like Warrel Dane and Jeff Loomis left Sanctuary to form Nevermore. You could say that Nevermore is a fork of Sanctuary. ) of a program called Sodipodi... Sodipodi? What sort of name is that? Certainly harder to remember and not as obvious what it is compared to Inkscape. I wonder if the names of the programs were responsible for Sodipodi failing while Inkscape succeeded. It would not surprise me if it was.

To a ( slightly ) lesser degree band names are also important. There is something intriguing about the name Soilwork. It's just a peculiar band name. I went to a gig in Manchester to see ( if I remember rightly ) Arch Enemy wearing a Soilwork long sleeve shirt ( A predator's portrait by the way. The album before Soilwork went downhill. ) with blatantly emblazoned on it Soilwork in huge letters. I was walking down Oxford road and every 2 or 3 people I walked by had a good look at my shirt then, after I walked pass, I'll hear them muttering in a slightly perplexed voice Soilwork?. Copywriters ( yes "Copywriters", not "Copyrighters" ) would sell their liver to get people looking at a title and wondering in fascination just to create titles like that every week. I wonder if Soilwork spent a long time pondering about their name thinking about whether it would get people talking about them, or did the conversation go like this,
Hmmm.... how about Soilwork?
.... sounds odd... but doesn't sound stupid. Balls to it we're "Soilwork"

I admit there isn't one rule for all with song titles. What would attract the attention of one person could be missed by another person. For example Vim by Machine Head on Through the ashes of empire earns brownie points for being named after my favourite text editor Vim :) .



Well OK I doubt the band were thinking of Vim the text editor but I cannot possibly think what Vim could mean. Vim cannot be Roman numerals because what would Vim be? 994 cause of v + i - m or 996 cause of v - m + i or 1004 from m - i + v but none of these are correct Roman numerals. To people who have never heard of Vim the text editor this song title would normally skip past their attention.

I spent a good chunk of time thinking of the title to this blog post. First I was thinking of just calling it Song titles ARE IMPERATIVE then I was thinking of going for You know song titles ARE IMPERATIVE. I was not so sure about the Imperative bit so I thought I would go for the present title How to get your song noticed. Although slightly cheap it looks to have got your attention at least so it can't be all bad. So remember, THINK TWICE about your next song's/album's/band's name. In the Internet which is rather text based your song title gets seen first. More Reflect the storm and less Your bedtime story is scaring everyone.

Any song titles you think give a positive or negative impression on the reader? Just post them in the comment section. I would like to see what the general populace thinks of them. Until next time. Cya.