Too Metric

Dreams So Real, the feature-length concert documentary, captures Canadian rock group Metric's last live performance of a year-long sold-out world tour…

Dreams So Real, the feature-length concert documentary, captures Canadian rock group Metric's last live performance of a year-long sold-out world tour…

’Heroic hymns of battle’ was how the American critic James Huneker visualized Chopin’s polonaises. ‘In them’, Liszt wrote evocatively in his Life of Chopin, ‘are to be found embodied the noblest traditional feelings of the Poland of a bygone age; through them breathe the stern resolve and the reflective gravity of the Poles of other days. Usually of a warlike character, bravery and valour are in these polonaises rendered with a simplicity of expression which was a distinctive characteristic of this warlike people. They bring before the imagination with vivid intensity the ancient Poles as they are described in their chronicles.’

This isn't just a 2-CD set of some unbelievable guitar work from a long-esteemed player of truly formidable skill but rather a treasury that proves beyond doubt that Melvin Taylor needs to be placed within the museum of the guitar greats: Wes Montgomery, George Benson, Chet Atkins, Frank Zappa, Earl Klugh, Jim Hall, Leo Kottke, Robert Fripp, Grant Green, Pat Metheny…all of 'em, regardless of style and genre. And he not only plays all the many layers of various guitars here but bass as well in a nominally foursome format.

In order to bear witness one must believe what one sees and belief, of course, is subjective. Knowledge is essentially faith. And the flexibility of human memory, our blind spots (whether empathetic or optic) and our great imaginations don’t make truth any easier to contain. This becomes more evident over time as the pages of history weather and the cataracts of progress cloud our collective “knowledge”. Humans love to forget and to repeat. We fall subject to confirmation bias, sway to suggestion, take the easy way out and allow ourselves to be governed while adamantly broadcasting our independence. Naturally it takes followers for a leader to exist, but like anomalons or quantum particles that change when being observed, the psychological battle within each of us changes depending on who is bearing witness. We are the worst portrayers of truth as we have no idea what it is. Everyone is a hypocrite. Everyone is wrong.

In the early '70s, the India Tobacco Company sponsored an annual "All-India Simla Beat Contest." These events sparked compilations of Indian rock bands, Simla Beat 70 and Simla Beat 71, that have been combined into one package on this double-CD reissue. Very, very little Indian rock from this era has been heard in the West, and the sounds are both surprising and, in some ways, disappointing. Surprising in that it's uncanny how much this sounds like the garage bands that could have been playing in any country, although it actually sounds more like bands from Europe and South America that spoke English as a second language than it does like American or British groups. Surprising, also, in that it sounds much more like 1965-1968 rock than it does like early '70s rock, although that's understandable given that it can take years for Western trends make their impact on the other side of the globe.