Cradle To Grave, Scythia, 13th Prophet at The Red Room July 27th 2011

Due to the nature of my culinary career, I work evenings. It's just what you have to do to make it in this business. A good busy lunch is of course integral to the success of any restaurant but dinner service is the show. That's where most restaurants make it or break it. So because of that, I don;t get out to shows enough, and even when I do i rarely catch the whole thing. But with Cradle To Grave hittin the stage for the first time in a few years...there was no way I was missin out.

After a frantic closing of my station and a good sprint from the restaurant to the bus, i managed to get to the Red Room for the last 2 or 3 of Scythia's songs, so really not much I can say about their set. I will catch one of their shows in the not too distant future, and obviously i missed 13th Prophet altogether. Next up was Cradle To Grave...

Cradle opened up with Broken God off their latest release "Texas Medicine", which is one of my favourite tracks from them, so I got fired up right off the bat. If you don't have that album I highly suggest you pick it up. It's laden with aggressive riffs, big grooves and well written songs. It's a staple workout soundtrack for me when I'm in the gym too.

Myself I am more familiar with this album than their earlier work, so it was cool for me that their set focused a lot on some of their older tunes, which I haven't heard as much. A big standout for me was "Burn It All". Really cool bass groove with a cool riff over top of it that reminded me a lot of Supernaut by Black Sabbath, and the song itself reminded me a lot of Tank, one of my all time favs, but with a modern twist. They also played an older version of one of my favourite tracks that I first heard on Texas Medicine, Beheaded In Paris, and I personally liked the version they played live better. As We Lay Dying was another killer, just really crushing riffs.

The sound started out a bit muddy during the set but got better really quickly. Denis Barthe has probably one of if not the best guitar tones in the city, and it sounded particularly crushing coming through the massive PA at the Red Room. I was partial to Glenn Chisolms bass tone as well, as a Fender bass through an Ampeg is just pure glory to my ears as a bassist. Vocalist Greg Cavanaugh is like a ramped up version of Oderus Urungus from Gwar with a bit of a Mike Muir swagger and an original voice, and he was on his game vocally this night. Easily one of the best frontmen in town.

All in all one of the better if not the best sets I have seen from a local band in a long long time. They focus on writing riffs and hard hitting grooves rather than trying to just impress with technical playing ability, which is something as an old school metal fan that I really appreciate. Good turnout as well especially for a Wednesday night, as this town is usually asleep by 930 on weekdays. Hope to see more shows from these dudes in 2011 and beyond!

People ask me quite often who my favourite chefs are.  "Do you like Gordon Ramsay?  Jamie Oliver?  Bobby Flay?"  Inherently the questions are always about Food Network guys.  Honestly yes I do like some of those guys.  I'm not like most chefs who bash every single dude that appears on the Food Network and calls them a sellout.  Really most of these guys have paid their dues for years sweatin on the line like I do on a nightly basis.  I don't blame them for takin an easy job makin a TV show and cashing in.  Who wouldn't?  And yes it is an easy job.  When I met Rob Rainford from License To Grill in Toronto a few years back, he told me it was the easiest gig you could imagine.  Everything is prepped for him ahead of time, he shows up and wham bam TV magic!  (That being said he does have input on his show, which has some bad ass recipes and he is an accomplished chef in his own right!)

But i digress, this post is about who my favourite chefs are.  For some of my fellow chef buddies this will be old hat but some of you probably have never heard of these guys before.  If you haven't I STRONGLY suggest you check them out.  I'll start with my favourite chef on planet earth by a long shot....

Ferran Adria:

Chef at the famous El Bulli and regarded by many (including myself) as the best chef in the world, Ferran Adria created the movement which is changing the shape of the culinary world known as molecular gastronomy.  He uses unique ingredients and new innovative techniques that he researches in his lab know as El Tallier to modify food on a molecular level and create something unique, incredible and sometimes downright mind bending.  Before this guy, the fundamentals of cooking hadn't fully changed for about 100 years but Ferran is re writing everything.  These are the first completely original techniques we have seen in recent time.  In my mind he's the most influential chef since Escoffier (The grandfather of french cuisine).  These techniques are quite a hot topic amongst chefs as many dismiss it as a pretentious gimmick or a flash in the pan.  While I agree that these techniques will never replace good solid cooking and fresh ingredients, I think they can be a fantastic extension of them, as I have found out first hand in my own experimentation at home.


Thomas Keller:

Another one of the most innovative chefs of our time, Keller is the head chef of the very famous French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley.  He also runs Per Se in New York, Bouchon in its various locations and Ad Hoc in California.  His famous book "The French Laundry Cookbook" was one of the most eye opening books I ever read as a young cook.  The ideas, recipes, concepts and everything that were in that booked seemed like a whole new world to me, and really made me strive harder to increase my own level of culinary ability.   Anything this man writes is essential reading for any chef.  Nothing less than a genius.

David Chang:

This guy just makes bad ass food.  He is the chef/owner of the Momofuku restaurants, there's many and I'm not gonna list em all, just go to google and look for yourself!  He's a master of putting really creative and just downright good flavours together.  When you read his menus or his cookbooks, it instantly makes you wanna eat or cook or both.  Definitely one of the best of our time, and had my favourite quote in reference to the pretentiousness and faux creativity of a lot of chi chi fine dining chefs on the west coast...."They don’t manipulate food, they just put figs on a plate."

Wylie Dufresne: 

Another culinary mad scientist with the best name for that occupation ever, Wylie is the chef/owner of WD-50 in New York, and one of the best practitioners of molecular gastronomy on the planet, even though he has stated he hates that term.  A very innovative chef who takes a lot of what seem to be bizarre flavour parings and makes them work.  Dishes such as "King oyster ‘udon,’ sweetbreads, banana-molassas, pickled ginger" and "Soft chocolate, beet, long pepper, ricotta ice cream" give you an idea of the crazy genius of this man.

Martin Picard:

Gotta get at least one fellow Canadian in there!  Martin Picard is the chef at Au Pied Do Cochon in Montreal, and the modern king of gluttonous food.  Known for his mastery using entire pigs and foie gras, his dishes certainly aren't for the weak of heart, but they are most definitely beyond delicious.  I love how he uses every part of the animal in his cooking which shows a mastery of numerous cooking techniques and he's said to be obsessed with local fresh ingredients. 


Really I could go on for a really long time.  Some others I recommend checking out are Eric Ripert, , Rene Redzepi, Huebert Keller, Rick Bayless, Charlie Trotter, to name a few.  I also have to give props to the old school like Auguste Escoffier and Paul Bocuse, without whom none of this would exist for any of us.  For all you food fans out there, there is a wonderful culinary world that exists outside of what you see on TV with the food network.  Have a look and get in touch with these guys and all the others that are on the forefront of the culinary world.

And as far as my least favourite chef on earth goes to "Canada's Iron Chef"........PUUUUKEE!!!!!....

Being an avid and honestly sometimes obsessed fan of heavy metal music, there is one thing that really peaks my interest when I look back at the last decade of music.  The complete lack of CLASSIC albums.

If you look back at the history of metal and/or hard rock dating back to the late 60's early 70's all the way up through the 90's, there were new bands coming along that were putting out albums that people will label "classic", meaning that they are genre defining, monumental slabs of molten glory that will forever stand the test of time and be revered by fans for years and years to come.  Such albums that when they came out blew everybody's mind and changed the game altogether.  In the 70's you had Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, The Scorpions, Thin Lizzy, Deep Purple.  Then in the 80's Iron Maiden emerged (although they had started in the 70's), followed by Metallica, Anthrax, Slayer and the countless other bands in the thrash movement, then in the 1990's there were trend setting bands like Pantera, Machine Head, White Zombie etc etc etc and the list goes on.  Regardless of what you may or may not think of the music the bands I have listed put out you cannot deny the impact and influence that they had on their respective generations of listeners.  When bands like this put out albums they set the bar, everybody was put on notice that this is what you have to live up to in order to run with the big dogs.

Take a look at what has emerged from the year 2000 onwards.....in my opinion nothing new that measures up.  I'm not saying that there hasn't been any "good" albums put out since, there have been many.  I still am a huge fan of metal to this day and I still pick up albums that I think are really good, but when I look back on my collection from the past decade I don't see any genre bending mind splitting albums that 10 years from now will be looked back on the same way we look back on those old Maiden or Priest albums.

So why is that?  Why all of a sudden as a new millennium hits is there a lack of seminal releases and new genre bending bands?  Is it just my perspective?  Am I just getting old?  They say that the first music you fall in love with is always gonna be the best music you ever hear, which I think that may account for some of my disenfranchisement with a lot of today's metal, but not all of it.  I'm definitely too old to understand bands like All That Remains and shit like that, which is geared more towards a teenage audience.   But go and take a look at any all ages metal show and see what band T shirts all the kids are wearing....Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Slayer, etc.....all the old bands!  This generation of metalheads is paying more reverence to the bands of old than the bands of their own generation.  When I was a teenager growing up in the mid to late 90's, we had a love for the classics, but THE bands for us were Pantera, Machine Head, Zombie, and some of the bands like Testament who were still churnin out relevant music, and of course Metallica were on top of the world even though they were putting out really bad albums.  It seems like today, kids gravitate towards the old bands from the 70's/80's and the new bands that sound exactly like that (aka ripping them off).

So if it's not just me being an old curmudgeon, then what is it?  I don't think there is one easy answer, nor do I claim to have every piece to the puzzle in place but I do think I know the root cause, and I know this is going to open a huge pandora's box and a can of worms but this is what I think is the main cause.....

Downloading.

Ah great, I know here we go again.  This old debate.  Before you roll your eyes or get angry, I'm not going to get up on my soapbox and preach about the moral rights and wrongs of downloading, because I don't care about them and that argument has been beaten to death and back to life and to death again.  However I think it's the most relevant cause of this strange paradox I am talking about in this blog post.

To start, just look at the time line.  Napster and free downloading started to get really big around 2000ish, the same time frame we start to see a decline in really big classic albums.  Not a coincidence if you ask me.  No matter what your opinion of free downloading is, whether you do it or not, you cannot deny the simple fact that if a band doesn't sell albums it doesn't make as much money.  You can't debate that, it's a simple fact.  Now I know that bands make their money elsewhere and record labels rip them off blah blah blah, but as a metal band coming up trying to tour and get signed, you starve.  And when you can't sell albums, at the live show or at the record store, you starve more.  That's the number one cause of bands breaking up....people get sick of being broke and you can't blame them for that!  I know we are supposed to do this just for the love of it, and many of us do....but not making any money and in fact LOSING money some times on the road is really difficult.  Fact is bands HAVE to tour to get themselves noticed (the whole notion of the internet making peoples music accessible all over so you don;t have to tour to sell albums is completely idiotic!), so couple increased gas prices which really add up when you are in a tour van hauling a trailer full of gear, with really low album sales and you got a situation that makes it difficult for bands to last and get good and reach their full potential.  A prime example is my bands first album has had a couple thousand traced downloads from the source computer, and about 10 of them were from itunes where we charge $8.99 for the album.  Had those couple thousand people bought our disc we could have easily gone on an extensive tour to support it.

This has created another interesting attitude in music these days which i find totally disgusting.  Bands make more money off merchandise than they do off their music, so they are told to sell themselves as a "product".  Make a cool t shirt, pins and various other crap that looks all pretty and use your music as the commercial vehicle to sell this stuff to the masses.  This has always been there to a certain extent, but the level it has reached these days is complete nonsense.  Basically every band has become KISS.  Where's the incentive to spend time trying to write an immortal masterpiece that bends time and space if that's not puttin money in the bank?  The focus is now on who can make the coolest t shirt that is gonna sell, which is style over substance.  Personally i think that's crap and that kind of forced commercialism is no good for music at all.

The other thing which people falsely applaud is that all the big record labels are crumbling.  Don't get me wrong, I think the industry has created this problem for itself by overcharging the public for music for the last 25 years or so, but if the labels are gone, who is gonna invest in these bands?  Who is gonna put in the time and support these bands while they develop and get their music out there?  Who's gonna finance the recording of their next album?  DIY???? You know how much DIY pays you?  Not enough to feed and house 5 dudes and their families and give them a comfortable living I'll tell you that much from first hand experience!

So what I'm getting at here is a sharp decline in album sales makes it harder for bands to survive, get really good, and make that album that is gonna put their stamp on world of music.  Most bands if you look back put out many albums, EP's, demos and etc before they get that big break and put out that classic disc.  Take away another portion of their very limited income and it makes it all the more difficult.

I'm not preaching to you whether or not to download music for free.  I completely understand people's attitude from a consumer's standpoint as I too have overpaid for music for years.  I also understand that money gets tight and sometimes it just is what it is.  But I will say that if you never buy music, then you aren't supporting metal.  I still buy music to this day, both in physical and digital forms from bands that I love.  I strongly encourage you to do the same, and especially if you go to a show and see that independent touring band on their way up.  That 10 bucks you drop at the table on their album means a ton to them and it really helps them out.

Another contributing factor to the current state of things in my opinion is recording technology.  A lot of albums that come out these days sound exactly the same. It's all very formulaic and uninspired.  Nobody seems to want to put any of their own signature sound or style in their recordings these days.  Like when you hear any old Pantera album you know that's Dimes guitar instantly.  When you hear any old Iron Maiden track it takes half a millisecond for it to register that it's f**kin Maiden comin out of the speakers.  These days you could easily take 3 albums by 3 different bands and not be able to distinguish the guitar tone or the drum sound from any of them, because it's all digital, sampled and most of the humanity is squeezed out of it.  There's not point to this, it just makes you feel like you've heard this a hundred times already.

This technology has also enabled every Dick and Jane to put out an album from the comfort of their own home, which has it's advantages and disadvantages.  Advantages are demos are easier, recording music to show your band mates is easier, plus more.  But the main disadvantage is that a lot of troglodytes can put out a lot of really really bad music and just flood the market with it, so on the indy level you gotta weed through a galaxy of garbage to get to the really good stuff.  


So this is just my 2 cents on where we are at in metal and music these days and why.  Like I already stated I still love metal unconditionally and that will never change, it's as much of a part of my life as anything is, and has been one of the only constants since my teen years.  But I do feel that there are major issues being faced by our beloved genre in this day and age, which hopefully won't be issues forever that bands and fans alike have to face.  I'll be very interested to see where things go in this next decade, but one thing's for sure, I will be seeing you all down at the front of the stage!

Critics:

In both my lines of work, food service and music, critics play a major role.  Music and food critics can shape a product or a person's reputation for better or for worse.  They analyze, they judge, and then they broadcast their opinions via website, newspaper, magazine or tv show to the general populace, and their opinions can play a large role in making or breaking someone.

But who are they?  What gives them the right to be the authority on what is good or what is bad?  Who died and made them the be all and end all of what people should and shouldn't buy or eat? In my opinion, for the most part....NOTHING!

Now before I go any further I am well aware of the irony that I write a blog and and running my mouth about other people who do the same or similar things.  The major difference between me and them is that I actually work in both areas that I am talking about, and am fairly proficient and skilled n both cooking and music.  So my opinion is more educated, and frankly i think most of my criticisms are more founded and thought out.  Also I don't get paid for doing this. 

I would like to also state before I get into full blown rant mode that there are a few shining stars out there in the critic world.  A few people with actual experience in the industry they are writing about, and possibly an education as well.  However for the most part we got a lot of substitute teachers out there spouting a lot of subjective misinformation to compensate for their feelings of inadequate intellect and really the fact that they suck at most things in life so they want to bring down those that don't suck.

My main problem with critics is that they state opinions as if they were facts.  When writing about your personal experience eating a meal or listening to an album....it's entirely subjective, therefore facts are skewed by your own personal tastes and biases.  You cannot say just because you didn't enjoy the prawn cocktail at said bistro that it's not any good.  You just didn't like it .  Some people may like it.  You cannot say that just because you don't like the guitar tone on the new Anthrax album that it's not any good.  What might not sound good to you might sound good to me (For the record I love what I've heard from the new Anthrax disc).  As Mike Muir from Suicidal Tendencies once said "Just because you don't know what's goin on doesn't mean it ain't no good".  Double negative aside.....that's bang on!

The other thing I hate is how critics all act like snotty little know it alls, cutting down people who are ten times as successful as they.  Take this recent example from the Globe And Mail, Alexandra Gill reviews Ensemble restaurant in Vancouver.  Which if you aren't aware is the new restaurant run by Chef Dale Mackay, the winner of Top Chef Canada.  Here is the link if you want to check it out......

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/restaurant-reviews/top-chef-winner-triumphs-in-his-own-restaurant/article2092160/print/


Overall she gives a positive review but that's not my point, it's the literary devices and overall spoiled brat attitude that comes across.  Just look at this snobby twit trying to talk like she knows anything!  She's talking to a guy who was on Gordon Ramsay's opening team, was one of Daniel Bolud's top guys, and now has won the biggest cooking show in Canada like she knows better than him how the dishes should be served!  

"This extra note – the layer that separates a top chef from a great chef – is missing from your herb risotto, which is technically excellent – loose and creamy – but boring. Same with the roasted beet and fresh ricotta salad, which would be much creamier and delicious if served at room temperature."

Really?  Is that so?  Let me ask where did you do your schooling?  Who did you apprentice under?  What credentials do you have to tell a Top Chef winner how he should be serving his food?

Oh that's right you don't have any, you just write for a newspaper.  Also how can a risotto that is technically excellent be boring? 


"Now the pulled pork sandwich is one you probably should be doing differently in the restaurant. You won this challenge because you were able to use a pressure cooker to pull off a good braise under tight constraints that would be easy for home cooks to replicate. But you’re not cooking at home and you’re no longer pressed for time. Although the sauce is lovely and deeply smoky, your pork butt tastes like a dry sponge."

For one, you are missing the point of the dish.  It's on there because it's a Top Chef winning dish for one, so it's something cool for casual diners and fans of the show to try, and at it's price point is an affordable option.  Also have you ever slow cooked pork butt?  Have you ever educated yourself in southern BBQ?  I'm gonna take a wild shot in the dark and guess that you haven't.  Do you know for a fact that he is not pressed for time?  Do you understand how long it takes to properly slow cook pork butt?  Do you understand how difficult it is to serve something like that hot and fresh in a fine dining setting?  Have you ever attempted something like that?  Obviously not.  You just write for a newspaper.

That brings me to my next point.  Who are these people anyways?  Where did they train?  Where did they go to school?  The answer is....they are WRITERS.  Their job is to sell newspapers.  They don't present good unbiased professional opinions,  they say what they think needs to be said for people to want to read it, sell papers and therefore keep their jobs.   They may be qualified to write but they are certainly not qualified to offer professional opinions on food, music or really anything else they are not trained or experienced in.

If I ran the show, every food critic would have to be a chef or a waiter for at least a year before being allowed to write a column and get paid for it.  Every music critic would have to be in a band. Write, record and release an album, then go sweat it out in the clubs and on tour in front of a real live audience for at least a year before gettin paid to spout off opinions about other peoples hard work.

So what's my point in all this?  Two points.  1) I hate most critics, and have zero respect for about 98% of them in all fields.  2) Please for the love of all that is sacred and good in this world, don't read a critics review of a restaurant, an album, a movie or anything else and base your decision as to whether or not to buy or check out said product around the review.  Use your own brain and senses and go see for yourself.

As Ernest Hemingway once said "Critics are the kind of people who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors"