Whatever I Want

I get to do a post on WHATEVER I WANT today, so I'll put up a review I just did at my other blog TIRADES. For more reviews you can go there. Enjoy (or maybe not).

CORPORATE AMERICA by BOSTON

Released: November 5. 2002
Genre: Rock
Length: 47:28
Label: Artemis
Producer: Tom Scholz, Gary Pihl, Fran Cosmo, Anthony Cosmo
Tracklist:
   1. I Had a Good Time
   2. Stare Out Your Window
   3. Corporate America
   4. With You
   5. Someone
   6. Turn it Off
   7. Cryin'
   8. Didn't Mean to Fall in Love
   9. You Gave Up on Love
   10. Livin' For You (live)
   11. Crystal Love (European Bonus Track)

   Corporate America Boston's first record since 1994's Walk On. Most people haven't heard any of the songs on the record except maybe "I Had a Good Time," which was put on the Greatest Hits compilation in 2006, but other than that the record will be completely unfamiliar to the casual listener. Hardcore Boston fans who bought this record when it came out almost universally hate it, and they have some good reasons, although their outright hatred is a little unfounded. Fran Cosmo continues to provide some lead vocals for the record, but this time he's joined by original vocalist Brad Delp and a new vocalist, Kimberly Dahme, who I'll discuss in a minute. Tom Scholz has also taken a bit of a backseat for this one, letting Fran and Anthony Cosmo do a lot of the songwriting.
   "I Had a Good Time" is on Greatest Hits for a reason. The song is classic Boston, with Schoz's driving guitars and Delp's vocals creating a catchy, satisfied attitude. Delp's vocals are still good, but there's something...missing from them. He doesn't really test his higher range, instead choosing to play it safe throughout the song. The next track was written by Anthony Cosmo, and it's driven almost entirely by an acoustic guitar, something typical Boston fans aren't used to at all. It's a decent song, with a chorus delivered by Fran Cosmo that's pretty easy to sing along to.
   I find the title track to be slightly ironic, as Boston was created by a corporate record company and didn't even have a full band until their first album was put out. The track sounds very similar to "Higher Power," which was recorded for Greatest Hits. The lyrics are like a ramped-up version of "Peace of Mind," harshly criticizing the American Capitalist system. The song itself is catchy enough, but the lyrics were a little too 'save the trees' for me. The fourth track, "With You," is where Kimberly Dahme comes in. She wrote and performed vocals on the song, which is probably why the song sounds so out of place. Dahme plays an acoustic for this song, and after a few seconds her country/pop oriented vocals kick in. I already dislike country, and to hear it on a Boston album was a little too much.
   "Someone" starts with a killer organ/synth solo that screams 'classic Boston.' It helps that Scholz wrote the song and Delp sings lead vocals again, with some backing vocals from Fran Cosmo, making it the best song on the album since track 1. "Turn it Off" starts with an acoustic/flute solo that caught me off guard, but then the guitar riff kicks in with Fran Cosmo's dark vocals. While it falls just short of Boston's standards, it's the best written by Anthony Cosmo. "Cryin'" was an average song, but Tom Scholz takes charge of the writing again for the rest of the record starting with track 8, "Didn't Mean to Fall in Love." This next track begins with the sound of a phone dialing and an organ solo from Tom Scholz, with some background vocals from Brad Delp. The chorus has got a really catchy organ solo that sounds vaguely similar to the earlier track "Someone." While I didn't like it as much as "Someone" or "I Had a Good Time," it was still one of the stronger tracks on the record. The last studio track on the album has a good beginning that gives way to an acoustic and a flute. Dahme gives the backing vocals some really good flavor, and the chorus is pretty catchy. The live version of "Livin' for You" is pretty good, with Delp singing lead vocals, but I don't see the point of including it on Corporate America. "Crystal Love" is a bonus track on the European version, but it's just a six minute long guitar instrumental. It's a good instrumental, but it's an instrumental.
Good:
Scholz really did put a few great tracks on here. Delp's vocals are still fantastic for his age, and I've always liked Fran Cosmo's voice too. "I Had a Good Time" "Someone" "Didn't Mean to Fall in Love" and "You Gave Up on Love" are all classic Boston. Scholz is just as skilled in his songwriting as he was for the other three Boston albums.
Bad:
At least half the tracks weren't written by Tom Scholz. Out of the four tracks that weren't written by him, only one of them is even ok. The other ones are very weak tracks, especially "With You," which was a country song on a Boston record. Only half the songs on the album are really worth listening to, and that's a problem because this record doesn't have a downloadable version on iTunes OR Amazon, so you have to buy the whole darn cd to own any of it, and on Amazon the compact disc ranges from between 30-60$. No one bought the cd really, and Artemis is a European record company, so it's hard to get a hold of. However, if you want to listen to Corporate America on the internet, I'd stick with tracks 1, 5, 6, 8, 9, and MAYBE 2 and 3.
Rating:
2 stars. Tom Scholz should have known better than to let Kimberly Dahme sing ANY lead vocals or do any songwriting. Considering his ultra-perfectionist attitude, I thought he would have taken more care with a Boston record and written more of the material himself.

My Favorites:
Someone
I Had a Good Time
Didn't Mean to Fall in Love
You Gave Up on Love

What You'll Probably Like Best:
I Had a Good Time
You Gave Up on Love
Someone

The Beginning: Love is Hell-Chapter One

   Today, I get to post something I've been working on for the past few weeks, so I'll be putting up the first chapter of my new story Love is Hell: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I tweaked a few things, but tell me what you think. PLEASE.

Love is Hell: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast

Author’s Note

This story is entirely fiction. The town of Atwood California is an actual town in Orange County, although in this novel it is used entirely for fictional purposes. The people, religious beliefs, demographics, and dynamics of Atwood are used with little or no factual basis.

LOVE IS HELL

Chapter One

The sun set in Atwood California, the shadows slowly falling on a house on the edge of town. Although the house wasn’t particularly sizable compared to other large houses in the States, it was one of the biggest in town. Eventually the sun came down past the horizon, and the normal business of the day was ended. Main street fell silent, and the nearby homes fell silent soon after. The hour of midnight came, and the silence was broken by the creaking of a front door, barely audible to the human ear. Two figures moved quietly through the streets, whispering as they walked. One was taller than the other, with a backpack on, the other following to the other’s side, slightly behind it.

    “What if someone finds us?” whispered the smaller figure.

    “They won’t, Eva. Just relax. This is already going to be freaky; don’t make it worse with all your worrying.” said the second.

The two fell silent again as they came up to a battered road. The asphalt was very old, and had crumbled quite a bit through lack of use or maintenance. At the end of the road there was a massive house, even larger than the one the two teenagers had just snuck out of. Even at night it was obvious that the house hadn’t been lived in for at least fifty years. Several of the shutters were missing, and several of the windows were broken. The grounds of the house were overrun by weeds, and the small home that once would have housed a groundskeeper was covered in graffiti.

Bored teenagers vandalized the shack every once and awhile, but no one touched the house itself. Things happened at this house; unnatural things. As the two kids approached the house, Eva’s nervousness reached a peak, and she paused in the middle of the road just outside the grounds. Her brother kept walking, unaware that she had stopped. She continued to stand motionless, breathing hard. Mike noticed that she wasn’t by his side anymore, and whirled around, running toward her.

“Eva, come on! We don’t have all night to do this.” he said.

“I’m really scared, Mike. This place doesn’t feel right.” Eva said.

“You think I’m not nervous about this too, Eva? We came to get a thrill, remember? Think of it like a ride at the amusement park we used to go to. It’ll be fine.”

“People have died here, Mike.”

“That was forty years ago, Eva. Nothing’s happened since then. It’ll be fine. Let’s go.”

She complied reluctantly, following closely behind him as they entered the mansion’s grounds. They came through an iron gate, walking on the paved driveway that came up to the front of the house. The two walked with fearful curiosity, taking a close look at the house and the surrounding lawn. Daring kids like them came sometimes, but something bad had always happened. Johnny Edwards had been bitten by a snake after running away from the house, Sierra Calvin had fallen down the stairs in the inside of the house and broken her collarbone in three places after breaking in.

    The two came up to that same window Sierra had broken to get into the house, looking inside. Mike concealed his fear well, but Eva was visibly trembling as she peered inside cautiously from behind her brother. The window was very large, the bottom being at knee level and going up about five feet. The furniture, once beautiful and glamorous, was overturned and destroyed. The table that once had sat in the middle of the room was on its side, two of the legs broken. Eva’s attention turned back to Mike as he inhaled loudly and stepped over the window’s edge and entered the house. He turned back to her and held out his hand.

    “Come in, Eva! You can’t come all this way just to get scared before you even come in.”

    “I don’t want to go in, Mike. I’ll see you when you get back.” She turned to walk back, but Mike grabbed her by the arm and pulled her hard. She hit the edge of the window and tripped, falling into the house and onto the remnants of the broken glass on the floor. She let out a short shriek of pain as Mike pulled her up and dusted her off. She had several small cuts on her arms, but on her knee there was a cut about two inches long.

    “We’ll take care of that when we get back,” said Mike. “we’ve got to finish this first though.” he took off the backpack and unzipped it, pulling out a small wooden ouija board. Eva cried for a couple of minutes as he propped up the fallen table, balancing it precariously using the broken legs. He put the ouija board on the table and turned to Eva, who was using her pants to stop the blood flow.

    “You ready?” he asked. “We don’t have a lot of time, and we’ll have even less if you keep whining about that little cut you got.”

    Eva stopped crying and looked up at him angrily. “You @$$hole! You think I still want to do this? I didn’t really want to do it in the first place!”

    “Fine then. I’ll just do it myself.” he said as he took a deep breath and turned toward the board. Eva got up and dusted herself off, turning back to step over the broken window. She didn’t look back as she walked toward the grounds entrance. Just before she reached the gate, she heard screaming coming from the house. It was Mike’s voice.

    Eva ran back to the house as fast as she could, but when she came in, Mike was laughing. Realizing what he’d done, her face turned red with anger.

    “You think that’s funny?” She yelled. He kept laughing, ignoring her words. She walked up to him and slapped him in the face. “It’s not funny, Mike!”

    “You totally fell for that! You think I’d ever actually---”

Mike’s reply was cut short as a loud crashing noise came from upstairs, and someone laughed. Eva turned to see what it was, but she looked back as she heard a loud thump next to her. Mike was on the ground, convulsing violently. Although he was almost completely immobilized, he managed to get two words out: “Run, Eva!” Eva ignored him and picked him up by his feet, dragging him toward the window. “RUN!” he screamed. She dragged him several feet until she heard laughing again and fell to the ground.

    She tried to move, but she had no control of any of her limbs. As she convulsed, she saw Mike get up and run out of the house. She tried to call out his name, but she didn’t have control over her own body. She’d tried to help him; why didn’t he do the same? She said a prayer in her head, hoping that it would do something to get whatever was controlling her out, but it didn’t help. After a few minutes of convulsing, her legs started to move without her telling them to. She started to get up, but she heard noises outside and the door burst open. Several people walked in, including Mike.

    The force inside of her kept trying to move for a minute, but one of the people who had entered the house lifted a wooden cross into the air, praying to the Lord to cast out the devil inside her. She felt what seemed like contempt coming from the force for a minute before it obliged her father’s request and left. Eva had control of her own body again, but she was overtaken by a sudden rush of exhaustion, and fell to the ground before blacking out.

The PAST

   It's been a pretty long time, hasn't it? This time, I'm here to talk to you unfortunate viewers about the past, one of the most widely discussed subjects in literature. Life itself is arguably about how we handle the things that have happened in the past, so it's a pretty important subject. From Star Wars to Back to the Future to The Lion King, the past is one of the main themes of the story. But why is the past so important to everyone? Because things happen in the past that we can no longer change, that we have to learn to deal with forever. If we screw up, we've got to find a way to handle it, because the things that happen as a result are 100% out of our control and there's nothing to do about it. That is why history is so darn important. The only thing you can do with the past is look at what happened and try to learn what went wrong so you can avoid it if the situation comes up again. If you do something right, you want to remember how you did that so you can repeat it again later.
   What else about the past is important? I could talk about my past, but trust me, that's not something you want to know about. None of you care about my past, so I'm going to do something new and GIVE YOU A WRITING PROMPT. What's important about your past? Do you feel at peace with the past, or is it still something that haunts you, like Simba in The Lion King? Write about it. If you really feel like sharing, you can copy and paste your replies to the prompt as a comment or email it to me at kawebb3.5@gmail.com or something.