#82 - Angra

Symphonic prog-power metal band Angra is the only Brazilian band on this list and one of very few I know.  Yes, I suppose I am giving away that you won't hear Sepultura touted as one of my all-time favorites.  I'm pretty sure that won't be the only potentially disputed omission, and probably not the most arguable either.  Angra plays a really ambitious take on Euro power metal, which is a bit ironic given their geographic origin, but they're apparently pretty tight with some of the pioneers, having had Helloween's Kai Hansen as a guest and producer very early in their career.  Like a lot of bands of that sub-genre, they play a lot of notes, and fast. They also feature the soaring, high-pitched vocals and machine gun double kick characteristic of the style.  But they're more inclined than most to change meter and time on a dime, to layer large orchestrations, and to incorporate folk elements.

Holy Land is the title track off of Angra's second album from 1996.  At that early stage, they were still essentially a power metal band, but you start to hear some of the progressive influences that become more predominant as they mature in later albums.  I really love the use of Brazilian instruments and themes in this song, as well as the orchestral parts, which I think work really well.  The album features chorus and flute as well on some other songs (the flutes on this one are synthesized).  There are some cool bass fills early in the sparsely orchestrated beginning of the song, and I also like the phrasing of the main piano riff.  The drums and guitars don't enter until 2:06, but there are folk percussion instruments throughout.  The surprise orchestra interlude happens at 3:13, and is the climax of the tune.  I'll allow there's some cheese here, but we've been over that in the Nightwish post.  There's a recap of the softer opening before the groovy outro on the main riff.  The whole album's supposed to be a concept thing about beautiful Brazil.  Check out the title track below and see if you think it's as fun as I do.

#83 - Pain of Salvation

Sweden's Pain of Salvation has been around for about 16 years, and in progressive rock circles (do those exist?) is a favorite among the heavier bands.  For me, they're on the border between progressive rock (a la Yes) and progressive metal (like lots of the other bands you'll see if you stay with me), sort of like Dream Theater, only more varied in terms of influencing genres and sounds.  As far as I know, every single one of their albums dating back to 1997 is a concept album, meaning the songs are all related to each other and some overarching theme or story.  There's no denying their musicianship, as you can hear below.

If you listen to the song below, you'll hear fairly typical Pain of Salvation (although their sound can be pretty varied): loose, somewhat improvised vocals, musical influences outside of metal or even rock, varied instrumentation and feel, and thoughtful compositional form.  It's the last track on my favorite of their albums, entitled "Be".  The song starts with a movie soundtrack sounding introduction which includes strings and a snare march-like cadence for time.  At 1:53, it shifts gears... still kind of movie-ish but with a more urgent, kind of eastern sound and some synthesized winds.  At 2:36, a really difficult guitar riff in three starts and is joined a bit later by flute.  It builds through some odd meter stuff, until it finally resolves to a more relaxed, bluegrass feel at 3:32 back in three.  That builds, adding instruments and growing in intensity, until 5:37 where it becomes a folky, Riverdance percussion solo (almost) before ending abruptly with a slamming door or something reminiscent of one.  It's an interesting song and worth checking out for a taste of Pain of Salvation.  See what you think, and let me know.

#84 - Lacuna Coil

Lacuna Coil is my second band featuring a female vocalist (Nightwish was the first, and I'm not counting Sceptic, since I only know their pre-Weronika Zbieg stuff), and I think my only representation from Italy.  Frontwoman Christina Scabbia, who by the way is just four days younger than me, shares vocal duties with growler Andrea Ferro, but make no mistake... all eyes (and ears I guess) are on her.  I picked up their sort of gothic metal debut album in Italy in 2001 when I was on this kick where I was trying to get an album from a national band every time I traveled to another country.  The album was released in 1998 and they were actually doing quite well in Europe although nobody had really heard of them in the States.  (Of course not, when there was so much Destiny's Child to be listened to.)  I remember overhearing an argument a couple years later where someone was criticizing Lacuna Coil as an Evanescence knockoff; ironic since their debut album predates that of Evanescence by a good five years.  They just hit in America around the same time.  I got a chance to see them at Ozzfest in 2004, where they played at 9:00am on the second stage!!  Last year, their sixth album, Dark Adrenaline, peaked at number 15 in the States.  I guess they've come a ways.

"To Myself I Turned" is the first song I heard by Lacuna Coil.  I was looking for metal bands with female vocalists, something there is not nearly enough of - not surprising, I suppose, given the traditionally geeky-teenage-boy aesthetic of the genre - when I happened on a pretty comprehensive list on the subject online.  That search led me to some pretty sketchy bands, but this song hooked me immediately.  The band plays, while not particularly prodigiously, with good precision and Christina's vocals are powerful and emotive, with solid tone and pitch.  I also like the shifts between soft and heavy in this song, and especially the interesting chord progression in the chorus (first reached at 1:00).  It's no I-IV-V-I progression.  (In fact it's i-VII-#3sus-4sus-2sus-V-i I think.)  Actually, the progressions throughout are pretty unusual for a rock song.  And the melodies flow pretty naturally in spite of that.  Check it out and see if you don't agree.

The VLOOKUP function in MS Excel

My brother-in-law, Tom, asked me about the VLOOKUP function in Excel, which is something I've used regularly over the past 15 years or so, so I thought I'd put together a little explanation of its purpose and invocation for him and anyone else who might find it useful.

VLOOKUP is essentially a database function, used to get a value for one table from another table when the two tables have a foreign key/unique key relationship.  In other words, you have a bunch of rows in one table that reference a single row in another.  Let me give you an example that I've used in preparing for fantasy football pretty much every year.

In one table, I have a list of NFL quarterbacks.  I know each QBs name and what team he plays on, and perhaps some of his stats from past seasons.

Now I need to know what week each of these guys has a bye so that I don't end up drafting two QBs who are both off on the same week.  I happen to have another table that lists which is each team's bye week in the upcoming season.

Now I could just go through the list of players and type the appropriate bye week into each row, but since there are actually 169 QBs that would be a lot of busy work.  In fact, there are also 476 wide receivers on my list, so I've got to find another way or I will certainly go mad.

Here's where the VLOOKUP function swoops in to save me.  As you can see, in my first (player) table, I have the team that each player plays on.  In some cases, a team appears more than once in that table, as there are multiple players per team.  For example, Charlie Batch, Byron Leftwich and Ben Roethlisberger all play for the Pittsburgh Steelers (or PIT).  In this table, the team code (e.g. CAR or PIT) is what's referred to in database speak as a "foreign key".  A foreign key value can appear multiple times and is a match for a unique value in another table.  So the "Team" column in my player table is the foreign key, and it refers to the "primary" or "unique" key column also called "Team" in my second (byes) table.

Here's how I use VLOOKUP to give me the bye week for each player:

Like with any function in Excel, you start by typing "=" followed by the function name and an opening parenthesis.  Once you get there, you get a prompt telling you the argument names that the function takes.  The first is the "lookup_value", the foreign key that I mentioned earlier.  For the example row, the value is in cell B2, "PIT".

So I enter B2, and move on to the "table_array" argument.  This is the table from which I want to draw my value.  Since I need to find out what bye week PIT will have, this will be the table that includes "PIT" as a unique key value and the corresponding bye week.

As you can see, I'm providing "Byes!A:B" as the argument.  That simply means the "Byes" worksheet, columns A through B.  I selected the entire columns rather than A2:B33, because if I do the latter, when I copy my formula into the rest of the quarterbacks' cells later, Excel will increment each of those numeric values as I copy further and further down the sheet, which will cause errors.  It thinks it's being smart.  You can get around that with A$2:B$33 (which means use absolute rows 2-33), but it's just quicker for me to select the two entire columns and be done with it.

Next I'll need to enter my "col_index_num".  This is just the column number that I want to return the value from, counting from the left.  So in our byes table, column 1 is the "Team" column and column 2 is the "Bye" column.  We want the bye week, so we'll enter 2.

Finally, we enter the "range_lookup" argument.  It defaults to TRUE, which in my experience is worthless.  We want FALSE, which means an exact match only please.  This way "PIT" will not match "PHI".  I have no idea how Excel determines approximate matches, but it doesn't seem at all useful to me.  Maybe someone will read this who can enlighten me.

So now we close the parentheses and we're done with our VLOOKUP formula for determining Charlie Batch's bye week.

As you can see, he's off in week 5.  Was that easier than looking up Pittsburgh's bye week myself and typing it into that cell?  No.  But you'll see where the big time savings come in in a moment.  First I want to point out the little green corner of that cell.  Excel is warning me that there are empty cells in the VLOOKUP table because I selected the entire columns and not just the cells with values in them (remember A2:B33?).  Don't worry about it.  It doesn't matter here.

Now I can simply copy the cell (C2 in my players table), highlight cells C3 through C40+, and paste.

Finally, and not strictly relevant to the discussion, you'll probably want to copy all the cells that have the formula in them and replace them with their resultant values so that you don't accidentally replace them when your moving things around further, and so you're not constantly recalculating them either.  Just highlight the whole lot of them, right-click, select "Copy", right-click again, select "Paste Special...", and choose "Values".

[Edit] - Jen pointed out, and rightly, that this copy/paste operation makes sense for my case because the data in the lookup table won't change.  If your lookup table involves frequent edits, it might be better to keep the formulas, since they'll automatically update with any changes in the source table that way. [/Edit]

OK, and you're done.  We now have the bye week for each of the thousand or so skill position players in the NFL, and in a lot less time than manually looking up and entering each value would have been.  Let me know if the comments below if you have any questions or I missed anything.

#85 - Necrophagist

Germany's Necrophagist is probably the most extreme metal band on this list.  The tempos are blistering, the torrent of sound relentless, and the lyrics revolting.  Fortunately, there's no way to discern what the lyrics are without research.  Also fortunately, guitarist (and vocalist) Muhammed Suiçmez is an incredible player who, oddly enough plays clean-tone solo lines along the lines of good ol' Yngwie Malmsteen.  Somehow, his fluid, arpeggiated soloing doesn't sound out of place in the music, which is otherwise textbook technical death metal.

On "Fermented Offal Discharge" (*cough*), as with the rest of the first Necrophagist album, Suiçmez handles vocal duties, as well as playing all guitar and bass parts... well.  The form is too complicated for me to outline for you without spending a couple hours trying to analyze it.  It's a terrific metal composition though, not to mention performance, and bears repeated listening.  At least give it a once-through and pay particular attention to the guitar solo, beginning at 3:01 (like you can help it).  It's jaw-dropping.

#86 - Jens Johansson

Jens Johansson is one hard-working dude.  He's like the Swedish and keyboard version of Dave Grohl, having appeared on over 50 albums over his 30-or-so year career.  He appears on a lot of prog and power metal albums and is probably best known for his work with Swedish guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen in the 80s and Finnish power metal band Stratovarius since 1995.  He is clearly influenced by the classic rock and fusion keyboardists/organists of the 70s as you'll hear below, but he worked up some pretty formidable chops to be able to trade solos with the likes of Yngwie, Michael Romeo, Mike Stern, Shawn Lane and Ron Jarzombek to name a few of the shredders I've heard him recorded with.  Bonus points go to him for being a computer programmer!

The two solo albums that I have by Jens are drastically different.  The latter, entitled The Last Viking, is pretty straight-ahead Euro power metal, similar to his band Stratovarius.  The earlier, and preferable to me, is Fission, a prog fusion instrumental album from which the below song comes.  It's a pretty standard jazz form, setting up the feel with an intro that adds parts until the head played by solo keyboard.  The first statement of the bridge section is just kind of a melody-less spacey feel section, but when it returns later, the melody is played by guitarist Mike Stern and then subsequently between each solo.  The solos are pretty impressive, and each very different.  It starts with Jens, followed by Stern's usual lyrical, vocal-like phrasing and then Shawn Lane, who is maybe a bit out of control, but he sure can pick fast.  The drums (played by Anders Johansson, Jens' brother) are super busy in this tune, and I should mention that it's in a tricky 6+7 time signature.  Enjoy Swedish progressive fusion metal... as though you don't everyday.

#87 - Frantic Bleep

Frantic Bleep, slightly less well-known than the previous two bands in this list, is the first entry from Norway, but they certainly won't be the last.  An uncanny percentage of excellent metal bands hail from Scandinavia, and from Norway in specific.  When you figure that combined populations of all of Europe and the United States alone are over 1 billion, you wouldn't expect little 5-million-person Norway to have much representation in any list, except maybe winter sports.  Perhaps it's my bias as a son of a daughter of a Norwegian, or perhaps it's something to do with the whole Vikings and Valhalla history.  Whatever the case, Norway has more than its fair share of this list and, in my opinion, great metal bands (and perhaps musicians in general).  Especially those of the experimental variety.

Which brings me back to Frantic Bleep.  I haven't heard a lot of bands who sound like these guys.  They play a mid-to-slow tempo, heavy variety of progressive metal with mostly clean (although there are occasional growls) mid-range vocals.  It's kind of angular music, although also melodic, and I find myself singing some of the odd riffs and melodies to myself after listening to them for a bit.  They're certainly not as conventional as some of the other bands on my list, nor are they as mind-bogglingly technical.  But they play an interesting and unique brand of metal with somehow convincing songwriting and precision.  Unfortunately, they seem to have disappeared after one full-length album.

"...But a Memory" is probably my favorite song off of that album, although they're pretty consistent.  It kicks off with the main riff, which is a strange two-measure wave-shaped scalar melody with an extra half-beat in it.  The odd 4/4+(3/4+3/8) meter continues through the vocal verse (there's not really a chorus in this song) and then repeats the opening riff and a mellower version of the verse.  The loping (limping?) feel and time signature continues still through a quiet interlude without drums and then the third intonation of the verse, this time louder and heavier than the first two.  Just when you're getting used to it and maybe even tapping your toe, the song switches at 2:55 to a more conventional 4/4 feel, although with some odd syncopation in the rhythm section that proceeds through the synth solo, final vocal, and then closes out the song.  This is definitely not "Cult Of Personality" but I hope you like it!

#88 - Living Colour

Sticking in the same vein as the number 89 entry, Faith No More, Living Colour originated in the mid-80s, is often cited as one of the first funk-metal bands and rose to fame with a big MTV hit.  To be honest, it's a stretch to call Living Colour a metal band.  When guitarist Vernon Reid started the band, he was playing with a number of fusion and jazz musicians including M-Base pioneers Geri Allen, Don Byron and DK Dyson.  But I feel there are enough metal elements in Living Colour to include them in this list.  Plus, it's my list.  And they're awesome.

"Cult Of Personality", included below, was the first single of the first Living Colour album, Vivid.  It took several months to gain attention and momentum, but ultimately became their biggest hit.  The distinctive main riff is pretty complex for a repeated rock riff, and instantly recognizable.  I love the doubling of it by the guitar and bass, which can't have been easy, and the chasm of silence between its reiterations always on the one, making it simultaneously heavy and funky.  Vocalist Corey Glover improvises a bit throughout on the melody, bassist Muzz Skillings and drummer Will Calhoun lay down a monster groove, and Vernon Reid plays a screaming, relentless, jaw-dropping solo a little past halfway through the song that ices it as one of the great rock songs of the 80s.  Be sure and stick around for the cool instrumental outro after the JFK quote at 4:35 or so.  Listening to this song again makes me smile. :)

#89 - Faith No More

Some of you may have been waiting for a band you've heard of.  Well, here you go.  It won't be the last one, I promise.  It's sort of funny that Faith No More is as well known as they are, since their music was pretty adventurous, their behavior off the wall, and their style all over the map.  Their most popular vocalist, Mike Patton, is famous for his multiple stints with edgy and/or avant garde musicians across genres (e.g. John Zorn, Bjork, Kool Keith, Melvins, Melt-Banana and Dillinger Escape Plan to name a few).  For him, Faith No More is pretty tame, but by most standards they were an innovative and kind of weird bunch of guys, setting the stage for other alternative metal bands of the 90s.

Epic was the band's biggest hit, and you'd have to have been living under a rock in 1990 to not be familiar with it.  However, it's probably been too long, so give it a listen below.  It's really a great song, even 23 years later.  After a brief, heavy, anthemic and keyboard-laden intro (essentially the chorus minus the vocal), the song goes right into a Red Hot Chili Peppers-reminiscent rap-ish verse.  There's a second variation of the chorus later which blends the heavy rock of the chorus with the punk-y rap of the verse that returns a couple of times and underlies the guitar solo before fading out into a nice solo piano outro.  Enjoy Faith No More's only top 10 hit, Epic.

#90 - Dreamscape

Germany's Dreamscape is pretty much a textbook example of a progressive metal band.  They've got the high-pitched clean vocals.  They've got the twisty odd-meters.  They've got solid technical musicianship.  And they've got an ample keyboard presence.  They maybe skew a little toward Euro power metal along the lines of Helloween or Stratovarius, but I'd say they're closer to the oft-imitated Dream Theater, who are probably the first band that come to most minds when the genre is mentioned.

I only have one album by these guys, called 5th Season, but I like it a lot.  It's really flawless prog metal throughout.  I'm including one of my favorites off the album, called "Somebody".  It's got some nice piano in it and might be the most melodic entry in my whole list of awesome bands.  There are plenty of odd meters, but it doesn't feel that shifty.  In fact, it's downright catchy.  And the lyrics are actually pretty feel-good.  Did I call this metal?  Warning: this is one of those songs that lodges in your brain.  Fortunately, it's not the annoying kind.

#91 - Corrosion of Conformity

Corrosion of Conformity took a circuitous route to metal glory, starting in the early 80's as a thrashy punk band out of North Carolina.  Over their first 10 years or so, they gradually shifted toward more of a straight ahead thrash metal sound.  Their last indie release (which was the first one I heard) was Blind, which prompted a signing by Columbia.  Their first major label release in my favorite of theirs.  They were hitting their stride in terms of energy and musicianship, and had found their sound, which was an unusual and yet catchy blend of southern rock, stoner metal and thrash.

I'm including my favorite of their songs below: "Clean My Wounds" from Deliverance.  I really like the setup for transitions in this song.  The opening is just a solo guitar playing the main staccato riff, which is a great one as much thanks to the silence in it as the notes.  Four bars in, the drums and bass join, the hi-hat tight to compliment the sparse and staccato nature of the main riff, which continues through the verse.  The cymbals loosen up with the note lengths for the chorus.  That's pretty much all there is to it. The riff is just so tight and driving, and the contrast of the chorus makes it feel even tighter.  Plus the guitar solo work is distinctive and there are several well-placed uses of a cool little shotgun guitar effect.

I think this pretty simple little song captures what was great about COC and why I dig 'em.  Check them out and see if you agree (and let me know in the comments below or on FB).