Control and Resistance

control and resistance

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Guitarist-composer Rich Woodson spent his formative years playing in Austin, Texas, rock bands, but that background doesn't immediately come to mind in the debut of his band Ellipsis. Instead, it's a tight collection of players from New York's Downtown scene, schooled in free jazz and adept at wending their way through PoMo mysteries. They're well-suited to Woodson's music, an oblique mix of jazz and rock sonorities wedded to an original structural methodology. Each of his pieces here is a sudden complex of elements, a patchwork of shifting beats and motifs that creates its own logic. Tension figures build only to suddenly stop; distorted guitar is matched with bowed bass; moments of rare lyricism are jolted by anarchic bursts. In fact, the pieces are a lot like their titles, perverse weddings of the routine and the bizarre, invocations of a world where chaos and repression leisurely walk hand in hand. The band includes saxophonists Aaron Stewart and Peter Epstein, bassist Mat Fieldes, and drummer John Hollenbeck, and they do a brilliant job of making the parts fit together, blurring the lines between the composed, the conducted, and the spontaneous. Woodson has cited the influence of saxophonist Tim Berne, composer Charles Wuorinen, and rock bad boy Frank Zappa, and listeners will likely add Captain Beefheart's Magic Band to the list, but Woodson's an original. With Ellipsis, he's assembled a fine instrument for realizing his vision. --Stuart Broomer

Control and Resistance,Rich Woodson's Ellipsis,Cuneiform,Avant-Garde Jazz,Avant-Prog,Experimental,Modern Composition,Modern Creative,Pop,Rock,Rock/Pop

Control and Resistance

Average customer rating:

Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD...
so this is where it came from...
You call this MUSIC?! This SUCKS!
Vive l'Anarchie
A very important but not reminded album

Control and Resistance
Watchtower
Manufacturer: Noise
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music

General | Rock | Styles | Music

Progressive Metal | Progressive | Rock | Styles | Music

General | Hard Rock & Metal | Styles | Music

Thrash & Speed Metal | Hard Rock & Metal | Styles | Music

Pop Rock | Pop | Styles | Music
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ASIN: B00009KU6B
Release Date: 2003-08-12

Tracks:

Instruments of Random Murder
Eldritch
Mayday in Kiev
Fall of Reason
Control and Resistance
Hidden Instincts
Life Cycles
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Customer Reviews:

Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD..........2006-02-19

Utterly unlistenable. This is cold, clinical and embarrassing in its excess. Please understand, I am a huge fan of Rush, Dream Theater, Fates Warning, fusion (Holdsworth, DiMeola, Scofield, Tribal Tech, etc...), Shrapnel Records shred fests... the whole thing.

So why the 1 star review? Watchtower, at least on this record, made something so progressive that it hit an evolutionary dead end. Like a two-headed fish, it not only couldn't survive, but it had no real usefulness except to marvel at and think, "There but for the grace of God (and good taste) go I."

The lyrics are wince-inducing, are so on-the-nose I had to have rhinoplasty after hearing "Control and Resistance". My shredder friends who attended Musicians Institute with me used to sit around listening to this album as an example of what could happen if pure chops were pursued as if they were the only thing that mattered.

Songs? Bah! What use have the mighty instrumental warriors of Watchtower for something as simple and condescending as songs?!? Let mere mortals observe our masturbatory glory in all its larger than life excess and then tell us what use have they for something as quaint as recognizable structure, as backwards as an easily-grasped melody or as populist as a musical interlude that does not feature every note known to Western man played at least a dozen times per bar! All hail us, Watchtower!!!

Sorry, this self-indulgent stuff really desrves to be both admired for its single-minded, serious-to-the-point-of-unintentional-humor adherence to an obscure aesthetic and mocked mercilessly for the amazing self-indulgence and all around dorkiness of its execution.

Listen to this CD at least once if you love anything that can vaguely be described as "progressive" anything, but don't be afraid to laugh at it. And pray that these guys have found girlfriends since then so they never again spend 12 hours a day practicing with a metronome.

so this is where it came from..........2004-04-07

a few years ago, i discovered this band called Spiral Architect. i immediately fell in love with them. the complex arrangements, the brilliant vocals, and above all the mind-blowing basslines stole my heart upon the very first listen. its what i always wanted to hear: a balanced mixture of fusion and progressive metal. i had never heard anyone like these guys, they were totally original...

...until i discovered watchtower a few months ago. for the record, Spiral Architect ripped off Watchtower for every good idea they had. i was shocked upon my first listen of Control & Resistance. it sounded EXACTLY like Sprial Architect! well, technically Spiral Architect sounded exactly like Watchtower, but whatever...

i just couldnt believe it. these guys were doing it 13-14 years before Spiral architect ever thought about it. ok, enough about this...

about the album. the album is spectacular. for guys like me, its an extremely satisfying listen. fusion chops, prog metal leanings, it really doesnt get much better.

watchtower is my all time favorite progressive metal band, and Control & Resistance is my favorite progressive metal album, bar none. absolutely classic.

You call this MUSIC?! This SUCKS!.......2004-04-06

Do you mean to tell me people actually listen to this noise?! So what the guys shred their guitars, what does it matter when the songs sound like complete chaotic crap? Ever heard of a little thing called a melody? A song needs one in order to exist. Obviously these guys never picked that up.
Look, I've been listening to heavy metal for over 12 years now, I listen to everything from thrash to death to glam, even a little punk rock. I've never heard anything as UN-LISTENABLE as this. It's just a chaotic mess! Sepultura's first album had 10 times as much melody as this and anyone thats ever heard that album knows what kind of a JOKE that is.
Don't be fooled by people sitting there going: "this is pure technical progressive metal" or "wow, these guys can really play". This album is the worst sounding rock album I've ever bought. Don't get me wrong these guys know how to play their guitars real fast and stuff. But that isn't the same thing as making a song. This is @#$%!!!!

Vive l'Anarchie.......2004-04-01

There may never be another band like Austin's Watchtower. In the wasteland of hairband excess of the 1980s, Watchtower was an oasis of intelligence, talent, and imagination. Nowhere to be found were the idiotic lyrics about sex, cars, and getting drunk. The disingenious 3-chord riffs were MIA. In their place were thought-provoking social commentary and musicianship that was unheard of since the heyday of Yes. Here was a band who combined the heaviness and intensity of thrash metal with the musical sophistication of jazz fusion. Even though they wouldn't exactly dominate the charts, they would be a role model for other amazing bands like Dream Theater, Cynic, Death, Dillinger Escape Plan, and Spiral Architect.

Control and Resistance is Watchtower's second album, after the 1986 debut Energetic Disassembly. Their first vocalist Jason McMaster would leave to join the more commercially accessable Dangerous Toys, and Hades frontman Alan Tecchio would take McMaster's place. Guitarist Billy White would be replaced by ultrashredder Ron Jarzombeck. Jarzombeck's playing sounded like a mad-scientist trying to create his own idea of the perfect guitar player by kidnapping Yngwie Malmsteen, Dave Mustaine, Carl Stalling, and Allan Holdsworth- then trying to fuse them all into one person. Doug Keyser was better suited for funk or fusion - Who needed him when you had bass maestros like Nikki Sixx who just strummed along with the australopithecine guitar chord progressions? Just joking - Keyser laid down a funky groove that made things far more interesting. Rick Colaluca ,in my opinion, was the Neil Peart of the speed metal generation. When so thrash metal drummers were saying, "Look at me, I can play 250 beats per minute.", Colaluca was exploring polyrhythms and odd time signatures that Lars Ulrich will never understand if he lives to be 150. Finally Tecchio sang with the melodicism of a NWOBHM vocalist and the manic energy of a punk singer, with a healthy dose of paranoia.

Lyrically, the songs may seem a little dated because they dealt with 1980s social concerns. "Instruments of Random Murder" is about the aspirin poisonings of the 1980s. "Mayday in Kiev" is about the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, and the unsuccessful and cowardly attempts by the then existing Soviet government to cover the incident up. "The Fall of Reason" is an anti-war song, a theme that was popular during the Reagan years.

Even if it didn't exactly set the world afire, Control and Resistance came out at a time when rock music was (and still is) in desperate need of a brain transplant. It lacked the support of eMpTyV, radio, and the major labels. But what it did have was some pretty good word of mouth. People, the few who heard it, who liked the album REALLY liked it. The good word of mouth is still circulating. When millions look back at the likes of Poison, New Kids on the Block, Hanson, Warrant, and Oasis; they hang their heads in embarrassment and say to themselves, "Oh Dear Lord, I used to listen to that." Then you have the thousands who listen to Watchtower and hold their heads high. Even more proof not to follow the hive mind.

A very important but not reminded album.......2004-01-07

This album simply was ahead of its time, maybe because Ron Jarzombek was. Most of the complaints go for the vocals, but if you pay attention, the harmony requires those notes. While Metallica felt like thrash metal was over, Watchtower re-created it and made it more complex and giving the foundation to a new genre: technical metal. Bands that followed Watchtower were Cynic, Sieges Even, Spiral Architect and others. The drumming is quite complicated and the bass lines remind me of Fusion pizzicattos. Excelente choice if you like Technical thrash
metal!

Average customer rating:

The Resistance
Jahson
Manufacturer: Mission Control
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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Average customer rating:

Control and Resistance
Watchtower
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Binding: Audio CD

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ASIN: B000M2X0WG

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Out of print, original 1st pressing from Japan on the Victor Japan label. Catalog: VICP-8006. Out of print in Japan since 1991. Featuring legend Alan Tecchio on lead vocals (later with Non-Fiction, and in 1993, with Power (Justice of fire).

Average customer rating:

Took a while to appreciate its beauty...
Intense, stupendous...

Control and Resistance
Rich Woodson's Ellipsis
Manufacturer: Cuneiform
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

Avant Garde & Free Jazz | Jazz | Styles | Music

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Vulgarity In Lieu Of Nothing Else
Teargash

Amazon.com

Guitarist-composer Rich Woodson spent his formative years playing in Austin, Texas, rock bands, but that background doesn't immediately come to mind in the debut of his band Ellipsis. Instead, it's a tight collection of players from New York's Downtown scene, schooled in free jazz and adept at wending their way through PoMo mysteries. They're well-suited to Woodson's music, an oblique mix of jazz and rock sonorities wedded to an original structural methodology. Each of his pieces here is a sudden complex of elements, a patchwork of shifting beats and motifs that creates its own logic. Tension figures build only to suddenly stop; distorted guitar is matched with bowed bass; moments of rare lyricism are jolted by anarchic bursts. In fact, the pieces are a lot like their titles, perverse weddings of the routine and the bizarre, invocations of a world where chaos and repression leisurely walk hand in hand. The band includes saxophonists Aaron Stewart and Peter Epstein, bassist Mat Fieldes, and drummer John Hollenbeck, and they do a brilliant job of making the parts fit together, blurring the lines between the composed, the conducted, and the spontaneous. Woodson has cited the influence of saxophonist Tim Berne, composer Charles Wuorinen, and rock bad boy Frank Zappa, and listeners will likely add Captain Beefheart's Magic Band to the list, but Woodson's an original. With Ellipsis, he's assembled a fine instrument for realizing his vision. --Stuart Broomer

Customer Reviews:

Took a while to appreciate its beauty..........2006-10-04

But beautiful it is, and completely absorbing, even when it is dense and dissonent (which is most of the time!). Fans of Henry Cow or Zappa, or anyone else interested in something different and highly rewarding, should not hesitate to acquire this gem.

Intense, stupendous..........2001-06-27

I've listened to this record more times than I can count, and it always pleases and surprises. Although parallels have been mentioned by reviewers, Rich Woodson is a composer all his own.

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