Metallica †free essay sample

Five years after the release of â€Å"St. Anger,† thrash metal band Metallica has released a new album, â€Å"Death Magnetic.† When making it, Metallica chose to go back to their roots and create an album that was thrash metal, rather than heavy metal or hard rock. The biggest improvements this CD has made over â€Å"St. Anger† are a better snare drum that does not sound like a tin can, the inclusion of guitar  ­solos, and vastly improved  ­production. Metallica has chosen to play more complex, multi-layered songs, as seen in their 1988 release â€Å"†¦ And Justice For All.† The album is also structured like their 1980s releases and even includes their first instrumental in 20 years. Most of the songs are fast, but they never get to the point where they become just noise. The first single, â€Å"The Day that Never Comes,† follows the same formula as their 1980s power ballads, starting slowly and melodically, but finishing fast and strong. We will write a custom essay sample on Metallica – or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page This is the first album that bass player Robert Trujillo has contributed on, and his influence shows. Trujillo plays a style akin to Cliff Burton, Metallicas former bassist who was tragically killed in a bus accident over 20 years ago, who was arguably the most influential member of Metallica during the 1980s. â€Å"Death Magnetic† also represents another first for Metallica: Each member of the band contributed to every song. In the end this is a vast improvement over â€Å"St. Anger† and shows that even after 25 years, Metallica still has what it takes to make fast, aggressive music.

The True Story of Spit McPhee Character Profile essays

The True Story of Spit McPhee Character Profile essays Angus McPhee is the main character the the text and is commonly known as Spit McPhee. He is 10 years-old when he is introduced into the book. When Spit arrived in St Helen, he was 5 years-old and immediately copied his grandfather in every way including his course and crude language. He shouted aggressively because Fyfe did, and he spat (or tried to) in imitation of Fyfes frequent and noisy spitting, owing to smoking a short cubby pipe. Inevitably, Angus was known as Spit, and it was a nickname he didnt mind. Angus would spit dryly and forcefully to state his position. By the end of his first summer, Spit was a brown, bare-legged, barefoot copy of his grandfather, who never seemed to restrain him. Spit was left free to wander wherever he liked. Spit was a very good swimmer and in a few days the river became his secret home. A key moment for Spit during the opening chapters is his connection with Sadie Tree; a quiet and clever girl who watched everything, saw everything and said so little that very few girls her age even noticed her. It was at the Little Murray that Spit formed a friendship with Sadie. Spits passion for watching the currents and sending boats along the river carrying messages to unknown destinations, often took him along the bank downstream to pass by the Trees house. He loved to guess or calculate the complex twists and turns in the currents and eddies, or puzzle over the reasons for their endless variety. One day, when he was absorbed by one of his little boats, he heard a voice behind him, which told him where his little boats always ended. This is how they met. They sent messages to each other on the river, and he realized that his private and imaginative world had been penetrated, and he now had a companion. Besides his grandfather and Sadie, Spit had very little contact with the other towns-people. Spit is afraid of nothing and nobody, which clearly intimidates most of S...

How does the postmodern picturebook set out to capture both the adult Essay

How does the postmodern picturebook set out to capture both the adult and the child reader's interest - Essay Example This paper examines two postmodern children’s picture books, Voices in the Park, and The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Fairy Tales, and explains four techniques that they use to capture both the adult and the child reader’s interest, namely non-traditional plot structure, shifting character perspective, paratextual devices, and intertextual references. The postmodern children’s picture book does not exist in a vacuum, but follows a long history of writing and illustrating which goes back many centuries. It sets itself against the rather rigid traditional stories such as fables and fairy tales, which usually have an anonymous narrator who leads the reader along a steady chronological timeline through a single plot with key characters who play fairly predictable roles. Children and adults alike enjoy the comfortable framework that is provided, and there are conventions like a â€Å"once upon a time† beginning, some thrills and spills with good an d bad characters in the middle, and a nice, neat â€Å"happy ending† in which all the loose ends of the plot are tied up. A postmodern children’s picture book relies upon this framework too, but in a different way. Instead of following these predictable patterns, it springs outside them and introduces different narrative voices and non-chronological structures to mix things up and make the story multifaceted. A good example of this is Voice in the Park which tells four stories in succession, all of which refer to the same actual time frame. No one narrative voice is dominant, and the perspectives of mother figure, father figure, girl figure and boy figure are allowed to coexist, even though they do not exactly agree with each other. Portraying them as gorillas is a clever technique which echoes older traditions of anthropomorphism but at the same time forces modern readers out of any race or class stereotypes: age and gender are what distinguish the characters, and the re is an equal number of each. There is no single plot in this book, but instead there is a spell of time in a park in which four people meet, and the book presents this from four different angles. In The Stinky Cheeseman there is a single narrator, who is the â€Å"Jack† character from the well-known fairy tale â€Å"Jack and the Beanstalk† but he appears in the book outside the confines of his own story, and interacts with characters from other tales such as the Little Red Hen and Little Red Riding Hood. None of the characters in the stories agree to play along with the original plotlines that adults especially will have learned, and the result is a kaleidoscope of fairy tale elements turned upside down. There are short tales within a tale, but the boundaries are fluid and characters appear in stories where they traditionally do not belong, all of which indicates a postmodern playfulness. The narrator is not in control of the stories, and the characters run amok. Thi s is an example of metafiction (Pantaleo, 2004, p. 213) because it draws attention to how the story is put together. This in turn stimulates discussion between readers about both the content of the story and the whole process of story formation, reading, listening and understanding. Returning to Voices in the Park, this book adult and child personas to engage both adult and child interest. Adults will be able to identify with the mother figure, criticising the