Rolling 2004 Metal Thread

msp if you dig "The Beautiful Sounds of Lickgoldensky" just wait 'til you hear their next stuff...holy God is it focused

sleepytime gorilla museum is really good. sort of us maple meets mr bungle/faith no more. heavy, but quirky. very knowledgeable and/or talented musicians are behind it. (the band seems made up of avant musicians from the bay area... mills college has connections i know. aka, where fred frith is a professor.)

m.

GOATSNAKE are coming back, which is excellent to know.

Whoa. Well, I'm intrigued now -- what does the cover get right that the original might get wrong?

Heh. *checks which track* "The Evil That Men Do," I have to say that's not a Maiden track that sticks with me much, so maybe the cover will make it more memorable.

What, exactly, am i missing here?

It's a younger band?

Except for the Meat Puppets on your list I really don't hear LGS as belonging in that group: Neurosis, Meshuggah, DEP, Prong et al. are all really math-y, you can practically hear 'em goin' "ok we've done that riff thirteen times, now switch to the 5/4 section." LGS are just way more interested in messing around with sound (esp. than Neurosis who unless I misremeber recorded their last one at Electrical = they are not at all interested in messing around with sound-as-such), mastering, production - and also image, which maybe shouldn't be an issue & maybe should. There's a big-burly-guy aspect of Neurosis/Meshuggah/the End/all-Primsesque-metalcore-stuff that's totally absent from LGS, who are more like a pop Melt-Banana (esp. on the new one which has some really fucked up pop aspects to it).

I dunno, I am a big LGS evangelist, they seem to actually rock where Converge, Isis, etc. etc. etc. just sorta lurched.

I haven't made it through the whole Relapse DVD, either, but that's because I don't care enough about Bongzilla or Alabama Thunderpussy (or Dillinger Escape Plan or Today Is The Day) to watch their performances. High On Fire's section is great, as is Neurosis's, and I liked Burnt By The Sun (and, as I mentioned, Dysrhythmia). Pig Destroyer disappointed me (because I heard they finished early, and Agoraphobic Nosebleed finished out the set-time with their so-far-only-ever live appearance, and it wasn't included on the DVD).

xpost (I meant what else I'd put on if I wanted to be rocked...)

Isis more interesting, you're right, I shouldn't tar them with the same brush.

x-post Burnt By the Sun is pretty good, yeah

what are they doing then?

the lgs with the flower on the cover wasn't mind-blowing or anything. not anything that tremendously broke molds... but i thought as far as songwriting goes it was better than some other stuff that i've heard recently. less one trick pony. more angular. more industrial by way of psychedelic. (see the last track that's nearly as long as half the incredibly short album.)

or maybe it was just new. who knows?
m.

Jumping up and down in place and yelling really loud, mostly. With their hands in their pockets. And a javelin up their ass. (And sometimes laying on the floor and beating their hands on the lineoleum floor 'cause Mom won't give them any more Pepsi.)

Anyway, here's what Dave Queen wrote about Pelican; I (obviously?) like where he says instro-stoner metal reminds him of dub:

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0402/queen.php

A little less, actually, but I'm still pissed off about it. In the end, Eyehategod were incredible, and Unsane royally royally sucked.

Also, I hung out with Jimmy Bower one night at CBGBs (Eyehategod and Soilent Green and BuzzOv'en and some other bands were playing, but EHG had one of their roadies on vocals because Williams was in jail or something), and he was wearing the greatest hat I've ever seen. It was a black baseball cap with a pentagram (w/goat's head) on the front, and below the pentagram it said "The New South." I've coveted that hat since that night.

xpost EHG live gave off the most evil bad-feeling something-shitty's-gonna-happen-any-minute-now vibe of any band I've ever seen except for Whitehouse - magnificent, and some of the best audience-baiting ever

...and their songs flow together in the mire like DJ sets. I wasn't too impressed, though, the very first time I saw them, in New Orleans in '94. We kept going across the street to watch New Birth Brass Band, the little brothers of Rebirth. Awesome. Came back between sets, and horror writer Nancy Collins was onstage punching Mike in the head, while the rest of the band called her a bitch. Par for the course. When EHG grew up musically, they were greatness.

...but the bad vibes permeate New Orleans. Soilent Green bassist Scott Williams was just murdered Monday night.

I've defended Children of Bodom

It's not so bad, for a band named after a cafe press. I'd recommend the Norther album Death Unlimited, on Spinefarm, to anyone enamored of this melodic death-thresh sound.

This is the first I've heard about Williams. That's too bad. I never liked the band much, but still.

They're unofficial reprints. Mutilation doesn't do more than a couple hundred copies and refuses to do official repressings.

I think all these bands would have done better had they cut the cheese and reliance on the say-so of Hollywood types and tried bribing people into letting them onto Outlaws and Skynyrd tours. Artful Dodger went that way and they wound up with a couple of good records and a reputation.

What's most entertaining is to see how American and mechanical the treatment of a band like Busted is. It's obvious the label employees believe in pop music, or hard rock, or whatever, as an equation to be solved simply by arranging the right inputs and outputs and balancing them.

It's nasty and a joy to watch other people come a cropper by it. The Busted guys can sit there and watch as their careers are taken in thirty seconds, analyzed according to theoretical demographic, and ground into packets of Lik-M-Aid. (Which, by the way, comes with the Mr. Wonka?! CD-Rs.) In their old age they will still be able to precisely map when they became fucked. Yep, it was when they said nothing as the chick at the big table scheduled 'em for that TV show where Cocoa Marsh is dumped on heads.

Well, things could be worse. You could always be in a Kiss, Judas Priest or Queen tribute band, which is what I learned from the absolutely awful documentary, "Tribute." Watching "Tribute" was right up there with going to the eye doctor to have a chelazion in your bottom eyelid cauterized. It was too much about sadism/masochism rationalized as a way to earn some money off rock and roll. You get to be Kiss without any of the benefits or, actually, Wicked Lester.
You get to put on faux Kiss duds (or faux Judas priest) and make-up
(how good it looks dependent on your limited budget,) play the Kiss songs you're sick of in small dives for really drunk men. If there are any women involved, it's only one or two with grey tattoos and all their teeth knocked out from years of amphetamines abuse. Finally, you "get lucky" in the sense that someone with a video camera puts you onscreen on cable, like that series about whores at some street corner in one of the outer boroughs of NYC.

Get slowly driven mad until you quit, have a nervous breakdown that results in a transformation into a religious zealot.

Precision Sound Releases "Demonic - Voices from Hell" Sample Collection

From the darkest areas of human vocal art comes a new 158-file, 24-bit Mono WAV format collection of "Growls", "Screams" and "Words". All WAV files has also been mapped for HALion & Kontakt for easy access if you working with these samplers.

Demonic - Voices from hell offers unprocessed performances from professional singers in the darker heavy metal genres. The collection contains staccato and long growls, hi and lo in different "tonal colors" and lengths, screams and demonic words.

For more information, visit their web site at

http://www.precisionsound.net