Queens of the Stone Age with Chelsea Wolfe at the the Fillmore Miami Beach February 5, 2014

First time I'd been to the Fillmore and first time I'd seen QOTSA. Sometime during the show, Josh Homme said that it'd been 11 years since the band had played South Florida, which means that the last time they played in the land of bikini waxings and easy Oxycontin, I knew nothing of them . . . or of Kyuss, if you can believe that.

It was a long time ago. Never mind that I'm pushing 50, Josh Homme just turned 40.

Well, it's good that some things don't change. Except for a lame ballad or two (which, unfortunately, the band wasted precious set time with last night), QOTSA's still fairly new . . . Like Clockwork is chock full of the same robot rock that the band has always played. And the show amply demonstrated that Queens, whatever its current personnel, is still very able to pound that groove into your head over and over and over.

It's a wonderful thing, even if the coming back to South Florida thing was an afterthought. When the tour to support . . . Like Clockwork was first announced back in June, South Florida was not included.

Support for the first leg of the tour was provided by British post-punk revivialists Savages, but when the tour expanded into 2014 and to include Miami (hooray!), the backing band named for the second leg was Chelsea Wolfe.

It wasn't quite as bad as when the second leg of Nine Inch Nails' recent US tour switched support from Godspeed You Black Emperor! to Gary Numan, but I would have liked to have seen Savages play, and I certainly had never heard of Chelsea Wolfe.

While there's certainly nothing new or exciting about the goth-chick schtick she's got going, I thought her set was nevertheless interesting. Wolfe sang and played guitar on songs that had an electronic pulse, but seemed to have their backbone in noise and old-style reverb. Not all of the tunes overcame a certain melodrama, but enough did for me to buy her most recent album--Pain is Beauty, natch--during the intermission. My initial listen is making me think that Wolfe's set was heavier, and better, than her record.

Something about "Keep Your Eyes Peeled"--maybe it's the pots and pans intro, maybe it's the midtemponess, or maybe it's just that it's the first song on the new album--made me think in the days running up to the concert that it would be the show-opener for Queens.

It wasn't. "You Think I Ain't Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire" did the honors. And good enough; it's as representative of the bands pound-the-groove approach as anything else. But, turns out, my imagined highlight wasn't even played. And a few other songs I would have liked to have heard--the songs that I feel pound you the hardest--were missing as well. No "Battery Acid." No "I'm Designer". No "Everyone Knows That You're Insane."

That they missed great stuff is indicative of the deep catalog they have built. You maybe--I maybe--may not have realized just how many good songs QOTSA has.

• "Little Sister
• "Sick Sick Sick"
• "Burn the Witch"
• "Go With The Flow"
• "Better Living With Chemistry"
• and let's include the new "If I Had A Tail" coz it's fucking great, you know it is

They played all these. But I do wish--especially considering they were pretty much obligated to play "Make It Wit Chu"--they'd skipped a couple of Clockwork's power ballads. They did "The Vampyre of Time and Memory" (the best one of the bunch) and "Kalopsia" and the title track to the new record, and it was too much schmaltz for a band that's about driving straight ahead hard rock, too much, frankly, for a band that decided to skip "Battery Acid."

One thing I did learn with all the the power-ballads being played, and I'm glad in this weird cynical way that I did, is that these kids these days, they still do the stupid lighter thing during the power ballads.

They still do the lighter thing, and they also as you know spend the entire show taking video with their phones, but they also don't move that much. Or at least they don't at Queens of the Stone Age. Josh Homme--again, 40 years old--spent the night dancing with his guitar. Yours truly, nearly half a century on this tiring tired globe, spent the entire show dancing spastically, banging his head, and strumming his air guitar. I worked up quite a sweat there in row five as I looked out over the groundlings who never once formed a pit.

Metal up your ass, kiddies, and get off my lawn!

Explosions in the Sky - "The Birth and Death of the Day" from the CD All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone

I posted something at my Tumblr about the Explosions in the Sky gig I went to last night, and by the time I was done with it, I realized the piece was long enough to post here

Explosions.

I don’t know about you, but there are really three places where I listen to music: on my 45-minute drives to and from work, while doing the grocery shopping, and while bopping around the house on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon.

The point is, always I’ve got time to kill when listening. I don’t mind your expansiveness of concept right then. In fact I welcome it, You wanna take 20 minutes to do your Impressions of the Revealing Science of God? Great. Want to stretch out and use 19 minutes to paint me a picture of Swastika Girls? Kick-ass, I’ve got time.

It may seem incongruous to describe Explosions in the Sky as driving music, but I think that’s exactly what they are. They start with this tiny, quiet smidgen of a lyrical idea, and then keep piling on to it. Fifteen minutes later, the band is indeed exploding.

But you gotta have that fifteen minutes. If you”re in and out of the shop, let’s say, like I am at work, you either catch the beginning or catch the end, but not both. And the beginning makes the end, and vice versa.

While it seems that much of the (very large) audience last night knew EITS’ music better than I did, I still noticed something interesting: the cheers, when they came, were typically not at the end of the songs, but rather at the end of the explosions. Many of their songs have quiet codas reprising the beginnings, and several times last night I couldn’t hear these soft endpoints ‘cause the crowd was going nuts.

To me, that says that the crowd was there for the crescendos. Hell, the crescendos were what I was there for. Their crescendoes are awesome. But I also found myself at times kind of waiting around for them. The buildups that seem like necessary world-building while I’m driving seemed kind of interminable while I was standing on my tired and achy dogs in the packed and sweaty performance space.

Nothing to be done for it, not really. That is the kind of music Explosions in the Sky makes. They can’t cut it down or edit it, at least I don’t think they should. They and we just have to live with it: The music’s integrity relies on parts that don’t translate as well in a live situation.

On the other hand: When they had it going, the racket they made was as powerful as anything I’ve ever heard in my life. I say that even though I’ve seen Sonic Youth three times. I once saw a unknown band named Polline’ open up for the Mercury Program and I had thought that the capstone to their show was as unholy a noise as I was ever likely to hear. Explosions equalled if not surpassed it.

And they are like Sonic Youth, because when they get going, you’re not sure that everything you’re hearing is actually there, if you know what I mean. Everything is swirling so quickly and so loudly that your mind is a little unsure of how to process it all, and sometimes it makes things up to fill in the gaps. It can be audio pareidolia: you hear bells and voices and whistles and other non-existent aural patterns amidst the buzzsaws.

Or maybe they’re there after all. . . .

Anyway, in a nutshell, put up with the boring soft parts, as the loud parts are fucking incredible with this band.

The other thing that needs to be said is that Explosions thrash around. Mightily. Nearly spastic Michael James was dripping sweat five minutes into the show. All three guitarists are out of control at various points, sometimes all three of them at once. It was a joy to see them so very much into the music, and let's single out Munaf Rayani as a man who Pete Townsend could take to heart for the abuse he dishes out to his Fender.

And yo, loved the Texas flag draped over the amplifier.

Explosions in the Sky - All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone - 01 The Birth and Death of the Day.mp3

File under: Driving Music

The Psychedelic Furs - "Dumb Waiters" from the CD Talk Talk Talk

So the U2 360° tour passed through town Wednesday. I was not at Sun Life Stadium for the event, nor had I wished to be.

I have instead put my measly weekly discretionary income aside for The Psychedelic Furs, who are playing The Culture Room tonight.

If I were looking for the authentic concert experience, and why wouldn't I be, then it probably should have been the U2 show I steered myself toward. After all, U2 released a new album of original material as recently as two years ago, and they are touring of course with a lineup composed entirely of original members.

Taking a quick look at the Psych Furs' Wikipedia page and at the band's own site, I see that the last time the Furs released a new album of original material, it was 1991, and that only two out of six in the current touring lineup were onhand 31 years ago for the debut elpee.

Consider that tickets to the U2 show could have been had for as little as thirty bucks, and that The Culture Room is asking 25 tonight, and I appear to have allocated my time and my money somewhat rashly.

The question, then, almost assaults you in its eagerness to be formed: Why would I wanna go see some nostalgia band when for almost the same dough I could have gone to see something that is continuing to evolve?

Well, the smartass answer to that question is simply that I don't like what U2 is evolving into.

Seriously, I liked the Irish blokes in the '80's, when Bono 'n' The Edge 'n' Adam Clayton 'n' Larry Mullen basically copyrighted the angular postpunk pop anthem. But their music in the nineties and in the aughts moved away from that sound, into some kind of nethergroove I don't get, and I chose--rightly I think--not to follow.

And if The Psychedelic Furs have stopped evolving because they've stopped producing original music, maybe the most important upshot of that is that they stopped growing at a place where I still liked them.

The Furs' site says that their current set of dates is the "Talk Talk Talk 30th Anniversary Tour," and though I don't know if any Furs album is the complete masterpiece that would truly deserve such honorifics, I still think the fact that they'll be playing their second album in order tonight, in its entirety, is pretty cool.

Even if John Ashton and Vince Ely and Duncan Kilburn won't be some of the ones playing it.

* * * * * * * *

I see, as they are fond of saying on the internet, what I did there. After spending two days writing condescendingly about the nostalgia process and the way it replaces critical listening, I lay down some bullshit that suggests nostalgia's OK when I choose to invoke it.

Guilty, I suppose.

This won't be the first time I've seen The Psychedelic Furs, as it happens. I think it was 1987 and the band was touring off Midnight to Midnight. If that album wasn't the band's artistic height, it was certainly the height of their success, and its promo tour came to the fancy-ass James L Knight Center at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Miami.

I remember that the newest AOR station in town at the time, WGTR, was sponsoring the thing, their personnel as they raised the banners and introduced the show blithely ignoring the sad fact that the station featured none of The Furs' music in their daily playlists. The station had brought along their two-and-a-half storey inflatable guitar-playing monkey, and had tried to raise it outside the hall, but it, fittingly and pathetically both, was in a sad state, non compos erectus, I guess you could say.

Maybe it was because of the ringtail radio station or that monkey or the sad truth that once I got inside, I was completely sober. But despite the fact that the show was well-played, and well-engineered, with no glaring mistakes of performance or of sound, I left the show a little bit annoyed.

I think it was mostly the lighting. The band had a huge glitzy sign that swung forward at louder moments, practically illuminating the entire hall in faceted diamond light, and the whole thing looked and felt so Hollywood and so mechanical to me. It sure as fuck didn't feel like the Psychedelic Furs, who had always seemed much darker, much smokier, much more noir than all that gaudy rockstar bullshit.

I think Richard Butler will tell you now that Midnight to Midnight was the closest his band came to a sellout album, and would agree if you told him the album was his band's most blatant attempt to enter the mainstream. And I guess I just found some measure of offense in the way that the lighting and the stage show were so blatantly mainstream, as well. I was, like, I'm not sure who told these guys they were stars, but . . . .

Anyway, the Culture Room, while having made some improvements over the past few years, is still a hot and sweaty dive and a major fire trap, to boot. Maybe a better name for the band I'll be seeing tonight would be "The Butler Brothers Plus a Few Guys Who Played On Midnight to Midnight." But let's not quibble. If I can be pardoned for reaching back into my past, three quarters of the reason I'm taking the plunge this eve is that I'm hoping maybe tonight I'll see the Psychedelic Furs as they should be seen.

File Under: Concerts That Rastro Went To

Steve Miller Band - "Mercury Blues" from the LP Fly Like an Eagle

Went out to the ballpark last night and saw Stevie Guitar Miller.

It's not too odd these days for major league teams looking for a boost to their attendance to host concerts by those on the nostalgia circuit after Friday or Saturday night games. And the Marlins I guess are a little more active on this front than some of their competition, other than considering the makeup of the area, half the shows they sponsor are salsa acts.

But last night was for the Anglos, and longtime readers who know I'm a Steve Miller fan should only be slightly surprised that I took Schfrank and Cerveza up on the opportunity presented when they invited me to the game.

In one sense, of course, a Steve Miller concert might be among the events I'd be least expected to attend. While a time machine or some other method of delivery to the late '60's would be greeted enthusiastically, as it would allow me to witness the band's set at Monterey Pop, the last thing I'm about when it comes to music is the warm and fuzzy feeling of nostalgia. I'd rather be challenged with something new or at the least old and obscure than hear the number one hit yet again. So what if they played "All the Young Dudes" at my high school's prom?

I wasn't even fucking there.

And yet, to me, Miller's formidable body of work prior to his mid-seventies' career peak makes him something of a titan--no-one from San Francisco was better, and no-one anywhere played a slow blues the way Miller could. And Miller might be a nostalgia act at this point, but he DOES have a new album out, and it IS good. It's called Bingo!, and it nods more in the directions of his late '60's work than his mid '70's stuff, being a collection of R & B and blues covers.

And while recognizing it unlikely that someone playing after a ballgame in Miami would stretch out and play their old and obscure psychedelic blues or their new and obscure R & B stuff in lieu of their massive radio hits remembered as tokens of their youth by the upper-middle class suburbanites who attend a ballgame in Miami in the first place, what clinched it for me is that I actually LIKE a lot of the radio hits.

Why, just the other week, I added "Take the Money and Run" to my iTunes after hearing it on the classic rock station during the three or four days when Jr. was dead but III had not yet arrived. Still love the way he rhymes "Texas" and "facts is" and "taxes." I was even telling Carlos the warehouse kid about how great those lines are . . . . though Schfrank would express a contrary opinion during the show.

So, fuck yeah, reservations be damned, let's go, Steve Miller, the Space Cowboy, the Gangster of Love, even though in all likelihood, he wouldn't actually be playing the songs which gave him those nicknames.

I got there early, and saw all the ballgame, and let me tell you this: Do not go to a ballgame in late September in which both teams have been eliminated, unless they've got some kind of a concert afterwards. The Marlins (long since eliminated from the playoffs) faced the Pirates (the worst team in baseball, v. 2010), and if it's possible to play a game in a more lethargic and less energetic manner, I don't wanna know about it. Marlins won 2 - 0 in perhaps the most boring game I have ever personally witnessed.

But hey! No worries! After a short fireworks show, it's Stevie Guitar Miller!

Let me say before proceeding that Miller looked good for a 67-year old man. Grey to be sure, but spry and still flexible in the fingers where it matters. His voice was more hit-and-miss, though, but what are you gonna do?

First song was "Jet Airliner"--no surprises there. But the second was "Mercury Blues" and that was a little surprising, especially in that Miller played it more in the country style of Alan Jackson's # 1 hit version than of the primo blues version he himself had released on Fly Like an Eagle. It also seemed to me that Miller was singing "Crazy about a Mercury Ford."

Weird, right? Turns out that right around when Jackson recorded the song and allowed Ford to use it to sell their pickup trucks in the early '90's Ford Motor Company actually bought the rights to the tune from the estate of KC Douglas or whomever. Now, no company anywhere no matter what rights they own can dictate the lyrics to a song performed live in concert, but--given that Miller conducted his own business transaction with Ford when he allowed the guitar intro to "Swingtown" to be played over commercials hawking the Ford Mustang in exchange for some Ford-built tractors--I have to wonder whether Miller has maybe cut another deal with Ford to sing the song that way in his appearances.

That's another one of the things about the nostalgia circuit, I guess: you can't ever pretend it's not about the money.

Miller would also go on to play a rather boring version of "Swingtown," though if Miller considered rewriting the lyrics to mention FoMoCo, he ultimately passed on the opportunity.

"Swingtown" was probably the least inspired tune Miller did, but later in the show came a song that he historically has failed to render properly. Back in the '80's, after "Abracadabra" had hit, Miller put out the Steve Miller Band Live! LP, and I remember being turned off to its eventual purchase by the video for "Living in the USA," which--recorded in Vegas or wherever in 1983--totally and absolutely failed to capture the groove it had on Miller's classic Sailor LP from 1968.

Twenty-five years later, with Sailor bandmates Boz Scaggs and Lonnie Turner and Tim Davis just as absent as they'd been in '83, it is kind of reassuring to me that Miller still can't get his old song right. And I won't hold it against him that he dedicated a song about the inauthenticity of a plastic land to our soldiers in Afghanistan, not given his audience for the evening, but I'm pretty sure he can't have meant that.

It might seem like this review is going in a certain direction, but let me nip that in the bud. If the "Mercury Blues" thing made "Swingtown" sound a little funny, or if the message on "Living in the USA" was a little garbled, that was it. Miller was never cheesy, always played and sang entusiastically, and rather smoked on the guitar. For me, the highlights of the show were when Miller took his solos. For example, I never much cared for "Abracadabra," but the version played Saturday night jammed. Miller's solo work was muscular throughout, and side deals or no, you can tell he loves playing the instrument.

And he played two songs from Bingo!, too, and got decent if not overwhelming responses, as well. I was glad to see that.

The show was hardly perfect, but regardless of the flaws, I had a damned good time. In saying goodnight, Miller asked to be invited back when the Marlins open their new stadium in 2012. I'll say this: if the team does invite him back, they can count on at least one fanny in their seats, even if it's a late season game without any playoff implications at all.




File under: Blues Rock, Concerts rastro went to

A Florida Heavy Metal Freakout: Four Songs and More Links

I've been spending most of my time over the last couple weeks converting my baseball card website from one that's powered by manually written HTML to one that will be powered by PHP and a MySQL database. I haven't actually written all that much PHP; all my time thus far has been spent writing and then employing these little Excel and javascript widgets that help me distill the HTML I have into a comma-delimited text file that the SQL server can understand.

I enjoy the coding, one 'cause you're sort of on the hunt after something that will actually fucking work, and two because at no point during the programming do I ever think, "Ack! What am I going to WRITE?"

Which brings us back to this recently-fallow blog. Not saying I won't write next weekend, but, y'know, if you don't see anything here, you'll know what I'm doing.

I did kind of feel obligated to write today before the rest of the weekend slips away, in a perhaps futile effort to keep the tumbleweeds and the Oriental spammers away.

And it turns out I DO have something to write about: the one thing other than working and sleeping and coding widgets that I've done over the last fortnight, which is seeing Floridian heavy metal bands.

On the 7th, I once again dragged myself into the inner city oasis and fortification that is Churchill's and saw 4/5 of a five-band bill made up exclusively of Sunshine State metal acts. And then, on this most recent Friday the 13th, I missed most of the out-of-state opening acts, but managed to catch technical death/prog metal legends Cynic (who of course are from Miami) at the more nearby Culture Room.

The show at Churchill's was headlined by Miami-based Green Sky. I first heard about the gig looking through my recommendations at Last FM, saw that the trio were labeled "sludge rock" and were "heavily influenced by Isis" and thought that might be interesting.

But it wasn't 'til I got a shout from the lead singer of Orlando-based supporting band Bad Actor that I decided to actually attend.

Turns out Green Sky weren't that sludgy, and they didn't sound much like Isis, either. "Remote World" has this nice heroin/trance vibe that I liked, probably transmitted by the dull mantra-like chanting of its vocals. But there wasn't much chance of that kind of thing being conveyed live, and maybe "Remote World" is a bit of an outlier for them anyway. Still, I liked the approach and I liked guitarist # 1's polycarbonate axe. I'd see them again, but it looks like their next gig is in Russia, how about that?

It doesn't appear that Green Sky has a website, but I know you can get more music at their Last FM page, 'cause that's what I did.

Bad Actor were the most straight ahead death metal band on the bill at Chuchill's, and the most energetic. Most of that energy came from the lead death growl dude, who jumped up and down, got on his knees (you know, so he could give his all into his growls), waved his hands in the air, and at one point mimed the smoking of a marijuana cigarette. The bassplayer (who I thought was particularly good) and the guitarist kind of just stood in place and watched amusedly as their singer (whose name is Jarad Weston) did his thing. But more power to him. Metal should be energetic, and if he works a half-empty room like Churchill's was that way, I bet seeing him before a real crowd would be a treat.

If the arrangements weren't quite worthy of the tech death label, Bad Actor were a quality heavy band with solid progressive elements. I'd see them again, too, for sure, if they wanted to come back to Miami. If you want to check out more of their music beyond what I've got here, go over to http://badactor.bandcamp.com/, you can throw them a buck or some bucks, and get their most recent EP in full like I did.

In my mind the best band at the Churchill's gig was Shroud Eater, another Miami-based trio. Two heavily-tattoed gals on bass and guitar and a stocky Latin dude as drummer. When I told Pieman's buddy at the Cynic show about them, he asked, "were they hot?" referring to the chicks, and I was like, I don't know, skinny heavily tatooed chicks don't do it for me anyway.

Shroud Eater, pictured at Churchill's, no less

But why's it always gotta be about that anyway? This is metal goddamnit. You think about sex after the show. What I thought was cool and funny was how the bassplayer (whose name was Janette Valentine) used a Fender Jazz bass, and it was practically bigger than she was. But Ms. Valentine was a very good player indeed, and though the guitarist was frontwoman and sang and growled, it seemed like the band's arrangements revolved around the intricate bass work.

Those arrangements were of songs that might be best described as a stoner/death hybrid. Their Last FM page talks Kylesa and Helmet, but Kylesa aren't downtuned this way, and Shroud Eater, as good as they are, don't do the angular Venusian Page Hamilton thing. What I DO get from Shroud Eater is Kyuss and the Stoner Desert sound, and that of course is a very good thing indeed.

If any of this sounds interesting, you can go to their site at http://www.shroudeaterrocks.com for more info and free downloads of the two songs that aren't here.

Green Sky finished at about 1:15 in the morning, and since I'm nearly 45 years old and have my lovely Melanie at home, I figured it was time to split. The band I missed may or may not have been named Consular. Maybe next time, huh?

Just like maybe next time for Dysrhythmia. I'd had a couple nights of insomnia, and as I worked through my Friday workday on the 13th, it became apparent to me that I was going to need to catch a nap before I went to any metal concerts. The Culture Room website said doors open at 7:30, but since when has the doortime had anything to do with showtime?

Well this time it did. By the time I'd had my nap and gotten over to the Culture Room, opening act Dysrhythmia from Philadelphia had already been and gone, and middle act Intronaut from Los Angeles were mostly done.

Fuck. Oh well.

As discussed here elsewhere at greater length, my most metal days were in the mid '80's to the early '90's. But I had mostly stuck to the thrash- and speed-metal champions, while poking a sort of fun at death metal and their silly growl vocals.

And then I quit The Herald, got a normal nine to five, and found a girlfriend. My involvement with the metal scene waned just as Cynic were making its entrance.

So it has been only over the last few years that I've become familiar with Focus, the amazingly esoteric debut from Cynic that until recently was the band's only true album.

My buddy and sometime speech tutor Schfrank took this Friday night. You can see Masvidal clearly on the left, and bassplayer Robin Zielhorst in the middle. The two bright circles of light at stage level were always full of interesting images, amoebae and galaxies and gears and cyclical whatnot.

The first thing I noticed as the band took the stage was that both guitarists were using headless guitars; later on I'd find out that Steinberger was in part sponsoring the tour. During some inshow banter, soft-spoken frontman Paul Masvidal would talk about how the whole tour with Intronaut and Dysrhythmia had been a "geekfest"--and got rousing cheers and applause! Not sure I want to correct Mr. Masvidal about the distinction between geeks and metalheads (hint: geeks don't wear black), but if this were a geekfest, the headstockless guitars certainly set the tone.

It's almost impossible to treat with Cynic without mentioning the vocoder-processed vocals, so let's do so. To me, who structures his listening so often around recognizable bands rather than recognizable songs, a band like Cynic presents a natural affinity, simply 'cause nobody sounds like 'em. Nobody else combines the odd-time metallic rhythms with the vocoder. I wondered aloud to Cerveza whether Masvidal's use of the vocoder stems from an insecurity with the sound of his own amplified voice, and like with the bullhorn machinations of early era Michael Stipe, I would reckon this to be the case. But either way, it results in something unheard elsewhere, which is always what you're looking for from a band.

But beyond surface cosmetics, what struck me most about Masvidal was his lead guitar voice. I don't want to suggest he's in Page Hamilton territory, but his leads were always distinctive and unconventional, taking off at 65-degree tangents from the straight ahead thrust of the music. They burst forth and flew off before dissipating under the weight of the rhythm provided by the drummer and the bassist and the other guitarist.

Not that it was a perfect show, or that Cynic is a perfect band. They are I'm sure very proud of the way their music so often changes back and forth in its tempo and its flavor. But sometimes during the guitar-synth washes, you're like, OK, let's get on with the jamming.

At one point there was an acoustic piece that sort of went nowhere, and it was followed by a song that featured a long dead sea of textural wash. At this point, I began noticing my aching knee, and how one of my toes had fallen asleep. Yes, yes, I know, the perils of being an old fart, but also the perils of listening to a somewhat overindulgent band.

Cynic are of course incredible instrumentalists, and it's a criticism I have levied before, but sometimes they just need to keep those instruments moving.

But overall I thought Cynic put on an excellent show that went to different places in different ways, and the recent memory of it has made me think since that I need to become more familiar with the landmark fusion-inflected tech death album--and from my own home city, no less--that was initially released just as I was no longer paying attention.


Cynic - Focus - 06 - Uroboric Forms.mp3

192 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (Right click and save as target)

File under: Heavy Metal Yoga


Green Sky - Remote World.mp3

128 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (Right click and save as target)

File under: Heroin/Trance Metal


Bad Actor - Portrait of Finality - 01 The Kraken Of Normandy.mp3

320 kbps mp3 up for six weeks (Right click and save as target)

File under: Death/Prog Metal Hybrid


Shroud Eater - Vesuvius.mp3

160 kbps mp3, up for siz weeks (Right click and save as target)

File under: Stoner/Death Crossover

Lightning Bolt - "Dracula Mountain" from the CD Wonderful Rainbow

Going to see Lightning Bolt at fabulous Churchill's Hideaway tonight.

While it's always good to get out and drink some English beer (maybe I'll even smoke a cigarette or two), I'm not that psyched, I'm finding, somewhat to my own surprise.

Lightning Bolt--a School of Design drum and bass duo who play oddly tuned noise rock at near-deafening volume--are certainly conceptually audacious, and certainly have an innate appeal to me for that very reason. That the bassist has recently taken to playing a five-string bass, or that the band often plays offstage, amongst, and in the midst of, their audience, can only score them additional points with me.

And the Wikpedia article certainly gushes forth.

But at a certain point, you know, you've gotta drop something more than mere audacious concept. Not that I've heard a great deal of Lightning Bolt, but most of what I have heard is kind of inchoate. The song I present for download is quite the jam, I like it very much, the bass and the drums alternating like machine gun fire, or, even better, like Murph and Barlow without the Mascis, yet to this date, it's the only Lightning Bolt song that I've really come to love.^*

On the other hand, the band has quite the live reputation, and what the hell, I've been hankering to attend a show, why not tonight?

So we'll see. I was always lukewarm to Oxes until I saw them one night at the Polish American Club; maybe Lightning Bolt will be critically uplifted for me in a similar way.

If I can, I'll come back over the next couple days and post a comment about what the show was like.

Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow - 03 - Dracula Mountain.mp3


File under: Noise rock

^*Although I'd have to guess "St. Jacques" and "Nation of Boar" are pretty good, if not great (Return)

The Mercury Program New Album and Tour

Longtime readers may remember the piece of practical poetry I wrote about a particular Mercury Program song one year ago this month. Particularly astute longtime readers may also remember the comment I appended to my post, in which I proclaimed how psyched I was that the Program would be releasing a new album in the summer of '09.

Well, I checked for the new album periodically as 2009 melted away into candle drippings and memories of financial angst, but never was greeted by a web page with a release date. I'd stopped looking, to be honest, figuring that some spat had ended the band's reformation.

So imagine my surprise last night, when Melanie, in the midst of a nostalgia trip for her one-time home of Tampa, discovers that none other than The Mercury Program had played last Friday at a bar she used to frequent.

It turns out Mercury Program had actually dropped their album in late December or early January, and that, further, they're playing tonight a mere 45 minutes up Interstate 95 from the world famous La Historia Corporate Headquarters.

Well, hot damn, gas up the Toyota, Holmes.

I haven't been to a show since I saw Hank III last summer, and I've been kind of jonesing for the concert experience. And Melanie's a fan, too. So it's the both of us who're driving up in about an hour.

I've ordered Chez Viking and it's on the way, though I haven't heard it yet. When I do receive it, I won't be posting anything, at least not immediately, because I don't think it's right to post an mp3 from a new release that the band hasn't uploaded themselves.

But while I'm enjoying the band's music tonight, or basking in its afterglow for the rest of this week, I urge you to check out the song I'd earlier blogged, "Nazca Lines of Peru." It's still up, six week notice or no, and if you like that, if you're struck by the band's work on the song, by both the parts that draw on their impeccable sources, and by the parts that rely on the band's own unique vision, well, you could do worse than heading over to the band's website and laying over 12 cyber-smackers for their new one.

I can say that without even hearing it. Mercury Program have already proved themselves to be one of the most adventurous bands of the last decade. Plunking down twelve of your hard earned for their product is no gamble, and in fact, I recommend wholeheartedly that you do so.

And if you're reading this on Monday the 15th, and live near Lake Worth, FL, well,a trip to Propaganda on J Street might not be a bad idea, either.


The Mercury Program - From the Vapor of Gasoline - 04 - Nazca Lines Of Peru.mp3

192 kbps mp3, still up (Right click and save as target)