Revocation--Chaos of Forms

I just recently got back from Portland, Oregon, where I was visiting a couple of dear friends of mine and their young son.  The trip was fantastic; I got to hang around in the Pacific Northwest, drink fancy beers with a bunch of jiu jitsu fighters, pass out on a futon, and alter my diet to eating roughly 50% vegan food and 50% cartoonish novelty foods.  Seriously, I had a doughnut that had a strip of crispy bacon on the top of it:

Dear Voodoo Donuts: your doughnuts are hard to take good pictures of.

which was subsequent to my conquest of the cheeseburger that has TWO GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICHES WHERE THE BUN IS SUPPOSED TO BE:

  Dear arteries: I didn't like you that much anyway.

Also, there was a Meatball Deathstar in the mix, which is exactly what it sounds like, except it's served on garlic bread.

  There isn't anything there to really get a sense of scale, but it's comparable to a very fat baby.

It was a delight.

One of the odd things I hadn't taken into account when I left for Oregon was the hippies.  Austin is pretty thick with the college age hipster with stupid haircuts and ironic t-shirts and fixies clogging the streets like that grilled cheese clogs my myriad blood vessels, but Portland stinks with hippies.  It's insane.  You know those girls they talk about who look like they have Buckwheat in a headlock?  Like those old "Your Mama" jokes?  Not only do they totally exist, but they live on a very homely commune in Portland, and you can't go to a vegan restaurant without having to listen to their windy, pretentious conversations about coffee.

AND EVERY RESTAURANT IS A VEGAN RESTAURANT.

I know this is starting to sound like a horror story, but it's really not that bad.  It seems that the Austin scene actually prepared me for the much more extreme scene that I was about to immerse myself in, and for that I'm glad.  Thank you, you stupid assholes with the handlebar mustaches!  Your faggy liederhosen-wearing ways made the shock of hanging around with real hippies dull to the point of barely being shocking.

I just thanked the Austin hipster scene.  You win, universe.

Much like the Austin hipsters, bands like Children of Bodom and Dream Theater prepared me for music that is much more extreme; things like Anaal Nathrakh would be perfectly and permanently inaccessible to me had I never inducted myself into the metal scene with the relatively sultry and laid back sounds of Dream Theater and the melodic Finnthrash attack of Children of Bodom.  Oh, how I used to lament that nobody seemed to be able to meld the two bands into one superband, with major key, offtime guitar solos and thrashy hooks.

Oh, the pain of it all!

Then, last year, I discovered Revocation.  Their previous effort, Existence is Futile, gave me hope for prog nerds like myself.  Dave Davidson's shredding attack and penchant for the progressive gave me hope that the perfect hybrid of two bands I'm ashamed to admit that I love exists, like some kind of boner-inducing heavy metal Cerberus howling a blood red moon.

Also, there are skulls everywhere, like those flashforwards to the year 2029 in the original Terminator movie.  And lasers!

But thankfully, no keyboards.  Well, I guess I should say "less keyboards," which is good enough.

Revocation continue this shamefully delightful formula one step more extreme on their latest effort, Chaos of Forms.  Not only do the guys in Revocation enjoy playing metal that is extremely extreme, but their signature version of progressive deathrash has grown so powerful that every time I listen to the album, flocks of birds fall dead from the sky.  Since I don't drive a car, I think it's awesome, but my bosses have begun insisting that I listen to this album at work only during the late hours of operation, once their Porsches and BMW's are safely out of range of the bird genocide.  Other entertaining effects of listening to Chaos of Forms include:

--spontaneous combustion of any adjacent flammable materials,

--sending the secretary into an unreasonable panic, and

--random appearances of pterodactyls.

Chaos of Forms is so epic that it'll make you bored of hearing stories of swashbuckling adventure on the high seas, even if they contain encounters with the mystical Kraken.  It's so powerful that it makes your dad's midlife crisis car look like a broken bicycle and so frighteningly good that your dick will retreat into your abdominal cavity like a fleeing caveman.  Don't believe me?  Check out standout tracks like "Cradle Robber," "Dissolution Ritual," or the title track.  See how your dick went away?  Don't worry; it'll come back once it realizes that there is no immediate danger.

But you should maybe take those oily rags outside.

Do You Like Ghost? You're Wrong

I don't often write about things that I don't like on this blog; I try to be positive and keep away from that standard Interbung nerd voicing his inane opinions about why stuff is stupid as much as possible.  In fact, I try to just let stuff that I think is stupid just roll off my back and be forgotten, lost to the ages like my memories of my parents living in the same house or that smelly pair of shoes that I'm suspicious my wife threw away just because they smelled like death. 

But I cannot abide by Ghost.

They've been getting quite a bit of hype and press since their breakthrough Opus Eponymous stormed the beaches of the blogmosphere around a year ago.  Everybody seems to be running back and forth with big wet spots on the front of their pants, gibbering about how "catchy" and "theatrical" the band is.  Indeed, the allure of the band seems to rest in the mysterious visage of the frontman in the giant hat, a man who is caked in makeup and made to look like something that would have absolutely terrified parents in the early 1960's.

Theatricality!  Mystery!  Ghost seem to have it all.

Here is my issue: it seems like nobody is taking into account that Ghost is 1) not metal, and 2) not good.

Most people who are in my position are being denounced as detractors for the sake of detracting, or are accused of being charlatans whose beef is with the fact that somebody is "making it."  Am I jealous?  Perhaps.  I've thrown my hat into the music ring with more than just a few failed attempts to wrest some of that media attention from other bands, and I've never succeeded.  I'm also jealous that Kanye West gets to be so fucking rich, because he's clearly just an assclown with a high opinion of himself who likes to ruin awards shows as an extracurricular activity.  But that's not why I don't like Ghost (or Kanye West).  I genuinely think that Ghost is a bad band that has achieved much fanfare for confusing reasons.  I'd like to briefly break down my reasons for not liking them, something of a brief counterpoint to the article I read on Invisible Oranges this morning that pushed the boulder over the edge.

The Sound

My biggest concern with Ghost is that their sound is so outdated and boring that it loses me from the very intro to Opus Eponymous, the sad, poorly played organ solo giving way to the driving (and perfectly generic) riff that dominates much of "Con Clavi Con Dio."  What really bothers me is that this early 60's sound that lacks any extremity (other than some light double bass work and Satanic themes and imagery) has become something that the extreme metal community has become so fixated upon.  "But your just jelous LOL," you're thinking, "their songwriting is so catchy you couldn't do it yourself.  U a hatr!"  If you're so interested in songwriting, interbung nerd, you should check out all of those people they play on the radio.  They do the standard formula for songwriting, too, and actually get quite famous for it.

In fact, listening to Ghost (which I'm doing right now [ugh]) makes me believe that if Taylor Swift wrote some songs that thematically centered around Satan, she would be welcomed into the metal community with open arms.  Maybe she'd have to pour some pig's blood on herself too.

It would look like a Cannibal Corpse song.

The Theatricality

I hope I'm not the only person who thinks that musical theater is super lame.  Am I?  From most accounts of live Ghost shows, the band seems to mostly stand perfectly still while the singer gazes imposingly across the crowd, "transfixing" them with his I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Alice-Cooper mystique.  To deny that heavy metal lacks any theatricality would be disingenuous, but I don't revel in it.  Indeed, I like to play that aspect down to the casual observer, because the moment that you admit that the allure of Manowar is the motorcycle sounds and the buff men in leather codpieces, you're going to have lots of explaining to do.


And believe me, it's a lot harder to convince people around you that you aren't gay than you'd think.

The Cool Costumes

Costumes are dumb.  Except for this one:

"Dear Diary: I think I finally broke my jacking off arm today."

 Probably Some Other Stuff About Ghost You Think is Cool

It's not.

I wish I had some other insightful and thought provoking reasons why I don't like Ghost, but since I've had to listen to this album one time more than I ever wanted to so that I give semi-coherent reasons why I hate them for no reason, I'm tapped out of things to say about boners.  So I'll leave you with something that is uncharacteristically hateful for me to say:

If you're into Ghost, you're probably still wondering how your mom suddenly forgot your name.  It's because you're a hipster failure and you should shave your handlebar mustache off.

Baring Teeth--Atrophy

The last few days I've been spending most of my time boxing up my life so that my wife and I can move into our new apartment.  Moving is horrifying, and though I probably don't need to explain to you why it's so unpleasant, I'm going to anyway, because I'm bored and don't have any better ideas for how to start this thing.  Moving affords me the opportunity to sift through all of my crap and see what kind of bullshit I've managed to accumulate and hide away in the little nooks and crannies of my apartment.  It's all scraps of paper from a year ago with names of music shops written on them and a surprisingly thorough collection of joint braces, which includes a $350 ankle brace that I had to purchase from the doctor after my ill-fated trip to Las Vegas, where I came back with a ruined cell phone and a broken ankle.

That might have been the pinnacle of stupidity in my life.

So I get to sift through all of that crap and make snap decisions about what can be kept and what I can afford to purchase a second time should I ever go rolling fully clothed into the swimming pool at the Golden Nugget again.  Then the rest of the stuff gets unceremoniously shoved into an old box where I hope it doesn't get damaged in the next couple of weeks while it's stacked up awkwardly in my formerly not-that-messy living room.

Sigh.

The most disturbing thing about getting moving is the filth that I've discovered that I'm apparently not only continuously generating, but that said filth is just going to be left behind for some jerk to clean up.  Take, for example, my bed.  Because I'm so successful, my mattress sits on the floor, thus allowing easier access to my mouth for the many bugs that are always crawling around my apartment, and also to show off to anybody who glances how I can't afford to buy a bed frame. 

Because I make blogger money.

But I had to get back there the other day to see if there were any giant spiders or delicious treats hidden behind the mattress (that place has historically been a treasure trove of Goldfish snack crackers, and I wasn't nearly covered enough in crumbs), and I noticed that the wall where my head sits all night is disgusting.  It's black with head dirt!  I never really took into account how dirty the top of my head was, or how often I'm apparently mashing my head into the wall and spreading said head filth all over the wall on my side of the bed.  It looks like the wall inside of an insane asylum padded room, but with slightly less feces smeared on it.

Coming the realize that my apartment is a dank den of fart smells and head dirt is a jarring sensation.  But it's not as jarring as listening to Baring Teeth's latest offering, Atrophy.

Baring Teeth are a Dallas-area band (or they used to be) that I became aware of a couple of years ago when they were in Austin playing with Disrhythmia on a lonesome Wednesday night or something.  I was so impressed with their live performance and angular riffing that I bought their demo and promptly lost it (I found it just recently in the course of my daily rummaging.  It has two tracks that made Atrophy, and would have made me feel like a big shot had I ever listened to it).  Their angular, unsettling attack translates perfectly to the recorded medium, resulting in an album that is a perfect representation of the inside of a schizophrenic's head while he writes his anti-government manifesto in pigeon blood.

Stark dissonances and doomy passages lend Atrophy a feeling of impending doom, like the army of clowns are arming themselves and lining up in battle formation inside their secret underground Evil Clown bunker.  The skronking dissonance of tracks like "Distilled in Fire" challenge the listener to gaze, mouth agape, into the dark abyss of pure vitriol.  The entire album in draped in a disturbing miasma, making it sound like what would happen if you gave my bathroom musical instruments and said commanded the toilet to express itself.  Such frantic, angular, hateful music (and my thorough enjoyment of it) proves unequivocally that I should have given that therapy that my mom forced me to go to as a child a fair shake.

The point is that you should really go listen to this music.  It's avante garde death metal at it's finest, and it totally earns the label that Colin Marston gave it while he, myself, and my good buddy Van Damned stood there watching their set two years ago.  Colin (we're on a first name basis in this scenario) leaned over and said "Total Goreguts worship."  True story.

I know, right?  It was awesome.

Go do yourself a favor and stream the album on Invisible Oranges or be a winner like me and listen on Spotify.  Or you could buy it, but you aren't going to buy it.  Just admit it.

Mastodon's "Curl of the Burl" Single Streaming (Elsewhere) Now!

We're having a mustache competition at work.  It seems hipster-y and lame, and I'm not going to deny that.  My boss, who is a cool dude, thought of the idea as a fun way for everybody to humiliate themselves for a whole month, thereby making us like each other better or something.  The contest features three prizes: the first is the "Best Tom Selleck Award," which will be given to the guy with the fluffiest and fullest mustache in the company; the second award is the "Creepiest Mustache Award," which will be given to whoever looks most like a legit pervert with a mustache (for which my boss is the clear front runner right now); and the third is the "Nice Try Award," which will be given to the person who grows the lamest mustache.

And I'm a lock for that third award.

And with a $500 pot spread among three prizes, being a lock for one makes for a great return on investment, to misappropriate a business term.

Observe my two week mustache, in all it's weak, lame glory:

Fucking LOCK!

It's going to be awesome when I win that money, but there's always a flipside to this kind of thing.  Namely, I have exactly fifteen days left of making the average 13 year old look like a  hairy dynamo with a totally boss 'stache.  I have exactly fifteen days left of hearing things like this:

"Are...are you trying to grow a mustache?  HEY GUYS, HE'S TRYING TO GROW A MUSTACHE!  LOOK HOW LAME IT IS!"--Josh, at band practice

"That's not a mustache!  What are you, twelve?!?"--Jessica, at work

"You weren't joking; you can't grow a mustache at all.  That's pathetic."--Cheri, at work

Luckily, looking at my reflection in the mirror makes me laugh every time I see it, because otherwise it would make it a lot more difficult for me to withstand the ever-flowing stream of people who like to tell me that I look like a faggot.  But when I have my cash money after only an entire month of escalating humiliations, they're going to look stupid.  Real stupid.

What I'm trying to say is that growth is inevitable, but it's not always the thing to do, especially if you choose the wrong avenue for it.  Which brings me to the new Mastodon song, "Curl of the Burl," which is streaming on Metalsucks right now.

I'd like to preface this by saying that I am (or at least once was) a Mastodon diehard.  I was just a couple steps short of being a super fan, like how I am right now with Trap Them.  I got the Blood Mountain bundle off of their website when that came out, and it came with a totally sweet "The Wolf is Loose" shirt that I quickly became too fat to wear anymore.  I bought Crack the Skye the day it came out, and I sat down and listened to it two times straight through while I played Skate 3 on Xbox 360.

I remember thinking to myself, "Oh god, Mastodon sucks now!  OH NO..."

In all fairness, however, Crack the Skye grew on me and, though it definitely contained the band's weakest material that I've come across yet, the album also contained some of the best material that they've come up with to date, and included a couple of totally righteous hooks in there too.

I'm feeling a little less optimistic with their upcoming album The Hunter now that I've listened to the leadoff single "Curl of the Burl."  Now I would never demean what such a (formerly) excellent band has built up, and I'm all about at least one of our own enjoying some commercial success.  I'm not one of those guys who will accuse them of selling out; I don't think that's really a thing, or at least it's not as much of a thing as people would like to give it credit for.  I would like to say that, if this is Mastodon's permanent direction, they've lost me.

Crack the Skye really opened itself up to me after a few listens; indeed, I'm the kind of dude that will give an album a little bit of time to grow on me, and that's exactly what Crack the Skye did.  But I remember the distinct feeling that if they were going to keep pushing this direction, with the vocals that sound like the dude from cKy over halfhearted prog riffs, I was going to be bummed out.  And like my decision to grow a weak ass mustache for an entire month, Mastodon took the wrong direction and decided that their growth necessitated the need to phase out writing good music.

It's a real heart breaker.

My fear is that this trend will continue, and by the time Mastodon decides to "return to their roots," Bon Jovi-style, they'll have forgotten how to do what made them so great, and they'll just be writing lame radio rock, complete with Disturbed vocals, cheesy hooks and poorly drawn lyrical metaphors.

What I'm saying is that, when it comes to new Mastodon, I rate it like I rate my mustache; it's weak, lame, and drains me of hope for the future.

I'll miss you, Mastodon.  But we'll always have Leviathan.

Don't believe me?  Listen to it here for yourself, and follow the link to "Black Tongue," which features some sweet woodworking to try and make up for the lackluster music.

Atheist--Jupiter

I spent most of this weekend watching movies.  Something that Netflix On Demand has allowed me to do is the revisit movies from my childhood that I haven't watched in a long time to determine once and for all if they deserve the fond memories that I have attached to them.  I'll just say a few things about that here, namely that 1) Spaceballs somehow magically jettisoned all of its jokes somewhere between when I was ten and now, because I remember that movie being funny.  Recent inspection of Spaceballs reveals that, in fact, it isn't funny anymore.  I consider it a marvel of technology that such a well loved movie can somehow lose everything that was funny about it over the course of sixteen years or so.  2) The Crow is gothy and confusing, but not as bad as I assumed it was going to be.  That doesn't make it less embarrassing that I loved it as much as I did when I was young, though.  3) Driving Miss Daisy is exactly as boring as it looked when I was a kid, which caused no small amount of cognitive dissonance in my tiny mind considering it featured a young Dan Aykroyd, to whom I hold a strong and unhealthy attachment for his role as Ray Stantz in Ghostbusters.

I love that dude.

Hit me up, Dan Aykroyd.  I <3 U

 Most unsettling to me, however, is a convention from old movies that carries with it some harsh implications.  I'm talking about the tradition where, in medieval era movies, the hero's lady is carried away by the brutish bad guy, and it looks like he's going to force her to marry him.  This happens in all manner of movies, and many of them are geared toward children.  In fact, this is the plot device that drives literally every Popeye cartoon ever created.  It usually goes like this:

Bad Guy: "I'm going to make you mine!"(Grabs girl and carries her toward a tower)

Damsel: "No!  Put me down, you beastly fellow!" (Struggles weakly) "Help me, [hero of the story]!"

This happens in a surprising number of these old movies (and every Popeye cartoon), and I'm not sure how comfortable I am with it anymore.  When I was a kid, I didn't realize what was actually going down, but it could be translated like this:

Bad Guy: "I'm about to rape the shit out of you, bitch!" (Grabs girl and carries her toward a tower)

Damsel: "Oh, God, my tight hole!  Not my tight hole!" (Struggles weakly) "[Hero of the story], only you can turn this rape into an attempted rape!"

It actually bothers me that this is an old-timey plot device, because when I see it now, it doesn't even bother me.  It took me watching Robin Hood, Men in Tights to realize how widespread this convention is.  And it bothers me even more that it's almost always geared toward children, thereby subtly telling them that sometimes, when they're an adult, they'll be carried off by some jerk and have sex forced upon them.  If we're looking for harsh truths to force upon our nation's children, let's maybe get away from all the sexual assaults (I'm looking at you, Pepe Le'pew) and create some characters that have really mundane jobs and drink to get away from the nagging sense of failure that they've developed after having the American Dream forced upon them as the only standard against which success is measured.

They can also teach kids about the alphabet (for filing purposes), and how to use a double windsor tie knot to hang yourself.

Speaking of old things surprising you, I'd like to talk about Atheist.

I first became aware of Atheist a long time ago, in the glory days of being in high school and not being able to steal stuff from the Interbung.  It was a magical time when finding new music sometimes required you to make a purchase with your hard-earned money that didn't pay off so well (I'm looking at you, Symphorce [and yes, that happened.  I was young and stupid!])  I tried all sorts of ill-advised pieces of music out, ranging from Strapping Young Lad to Animosity to Wintersun.  What a time to be alive!  I would get paid from my first job and go buy three new albums every two weeks, hoping for a gem to rear it's brutal head and make my day.

But my tastes weren't always so good.

I tried out Atheist one time on one of those "Sample before you buy" kiosks at some music store.  I remember listening to whichever album I was listening to and being confused by the sounds that assaulted my ears.  I was hoping for something that sounded exactly like In Flames, which was the only death metal band for which I had developed a taste yet.  But it didn't sound exactly like In Flames, no; this was more scattered and frantic.

This was tech death.

I feel remorse for my days as a metal n00b all those years ago, and it's chiefly because I hated Atheist the first time I listened to them.

Fast forward to now, and the Interhole has graced me with a vast catalog of music at my fingertips, waiting to be plucked from the ether and enjoyed without any financial risk, thereby maximizing the reward that I get from finding something that I enjoy.  It's like being a bank robber, but instead of sticking up anyplace, I click on a button and the money pours out of my computer screen and lands in my lap.  It's all the fun of winning without ever having to lose.

It was only recently that my ears were ready for Atheist, and I'm at least glad that I've learned not to rely on my ancient first impressions of albums, because if I did that, I'd still be hungrily consuming Luca Turilli albums like some kind of Pac Man with shitty taste in music.  Jupiter is Atheist's bit return to the game, and it doesn't in any way disappoint the avid tech death fan whose interests include wanking, more wanking, and wanking harder.  Shreddy, brutal, skronky, and complex, Atheist prove that their position as death metal gods were well earned and lasting.  Do I feel like a fool for having effectively ignored them for as long as I did?  Yes, for that reason and several others.

Like how I used to listen to *sigh* Stratovarius.

What I'm saying is, I'm sorry, Atheist.  I think you're great.  And I think Jupiter is great.  Not like all those rapey childrens' movies and cartoons.


Seriously, what the fuck is up with that?

Watch out, bitches.  Bluto's getting some pussy tonight.

Best of the Year So Far

In keeping with my lack of creativity and overall laziness, I've decided to jump on the bandwagon and publish a short list of stuff that I've been supremely pumped on this year so far.  Most of this stuff will come as no surprise to people who know me and/or read this stupid, pointless blog of mine, but I'm bored and I need to start posting up here again to make myself feel productive and smart.

It seems to me like the year 2011 is a year for grind.  I've been totally pumped on grindcore all year (so far), and the trend doesn't appear to have an end in sight.  Crust has made a fair showing (like it always does), and the last couple of months have shown me a rekindling of my interest in technical death metal, which I had stepped away from at some point in the last two years in order to sate my teenage need for crusty, hateful hardcore.  But it would seem that grind rules the roost as of right now, with a couple of surprise contenders in there for flavor (i.e. bands whose albums I liked way better than I thought I would).

With the advent of certain musical services who I have been publicly pimping super hard, and which I shall not name here for the sake of sanity (*coughcheckitoutherecough*).  And seriously, the company who runs the service in question should seriously be paying me, because I don't ever stop talking about it for any reason.  I imagine that I'm like some kind of autistic three year old, talking endlessly about trains or vacuum cleaners or Harry Potter or something.

Because autistic kids know all about that kind of shit.

All of this is obviously up in the air, and there's really no telling what my year end list will actually look like.  Maybe I'll somehow get really into that powerviolence stuff that 8===D is always waving at me every time we hang out.  Or maybe I'll become re-enamored with power metal (it could happen.  It won't, but it could).  However, the way things are stacking up, these are my contenders for my Top X Number of Albums of the Year list, in no particular order.

Victims--A Dissident

Rotten Sound--Cursed


Gridlink--Orphan

Anaal Nathrakh--Passion


Trap Them--Darker Handcraft

Abysmal Dawn--Leveling the Plane of Existence


Decapitated--Carnival is Forever

Blut Aus Nord--777 Sect(s)


Ulcerate--The Destroyers of All

Graviton--Massless


Origin--Entity

Neuraxis--Asylon


Indian--Guiltless

Protest the Hero--Scurrilous


Additional consideration will be given to albums that are going to come out this year (or albums that might; I don't have a lot of time before work to see what's going to come out when so that I can compile a legit list), including anything that Opeth puts out, any new Cut Your Teeth that might surface, and Black Breath's new album, which I have no idea what the release date is on it, but I can almost guarantee that I'm going to love it like it was my own.  Additionally, I would like to implore the following bands to make and release new records this year, because everybody's been talking about them doing that for a while and they never seem to.  I'm talking about:

Meshuggah

Necrophagist

and,

Pig Destroyer

Step it up, guys.  I have lots of disposable income that is all being funneled to...sigh...a bedframe and entertainment center to make me and my wife look more like grown adults.  Please.

What did I miss?  What should I give consideration to?  Am I missing something so obvious that it makes me look like an ill-informed n00b boner?

Tell me in the comments.

Listen To This Right Now

Introducing the newest and hottest podcast on the Interbung, the Will and Andy Show.  If you're one of my faithful readers (all two of you), you know that my posting habits started off nice and consistent.  I built a good base for traffic using only boner jokes and talking about taking a crap, and then I one day realized that writing like that is really difficult.  And it saps the creativity from my countless other endeavors, such as playing guitar and pretending that I'm not drunk.

It's a difficult balance to strike.

But I've also been doing other interesting things, and this is one of them.  I've jumped on board with Will, nee The WZA'd, better known as 8===D, to create the poorly named Will and Andy show for the listening pleasure of my Internet audience, as well as whoever the hell else for whatever reason would care to listen to us talk shit about metal or whatever.  Since I've been so busy sitting around doing nothing while Will edits the podcast and does all of the site stuff, it's been tough for me to find things to post about.  It doesn't help that my coworkers only like to listen to 2pac and dubstep, either.  In fact, I listen to dubstep so much that I could start a dubstep blog, and I would consider it if I didn't know that every review would be a verbose way of saying "I hate dubstep so very much."

But I digress.

The Will and Andy show has it all, from talking about peeing and boners and stuff, to probably something else.  I don't know; I'm kind of a one-trick pony.  Since I'm also very squirmy about listening to myself on recordings and things, I have no idea if it's funny, and I refuse to listen to it ever.  But other people have said great things about it, and some of those people weren't joking (possibly).  Check out these rave reviews:

"This isn't...horrible...WHAT'S THAT ON THE WALL?!??"--Tom, shortly before escaping my apartment for some reason.

"I can't sit here and listen to you waste your life on this."--My mom

"Who is this?  I'm calling the police!"--Brian Posehn, when I called him.

"The Will and Andy Show is a tour de force rollercoaster ride full of thrills, chills, and spi--HELP, HE HAS A GUN, HE'S GOING TO KILL ME!"--Some uncooperative guy in my sex dungeon*.

So there you have it.  The Will and Andy Show is a tour de force!

Listen to it here if you dare.

*Note: Nobody from my sex dungeon was harmed in the making of this podcast review.

Arsis--Starve for the Devil

This weekend was quite eventful for me; usually weekends are used to aimlessly jam on guitar, practice songs that my bands inexplicably cannot ever remember correctly, and have nighttime cocktails that inevitably end in my falling asleep on the couch during a movie that my wife really wanted to see but that I've never heard of.  But she always chooses some semi-artsy quasi-horror movie with lots of talking and surprisingly few exploding humans, or else she wants to watch something girly with David Duchovney in it.  Neither of those options are really anything that I'm very interested in; I'm more into abstract zaniness and awesome bad guy comeuppances.  You know, where you hate that one jerk so bad and then the hero says something witty right before shooting him with a stolen U.S. Government Boson Particle Accelerator Gun or something.  And then you get to see the bad guy's skeleton! 

Ice to see you!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm a film buff.

But this weekend was different.  I went to practice and played some stuff and drank some sweet bourbon, brownest of the brown liquors.  There was bro time, and I even got a new doom song written with one of my massive homebros.  It was, now that I think about it, an extremely standard weekend for me, except I went and looked at an amp, and on Sunday I ate chicken wings.

Spicy ones.  REAL spicy.

I love getting Buffalo wings.  They're all tiny so they act like delicious chicken supplements, which means that, though they're deliciously fried and slathered in delicious sauce, they have almost no calories and you can eat literally as many as you want.  And the dressing that you dip the wings in is specially made to be healthy as well as full of mayonnaise, which means that you don't have to skimp on dressing just to keep your waistline in check. 

It's science!

I'm actually on the Buffalo Wing Diet (developed by people who may be--or know--doctors!), but it's really not working for me.  Getting wings every day is kind of expensive, so I've been cheating on my diet and eating fruit and granola bars and stuff on the side.  So the diet isn't working as well as it would be if I were eating nothing but Buffalo wings.

Curse you, fruit!  CURSE YOU FOR MAKING ME FAT!

It's been a rough road, but I have confidence that if I stay away from fruit and vegetables and I drink only enough beer to get really, really drunk most nights, I can drop the pounds that I need to get down to UFC fighter weight.  The only downside to my current diet?  My morning constitutional now has an all-new "Ouch, my ass," aspect to it, which is horrible.  Now most mornings I'm sitting on the toilet crying because my tender ass is being burned from the inside out.  It used to be that I would cry on the toilet just because of the general malaise and sadness that comes with being a snooty American (or, as I like to think of it, "The good kind of crying"), and if there was something that looked like blood on the toilet paper, there wasn't a very good possibility that it was just undigested Buffalo sauce sent to further inflame my rash-covered ass.

Why do I do it?  For my health!  I gorge on chicken wings because I think I remember a guy telling me that I should.

Arsis, on the other hand, choose to Starve for the Devil. 

See what I did there?  I should work for Metalsucks.

Arsis bring their signature brand of ridiculously technical death metal back to the front and center with their newest release, which I'm just now getting around to listening to because I arbitrarily chose to exercise some self restraint and not steal this album.  It was a perfectly meaningless exercise in not-breaking-the-law, because I always wanted to listen to it because I knew that I would like it, but I never remembered to go out and buy it.  So now I'm getting around to it, and it turns out that I was right, and I do like it.  A lot.

Listening to any Arsis album is like listening to the reality that I lived in coming up as a guitarist in the metal scene.  I used to listen to We Are the Nightmare while I whittled my time in college away and think to myself "I'm going to do something like this someday."  Then I got married and the rigors of having to make sure my wife and I didn't get kicked out of our apartment wore my spirit down to the dirty, calloused nub that it is today, and I forgot to learn how to play this kind of death metal.  It's probably my favorite kind, too, with punchy, modern recording, clean parts, no clean singing, exhilarating thrash attacks, sweet solos and good song structure.  Critics applauded this album as being a step away from the wanky We Are the Nightmare, but I miss the wank a little bit. 

Actually, a lot.  I love things that are wanky.

That isn't to say that they dialed down the technicality for Starve for the Devil, but it does mean that the riffs sound less like repeating, self-contained guitar solos and sweep picking studies crammed behind some nebulous death growls.  People appreciate that, and I like it, too.  But I wish they were still trying to blow my twenty-year-old mind with relentless shred.  I just do.  But this is really good, too.

So if you're a normal metal d00d and you for some reason don't spend all of your time listening to Djent with the rest of the crowd (good for you if that describes you, by the way), you should check out Arsis.  And if you see them around, you should let James Malone know about the Buffalo Wing Diet.  He doesn't have to starve anymore!

But you should also let him know that he needs to keep lots of milk around to pour down his buttcrack when the burning gets too intense.  It's the only thing that helps even a little bit.

Check out Arsis on Facebook, or be cool and get a Spotify account.