And I don't care. Because I love it.
Let me give you a little bit of background for why I'm all about this album. As I've obviously mentioned a million times before on this pointless blog of mine, in the early days of the Interhole, when Myspace wasn't just an acceptable platform for musical promotion but the PREMIERE platform, I would read Decibel Magazine for all of my music news. Blogs? Blogs were still for homos in those days (please don't point out that they still are, because I know). Mediafire? What the hell is that? You might remember those days too. They were the salad days of our nation, where people would randomly send friend requests on Myspace with lines that read "Let's be friends, you look like a true juggalo!" and instead of being virus-filled internet pages, they were just people who were really, really stupid.
The year was 2008, and all that stuff I said about it being the salad days of our nation are totally false. Sorry.
I was reading Decibel leading up to the release for Live the Storm, and they kept mentioning the D-beat. Like I usually do, I just sat there and pretended like I knew exactly what that meant even though I didn't have the slightest idea. I HATE RESEARCHING THINGS. I didn't do it then and I won't fucking do it now. But one night I happened over to my major dudebro Ed's house; several of us convened and we played doubles ping-pong in his backyard, with one person sitting on his partner's shoulders, each holding a paddle. Ed's wife was not amused by our antics, but realizing that we are all large drunk men, simply stayed out of the way, understanding that once one of us was injured in the patio ceiling fan or by plunging awkwardly from the top of another 6 foot tall gentleman, we were bound to stop horsing around. Both of those things happened, and we did indeed decide to stop.
Ed pulled up his laptop and put on music, and our conversation turned to new stuff. There was talk about Oxbow and some other stuff that I couldn't care less about, and suddenly I had enough beer to admit that I didn't know what D-beat was. We formulated a hypothesis about what D-beat could possibly mean before Ed did what I should have done months before and just Googled the term. Once we saw the musical notation for it (the very same picture that headed up the announcement post for D-beat week, no less), I understood. Then he found some Disfear music to get a good idea about what their music sounded like, and why Decibel would continually refer to them as the "kings" of D-beat.
Nobody was impressed. Except for me.
It was awesome.
I had my first experience with a D-boner that fateful night; as I walked out to my car, feeling slightly tipsy from a night of outdoor drinking and reckless ping-ponging, my mind wandered to the amazing thing that was happening to me. My D-boner raged, and in an extended fit of reckless behavior, I ended up slamming that D-boner of mine in the car door.
I expected pain to flare through my body, and the subsequent trip to the hospital to be embarrassing to myself and my family. But there was no pain.
Do you believe that my D-boner was so rock solid that the door bounced right off of it, like a bullet bouncing off of Superman's D-boner?
Invincibility. I needed more.
Immediately it became my only mission in life to get Live the Storm and listen to it forever. I've done a pretty good job at it so far, and I don't intend to stop. Live the Storm is packed to the gills with awesome moments, from the first notes of album opener "Get It Off" to the last notes of "Phantom." I can't recommend this album enough; it appealed to my punk rocker friends with it's noticeable rooting in hardcore punk, but maintained a crossover appeal to me and my br00tal br0z with a nice dash of heaviness and the throat-tearing vocal style of former At the Gates frontman Tomas Lindberg.
It might be the best thing ever; I don't want to say for certain that it is, but there aren't many albums that struck me the way that Live the Storm did. And it reignited my passion for the D-beat, which had lay dormant for so long after my days of punk rocking were officially over. D-boner jutting out triumphantly in front of me, I resolved to live this way forever, with Live the Storm as my bride, it's lyric book speckled with jizz from all the off-jacking I managed to do over the music. And with the increasing strength in my right arm, I pledge to keep this train rolling, fevered fits of masturbation and all.
I'm glad my wife never caught me. That would be...real bad for me.
Listen to Disfear
Addendum to this post: Disfear's bass player, Henrik Frykman, just passed away this past March after a long battle with cancer. I was uncharacteristically injured by the passing of a person that I had never met and never would, and it's because of how attached to this music I've become. My condolences to his family and friends. Lame.
Disfear came to me over the loudspeakers of the crummy pub that I bartended at in Waco. Each night, after the customers had left and the radio was switched over from "Inoffensive '80s New Wave Hits" to "Whatever-Ear-Shredding-Heaviness-We-Want," me and the other manager would trade music. I showed him Nachtmystium and Wolves in the Throne Room -- this was early 2008 -- he showed be Tragedy and Disfear. I think I came out ahead in this scenario.
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