Struck By Lightning--Serpents

I had heard of Struck By Lightning before I ever listened to them.  But I was skeptical because of reasons that will be clear before too long.  Let me give a backstory though, because that's what I like to do, and because I like to waste your time with reasons why I like things.  Eat it.

So one day I was perusing the selection at the local Half Priced Books, a local Austin retailer that buys all of the secondhand copies of Jane Eyre that are available and offers them to the consumer who doesn't know that Victorian-era literature sucks and is boring, but for a discounted price.  Seriously, if you want to find a copy of a book that you'd never consider reading at a deep discount, you should check out Half Price Books.  It's amazing for literature that everybody hates.

But the saving grace of Half Price Books is their music selection.  They buy anything, and I mean ANYTHING, off of whoever manages to walk in the door and appears to not be a home invasion robber without batting an eye.  My fortune is living next to a Half Price Books that benefited from a serious metalhead up and deciding that he didn't want any of his albums that he bought.  I imagine that he got married to some prostitute who didn't like his amazing taste in music and decided to castrate him for her own pleasure, and then made him take the walk of shame into the used bookstore and sell all of his great CD's for virtually nothing.

I can't say that I disapprove of him wholly; I've done some strange things just to make my wife feel like I'm listening to her, which I never am.  But I'll at least nut up and defend my music collection.  Because, seriously, if your amazing taste in music is suspicious to a woman, it's because she's evil and wants to eat your soul.

And seriously, fuck the bitch who set me up to get this album for so little.

I spend a lot of time just parsing through albums at record stores.  I fucking love it.  I like to just look at everything, making note of bands whose names bum me out or invigorate me to keep investigating, and then I buy the stuff that has been recommended to me, or has a cool album cover or something.  And that day, I found Struck By Lightning.

I'm not going to lie to you, fair reader, because it's D-beat week and I love D-beat more than I love my mother, who, though she gave birth to me and did some other stuff to make sure I don't die or whatever, never played drums.  If she had, and gave me the gift of D-beat, I would be forever grateful, but I don't even remember popping out of her vagina, and therefore imagine that it was a perfectly painless and utterly pleasant affair.

Also I was a cute baby.

At any rate, Struck By Lightning managed to revolutionize my world via Interbung at a time when I really needed it.  I took the album home for the low low price of $2 USD (a fucking steal, it turned out), and was immediately notified that the album sucked by 8===D, who had listened to it after seeing the band live and immediately gotten over it because of his amazing powers of getting over things that rule.  But I paid no heed to these things, and I managed to listen to this album no less than one thousand times while I was out on the road for my old job, and an extra thousand times since.

It's incredible.

I"m no proponent of hyperbole (yeah right), but I can say for certain that Struck By Lightning have that certain "it" factor that has endeared me to other inferior bands since I took up the torch music nerdery.  And they won't fucking stop, either.

Serpents is a tornado (too soon?) of D-beat-fueled pandemonium that refuses to stop despite your best efforts to make it do that.  It's great.  It's amazing.  It's everywhere you want to be, which is to say it's IN MY HEADPHONES BLASTING INTO MY STUPID HEAD, and I know that's where lots of people want to be.  It's a very exciting album to listen to.

Standout tracks like "Supercell" and "Tightening the Noose" should be enough to convince any normal asshole that the band totally rules, but if you're skeptical unless I give a dick-related critique to it, well, here you go.

Struck By Lightning makes my D-boner so hard that I've spent the last year using my D-boner as an anvil to forge daggers for my latest interbung-related endeavor, which is Anti-Obama Self Defense Daggers Inc (a Global Stabbing Instrument Concern company).  And before you ask, YES, IT'S THAT FUCKING HARD.

If you've been reading D-beat week all week in anticipation of what stupid things I'll say and somehow enjoying it, you should be listening to Struck By Lightning.  They look like a band of gaywad hipsters:

God damn it, seriously?  A MUSTACHE?  FUCK!

But they rock so hard it'll make your D-boner dig a hole in the backyard and escape, no doubt looking for greener pastures and more massive strokage.  Because it deserves it.

Don't be an asshole.  Fucking listen to this band for fun here or just steal the album because it's easy and actually surprisingly satisfying.  But you shouldn't, because they deserve your money for being so awesome.