Like most Americans, I've been inundated from birth with the compulsion to consume whatever I like in as vast quantities as I can possibly conjure. It's sometimes a lot of fun, like when you end up on a boat and drink a bunch of fruity sangria and then fall asleep face down in the sun at 5 p.m. and wake up with a sunburn that reveals the secret message "Matt Sucks" with a giant dick below it is on your back.
Okay, so maybe that was my brother who fell asleep, but I made the sunburn mural on his back, and I had a fantastic time doing it that day. But my grandma's birthday parties always tend to get out of hand.
Last night I was reading about Metal Blade records, who recently pulled their entire back catalog from Spotify in an effort to make me cry in front of my coworkers. I was really enjoying several albums that apparently got pulled, and since Metal Blade records stopped responding to my emails that one night when I got drunk and started spamming them so they'd send me promo copies of albums, I had nobody to send an angry letter to. And word to the wise, if you're trying to drunkenly get internet respect from a record label, using the phrase "What, did you lick too many penises today?" seems like a great way of making them take you seriously, but it turns out that's just your malfunctioning brain giving you shitty ideas, and nobody else thinks it's funny. Also, don't send them unsolicited nudes, even if they're really tasteful and as artsy as they can be while still revealing every disgusting nook and cranny of your Fun Zone.
I could write a book about how to get record labels to continue ignoring you, actually. And how to take disgusting nudes of yourself while your wife watches television in the other room.
What I'm trying to say is that I've been really distraught that I can't listen to Hail of Bullets over and over again for the paltry sum of $9.99 a month. It's heartbreaking, considering I listened to ...Of Frost and War about a thousand times last week, but all good things must come to an end. Easy come, easy go. I need more cliches to distract me from how much I miss listening to that album. So, this morning, I woke up with the grand idea of using the power of Interbung to find and purchase some new albums. It's all so simple! And since I'm one of the very few metal guys who will actually go out of his way to purchase stuff that he really likes, it makes perfect sense. I love America and Interbung so much!
Until I tried to buy ...Of Frost and War on vinyl from Interbung. Oh, the anguish!
It seems that, no matter where I go, nobody has a copy of ...Of Frost and War on vinyl. I know that I've gone on record as saying that I don't much care for vinyl in the past, but there's a certain allure to it that I don't get from collecting cd's. The colors! The great, big album artwork! The free digital downloads of the album! The opportunity to pretend to my wife that I only bought it on vinyl because it's a special edition (per our agreement that we made when I got my turntable)! It seems that, out of all the albums that I could be trying to purchase right now (and there are several), Hail of Bullets, my new favorite band of the moment, has nothing that I can buy. Sure, I can buy the cd's (and I totally will), but I wanted the big, shiny record to put on my shelf and enjoy at my leisure.
I would take my Hail of Bullets Gridlink-style, with a glass of single malt Scotch for dipping.
Goes down smooth!
I found one website boasting that they had one brand new copy of the record for $140.
$140! I didn't realize that I was buying the test press of Abbey Road! I thought it was a death metal record about World War II. Unless perhaps this is one of those albums that also functions as a sex robot, in which case I'm all in. And if there's a second one floating around, I'll take that, too. Seriously, my wife has a credit card, and I'm not afraid to make foolish purchases.
So this whole situation has obviously whipped me into a frenzy of angry music purchasing. I'll show Hail of Bullets! I'll teach them to not have something immediately available to me in the format of my choosing! And I'm not going to eBay, either. I don't trust things that start with a lower case "e."
Unfortunately for me, my revenge on Hail of Bullets has taken the form of buying all of their cd's from Metal Blade (I'm not very good at revenge), buying a Black Breath record, the new Revocation record, and for some reason, a new pair of shoes. This is how television taught me to deal with the stress of not having something immediately available to me, after all; the solution is to buy a ton of OTHER stuff that is immediately available, and to do it as quickly as possible.
I guess what this whole post is about is this:
Dear Hail of Bullets,
Send me some free stuff, because I love you, but not in a creepy way, like the way I love Trap Them. It's a slightly less creepy way, like the way I love Anaal Nathrakh, or the way I love that breakfast burrito I got right before I left Portland on Monday. It's still really intense, but you're too far away for me to be able to lurk in the bushes everywhere you go. So send me some records, because I'm just going to review them anyway.
I yearn for you tragically.
Yours,
Monsoon Cobra.
P.S. I would also accept this album from anybody else who happens to read this, but I don't ever pay for shipping, because I don't believe in taking things places. It's unnatural.
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