Obligatory SXSW Post

With the yearly festival to end all festivals quickly approaching, I've been seeing lots of "guides to SXSW" popping up.  Showcase here!  Look at this band!  Ooooh, there's another!

Wheeeee!

I'm ambivalent about SXSW; on the one hand, there's always some sweet ass bands running around, doing like 10 shows a day (this year, there's a high likelyhood that I'll be following Trap Them from venue to venue, only pausing to watch sets by The Red Chord and Wormrot).  Many of the shows are free and there are always a large population of my best metal dudebros hanging around.  Fun!

And who doesn't like a day of creeping out Trap Them punctuated by dick jokes with your best metal dudebros?  Communists!  That's who!

"I disapprove of fun and stalking Trap Them."

Last year at the St. Patrick's Day Action P.R./Metalsucks Showcase I attended (Clinging to the Trees of A Forest Fire, Withered, Bison B.C., Gates of Slumber, Scale the Summit, and High on Fire, among others), I achieved the pinnacle of my life, wherein Matt Pike allowed me to touch his guitar and hang out with him for a short period of time.  If you meet me around, I'll be happy to regale you with the story, because it includes too many wild arm gesticulations and over-the-top shouting to to convey with the written word.  But it was the best thing that ever happened to me, and now I can rest easy that the best moment of my life is over and it's all downhill from there.  Also, Matt Pike is a really nice guy, and I got to see him in the wild, where he was still wearing a shirt.

It looked like this, but Matt Pike was wearing a shirt.  It's kind of hard to visualize.

I tied a pretty good one on that night; meanwhile, my ride, codenamed Sgt. Boner, had followed some girl out of the venue only to find out several hours afterword that she had a boyfriend, and then went home, stranding me downtown.  I didn't notice because I was harassing Bob Fouts and watching a The Artist Formerly Known As the WZA'd argue with a drunk girl about whether or not she was capable of kicking him in the face where he stood (spoiler alert: she was, in fact, capable of doing so).  It was quite an evening, all right.

I've had good times at SXSW, make no mistake.  But my ambivalence lies in the fact that millions of people swarm the city, effectively shutting downtown down, making it impossible to get from the north side of the city to the south side without much furrowing of brows and clucking of tongues.  Also, when you try to get over to a show, the crowds that form stop traffic altogether.

It's like a swarm of cattle with dead, empty eyes forced themselves into skinny jeans and Grandpa shirts, only to stand around in the street rather than using the adjacent sidewalk.

That's right, more anti-hipster sentiments.  Fuck you, hipsters!

Hey, dude, I'm trying to stand in the crosswalk and stare blankly at my surroundings, mouth agape.  Why don't you take your...*pretentious scoff*...CAR to the freeway?  *Resumes staring, mouth agape, at his surroundings*

It's fucking impossible to get anywhere and do anything with all these buttholes running around, cramping my style.  Now, I've only lived here for a couple of years; I don't consider myself an "Austinite" and I don't like to get all high-minded about "out-of-towners" the way that Austin natives tend to.  That's not my thing.  I'm glad that I was allowed to move out here, because the alternative was so depressing.  I'm pretty confident that by moving out here, I was able to avoid numerous DUI's and a career in moving around cans of carbonated beverages at grocery and convenience stores.  But Austin is congested enough without all these mongoloid halfwit hipsters running around, creating lines at all the food places and wearing stupid clothes that are perfectly harmless but that I hate.

I just want them to go away.  *Sigh*

Ranting aside, SXSW is always quite a thing, and I'm looking forward to checking out a bunch of it this year.  I'm hoping to get a Friday off so that I can gallivant around downtown with Van Damned and The Artist Formerly Known as the WZA'd.  I'll have at least three chances to check out Wormrot, which will be awesome, and I'll get to finally cross The Red Chord off my bucket list of bands to see live.  Plus, there's virtually no way I'd rather spend my day than following Trap Them around like some kind of lonesome and pathetic Deadhead (perhaps a Trappy?).  As a quick note to Trap Them, since there are no bushes for me to hide in, and an absence of darkness to skulk around in, I'll be much more visible than usual.

I'm hoping Brian Izzi has a prescription or Medic Alert Bracelet I can swipe.

Check out the half-hearted SXSW guide that The Artist Formerly Known as the WZA'd put together here; this will make it easier to track my movements (and plan your own I guess).  Make sure, if you're in the area, to check out all the cool bands and buy some shirts, because we all know that you fucking stole their albums and learned the lyrics.  Don't be a dick, bro.

Oh, and I guess there will be some movies or something also playing, and some kind of conference.  And look for me in the Austin American Statesman under the headline "Daring Daylight Robbery of the SXSW Guitar Show Baffles Police: 'Who Is This Masked Dynamo?' Asks City Hall."

The perfect crime!

The Adventures of the Married Metal Man--Being in a Band

If you are alive and reading this, there's a good chance that you have been in a band.  Everybody knows that being in a band is the second coolest thing a human being can participate in, behind smoking cigarettes and just ahead of never getting married.  But when it comes to being a married metal man, what do you do to convince the albatross around your neck that you should be allowed to spend your time away from her piercing gaze, out with your dudebros participating in the two coolest things a human being can participate in (and pretending to be participating in the third)?  Luckily for you, I've run this gauntlet many times before and I have the inside scoop that will keep you and the Turds of Misery (pictured above) shredding the garage for years to come, or until the bass player inexplicably sells all of his gear and decides that selling and smoking weed is how he'd rather spend his spare time.

As I mentioned above, I'm no stranger to being in a band.  I am, however, a stranger to being in a band that actually plays shows and practices more than twice before everybody stops returning your phone calls (Austin is a tough place to start a band).  Since I moved out here, I've been a "member" in more bands than I'd care to recall, each with their own cringe-worthy name and founding members that give themselves too much credit for their substandard playing ability.  None of these bands have worked out though, due to outside factors like the drummer breaking up with his girlfriend and going into seclusion for 8 months only to call me one day and ask if I can practice the next day, or like the bass player who got kicked out of his shantytown apartment complex that decided that he likes working at Hot Topic more than returning phone calls.  But, through all of this, I maintained the delicate balance with my wife, convincing her that my being in a band was not a big deal and that she was okay with it.

So how did I do it, you ask?

I'm going to let out the key to living the "in a band" lifestyle right off the bat.  It's important, and needs to be approached with subtlety and finesse so that you can get those two or three band practices in unimpeded, and so that your crappy band can implode from inside factors and not because of your crappy wife.  The most important thing you can do to be in a band is to convince your wife that you playing a musical instrument is sexy.

Baby, I was thinking of you and this song just...came to me.

Your wife already knows all sorts of unsavory and unsexy things about you.  She knows that after a hard night of drinking, your morning bowel movement is likely to set off the smoke detectors in your apartment.  She knows that you're likely to fall asleep on the couch and snore loudly through The Notebook on your "stay at home together" night.  She knows that when you get home from work, you're going to smell like Bigfoot just crawled out of a vat of his own sweat, which was located in a nearby sewer.  But she has to think that your half-witted command of your chosen musical instrument makes you a hot potato.  How do you achieve this?  The answer is surprisingly easy: write her a song.

Don't be stupid about the song, though.  It has to be really, really gay and lame, with lots of over-the-top "feelings" sprinkled throughout.  If you're reading this, you probably hate those kinds of songs, but believe me when I say that this is an easy way to get her to like what you do.  Never play the song live or even insinuate that you are going to do so; simply use your instrument to tell her that you want to touch her genitalia with yours and she'll immediately consider you to be the next John Mayer, and women love shitty stuff like John Mayer.

 I can see your vulva in the moonlight, darlin'.  It fills me with feelings.

Once you have reduced your lady to a simmering pool of sex juices, you're ready to hit the scene.

Finding a band can be difficult if your local scene is full of stony boners who say "there is no scene out here, man," and skip every single badass show that comes through because the $5 cover would cut into their weed money.  These kinds of dudes also usually want to play something that sounds exactly like Darkest Hour or At the Gates, but with lots of breakdowns and much lamer riffs.  But if you tough it out, you'll have a band briefly assembled, and then you have to convince your woman that you are allowed to go to band practice.  

Try cooking dinner for the two of you a day or two in advance and passing it off as quality time.  Also, make sure you hide the Spaghetti-O's cans really well; you don't want her to know how half-assed your approach to cooking can be.  Then suggest watching a movie and try to stay awake through the whole thing; this can be tough, so you'll have to make sure that the movie has at least a couple explosions in it to keep you engaged.   When band practice day is approaching, tell your wife IN ADVANCE that you'll be doing band practice.  If she puts up any resistance, remind her of the nice evening you spent together and accuse her of never letting you go do things with your friends.  Once she relents, you'll have to repeat the process a couple more times until she just accepts band practice as part of the weekly ritual.  Then you're golden.

Celebrate!  Now you're in a band.

If your band miraculously stays together long enough to do a show, invite your wife to the first one.  Make sure that she sees that you are actually creating music when you leave the house, and make sure she has a bad time (most women will).  For subsequent shows, DON'T LET YOUR WIFE COME; instead, gently tell her that she doesn't want to come.  She's heard all the songs before and she isn't even into the kind of music your band plays; tell her it's okay with you if she just wants to skip out on it, and that you won't be home too late.  Let her feel like YOU'RE letting HER off the hook.  Then you can go have fun with your friends and do cool stuff, like drink beer and make jokes that she would normally hit you for making were she around.

I can't understand what the singer is saying!  Where's that song you wrote me?  Play that one!

The best part of all this is that, with the state of the music industry, your band will never make it big, and this will just be a totally sweet ritual that exempts you from having to do dumb stuff like hang around with your wife a few times a month.  Put together a Facebook page so that you'll have an avenue to tell your 12 fans that your band is breaking up once the rhythm guitarist gets a job at the Vans outlet.

Repeat the process ad nauseum until your wife accepts your obsession with playing poorly constructed music as one of your unavoidable personality flaws, like forgetting to brush your teeth or accidentally drinking 13 beers alone on a Wednesday night.

Whoops.  I forgot I have to go to work in the morning.

And you're welcome.

What An Asshole!--Volume 1

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Goes Cube--Another Day Has Passed

I've been taking the train to work for the last month or so.  I actually kind of enjoy it, provided that the weather isn't too cold during the walk over there.  I'm not a cold weather person; where I grew up was freezing cold if it got into the 30's, and Austin this year has annihilated my understanding of what cold weather actually is.  It sucked.  I'm just lucky that it didn't snow too much; with enough snow, there's a high likelyhood that I'd walk out to my car to get a work shirt or something and they'd find my perfectly-preserved frozen corpse five feet from my front door once the thaw came.  I'm helpless against the cold; like a monkey flinging his feces at a group of laser wielding stormtroopers, my many attempts to deal with the cold proved unsuccessful and even ludicrous.

But the summer is coming, and I'll finally be back to sweating all day and stinking like a dead body as a result.

So anyway, I walked over to the train earlier this week.  It was a nice day, but largely unremarkable.  I dodged the Mopac hobo successfully and made it to the train station with plenty of time to spare.  I was listening to the debut full length from Goes Cube on the way to the station, and my iPod died on the walk over.  As I was standing on the platform waiting for the train to come, I beheld a sight that nearly caused me to turn and run, train be damned.  It was a school bus, full of kids, coming to take a field trip to check out our fledgling public transportation option.  Which, by the way, is a really lame sort of field trip to take.

Now, I'm not going to lie to you.  I'm afraid of kids.  For one thing, they always remind me of my former self, the seventh grade Monsoon Cobra walking around, loudly announcing the dumbest possible shit.  If I ever came through some kind of wormhole/timewarp and came across myself at the age of 12 or 13, I can guarantee that I would not be able to stop beating up my past self.  Every time my 13 year old self would open his mouth, I'd have to slap him like a bitch.  And being reminded of my former self is unpleasant.  For another thing, I watch a lot of Law and Order: SVU.  I know that when those kids are hanging around at the train station asking me what that thing on my head is (it's a hat, retard) and riding their razor scooter, I have to ignore them and move away.  Because if those kids get abducted (and according to Law and Order: SVU they all inevitably do), mom and dad are going to remember the dude at the train station and I'll be in trouble.  Then you have to convince the police that walking through the green belt behind your apartment complex was for fun and not to bury a tiny body, and they never believe that (also according to Law and Order: SVU).

So today I secluded myself from the children as best I could and kept my headphones on my ears as a discouragement for any of them to try and speak to me for any reason.  I idly listened to their stupid questions and watched them wear their crappy technicolor hooded sweatshirts until the train finally came.  We got on and the place was obviously in disarray because of the gaggle of squawking middle schoolers all collectively refused to shut the fuck up and sit down, but then I heard something amazing.  One of the chaperones was behind me, and one of the kids announced (in typical way-too-loud-for-the-circumstances fashion) "I want to go sit up there with my friends!" to which the chaperone replied (just as loudly as the kid's pronouncement, mind you) "YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS!"

It was awesome.

So now, I associate Goes Cube with that time spent on the train, and the kid who got shamed by the bearded man sent to ensure that they wouldn't get crushed by the train or stolen by the weirdo who takes said train to work.

Goes Cube is a very good band with a very strange name; they exist in that nebulous outerworld of metal that, until just recently (for me), only Burst and Bison B.C. inhabited.  They generally play slow- to mid-tempo heavy music with shouty vokills and lots of watery, wobbly clean interludes sprinkled throughout.  Unlike most bands that attempt the watery clean interlude, bands in this category inexplicably tend to be able to pull it off without damaging the song in any way (I suspect it's the hard-to-pin-down nature of the music that allows such flexibility; however, if a progressive death metal band attempted the same thing, the resulting product would suck super hard).  The riffs are tasty and the licks are hot, but Goes Cube tends to eschew the mathy nature of Burst in favor of a more straightforward sludge-oriented approach.  Myriad forays into Isis territory lend the music an interesting dynamic, where the riffs are serenely heavy and hypnotizing (though sometimes too long).  My favorite part of any music is the fast part, and though Goes Cube uses this songwriting mechanic relatively sparingly, when it hits it works wonders.  It's really no wonder that when this album first dropped about two years ago, Decibel magazine was all atwitter over it.

If you're in the mood for some metal the defies easy classification, you should follow your nose and check out the album.  I think Goes Cube is going to be around for SXSW, so if they are I'ma go see them live and try to make it up to them that I stole their album from the Interbung.  And that's when things get awkward, I try to make them my friends, and they duck into the crowd, reminding me that I need to sharpen up my social skills for when I meet new people.

But I'd rather be playing video games.

Stopgap Post

I don't have anything good to write about until tomorrow.  Enjoy some videos that you've probably already seen.  Thanks to Ed and Marshall, respectively.

Additional Immortal Pictures

 The original band name for Immortal was The Norwegian Dreams, but they couldn't sell the accompanying teen sitcom to any Norwegian television networks, so they went with their second choice, which was The Beastie Boys.  When they found that was taken, they settled on Immortal.

A friend of mine sent me a different writeup of the Immortal show the other day.  That dude was way more knowledgeable than me on the subject of Immortal, and he used significantly more $10 words than I could even conjure if I had an actually active imagination (curse you television!) and a dictionary that yelled words at me.  It turns out that, while I was meandering around in a whiskey-induced haze, there were several people who dropped beer bottles and then injured themselves on the broken glass once the impromptu mosh pit inevitably broke out.  I was curious about how I got someone else's blood on me; now I know that everybody was likely just as stinko as I was (which would also explain why so few people gave me the business for being as stinko as I was).  So, I guess the mystery has been solved and replaced by a whole new, much more sexy mystery: namely, which kind of hepatitis did I contract by falling all over someone's blood they forgot at the show?

Incidentally, I made several new friends that fateful night, and one of them, Josh Dawkins from Lions of Tsavo (namedrop, bitch!) sent me some additional pictures from that evening.  Since I haven't been writing very much lately, a result of having to expend my creative juices elsewhere for a brief time, I decided to add some more Immortal pictures to the pile.

Gratuitous Guitar-firing-a-laser shot.

"I hope they can feel my grim frown; I'm doing it really fucking hard."

 

Immortal didn't have a fog machine.  This effect was achieved through the collective marijuana smoke of San Antonio.

 

 Right before the show ended, nobody was capable of seeing with their eyes due to the smoke in the air.  Several people died of smoke inhalation that night; they will be remembered as pussies.

 

Thanks Josh for hunting down my email address, which I didn't realize wasn't easy to find (it's now visible on my profile, and I'm waiting to see how that pans out).

 

 

Slammin' Saturday Roundup XXXTreme--Immortal Live in San Antonio

It's not very often that I actually get down with something that is tr00 and kvlt.  Black metal is one of the genres of music from which I cull very little of my musical taste, though it has become more and more frequent that I am able to find something in that darkest category to enjoy and identify with on a deeper level.  But this past Saturday, something amazing happened.  The mighty Immortal swooped in on giant, ice-covered pterodactyls and brought the frostbite and frowns to San Antonio, TX.  Now, I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking, "Out of anywhere in Texas that Immortal could do their sole Texas show, why in the holy hell would they choose San Antonio?"

That is not for us to ask.

On this most grim day, my crustiest and cakiest bro Van Damned was kind enough to open up his apartment to an elite group of people for pre-show partying and general good times, and good times were indeed had.  Among the group were other crusty, cake-y bros Andy Wilhelm (with his girlfriend Amanda in tow) and the Artist Formerly Known as the WZA'd, who this time didn't say anything that would piss off somebody in a band that I like.  The Farinellis were in attendance and regaled us with stories of Gaahl's creepy tastes, which are more horrifying than you'd think even if you know who he is, while latecomers Daine Vineyard, Josh Dawkins, and a fellow I only know as Adrian rounded out the evening with beards and band notoriety.  Our motley crew looked like this:

Getting pumped...

But quickly devolved as I drank all of Van Damned's whiskey into this:

Thug life is for chumps.  We live the Chug Life.

and finally pictures started to resemble mugshots shown on the Megan's Law website

Photographic evidence of why I'm an embarrassment to my family and friends

and we knew that we were ready for action.

We showed up to the show and got through will call without any issue.  We were pumped and ready, and there were a great many people in full corpse paint that were similarly ready for such a wonderously grim event.  Absu opened up the show and played a great set that I remember hazily at best, and since I know very little about Absu I can't name any of their hot cuts that got jammed out, but the air was thick with anticipation.  And also pot smoke.

 Grim.

 Gratuitous drummer action shot.

Absu finished their set, and Immortal started setting up.  It took forever, but I took the opportunity to wander around in a confused haze, find Van Damned, get punched in the stomach by Van Damned for some reason and get lost again.  Then the show started.

It was glorious.

It looks like they have smoke machines, but that's just the crowd's collective smoke adding ambiance.

Immortal giving shout outs to the people in the crowd wearing Immortal corpse paint.

The music was tight and hateful, a pumping, squealing hot mess of ultimate grim power and scowls.  I was floored; and by that I mean that a mosh pit broke out right in front of me, and the guy behind me made an executive decision that I should be a part of it.  He shoved me from behind, and my drastically compromised sense of balance coupled with the slippery floor caused me to immediately fall flat on my back.  I was lifted up by the crowd, and no sooner than 5 seconds later, a dude in the pit came at me and the exact same thing happened.  Laying on my back, gazing up at the sparse lighting and the faces of the people who thought I should be moshing, allowed me a short moment of repose to realize that I probably wasn't going to drive home to Austin that night.  Shortly thereafter, I was mercifully allowed to leave the pit.  I wandered to a better lighted section of the venue to find that I was filthy and had acquired a smattering of mystery blood on my hands, which was unsettling in a way that was appropriate for the show.  I took a quick hobo shower in the bathroom and charged back out to see more of the spectacle.

 Here's a picture of Immortal's setlist via Brooklyn Vegan.  Since I've never been good at retaining song titles, I figured you might like to look at what got played so that you may burn with jealousy that I was there:

The show ended and we headed out to eat and hang at Van Damned's grim and frostbitten apartment.  I then realized that I was going to have to explain to my wife why I had "Chug Life" written across my belly in permanent marker.

But she's seen worse things written on me.

Thanks to Stephanie Farinelli for the pictures, and for being so nice.  Also, thanks to everybody for putting up with my gloriously drunken antics.