Entertainment

Dropout Boogie tour tonight! Black Angels & Black Mountain at the Commodore. It's gonna be one dark evening. Setlist and analysis to follow.

Glance

Just checking in. I'm at the busiest time of year for school right now. A couple weeks and I'll be on vacation.

The new Kylesa album, Spiral Shadow is ruling my world right now, these guys have just gotten better with each release. It's their fifth platter, and my favourite. The title track just destroys. "Don't Look Back" is catchy like herpes. Crazy eastern guitar leads on "Crowded Road." Giant fucking riffs and huge hardcore shoutalongs. Anthemic, huge, awesome. Look for it on some year-end lists.

Gonna see some shows this week! Quest For Fire and Thee Oh Sees this week for some heavy psych and crazy rock n' roll, then see Bison and Kylesa melt some faces in a couple weeks. It's looking like a heavy winter.

THE BEARD IS BACK. By which I mean, my good friend Noah from Calgary says he's brought me a copy of former Blue Cheer guitarist Randy Holden's 1970 solo album, Population II. Have a taste.

Remembrance

Motörhead's "1916" is a simple, touching tribute to the fallen. I can think of no better song which captures the futility of war. Wear a poppy and hug a veteran today, if you can still find one.

16 years old when I went to war,
To fight for a land fit for heroes,
God on my side,and a gun in my hand,
Counting my days down to zero,
And I marched and I fought and I bled
And I died & I never did get any older,
But I knew at the time, That a year in the line,
Is a long enough life for a soldier,

We all volunteered,
And we wrote down our names,
And we added two years to our ages,
Eager for life and ahead of the game,
Ready for history's pages,
And we fought and we brawled
And we whored 'til we stood,
Ten thousand shoulder to shoulder,

A thirst for the Hun,
We were food for the gun,
And that's What you are when you're soldiers,
I heard my friend cry,
And he sank to his knees,coughing blood
As he screamed for his mother'

And I fell by his side,
And that's how we died,
Clinging like kids to each other,
And I lay in the mud
And the guts and the blood,
And I wept as his body grew colder,

And I called for my mother
And she never came,
Though it wasn't my fault
And I wasn't to blame,
The day not half over
And ten thousand slain,and now
There's nobody remembers our names
And that's how it is for a soldier.

Extraneous

Today is a happy day in British Columbia. Ladies and gentlemen, our Premier, mister Gordon Campbell, has resigned.



I promised myself I wouldn't cry when it happened. And I'm not.

I know this has nothing to do with music, but I'm so happy I just want to stand on the roof and shout out to the world. So... here's a song I guess.

Oh yeah, and Electric Wizard have a new album out, Black Masses, and it probably canes harder than anything since Dopethrone. Just so you know, they are the Heaviest Band in the Universe. I held a cage match once to find out. Anyways, I'm gonna go listen to it. See ya.

Unholy

So I'm tearing myself away from Hammer horror films and homework to do a quick and dirty Hallowe'en playlist to share with y'all. Unsurprisingly, it's heavy (no pun intended) on the doom metal. When the Zombie apocalypse comes, we'll all be jammin' out to these tunes.

Music to creep to:
Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
Mercyful Fate - Into The Coven
Witchfinder General - Burning Sinner
The Misfits - Mommy, Can I Go Out And Kill Tonight?
Bad Brains - Fearless Vampire Killers
Awesome Color - Zombie
Ramesses - Baptism Of The Walking Dead
KISS - Unholy
Candlemass - Under The Oak
Death - Zombie Ritual
Cathedral - Serpent Eve
Warlord - Mrs. Victoria
Saint Vitus - Zombie Hunter
Blue Öyster Cult - Tattoo Vampire
Mayhem - Funeral Fog
Warlock - Burning The Witches
The Ramones - I Don't Wanna Go Down Into The Basement
Iron Maiden - Dance Of Death
Morbid Angel - Chapel Of Ghouls
Ozzy Osbourne - Bark At The Moon
The Melvins - At The Stake
Possessed - The Exorcist
Judas Priest - Evil Fantasies
Exciter - Black Witch
Electric Wizard - We Live
Pentagram - When The Screams Come
AC/DC - Night Prowler
Trouble - The Skull
Angel Witch - White Witch
Venom - Witching Hour
Sunn 0))) - Big Church
Helloween - Halloween

Happy Halloween all you witches and warlocks!

Reccomendation

If you are ever looking for a place to buy wax in Vancouver, Neptoon Records is the place to go. Their selection of early 70's rock n' roll is unsurpassed in the city. Props to Ben for ordering in all that crazy stuff, including plenty of obscure Japanese psych and long out of print British hard rock. Great used section too, everything is in good shape and reasonably-priced. Would that I had way more money to spend on records, I'd be in here every day.

Amalgamation

We all know that the first four Black Sabbath albums should be required listening for every man woman and child on earth. That's a self-evident truth. But what about the others? Mid-period Sabbath is often criminally overlooked due to the drug-fueled excess, legal wrangling and just plain bad ideas that plagued the band from 1973-1975. As much as the band's personal lives may have been falling apart at the time, there was still enough left in the tank to produce two great albums in Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage that are only disappointing if held to the impossibly high standard the band had already set for itself during the incomparable main sequence of Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master Of Reality and Volume 4. Until 1976, it was never a lack of good material that hampered the band, but rather an abundance of half-baked ideas and poor decisions. The torrid pace with which the earlier material was cut compared to the 2 year layover between Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabaotage suggest not only that the ideas may have been slower in coming but also that they were more heavily laboured upon when they arrived. At that point in their career a very successful band, Sabbath was given access to studio time and equipment that had previously been unavailable, and the temptation to make use of it caused a shift in their sound towards something denser and more progressive. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing, as such studio flourishes like Geezer's nifty overdriven echo-wah bass on "The Writ" or the acoustic coda to "Symptom Of The Universe" make clear, but the case I'm making with this here riff sandwich is that Sabbath could still move mountains when they just locked in and did what they did best. Hey, no one's done torpid, doomy drug rock better than these guys before or since, so why not listen to some of their lesser-beloved material with a fresh set of ears?

Side A
Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath
Symptom Of The Universe
Killing Yourself To Live
Megalomania

Side B
Hole In The Sky
Sabba Cadabra
A National Acrobat
The Writ

How's that for a smokin' platter of rock n' roll? No "Fluff," "Who Are You," or "Superczar," just slow, heavy riffs and titanic drums with everyone's favorite acid-blasted hippy pleading for peace and love. And really, isn't that all you ever wanted?