Finland - the holy land of Metal

Just after having a recent conversation with Eric on this very topic Evil Ray sends me the below video. Now the guy can't sing. Fine. THAT IS NOT THE POINT! Imagine anyone choosing to sing Maiden on American Idol. Would she be allowed? What would the sponsors think? Viva la Finland!

BBQ Sauce Uber Alles!

Fresh from Indonesia, the SUPERIOR vegetarian barbecue sauce!

Yet even more updated concert schedule

5/30 Roger Waters
5/31 Metal Meltdown II (Gods of Fire)
6/9 Skinny Puppy
6/19 Big Business
6/21 Porn Rock Ball (Gods of Fire)
6/22-6/23 Brooklyn Metalfest w/Ross-the-Boss, Seven Witches, Magus Beast, others
7/7 Boredoms with 77 drummers!
7/8 Rush
7/28 Sonic Youth
8/7 Deep Purple
8/9 Daft Punk
8/11 Symphony X

Eddication Friday!

My new books arrived today!!

The Barbecue Bible!

and

Mastering Audio: The art and the science

If you are interested in compression or Kofte kebabs, I'm your man!

Thanks Harry for the tip off for the BBQ book. Now I have something to do with all those spices I just got.

Spoiler free reaction to the season finale of Lost

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA?

....and a great Nirvana reference!

Jesus and Mary *snore* Chain

Nerds, if you look closely at that photo on the left you may notice that William Reid was playing through TWO (2) Orange heads powering TWO (2) Orange 4x12s. That is more juice than even J Mascis needs!

Unfortunately the show wasn't very loud, wasn't very heavy and the band looked as bored as ever. No one forced them to reunite or take my $50.

Why bother going on a reunion tour if you can't go out on stage for an HOUR (I heard it was 70 minutes with encores. I left right after their last proper song, Reverence) and pretend to be vaguely interested? Yes Johnny Rotten, I did feel cheated.

Between the show and the season finale of Heroes, last night was very dis-satisfying. At least the Falafel and Hummus plate at Chickpeas was good. As were the 10 shots of Jager I drank throughout the night..........

He who controls the spice, controls the universe.

Just ordered via the world wide web:

Baharat (Lebanese spice blend)
Berbere (Ethiopian spice blend)
Ground brown chipotle
Smoked hot paprika
Hot Indian curry powder (red)
Jaffna (Sri-Lankan hot roaster curry powder)

This summer will be tasty!

New album micro-reviews!

The best, worst, and in-between of the recently leaked/released:

Chemical Brothers We are the Night: I don't know when they became a rock band, but they're damn good at it! The track with the Klaxons is so far my favorite

Art Brut It's a bit Complicated: "People in Love" is the best pop song I've heard this year. The rest of the record is very good too.

Bad Brains Build a Nation: Ugh.

Dream Theater Systematic Chaos: They got really heavy and more traditionally proggy. Love it! They should ease back on deliberately cribbing Muse, though. "The Dark Eternal Night" is the current stand-out track for me, but I imagine this will change with more listens.

Symphony X Paradise Lost: The first one that sounds like an album, and not a home recording project. The songs are great too. I think it is a concept album, but I can only tell because every song references Babylon. They are still not world class, but one day. Every album shows a big leap in songwriting and scope.

Marilyn Manson Eat me, Drink me: Unlistenable. Sounds like something a high school kid posted to MySpace.

Megadeth United Abominations: About half the record is as good as anything they've ever done. What more could you ask for?

Wilco Sky Blue Sky: See Megadeth

Ozzy Black Rain: I can't tell if the album is no good or if I just irreparably hate Ozzy. Either way, fuck this noise.

The Holy Wars

Saw Megadeth/Heaven and Hell (Black Sabbath) last night. There's not too much to add to what I already said about Heaven and Hell from the last time I saw them in March. They are still a killer live show, and a reminder of how great arena rock can be.

Megadeth, performing a 45 minute opening set, was killer! Mustaine needs to be constrained more often! With a RUST IN PEACE heavy set, they came out and kicked complete ass despite having headlined the same PNC stage not too long ago.

The setlist to the best of my memory: Sleepwalker/Take No Prisoners/Kick The Chair/Washington is Next/Wake up Dead/Tornado of Souls/Hangar 18/Peace Sells/Symphony of Destruction/Holy Wars (with Mechanix in the middle after the flamenco part)

That is a pure "A material" set. Half of Rust in Peace? TAKE NO FUCKING PRISONERS??? It lends more credence to my theory that bands, with more at stake, often kick more ass as the opening act than when they headline.

MASTO-DONG

That sweet assed camera phone pic on the left is from Mastodon last night at Roseland.

Although the experience wasn't as hot as the last time I was there, it was a pretty amazing show.

Mastodon is a band right after my own heart. They came out, didn't address the audience, and did a straight one hour balls out set and left the stage with no encore. The perfect amount of rock time! No overstaying their welcome, no filler, no muss nor fuss. Just a whole lot of rock.

The bill was weird. We decided to straight up miss Cursive, which was fine with me. I wasn't exactly blown away the last time I saw them. We thought by getting to the venue around 9 we would have circumvented the opening acts. Unfortunately this wasn't the case and Against Me! went on as soon as we walked in. I can only describe them as the type of music MTV would be playing if MTV still showed videos. They looked SoCal punk, sounded poppy and dark, and made use of post-punk disco beats. We hung out in the "secret bar" behind the stage where mercifully you can barely hear the bands and waited all the nonsense out. This band had really young crowd surfing fans, many of whom left before Mastodon. All the better!

Mastodon definitely does not have a Metal audience. The divide between METAL and indie-metal is still pretty vast. I saw that kid who lives in my neighborhood and plays trombone in some indie band and knows my cousin outside smoking a cigarette. Everyone had short hair and could have just as easily been at a Rocket from the Crypt or Arcade Fire gig. I felt like the odd man out. Even the KIDS weren't as Metal as they were at Dimmu Borgir. Where were the mis-guided 15 year old virgins wearing corpse paint?? Either way, Mastodon rocked. By the end of Blood and Thunder I was completely drained. And they played Circle Sysquatch!!!

Faux Faust

Graham came over last night to create yet more music for his first feature film. He had cut an entire scene to a Faust song of dubious copyright, so like any industrious director decided we should sorta "re-create" the song for the scene.

At home using Fruity Loops, Graham built the entire drum groove and brought it over to the studio. First thing we did was upload the scene into Sonar. After the video thumbnails set themselves up we matched the loop to the timing of the scene. Then we found a nice analog keyboard sound to match the bass of the original track.

Then we went into our own thing. I'm a huge fan of DI'ing string instruments and building all of the sounds in post. Graham really wanted me to be insipired laying down the guitar parts by recording dirty. And he used dirty tricks to get what he wanted. He brought out of his bag the BUZZ BOX, a pedal he owns and knows I lust after. It is a pretty nasty sounding distortion which also has an octaver that goes two octaves below POORLY. I thought it would be fun to shred so fast that the pedal couldn't keep up and sadly it wasn't very hard. The octaver would chug along behind me at its own pace, sometimes hitting the right notes, sometimes not.

So this is how the guitar parts went. I did two tracks of Kraut Rock noodles completely DI'ed with the Buzz Box. Played back straight back through the monitors without any additional effects the sound was very reminiscent of early Butthole Surfers. I'm pretty psyched with it. As we speak Graham is adding vox, an e-bow track, and editing the whole thing together in his studio on a Pro-tools setup.

Between this, our doo-wop tune Spray it On, and the general noise weirdness we recorded, I think the soundtrack for this movie is going to kick tons of ass!

Concert schedule - updated

Jesus Christ I go to a lot of shows!

5/17 Mastodon
5/19 Heaven and Hell/Megadeth/Machine Head
5/21 Jesus and Mary Chain
5/25 Symphony X
5/30 Roger Waters
5/31 Metal Meltdown II (Gods of Fire)
6/2 Weird Al
6/21 Porn Rock Ball (Gods of Fire)
6/22-6/23 Brooklyn Metalfest w/Ross-the-Boss, Seven Witches, Magus Beast, others
7/7 Boredoms with 77 drummers!
7/8 Rush
7/28 Sonic Youth
8/7 Deep Purple
8/9 Daft Punk

dysgrace

New song up on the myspace. Check it out here.

I'm pretty proud of where I took this one. I didn't expect it to turn out this guitar heavy. A lot of the vocals were recorded before guitars were added to the mix. Discipline has never been one of my finer traits and shit, I can add layers indefinitely. Knowing what to take away or never put in was as important as what to add.

I think I'm getting the hang of the new gear. We'll see where the next one goes.

An open letter to the people promoting Dream Theater

How come I received 5 emails via 2 email addresses letting me know that if I pre-order Systematic Chaos I can get a free lithograph, but ZERO (0) emails letting me know that tickets for Jones Beach and PNC are already on sale?

Fuck your dead mothers.

Love,

scd

Celtic Frosted Flakes

On a whim I went to go see Celtic Frost and Type O Negative at the venue formerly known as Irving Plaza.

Celtic Frost was about 1,000 billion times better than when I saw them headline BB King's last fall. I think it had everything to do with them being an opening act. Some of the best sets I have seen are when bands come out hungry trying to win over someone else's audience. The two best times I saw Children of Bodom were opening for Iced Earth and Slayer. Sure their 90 minute headlining sets are great, but when they came on stage in front of Iced Earth's audience knowing most people neither knew nor cared who they were there was a fight in them that was positively intoxicating. Celtic Frost had this last night.

They came out in shockingly effective corpse paint and rocked through a very bare bones stage set up. Check out the awesome camera phone pic above. Yay, Motorola! Most of the songs were old, going waaaay back to Morbid Tales. They just got in front of the audience and kicked ass. No bullshit. No muss, no fuss.

Type O kinda sucked. I've seen them a few times in the last 13 years (damn!) and I really like the new record, but there was something off. Pete Steele's voice wasn't that great, the band didn't sound that tight, and the sound mix wasn't very flattering to their legato sustained notes. What sounds sublimely taut and tense on record was pretty boring at Irving. Even the punchy opening of Magical Mystery Tour into We Hate Everyone was a bit of a snore. I left after about 30 minutes. I know I have a knack for leaving shows early, but that had to be a world record. On the way home I listened to the new Symphony X and started getting pumped to see them at BB's in a couple of weeks!

An open letter to internet music leakers

I applaud your efforts towards bringing me brand new records months before their release date.

Though I must say I am REALLY backed up right now. The new Symphony X? For reals? Right after you bless us with Bjork, Megadeth, Marilyn Manson, They Might Be Giants, Tomahawk, and Dungen?

Really, take a nap. I need to catch up. Seriously, I had to crash course the night of Dimmu as I hadn't even had a chance to absorb their record. I don't have as much time to listen to music as I did. The madness must end!

Leakers you need to take a leaking break. Let us enjoy some tunes before the new wave of bombardment. However if anyone out there is sitting on the new Bad Brains, King Diamond, Art Brut, Dream Theater, Shellac or Entombed, then please disregard this message.

Thanks!

Best,

scd

A perfect ratio

Today is a great day for the Gods of Fire MySpace page.

We have the PERFECT amount of friends! Looky look look! (click the pic for full size awesome awesomeness!!!)

Ok gotta run to PMK...........