Before diving into the subject of this post, let me make one thing clear: I do not understand why metal blogs spend print on Emmure’s Frankie Palmieri. The writers I have in mind do not listen to Emmure. Most of their readers do not listen to Emmure. Frankie Palmeri is not an interesting person. Therefore, why write about him? The only answer I can think of is that he’s easy to make fun of, because he says ridiculous things. Seems like a waste of space to me. Now, having gotten that off my chest, I’ll move on and write about Frankie Palmeri.
By way of background, Emmure are touring Europe at the moment. So are The Atlas Moth — a band whose music I like a lot. The Atlas Moth have been stopping at venues where Emmure have previously stopped. Upon finding Emmure stickers and assorted tags at these venues, The Atlas Moth have been defacing them with drawings of dicks, because, well, The Atlas Moth think Emmure sucks. This has led to a war of words with Frank Palmeri, which is sort of like going to war with a cockatoo. Things that sound like words come out, but they don’t make much sense.
Yesterday (May 7), while performing in Moscow, Franki Palmeri received an electric shock while in the middle of a song, a shock that was powerful enough to knock him straight down and out cold. Obviously, a dangerous situation that could have been worse, though Palmeri has recovered and is already making PR hay out of the incident.
And finally I come to the subject of this post. In a display of creative genius, Cris Bissell, the drummer for a Wisconsin band named Orwell, created a music video, pairing up a continuous loop of film showing Palmeri getting zapped to The Atlas Moth song “Holes in the Desert” (which is a killer song). I found this to be funny as shit. Why?
March 2, 2010: I wrote a rare, completely off-topic post about a movie — Crazy Heart.
April 9, 2012: A new comment appeared on that post. No one would have seen this comment, except possibly for Phro, since he left the only other comment on the post — in March 2011.
Here is the recent comment by a smear of living diarrhea whose spam-bot created the name qr5mer, with my interspersed responses in yellow, since that is the color of the piss in which I would like to drown this jackass:
“Let it end up being. ‘If a cyst is smaller than average discreet, whether or not this doesn injured or perhaps scratch in case this isn reddish colored and also soft, then you could only get out only, Inches states that Jack H. Any hands-off plan is the best for any cyst.”
Pardon me for being less than average discreet, but I disagree. A hands-off plan for the cyst that you are would be the worst plan. I would like to injure you, by scratching you until you are nothing but a big reddish color, and also soft.
Oh what a difference a day makes. Yesterday I was congratulating Encyclopaedia Metallum – The Metal Archives on the addition of the 90,000th band to their remarkable band database (and celebrating the music of that band — Senobyte). And then today, thanks once again to a tip from Happy Metal Guy, I learned that Nickelback have now been added to that same database.
Yes, Nickelback. The band that all true metalheads love to club like a baby harp seal stranded on an ice floe. They are now polluting Metal Archives, right here, big as life and twice as smelly. And don’t think the moderators of Metal Archives didn’t know what they were doing. This explanation appeared last night on MA’s Facebook page:
After a long and harsh process, M-A has decided to add Nickelback to its database. Once our Canadian moderators brought up their early releases, and our German mods agreed in unison, we were forced to reconsider them. Indeed, their first album Curb is totally metal and influenced by Soundgarden and Alice in Chains who are both on the site.
We felt like explaining ourselves and we’re truly sorry to all their fans for this mistake, they DESERVED their spot on the Archives.
Knowing my interest in unsolicited offers of wealth from exotic foreign lands, my NCS comrade TheMadIsraeli shared with me an e-mail he received yesterday from Dr. Sani Ahmed, Director, Telex/Foreign Operation, of the Central Bank of Nigeria. I took it upon myself to answer the message and have sent the following response:
Dear Sani,
Heh dude, how they hangin’? You messaged my bro TheMadIsraeli yesterday about a pile of cash you’re offering to get to him. Because he’s my bro, he’s turned all that shit over to me so we can use it to keep our metal blog going. It’s a fuckin’ great blog, you should read it sometime. Seriously, it will change your life. And after reading your e-mail, you definitely need some kinda fuckin’ life change. No offense.
Anyway, I put my answers in what you wrote, and they’re in yellow so’s you can tell when I’m rappin’ at you instead of you rappin’ at me.
You may have noticed that over the last couple of months our site has periodically been unavailable. You come here, and you get an error message of one kind or another. Usually the outages haven’t lasted long, maybe 10 or 20 seconds at a time — except for a 2-hour meltdown that happened last weekend. But in that case, our web host (BlueHost) went down across the board, crashing thousands of sites at the same time, allegedly due to some kind of “power surge” that knocked out our host’s servers in Utah.
Even though the downtimes on our site have usually been brief, it has still annoyed the shit out of me. Given the increasing unreliability of the service, I’ve also grown increasingly worried that something really fuckin’ bad will happen, like corruption or loss of data in our database, destroying years of priceless NCS work product. Late this week, I finally decided to bite the bullet and switch web hosts.
This is not a decision to be made lightly, because switching hosting services is a BIG fuckin’ hassle. But hey, guess what! I may not have to make the switcheroo after all! This morning I received this e-mail from BlueHost:
This little story originally reported on gawker has been making the rounds on the internetz this morning, and it’s just too good not to share.
According to a notice posted on the employee bulletin board at Seton Hall University’s heavy metal radio station WSOU, uttering any band names or playing any songs with the words “devil,” “Satan,” “God,” “Jesus,” or “any other Catholic references that are portrayed in a negative light” will result in suspension.
But to take any guesswork out of which band names aren’t appropriate for the airwaves at “Seton Hall’s Pirate Radio,” the management drafted a list of the 53 dirtiest band names that you can never say on the radio, a la George Carlin’s iconic monologue about TV.
The list includes such metal radio staples as Cradle of Filth, Cannibal Corpse, Anal Cunt, Morbid Angel, and Deicide, but also a bunch of just-fun-to-say-out-loud outfits such as Adolf Satan, Baby Jesus Hitler, Crucifucks, Jesus Chrysler, Smother Theresa, and, of course, Hell-O.
Completely understandable and appropriate. Seton Hall is, after all, a private Roman Catholic university (located in New Jersey), the Archbishop of Newark is the president of its Board of Trustees, and lord knows that the Catholic Church has never tolerated filth, depravity, or degradation . . . except among minor church functionaries known as “priests”, but that doesn’t count.
Having already featured Infant Annihilator’s profound video for the song “Decapitation Fornication” (which has already amassed over 100,000 YouTube views among discriminating voyeurs of art-house film), it follows that we must feature the “making of” video for the video of “Decapitation Fornication”.
There is really no choice in the matter, is there? No, of course there isn’t. In for a dime, in for a dollar. Or maybe it’s in for a pence, in for a pound? Or whatever expression people in England use for those moments when you just decide to dive all the way into whatever mess you’ve already tip-toed into.
And since we’re on the subject of Infant Annihilator, this seemed like a good time to feature the just-released artwork for the band’s debut album, The Palpable Leprosy of Pollution, which will be vomited forth on 12-12-12.
But back to the “making of” video. It’s a rare privilege to get a glimpse behind the scenes of filmmaking at this level, to witness the seriousness and care with which the cinematographer and the cast approached the project, to see how much love (and nipple-massaging) went into the production.
In an age when CGI is king, we can also see that Infant Annihilator went with actual green vomiting. However, as an objective critic I have to say that the band tarnished their cinéma vérité credibility by using simulated sodomy and no actual tonguing. Still, as budding filmmakers, Aaron and Eddie should be forgiven for feeling their way gently in their first effort, and we have every confidence that in their future work they’ll get down to the kind of raw hardcore pounding that their growing legions of fans will undoubtedly demand.
I fell off a wall last night. Intoxicants may have had something to do with it, though native idiocy could explain the whole thing, too.
My wife is out of town. I had been out carousing. Turns out I had locked myself out of my house, and had left the house key inside. I had also forgotten to turn on any lights, and where I live, it’s pretty close to pitch black when the lights are off. I also had no flashlight in my car (yeah, I’m that kind of dumbass). I was trying to find my way around to the back of the house to a place where a spare key is hidden. This involved walking along the edge of a low wall above a shallow ravine.
I thought I’d passed the end of the ravine and could safely turn left to walk down a small slope to where the key is hidden, but like I said, I couldn’t see shit. I took a step, unexpectedly went down about four feet, and landed awkwardly. Skinned up my left leg and twisted my ankle pretty good.
I lay there for a few minutes whimpering, with the sounds of the lorises’ mewling laughter ringing in my head. After I made it inside (which took a while), I probably should have tried to do something about the ankle, something like putting ice on it or wrapping it in an Ace bandage, or cutting off my foot right above the sprain. But I was kinda fucked up and I wanted to get off of it fast, so I pounded some Advil and went to bed.
I received the following e-mail today, with the word “urgently” in the subject line. I replied to it urgently. Because although not one of these people has ever followed through and sent me money, I know that one day it will happen, because people are generous and good and will eventually recognize all the wonderful things I can do with a few million dollars, such as enhance the electrification of the fencing around the loris compound and install the Grolsch beer fountain and pay Fleshgod Apocalypse to move to Seattle and play music for me whenever I want and buy a head so that Phro will stop making fun of me.
From: “Mr Jackie Gallop“<[email protected]>Date: October 27, 2012 8:09:42 AM PDTTo: undisclosed-recipients:;Subject: urgentlyReply-To: <[email protected]>Dear Client,
Report : Investigation revealed that you have received Lot of Payment Notification with requests to secure funds Transfer Documents, Pay Diplomatic fees, Transfer Charges etc, yet all effort to receive the Compensation/Lottery payment lawfully entitled to you, have been to no avail. With the help of the best Internet investigators, The International Monetary Funds IMF we have taken out time in screening through your Compensation/Lottery payment project as stipulated on our protocol of operations.
Prior to series of reports (Email, Fax, Telephone and Mail Post) from beneficiaries across Asia, Europe, America just to mention a few, urging us to investigate these irregularities, Special International Dept Settlement Officers attached to this honorable Institution, The Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI was deployed to various Compensation payment Centers around the world so as to carry out proper.
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It will come as no surprise to our readers that of all my many Facebook friends, most of whom undoubtedly have mistaken me for someone else, it was Phro and Phro alone who posted a link to the above video on his page. By being straight-forward and direct, it serves as a pointed reminder of how much bullshit we put up with in advertising. It made me think of how refreshing it would be if promotional campaigns for metal albums followed a similar formula.
Don’t get me wrong. I have cordial relations with many label representatives and PR folks, and I generally enjoy reading their album descriptions because they write better than I do and I admire good writing, except when I don’t enjoy their writing because they write better than I do. Also, I depend on them for advance access to music, which I appreciate because there’s not really a quid pro quo, given that even when I whip my lazy ass into writing a review it’s difficult for me to imagine anyone actually relying on my opinion in deciding what music to buy. This is why I always include music with the reviews. I may be stupid, but I’m not dumb.
Still, after seeing that video, I couldn’t help but fantasize about what the “Bag For Your Dick” approach to promotion would mean for metal PR:
“This album sounds like thousands of other deathcore albums with a few weedily riffs thrown in to make it sound “progressive”. It gave me diarrhea by the second track, but brainless teenagers will think it’s brutal. If any brainless teenagers read your blog, pimp the crap out of these hacks. Make sure you have the quart-sized Pepto Bismol on hand before you listen to this shit.”
“Here’s the long-awaited and highly anticipated new album by this band whose name I’d give my left nut to forget. And by ‘long-awaited and highly anticipated’ I mean these assholes have been auto-tuning and pro-tooling the living shit out of this pile of putrescence for the last year while getting high every night and bitching about their gf’s, who must be as retarded as the deluded dudes in this band. Whatever.”
