WHISKY, DOOM, AND ONE VOTE FOR THE MOST METAL VAMPIRE MOVIE YET MADE

 Off Topic, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  14 Responses »
Apr 212014
 

I don’t have any rhyme or reason why I combined the items in this post. The mind works in mysterious ways, especially after it has been pickled in alcohol.

“WHISKY AND DOOM”

A friend of mine who reads the New York Times every day sent me a link to an article by Charly Wilder in yesterday’s Travel section, because he knows I love metal, even though he doesn’t. I’d like to just copy and paste the whole damn thing, but I’d probably get a take-down notice from some lawyers for copyright violation. So I’ll just paraphrase.

The article is about an event (“Taste the Doom”) that has been happening off and on since 2011 in the back rooms of various Berlin bars (Germany, not North Dakota) in which the organizers pair single-malt whisky and doom metal. Until experiencing them together the writer was not a fan of single malt (“a decent drink but hardly worthy of all the macho lore and rhapsodizing on peat content and cask type”) or doom (“with its sludgy guitars and demon voices, it was hard to imagine it being enjoyed unironically by actual adults — or really anyone not planning a murder-suicide”). But when she tried them together beginning two years ago, “it all made perfect sense”. Continue reading »

METAL FASTING — REFLECTING ON EXILE

 Off Topic, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Apr 102014
 

(NCS contributor Leperkahn decided that for a school project he was going to spend a week without metal. He received a lot of suggestions from our readers for non-metal listening, and he wrote day-by-day reports of what he explored instead of metal. In this post he reflects on the experience.)

Well, I’ve finally returned to my beloved metal. Though it was very interesting and informative to explore other genres, the experiment also proved to affirm metal as my outright favorite genre, at its best combining all the disparate positive elements of nearly every other genre into one. Part of that may stem from the extremely vague definition metal has come to assume: Perhaps the only uniting factor is a strong, loud percussive unit (and even that could be called into question).  Many of the other genres I explored seem to have somewhat stricter definitions, which necessarily seems to place an eventual constraint on the directions in which a genre can evolve.

That’s not to discount the ability of these other genres to go places where metal has never gone, nor could ever go. Most forays of metal into rap’s “territory”, for example, have been rather ill-fated (I think of Limp Bizkit here, as opposed to the success story of Rage Against The Machine). Continue reading »

METAL FASTING: DAYS 6-7

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Apr 072014
 

(NCS guest contributor Leperkahn decided that for a school project he was going to spend a week without metal. He received a lot of suggestions from our readers, and this is his report on the last two days of the experiment.)

Today’s listening, on my last day of exile (I must have missed a day in writing somewhere, ‘cause it’s definitely been seven days, but I only have six posts to show for it), was a rather faint attempt to delve into some classical, bolstered by catching up on SNL and Vikings (hence the reduced listening). Let’s get right on to it.

***

I pretty much went for the two classical pieces suggested by reader TGLumberjack: Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. The former was, as were the other classical tidbits I sampled yesterday, quite a journey throughout its roughly 40-minute runtime, introducing many interweaving melodies and tense climaxes. As for the latter, TGLumberjack probably described it best: Continue reading »

METAL FASTING: DAY 5

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Apr 052014
 

(NCS guest contributor Leperkahn decided that for a school project he was going to spend a week without metal. He received a lot of suggestions from our readers, and this is his report on Day 5 of the experiment.)

I’m afraid I didn’t get much listening time yesterday, probably because I didn’t have any prolonged, sedentary activities to perform (i.e., studying). In fact, I really only got to one album, an electronic album recommended by a couple people from a feller named Mosh. The album was Monarchy (not his most recent release, as I eventually found out).

While it was a very enjoyable background album, and thankfully did not sound like Transformers fornicating, it confirmed many of the other suspicions I have about electronic music. Quite a lot of the electronic music I’ve heard tends not to go for a sonic journey, as much as to paint a picture of a given atmosphere (or just go for a perpetual dance beat). That’s one of the things I enjoy most about most metal, and about the new discoveries I’ve made on many fronts this week. If anyone has some suggestions as to electronic artists who can actually achieve that type of aural excursion, please leave them below, as I would be very intrigued to hear about them. Continue reading »

METAL FASTING: DAY 4

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Apr 042014
 

(NCS guest contributor Leperkahn decided that for a school project he was going to spend a week without metal. He received a lot of suggestions from our readers, and this is his report on Day 4 of the experiment.)

Very early on in my music listening career, I was very much into rap. Part of it might have been the combination of the ease of access to it (all I had to do was go to the Top 100 iTunes songs chart to find plenty of stuff for my young ears) with the misguided idea that girls had “cooties” or something, and that listening to other types of pop would make me “girly”. In hindsight, I want to slap my former self for ever thinking like that, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was the way I thought once.

Nevertheless, I used to be mostly a rap fan (specifically the popular stuff). That all changed when I first picked up, played, and became obsessed with Guitar Hero III (maybe as a third or fourth grader; I’m not in the mood to calculate when exactly it would have been). That elucidated to me the wonders of classic rock, and sent me on a decade-long tailspin that has landed me here, deeply entrenched in the metal underground.

When I began to get more immersed into rock, and especially once I found heavier metal, I began to swear off all types of rap, perhaps in realization of how awful my music taste once was. Honestly, I hadn’t even tried to look into rap for years, until this project hit. Continue reading »

METAL FASTING: DAY 3

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Apr 032014
 

(NCS guest contributor Leperkahn decided that for a school project he was going to spend a week without metal. He received a lot of suggestions from our readers, and this is his report on Day 3 of his experiment.)

This third post is going to be a bit light on music, as was my day, for the first time in a very long time.

Like most NCS readers, I tend to fill my earholes with music on a semi-constant basis, in both appropriate and inappropriate social contexts. For the first time in a long time, I really didn’t listen to much music. In fact, I didn’t listen to anything besides a bit of random radio garble while driving various places, at least not until a little before 7 o’clock at night.

Part of this might have been that, unlike yesterday, I had no plan at all as to what I was going to theme my day with. My brain racked for a bit in search of an idea, but for most of the day nothing came to mind that seemed fitting. Part of it was also definitely a lack of opportunities to listen, since I had a calc test and part one of my two-part final essay in a Literature class. This, combined with a lack of sleep from studying the previous night, left me in a rather crabby mood, and not particularly receptive to music.

However, I eventually came around. I started by checking out a band recommended in the Day 2 post, The Goat Rodeo Sessions. Continue reading »

METAL FASTING: DAY 2

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Apr 022014
 

(NCS guest contributor Leperkahn decided that for a school project he was going to spend a week without metal. He received a lot of suggestions from our readers, and this is his report on Day 2 of his experiment.)

As I forecast in my Day 1 post, Day 2 was an excursion into the vast world of jazz. Copious amounts of studying in the wake of finals simultaneously pushed me to wit’s end and gave me a lot of time to listen to a lot of jazz.

I started the day with a band that is perhaps not entirely jazz, but is awesome nonetheless: Steely Dan. They and Aja were perhaps the most recommended band and album throughout the various mediums on which I solicited non-metal suggestions. The album seemed to be right in the middle of classic rock and jazz, reminding me of The Eagles or Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in places while staying jazzier (with a faint Kenny G vibe hanging in the air) elsewhere.

It was a great start to the day for my ears, and is a band and album I foresee myself revisiting quite a bit (especially considering that I just saw a show listing for them at Humphrey’s By the Bay, which might be one of the coolest places to see live music). Continue reading »

METAL FASTING: DAY 1

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Apr 012014
 

(Last Friday, NCS guest contributor Leperkahn announced that for a school project he was going to spend a week without metal, and he asked our readers for suggestions of non-metal music to explore. He received a flood of comments, which are damned interesting to read all by themselves — HERE. Beginning today, Leperkahn is revealing his choices and documenting his listening experiences.)

It has begun.

I have not listened to metal since midnight last night, after one last farewell listen to Opeth’s Blackwater Park. In its place, today has been filled with various folk excursions, all of them coming from your lovely suggestions. On the whole, I had a generally positive experience with my selections today: some awesome, some not-at-all-my-thing, some meh. We (the royal we) shall document them chronologically.

The morning started off with the ethereal acoustic guitar of Musk Ox (pictured above), which paired perfectly with the speed of my Monday-afflicted brain (Chai tea helped too). Founding member  Nathaneal Larochette and a changing line-up of cohorts do an excellent job of creating marvelously sparse, yet epic accompaniments to the album covers used (especially the later covers). I only had time to listen to the few single tracks Musk Ox had uploaded (one of which came from the Whom The Moon A Nightsong Sings compilation that was suggested at some point), as well as one of the EPs, Entre La Terre et Le Ciel.

On a surface-level listen (which was all I was capable of this early in the morning) the songs seemed rather similar to each other, aiming for a flowing atmosphere and mood rather than attempting to distinguish songs. All in all, Musk Ox proved a promising start to the experiment. Continue reading »

A NO METAL POLL

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Mar 282014
 

(NCS guest contributor Leperkahn has embarked on what appears to be a foolish endeavor. Against our better judgment, we’re helping him out by letting him solicit your suggestions for this hair-brained escapade. This will end in tears.)

Greetings, NCS comrades.

As a few of you may know, I’m still in high school (only for a couple more months, though). My elective class for this semester is a journalism class. For one of the capstone-y projects of the course, I am supposed to do an experiential blog. More precisely, I am tasked to alter my life in some meaningful (but feasible) manner, and write about the process as I go along.

I have listened more or less exclusively to metal for a couple years now, with only a few conscious forays into other areas (by conscious, I mean outside of the pop music that cannot be escaped by any sociable person). Thus, I thought it fitting – difficult, but certainly feasible – to try and live an entire week without any metal in my life. None. At the many times I would usually listen to metal during the week, I will instead listen to another largely unrelated genre. Continue reading »

THE LATEST EXTORTION FROM FACEBOOK

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Mar 222014
 

Aw hell, here we go again.

The writing has been on the Facebook wall for a while, and I’m not talking about your writing. I’m talking about the invisible writing of Facebook’s programmers, the increasingly demonic sigils inscribed into the backbone of the Facebook monolith that determine what its users will and won’t see in their news feeds.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written on the subject of how Facebook manipulates the selection of content that each user will see, but the story is a continuing one, with a consistent theme. This is just the latest chapter in the company’s efforts to leverage their gargantuan user base for the extraction of more advertising dollars — including money that Facebook Pages can spend to “promote” their posts so that more people will see them.

Honestly, on a day-to-day basis I don’t pay much attention to developments such as the one I’m about to describe. Other people watch Facebook’s moves like a hawk, because they can have a big effect on big bidness. I generally avoid the subject because it makes me queasy. But my fellow metal blogger Angry Metal Guy recently alerted me to a new piece of intelligence that confirmed some of my recent suspicions — and I’m writing about it because misery really does love company. Continue reading »

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