I gotta admit, Mastodon is pretty cool.

The late ’90s weren’t a friendly time for heavy metal.  The airwaves were full of tripe like Static-X and Fear Factory.  Metal fans everywhere were forced underground when the heretofore-unstoppable Metallica sued Napster and aligned themselves with The Man.  The late ’90s was the heyday of the Juggalo.  It was a shitty time to be a metalhead, but there were those who kept the faith, even when the only way to catch a decent show was to go see the perpetually touring Slayer for the millionth time and wait outside til the crappy opening acts were done (and oh, did they ever tour with some awful bands).

The furry beasts of Mastodon

Quietly, beneath this cesspool of craptitude, isolated pockets of good metal were beginning to brew.  Acts like Lamb of God emerged in the mid-2000s to carry the torch into a new era.  One of the best bands of this rare but valuable variety is Georgia-based Mastodon, whose straightforward, hammering style hearkens back to the glory days of dirty, working-class metal bands.  The band got together because they were all fans of the Melvins, and they maintain their metal integrity both by playing consistently high-quality heavy music, and by acting like a metal band – they made the news after the 2007 VMAs, at which guitarist Brent Hinds got super wasted, picked a fight with the drummer from System of a Down and a couple other guys, and suffered brain hemmorhaging and a broken nose.  Could you see Lars Ulrich pulling that shit?  Of course not.  Mastodon are keeping the spirit of metal alive, man.

Mastodon is coming to town tonight, and they’re opening for Dethklok, the cartoon band featured in the Adult Swim program “Metalocalypse”.  Until recently, I’d never seen this show; my heavy metal fandom caused my friends to recommend it to me.  “You must watch it!” they said.  “It’s the funniest thing ever!” they said.  So I did, and it wasn’t.  The show is terrible.  Apparently, though, the show has lots of fans, because the band has found a way to successfully tour, despite the fact that they’re cartoon characters.  I think the creator of the show and a bunch of session guys are playing in front of a screen displaying the cartoon band.  Huh?  People pay to see this kind of fail?  I’d totally go just for Mastodon if I had the money, though.

What: Mastodon, Dethklok, and High By Fire.  Where: House of Blues, 2200 N Lamar St.  When: Wednesday Nov 11th, doors at 6, show at 6:30 (this seems really really early to me, but whatever).  How much: Tickets range from $34.50 to $60. I guess this Metalocalypse thing is pretty popular if they can get away with charging that much for tickets.

Your gift for today is Mastodon’s appearance on the Jimmy Fallon show a couple weeks ago.  They’re hairy and ugly, but boy, can they rock out.

today in history (a couple days late) October 28, 1994: Pink Floyd gives Douglas Adams a belated birthday gift

I’m a huge fan of Douglas Adams, best known as writer of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.  He’s one of the funniest human beings to ever have graced humanity with his wit.  Douglas Adams himself was a huge fan of Pink Floyd.  He was close friends with Floyd singer/guitarist David Gilmour, to such an extent that the band had Adams name one of their albums, 1994’s “The Division Bell”. 

That same year, Gilmour and his bandmates gave Adams a phenomenal birthday present: an invitation to sit in with Floyd onstage as rhythm guitarist on a couple songs.  Adams, a talented amateur guitarist and guitar collector, jumped at the chance, and the gift saw its fulfillment during Floyd’s October 28, 1994, concert at Earls Court in London.  No video exists of the concert, but we do have audio and photos, which an intrepid YouTuber has put together for our enjoyment:

Adams plays left-handed; I think he’s playing a Danelectro in these pictures.  He’s no Gilmour, but he’s not bad, especially given the circumstances (if I were invited to sit in with Pink Fucking Floyd, I’d mess up, for sure).  Adams passed away in 2001 from a heart attack, and the world is a lesser place without him – he’s one of the greatest literary talents to ever take pen to paper, and by all accounts, he was a spectacular human being as well.  David Gilmour played at Adams’ memorial service, along with Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker, also a friend.

I’m bringing Wiki-back: the strange tale of the Nickelback Wikipedia page

okay, so the last few weeks have been full of fail in the writing department.  Not only have I been neglecting this blog, I’ve been falling behind on homework, which is a very, very bad thing.  In the spirit of pulling myself up by the bootstraps and becoming productive once again, I am putting one of my (very late) school assignments up here as well as on the blog I use for classwork, as the topic pertains to music.  Well, sort of .  As I explain below, there’s some debate as to whether Nickelback constitutes music per se.

hey, give them a break, they're Canadian...

I myself am not a Nickelback fan, and it seems like I am not alone in my non-fandom of this band. Their Wikipedia page has been vandalized so often, and with such fervidity, that the History page on Nickelback’s Wiki entry is something to go see if you are into lulz of the really, really offensive sort.  There’s even a video that pays tribute to the unabashed hatred that the wiki-community has for these poor guys.  Witness:  

(warning: the song that goes along with this video is pretty damn awful, so be prepared to mute it.  In its original posting on collegehumor.com, it has an equally awful but more appropriate Nickelback song playing during the video; I couldn’t embed the original and had to use the version someone put on YouTube with a different song, which I figured was okay because the viewer would probably be muting the Nickelback version anyways.)

This video has inspired a new wave of wannabe wiki-hoodlums to truck on over to Nickelback’s page, only to find it locked.  There was much discussion on the wiki about whether or not the widespread negative opinion of the band should be included on the main page.  After concluding that the sheer volume of negativity directed at Nickelback rendered this collective opinion both valid and relevant, editors opted to include a lengthy “Criticism” section at the end of the article, which has a much more neutral tone than the earlier vandalism, and refrains from the latter’s rampant use of the word “gay” *.

Wikipedia is one of the most interesting phenomena to come out of Internet 2.0, and everything good and bad about this site is encompassed on the Nickelback page.  Opinions occupy a space outside the realm of truth and falsehood; however, when an opinion is widely held, the very existence of this collective opinion becomes a fact in and of itself.  Pop culture by definition is shaped by the popular opinion of a large group of people; Nickelback, as entertainers, are part of pop culture as well, and if lots of people think they suck, this opinion is a vital part of the story of the band.

* – Seriously, internet vandals.  I’d be much more approving of your mischief if it wasn’t for the homophobia, racism, and sexism.  Surely you can come up with more creative ways of being ridiculously offensive.  Perhaps I expect too much out of the teenage-boy troll contingent, but if they know how to hack into things and write code and stuff, they have at least some working brain cells, which could be put to good use coming up with something more clever than “this shit is gay”.

band rehearsal: I can see the train a’comin’ from far down the tracks…

…and oh, yes, what a wonderful train wreck this is gonna be, because I’ve convinced the guys in my country-music cover band that we should do a Taylor Swift song.  None of them has ever heard a Taylor Swift song before, as they’re all old dudes in their fifties who don’t listen to teenybopper radio.  I played them “You Belong With Me” on my guitar yesterday at rehearsal, and they said it was “sweet” and agreed to do it.  ”This’ll appeal to the teen fanbase,” joked one of the Chucks (bass player & drummer are both named Chuck).

I made them watch the video for the song, and the looks on their faces was pretty priceless.  ”What in the hell is that?” said Tom, wrinkling his nose like he’d smelled something awful as he watched a pigtailed Taylor flirt with the cutest boy in school.  They told me I sing the song better than Taylor, which is an outright lie, but I appreciate it nonetheless.  Despite the junior-high look of the video, they maintained that it’s a good song (which it is) and said we should still cover it (which we will).  Why do I feel like I’m corrupting these old guys, who’ve been in punk bands since the ’70s, with this teenybopper nonsense?

They don’t seem to want to kick me out of the band yet, so we’ll see what awful cover concepts I can come up with next week.

your gift for today: Immortal brings teh lulz

I came across the strange story of the Immortal photoshop/Youtube meme when I was doing research on internet memes for my emerging media class.  For those who don’t know, a meme is something stupid and random that becomes very popular on the Internet for reasons unbeknownst to most folks – for example, Rickrolling or Lolcats.  The Immortal meme centers around the eponymous Norwegian black-metal band Immortal.  They are a pretty spooky bunch, as might be expected from a band in corpsepaint whose frontman is named Abbath Doom Occulta.  In the early ’90s, Immortal made one of the most ridiculous metal videos of all time for their song “Call of the Wintermoon” (click for the original video).  It’s not a bad song, but the video is one for the ages: this low-budget gem features band members traipsing around in the woods in witch costumes and making scary faces at the camera.  It’s fucking hilarious on its own.

The meme started a few years back on various heavy metal message boards; someone decided to do a funny photoshop of one of Immortal’s promo shots, in which the band is trying their best to look very scary (which, of course, makes it so easy).  The idea caught on; pretty soon, Immortal photoshops were cropping up on message boards across the web.  It was only a matter of time before people started messing with the “Call of the Wintermoon” video.  YTMND audioswaps began circulating, and a sped-up version of the video set to “Benny Hill” music soon appeared on YouTube.  Witness the hilarity:

Yeah.  The dude in the witch hat is a dead ringer for my best friend’s roommate.  However, my favorite funny Immortal mashup video has got to be this inspired bit of bewonderment, set to the Scissor Sisters:

Who says the Internet isn’t a great source of high culture and mind-expanding awesomeness?  I swear, my brain gets bigger every time I watch that video.

Alice Week concludes: Alice in Dallas! October 12th at the Palladium

“I think Alice Cooper is an overlooked songwriter.” – Bob Dylan (no joke)

Although he’s my favorite musical artist of all time, I’ve never seen Alice Cooper live.  His stage show has set the industrywide bar for theatricality for four decades now, and when I heard he’s coming to town in October, I started getting that special “I want to go to that” antsiness.

Alice’s shows are a vaudevillian feast for the eyes and ears, with one foot in the carnival and the other in a psychedelic proto-metal stewpot that began simmering in the late ’60s; although this scene produced some notable acts (Deep Purple, Blue Oyster Cult, Mott the Hoople, Black Sabbath), Alice is unique among them.  He never had that sludge-y sound that made Black Sabbath sound so evil, and he was too horror-happy to join the glam ranks of the New York Dolls and Slade.  His stage act, with the live animals, costumed dancers, magic tricks, smoke, mirrors, and lights, is more akin to a circus than a “serious” concert.  Alice and KISS shared some aesthetic and musical aspects, but Alice was far too artsy and progressive to be compared too extensively with the relatively one-dimensional KISS.

he's back - the man behind the mask

Some aspects of his stage show are easy to dismiss as cheesy, and it’s true that the interpretive dancers in spider outfits are pretty over-the-top.  But think about it: interpretive dancers in spider outfits.  The only other time I’ve seen that done was on Lawrence Welk.  Only Alice could make mothers fear for their children’s souls with a stage show featuring ballerinas in corny Halloween costumes.  From the chicken days onward, Alice’s live show has been the best there is.  Who cares if his band is made up of soulless studio musicians?  There’s so much to look at that it’s almost a guaranteed good time.

No one is quite like Alice, although others have tried – when Marilyn Manson broke big, I heard a lot of people saying, “I liked Manson the first time around, when he was called Alice Cooper.”  However, while Marilyn & co. have faded from view (that’s what happens when you have a cool scary stage show and really crappy music), Alice is still releasing albums and videos that, while they don’t touch the quality of his heyday, sound pretty good for a guy who’s been setting the standard of spooky for 40 fucking years.

I’ve gotta see Alice live before I die or he retires, whichever comes first.  I’ve got a class presentation that day, but I’m gonna see if I can swing it.  Wanna go too?  The deets:

What: Alice Cooper’s Theatre of Death!  Where: The Palladium Ballroom, 1135 S Lamar, by the Convention Center and Southside on Lamar.  When: Thursday Oct 12th, 8:00 PM.  How much: $25.00 for cheap seats, $39 for midrange, $60 for expensive ones.  The Palladium site says parking is $10, so this one’ll cost ya, but…hmm, is Alice worth it?  Answer: yes.  Click it for tickets.

Joe vs. Kanye: it’s mashup mania!

Yesterday, my professor, Dave, Tweeted that anyone in our class who made a mashup video of Kanye West and Joe Wilson would get bonus points.  My classmate Keith rose to the challenge; I promised him that I’d post his video here once it was finished, so here it is.  He says it’s not his best work, but I think it’s pretty cool.  Witness how college students earn extra credit in the information age:

The bit at the end with Quagmire was a nice touch.  Thoughts?

Alice Week resumes! Greatest Albums of All Time (in no particular order): Alice Cooper, “Killer”

There are several Alice albums that don’t have a bad song on them – “Love It to Death“, “Billion Dollar Babies”, and “Welcome To My Nightmare” are a few notable entries on that list.  At the top of the heap, however, lies Alice’s 1971 prog-pop-hard rock masterpiece “Killer“.  Nick from Superbligged84 beat me to the “Killer” entry by about a week – seems he loves it as much as I.  Today’s daily Alice documents what Johnny Rotten called “the greatest rock album ever recorded”.   Although it was a bit overshadowed at the time by “Love It to Death”, which was released the same year and contained the massive hit “I’m Eighteen”, “Killer” edges it out as Best. Alice. Ever.

The Alice Cooper band was made up of a bunch of weirdo art students from Detroit.  They started out under the wing of Frank Zappa and his creative collective; their first album had the kind of almost-unlistenable prog bent that was a Zappa hallmark.  They soon found their own sound, keeping the experimental art-rock edge but adding supremely listenable pop melodies that snuck the artsiness under the noses of radio listeners.  The band’s glittered-up art-project stage show got more and more outrageous, attracting a young audience who were drawn to the bloody, cartoonish theatrics.

“Killer”, like “Love It to Death”, was produced by Bob Ezrin, who was instrumental in developing the pop side to Cooper’s progressive noise.  The album opener, “Under My Wheels”, was a hit in the U.S. and Europe, with its jangly alt-pop riffs and catchy refrain.  ”Be My Lover” is another infectious garage-rock classic that could’ve been a radio hit had it not been for the twenty billion Cooper songs that already glutted the airwaves.  The crowning glory of “Killer”, though, is the psychedelically orchestral “Halo of Flies”, an eight-minute epic that breaks every rule of pop music but manages to remain accessible.  It’s really long and super progressive, and  it’s done in two parts that sound completely different but somehow go together perfectly – this song has a structure like none other I’ve heard.  “Halo of Flies” was actually released as a single in Europe, and it charted briefly in Holland.

After the greatness of “Halo”, a letdown might seem imminent, but Cooper keeps the greatness coming with the snarling “Desperado”.  The gunslinger in this track is rumored to represent Alice’s friend Jim Morrison, who died the year “Killer” was released.  “Dead Babies” is more classic Alice: spooky and fun and full of the kind of metaphors particular to Alice’s variety of alcohol-soaked weirdo genius.  “Yeah Yeah Yeah” and “You Drive Me Nervous” are hard-rock songs with a bubblegum soul, and exemplify why the early ’70s was ruled by the unstoppable Cooper and his band.

Your gift for today is the only track I could find off of “Killer” performed live the year it was released. Here’s the Alice Cooper band, doing the album opener, “Under My Wheels”, circa 1971.  Check out Alice, drunk as a skunk and fiddling with the crotch of his unitard.  Enjoy.

greatest album titles of all time

Okay, so I’m putting Alice Cooper week on hold a bit.  I’ll pick up again tomorrow.

This evening, I ran across a Tweet from my classmate Laura-Jane, who wrote that “Physical Graffiti” (Zeppelin) has to be one of the best album titles of all time.  Inspired, I started searching the ‘tubes for really cool album titles.  I began tweeting them, but this resulted in a firestorm of useless tweets that probably clogged up people’s Twitter feeds and annoyed my followers as much as tweets about people’s eating habits annoy me.  So I’m putting them here instead. 

Frank Zappa, “Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch”.  This title, from the album that gave us “Valley Girl”,  kind of needs the cover art to make it great, but it’s fantastic nonetheless.  Honorable mention from Zappaland: “Sheik Yerbouti”.

Godspeed! You Black Emperor, “Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven”.  Wow.  These guys either took a lot of drugs, or took no drugs at all.

Camper Van Beethoven, “Vampire Can Mating Oven”.  From back before they renamed themselves Cracker and ceased being cool.

fairies and unicorns and elves, oh my!

The psychedelic era produced some cool ones: “Disraeli Gears” (Cream) and “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” (Pink Floyd) are absolute classics.  “My People Were Fair and Had Sky In Their Hair, But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars On Their Brows” was a great title by the hippie duo Tyrannosaurus Rex, a.k.a. Marc Bolan and sidekick Steve Peregrine Took.  Sure, the album title’s kind of long and silly, but what can you expect from a band with a bongo player named after a hobbit?  Bolan later plugged in, turned glam, fired Took, renamed the band T. Rex, and conquered the world (well, England, anyways).

So…what are your favorite album titles of all time?  Comment away!

Concert review: We Shot JR presents Neon Indian, Vulgar Fashion, and Kashioboy at Rubber Gloves

Vega’s Alan Palomo busted the live cherry of his much-ballyhooed side project, Neon Indian, Wednesday at Rubber Gloves; it being that I’m making an effort to find out what the kids are listening to these days, I decided I must be in attendance.  The show was sponsored by local blog We Shot JR, which made me full of blogger-solidarity warm fuzzies, so I made the trek up to Denton to see what this Neon Indian thing was all about.  If nothing else, I figured I could tell all my friends that I am well on my way to becoming cool, because this past Wednesday, Rubber Gloves was where all the cool people were at.

Neon Indian's Alan Palomo: adorably shy

Alan Palomo has been getting tons of press of late, not least because of Vega’s drama-filled Crystal Castles entanglement.  As is befitting a buzz band of this stature, the Denton glitterati were out in force for this show.  The music blogosphere was well-represented by Nick from Superbligged84 and the lovely ladies of Denton Deluxe, as well as We Shot JR (I wanted to finally meet StonedRanger, but I don’t know what he (she?) looks like, so I was kinda lost).  Promoter/Denton music fixture Josha Flores came by to say hi, rocking the military jacket and Ghoultown facial hair.  Apparently, everyone who was anyone was at that show.  As my own coolness factor is still a work in progress, I barely knew anyone and felt slightly out of place at first, but by the end of the show, I was having a great time bopping along to the electronic pop yumminess.

The venue was packed by the time Kashioboy went on.  Kashioboy, aka Chris, plays dance-y electropop with assists from old-school video game equipment such as a Super NES and a Game Boy.  Chris’ inventive mashups of video game noises set to thumping dance beats got the Wednesday night crowd tapping their toes, although the audience probably would’ve danced to anything at that point – the equipment-related cancellation of openers Darktown Strutters left the crowd a bit antsy, despite the capable DJing provided by Time Bandits.

The crowd really started rocking out when electronic-rock wizard Vulgar Fashion took the stage.  Now, I love a visual band, and Vulgar Fashion didn’t disappoint, with video projections and light shows (all the pretty people dancing up front didn’t hurt either).  I’m not sure what the Vulgar Fashion guy’s name is, but he rocked the electronics like few artists I’ve seen, working himself – and the crowd – into a lather by the end of his set.  This was the furthest thing from the usual laptop-deathmatch live mixing.  I was vastly impressed – I hadn’t heard of them (him?) before the show, but according to the (minimal, lazy) research I’ve done, Vulgar Fashion is also quite the buzz act, a title that is richly deserved.

By the time Neon Indian took the stage, it was after 1 AM, and I was exhausted.  I didn’t stay for their entire set, but I stayed long enough to get a feel for their sound.  If you lived through the ’80s, this isn’t anything you haven’t heard before, but Palomo and his beautiful bandmates (the guitar player looks exactly like Belgian model Anouck Lepere; the drummer was a classic teen-girl wet dream, down to the shiny, floppy hair) brought a freshness and attitude that I liked a lot.  The second song in their set sounded strikingly similar to Robbie Dupree’s ’80s soft-rock hit “Steal Away”, which made me giggle.  They didn’t look entirely comfortable onstage, which is completely understandable considering that a) this was their first live show, and b) the equipment gods haven’t been very nice to them lately.  I’m looking forward to seeing them blossom – Palomo is becoming quite the young auteur.

All in all, it was a show worth going to, despite the prohibitive drive.  It was only six bucks to get in; beer was cheap; and I got to see a super buzzworthy show that, although it didn’t completely blow me away, was pretty damn cool.  That said, your gift for today is Neon Indian’s effects-soaked track “Deadbeat Summer”.  Listen away, then tell your friends you are now way more hip than them because you know things about this band.  Hell, if it works for me…