Concert review: Maleveller EP Release at the DoubleWide 1/30

Maleveller: don't let the beards fool you, they'll rock your face off

I wasn’t planning on going out this past Saturday night.  I had homework to do, and my laundry was piling up.  Feeling slightly stressed, I did what I usually do in such situations, i.e. blow everything off and hit the town.  I’d been curious about Maleveller since seeing an article in one of the local free publications about this new metal band made up of guys who’ve played around town in various acts (Max Cady, Pegasus Now) for years, and who have generated some serious buzz with this new project.  It being that heavy metal is one of my favorite things in the universe, I opted to attend their EP release party at the DoubleWide, so I bid my laundry pile adieu (I swear it waved back as I walked out the door) and headed to Deep Ellum.  Grown-up obligations mean nothing in the face of METAL.

I missed the first act because I found out about the show at 10 PM, which is when doors opened.  I got there an hour afterward, while heavy-rock trio True Widow were onstage.  They weren’t terrible, but they weren’t great either.  Their sound is kind of Sonic Youth-y, very heavy and distorted; I liked their stuff, but all their songs kind of sounded the same.  The bass player and guitarist switched off on vocal duties.  True Widow’s bassist is a good singer, and quite charismatic in a low-key, shoegazer type of way; I’m not going to write about what I think about the guitarist’s singing because I’m not that mean.  Let’s just say that he’s pretty decent at playing guitar, and leave it at that.

The crowd was very hipsterish: lots of cute girls with bangs and thrift-store clothes, and guys with the prerequisite beards and corduroy clothing.  It was a little surprising to see the horn-rimmed glasses/skinny-jeans set at a metal show, but I’ve heard that metal is the new in thing amongst the kids these days (all the cool kids at my school are really into Megadeth, which gives me hope for the new generation).  I ran into preternaturally awesome Akkolyte/Yells At Eels bassist Aaron Gonzalez, whose extremely high opinion of Maleveller convinced me that I was at the right show, even amidst the sea of wearable irony.

Maleveller came onstage to the thundering cadence of the “Mars” suite from Holst’s “The Planets”  (Aaron began hollering his approval at this, which made me smile).  They don’t look like the typical metal band: singer Brian Smith is middle-aged and slightly paunchy, with long, thinning hair and a gray beard; guitarist Jeff Biehler has a handlebar mustache and floppy hair.  However, when they tore into the opening chords to their first song, my jaw hit the floor, and all preconceptions were tossed aside in favor of absolute awe.  These guys are fucking fantastic.  I was reminded of “Ride the Lightning”-era Metallica as well as Slayer circa “God Hates Us All” (that’s a hefty compliment coming from me – the Bostaph years produced some of Slayer’s finest work, IMHO).  Maleveller’s brand of metal health was administered, a la Mastodon, with a nudge, a wink, and a nod to their predecessors – they wear their love of early ’80s speed metal on their sleeve.  They also play really cool guitars – Smith plays an Explorer with a mirrored pickguard, and Biehler wields an equally sweet flying V.  During the show, I stood rapt, unable to wipe the big goofy smile off my face as the band ripped through their set.  I’ve been waxing poetic about them to anyone who will listen, and I plan on attending more shows (Maleveller’s myspace site doesn’t list upcoming shows, so I’ll try and keep you posted if I hear anything). 

The only thing that pissed me off about the show is that hipsters don’t appear to know how to properly throw the horns.  I saw some of the most half-assed horn throwing I’ve ever seen at that show.  Note to hipsters: this most sacred of hand gestures is NOT to be administered with a limp hand.  Doing so constitutes epic fail.  For those who are still confused, Ronnie James Dio, long credited as having introduced the horns into the metalverse, explains:

The Band Photo: can you handle this hawtness?

One of the essential elements in attaining country-music superstardom is HAWT BAND PIX.  Tom hooked us up – his friend Kent Barker is a friggin’ fantastic photographer who has shot such music legends as Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Nelson, and now Grass Valley.  Tom emailed me this photo last night, and I’m just all squee kind of excited about how great it is.  So here it is, that you may gaze in wonder at the FABULOUSNESS that is us:

sorry ladies, they're all taken (except for me)

I’m on the left (obviously).  Chuck Rose (Bass Chuck) is in the hat, Tom (Guitar Chuck) is on the right, and Chuck Spurlock (Drum Chuck) is in the glasses.  This is one of the first photos I’ve ever taken where I don’t look constipated – in most pictures, I have this “I haven’t shit in a week” look on my face, but Kent was able to coax some sexy out of me.  I’m not going to tell you the size of the box Bass Chuck is standing on, because I wouldn’t do that to him – I’m not that evil.  And, for the record, that’s Tom’s happy face.  I was insisting to the guys that it’d be hilarious to do a shoot in front of a brick wall, but they vetoed the idea.

Jay Reatard is rock’s latest martyr

For those aren’t familiar with the name, Jay Reatard was an indie-rock weirdo from Memphis who started out as a teenage Oblivians acolyte and caused some ripples in the garage-rock scene over the past couple years, getting tons of press for his off-the-hook live shows.  He was found dead at 3:30 this morning.  I s’pose we’ll have to wait and see what kind of fuckery was involved in his death.

 Reatard was 29.  So am I.  It’s always weird to hear about people who die at the same age as me.

Your gift for today is Reatard and his band performing their song “I’m Watching You” live in New York in 2008.  It’s not the most spectacular thing I’ve ever heard, but it’s catchy, and it smacks of untapped potential.  Isn’t that what they always say about dead rock stars, though?

Rock superstardom just might suit me…all I need is a ridiculous backstage rider and I’m set

Okay, so I haven’t posted in months and months, but I’ve been up to stuff during the break.  Most notable amongst my activities has been the band.  We decided on a name – we’re called Grass Valley (Bass Chuck made a myspace – I’ve been threatening to edit it and make it all glittery and pink), and we had our first show on Friday the 2nd at Allgood Cafe.  Posting an advertisement for the show on this blog could’ve been beneficial…oh well.  There will be more shows, because the first one was way fun. 

And yes, there’s video!  Your gift for today is ME, fronting a Real Live Awesome Band.  So here’s a few snippets of some of the songs from our hourlong set, strung together by Tom the guitar player.

The only rating that this video has so far is from me, and you’re damn right I rated it five stars.  This is good shit.  If you think it sucks, rate it something else.  I want to hear what people honestly think, because at this point I’m having so much fun with this band that I don’t give a rip whether I suck or not, and I think that if we’re going to conquer the world and become disgustingly wealthy country-music superstars, I should probably start caring about how I sound (Tom & the Chucks always play spectacularly, and they didn’t disappoint).  So…rate it, comment here, comment on the video, I want to hear it.

And, since I know you’re all waiting with bated breath for the Taylor Swift song I’ve been talking up, here is the video of “You Belong With Me”.  That’s a really difficult song to sing – I give Taylor props for it.

I think I’m in love.

I stumbled across this guy’s YouTube channel, titled “Heavy Metal Happy Hour”, earlier this afternoon. This dude’s channel is seriously one of the strangest things I’ve seen on YouTube.  After watching like fifteen of his videos in a row (he’s done hundreds of these things, all completely in character), I realized that I’d fallen madly in love and am destined to marry this weirdo.

He calls himself “The Master of Metal”.  Decked out in badly applied corpsepaint, he performs under-2-minute comedy vignettes in which he tells super corny, filthy jokes about people’s mothers and recites strange poetry about what’s in his pants.  He also plays Katy Perry covers on the piano; the fact that he’s actually a good keyboardist somehow makes it all the more bizarre.  Here’s my favorite of his music videos; for the record, this is him playing the piano – he has other videos that show his hands while he plays, and he’s really this good (warning: NSFW due to language):

Attempts to Google-stalk him were almost completely fruitless.  I couldn’t find his real name, and I have no clue if he has any other projects.  As far as I can tell, he lives somewhere around L.A., and  it appears that he started the Master of Metal thing as emcee for a low-rent burlesque troupe and has hosted a few metal shows at bars in the Los Angeles area.   He’s got a Myspace, a Facebook fan page, and a Twitter account; his following on both is small but loyal.

I get the feeling that he does other stuff, that this is just a strange lark for him.  Either way, I must find him and we must wed.  Immediately.  Freaks of this caliber are rare and precious gems, and we must treasure them as such.  If anyone knows who the hell this guy is, please let me know so I can inform him of our impending nuptials.

Update: I found him – it took two days, which, in Internet-stalking years, is like forever.  And he is…drumroll please…

…Nick Lachey’s guitar player.

This shit just gets weirder and weirder.  Click here for a video of the Master of Metal and Mr. Jessica Simpson onstage together.  He’s also an editor at Keyboard Player magazine, and is pretty spectacularly hot without the makeup, which is nice, but all in all, I’m a bit let down – he was much better with the mystique of anonymity around him.  Still, though, it makes me feel better about the world to know that Nick Lachey’s guitar player is secretly doing really bizarre, offensive internet videos.  Gives me the warm fuzzies, I tells ye.

now, I’ve got to find someone new to stalk.  Ideas?

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.