Little has gone my way in my life thus far but SLAYER, MASTODON AND LAMB OF GOD ARE TOURING TOGETHER THIS SUMMER, so what difference could the foregoing twenty-odd years possibly make? "That's my dream line-up" has been said about many a tour, surely, but anyone who's said it about any other lineup, even decades ago, was totally full of retroactive shit because SLAYER, MASTODON AND LAMB OF GOD ARE TOURING TOGETHER THIS SUMMER.


Dear Dillinger Escape Plan:

Some - a great many - of your songs are so heavy, are such an onslaught that my breath is literally taken away. Clean away, as by a blast of Artic air upon exiting a greenhouse, say. And some of your songs sound like Nine Inch Nails. Explain, please? Me and this adorable kid who only smiles with one side of his janky mouth are wondering.

Do you know what Lee Madueno said to me a few days ago, after viewing that reallly dreadful documentary about the more famous murderers in Norwegian black metal? He said - I'm making hideously exaggerated faces of mock bafflement as I type this, at him, and he's not here - "You know, back in the day Varg really looked a lot like Chris K." Lee? Were you really pointing that out as something I may not have motherfucking noted? For a year I've been expecting Lee to shout at me in some heated moment "You only like him because he's Varg's non-evil twin!", and he just now hipped himself to the likeness. Well, he'll yell it soon, I expect.

Varg & members of Motorhead - the only guys who can get away with wearing their own band's shirts.

Mastodon's "Leviathan" album came out - Jesus - almost two years ago, somehow, and I've only rarely gone more than 48 hours without listening to at least some of it. I know I'm too breathless about these things but still, the MIGHT of that fucker, the I swear to God literally palpable weight of it. It is fucking palpable - take several bong hits and lie on the floor between two speakers, playing that album hurty-loud, and it pins your goddamn limbs to the hardwood. It limits your lungfuls, your poor ribs strain. And anything you listen to after it has all the heft of a small pile of dry leaves poorly raked up by Gramps*.

*(I cannibalized that there strained and overlong metaphor, the leafpile bit, from a MySpace message I sent a few weeks back, to Aleks of Battleship. In reference to his band. Sometimes I vomit fandom at him inappropriately. Yes! This is the quality of asskissing available to you if I worship your band enough!)

Yeah. "Leviathan". What a beast of an album. Those sons of bitches. And they look this perfect doing it:


It looks heavy as it leaves their bodies, even.