Hurt his feelings and an hour later, a perfect pearl rests beneath his kitten-pink tongue.
Hurt his feelings and his eyes go from Blu-Razzberry Frostee to a smears of pulped violet plum on hail.
When he throws his wet hair back after a night swim stars get struck and stick.

Today a local denizen of the streets inquired of me, as I entered my caffeination station, whether I had any change so he could obtain "a donut". Oddly, he smelled strongly of fresh, unsmoked pipe tobacco, which I doubt he had on his person, being less of the gent class and more of the literal crackhead class. I noted this olfactory puzzle but moved on, prompting the hungry seeker to scream "COLD-HEARTED BITCH!" at my back. Nothing notable there, since around here such an outburst is as remarkable as a pigeon crossing one's path. Tough life they've got, the Oakland baseheads. I'd be a bit of a crank myself, perhaps, were I in their flapping-soled shoes.

But . . . was it possible he'd said not "cold-hearted" but "coal-hearted"? Because as it happens - well, I'll just tell you what I told him. "Did you happen to say 'coal-hearted'? I just ask because in the last couple weeks I've grown interested in what leads one to choose a metaphor of burnedness vs. coldness to describe someone's figurative 'heart', i.e., does the speaker mean the accused party at some point had a soul and lost it, or that the accused was emotionally defective from birth? They're both such persistent tropes in verse and song, from Chaucer's time right up to contemporary Nashville junk-country. It compels me, this question."

Seemingly without a strong opinion on the subject, the donut-hungry interloper had wandered away as I mused. So what's the punchline? It's: got any spare change for grad school?

Being of a Victorian sort of temperament myself, prone to myriad spells and nervous disturbances, I long for a society that slaps such souls not with clunky, unendearing labels like "PTSD case" and "multiple personality disorder", but the less pathologizing and more picturesque "highly-strung", "fragile constitution", "susceptible to vapors", etc. I need a fainting couch, not a prescription drug regimen. But unlike many other fetishists and Anglophiles, I'm without affection for the actual historical era. For one thing, I find the literature unreadable, the only such period in British writing for me from the 16th century right up through Spring 2009. Were it not for the Emily one inspiring Kate Bush's goddamn unbelievable song "Wuthering Heights"*, I'd say bugger the Brontes all three at a time, e.g. Reading Tennyson's like eating white sugar out of the bag, with a nearly unusably overwrought spoon. Dickens? It's almost like that shit was written for cliff-hanging serial publication in middlebrow publications. OH, THAT'S RIGHT, 'TWAS!

*terrible, anemic guitar solo excepted

But you know what I'd love to see today? The hour of the promenade. Everyone would gussy up in their featheriest finery, and pretty much walk around a large scenic circle to appraise every else's finery and choose whom to snub and whom to compliment backhandedly. I've realized that staring and judging are pretty much the only interactions I desire with strangers and acquaintances, and I seem unable to lose my love of assembling a distinctive and just-batshit-enough ensemble. I don't want to talk, but I do want to look, and I do enjoy nonverbal but eloquent exchanges. Eyefucking, for example. At the moment, in modern-day, sans-promenade Oakland, I have to make do with the Whole Foods, and my fellow shoppers, mostly being cowards afraid of glamour, seem uninclined to appreciate my distinctive color sense and bold new ideas in layering. No one has yet said "I like that sensibility" as I look over the root vegetables in an elegantly contorted fashion on account of my overly tight shorts and competing shirt-straps.

I am uncomfortable with the thought that there may be exist feminists more radical (though I prefer "incendiary") than myself, so I'm careful to keep a simianishly tight toe-grip on the furthest fringe at all times, right. And yet. Breaking up pigeon mating rituals, grunting "Leave her alone, see how she's walking away from your stupid puffy chest?" . . . I suppose even the most flawless, indeed righteous topiary still needs to be well-acquainted with the pruning shears, yes?

But vivid excesses and profound logical lapses are to be expected in my case. Maintaining such a cruelly keen and spit-honed edge on my manhatred while being so raveningly heterosexual that Paul Cadmus drawings give me actual clitoral boners when skimmed in bookstores - it creates structural weakness in the mind's framework, i.e. imbalances.



"Cadmus? Hey, hold on!," the reader protests. "Doesn't this make you not a 'raveningly heterosexual woman' but a 'weird girlfag with no erotic home in the world'?" Well yeah but this is a blog not a book-length treatise on my gender orientation pain, so keep your astute and penetrating insights quiet.

Will Oldham, in his enormously valuable one-off appearance as half of the duo Superwolf, opened the record with the lyric "I have often said/that I would like to be dead/in a shark's mouth", which was earthshaking to me then as a shark-obsessed suicide-in-waiting who revered W. Oldham as she has never revered another. Too much a coincidence not to seem special and meaningful and fated, since it was how I too would most like have been dead, though back then I wouldn't've been picky. Now I LOVE LIFE, so I don't want to maimed and ended by a shark, I want their LOVE, REGARD and FRIENDSHIP. This is of course impossible. It's what I want, but what I will settle for is one of these black-tipped reef numbers, common as seagoing pigeons in Philippines waters I hear, with which to luxuriate in a tepid bath, singing to her horribly arch little Magnetic Fields-ish ditties about keeping on her smooth side. Well-fed and luminous as she will be, sharing my mongoose-cat's perpetually ample supply of little oily fish, she will feel no particular need to bite me once she grows past the wee-sharklet stage (I believe they are truly called PUPS as though needed more encutenment), and this disinclination to attack I will choose to take as affection and fondness. Not LOVE though, which as observed above is not a rational desire.

Now that the Death Camp project has been wrapped up in a tidy bow of purply-pink entrails, Lil' Copenhagen and the Andychrist are free to construct a new legend, a new legacy of brutality.  A period of respectful mourning must first pass, in which we face a present and future bereft of blood-stinking warehouse gigs commenced by Copes's black sermons; the growled "Bow your motherfucking heads" shall silence the unruly mass no more.  How now will this once-in-a-generation gift for putrid belched-forth beauty be skinned and eviscerated and reanimated into something new?

"I might want to, like, sing," Copes said recently, bonfire-lit and profoundly stoned.  ("Singing" vs. being the vocalist, singing not being a feature of x-treem metal.)  The Andychrist slowly leveled a gut-ashing glower at him.  Chastened, Copes said weakly "My vocal cords don't seem to coarsen . . . everything's still pink and tender and ouchy for a week after and . . . "  But this threat has not been repeated.  Fortunately for East Bay evil, he's still too young to have that itch so many hollerers and shriekers seem to get in their late 20s, wherein their desire to croon, or at least perform intelligible lyrics, increases greatly.  (Warning signs include a gradual shift in drunken karaoke choices from Maiden and Priest to Journey and Boston slow jamz, and an emphasis on early, melancholy Modest Mouse numbers for shower singing.)

But naturally, like all musicians who take their music half-seriously, the band's name is being debated before the genre is determined.  An option I'm rooting for is combining a total lack of the band's name on recorded material and reporting it verbally as both "Phantom" and "Bantam", rather slurredly, so that no one's really sure which it is.  (That's another sign of the half-serious musician: having How do fuck with our stupid fans? as an integral part of persona-sculpting.)

A drawback of being thoroughly hydrated at all times is that one's tears lose a surprising portion of their salinity.  One thinks of tear-taste as being a fairly stable thing.  As it turns out, bulk Evian plus a diet extremely heavy on fruit equals only very subtly salty tears that are sweetish.

On paper this may seem an enchanting and/or tantalizing novelty, but ultimately I feel something's lost.  What a rich, if well-worn, literalization of metaphor salty, salty tears can be.

My (third, now) sob over the novella told by this gravestone seemed cheapened by its Sanrio-ish tang on my lips.

Among the things I can "[verb] people under the table" at or with is volume.  Baby here doesn't employ earplugs but camps next to the amps at shows, and typically emerge from my truck so decibel-dazed I can't walk a straight line.  Yet even I don't venture into the volume range available by maxing out both my computer's volume & the independent volume control on the headphones plugged into it.  It's too much.  It's genuine unbearability.  So I thought.

THEN CHILDREN OF BODOM DROPPED THIS HERE "BLOODDRUNK" ALBUM.  And while 15 seconds into it I knew: untested volume heights must be scaled, no, not scaled, flown the fuck up. What is this shit?  Is this what it feels like to shoot coke straight into your spinal fluid?Alexi, I give you 65% of my remaining hearing all too gladly.  Alexi, it is less than the least I can give!  Alexi, for the gift of these songs I would let you personally icepick through both my eardrums, leaving me able to feel only "Blooddrunk"'s mere vibration in the floor, AND THAT ALONE WOULD SUFFICE.   And in mere weeks I get to see it performed - I get to see you tear onto the stage and shriek "We are Children of Bodom and we are from motherfucking Finland!"  I routinely count the days to CoBHC shows - this time around I'll be marking off the quarter hours, oh, oh, every ropey-spit-dripping review blowjob this record's getting in the press is deserved. 

Sometimes Li'l Copenhagen can be trying.  He may test one, he may vex.  So much so that one might find oneself vividly imagining, say, bludgeoning him with his own skateboard and pushing him into a halfpipe and watching his limp corpse roll about humorously a bit before slowing to silence, eternal silence.  Pretty, pretty hair caught in a last breeze before being slowly soaked into the pretty, pretty blood a-spreadin'.

But then one reads an old journal entry and recalls the celery thing.  The protocol for limp-produce disposal at my mother's country home involves strewing it about in a series of wildlife hot spots, then returning the following day to theorize, sans any evidence, about what may have come along and eaten it.  Copes was involved with distributing a great number of carrots and celery stalks that had passed a state offerable to horses.  Only because an unrelated chore took me over his path shortly thereafter do I know that he arranged the items into a substantial "HI GUYS".  

 

The 'El seemed a touch cross about our nonconsensual "sanitizing" of his record collection - hey, we would have asked you, blondie, but you weren't home, and since you live alone there was no one to leave a note with, and also maybe we shouldn't have keys, hmm? - but just as Lil' Copenhagen refuses to swallow the semen of meat-eaters, so too do I with that of people who willingly expose themselves to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. No way. Perhaps we could've let him keep the Queens of the Stone Age, but the Cypress Hill positively screamed for chucking. I thought but did not say "They're really good MCs skillz-wise though", because I did not want the Who The Fuck is Standing Next to Me? look.

Actually The 'El should thank me, since had Copenhagen been alone he'd have no post-'86 Metallica. I grabbed his wrist and said "You're going too fucken far now! Some of us really need access to 'Sad But True'!" Copes mulled this at beard-tugging length, then ruled. "Kid can keep it, except for Load, Reload and St. Anger, but only for practicing to if he's away from the kit for a while." This actually makes elegant sense, since Mr. Ulrich's drumming is so plodding and pedestrian it's for warmups only. It's like a hamstring stretch for a lead singer, perhaps. I'll ask Davey what he thinks next time we bump hands reaching for vegan mousse at Whole Foods OAK-LAND. No frontman's hamstrings are more limber, you know.

This, from a friend: "A really cute thing about you guys is how you'll pull up and both be wiggling and dancing and bouncing in the truck like you're listening to Green Day, and then the door opens and this horrible wall of shrieking and Satan-worshiping that isn't exactly even music comes pouring out."

Yeah, it is pretty cute. The real ass-shaking happens when it's Lamb of God though. Compared with the frosty hinterland sound of the black metal that's our dietary staple, they lay the grooves down, fat muscular Virginia fuckin' jamz. Makes us get up on tables.

Hey, remember when this site featured commentary on non-rockin' out-related topics? A taste today, a trickle comes, as my breakfast was almost soured by a reopening, w/Yuoshka, of the only topic more searingly divisive for us than whether Maiden's first singer was worth a damn.  (That I won't even name the dork should imply my position there.) The one that can make us go days with nothing to say about the other the other than "Fuck that faggot."  

It couldn't be helped, it was broached by another, an innocent, an unwarned soul, who asked us over ice-loud slurps of Coke "if we were of the same mind on Israel v. Palestine, or is that something you fight about too?"  (We had been, Yuosh & I, ignoring the rest of the table in order to almost holler, in the packed bistro, about whether writers and producers of "The Brady Bunch" ever slipped subtle subversions into the scripts, which Yuoshka's insistence upon is perhaps the sort of retarded over-optimism one can associate with people who allegedly want to see Communist rule spread.  He does, look in his wallet - card-carrying!  Thinks it can work!  These people still exist!  Ad people call Li'l Copenhagen the throwback, the museum piece?)

Bellowing over the crepes this morning didn't purge all the bile that needed purging, so I ask the Internet's ether, what online pharmacy can provide me with the crazy pills taken by people who think the media are, I'm chuckling as I type it, "pro-Israel"?  When the daily rocket attacks on Sderot are nearly without exception described as "seldom fatal"?  It's a striking dismissal.  Usually only property damage and maybe some serious injuries and the constant possibility of a fucking rocket blowing your house up.  But only a couple-few civilian fatalities a year, so certainly not anything for the Israeli military to feel compelled to act upon, daily rocket attacks compliments of people whose stated desire is your extinction.  

And almost exactly the same goes for the coverage of suicide bombings when a few months have passed without one.  No one can get more than 4 sentences into their piece without saying something very close to "the first such attack in months".  It's usually in the first sentence.  Why, it's been months since baby bits pinkly frosted a donut shop, and one teensy-weensy bombing and Israelis want something to happen because of it?  The swine, the Jew swine!  Can't they just negotiate and compromise?  With the people whose stated desire is their extinction?

Nothing in me, no uncertain cell, desires to resist stating that Jonny Greenwood's score for "There Will Be Blood" is the greatest thing ever composed to accompany a film. Hyperbole's not even up to the task. When permitting it to penetrate me via iPod in the Whole Foods, fr'instance, I sometimes am so struck by the adrenaline-stinking dread I abruptly stop all motion and my mouth falls open and I assume an expression that must appear as mute horror, horror, like there's a toddler's chubsy severed leg amongst the grapefruit. It's a cadaver's salamander-cool tongue pressed to your spine. In its climaxes it's like hearing a strange clicking approaching you from behind and turning to be hit in the face with a plague of hornets whizzing sting-first. I mean Christ. I mean dripping impaled purpling Christ on the cross.

My Thom Yorke devotion has long made me wave off people who insist Greenwood's importance in Radiohead's astounding brilliance is grossly underrated: my goodness, imagine what I'd've done if one of them'd said he'd some day do some possibly more important than Radiohead! It gave Li'l Copenhagen a high fever the first time he got to "Henry Plainview", and has since made him halt several times, like me in Whole Foods, and clasp his head in both hands and moan "Oh no!" Only it's when he isn't listening to it.

Hails to Figgis for letting me use this in my upcoming black metal photography coffee-table book. Horns facing down, though, for briefly believing me when I said this here blog was called Vegan Gauntlets.



Speaking of dishy horde members. Homepiece here doesn't getting enough credit for overall Nailing It, possibly because his band wears costumes & possibly blush - sorry, y'all do - but dude just leaned out our door to admonish the postman for wrenching open & violently slamming shut our mailbox while shirtless and with a joint in his hand, saying only "People resiiiide here man", and seriously, maybe 1 of 25 listeners would've guessed he moved here from Sweden a month ago. It was all late Sixties Cali stoner, with the stress rising in the middle and trenching at the end & no verbal comma whatsoever between "here" and "man". All of which is a verbose and tiresome way of saying: the 'El gets slept on. Rekkanize it East Bay.

Surely there could be no credible aesthetic objection to basing a large tattoo around the chorus of The Mars Volta's recent phat-azzed hit single "Wax Simulacra": "Am I waiting now?/Does my waiting howl?" Jesus Lord have you seen a better two-line poem? It shall involve buzzards.

Lightning Bolt.  Dude.  Lightning Bolt.  Sometimes when I horrify myself by imagining alternate realities in which given important things did or did not happen, I think "What if I'd never needed to cover my ass by buying Lightning Bolt's entire back catalog after I told Aleks Prechtl I liked them a lot, when really I'd heard like 2 songs?"  If he'd never asked me that day, sweeping granola and peering at me over his glasses with the usual skepticism, I might never have drunk deep of them.  These motherfuckers who make creamed spinach of a stoner's sinuses.   These motherfuckers who hasten the apocalypse, who dare the black horsemen to advance!  All two of them.  All two members.  Plenty of true things are impossible, but that two dudes can produce such a malefic roiling churn still boggles, and here's the most fucked-up part: you can dance to it.  You can't not dance to it, in fact.  The "Wonderful Rainbow" album pistolwhips you about 125 ways in 40 minutes, and the opener, the (no it is) lovely "Hello Morning"?  Is what my rotting shark spleen of a soul would look like if you turned it inside out.  I know this because Lil' Copenhagen turns it inside out every day - IN BED.  Listen to Lightning Bolt.

A note regarding the (marvelous, marvelous!) jumping spider adored below, previously unnamed: it came to me today as we played (I mean it, this isn't creative writing), as I bumped him backwards three times with the tip of my index finger while saying "Poosh poosh!", after which he tends to do a backward diagonal zigzaggering jig, an immensely jolly experience. Anyway as I poosh-pooshed his UN-blue head, I realized that for duh's fucking sake, I've longed for years to name something Boutros Boutros, and never has a present from the fates arrived so prettily gift-wrapped!

[The following contains a great deal of anthropomorphization, a charge which I am hereby simultaneously acknowledging and dismissing.]

Once I was the primary driver of a '65 Ranchero that served for a time as the home of a jumping spider, a jolly little charmer I came to have heart-brimming affection for.  Loves, it's happened again!  A new spider superball now lives in my Tacoma, a marvelous blue-headed tugboatish little fellow who dances and bows for me whenever I slide into the driver's seat.  He appears from nowhere, we interact, I stroke him (fer reals) some, he crouches and hops, I praise his hilariously oversized glossy eyes, then as soon I look away to say put the key in the ignition he's gone when I look back.  Obviously he's magical and a fine protector.  No name yet, but the love's already there, rich enough to make me look like a madwoman as I sit in my driveway, surely appearing to passersby to be cooing to and caressing the windshield.

Looks a bit like this character here, except with a United Nations Blue head.  Perhaps the cosmos sent him to me as a peacekeeper, then.  And perhaps I'm overprone to symbolism.

I save any down shed by his outerwear.  I could not do otherwise  - they're relics! - think of it! - a snow-white fwuffy feather that once held his warmth, held it near him, dearly?  Where could this down possibly be bound but one of several treasure chests, alongside sea glass approximating his eye color?  

The spinning, dazzling, snake-throwing orb has touched down, oh Jesus, oh El Paso, as an e-mail sent to my boss yesterday said, you want to talk shit on the Mars Volta, you best do it out of my earshot.  (Since it was a message to Dave Craib, I should have added "And were it sane to say both their names in the same sentence, I'd add 'Let these motherfuckers show Slipknot what 8 dudes should sound like'.")  

Mssrs. Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez Lopez, from At the Drive In's first noises through The Mars Volta's current universe-imploding better-than-God status, have now given me reason to get up in the morning for nearly as many years as has Glenn Danzig.  I realize revealing this insults both me and Omar & Cedric, but Owls! knows no filters.  If one or both of them were shoeless before me I would lovingly tongue their soles and coo lush blasphemies.  I would feel like whatever Biblical Jesus Krush Klub member washed her messianical man's feet with scented oil and then dried them with her hair.  (I think that may have given me a boner in grade school, that passage. Nothing like the crucifixion though, of course.)  I would be the nearest I'd get to touching the divine, to filling with divine healing light and benevolently touching all dimensions.  These songs, this "The Bedlam in Goliath" joint released yesterday, forges a cosmos saturated with colors never seen by earthly eye.  No names for these shades, a new spectrum.  A gauntlet thrown & to be frozen forever midair, because no living or future humans will be able to touch this shit.  It shall hover, hover. 

Today's listening party was puncutated with many "What IS this?"s and "What are they even doing???"s.  I feel like I've never heard rock music before.  It is the first rock record ever.  My new calendar begins today, today is day one of After Goliath.  Now we are are A.G.  I am off to sketch a plan for a shrine.

---------------

So yes, a freshly distorted and diluted Owls! coughs into existence.  Stop by regularly for blasts of richly-figurative fangirl spew with plenty of dubious metaphor!  Owls!  Volta!

I make a pest of myself to Mr. Prechtl here, stammeringly re-asking the same questions - "Uhhhh, you guys auditionin' drummers yet? Uhhhhh, there's still a Battleship, right?" I hate to risk engrumpening him, longing for his approval as I do, but how can I squelch my whines when the world risks losing this action?

Lil' Copenhagen's skin's so luminous & buttermilky I half expect daffodils to issue from it come spring. This plus the obscene 3-tone Blue Razzberry irises he's got, plus the bolts of rosy apricot blushery whenever he's chilly or even halfway excited about something, plus the artificially black hair, equals a boy of almost lurid coloration, and it makes everyone else look like gruel of no particular shade. It's ironic, given his loathing of the tropics, what a supersaturated bird-of-paradise thing he is, and I've not even attempted to describe the pink of his mouth (decency stops me). And do you know what this asshole applies to his cuts 'n' puncture wounds, for its natural antiseptic and healing powers? Motherfucking honey! Rubs it in. To an overactive imagination like mine, this means that his very blood is literally sugared, his sweat! I don't know which I want to be more, his toothbrush or his toothpaste. To slip between his teeth, or to slide, as a liquid, over his tongue?

Anyone considering cohabitating with Lil' Copenhagen should know that Bragg's Liquid Aminos must be on hand at all times, both in original undiluted strength and diluted 4:1 with water in a spray bottle. Failure to maintain adequate stocks of Bragg's - for example, should the fluid level in the dilution spray bottle fall below 75% - makes Lil' Copenhagen bummed, and when he's bummed, you're not going to get to see to him with his hood up & tucked behind his ears, pushing them forward at juussst the right angle for max elfinness. And let me tell you, when he does that shit . . . what happens is, it so upsets the Adorable Beauty balance in the natural world that sweetly babbling brooks cease to flow, spotted fawns vaporize in mid-nuzzle, songbirds' warbling turns to grit in their throats. Because he's draining the world's beauty reserves, see, taxing it unmanageably with his motherfucking dazzle. And once . . . I'm almost afraid to mention it, it so angered the gods - once he did it when his hair was in braids and the cosmos began to pull apart, the night sky tore apart like cheap pantyhose, and he knew never to do it again, or risk all the universe.

I suspect my Foto Barrage! posts are the most insipid of all, but, uh, Barrage! incoming. But first, lest anyone think I was randomly harsh on a poor unstylish vain little Finn in my last post: I can't go into it here, but KALLE KNOWS WHAT KALLE DID. Aside from the hang of his pants and his wearing black nail polish like we're all about to watch a Nine Inch Nails concert DVD together. Awright, let's have some images.

OK, we have to allow for Swedishness here, and forgive some fashion errors (the horror of those boots with the strappy business, the Slipknot-esque camo pants), because that is a nice fourbanger. Hails.



A black metaller with a sense of humor is rare as an outgoing snow leopard, and here we've got a pair of them. So hails here too. Hails on being sublime, and that's rare thing to get hailed on.




This one's initially a tough call. Working against Jan here, we have vexsome Aryan half-dreads (held back with - can it be - a terry band?, abysmal cuff tastes, and pro wrestler facial hair. For him, we have the again sublime comic sense necessary to strike a BMetal pose next to such an outlandishly cute, tiny and Disneyesque phantasy-goat. I'm going to say yes. Finnish fashion again forgiven, Jan obtains my blessing.




My thumb turned downward without too much deliberation here. Farron Loathing (GET IT? Gag names have been more obtuse than that, I feel.) does earn some points for an attempted crossover move - having an irony/stoner/prog metal mustache while in a black metal band. Bold, it's true, but ill-chosen. I can't get behind it, or feel like riding it (GET IT?). Plus the attempted rock-sex-god position he's assumed here for his promo shot. Eek. However, his band is fucking called Lightning Swords of Death, and I wouldn't dream of impugning that. That is gooood.

If it weren't for Kalle here I might've gone, oh, perhaps several more months without learning that "rock and roll" (noun or verb) is "rokaten ja rollaten" in Finnish, and I do consider that a pretty important piece of information to have. So thanks. But having said that, Kalle, I have some less positive things to add.

Not a girl on earth loves a scumbag with his scumbag jeans riding way too low more than I do, but there are internationally recognized limits for these things. Christ. And really, I know Finns have the worst fashion sense of all Europeans but what's with the "My So-Called Life" Clare Danes hair ? You're not in the only metal band in Finland, you're not completely on your fucking own out there, what is your excuse? And I know it's warmer in "Cali" than you're used to but it's not warm right now so get dressed.

I purchased some Arkansas Black apples today, and they shocked me into realizing I've never not once posted a word about Saviours, nor about their teen-dreem frontman Austin Barber, who came to us from Arkansas to infect the populace with his black gospel of KILL FOR SAVIOURS. The beauty of this band is that their deal, their "message" if you will, can be summed up thus: "Hey, do you guys like metal? Well, here's some kick-ass metal for you." There's no "style" beyond that. They came to rock balls and make you feel sweaty and menaced, and they bring that shit every fucking night. Saviours rule.

Yet it does make me chuckle that people are posting pictures of themselves with bandmembers on Saviours' MySpace page:

Look, here we are in the bathroom line with Austin and Cyrus! It's our brush with fame!

Shit, are they going to be famous? Austin's already been interviewed in bloody Alternative Press, of all the strange venues - but here, read a bit of it anyway:
There's little room for ambiguity with pentagram-adorned artwork and song titles like "Christ Hunt" and "Holy Slaughter." "I've always hated Christians," spits Barber. "I grew up in the Bible Belt, In Arkansas. I was the fucking enemy down there." While the songs and images are provocative, Barber feels more of a kinship with the modern Church of Satan than medieval ideas of devil worship. "I do what I want. It comes from the punk thing as well," he says "I'm a considerate, compassionate person. I live pretty righteously." With the band's musical background, metal purists may be poised to cry, "false metal." Barber doesn't think they can. "I think [ Crucifire ] is the best thing I've done," he says. "I don't think anyone can fuck with it.>"

Indeed not. He puts that really well, actually - whether it's to your taste of not, you certainly cannot fuck with it.

I have only a single criticism to offer the band: Austin needs to hone his metal stance. He needs to show the metal - plant wide those feet, foxy!

I'm thinking of changing the name of this page to Why Don't People Talk About Disembowelment More? "The Tree of Life and Death" was, just minutes ago, almost visible in this room, oozing though the air through the air like an animated algebra problem of heaviness. You think that's a strange and unintelligible analogy, but you haven't listened to Disembowelment lately, have you? Their songs are like a slowly rolling mass of mating anacondas, heaving in the mire, air bubbles taking minutes to reach the surface. Hoo boy. Renato Gallina's vocals really do sound belched out of a sulfurous hellcave, and because the band employed much cleaner production than any other 90's death-grind contenders, it has this nightmare-in-the-surgical-theater feel, harshly lit yet almost too richly textured and detailed. Fucking astonishing. I hate "glossy" production as much as any dirtbag metal fan but Disembowelment's work shows what a more clinical touch can do. Whereas the shitty, murky production of most extreme metal barely illuminates the demons in the corners, chompin' on femurs, in Disembowelment's songs they have a searchlight trained on them, and they're frozen in contorted crouches, leering at us, all gore-besmirched. Good stuff.

Just said to Yuoshka and I, in a whisper-shout as inflamed as Avenged Sevenfold's abcesses: "You know, from you people's body language right now a person would think you were listening to metal, but you're actually listening to Coheed & Cambria. How's THAT?" Spittin' mad at us, Lil' Copenhagen was. We ignored him 'cause we were just getting to the third-best part of "From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness", the part with all the ghosty Haunted Castle! noises. Magnificent. I feel like this about perhaps one album a year, but never before about a band who played on the fucking Warped Tour, for Christ's sake.

And when Yuoshka and I complete our modern dance epic to accompany the album, we will surely obtain a hefty grant of some sort to stage it in the world's more artistically savvy cities. But the dancers who ultimately perform it will have to be ready for exertion. Sometimes the muscle overlying my diaphragm is astoundingly sore the day after a "practice", from all the deep, arms-pinwheeling backbend-type moves. (Does anyone think I'm making that up? I'm not.) We were trying to figure out which modern choreographer most influenced our style, then realized we only knew of such people by name and by B&W photos of them in the New Yorker and were pretentious little shits having a fraudulent conversation.

One last bit and then I'll leave Burning Star IV alone for at least a fortnight: during a recent listen Y. sighed, chin in hand, seal eyes rolled to the firmament, "I wish I could sing like that." That from someone who will tell you in all seriousness that he's a better singer in every conceivable way than such middling vocalists as Freddie Mercury and Steve Perry. (Never says it about Stevie Nicks though, no, that faggot does not.)

Havoror here was kind enough to explain his name's Old Norse origin - something to do with "high" and "battle", I'm not kidding - and though his English is far clearer and more correct than mine (ain't it always, with these Scandoids?), I didn't get much of it, because I was stuck doing my retarded parakeet impression, staring at him goggly and tilt-headed. I swear he smelled of glacier. He and his marginally talented black metal horde were in town, and pre-show he wanted to be photographed ("snapped", as he put it, blackbless his heart) in old-school fashion in front of "the most California thing I can find". Hence the Corona endcap at Safeway. Well-chosen, I feel.

In the course of our conversations that evening, Havoror said that he'd gotten his corpse paint on a few hours earlier than usual to luxuriate in the relative safety, potential ass-kickingwise, of Berkeley vs. his neighborhood in an allegedly "very rough" area of OSLO. (Several Oakland residents snickered into their Burmese noodles upon hearing this, but c'mon, I'm sure such areas exist.) I was aghast. "Really? People are that shitty about it, in Norway? It's just part of the musical and visual landscape, though, isn't it, in the cities anyway? And, seriously, to the point of violence? Oh, that's crummy!" Really, I was crestfallen, my paradisiacal notions in jeopardy. My sneering beau drew himself at this, PSSHing in my direction, and muttered "It's like you think they've got guys in Parliament in corpse paint over there." Aww, meanie, isn't everyone entitled to some vision of Eden, worldly or otherwise? And while the Parliament bit was overstating it, we know that Norsepeople DO routinely carry on like this, so . . .

(I have that shirt, but not those balls.)

What did the crazy lady just do? She just bought the same Cattle Decapitation songs off iTunes twice apiece, as a sin tax of sorts on not being strictly vegan and listening to the band anyway. Here's some extra money, guys, for that goat cheese yesterday. Still, despite how batty that is I feel the purer for it. I do feel somewhat absolved.




I feel like a towering poser for not getting Celtic Frost until *2006*, and in *2006* only getting them after I saw a video - for a *new* song - on Headbanger's Ball. Egregious! But I'd just never had a Click! moment with them: those moments, you know, when a band you've heard here & there for years but mostly shrugged about suddenly reproduces in your blood, sometimes with the stroke of a single droning hook. As with Celtic Frost here, Celtic Frost and me. The song is "A Dying God Coming Into Human Flesh". Lord, is it ever a choking cloud of shimmering charcoal dust (I want to say this dust is composed of the charred bodies of faeries, but *could* I, really . . . )! It makes me drop my head in motionless supplication. The feelings it evokes are distinctly worshipful for me, in a woodcut-feeling way, medieval. The weight of it on your shoulders, it's a crucifix of heavy. Ho-ly-shit. And the video! Has any Swiss person ever before GONE FOR IT like Warrior in this video? In a snow-white, what, JEDI robe, basically, it's a kimono right on the Jedi line, is what he's got on. As he stands, this human god, laying down this feet-wide-apart slo-mo-icepick-murder of a riff, doooooomy as hell, with - are you ready - modern dancers writhing on the floor, encased in white nylon tubes, all around him. HAIL THIS TRIUMPH OF ART METAL. I regret the misspent years of not listening to Celtic Frost. How many of their songs do I need to duplicate-buy to be absolved of *that*?

The itchy, twitchy life of a highly-strung neurotic who loves too hard! When I look at Chris my blood feels carbonated, a baby-pink fizzy-drink where the bubbles are little quivering exclamation points (shit yes I'll reach for that metaphor! shit yes I'll strain it!) - yet lest this sound sunny and pop-songish, THOSE BUBBLES ARE BROKEN-LIGHTBULB SHARP and COLLAPSING MY VEINS. When perfectly reasonable people are saying perfectly interesting things to me, I want to interrupt them with a curt gesture and say something like "Chris really likes pears." I want to shriek "Chris really likes pears!" off the top of a grassy hill and keep shrieking it as I roll down, perhaps summing up with "and squirrrrelllls!" as I pick up speed near the bottom.