This is how I’m rolling today. Rock it:

[Link to video]

My general feeling about Metallica is they’re washed up, used, irrelevant and more than a bit embarrassing for many years now. The drummer is annoying and what they put out now is hardly what I would consider Metal, Thrash or otherwise.

From the whining over Napster, back in 2000 to the overall, professional douchebaggery of their drummer, they lost whatever was left of any respect from my adolescence.

Now, I see they want you to pay for the ability to watch promotional in-studio videos of their up-and-coming album. With price packages ranging from $24.99 to a whopping $124.99, with hardly any real value in the products, I’m thinking they’re sounding their own death knell to whatever is left of a paying consumer base that retains more than a couple brain cells.

Since when did a successful marketing and promotional campaign start with requiring consumers to pay? Is the album that bad?

With their bratty and self-defeating stance on digital media and DRM, they basically beg to be pirated. Why drop cash onto their already significant earnings if they treat some of their base as criminals and the rest as suckers? Really, why even listen to them?

It’s a late Saturday morning for me (past noon, for you other people who get up early on the weekends). This normally consists of camping on my couch with some coffee, a laptop and a shitload of RSS feeds to go through. During this time, I like to listen to a little music. It’s nice, you should try it. Anyway, I just finished listening to the first album by the Norwegian Psychedelic Stoner Doom band, Sahg for the first time and it’s so fucking good, I’m compelled to write a blog post about it.

Sahg combines strong influences from Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and a host of other awesome 70’s bands, bringing it all together into an original, modern sound. They kill. Sahg is one of those Norwegian super-bands, comprising members of well known bands, covering several genres (the bassist from the Black Metal band, Gorgoroth is a member, for example). Their sound is tight and the production is very high quality. All together, they make you want to grow your hair long, take a few bong hits, knock back a bunch of beers (possibly with a tab of acid), bang your head, nail some groupies and worship Satan.

Trust me, it’s good. Get it.

[Official Sahg website]

I’m loving this dance remix of Bill O’Reilly’s F-bomb explosion. It’s pure editing genius:

[Link to video]

Here’s a the original rant/tantrum O’Reilly threw that provided the source material:

[Link to video]

Holy shit…can this kid shred:

[Link to video]

Only 8 years old!

It’s a slow week. My mind is sludgy. I just ate meatloaf and I’m bored.

This is where my mind is at:

[Link to video]

It’s been a at least a few months since I’ve posted some of the photosets of concerts I’ve been to recently. If you know me (really, you don’t), I go to a fair amount of shows here in New York City, mostly metal of the Doom, Black, Stoner, Drone and occasionally, Death varieties. I like Metal; I like getting pasted and snapping a shitload of photos and uploading them to Flickr with minimal editorial discretion.

So, here’s a mess of them for you:

• Mouth Of The Architect / Wetnurse / Total Failure / Psyopus
• Fu Manchu
• Tombs / Plows
• Estuary
• BloodHorse / Disfear
• Howl
• Earth / Kayo Dot / Zaïmph
  

The cool thing is that today, the band Wetnurse emailed me to ask if they could use one or more of the photos I shot of them for the liner of their new CD. Of course, I’m more than happy and honored to oblige.

I see echoes of something Satanic—slightly reminiscent of “Rosemary’s Baby” in this video. Part of me wants to run screaming from my computer, the other part of me is relieved by the realization that perhaps I didn’t take too much acid as a teenager, The Captain & Tennille sure fucking did though. The dancing muskrats make me want to rip my eyeballs out and make a milkshake out of them.

Be warned, people, for I present you, “Muskrat love”:

[Link to video]

Not since R. Kelly has an R&B video cracked me up like this one:

[Link to video]

Awesome!

I’ve been looking for a decent way to convert FLAC files to MP3 under Linux for a while now. I’d been using SoundConverter, but I notice that there’s something not right with it. I’ll set my preference to VBR, highest quality (target rate is ~256), but I end up with files at around 150-192, which is not right.

So, I’ve done a bunch of searching around and have cobbled together this script, taking a little bit from here and a lot from there:

##START SCRIPT##
#!/bin/sh

for a in *.flac
do
OUTF=`echo "$a" | sed s/"\.flac$"/"\.mp3"/g`

ARTIST=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=ARTIST | sed s/.*=//g`
TITLE=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=TITLE | sed s/.*=//g`
ALBUM=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=ALBUM | sed s/.*=//g`
GENRE=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=GENRE | sed s/.*=//g`
TRACKNUMBER=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=TRACKNUMBER | sed s/.*=//g`
DATE=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=DATE | sed s/.*=//g`

flac -c -d "$a" | lame -V 0 - "$OUTF"
id3v2 -t "$TITLE" -T "$TRACKNUMBER" -a "$ARTIST" -A "$ALBUM" -g "$GENRE" -y "$DATE" "$OUTF"
done

mkdir "$ARTIST" && mkdir "$ARTIST"/"$ALBUM"
mv *.mp3 "$ARTIST"/"$ALBUM"/.
## END SCRIPT##

It works beautifully.