Since when is Black Metal with naked, fat old ladies in corpsepaint not a good time?

[Link to video]

I really dig Carpathian Forest.

Lots and lots of photos.

Back in February, I caught Gibby Haynes, singing most of the better songs of the Butthole Surfers with The Paul Green School of Rock backing him. Watching kids, from 8-18 perform on a stage is not my idea of fun at all. But I figured, when am I going to see a Butthole Surfer concert ever again? So, there I was with a bunch of moms and their cameras, along with a gaggle of aging Puppies (that’s Punk/Hippy). The crowd was pathetic and after suffering through part of one of the opening band’s set, I seriously considered leaving.

However, I’m glad I stayed because Gibby was fucking awesome. The dude is pretty old looking, but he still has his voice and rack of distortion gizmos. The kids were a marginally acceptable backup band. No one could manage any of Paul Leary’s signature shit. But still, it was sick seeing Gibby live. Here’s a photoset.

Then, on March 4th, I went to The Knitting Factory to see one of my all-time favorite live bands, Boris. The club is far too small a venue for the band and sold out as it was, the place was packed to the fucking gills, hot and uncomfortable.

The opening band, Growing, sucked fat donkey balls. They had a seriously impressive array of effects pedals, but all they could manage to create was substandard dance floor-ish music, delivered via guitar and effects pedals. Who the fuck wants to listen to that and what the fuck do they have to do with Doom Metal? Terrible. I stepped outside and let them finish their crap set beyond the range of my ears.

Boris was great. It was my second time seeing them live. They played a bunch of songs off of their soon to be released album and just all-around blew me away, as was expected. Photos, photos, photos. Boris rules.

Lastly, on the 5th, I saw the Sludge Doom juggernaut, Weedeater. Originally booked to play Club Midway, they switched at the last moment to Don Hill’s, due to Midway being shut down for some violation of some sort. After a couple of seriously mediocre opening bands (can someone say jam-metal?) and a large amount of PBRs, Weedeater finally took the stage.

As usual, they were molar-shattering loud. Unfortunately, about four and half songs in, the cops showed up and shut the show down because of it. One faded rock geezer who worked at the club said to me, “In my 25 years working this place, it ain’t never been shut down ’cause of noise. ‘Dat band is fuckin’ loud!”. Weedeater never fails to disappoint.

In truth, I was amused. I love Weedeater, but I was drunk and tired and they did manage a few songs. I hope they play New York again. I had a bunch of beers with the band and a completely one-sided and heated DRM debate with the very drunk guitarist (call me an Anti-DRM Nazi).

Some pretty good photos of the aborted show can be found here.

Here’s a set of photos from the Sourvein concert at The Knitting Factory last Sunday. It was really dark in the club and I couldn’t really take photos the way I normally do (without a flash), but I was twisted enough to actually bump the singer on stage, in between songs and ask permission to use one, which he very graciously gave.

Wretched, drunken and loud Doom Metal. I had a great time, although I did get way too smashed, somehow ending up at the Staten Island Ferry and nearly falling down twice in the various subway stations I stumbled through till I finally found my way home.

Seeing High On Fire play live for my first time this past Sunday was absolutely epic. There was literally no room except to stand in the club and I managed to to get right up close to the stage and marvel, mouth agape like a halfwit at the epic output of Matt Pike. I have never seen a person so charged and possessed by the music they’re playing. The dude is a Metal juggernaut. I was amazed and fully fucking entertained.

I’d eaten a rather pricey ticket to another concert that I’d purchased prior to finding out about the High On Fire gig. It was a totally worthy loss. I had a great time and I nailed a pretty sweet t-shirt. Next time, I’m pulling some strings to get backstage.

Anyway, I took photos. Arguably, a retarded amount of them, but hey, I fucking love High On Fire. You can find the complete set of the night here.

I’m seeing High On Fire, live in Brooklyn this Sunday. I’ve never seen them play before. I’m getting apeshit excited. My camera will be charged and my blood/alcohol content will be high. High On Fire is an awesome band. Matt Pike wakes up in the morning and after a bowl of Cheerios, just starts shitting Stoner riffs all over the place. The man is a fucking Metal machine. Their last three albums are some of the best recordings I own. I’m cannot fucking wait. It better not get canceled at the last second or any such bullshit.

A few nights ago, I went to see Mastodon and Neurosis at a Masonic Temple (of all places). The concert was okay, nothing special as far as I’m concerned. Here’s a link to a set of photos of the show, mostly of Mastodon since Neurosis played under far too dark lighting conditions.

Anyway, there I was with a number of drinks in me. I started thinking to myself, “When the hell am I going to get another chance to be in a Masonic Temple?” So, armed with my trusty camera, I started exploring the building, leaving the performance area and heading up to unoccupied floors. Aside from the stairwells and landings, the floors were unlit. I started heading down dark hallways, using my camera flash to navigate.

Next thing I know, I’m in this big room where I’m guessing the ceremonies take place. There was a funky altar/podium and all these large, ornate chairs. There was even a throne-like one set at the head, on a raised platform. The whole room was very church-like and fumbling around in the dark as I was, kinda creepy. I took a bunch of photos and on my way out, completely blind, I snapped a photo so could see where the exit was and lo and behold, I’m standing in front of a coffin, propped against the wall.

Anyway, here’s a set of the photos I took (minus most of the random shit ones I took just to see where I was going) of my exploration of the temple. Pretty neat, I think.

This is how I’m rolling this morning:

[Link to video]

Here’s a set of photos I took last night of 3 Inches Of Blood and The Black Dahlia Murder, playing live at BB Kings in Manhattan. Another band Hate Eternal was supposed to perform as well, but didn’t show until I was practically out the door, my stamina and good will at being patient for them to set up at an end. Still I had a pretty good time. I was really impressed with 3 Inches. They don’t sound like much from their recordings and I’ve never been one for the high pitched, Judas Priest-like screeching, but damn, they are one awesome band live.

Overall it was one of the more rowdy of concerts I’ve been to at what is normally a pretty locked down club with really intense security guards. I saw one teenage kid get thrown over the barrier, smacking face-first against the edge of the stage, hard enough to bounce his head and fuck him up, which pretty much served him well for being a crowd-surfing idiot. Another guy who was standing next to me caught an elbow to the face and ended up breaking two of his lower teeth. Understandably, he was pretty pissed, but it was an accident and I don’t think anyone even knew who had hit him in the first place.

I got into a one-sided shoving match with some long-hair, biker jacket-wearing wannabe, which in retrospect was stupid of me, but he did shove me out of the way first and I had some beers talking in me which sparked the uber-aggressive politeness nazi in me. I really hate it when people can’t traverse a crowd politely, thinking that being physically rude is an acceptable pseudo-alpha posture, just because they have their friends with them and their pumped from the Metal. Of course, with about five beers in me, I have all the invisible friends I think I need. Someday, I’ll probably get a good ass-beating, considering the way I get up in people’s business sometimes. But hey, I did make him apologize, so it’s a win.

I love last.fm. If ever you want to completely geek out on your music statistics, that’s the site to use. Since it’s the new year, I was looking at some of my listening habits have been and whatnot and noted that in the past year, I’ve attended twenty-three live shows. I like drinking; loud Metal madness and taking photos of bands. It’s my thing. I dig it.

For this new year, I think it’s safe to say I intend and will be able to double that amount.

Bang for buck, Amarok is the best music player/library manager on earth. But lately, since I’ve been flying Gnome, Xfce and other non-KDE-native environments, I’ve been using Exaile, just for the heck of it. It’s also nice to not have to load KDE libraries, just to play some music. Anyway, Exaile a good program. It’s come a damn long stretch since I first checked it out. It can handle large libraries and with every realease, closes the gap on features that make Amarok the best.

I’ve been using exaile, pretty much exclusively for about a year or more now. I’m not sure what took me so long but I just now ran ‘exaile –help‘ and got the command line arguments. Why didn’t I do this a year ago? I love command line music control. I don’t know if they’re any better, but to me, it’s always much more satisfying to execute tasks via command. Managing my playlist via command line makes it uber.

Usage: exaile.py [option...|uri]

Options:
-h, –help show this help message and exit
-d DIR, –duplicates=DIR
Finds and deletes all duplicate tracks (based on their
md5 sum)
-n, –next Play the next track
-p, –prev Play the previous track
-s, –stop Stop playback
-a, –play Play
-t, –play-pause Toggle Play or Pause
-q, –query Query player
–gui-query Show a popup of the currently playing track
–get-title Print the title of current track
–get-album Print the album of current track
–get-artist Print the artist of current track
–get-length Print the length of current track
–current-position Print the position inside the current track as a
percentage
-i VOL, –increase_vol=VOL
Increases the volume by VOL
-l VOL, –decrease_vol=VOL
Decreases the volume by VOL
–play-cd Start playing a CD
–new Start new instance
–set-rating=RATING Set rating for current song
–get-rating Get rating for current song
–settings=SETTINGS Settings Directory
–cleanversion
–version
–testing
–no-equalizer Disable Equalizer support
–start-minimized Start Exaile minimized to tray, if possible

Awesome. For me, at least.