Friday, July 29, 2011

...Worst Rock and Roll Album Ever? Exena Cervenka's Unabomber Album




Exena Cervenka of the punk band X reading excerpts from the Unabomber Manifesto with free jazz experimental music playing in the background. At this point she had lengthened her name to Cervenkova. When people talk about worst rock and roll albums ever made, I hear Having Fun with Elvis on Stage the Elvis record without any music, and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music which is 2-hours of laired guitar feedback,given as answers a lot. The Lou Reed is certainly unlistenable, but it has adherents. I’m going to make a vote for this album, which I hadn’t thought of in the longest time until last night.
It’s worthless. The Unabomber was crazy and couldn’t get his work published without killing people to get it attention. Anders Breivik apparently plagiarized the Unabomber recently and might be even more boring, but Kaczynski was massively boring. Exene Cervenka is kind of an idiot. A lot of people in bands are idiots. Punk rock is the world’s biggest “was”. She was something like 16 years past her prime when she put this album out in the 90’s. It’s dreadful.
You think you could sit through this crap for 45 minutes? I don’t.
Wait, Exena was married to Viggo Mortenson- Viggo Mortenson couldn’t get a better looking wife then that? That’s inexplicable.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

MASS-SHOOTER VIDEO ART Featuring Anders Breivik and Jared Lee Loughner!



Do mass killers have video art? Of course they do! They are often desperate for creative self-expression! They’re also desperate to get their self-expression attention. So desperate, they’ll kill to get it!
Such is the case with Anders Behring Breivik, the shooter and bomber in this week’s mass murder in Norway. If for some reason you want to know what was going on in his head, there is an extensive manifesto of his available on-line. Fans of literary theory may be surprised to see a fairly extensive history of the Frankford School and cultural theory in there, Breivik was obsessed with it, and saw it as a massively powerful and destructive force. I was under the impression that cultural theory was a marginal leftist school of thought that attracted academics and art world people that pontificated a whole lot but had little influence over policy, but Breivik was apparently ticked off about it enough to open fire on kids at a youth camp tied to the Norway’s liberal Labor Party. His general main gripe is that the rise of political correctness is leading to the destruction of Europe because it is leading to the colonization of Europe by Islam. Actually, many Europeans have similar concerns about Muslim immigration into Europe, but most of them just voted for conservative political parties and didn’t open fire on a youth camp. His video art is cool though, check out the cheesy Knights Templar graphics! It is really too bad he committed his crime in Norway and not in Texas, he could be on the death penalty express lane very quickly. Here is a link to his boring-ass manifesto. According to Reuters a lot of it was plagiarized.
http://www.kevinislaughter.com/wp-content/uploads/2083+-+A+European+Declaration+of+Independence.pdf
Woo-Hoo! Look at me! I’m a Knight Templar! Woo-Hoo!!!
Elsewhere in the news, Jared Lee Loughner the shooter in Arizona who opened fire on the Congresswoman Giffords early this year, he’s been forced medication in prison. It was thought briefly Jared Loughner was tied to the far right because he referenced the gold standard, which has been a cause of Ron Paul and other conservatives, but it became quickly clear from his YouTube videos that he had, shall we say- unique things to say about currency and grammar. In fact he intended to create his own currency, apparently. I’ve always been curious about the music he used in his video art. I think he probably made the little techno songs in the background himself on GarageBand software or other similar music software. Of course, the content suggests that we, society at large, are all brainwashed and asleep, that he alone understood the truth. That we must urgently listen to him. Of course, no one did, so he opened fire to force us to listen. And when we did listen, we determined he had nothing to say, and we simply put him behind bars.



Friday, July 22, 2011

Film Review: Revenge of the Living Dead Girls

Film Review: Revenge of the Living Dead Girls



This film is sort of an inexplicable French horror film from the 80’s. The acting is awful, the plot made me shake my head. It does have female zombies biting a man’s penis off in it, if that’s your thing. There is also a sequence where the female zombies sexual violate, she later appears to like it, and then one of the female zombies sticks a sword in her vagina.
That’s a real sign of some class cinema, there’s a scene involving a woman being sexually violated by a monster and then as it occurs she looks like she’s getting into it. That’s been in a bunch heinous films I’ve seen of late. The film the Geek, which is thankfully becoming hard to find, Bigfoot rapes the chick and she looks like she’s into it. The maggot scene in Galaxy of Terror is kind of like that. And of course, there’s all the Japanese animated porn with the girls getting raped by monsters with tentacles.
I’m not going to even bother explaining the “plot” in detail. Small French town with a German owned chemical company in it. The opening scene a guy on a motorcycle sneaks a bunch of poison in a milk truck. Three girls die from drinking milk. The scene the first girl dies, she’s hanging out with her mother in the kitchen but she’s wearing erotic lingerie. There’s part where a woman that works at the chemical company unbuttons her shirt, offers the guy a million and a half dollars or something like that for sex and he refuses. It happens for no real reason either.
There’s a lot about this film that doesn’t make much sense to me. The one rich guy at the company has somebody disposing of chemical waste for him in the local graveyard- bang- the three dead girls come back to live, and hence the title Revenge of the Living Dead Girls.
I was to be honest, transfixed. By extreme film, I mean so in terms of the stiffness of the acting and the holes in the plotline as much as the violence involving sex organs that this film revels in. The zombie masks are also absolutely dreadful. This is some really trash cinema. I don’t know if I ever seen trash cinema quite at this level. Cannibal Holocaust is a very violent film with the killing of live animals in it, for example, but even there was a certain level of filmmaking at work. I’m still working on why this woman was having breakfast with her mother in lingerie.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Max McDonald and Goodnight Gunfight

There’s an old quote from Phil Spector that is something to the effect that he was saddened by the fact that he had reached the age where he had outlived many of his enemies which was a sadness for him because they had defined him. Something somewhat like that has happened to me. People I hate had these bands and artistic projects that appeared to be going somewhere, I check back on it on-line and the band’s been gone for years and the person isn’t doing anything anymore. Phil Spector is now rotting in jail, which is funny because, at one point I was working with a female goth band called Goodnight Gunfight who was tied to his daughter Nicole Spector in New York. I’d known Goodnight Gunfight from Bard College. The details were that Jesse who was the drummer for Goodnight Gunfight had a roommate who had dated Phil Spector and then continued a friendship with Nicole after breaking up, and that Phil Spector was calling the apartment frequently, is what was claimed. I don’t doubt it because everyone in New York seemed to know Nicole Spector. I interviewed them for an article that was never run when I owned a magazine, which didn’t sell, called AeonElectron. They were tied to another band called Lions and Tigers that was also a Bard graduate band because they featured Max “Heel” McDonald on base- that was the son of Ian McDonald of Foreigner and King Crimson. There was a fairly incredible misunderstanding of Joy Division he had. It was not, however, a distinctive one at the time. Arguably Lions and Tigers were shaped more then anything by an impulse to blend in to the crowd. There were so many other bands doing that in New York at that point. Here is his poor music
http://www.myspace.com/lionsandtigersnyc
Fans of Williamsburg music would be interested to know that I’ve been a long time friend of drummer Kevin Shea and I tried to set him up to be Goodnight Gunfights producer because I recall that Max McDonald was hovering around the band, and he might completely fuck everything up potentially. Kevin’s schedule and Goodnight Gunfights did not line up. I gave up working with them, they were really, really obnoxious to work with. I think the misconception some people have is that they screwed me over somehow. That’s actually not true at all. I just didn’t like them. They were a very spoiled little group of young women. If I had been dating one of them it would have been a different deal, but otherwise who would want to babysit a band like that?
Goodnight Gunfight was a waste of time to worry about either way. It isn’t that hard to get a connection to Spector anyway. His PI Tawni Tyndal is a friend of a friend, the lawyer from his first trial Leslie Abramson, now retired, was at the Pellicano trial when I was there doing an article that ended up in Reviewer magazine. His daughter Nicole partied with a lot of people in New York, and the problem would be getting him to talk. He was described as a recluse even before he ended up in jail for murder. The other thing is that Goodnight Gunfight was just not the best band in the world. You can look that all up here-http://www.goodnightgunfight.com. The thing with them musically is that they were not hugely original. They sounded much like gothic bands from the early 80’s but dressed more or less like indie rock hipsters of the last ten years. That was common practice in the 2000’s. Two bands I can think of did that and made a bunch of cash- Interpol and the Rapture. That was kind of also what Lions and Tigers were. But for every band like Interpol and the Rapture there were dozens of bands that did the same thing but didn’t make any lasting impact and failed to graduate out of being small club bands. That a band gets some press in local publications briefly doesn’t mean much of anything in terms of continued success. What is really puzzling about Goodnight Gunfight and Lions and Tigers is to look at the contacts they would have had in the music business. Foreigner is not widely considered a great band but they sold a mess of albums. King Crimson is widely considered an influential and important band. Phil Spector’s crazy and was facing murder 2 charges at the time, but he still had contacts in the music industry as evidenced by the fact his young wife was able to put out her crappy album. Its’ truly amazing that Max McDonald failed as radically as he did. The same with Goodnight Gunfight.
The other things as I’m writing this, not so much Foreigner, but I’m thinking about King Crimson and Phil Spector, none of these little bands from the 2000’s came near the musical ability or imagination of those musicians. Spector was a good musician forgetting anything else about him. That album Islands by King Crimson is a beautiful record-they was bunch of dirty hippies but, again, forgetting anything else about them they were good musicians. If you think about King Crimson and Phil Spector and then think about Goodnight Gunfight or Lions and Tigers, that’s truly an embarrassment.
The degree of failure astounds, and now they're not even doing anything for me to destroy.

Monday, July 18, 2011

More Fun with Mr. Sock

Terrible Music! Black Tape For a Blue Girl "Within These Walls"





There was a while when I aspired to create music like this. I’m not simply talking about liking this song-I’m talking about I once aspired to make this kind of music. My general excuse has been that my mother had passed away in 2002, and that it was also a sexual thing in so far as I wanted to surround myself with beautiful women through making this kind of music. Oddly enough, someone who played with Black Tape for a Blue Girl laughed at the idea that Sam Rosenthal was a Casanova.
For music reviews on here I like to do the metal reviews. You show me a metal band from Finland and I will most likely say how genius they are. A band from Helsinki or a band from Montreal that plays metal that is any way progressive or in the vein of Voivod or Celtic Frost is good to go. That to me is very easily the way metal should be dealt with. It’s very much an echo of the sentiments that Lou Reed has expressed lately about playing with Metallica. If nothing else, I can attest to the speed at which a band like In Silentio Noctis (unfortunately broken up now) could play.
I also like reviewing or writing on gothic bands on here, but it is a far more complex relationship. I had a genuine fondness if not obsession with gothic music in my teens and into my twenties, but as my twenties progressed it became more and more that the appeal of it was passing away from me, but that I was in denial of this. At the same time, I’ve admitted on the page that Serpentine Gallery by Switchblade Symphony is a kind of neglected classic or semi-classic. So it is a far more complex topic for me to speak of.
Having already written a blog on what a bad piece of music This Mortal Coil’s version of “Kangaroo” by Big Star is, and having already written about how I was a fan of Projekt records and was friends with Patrick Ogle of the Projekt records band Thanatos for a while, I think the inevitable next move is to point out what a bad song “Within These Walls” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl is, seeing as it is much the same kind of bad music as This Mortal Coil’s version of “Kangaroo”. Terrible, terrible “art” music is what it is.
I was quite surprised to see on Wikipedia today that Brian what’s-his-face from The Dresden Dolls had ended up playing with Black Tape for a Blue Girl for a while. Amanda Palmer must have really thrown that guy under the bus, because I recall the Dresden Dolls got to the point where there t-shirts and such where everywhere, but Patrick Ogle told me that Black Tape for a Blue Girl never sold at all. During the 200’s the old bands from the Porjekt label were sort of the scene as bands like the Dresden Dolls, I knew that because I was a kind of in that scene a little bit. I would never have guessed that Brian from The Dresden Dolls would have ended up backing Rosenthal. Early Black Tape for a Blue Girl is probably musically better, but they never sold well at all, stayed relatively obscure, and are sort of weak. "Within These Walls" was their first album, they made 25 years worth of more music. You can imagine the depths of bad music they sank to?

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Music Review:Cryptopsy None So Vile



Ah yes, Cryptopsy from Montreal. I’m not sure I would put them on the same pedestal I would other French Canadian metal bands, but they are good. They have some serious competition up there in Canada because the original Voivod line-up was one of the best bands of all time, and Akitsa are a fairly incredible band.
This album was made in the 1994, the second album by Cryptopsy. I don’t strongly associate the 90’s with metal. Cobain killed himself in 1994, metal was mostly out of the spotlight. Some bands that had sold very well held on to their U.S. audiences. The thing with the black metals buring down the churches was during the early-mid 90’s but that wasn’t getting that much press in the United States that I can recall. Nine Inch Nails was a bigger deal where I was. I hadn’t heard of Cryptopsy until years later when I went to Montreal and saw that there was a whole big metal thing up there, I think that was when I heard about Cryptopsy for the first time. That was 2002. None So Vile is an album I like but is not an album I grew up with or new of when it was released.
Don’t pay money for this album. It is all available on YouTube. I wrote the same thing earlier today about Switchblade Symphony’s album Serpentine Gallery. Relative to the scrap of dung that is produced and labeled rock and roll and released to the public for consumption, those are two of the best albums ever made. Still, there is nothing about them so urgent that you need to even download them unto your own computer. There is something to be said for listening to the tracks on an album in the order that they were originally intended to be heard. The track listing is on Wikipedia.
Anyway, to describe accurately Cryptopsy. They are a hard, nasty death metal band from Quebec. At this point in the bands career they had a lunatic lead singer named Lord Worm who barely sounds human. The general consenus I’ve heard from metal people is that the better Cryptopsy albums have Lord Worm in them. Cryptopsy obviously had a lot going on in terms of technical skill evident in their ability to pound their instruments into submission at rapid speeds. The drummer in particular was a beast on this one. That and Lord Worm’s inhuman sounding vocals are the high points of the album. The weakness of the album is that individual songs would be difficult to discern from other songs. An exception to this would be the song “Phobophile”. because it features a very delicate piano opening.
I can’t say anything about the lyrical content because, of course I can’t make out the lyrics. Lord Worm would switch over from inhuman growling to high pitch screams with nothing resembling the human voice in-between. I am, however, very impressed that the final song on the album was entitled “Orgiastic Disembowelment”.

Music Review! Goth Absurdity Continues with Two Witches

Review: Wenches, Witches and Vampyres: The Very Best of Two Witches 1987-1999


There are a lot of good bands from Finland that don’t get much attention in the U.S. A lot of gothic/industrial music of the 80’s -90s was never really reviewed much of anywhere. I’ve tried to find criticism and reviews of this music, a lot of it I couldn’t even find reviews of on-line. One really example of an album like this is Wenches, Witches and Vampyres: The Very Best of Two Witches 1987-1999 an excellent collection of the bands career. Incidentally, I understand exactly how absurd this band is and that is part of my reason for liking them. I was a fan of goth music in the 90’s, but I didn’t know this band's music well until many years later.



Two Witches are a goth band from Finland that never pretended or tried to be much of anything else. They’re akin to other gothic bands like Christian Death in their lyrical preoccupation with religious and occult themes. To some extent they’re also one of those goth bands like Sleep Chamber that plays up the connection goth music has to S&M/fetish culture. They went straight for the songs about vampires. They really dressed the part with the gothic fetish outfits. There are of course, two witch looking women in the band, but the singer developed complications in the direction of male pattern baldness fairly early on. They never had any qualms about being into the vampire gimmicks and costumes whatsoever. I like that about them, the extremity of their gaudiness.
Musically though, their commitment to a fairly ahead goth band is one of their real strengths. There is that subgenre of gothic bands, which Two Witches are not- that attempted to go a neo-classical route or try to sound like they were from the medieval ages, such as Dead Can Dance or Atraxia. However, most goth that has been is more like punk in being a less-is-more approach. Often the drum machine parts, keyboards and guitar riffs on goth albums are relatively simple. The track “Cat’s Eyes” has a simple drum machine beat, some keyboards and I think some guitar as the backdrop, but it’s a perfectly full sound. The whole rock and roll thing tends to work best when it’s a straight, hard, sound. Skinhead bands and goth bands intuited that well. It would be falsely reductive to say that these bands could not play. There is nothing sloppy about what Two Witches and bands of their ilk did. Two Witches went for a foreboding sound not unlike other small-label goth bands of the era. They put digital delay and echo type effects on their guitars, although at some points the little musical trick that they used a lot which is to leave a heavier guitar parts with a lot of space after them so that the reverb just hangs there. The singer has a real, mournful, low voice- which is like a variation on Andrew Eldritch of Sisters of Mercy or Ian Curtis form Joy Division most of the time, but he occasionally he gets pretty nuts with his whole “I’m a vampire” thing. They use electronics sparingly and in minimal atmospheric ways- the keyboards and electronic beats are there sometimes, but they are generally a guitar-based band. The females in the band sing occasionally, most of the time it’s the bald guy. He had some pipes though. In particular, the lairing of guitar sounds on this album is very effective. This is a very rich textured sounding album with a lot of color on it, but they weren’t working with much. The band was probably never was a huge money-maker, and they only had some minimal electronics, guitars with a few effects pedals, a bass, drums and their voices to work with. They were able to create a big sound with a great deal of space with what they worked with regardless.
They certainly have their whole lyrical thing with occult and religious imagery, their whole thing with vampire erotica or whatever it is. The singer gets pretty breathy and perverted sounding, although I’d likely sound the same way if I was in a goth band with two Finnish women in it. The only track which does sort of annoy me is “Holy Land (I Don’t Need Your)” which sounds fine, but the singer goes on an anti- Christianity bit rather predictably, decrying Christianity for having previsions against homosexual and lesbian acts and for other reasons. When bands do that it becomes simply another bully pulpit. I’m not big on music with messages. They must secretly love Christianity because they are obsessed with invoking its iconography and decrying it. It is perhaps a kind of inverse love/hate deal sort of like S&M is. That song is the one track on the album I don’t care for much.
I’m not sure were exactly the future of bands like Two Witches lies. It could be that they remain in relative obscurity. It could be that they are rescued form obscurity or it comes to be that they are understood to be ahead of their time at some point. I could see this band and others like it becoming fashionable in the future for some reason.

Music Review-Switchblade Symphony-Serpentine Gallery



It was a few years ago that I wrote an article for a small new York music publication called Balladry in which I said something to the effect that most rock and roll bands of any musical interest where on the Cleopatra Records catalogue during the mid-90's. I would probably recant everything I said in that article. So much so, gothic/industrial music no longer speaks to me. It would be hard for me to disagree that Joy Division had created a masterpiece in the Closer album, but at that point the term gothic music didn't exist or wasn't prevalent. Joy Division was the first on really, and I read somewhere a million years ago that the term gothic music appeared in a radio interview with Joy Division. By the time I was a teenager goth had been an institution of teenager self-pity and angst for a decade. At that point, Nine Inch Nails had managed to get widespread mainstream success, but smaller labels like Cleopatra and Projekt records had scores of bands that never did that well on them. I was a fan of this kind of material in my teens, but then in my 20's I feel I tried desperately to hold on to something which was no longer something to hold on to. Goth had not aged well. It wasn't the annoyance that indie rock had become, but few things in life are and that may have been in part because goth did not have the same exposure over the decade or so past. If they played lesser goth bands everywhere you went in Williamsburg that might have become equally obnoxious. If you have to rediscover or re-examine an album by a gothic band from the time period I'm talking about that had something resembling talent, check out the band Switchblade Symphony's first album Serpentine Gallery.
Do not pay money for this album. Every single track on it was posted to YouTube. It's an interesting little album, I can't imagine someone giving it so many repeated listenings that you would need it downloaded.
Back in the 90's when I was in New York I had a roommate that was like 8 years older then me who made the joke about this album that he kept expecting Ozzy Osbourne to start singing. There is a little bit of a metal element in there. They did use a guitarist but all of the other instruments where electronic, the beats are all drum machine. Then there was what was really the definitive musical signature of Switchblade Symphony which was the use of two female vocalists. These were not just any two female vocalists, these were two female vocalists with a fair bit of technical abilities. These are vocal parts that would be difficult to emulate. Probably for that reason, Switchblade Symphony never got that aggressive or noise-oriented- the production had to be fairly clean so you could hear the vocals clearly.
There was there lyrical fascination with fairy-tale subject matter. The children's song "London Bridge is Falling Down" was incorporated into the song "Gutter Glitter". I kind of think that was a bunch of stupid goth chick nonsense and they were probably not being nearly as profound as they though they were being. There might be a campy quality to it at this point. The album was released in 1995, I recall some of the tracks are rereleases from even a few years before that, so what are you going to do? I recall their second album as being weak. Alas, as soon as a thing is a breathing artistic entity it is often quickly dead. I would go as far as to say that Serpentine Gallery is an overlooked a album, a kind of neglected classic or semi-classic. That's a lot coming from em at this point. I think even at one point I in conversation said I preferred Switchblade Symphony to the Velvet Underground. That's a good thing to say, because it will drive the people that play in indie bands and work at little record shops insane. They take all that way too seriously, many of those people are wing-nut leftists in the dumbest kinds of ways, and indie rock doesn't need to get good press ever again.
This albums okay, give it a listen.

Music Review: Projekt Afar Free Compilation.

Projekt Afar is a free compilation available on-line that’s been on Amazon since 2010 I believe. Projekt records has been around forever. It was created by Sam Rosenthal of Black Tape for Blue Girl to release his own work in the late 80’s originally. It’s generally associated with soft and atmospheric gothic music, although they’ve put other things, a controlled bleeding album if I recall. During the 2000’s I was friends with Patrick Ogle of the Projekt band Thanatos. That stopped when he interviewed the washed-up grunge band Silverchair from the 90’s. At that point I still held hopes to make a living through my fiction, and all the press was going to little indie rock bands, and when people interview rocker assholes like Silverchair that just encourages the magazine industry to go with the worthless indie rockers. I know that he was doing what he did to make a living, but it was clear that he didn’t see the larger fall-out or cared about quality control.
I bet though if I looked it up, Patrick probably at least released puts out some relatively decent music. The Black Tape for a Blue Girl track on Afar is extremely weak. Probably the worst performance I’ve ever seen live by a band was Revue Noir, which was a project by Sam Rosenthal with some not very attractive goth chick singing, an attempt to conform to the Dresden Dolls popularity at the time. Actually, the Dresden Dolls, looking back on it now, were always wretched. Amanda Palmer comes off as a spoiled little theatre major type, she’s not sexy on account of the unshaved armpits. Revue Noir was a guy who’d done goth albums in the 80’s and 90’s trying to adapt to the trend of the Dresden Dolls and bands of that ilk as the trend was on it’s way out. The track from Black Tape for Blue Girl on Afar sound like Revue Noir, unfortunately.
The gothic music, goth, doesn’t have the same magic it had for me in high school or college. I think in my 20’s I was in denial that it was slipping away, that I’d got sick of it. The band that stands out as the one that still holds is Joy Division really In the case of Projekt records, being friends with Patrick during the 2000’s offered insights into the music, but a lot of that was unflattering insight. I learned that these bands hadn’t sold nearly as well as I would have thought, for example. That being said, some of the tracks on this album are more embarrassing then others. There’s a two artists on here that are not doing anything radically new but have retained the way they sounded in the90’s more or less, Lovesliescrushing and Steve Roach. I think Steve Roach was waiting for a check to do instrumental work from Hollywood that never really came.
Then there is the track Call of The Devine by Mark Seelig that goes straight for being the music playing in the background at a New Age bookstore. This collection is free. I suppose it would be unobtrusive music for a dinner party or something like that, the Black Tape for a Blue Girl track on there would have to be skipped over, that is actively irritating.

Friday, July 15, 2011

Video Review: Lady Blue (Anime 1996) Japanese Tentacle Hentai...

There are without question two topics I’ve written about on here that have attracted the most attention on here. In different ways I find it is sort of disappointing that they are the two topics that they are. The first topic of interest has been my review of the poor music project Their Only Dreams by David Lyudmirsky. I have no idea why anyone would want to even read about how bad that thing is. The other one was a review that dealt with their being almost a subgenre of very graphic horror films involving rape and in many cases impregnation by monsters and aliens during the 1980’s. Mercifully, David Lyudmirsky only has so much music available on-line. However, I think with the topic of films with graphic images of women being raped by monsters I only have barely skimmed the surface having ignored the nation of Japan. Quite an oversight, as it turns out.
Apparently, there’s an entire genre of Japanese animation with graphic sexual content named “hentai” and there is a subgenre of it if you can believe it called “tentacle hentai” which involving rape by monsters with tentacles. Of course the rape victims actually become excited by the rape. I found a store in Philadelphia that sells this material and found one, namely one called Lady Blue.
The plotline of Lady Blue is actually quite intricate and difficult to follow. It involves demons and ninja clans. I’m not going to write out cliff notes or a plot synopsis on it. For those of you who have sexual fantasies about animated characters being raped by monsters with tentacles I can assure with great certainty that you will get plenty of what you want from this video. Women raped by monsters with tentacles, women turning into demons with vaginas with teeth, a female vampire type creature that sucks the life out of women by performing oral sex on them. There’s a female werewolf type thing in there. It all pretty much revolves around women being raped by a creature with tentacles. There some pretty ridiculous electronic music in the background of this film. So if you like tentacle rape with some cheesy Casio synth in the background, this is absolutely the film for you. It’s fairly heavy on the violence as well. “Deep in your heart you want me to violate you” is a line from the dialogue. I think that is essential to the fantasy, although I’m not sure why the idiom is animation, and why the specific fetish for tentacles seems to dominate.
Not surprisingly given the sketchiness of the store I bought it from, I did not see the end of the video because the disk was damaged. I can’t tell you how this video ends. It has something to do with women being raped by a creature with tentacles. That much is certain.
I think there are numerous such “tentacle hentai” videos in existence. I do know that when I write about things like this, and post it on the web, I get hits in a big way. Who the audience is for this material I can only imagine.

Book Review! Where's the Birth Certificate by Jerome Corsi!

How can a book about Barrack Obama called “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” still be relevant and selling?
The controversy around Barrack Obama’s birth certificate continued for three years or so, and then the week that Barrack Obama provided the long form of his birth certificate, this very book came out and was on the New York Times best seller list. Jerome Corsi’s name was not unfamiliar to me- I’d listened to a speech of his on the webpage for the Constitution Party, a sort of obscure and smallish U.S. Christian Right political party. Jerome Corsi spent years trying to track down Barrack Obama’s birth certificate. The actual birth certificate was only part of his crusade and one of the topics covered in the book. Corsi argues that Barrack Obama wouldn’t have been considered eligible for the presidency by the founding fathers even if he was born in Hawaii because of his father’s British citizenship which inferred Obama with dual citizenship at birth.
The question of his citizenship and eligibility for the oval office is only one of the question that Corsi brings up in this book. He also goes into the question about the secrecy surrounding Obama’s college transcripts. There’s that whole thing that his social security number is supposedly a Connecticut number.
Corsi does actual nail the left with an incredible inaccuracy in so-far as for although the labeling of those on the political right calling for prove of the president’s citizenship as “birthers”, because there was controversy as to whether John McCain was eligible to be president on the ground’s he was born in the Panama canal zone and not U.S. soil, which was dismissed because his parents where both Americans and he was born on a U.S. military base.
These most recent months Corsi has been claiming that the borth certificate provided by Obama is fraudulent. For a while, the theories about Obama and the birth certificate got some very serious mainstream media attention, there were people like Donald Trump jumping on the issue. Because Barrack Obama produced what appears to be his long form birth certificate, the issue is likely to end up ghettoized in the realm of the right-wing conspiracy next to the 9-11 theories and the Jewish world banking conspiracy. A successful GOP candidate would be unlikely to even bring the topic up at any point. I don’t what the future on Corsi is, but it’s unclear who the Constitution Party is going to run in 2012. They ran Pastor Chuck Baldwin 2008, but Corsi has been probably getting more press lately then anyone else connected directly to the Constitution Party that I can think of, it would surprise me if they ran Corsi as their candidate- not that a Constitution Party candidate has a sinner’s chance in hell of winning. That would be fascinating to watch. Corsi is not an idiot by any stretch of the imagination.
That Corsi book is actually a half-way decent read. I was more engaged by it then other books coming out of the right that I’ve read lately, books by Michael Savage or Ann Coulter, for example.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Film Review: The Unborn 1991! Thumbs Up from Nancy Garrido!

Film Review The Unborn 1991


As being that the topic of horror films involving rape by monsters and/or impregnation with monster fetus as a re-occurring film element. I also wrote about Phillip Garrido’s music. I learned of the film the Unborn, which involves impregnation with monster children (not monster rape, though) from an interview with Phillip Garrido’s kidnap and rape victim Jaycee Dugard in which she mentioned it as a film Nancy Garrido was into! If you watch the film with the details of the Dugard kidnapping case in mind, the connection is quite striking.
Another interesting little detail about The Unborn. You know Gary Numan, the electronic music pioneer from the 80’s? The guy who did “Cars”? What was he doing in the early 90’s? He did the soundtrack to The Unborn!
The premise of this film is that this couple that wants to have a kid go to this doctor that’s a fertility expert. The thing is, he’s not really an gynecologist, he’s a geneticist. The friends that referred the doctor had a retarded child, then a genius child thanks to the good doctor. The genius kid of course kills the retarded kid!
See what I was saying about the Garrido thing? Very striking.
Gary Numan’s soundtrack work on this one is quite effective. There’s even a bit about the new age tapes the doctor gives her having subliminal messages in them, presumably the music for the creepy New Age tapes was Gary Numan’s work.
The chick goes crazy too. The fetus has psychic powers and no good intentions. This is a very sinister film little film. The main female character is a children books writer, so she flips out on a TV interview and then starts bleeding from the uterus on air! This film even has the lesbian couple that does her birthing class killing each other randomly.
The one serious flaw with the film though which is that the special effects for the killer baby at the end are wretched. That could just be looked at to some audiences as comic relief though.
This film might have disappeared into obscurity, but because Gary Numan did the soundtrack and he’s had a continuous cult following for years and years, I think this film will have a continued cult status. I also think that’s true because of the connection to the Garrido case. This Sunday’s ABC interview with Jaycee Dugard in which she mentioned the film was watched by millions of people. The film may have a resurgence of interest

Album Review:Lou Reed The Blue Mask

I’m gearing up for the album length collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica. I’m currently in the most dire and dismal period of my writing I’ve ever been in. What happened is that with the new blog, I can see exactly what gets hits and what does not, the top five blog entrees in terms of hits right now are-a review of Their Only Dreams by miserable musician David Lyudmirsky, an article about how there where a series of low budget horror films in the 80’s that revolved around women being raped and impregnated by aliens and other monsters. I will do what I can to get hits, but Lyudmirsky, that’s just worthless. There are just a lot of bands that have no reason to be. The collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica came about through a fundraiser for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is an excellent entity to bring up in this context. I can understand roughly, roughly why people like Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Neil Young, Alice Cooper, and Iggy Pop are in there. Joy Division is not in there, don’t know if they ever will be, but there are three movies about them. I expect in coming years you will see Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana and Beck- the big rock stars when I was a teenager- I’m sure they will get in eventually. I like the original Norwegian black metal bands they won’t make it in there, but so be it. Goblin who did the soundtracks for numerous Italian horror films are amazing, I doubt they’ll get in there, but if there was a horror cinema hall of fame, I’m sure they’d be in that. Then there are a million little bands that no one gives a fuck about. Clubs are full of a lot of terrible little bands no one really cares about. Art scenes in U.S. cities like Boston, San Fran,New York produce a million little miserable bands. What we forget is that Lou Reed and Metallica got where they are for reasons. I feel part of that is because what I’ve heard of Lou Reed and Metallica jamming is the best that Metallica has sounded in 20 years and the best Lou Reed’s work has been in almost 30 years. With Lou Reed I hesitate to say 35 or 40 because there’s the Blue Mask from 1982, which is an excellent album.
Lou Reed I think, made two very poor musical decisions during the 70’s and I’m not even referencing the Metal Machine Music album of pure feedback, which is kind of funny. For pretty much all of the 70’s he didn’t play guitar on any of his albums or live. The other mistake that I think Lou Reed was that he spent a good part of the 70’s trying to sound black. His drug problems at that point are stuff of legend, I think for a good part of the 70’s, 74 on almost, you had a white drug addict trying to imitate soul music. At the same time in London and New York these bands in England and New York (Joy Division I mentioned above) tried to imitate the musician he’d been in his 20’s during the late 60’s. For 1982’s the Blue Mask he went back to a hard guitar sound by a. picking up the guitar again and b. hiring for a second guitarist Robert Quine from the punk band Richard Hell and the Voidiods. A couple years later he’d gone back to making total crap with the album New Sensations, which is a hundred times worse then his 70’s music. Briefly though, he returned to a guitar sound much like the Velvet Underground. Similarly confrontational lyrical themes about substance abuse (Underneath the Bottle, Waves of Fear) and violence (The Gun, the lyrics to the song The Blue Mask are some weirdness about castration) that recalls the Velvet Underground album White Light/White Heat. Back in the 60’s the Velvet Underground did not go over well because of their musical aggression and use of taboo lyrical subject matter. You wouldn’t get that from most music he’s done since. He did, however, make one very unfortunate move on the Blue Mask, which is one that marred his music increasingly since then, which is the use of cheesed-out studio musician Fernando Saunders on bass. I think Saunders came out of a jazz-fusion background to give you a sense of how bad Lou Reed’s solo career has gotten in its lowest points.
That’s why it is so exciting to see him working with Metallica. For one more time he is the Lou Reed of the Blue Mask or even the Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground. The Lou Reed of New Sensations actually song about being friends with Martin Scorsese. That track features Fernando “lame studio musician” Saunders on the funky base. I kid you not. That is all very unfortunate.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Film Review: Raped by a Giant Maggot in Outer Space in Galaxy of Terror

There was no way around reviewing Galaxy of Terror based on the films I've been reviewing and discussing in reviews lately- Inseminoid, Xtro, Forbidden World a.k.a Mutant, Humanoids from the Deep, Breeders, The Beast Within…all within the same general period and with other inter-connections. Inseminoid, The Beast Within, Xtro, and Humanoids from the Deep all have the dubious distinction of having plots involving the rape and impregnation of women by monsters. The women that gets raped by a monster in this film- a giant maggot- is lucky enough not to conceive, but close enough. Forbidden World, Humanoids from the Deep, and Galaxy of Terror share a producer- one Roger Corman, whose been at the b-movie game since the days of black and white. It appears the "hyperspace" special effects from Galaxy of Terror were re-used for Forbidden World the year after. That all safely places Galaxy of Terror in the category of low budget 80's horror shock cinema. If you've seen those films, you might be able to guess and guess correctly that the soundtrack to this film is an early drum machine beat with three notes on an early synth. You just can't have a rape by an inhuman monster without the three notes on the early synth.
The plot is that this "planet master" with a glowing head orders these personality-less characters that are on this space mission to rescue the crew of a spaceship that crashed on a planet somewhere. The crew of the first space ship is of course dead, and they find a gigantic pyramid.
Please don't pay money for this movie, it is on YouTube.
The crew is attacked by aliens in the pyramid and it seems to be that each character is confronted by their own greatest fear. Yeah, that's when they have the scene where the chicks gets raped by the giant maggot. The women who gets raped by the maggot doesn't look like she's being raped though, it looks like she's kind of into it, which might be one reason the film is infamous. After that scene though I do sort of watch the clock and wait for the movie to end. I guess its kind of cool that the one guys greatest fear is himself. The idea is that the characters are all actually destroying themselves, that the pyramid is actually a toy for aliens from a dead race. The ending doesn't really make that much sense.
Come to think of it, Galaxy of Terror may not even have the drum machine, just the three nots on the early synth.

Music Review: Sacrilege Behind the Realms of Madness

I'll tell you what I think about rock and roll right now. You know what period really does it for me, the early years of extreme metal in the 80's. People talk about 80's goth and punk, but I've been increasingly of the opinion that the better ideas from those genres where integrated into metal by the middle of the 80's and perfected by the likes of Celtic Frost or Voivod. I've written about Celtic Frost on here, excellent, excellent band. I wrote about Bathory earlier this week, the first Scandinavian black metal band, they were something else. I can not shut up about Voivod when I get started. Mayhem actually started in the 80's, later becoming infamous for the black metal church burning chaos. Of those bands Sacrilege is the one that I never hear anyone talk about. To bad, they're good.
The real element that makes Sacrilege different from those other bands in very serious ways is that they had a female vocalist. Yeah, well Lynda Simpson was a sexy metal chick back then. Go back and check her out, she had quite a set of pipes.
Their audience apparently overlaps with the crusty punk thing. Those crusty punk people are into all kinds of fringe leftist politics that I have nothing to do with. I couldn't make out any of the lyrics to Sacrilege songs and don't see any indications of overt politics in their music.
They are as loud and aggressive a metal band from the 80's as you've heard other then that. I think Sacrilege might have worked with minimal production budgets and a lot of the music they made was originally for demo tapes. There first release which is about EP length is Behind the Realms of Madness It's now available for 6 bucks or so on Amazon as an mp3 album, there is no real excuse for a serious metal fan not to own this album. It wasn't a demo but that is much the feel that it has, probably it's strength really. Sacrilege could play.
They're solid. I think they'll do you.

Film Review: Prey (1978)

This film is also known as Alien Prey. A very strange film from a very strange director Norman J. Warren who made four films in the late 70’s and early 80’s that sort of disappeared after that. I’ve seen all four of those films. Satan’s Slave, Prey, Terror, and Inseminoid. He is known to be on the sleazier side of British horror, which is somewhat true. I’ve been writing lately about their having been almost a subplot about films involving the rape and impregnation of women by monsters and aliens, yeah Inseminoid is one of those. Norman J. Warren went there with Inseminoid. I’ve heard Terror described as imitation of Dario Argento’s Suspira, I don’t see the connection. The cool thing about Terror is that the main characters are involved with making porno. Satan’s Slave I already reviewed on here, that’s a Satanist drama. There are a lot of breast shots in Norman J. Warren films. His budgets on these films were miniscule. He’s weird I don’t know if he’s a wretched filmmaker or one of the best I’ve ever seen. I can’t think of filmmaker with stranger electronic incidental.
Prey is this film he made about a lesbian couple out in the countryside and an a killer alien whose disguised himself as a human that they’ve taken thinking his been in accident. It is sort of a double thriller because one of the lesbians is very dominant and controlling, obsessed with knifes. The alien is flipped out by basic things like parrots and water and seems to have a real affinity for eating live flesh. Periodically, he turns into a vampire looking creature. The butch lesbian seems like she could be potentially just as dangerous as the alien though, so you really just don’t know which was it’s going to go and it may not be where you expect it to. One of the lesbians turns out to be not so pure in her lesbian-hood, but you really just can’t change a killer alien! The alien does determine in the end that humans are high in protein and easy prey.
Again though, I don’t really know whether I like Norman J. Warren’s films. He’s sort of a curio. If you like very low budget filmmaking, his odd choice in electronic incidental music made on early synths, and a little bit of a sexually perverted streak, you might get a kick out of him.

Friday, July 8, 2011

80’s Shock B-Cinema Double Feature Review Xtro (1983)Forbbiden World (1983)

As I have discussed in the last blog on here, there are a bunch of very strange films from the 80’s that revolve around rape and impregnation of human women by inhuman monsters, in particular, aliens, such as The Beast Within, Inseminoid, Breeders, and Humanoids from the Deep). When I wrote a review of two such films of this kind, I started getting lots of hits from people looking up phrases like “raped by a monster” and “raped by alien videos”. I’d like to clarify that I am not necessarily a fan of such films. I initially reviewed such films as cinematic curiosities. Xtro is another clear example of the genre. It is a bizarre, sick, gross little piece of shock cinema. Its also kind of boring, doesn’t make very much sense, and is likely a waste of your time. It does have the infamous scene where a woman gives birth to a full grown man. So that you don't have to watch the whole film, here it is!


Xtro’s plotline in general is there is a young boy whose father is abducted by aliens. He’s been gone for three years, his mother has a new lover. An alien comes down to earth and a worm comes out of his body and infects or impregnates a women who is instantly pregnant and gives birth to the father that was abducted. I am not making this up. Then the father returns to the house. The human interactions in this film make as little sense as the sci-fi bits, he comes home, tells his wife he doesn’t remember where he was for the last three years, and starts living with the Mom, the kid and her new boyfriend. They also have a sexy French nanny, who they eventually show getting similar treatment as the woman who gave birth to the grown man. The father tells the son that he has been living on another planet and that they had to change him so that he could live there. There’s something about the father causing the son to transform as well. The kid appears to have strange psychic powers. There’s part where the father eats eggs laid by the kids pet snake. It doesn’t make much sense. The son’s toy solider turns life-size and kills the old woman downstairs. The father turns into monster at the end, spaceship arrives and takes the son and the kid away, there’s a final scene that doesn’t really follow any logic that has the mother with the worm type thing that impregnated the woman towards the beginning of the film.
I really don’t know what to say about the phenomena of raped and impregnated by aliens films from the 80’s. I don’t quite honestly understand what motivates the fascination with them that I’m learning more and more a lot of people have. Perhaps male sexual frustration, especially male sexual frustration is expressing itself in a kind of grotesque fantasy. Maybe there is more to it then that. Xtro is kind of boring and hard top sit through, I felt. I feel the same about Insemenoid, but I’d be willing to give Inseminoid another watch at some point because I’ve seen other films by the same director Norman J. warren receantly that I felt to be decent films. In particular Xtro and Insemenoid have a kind of dead seriousness about them as well. It's as though these directors thought they were doing something deeply profound when they made these low-budget rape and impregnated by space alien jerk-off flicks that sat in the back of video stores in the 80’s.
There are a Xtro 2 and a Xtro 3, but apparently they have little or nothing to do plot-wise with the original Xtro. Xtro can exist on its own as a unique moment in cinema.
A film that belongs roughly in the same category of 80’s shock cinema but a far superior film is Forbidden World, also released under the title Mutant from the same year as Xtro. Forbidden World is in many ways a low budget rip-off of the Movie Alien, but it’s an interesting variation on Alien. Forbidden World is infamous for its ending in which the monster is killed by eating the liver of someone with cancer at the end. The film is actually set up so that roughly makes sense. The idea is there is base on an alien planet where genetic research is being done to create a food source for the human race through genetically engineering bacteria that grows rapidly. The results are good but they’ve got a monster running around the station which is revealed to be the result of mixing human DNA with the bacterial DNA. It is a lot like Alien with this beastie whose design is a clear plagiarism of Alien running around killing off the crew. One of the geneticist is clearly sick through out the film, later revealed to have cancer. The mutant creature doesn’t simply eat the crew, he sort of slimes them and sort of incorporates the human DNA to create his own food source-very weird. But then at the end which makes total sense, they feed the liver of the geneticist with cancer to the monster, he incorporates the cancer. It does actually make sense in the film. Cancer is a sensitive topic -my mother passed away from it-but that’s kind of a clever plotline actually. The other thing about this film is there is plenty of nudity and sex that appears for no reason that has anything to do with the plot directly. There’s the scene where the monster kills the women by shoving a tentacle between her legs and up through her back, but at least in this film she didn’t have to go through impregnation.
Both films of course have two notes on a synth and early drum machine beats for a soundtrack. Love those 80's!

David Lyudmirsky Takes Backseat to Films like Inseminoid, Bands Like Celtic Frost

On the blogger webpage I use I can look over the stats on what is getting hits and what is not, in which country and roughly when. The answers are sort of surprising, and I can use the information to make careful decisions about what to work on. What the numbers indicate is that reviews of indie rock type projects (David Lyudmirsksy’s Their Only Dreams) and attempted art-house directors (Jonathan Whittle-Utter) have ultimately attracted less interest then reviews of either black metal bands or low budget horror cinema.
The most popular blog entry at time of writing is the review of the indie project Their Only Dreams from David Lyudmirsky. Their Only Dreams, David Lyudmirsky- the thing about all of that is that very few people reviewed him at all, so if somebody hears about him, meets him, they Google his name, my review shows up. If you added up the numbers on the other low budget horror films I’ve reviewed, the number of hits on David Lyudmirsky is fractional. For other music reviews, three of the metal bands I wrote about Akitsa, Silencer, and Celtic Frost did relatively well, counted together those blogs got more hits then Their Only Dreams. The math doesn’t lie. More people have wanted to read about black metal. I can’t say I blame them either. Their Only Dreams is absolute garbage. Their Only Dreams- what, he’s on drugs? He’s screwing around with recording equipment? Does anybody care? The only real justification I can come up with for having bothered to write about it is because it is kind of typical of the kind of garbage that people produce today. A lot of people I knew in New York, a lot of people I went to college ended up in such heinously irritating bands, and in many cases they failed completely. It’s an excellent way to blow your trust fund, I don’t know about it doing anything else for anyone. The world often doesn’t take these indie rock band people as seriously as they take themselves, and often it will turn out that a band has nowhere near the size of an audience as you might think. The other thing about that is that song “Adult Contemporary Man” by Their Only Dreams is painful to listen to. If he was trying to be funny he failed, and if he was trying to be serious he’s a joke, but the joke is still not that funny.
The next one after that, very closely, was a blog on of all things, the fact that there was almost a subgenre of films in the 80’s that involved women being raped and impregnated by aliens and monsters of various kinds. Examples of such films are Humanoids from the Deep, Inseminoid, The Beast Within, and Breeders. The blog focuses on The Beast Within and Breeders. Inseminoid I may have to give its own full blog because the director who did that Norman J. Warren did a bunch of other sort of interesting films. His film Satan’s Slave I also reviewed on here. It would appear that many of the people who read the blog on the raped-by-aliens type films found the blog because they where looking up phrases like “raped by a beast”, “raped by a monster”, things like that, which sort of implies to me that people where looking for horror films or pornography that involved those kinds of fantasies. That’s a very odd kind of sexual fetish, those films are also insanely low budget, and the subject matter is kind of gross. I’m a little bit afraid to interact with these people who go looking for films that will indulge such fantasies. I’m kind of picturing someone with hair coming out of their palms as a result of jacking off to sci-fi rape horror. The film Humanoids from the Deep is rather extreme film, if it gave you an erection you probably need help. I think you may have some serious basement dwelling sock fuckers out there reading that kind of stuff, potentially. My angle on it is more just an observation of a cinematic curiosity, but hey, if that’s what people want to read about it, I’ll go there. I recall Inseminoid being particularly hard to sit through, but if people want to read about that, an audience is an audience. I have a high tolerance for grindhouse trash.
There is also the thing with new age failed art film maker Jonathan Whittle-Utter. He started writing in to me, at first I thought he was just a poor filmmaker but he turned out to be out of his mind as well. This is sort of interesting. He is mentioned in three blogs, one of which was popular- the very first blog I did on this site. The other blogs referencing him no one paid any attention to. There have not been any hits as a result of searches done on his name. No one appears to care about him. That’s good because I’m sick of writing about him. All in all, I’d rather be watching Inseminoid.
In general, the message from the statistics seems fairly clear to me. What I take out of it is that the approach of reviewing crap indie rock bands, a fecal attempts at art films by people like Jonathan Whittle-Utter, a documentary filmmaker who makes massive factual inaccuracies like Peter Joseph- these reviews on the surface do okay, but taken with the numbers on horror film reviews and black metal reviews in total, the subject matter has less appeal. If people prefer to read about films like Inseminoid and bands like Akitsa. I’ll write about that. Just because someone has the pretense of being an artist doesn’t necessarily mean anything to anyone else. It only works so well to mock these guys because no one’s heard of them. The voices in Jonathan Whittle-Utter’s head may tell him he’s a genius, but ultimately there’s more interest in films like Inseminoid then in what he does. That’s just how the math works.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Review: 2011 Metal Blade Sampler

Well first of all, this album is free, so there is no reason not to get it. If you don’t like the album, you just don’t listen to it again. Metal Blade records, that record label that puts this out has been around forever. One of my favorite albums is Voivod’s War and Pain. My older brother had it when I was a little kid, that was actually the same Metal Blade records.
The band Pentagram on this sampler, they date back even further then Voivod- they existed in the 70’s but didn’t put out a full length album until the 80’s. Ho far back? 1971 Pentagram existed, and if you want to make the claim that they where way ahead of their time- they sound suspiciously a lot like Black Sabbath who were big at the time. They sound more or less the same as they did in the 80’s. Actually there are recordings of the 70’s Pentagram spin off band Bedemon floating around, sounds more or less the same as they do now. Those guys have been doing the same thing for forty years.
Sister is a new band but they sound like they just stepped out of the 80’s- but they feel like they stepped out of 80’s hair metal which I’m not nearly as warm on. The band Portrait on here also sound like they stepped out of the 80’s, but are closer to N.W.O.B.H.M (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) era stuff. They are Swedish. They at least decided to imitate decent-good range 80’s music. Its not until a track by the death metal band Hate Eternal out of Florida do we get a sense that this is a sampler from the label that once put out War and Pain which is more or less a wall of noise. Ipsissimus serve up some standard black metal.
Hey, the label has been around long enough to put out the first Voivod, and the album is free, how much can you expect. That band Primordial have a track on it, a kind of lengthy doom metal power balled with operatic 80’s metal vocals. In fact a lot of the album sounds as though the 90’s haven’t come yet, more or less. Doom metal, black metal, and death metal all existed back then. That’s fine, I like 80’s metal. I won’t lie and say this is a radical and revolutionary album, but I could see throwing the sampler on when something else was going on. There’s a track by a band called Across the Sun that has some very odd synths and very odd song structure, but the collection is mostly very traditional metal. Actually, if you went back and put on War and Pain at a party or something it would likely sound more contemporary then the 2011 Metal Blade Sampler.
Hey, the album is free and the label has been around forever. What are you going to do? Even though this album finishes dead last of metal albums I’ve reviewed this week (Velimor, In Silentio Noctis, Bathory and Candlemass) it isn’t the worst album I’ve ever heard or anything, and it is free. I do, however, regret having given In Silentio Noctis a mediocre review because in comparison to Metal Blade Sampler 2011 In Silentio Noctis sound revolutionary.

Music review: In Silentio Noctis: Through Fragments of Christianity

Through Fragments of Christianity is the only album I could find from the Finnish band In Silentio Noctis. They apparently broke up in May this year, so we likely won’t anything more from this excellent band. It’s kind of a shame. I can understand though that the time commitment that must go into a band like this is incredible and there may not be much money in it, neccesarily.
In Silentio Noctis was really pulling metal forward it would seem, with what in the language of annoying metal subcategories could be called symphonic gothic metal. Defined by technical virtuosity and excellent female vocals. It is difficult to believe that human beings could possibly play at some of the speeds they achieved.
True their songs have a tendency to blur together into a single song, they had their little bit that they did, which is high operatic female vocals over the fastest and most brutal metal you’ve ever heard, plus some keyboards. It worked well enough. It could have kept going. Alas, personal conflicts and time constraints apparently crippled this band from being the band they could have been, they could have kept playing and developing this material for years, it would have sailed above other bands. Finland doesn’t have any shortage of weird local metal bands, that’s for sure. Astral Sleep is still going strong. The first Scandinavian black metal band was Bathory back in the 80’s, so there is no lack of back catalogue of Scandinavian black metal to go through. There are a million bands of that to go through and the tendency on something like Scandinavian black metal is that the primary years are the years of most interest. Then there is the whole thing with a band like Children of Technology where they kind of nailed down the importance of early Celtic Frost and early Voivod, duplicated it relatively successfully but recently. I’m still up in the air about doing things that way. That is still miles above whatever indie bands in New York are doing. Maybe I should just go back and go through Candlemass and Bathory albums. That review of the old Celtic Frost album got hits.
I suppose it is better that In Silentio Noctis only did one album which is reasonably good, and then broke up, then they do what a lot of metal bands have done and kept going for years and years producing endless weak albums.
Through Fragments of Christianity doesn’t stand up to early Celtic Frost or early Voivod, by the way. It’s reasonably good, though.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

80's Swedish Metal Fun with Bathory and Candlemass!!!!!!!

Ah yes, the wonderful 80’s. I recently listened to two classic 80’s metal albums both by Swedish bands, those being Bathory’s self-titled debut. For horror films, I have to say that one of my favorite periods is the early to mid 80’s- I’m thinking of Lifeforce, Critters, Ghoulies, Phenomena (also called Creepers), Scanners, Videodrome, countless other films. There are a number of 70’s films that are really amazing such as Phantasm from the 70’s as well. I used to be infatuated with early goth bands like Sister of Mercy and Christian Death from the time, but I’ve sort of worn those all out, with the strong exception of Joy Division. The early development of extreme metal from the time, that still carries a lot of magic for me. It would be very difficult to talk about that without mentioning Bathory.
Bathory have the distinction of being the first Scandinavian black metal band. The first time the term “black metal” was used was in the title of a Venom album, so Venom have the claim to being the first black metal band, but Venom is a British band. The main vocalist Quorthon died in 2004 at the very young age of 38 of a heart attack. They took their name from that weird Hungarian countess that supposedly bathed in the blood of her servants. Something like black metal is bound to be most active and interesting in the very formative years of its development. The whole bit with the church burnings started in the early 90’s, but the band Mayhem notoriously involved in the matter, had actually existed for many years at that point. I would rank a band like Akitsa as rival in quality to the best of anything I’d heard by Voivod, Celtic Frost, or Mayhem. That is the exception more then it is the norm. Bathory self-titled is a good album. I wouldn’t it rank it with the original Voivod line-up or early Celtic Frost, but the first Scandinavian black metal record, that’s not bad. Considering all the fecal music that the world produces, that is within the small iota of music I care about.
Another influential classic 80’s metal album from Sweden is Candlemass “Epicus Doomicus Metallicus”. That one I didn’t even pay for. Somebody posted the entire album on YouTube. It’s okay. Candlemass, despite bing a metal band from Sweden very much around the same time Bathory came out, don’t sound much like Bathory. As is frequently the case with doom metal, they are slower. Their songs are extremely lengthy as well. They also periodically used synth parts reminiscent of 80’s horror cinema and goth bands. There’s a song about a crystal ball on it. The track “Black Stone Wielder” on YouTube has the comment- “this song gave me a weird fucked up salvia trip once.”

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Music Review! Velimor “Ancestry”

In a bar in Philadelphia the other night, someone asked me if I belong to Aryan Nation. The answer is no. The Libertarian Party and the NRA yes, not the Aryan Nation. There’s a lot about white nationalist ideology that is hard to swallow, ultimately. The white nationalist movement have produced some noteworthy bands over the years, that’s about as much as I can give them. There’s one musican who played with the Beatles, Elvis and the Rolling Stones- his name is Phil Spector and he’s in prison for shooting a woman in the head. No one is taking Let It Be of the shelf. The neo-Nazi thing for a lot of those bands floats around as a vague ideology, I don’t know how much actual violence a lot of those bands have in fact carried out.
Velimor is a Russian band that’s been around about ten years from what the internet tells me. They appear to be neo-Nazis, actually they make no real bones about that, they have a cover of the song “Rudolph Hess” by the skinhead band Honor on YouTube. The first I was made aware of the band was by their appearance on the Folk Metal edition of the excellent Metalhit Free Download Series put out late ‘10-early ‘11. In the language of obscure metal subcategories they are described as Neo-Pagan Folk Metal. The first track on their album Ancestry wouldn’t even identify them as a metal band. The first track is a nice little instrumental with some nice acoustic guitar playing is all. The metal kicks in on track 2. Velimor is one of those places where the whole terminology of subcategories used to describe metal becomes silly because I would be hard pressed to define the band as folk metal as opposed to black metal much of the time. I think they are categorized as folk metal rather then black metal, because they have the faux medieval flute that comes in every once and awhile. How hateful are the lyrics? I can’t tell they’re in Russian. Its some decent music, but then again I don’t know what kind of drugs you’d have to take to be able to listen to hours and hours of it. Possibly, they are attracted to some notion of Slavic history. Whether or not that Slavic past existed as they imagine it might be another question. At the end of the album it circles back into the purely acoustic guitar and flute type stuff. It is a fair album, for 8 bucks on amazon it’s worth it, if you’re into folk metal.
There is a lot of very strange metal out there. I don’t know how long it would me to get through all the weird little black metal and doom metal bands that have happened over the years, all the weird little gothic metal bands from Finland alone could just keep going and going. People are very excited about this collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica, but I have a feeling it isn’t going to be that different from what bands like Voivod, Earth, Circle or Celtic Frost have been doing for years, or even further into the kind of obscure black metal or doom metal you might find on webpage like Metalhit or in some of the French Canadian music stores I’ve been in. I’ll keep writing about that kind of thing, too. That’s because it gets hits. People are still looking up the Akitsa, Silencer, and Celtic Frost reviews. The metal reviews and the horror film reviews have done quite well.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Puppet Fun!

Book Review: Demonic by Ann Coulter

Read this book? I didn’t read this whole book. I cheated, I did the audiobook. Actually, I did about half the audiobook. This book should have been about a third the length it is. The general thesis that Coulter holds is that the left in the united states operates out of a kind of blind mob mentality, which of course operates destructively and irrationally. There are actually some halfway decent points that Coulter brings out. This book is kind of dull, redundant and sort of badly written.
A couple of the better parts in my mind are some of the absurd news stories of the past. Coulter has a real pre-occupation with the Clinton sex scandal. She goes into some fun details of that whole media circus you may have forgotten. Reginald Denny from back in the 80’s? The trucker who got hit on the head with the cinder block during the LA Riots for being a white truck driver in a black neighborhood at the wrong time? I had forgotten about that one. Wow. That’s pretty wretched. People on the left defended it, too. Jared Lee Loughner? Do you remember a couple months ago that whole thing where the left was calling for a debate about civil political discourse and tried to blame the whole thing on Sarah Palin? Coulter hits that one and points out that there was no evidence that Loughner-“liked Sarah Palin or even knew who she was”. Ann Coulter is dead on about that one. They just deemed Loughner not sane enough to stand trial and there’s been a whole mess about the prison getting authorization to inject him with anti-psychotics- implying that Loughner is in a psychological state of a complete break with reality. Coulter has a point on that one- there was no evidence that Loughner supported Palin or even had any real understanding of who she was. He probably really doesn’t- he’s deeply psychotic. There’s no proof Loughner even knows where he is.
Then she goes into some very lengthy bit about the French revolution, seeking to draw a parallel with our American Democratic Party and media. Then she goes into why the American Revolution was vastly superior to the American Revolution.
It’s kind of a weak book. I even agree with a lot of what she says, but this book is a chore to get through. It is very repetitive and she has a weird, very forced feeling sense of humor that I find falls flat. I think the way to go with Coulter is maybe to read a blog entre here or there and get a little chuckle out of it maybe. I can’t do the whole book. When you have these conservative pundits on the radio they at least have people calling in and arguments breaking out.
Loughner- what a crazy freak he is. That might be the best part of the book is the part with him in it.

Movie Review! Cherry 2000 (1987)! WRETCHED!

I must urge you to avoid a film from the 80’s called Cherry 2000. This is a dreadful film. Melanie Griffith and this other actor who is not that famous star in it. Tim Thomerson who is in numerous b-films plays the bad guy. Tim Thomerson is such a wretched actor, and Melanie Griffith is awful in this film. It was a bomb in the 80’s when it came out and has not developed much of a cult status since, because it kind of rots.
The general idea is that in the future they have robot women to service men. This guy is making out in the kitchen with his robot woman and she is shorted out be dish soap. The model of the robot is now rare, and so he has to go out in what appears to be the Nevada desert to find a new Cherry 2000 robot to put the old ones memory-chip in. He employees the help of a desert tracker played by Melanie Griffith. There is a Mad max type roving gang that controls the area of the desert that the warehouse with the robot is in, leader played by Tim Thomerson. This time Tim is in a movie that isn’t even bad in a funny way. Oh Guess what? This will blow your mind! Main character falls in love with Melanie Griffith and learns that the love of a real woman is better then the love of a robot. I never would have guessed that would be how the film would end. That’s amazing. This is not the most predictable film I’ve ever seen.
No of course that’s exactly how it ends with the main character leaving behind the robot for Melanie Griffith.
It does remind me of something- Tatum O’Neil about 7 years ago came out with the allegation that, get this, Melanie Griffith took her to a sex orgy when she was 12 years old! Check the link I couldn’t come up with this myself.
http://www.contactmusic.com/new/xmlfeed.nsf/story/tatum-o.neal-corrupted-by-griffith

That’s way more interesting then Cherry 2000 was.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Film Review: Dario Argento Double Feature Deep Red (Profondo Russo)/ Unsane (Tenebre)

The articles on here that get the most attention have been horror reviews or reviews of metal bands/albums, so you know how it goes, even if that’s not what I necessarily care the most about I got to keep putting up the horror film reviews, and here is yet another one.
Deep Red (1975) would have a very distinguished place in the history both of rock and roll because it was the first film in which legendary Italian horror director Dario Argento employed the services of an Italian progressive rock band called Cherry Five, whose name was for the film changed to Goblin. I’ve written this elsewhere, but one of the few rock and roll bands that still capture my attention in the vast sea of irrelevant crap is Goblin. Possibly it has one of the best soundtracks of any film I’ve ever seen. I’ve listed Joy Division, various black metal and doom metal type bands and Phillip Garrido as rock musicians of quality and expressed enthusiasm for the up-coming album with Metallica and Lou Reed playing together. However, Goblin might be my favorite band.
This is a relatively violent murder mystery with some supernatural elements sort of a silly trick ending, but generally a good film. It is incidentally, much the same silly trick ending that the nearly contemporary original Friday the 13th had. The driving soundtrack from Goblin really helps this film. The film starts with a lecture on the paranormal where I psychic demonstrates her mind reading abilities and then starts flipping out because there is a murder in the room. There are two pianists having a conversation on the street, one of which is the main character, the other turns out to be a gay alcoholic with a very weird mother, when they hear a scream which is, of course, the psychic being murdered. The main character and a female reporter start trying to solve the mystery, a number of people are killed, and then, we get the sort of ridiculous and implausible trick ending. This film is not Argento’s best nor widely considered to be, but it is a watchable example of Italian horror cinema of the time. For people that don’t like that sort of thing, there are a few very brutal murders in it. However, the Italian horror film Cannibal Holocaust came out around the same time and was banned in a few countries, Deep Red is nowhere near that level of gore. The best thing about the film is the score by Goblin. The idea of using a progressive rock band to score horror cinema was a stroke of genius on Argento’s part. It’s an okay movie, if you like Argento or Italian horror flicks of the 70’s and 80’s, then it is worth your hour and forty minutes to watch.
Another Argento film using a serial killer as a focus and an excellent Goblin soundtrack is the excellent Unsane (Tenebre) from 1982. That one has some equally implausible plot developments. The general plotline is that an American crime writer staying in Rome is stalked by a serial killer that uses a razor and kills people near the author. As the film progresses, the original killer stalking the crime writer is killed, and another killer steps in- the crime writer. Again it is not terribly plausible- although the general idea of the author being killed is that he has an ex-lover having an affair with his agent, and that he could take them out and get way with it because of the first killer, which sort of makes sense. Its also sort of made clear that the author had a previous history of sexual violence and violence towards women. There’s a whole bit about the author being sexually humiliated by a young woman in his formative years and taking vengeance on her. I’ve seen some critics say this film is some kind of brilliant psychoanalysis of violence. I think that is probably an overstatement. It’s a well structured thriller with some female nudity and themes of sexual violence and misogyny. He always had sort of a sexually perverted streak, but personally, I thought Argento handled supernatural or psychic elements very well in his films. That doesn’t come up in Tenebre. Oh well, it has Goblin soundtrack and some lovely Italian actresses naked.

Book Review! The Enemy Within by Michael Savage!

Michael Savage is something else. Not only as he gathered a gigantic following Estimated at around 8 million listeners) he’s also managed to get banned (banned by then U.K home Secretary Jacqui Smith in 2009) from entering a western nation entirely based on his political beliefs. I’ve been reading one of his books from 2003, The Enemy Within, which I found at a local mall.



I can see Michael Savage being semi-controversial but I don’t think he should be banned in the United Kingdom. The right wing talk show host does refer to homosexuality as “sodomy” in The Enemy Within. He was fired from MSNBC in 2003 for saying to a caller- "Oh, you're one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig." Michael Savage wrote about this very incident in The Enemy Within, his claim was the caller was a crank caller, and that he didn’t know the microphone was on, and that he issued an immediate apology. The rapper 50 Cent and others are the subject of similar controversies, but did not get banned from entering the U.K. Michael doesn’t, however, advocate gay bashing crimes. I haven’t seen him advocate any illegal acts of violence. The only time I’ve heard him using ethnic slurs is one time he referred to his Irish-American rival conservative pundit Sean Hannity as “corn-beef eating”. He is strongly against illegal immigration but he says he has no problem with legal immigration into the United States. The distinction between someone like Michael Savage and a 50 cent lies in that Michael Savage criticizes things like socialized health care and wealth redistribution, which could very well be the real reason Michael Savage is banned from entering the U.K. and not 50 Cent. That’s why I, a libertarian conservative, find the whole thing with Michael Savage and the United Kingdom is totally absurd. The MIAC documents from the same year (2009) was much more serious in my mind. For those who don’t know what that was, there was a document going around Missouri law enforcement identifying people with bumper stickers supporting the presidential campaigns of Ron Paul, Bob Barr on the Libertarian ticket, and Chuck Baldwin on the small, third party Christian right Constitution Party as potentially dangerous militia movement members. I could have been in deep trouble on that I am a big supporter of both Ron Paul and Bob Barr. So I don’t support the ban on Michael Savage entering Great Britain, that’s a very slippery line.
At the same time, my identifying myself as libertarian conservative and a Ron Paul supporter indicates exactly what I think of his book: which is to say, I agreed with some of it but didn’t like it that much. If you look back at the 2008 election season, Ron Paul and Bob Barr didn’t run on a strongly anti-gay or anti-Muslim agenda. Michael Savage is fairly predictable. I find his writing sort of dull, really. I was back at the same local Pennsylvania Barnes and Nobel, I found they had the audio books section, which was a few feet from the horror DVD section, the horror DVD section had numerous films I wanted to see. The audio book section had a number of conservative materials I’m more interested in then Michael Savage- again, Ron Paul, and other things like Stieg Larsson’s work on audio format. Those are all things I deem more enjoyable then Michael Savage. I’m not going to finish that book most likely, to be totally honest. Every once and a while, he did bring up a few interesting points in The Enemy Within. He writes about the ACLUs support of NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association, which I didn’t know anything about. He’s very into going into these tangents about growing up in the Lower East Side. I wasn’t blown away by any of that material. Michael Savage is kind of funny sometimes, he brings up a valid point every once and awhile. His genius is provocation. Its very hard to shock anyone in this day and age, let alone get banned from entering a western nation based on something you said. Michael Savage did accomplish that, I’ll give him that much.
You know what though? Since the horror film Human Centipede 2 was just also just banned in the United Kingdom (for sexualized violence) you know what would be a great first date? What would be great on a first date is to take in Human Centipede 2, and then come back home, tune into some Michael Savage on the radio. That’d be cute. That would get you laid I bet.