Full Live Set: Thee Oh Sees

Thanks to Brooklyn Vegan for posting this. Thee Oh Sees live at LA's wonderful Echoplex last week. Within the first minute and a half of this video you can see just how much fun this show would have been to be at.

Bob Mould - I Don't Know You Anymore

This song/video actually made me cry. Well, not great racking sobs, but it got me a bit teary-eyed. Part of this is recent nostalgic reflection on my own part of the loss of the record store, and part of it is Bob Mould's tone here - so much like the tone on one of my all-time favorite records, Mould's Sugar: Copper Blue - really hits me in the emotional breadbasket.

I can still remember the first time I heard Copper Blue, or any of Mould's music for that matter. It was 1993 and on the way home from an Anthrax/White Zombie show at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom, tired and sore and stoned, Mr. Brown put on Sugar's Copper Blue to detox us from an all-out metal assault. It was perfect, and it's engrained that particle night, practically floating home on Lake Shore Drive at sometime after midnight, Brown driving his maroon red station wagon at a comfortable fifty-five miles an hour, Mould's emotionally provocative hooks etching into my heart and making me feel as though all is right in the world. Mould's 2013 record, Silver Age, was a return to this kind of sound, and now it appears that his just-released-today Beauty & Ruin is as well. You can order the new record directly from Mr. Mould on his website here. Thanks to Mr. Brown for sending me the link to this video and always keeping me in the loop on new Mould.

Here's to ten more albums at least Mr. Mould!

Stream New Godflesh EP Decline and Fall

Released via Avalanche, inc. earlier today. Buy it on the Godflesh's Bandcamp here.

Perturbator - She is Young, She is Beautiful, She is Next

Via Bloody Disgusting. This is just fantastic. Also, the upcoming record this is taken from, Dangerous Days, has one of my favorite album covers in recent memory.

image courtesy of Blood Music

Mini Doc on Selim Lemouchi's Art and Inspiration

Fascinating.

Watain - Waters of Ain

Several years ago my good friend and Metal Curator extraordinaire Tori lent me Watain's Lawless Darkness. After a few precursory listens the album fell back into the ever churning void of music that lays just beyond my reach in this internet age of "everything available all the time". In the throws of one new release or another I'd essentially completely forgotten about Watain, even as my appreciation for certain crevices within the Black Metal dimension has deepened. Then, earlier today - much after the fact - I learned that Selim Lemouchi, the founder and main driving force of The Devil's Blood died in March. There is a wonderful tribute to Selim on Metal Sucks. If you were a fan read it, as it will give you a very multi-faceted look into this fascinating artist. The remembrance links or mentions several peripheral Selim appearances and this Watain song - on which Selim performs the outro guitar solo - is chief among them. Sitting here listening to Waters of Ain and marveling at the power of it I quickly dug Lawless Darkness back out of the virtual banks on an old mac and have begun to get better acquainted with it. Good stuff, when you're in the mood.


I hope Selim found what he was looking forward after he slipped through the gates of the silver key...

Mastodon - Chimes at Midnight

I don't totally love this track yet, but I like it, and Mastodon has proven to be a band whose music really filters in through the nooks and crannies only after I can sit and really absorb an entire album over the course of several sittings. The A and B parts of this song are both awesome, but I'm drawn much more at the moment to the slower, melodic guitar of the B sections. It has a cosmic feel to it, a distance that is not relatable by human language or emotion. And I like that. It makes it feel enigmatic and magical, to a degree.

Very much looking forward to Once More 'Round the Sun on June 24th. And honestly, I've never contemplated paying $69.99 for a vinyl no matter what it came with before, but if you follow that link and see those lithographs of the artwork by Skinner, well, if I have the money I just might. Hanging that on the wall in my home seems as though it might turn said wall into a doorway to Cykranosh.