... That's the name of the new 80's grindcore/children's speech therapy institute I'm opening in San Francisco. Doesn't it seem like the staccato delivery and complex phrasing of early death metal vocals could really help some kids conquer their developmental speech problems? I think so.
While we're on the subject, check out these two zany clips of Dorrian-era Napalm Death on a BBC kid's show in 1989. Make sure you stick with the second one all the way to the end.
OK, so I've been on another "mind-bending tech-death" bender lately, and I know nobody even likes this type of stuff (except Bro Thing), and honestly I don't fucking care and I'm going to post it anyway. Listening to crazy shred like Anomalous will make you a better person. It will make your balls (ovaries, if you are of the fairer sex) grow infinitely larger, and help you stand up to your boss/parent/authority figure. It will make you super angry and ready to engage in physical confrontation immediately.
I will share a closely-guarded IllCon secret with you: the reason we like metal so much is because it is such a harmonious blend of the visceral and the cerebral, equal parts Einstein and WWF. Heavy metal, at its best, will encourage you to kick the shit out of your enemies while you recite poetry to them. That is why we can't remove ourselves from this proverbial salt lick of total annihilation. We like heavy metal bands around here. And when the heavy metal band comes from San Francisco, poses with weird doll heads in their band photo, involves Lord Marco, and blends strange, atmospheric noise with their crippling grind, we are all useless to resist.
If you don't get it, you are probably either Tea Party, or French, or dumber than two sticks.
Apparently, Anomalous' long-awaited (they've been together since 2001) debut full-length album will be released on the very last day of 2010. My boner is poorly hidden.
Okay, assholes. Listen up. It's been a long-ass fucking time since we did one of these things. But it is time. And it is time because Mr. Jaime Glen Danzig (right) is pretty much IllCon's new BFF. Got it? Good. Now fuck off and fucking die, poser twat.
-Cobras
Hey dudes. I'm JGD and I do a blog called The Living Doorway. I mostly talk about childhood traumas, my idiotic pets, and how shitty my job is under the guise of writing about death metal, but the facade has worn really thin and I'm pretty sure everyone is on to me by now. Shelby invited me to write a Bromantic Interlude over here on the IC, which is awesome because my girlfriend once had a dream that I spent my entire life savings opening a rollerskating rink called 'Bromantic Slides', which presumably wasn't a very financially sound career move, but definitely a pretty awesome name for a rollerskating rink. It also sort of sucks writing stuff here because I'm not a music/actual nerd like the rest of you dudes and can't write a history paper on some cool obscure metal genre or whatever the fuck for you. I'm afraid you are just going to have to collect all your lo-fi Ukrainian folk metal information from someone else. The only other option I considered was writing about musicians who had most likely sold their souls to the devil, but I'm lazy and that requires a lot of research, not to mention that there is a surprising lack of Robert Johnston videos on youtube to help make up for the inevitable lack of content. So I dunno. Instead of making some bullshit "mix tape" of crappy death metal that you won't even bother to download, I'm going to take the easy way out and just shoot a bunch of retarded fish in a very small barrel. Yes, I'm talking about CELEBRITY BANDS.
Celebrities are awesome. They do all sorts of stupid shit to keep the general population entertained, most of the time without ever even having to act or do anything that requires any talent. They get arrested for drugs, drunkenly babble in barely coherent interviews, and have full on mental and emotional breakdowns on the world wide stage. They make us feel better about ourselves because most of us can actually hold down a steady job, raise a family, and sustain a healthy coke habit even without earning ten million dollars a year. That's why we are so delighted when Paris Hilton can't avoid getting thrown into the slammer because she's simply too stupid to not pull out a baggie of cocaine in front of a bunch of cops. Totally rad, right? YOU HAVE EVERYTHING AND YOU FAILED. For some celebrities, the complete inability to develop into a reasonably functional human being isn't enough: they actually have to go out of their way to make sure that the entire world knows they still have what it takes to totally suck. This usually happens when A: the celebrity gets cocky and thinks the world can't go another day without a song called 'Party All The Time,' or B: the fame starts to erode and they make a desperate bid to jumpstart their career with what will surely be the hottest single of the year. What most celebs don't seem to realize is that being and actor/musician is on par with being a car/boat. How many people do you see driving car-boats around? That's right: none. Because car-boats are shitty cars, and they are also shitty boats.
I'd like to start our foray into shitty celebrity music with a band called 30 Seconds to Mars, featuring a very pretty man named Jared Leto. You might remember him as the dude who got his face destroyed in Fight Club, or to a lesser extent, the fat guy with glasses in that shitty movie about John Lennon's murderer. I actually got a call last week from a good friend of mine, who was unable to have Thanksgiving with us because he was meeting with the management of this horrible band to potentially join them as a touring guitarist. I'm pretty sure that actually knowing someone who might join this group for having the right "look" should disqualify me from writing about metal for the rest of my life, but he assured me he would only accept the position in order to make retarded amounts of money while having sex with a lot of equally retarded groupies. I'll keep you posted, I guess. Anyway, it's important to point out that these fucking douchelords are faker than a cargo jet full of fake dog crap and I hope they all die slow terrible deaths for polluting the world with their foul existence. Potential touring guitarist excluded.
Oh great, a bunch of twangy generic fake-Americana bullshit from what is surely the ugliest man to ever have his name tattooed on the wretched harpy known as Angelina Jolie. What an absolute delight. It's awesome when dudes like Billy Bob get all bent out of shape when interviewers don't ask him enough band-related questions, when the only interesting thing about his entire existence is that he got to see Lara Croft: Tomb Raider naked.
"My name is Gladiator. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife, singer of 30-Odd Foot of Grunts." I don't want to say anything too bad about this because Shelby is a pretty big fan, but yeah. Fuck this shit.
Before Rick James became famous again for having cocaine-fueled fights with Charlie Murphy, he made some music with his brother Eddie and it sucked. I think my mom used to listen to this a lot. She was pretty into cassingles for a while. Anyway, the real bummer is that this video is still better than any movie he's been in over the last ten years.
OHHHH WOWWWWWW SCARLET JOHANSSON SHE SO PRETTY. Big deal. Can you imagine how excruciating it would be to have to spend an hour in the company of this monotone idiot? Based on this one single song that I only listened to half of, I would suggest to Scarjo that she pursue different avenues of personal expression. Maybe some videos of her watching ice melt. Or a montage of her yawning several thousand times in a row. Or perhaps a triumphant return to her successful career of being a lifeless mannequin in every single movie she's ever been in. Apparently one of her big inspirations is Tom Waits, who reportedly flung his aging carcass from the roof of the nearest building upon hearing the news.
I'm trying to think of something shitty to say about this but it's just too good. Sick rhymes, good flow, great muscles. John Cena #1.
Oh jesus fucking christ. I told you this was going to be shooting fish in a barrel. Look at this guy. It's like a B-list celebrity version of Blues Hammer. I almost feel bad hating this because I bet Seagal could really use whatever amount of tips he gets at open mic night, but FUCK. What a bloated sack of humorless garbage. Law Man, my ass.
There's not a lot of actors that irritate me as much as Juliette Lewis. I can barely stand the sight of her face (is it me or is she slowly morphing into Steven Tyler?), let alone sit through an entire movie of her trying to act. So I was stoked when she decided to take a step away from film and focus on her crappy band for a while, because I figured it'd be way easier to avoid her that way. And yet, here I am, torturing myself with this god awful bullshit video of her running around town like some retarded 80's Pocahontas. I hate you, Juliette Lewis, and you certainly didn't deserve that role you scored in Old School.
Hey look it's fucking Edgar Frog from The Lost Boys being a fucking asshole in front of the entire world. I feel really bad that your conjoined twin died after filming License to Drive, but there's no excuse for ripping off every single one of Michael Jackson's moves and slaughtering them to a soundtrack of undiluted pop drivel. I could go on and on about how awful this is, but by now it's just a universal truth that Corey Feldman is a sad, talentless, attention-starved little man who no one actually likes. I'm sure that even his mom thought this sucked. And seriously, the real question is WHO THE FUCK thought this was a marketable idea? Who green-lighted this sonic/visual abortion and was like "yeah, lets sink some serious moolah into this kid!"? You could practically seen him him falling off the celebrity ladder and hitting every step on the way down as soon as The Goonies wrapped up.
Well, here is 100% irrefutable proof that Will Smith is the king Midas of suck. Everything he touches is rendered irrevocably shit-blasted, as evidenced by Jada Pinkett Smith's misguided attempt to front a "heavy metal" band on national television. Fuck dude, I don't even know what to say about this. It's beyond eye-rolling or groan-inducing: it's a veritable black hole of terribleness, consuming every ounce of my strength to carry on. This is life-destroyingly bad. I just want to lay down and sleep forever so I never have to be exposed to this video again. Why didn't anyone stop her? Why didn't anyone say, "hey, your band is absolute garbage and even if they weren't, your voice sounds really stupid and you don't have a fucking clue what you are doing, so maybe you should reconsider playing live on LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID FUCKING LETTERMAN." Nope. Not one single person chimed in with a whisper of reputation-salvaging advice. Not even a "Hey, it's gonna take a lot more than crazy eyes, big jeans, and some cool robot moves to pull this off, Jada." The thing that really sucks is that you can tell that the guy in the Carcass shirt knows better and is totally ashamed of himself, but hey, your kids braces aren't going to pay for themselves, you know?
Okay, this has put a big enough dent in my soul for one evening, so I'll leave it at that. I'm sure I missed a ton of other incredibly shitty celebrity garbage, so why don't you go ahead and post your favorites in the comments. Oh, and thanks to Shelby and the assorted bro-dogs at Illogical Contraption for the space. I like the way you do stuff.
Wait wait wait. It feels weird doing a post without talking about death metal, so maybe I'd feel better if I also posted some of my favorite records of 2010? Yeah. Let's give it a try:
In no particular order:
Undergang - Indhentet af Døden Vasaeleth - Crypt Born & Tethered To Ruin Acid Witch - Stoned Hail Of Bullets - On Divine Winds Necrite - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi Decrepit Birth - Polarity Stargazer - A Great Work of Ages Weapon - From The Devil's Tomb Father Befouled - Morbid Destitution of Covenant Deathspell Omega - Paracletus Cemetery Urn - The Conquered Are Burned Sargeist - Let the Devil In Entrails - Tales From the Morgue Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky Defeated Sanity - Chapters Of Repugnance
I realize that I haven't discussed my long-standing affection for Public Enemy much here on IC in the past, and I intend on righting that transgression posthaste. You see, from approximately the end of my sixth grade year to somewhere in the middle of my eighth grade year ('90-'92ish?), I ate, breathed, and slept nothing but D, Flav, Griff, X, Souljah, and the S1W's. PE was my FAVORITE, the standard by which I judged all other things. In retrospect, it seems overwhelmingly absurd that a white mountain kid from rural Northern California would be so in touch with his African roots, but FUCK, man, PE was the FUCKING SHIT back then. I wore a puffy Starter jacket, Nike Flights, and a Generra Hypercolor shirt. I might've lived in Redwood farmland, but I was down with "urban" America. To this day, I remember making a special trip to a friend's house to view the MTV premier of "Can't Truss It" when it came out (my family didn't have cable). I understood the "struggle", the "revolution". Chuck D had told me all about it. To this day (and many of my close personal friends will confirm this), if you feed me enough booze and have access to the correct stereo equipment, I will rap along to ANY and ALL Public Enemy albums (up to and including Apocalypse 91), word-for-word, until someone stops me. I know, it's embarassing as fuck and something a grown man should never be caught doing, liquored up or otherwise. But I can't fucking help it. PE IS IN FULL EFFECT, ALWAYS HAS BEEN, ALWAYS WILL BE.
I never really pursued the music of Jerusalem's Melechesh much, probably because I read one too many ball-scrubbing reviews of their work on MetalSucks and just assumed they were crap. And, in defense of my unjustified prejudice, their later albums proved to be unsurprisingly mediocre. But I'll be dipped in dogshit if their 1996 full-length debut album As Jerusalem Burns... Al'Intisar ain't a monumental mindfuck of an album, a true standout from a time and a place where no one ever really expected it. I'm definitely glad I finally gave these guys a shot, and Jerusalem has stayed in heavy rotation around ICHQ as of late. But it's not only because these dudes sound like a more-technically-proficient, desert-ified, Nightside Eclipse-era Emperor. There are several reasons why this band (or, more specifically, this record) is exceedingly remarkable amongst its peers. Please find just 5 of these reasons below:
1) When you're listening to Melechesh on your iPod on the bus or BART or whatever, every once in awhile a guy will sneak up and shake a rattle or a rainstick or some shit in your ear (on the recording, that is). It keeps you on your toes, and, as Melechesh are actually from the Middle East, their use of "native instruments" comes off as a bit more LEGIT than Nile or whoever.
5) OK, this one is kind of hard to explain, but you know when a drummer is playing a blastbeat, and then they go into a different, faster blastbeat? Not doubling the tempo or anything, just a slightly different beat, which makes the whole mess just sound that much weirder and more twisted? I love when drummers do that, and dude from Melechesh does it really well.
Go to the exact middle of the title track of this album for an example:
Fuck that rules. Anyway, do you guys need MORE than 5 reasons to get this? I think not.
A cake? For me? Really? Oh my god, I can't believe you guys remembered IllCon's second birthday. That's so cool! Wait, what? The cake wasn't for me? Oh, cool. No, that's okay. No really, it's cool. No, I'm sure lots of people celebrate Jaco Pastorius' birthday with cake and ice cream. Sounds totally normal. He would have been 59, I know. Yeah, total tragedy. No, my feelings aren't hurt. Not at all. Really, enjoy your cake. Really.
... Assholes.
What? Nothing. No. I didn't say anything. OK, see ya.
Hey, did I mention today marks the completion of our SECOND YEAR here at Illogical Contraption, "one of the most amazingly retarded geysers of intellectual circularity (the world has) ever seen" (Seth J.G. Goodkind, Lost Video Archive)? Because it fucking does, and I think everyone here at ICHQ deserves a high five. Two years is kind of a long time to sit in front of a computer screen and try to think up semi-witty shit to say about generic death metal records.
Anyhoo, if I am to believe what Sitemeter tells me, IC has enjoyed approximately four times the visits this year as it did last year (100,000ish Dec '08-Dec '09, 400,000ish Dec '09-Dec '10), which to me signals that a lot of you clowns have jumped on the bandwagon within the last 12 months or so. And THAT means that a lot of you guys missed out on tons of cool shit that happened in the first year of this blog's existence. So today, I thought we could take a brief walk down memory lane, explore the IllCon vaults so to speak and look back at a couple of forgotten jams from yesteryear. Or maybe from just the first six months or so.
Good Gods, there's alot of shit to read on this sucker. My eyeballs are vibrating. Look for another one of these retrospective-type things when IC hits 1,500 posts (probably) around the beginning of next year...
My sincere thanks to all the motherfuckers and motherfuckettes that have contributed to this thing in the last 730 days, and thanks to all you IC Bros for reading (and listening). You guys don't suck.
Lastly, a reminder to come see Seanford (below) and Huntress at the Victory Warehouse in Oakland this Friday and Bender's in SF this Saturday. Would it kill you to come out and meet Team IllCon in person? And maybe buy us a beer or two?
I'm gonna keep this (relatively) brief, and I'm also gonna assume that you're all fans of John Carpenter's 'The Thing'. If you ain't, then you can not entry as you are a false. G'wan, AMSCRAY!!
So. Now that it's just us non-falsers left, I'm gonna share something FUCKING AWESOME with you. Does the name Justin 'Uberkvlt' Bartlett mean anything to you? If it does, then you know he's the fuckin' MAN. If it doesn't, then go to your record/CD collection and have a good rummage through the Black Metal, Doom, Sludge and whatnot. I guarantee you'll have at least ONE of the man's record/CD sleeves in there...Trap Them, Dragged Into Sunlight, the AMAZING new Locrian album, a bunch of Southern Lord covers...see? You know him.
Amongst other things, Justin LOVES 'The Thing', so, when he said that this Hallowe'en he was gonna give us HIS take on what the cover for the VHS version of 'The Thing' should be, well, I was excited.
When I saw it, I was beyond blown away.
Before I unveil it, let us compare the original covers that you may well have on YOUR copy of 'The Thing'
...nothing ostensibly wrong with these. The original cover with the dude in the lit-up parka is pretty iconic, but on the whole, they could ALL be improved upon, right?
With that in mind, FEAST YER PEEPERS!
You gotta be fucking kidding, right?
I bet you'd love to be able to download and print off your own copy, so you can swap out the less awesome one for the super-awesome Uberkvlt one, right?
Yes, it's free, BUT, if you feel like making a small donation then there is the option there. Justin is a struggling artist and the merch from the upcoming Tron:Legacy movie ain't cheap....
Download, replace and enjoy. If you need me, I'll be in my shack getting drunk.
I don't have time right now to do a proper introduction for this post, but if anyone out there in IC land is a fan of the Wolf Roxon stories I've posted you'll definitely want to read this. It's a link to a story about The Moldy Dogs, the band Mr Roxon started in St Louis in 1972. I hope you'll read it, and enjoy it, and tell everyone you know about it.
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