Todays music selection

I listen to a shit load of music, so here are a few snippets of what I've been listening to lately.

I just got hold of a leak of Mastodons new album, Crack the Skye. Haven’t listened to it very much yet, but it's sounding like they've gotten a lot more proggy and a lot less heavy. Leviathan and Blood Mountain were fucking intense, but compared to them this sounds like something by Dream Theater. On the other hand, I'm hearing a lot of complicated guitar fiddlery, which is always welcome, especially from a band as freaky and unpredictable as Mastodon. I've seen them live three or four times, the last time being with Slayer just before Christmas at the Unholy Alliance 3. They didn't seem to have lost their edge at all, but then again they didn't play any new songs either. SPLIT YOUR LUNGS WITH BLOOD AND THUNDER!


Gama Bomb's latest album, Citizen Brain, is everything I love about thrash. Songs about Robocop, zombies and hitting people with hammers never cease to entertain me, especially when they're played with such speed and tongue-in-cheek ferocity by a bunch of Irish maniacs. Gama Bomb are probably my favorite band from the new wave of thrash, second only to Municipal Waste perhaps. And, it turns out; they also put on an equally incendiary live show. They tore London a new one supporting Exodus and Overkill in February, it's just a shame I missed Torture Squad on before them.


Stabwound, from Necrophagists (I think it's pronounced Necro-fay-jist) album Epitaph, came on while my mp3 player was on random a few weeks ago, and I've been listening to that one song over and over ever since. It's so brutally technical in a way that only a classically-influenced death metal band from the land that brought us the likes of Ludwig van Beethoven (A bit of the old ultra-violence, my brothers?) and Johan Sebastian Bach, could achieve. Another particularly excellent song is Fermented Offal Discharge from their other album, Onset of Putrefaction.


Their new album's out already, but for some reason I don't have it yet. Instead I’ve been listening to a lot of Amon Amarths old stuff, and I reckon their album The Avenger is best. Amon Amarth used to play grind core under the name Scum, and only really found their current melodic sound in the mid 90s, hitting peak with this album in 1999 before slowing things down a bit for their latter releases. Compared to those, this album is a much more raw beast, faster and heavier than Fate of Norns and With Odin On Our Side which seemed to take a deeper and almost melancholy turn (as amazing as they are). Viking warriordom seems to be in great demand at the moment, so maybe the new album will regain some of that berserker ferocity; I'll probably pick it up at the weekend.


Also, I’ve been listening to Amorphis, Bloodbath, Vader, Cannibal Corpse, Turisas, Turmion Katilot, 3 Inches of Blood, Korpiklaani, Fintroll, Primordial, Equilibrium, Immortal, Municipal Waste, Exodus, Testament, Saxon, Destruction, Kreator, Suffocation, Zyklon, Lamb of God, Skyclad, Athiest, Dismember, Desecration... And many more, a lot of which are regular listening staples.


And finally, here's a clip of Exodus. You can't really see, but I'm the guy who crowd-surfs over the barrier at 0:57. The bouncer with the retard hair who pulls me over threatened to throw me out if I did it again. I did it again 20 seconds later.

First Post... Continued

Right, I mentioned I was working full time at the moment and that I had some adventures planned, so I thought I'd elaborate a little on both.

I work for a small ISP, we mostly serve businesses with Internet and VPN solutions as well as the usual web hosting and email service malarkey and loads of other random crap. I'm 1st/2Nd line technical support, so when something breaks and a customer phones in, I pretty much do everything from answer the phone to fix the bastard. Oh, and i hate my job.

That's work covered, now for the adventure! On the 5Th of June 2009 I will be leaving work for the last time to embark on a summer filled with festivals, traveling and anarchy. First up is the Download festival at the legendary Castle Donnington, then soon after that I'll be flying out to Helsinki, Suomi Finland. From there I start an epic Viking pilgrimage through Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, traveling mostly by train, finishing in North Germany for Wacken Open Air, the largest metal festival in Europe. After the heavy metal onslaught that is Wacken I'll be heading back to English shores for Bloodstock Open Air, a smaller and lesser known but equally brutal metal festival.

When it's all over, after two months of rampaging through Europe in a sonic frenzy of hair and steel, I'll have the best part of a month to catch my breath, so I'll probably need to find some local part-time work to keep myself liquored up. Then I'll be off to university. I have a place at Brighton Uni, studying Digital Media, which covers pretty much everything I do in my spare time (while sober at least) so, combined with standard student antics, should make for an entertaining three years.

I've been working 9 to 5 since I left college almost two years ago, and I've really come to hate it. A lot has happened since then and I've generally become a lot less happy with life due to various reasons; women, terminal illnesses in the family, etc, etc. I'm sick of the monotony of the weekly routine I'm subject to. Monday to Friday i get up, go to work, come home, sit about, sleep, repeat. At the weekends I drink myself under the table by night and sleep by day. I guess it's the same for 90% of the modern world, but I refuse to accept that this is all there is to life. I figured, if you hate something, change it. So I'm shaking things up a bit, quitting my job and going in a completely different direction. Despite everything I'll be doing in the coming months, the thing I'm looking forward to the most is getting out of gainful employment and no longer being a wage slave.

Bring on the Summer. Bring on the sun, booze, bitches, blood and BATTLE METAL!!!