Observes From The Satellite

Fires of Old with Katahdin, Mythology, and Crypter [Ralph's, Worcester, 1/5/2012]

2012-01-23T10:22:00.003-05:00

I got moving out about normal, with a minor delay to gawk at the Bruins kicking the crap out of Calgary in Barca-vs-pub-teams-in-the-cup fashion; it was 5-0 when I left the sub shop at the start of the second period, and 9-0 by the time I got out to Ralph's. The run this team was on, frustrating losses to Vancouver aside, has been just mindblowing.

Beer in, it wasn't too long before the bands started up.

Crypter [4.5/7]
I hadn't seen this band before, though they've been playing out a lot recently, and was concerned that they might be just another thrash-revival band. This fortunately was not the case: Crypter does have a strong revivalist streak, but the world could use more young bands who are thoroughly convinced that Scream Bloody Gore is the best record in the history of ever. The ideas are on the right track, even if the writing and arrangements aren't fully matured yet, and the turn-of-the-century Immortal tone that cut through on their more developed leads made for a nice contrast with the faster and rawer parts. On the evidence of this set, Crypter doesn't quite have it all together yet, but they are frustratingly close, and are going to be damn good when they get themselves shaken out.

There was a bit of longer downtime here while Mythology set up their gear and figured out how to hang their banner off the hardpoints on the Erol Otus-inspired monster backdrop that's become a Metal Thursday regular of late, and I scored some beef jerky and a can of expired, non-reliably nonpoisonous energy drink off Yosh, as did several other people. The beef jerky part, at least; Yosh's jerky is pure class, and most people are too smart to take the free cans of Cocaine.

Mythology [5.5/7]
I'd missed seeing Mythology a couple times here, and was glad to finally be able to not miss a show they were on for stupid reasons. Despite a bit of ring rust, they set out a killer set of Norwegian-inspired black metal with a few Germanic touches, done at a level that wouldn't be greatly out of place from the actual Norwegian second tier (see Keep of Kalessin, Den Saakaldte, etc). The band's currently gearing up to be more active again, which is a good sign not just for more people seeing Mythology, but for how they see them: the slack parts in the set were about 70% down to the band resynching with each other rather than inherent to the music. Good signs.

This is wicked late, but part of the delay is kind of on this band; it took some disciplined recall to work out what their set really was after a solid week of spinning their Impaler record. Why? Look, go listen to "Rebuilding Poenari" and tell me you wouldn't have this stuck in your stereo a week straight.

The whole disc is not quite this good, but it's a lot better than skeptics would expect of a concept album about Dracula by an unsigned black metal band. Definite support.

Katahdin [6/7]
More than the openers who I hadn't heard yet, I'd come out for the last two, and they certainly didn't disappoint. Pure slashing fire, third wave without a hint of hipsterism, and as good a set as I've seen from them so far. They had some major technical difficulties with Kyle blowing a cable or something, but Eric was able to hold down the melodic fort alone, and the set barely took a dip. Straight killer.

In here I did merch, picking up Mythology's Tepes and Impaler records despite the duplication (the first is the demo version of the latter), and not only the new split but also Katahdin's first LP. All of this is highly approved; The Black Hours is about the most diverse BM split you'll hear, and a solid package in the tradition of Black Death.

Fires of Old's mic stand is now almost completely unhandleable, a jagged upright pile of spikes and barbed wire.

Fires of Old [6.5/7]
Maybe it was the slot allowing more time and thus more old stuff, but this set was a lot rawer than I've seen from these guys lately; the ripping Satyriconesque stuff "of old", though still allowing room for the more expansive Primordialisms of "V" and "Majestic Death". Both sides complemented each other, and the result was another completely killer outing that no amount of wannabe critical detachment could keep off that mark. Still excellent, and the sooner they get some recordings done/available again the better.

From there it was back home, with subsequent shows missed to work, on-call, and work drinking; this is done at last, and next was supposed to be Untombed before the football stress and beer consumption made driving in a nonstarter; fortunately, there's no game next weekend and no shortage of tasty shows coming.

Scaphism with Coffin Birth, Vaporizer, and Xatatax [Ralph's, Worcester, 12/29/2011]

2012-01-05T19:16:00.003-05:00

Despite a somewhat late start and traffic starting to pick back up again, I got out in good order, only most of the way through Woods II; this of course being in response to David Gold's passing, as would be a persistent and somber theme on the night. We will not hear these works live again here -- and if we'd thought the same a month ago, it was with the hopeful prospect of grooving on Woods V and scorning hipsters at the Middle East and larger venues further down the line. So it goes.

It was not all, of course, authentic despair, and presently the bands got rolling.

Xatatax [4/7]
I hadn't seen these guys before, but had heard decent things about them, and was interested to see how this was going to shake out. The basic impression was one of a 21st-century, post-underground answer to the Kinks or Blue Cheer, making up for their shortcomings in composition and technicality through loudness. As the set went on, they picked up a little, bringing stronger elements of black metal and hardcore into their fairly basic doom mix, but at this point the band still sounds a little underfinished. They're a young band, and there's no reason that they won't be able to develop the interesting parts of their sound further, but they're not quite there yet. This was a decent opener on a strong bill; it'll be interesting to see how they do next time out.

Vaporizer [6.5/7]
If this band template-cut their sound to Heaven Shall Burn's and wedged doom in where all the NWOSDM parts are in the original, they could not get closer. This isn't a bad thing by any means, though, just self-satisfied back-patting about a comparison that I happened to get right eighteen months ago. In the interim, the band has if anything solidified, further refining their doom-riffs-with-metalcore-delivery style to weapons grade. This outing may not have been as mindblowing as that first time, before my expectations were set, but it definitely felt more precise and replicable: Vaporizer is going to be this good, pretty reliably, whenever you see them, and if it wasn't for the unorthodox way that they approach doom metal, more people would be talking them up as the successor to Black Pyramid's vacated title belt. They're not, really, though; this is a band that stands on its own and should be appreciated for their own significant merits by a lot more people.

I'm not going to put a mark down on Matt's acoustic tribute to Dave and Woods in here; he didn't cover all the riffs or hit exactly the right cadences in the lyrics, but it was a good and valid tribute, scared up in the space of less than a week, from flat nothing, and one that I think Dave would probably have enjoyed and respected. If there's anything you get from Woods, it's the importance of taking things that other people have defined, refusing to be defined by them, and putting your own interpretation down. This was not Woods as Woods has been here before, but it wasn't intended to be: this was Matt Smith and a guitar taking a break to remember and let others remember.

The slack on "flat nothing", also, is mandatory, because Woods was one of those bands that everyone listened to but no one would dream of covering. For all Dave's impressive compositional abilities putting songs together, and his knack for memorable riffs and a biting, artful, turn of phrase, what really drew and will draw metalheads to Woods of Ypres was his gargantuan personal courage as a lyricist, the ability to strip-mine the most intimate highs and lows of his life and set that trauma to music. Who among us has not wrestled with shedding their own "Deadwood", and who has not bounced along the bottom of a "December in Windsor"? This identification gave a lot of people what they felt was a real personal connection to Woods and the man behind the texts, even if they didn't know him personally all that well, or at all, but the respect for that connection, and the respect people had for David in baring his soul that way, meant that nobody had ever sat down and tried to play any of his stuff for themselves past, maybe if that, "A Meeting Place And Time" off Woods I. There's something almost sacrilegious about putting your own interpretation on someone else's personal history; "...Mount Pleasant..." is abstract and well-known, and "You Are Here With Me" is short and nonspecific, making them approachable for a tribute like this. There's no way someone's going to sit down and try to interpret "The Ghosts of Summers Past" or "Into Exile", and that fact is what makes the loss so significant. Other bands will get tributes, and see covers worked into their fans' sets after they cease to be; Woods' material, the band ceasing to be, is in large part never going to be played live again. What we experienced, finally, on those three dates as they got some actual label support and were able to tour across English-speaking North America, has been foreclosed upon for future metalheads with a definite and sobering finality.

Coffin Birth [6/7]
I'm not sure about stabilized, but the Coffin Birth lineup has definitely solidified, for the time being with the additions of solid technicians Dana and Ari alongside Anthony. The result was a finely tuned, professionally processed-out set of blackened death metal, rolling forward with a firm and singular commitment and purpose, and not really getting blown back by the fan that various people in the front row lifted off the stage to blow air on Anthony from different angles with. Getting used to such stage gimmicks may happen with Belphegor, but what's much more relevant is that the band as they are is fully and completely beyond them. Eventually, they're going to get something recorded, and the world beyond New England is going to get a glimpse of the new-forged steel here.

Scaphism [6/7]
Back on home ground, Scaphism kicked out another solid set of straight-ahead brutal death metal, along with the usual banter bits; Tony alternately doing a best-of Pete Steele's crowd-heckling Type O lines and ripping on the audience for cheering for rape over stuff like chainsaws, Star Wars, and H.P. Lovecraft. The headlining set and no "Tower Deflower" left room in the set for the full Rape Trilogy ("Chainsodomy" -> "Raped Till Death" -> "Violating The Dead"), though not, if I recall correctly, all exactly one after the other. Truth told, though, the Metal Thursday audience is not a bunch of deranged perverts (ok, that may be a little far, "not a bunch of actual real-life rapists" is more strictly accurate), and the best crowd response was probably for "Pathogenic Bacteria", mostly because it came out fucking immense in this performance. As has been noted before, Scaphism is nothing if not consistent, and that consistency in producing high-level performances is going to get them noticed further afied sooner or later...and if they keep getting occasional out-of-region deathfest slots, it'll come sooner.

The bands having finished up, I headed out; I was technically on call and worn down from an early start to the day, but managed to get back home in one piece, and finish this shortly before heading out to see Fires of Old. Life rolls on, and sooner or later I will get better at documenting the relevant parts faster.

Panzerbastard with Ashers and Intheshit [O'Brien's, Allston, 12/22/2011]

2011-12-29T19:41:00.003-05:00

I'd been ground down from the trip and subsequent re-integration into work to go out to the Worcester iteration of this non-release release show, but with another week gone by and whatever I was too sick from at the weekend to do much of anything cleared, it was in to Boston for this go-round. My timing was a little off, partly from ring rust and partly from the slightly earlier start -- Born of Fire shows are usually two-band with little chance of music before ten, but there was a third band on this date -- but that of course didn't matter much, with beer, Dead Snow, and good company whiling the time down until Intheshit was ready to blast through their set.

Intheshit [5.5/7]
Of course, the band promptly flipped that assumption by playing a more extended, varied, and meaty set still built around, though no longer solely composed of, fast, blasting grindcore. Intheshit's no longer a stopwatch grind band, where the set is a battle between the length of the available material and the band members' stamina and ability to execute, and the slower and occasionally doomier parts do well to set up the straight-ahead violence. When called upon, like at the end of the set, they can still do up three songs in two minutes, but their performance is no longer solely predicated on doing that. I don't see this band as often as I'm able to, but with this kind of development, and the promise of more in the future, that's definitely something I need to get fixed.

Ashers [5/7|NA]
I'm not sure that I can properly rate hardcore; if you go to more hardcore shows than metal gigs and don't trust a guy with Ensiferum and Tourniquet patches on his rig to properly understand a band like this, feel free to toss out the arbitrary number. That aside, this was a good, enjoyable set of punk-flavored hxc with some rockier elements; not quite up my alley, but a good change of pace, a good performance, and a necessary complement to the other opener given the headliners and how this gig was inevitably going to draw. I may not go out to see them on my own hook, or encounter them too often since I don't see many pure hardcore or punk shows, but they'll be worth the watch next time I encounter them on a more metal/grind/Bobfest bill.

Worth mentioning in here is that O'Brien's was full up nearly to capacity, despite being a Thursday night so close to the holidays. You'd expect this, having a release show with good support for a killer, well-liked band who draw from both metalheads and punks, but it's also always good to see expectations being met. The only expectation that wasn't met was that Panzerbastard would actually have material available for sale, this being a release show, but pressers, what are you gonna do? They'll eventually have the record available, and we, oh horrors, will just have to go see Panzerbastard again to pick it up. Somehow, Boston will deal.

Panzerbastard [6/7]
Lack of new recordings aside, PB completely killed it, pretty much as expected. The Motorhead-cribbing-Hellhammer ethos remains intact, rolling forward in a spiky ball of tarry sludge with rusting metal spikes sticking out of it, the new stuff that people didn't all immediately know how to yell along to blending right in with the older stuff that they did. It felt a little short at the end, but this is probably due more to me losing track of time than anything else; this was a thoroughly crushing set that covered most everything you could expect from the band. Keith may have chopped off his hair, but he's lost none of his fire, as the aftermath below shows:

Absolute fucking carnage. The only way.

After gawking at the carcass of Keith's bass as above, I beat feet for the bridge; it was only a little early, and I still had work and holiday crap to get through. This last hogged up most of the intervening week; this being out, though, I now get the chance to dare the Pike out to Scaphism.

Spedition Gebr. D GmbH - Bayern (part 4)

2011-12-27T15:00:00.002-05:00

12/11 - about Pressbaum

We left Vienna under a gray morning light, and promptly got stuck due to track damage. Wir sind die Pechvögel den deutschsprachenden Railsystemen. Sooner or later, though, we will get through this, and head on to Munich. Hence the early start; we should be able to get at least a little done, no matter how long it takes us to get there.

Some rules for travel, at least and in about the order that I passed them on to M:

0. Don't Panic.
1. Don't make mistakes.
2. Have enough to get all the way out at all times.
3. Don't assume you'll be able to immediately clear a LZ.
4. Mouth shut, eyes and ears open.
5. Hope for the worst.

365. Shadows of the distant Alps. M has much better pictures from passing through Salzburg.

- Munich -

Safely in, but the hotel thinks the wrong booking was canceled. Eejits. We'll survive, though.

After getting in, we hiked out to the Hirschgarten for lunch and a look at nature.

366. Hill in the Hirschgarten.

Lunch was good if a little pricey (even after Vienna), but worth the trip out, even in the offseason.

367. Hirsch im Garten.

368. Some more deer at the other end of the enclosure. If you think "wow, that's a lot of deer for a somewhat small and sad habitat", you're right, but it doesn't matter, because these guys are also on the menu, and the population issues accordingly get worked out.

369. Tremendously sad snowman, coming back. It snowed a few days before, but by now had mostly melted.

370. General landscape, Hirschgarten.

The garden is nice to walk through, but if you're mostly coming out for the restaurant (or the beer garden, in season), it's probably easier to get off the S-bahn at Leim, one stop further out, than at the eponymous stop; getting out at Hirschgarten, as we did, you have a nontrivial hike over a rail overpass and through some new developments to get to the park, and then it's all the way through the park to the restaurant and deer pen.

371. A striking apartment block by the hotel.

This is Bavaria and also Sunday, so goddamn-all everything is closed. Fortunately, there are kebap and Chinese places (multikulti means different religious days off, kickass) in the area open, and also an Adventmarkt. After that's done, I have an hour of internets to plan tomorrow end-to-end before the meter starts running. Not a problem.

12/12 - Munich

Last day - minor crisis averted last night, probably triggered by mediocre-to-crappy Greek food, so we should be good to press on. This will likely be a shorter day in and around Marienplatz, as we're out at like 4:30 AM tomorrow in order to get the S-bahn to the airport.

Instead of taking the S-bahn in after not finding the memorial plaque at the site of the former Bierhalle-putch-bierhalle, we decided to just hike in to the center.

372. Neat pillar in front of the Gasteig culture center.

373. More cool sculptures on the front.

374. At the public pool by the Isar.

375. Down towards the Deutsches Museum.

376. Reflected in the river.

377. Right at the first fork.

378. Inside the hof.

379. Street view towards the center.

380. Closer on the toy museum tower.

381. Wee guy over this row of shops.

382. Face of the Rathaus.

383. Pillar out front.

384. In towards the Frauenkirche towers.

385. Cool old storefront.

386. Another impressive facade.

387. Gate to Stachus.

388. Across the traffic circle.

389. Heading back towards the river.

390. Exact as always.

391. Memorial for the old synagogue.

392. Frauenkirche towers over the city.

393. Classic old street towards the church.

- Frauenkirche -

394. Up from the base.

395. Inside; crossbow and stained glass.

396. Up to the organ alcove.

397. View in the sanctuary.

398. Brudertritt.

399. Teufelstritt. This is not to cast any aspersions on my brother's character; he was just standing on the Teufelstritt, Phillipe-style, before I got to take a picture looking down at it.

400. Door detail, heading out.

- Residenz and stuff -

401. Tucked away in a corner, here gather the smallest in soul of the entire world. You are in FUCKING MÜNCHEN, HEIMAT DES BIERES, and you go to a ripoff Irish bar?

402. Panorama across the square by the Schlosskammer.

403. Up across from the Residenz.

404. Out to the suburbs.

405. Inside the Residenzhof.

406. Facing wall of the Residenz.

407. Figures along the roof representing traditional Bavarian professions.

408. Dome over some trees.

409. Smaller church by the Spanish cultural center.

410. Volkskundemuseum on Maximillianstrasse.

411. Government building opposite.

412. Stature of the Woburn-born Count Rumford out front.

413. Maximillian II's statue in the middle of his eponymous street.

414. Europe; great architecture amid the everyday.

415. Down the steps to the rejoining of the Isar.

416. Maximillianeum at the far end of the bridge.

417. Short side of the river.

418. Close in on the top of the building.

419. Statue on the bridge.

420. Cool discoloration from the lamp above.

421. Statue and Regierung.

422. Better view of the church in 414.

423. München obligato.

424. Dude with the mug atop the Hofbräuhaus.

425. Barrel-end crest inside.

It's recommended to come up Herrenstrasse to the Hbh; you see the back and the service entrance first, a privilege accorded to few tourists.

Lunch done, gotta run; plan is to crawl back over the bridge via various brewpubs.

This turned out to be successfull; gute Gemütlichkeit, but also a nap till about 7pm, and we need to box clever for dinner.

426. Biere und Bruder in Augustiner-keller.

427. Church of the Holy Spirit after coming out.

428. Paulaner helles.

429. "No politics" sign in Paulaner am Tal.

430. Stammtisch reservation signs in the Schneider Weisse pub.

431. Weissbier here, of course.

video8: Wirtkunst in Betrieb. This guy was really good, but this video doesn't really show him in full command of his equipment.

432. Mural by the Dürnbräu/Spaten pub.

433. Tankards with the traditional hinged top.

434. Look back along the river, coming back across.

435. Propeller and shaft outside the Deutsches Museum.

We are quite close to a successful conclusion to the trip, but we need to go get dinner and some brekkie supplies for tomorrow. There's a failover sequence of Afghan (worked, and do piasa=win) - Chinese - Turkish restaurants, though, and a minimart in the subway, so we should be fine; fare for tomorrow morning already pulled. Said minimart turned out to be closed, but we managed -- I'm an old pro at having stuff around to avoid starving on.

12/13 - Amsterdam

M and I parted ways after getting off a bumpy hop from Munich, so I'm on my own again. Long hike, brief security theater, ready to roll on.

436. Leaving Munich. Dawn takeoffs kick ass.

There's not a lot of time or grist to reflect on here; I did things I didn't really want to, and skipped or had to skip things I did, but it was a decent experience all told. I don't think either of us will really want to do this again, but, again, it was a good experience to do it once.

The basic difference is of comfort level; M gets easily alienated in strange surroundings, and feels bad when he is, while I'm not sure I've been homesick since I was 13 years old. That bout was bad, but ever since, I've found it easy to adjust and acclimate to everywhere I've been. Home is a place to store the stuff I can't pack with me, and family people I see now and again between rovings. If required or possible, I could "stay out" practically forever.

If I did, I could easily avoid loud idiot Americans in airports. This is the other reason I pack a mp3 with: why the hell are so many of my countrymen such derps, and what is it about the United States that so inhibits the development of an "inside voice" as the rest of the world recognizes it? It's all easily obviated, though, as the moon rises over Kara-Shehr.

The Weinachtsmarkte were quiet, and the luxury stores were brightly lit, the tourist sites mobbed, though the arc Moscow - Zwickau - Brussels - London was anything but. The debt crisis is ultimately a confidence crisis; the confidence on display in the Germanic countries seems to at least indicate that they have the confidence to haul the rest of the continent back from the brink.

Still, Zwickau hovers like a plague specter over all of this. The prosperity and glitter of the capitals does not trickle out to their own hinterlands so well, let alone those in the periphery. If things have to get worse before they get better, we are running a sever risk of going back to the bad old days of the '90s, in terms of the radical right. The hope, though, is that people are far more connected and less vulnerable to propaganda than in the old days; if Rageface shows up protesting Putin, then there will be others among the anonymi that can take the fight to the fascists. Europe is going to survive, but in what shape and in what straits is yet to be determined.

My part in this story, though, is done for the next seven or eight months, as I go back to my own self-destructive, right-plagued, stupid, and enormously productive economic sphere. I go back to Party.San for one last spin of the wheel on the festival system, and then it's off to other horizons, other shores for other adventures before the sands of time run out on me.

Gear notes: my secondary pack is falling apart and needs repaired. I could have used another shirt and maybe another pair of socks, but what I had worked. The general-use coat was proof against what little rain we had to deal with, and while I did not need the emergency pants or belt, they served their purpose. Two sweatshirts was a good idea for both layering and rotation purposes. The shorts were a lifesaver with hotel temperatures this high.

The storm has cleared Schipol, and the light is amazing. Just about to board, and if my mp3 runs out of battery, it's had a good run and done what it needed to.

- approaching Labrador -

After like 14 hours of flight/airport-bullshit-blocking time, the battery is finally dead in the player, midway throgh Kreator's "System Decay". Credit to Phillips; I thought this thing was dead six hours ago grooving to "NDW 2005" while boarding.

- off Salem -

Class view of the twin bridges as we go flaps-down. It's good to live along the coast, next to such obvious landmarks, under one of the main approaches to your local air hub.

Just magnificent views of the city. I come and go so often at dark, under shitty weather, etc, that I sometimes forget how Boston looks.

- Boston -

Out of customs and to the Amex exchange desk. 1.12 LESS commission. This is why I avoid exchange desks whenever possible. Fuckers. At least I'm minimizing my losses; I only need ten euro changed to get home, so the rest can lose value the natural way as the dollar appreciates.

Home, finally, to a more or less empty fridge and going to sleep at six in the evening. Work in the morning, back to the grind again.

Spedition Gebr. D GmbH - Ostmark (part 3)

2011-12-27T14:05:00.003-05:00

12/8 - Vienna

So we woke up early and hiked out to the anatomical museum, only to find it closed for the university break. Oh well.

211. Mozart fountain by the hotel.

212. Paulanerhof, on the way to the center.

213. Chicken-angel on a building.

214. Front of the opera house.

215. Along the Opernring in the early light.

216. Across the Ring, same intersection.

217. Maria Theresa in her eponymous plaza.

218. Front of the NHM.

219. Front of the KHM, worse light.

220. Austrian Parliament building.

221. Closer detail of some statues and the church-like Rathaus beyond.

222. Front view of the Rathaus over Weihnachtsmarkt.

223. Pillar and cool old houses on the Ring.

224. Church under renovation.

225. Shadows of the past.

226. Locked door of the Patho-Anatomisches. We at least made it out here, goddamnit!

227. Graffiti on a trash can, crossing back to the city center.

228. Serving two masters.

229. Another church in the city center.

230. Lippizanerhof, wide view.

231. Closeup on the dome.

232. And we didn't go in. Diese Reise, wie auch das Leben, iss gar kein Ponyhof!

233. Joseph II in front of another palace.

234. Down the pedestrian street away from the Stephansdom.

235. Stephansdom, quartered out.

236. Full view of the church and decorated scaffolding.

237. Line of horse-drawn carriages with emissions-control systems.

238. Side tower on the cathedral.

239. Orthodox church closer to the Donau.

240. View downriver.

241. Modern architecture across the Schwedenbrücke.

242. More of the same.

243. A look along upriver.

244. Graffiti under the bank.

245. Cool street view off the river towards the center.

246. Modern building across the canal.

247. Pedestrian and subway bridge across the canal, in horrible light.

248. Equestrian statue from across the ring; light could be better, but it's winter.

249. "Star metal"; meteorite slices in the NHM.

It was too dark inside the Venus of Willendorf exhibit to take pictures, but it was still really cool to see. There is a lot of other cool stuff here, but M is bored clean out of his skull, an unfortunate consequence of him not having any contending plans. "Walk around and look at stuff" is not an objective: we can do that between objectives.

The museum nearly finished (i.e., all that I could get away with), we went on back to get lunch.

250. Neat fade-out of steps at Karlsplatz.

251. Cool modernistic apartment block over the pizzeria we did lunch at.

252. After lunch; awesome sky as we go back to the hotel and regroup.

So we headed out to the Zentralfriedhof, which isn't that Zentral, actually, being way out past the end of the U3 at Semmering. We misjudged the distance from that stop and hiked out from the U-bahn rather than picking up the S6, which made for an interesting hike.

253. Send this to any horsey types among your friends. They will like it at first, then recoil in horror.

We did not get a snack here. I wasn't hungry, and M doesn't eat Leberkäse.

254. Sind wir nicht alle? Some irony that didn't come out before enhancement; this whole place is for the disposal of "biological waste".

255. Central memorial church, backlit.

256. The Mozart memorial, flanked by other great composers.

257. Beethoven's monument.

258. The grave of Franz Schubert.

259. Hic requiescat J. Brahms.

260. Strauss, the last of the composers in this corner.

261. Pillar at the exit, lit from the west.

After getting back to the city center, we hiked around looking for a cafe, and ended up at a former satellite house of the famous Julius Meinl. It's rare that you wait 20 years for something and find it better than anticipated, but Sachertorte did work that way. It is hard to argue that this is not the best cake in the world; if you also encountered this in a sidebar in your German I text and have been wondering, yes, it is worth coming out to Vienna for.

12/9 - Vienna

After a very long hike, we finally found the military museum, very much a "cahn't git thay-uh from hi-yuh" proposition. It was a good hike, and it ended up being a highly interesting collection, even for M to some degree.

262. Cool urbanscape on the hike in.

263. Finally back inside the city limits. Getting from the U-bahn to the museum involved walking completely around the arsenal complex and a bunch of abutting sprawling commercial complexes, crossing under the A23 twice, and in the process exiting and re-entering Vienna proper.

264. Cannons outside the museum.

265. Panorama of the military museum courtyard. The building is really long and thin, which makes for easy encapsulation of the halls.

266. Detail of the central hall.

267. Saab parked over by the side.

- World War I hall -

268. Selection of pre-war pistols.

269. Cross-section of a Mannlicher type 1895.

270. Models including a 1911 tank design (never built).

271. Alpine gear of "the enemy". My Italian great-grandfather fought against the Austrians in the Alpine campaign; hence the adversarial references here.

272. Mountain artillery; in the alpine campaign, both sides man-packed guns like this up the mountains to shoot peak-to-peak at each other.

273. Equipment and mugshots of the men who killed Europe to save Serbia.

274. Franz Ferdinand's blood-soaked, doctor-slashed jacket.

275. The car.

276. Bullet hole in the rear panel, either a miss or the shot that killed Sophie.

277. Wartime rationing posters.

278. The enemy sells war bonds too.

279. Instruments built by Russian POWs.

280. Canvas from the Alpine campaign.

281. When flashlights haven't been invented/made it over to you yet, here's how to march by night.

282. Captured Russian rifles with their absurdly long bayonets.

283. P96 because I'm a Jin-Roh nerd.

284. Montenegrin revolvers.

285. Turkish Lewis gun; such sick ironies of the international arms trade fed pacifist movements between the wars. For those who are not historical weapons nuts in their spare time, the Lewis gun is an American design mostly used in the first World War by Allied forces; that the Turks had them meant that the Ottoman soldiers on the heights and the diggers down in the sand at Gallipoli were shooting at each other with the same exact weapons.

286. Italian bergsagliere gear.

287. Photos from the front.

288. Another mountain gun, this one still with breech block.

289. Elephantine mortar dominates this hall.

290. "War junk", literally. A good enough end for it.

291. Nailbats and other trench weaponry, including a shield that was obviously less useful than its bearer hoped.

292. Shells with stool for scale.

293. Forest of muzzle tubes.

294. Shell casings by a window.

295. More sample shells.

296. Air-powered mine thrower and compressed-air cylinders.

297. Scrap metal collected for the war effort.

298. Iron bunker showing shell damage.

299. Another view of the giant gun, with little kid in the frame for scale.

300. American trench weaponry.

301. Breech of the mortar.

302. Helmets with improvised over-plates.

303. Primitive antiaircraft mount, on a post and cartwheel for 360-degree traverse.

304. Primitive truck wheel. The "tires" are two layers of metal separated by wooden blocks.

- World War II hall -

305. Hyperinflation hit Austria as well.

306. Paraphrenalia of the National Front.

307. Anti-communist propaganda.

308. Barricade and propaganda posters. Austria fought two poorly-concluded civil wars between 1930 and 1938 that laid the foundation for the Anschluss; stripped of territory and riven by political violence, a critical minority were willing to go along with the whole "giving up on being an independent country" thing, even if they weren't crazy about the Nazis.

309. Election posters from various parties.

310. Anti-semitic poster of the Christian Socialist party.

311. Opposing Anschluss.

312. And in favor.

313. Hitler relics post-takeover.

314. Entfernt. Hitler, as always concerned about his place in history, had himself added in among the emperors and great generals in the lower entrance hall of this museum immediately after Anschluss; the curators removed the bust as soon, in 1945, as the Red Army could make possible.

315. Negative space. The residents of indicated cities outside the Reich can be forgiven for, on seeing something like this, thinking themselves on a checklist.

316. More ~~Jin-Roh~~paratrooper weapons.

317. Tracked motorcycle/hauler.

318. Detritus of Stalingrad.

319. Damaged tail of a B-24.

320. British incendiary bomb.

321. Desperate for good news.

322. "Der Schreibtisch-täter" -- I'm translating this as "The Criminal at His Desk", but the original is a lot more clear about the writing desk being the weapon and method of agency in the crime.

323. Leaflets bombed out in advance of the Red Army.

324. German assault rifle and Panzerfaust.

- navy of a pretty much landlocked nation exhibit -

325. The terrifying power of naval gunnery. Eight inches of armor plate, done through like a hole punch.

Upstairs!

326. Inside the upper hall.

327. Another view of the ceiling. This, let alone the car and jacket, makes the hike worth it.

328. Back from an exhibition corridor.

- Establishment of the national army and wars against the Turks -

329. Arquebuses - exactly as unwieldy as the rules say they are. Absent explicit post-Renaissance technology levels, I am never allowing any mods to the arquebus performance stats in any game that I ref. Just look at these things. This is where the technology actually was, at a place where you would need to be mildly insane to want to use one of these from anything but a fortified position, let alone carry it into the field.

330. Volley gun and the equipment it was trying to obsolete.

331. Captured Ottoman banners.

332. Turkish muskets, not quite jezail-form.

333. More captured Turkish hardware.

334. Breaking the siege of Vienna.

335. Armor piercer; the physics are solid, but this needle-thin, five-foot-long blade is almost the direct opposite of "wieldy".

336. Turkish hunting rifles adapted from earlier military pieces.

337. Jezails captured at Belgrade.

- Napoleon to the Austro-Prussian war -

338. Prussian accessories.

339. A collection of bayonets.

340. Inside a Turkish field tent.

341. Repeating airgun and part of the machine needed to charge its cylinders.

342. Apt damage to figures from a memorial garden.

343. Model of the museum and arsenal at the time Radetzky built it.

344. Why Austria lost the Austro-Prussian War; the only breech-loader in this entire case of contemporary arms.

345. Leavings of the first and last emperor of Mexico.

346. And why Prussia won: the giant, idiot-proof bolt handles of the needle-guns proclaim efficiency, standardization, modernity.

We then took a nice lunch at the restaurant in Objekt 1, and, finding the S-bahn connections unfriendly, hiked the rest of the way back to the hotel.

347. Courtyard face of Objekt 1.

348. Back in the city center; Russian war memorial.

349. Closeup of the soldier atop the pillar.

350. Fountain in front of the memorial.

351. "Morning Line", a sculpture installation in the same square.

352. Across to the Schönberg-Institut.

353. Another angle of the Russian soldier.

354. Cool building crossing back towards Karlsplatz.

355. Detail of the vignettes on the corners.

So we're at dinner waiting to get told we need to clear out in the morning (my screwup this time). We're in a Uighur restaurant, probably the only one between New York (because New York has one of every kind of restaurant) and Urumqi, and zero of the four total customers of are Viennese (I make it three Amis and one Hong Kongese). So geht es die Welt.

356. The imperial industrial ministry lit up at night.

Shishlak is on the menu, but wur no gettin it: M because it's likely to actually be meat, me because this place is far too sanitary. If you don't need to clean it out with your carry knife/AK47 bayonet, it's not real shishlak.

357. Lagnam and somen. Verdict: excellent, but the hot sauce does not fuckin play. Underestimate Central Asian foods at your peril.

Universe? FUCKING DEKED. As far as I can tell, we're out on the 11th, not tomorrow. Tonight is writing and umbuchen, tomorrow is Naschmarkt, Georgian food, the hope of not getting bags bagged, beercaps, and El Clásico. I still hope for the worst, but the possiblity of the sun shining through it still there.

12/10 - Vienna

The shadow of a chuckie oot still hangs over us, but the likelihood of avoiding it goes up and up each time we pass the front desk and are not called to account. It's somewhat of the essence of being in Metternich's old depredations to live in fear of the knock at the door.

The Naschmarkt was awesome; maybe a video later, but my camera doesn't do smell, and the sound isn't that great. All of the Hapsburg empire, from Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, and farther east, the Czech and the Balkans, shows up packing gourmet food and junky household accessories, in a babel of tongues and a swirl of costumes ancient and modern. "The flotsam of empire" has seldom found more apt a Stichpunkt.

358. 1. Wiener TV, on the way to the market.

359. Face of the carpenters' hall, coming back.

We are currently trying to find a phantom Georgian restaurant, because if that doesn't work, we're down to grabbing some snacks and (more) beers from the supermarket and killing time adding to the cap collection while we wait for El Clásico. Celtic has an afternoon kickoff, but with no internet, I won't be able to check that till Munich.

The Georgian place turned out to be right next to the hotel. And closed. On to the Naschmarkt!

video7: So im Naschmarkt. I was looking for a better view, but was hurting on battery.

360. The Secession gallery at the Karlsplatz end.

361. Naschmarkter Mittag. Fresh ingredients, a knife, a table, and some punch: all you need. Substitute, of course, beer in warmer weather.

362. Rote Wien im Effekt.

As long as we don't get tossed between now and 2, we should be ok. Plan is to hang oot, drink beer, and eventually get dinner before the game, but lunch was damn huge -- and I have still an unexpected amount of wild boar salami to last the rest of the trip.

3-4-3 vs 4-2-3-1. This will be decided by the midfield battle, and then by Puyol vs Higuaín. If Inestia and Xavi can't handle Özil, Khedira, and Alonso, it's over -- likewise if Puyol needs help on Higuaín. Pep must really trust his offense if he's setting out like this (he wasn't actually, but that just shows how smart Sky is at predicting lineups) -- otherwise, it's really looking like Real will take the gap to six. (Hooray reverse jinx!)

363. Karlskirche by night.

364. From the foot of the church.

My first-scorer bet, had I placed it and identified Benzema (who started) rather than Higuaín (who didn't) as the ponta de lança, would have been correct, but precious little else as Barca of course went on to win 1-3. Packed house, gute Stimmung, exactly what you want for El Clásico.

Spedition Gebr. D GmbH - Bohemia (part 2)

2011-12-27T11:40:00.003-05:00

12/5 - Dresden

Sixty euro plus internet charge, a couple hours to sleep, and we're rolling. New easy to reach hotel in Prague, and even M is now a seasoned vet, capable of being go-ready 30 minutes after alarm.

034. Morning; SGD tag and fanshop.

The refund comes to 16.40e, which is worth getting; that's at least lunch when we get back in the Eurozone in a couple. The CZ is cheap, and I'm planning to do that by selling dollars at the h.l.

We left the Elbtal behind at Lovosice and strike now into the Bohemian countryside. The light is great, now, even if it was a little weak for the Sächsische Schweiz. Still wicked, wicked cool.

035. Misleading signs in the train. Pretty sure those need crossed out.

Billowing white smoke from a coal plant against a Prussian-blued sky is photogenic as all hell, but I wouldn't want to be downwind of it in Poland or Belarus.

- Prague -

It was raining as we got in, but after a cafe stop for second breakfast, things improved rapidly. The winter light kills it, and there was light in actual abundance.

036. Cool decaying corner on Wenceslas. The similarities with the Nathan are striking.

037. Creche and Christmas tree in the Christmas market at the foot of the street.

038. Long view of the castle.

039. Bridgehouse going up to the Karolus.

040. Old-town-side-tower on the bridge.

041. Church opposite.

042. Gate detail to the side.

043. View up from the Karolus.

044. Riverbank on the new-town side.

045. Closer view of the castle.

046. New-town-side bridge tower. Not exactly as I shot it six years ago.

047. Contrasts in white, gold, blue, and shadow.

048. This just contrasts all the Baroquery everywhere else.

049. More brilliant lighting.

050. St. Joseph's chapel.

051. M still setting up his shot. Frame it in your head, zoom as you bring the camera up, click it, drop it, stop blocking the road, and check if necessary as you move on. Them's the rules for flaneur tourism.

052. Closer view of 049.

053. Cool back street in New Town.

054. Excellent lighting on the back of the Augustine church.

055. Neat view up to the villas.

056. Old multilingual sign for the river.

057. Back of some ministry if I recall correctly, same street.

058. View back into Old Town from below the Kafka museum.

059. Below the Karolus bridge.

060. More awesome sidelight on stucco.

061. Occluded bridge tower.

062. Fountains just hanging out.

063. View downriver to the northwest.

064. Over the bridge crowds to Old Town.

065. Swans, breakwater, and cool building on the far shore.

066. Exposed joists. $100/night is steep for Prague, so you get this total badass room for US motel prices.

Crashing hard, so it's time for a nap. Bars and dinner when that concludes, probably.

067. Das Gute an Schwarz. King Louis and a mostly-consumed Krušo černé.

This restaurant was kind of a ripoff, but pretty decent even so -- and they had fresh Krušo by the half-liter, which is what's really important here.

068. Over the roofs at night.

069. Nicholas Eve crowds under the astronomical clock.

070. Across Old Town square.

video 3: Firefalls on the main Christmas tree.

071. Tower over the clock.

video 4: Fire dancers in front of the pageant.

Old Town square, and to a lesser extent the surrounding streets, was full of revelers: bearded bishops, black devils in straw and chains, and cute girls in light-up horns. Bohemia's first reformation (Google Jan Hus) came before paganism had been really extirpated, so no matter the tradition, the shadows of ancient fire cults and the Black God remain. This may be the least of the attractions of Prague, but if you go in the winter, go Nicholas week, and see the old ways still alive.

12/6 - Prague

After a late start and probably expensive breakfast, we got rolling. Having hit many tourpoints yesterday, "castle for real", "Kafka", and "Žižkov" comprised the bulk of the agenda.

072. Modernistic hitching posts on the way up to the castle.

073. Stairs up. Probably shorter than at Ngong Ping, since I only needed the one break.

074. From the top; back to the Žižkov Tower.

075. Panorama from the top: supersedes the 'stitch' effort from 6 years back and 30 feet down.

076. Across the castle courtyard.

077. Guards marching. We saw but did not shoot/film the changing of the guard. Guard duty must suck. Standing at attention in a box for an hour, hoisting a mirror-polished SKS -- and in summer the ushanka is probably no joke either.

078. Front of St. Vitus cathedral.

079. Rest of the front that didn't get in the first shot.

080. Inside, main hall.

081. Profis set up their own light.

082. It's only pixels; modernist additions.

083. Older-styled painted glass.

084. Staircase up.

085. Across at the lofts.

086. Saints and angles.

087. Wooden Christ over a side altar.

088. Sarcophagus at the center in bad light. Save everything!

089. Founding personalities of Bohemia.

090. Grillwork between the windows and main floor.

091. Central sarcophagus in mystic lighting.

092. What hath Vatican II wrought?

093. Long wooden relief centered on Karolus most.

094. Altar behind grillwork.

095. Steeple-in-steeple.

096. Sarcophagus of Charles IV of bridge fame.

097. Splendor in silver.

098. M avoids another still-setting-up-his-shot pic.

099. Damage at the foot of the rail.

100. View back down the hall.

101. Reliquary of one of the first archbishops.

102. That silver assembly again.

103. Candle-holder beseeching out of the wall.

104. Allegedly better view of the sarcophagus; the light worked better, but the version in 091 is actually a better picture.

105. Finials of the pew ends.

106. Lion on guard at the base of a Baroque memorial.

107. View into the Wenceslas chapel.

108. Up at the organ loft.

109. Common cross motif behind a candle.

110. Better view into the chapel.

111. Wenceslas himself.

112. A sense of space.

113. Heraldry didn't have to be complex....

114. ....until it did.

115. You know it's modernist via the communist symbology.

116. Full view of one of the modernist windows.

117. Outside finally; obelisk.

118. Castle buildings still in government use.

119. Side view of the cathedral.

120. Wicker-straw creche. Nobody has set the goat on fire yet.

121. Mural on the face of the cathedral.

122. Looking past down the nave.

123. Golden grillwork up top.

124. Buttresses by the nave.

125. Bulls under a metal awning.

126. Doorway inside the castle.

127. Prague's most famous window.

128. Roundel window.

129. Up an open corner on the staircase.

130. Inside the central pillar.

131. Out over the roofs into Old Town.

132. (Not applicable/didn't come out)

133. Door furniture.

Pics are technically not allowed in the castle without badge. Why? Noobs who shoot flash. Plenty of bridges in this town, losers, start jumping.

134. Another chiaroscuro paving on the way out; ref. Denmark.

135. A neat side door between attractions.

136. Facing onto a courtyard.

137. Old building in brick.

138. Cathedral and Christmas tree.

139. Contrasts, even inside the castle complex.

140. Inside the basilica.

141. Grillwork and side chapel.

142. Bohemia's "stone of Scone", where the abbesses here crowned the kings.

143. "Christ in the trunk" -- not quite "Christ in the tortilla", but taking a bit more effort.

144. Altar in the basilica.

145. Grillwork at the side.

146. Reliquary and blackletter.

147. High windows above the main sanctuary.

148. Ancient burial customs -- dugout coffins.

149. Cathedral from a little further back.

150. Tower and a line of roofs.

151. Just a cool view.

152. Looking down at another tower.

153. Along Golden Lane.

154. War machinery outside the White Tower entrance.

155. Candleworks (and brother) downstairs.

156. Better view of the arbalest.

157. Outside; one of the few tourist-free zones.

158. Roofs in Golden Lane.

159. Inside the White Tower; suit of blued armor.

160. Conserved garderobe.

161. Mix-pack of polearms.

162. Your obligatory Bohemian ear-spoon.

163. Volley gun, just left on the floor.

164. Teutonic helm and shoulders. They match, so this is obviously a tier set. :eyeroll:

165. LOLOLOLOL EISENHART.

If you don't get that last caption, see this closeup:

166. Jousting armor with lance rest.

167. Impractical tournament armor.

168. Some samples from the "helmets through the ages" display.

169. More hats.

170. Greathelm ventilated with a nail/spike as per original rather than a modern punch.

171. Mix pack of flails.

172. Protection over visibility gets ridiculous. The opening here is less than half an inch at its widest.

173. Wack-ass puppet in a shop window.

174. More roof contrasts.

175. Looking out into Prague.

176. Overlooking the entrance to the prison.

177. Down into the dungeon.

178. Beheading swords down in the lower chamber.

179. Prisoner cage; the small tower reminds that former days didn't have the infrastructure for a prison-industrial complex, leading to "justice" that had to be brutal because it had to be swift.

180. Two-legged cage in the rafters.

181. Up into freedom.

182. Panorama from the terrace.

183. Push on the Žižkov Tower.

184. Striations from blasting and a sightseeing touring car.

185. Classic old street.

186. Monument and view into Old Town.

This took like all of lunch and 1.5l of Urquell to catch up on -- must rest more often.

video 5: Trollmaterial. Not RttP-fähig, though; needs moar abortions.

This concluded, on to Kafka.

187. What we lost: science and philosophy are seldom so close in the academy, and never in the working world.

188. Even Kafka got to eat. Having worked in support and documentation at various times, it is not surprising that dealing with industrial accidents, and the soul-killing regularity with which people do the stupidest possible things with the machines and processes around them, might have led Kafka's talents down the path that they followed.

189. Out in the Old Town.

190. Back over to the castle.

191. Row of houses, same intersection.

192. Some nifty brick facades.

193. Falling into disrepair.

194. Front of the opera house.

195. Up to the castle again.

196. Old and new in the Jewish Quarter.

197. Christian mosaic on a corner.

198. Crosswise on the main synagogue.

199. Star of David, maybe also with a Jew's hat. The ethnography of that, as with, really, everything, gets wicked complicated.

200. Cathedral side on Old Town square.

201. Across to another church.

202. Underside detail in awesome light.

203. Back of the clock tower.

204. More amazing light on an old house.

205. Church and sky.

206. A former abode of the Kafka family on Old Town square.

207. A suspicious sign. I can read 'big', 'world', and 'booze', but the last character isn't matching to anything. It's got nothing to do with the restaurant advertised, and probably a lot more to do with the co-operated every-booze-in-the-world store next door.

So my ATM card down't work here. Fortunately, M's does, and I have enough dollars and euros left to get to Munich, where I know I can find working cashpoints again. Change $40 tonight -- or takeaway + train, whichever fits better -- and I should be good to go. I'm not being as insanely tight as usual; risk of not going it alone. Not only the expense of two and having to charge back, but eating multiple meals in actual restaurants and paying for tickets to museums I'd already been to. So geht's.

Next up is change, maybe out to Žižkov, and likely carryout, but I need to check train rates first.

12/7 - Prague

We are leaving, as soon as the train pulls out, with enough Kč left to get snacks, maybe, but more importantly enough still-valid euros to get from Vienna to Munich. Hardmode may be hard, but things look to be at least sort of recovering, and if I can't bluster my bank into turning my card back on (worse option: totally cleaned out, though I'm not sure that's possible), I at least brought a brother to mooch off of. Losgehts!

Another potential attraction of central Europe in the winter is that the women of this region remember what proper boots are, which is to say "not goddamn Ugg mukluks". If this is relevant to your interests, as it is to your correspondent's, it may factor into your trip planning -- but it should not dominate it, as that would be just kind of perverse.

Going through the forests of the Czech hinterland really reminds me of home. The building styles are greatly different, the vegetation a little less so, but the dynamics of the trees and undergrowth are pretty much exactly what you find in New England. Climate is what climate is, I guess.

Snow on some of the higher hills now; it's been raining off and on throughout, but this is the first sign of winter-winter so far. The passage from Wien to München is at least around the Alps, so we should see some more on that leg, but we'll see.

- Česká Třebová -

We've gained significant elevation as well as land depth, so the snow is sticking everywhere, lightly frosting the trees, houses, and fueling tanks. A few flakes drift down as the train pauses in the station.

video 6: From the train. Now it's starting to feel like December.

Leaving the city behind, the snow gets thicker. Absolutely everything's overclad in white. We'll see how this develops toward Vienna.

Frozen rivers outide Opatov. It really is like the seasons have changed just like that.

- Adamov -

Wedged into the mountains of Moravia, this is as essential an example of the old East Bloc planned city as you're likely to find. It doesn't fit the landscape, it doesn't show the organic growth patterns of the settlements around it, and the first thing you encounter, coming through the tunnels and passes from Prague, is a huge and decaying factory complex set with a 20-story glass-windowed skyscraper. Impressive, but to what end? There are limits on how far we can force history and human ecology.

- Vienna -

Erfolgreich in Wien. This hotel is gonna be expensive, and I still need to rebook Munich, but my bankcard's working again, we did a killer lunch/dinner, and there's no shortage of bars aroudn the Mozartgasse. Time for some planning, then maybe go out if we aint beat.

208. Look down the Argenteniergasse, hiking in.

209. Oor hotel has its own arms.

210. Blurry relief opposite the Wieden-Bräu brewpub. Heavily recommended if you're in this part of Vienna.

So we saw history made, over beers in a betting parlor: Man Utd fails to qualify for the last 16. The gap is closing.

Spedition Gebr. D GmbH - NBL (part 1)

2011-12-27T10:49:00.003-05:00

12/3 - Beverly

Finally, finally, a chill in the air. Just into December, and the cold is finally starting to nip. Maybe next year it'll be off for the tropics, by contrast, but for now, the cold and the bleak half-light of a northern winter afternoon are 'correct'. I head off to more dead trees and bleaker platforms, to root in the ashes of empires as Europe treads on the brink of the abyss.

I additionally have this a little harder because my brother is along, and this is a lot less 'duo' and more 'escort quest'. We'll see if A-dam's toughened him up by the time we meet up, and there aren't really and real hardmodes in this, but still. I don't Tourleiter, and our personalities are more different than is often given credit. In all likelihood, this will be a hard education in "jibun ni mite, kite, kangaitte" -- but even at this it will be fun.

I nearly bailed on HK last year; feart, sick, and demotivated, but I bit the bullet and did it, and all those fears and uncertainties are now gone. Maybe this is a false dawn, and I don't have the opportunity to do this pro anymore, but I really feel like I'm back in stride. The hills of Prague will kill that right dead, but it's nice to be optimistic.

001. Cracking weathered concrete on the platform. Actually, this is out of line, I'm not going to Poland.

- Logan -

The thing that's uniquely annoying about American airports, relative to the rest of the world, is the incessant noise. Nowhere else beats up travelers with constantly blaring TVs and elevator music. I pack a mp3 player almost exclusively for this purpose, but the Christmas tunes in this bar are too damn loud to be overpowered, even on the highest volume. Get to fuck!

On the PA for the above: "Baby, It's Cold Outside". Appropriate.

002. Dusking skyline into the Financial District.

About two hours to kill, so enough time to check the sked and see that I have less time in A-dam than anticipated, but hit ground in Berlin earlier. I'm still not in Prague before dark, but it's better to get a more concrete sense of how things will go.

About an hour to go, and jamming-out aside, it's getting a little boring. Of course, at this time of year, you can't plan on short lines and relatively little security theater.

25 minutes delay, fuck off. Still got the two hours, but Schipol is a big airport, and I'll probably have to do security again.

There's something uniquely empty about the Mountain Goats' "Game Shows..." when interspersed with loudspeaker calls for passengers rattling around a half-empty airport as evening settles in. Tuning out the muzak does not replace the environment, but it does define distinct sides to things.

- off Newfoundland -

Fuckin Amis. Cheese in the salad, cheese on the pasta, and an extra minibrick of cheese for afters, just because. Instead of making food taste better an sich, we throw more goddamned cheese at it. Way to go.

- over the Dutch coast -

As cool as we have it with the Atlantic washing against our dooryards, it's still special to see the "rose-fingered dawn" coming up over the clouds, in the dead silence as the engines are spun down to reserve power for the final glide in. It's not why I do this, but it's a nice side benefit.

12/4 - Amsterdam

You get this to a certain degree with any densely populated area, but coming in to Amsterdam in the dark (like a 7:30 landing this time of year) is really cool. The geology doesn't really allow for skyscrapers, so you've got this infinite sea of Christmas lights, strewn flat across the ground. Really cool, and it reminded me of the good/bad old days of working in Dresden, where I'd not see the sun all week in the winter: in the fab by 8 and it's not up yet, out at 5 or 6 and it's gone.

Only one sec-check, and a mild one compared to the bollocking at Boston; it's another hour before gate open, and the flight won't leave for another hour and a half. Hurry up and wait...and my bro better hurry up, or I'm gonna lose my shit waiting.

- Berlin -

So he didn't show, and after a nervous hour in the air and some furious texts on the ground, shit got sorted. New plan, new place, seven hours wait.

003. Berlin bleakness.

004. The dying sun under concrete.

The approach to Tegel is wicked cool, apartment blocks unwinding like concrete serpents, the TV tower looming like it's built at the wrong scale, the plane tipping and flowing like you imagine the airlifters did. Not so fun to be going through the hood by Ku-Schu on the bus to the U-bahn and seeing jets come in scraping the roofs, but it's still real, and you can almost understand the suburban/Bild-driven initiative to save the place.

M underestimating his alarm capacity has given our plans a wee bend: by the time he gets in, the Czech border will be closed. So we're going to Dresden, we're gonna hike around Altstadt begging at the sides of the Pragerstrasse for a room (and WLAN), I'm gonna organize a hotel in Prague to replace the one we're gonna bust on, and tomorrow morning we have a 7AM date with the Elbtal. Medetashi medetashi.

In a way, this is good; M gets to see some amazing countryside across the Frisian plain, and then at least the experience of having been in Dresden. It's just stupid fucking expensive. And I? I get to spend too much money wrangling trains, peoplewatch a little in the Hbf, and catch up on writing.

005. Geometry after the rain.

006. Himmel über ~~Berlin~~Washingtonplatz.

007. Across the other way to the Bundestag.

This does avoid trying to get into deepest Žižkov in the dark, at a cost of almost no Prague days, but I'm worried about hoboing it up in Dresden, about what kind of hotel we're likely to fall back to, etc etc etc. This is why duoing is harder than soloing this shit: so much more can go wrong.

That said, technology is awesome. Absent cell phones, what the fuck would I do in this instance? The answer, of course, is "know khed's hotel and flight arrangements and give a call on landing in AMS", but this is far too social. Better to run up stupid bills texting.

Doner for late lunch, cap, and change for tour. To keep occupied, and keep from falling asleep. Pre-Rundfahrt pix:

008. New construction in perfect light.

009. Cool industrial storage cylinders on the north side of the Hbf.

010. TV-tower over older buildings and S-bahn.

011. Across Washingtonplatz to the Kanzleramt.

012. Moar Fernsehturm.

013. Not, maybe, my view of Berlin, but a view, regardless.

014. Ramparts on the floodplain.

015. Front of the Hbf.

In a Ku-damm stop:

016. Bellevue palace, residence of the German head of state, who cuts ribbons and pardons turkeys so the Kanzler can get on with running the country.

I took advantage of the break to move upstairs on the tour bus; better views or at least less-spotty windows. This is supposed to kill about 2 hours, so I might as well not look out of regular bus windows.

017. Ku-damm kitschmarkt view out the front of the bus.

The bus went on, as did the rain.

018. "Dancing Spaghetti" sculpture, actually symbolizing the four former occupation sectors.

019. Chamber music building by the philharmonic.

020. Matthiaskirche, again from the bus.

021. Public sculpture without comment; obviously somehow about love and conflict.

022. Along the back of Potsdamer Platz.

023. Unrestored Wall in place.

video 1: Along the wall. Add your own AggroBerlin-worthy gangsta lyrics.

video 1a: An easier version for doing just that, with the instrumental from Fler's "NDW 2005", at least until GEMA gets it taken down.

024. On the Gendarmemarkt.

025. A little different view by the side.

026. Bus stop over the Christmas market to the theater.

027. Weihnachtsmarkt at the Marienkirche.

028. Winter rain on Unter den Linden.

The guide's English is ok, but those who don't understand German missed a lot, among which were some hideous, hideous puns.

Back at the Hbf, just about 1700. Nachfassung:

029. Original Hummer limo in front of Madame Tussad's.

030. Side of the Brandenburger Tor.

031. Full view along the back side. I don't have a lot of touch points on Berlin at night, mostly because the sun never goes down in the summer. This is a cool side I haven't seen so much.

032. The Bundestag is all blow'd out, since the bus started moving right in the middle of the exposure.

"video" 2: Hideously wrong or hilariously appropriate shadow from a graphic on the front of a stall door in the Hbf men's room. This is a still from a video because the camera doesn't make shutter noises taking them; shutter noises in public bathrooms here, like anywhere else, are excellent ways to proc aggressive and suspicious police attention.

Two hours till warning text and platform. Maybe go get a beer now that I know I'm not perma-cut off at the cashomats, but I need to be alert and watch my cashflow.

I really have to hand it to Beck's. With their "Gold", they have made an American beer, something previously thought impossible for Germans. It's a new cap, but that was also the case for Skol last year, and Beck's doesn't have any hilarious Engyu on the bottle.

There's certainly less hops in it, though. This is like the anti-Jever, particularly since Jever is wicked awesome.

Germany remains Wicked True; hanging about, I've seen dudes in sweatshirts from Carnifex, Blind Guardian, and Dysentery. Ok, the last is kind of a plant, but the point stands.

One hour left, and up on the third level. The wind is a cold bastard, but the second level is getting a little deserted, and there's more traffic up here. Also, I eventually have to climb up to the uppermost deck and flag down an ICE, and "do it now so you're closer later" is the whole reason we're headed for the DD rather than cajoling a closet at the Meringer or Motel 1.

- a random siding in south Brandenburg -

So Dresden was a dumb idea. The train is stuck for the foreseeable. However...this is as cheap as cheap hotels get (see my mania for ferries), and we only need to be in Dresden by 7 AM. And if this isn't possible, we're not in Germany.

As far as positives go, this trip is not short on adventure. The challenge is to actually take on that adventure, rather than yearning hobbitlike for convenience. Running around in circles in the middle of the night sucks for the regular passengers, but us roving Amis have the liberty to rightly consider.

The right consideration, of course, was to stay in one of the many cheap hotels in Berlin and pick up the adventure in the morning, but the more predictable it is, the less adventurous it becomes by definition. I'm not adventurous enough to do homeless in Dresden for real, having lived there, but in a real pinch there is always Cafe Europa, and if there isn't, I know where the field office at least was, and that there aint many cops out that way. Meilen nach Meilen, Rumgang nach Rumgang.

10 gets 1 the Bionade on offer as Entschuldigungsgetränk aint even gratis....or they're only giving away weird flavors.

As soon as the situation clicked over to 'ridiculous', the mood improved noticeably. People smiling, laughing more, stress cleared, even exhaustion cleared. And what cleanses these debuffs? Adventure -- that and a potential 25% rebate.

Seriously, there's not a lot of problems with German trains. But going by mass transit rather than something you think you can directly control does kind of require that adventuring good spirit in any case. Homeless and gearless to Oslo, starving through Sweden, waiting with bated breath in this crisp Nicolas Eve night -- how silent! how still! -- you float on the waves of fate every day and in every way regardless, but here you can see the swells. At least we don't have to change bogies before we turn around....or was that "spoke too soon"?

Ingesamt hat diesen Tag uns beide zu viel gekostet, trotz des Rabattes. Deswegen isses aber nicht "Abenbillig" genannt.

The plan is to hit the DD at "stunde null" -- we'll see if our luck changes on the 5th, because the 4th has been pretty tough so far. Trotz den aktuellen Fahrtrichtung, eastbound and down.

More signs of civilization, but we're going far too fast to read station signs. In a way, of course, this is a good thing.

We thunder through a freightyard. The lights bounce ghosts of structures between the windows. I miss the IGl (wrong approach?) and we are are in Altstadt, skipping it. Wir erreichen Reiseziel Dresden Hauptbahnhof.

033. Christmas tree in the renovated station. No boards, no mud, almost no exposed ironwork -- where is Dresden Hbf and what have you done with it?

Spedition Gebr. D GmbH - introduction

2011-12-27T10:40:00.004-05:00

Between one thing and another, my brother M and I ended up doing a tour of various points in central Europe at the end of 2011. This was a bit of an 'odd couple' act; he needs time to understand his surroundings and hadn't left the US on his own before, and I adjust to different places by osmosis and have the kind of passport that CBP doesn't bother hogging room in with reentry stamps. He doesn't do museums, and I have to be pulled out with ropes and chains; he takes few pictures, and I, as previous chronicles will show, should probably look into one of those ear-mounted coaxial video cameras. He does the "vaca" in "vacation", the sense of empty space, and I do the "ation", where everything is all blastbeat all the time, always in motion.

Despite this, things worked out, and we saw a bunch of cool stuff and had essential European experiences. We got stuck on a rail siding in the middle of the night and wrote out refund forms for the DB, and pitched up at a budget hotel on a wing and a prayer. We did half of Prague zonked out and loaded up, drinking coffee in a tiny cafe run by an aging expat hippie, blowing a last cooldown to get that last mile. We used flowery formal German and punchy umgangsprache to grease shit through in a Viennese Adelhof, and good sense to buy yummy food rather than expensive and probably illegal junk in the Naschmarkt. We camped out in drafty railway stations, and we saw high-stakes championships in footnote sports like snooker and curling as well as do-or-die Champions' League matches and an El Clásico. We ate local food, a lot of Turkish takeout, and more Central Asian stuff than might have been expected. Our pockets were full of rye bread, sausage, hummus, beer caps, and validated subway tickets. We saw the Alps in winter and the sun on the rolling hills of Bavaria, and dawn amid the sandstone bluffs of the Sächsische Schweiz. We drank a lot of beer -- halves with normal meals, nach Mass killing Brotzeit plates around Munich, half-liter bottles just hanging out, and 33s only once, with Uighur plates -- but also a lot of wine and punch standing around Christmas markets in the dark. We saw pagan fires, Christian cathedrals of both species, and both synagogues and the shadows where the black tide of '38 had swept them away. We saw the window, the car, and the beerhall (or, more accurately, the Hilton where it once stood), and perhaps understood things a little better. This was not a perfect trip, but perfection is seldom adventurous, and as long as you're not dead yet, you might as well have some fun with it.

Sofort, how Spedition Gebr. D GmbH undertook this undertaking, in four hopefully-convenient parts:

1 - NBL
2 - Bohemia
3 - Ostmark
4 - Bayern

rapid promotion and the challenges of the top flight

2011-11-22T10:00:00.003-05:00

So as per the labelblag, Pilgrim has gotten picked up by Metal Blade; the reaction from New England has basically been "wow, that was quick". As noted a ways back, this band has potential in buckets, but on the evidence so far, it's difficult to say "yes, they're ready to debut on a major". They have, essentially, a single out, and while Forsaken Man is a wicked good doom single, these guys are getting signed a lot more for potential than for past performance. For comparables with other major-label bands from the area, this is a lot closer to their Chainsaw Sacrifice Ritual than Summon The Spawn.

This is where it gets a little sticky, because the guy assessing that potential and its labelreadiness is Alan Nemtheanga, and it's well known that when he's acting ex cathedra, he's incapable of a wrong opinion. Looking at the dynamics around this, it looks very much like a calculated risk; if Pilgrim do develop to that potential, they'll get sold up rapidly to the main label, and Poison Tongue will get more budget for similar artist-development endeavors. If not, the Cali operation will let one or both sink untraced. Hopefully, they do develop and blow up huge; for confirmation, though, we'll need to wait about two months until Misery Wizard drops/gets leaked.

Joe Stump with Benedictum and DesDemon [Ralph's, Worcester, 11/17/2011]

2011-11-18T15:45:00.002-05:00

Since I was not paying attention as usual, I didn't know that this was a late start -- just figuring that the two touring bands would get slightly longer sets -- so I started out earlier than strictly necessary, but no later than I could really stand sitting around twiddling my thumbs. As I left the sub shop to head for the highway, the precipitation was coming down at weird angles; the air's getting colder, and the time when slick roads and excessive frozen water deposits tempt me to wuss out on excellent shows is coming back around. The slushy rain continued almost all the way out, but didn't stick, and the roads didn't freeze when I eventually came back, and the quality of the bands and performances involved demonstrated the other side of the argument: I'm still good enough, and my car is still good enough, to pretty reliably not get killed in these early mornings, and missing shows will lead to regrets.

In at Ralph's about normal doors, so with about an hour to kill, I sat around, browsed the merch tables, drank more beer than initially anticipated, and did a bonus shot with Yosh, Chris, one of the other bartenders, and the sound guy for being one of the few "regulars" in the building at the time; this show pulled in a lot of people who don't normally go to local shows, and the barkeeps were getting anxious over potential stress and non-acculturated tipping behavior. This also led to some examination of, but nobody actually doing, Cocaine....because said barely-nonpoisonous "energy drink" is no longer produced, and the single can by the bar remains for reasons of historical interest and lulz only. (And, also, the obvious reason that even if it was being actively produced, the thing contains the liquid-meth-emulator potency of about four cans of Red Bull in an equivalent delivery vector, and nobody was at that point either looking to have a heart attack or drunk enough to think that doing this kind of drugs was a good idea.)

DesDemon [5/7]
I hadn't heard of this band, so it was somewhat surprising to see such a high level of production value on their CD packaging....until I saw that it was in Japanese. To be fair, the market for this kind of music is absolutely huge in east Asia: in Korea, Helloween deep cuts just randomly come up on the jukebox, Morifade records are in print ten years on, and Dark Moor gets featured placing in HMV and extensive biographical inserts in the CDs. The band brought that high level to their live performance as well; if they resemble nothing so much as 2002- or 2003-vintage Nightwish, it is humbly offered that this is about the optimum period of Nightwish to clone. They had some sound level issues at the start, particularly with getting Chelsea's mic all the way on and responding to her vocals, and as kind of implied, they didn't really assert an identifiably original sound, but this is a sound that Nightwish isn't exactly using any more, and the execution was pretty kickass. Being from NYC, they'll probably be back up sooner or later, with the response they got, and they'll be worth seeing then as well.

During DesDemon's second or third song, one of my co-workers made a surprise appearance; he'd shown a little interest in the show earlier in the day, and apparently after dinner and a couple Ketel+krans, he decided to head over. Good dude, and he was genuinely into both the music and the scene, but if you were weirded out by the dude in chinos and the button-down shirt going bananas in the first row, yeah, mir schuld.

Benedictum [6/7]
I had wanted to see this band at Wacken a couple years ago (either '07 or '08) and had not been able to, a victim of the scheduling; the two or three songs that made it onto the DVD were straight-up killer, though, so I was well amped to see them. They certainly didn't disappoint, with a high-energy set of technical melodic metal that took things back in more of a thrashier direction. Veronica's vocal attack really suggests early Anthrax for some reason; whether you see the comparable as Neal Turbin doing Spreading... or Joey doing Fistfull..., it's hard to miss, and also indisputable that Benedictum's definitely pushing off in their own direction from that base. Veronica's plenty hot, but sticks to a classical Classen-following metal style rather than crooning, and Pete has some serious chops, but never lets shred become an end over a means in the song structure; Benedictum may not be the most fashionable or best finished metal band around, but they are a damn good one, and this was a killer set. The band appeared to enjoy the nearly packed house and enthusiastic crowd as much as us on the floor dug the band, and a smashing good time was had by all.

I almost picked up Benedictum's first record here as well, but didn't get the opportunity; just the two most current, then. Even as the CD heads towards the dustbin of history, it remains a more attractive proposition than a $20 t-shirt, at least as long as I have to spend a minimum of 90 minutes a day in a steel box not having a coronary at the idiocy of other drivers. Good metal releases rage at shows and bleeds it off on the stereo.

Joe Stump [6/7]
As before, a Joe Stump set follows some time-honored parameters: Jay and Hector lay down some rhythm structures ranging from the basic to the moderately complex, and Joe flips out and flies around wailing on guitar, because he is a mammal and shit, snakeskin on his feet to the contrary. Joe's act is to all intents and purposes nothing but shred, but it's to his and his sidemen's credit that he can make those shred virtues work over a full-set runtime. Those without a significant interest in guitar virtuosity might get more bored with this set faster, but this is heavy metal, and there is always going to be a place for sheer unadulterated guitar wizardry, and as it goes, Joe has it nailed, without any pretense of doing anything but shredding the fuck out. It worked, the audience who remained (down somewhat, but not a whole lot, from the peak at Benedictum) dug the fuck out of it, and it provided a class capstone to the night.

Joe eventually closed up just short of 2 AM, and the bar staff wasted no time shooing us the fuck out the venue. I ended up, through various circumstances, at a diner under 290 with Chris, 40% of Avariel, and also about half the other "regulars" that ended up being in attendance. A good time for sure, but as a result I didn't hit the road back till 3 nor, consequently, get to sleep until 4:30, resulting in a caffeine-undermined two-hour nap before heading in to work. And yet metal, still, is worth it: only by stepping away is there ever anything to regret.

If traffic is not awful and I'm not dead from the holiday, I may make it back out for Scaphism here the day after Thanksgiving, but otherwise it's looking a lot like nothing till after I get back from my turn around the old Hapsburg haunts. Bi'spätz, leutz.

Exhumed with Goatwhore, Havok, and Dysentery [Worcester Palladium, 11/8/2011]

2011-11-17T18:44:00.003-05:00

I got an earlier start out to this one than last night, and turned out to need it: traffic was heavy as shit, and I ended up getting over, in, and through doors just barely in time to get Dysentery's new record off Drew (and crack wise about previous transactions) before he had to go downstairs and strap his bass up. I blame the economy sucking slightly less, and me forgetting how Palladium shows work, not having gone to ones on weeknights in like a year.

Dysentery [6/7]
While this wasn't the best, full-stop, show I've seen from Dysentery ever, it was wicked fucking good, full not only of slams, huge breakdowns, and crushing drops, but also a thick measure of more doctrinaire death metal brutality. They remain the ne plus ultra of slam, at least in-region, and still get kids going completely bananas on the drop, but in a lot of the new stuff, as well as the older songs as they've been reworked and tightened for Internal Devastation, there's a move towards one really huge slam breakdown rather than chaining breakdown to breakdown after each other. Still good stuff, and the record is flat killer; it'll be interesting to see where they go from here, especially with the lineup diverging from Parasitic Extirpation again, which should keep Dystentery focused and active even as Parasitic's shaking off the rust.

A quick merch break here did the obligate merch on the national bands; no tourdates and a lot of Carcass-borrowing logos put me off the Exhumed shirts, but I did get the new record and the far-more-early-Exhumed-than-anyone-really-needs Platter of Splatter comp. I bought Goatwhore's current album out of a perhaps-misplaced sense of duty, not because I especially wanted to hear five to seven attempts to make "Alchemy of the Black Sun Cult" part 2.

Havok [6/7]
I'd missed this band on their previous stops in the region -- I think they were at Ralph's last year, and they may have played somewhere in the area with Razormaze since -- so it was good to finally see them, and welcome on top of that that they're less completely, totally, pro-forma thrash-revival than might otherwise have been dreaded. I'd rather see Witchaven getting this kind of recognition, but at least it's not Bonded By Blood or Warbringer ("in Richtung Slayer, Kreator und Exodus"?! Scheiss drauf, mann, gegenteilig iss die Band ne Fälschung Slayer, Kreator und Exodus!) in this slot again. For those not familiar, Havok set out a straight-ahead set of Big-Four inspired thrash metal, the kind of music you'd get from a band that decided to be influenced mostly by Slayer and Metallica, and stopped listening to either band in 1985. It wasn't terribly original, but the execution was pretty killer, and they further diversified the bill while not deviating too far from the thrash elements in Exhumed that presumably got them onto the package in the first place.

At the end of their set, they introduced "Afterburner" with the usual complaints about karate mosh, and, because this is New England, several people in the crowd immediately marched up the front to throw down for the song in as exaggeratedly antisocial a manner as possible. Not because New England inherently moshes like a dick, with feet flying at head level, but because we are all sardonic trolling bastards up here, who delight in provoking and confusing outsiders whenever possible.

Goatwhore [5.5/7]
As weird as it may seem given how the band have taken Krisiun's slot as mandatory openers on every tour ever, I hadn't seen Goatwhore in a while, and was at least a little interested to see what the deltas were between this performance and the many, many, times I saw them in 2007. The difference appears to be a much stronger commitment to black'n'roll, via the agency of a new record that is mostly composed of attempts to clone the sound, and presumably the success, of "Alchemy of the Black Sun Cult" off A Haunting Curse. That's a good song, still, even today and it was good as delivered here, but it loses a little of its luster when the band plays three other variations on it in the same set. Goatwhore are still a fundamentally decent band, and they still put on a good show, but it's hard to see where the upside is here. They allegedly have a new record coming out next February, but given their level of material to date, and the direction that they took on Clawing Out The Eyes Of God (i.e., cargo-cult black'n'roll that knows where it wants to be but is clueless on how to actually get there), it's difficult to forecast any kind of material change. Goatwhore is going to continue to be, as a RTTP wag put it in advance of this date, "America's Second Billed" for the foreseeable future, and "unable to headline" is probably not where a band that's been touring nationally for five years really wants to be.

It was probably in here that I picked up a bunch of Dysentery kit and apologized to Dave from Havok for not buying his record immediately; I ended up far enough back, and enough people lamered out over the course of Exhumed's set that it wouldn't've gotten crunched, but all they had was vinyl, and not only is that an iffy proposition to survive on the floor at a death metal gig, but I'd gotten quite enough of holding a record sleeve rather than having my hands free the previous night.

Exhumed [7/7]
There are probably points to pick with this, and like Cynic the day before, this is not an especially "high" 7. However, it's undeniable that Exhumed set out a violent, abrasive, and generally very well-performed set of frenetic goregrind that got people thrashing around with appropriate reciprocal violence...and they eventually got around to doing "Matter of Splatter" in the encore (preceded by minimal bullshit), which was enough to put it over the top, at least for the easily-pleased simpleton writing this worthless text. This was a solid, killer, Exhumed set, and if you listened to it and thought the band was just turning the gears, or hadn't knocked all the rust off yet, see Carcass for a prior comparable of how that situation can still stat out to awesomeness.

After picking up Time Is Up as promised, I hit the road; I got back in good order, but picked up some kind of all-destroying lung disease that prevented me from seeing Absu at the weekend; I'm recovered now, but there's not a lot of shows between now and the Winterreise, and fewer still between there and the end of the year. I still need to plan for that...we'll see what shows, if any, are going down in Prague at the start of December.

Cynic with 3 and Scale The Summit [Worcester Palladium, 11/7/2011]

2011-11-08T16:43:00.003-05:00

I thought, getting in, that this was going to be a close-run thing; work and subsequent traffic had put me right up against it over a stressful drive out, following an absent-minded morning where I left the house without my rig. Fortunately, this was a post-metal show that was doable without said rig over my back, and also fortunately, this was a Monday night show with bands that for all their lack of kvltness are still pretty niche: the parking lot was as empty as the queue to get in as the length of the bar. Beer, two 3 records, Carbon-Based Anatomy and a vinyl of Cynic's previous overly-fluffy space-rock EP that I already own for probably too much money, and it was downstairs to stand around and see if Scale The Summit was actually worth spending money on records.

The crowd here bears some mention; not only, as implied, skewing younger than normal shows, it was a lot more diverse (by certain parameters), looking a lot more like the 128-belt tech industry than normal metal shows do. There's definite bases for launching into a rant about girlfriend metal and how this is going to choke the scene dead, but there's zero evidence of this actually happening, and I can see nothing but benefit if more of the nerdy children of engineers get into metal: their future earning power means more disposable income redirected to musicians, and their relative social isolation means that they're more likely to keep doing this shit longer. The hipster Fraktion is of more concern, and more of a threat to co-opt black metal than this music, where you kind of have to be a try-hard at your instrument to even get in the door. Sure, at some points even I wanted to see the front row run over with a bulldozer, but if this audience keeps buying enough merch to keep Cynic, even this Cynic, touring, I can put up with it.

Scale The Summit [6/7]
This is the kind of band that sells guitar tab books at their merch stand. Little more really needs to be said, but they did justify that inclusion with a killer if somewhat retreaded set of instrumental post-metal that sounded like what you'd get out of Pelican if they listened to more modern Cynic and a lot more BTBAM. I'm not one to argue with Joey from 3 about anything, but I seriously take issue with his later classification of this band as 'innovators' alongside Cynic and his own band; "good", yes, and "original", sure, but this general sound is kind of the meat and bones of post-metal/instrumental post-hardcore, and at least from this set I couldn't identify anything that STS was doing to define themselves away from those three obvious forebears. Good music is its own justification, so this ultimately didn't matter to the set, but this is a band you see when they're opening for other bands, and listen to when you're digging deep into this music, not something that like Alaska or ...Fire In Our Throats... is going to get instantly dug out as a snapshot of the sound.

I did go up and buy a record off their stack in here, but only one, and no tab books; I was running out of money, and I don't even play guitar at the Old Skull level, let alone the level where I would be able to read, let alone make use of, something like the Carving Desert Canyons tabs.

3 [6.5/7]
Some derp did the obvious "BUT THERE AR FOUR OF THEM HURR DURR DURR" gag midway through the set. That's not the immediate problem, but it's an associated indicator thereof. This is the first sub-full-marks 3 set I have on record, and it's as much for the loss of their aux percussionist in cutting down to a four-piece as it is for the Opethisms and more conventional shadings on their newer stuff. The "thing" about 3 has always been, like Autumn Above, their facility in crossing back and forth between metal and plainly non-metal styles, but in a bizarre way both axes are diminished in this incarnation of the band: more prog and indie elements mean less metal, and the removal of the crosswise polyrhythms means that those less metal parts are also less challenging and less interesting. What remained was a good set, and the guitar and drum solos were pretty cool, but this band's ceiling is higher than shown here. When they're on, they've still got it, as the rather high arbitrary number up the top shows, but what they have now is not as compelling as it's been in the past.

I hadn't actually listened to them on record for a while, so it was only this morning, listening through The Ghost You Gave To Me in the car, that I was able to confirm that this set is a pretty fair approximation of where 3 actually is musically at present. Good, in that they didn't cut down the band for financial reasons (tour logistics), but bad in that that element is presumably just gone.

Cynic [7/7]
This was not as good a set as at Wacken, probably mostly due to Cynic's modern material not actually being out at that point -- we got demos of some of the Traced... material, but obviously nothing off ReTraced or CBA -- and the constraints of the shorter festival slot....but we didn't get the band reprising Reflections of a Dying World then either. Saying that, the Traced In Air stuff that dominated the set (only "Wheels.." off ReTraced, which benefited from the live presentation, and kind of half of "Integral Birth", showing I was more on track than I knew), as then, matched up well with the Focus material; if Cynic was not a death metal band at that point, as they certainly aren't now on latest recorded evidence, they were at least a prog metal band, and they remain capable of executing that kind of deathed-up prog metal live. Paul had issues with his mic the entire set, and was constantly swapping off guitars, but despite the technical issues and how ethereal and non-metal much of the Carbon Based stuff is, it is real hard to look at this set as a single piece and see the score coming out differently. Yes, they didn't play "Uriboric Forms", but Traced In Air is a better record than is often credited, and Cynic as a band, for someone at all interested in music, is still a must-watch. We don't have the option to go back to 1990 and hang around in Miami dive bars as Cynic lays out progressive death metal too far ahead of the curve for the audience to appreciate; all we can do is watch them march off into the weeds musically, still doing things that the audience doesn't quite get, and hope to hear the echoes of those days gone.

The most significant debit on this show was that it got out at like quarter past eleven; on a school night for a lot of the audience, and with a headliner with ADD (at least according to Paul in closing) and a shallow catalog, this was almost to be expected, but a local opener and a later close would not have gone amiss. As it was, though, I got home shortly after midnight and was able to cycle up again without great difficulty; if the cavalcade of retard tickets stops by six, I should be on my way out to Exhumed.

Hessian with Black Trip, Skull Hammer, and Triforium Dawn [Ralph's, Worcester, 11/3/2011]

2011-11-07T17:32:00.002-05:00

The last show before yet another on-call stand that was going to endanger the schedule, this was also a strong bill in and of itself; the chance to see Hessian again does not go missed lightly. I was a little late getting out of work, but managed to get through the roadworks without much difficulty and in to Ralph's about as Triforium Dawn was finishing setting up. Some days you cut it close, some days you twiddle your thumbs for half an hour. This turned out to be one of the former, probably due to the need to keep things rolling for the headliners, down from Maine on a one-off.

Triforium Dawn [5/7]
I hadn't seen this band before, and if nothing else they were immensely interesting, doing what at times seemed to be a fusion of Final Chapter-era Hypocrisy's rhythm section with Dickinsonian vocals. The concept behind this band, though, is a little better than the execution at this point, as showed clearly in their cover of Emperor's "I Am The Black Wizards"; the abundance of guitar mistakes in the faster first half of the song and their almost complete absence in the second half is a really clear indicator that the weird fit in a lot of places in their originals is down to the guitar parts having an effective speed limit, beyond which the guitarist/vocalist can't play with predictable accuracy. The best performance, musically and vocally, though, came when he put down the axe and was able to concentrate on vocals, with the bass filling in both melody and harmony; this band used to be a four-piece (established by later research), and would probably benefit from getting back to that configuration, at least on the evidence offered here. This was still a good set, and showed off some incredible bass skills, but this band has the immediate potential to become much better.

In here, I went back to get another beer, and the barman had it to hand before I even got belly-up. I remain as ever embarrassingly predictable in my ongoing dedication to being cheap.

Skull Hammer [5.5/7]
Skull Hammer's slightly changed their lineup up since the last time I saw them, bringing in Matt from Seax on the four strings. This, though, didn't make as much of a difference as going from the Champions' PA to the much better Ralph's system; unlike the bands before and after them, Skull Hammer didn't have any problems with the vocals (or anything else) cutting in and out, letting them blast out a quality thrash battering. Nobody's going to accuse this band of doing anything particularly new or groundbreaking any time soon, but their execution isn't to be questioned; there's always going to be an audience at the DIY level for well-delivered straight-ahead thrash metal, and as long as Skull Hammer can keep executing, they're going to continue to satisfy that audience.

About here I did my merch for the night: a couple buttons off Skull Hammer due to already having both of their records, and another shirt from Hessian, which is a little more general-use-friendly than the last one, which I can wear out pretty much only in northern Europe, where standards of how much vagina you can show on a t-shirt are a little looser. Still a cool design, still will probably make it over to next year's Party.San.

Black Trip [5/7]
Most of this set was done instrumental, because the PA was not working; this cut off the vocals almost entirely, but since this was a DIY show, there was still plenty of sound coming out of the cabs and off the drumkit regardless of the micing. Ralph's has had equipment problems in the past, but in retrospect this one is probably down mostly to the band overloading the system: while the PA cut in and out intermittently, it was fine for Skull Hammer and also fine for Hessian. Regardless, the band still executed decently, doing, as previously mentioned, endZone with some tweaks for localization, and Ben continues to establish himself as one of the better and more underrated lead guitarists in eastern New England. I'm not 100% sure that this set would have been notably better with vocals in, but their absence was a definite distraction, and if they're turning up to an extent that habitually overloads the venue's circuits, this is something the band has to work on, if only from the logistics standpoint.

Hessian [6/7]
This was a little more developed of a Hessian set than last time, a little longer, with a few more covers, and some more new originals, but pretty much of a measure. The band's taken it up a notch, but the previous level was pretty damn high, and in some ways there's only so much that you can tinker with this sort of first-principles heavy metal before it mutates into something else entirely. Hessian are continuing to fully explore that space, though, and the next record, at least on the evidence that we got here, will at least be a worthy successor to Old, Wild, and Free. Hopefully, we'll see them down again sometime before that point; they got a strong response here as in Boston, and probably made a few converts who hadn't seen them here back in July. They played right up until the limits, taking an encore or two when offered by the soundboard, but eventually did have to close up; one of the perils of playing licensed establishments.

The bands having closed up, I beat feet back to the east, getting back in time to take a quick nap before work, then have my weekend hogged by production tickets, which meant neither Mayhem nor The Binary Code. No good; hopefully nothing catches on fire tonight before the end of Cynic. Work has to come first, but that doesn't mean I enjoy walking out on good bands.

Impiety with Nachzehrer, Obsidian Tongue, and Blessed Offal [Ralph's, Worcester, 10/20/2011]

2011-10-24T16:15:00.003-04:00

Despite getting stuck in a little late at work and the concern that this would end up packed, I got out in good order and over to Ralph's just about doors. There was a while till the bands started, but with a bill likely to draw this well, better safe than sorry.

Blessed Offal [5.5/7]
While this probably wasn't the best show I've seen from the band, it was probably the best-sounding. The Ralph's sound carried every instrument forward in good balance, really bringing out the blacker elements of their sound, which hasn't come forward as much in the past but was really obvious here. It seemed like they were running out of steam a bit towards the end of the set, but this was a dropoff from 'great' to 'really good'. This band has really established themselves on the last year or so as now one of the legit top Boston death metal bands, and they're only going to keep improving.

Marcus' beat-to-fuck China in front of Impiety's banner captures the dirt-level don't-give-a-fuck-ness of the balance of the bill.

It was about here that I did most of my merch, deciding against the Impiety shirt (in favor of a patch and about the most expensive CD-EP I've ever run across) because it would kick too big a hole in what I had in my wallet. One day, I'm going to remember to get loaded up cashwise before going out to see bands from far away on infrequent tours, but that day was not this time out.

Obsidian Tongue [5.5/7]
This was probably the best set I've seen from this band, as they continue to overcome their limited numbers with creativity and cabinet buildout. There were still a few sticking points that show they don't have all the answers yet, but they were greatly outnumbered by long stretches of the sublime. OT aren't quite yet in the top rank of black metal bands locally -- mostly due to intense competition -- but if any two-piece outfit can get to that level, they will.

Obsidian Tongue jamming with the lights on. Ralph's doesn't always render blue inside.

Having spent less than all my goddamn money on Impiety, I was able to pick up Blessed Offal's CD (having honor, I didn't rip the one that I brought over this summer), and at least pay for an Absu ticket off Nachzehrer, which by the time this is getting written up, is already in the post. Result.

Nachzehrer [6/7]
A strong return to form for Nachzehrer, though for the pessimistic, Nachzehrer playing at all, with all the members they had at the start of the month, might alone have qualified for that. Their thrashing black metal set things up well for Impiety, but more importantly was a kickass outing in its own right, and on any other Metal Thursday would have capped off a good and varied night of the contending definitions of NEBM. They justified their relative place on the bill, as much as that ever means at the local level, but in fairness all the locals were pretty close to this level in setting the bar for our guests.

Nachzeher keeping on rolling.

At this point, I was out of money thanks to grabbing a Hollenthon record off Bill Zebub's distro that I wasn't sure even existed, but Bobby, settling an old debt unprompted, set up my last drink of the night, something heavily alcoholic in a tall glass that didn't end up screwing up the drive home. Double result.

Impiety [7/7]
Of course, you don't haul over from Singapore (or, ok, well now, Italy), even just Shyaithan alone, to play slapdick shows. The stand-in sidemen held up well, and the result was a kickass and undeniably true Impiety set that justified the late hour, the long haul, and the room packed brimfull of damn near everyone in blackish metal in New England. When bands that don't tour play out, you go, because when they do play, they destroy.

Impiety tuning up.

More setup.

Shyaithan faces the audience.

After "Blood Ritual Defamation" led into "Torment In Fire" and the deliciously unlistenable tones of Anton Maiden took over the PA, it was time to split, dead skint but rich in music and experience. That part where I had only three bucks in my pocket prevented me from getting out to GWAR on Friday, but even I don't have infinite resources, and after I discovered that I was confused about the openers (I blame the Impaled guys for lying about the band's origin, Creepsylvania != Bulgaria, so obviously Ghoul != Corpse, despite the marginally similar logo, or maybe this is something that only morons get confused about), the Thursday night show was definitely more of an attraction. After the nine billion Halloween shows this coming weekend, next real gig is probably next Thursday....and then like every night in the first week of November, there's a Palladium show. Hello Mayhem, Cynic, Exhumed, and Anthrax (headliners, in that order, Sun thru Tues and Friday), goodbye cash.

Faces of Bayon with Led To The Grave, Forced Asphyxiation, and Demoralizer [Ralph's, Worcester, 10/13/2011]

2011-10-19T18:21:00.002-04:00

This time around, I successfully had enough other shit to work on that getting out, fed, and over on time involved a pretty minimum amount of latency. I got out to Ralph's shortly after doors, but didn't have to waste a whole ton of time aimlessly browsing the Ragnarok distro table while waiting for the bands to start, and unlike last week, it was only one beer from inside to first notes.

Demoralizer [5.5/7]
If deathcore wasn't already a word -- and, more importantly, a deadly slur -- it would be appropriate to coin it for this band. I hadn't seen Demoralizer before, probably because they tend to play doomier and/or more hardcore bills than I tend to go to, on balance, but they kicked out a solid, chunky set here of violent, aggressive music drawing for both its riffs and intonation from death metal and from hardcore. Juan afterwards compared them to Autopsy, which I can definitely see]: old-styled death metal flavored with punk and grind vitriol. Though the vocalist nearly started a nerd fight bantering with Tony over, of course, Star Trek vs Star Wars, it was mostly the music that stayed violent for this set, early as it was in the night. This was a good performance, though the style isn't one that I'd necessarily go hunting a full bill of, and I'm definitely going to watch out for this band in the future.

On the vital question of Star Wars vs Star Trek, which is on course to be come the irrepressible conflict of the Boston scene, pitting the blue of the Federation science officers against the gray of, um, AT-AT walkers, let's go with that rather than those trade-alliance-space-Fu-Manchu-mandarins from The Phantom Menace, the answer is clear: both lose, because the fortress planet of Iserlohn is composed largely of liquid metal armor that would absorb, then out-radiate, the energy blast of the Death Star (fucking conductor physics, how does it work), and the reconfigurability of its weapons systems, both the Thor's Hammer and the normal gun emplacements, means that it could easily concentrate enough firepower to punch a hole in a Dyson sphere (which if you want to get really technical pretty much need to be made of tissue paper in order to be remotely resource-efficient, but whatever). Your humble author nerdfights for keeps, with the power of embarassingly deep kvltness.

Forced Asphyxiation [6/7]
FA, as entirely expected, smoothed those disputes out by getting the bill back on track with strong, traditional brutal death metal on traditional subjects: weed, corpses, weed, violence, mayhem, and yeah, a few songs about marijuana. For all the "Terrifying Hydroponic Carnage" label they put on their stuff, and for all the ease that people in the scene around here have in referring to any Force Asphyxiation song as being about weed, the signal change in this set was the relative lack of songs about pot (ok, "relative lack" here means "not every song is about weed", but still), despite getting more runtime than I think I've seen from them before. The band's songwriting is developing as surely as their execution; it's not that songs about weed are bad, or that there isn't a lot of room for other death metal subjects to get hackneyed, but constraint in lyrics leads to constraint in music, and the more varied topics Forced Asphyxiation puts into the lyrics, the more variation they're going to put together in the music. This was a good strong performance from a band that has every sign of continuing to develop; they're not quite in the top echelon of NEDM yet, but they're getting there, and the tour that this show kicked off is only going to help.

As mentioned, FA were out on the road for most of 19 days supporting Led To The Grave after this, so I bought a shirt to support and because it was pretty cool. The "most of" in there is because of how LTTG routed the tour; they quite sensibly started with three dates in Worcester, New Bedford, and Boston and will wind it up with a homecoming show out on the Cape; taking advantage of population density and an active local scene to add more dates at the start and end of a tour isn't cheesing, it's smart planning, as the bands get some shakedown days in front of presumably understanding audiences to work the bugs out and get used to playing out every night. The fact that it makes a more impressive itinerary without adding more days of sleeping in a van without showering is a side benefit.

Led To The Grave [5.5/7]
As noted back a bit, doing this tour is a challenge for Led To The Grave that they're going to have to meet eventually in order to decide how they continue as a band. On the evidence of this set, there's every indication that they're at least prepared to make that step up. There were still more than a few moments of "yeah, we've heard this before", but more of "wow, this is really cool" then previously. There is not as much unbroken ground in thrash metal now as there was 20 and 25 years ago, just due to the passage of time, but LTTG did show some signs here of at least differentiating themselves from those replacement-level associations. More of the stuff on the new EP is more different, and just better, than the stuff on their first record, and their live execution continues to improve. The difference between them and their nominal support is not quite as large as the granularity of the arbitrary numbers pasted here suggests, and other people might have marked their cards differently. This was one of the stronger sets I've seen from this band and a good tour kickoff; we'll see where they stand when they get back.

Already having a shirt in my belt and mindful of the giant piles in my closet, and also wanting to get a listen of the band's new stuff, I picked up the Sent To Burn EP from Led To The Grave and through a miscommunication got the Extreme Audio Gangbang split-7" as well. No problem with either of those; the EP is a decent enough record and the split includes not only one of LTTG's better songs, not available elsewhere, but also tracks from Dead Languages in what felt like a better presentation than I've heard from them on CD, and Macerated, whose demo from way back is probably at the bottom of a pile or something. Very cool.

Faces of Bayon [6/7]
In Which A Headliner Plays Four Songs, And Nearly Gets Yelled At For Running Over. As noted previously, Faces of Bayon have a habit of writing extremely long and grindingly heavy tunes; this set was about half of the meaty parts of Heart of the Fire, plus "So Mote It Be" after Matt confirmed that they had the time for one more. One more ten-plus-minute song might have been pushing it a little, but the band pushed it as well; relentlessly solid execution here as on any time I've seen this band. My personal preferences in doom may be coloring perceptions somewhat (first Cathedral record only or you're a false), but it's pretty undeniable that Faces of Bayon consistently produce solid, well-executed, heavy-as-fuck metal whenever given the opportunity. Killer stuff.

Following the close-up of festivities, I dumped my remaining wallet contents on the Ragnarok table, picking up stuff from Dormant and Abaroth, both of which proved their mettle on the drive home. I'm on call now, but tomorrow, Impiety's bringing the wrath to these trembling halls: if I miss out on that, not only do I miss probably my only chance to ever see Impiety, but there might not be a Ralph's left for another Metal Thursday.

Necronomichrist with Summoning Hate, Excrecor, and Ramius [Ralph's, Worcester, 10/6/2011]

2011-10-07T13:11:00.002-04:00

As is apparently becoming usual now that I've cleared a lot of backlog and reduced my load of busywork, I left too early due to a lack of stuff to stay occupied with in the office, flew over the highways due to a lack of traffic and roadworks (at least on the way out, coming back was another story), and got in well ahead of technical doors, nabbing an early beer downstairs and killing some time while staying out of the way of the bands setting up. Round about 9 I actually headed in, picking up another drink; due to the long drive, I tend to monitor consumption per unit time pretty strictly when I'm out here, which indicates how stupid-early I got in. Maybe I need to start playing KoL again to kill time.

Anyway, the bands loaded in and soon enough got started.

Ramius [5/7]
This was apparently their first show ever, and it kinda showed via the lack of material; four songs prepared, total, even if they were pretty good songs. Soundwise, the best description of Ramius is pretty much late-period Death, without the LIMIT BREAK and run through some more modern filters. Their approach to death metal is obviously rooted in said band -- "Omegaton" is substantially cribbed from "Crystal Mountain", which they went on to play immediately after it -- but like most bands just starting out, they don't quite have the chops to handle the whole thing. There's nothing wrong with this, of course -- there's no shame, as a guitarist, in not being Chuck Schuldiner, just as drummers should take no heat for not being Gene Hoglan or bassists for falling short of Steve DiGiorgio -- and it's good to see bands challenging material and styles like this, but they're not quite there yet. Still a good set, despite the limited material and the down tempos on some of "Crystal Mountain", and there's every indication that they'll get better as they gain more experience as a band.

For reference, the band pronounces their name as "RAY-mi-uss" rather than "RAH-mi-oos", probably because unlike their mascot, they're not themselves Lithuanian.

Excrecor [6/7]
Another set, another great performance from Excrecor. Some people may want a caveat here, that the author is a hardcore Hypocrisy fan and his experiences may not match the mean, but I assert that someone who does not dig Carcass, mid-90s Hypocrisy, and occasional 1997-vintage In Flames digressions hammered into a seamless and originally-developed whole is not someone who is even at death metal shows. They did a couple of new ones here, off the record that's still under development, and if the material they brought out here is a representative indication, that's also going to be a solid fucking record, in the vein of Synchronicity if not better. We may have occasional blank spots in our coverage of the full death metal spectrum in New England, but we've got some really good bands in the range that we cover.

In here I picked up my last beer, and a bottle opener from Necronomichrist. My Coctopus one is still holding up pretty well, but since I already had Excrecor's last record and wasn't up for a shirt, there weren't a whole lot of merch options at this show. Eventually, that opener will break unrepairably, and I'll have a backup on hand.

Summoning Hate [6.5/7]
Between the sound, the volume of material, and the total execution, this was one of the best if not the absolute best set that I've seen from Summoning Hate. This is a pretty significant mark given how many good sets I've seen from this band over the last five years, but this was a nice long set of killer material well-delivered, which also saw one of the few legitimate mosh pits (as distinct from "dudes stand in a circle while Dan thrashes around from wall to wall") I've seen at Metal Thursday lately, and some vicious hardcore dancing on the breakdown at the start of "Decimated". They brought out a new one amid some technical difficulties -- first Juan's guitar cables not working, then Juan and Alex keeping in synch with each other and Chris -- but these weren't enough to suppress the mass coolness of that song, let alone drag down the set as a whole. Simply killer.

Perhaps more significant than how good this set was is that Summoning Hate is apparently writing (more) new material, which suggests the possibility of new recordings sometime in the non-distant future. This band is and has been awesome, but they haven't recorded/released anything since they were going by Downfall, and even that's been out of print for years. This is one of the better death metal bands in Boston, but there's not really a lot of evidence that can be presented for that argument without seeing them live.

Necronomichrist [5.5/7]
The band's a little rebalanced since last time, which has had a definite effect on their sound. By going down to one guitar and bringing the keyboards more forward, they now sound less like Vital Remains b-sides and more like turn-of-the-millennium Hypocrisy covering Vital Remains b-sides. Dumb and snide jokes aside, this was a good solid performance, even if listening to that s/t the whole way out colored my impressions of what the band was working from. Necronomichrist is also working on a new record, and the newer stuff that they did here is a clear step both up and forward from the last CD: it's more developed, a little more technical and better-composed, and at least in this presentation significantly less Vital-influenced. As with, really, all of the bands on here, when they bring that one out eventually, it's definitely going to be one to look out for.

Necronomichrist closed up and/or ran out of material around one, and I beat feet for the exits. After waiting through most of "Until The End" for the windscreen to defrost, I headed out for the highway, and that would've been the end of it if I hadn't run into Milo randomly at the McDonald's at the Natick rest stop. I essentially communicated the above on SH's set, though without the frustrated whining about the lack of recorded material. We'll see what they have for that show on the 15th as regards any more new stuff, or fewer fillips on the on they rolled out tonight; I go on call next weekend, but that O'B's show is worth packing the phone and bending the rules.

(Kallathon) with Nachzehrer, Deathamphetamine, Axeman, Katahdin, and Ramlord [PT-109, REDACTED, 10/1/2011]

2011-10-06T17:48:00.002-04:00

Earlier in the day, I'd been hiking around Boston, picking up some stuff from Armageddon and having some interrelated adventures that would have both positive and negative results. The negative was that due to insufficiently hardcore socks or insufficiently repaired boots, I ended up with a two-euro-sized blister on my heel that was on the verge of turning into a two-euro-sized hole in my foot. The positive was that, stopping to fix that on the steps outside the Museum of Science, I ran into two Brits as I was getting up who commented on my Tankard hoodie. This led to a brief exchange of information, not only about the record shop I was coming from, but the gig I was going to, and while Dave and Emma didn't end up coming out, it's always good, in a new city, to find out where the metal stuff is -- and Armageddon and PT-109 (the exact address I didn't provide and can't remember, having forgotten it as soon as I memorized the navigation) are pretty damn good as regards record stores and DIY venues, respectively.

Having gotten back home, I stupidly didn't dress the hole in my foot before heading in again; some of this was time constraints, but a lot of it was just the casual disregard for life and limb that I normally go with. I cached my car and stumped over, and despite the wounded-bird limp, got over well ahead of doors and had to hide out for a bit before eventually holding the door open for Ramlord and getting on inside. Bad timing is worse on DIY venues; most of the time, you're locked out, and then have to not be seen for a couple minutes to avoid pulling aggro.

Eventually, of course, I got in and hanging out, and should have paid for, well, something at this point, but Mike Nachzeher ended up comping me their cassette that was being released at this show and refused my fiver to get in. As with prior incidences, I tried not to let this color show impressions; $5 is not a lot to pay for a show of any kind, especially a good one, and the money I saved here ended up getting recycled towards the unexpected touring bands, so things kind of worked out in the end.

Ramlord [5/7]
I hadn't seen these guys before, but from their merch setup, they have some member overlap with Ultra//Negative, which kind of showed in the music. Looking much more like a crust/punk band than a black metal combo, they smashed out raw, mostly simplified black/crust in line with that punk ethos. This kind of apparent "crossover" would have been impossible a few years ago, but in modern days punks have also figured out what the historians of black metal noticed as soon as Norway started diversifying: black metal is punk rock with an escape hatch, where you can play raw, brutal, violent music, then develop that into more melodic or more rarefied avenues without losing the raw DIY audience that shows up to gigs like these. Ramlord took a couple of these turns, of course, bringing in touches of punk, hardcore, and third-wave in various places, but still of course to good effect. Ramlord is nothing resembling a standard black metal band, bridging several scenes with those elements, but whether you define them as more black metal or more punk, they're a pretty good one, regardless.

That this opinion was shared by the audience here was made obvious by the conditions of their merch stand later; by the time I hit them up, they were out of Ramlord music, so I ended up nabbing an Ultra//Negative tape and a couple Ramlord buttons. Maybe not quite patch-level -- and I'm running out of space regardless -- but still cool.

Katahdin [5.5/7]
Katahdin sounded notably better than previously in this space, even beyond me just being in the building for their whole set. They kept the raw sound of the room, but were either more in tune or more consonant than before, producing a better final effect. They're still short a bassist, but in only a technical sense: Katahdin works fine without a bass player, and I'm pretty sure that nobody actually missed that dimension here.

Axeman [6/7]
I was running low on beer on this point, and thus pretty well oiled, so I wasn't immediately sure which of the several possible Black Twilight Circle bands that had been discussed as late adds to this bill was actually playing. I recognized some of the dudes from Volahn way back, but that's hardly a definitive indicator given the rat's-nest member pool of this group of bands. As it eventually came out, this was Axeman making a rare live return, and the violent, hard-hitting black metal they provided meshed in well with the rest of the bill. There were some comments made about excessive space-rock-isms on some of these bands after the fact, but Axeman's guitar tone didn't sound that way at all: either it wasn't, or the long-suffering PT-109 PA system was hitting critical levels of abuse.

It was wicked packed at this point, and on after, so I wasn't able to go get what ended up being a Volahn tape and patch until much later (after Nachzehrer had stormdetonated like, the entire venue, but that's a story that's coming in a few grafs). Mostly for a lack of Axeman merchandise and a lack of familiarity with the totality of the BTC catalog rather than any special preference; I want to support the bands, I know I like Volahn, and when I eventually manage to corral a working tape player that won't destroy its inputs, I want to have a souvenir of this show that I'll determinatively dig listening to.

Deathamphetamine [5.5/7]
This was about the drunkest and most hardcore set I've seen out of Deathamphetamine, digging back to older material from before my acquaintance with the band as well as more modern stuff. Despite guest spots all over the set from Mr. Evan Williams, they stayed solid and on point for most of the set, including some other special guest appearances from Eric from Katahdin on bass to cover some Poison Idea, and Mike from Nachzehrer on Mel Gibson well, pretty much everywhere. DIY, motherfuckers. The crowd was starting to get earnestly violent as well, aided by more space, allegedly from "tourists" vacating since one BTC band didn't immediately follow the other.

Nachzehrer [5/7]
As befitting the nominal headliners of a release show at a DIY space, Nachzehrer set things off immediately, and to devastatingly chaotic effect; it could be argued that this was maybe too devastating and too chaotic, because Mike's movement, and later the crowd's reaction, generated a host of human and environmental casualties in its wake. This was still decent, despite the loss or effective loss of a couple members at several points, and cabs getting punched over and stuff; full credit to Alex, Paul, and Erik for pulling things through and keeping things locked down under some trying conditions. Nachzehrer have definitely played better than this, and may have preferred this set to go down differently than it did, but they still put up a decent representation of their sound to those people who may have come along for the touring bands despite the circumstances.

Despite the risk of getting branded a tourist, I had to bail at this point; I had to ferry my brother to a race in New Hampshire in five hours, and I was having a tough time standing up thanks to the hole in my foot. It hurt to miss Kallathon, but not as much as soldiering on with a huge undressed wound and crashing into a tree in the morning would have. I limped out, picked up my whip, and headed home for a brief nap before the alarms went off again. About the drama subsequent, I'm keeping mostly schtum as it's none of my goddamned business. What can be observed is not much more than this: there are a multitude of ways to do DIY music. The bands that are successful, either at the DIY level or in breaking out of it, tend to sooner or later get everyone on the same page as regards how the band's going to approach DIY. Those that don't tend to end up on the casualty lists. We'll see which way this Wendepunkt weht.

Next up, Metal Thursday -- and enough training at work tomorrow that I really ought to be able to get that out on schedule. There's still technically a hole in my foot, and I've still got the same boots on, but fucking duct tape, how does it work.

Here Is Your Goddamned Infernal Combustion Archive Link

2011-10-06T17:47:00.001-04:00

I refer to Infernal Combustion far too much for a satirical webzine that published most of its relevant numbers more than a decade ago. This is because Keith Bergman and Mark Tinta put together some awesome writing in an era in which there was a lot less stuff on the internet, and it's had some staying power. This is where that Amon Amarth copypasta comes from, as well as what I'm referring to when I talk about Hypocrisy and Gamma Ray wrecking a hotel room, or attribute certain guidelines on music to King Fowley. ("...[I]f it's not on vinyl and I don't own the band's backpatch, it's probably homosexual!") So go read it, and whine that the Wayback Machine folks have the later, Roadrunner/Blabbermouth-aegised content stored under a different hierarchy.

http://web.archive.org/web/20021210045130/http://www.infernalcombustion.com/index2.htm

Also, if you got here from a misformed phpBB URL wrapper for a picture on a site for Ukranian prostitutes, please leave a comment explaining how that even happens. I get referrer spam all the time, but seldom is it this obviously sketchy or this functionally impossible.

Sapremia with Engorged, Avernus Ortus, and Seax [Ralph's, Worcester, 9/15/2011]

2011-10-05T15:28:00.002-04:00

The program on this Metal Thursday shows that the organizers are true, deep, Motorhead fans; the construction of this program was simple and direct: Seax and death (metal). After the weekend, I wanted to see the aforementioned on a proper stage, and by no way was missing Engorged on probably their last gig ever. So out it was, getting in a little early as the roadworks were less severe than anticipated, and unwinding a little before the bands went on.

Seax [5/7]
What they gained in the larger stage set, they kind of lost in immediacy; Seax handled themselves well, but they've got to work a bit on the logistic side of things. The music was good, but the set wasn't as strongly organized as it should've been, and they got cut off at the end for running over their allotted time. Nevertheless, they got a full death metal crowd screaming along to "High On Metal", and definitely should be satisfied with that result.

Side note: it is by now out of line for anyone, let alone some shithead with an interblag, to use the "p" word in relation to Carmine, but dude, diving down to make faces at the camera where the music doesn't demand it is exactly what Def Leppard were doing when it was coined. Aint sayin, just sayin.

Avernus Ortus [6/7]
We do not have death metal like this in New England, really, and this is why even in the modern internet age where anyone can be influenced by anyone anywhere, bands still need to tour. A.O (Crowleyism not really warranted, but I have to suck up to Ipsissimus somehow) smashed out a direct and ruinous set of punishingly technical brutal death metal, utterly unconcerned with any other style or influence. The various slamming, thrashy, and bestial styles of death we have around in eastern New England are cool and all, but there's also a need, at times, for this kind of direct and uncompromised brutality, and it's good to see that it's still alive and kicking elsewhere in the underground.

Unfortunately, they didn't have anything for sale; they got a good enough response, though, that they'll almost surely be back, and hopefully packing some CDs or shit, because this was seriously good music.

Engorged [6/7]
In addition to being their second gig in 17 years, and their last gig ever, this was also Engorged's inaugural performance in their hometown; there was no Metal Thursday 20 years ago when they were getting started, and though you'd never know it now with how well Ralph's and Oasis are doing, by the existence of the Wheelchair, and the fact that the friggin Palladium is in town, it was at one time impossible to book metal in Worcester. Go fig. Regardless, they of course killed it, perhaps even overtopping their Bobfest set, to a crowd more or less evenly split between old heads who'd followed them to Boston and Newport back in the day, and folk who were in grade school when they broke up. The circle's complete, and if you missed these two sets of essentialist 90's death metal, you've got to be satisfied with Fires of Old and Faces of Bayon -- well, that or spam NWN until they agree to rerelease their demo to shut you the fuck up.

Sapremia [6/7]
Last in line, Sapremia up from Jersey, and as much as Lou talked about the difficulties of following three bands killing it in such strong and diverse ways, they were able to pull it off, with their characteristic grooving brutality following naturally on from Engorged -- as you'd expect from a band of the same era that's been reunited and active for a while, moving forward -- and bridging the gap towards Avernus. This was where the crowd got its most turbulent, Dan at one point getting flipped completely over, and the band got into the act as well, dragging Chris on stage to play some bass (unrehearsed live, but dood was in Zircon, so of course he had it drilled down) on one of their tunes so that Lou could take some turns in the pit between verses. All in all, a killer capstone to an awesome night.

After Sapremia closed up, it didn't feel that late, maybe just because this had only been four bands and I was still in festival mode from Bobfest. Regardless, I split, and true to form it was like 2 in the morning before I got home. Work's been ruinous since, but the worst is temporarily over.

Bobfest day 3 [O'Brien's, Allston, 9/11/2011]

2011-10-05T14:53:00.003-04:00

Whether it was the later start or mini-festival mode, I was up and ready for another day of Bobfest well in time, getting in early to a nearly empty O'B's. The crowds were down on the day; no big headliner, and it was a Sunday show, but still, these were good bands, and those who missed it or didn't stick around for the duration missed out. This is a festival; you pay the same at 2pm as at two minutes to midnight, so you might as well come down early and get value for money.

Seax [5.5/7]
"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:"
It's long been a contention of mine that a performance is a performance, whatever venue it's in, and that such performances are directly comparable across the whole spectrum from arenas to DIY basements. The corollary to that is that bands need to approach every set that way, whether they're headlining the True Stage or opening up for the proverbial puppet show. On this evidence, Seax at least have the latter half of that covered. They were playing to me, Wren, the sound guy, the doorman, the bar staff, and whichever half of Dry Heave happened to be inside at any point in time, but you could have transplanted the band's actual performance out to any stage in the world without it feeling out of place. The self-conscious may wince at this kind of acrobatic, ceaselessly old-school heavy metal being delivered with such passion in such an empty room, but you cannot do this kind of music without that passion, even in this setting, and be able to deliver it with the necessary fire on the open-air stages of the continent. Maybe Wacken isn't waiting for these guys, but if they can keep it up, Headbangers Open Air is definitely a possibility...and probably more what they're aiming at anyways.

It was still a little early, but I took the time now to get dinner rather than waiting around till when the bands would get thicker and more personally interesting. If you're ever at an all-day event at O'Brien's where there's no barbecue (which Born of Fire and the TDB guys like to do when they do longer events), I highly recommend Asia Wok. They do a decent likely-vegan but still carnivore-palatable mapo tofu, and the bar staff will let you chow down inside with your beer as long as you aren't spilling shit everywhere.

Dry Heave [5/7]
I'm not really sure that I can immediately rate hardcore, but this was a decent set to eat dinner to, and pretty good even with that filter. The music was mostly brutal and punchy in the vein of Hatebreed, but still good enough in that frame -- and let's face it, Boston hxc likes brutality and heaviness, so it's not like this is a barrier or anything -- that I was quite bummed that I wasn't able to get ahold of their demo. Maybe I'll see them on a mixed grind bill sometime, maybe I'll actually bestir myself and pick it up off the internet. So geht's.

Jack Burton vs. David Lo Pan [5.5/7]
If you've been ignoring this band because of their somewhat silly name, you're wrong. Fix it immediately. (And if this is the same band that's now billing themselves as Lo Pan, you have even less of an excuse.) JBvDLP was easily the best of the local bands I hadn't heard before on this festival, mixing killer, vicious grindcore with doom and Motorhead touches to awesome and devastating effect. You need to know about this band, and get ahold of their material if/when possible.

Haxen [5.5/7]
Das handelt nix um Schweinshaxe, das ist black metal. (Naja, Schweinshaxe sind ein bisschen Krieg, aber seit Nargaroth ist alles Krieg.) This was a good set that is not worth idiotic German old-man-jokes, in the most part a near-perfect read-down of early Burzum and Emperor that leveraged the slightly messy room sound to good effect. They've got some room to grow, but they've already established their place as one of the cooler black metal bands in eastern New England.

Because I have a general southward limit of about the Pike, or at least the lower 128 belt, as regards going to shows, I'm late to the party on this, but to the extent that anyone outside the region actually reads this, any black metal band from Rhode Island is getting to be categorically worth a second look. Between Haxen, Bog of the Infidel, WIWC, and yes, even Graveside Service (did you know Scott from Xasthur once recorded some bass tracks for them? NO WAY THAT IS A REVELATION THE BAND DOESN'T CEASELESSLY NAMEDROP HIM EVERY TIME THEY'RE MENTIONED ON THE INTERNET), RIBM is much better than any such geographically-limited subscene really has a right to be, and these and other bands from the state deserve the attention they're getting.

Finisher [5.5/7]
Continuing in the line of good sets from good bands I hadn't seen before, Finisher set out a strong performance of grinding, occasionally manic doom metal. They might have blended in a little better the day before, with Elder and Phantom Glue on the program, but appearing here pumped up the diversity on the day for Sunday, which ranging from Seax to Composted and JBvDLP was already pretty wide.

As alluded a while back, I did successfully pass the "dino metal" idea on to Mark. No idea if they'll actually do anything with it, but it's out there.

Composted [6/7]
As should have been expected from a festival performance on this date, Composted stepped it up with their gimmicks, FOR FREEDUMS. This was killer outing of slams, even if the soundboard didn't fully deliver their Hulk Hogan, TA:WP, and Lee Greenwood samples, and the balance of props was just enough to get the band's essence across without impeding the delivery of the music under the time constraints involved. Though they've been playing out less lately, Composted still has it, and will be making weird noises for the foreseeable future.

Witch Tomb [6/7]
Nae Strep Cunt, nae Witch Tomb. Regardless of juvenile bitching about lineup changes, this was a kickass set of Witch Tomb's characteristic alienating black metal, but the distance between this band and other Beckwith Bros. projects (see also Hirudinea) is kind of decreasing. Still, good, and we'll see what develops.

I and probably most other people in the Boston metal scene would rather that these bands all continued on their separate axes, but if what happens instead is a convergence and an eventual resolidification, under that name or something else, of something approaching the Completely Dehumanized-era December Wolves lineup, we would probably be ok with that.

Engorged [6/7]
Back from seventeen years off, without any sign of missing a beat. (Of course, I don't have direct points of comparison, because the last previous show this band played, I was probably standing on a parking lot holding up a trumpet as a shortarse Sicilian DI yelled at me, because that was what I was doing for most nights in the last half of 1994.) Nearly everyone in the band is still active in the scene, of course, but not playing music this remorselessly fast, brutal, and technical, really recapturing that essence of 90's death metal from this region; some grooves foreshadowing slam that probably filtered up from Long Island, and a light blackening in places reminiscent of how Vital was evolving next door in Rhode Island. Absolutely straight-up killer.

Fires of Old [6/7]
I hadn't seen this band in a while, but the differences and changes are all for the positive, much like the metastasis of spikes and barbed-wire on their now nearly-unhandleable main mic stand. Cutting down to a three-piece (and, incidentally, a functional subset of Engorged) has definitely sharpened the sound, and the more Primordial-esque elements are both new and to good strong effect, improving the music and setting them apart from others in New England. The only debit was the set length; festivals do that, but I really need another headlining outing from this band. Kickass.

At this point, it was getting late, I had work in the morning, and a two-mile hike in front of me; I stepped out, giving KYOTY a pass. That hurt, even of itself because this is a good band we're talking about here, but more so because I ended up getting back home shortly after midnight, even with that hike and pounding across the highways. I probably could have stuck, and failing to fails it. Regardless, I got turned around, and back into the swing of work without killing myself. Festival successfully negotiated; onsite accommodations and Thur-Sat might have made it go better, but as noted, that's not the way fests work on this continent....yet.

Bobfest day 2 [O'Brien's, Allston, 9/10/2011]

2011-09-16T11:25:00.001-04:00

Hopelessly late due to work being a bastard, here it is; the second part should be up shortly.

After three iterations, I finally got down for most of Bobfest, missing only the first day out of three. This was, overall, the most impressive package that Wren's put up yet, both in terms of volume and headliner value, but the undercard was cool throughout as well.

Despite various traffic obstructions, I got over and in about on time, and was able to get set up drinking as the first band was getting set up. I still had to watch out due to eventually having to drive rather than stumble back to a pup tent in the railyard or somewhere, but despite the indoor environment, it was still possible to get into festival mode.

Splatter Effect [4.5/7]
I hadn't seen this band before, but they made a cool start to the day's events with some good if moderately pedestrian music, NWOSDM (or Gothenchusetts if you prefer and still have a bug up your ass about that scene five years after it mostly died out) somewhere between Sacrilege and Shadows Fall, slanting more towards the Swedish end of that continuum. They showed off good chops, but the music was more or less pro forma: as they continue to develop, they may do something more unique, but at this point, this is the right slot.

O'Brien's was pretty empty as Splatter Effect started, but people steadily filled in, and there were a decent number in as Blessed Offal got in and started setting up, including the Deceased guys.

Blessed Offal [5.5/7]
This felt like a really short set, but it was still damn cool. It felt in some ways a little more on-point than the last outing I caught from them, but it didn't quite match up to that show as regards feeling and atmosphere. Regardless, this is a good band on a definite upward trajectory, especially as they seem to have finally beaten the lineup-cohesion issues that have plagued Ross in former years.

In between here, I went over to grout up Deceased's merch table, which is an adaptive decision for anyone who likes old metal that's not easily found in physical form elsewhere. We know of old that King has some strong opinions and connections to the days of old, and that manifests itself in a pretty kickass distro box. In addition to the latest Deceased record, I also got Demolition Hammer's entire label discography, Pantera's epically-stupid but historically-important Power Metal, and Halloween's famous Don't Metal With Evil, which I never thought I'd run into a physical copy of, but was somehow re-released by Twilight out of Germany last year. Everything old is new again.

Phantom Glue [5.5/7]
Since the last time, the band's taken a significant step forward, rebalancing to a less exploitative configuration, but vastly more importantly, improving the content and execution of their material. This was a killer set of ear-destroying aggrodoom held back principally by the vocals getting lost now and again, which is kind of a casual risk in a setting like this one where most of the sound is coming straight out of the cabs. As they get into venues that allow better sound balance, and continue to develop their music beyond as well as through sludge-soaked Sabbathisms, they'll likely continue to progress from here.

After Phantom Glue unplugged, I headed out to scare up some food; of the bands on the day, I'd seen Led To The Grave about the most often, and in general their set is about the most uniform, as regards content and execution level, of the bands that I was familiar with. I reckoned that I could run the risk of taking longer than the set break to get fed, confident that whatever sample I ended up getting from LTTG would be representative.

I stumped around the block for a bit in an unsuccessful search for a deli sub, and ended up at Asia Wok, picking up an unchallenging entree that I know I could eat on the sidewalk, and ended up getting nearly all of it down before the band started; if I'd gone in directly, I could have caught their set from the start, especially given how things went Sunday.

Led To The Grave [5/7]
I thought initially on coming in that I'd get about half of LTTG's set, but as it turned out I only missed about a song or two, at least based on the length of the performance I heard relative to other sets. That performance, of course, was an energetic and violent outing of replacement-level thrash metal: this was a good, fun, performance, but just about as good as Led To The Grave gets with their current material. They got good crowd reactions, as good thrashing music necessarily does, but the material here is a clear and critical limiting factor. They're allegedly heading out on tour soon, and will likely get good reactions on the road as well, but the band desperately needs to take a strong step forward in the writing department on their next one, if only to keep pace with their live energy.

Elder [5/7]
If we're relating musical styles to kung fu, Elder is the clear successor to the Black Pyramid school, now that that band has decided to hang it up. This was a good strong doom metal performance, but almost completely within that towering shadow to the degree that in several places I wondered if someone'd just dropped Stormbringer on the stereo. Elder did show some signs of getting out and establishing their own sound, in some cool breaks that were far more hippie than anything I've heard from Black Pyramid, but they need to continue to differentiate themselves beyond claiming this vacated territory.

In here, it was time for a break; I unwound my back outside, and eventually got back in to see a hedge of people around the stage, watching the bassist for Oneiric Realm dance in harem pants.

Kate Hale NR
This certainly was an interesting break, and a good demonstration of the actual art of bellydancing as opposed to the popular conception of it, but if you really want to step away from the ero-ero connotations, "St. James Infirmary" is probably not a song you want to put in the rotation. The mix of metal and traditional tunes was also interesting, if occasionally sacrilegious for some of the audience; again, it's hard to consider this as an absolute success, but it certainly drew interest, and like the incredibly diverse lineup and Star Trek movies playing on the TVs, is yet another element setting Bobfest apart from other indoor DIY fests.

Back to music, and what a "return" it was.

Returner [5.5/7]
Because I do zero research on bands before seeing them (part work demands, part laziness, part wanting to form opinions based solely on what they present live), Returner were the surprise of the festival for me. They blasted the audience with a hammering, killer blend of technical Death-styled extreme metal flavored with traditional doom elements to great result, and hopefully the rest of the audience gave them the support they deserved for getting up from Philly. Their sound wasn't quite finished, but the execution as it was was immensely promising, and the more bands like this that we have in the scene, ultimately, the better.

I cut it kind of tight, but did end up getting their last two records before the end of the night. For those looking to steal records first, then legitimize them after, The Black Notes is a pretty accurate picture of Returner's current sound, and is good enough at a low enough price point to just buy off the band directly sight unseen, you goddamn leech.

Deathamphetamine [5.5/7]
As with the other band containing most of these members a couple hours before, this was a killer set, if a little short, and marked by occasional complaints from Scott about exactly which of the Star Trek movies was playing at the time. The banter also included some insights about corporate decision-making vis-a-vis DIY punk songwriting, but the humor of both was given its real edge by the music, still strongly thrash but with the most punk/hardcore content of any of the bands on this day's bill. Most of that music, of course, coming from their more recent work, which is more suited to the current three-piece lineup; unless I was truly out of it and missed it, they didn't respond to the jerk yelling for "...Hand Axe..".

Given the date involved, the band also did a lot of promo for a certain t-shirt design that I'm not sure is suitable to mention on the internets, the home of the most permanently-offended people ever, especially on the subject in question. LOLOLOL FEDERATION DID 9/11 LOLOLOLOL.

Deceased [6/7]
Deceased, 25 or so years in, are nothing if not consistent with expectations, blasting out a killer-cool set of screaming deathy thrash metal of another era. King absolutely throws himself into the material, executing with the same passion as ever, despite the changes to the band surrounding him, and to the constraints he's now subject to (mostly on stamina, which is why they had to go on exactly here, and no later), and getting a suitably turbulent and amped-up response from the crowd. This was an awesome set -- and then they played "The Premonition". Sue me, I'm a sucker for old shit, especially delivered this well.

Predictably, after Deceased, the Pegelstand went down a little -- though what this meant in real terms is that the people the door was keeping outside on a one-in-one-out basis were mostly allowed in. Yep, O'Brien's hit capacity, and for the most part stayed pretty close to it for the remaining two bands.

Soul Remnants [5.5/7]
Soul Remnants are also starting to develop a reputation for critical consistency; again, as on all other previous occasions, they smashed out a set of tuneful yet punchy death metal grounded in the Swedish scene. This kind of consistency does make it hard to identify a given Soul Remnants set as getting to a level beyond where they've been before, but it also implies a professionalism that when they bring out material that kicks on from here, it'll've been drilled on and perfected to the point that it's also a consistent and persistent step up.

Scaphism [6/7]
Tony may have lost some of the crowd with his banter -- probably impenetrable unless you're familiar with ICP's banter or have lived in southeast Michigan for a while and can infer such -- but the actual musical performance in between calling the audience juggalos was as solid and kickass a Scaphism set as anyone's likely to require. With more time in the headlining slot, they had more room for more RAEP material, but with the set rebalanced to make sure that the focus was on the OTT-brutality aspects of the songs rather than sexual assault as the agent of brutality. Malika's vocals got lost for most of "Tower Deflower", a casualty of the room, and probably the sound board not realizing the second mic needed to be on/balanced for this band, but most of the crowd knew the chorus involved and was able to make up for it. All in all, a good performance, a killer close to the fest, and no nerd gang fights broke out, despite closing with "Slowly Digesting..." while there were still Star Trek movies playing.

Day two wound up, I headed back over the bridges to commute home, worn down but well ready to have another go the next day. I'd've preferred for day two to be a Friday rather than Saturday for work-recharge reasons, and to sleep locally rather than commute, but things work differently in this country....at least for now.

Dreaded Silence with Worldecay, Forever's Fallen Grace, and Lore [Ralph's, Worcester, 9/1/2011]

2011-09-06T16:54:00.003-04:00

I left a little later for this than planned, mostly due to hurricanes and laziness forcing a delay in the last writeup, but still made good time out -- the sun being completely down as the seasons run ever on and the days grow persistently shorter -- and got up to Ralph's while Lore was still setting up.

Lore [5/7]
Lore came out with a cool, aggressive set driven by some badass "lead bass", but throughout could not shed the niggling impression that this was not actually a metal band playing. Their version of "heavy alternative" might stand in well with the diverse likes of current Cynic, Tool, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Ehnahre, or Autumn Above, but the style and relative lack of riffs relative to other elements in the music is the kicker in this largely meaningless classification. Still good, and also still heavy, though, and if they come back on, say, a Boarcorpse bill, they'll fit in better than here leading into three melodic doom bands.

Forever's Fallen Grace [5.5/7]
This was an all-new lineup from FFG relative to the last time, and if it wasn't as ballkickingly crazy, it was also a pretty uniform upgrade in sound and style. Though they're still definitely a doom band, the greater and more structured melodics in that style really hearken back to Arcana XXII, about the last band you'd be expecting to be influential here, provided that you were familiar with doomy Namibian power metal bands in the first place. They closed in style, covering Mercyful Fate, but were complete class all the way through.

Forever's Fallen Grace, in addition to the five playing members, also took a while loading up the stage with styrofoam sculptures, many of which were full of dead plants. The reaction from the Dreaded Silence guys, while FFG was setting all this up, was along these lines: "We can't get upstaged like this. We need someone to find us a shrubbery." I thought briefly about getting up a band to write songs about dinosaurs and encumber the stage with all manner of live, green, plants, but rapidly dismissed the idea as impractical. That would involve practicing, getting at least two other people to buy into the "dino metal" concept, and writing songs that would not-suck to a sufficient degree to get shows. The smarter and more adaptive approach would be to mention this idea to Composted at Bobfest or something and help organize the plants if necessary.

Worldecay [6/7]
Up from Pennsylvania, this combo immediately justified the trip by kicking right into a killer if very short set of classic melodic doom inheriting from Opeth, Katatona, and Daylight Dies, maybe a little bit of Woods or GER for flavor. They did manage to take it in an original direction as well; while they're not completely independent of those influences, the synthesis is definitely original, and promises good things as long as the band can keep it going. The only downer was closing up after five songs; there was probably not a single person in the venue who didn't want them to keep playing, but that's very much all the material they have.

I got a shirt and CD from Worldecay here; I need to follow up and get FFG's record sometime, and Dreaded Silence can wait till their CD release if necessary (their current shirt is cool, but I already have all their recorded material), but I needed to support the touring band, and ended up kind of helping with change in the bargain.

Dreaded Silence [6/7]
The band's recent silence and temporary absence has been to good use; "Ghosts..." apart, this was all new material and all amazing. If Dreaded Silence was from Finland, they'd've never got past Jet Black, Blood Red unsigned, but if the new one is as good on disc as it is live, labels even here will have to pay attention. The music was so new that on one of the songs, Ken needed to go to the "cheat sheet" on his phone for the lyrics, apologizing after the song finished. Of course, the crowd didn't care, one jerk going so far as to yell back "Clip an iPad to the mic stand about it". Music with clean vocals has a lot less room to cover over misremembered lyrics with growls or screams, and the kind of involved, complex texts that you get in this kind of doom are a bigger ask in terms of memorization than lyrics that are more repetitive, so good bands will get cut slack when bringing out new stuff.

On their last song, though, Chris did something that I'm not sure I've ever seen from a local band, which is either telling about the boundaries that metal allows with regard to experimentation, or an even more telling indictment about my inability to pick up time signatures (see also, why I don't play in a band): he counted off in 3 rather than 4 (unless you want to read it as 12/4 in order to be deliberately difficult; yes, it was 4-bar 3/4, but with a 3 feel throughout rather than a triplet 4, and much too slow for that to be realistic), and kept in 3 throughout the song. If your band plays songs in 3, or even 6/8, fire in and give me a smack for not paying attention to other 3-feels, but at least going on the time it felt distinct and different.

For whatever reason, it felt like Dreaded Silence also closed up early, but they closed up regardless, and as the road miles ran on, it was clear that it was about normal; I must just have been less exhausted than normal for whatever reason. Let's hope this also carries forward to Bobfest at the weekend, and I can get the writeups of that turned around a little faster.

Hekseri with Soul Remnants, Cythraul, and Worms In Women and Cattle [PT-109, REDACTED, 8/26/2011]

2011-09-01T19:23:00.002-04:00

First off, apologies to those who had shows on 8/18; I ended up missing all of them through a combination of exhaustion from coming back and going on call a week early. Seriously, there were like seven shows in greater Boston on this date, which is a continuing argument for the scene here being as good or better than the next contender.

This one, though, I was done the on-call shift and on full power, so after loading up after work with essential supplies, it was down into the city and over the back roads to the location-blacked-out-as-per-prior-diktats. I was early and with improperly-sized bills, which caused Meg no little grief, but I was able to get in and set up, and also hand over to Larissa the Voivod live set that I'd been holding for like a month. I apparently ran into Meg indirectly at Party.San as well, likely in the fugue state of either Belphegor/1349 or Watain, darkness and disorientation being at fault for me (at least) not making a positive ID at the time. Cheers!

As per normal DIY expectations, WIWC took some time setting up, but did get going a little after the designated start.

Worms In Women and Cattle [5/7]
WIWC presented a cool take on third-wave black metal as it's come to be in the States, not burying their indie antecedents but also never allowing them to overwhelm the traditional elements. The result was something resembling a recital, through that proverbial darkened glass, of the first two Burzum records. This was cool, but maybe wore a little by the end, the band though definitely has the passion and commitment, as shown here, to take this forward, and it'll be cool to see how they resolve that great contradiction of third-wave BM, to diversify without destroying themselves.

It was probably in here that I had to go downstairs and hit the head, in the process discovering that the **REDACTED** bathrooms, male and female alike, were completely out of toilet paper of equivalent substitutes, which was a lot worse for the women waiting to potentially raid the men's room for TP than it was for us. If you go to a show here and think you may have to crap at some point, Asian rules (squat or pack your own tissues) are in effect; the alternative involves ripping flyers off the wall and having a very sure hand with a faucet.

Cythraul [5.5/7]
This was allegedly Cythraul's last show, and a hell of a way to go out. The sound was a little rough at the start, as might be expected from a five-piece with a lot of clean parts at a DIY space, but this got resolved and the band powered on. Driven principally by the Norwegian second wave with touches of Candlemass and funeral doom (at least as my poor not-listening-to-very-much-doom-at-all ears could pick out), this was a sound that we don't get a lot in this area, which makes it more of a shame if Steve's really decided to fold the tents. The lineup apart from him was completely changed up, at least as I can remember, from the last time I saw this band (admittedly aeons ago), but they did get in a partial point of continuity by bringing up a hooded, robed, and very drunk Cody for assistant vocals on some Mayhem and VON tunes towards the end of the set. Stellar outing, lots of smoke, lots of wreckage -- along every possible axis -- you could ask for little more in closing up a good band at an elite DIY space.

I spoke briefly with Cody after, inside and partially outside, and in the course of such he promised some new Bone Ritual material sometime in the short-term future. I might have gotten a deadline on that at the time, but due to front-loading my beer consumption for homebound-roadblock-related reasons, I don't remember if or when.

Soul Remnants [5.5/7]
Changing gears to death metal, Soul Remnants put up a cool, punchy, and macro-structurally melodic set about par for the course over the couple times I've seen them. Movement in the crowd accelerated a little here, though not up to the levels seen during Hekseri. For those who expected some kind of friction, or that a mostly black-metal audience wouldn't also get into it for good Carcass/ATG-influenced death metal, you need to actually go to shows once in a while, rather than getting your information from books about 20-year-old events in other countries.

As kind of expected, I got pumped for a lot of information on the Euro fests by various people over the course of the night. I answered as best I could, but somehow missed out on the critical summation of Party.San: just like this, but expanded by two orders of magnitude. Whether a DIY space with a 60:40 ratio, no pressure, and moderately-famous dudes like Dave Davidson and Colin Conway just walking in and hanging out like anyone else (ok, so Colin was also playing, but the point stands) is a smaller Party.San, or whether Party.San with every beer held in community trust, as much jury-rigging as official construction, and a community that takes absolutely everyone in is the world's biggest DIY space hangs only on what you're more familiar with.

Hekseri [6/7]
Für den Bodhrann-öffnung is gläubig Odroerir oda so schuld. Daran gewöhnt man sich nur in Deutschland. Though some people didn't get or appreciate said bit (some of the jokes cracked over it were funny, though), the band quickly got the audience back into it with a vicious performance of desperate witching black metal. Hekseri, at least on this outing, is not merely back in 2011, but somewhat better than they were the last time that they were active, before Megan hied off to Germany. The audience was super up for it as well, with room-spanning pits that had a habit of wiping out the mic stands, several of which were improvised anyway, but the band kept going at the heart of the chaos. Only for seven songs, if I read the setlist right, but it was a killer seven songs, and I'm pretty sure no one went home unsatisfied.

Eventually, though, that "went home" bit did have to happen; leaving my last vessel in community trust, I hiked back to my car and went back to my own country by a different route. There were a lot more people at this one than for Ash Borer; if PT-109 continues to gain in popularity, its days are surely numbered. Thus the paradox of DIY spaces (and, really, life): anything good will be gone sooner or later, so enjoy it while it lasts, and hasten its doom.

Suomi Finland Tourkele part 12: Move On!

2011-08-26T17:30:00.003-04:00

8/14 - Berlin

I didn't write anything on the actual trip out due to circumstances; jetzt, Nachfassung.

Around 7:45, Mitzi came by to pick up the Gwynbleidd shirt I'd been holding for her since Thursday. With this, it was all up; down to 5 Rampant Decay buttons out of about 35 buttons, 2 shirts, 90 CDs, and 150 or so stickers imported. I didn't think it'd all go, but it went; a light pack makes a light soul.

It's a bit disappointing to have only seen so few bands -- like 20 at Wacken, and about 10 here -- but I missed those bands having more fun, not sitting in a tent being miserable. In addition to keeping up with the two crews from last year, I hung out with a new huge bunch, and met or brought into the orbits of the above a bunch of other more tenuously-connected people, singletons like myself, going alone for that reason, to meet new folks, swap stories, and go halves on crates of 29. I've seen a lot of great music at festivals, but little that will be a stronger memory than Dennis literally falling over himself laughing as Müller attempts to push an unconscious Knut back into his tent by shoving him in the butt. Fucking balls-off hilarious.

All good things must end, though, and I had to drop my trash, hike to the bus, and then spend the better part of five hours getting back to Berlin. Decompression's hard when the train's overflowing and you're standing in the hall the whole way. Despite the Invalidenstrasse being completely dug up, the hotel was a little better in this regard: shower, shave, real Turkish food, a 6-pack, and Real v. Barca, and I'm almost acclimated to civilization.

8/15 - Berlin

All caught up; now I just need to catch a plane, and hope my pack makes it back ok.

445. Good news on the plane to Dublin. Aer Lingus is really good with legroom, but more is always better.

Dublin

In Dublin I dropped exactly 10 euro on lunch (water, ploughman's, cookie, so not exactly 100% worth it but airport prices), cleared US customs, and got on the plane, all told, with a couple minutes ot spare despite like 3 security checks. The flight across the Atlantic was long enough to listen through the new Motörhead and Social Distortion records a couple times, write up some interview questions based on the experiences of the trip (there's that old-and-getting-consumed-by-work thing again from the first post), watch Jeremy Clarkson call God a loser (a redeeming feature at last, but he obviously isn't a Lordi fan), put together the thankslist before I forgot people, and observe, via the cute education-policy funcionary seated next to me, that it's not uncivilized, among Irish people, to put jam on butter on a scone. I was going to do it anyway, because you eat the calories the airline gives you for free, always, but you never know how embarrassed you're supposed to be. Land in Boston, strap up, negotiate the T, short hike through the rain, pick up the car, and somehow, home again.

Years have passed, closer to the grave; this may be the last such expedition, but this was a good one, and you never go out on a high, because you think "yes, I can do it again" straight on until the point where you fail, and can't. I will continue to go out and do adventurous things until my body breaks down, and Party.San was so good, in environment and music, that I still want to go back, likely pairing it with Summer Breeze rather than Wacken, but Amon Amarth and Forbidden and Scorpions and Henry Rollins have already announced for next year. We'll see how this shakes out: the struggle between Kommerz and DIY is an eternal, and perhaps, a political struggle, but hopefully one that the rebels will win. In the meantime, there's Party.San, our own fortress island hidden in the Thuringian heartland, where only "heavy metal is the law", and if you've got at least one in the set [beer,booze,bratwurst,craic], you'll get hooked up with the rest, from some of the coolest metalheads on the planet, in practically no time at all.

Final stats and points:
--
Wacken day 1: 5 bands, average 5.6/7
Wacken day 2: 8 bands, average 5.69/7
Wacken day 3: 8 bands, average 5.56/7
Wacken total: 21 bands, 118 points, average 5.62/7
--
Party.San day 2: 5 bands, average 6.1/7
Party.San day 3: 3 bands, average 5.83/7
Party.San total: 8 bands, 48 points, average 6/7
--
trip total: 29 bands, 166 points, average 5.72/7

Yes, Party.San was that good, and yes, Wacken was that good, even with the mainstream stuff playing boat anchor. That's an improvement of nearly 0.3 from last year, and even Party.San is up trivially over last year's wicked good results. Even if you're going for the first time, fucking go: the ancillary stuff only gets tiresome enough to weigh down the fucking awesome music when you've been a few times, and are in that demographic that will end up scoring free bratwurst and playing Dosenfußball while cranking Scaphism and Exhumed, which just makes the awesome experience more awesome.

Suomi Finland Tourkele part 11: Heathen Tribes

2011-08-26T17:18:00.002-04:00

8/13 - Schlotheim

And yet here it is, 7AM, I'm done with breakfast, and still writing. Maybe get a beer or two, then go back to camp and sleep on the table; the bill for today is fuckin killer, and I need to make it to and through At The Gates.

As noted, I'm down to the square root of nothing merch-wise. I have half a pack of Bluntface stickers, the Blessed Offal record that I haven't technically managed to move yet, and then it's frickin buttons. I wasn't sure I'd be able to move all I had from FA and the BCS stack, but it's all gone. The sign helped; I'll be bringing my own markers over next time to make sure that goes out for Wednesday/Thursday. However, the sign wouldn't've helped anything if the people at this festival weren't honestly interested in all corners of the scene.

But seriously, I'm moving buttons? Come on.

Yes, seriously. I took the morning slow, hanging out with the Erfurt guys after moving the Blessed Offal record onto one of Timo's dudes (to the girl who got buttonholed by them, if you're reading this, leave comment = get rip of Bone Ritual demo; apologies that I didn't bring next to any black metal stuff over) -- old Broken Hope counts, right? -- and took part in the demolition of a decent bottle of Moskovskaya.

I also met the Chörnyj Woron guys again, by total accident; the same themes from two years ago about the coming end (or not) of the superfests are still relevant. After they left, Mitzi came by, which was more good craic, and eventually someone decided christ, we're all drunk again at 2 in the afternoon, let's go see some bands so our friends won't laugh at us when we get home.

437. Panzerchrist in Festivision.

The lack of focus nearly captures the haze you get when you and your friends are playing soccer on the road to the campsite and need to empty another 5l keg every time the "ball" gets too beat up to use, or dribbled off with by some random dudes...in addition to having a live can in your hand the whole time.

Panzerchrist [5.5/7]
Good, hard-hitting thrash music; a good pick-me-up in the middle of the afternoon. During this set Mitzi ended up rounding up, by chance, most of the rest of the Israeli contingent -- including Omer, who'd been operating for a year under the misapprehension that I was Scottish. This is why it matters what booze you back; in the absence of other information, it's an easy, if often terminally incorrect, ethnic signifier.

438. Panzerchrist gives the crowd a kick in the teeth.

Heidevolk [6/7]
This was really the only other band that I was an-sich motivated to see, so it was really good that I was in the infield and not completely wrecked. Much like on CD, this was a strong but not outstanding performance right up until "Vulgaris Magistralis", at which point people went bananas. Heidevolk is a good band, but that one song is so good, especially live in a festival context, that people may be tempted to write them off as a one-hit wonder.

439. Heidevolk, done with the ooga-chakas and hailing the crowd.

Here, we split; more drinking with various dudes, a bite to eat, and I end up on bench with the dudes from camp, yelling at people to smile. Success rate is about 50%; maybe high for stereotypical growling metalheads, but this is Party.San.

440. Knut demonstrates for Aktion Lächeln.

441. Knut with his glasses off. I promise this isn't Ryan from Autumn Above on the other side of the water.

Time went by, we played more Dosenfußball -- a big reason for the popularity of soccer worldwide is not only that you can play it with a crumpled-up minikeg in the middle of a crowd, but that since you're not allowed to use your hands, you don't have to put down your beer -- and eventually, I went back in for what would end up being my last band of the festival.

Watain [6/7]
Watain war's wert. This set wasn't as good as the one from last year, but you can count on this band to kick ass, always, and that they did.

442. Watain - to the death!

443. The audience by night.

Ground down by another hard-partying day, it was back to the site, to half-hear Enslaved and trade "4AM whiskey/soaked wisdom" with the other old dudes from the group. Haasi'd gotten the Disinter CD he was after, but there was still time and beer to go on about those hard, crystallizing moments when death is right there in front of you, in or out of your control, and if you survive, your fear is what dies. Heavy, maaan....but still, as shown, a hell of a time wrapped around and through.

444. Beersoaked, yet unbowed: left to right, Misha, Haasi, Sven, and me. Here's to comrades, near and far.

Suomi Finland Tourkele part 10: This Is The Song That We Chose To Sing

2011-08-26T17:01:00.002-04:00

8/12 - Schlotheim

There is little cooler than dancing around to Benny Hill, while drinking beer, at 6 in the morning. \m/. Unless, of course, it's having to switch off the music due to complaints from dudes half the campground away....and cranking it up again as soon as they leave.

It's absolutely going to rain today. Only question is when. I will see bands today, too; I'm near out of CDs, and have a flag to throw at Primordial.

In addition to just moving the CDs, I got some reactions as well; people, at least from the Erfurt crew that heard Dennis playing the BCS split from his car, were very impressed not only by the musicianship and songwriting of the bands, but also the professionalism of the recording. Big ups to Eric, Eliot, and any other engineers involved on this end; we have a lot of good recordists as well as good bands in New England, and the former definitely helps the reception of the latter.

Wow. I was wondering why my kutte felt so light (well, besides all the CDs being out of it) and was letting so much wind through; closer inspection reveals that almost all the dirt has been washed out of it. Yeah, it rained that hard on the last day of Wacken. Five years of mud, sweat, and beer, all gone.

It rained a little (knock on wood) and I spent most of the morning drinking with the Terror Blade NRW crew, at the beerwagon, in camp, and around the Flunkyball tourney. Now, in to the fest!

Urgehal [NR]
I only saw the last song from this bunch; pretty decent, all told, and if/when they play somewhere normal closer to home (one would probably suspect PT-109 or another DIY space for this kind of black metal band), it'll be worthwhile checking them out.

Skeletonwitch [5.5/7]
A little short, but a hard-kicking set of American blackened thrash including a couple off the new/forthcoming record. They hit nice and hard, but seemed to clear out a little fast.

410. "Upon Black Wings", Skeletonwitch take the stage.

411. Full band banging.

412. Hero shots "Beyond the Permafrost".

It was in here, or maybe just before, that I got the requisite "bum picture" taken by a few people I ran into before Watain the next night; me napping at the rail between bands, them at the side giving the horns. If you have this pic, send it in. Short sleep + eight hours of drinking + old age = big wreck of a carcass piled against a metal fence.

Desultory [5.5/7]
A crunching, puching set of Swedish thrashing death metal that beat back the rain and kept us tough folk who endured that downpour satisfied. Killer shit; I don't know nearly as much about this band as I ought to, and that's got to get corrected going forward.

413. Desultory steps out.

414. Blasting the crowd.

415. These dudes will never be "Enslaved".

video6: The weather tarp over the bass cabs kicks along with Desultory.

Absu [7/7]
Not perfect, but what a fuckin' set. Tremendous from start to finish; this kind of second-wave mayhem was supposed to be extinct, but not here. For a black metaller of my generation, there's not a whole lot better than "Never Blow Out The Eastern Candle" when played this hard. Amazing.

416. Proscriptor setting up. And yes, he's even better than advertised as a drummer/vocalist, which considering his rep is pretty difficult.

417. Absu assaults the stage.

418. Ezuzu, hero shot.

419. Vis Crom shredding the fuck out.

420. Uh oh, somebody smuggled in a political banner. This one isn't controversial, but security might want to think about what might've been if this'd been a Starry Plough or something.

Primordial [6.5/7]
No Grave Deep Enough
As Rome Burns
Bloodied Yet Unbowed
The Coffin Ships
Empire Falls

Killer set, and as can be seen, nearly all new material. There were some tech problems, and security was up on me about the flag (and also, they didn't close with "Death of the Gods", which would have got it chucked regardless), but as regards actual music this was amazing. Even more new stuff might have made it better, but they kind of have to play "Coffin Ships", and there's only so much time in a festival set. To the bitter end!

421. Alan is wicked pissed.

422. Michael, hero shot.

423. Ciaran ripping.

424. Pol laying it down, and Alan gets in the shot because that's what lead singers do.

425. Simon back behind his kit behind Michael.

426. No stage deep enough.

427. Full band, full stage.

Melechesh [6/7]
The hits keep coming; killer, first-class black metal with their unique Mesopotamian edge. I only saw the first half of this one from the front, the rest from the back, but this was still and absolute class performance following three other absolute class performances.

428. Melechesh setting up.

429. The band invokes the tones of war.

430. Guitar intifadeh.

431. A better shot, if not as low as Paul Proteus' ninja stance.

432. Ashmedi slashing away at the crowd.

433. Bassist on the far side.

434. Full band in full cry.

435. Moloch with his hood off. It lasted one song before being too hot to justify.

436. Hero shot of Ashmedi because he was also there. This camera's too slow to get a two-shot of the guitarists here as well.

When I came off the rail, I thought I'd hit the head, get dinner and a drink, then be back after Belphegor. This turned out not to e the case: it was quickly clear that I was, for lack of an equivalent expression in English, "völlig auseinander". Eight beers (that I can remember), a half pint of vodka, and a couple hits of whiskey between 0700 and 1400, followed by standing on a rail in sun and downpour for the better part of four hours without food or water will do that to you. By the time I was rehydrated -- which also included passing out a decent amount of promo stuff - I'm down to buttons, seriously - to Tank from Zombieslut -- I was about ready to pass out. I saw a bit of Belphegor (decent, but not enough of a sample space to actually rate), picked at some pakora (not working this year), then sacked out. I need to get better at sleeping in the morning and staying up at night.

Suomi Finland Tourkele part 9: Die With A Beer In Your Hand

2011-08-26T16:51:00.002-04:00

8/10 - Bitterfeld

Getting the time and energy to write this all up from the past few days took till the outbound train; Schlotheim is a little further from the main centers of Thuringia, so I need to stay awake. The changes between trains are extremely tight, but as long as we don't get delayed, I should be in Mühlhausen no problem around 1 PM, then over to Schlotheim before the rain gets too bad.

Schlotheim

As it happened, I got in to Party.San, period, by about 1, and with the help of Roger got my tent up. This would've been very difficult to pull off alone; the wind blows constantly from west to east across the airfield, and the ground is hard and dry. This leaves some hope that we'll be able to escape what looks like inevitable state-wide rain tomorrow, but regardless, enemy #1 this year will almost surely be the wind.

405. Hike up to hell.

406. Customizations. This obviously weakens the tent against water, but allows the wind to go right through without the threat of snapping the poles, which was a real danger beforehand, at least early on Wednesday before the campground filled up.

I also customized my tent with some stickers, since the cuts obviously condemned it to the bin once this trip was over, but they blew off almost immediately. This was some hardcore wind. A few of them got salvaged for Müller to paste on the tablecloth protecting the picnic table, but not many.

I ended up tenting on the edge of a larger campsite, which provides greatly enhanced party opportunities. Cheers to Dennis and crew for the hospitality, as well as taking a bunch of promo stuff; I'm still going to have to take time and pass stuff out manually as well as at breakfast and in the infield.

In the afternoon, Roger, Sven and I made an expedition into Schlotheim proper in search of beer and other necessities; we ended up hiking all through this small, cool town, vainly searching for a supermarket that hadn't been plundered of its can beer. After coming up dry at the Netto (they had "Schloss" brand "beer", but the similarity of that name to the "Schlitz" that Americans will recognize is truly serendipitous; Roger I think boosted a can by accident and later gave the verdict "well, it has alcohol in it"), we ended up back at the Edeka across from the bus stop, waiting for 1700 and the truck to get in with the beer. The celebrations when that occurred, and the staff finally wheeled the pallets of 29 in to the store, were a sight to behold.

On the bus back, we gave away a few beers to people who weren't carrying their own slabs, and I gave away a Forced Asphyxiation CD to this guy from Melbourne. I tried to also move the BCS split, but he already had it -- Boston's own Wren had sent it out to him earlier due to a prior acquaintance. Small world -- or maybe just that this is the magnet festival for those with itchy feet and hardened eardrums.

8/11 - Schlotheim

407. This doesn't look good. Walls of gray clouds from horizon to horizon; there's light in the west, but more clouds behind it. Not a good omen for the day.

I'm feeling much better than in Berlin, if a little chilly; we'll see if things pick up after breakfast.

408. View back from the breakfast tent.

Things did pick up; it somehow didn't rain, and over beer after breakfast, Roger introduced me to Mitzi and to Alex (from last year), again, by weird accident, and from there things snowballed. Between the "beergarden" and two campsites, I spent the day drinking with old friends and new, moved damn near everything from the promo stacks, and took part in a couple weird adventures, including holding a sign -- on the back of the sign that moved all those Boarcorpse and Forced Asphyxiation CDs -- for Mitzi's Aktion Rausziehung that was probably an active discouragement to the cause. When a cute girl is going around with a sign advertising free beer for bare tits, it's a lot more effective than when it's carried by a hairy auld kuttenträger. Hitrate was about 2%, not including dudes, most of whom did not meet the mass requirements for "tits" (the one or two who did, of course, did get beer for it, because otherwise it would've been gender discrimination), for anyone planning to try this in the future. Despite being hairy drunk dudes, we had more absolute success with Aktion Lächeln later in the weekend, but any time you sit on a bench and wander in the road drinking beer and barking up spontaneous social interactions with passers-by, it's a success. But especially if there's tits.

409. View up into the east at sunset -- Hammer!

The party later got even more chaotic; it's difficult to have ten people thrashing out in a VW van without it getting to that level. It was probably here that I got that burn putting out someone's cigarette with my palm by accident, but I'm not completely sure I remember. Party fuckin' San.

There were, of course, bands playing on Thursday night, but we weren't keeping track of time, and we didn't hear any bands start, which is normally the trigger to go inside the festival grounds. This was because, as I found out later, the roof blew off the main stage due to the winds, and the Thursday night bands got moved inside to the beertent. I was a little bummed at missing Negura Bunget and Aborted, not to mention how Decapitated was going to work as a revived band, but the sound was allegedly kind of crap -- understandable, since the PA in there was only set up for this roots-rock band Cashley who were supposed to play Saturday morning. Win some, lose some.

Suomi Finland Tourkele part 8: Zwey Seele Wohnen Ach! In Meiner Brust

2011-08-26T16:44:00.002-04:00

8/7 - Wacken

The rain came down so fucking hard through Children of Bodom and Subway To Sally that I was unable to write, and the notebook was so waterlogged as to be unusable until the end of the Berlin phase; three goddamn days out of the jacket, on top of the vents on an old CRT TV to dry out. Things were a little out of order there, but have been rectified in this publication, and despite the wet, I kept going, and got the following shots and observations in.

The rain trailed off in the morning, and I packed up, got breakfast, and packed out.

398. Flaneurisme Wacken; metal hands and windmills in the distance from the breakfast tent.

On the buses out, I got to listen in to some other Wacken experiences; everyone's is different on the surface, but fundamentally the same. We come in, drink heavily, meet new friends and have fun with old ones, grapple with the exigencies of the festival, and yet have a great time seeing awesome bands. Averaging over a sample space of n=70000, this is the Wacken story.

However, Wacken is not so simple. As was more obvious this year than ever, Wacken is a brand underwritten by other brands. It is brought to you by national beer and energy-drink brands, and its distinctive logo is printed on about everything that will carry it. It does promo for punk bands decrying "brand synergy" in synergy with national TV broadcasters. Wacken is a mess of commercialism and self-contradiction....but it is also a mass of 70,000 mostly-anticorporate metalheads, who strain against the bounds of Kommerz to establish their own synthesis of what Wacken should be. In seven years, the meme goes, every molecule in your body is completely replaced. I don't know that I'll be back next year to do the comparison, but I would suspect that the same idea will hold. Already, there is little left of the festival I saw in 2005; "Planet Wacken" exists, but much more as a circumscribed rather than a created space. The DIY tendencies here, weak then, have gotten further limited. Wacken is still a good festival -- this year, musically awesome, maybe even better than '06 -- but it's a huge and commercial festival, and the things that make it cult, rather than just another among German rock festivals, are fading. We'll see if things change, but the only way that things might be altered is if the wave of people drops, then flows crosswise to another festival in defiance of the power law. As long as Wacken sells out, Wacken will keep selling out; a guaranteed max headcount is a recipe for stasis, not change.

Berlin

I got in from Hamburg in decent order and found my way up to the hotel, which was located directly under the main approach to Tegel. Shutting the windows helped cut down the airplane noise, but the primary concern was like always: shower, eats, sleep.

8/8 - Berlin

Like usual, I went out to do laundry, and since I was feeling like crap, decidd to just go to the known-good laundry in Friedenau rather than mess around trying to find one in my own neighborhood. U6->U9, go.

399. Umbau in der Neidstraße. The feeling of the steel I-beams jutting out where balconies used to be just looked cool.

400-402. Some different views of the church, trees, and clouds at the end of Friedrich-Wilhelm-Platz. They're decent as they are, but I'm still not sure the scene eventually came out as intended.

With laundry done, I headed back and ended up sleeping a lot. Sick again.

403. Hotel Bärlin and clouds over Kurt-Schuhmacher-Platz.

404. Dinner. The Lidl by the hotel was out of spoons and forks, so I was restricted to combinations of stuff eatable with a plastic knife. There are people who do this shit, and then there are people who aren't hardcore enough about pack weight.

8/9 - Berlin

Pretty much the entire day needs written off. I was sick to a degree that I hadn't been for a long while; maybe the old hotel, maybe the jet fumes, maybe some strange bug picked up from the nonexistent sanitary environment of the W:O:A. (See previous years' comments about inevitable cholera epidemics.) Regardless, I slept, then got in a lot of groceries to try and retank on nutrients before heading off to another camping weekend. It seemed to kind of work, at least until I woke up coughing at 1 AM. Bad air; it'll heal itself once I get out in the field.

Suomi Finland Tourkele part 7: I'm Never Gonna Shave My Beard

2011-08-26T16:04:00.002-04:00

8/6 - Wacken

Pretty sure I'm not sick any more, at least as sick as I was yesterday. I'm blaming the fucking mayo on breakfast sandwiches and not eating them any more: choccy bread and coffee, like when I was living here for real. After like an hour writing up last night, it's getting on promi time; Crashdïet goes on in about two or three hours, and I've got a new coatful of stickers to move.

Under CDs, things have been about as slow as expected. I've moved nearly all of the Kinzel material, though, due to being extremely aggressive with it. I can't really take that into Party.San, where the expectations of extremeness are much higher; Wormwood Prophecy I might, but I'm likely to clear their remaining discs by the end of the day, and the main issue at Party.San is probably going to be keeping adequate stock of the B C S and FA "core competencies"....that and finding a bad enough dude to take the Blessed Offal record.

While in line for the ATM -- 100 euro Erstärkerung will get me through the day and likely to Berlin -- I ran into one of the guys from Aeon Throne. Unfortunately, I don't know shit about the band, and made the connection (artist pass, stage wristband) too late to pass him any of my promistuff. Oh well; it's all getting out one way or another.

video5: Dudes with a mobile stereo wagon for a personal soundtrack.

That video did a number and a half on the battery. It's been pretty good about regenerating, but it's got to be all normal pictures till I get to Berlin and a wall socket tomorrow.

369. Impromptu metal Scrabble game.

So far, I've done one survey and one live interview with the festival info staff. Maybe, the anticommercial, anti-tech, pro-DIY, pro-local-integration message is getting through, but it'll probably get lost as a view from terminally outside the target audience. Any German festival lives and dies on Germans between 16-25; us oldies and Ausländer are just bonus.

370. Hefeweizen bee trap. This is the second bee I've had drown in a glass at this fest. You'd think that the local population'd evolve an avoidance response, but I guess not.

Notice: as long as the Wacken newspaper follows Bild in page-1-ism, it, like Bild, will not get bought, because it will be presumed to be, like Bild, full of shitty journalism that needs tits on the front cover to foist itself on readers. There are enough good-looking girls just walking around the festival, there's no need to slap T&A on the paper just because.

Bulletbelts are weird. They obviously have bullets in the cartridges, at least most of the time, but the primers are all struck, at least those I've seen so far. A bulletbelt with "unstruck" (empty, of course) primers would be significantly more threatening, provided you're close enough to notice and know anything at all about guns. Ok, stupid idea, strike that.

Moonsorrow [7/7]
"Kivenkantaja" into "Sankarihauta" -- it gets better only with "Jotunheim", and this was an opening set, without a lot of room for a 20-minute song, even one that incredible. This wasn't as magical as '09 in P.SOA, but it's about as good as an opening set is ever gonna get. Two mugs may be making a positive filter, but a lot of beer and an amazing set is kind of standard operating procedure here, even at 11 in the morning.

371. Moonsorrow setting it off.

372. "Kivenkantaja" - simply perfect.

373. The Fenni are still unconquered.

Crashdïet [5.5/7]
No "Ticket to Hell", but we did get "Riot In Everyone", and that they're back at all, and on this stage, is a minor miracle in and of itself. They're still ultimately a Swedish riff on Motley Crue, but they bring enough punk energy in the package to make it work.

374. Crashdïet hit the stage.

375. ...and there's a "Riot In Everyone".

376. Simon takes it to the crowd.

377. The band collects plaudits from the audience.

Now it was time for a long-range quick-switch: out to the Bullhead tent for Onslaught, with a stop en route for food. To avoid undercooked meat problems, like last night, I grabbed a bowl of pasta, and used my Italian racial ability (Devour Pasta, 1 lb/round, the other being Garlic Immunity, Full) to completely scarf it down before getting processed in.

Once inside, I met a dude with a Ramming Speed patch on his rig. He wasn't a huge fan, but described them as "a drunker, less professional version of early Metallica", which I think Ricky, Jonah, and the boys would be very proud of.

Onslaught [7/7]
Not better than Moonsorrow only by a matter of degrees, this was an amazing set that fell, really, under the Heathen Rule: when a band that has no business being back plays an awesome set, you're not allowed to complain about their song selection. All that was missing was "Fight With The Beast", but a full hour of classic Onslaught old and new will get full marks every fucking time.

378. Onslaught smashing out.

379. "Metal Forces" united.

380. Blasting out the thrash...

381. ...with "Power From Hell".

Very little of these came out, but it was wicked awesome, I promise.

Dir En Grey [4/7]
I saw the end of their set while waiting for Knorkator, and like the Japanese, I can't understand why they are "big in kaigai". Give us Barbatos in this slot, or at least Aphasia if you want to go more mainstream. Or Jesus Christ, what the fuck is wrong with Metalucifer? They don't suck any more, and this is a country that goes nuts for HammerFall and Manowar.

Knorkator [6/7]
The pictures don't do this set justice. No still images, and probably no words, really can; Knorkator demands to be seen and heard in full motion to even be identified, let alone appreciated, because any kind of understanding is out of the question. "NDH gone a-trolling", maybe, for the uninitiated, but that doesn't capture half the mayhem that was on offer, from either the band or the audience. At least one crowdsurfer in a fursuit, and another toting a kiddie pool: that's a partial picture right there.

382. Knorkator's, erm, unique stage setup.

383. Alf inside his hamsterwheel.

384. "Der ultimative Mann" ist...blau? (Actually, purple, as I was told by non-colorblind people when they looked at these. Screw your correctly-functioning eyes, I saw what I saw.)

385. Full band, momentarily less crazy.

386. Alf without the camera in the way.

387. Stumpel takes off the gimp hood (the rest of the bodysuit would come off later, of course) for "Buchstabe".

388. Security somewhat unsuccessfully prevents Stumpel from diving into the crowd.

It was about here that we got one of the Teletubbies (see above pic) coming over the rail; he got to dance around for a while before the secus got him out, because the singer of the band on stage was right next to him, doing the exact same thing, in nearly so silly a costume.

389. Alf steps out for some lead vocals.

Mayhem [5/7]
I dunno if I'm seeing them next weekend (answer: no, they weren't playing) or not, but if not, I'll wait to see them inside in the States. The sound was good, but a little too good, a little too precise, to evoke that old feeling. Good to see them, but I need a bigger sample space than the one I got coming back from Knorkator.

The Smack Ballz [3.5/7]
There are some things that don't work on accordion. The intro from "For Whom The Bell Tolls" is one of them, and that this is even mentioned is a strong indicator of the band's compositional sense, or lack thereof. It's hard to lose patience with a beergarden band, but there are gimmicks, and then there are stupid gimmicks. "Average" is probably their ceiling.

Iced Earth [6.5/7]
I went up to check on the video walls in case Matt was singing. Others, I can take or leave (as in '07), but you go in for Barlow Iced Earth. Period. Rather, you went in for Barlow Iced Earth, because this classic, Something-Wicked-trilogy-reviving, vintage Iced Earth set was, at least to current information, Matt's last with the band. It's happened before, but in this case, with this public farewell, it's more likely to be permanent. Darkness and silence, man; another of the heroes of old passes away from the face of the earth, and off into the West.

390. There are the "Burning Times".

391. The only way to actually see the band, really, at this distance.

392. Wide shot; this is about how the infield always is.

393. Brothers of metal, parting the ways.

I had no interest in "Sepultura" with no Cavaleras, and I was tapped out anyways, so I went to grab some more pasta and another beer. Of course, about 10,000 other people were of the same mind.

394. This is what Wacken thinks of modern Sepultura. Everyone's waiting for Avantasia and/or Motörhead, so they're not back in camp, but they're certainly not in the infield.

395. ...and when there is no room in hell, the dead will eat and booze standing up. I eventually found somewhere to sit and write up, but the place is feckin mobbed.

For some reason, I've been running into a lot of Americans today, and numbers of American women completely out of line with prior projections. Good on yees!

With similar sentiments, I found a KTDF flyer that I could actually read, and noted that Funebrarum's playing; good on the band for getting over, and good on the fest that they can cover the flights.

Not pictured: beer mug tattooed on cellulite-filled bare ass, on a table during Hayseed Dixie (again, ratings-wise, pretty much second-verse-same-as-the-first). Half no time to haul out the camera, half concern about potential war crimes charges.

Only in Wacken: I just had a 45-minute conversation in German with a Frisian Dane; my second language, his fourth. We could've swapped languages like kung fu masters in a HK chopsocky flick switching styles (both of us useful in at least four languages, with fairly minimal overlap), but that would've just been stupid.

I'm not putting any ratings on Sepultura, Avantasia, Kreator, Motörhead, Children of Bodom, or Subway to Sally due to extenuating factors: these sets were deliberately "written down" to do promi in the beergarden, and the loss of what I sacrifice to talk to people and pass out CDs and stickers in an environment where they'll get picked up isn't fair to pass on to the end-reader. Good stuff (well, maybe Sepultura less so), but I wasn't listening closely to rate the performances or, more importantly, talk remotely intelligently about them.

I hate to self-promote, but after pushing my death metal allocation on Martin from Norway and talking DIY bass shop with him, I kind of had to pass on at least the name Coelem. Now I actually have to eventually finish that EP. Fuck.

That makes four now that I've seen here at Wacken in the world famous hoops of Celtic FC. That's nearly as popular as Barca and St. Pauli; a certain west of Scotland club should look at where "don't be a dick, seriously" can get you, then take a look at themselves.

In the rain, I met Eric the Swede, who shares my philosophy of life, if a little harder-formulated: you only live once, and you only regret the things you don't do. So do it, and accept whatever comes with no regrets. Drink up, thrash hard; nothing is guaranteed.

396. Still remains; my advertising is getting eyeballs, some way or another, still, two years on down the road.

The clouds opened hardcore as the night wore into the early hours; I ran into Sobo again, along with some other interesting people, and probably gave out an incorrect email address because I was worse for wear and/or drink at the time. It should be noted at this time that despite the debits of facial hair that some people may be aware of from the next week, there are decided benefits as well. Hence ripping off Thundermug for today's post title.

397. The first buses head out in the dark of the morning.

Suomi Finland Tourkele part 6: How Can I Laugh Tomorrow

2011-08-26T15:39:00.002-04:00

8/5 - Wacken

Before the festival, I went on a tear about how tent crime doesn't happen; it does. I got jacked for 70 euro this morning; they nabbed my wallet out of my shorts as I slept, took everything paper, and put it back. This sucked, but more importantly, it wasn't as bad as it could've been. They took no credit cards, no personally-identifying information, and didn't end up taking my passport. Also, I didn't go to the ATM at the end of the night, so the hole in my accounts, while still bad, is not as big as it might have been. Lesson learned: sleep in, or at least on, anything you don't have nailed down.

I worked through the experience hiking to and from the village, then eventually tanking up at a festival ATM. I then got some breakfast and killed half the morning talking to various cool dudes; only an hour or so until the bands go on.

353. The Wacken crest comes to traditional German ornamentation.

With the organizational improvements, you don't really need to go into the village for much, but if you don't, it feels like you're missing part of what makes Wacken Wacken.

Man, is it ever fucking cold. The sun was out for like five minutes and it was burning, but it's probably going to rain again and be terrible all day.

354. Panorama of the infield.

355. Priest's Epitaph banner -- might as well get it now.

I'm set up central, more to the True side, so I can see Ensiferum, then Suicidal direct, then Morbid Angel and still split if it gets too hardcore radikvlt. Come on the bands.

Ensiferum [6/7]
Good set, but not as good as I've seen off them before. There's a lot of playback in that's either new, or that I hadn't noticed, and their Sergio-Leone-isms in that regard can get a little trying, but when the band's in full cry, the sweep and hitting power of their spaghetti viking sound is just huge.

356. Ensiferum banging away on "Twilight Tavern".

I pussed out halfway through and hit the head; the blastbeats were doing a number on my ears from the front row, and inside the toilet cabin, the feeling was like nothing so much as seeing the set from inside a bass drum, the kicks of the speakers coming through the walls, ceiling, and floor. We'll see how much of today I can survive.

Suicidal Tendencies [6/7]
They had some sound issues at the start, but once these were ironed out, they were little short of incredible. This sort of wall-of-sound funk-metal sounds as fresh and vital now as it did in 1987, the execution was great, and Mike's rants/sermons were, at least to me, perfectly pitched and never so long as to detract from the set. Great stuff.

357. Suicidal gets the crowd amped up.

I'm seeing Morbid Angel next weekend (unless they're terrible here, or, as actually happened, I get peer-pressured by a pretty Israeli into drinking all hours with last year's crew of madmen). All the other bands except Priest I've seen. I can take a break, unwind my back, do some promo, and try to figure out how to beat whatever I'm sick from. I suspect it's "diet consists solely of beer and Krakauerwurst", but there's not a ton I can do about that.

Apparently, Killtown (noted last year) is doing a second year; good on them, and as usual, go if you're going to be in the area.

Morbid Angel [5.5/7]
The old shit is still quality, but the new material is pretty consistently inconsistent. They had the good sense to not play "Hardcore Radikult" in public, and "Where The Slime Live" kicked as,, but all in all, I've seen better Morbid Angel sets.

The traveling softcore show is back; they might as well go it, though, as it tends to be only dudes here who take their clothes off in public for free.

Sodom [6/7]
It took them a little whole to get cranked up, but this was a good solid Sodom set, closing in hammering fashion with "Agent Orange" into "Blasphemer". Just absolute fucking wreckage.

I'm still tired, but less sick. Just need to hold on till 11 when Priest finishes, than I can sleep. This assumes my shit isn't completely ransacked when I get back; it hasn't yet in 7 years, bt as the morning showed, there's a first time for everything, and looking flat broke doesn't always work.

358. Blaas of Glory go on a hike through the midway area.

The length of the ATM lines is a clear indicator that something's wrong. Either people are getting looted left and right, like I was this morning, or prices, particularly on drinks, are too high. In this heat, though, it's probably the latter: it's pretty easy to drink thorugh 80 euros of liquids without really trying, especially if you're alternating beer and water to keep hydrated.

Trivium [4/7]
I didn't really listen to As I Lay Dying for several reasons, but I did have to hear Trivium, and they were about as not-very-good as expected. Like Ill Niño last year, these guys are proficient musicians, but they don't write or play interesting stuff with their own band. Oh well; next is HSB, from the infield at least, then Priest from somewhere closer to the front.

359. Trivium, mediocre but ceaselessly grateful. Since so much of Trivium's music is so barely arranged, they feel like a fan band blown up huge; you'd expect this kind of performance and style from an early set on a DIY bill. Matt's enthusiasm for metal, though, is genuine and ceaseless, and you get the feeling that even if they weren't playing, they'd still be here, going bananas for HSB and screaming along to Judas Priest. Next time, please do, and lass die "Musik" liegen.

Heaven Shall Burn [6.5/7]
For 30 minutes -- until Priest came on and did what Judas Priest does -- this was the set of the day. It didn't quite hit the heights of that '07 outing, and the circle pit didn't quite catch that one for size or energy, but this was a ceaseless, remorseless audiovisual pounding that knew not pity nor fear, and shot off more pyro than any other band I've seen with the sun still up. There was a lot of stuff from the last record -- "Combat" is simply fucking immense live, and "The Omen" even bigger than on disc -- but no "Sevastopol" and not, at least as I could hear, "The Weapon That They Fear". Superfans may argue that "Combat" is a better "Weapon", but this ignores the fact that "Weapon" is maybe the best metalcore song ever written, and that what we're arguing about is a fundamentally great set from a genuinely awesome band. They are a giant among midgets (not exactly a God Among Insects) in the universe of contemporaries like AILD and Trivium, who got shoutouts from the stage, but they can also hold their own among the real giants of metal.

360. HSB comes out with a bang.

361. The gulf. It's a full 10 meters, minimum, from the first row to the stage.

362. "Electric Eye" of the BKA on the prowl for pickpockets. It feels a little odd to be watched over by machines of loving grace, constantly in the frame of surveillance drones, but as an American, I can't really say anything so long as our robot death planes are ceaselessly looking down at Pakistan through missile sights.

After HSB wrapped, I caught the end of Morgoth's set; not enough to rate, but much better than I've heard from them on record, and I'm really excited to see them at P.SOA.

363. Manual maintenance. In the hole in the middle of Dirk's belt buckle (the main image on the video wall is from Edguy's "Robin Hood" video) is a hand poking through and tweaking some non-working panels through an access pane. Sure, nerd content, but it's still cool.

364. Catching the scrim banner as it falls.

Judas Priest [6.5/7]
No KK, and no points of comparison for me, but you shouldn't need points of comparison for Judas Priest nailing shit from all over the place out of a 40-year career. Glen still rips, Rob still has all of his mind-blowing range, Scott still has it locked down on drums (and Dave is still locked up, lolz), and Ian Hill still looks like he's about to keel over of old age in the next second, but continues to pound away at the workmanlike bass lines whose perfect execution has kept him in a job for longer than most musicians will work, period. If you name a good Judas Priest song, they probably played it, from "Breaking The Law" on through "Victim of Changes" and "Diamonds and Rust" to "Beyond The Realms of Death", and they pulled out good stuff like "Starbreaker" that more than a few people (yeah, self included, duh) had forgotten they'd even recorded. They made "Turbo Lover" sound good and vital live, and ripped damn near everything to pieces with "Painkiller". The only debit on this set was that it ran for 2 and a half hours; great for ample provision of classics, but not so good for standing up the whole time. Thus, rather than waiting around for "Solar Angels" after "Heading Out To The Highway" (see stupid obsession), I went back to the beergarden, which resulted in the tail end of the set getting run over by Hayseed Dixie.

365. Judas Priest jumps out behind a sea of horns.

366. The Metal God doing "Metal Gods".

367. Judas Priest FIRIN THAR LAZERS

Hayseed Dixie [5/7]
At one point, the singer just stopped between songs to state: "This is the weirdest show we've ever played." Sure was; you never expect, as a band, to be handed the assignment "play over Judas Priest to people who are also trying to listen to them simultaneously", but they adapted well enough given the circumstances, and put out a good set of rebel rock'n'roll that was, at times, due to the strict Appalachian instrumentation, absolutely indistinguishable from Celtic folk. There's a huge political can of worms to be opened when people are holding up Confederate battle flags in a country and at a festival where the emblems of other racist regimes are explicitly banned, but intentionally leaving that aside, this was good music under difficult circumstances.

368. Hayseed Dixie pickin' 'n' grinnin'.

After this, it was off to bed -- due to the crime drama, I was up at like 4 and under heavy stress till like 7, then did a full day of Wacken -- tired, but on the upswing. I shoved my wallet and Paß down my grundle and set some thief traps, but was awakened only, as completely normal, by beer demanding to be recycled against the fence. Back to the routine.

Suomi Finland Tourkele part 5: For This May Be Our Last Quest

2011-08-26T15:23:00.002-04:00

8/3 - København

Apparently, if you miss the train by seconds, your ticket's free. WTF? Ten minutes till the next one, so some catch-up.

So I got lost, but found my way again last night, got in to the hotel in good order, found out the SGD had actually beaten Leverkusen while I was in Finland, and didn't get stabbed watching Rovers lose to FC Kø. All in all, decent, and I still managed to wake up in time to get packed out and onto an early platform.

338. Homeless camp from the hotel.

339. Tribal advertising catches the light.

Drama with breakfast; a homeless guy in what looked like an epileptic fit, surrounded by station security, as I walked into the 7-11 to get my eats. Situation under control; still about 45 till I mount up for Hamburg.

340. Spire against the sky while waiting for the train.

I didn't notice at the time -- because shit gets habitually rounded off and many stores will refuse to give sub-kroner change on cash -- but I got a 50-øre piece in my breakfast change. Denmark complete. Fucking win.

Wacken

Hamburg negotiated with a minimum of drama, it was on and out to the north again. Due to the early start, I got in around 2pm, but A was, as usual, filling up to the edges again. Time for beer and promi!

341. FMB giveaways reach new heights of ridiculousness. I guarantee one of these is getting chucked at someone by the end of the weekend.

The weather, as the cops and the Ärzte fan I took the train up with noted, is far too good for Wacken. Enjoy it while it lasts, because it never does.

video4: 30 seconds of beergarden, day. The plan was to do another of these at night, but it didn't happen.

People are picking up the Nocuous stickers and, predictably, turning them around to try and decide which way is up. If your band's stickers have a high degree of vertical symmetry, contact information can help not only with promotion but with orientation.

342. Blechblos'n gets out the KISS costumes for an encore.

Fucking drunk, let's spread stickers and fuck listening to shit.

It's a little lonely that I'm the only one who sees a Blechblosn member going through the crowd and goes "Prost, geiler Set, alter!" C'mon, DIY, dudes! Metal doesn't work without DIY.

343. An arch made of beer cups. Yes, this is only Wednesday.

8/4 - Wacken

344. "Wacken weather".

It gets easier from here. When there are bands playing, I don't generally drink liter after liter of beer on a pace that my aging carcass can't really handle any more. Last night was tough, but with the rain, I'm getting back into festival mode at last.

"Can" and "should" are different things. Though my kutte is so patched and dust/sweat-clogged as to be nearly watertight, when the downpour hit at breakfast, I still went into the tent after a couple minutes, when it was clear it wasn't just going to pass. It's a long day yet.

345. If there isn't an odalrune and/or an inverted pentagram on the other side of this sign (background), I'm calling bullshit. Dechristianize!

There wasn't. Again, bullshit; compare the town that hosted this year's Party.San. Also, the pic includes about the shortest ATM lines of the festival. Beer prices went up again to 8.50 with deposit (11.50 without), so if you were changing up beer and not-beer and didn't get a break on your water ration, or were drinking cola like an idiot, you could very easily blow through a hundred euros a day just keeping buzzed and hydrated. As a consequence, the queues got gigantic.

I'm not sure that I've seen so many people wearing keffiyehs here before. No idea if this is a trend generally inspired by the Arab spring, a reaction against Islamophobia, or if there are just enough Middle Easterners in Europe now that people are wearing them because their friends've convinced them of the virtues of this kind of scarf in hot weather.

(Further research in Berlin and at Party.San, respectively "many keffiyehs" and "no keffiyehs" samples, indicates that this is probably a trend, and says something about Wacken becoming less cult.)

346. Art rather than advertising; a welcome break from the ads plastered all over practically everything else.

Edelweiss [4/7]
Pretty much a beergarden-grade band; decent AC/DC covers with original German lyrics. Decent, and fit to the beergarden stage, but there's a definite ceiling to this kind of music, and they're right about at it.

Edelweiss played a couple more sets over the course of the festival, but they're ignored; mostly the same quality, and I wasn't especially paying attention.

347. This guy's vest is covered in beer caps.

348. In case you needed any confirmation about how trend Ghost is. They're playing here on the tent stage, but I dunno if I'm seeing them or not. (The answer to that turned out to be 'no'.)

349. Mobile tent. Somebody in a wheelchair is having a hell of a lot of fun at this fest.

To get rained on while holding a Maßbier, while Mambo Kurt covers Europe's "The Final Countdown" on a Würlizer is the essence of Wacken.

Dudes stripping on tables as a brass band covers Gaga's "Poker Face" -- this also is Wacken.

Frei.Wild [5/7]
Decent post-hardcore in German; they've earned their rep here, but it's not enough to get much past the No.Care on my part.

Helloween [6/7]
The heat's boiled off the clouds, so I couldn't last more than a song or two without hydration. Despite the sound cutting completely out whenever they tried to hit into the chorus of "Are You Metal?" they recovered well with a killer rendition of "Eagle Fly Free" and saved the set.

350. Helloween get shit going before the power went out.

Blind Guardian [6/7]
A little cut down by the distance, but this was a classic Guardian set, maybe a little shorter than on their last US tour, but with much the same content.

I was hanging around with a bunch of dudes from Aarhus, but it was only Dennis that went forward for Ozzy. Being inclined to adventure, I had to follow.

351. Crowd panorama.

352. Ozzy's band set up in bad light.

Ozzy [7/7]
Another classic set -- and if not as much Sabbath, this wasn't a Black Sabbath show, and we got a bunch of Ozzy's solo stuff that I never thought I'd see live. The start was better than the end, but this was all kickass cool shit, delivered at a surprisingly high level. Nothing is guaranteed in life; if you missed this, you may have missed Ozzy for the last time.

Suomi Finland Tourkele part 4: Going To Go Back There Some Day

2011-08-26T14:55:00.003-04:00

8/2 - Baltic Sea

As almost expected, I blew out a lace this morning tying up my boots. Since I use six-foot laces overseas for exactly this reason, I was able to pull through and just discard the two-foot short end. That right boot will cut its lace again before all's said and done, and if it does so before packing out at Wacken, I'll just cut the left lace in half and relace both boots out of that one lace rather than going to the backup.

On a more concrete level, I'm repacked for Stockholm->Copenhagen; time to go topside and shoot the inbound leg.

245. The way down to steerage. You climb out of the carpeted, brightly lit decks, and down, down, down into the bowels of the craft.

Feckin robbed at the change desk. The SEK I bought were closer to Danish than their own market rate. Doesn't matter; all I need is a train ticket, and I should have enough to swing that, at least.

246. Swedish coastline through the rails.

247. More coast.

248. Another ship on our track.

About two hours to port; time to rest, then go forward for pics and down for my gear.

249. A small rocky island to the south.

250. Another and a little larger.

251. More islands to the north.

252. You wouldn't think this was salt water, would you? Trees on both flanks.

253. Cool rock formations on the north side.

254. Down into the bow.

255. Ahead along the channel. The stop at Marienhamn is probably necessary for this reason; as can be seen, the approaches to Stockholm are choked with islands, and the channel needs to be tightly scheduled to keep ships from crashing into each other.

256. Into a little bay between islands.

257. Lighthouse on a rock in the channel.

258. Another warning signal to the south.

The washing team was coming through, so I switched sides.

259. High house on the north side.

260. Swans swimming off a private pier.

261. Cable beacon.

262. Windmill idling, probably too far back from the water.

263. Old-style half-timbered house through a gap in the trees.

264. Even out on the rural coast, a full-size pitch cut out of the forest.

265. Car ferry waiting to cross over.

266. Car ferry going across behind us.

267. The trees on this island are having a hard time of it.

268. Birds at anchor.

The sun here is just brutal. I hope I'm not jinxing anything, but I'll be glad to get down to cloudy ol' S-H tomorrow.

269. Another cable post in the channel.

270. An alternate channel off to the south.

271. Between islands on the north side.

272. Another cool light rock.

273. Parasailing rig on the beach.

274. Islands and rips in the water.

275. Passing another small island.

276. Aft panorama, back to the northwest.

We're getting closer to Stockholm, probably half an hour out. It's not worth it to haul my gear up early; pics of the approach, then join the crush like everyone else.

277. The channel closes in.

278. On both sides.

279. This door obviously opens with an Elvish passphrase.

280. Fortifications dug in at the choke point.

281. Observation bunker on the far side.

282. Blockhouse and old customs dock.

283. Car ferry cutting it close.

284. Breakwaters and an older boat.

285. The channel's wide enough here to allow two lanes.

286. Silja Europa, heading the other way.

287. Viking liner crawling through the outbound channel. This is bordering on un-navigable.

288. Old worked-stone dock.

289. Ship through the trees.

290. Bunkers blasted into the cliffside.

291. Ahead towards the suburbs. There was some confusion about this, as my watch is still apparently on Helsinki time, so an hour ahead.

292. This tank farm blends in with the island, which was probably a naval base.

293. This boat was moored a little too tightly at high tide.

294. Another boat clipped to its moorings.

Stockholm

It was a mistake to write "time in Stockholm" down to an hour and a half of pavement-hammering hiking. I'm going to come back, maybe on a winter burndown, and see this town proper. I need to learn Swedish to do so, and a chipped ATM card will help, but it's got to get done.

295. Classical and ultramodern houses side by side.

296. This hotel's celebrating its centennial.

297. Industrial Sweden; up towards a shipyard.

298. Fishing boat and private cat going past us.

299. Statoil tanks down to what looks like a reactor containment dome.

300. Unique fountain sprays off the end of this old breakwater.

301. It's by the Swedish Yacht Club, so they can afford it.

302. Into Stockholm center.

303. Prussian-style manor house.

304. Interesting converted lightship.

305. Closer view of this church complex on Södermalm.

306. Central spires over another ferry.

307. Old decommissioned windmill.

308. Looking up a canal cut.

309. North towards the town center.

310. Coaster tracks and cranes.

311. Central Stockholm, a little closer.

312. Still coming in.

313. Castle on Kastellholmen.

314. A better view of the amusement park.

315. Swedish navy on station.

316. A stable shot into Gamla Stan.

317. Along the southern shore.

The ship was swinging its stern around hard to go up to the slip, so I went down, collected my gear, and prepared for the trip out. Because money was going to be tight -- can't use Swedish ATMs -- this was going to be no bus, all aggressive hiking.

318. Solid bluff beetling over the piers.

319. A right turn won't get you there, but it will get you to the ferry.

320. Yes, seriously. No comment offered, or even really possible.

321. Neat building by the bridge.

322. It seems to grow out of the cliff.

323. Statue at the southern end of Gamla Stan.

324. More of the south side.

325. Awesome alley in Gamla Stan.

326. Another similar, looking up at a clock tower that's getting lost in the light.

327. Church behind some earthmovers.

328. The tower that didn't appear in ~~scene 24~~shot 325.

329. Everything is just awesome.

330. Classic facade.

331. Statues in Kungsträdgården.

332. Pride flag on a cathedral. Welcome to Scandinavia, where the Christians aren't such dicks about it.

333. Up a cool old street.

334. Sculpture plinth by the central subway station.

335. Along the street towards the central station.

336. In the well heading into the central subway stop.

This was, of course, before I found out -- from a map inside -- that Stockholm-C and T-Central are actually a couple blocks apart. Being experienced with poorly-connected rail systems, I did the hike, won the bet I made in the morning -- that the train would cost less than I was able to convert on the ferry -- got a bottle of water with my last dimes, an sat down by the track to write this up. I've got probably just short of 30 SEK in my pocket, just enough to get a snack on the train, but it was a close-run thing, and if the timing didn't come out exactly, I might not have been able to afford it. Everything about Sweden is cool except their cashmachine security.

After a short delay (late train, change tracks, twiddle thumbs), I'm on board for KBH, with space to unwind even after unpacking my crash bag from the main pack to get it into the overhead rail. The window's a little dusty to shoot out of, but that's ok; I should be back sooner or later.

The climb on the train north (out of Stockholm) is hardcore: ear-popping somewhere between the Peak tram and taking off in an actual airplane. The first stop's highly elevated, but it'll get less so as the terrain comes up to meet it. You don't feel the incline, especially in the tunnels, but the train's going so damn fast that you do feel the pressure differential.

This is really no my day: the cheapest sandwiches in the wagon were 38kr to my 34kr in change. Oh well; two packs of basically cheese crackers (if high-class cheese crackers that go $2 per pack) for lunch, and I still have my last beer from the ferry. Good enough to get to Denmark.

It's almost worth staying awake to see the inertia whip the inter-cabin doors open as the train goes around a curve.

I can only infer that the word that sticks out in the description of a chicken sub as "kyllig med ost og creme de salvia" is a false cognate. Otherwise, wtf?

Malmö

337. The city that brought you FUBIK DILDO (now sadly effaced) in 2009 has the same question about that slogan as you did. This also is overlooking the Malmö main train station.