--
Day 3
27 July 2009
København - Hovedstaden - Denmark
100. Anchor near my hotel.
101. What the hell? I can believe a chintzy Irish bar - those are all over the place - but a chintzy Boston Irish bar? With Patriots logos all over the place? I though all Danes were supposed to be Falcons fans? Seriously, WTF is this shit?
102. Humlaebak, y'all. This didn't come out so well due to distance and the dirty train window, but below the main town name on the station sign is the unexplained legend "Louisiana". It makes sense if you know about the modern art museum with the same name, but otherwise, is a complete wtf.
Helsingør - Hovedstaden - Denmark
103. Japan Whisky. When Grant's is just too high-class.
This was just the tip of the iceberg; it seems like every third store in Helsingør is a liquor store specializing in distilled spirits. Some of this is the tourist trade, but some of it - probably most of it - is Swedish tax dodgers. I feel like I'm in Nashua, about to cross back home.
104. City hall.
105. An old side street, with a ton of overgrowing greenery.
106. Half-timbered building.
107. More of the same on an adjoining street. The places I've been in Germany have this history of having been largely burned down in the years 1943-1945, so this kind of medieval construction is missing.
108. Old brick building housing a bar and strip club.
109. Medieval alley.
After this series I got a shirt that did, in fact turn out to be worth the $78 that I dropped on it, serving well throughout the non-metalling parts of this trip, and hunted up some refreshments before hitting the ferry.
Helsingør - Helsingborg passage, Øresund
110. Farewell, Norf-- ...er, Denmark!
111. Kronborg from the sea.
112. The Aurora crossing the other way, with a container ship in the background.
113. Moderate seas even with the crossing wakes all over the place.
Apologies for the hydrography, but I may need this later.
114. Drawing closer to Sweden.
115. It was probably fate that brought me across on the Tycho Brahe.
116. Looping wakes. The ferries do an oblate course through the minimal-distance track so that boats in different directions don't hit each other.
117. Coming in to Helsingborg.
118. Seawall encircling the harborage.
119. Up into town from the dock.
120. Hard strand north of the seawall. It would be very easy to launch from here and cross over to land north of Kronborg while staying out of the ferry track.
Helsingborg - Skåne - Sweden
121. North toward the city hall.
122. Either a castle of the Radisson entrance - maybe both. Wiki says this entrance leads to Kärnan, which in that case I'm sorry I missed.
123. Opposite the above, looking back into the harbor. Shades of Wenceslas in Prague.
124. Old brick-and-timber house.
125. Another one down a sidestreet.
126. A fountain dedicated to Tycho Brahe. (The real one.)
127. Inspired graffiti or Potemkin surveillance?
128. A shot into the Olympia Stadium - go Milk Cows!
129. Neat private houses across from the stadium take 1.
130. Take 2.
131. Take 3.
132. FITBA IS SRS BSNS. Near this was a pole with a sticker on it agitating for a supporters' rights group; "no football without fans", etc, promoting among other things (probably lower ticket prices and the like) that aren't cognates in Svensk, the legalization of fireworks. Maybe it's just me, but while flares in the terraces look cool on TV, it's not nearly as cool to go to a game and get set on fire by some drunken dip with a Roman candle.
133. RKP (Communist) poster advertising an anti-EU demo.
There was a LOT of AFA and communist stickering and postering all over the non-tourist parts of Helsingborg. I'm not sure how "left" this town is relative to the rest of Sweden for the second, but as for the first, you don't generally get anti-Nazi propaganda in places where there are no Nazis. No rightist flyers around, but plenty of antibodies in the bloodstream, as it were.
134. Despite the above, a prominent eagle....installed in 1907, so it's just here to mess with you.
135. The Gustavus Adolfus church behind a neat fountain. There are now a fair number of immigrants in this area, and in the plaza around the church you can see an open-air produce market. Old and new, and coronaries for Lou Dobbs fans.
136. Up a street to a neat building.
Shortly after this, I finally changed some of my spare kroner (DK) into krona (SE) and got set up to move on to Malmö. Just short of 2 1/2 hours in Helsingborg, all of it on my feet, nearly all of it effectively broke, as I didn't change getting off the boat in the hope of getting to an ATM. Of the two that I found, one was broken and the other wouldn't take my card. Oh well. Additionally, in the process of looking for the stadium, I missed my targets by half a mile (north of the stadium and south of the train station) both times. More exercise, and more stuff seen, but all in all a little less than necessary.
Final note: there is a large cemetery next to the Helsingborg hospital. There is a lot of parking lot in between the building and the cemetery wall, but that still can't be encouraging to any patients who happen to look out the window.
En route to Malmö, the last corner of the square that I intend to go around today. I don't have a ton of time in Scandinavia, but this is important, as Malmö keeps getting painted as a ground zero in the supposed "clash of civilizations".
Wikitravel refers to Malmö diplomatically as the "Chicago of Sweden". Other, less polite sources cut the bullshit and just say Malmöstan. The implication is the same (Chicago as a tough town has always been about the Other, first Italian, then black, as a violent criminal): immigrants have taken over Malmö and made it into a slum. I'm going to see exactly where the fact stops and the hysteria starts on this axis. Some of it may be real; you stick a lot of poor, marginalized people with few opportunities together, and you're going to get crime. Most of it probably isn't; just xenophobia and volkserhetzung. Some of it is also probably self-inflicted: Malmö is a pretty large city, and people coming in to that city from less-populated areas may not be aware of the basics - not to talk shit on people because they're different anywhere they might be listening. It's pretty basic, but it's not inborn by any means.
One way or another, Malmö is a ground zero. While it probably isn't Swat, the fact that it's acquired this kind of reputation indicates that Sweden is lagging at integrating its immigrant population.
You cannot have a permanent ethnic underclass forever. Revolution lies that way. The only alternatives for Europe at present are to enhance the opportunities for their new populations and integrate them into the mainstream, accepting that the mainstream is going to change to accomodate them, or send them all the hell home. The second is impossible and really would entail total social collapse at this point; that leaves integration, and while Helsingborg was a lot more diverse than its Danish counterpart and more integrated, at least, than what I'd seen of København, we'll see how things are down the city by the bridge.
A related note: while I was setting up to head out of my hotel this morning, some little German kids were messing around with the foosball table in the lobby, which had white plastic pegs for one team and black plastic pegs for the other. One of them said to the other, "hier spielen die Deutschen gegen die Afrikaner", and it struck me that this may be a problem. Not that kids identify white pegs with white people and black pegs with black people - human-shaped pegs in multi-racial societies, that's going to happen. But the way that the definitions are cut: not "weissen gegen schwarzen", but "Deutschen gegen Afrikaner". To be German, one must be white, and anyone black is an African, regardless of where they've grown up, what their cultural influences are, and what their primary language is. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but you would not, I think, hear American kids setting up the sides the same way.
I was at least right on the booze front: no alcoholic products in the Swedish convenience stores in the train station, while the Danish side has a typical selection for, say, Germany - one that I'm a hell of a lot more comfortable with, personally.
Malmö - Skåne - Sweden
137. On the roof of a warehouse by the station. FUBIK DILDO? What does it even mean? Does it even matter?
138. View from the landward side of the train station, part 1.
139. Part 2.
140. A suspicious banner that smart folks have righteously scribbled on. (Enhanced to show commentary.)
141. View over one of the inlets.
142. This way to København....
143. An odd little statue in a park along the inlets.
144. Donerturm. Ok, it's really called the Turning Torso, but it looks a lot like the donerspiess highrise depicted in Erkan & Stefan's Krass Buch, making its presence in a city allegedly overrun with immigrants pure lulz.
145. Back street in Malmö.
146. Square in Malmö. I think this is the Little Square, ringed by cafes and resturants.
147. Old apothecary building in the main (Big) square.
148. City hall? on the main square.
149. Equestrian statue, same square.
So, Malmöstan? Malmöbad? Hell no. While I didn't get down to the immigrant district, the other sections of the city are far from overrun with "swarthy thugs" or whatnot. No different from any other city; if you don't go looking for "the hood", "the hood" doesn't generally come looking for you. That said, this in itself is evidence of a problem. There was more ethnic diversity visible on the streets and more hijabs per capita in Helsingborg, and given the demographics involved, this is definite evidence of ghettoization, more than expected given my initial touch in Sweden.
For the short term, Malmö is not being taken over by foreigners. If that were the case, there'd be no way that the only kebab stand in the tourist district could get away with frozen pre-chipped kebab. You can get better in the frickin train station in København. But as long as those foreigners are socially walled in, the social problems in their areas will remain.
Someday, I hope to get back here, see more of the city, and get a proper kebab - and see not only Henke and Ali but also Fatima and Astrid playing fitba in these squares, Sweden moving into the future, even if it's different from the past.
150. Ok, so there's one crazy Arab street barker in Malmö. This guy was busking shirts, allegedly to get back to København. C'est vrai? Dinnae matter. Beware of unreal things.
151. Minimum qualification met. Apparently O'Leary's (see top) is a multinational chain; these taps are in the Malmö franchise. I did not get a Sam Adams, but did slug back a Carlsberg while watching the current U19 Euro championship and gawping at the massive amounts of Ray Bourque/Bruins/Pats/Celtics/Sox memorabilia. There was a bunch of Swedish fitba and hockey stuff as well, but if you looked at the back wall instead of the front, you'd think you were on Causeway Street.
Malmö-København passage, Øresund
152. Wind farm at sea. You say "eyesore", I say "sustainable future". Every coastal town should have a bank of these out to sea, and tidal generators around the bases.
153. Illustrating the difficulty of getting a good picture. There were a couple others like this, but this one was the one with the most actual content as opposed to just blurs from the ironwork holding up the car bridge above the train.
154. Container ship southbound.
155. A more normal sea shot, after getting back on land.
Friday, August 21, 2009
European Tour 2009 part 2: Helsingør/Kronborg
--
Day 2
26 July 2009
København - Hovedstaden - Denmark
Plan for today is simple: go north to Helsingør and bang around, investigate the crossing, maybe go over to Sweden, and see about getting another shirt or getting some distro done.
007. Typical Danish street view, including a statue I didn't shoot because there were too many locals around. Note the wide bike lane.
Because I didn't lug my to-this-point-accumulated change out, I couldn't get on the metro till I found a kiosk or something to break a bill at, and by the time I did, I was in "fuck it, I'll just walk to the Hbf" mode. So I did, and took some more pictures en route.
008. Some things are universal. Note that cinema=biografene. So maybe that A&E channel isn't so badly misnamed (provided they carry it here, that is).
009. This is also the name of the street that this old brick apartment house is on.
010. What are these bikes anchored to? Well, air, mostly -- air and communal trust. Either bike theft is uncommon or surplus used bikes are extremely so, so that nobody worries about theirs getting pinched too much. Later trips down this street found that maybe one bike in 10 was actually locked to something.
011. One of the ornaments in the Tivoli garden poking up over a building between me and the city center.
Tip: as alluded to above, if you don't like lines and come, like me, from a country with antiquated credit card security, break your Danish bills into coins as soon and as much as possible, or you will find yourself walking a lot. The ticket machines won't take even a 50-kroner bill, which is absurdly inconvenient. I didn't mind much, because I'm used to city hiking, and this turned out as a great way to toughen up for Wacken and Party.San, but those whose vacation plans don't include hauling a 40-pound pack over the countryside may want to avoid it.
Also tip: if you're going anywhere north of København on the Zealand coast, say you're going to Helsingborg. I saved about 25k by letting the teller win that argument, which is the cost of a beer (at retail, not the bar) and a rant about overspecificity in subsidy. Böshet.
Helsingør - Hovedstaden - Denmark
012. Side of the train station, Helsingør.
013. Plaza between the trains and the sea.
014. Oh, those Danes and their porno! These statues are, of course, completely innocent, but the abovementioned gas station also had a HUGE rack (floor to about 2m up, meter wide) of ridiculous hardcore porn DVDs browsable by anyone and averaging about $15 per. They are really serious about this "no undue regulation of pornography" business.
015. WWII monument, Helsingør.
016. Across to Sweden.
017. Same shot, full push. This isn't just possible, it's practical. The sea is pretty calm, even with heavy ferry traffic east-west and moderate container traffic north-south. Now to find some kayaks -- no run across on this trip (despite the number of later shots devoted to hydrography), but if someone will come along next time....
Kronborg, Helsingør
The former seat of the Danish royal family for several centuries and for much longer their official Jacking Fools Who Don't Pay Sound Dues Place, this castle/fortress complex is now a huge multipurpose museum and was also the setting of Shakespeare's Hamlet as well as Holger Danske's version of Arthur's Seat.
018. Entrance; the moat security has seen better days.
019. Sloping fortifications.
020. A minor point of disagreement. Ok, how old is this gate really?
021. Wide shot from the same place.
022. Up to the castle. Shot while trying to stay out of frame from a Japanese couple taking pictures of each other with various parts of the castle as backgrounds on an iPhone.
023. A small door and ventilation shafts, probably going to the outer works.
024. Latin inscription. I don't read Latin, but I know people who can; a lingua franca in its day much like the hanzi shot in Korea.
025. Inner courtyard.
Casemates, Kronborg
These are the actual underground fortifications below the castle, somewhat renovated, and somewhat just left. This is a must-crawl for anyone whose adolescence prominently featured the words "dungeons" or "Moria".
026. Entrance. Even medieval Danes were pretty big; I didn't have to duck much through the areas that saw high traffic, and I require a little under 2m in headroom.
027. Ventilation shaft up to the surface.
028. Sample corridor.
029. Same shot, natural lighting. In the next level down, there was even less light, which explains the vending machine full of flashlights by the main entrance to the area. Of course, I went without for a more natural experience....even though a real defender would have been not an idiot and packed a candle or an oil lamp or something.
030. Holger Danske in natural light.
031. Holger again with flash. This sculpture is obviously 20th century, but the legends go back to the pre-viking days.
032. Looking back to the outer courtyard, through windows that can be seen above in shot 021.
033. Pitchblack kvlt dungeon.
034. Musketeer mannequin by a rifle port. In the dark, unawares, you don't know if it's a mannequin or maybe a historical interpreter until the flash goes off. Very cool.
035. Grain storage bins. Somehow 034 and 035 disappeared in the original hand-written notes (not on a page-break or anything, mind you, making it extra weird) and this was numbered as 036, with the preceding being 033 because I forgot about 005 when I was writing notes. No matter, we're refuckingnumbering.
036. Graffiti in soot from when the electric lamp below was oil. The soot is that old, the graffiti, probably not, though there are dates in the 1700s in some of the masonry elsewhere, probably from the Swedish occupation, because Danes wouldn't scratch their tags in their king's house.
037. Over the centuries, people prefer to step in the middle, not on the cracks. See the Great Wall.
038. A later memorial to Billy Shakes -- HAMLET SET HERE.
039. A big lock on the bulkhead next to where I originally wrote this section up.
Castle chapel, Kronborg, or, Adventures In Natural Lighting
From my experiences with the Frauenkirche in Dresden, I prefer to shoot Baroque and later churches on natural, because the designers planned for them to be lit from the outside, which was not the case in the Renaissance and earlier. This place, no exception, despite the smaller windows.
040. Inscription in German blackletter. Nearly everything in this chapel was auf Deutsch -- Latin for Lutherans? In fairness, the Danish royal family at the time had significant ties to the German state of Magdeburg, so this is probably also a decent explanation.
041. Hymn board. The chapel is still in use once a month for regular services and occasionally for weddings and the like.
042. Royal ikon.
043. Baroque-styled organ. They may be Protestants, but they're not Calvinists.
044. Decorative arch over the royal pew on the second story.
045. Pulpit. With flash.
046. Altar tryptich, shot on natural. Seconds after this took, someone shot flash behind me. Noobs.
047. Badly out-of-focus donation jar. As a lapsed Catholic (and thus in no way either active or Lutheran), I had no motivation to donate, but it's also kind of weird to take a picture of; hence no flash and bad shake because it's poorly lit, because nobody figured it would be photo-worthy. I don't know if it was just the weird shape that made it pic-worthy, or the incongruity of having a small, beat-up donation jar in the royal chapel of a country with a state church. I mean, whut?
048. Water pump in the courtyard.
Royal Apartments, Kronborg
Anywhere else, this is a mid-brow condo development with kitschy painted half-timber fronts and an overly annoying association that still can't keep the tennis court swept; here, it's the other main part of the castle museum.
049. Flag and battery, out towards the Sound.
050. Where those ventilation shafts (see shot 026 above) come up.
051. An attempt to get some kayakers messing about in the water north of the castle.
052. Scaffolding, and the reason for it. I don't know if this is bad modern air or crappy original stone.
053. Model of the original courtyard fountain, since jacked by some Swedes. There is some debate about the accuracy of the details, since the Swedes made it into belt buckles and stuff after they got tired of having five tons of Danish bronze statuary sitting around in their yard not being a functional fountain, but this badly blurred shot probably works well as a close approximation due to not preserving much of the original detail.
054. Explanation of the Cyrus series featured in the tapestry exhibit (some samples may appear in later shots). Read it all, then go wat.
055. Painted ceiling panel in the royal chambers.
056. Wide shot of a doorway, same room.
057. Original table. Note the NO TOUCH sign.
058. Original from China or imitation from Meissen? Despite having been to both areas, I'm not a pottery appraiser and can't tell.
059. Tapestry; note the very humanoid face on the lion in the lower left.
060. Dresser with an inscription indicating year of manufacture.
061. Original silver mirror, not silvered glass. Shot side-on to minimize backflash; there was a fair bit of tarnish on the surface, but it was still mostly functional.
062. Tagging has a long history. Here we have the monogram of Christian IV, alias C4. Bombärstil!
063. A note to set up the next picture.
064. Picture this with alternating blue and yellow boards as described above. There's a word for that, and it's HYPE. This was the corridor leading from the royal chambers (previous pics) to the grand ballroom (coming up).
065. The ballroom, now hosting the modern part of the tapestry exhibition.
066. Not a cheap takeoff on the HSV flag.
067. Proper artist credit, still disputing the source.
068. Most of a piece called, in English, "Nothing".
069. "Fireworks at San Antonio Castellano", not by Frazetta.
070. Dudes' junk: NSFDRF. (Not Safe For Danish Royal Family).
071. An old globe showing the poorly-explored northern Pacific.
072. An old stove of monstrously inefficient design, showing why Ben Franklin originally got his genius cred.
073. Furnished royal apartments.
074. Some amazing inlay work.
075. Another royal room.
Maritime Museum and telegraph tower
In this last section of the castle museum, you get some nice Danish maritime history, a bit of Greenland, your obligatory indoor mountain climbing, and then more goddamned model ships than any one reasonable person might ever want to come in contact with.
076. What the hell is it with me and going to museums where people save old crappy bread? (Last old crappy bread museum here.)
077. Renaissance-era scribbling in brick.
078. Someone else's photo of the Emma Maersk, currently the world's largest container ship, under construction.
079. The Emma Maersk in about 1:300 scale or so. At nearly 400 meters in beam, you could technically play out a group stage on top of the containers simultaneously....as long as you're prepared to lose a lot of balls overboard.
080. Native Greenlandic art. Now Lovecraft picking Greenland as a site of the survival of the Cthulhu cult makes a lot of sense.
081. Rifle modified to fire salvage rockets.
082. Mini-bombard set up likewise. If the other option is breaking up, you'll take a few small holes in your ship to put lines in.
083. A not-open door, on the way up the tower.
084. It's not Europe if you don't do some indoor mountainclimbing. Looking back down the steps from the top.
085. Harbor view from the roof.
086. Looking back into town.
087. The copper-clad roof, and some weird pointy parts.
088. Marina to the north. Any serious crossing will probably have one of its legs start here, in some heavier surf.
089. That way to Norway. Maybe another time....
090. Trumpeters' Tower (not open) from the roof of the telegraph tower.
091. Incomplete graffiti. Write faster noob!
092. Door to the royal pew (after coming back down and going past a horde of model ships). I resisted the urge to intrude.
093. Original floor pattern. When the old medieval castle was converted into a Renaissance palace, the floors were all done up like this.
094. You're out of ticket parts! Go eat lunch or something! This museum took a little more than five hours to go through completely; getting lost in the casemates or having any kind of interest in model ships would significantly increase this figure.
095. Postcard shot of the castle, leaving.
096. It didn't come out, but this is probably the most-photographed-by-native-English-speakers sign in Helsingør. It says Hamlet, and is thus guaranteed to make native Anglophones over the age of about 16 take a picture, though why and to what use is anyone's guess.
097. You can almost reach out and touch it.... (with typical navigation hazard)
098. Low high-water line and soft breakers indicate an excellent launch point and usually calm seas.
At this point, I wanted to take a shot of the castle from this beach, but the camera batteries ran out, and I stupidly did not bring my spares. Time to go try to buy some more; Sweden can wait till tomorrow.
Luckily for the guy, I was out of battery when I saw my youngest brother's double waiting for the train back to København. Unluckily for me, I was also out of battery while walking around in "real Helsingør". local shops! cool houses! Priestergaerde! strip club! And no batteries for sale in the one open kiosk. Sundays. Well, there's always tomorrow, and expensive reloads at the 7-11/ticket office at the station. Yes, instead of having a permanent ticket office for the train, they added tickets to the stock of the 7-11 in the station building. Got to go there.
099. In addition to being a nice beer, they also have a solid revenue stream locked in if Nintendo ever makes a brewing game.
There are a lot of 'out' metalheads here; not even in transit to/from fests, just going about their daily business in HammerFall, Megadeth, and Cattle Decapitation shirts. And Nordhavn (never hit from the ground on this trip, unfortunately, just the train) looks like a cool place to work....and there's a lot of stuff floating around to the effect that Denmark doesn't have enough workers for their economy.....
Day 2
26 July 2009
København - Hovedstaden - Denmark
Plan for today is simple: go north to Helsingør and bang around, investigate the crossing, maybe go over to Sweden, and see about getting another shirt or getting some distro done.
007. Typical Danish street view, including a statue I didn't shoot because there were too many locals around. Note the wide bike lane.
Because I didn't lug my to-this-point-accumulated change out, I couldn't get on the metro till I found a kiosk or something to break a bill at, and by the time I did, I was in "fuck it, I'll just walk to the Hbf" mode. So I did, and took some more pictures en route.
008. Some things are universal. Note that cinema=biografene. So maybe that A&E channel isn't so badly misnamed (provided they carry it here, that is).
009. This is also the name of the street that this old brick apartment house is on.
010. What are these bikes anchored to? Well, air, mostly -- air and communal trust. Either bike theft is uncommon or surplus used bikes are extremely so, so that nobody worries about theirs getting pinched too much. Later trips down this street found that maybe one bike in 10 was actually locked to something.
011. One of the ornaments in the Tivoli garden poking up over a building between me and the city center.
Tip: as alluded to above, if you don't like lines and come, like me, from a country with antiquated credit card security, break your Danish bills into coins as soon and as much as possible, or you will find yourself walking a lot. The ticket machines won't take even a 50-kroner bill, which is absurdly inconvenient. I didn't mind much, because I'm used to city hiking, and this turned out as a great way to toughen up for Wacken and Party.San, but those whose vacation plans don't include hauling a 40-pound pack over the countryside may want to avoid it.
Also tip: if you're going anywhere north of København on the Zealand coast, say you're going to Helsingborg. I saved about 25k by letting the teller win that argument, which is the cost of a beer (at retail, not the bar) and a rant about overspecificity in subsidy. Böshet.
Helsingør - Hovedstaden - Denmark
012. Side of the train station, Helsingør.
013. Plaza between the trains and the sea.
014. Oh, those Danes and their porno! These statues are, of course, completely innocent, but the abovementioned gas station also had a HUGE rack (floor to about 2m up, meter wide) of ridiculous hardcore porn DVDs browsable by anyone and averaging about $15 per. They are really serious about this "no undue regulation of pornography" business.
015. WWII monument, Helsingør.
016. Across to Sweden.
017. Same shot, full push. This isn't just possible, it's practical. The sea is pretty calm, even with heavy ferry traffic east-west and moderate container traffic north-south. Now to find some kayaks -- no run across on this trip (despite the number of later shots devoted to hydrography), but if someone will come along next time....
Kronborg, Helsingør
The former seat of the Danish royal family for several centuries and for much longer their official Jacking Fools Who Don't Pay Sound Dues Place, this castle/fortress complex is now a huge multipurpose museum and was also the setting of Shakespeare's Hamlet as well as Holger Danske's version of Arthur's Seat.
018. Entrance; the moat security has seen better days.
019. Sloping fortifications.
020. A minor point of disagreement. Ok, how old is this gate really?
021. Wide shot from the same place.
022. Up to the castle. Shot while trying to stay out of frame from a Japanese couple taking pictures of each other with various parts of the castle as backgrounds on an iPhone.
023. A small door and ventilation shafts, probably going to the outer works.
024. Latin inscription. I don't read Latin, but I know people who can; a lingua franca in its day much like the hanzi shot in Korea.
025. Inner courtyard.
Casemates, Kronborg
These are the actual underground fortifications below the castle, somewhat renovated, and somewhat just left. This is a must-crawl for anyone whose adolescence prominently featured the words "dungeons" or "Moria".
026. Entrance. Even medieval Danes were pretty big; I didn't have to duck much through the areas that saw high traffic, and I require a little under 2m in headroom.
027. Ventilation shaft up to the surface.
028. Sample corridor.
029. Same shot, natural lighting. In the next level down, there was even less light, which explains the vending machine full of flashlights by the main entrance to the area. Of course, I went without for a more natural experience....even though a real defender would have been not an idiot and packed a candle or an oil lamp or something.
030. Holger Danske in natural light.
031. Holger again with flash. This sculpture is obviously 20th century, but the legends go back to the pre-viking days.
032. Looking back to the outer courtyard, through windows that can be seen above in shot 021.
033. Pitchblack kvlt dungeon.
034. Musketeer mannequin by a rifle port. In the dark, unawares, you don't know if it's a mannequin or maybe a historical interpreter until the flash goes off. Very cool.
035. Grain storage bins. Somehow 034 and 035 disappeared in the original hand-written notes (not on a page-break or anything, mind you, making it extra weird) and this was numbered as 036, with the preceding being 033 because I forgot about 005 when I was writing notes. No matter, we're refuckingnumbering.
036. Graffiti in soot from when the electric lamp below was oil. The soot is that old, the graffiti, probably not, though there are dates in the 1700s in some of the masonry elsewhere, probably from the Swedish occupation, because Danes wouldn't scratch their tags in their king's house.
037. Over the centuries, people prefer to step in the middle, not on the cracks. See the Great Wall.
038. A later memorial to Billy Shakes -- HAMLET SET HERE.
039. A big lock on the bulkhead next to where I originally wrote this section up.
Castle chapel, Kronborg, or, Adventures In Natural Lighting
From my experiences with the Frauenkirche in Dresden, I prefer to shoot Baroque and later churches on natural, because the designers planned for them to be lit from the outside, which was not the case in the Renaissance and earlier. This place, no exception, despite the smaller windows.
040. Inscription in German blackletter. Nearly everything in this chapel was auf Deutsch -- Latin for Lutherans? In fairness, the Danish royal family at the time had significant ties to the German state of Magdeburg, so this is probably also a decent explanation.
041. Hymn board. The chapel is still in use once a month for regular services and occasionally for weddings and the like.
042. Royal ikon.
043. Baroque-styled organ. They may be Protestants, but they're not Calvinists.
044. Decorative arch over the royal pew on the second story.
045. Pulpit. With flash.
046. Altar tryptich, shot on natural. Seconds after this took, someone shot flash behind me. Noobs.
047. Badly out-of-focus donation jar. As a lapsed Catholic (and thus in no way either active or Lutheran), I had no motivation to donate, but it's also kind of weird to take a picture of; hence no flash and bad shake because it's poorly lit, because nobody figured it would be photo-worthy. I don't know if it was just the weird shape that made it pic-worthy, or the incongruity of having a small, beat-up donation jar in the royal chapel of a country with a state church. I mean, whut?
048. Water pump in the courtyard.
Royal Apartments, Kronborg
Anywhere else, this is a mid-brow condo development with kitschy painted half-timber fronts and an overly annoying association that still can't keep the tennis court swept; here, it's the other main part of the castle museum.
049. Flag and battery, out towards the Sound.
050. Where those ventilation shafts (see shot 026 above) come up.
051. An attempt to get some kayakers messing about in the water north of the castle.
052. Scaffolding, and the reason for it. I don't know if this is bad modern air or crappy original stone.
053. Model of the original courtyard fountain, since jacked by some Swedes. There is some debate about the accuracy of the details, since the Swedes made it into belt buckles and stuff after they got tired of having five tons of Danish bronze statuary sitting around in their yard not being a functional fountain, but this badly blurred shot probably works well as a close approximation due to not preserving much of the original detail.
054. Explanation of the Cyrus series featured in the tapestry exhibit (some samples may appear in later shots). Read it all, then go wat.
055. Painted ceiling panel in the royal chambers.
056. Wide shot of a doorway, same room.
057. Original table. Note the NO TOUCH sign.
058. Original from China or imitation from Meissen? Despite having been to both areas, I'm not a pottery appraiser and can't tell.
059. Tapestry; note the very humanoid face on the lion in the lower left.
060. Dresser with an inscription indicating year of manufacture.
061. Original silver mirror, not silvered glass. Shot side-on to minimize backflash; there was a fair bit of tarnish on the surface, but it was still mostly functional.
062. Tagging has a long history. Here we have the monogram of Christian IV, alias C4. Bombärstil!
063. A note to set up the next picture.
064. Picture this with alternating blue and yellow boards as described above. There's a word for that, and it's HYPE. This was the corridor leading from the royal chambers (previous pics) to the grand ballroom (coming up).
065. The ballroom, now hosting the modern part of the tapestry exhibition.
066. Not a cheap takeoff on the HSV flag.
067. Proper artist credit, still disputing the source.
068. Most of a piece called, in English, "Nothing".
069. "Fireworks at San Antonio Castellano", not by Frazetta.
070. Dudes' junk: NSFDRF. (Not Safe For Danish Royal Family).
071. An old globe showing the poorly-explored northern Pacific.
072. An old stove of monstrously inefficient design, showing why Ben Franklin originally got his genius cred.
073. Furnished royal apartments.
074. Some amazing inlay work.
075. Another royal room.
Maritime Museum and telegraph tower
In this last section of the castle museum, you get some nice Danish maritime history, a bit of Greenland, your obligatory indoor mountain climbing, and then more goddamned model ships than any one reasonable person might ever want to come in contact with.
076. What the hell is it with me and going to museums where people save old crappy bread? (Last old crappy bread museum here.)
077. Renaissance-era scribbling in brick.
078. Someone else's photo of the Emma Maersk, currently the world's largest container ship, under construction.
079. The Emma Maersk in about 1:300 scale or so. At nearly 400 meters in beam, you could technically play out a group stage on top of the containers simultaneously....as long as you're prepared to lose a lot of balls overboard.
080. Native Greenlandic art. Now Lovecraft picking Greenland as a site of the survival of the Cthulhu cult makes a lot of sense.
081. Rifle modified to fire salvage rockets.
082. Mini-bombard set up likewise. If the other option is breaking up, you'll take a few small holes in your ship to put lines in.
083. A not-open door, on the way up the tower.
084. It's not Europe if you don't do some indoor mountainclimbing. Looking back down the steps from the top.
085. Harbor view from the roof.
086. Looking back into town.
087. The copper-clad roof, and some weird pointy parts.
088. Marina to the north. Any serious crossing will probably have one of its legs start here, in some heavier surf.
089. That way to Norway. Maybe another time....
090. Trumpeters' Tower (not open) from the roof of the telegraph tower.
091. Incomplete graffiti. Write faster noob!
092. Door to the royal pew (after coming back down and going past a horde of model ships). I resisted the urge to intrude.
093. Original floor pattern. When the old medieval castle was converted into a Renaissance palace, the floors were all done up like this.
094. You're out of ticket parts! Go eat lunch or something! This museum took a little more than five hours to go through completely; getting lost in the casemates or having any kind of interest in model ships would significantly increase this figure.
095. Postcard shot of the castle, leaving.
096. It didn't come out, but this is probably the most-photographed-by-native-English-speakers sign in Helsingør. It says Hamlet, and is thus guaranteed to make native Anglophones over the age of about 16 take a picture, though why and to what use is anyone's guess.
097. You can almost reach out and touch it.... (with typical navigation hazard)
098. Low high-water line and soft breakers indicate an excellent launch point and usually calm seas.
At this point, I wanted to take a shot of the castle from this beach, but the camera batteries ran out, and I stupidly did not bring my spares. Time to go try to buy some more; Sweden can wait till tomorrow.
Luckily for the guy, I was out of battery when I saw my youngest brother's double waiting for the train back to København. Unluckily for me, I was also out of battery while walking around in "real Helsingør". local shops! cool houses! Priestergaerde! strip club! And no batteries for sale in the one open kiosk. Sundays. Well, there's always tomorrow, and expensive reloads at the 7-11/ticket office at the station. Yes, instead of having a permanent ticket office for the train, they added tickets to the stock of the 7-11 in the station building. Got to go there.
099. In addition to being a nice beer, they also have a solid revenue stream locked in if Nintendo ever makes a brewing game.
There are a lot of 'out' metalheads here; not even in transit to/from fests, just going about their daily business in HammerFall, Megadeth, and Cattle Decapitation shirts. And Nordhavn (never hit from the ground on this trip, unfortunately, just the train) looks like a cool place to work....and there's a lot of stuff floating around to the effect that Denmark doesn't have enough workers for their economy.....
European Tour 2009 part 1: intro, setup, landing
What follows is a transcription of my notes from my vacation of 2009 to central Europe. There has been some cleanup and editing, but the original structure and nearly all of the original content is there, hence the "you are there" style. This particular trip covers from 24 July to 10 August 2009, a total of 18 days. As expected from nearly 3 weeks on the road in foreign countries, there are a lot of pictures, well over seven hundred, and a lot of scribbling in between.
In the course of this trip, I ran through about four full charges of camera batteries, three pens, and something like 200 notebook pages, which required the purchase of a backup notebook. Shaking this all out into digital form also took a while, but hopefully will be rewarding.
A note on pictures: I am not a professional photographer and for this trip was using a four-year-old camera with accordingly limited capacities, and a lot of the shots from festivals were done at night, unbraced, and tend to look like crap. Don't use this as an authoritative source for band pictures, or complain that there's too much frame shake in the low-light shots. Most everything came out, but there's still a few that didn't, most of which are still included here for historical reasons.
--
Day 0
24 July 2009
Boston - MA - USA
For the next 17 days, I'm going to disappear. Off the map, off the radar, into a shadow life as part tourist, part missionary, part bum in a north-south corridor from the Øresund to the Thuringian hinterland. I have only the barest semblance of a plan or an itinerary, but I do have a definite mission to fulfill in several parts.
1) To explore and note points of interest in the Copenhagen-Malmö-Øresund area.
2) To investigate the feasibility of a paddlecraft crossing of the Øresund at Helsingør-Helsingborg.
3) To celebrate the 20. Jubiläum of the W:O:A and see as many bands as possible.
4) To explore Party.San and see as many bands as possible.
5) To evangelize the New England metal scene to the greatest extent practical at the foregoing festivals.
6) To investigate points and events of interest in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and the German transit system.
7) To record physical, intellectual, and cultural observations in the course of the above objectives in words and pictures, and to publish them for the edification of those who couldn't come along, or who not being me do not have the same experiences of the same places and events. There are going to be 70,000 stories of Wacken this year, and about 10,000 of Party.San. This one is mine.
000. Imports not declared. This is nearly everything; CDs and stickets from Parasitic Extirpation, promo cards from Composted, pins and stickers from Dysentery, pins and sticks from Autumn Above, and some additional stickers for Parasitic Extirpation and Goreality. How these were disposed -- and nearly all of them for distributed -- will be covered on later days.
001. The journey begins... It's just the train station in my hometown, but every travelogue has to start somewhere, and this is where I stepped off the map from. Additionally, Aaron had been pressuring me to make a better record of these endeavors, suitable for RTTP linkage, and I'd also been unduly influenced by Forbidden Railway, which is of course the king of the DIY travelogues. Seriously, go read it. Helmut's pics of the transition from the orderly Vienna suburbs to the USSR-echoes of European Russia and then the wilds of Siberia and finally he austerity and barrenness of North Korea are effective because he starts the station shots in somwhere relatively normal for his audience; the reader starts in the ordinary with him, and then goes off with him over the edge of the world.
This, of course, is going to be nothing so adventurous or awesome, but just as every adventure is fundamentally "there and back again", every time you step out your front door can be an adventure if approached correctly, and this trip, changing continents to see some rather epic lineups, is admittedly a little more epic than many.
--
Day 1
25 July 2009
Keflavik - Reykjanes - Iceland
If you're for some reason keeping a "bucket list" or something, on it needs to go "fly in to Iceland at dawn". As that rose-and-purple glow starts to light up the terrain below you, you look down and see spots and stands that remain black poking up through the white, alien and inscrutable. You ask yourself, are those volcanic rocks poking up out of the sea, crags in a glacier field? But the white is too unevenly leveled for the first, too uniformly contiguous for the second, and presently it becomes clear that you are still too high for either, and what you are seeing are the tips of mountain, pushing up through the blanketing clouds.
Later, if you're coming in to Keflavik (and being Iceland, country of few people and fewer international-capable airports, you probably are), you land on an airstrip carved out of a lavafield, with most of the original terrain intact. Unfortunately, because the plane got a wicked late start from Boston, all this purple prose boils down to exactly zero pictures, due to spending less than 10 minutes in Iceland and not in a flying tin can, and much of that either waiting in security lines or quick-marching in stocking feet, and occasionally both. I'm going to have to come back here some time and put boots on the ground; zero time past passcheck with shoes on due to zero time to make the next connection. Amazingly, my pack made it through as well.
002. The only souvenir of Iceland. As a language geek, I had to get a picture of something with a thorn (funny crossed D or Đ) in it. Additionally, if I ever finish that late-Ildjarn-ripoff record with Coelem, I'm using the latter sentence in this pictue as the title. There will be massive lulz when the meaning is discovered, so no translation now.
København - Hovedstaden - Denmark
003. Street near the hotel.
004. Ok, no more bitching about gas prices ever. Yes, these are to two decimal places in kroner/liter, but still: about 4 L/gal, 40 kroner ~= $10. Eight to ten bucks a gallon when we're barely short of three in the states, and a 180% sales tax on cars? It helps to explain the comfy metro (pictured a few days on) and the racks and racks of cycles, but people still drive here regardless.
This hotel is in a pretty good place; a decent neighborhood with easy metro access and good local services even apart from the hotel. This means said gas station, with a wide variety of local foods and beers in addition to relatively liberal hours open; this is the great virtue of gas stations in Europe, reliably providing 20-hour minimarts in nations where most shops tend to close around 8pm.
005. Stormclouds cover the kingdom. Some impressive weather over the street by the hotel.
((006. Not germane.))
All of the pictures I took are numbered consecutively for personal archiving; some are published in some contexts but not others for various reasons, but in order to keep me from going insane writing them up, the consecutive numbering system has to remain constant. Those pulled from here have zero novelty or historical relevance and are usually, like this one, more of pure personal messages.
In the course of this trip, I ran through about four full charges of camera batteries, three pens, and something like 200 notebook pages, which required the purchase of a backup notebook. Shaking this all out into digital form also took a while, but hopefully will be rewarding.
A note on pictures: I am not a professional photographer and for this trip was using a four-year-old camera with accordingly limited capacities, and a lot of the shots from festivals were done at night, unbraced, and tend to look like crap. Don't use this as an authoritative source for band pictures, or complain that there's too much frame shake in the low-light shots. Most everything came out, but there's still a few that didn't, most of which are still included here for historical reasons.
--
Day 0
24 July 2009
Boston - MA - USA
For the next 17 days, I'm going to disappear. Off the map, off the radar, into a shadow life as part tourist, part missionary, part bum in a north-south corridor from the Øresund to the Thuringian hinterland. I have only the barest semblance of a plan or an itinerary, but I do have a definite mission to fulfill in several parts.
1) To explore and note points of interest in the Copenhagen-Malmö-Øresund area.
2) To investigate the feasibility of a paddlecraft crossing of the Øresund at Helsingør-Helsingborg.
3) To celebrate the 20. Jubiläum of the W:O:A and see as many bands as possible.
4) To explore Party.San and see as many bands as possible.
5) To evangelize the New England metal scene to the greatest extent practical at the foregoing festivals.
6) To investigate points and events of interest in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and the German transit system.
7) To record physical, intellectual, and cultural observations in the course of the above objectives in words and pictures, and to publish them for the edification of those who couldn't come along, or who not being me do not have the same experiences of the same places and events. There are going to be 70,000 stories of Wacken this year, and about 10,000 of Party.San. This one is mine.
000. Imports not declared. This is nearly everything; CDs and stickets from Parasitic Extirpation, promo cards from Composted, pins and stickers from Dysentery, pins and sticks from Autumn Above, and some additional stickers for Parasitic Extirpation and Goreality. How these were disposed -- and nearly all of them for distributed -- will be covered on later days.
001. The journey begins... It's just the train station in my hometown, but every travelogue has to start somewhere, and this is where I stepped off the map from. Additionally, Aaron had been pressuring me to make a better record of these endeavors, suitable for RTTP linkage, and I'd also been unduly influenced by Forbidden Railway, which is of course the king of the DIY travelogues. Seriously, go read it. Helmut's pics of the transition from the orderly Vienna suburbs to the USSR-echoes of European Russia and then the wilds of Siberia and finally he austerity and barrenness of North Korea are effective because he starts the station shots in somwhere relatively normal for his audience; the reader starts in the ordinary with him, and then goes off with him over the edge of the world.
This, of course, is going to be nothing so adventurous or awesome, but just as every adventure is fundamentally "there and back again", every time you step out your front door can be an adventure if approached correctly, and this trip, changing continents to see some rather epic lineups, is admittedly a little more epic than many.
--
Day 1
25 July 2009
Keflavik - Reykjanes - Iceland
If you're for some reason keeping a "bucket list" or something, on it needs to go "fly in to Iceland at dawn". As that rose-and-purple glow starts to light up the terrain below you, you look down and see spots and stands that remain black poking up through the white, alien and inscrutable. You ask yourself, are those volcanic rocks poking up out of the sea, crags in a glacier field? But the white is too unevenly leveled for the first, too uniformly contiguous for the second, and presently it becomes clear that you are still too high for either, and what you are seeing are the tips of mountain, pushing up through the blanketing clouds.
Later, if you're coming in to Keflavik (and being Iceland, country of few people and fewer international-capable airports, you probably are), you land on an airstrip carved out of a lavafield, with most of the original terrain intact. Unfortunately, because the plane got a wicked late start from Boston, all this purple prose boils down to exactly zero pictures, due to spending less than 10 minutes in Iceland and not in a flying tin can, and much of that either waiting in security lines or quick-marching in stocking feet, and occasionally both. I'm going to have to come back here some time and put boots on the ground; zero time past passcheck with shoes on due to zero time to make the next connection. Amazingly, my pack made it through as well.
002. The only souvenir of Iceland. As a language geek, I had to get a picture of something with a thorn (funny crossed D or Đ) in it. Additionally, if I ever finish that late-Ildjarn-ripoff record with Coelem, I'm using the latter sentence in this pictue as the title. There will be massive lulz when the meaning is discovered, so no translation now.
København - Hovedstaden - Denmark
003. Street near the hotel.
004. Ok, no more bitching about gas prices ever. Yes, these are to two decimal places in kroner/liter, but still: about 4 L/gal, 40 kroner ~= $10. Eight to ten bucks a gallon when we're barely short of three in the states, and a 180% sales tax on cars? It helps to explain the comfy metro (pictured a few days on) and the racks and racks of cycles, but people still drive here regardless.
This hotel is in a pretty good place; a decent neighborhood with easy metro access and good local services even apart from the hotel. This means said gas station, with a wide variety of local foods and beers in addition to relatively liberal hours open; this is the great virtue of gas stations in Europe, reliably providing 20-hour minimarts in nations where most shops tend to close around 8pm.
005. Stormclouds cover the kingdom. Some impressive weather over the street by the hotel.
((006. Not germane.))
All of the pictures I took are numbered consecutively for personal archiving; some are published in some contexts but not others for various reasons, but in order to keep me from going insane writing them up, the consecutive numbering system has to remain constant. Those pulled from here have zero novelty or historical relevance and are usually, like this one, more of pure personal messages.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Wacken/P.San in process
I'm currently in the middle of transcribing notes and processing about 770 pictures relating to the recent central European trip. Wacken and the tourist parts are done but I haven't hit Party.San yet; about 210 pictures are left to be resized/edited and documented. Look for the first updates toward the end of this week, along with all the Every Shirt installments since Tuesday that I haven't written up yet due to working on the trip stuff. Being on call sucks for not going to shows, but as long as no one calls, it's more time in the evenings to finish this crap up.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Summoning Hate with Goreality, Dysentery, Blessed Offal, and Axiom [Plaza Garibaldi, Revere, 7/23/2009]
Because I wanted to be sure that I found the place and could deliver correct directions back to some people who'd hit me up to potentially lug stuff over to Europe, I left right from work and picked my way carefully in through the rain and backroads traffic. The venue was exactly where the map said it was, and the tricks needed to get turned back around were pretty straightforward. I got in right about doors, and got my entry comped by Dave, which was unexpected. I had qualms about writing the show up afterwards; the experience you have as just someone who sees a flier and comes out is necessarily different from someone who just gets handed through by the promoter, if only because mine is missing that important arm of “value for money”. Ultimately, though, this massed out as pretty academic: this was a fucking awesome show in a hell of good venue, providing so much total value that the $5 entry charge effectively goes to zero in comparison.
The venue is a Colombian-operated (allegedly; doesn't matter, so I didn't check) Mexican restaurant with a good stage, a decent PA, TVs that follow the fitba, and a reputation online for bad margaritas and general gunginess. None of this was in evidence here; some people complained after about the price of drinks, but not the quality. One expects a certain amount of “yanqui go home” may have been poured out on the negative commenters, probably with reason; if the staff are cool with a bunch of death metallers thrashing out, spilling beer, and otherwise being death metal fans, you've probably got to be a real A-line jerk to get bad service out of them.
Though the music was slated to start sharply at 8:30, this was delayed a little; maybe part setup, maybe part Dave holding the start until the Gold Cup semifinal finished. Despite the US defense, as usual, doing their wet paper bag impression from about 55' on, Honduras proved themselves unable of punching through said wet paper bag, and the US stole a late reinforcement to make it 2-0, where the game ended. It was a crappy match, and I, a USA supporter, was nearly as mad as the Honduras fans in the bar at a generally incompetent display of football. And yeah, maybe not everyone knows everyone going in, but no matter who you are, if you stand next to Juan (Untombed) and rant about bad performances in the current game with him, you will, shortly, be in with all and sundry at this kind of show. (Well, as long as you don't run down Mexico too much.)
Beer, metal, fitba, and good company; I thought I wasn't getting over to Europe till Saturday?
Axiom [5.5/7]
These guys had a couple false starts, and took a song or two to get cranked up and dialed in, but when they did, they laid out a nice performance mixing a lot of elements of Dissection and Hypocrisy, melding melody and brutality in a way that you don't see much any more. It also needs to be said that they either explicitly or just by association pull some influences from Revocation as well; only Dave Davidson is Dave Davidson, but the guitar player in this bunch is cut from the same cloth, even if his style and skills aren't quite as developed. It could be mutual influence or parallel evolution, but regardless, it made for some cool-ass guitar work, and a killer set overall.
Blessed Offal [6/7]
I hadn't seen these guys since the Skybar was still open, and they've substantially revamped their lineup since, but if anything this hasn't affected their provision of high-quality, dirty, blackened death metal. This was about as black as the bands would get, but each of the bands represented a maximum outlier on some axis: melody, blackness, slam, brutality, thrash, and all of them tied back in with the provision of fundamentally worthy death metal in the bargain. Hopefully, this lineup will stick, and it'll be less than two years before I see Blessed Offal again.
Dysentery [6/7]
If you are lazy and just like to look at scores rather than reading about what the bands did to pull those marks, you will see an extremely limited range on this show. If you're also wicked anal, I'll cut to the chase and note that Dysentery's set was probably the top among equals. The band does what they do, and they did it extremely well here, locked in, mountain-thick, perfectly clicking for an avalanche of audio destruction that meshed well with their crew thrashing the fuck out in the pit. Only one person got injured (busted knuckle, self-inflicted), Paul (Proteus R.I.P.) didn't spin-kick the head off any of the normal patrons, a couple of whom were up front and into the band, and everyone had a good time or a piece of ballistic-rated cover to stand behind, which is as close to a success criterion as you're going to be able to encapsulate for a Dysentery performance.
Goreality [6/7]
This may be the lowest score I've given Goreality (still without bass, but no marks off); if they'd gone on, this might have gone up, as they started slow and cranked up through the course of the set, perhaps an adjustment process with their new/fill-in singer, who had a good command of the material, but, as any rational person should have expected, was no Dan Pevides. From the sample at the end of the set rather than the start, she's definitely good enough to stick full-time if needed; we'll see if she's still out front (and if they can recruit a capable bass player in time) on the NEDF.
Yes, “she”. It's perfectly possible for a woman to front a brutal death metal band and do brutal vocals, ande Scariel definitely filled her role capably. Not Arch Enemy style; think of the old Russian band Mary....or not, because nobody fucking knows them except absurdly underground 1%ers who didn't have a problem with the initial idea in the first place.
It should also be mentioned that this show was effectively backlined with Goreality's Vader cabs (Steve and Mark are Vader endorsees), and this may have played a part in the uniformly high scores. While crap still sounds like crap when played through good equipment, good music will only sound better when pumped through two to four Vader 4x12s.
There was a bit of a break here while the Mexico – Costa Rica game wrapped up. Mexico stole an absolutely brilliant winner in the 88th minute with an attack that resembled a hxc VFW show, half their strike force ending up in the back of the net before one of the midfielders volleyed the ball past the goalie at last. Go find this goal, it's awesome.
Summoning Hate [6/7]
They came off as a lot more together than their last outing, which will go to rehearsal more than anything. Even though Marco's bass died in the middle of their second song, they soldiered on and smashed out a badass set of thrash-death metal, closing up only after pleading with Dave and the ownership to give them a last song. Maybe not a whole set, and maybe not a full band for most of it, but Summoning Hate still makes some quality metal, and though the crowd thinned after Goreality, they had as much a claim to a legit headliner-quality set as any of the last three bands.
NB: Though the last two bands were effectively bassless, Drew's bass attack in Dysentery provided enough low-end awesomeness to compensate. Pure annihillation.
In the end, it was time to go, as I had to work and then fly the next day. I picked up some Parasitic Extirpation, Dysentery, and Goreality stuffs, both for personal use and general distro in the eastern territories, and made my way out into the downpour to wend my way home.
Written in the Logan terminal before boarding for Iceland; next is German fests, which will probably not be digitized and published till well after.
The venue is a Colombian-operated (allegedly; doesn't matter, so I didn't check) Mexican restaurant with a good stage, a decent PA, TVs that follow the fitba, and a reputation online for bad margaritas and general gunginess. None of this was in evidence here; some people complained after about the price of drinks, but not the quality. One expects a certain amount of “yanqui go home” may have been poured out on the negative commenters, probably with reason; if the staff are cool with a bunch of death metallers thrashing out, spilling beer, and otherwise being death metal fans, you've probably got to be a real A-line jerk to get bad service out of them.
Though the music was slated to start sharply at 8:30, this was delayed a little; maybe part setup, maybe part Dave holding the start until the Gold Cup semifinal finished. Despite the US defense, as usual, doing their wet paper bag impression from about 55' on, Honduras proved themselves unable of punching through said wet paper bag, and the US stole a late reinforcement to make it 2-0, where the game ended. It was a crappy match, and I, a USA supporter, was nearly as mad as the Honduras fans in the bar at a generally incompetent display of football. And yeah, maybe not everyone knows everyone going in, but no matter who you are, if you stand next to Juan (Untombed) and rant about bad performances in the current game with him, you will, shortly, be in with all and sundry at this kind of show. (Well, as long as you don't run down Mexico too much.)
Beer, metal, fitba, and good company; I thought I wasn't getting over to Europe till Saturday?
Axiom [5.5/7]
These guys had a couple false starts, and took a song or two to get cranked up and dialed in, but when they did, they laid out a nice performance mixing a lot of elements of Dissection and Hypocrisy, melding melody and brutality in a way that you don't see much any more. It also needs to be said that they either explicitly or just by association pull some influences from Revocation as well; only Dave Davidson is Dave Davidson, but the guitar player in this bunch is cut from the same cloth, even if his style and skills aren't quite as developed. It could be mutual influence or parallel evolution, but regardless, it made for some cool-ass guitar work, and a killer set overall.
Blessed Offal [6/7]
I hadn't seen these guys since the Skybar was still open, and they've substantially revamped their lineup since, but if anything this hasn't affected their provision of high-quality, dirty, blackened death metal. This was about as black as the bands would get, but each of the bands represented a maximum outlier on some axis: melody, blackness, slam, brutality, thrash, and all of them tied back in with the provision of fundamentally worthy death metal in the bargain. Hopefully, this lineup will stick, and it'll be less than two years before I see Blessed Offal again.
Dysentery [6/7]
If you are lazy and just like to look at scores rather than reading about what the bands did to pull those marks, you will see an extremely limited range on this show. If you're also wicked anal, I'll cut to the chase and note that Dysentery's set was probably the top among equals. The band does what they do, and they did it extremely well here, locked in, mountain-thick, perfectly clicking for an avalanche of audio destruction that meshed well with their crew thrashing the fuck out in the pit. Only one person got injured (busted knuckle, self-inflicted), Paul (Proteus R.I.P.) didn't spin-kick the head off any of the normal patrons, a couple of whom were up front and into the band, and everyone had a good time or a piece of ballistic-rated cover to stand behind, which is as close to a success criterion as you're going to be able to encapsulate for a Dysentery performance.
Goreality [6/7]
This may be the lowest score I've given Goreality (still without bass, but no marks off); if they'd gone on, this might have gone up, as they started slow and cranked up through the course of the set, perhaps an adjustment process with their new/fill-in singer, who had a good command of the material, but, as any rational person should have expected, was no Dan Pevides. From the sample at the end of the set rather than the start, she's definitely good enough to stick full-time if needed; we'll see if she's still out front (and if they can recruit a capable bass player in time) on the NEDF.
Yes, “she”. It's perfectly possible for a woman to front a brutal death metal band and do brutal vocals, ande Scariel definitely filled her role capably. Not Arch Enemy style; think of the old Russian band Mary....or not, because nobody fucking knows them except absurdly underground 1%ers who didn't have a problem with the initial idea in the first place.
It should also be mentioned that this show was effectively backlined with Goreality's Vader cabs (Steve and Mark are Vader endorsees), and this may have played a part in the uniformly high scores. While crap still sounds like crap when played through good equipment, good music will only sound better when pumped through two to four Vader 4x12s.
There was a bit of a break here while the Mexico – Costa Rica game wrapped up. Mexico stole an absolutely brilliant winner in the 88th minute with an attack that resembled a hxc VFW show, half their strike force ending up in the back of the net before one of the midfielders volleyed the ball past the goalie at last. Go find this goal, it's awesome.
Summoning Hate [6/7]
They came off as a lot more together than their last outing, which will go to rehearsal more than anything. Even though Marco's bass died in the middle of their second song, they soldiered on and smashed out a badass set of thrash-death metal, closing up only after pleading with Dave and the ownership to give them a last song. Maybe not a whole set, and maybe not a full band for most of it, but Summoning Hate still makes some quality metal, and though the crowd thinned after Goreality, they had as much a claim to a legit headliner-quality set as any of the last three bands.
NB: Though the last two bands were effectively bassless, Drew's bass attack in Dysentery provided enough low-end awesomeness to compensate. Pure annihillation.
In the end, it was time to go, as I had to work and then fly the next day. I picked up some Parasitic Extirpation, Dysentery, and Goreality stuffs, both for personal use and general distro in the eastern territories, and made my way out into the downpour to wend my way home.
Written in the Logan terminal before boarding for Iceland; next is German fests, which will probably not be digitized and published till well after.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Every Shirt CXVI: Skinless
shirt: Skinless
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2007
provenance: band
The last of these for a while, this shirt was picked up in early- to mid-'07 and has done good service since. I'm not sure if it's been overseas or not; maybe not in a festival capacity, but it's likely I lugged it over on unrelated business; it's a good shirt, if not especially uncommon, and that's kind of a bonus when you figure in the possibility of loss or damage.
As noted, this series is going to be going on hiatus for most of the next three weeks, as I go over to Europe, have adventures, thrash out at festivals, and in general do everything inimical to wearing a different metal shirt every day and taking pictures of it. There will be copious reportage on those subjects after I get back, and potentially some live commentary during the journey, though this depends on what of my gear is functioning and how dead I am personally during the inter-festival periods. After I get back Stateside, the series will resume, and probably continue to run into mid-September; I'm anticipating a decent amount of shirt gain out of the trip, and then there's NEDF as well before supplies are likely to run out.
Every Shirt CXV: Deathamphetamine
shirt: Deathamphetamine
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2006
provenance: band
Acquired at that "five bands, three majors-to-be" show back in October '06, this shirt is from the only surviving band from that day not to make it onto an internationally-recognized label, though they have had some member-retention difficulties that make this more understandable. Deathamphetamine is still together, though, still occasionally playing shows, and reportedly sounds noticeably different and even tighter than they did formerly; we'll see if they make a run, maybe as soon as 11 September, which I think is the first chance I get to see the stabilized newer lineup. I've seen them as a four-piece, but this was a little while back if I recall correctly; not sure if there's been any movement since they decided to continue under this name.
Every Shirt CXIV: Mastodon
shirt: Mastodon
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2006
provenance: band
Picked up when I started broadening my willing-to-go-to-Worcester-for-shows horizons, this is a good shirt from a good band that has seen a pretty average amount of use. It's in many ways a pretty median shirt, but fortunately is a lot closer to the end than to the middle of this particular dive through the pile.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Every Shirt CXIII: Amon Amarth - Fate of Norns
shirt: Amon Amarth - Fate of Norns
size: 2XL (US)
vintage: 2006
provenance: band
From the last major show I saw in 2006, this shirt was also from the last time, at least that I can recall, that Amon Amarth toured as support rather than being supported by other up-and-coming bands. This is good stuff, even if I've seen Amon Amarth somewhat decidedly infrequently since then; they tour often enough, but on the last go-round I was sick, and decided rather to rest up for Master. That was a correct decision, but I still wish I'd been well enough to see Amon Amarth that week as well.
Every Shirt CXII: Municipal Waste
shirt: Municipal Waste
size: 2XL (US)
vintage: 2007
provenance: band
Acquired the first time that I saw these guys in '07, in the middle of Metal Winter Break, this shirt made it up to the day that this picture was taken intact, and then shortly afterward had its sleeves excised because I was going to be out grilling all day and didn't want to sweat to death. It was just luck that the shirt getting de-sleeved was also a shirt that debatably should have come de-sleeved, and was certainly de-sleeved by about 80% of the other people who bought it on that tour, some of them probably before leaving the venue. Trendthrash lolwut? or actually appropriate for the band, whatever.....
Every Shirt CXI: Blind Guardian
shirt: Blind Guardian
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2006
provenance: band
This one is from the last US tour the Guardians did, and is, if I recall correctly, my only Guardian shortsleeve (despite being into the band for now more than 10 years), and thus the only one that gets worn. I've got a ridiculously high-detail longsleeve from these guys, but that'll be handled on some weekend after I get back from Germany, because I tend to hate longsleeve shirts; I make exceptions for Running Wild and Bifrost, but that's only because I own no other Running Wild tack, and even a longsleeve makes me the only person in North America with a Bifrost shirt of any persuasion.
Every Shirt CX: Eyes of Noctum
shirt: Eyes of Noctum
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2009
provenance: band
I got this shirt because the band's merch chick was having trouble scrounging for change and I hate inconveniencing people, especially when those people are on tour....even when the tour bus/van may potentially be being ridealonged by a Rolls-Royce. Eyes were decent, but not OMG MUST GET SHIRT good, which was thrown into higher contrast by there being a band on this gig that was. The CD is ok, but with approaching 150 shirts in the total stack, bands normally have to be a lot better than "ok" to get in.
Every Shirt CIX: Bone Ritual
shirt: Bone Ritual
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2009
provenance: band
Picked up at their first gig and immediately turned around for the show the next night, this sharp turnaround was executed because the band in question is Wicked Awesome. This shirt is getting its sleeves excised for 100% duty at Party.San, partly because I promised Charlie and Cody that I'd do so (while moderately gassed), partly because there's a lot of overlap between Party.San attendees and their potential audience, and largely because, playing into this, the band is Wicked Awesome. They did a demo release at this gig and are nearly sold out of CD-Rs already; watch for it on Bestial Burst, probably in some ridiculously kvlt format.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Darkwor with Cursed For Eternity, Ov Dust, and Shabti [Ralph's, Worcester, 7/16/2009]
When I went out to this I was still fatigued from the previous night's gig. Right now, I'm about 87% dead and taking significant advantage of the fact that my place of employment, being full of French people, has a DIY espresso machine. Six hours' sleep in 50+ and counting -- I'm already in festival mode, and got to see a second awesome black metal gig in the process.
As has been all too usual lately, I left right from work, navigated the Pike out without getting killed, and got in to Worcester just as the rain -- coming from the opposite direction -- was arriving. This was right about doors, so I got to stand and sit around for a bit and generally decompress. At this point, it looked mostly like a lot of Metal Thursdays do early on; not a lot of people, and many of those who are there are in the bands or traveled out with them.
Shabti [5.5/7]
This was a seriously impressive performance from a band that people in New England should definitely start paying attention to. The songs are not the most fully developed in the world at this point, but the musicianship that they displayed has to be acknowledged, as does the originality of their sound. Trying to sum it up for Matt from Faces of Bayon, who didn't get in until their last song, I couldn't do much better than the leftovers of a collaboration between 1990-vintage Cynic and 1991-vintage Dissection: a more or less even blend of tech-death and second-wave-black-metal elements that still felt raw around the edges. If they had CDs, I would have picked one up; unfortunately, all they had were shirts, and I'm not sure that they're "shirt-level" yet. I like the band, and will make a point of seeing them the next time they come around, but I already have too goddamned many shirts at this point.
Ov Dust [5.5/7]
I was wondering what band I'd seen the singer for these guys in before, but figured out while they were soundchecking that it was "none of the above", and that it was just the blown-out platinum hairdo, which you tend to see on about every third or fourth dude involved with a German folk/goth/Mittelalter-metal band. So we're clear, this guy is not the same as the dude from Subway to Sally. Similarly, Ov Dust is not the same as Celtic Frost, though the similarities are a little closer in that vein. They opened up with "Dethroned Emperor", which I didn't recognize at first, just thinking, man, these guys are just all over CF's knob, aren't they. Then the lyrics come in and I realize they're opening with another band's song. To their credit, they did play originals for the rest of the set, and got to a point where they just liked Celtic Frost a wicked lot rather than wholesale biting of their sound and catalog with huge gnashing fangs. They also strongly promoted their Myspace and covered the floor in flyers, which was a good thing, because there was a lot of beer spilled during Darkwor's set, and the extra absorption on the floor probably helped the staff with cleanup.
Cursed For Eternity [6.5/7]
This must have been Witch Tomb offspec week; Bone Ritual the night before, then this outfit similarly crushing all a day later and about an hour to the west. Here, though, the return to the primitive took on a different form: this was pure Black Circle music, neither Pure Fucking Armaggeddon (despite ending with an annihilating cover of "Deathcrush") nor Wrath of the Tyrant but somewhere in the middle, solidly within that musical continuum. It was also by far the best set of the night -- maybe only "by far" because of Darkwor's guitar amp issues, but whether you want to play the comparison game or not, the simple fact is that this set killed.
As mentioned, there were not a lot of people in this venue initially. However, that number steadily increased, to the point where, looking around after CFE finished, the entire frickin place was packed, and at about a 60:40 m:f ratio, which is absolutely unheard of in underground metal. This is, one supposes, a contributing factor in why Metal Thursday is where it is: there were more women in attendance by the end of this gig, nearly all of them actually interested in seeing and into Darkwor, than there were at the end of the EoN gig the night before, counting the posse that showed up from Wonderbar and wherethefuckeverelse solely to ambush Nicholas Cage. This isn't a "dude the CHICKS go to this show!!1!" selling point; it's an indicator of a healthier and more diverse scene.....in which this long-running and successful concert series is also probably a contributing factor.
Darkwor [6/7]
Originally I thought that I couldn't hear the guitar because my ears were blown out after Cursed For Eternity. Then other people, some of whom I'd seen wearing earplugs at the show, confirmed that there was a problem with the amp at the start. Either way, Darkwor didn't get off to as clean a start as they might have liked, if only due to technical reasons. They did get cranked up over the course of the set, though, and did up some killer music...that I now don't have the most concrete recollection of, because they didn't have CDs (in "tiny jew cases" or otherwise) available, but mainly because I was pit-tanking throughout their set, which is always a challenge at this place. The usual supsects (modulo Chris, on IR at the bar for this one with a concussion) went completely nuts despite the large crowd, and the janitor/assistant bartender for the club was motivated to climb up one of the poles on the floor and hang upside-down from the light rigging before jumping off and getting circus-carried around the pit by Dan. The dude in question always gets into the bands, but this was a lot more over the top than I've seen before.
Somehow, when they finally finished, the conclusion was universal that it was too soon, and there was much bellowing of MOOOOAR! at the band, but the damn lights went on anyways, and the show was concluded. Already having a belle copine and definitely, in any case, having to work in the morning, I did not stay to work the room but hit the road, and despite extensive construction and humidity high enough that I had to run the wipers to keep the windshield from fogging up, I made it back in time to catch a two-and-a-half-hour nap before the alarm clock rang and I had to be moving again. Show was worth it, though; they usually are, as you can generally leave the sucky ones long before you have to sacrifice anything in terms of rest or stress.
I may or may not be going to Summer Slaughter; I go on call tonight for the next week leading up to when I hit the tarmac at Logan, and I may have other commitments as well tomorrow. Other than that, maybe hanging with the perpetually-expanding-their-universe-of-affiliated-bands originally-Downfall/Summoning-Hate crew Tuesday night, and definitely that last-chance show in Revere Thursday. And somewhere in all this I get to walk a 1/4 marathon, finish packing, and hack up a pair of BDU pants for overseas use.
As has been all too usual lately, I left right from work, navigated the Pike out without getting killed, and got in to Worcester just as the rain -- coming from the opposite direction -- was arriving. This was right about doors, so I got to stand and sit around for a bit and generally decompress. At this point, it looked mostly like a lot of Metal Thursdays do early on; not a lot of people, and many of those who are there are in the bands or traveled out with them.
Shabti [5.5/7]
This was a seriously impressive performance from a band that people in New England should definitely start paying attention to. The songs are not the most fully developed in the world at this point, but the musicianship that they displayed has to be acknowledged, as does the originality of their sound. Trying to sum it up for Matt from Faces of Bayon, who didn't get in until their last song, I couldn't do much better than the leftovers of a collaboration between 1990-vintage Cynic and 1991-vintage Dissection: a more or less even blend of tech-death and second-wave-black-metal elements that still felt raw around the edges. If they had CDs, I would have picked one up; unfortunately, all they had were shirts, and I'm not sure that they're "shirt-level" yet. I like the band, and will make a point of seeing them the next time they come around, but I already have too goddamned many shirts at this point.
Ov Dust [5.5/7]
I was wondering what band I'd seen the singer for these guys in before, but figured out while they were soundchecking that it was "none of the above", and that it was just the blown-out platinum hairdo, which you tend to see on about every third or fourth dude involved with a German folk/goth/Mittelalter-metal band. So we're clear, this guy is not the same as the dude from Subway to Sally. Similarly, Ov Dust is not the same as Celtic Frost, though the similarities are a little closer in that vein. They opened up with "Dethroned Emperor", which I didn't recognize at first, just thinking, man, these guys are just all over CF's knob, aren't they. Then the lyrics come in and I realize they're opening with another band's song. To their credit, they did play originals for the rest of the set, and got to a point where they just liked Celtic Frost a wicked lot rather than wholesale biting of their sound and catalog with huge gnashing fangs. They also strongly promoted their Myspace and covered the floor in flyers, which was a good thing, because there was a lot of beer spilled during Darkwor's set, and the extra absorption on the floor probably helped the staff with cleanup.
Cursed For Eternity [6.5/7]
This must have been Witch Tomb offspec week; Bone Ritual the night before, then this outfit similarly crushing all a day later and about an hour to the west. Here, though, the return to the primitive took on a different form: this was pure Black Circle music, neither Pure Fucking Armaggeddon (despite ending with an annihilating cover of "Deathcrush") nor Wrath of the Tyrant but somewhere in the middle, solidly within that musical continuum. It was also by far the best set of the night -- maybe only "by far" because of Darkwor's guitar amp issues, but whether you want to play the comparison game or not, the simple fact is that this set killed.
As mentioned, there were not a lot of people in this venue initially. However, that number steadily increased, to the point where, looking around after CFE finished, the entire frickin place was packed, and at about a 60:40 m:f ratio, which is absolutely unheard of in underground metal. This is, one supposes, a contributing factor in why Metal Thursday is where it is: there were more women in attendance by the end of this gig, nearly all of them actually interested in seeing and into Darkwor, than there were at the end of the EoN gig the night before, counting the posse that showed up from Wonderbar and wherethefuckeverelse solely to ambush Nicholas Cage. This isn't a "dude the CHICKS go to this show!!1!" selling point; it's an indicator of a healthier and more diverse scene.....in which this long-running and successful concert series is also probably a contributing factor.
Darkwor [6/7]
Originally I thought that I couldn't hear the guitar because my ears were blown out after Cursed For Eternity. Then other people, some of whom I'd seen wearing earplugs at the show, confirmed that there was a problem with the amp at the start. Either way, Darkwor didn't get off to as clean a start as they might have liked, if only due to technical reasons. They did get cranked up over the course of the set, though, and did up some killer music...that I now don't have the most concrete recollection of, because they didn't have CDs (in "tiny jew cases" or otherwise) available, but mainly because I was pit-tanking throughout their set, which is always a challenge at this place. The usual supsects (modulo Chris, on IR at the bar for this one with a concussion) went completely nuts despite the large crowd, and the janitor/assistant bartender for the club was motivated to climb up one of the poles on the floor and hang upside-down from the light rigging before jumping off and getting circus-carried around the pit by Dan. The dude in question always gets into the bands, but this was a lot more over the top than I've seen before.
Somehow, when they finally finished, the conclusion was universal that it was too soon, and there was much bellowing of MOOOOAR! at the band, but the damn lights went on anyways, and the show was concluded. Already having a belle copine and definitely, in any case, having to work in the morning, I did not stay to work the room but hit the road, and despite extensive construction and humidity high enough that I had to run the wipers to keep the windshield from fogging up, I made it back in time to catch a two-and-a-half-hour nap before the alarm clock rang and I had to be moving again. Show was worth it, though; they usually are, as you can generally leave the sucky ones long before you have to sacrifice anything in terms of rest or stress.
I may or may not be going to Summer Slaughter; I go on call tonight for the next week leading up to when I hit the tarmac at Logan, and I may have other commitments as well tomorrow. Other than that, maybe hanging with the perpetually-expanding-their-universe-of-affiliated-bands originally-Downfall/Summoning-Hate crew Tuesday night, and definitely that last-chance show in Revere Thursday. And somewhere in all this I get to walk a 1/4 marathon, finish packing, and hack up a pair of BDU pants for overseas use.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Eyes of Noctum with Closed Casket, Bone Ritual, and Who Carries The Lantern [O'Brien's, Allston, 7/15/2009]
There was a lot of sturm and drang about this show going in, ranging from "lol,wut" to "GRR SILVER ENEMA HOSE UP YOUR ASS", to "meh, we'll give it a shot", but fortunately, things resolved to the point that this was a good and largely peaceable show, and the visitors from SoCal made it through the night without that old chant being bellowed at them.
I got bogged down with stuff at work more than anticipated, and thus left late -- and got caught in ANOTHER ridiculous main-thoroughfare closure -- but was able to stump my way in shortly after 9pm, when the bands were supposed to start. Of course, nobody who's gone to more than a handful of shows was anticipating the music to actually start at nine, so I had the chance to hang about, drink beer, try to stay out of the bands' way as they loaded in, watch riders biff it on the Tour, and yack with Dave and Juan about spreading Vicious Insanity, Ill Daemonium, and other materials around to the eastern territories. To be determined if I go hang with said doods Tuesday; I've got a lot of stuff packed into the next week and still have to finish getting all my gear together.
Who Carries The Lantern [5.5/7]
In a welcome respite from the usual go-around (I go to a show, at least one band doesn't have a bass player, I whine about it on the internet but headbang during their set and buy their merch anyway), half of the bands on this bill did cut down their instrumental distribution, but in a way that (decade-old snark about godheadSilo aside) I'm fundamentally more comfortable with. WCTL was the first of the guitarless bands on the bill, and though their doom/post-metal sound wasn't the tightest match for the rest of the bill, that's Ammonia Booking for you; Robin apparently has a fetish for bills that hang together only tenuously, probably for "if the kids are united" reasons as much for maximizing turnout. Here, as on most other occasions, the head-scratching quickly gave way to appreciation; WCTL got a good long set for an opener, and filled it with diverse, heavy, developed, and often melodic music that you might not immediately expect from a vox-bass-drums three-piece. This was some good stuff, and though they played for quite a while, there was never a sense that they were falling into a rut, which is often the case with drum-and-bass bands. They didn't have anything recorded available, which is a shame, but I was able to pick up a button that unfortunately isn't on my rig yet.
Bone Ritual [6.5/7]
There is a certain portion of the black metal population that bought into the drama going into this show and, presumably, hard-line refused to support Wes Coppola going around the country in a van with four other dudes and a bunch of equipment on the basis of his last name and some invented perversion of the true ideals of black metal. This now becomes deliciously ironic and hilarious because these people kvlted themselves out of Bone Ritual's first show, a set which played every other band at this gig off the stage and will likely destroy every subsequent black metal performance in Boston this year with the same facility that it beat out every previous one. Foregoing guitars in favor of Cody/Strep Cunt playing through more and bigger amps than he usually does with Witch Tomb, Bone Ritual blasted the audience with a tight four-song set of not-quite-VON-worship (including, yes, VON's "Dissection Inhuman") blending funeral-doom and ritualistic styles with the black metal filth that was expected going in based on the lineup. The good part was that Bone Ritual played a show, when the band had previously been ambivalent about taking the music live; the bad part was that they had only so much skullcrushingly awesome material on their demo, and couldn't really go on longer without people complaining about them suddenly turning into a VON or possibly Ildjarn cover band.
Of course, this then begs the question of who would object, really, to having bands occasionally perform full cover sets of obscure and/or defunct underground bands; yes, it's not the same as the real thing, and touring on it would be a ripoff, but it's easier to woodshed on a couple records for three weeks than to convince VON to reunite and play gigs, and cheaper to show up for gas money and a pizza than it is to bring in Witch Trap from Colombia. A scene that does this too regularly becomes vinyl-bound and loses its own creativity, but once or twice a year isn't going to hurt anything, and may convince the real bands to tour once they see there's a demand for their imitations.
Closed Casket [5/7]
I don't think anyone was actually confused or disturbed by Closed Casket having guitars, though some may play it so for the lulz in retrospect. They came down from Maine and acquitted themselves pretty well with a mix of black metal and NWOSDM that acquitted itself well, neither hitting any real highs nor being so boring or mis-composed as to drive people out of the room. I'm sure that, given the distance, they'd like to have made a bigger splash, but when you follow Bone Ritual, ending up at "decent" rather than "totally underwhelming" is a bit of an accomplishment in itself. I'm a little skeptical about them ending with "Killers"; while two of the other three bands also did prominent covers, they finished strong with their own material. Of course, this may just be me; my views on what Iron Maiden covers are interesting are well attested. Unfortunately, they didn't appear to have any merch available; differences between live and studio abilities aside, you usually get a better idea of a band's music on CD at your own leisure rather than while buzzed and shell-shocked from another band's set, and I wanted to make sure to give them a fair shake.
Between bands, I got Bone Ritual's standard merch bundle off Charlie (drums) and somehow scraped up enough quarters that he didn't have to break any bills, then, after leaning back against the post, had Nicholas Cage just walk on past in front of me to stand over by the end of Noctum's merch table. Holy fuckin' shit, man.
Eyes of Noctum [5.5/7]
First: EoN is not touring solely on Wes Coppola's last name. Second: if his last name wasn't what it is, they'd probably be touring with another band ot two rather than solo, much like the last black metal show I saw in this place, which featured 2-3 bands (given the near-100% overlap between Ashdautas and Volahn's live lineup, I'm not going to call this 3 bands without any qualification) from the same general part of the world. They played a decent set that incorporated a bunch of death elements, including a Bloodbath cover, sagged in the middle, and sounded nearly as much like Dimmu as advertised. Wes ran out some inter-song banter that seemed not to have been written by a native English speaker, but also threw in a self-deprecating joke about perceptions of his dilettantism ("I just became a vocalist an hour ago"), showing that he at least understands where the anti-elite-elitists are coming from. I got their CD, and a shirt because the merch chick was having trouble breaking the bill and I hate inconveniencing bands; not sure that I'd go out of my way to see them again, but this set at least was decent.
After the initial shock of Pops Coppola showing up at this shindig, we also got an illustration writ larger than usual of a phenomenon that, as Rev. Aaron's been quoted, is not so usual: parents showing up for shows, and beyond this, parents who show up to gigs and cause a distraction. Parental intervention usually involves both pride ("I'm glad, deep down, that my dad cares enough to show up and support when I'm playing a gig") and embarrassment ("I'm on stage in face paint and goth elevator boots singing about cannibalism, and my frickin dad is out there in the pit clapping along"), but in the case of the front-and-center parent, this can also turn into Oedipal frustration; no matter how much musicians say they want to not seek fame, when you're up on stage, you want people to pay attention to you....and when halfway through your set, it's half black metal doods and suddenly half preppie starfuckers who are grabbing your dad for pictures, it's got to rankle. Unlike some other cases, though, Pops Coppola was not looking for attention, just standing to the side, in the back, in front of nobody but the mixing stand, and since Wes has grown up his whole life with famous parents, he doubtless understands that this sort of comes with the territory. If his dad's following him around the whole tour, things could get awkward, but I've got to believe that a guy who changed his name to step away from his own family when he was coming up as an actor would have enough sense and taste not to helicopter his own kids. Also, I'm having a hard time seeing him wanting to take on three weeks of standing in dingy dive bars, getting pestered for pictures by non-fans and yelled at by liquored-up black metal dudes that he hasn't made a good movie since The Rock. Shit sucks; if it wasn't for the "rich" bit, nobody would ever do the "famous" part.
Tonight: moar black metal, fewer celebrities, out in Worcester.
I got bogged down with stuff at work more than anticipated, and thus left late -- and got caught in ANOTHER ridiculous main-thoroughfare closure -- but was able to stump my way in shortly after 9pm, when the bands were supposed to start. Of course, nobody who's gone to more than a handful of shows was anticipating the music to actually start at nine, so I had the chance to hang about, drink beer, try to stay out of the bands' way as they loaded in, watch riders biff it on the Tour, and yack with Dave and Juan about spreading Vicious Insanity, Ill Daemonium, and other materials around to the eastern territories. To be determined if I go hang with said doods Tuesday; I've got a lot of stuff packed into the next week and still have to finish getting all my gear together.
Who Carries The Lantern [5.5/7]
In a welcome respite from the usual go-around (I go to a show, at least one band doesn't have a bass player, I whine about it on the internet but headbang during their set and buy their merch anyway), half of the bands on this bill did cut down their instrumental distribution, but in a way that (decade-old snark about godheadSilo aside) I'm fundamentally more comfortable with. WCTL was the first of the guitarless bands on the bill, and though their doom/post-metal sound wasn't the tightest match for the rest of the bill, that's Ammonia Booking for you; Robin apparently has a fetish for bills that hang together only tenuously, probably for "if the kids are united" reasons as much for maximizing turnout. Here, as on most other occasions, the head-scratching quickly gave way to appreciation; WCTL got a good long set for an opener, and filled it with diverse, heavy, developed, and often melodic music that you might not immediately expect from a vox-bass-drums three-piece. This was some good stuff, and though they played for quite a while, there was never a sense that they were falling into a rut, which is often the case with drum-and-bass bands. They didn't have anything recorded available, which is a shame, but I was able to pick up a button that unfortunately isn't on my rig yet.
Bone Ritual [6.5/7]
There is a certain portion of the black metal population that bought into the drama going into this show and, presumably, hard-line refused to support Wes Coppola going around the country in a van with four other dudes and a bunch of equipment on the basis of his last name and some invented perversion of the true ideals of black metal. This now becomes deliciously ironic and hilarious because these people kvlted themselves out of Bone Ritual's first show, a set which played every other band at this gig off the stage and will likely destroy every subsequent black metal performance in Boston this year with the same facility that it beat out every previous one. Foregoing guitars in favor of Cody/Strep Cunt playing through more and bigger amps than he usually does with Witch Tomb, Bone Ritual blasted the audience with a tight four-song set of not-quite-VON-worship (including, yes, VON's "Dissection Inhuman") blending funeral-doom and ritualistic styles with the black metal filth that was expected going in based on the lineup. The good part was that Bone Ritual played a show, when the band had previously been ambivalent about taking the music live; the bad part was that they had only so much skullcrushingly awesome material on their demo, and couldn't really go on longer without people complaining about them suddenly turning into a VON or possibly Ildjarn cover band.
Of course, this then begs the question of who would object, really, to having bands occasionally perform full cover sets of obscure and/or defunct underground bands; yes, it's not the same as the real thing, and touring on it would be a ripoff, but it's easier to woodshed on a couple records for three weeks than to convince VON to reunite and play gigs, and cheaper to show up for gas money and a pizza than it is to bring in Witch Trap from Colombia. A scene that does this too regularly becomes vinyl-bound and loses its own creativity, but once or twice a year isn't going to hurt anything, and may convince the real bands to tour once they see there's a demand for their imitations.
Closed Casket [5/7]
I don't think anyone was actually confused or disturbed by Closed Casket having guitars, though some may play it so for the lulz in retrospect. They came down from Maine and acquitted themselves pretty well with a mix of black metal and NWOSDM that acquitted itself well, neither hitting any real highs nor being so boring or mis-composed as to drive people out of the room. I'm sure that, given the distance, they'd like to have made a bigger splash, but when you follow Bone Ritual, ending up at "decent" rather than "totally underwhelming" is a bit of an accomplishment in itself. I'm a little skeptical about them ending with "Killers"; while two of the other three bands also did prominent covers, they finished strong with their own material. Of course, this may just be me; my views on what Iron Maiden covers are interesting are well attested. Unfortunately, they didn't appear to have any merch available; differences between live and studio abilities aside, you usually get a better idea of a band's music on CD at your own leisure rather than while buzzed and shell-shocked from another band's set, and I wanted to make sure to give them a fair shake.
Between bands, I got Bone Ritual's standard merch bundle off Charlie (drums) and somehow scraped up enough quarters that he didn't have to break any bills, then, after leaning back against the post, had Nicholas Cage just walk on past in front of me to stand over by the end of Noctum's merch table. Holy fuckin' shit, man.
Eyes of Noctum [5.5/7]
First: EoN is not touring solely on Wes Coppola's last name. Second: if his last name wasn't what it is, they'd probably be touring with another band ot two rather than solo, much like the last black metal show I saw in this place, which featured 2-3 bands (given the near-100% overlap between Ashdautas and Volahn's live lineup, I'm not going to call this 3 bands without any qualification) from the same general part of the world. They played a decent set that incorporated a bunch of death elements, including a Bloodbath cover, sagged in the middle, and sounded nearly as much like Dimmu as advertised. Wes ran out some inter-song banter that seemed not to have been written by a native English speaker, but also threw in a self-deprecating joke about perceptions of his dilettantism ("I just became a vocalist an hour ago"), showing that he at least understands where the anti-elite-elitists are coming from. I got their CD, and a shirt because the merch chick was having trouble breaking the bill and I hate inconveniencing bands; not sure that I'd go out of my way to see them again, but this set at least was decent.
After the initial shock of Pops Coppola showing up at this shindig, we also got an illustration writ larger than usual of a phenomenon that, as Rev. Aaron's been quoted, is not so usual: parents showing up for shows, and beyond this, parents who show up to gigs and cause a distraction. Parental intervention usually involves both pride ("I'm glad, deep down, that my dad cares enough to show up and support when I'm playing a gig") and embarrassment ("I'm on stage in face paint and goth elevator boots singing about cannibalism, and my frickin dad is out there in the pit clapping along"), but in the case of the front-and-center parent, this can also turn into Oedipal frustration; no matter how much musicians say they want to not seek fame, when you're up on stage, you want people to pay attention to you....and when halfway through your set, it's half black metal doods and suddenly half preppie starfuckers who are grabbing your dad for pictures, it's got to rankle. Unlike some other cases, though, Pops Coppola was not looking for attention, just standing to the side, in the back, in front of nobody but the mixing stand, and since Wes has grown up his whole life with famous parents, he doubtless understands that this sort of comes with the territory. If his dad's following him around the whole tour, things could get awkward, but I've got to believe that a guy who changed his name to step away from his own family when he was coming up as an actor would have enough sense and taste not to helicopter his own kids. Also, I'm having a hard time seeing him wanting to take on three weeks of standing in dingy dive bars, getting pestered for pictures by non-fans and yelled at by liquored-up black metal dudes that he hasn't made a good movie since The Rock. Shit sucks; if it wasn't for the "rich" bit, nobody would ever do the "famous" part.
Tonight: moar black metal, fewer celebrities, out in Worcester.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Every Shirt CVIII: Krisiun - Southern Storm
shirt: Krisiun - Southern Storm
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2009
provenance: band
Picked up on their tour stop this March with Destruction, this shirt was worn exactly once before getting dragged into the middle of the pile, to disappear for four months and get compacted down flat in the process. This is a shame, because it's a pretty hellacious design that abstractly does not deserve to stay buried for so long.
There are about 30 or so shirts left, modulo any gain from the three to four shows I'll see before going overseas, whatever I pick up at Wacken, and whatever I end up picking up at NEDF and other shows between when I get back. Realistically, given the break and expected volume gain, this project is going to finish up around the end of September, covering nearly six months instead of the expected three. As should have been noted before this, I have stupidly too many metal shirts.
Every Shirt CVII: Iced Earth
shirt: Iced Earth - Damien
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2002
provenance: catalog
The release of Horror Show sets a lower bound on when I could have gotten this one; the best reckoning is by Internet order in the winter of early 2002. This was my first -- and remains only -- Iced Earth shirt, as I was too broke when they came around last year to pick up another.
At some point, for some unknown reason, I tore the sleeves off this one; this is the only shirt I have to be so modified. Also of interest to probably next to no one is that the print, on both front and back, seems to be a little skewed, as if the shirt was in the press wrong. Whatever; is what it is.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Every Shirt CVI: Composted
shirt: Composted - SLAMbulance
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2009
provenance: band
Also acquired Friday, this is a shirt that really has to be seen full size to be appreciated, from a band that kind of has to be seen live to be fully grokked. For slam-death to give rise to a band like Composted, who are intentionally self-parodying as well as delivering quality slam, the genre has to be unintentionally self-parodying, to the point where people wonder if New Yorkment is actually a real band and don't get Composted's joke when they dress up in flat-brimmed hats, which may lead people to mistaken conclusions about the band, if all they've got is the music....until they see pictures from one of their gigs featuring otherwise normal Boston metalheads beating an inflatable plastic fish to death.
It may be difficult to see on the first pass, particularly because your attention's drawn to the SLAMbulance!!!1! and the Icy Hot Stuntaz just under the logo,but this dood is lurking in the background in the lower right (of the shirt, lower left of the image). No Pedobear, but there is a wicked lot of LOL INTERNETS on this shirt, even to the point, debatably, of this as a WYSIYWSB moment.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Every Shirt CV: Dragonforce
shirt: Dragonforce - Inhuman Rampage tour
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2006
provenance: band
This one was picked up on the occasion of the band's US debut at the 2006 NEMHF, which was the better of the two times I've seen this band so far. Like a lot of people who started listening to them back -- shit, nearly a decade ago, before Universal made them change their name, I remain convinced that they are better than they have presented so far in terms of being able to a) stay in tune live and b) put out records that sound different from each other. Sam had largely resolved problem (a) by the time this show came around, but at least of last telling, (b) was still under progress. I still don't own Ultra Beatdown DX Para Para Remix or whatever the hell the current record is called, so I can't confirm or deny; if they're not playing against anyone I want to see when they go on at Wacken this year, I may have some more information.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Composted with Rampant Decay, Embryonic Cryptopathia, and Macerated [O'Brien's, Allston, 7/10/2009]
Though the huge multinational trip is looming -- need to get some groundcloths in stat -- there are still local shows that need paying attention to, like this one, which was pretty much as awesome and as ridiculous as might have been expected going in.
I left right from work because I had some crap to take care of that ran late, but was pretty much on time until I got to the part where some idiot had thought it was smart to close 33-50% of Storrow Drive westbound for concert parking, instead of making people take the train and use their feet like they ought to. This wasted everybody's time and led me to hustle a bit after caching my vehicle, because I didn't want to miss Macerated. Fortunately, I got over with time to spare, and had the chance to drink a beer with a nice high water:chemicals ratio, apologize to Mark for not letting him know I was coming down in advance, and buy a CD off Rich before the bands started.
Macerated [5.5/7]
I have a history of prejudice against bands without bassists; such is well-documented here. Despite this drawback -- as mentioned in some other venues, Macerated's sound wasn't maybe as tight as might have been desired -- the actual music offered here was pretty damn cool. Their set was relatively short, but they kept up at a high level throughout, with a lot more of an old-school brutal sound than might have been expected on this bill, or with this kind of lineup. Part of this may have been the equipment; the guitarist had at least a seven-string, maybe an eight, and did a really good job of keeping a thick low-end going as well as slashing out the riffage.
As mentioned previously, this band had some good merch, but didn't charge much for it, and additionally spent a lot of time away from their merch table during set breaks. While this is understandable (nobody's going to begrudge band members the right to pack up, watch friends they see two or three times a year via tourdate trades, and get some food down), this may have led to decreased sales, which would be a shame: good bands from 500 miles away need and deserve a hand getting to their next gig.
Embryonic Cryptopathia [5/7]
There have been rumors that this is an active band about as long as I've been actually going to DIY shows in Boston. This, though, was the first time I'd actually seen them play, and the first or maybe second time I can recall seeing them on a bill. Though the set was far too short, EC executed masterfully, with short, sharp, heavily blackened bursts of death-grind pummeling the audience. You might not expect the black metal elements at a show like this, but that's before you notice the large numbers of Hirudinea and Witch Tomb members in this band; then, it becomes clear that this is the other side of that coin, the more grind-heavy side of that absolute blackened worldhate music. Hella good stuff; no idea when they're playing again, or if they'll have anything recorded by then, but a band to watch for in any case.
If there was anything odd about this set, it was that EC was debatably more costumed than Composted; while the "sports" theme the latter band had going on wasn't the most well-implemented themegag the band's ever done, this is still something.
Rampant Decay [5.5/7]
Mr. Rich Horror has put on, in concrete and scientific terms, a metric fuckton of shows, including this one, since I returned to the Northeast from overseas. I have been to many of these shows. He has also had an active band throughout, whether the name be It Will End In Pure Horror, Rich Horror and the Screaming Nervous Breakdowns, or at this point, Rampant Decay. Despite this guy running a large part, if not the lion's share, of heavy music in eastern Massachusetts, I had to date never seen his actual band, for three years either missing shows due to illness, schedule conflicts, or outside commitments, or going to shows and being bummed that his band had to cancel. It boggles the frickin mind.
So I eventually do actually see Rampant Decay, and what is the upshot? A hella good band that makes Rich's commitment to promotion entirely understandable, thickly slurrying the line between metal and punk to the point where other promoters might not book them on punk or hardcore shows as being too metal, or metal promoters give them a pass as too punk. This is, of course, dumb, given the quality of the music, which mixes the best elements of Carnivore and a moshpit fistfight to create high-class DIY music that doesn't care nearly so much about genre as it does about getting wasted and headbutting somebody in the jaw. Rampant Decay could also have gone on longer than they did, but it was a good set regardless, and hopefully this ridiculous streak is over and I won't have to wait another three goddamned years to see a very active band from my home area again.
Composted [6/7]
On this sad occasion, two members left the Composted family: Eliot "the BlackNess Monster" Bayless, who separated amicably from the band to pursue a career in actually getting paid to do music stuffs, which was taking off to the point that playing in an active death metal band was starting to interfere, and Leo the inflatable fish, who was beaten, stomped, and eventually hit by a car while trying to cross Harvard Ave. Yes, seriously. (Photo credits to Rev. Aaron, obviously.) That Leo survived to that point was something of a miracle, and may be a record for a Composted inflatable prop; practically everything else that gets thrown into the audience dies in a matter of a song or two, but Leo kept on trucking the whole set, flying through the air, getting punched and sat on, bouncing off everyone and everything, and helping Composted demonstrate that they are, yes, among the best slam-death bands out there, because while everybody may be able to lock in and drill siqq breakdownz khed, there's only an elect few that can do this while getting hit in the face with blowup fish and not miss a beat.
I'm pretty sure that this wasn't the best Composted set I've seen, but it was damned high quality, with solid slam-death making up for a slight decrease in gag volume. More so than for Rampant Decay, people got moving and violent -- towards each other as well as the inflatable fish -- but nobody got facewaffled and Eliot (on the floor because O'Brien's only has so much stage area) didn't even drop his guitar after he got run into, despite the strap separating from it. Good times, to be sure.
Eventually, the music stopped, and the band packed up, and people danced and made gang signs to the first Body Count disc, which was somehow on the club sound system, and then I hit the trail, saw Leo bounce off the windshield of some totally oblivious motorists, and hiked back to pick up my car again. Having gone right from work, there was no downtime, so I was feeling pretty beat, and as a result didn't pay attention on Route 1 and ended up detouring through Lynn and Swampscott for no discernable reason in the process of getting home. Three or four shows left, then it's off to Europe with whatever I end up hauling.
I left right from work because I had some crap to take care of that ran late, but was pretty much on time until I got to the part where some idiot had thought it was smart to close 33-50% of Storrow Drive westbound for concert parking, instead of making people take the train and use their feet like they ought to. This wasted everybody's time and led me to hustle a bit after caching my vehicle, because I didn't want to miss Macerated. Fortunately, I got over with time to spare, and had the chance to drink a beer with a nice high water:chemicals ratio, apologize to Mark for not letting him know I was coming down in advance, and buy a CD off Rich before the bands started.
Macerated [5.5/7]
I have a history of prejudice against bands without bassists; such is well-documented here. Despite this drawback -- as mentioned in some other venues, Macerated's sound wasn't maybe as tight as might have been desired -- the actual music offered here was pretty damn cool. Their set was relatively short, but they kept up at a high level throughout, with a lot more of an old-school brutal sound than might have been expected on this bill, or with this kind of lineup. Part of this may have been the equipment; the guitarist had at least a seven-string, maybe an eight, and did a really good job of keeping a thick low-end going as well as slashing out the riffage.
As mentioned previously, this band had some good merch, but didn't charge much for it, and additionally spent a lot of time away from their merch table during set breaks. While this is understandable (nobody's going to begrudge band members the right to pack up, watch friends they see two or three times a year via tourdate trades, and get some food down), this may have led to decreased sales, which would be a shame: good bands from 500 miles away need and deserve a hand getting to their next gig.
Embryonic Cryptopathia [5/7]
There have been rumors that this is an active band about as long as I've been actually going to DIY shows in Boston. This, though, was the first time I'd actually seen them play, and the first or maybe second time I can recall seeing them on a bill. Though the set was far too short, EC executed masterfully, with short, sharp, heavily blackened bursts of death-grind pummeling the audience. You might not expect the black metal elements at a show like this, but that's before you notice the large numbers of Hirudinea and Witch Tomb members in this band; then, it becomes clear that this is the other side of that coin, the more grind-heavy side of that absolute blackened worldhate music. Hella good stuff; no idea when they're playing again, or if they'll have anything recorded by then, but a band to watch for in any case.
If there was anything odd about this set, it was that EC was debatably more costumed than Composted; while the "sports" theme the latter band had going on wasn't the most well-implemented themegag the band's ever done, this is still something.
Rampant Decay [5.5/7]
Mr. Rich Horror has put on, in concrete and scientific terms, a metric fuckton of shows, including this one, since I returned to the Northeast from overseas. I have been to many of these shows. He has also had an active band throughout, whether the name be It Will End In Pure Horror, Rich Horror and the Screaming Nervous Breakdowns, or at this point, Rampant Decay. Despite this guy running a large part, if not the lion's share, of heavy music in eastern Massachusetts, I had to date never seen his actual band, for three years either missing shows due to illness, schedule conflicts, or outside commitments, or going to shows and being bummed that his band had to cancel. It boggles the frickin mind.
So I eventually do actually see Rampant Decay, and what is the upshot? A hella good band that makes Rich's commitment to promotion entirely understandable, thickly slurrying the line between metal and punk to the point where other promoters might not book them on punk or hardcore shows as being too metal, or metal promoters give them a pass as too punk. This is, of course, dumb, given the quality of the music, which mixes the best elements of Carnivore and a moshpit fistfight to create high-class DIY music that doesn't care nearly so much about genre as it does about getting wasted and headbutting somebody in the jaw. Rampant Decay could also have gone on longer than they did, but it was a good set regardless, and hopefully this ridiculous streak is over and I won't have to wait another three goddamned years to see a very active band from my home area again.
Composted [6/7]
On this sad occasion, two members left the Composted family: Eliot "the BlackNess Monster" Bayless, who separated amicably from the band to pursue a career in actually getting paid to do music stuffs, which was taking off to the point that playing in an active death metal band was starting to interfere, and Leo the inflatable fish, who was beaten, stomped, and eventually hit by a car while trying to cross Harvard Ave. Yes, seriously. (Photo credits to Rev. Aaron, obviously.) That Leo survived to that point was something of a miracle, and may be a record for a Composted inflatable prop; practically everything else that gets thrown into the audience dies in a matter of a song or two, but Leo kept on trucking the whole set, flying through the air, getting punched and sat on, bouncing off everyone and everything, and helping Composted demonstrate that they are, yes, among the best slam-death bands out there, because while everybody may be able to lock in and drill siqq breakdownz khed, there's only an elect few that can do this while getting hit in the face with blowup fish and not miss a beat.
I'm pretty sure that this wasn't the best Composted set I've seen, but it was damned high quality, with solid slam-death making up for a slight decrease in gag volume. More so than for Rampant Decay, people got moving and violent -- towards each other as well as the inflatable fish -- but nobody got facewaffled and Eliot (on the floor because O'Brien's only has so much stage area) didn't even drop his guitar after he got run into, despite the strap separating from it. Good times, to be sure.
Eventually, the music stopped, and the band packed up, and people danced and made gang signs to the first Body Count disc, which was somehow on the club sound system, and then I hit the trail, saw Leo bounce off the windshield of some totally oblivious motorists, and hiked back to pick up my car again. Having gone right from work, there was no downtime, so I was feeling pretty beat, and as a result didn't pay attention on Route 1 and ended up detouring through Lynn and Swampscott for no discernable reason in the process of getting home. Three or four shows left, then it's off to Europe with whatever I end up hauling.
Every Shirt CIV: Macerated
shirt: Macerated
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2009
provenance: band
Picked up last night (review forthcoming) when these guys opened up for a lineup consisting of Boston's kings of Manual Crowd Pummeling, this is a nice sick shirt from a nice sick band. They also had some slightly more complicated shirts featuring their current album artwork, but my tastes tend to the minimalistic, and additionally, buying a full-color print on camo for the prices these guys were charging would have felt like ripping the band off. If you accept that this shirt would go for $5, then I got a pin, their current record, and a CD-R demo from a side project for free. I've noticed this a couple times with bands from the South (these dudes are Virginia Beach), where the cost of living is legendarily less than it is here; it's good for dudes who don't have money, but most people wouldn't balk at a $10 shirt-and-CD package either.
Every Shirt CIII: Destruction - D.E.V.O.L.U.T.I.O.N.
shirt: Destruction - D.E.V.O.L.U.T.I.O.N. US tour
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2009
provenance: band
As mentioned back on the show, this was not the design I planned to get out of this tour. The front design isn't among the more inspired that Destruction's ever put out, but the tour dates are still on the back, and hey, the band gets money either way. They'll be back again, and I'll have another chance to get a good shirt from them.
Every Shirt CII: Autumn Above
shirt: Autumn Above
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2008
provenance: band
It's been a while since a shirt came up in this round where there could be a legitimate debate as to whether the band involved is metal or not. In this case, though, the definitional boundaries are wide enough to bring Autumn Above in, especially since there's no pre-established heaviness filter or anything. For now, at least, their Jester Race-era In-Flames-borrowings, tendency to write an Opeth break whenever songs need bridging together, Sentenced-styled lyrics and concepts, and occasional hxc backing vocals make them metal enough to get listed here; for broader purposes, the question will remain open as to whether they are a pop-rock band with Opeth breaks and a headbanging mania, or a metal band with acoustic guitars and pop vocal hooks.
As noted above, you should go listen to them, and despite the short notice you could find a hell of a lot worse things to do, if you're on the North Shore, than go see them open Witchstock this afternoon.
Every Shirt CI: Iron Maiden - Somewhere Back In Time
shirt: Iron Maiden - Somewhere Back In Time tour
size: 2XL (EU)
vintage: 2008
provenance: band
The front of this shirt is in many ways functionally identical to that other Powerslave shirt I have, except for being on a blue background because Maiden are wikkid stacked khed and don't have to print on normal black shirts if they don't feel like it. On the back are some more cool graphics, and also the short of casually impressive run of tour dates on five continents that you kind of expect out of Iron Maiden. All things considered, this is a really nice shirt that's almost worth the $35 I dropped on it; eventually, I would like to get a Maiden football strip at one of these gigs as well, but I have a hard time spending over $60 on shirts from the fitba team I actually support, let alone a band that I give enough money to already for CDs and concerts.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Every Shirt C: Metallica - Ride The Lightning
shirt: Metallica - Ride The Lightning
size: XL (US)
vintage: 1997
provenance: retail
As fitting for the hundredth (seriously? what the hell?!?) shirt in this series, this one is as close to the Generic Metal Shirt as can be found. Almost everyone who considers themselves a fan of heavy music either owns this shirt, or owned this shirt at some point in time. The Ride cover on the front and the skeleton dude getting electrocuted on the back has been around, in some form or another, since the mid-'80s, and this exact shirt is probably still in print today, unaltered from when I picked it up at Newbury Comics more than a decade ago. I constantly see people in this design at shows from DIY bar gigs up to festivals, watching all kinds of bands; metalheads are almost required by law to own Number of the Beast, Metallica's catalog to 1990, Reign In Blood, British Steel, Rust In Peace, and Paranoid regardless of what they listen to otherwise, and it sure seems like the same may be true for this shirt design.
Monday, July 06, 2009
Every Shirt XCIX: Fallen Shall Rise
shirt: Fallen Shall Rise
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2007
provenance: band/festival
This one was acquired at Loudfest '07 (there may be another one someday, so the year's still relevant to put on until about 2012), which was still a festival, if a kind of unsuccessful one. It was also pretty merch fail as well; there was Eric CSDO's table (which might be easily mistaken for a Hampton Beach t-shirt truck), and then there was this offering from this band, who were not particularly outstanding, but did have shirts. The festival didn't draw as well as the organizers might have hoped, but even if you end up playing to only 300 people in a venue set up for an order of magnitude more, that's still 300 people, more than you're likely to see in any three given DIY shows, and it kind of behooves you to have some stuff with your band's name and/or tunes on it in case someone in the audience thinks you're cool. I have no CDs from this band, nor any idea of what they've been doing in the nearly two years since, but I do have their shirt, and there's definitely something to be said for that from the band perspective.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Every Shirt XCVIII: Indignation raglan
shirt: Indignation rapper raglan
size: 3XL? (US)
vintage: 2006
provenance: band
This is the bizarre Indignation shirt with the bizarre backstory mentioned much earlier. I picked this shirt up at some DIY venue in the last three months of 2006; maybe at Sputnix, maybe up at the Haverhill Elks, maybe somewhere entirely unrelated. Regardless, it is a serviceable if gigantic piece of clothing that yells DIY rather loudly.
As tags that were on this shirt before I cut them off indicated, the fabric for this one was assembled for the Negro Leagues museum as replica kit for some old-time club, but obviously, it was cut out and seconded, either due to manufacturing errors or simple overstock. Having fallen through the cracks of the primary economy, Indignation acquired it, probably in bulk with other mismatched shirts, and screenprinted their logo onto it. When I got this one, such shirts, many using the older logo from when they were more of a punk band, made up the bulk of their merch, and they were distributing them rather freely to anybody who came into range. I'm pretty sure I got this one gratis for picking up a CD, which is the opposite of how such things usually go, but whatever. The usual model in the current digital age is to loss-lead with the music and use it to get people to buy shirts, but if your raw shirts are next to free and you consider your ink and screens as a sunk cost, you're a lot more likely to get people listening to your music if you buck the flow and give them free shirts.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Every Shirt XCVII: Wacken Mudfighters
shirt: W:O:A Mudfighters
size: 2XL (EU)
vintage: 2005
provenance: catalog/festival
I normally take a dark view of buying festival merch by mail-order (seriously, go to the show and don't front), but this is an exception, and it came about as a result of some exceptional circumstances.
Wacken 2005 was the last "smallish" version of the festival -- "smallish" being "under 40,000" -- and a significant part of that may not have been just the growth curve, but that the weather went from "crappy" to "wretched" over the course of the festival, in the middle of a generally rotten festival season, weather-wise. My boots survived, but other people's did not. My tent and sleeping bag were junked immediately on return to Dresden. As a consolation to those who were there, the organizers printed up ten thousand of these shirts; underneath the silver print on the front is a splattered brown MUDFIGHTERS legend; the pun is on the Wacken Firefighters shirts of similar design generally available at the festival, and of course the sea of mud that was eating boots and cars and stuff whole. On the back's another mud splotch that's decayed with age, and the Englisch pun "very matsch metal". Of course, we don't translate 'sehr' as 'very much' in this sense in proper English, but the Germans don't have another word for mud that could sub into another phrase.
Every Shirt XCVI: Archaeon
shirt: Archaeon
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2008
provenance: band
Acquired at the tour kickoff show at which I also got the TYAG shirt seen earlier, this is, considering that I consistently passed up getting Vanitas from retail, the sole piece of evidence I have of this band, who didn't quite have it together when I saw them that one time, but managed to do decently despite this. This is a rare thing in tech-death bands, which, as the comments at the time indicated, the band might have gone on to make some noise if they'd been able to keep their lineup together, but such are the stories of local bands, especially as young as these guys were: good music is not quite as rare as the luck and the circumstances that allow a band to stay together and get that music out.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Every Shirt XCV: Enslaved
shirt: Enslaved - Ruun world tour
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2007
provenance: band
Acquired on the final US date of this tour (the total list of stops on the back is rather impressive), this shirt has a minimalist, slightly grim, slightly trippy (being a moron, I didn't recognize the gray circle as being an out-of-focus satellite image centered on Africa until I saw it in the picture here) design that really suits modern Enslaved down to the floor. I'm looking forward to seeing the band again this summer -- and in that process I have to remember to keep kicking myself to pick up some of their more recent work. I'm not 100% sure I own anything past Mardraum, and that in itself is a problem.
this will, of course, end well
I understand that if people actually want to read about the upcoming W:O:A, the official site is over that way, and nothing is stopping people from doing so. I also understand that nobody reads this, and that any statistical noise in that "nobody" assessment probably also does not have a Wacken ticket, and thus does not care. Still, though, there are some things that are worth sharing.
The festival is less than a month away, and we're getting into the part where a lot of shit gets announced, both good (select sets being recorded live for cheap download), bad (Mago de Oz and Thin Lizzy cancelling what the hell), and WTF (this one). WTF, of course, because seriously, what else do you call hanging a Jaegermeister bar off a crane?
I'm a metalhead, and I drink Kraueterlikoers. I know many other metalheads who also like weird liquors made out of roots and herbs. And unambiguously, I forecast that it is a stupid idea to drink them when suspended 150 feet up in the air. They get you drunk, and make you do stupid things, and that is a long way to fall. The End; I will not get tagged for like $35 to send an international SMS while in the goddamned infield to get a chance to go on it, and I will assiduously avoid standing under it.
The festival is less than a month away, and we're getting into the part where a lot of shit gets announced, both good (select sets being recorded live for cheap download), bad (Mago de Oz and Thin Lizzy cancelling what the hell), and WTF (this one). WTF, of course, because seriously, what else do you call hanging a Jaegermeister bar off a crane?
I'm a metalhead, and I drink Kraueterlikoers. I know many other metalheads who also like weird liquors made out of roots and herbs. And unambiguously, I forecast that it is a stupid idea to drink them when suspended 150 feet up in the air. They get you drunk, and make you do stupid things, and that is a long way to fall. The End; I will not get tagged for like $35 to send an international SMS while in the goddamned infield to get a chance to go on it, and I will assiduously avoid standing under it.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Every Shirt XCIV: Mortician
shirt: Mortician - Chainsaw Dismemberment
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2006
provenance: catalog/band
I got this shirt as a consequence of some other merch I was ordering, specifically a more robust and wicked-metal bottle opener to replace the cheap plastic Headbangers' Ball one that I got at Metalfest '06 and ruined about 6 months later, Mortician being one of the few bands to make beer openers. (Said beer opener eventually wore out about 2 1/2 years later, and has been replaced by one I got from Coctopus in early '08.) Mortician also makes pretty awesome shirts, as this one will attest; this was a label order, but I'm pretty sure at this point that Mortician's label and merch point is the band themselves.
If you look at this on full size, you can see the rippling and clotting in the red ink that comprises the main part of the design. Seriously, this thing is like wearing a plastic chestplate as well as a t-shirt. Since this is a Mortician shirt, and one closely supervised by the band for production values, it makes sense that Will wouldn't want to skimp on the ink: this shirt's going to survive, and still keep its design, no matter how much bong water, motorcycle grease, Cheetos dust, and whatever the hell else gets thrown at it in the course of being worn by a Mortician fan. And at the end of all that, it's still going to be vibrant and brutal enough that it will never, ever, get ironically picked out of a thrift-store bin by some hipster.
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