A catatonic leisure at 1000 miles per hour

At The Drive-In- Relationship of Command (2000)
1) Arcarsenal
2) Pattern Against User
3) One Armed Scissor
4) Sleepwalk Capsules
5) Invalid Litter Department
6) Mannequin Republic
7) Enfilade
8) Rolodex Propaganda
9) Quarantined
10) Cosmonaut
11) Non-Zero Possibility
12) Catacombs

When this album first came out it was right up there with my favourites ever, it had such a profound impact on me that it's impression upon my young mind was indelible. Not that it's inspired me to do anything or actually seek out any other similar sounding artists, you understand, I just fucking loved the album. Unfortunately I don't give this anywhere near as much play time as it deserves and that is a crime on my part.....don't share in my crime lest you be taken to prison and molested in the showers by a big hairy guy called Brian with knuckles the size of water melons. It may very well just happen.
I first heard of these guys on XFM waaaaay back in the day when the station kicked ass and played shit like this. Post-fucking-Hardcore on XFM; I know, almost unthinkable nowadays what with them playing the mind numbing bullshit of Scouting For Fucking Girls. Going back to this 'post hardcore' nonsense I equally am clueless as to what it actually means or constitutes. I do at least know that it has nothing to do with the 'happy' hardcore variety that my mum assumed I was speaking about when she asked me what I was listening to when she overheard me playing this album for the umpteenth time. So, no cheesy bullshit euro dance trance fuck-whittery, instead we have an album full of schizophrenic, angular guitars with lyrics penned by a psychotic, drug addled 7 year old wearing a fez (the head wear is just for effect you understand.) This album is controlled chaos, but so loose is the band's grip on it that it threatens at any moment to veer off course and careene into a village, killing everyone. I'm so full of metaphors and similies it's untrue.
I digress, this is the fucking shit right here. It makes me want to head butt a small child in the face, that's how good it is. It's aggressive and angry.
The lyrics....oh how to describe the mad as a box of frogs lyrics. Best to let Cedric's words speak for themselves:
Yes this is the campaign
Slithered entrails
In the cargo bay
A neutered is the vastness
Hallow vacuum check the
Oxygen tanks
They hibernate
But have they kissed the ground
Pucker up and kiss the asphalt now
Tease this amputation
Splintered larynx
It has access now
...lol wut?

Enough waffle. I would talk more but I'm already painfully aware that this 'review' is so completely full of shit that it's in danger of being flushed very soon. So, get this album, listen to it, head butt small children an consider the musings of a totally ass hat mad bunch of young crazies.

My soul's gone Kold

Sólstafir- Köld (2009)
1) 78 Days In The Desert
2) Kold
3) Pale Rider
4) She Destroys Again
5) Necrologue
6) World Void Of Souls
7) Love Is The Devil (And I Am In Love)
8) Goddess Of The Ages

Yet another 'best of the 2000s' and yet another mashing of genres. It's kinda getting boring, I know, but I'll make up for it with the next few posts....I almost half kinda promise.
This time round it's Solstafir (fuck messing around with the funky 'O' bullshit in their name), an Icelandic psychedelic rock meets Viking black metal band. According to Wikipedia, the oracle of our ages, their name is Icelandic for the beams of light that radiate from the sun. Epic.
They happen to be another band that I found out about due to a sampler CD I got free with a magazine, either Metal Hammer or Terrorizer this time round. The track was 'Blood Soaked Velvet' (don't worry, no emo bullshit to be found here) from their Masterpiece of Bitterness album. Their music is epic in scale and sound and with Kold (again, fuck the dodgy 'O') it's as sweeping and vast as ever. There's an ethereal feeling to the album, an almost haunting beauty behind it's riffs. This isn't really 'metal' per se, but there's definately a remnant of the black metal guitar sound and effects present, just something about the guitars '78 Days In The Desert' reminds me of Cobalt and the ilk. The songs constantly threaten to break into full ahead, balls to the wall black metal but never actually do. This may seem anti-climactic, bathetic if you will, but it adds a fragility to their sound that makes it haunting and adds that ethereal essence I mentioned earlier. For me the sound is represented perfectly by the album cover and all that it depicts: darkness, bleakness, the ethereal and ephemeral and beauty. Yeah, you heard me, this music is beautiful, what of it? It's progressive, melodic, psychedelic, sweeping, haunting, fragile, cold, rousing and immortal.
This is the type of album you listen to with the lights off, imagining cloud giants fighting over the mountain of Megiddo or a lumbering leviathan writhing under glacial oceans, the waters so deep a blue they almost seem black. Beauty juxtaposed with power, precision and a sense of the grand(iose?)
To paraphrase Tenacious D; this album has powers, 'What powers you ask? I dunno...How 'bout the power... to move you?'

If I could catch a glimpse of your grand design...

1) Verdelet
2) Seduced
3) Shelter From The Sand
4) Eyes Of The Dawn
5) Abbadonna, Dying In The Sun
6) Words That Go Unspoken
7) Intractable
8) Seraphs and Silence
9) The Penance
10) Lex Talonis

Next up in my random selection of the best albums of the 2000s is one from perhaps the best British band of recent times. It feels a bit of a shame to say something like that, classifying them as British as if they've overcome some kind of burden and managed a spectacular feat of endeavour to create a good album. I'll start this again; Akercocke kick ass. They play blinding mix of blackened death metal with progressive elements. More music that mixes prog with metal, me thinks a theme is emerging in the albums I post here.
Anywho, I first got into the 'cocke when I heard two songs from the 'Choronozon' album on a sampler CD I got free with Metal Hammer (back when I thought the magazine still had the tiniest shred of dignity left.) I remember being absolutely blown away by the songs, Leviathan and Son Of The Morning, from then on I was hooked. I bought the album, and the previous two releases 'The Rape Of The Bastard Nazarene' 'Goat Of Mendes', and couldn't get enough of them. I loved the raw blackened death sound they played on the first two, with just a hint of progression bleeding into songs like 'A Skin For Dancing In.' I read up on the band, not only were they British but they came from London to boot. Not only this but they also had a penchant for wearing rather dapper suits on stage and during photo shoots.
So, I then hear in 2005 that the band were going to release a new album, I nearly shit myself in eager anticipation and when it hits it only turns out to be one of the best damn albums I think I've ever heard. To top it all off the album sports what is one of my favourite songs of all time...'Verdelet.' I know it's a bold statement and all and I know that for me, like most people I assume, their favourite songs change from day to day, minute to minute, but Verdelet is always up there in my top somethingorother. However, this one simple song is so full of not only 'win' and 'awesome' but also emotion and a sense of real honesty. It rises above the simple 'anit-christian' lyrics of some of the bands work and actually hits home to the real spirit of anyone who has ever questioned life/death or their own existence. It's enough to bring a full grown metal-head to tears of joy, sadness and realisation.
This doesn't even begin to draw upon the crushing epic majesty of 'Shelter From the Sand' nor the haunting message of 'Intractable.' The album continually fluxes between melody and brutality, something it does with brilliance and aplomb but not in any simplistic 'quiet bit, loud bit, quiet bit, loud bit' non-sense, there is real creative song writhing and structure here.
Anyway, it's a brilliant album from start to finish and deserves to be heard by as many people as possible, so give it a listen and go buy it when (not if) you think it's a work of genius and if any doubt remains, simply think on these lines:
'Hollow inside but dreaming
I curse this world
That it should keep turning
I curse this God
Who decrees that I should die
I will give you Hell
Avail the sins of the past'
....FUCK...YOUR....GOD!

Alone I bore the full weight of an empty heart

I came to the sudden conclusion that the main reason I don't update this place is mainly because I can't be bothered to sit through the upload process of sticking albums here for people who don't even visit. So, epiphany fully realised, I decided that the only way forward is to do what I originally started this blog to do; talk nonsense about albums I like/love/loathe.
It's a creative outlet for a man too lazy to write a novel, too ignorant to write a novella and too stupid to write a poem.
I also decided that IF on the slightest of off chances that anyone happened to happen upon this site and was so deeply in need of one of the albums I talked about they could simply leave a comment offering sexual favours, hard cash, cookies or simple e-peen and I'd slave away over a Megaupload loading screen to bring it to them.

So, this is yet another promise to post more....though with less actual content. What a bastard I am.