Dexter and stuff

Well. Long time no post.

I just finished up the second season of Dexter, the best show on television. To sum it up in one sentence, it's a black comedy with a serial killer protagonist who [claims to have][has] no emotions. Other than that it is pure genius. The first season was (as far as I know) a pretty close adaptation of the book Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay. The second one has very little relation to the book's sequels. I think I need to read the first one, because season 1 was damn good; as was season 2, but not to quite the same extent.

As I alluded to in my previous post, I recently watched a lot of material by David Lynch, the nightmare filmer. Seriously. This guy can't seem to make anything that isn't torn from the dark recesses of a tormented sleeper. Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Elephant Man, Eraserhead (which I have not yet seen, I'm a bit scared), all of them are darkened blurs of dread mixed with a healthy dose of insanity. Only Twin Peaks, which he did not have complete directorial control over, had any hint of humor. I enjoyed all of them though. All of them, that is, except for the blithering mistake that was Dune. I wasn't able to make it through the first 20 minutes of that debacle. Lynch himself has disowned it.

In the music scene, I've been exposed to a few more decent bands. I'm listening to Queens of the Stone Age's Era Vulgaris right now, and it's better than I expected from my very limited knowledge of the band. Just the other day I found a band called Hacride with a similar sound to Meshuggah (my favorite band ever for the last couple years), who on one track of their sophomore release Amoeba bring in a sort of indescribable latin-sound that just bursts with originality. Another album I got today is Ocassus by The Amenta, a death metal outfit with the jackhammer sound similar to the band I posted about earlier, Anaal Nathrakh. According to their Wikipedia page, their goal is to abolish "useless morality," such as religion. I don't entirely agree with or support this aim, but the music is enjoyable at least. On the progressive front, we have Ephel Duath. Their album The Painter's Palette is a somewhat chaotic amalgam of hardcore, jazz, and myriad extreme metal sub-genres. It didn't really sink in though. Lastly, the instrumental death metal super-group Blotted Science has put out a very enjoyable album in The Machinations of Dementia. It's much better than Behold... The Arctopus's output, in my opinion. Behold... is another instrumental metal band who shares a member with Blotted Science.

Here's a video by Hacride from Amoeba. It's the first track, called Perturbed. The video itself reminds me a lot of Tool.



So there you go.