iwrestledabearonce – It’s All Happening

This band is fun. Lots of people hate them, and a bunch of people, including me, like them. The reason they are maligned is they don’t give a shit about those people. Their image tends to group them into the “uncool” kiddy-metalcore scene, which the tr00 metalers can’t stand. They also don’t stick to the 100% evil requirement of metal, so they suck.

I don’t think they suck, at least not most of the time. I suppose they primarily fit into the metalcore genre. However, they cram in stuff from the electronic scene, 80s pop, grindcore, and technical death metal. Not all that different in concept from the insane Japanese group Maximum the Hormone; just a bit more leaning toward the metal side. Also, all the vocals are done by a girl. Not a common thing in this kind of music. She’s pretty impressive most of the time. A little bit of the clean singing falls flat once in a while, but she does a great job on the grunts.

Their tagline is “Metal just got gay!” I don’t think this has anything to do with homosexuality, just the attitude; it’s not evil metal, it’s fun metal. Chaotic pummeling with interludes of cheesy pop. They have awesome track titles too, like “Tastes Like Kevin Bacon,” and “See You in Shell.”

Anyway, this album isn’t as good as their self-titled EP from last year, but it’s still quite enjoyable. Enjoyable enough that I actually bought it when I saw it on the shelf at Best Buy today. I’m gonna be rockin’ it in my new car tomorrow. Check it out if you don’t give a crap.

Mass Effect

I don’t think I’ve ever played a real RPG, and this is about as close as I’ve ever gotten. Bioshock is probably the next closest thing. However, just from this experience, I have confirmed my suspicions that a MMORPG or its ilk would completely destroy my life.

Mass Effect is mostly boring. There is lots of lame dialog exposing the seemingly massive collection of lore the studio dreamed up, and quite a bit of time is spent just getting from point A to point B, although I guess that can be fun sometimes. However, the RPG elements of self-improvement and decisions affecting your development seem to drag me in like a freakin’ Sarlaac. It could have something to do with the promise of hot blue alien sex, which was actually pretty disappointing.

I chose the Sentinel class, which turned out to be kinda lame; the only gun you can use with any accuracy is the pistol, and relying on “biotics” for all your combat doesn’t really work. I still managed to kick a lot of ass though. I seem to enjoy inventory management.

I had a few technical problems with the game; at one point a boss threw me off the map, and I just started floating around, unable to even access the save/load dialog. Also a few times throughout the game my gun would overheat and not cool down, forcing a save and reload, which can only be done in non-combat situations, requiring retreats. It even happened on the final boss, with no option of retreat. Thankfully I was able to avoid the overheating by waiting around a while before shooting. It still sucked though. These problems might have been fixed in a patch; I didn’t have any patches.

So, this game is really addicting despite the lame story and often boring mechanics. I stayed up until 7:30 AM last night playing this crap, and then spent most of today finishing it off. I will never play WoW.

Deathspell Omega - Fas - Ite, Maledicti, in Ignem Aeternum

"Divine law - Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire!"

Another black metal review. This album is from 2007, so it’s not breaking news or anything, but I was reminded of it a little while ago and remembered how awesome it is. Also, I haven’t reviewed anything from this fantastic band yet, which somehow seems wrong.

Deathspell Omega are a secretive group of metaphysical musicians with burning-church-loads of talent. They started out as an orthodox (i.e. lo-fi and rather crappy) black metal band out of France. Then a few years ago they started making good music, most notably with the most excellent three-track EP Kénôse. It was filled with avant-garde churnings of brutality, chaos, and somber ambience that left the listener dazed and amazed. Two years later, this album was released with a similar sound in 46 minutes of chaotic glory.

This is by no means orthodox BM. It’s dynamic as any classical composition. There isn’t very much structure to follow, but it flows very nicely when it isn’t tearing from one section to another and ripping your ears out (in a very good way). The vocals are top-notch for the genre, very much like the angry barking of some vicious dog. I don’t know what any of the lyrics are, but I’ve heard they are quite intelligent and philosophical, of course including the satanic themes ever-present in this kind of music. The title is actually a Latin translation of a line from the biblical book of Matthew, which is pretty neat.

Anyhow, the music is just too great. I’m generally not good at descriptions so I don’t think I’ll go any farther with it; instead, check out the opening track for a taste.

A Nothing Post from netbook land

I just got an Asus EEEPC and holy junk it's hard to type on this thing. There will be no more typing corrections past this sentence. I'm writing this post using WIndows Livce Writer because it was insalled by defaulkt on the machine , and I felkt likt etring it out. It seems pretty nice I guess, but I don't think it[s much better than using the bklogger interface,. I'm voing rto try putting in an image.

Seemsto work alrighyt. Maybe it is a little nicer; I guess I[ll leave it instlled for bnow,,. Bigday tomorrow, going to Virginia for an interviewwith Lockheed Martin. Wish meuck, dudes!

--edit--

Just installed Windows Live Writer on my desktop, as I’m actually a bit impressed with it. All you crazy bloggers can check it out here if you want. I’m not currently using any other Live software, but this is pretty nice. Kudos, MS.

Devin Townsend Project - Ki

"Hevy Devy" has been one of my favorite artists for around 5 years now. I'm a big fan of both his heavy work in Strapping Young Lad and his usually mellower solo work under various other monikers. The albums City and Terria are definitely in or around my top 10 albums ever. Devin puts everything he has into his music; after recording the album Alien, he committed himself to a mental institution because it screwed him up so much. Of course, a lot of his recent work has been a bit rushed in order to get out of constrictive record deals and touring, and the music has suffered a bit (see Synchestra and The New Black). Now that he's out of all that business, he has been free to spend as much time as he wants, the way he wants, on his music. His first effort in this new musical world was The Hummer, an ambient record that didn't really grab me much, as it really is quite ambient indeed; pretty good for falling asleep, but not much else. Then there was Ziltoid The Omniscient, which while funny, wasn't very lasting.

And now after what Devin has said has been the longest formulation since the excellent Ocean Machine, he has released Ki. Ki is the first of four records to be potentially released this year under the Devin Townsend Project name, all of which will be made with different people (aside from Devin of course). This first album is probably the most dynamic thing he's ever done. It goes from simple laid-back rock to full-blown death metal sound in the space of a few seconds, and then back again in even less time. The mellow parts are beautiful and catchy, and the heavy bits are devestating. The track Heaven Send is a perfect example of this dynamism, and has the added benefit of some beautiful female vocals. Devin has employed some great musicians for this one, the seemingly oddest being one Duris Maxwell, an old-timer session drummer with a long and storied musical history. His style is much different from Devin's other drummers like Gene Hoglan and Ryan Poederooyen with their bombastic metal styles; Duris is a laid back Ringo style drummer. Solid as a rock. The resulting music is just fantastic.

Here's a youtube of Heaven Send, I don't know how long it'll be around, although Devin is very supportive of people sharing his music.


All told, Ki has become my favorite of anything Devin has put out so far. This is finally what he really wants to do, and it shows.

Star Trek '09

I've never been as big of a Trek fan as much as I am a Star Wars fanatic, but I have fond memories of a few episodes of the original series borrowed from our local library. They were really funny, often intelligent, and had loads of corny monsters and sentient dust-clouds in space. Spock was my hero. I can't do the eyebrow raise, but I've been able to salute in Vulcan style for a long time.

JJ Abrams seems to have been a fan of the show for quite a while, and managed to put forth a largely similar feel to the original series, if not nearly as cheesy. This is a much more polished film than any Trek previous, even the TNG movies I think. Some of those were good though, like First Contact, a favorite of mine. There are a lot of explosions and black holes and angry people; but the the humor is still a major part of it, especially around Kirk and Scotty. I can't say I was the biggest fan of the Kirk guy, but all of the other characters were fun. They did a fantastic job with Checkov especially; I really liked the computer failing to recognize his pronunciation as valid commands.

Leonard Nimoy had a much larger role than I expected, which was cool. However it's just not quite the same when he's not acting like the old Spock with all his logical detachment, which I suppose Zachary Quinto did a pretty good job of portraying. He's just a little bit too much of a pretty-boy for the role I think. Overall, pretty much everyone did a great job. It was a very fun movie.

Chuck

I tried watching Chuck when it first came out a year or so ago. I'm pretty sure I was going through The Wire at the time, and for that reason I wasn't very impressed. It all seemed very plastic and insincere; of course, that's kinda the point with this sort of comedy. So I decided to give it another shot a week or two ago. It was a fun watch.

I'm going to skip the plot summary because it doesn't matter much. Suffice to say that it centers around a so-called nerd named chuck who has fallen into a stressful life with two government agents, one of them a smoking-hot babe (pictured above in wonderfully nerdy attire) and the other the guy who played Jayne in Firefly. He also has some crazy and entirely unlikely image-recognition matrix thing in his head that only does anything when he sees certain people things, usually kicking off the plot of each episode. Hm. Well I guess that was a plot summary, oh well.

So the show is fun. There are lots of very pretty ladies, awkward moments, bits of subtle nerd humor, and a fair amount of action. It's predictable but entertaining. Compared to The Wire, as I was doing last time, it's a mud puddle; but what isn't?