Carpathian Forest - Strange Old Brew

I've been a fan of Carpathian Forest for some time, so I think it's only appropriate for me to push an album of theirs. Carpathian Forest is a Norwegian black metal band that was formed by Nordavind and Nattefrost (yes, the same Nattefrost of "Nattefrost" fame; the one-man black metal project that apparently every black metal fan except for me loves to hate) in 1990. Since their creation, they've released two demos, about six studio albums, and a handful of compilation albums. Their older material tends to stay on the traditional end of black metal (lower production quality, high-pitched corpse-painty vocals, etc.) but their twist (adding electronic/synth tracks to create weird ambient noises and unusual song segments) adds a more unique touch to their music.

A word to potential downloaders: if you read the above paragraph and either rolled your eyes or lowered your head in frustration at the mention of Nattefrost, you may still like this. Production is of a higher quality than Nattefrost's solo albums, and material deals with more than just satanic slut whores fellating wonky black metal wieners, or, my personal favorite track "Nattefrost Takes A Piss" (complete with a cute little satanic fart thrown in for good luck at 0:05).

Here's a live video of the track "Bloodcleansing" from "Strange Old Brew."



This album, "Strange Old Brew," was released in 2000. To me, I feel like it's a great representation of all of Carpathian Forest's strong points: making black fucking metal, blending it with various aspects of thrash metal, incorporating really unusual electronic elements, and then skull-fucking the shit out of you because they're Norwegian as shit and you can't and won't do anything about it (see: Carpathian Forest's album "Fuck You All"[another great CF album, btw]).

You can find Carpathian Forest's "Strange Old Brew" album for download here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/274532169/Carpathian_Forest_Strange_Old_Brew_by_asuraa.rar

-K

Windir - 1184

Windir was a band from Norway that formed in 1994. It was the brainchild of vocalist/musician Terje "Valfar" Bakken, and they blended a unique style of folk and black metal. While I've actually never given either of the first two Windir albums ("Sóknardalr" and "Arntor") a listen, I got into this band after my brother introduced me to them. "1184" was a bit of a transition into a more folkloric style of music and incorporated more electronic elements. It really is an absolutely fantastic album, and fans of black metal and folk metal alike will get something out of Windir.



The music is clear and absolutely a pleasure to listen to, and the vocals occasionally switch between the more traditional black metal style vocals and clear vocals. Ultimately, Windir is one of those rare black metal gems that you occasionally find that is actually capable of making black metal that doesn't hurt to listen to for an extended period (and that's coming from a huge black metal fan).

Windir unfortunately disbanded in 2004 after the death of Valfar. If this isn't a truly black metal way to die, I don't know what is: Valfar froze to death in the middle of a snow storm after he decided to walk to his family's cabin in the middle of January. In Norway.

You can find Windir's "1184" album for download here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=JSW7KU0H

-K

Satyricon - Intermezzo II

I've had the discography of Satyricon for a while, but I've never really listened to the entire thing all the way through so it's understandable how this little gem of an EP slipped through the cracks.



Intermezzo II consists of four songs that add up to approximately 0:20:08. The vocals are certainly what one would typically expect, with the rest of the instrumentation being about the same. Satyricon's style, however, helps to distinguish them from most other black metal bands. Their infusion of pseudo-industrial metal really comes through on the final track, "Blessed from Below: Melancholy/Oppression/Longing." The really enjoyable track on this for me, however, is "I.N.R.I." (a Sarcófago cover). Frost consistently pummels away at the drums at a blazing 251 BPM, and it really is a bit of a mindfuck to hear such fast ferociously accurate drumming.

It's a great little EP and definitely worth having, if not just for a quick black metal fix every once in a while. You can find Intermezzo II for download here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/130579130/Satyricon_-_1999_-_Intermezzo_II.rar

-K

Khanate

I started listening to Khanate years ago after a friend of mine dragged me to a show they were playing at the Ottobar with Earthride and maybe like one or two other bands. At the time I liked them ok, but as I kept listening to them they started to grow on me as with the rest of the super-slow droning doom metal I listen to, like Sunn O))), Catacombs, and my personal friends Oak. They're a very unusual band that really kind of makes you sit back and think, even though your reasons for doing so don't quite seem apparent. Khanate produces beautiful music that really drives itself deep into your very being, whether through evoking certain emotions or just from the bass.

Here's a video of the song "Dead" from their album "Things Viral." It's a shame it's about half the length of the actual song.



You can find the album "Things Viral" for download here:

http://mediafire.com/?3m2ycnyntja

"Capture & Release" here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/235601530/capture.-.realese-MCNO.rar

And their self-titled release here:

http://rs458.rapidshare.com/files/147290117/Khanate.rar


-K

Anaal Nathrakh

Here's another recent discovery I made. I'm a bit surprised that I've never heard of this band before, just due to the sheer amount of material they've put out. Formed in 1999, Anaal Nathrakh hail from England. They blend a delicious style of black metal, grindcore, and a bit of industrial-esque sounds thrown in for good measure. Their sound is mind-numbingly horrifying, and in black metal that's always good thing. I almost checked my ears afterward to see if they were bleeding, but I got giddy of the thought that they might be and decided not to disappoint myself so hastily.

After seeing their logo in a google image search, I went to youtube and first listened to this track:



Upon finishing that track, I then listened to this one:



Upon finishing that track, I then logged on to Soulseek and downloaded their entire discography. You can find it here:

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4991132/Anaal_Nathrakh_-_Discography_%281999-2009%29

-K

Oranssi Pazuzu - Muukalainen Puhuu

I just discovered this band earlier tonight. From their myspace (http://www.myspace.com/oranssipazuzu), "Oranssi Pazuzu’s music has a taste of Norwegian black metal and Finnish kraut-psychedelia. The sound is highly visual and atmospheric, embracing the dark corners of space and mind. Oranssi Pazuzu has existed since 2007." They definitely have a great jazzy feel to them, and the black metal influence is certainly quite heavy with the vocals. I would imagine the title track of their debut album as being included in the soundtrack to the Finnish release of Dead Space. At times very ambient, at others metal as fuck.

Here's a little taste:




For those of you interested in Oranssi Pazuzu's full-length debut album "Muukalainen Puhuu," you can find it at the link below:

http://rs711.rapidshare.com/files/240903501/Oranssi_Pazuzu_-_2009_-_Muukalainen_Puhuu.7z

-K

How this blog will now be operated

So, I've decided to make this blog devoted to music, but more often than not new bands and artists that I discover over time. I know there are a million music blogs on the internet, but instead of devoting this to a specific type/genre of music, expect to find posts dealing with all kinds of music (predominantly metal and all various sub-genres of metal).

Oh, and I'm also going to be using this blog as my way of memorializing my friend Kevin Hanningan who passed away on November 10th, 2009. He was an amazing person and his life pretty much defined what it meant to be a true music fan. He was at almost every show I ever went to, he introduced me to so many different bands, and he was so incredibly capable of creating amazing music. He basically had the musical Midas Touch. He was a beautiful person with a heart of gold, and was one of the most authentic, genuine, caring, and kind-hearted human beings to ever grace this planet. When he died, humanity truly lost one of it's best. He will be forever missed, and I hope that wherever he is he's right up at the front headbanging, with a Boh in his hand and his arms around everyone.

-K

My lovely experience with gastroenteritis

So as some of you (read: the two of you who may occasionally browse through my blog in the hopes that I've written something worth reading...sorry to let you down yet again) may know, I spent the past week in the firm uncomfortable grasps of the viral infection best known as gastroenteritis.

For those of you who have never heard of this terrible affliction, gastroenteritis is the inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract, stomach, and the small intestine. It is usually caused by certain viruses, and less often by bacteria (like Salmonella, Shigella, Staphylococcus, Campylobacter jejuni, Clostridium, Escherichia coli, Yersinia, etc.) or their toxins, parasites, etc. Worldwide, inadequate treatment of gastroenteritis kills 5 to 8 million people per year. That's approximately 5-8 times more people than HIV annually. To put it simply, this is serious shit.

The really serious part about this is that I'm almost positive that George Lucas and his cinematic shithouse of horror Indiana Jones 4 gave me this. There's no other possible explanation aside from the movie was just so terrible, I literally got sick for a week and shat myself in a hospital emergency room. I couldn't eat for about four days without vomiting it right back up, and I owe this all to George Lucas's desire to make more shitty prequels and sequels than plot twists in a single episode of LOST.

Here's a list of the fun things you can do while trying to get over gastroenteritis:

• Have diarrhea 10-15 times a day. Not the semi-chunky kind either, I mean like a definite 7 on the Bristol Stool Chart (btw, LOL..."Entirely Liquid")
• Think about all the food you really want to eat, and then vomit because you're sick as shit and couldn't keep it down if you chased it with cement
• Watch lots of boring repetitive tv that sucks
  
• Not have sex with your girlfriend because you're afraid you'd accidentally shit on her (unless, of course, you both consent to, acknowledge, and accept that as being a possible outcome of intercourse and go about it anyways)
  
• Take lots of off-the-shelf medication to keep your temperature under 102 F
• Wake up halfway through the night because you think you've pissed the bed, only to realize it's just copious amounts of sweat
• Wake up 5-10 times during the night because you think you're going to shit the bed, only to realize you only had to shit one of those times
• Lay around on a couch and smell bad because showers feel weird
  
• Drink lots and lots and lots and lots of fluid. So much fluid you feel like you're going to drown
• Wish you were dead
• Curse the name of George Lucas and research the Lucasfilm facilities at One Letterman Drive, San Francisco, CA 94129 to assess where the most effective point of insertion for a small tactical team would be
  

Here's the list of things you should do if you end up seeing Indiana Jones 4/catching gastroenteritis/find yourself with an insatiable desire to send Lucasfilm some depleted uranium and a wooden crate filled with Leiurus quinquestriatus (otherwise known as Deathstalker Scorpions):

• The first thing you need to do is go to the store and buy a pair of athletic shorts. Seriously, I thanked the Old Norse deities that I had a pair of athletic shorts because I certainly did not have time to constantly undo a belt, unbutton some shorts, or fumble around with a zipper when the shit flood gates opened. They will save you from so many horrifying shitty messes
• Make sure your path to the bathroom is unobstructed at all times
• Leave the toilet seat down. If you have diarrhea (hold on...if? I meant to say when) you can just slide your athletic shorts down and fall onto the shitter
• Get some sports drinks. Electrolytes, man. Keeps you fucking ENERGIZED goddamnit.
• Apologize to everyone that's been taking care of you because you're a filthy fucking asshole that's sick and pitiful and wreaks of shit

Gastroenteritis fucking sucks. George Lucas, I know it's all your fault and I'm coming for you. Your fucking battle droids and stupid alien booby-trapped cubicles covered in Mayan gold and shitty rejected prequel/sequel ideas are no match for my Daneaxe.

-K

Spoiler Alert: Indiana Jones 4 is a Steaming Pile of Shit

Yep, I said it. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sucked. It was terrible. It was abysmal. It was a total tragedy in the history of cinema. I'm still pissed that I lost $6.50 to go waste my time watching that movie, and I saw it weeks ago. I'm even half-tempted to put a hit out on George Lucas for ruining YET ANOTHER fantastic series (Star Wars anyone?). Let me tell you exactly why this movie made me feel like I let Lucas pull another fast one on me, and just why it was so terrible.


1. It had Shia LeBeouf in it. Not only was he just in the movie, he was Indiana Jones's son named Mutt. Mutt is appropriate, because goddamnit, this no-talent hack is nothing more than a half-breed fuck-up deserving of getting euthanised. This little shit ruined Transformers, he's a poor actor, and to this day I still wonder why no one has taken it upon themselves to run this little fucker over with their family-sized sedan. Oh, during a chase scene through the jungle he gets caught in some vines and for some reason, all of the monkeys in the rain forest decide to help him by miraculously teaching him instantly how to swing from vines. Then all of the little monkeys beat up Russian soldiers and help Indiana Jones and his stupid fucking crystal skull (that I wish would shatter) escape.

2. The main baddie is some crazy psychic Russian nutjob named Irina Spalko who carries a rapier and thinks that extraterrestrials left crystal skulls to allow the Russians to gain infinite knowledge and somehow become the ultimate fighting force on the planet...and I'm not even fucking kidding, either. Not only that, the movie begins with her and a few truckloads of Russians breaking onto an American military base. Sure, it's "1957 - the height of the Cold War" (taken from the official webshit), but are you fucking serious? The only successful military campaigns the Russians ever won were pre-1900, and they certainly weren't against the U.S.


3. Indiana Jones survives a fucking nuclear bomb by hiding in a goddamn refrigerator. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME. Taken from the wikipedia page on nuclear explosions: "The dominant effects of a nuclear weapon where people are likely to be affected (blast and thermal radiation) are identical physical damage mechanisms to conventional explosives. However the energy produced by a nuclear explosive is millions of times more powerful per gram and the temperatures reached are briefly in the tens of millions of degrees." Tens of millions of degrees. I don't give a fuck if you're the Terminator, those kinds of temperatures are going to fuse your body to the stupid little lead-lined fridge you climbed into, and you're most certainly going to die.

4. Bad guys got eaten by "giant" ants (by giant, I mean 6x normal size at best, hardly man eaters) in the middle of the fucking rainforests of Peru. Come on Georgie, if the Russians are gonna die it should be from the hands of a full-blooded bulldog American like Harrison Ford. Christ, when Indie was fist-fighting the big Russian bad-ass and kicking the commie out of him, the fucking ants come and steal the kill! On top of Shia LeDouche's epic-fail performance in the jungle, I finally realized at this point in the movie that I wanted to rip George Lucas's spinal cord out the back of his neck and eat his still-beating heart.



5. After getting chased by Russians and big ants (both marginally less impressive than the Nazis or cultists of the previous movies), Indie & Co. ride a stupid amphibious car over 3 waterfalls that had to have been several hundred feet tall each. The first two, the car lands upright and they climb back in, but OH NO! After the third, it's totally thrashed. Please, the excitement with this movie is ENDLESS...if you're 8 years old and you have down syndrome.


6. The big surprise: THEY'RE FUCKING ALIENS!
Or to be more specific, extra-dimensional beings, all thirteen of which are actually just a single being that are somehow related to the "aliens" from Area 51 in Roswell, NM. Not only are they aliens, but they are aliens with skeletons made out of crystal. Oh, and they love gold too. Mayan gold. Oh, and they came to earth thousands of years ago to teach the Mayans how to grow crops, build things, and do everything else. Yep, aliens taught humanity how to live. I think this practically put Lucas's film on the same playing field as intelligent design. Forget about the idea that over millions of years, Homo habilis developed into the amazing Homo sapiens and progressively picked up skills and talents to learn how to sustain itself and overcome its environment, oh no. Fuck that idea. I have a better one...it was aliens. George Lucas, go fucking kill yourself. I mean in Raiders of the Lost Ark it was Nazis getting destroyed by the Ark of the Covenant, in The Temple of Doom it was the British Indian Army helping Indie escape the Thuggee, and in The Last Crusade it was the Holy Grail getting lost in a temple quake. All three past movies have been pro-American and pro-adventurer with christian themes in the treasures sought. While the latter doesn't quite appeal to yours truly, it's still better than turning the Indiana Jones series into a drawn-out episode of the fucking X-Files.

Overall, I'd give this movie a 3 out of 10 because it was such a monstrous abomination of cinema. The only thing that kept me from giving this load of Peter North's semen a 1 out of 10 was the fight scene in the diner that was provoked when Indiana Jones told LeDouche to "hit that frat boy" and an all-out brawl between frat boys and greasers broke out.

George Lucas, if you're out there, if you make another Star Wars movie or make Shia LeBeouf the next Indiana Jones, I'm going to gouge out your eyes with my thumbs and beat you to death with your own severed appendages. The horse has been dead since 1989, so stop fucking beating it or a large angry man with a Daneaxe is going to show up to your house one day and nothing, not even $30+ million in CGI will be able to save you.

-K

Opeth: band of the century

I don't think I could possibly find a flaw with this band, and I've even tried. I've tried to find things about this band that suck or things that they do that aggravate me, but I'll be damned if I fail every single time. They're amazing. Their music is a fantastic medley of death metal, prog-rock, folk, blues rock and jazz, and from what I've heard (hopefully what I can see in the near future) they sound phenomenal live. I'm going to take a look at a couple of their albums, and review the band as a whole.

Ghost Reveries - This is Opeth's eighth full-length album that was released in 2005. Usually people will start with earlier work, but I don't fucking care. This is by far my favorite Opeth album. It opens up with the 10:29 powerhouse, "Ghost of Perdition," which contains more beautifully composed and executed transitions than most bands' (I listen to) careers. It moves wonderfully into the second track, "The Baying of the Hounds" which also finds itself in excess of 10 minutes. Other songs on this album like "Hours of Wealth" do a superb job of showcasing the band's talents of not only being able to write extremely heavy songs, but also soothing and melodic tunes as well. All I really have left to say is that this album was produced to near-perfection, and that the sound quality is phenomenal. Opeth really demonstrates that they make every note count in Ghost Reveries.




Blackwater Park - Released in 2001, Blackwater Park is Opeth's fifth full-length album. This album opens with "The Leper Affinity," a monstrous 10:23 musical adventure composed of beautifully blended musical styles, transitions, pattern changes, and a soothing ending so flawlessly executed that is reminiscent of an Autumn landscape (I fucking love it, don't judge me). "Harvest" is yet another perfect example of Opeth's stunningly diverse musical capabilities, and it flows quite nicely into the following track, "The Drapery Falls" (which has more separate pieces than a goddamn Lego castle, all of which are miraculously amazing). "Dirge for November" is a hauntingly beautiful song that I can only imagine is a about suicide and the stages one goes through (beginning with hopelessness, moving to anger, and then ending with the act of suicide). It's both sad and chilling while still managing to be auditorily attractive. The mood quickly shifts with "The Funeral Portrait," but returns to a somber yet calming state through the instrumental "Patterns in the Ivy."


Orchid - Orchid is Opeth's debut album which was released in 1995. It's absolutely amazing to me that a band could make their debut with such a fantastic album. Every song is in excess of 10 minutes, with the exception of "Silhouette," a piano interlude played by the drummer and "Requiem," an acoustic track that started Opeth's career-long exhibit of 'better-than-your-band' music. Orchid is probably my least favorite Opeth album, but when speaking in terms of this band that still leaves this at an 8.5 out of 10. It certainly isn't as good as most of their other albums, but then again this was their first and the band was still in the stages of developing their style (both as a single entity and as individual musicians). None of the tracks on this album particularly pop out at me as exceptional, but I still find myself listening to it often.


So to effectively sum up my review of this band, I would most most definitely give them a 10 out of 10. I have not disliked anything of theirs I have heard, and their style is very unique and original. It's rare to find a band these days that makes their albums worth buying, but I can honestly say that I feel Opeth is within the elite core of those bands. Every one of their albums contains as much music as possible, and the quality of each is truly beyond expectation. This isn't your estranged second cousin's obscure Black Metal band that sounds like every album was recorded on a 4-track in a metal garbage being thrown down a rocky hill or another electro-grind band that packs over 90 songs onto a mini-disc. It helps that each member of this band knows their job and how to perform their duties to the fullest, and that they obviously care a great deal for the music they write. Opeth is easily one of the most amazing bands I've had the pleasure of listening to, and I can't wait to hear what Watershed (their newest album) sounds like. If their gradual and steady growth from incredible to prodigious continues, that could only leave Opeth in a marvelous utopian state.

-K