“Star-Crossed”

We are one third of the way through the 2011-12 NBA basketball season, and there seems to be enough of a sample size to get a pretty good idea of how the season will shape up.  What we’ve seen is for the most part what we thought we would: Lockout Ball. With a compressed 66 game schedule, no real training camp or pre-season, and back to back to back games with 4 games in 5 nights, what you get is ugly basketball. We’ve seen tons of blowouts, scoring and shooting percentages are down, there are lots of turnovers, and the injuries among key players are piling up. Players due to miss significant time (6-8 weeks or more) include Brook Lopez, Manu Ginobli, Andrew Bogut, Zach Randolph, Al Horford and Eric Maynor, and we’ve seen plenty of guys in and out of the lineup with minor injuries. It’s too many to name.  This is what we expected.

What we — or at least I — didn’t expect was an illumination into the after-effects of the recent formation of super teams.

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[Regular MS columnist Doc Coyle recently got in touch with us to ask if he could helm a regular column about the NBA similar to the NFL columns we've run with Greg Weeks, Dave Brockie and Jeff Paulick. Sure, why not? If you all like what Doc is doing he'll write more... so show him some love! Here's the first installment of the brand new shortened 2011-2012 season. Doc's got a lot of interesting points on the lockout, the legacy of the game, what to expect this year and more. - Ed.]

This is my first foray into the world of sports blogging, but I am a diehard NBA fan and could no longer contain all of my thoughts and views on the league.  I started out watching the NBA in 1994, the year after Michael Jordan’s first retirement when the Knicks made a title run with a tough as nails, substance-over-style group of quasi-thugs.  When I get into something, whether it be comic books, action movies, heavy metal, or basketball, I tend to obsess over it.  I suppose this characterizes me as a nerd.  I’ll wear that hat because I pour over stats incessantly trying to break down the ins and outs of the game.

I was a dedicated Knicks fan as they transitioned from the Ewing, Oakley, Starks bunch of the mid ’90s to the Houston, Sprewell, Larry Johnson squad of the mid ’90s, early ’00s. When that team was dissolved, my band started touring, and I fell off for a few years roughly until Lebron James came into the league. People love to hate that dude, but I had never seen a player like him and it re-sparked my interest in the sport. The talent pool was suddenly much more potent than what I was watching in the mid ’90s.  Jordan had no equal in his era, and I had missed the Bird/Magic rivalry first-hand. Lebron, D. Wade, Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, Carmelo, etc were doing some superhuman shit, and I was hooked again.  Every year, since 2006, I’ve been more and more drawn in to the point where I devour every game, article, sports-radio broadcast, twitter feed. You get the point. I might as well share my thoughts and analysis. Here it goes. Watch me spew:

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As you may be aware, MetalSucks recently invited  musicians from across the vast spectrum of the metalsphere to tell us what their favorite albums of 2011 have been. But the always-unique Eugene S. Robinson of Oxbow fame turned in a list of a somewhat different nature. The silver lining is, his list is so great that we opted to run it anyway! And so please enjoy Mr. Robinson’s list of “Top Ten Records for Making Everybody in the Room Uncomfortable…”

10. Sylvia, Pillow Talk – Sure, she started Sugarhill Records, which was on the map for giving birth to what Morrissey (more on him later) would call “pop thuggery” in the form of hip hop, and sure, she just died, but nothing says “douche chills” like her making fuck noises on this record. For like twenty minutes. Complete with baby talk and the lyric, “What I’m teaching you tonight, boy, you never learned in school.” In fact, any song with fuck noises in it gets on this list. Think I’m a prude? Try playing this shit when your mom’s around. Also, why does heavy metal, outside of Black Flag’s Slip It In, have so little simulated sex going on in it?

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There seems to be a firestorm in the metal world regarding the state of the industry, Spotify, illegal downloading, and the philosophical struggle between capitalism and artistic integrity. Lines have been drawn in the sand and it’s getting fucking personal. I have remained rather silent on the sidelines but all of this action has inspired me to enter the fray.

But I’d like to approach this discussion from a different angle than the one that has been taken thus far – one which deals with some issues that are beyond music. Perhaps you could call it a political discussion, or a cultural discussion, or even a philosophical discussion. I want to talk about the idea of ownership, and what exactly that means in our modern, western paradigm, which is one rooted in competition-based capitalism.

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[Blackened doom metallers Woods of Ypres are currently touring North America on the so-called "Pain & Piss Tour." Bassist Shane Madden will be taking us along with him on his journey of pain and piss, to be delivered in four parts throughout the tour. Read Part I, Part II and Part III from weeks past. The fourth and final entry follows.]

Part IV: The Process

The venue was an auditorium that looked like it could be part of any high school in North America. It had those white, speckled, linoleum tile floors and wooden steps leading to the stage and brown, unattractive folding tables along the sides of the room presumably for merch, but there was none there. The gravel parking lot outside was crowded with teenagers coming to the show on a Tuesday night now that school was out for the summer. They stood clustered in their various circles in gym shorts, neon deathcore tees, and ironic tanktops, unmoved by the lightning storm going on overhead. These were not the styles I remember from my day. It was sticky outside as the heat had come on just as we neared Texas, like the state border was the entrance to the first circle of hell.

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[Blackened doom metallers Woods of Ypres are currently touring North America on the so-called "Pain & Piss Tour." Bassist Shane Madden will be taking us along with him on his journey of pain and piss, to be delivered in four parts throughout the tour. Read Part I and Part II from weeks past. Part III follows.]

Part III: “It sucked and it sucks still.”

Fenriz so succinctly summed up a few things with the above words in the documentary Until The Light Takes Us. While applicable to any situation of a sucking nature, and serving as a recurring quote being thrown around in the Woods camp this tour, the negative vibes drowning this blog need to be turned down right now. It’s of the utmost importance to keep it “posi” on tour for mental health if nothing else.

Besides, who from the east can really complain about being out west? Alberta, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California. The tour rolls on generally unhindered. A crucial show was cancelled but I went into the topic of failed promoters in the last entry of this blog and I really despise rehashed anything. We’ve blown through of almost all the merch we expected to carry for the entire five weeks, requiring us to pick up a shipment here on the coast. It’s a good problem to have. Get it while it lasts, kiddies.

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Our number one homie Justin Foley is just completed a mini-tour with his band, The Austerity Program, and graciously offered to do a tour blog for us. We can never say “no” to Justin and wouldn’t much want to anyway, so we agreed! You can read his account of days one and two of the mini-trek here, day three here and day four here; the fifth and final day is below… enjoy!

Saturday, May 21, 2011
New York City

Back at home after the whole thing is over.  Here’s one of the many things that no one ever tells you about when you think that you want to be in a band: some time not too long after going out on some sort of tour, you should set aside a few hours with a bucket and a bunch of rags and then just wipe all of your equipment down.  I spent the better part of Saturday afternoon doing just that and boy, the water in that bucket gets nasty quick.  What lives on the floors of these clubs that we go see bands in?  What calls those puddles of stale beer its home?  What foul creature sneaks into venues late at night and hides stage monitors deep in its own crevices, so that they are bathed in the funk of the undead?  Well, the amps are clean anyway.  Sitting back in the practice space, ready to make more music.

I figured I’d take the last of these entries to talk about the best case scenario for playing a show.  Thursday night is a good enough example of that. We were third out of four.

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Our number one homie Justin Foley is currently doing a mini-tour with his band, The Austerity Program, and graciously offered to do a tour blog for us. We can never say “no” to Justin and wouldn’t much want to anyway, so we agreed! You can read his account of days one and two of the mini-trek here and day three here; the fourth day is below… enjoy!

Providence, Rhode Island

We are in the capitol of the smallest state in the US, the Ocean State.  Tonight’s venue is nestled into the downtown, combining an art gallery with a restaurant with a bar with a place for bands like us to play.  Charming little city you got here, Rhode Island.  Nice place; you should keep it.

Funny thing that we’re playing P-town tonight.  A few years back when we put out our first record, we didn’t understand too well how this whole ‘marketing and promotion’ thing worked with records.  So, rather than put out some materials that talked seriously about how important our artistic vision was and how we were for fans of this band and influenced by that scene, we chose instead to make up some bullshit story about how we were suing our record label because they wouldn’t allow us to issue patents on our song.  I don’t know what we thought we were going to accomplish by this, but we thought it was a fun little goof and that no one would actually believe it.

Wrong.  Turns out a bunch of people were mad about some assholes from New York City that no one had ever heard of loudly broadcasting legal action against the beloved label that put out records by Cave In and Botch.  Man, the things people will send to a total stranger over email… it’s just unkind.

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[Blackened doom metallers Woods of Ypres are currently touring North America on the so-called "Pain & Piss Tour." Bassist Shane Madden will be taking us along with him on his journey of pain and piss, to be delivered in four parts throughout the tour. Part I was posted earlier this week, and Part II follows.]

Part II: The Spring of Our Discontent

I really hope that isn’t my appendix. Sudden, inexplicable pain on the road makes you realize it would be an especially inconvenient time to have an organ burst. Also, I think the drummer has gangrene. Poison ivy is devouring his right arm at an exponential rate every day and it just doesn’t look right. We’re two weeks into this weird trip and no one is falling apart on death’s door quite yet, but there have been enough figurative assaults on the organs of the tour machine already. The Midwest is an unforgiving place for what we’re doing.

I was wrong about greens, yellows, and sunshine. It’s brown and bleak, raining and cold. Several buses of what I can only believe to be a new cult were at Canadian immigration declaring that the world will end on May 21. “If nothing happens then we’ll leave by the 23rd,” the cult leader was overheard saying. Immigration denied them entry to the country but it held us up for over three hours anyway.

The winter thaw in Canada has left a lot of the prairies flooded, resulting in closed highways and detours. The little buildings, parts of farms or homes that we pass sporadically between tiny towns are done in post-apocalypse chic. Relatively modern structures sit directly next to crumbling, decaying, dust bowl-era relics. Texas Chainsaw Massacre-esque gas stations.

So why do we travel through these places that seem so strange and forlorn? Allow me to answer my own question: DIY touring.

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Our number one homie Justin Foley is currently doing a mini-tour with his band, The Austerity Program, and graciously offered to do a tour blog for us. We can never say “no” to Justin and wouldn’t much want to anyway, so we agreed! You can read his account of days one and two of the mini-trek here; the third day is below… enjoy!

Wednesday, May 18, 2011
New York

Philadelphia, PA last night, aka Quaker City.  We arrived in town with hunger in the belly and a bit of time to kill.  This second thing nearly killed us.  Thad and I never have time to kill; work, family, odd projects, people who need setting straight on the Internet – all of these things consume more time than we have and so things like leisure and friendships are usually left unattended.  And so, an hour or two after getting ‘the best vegetarian cheesesteak in Philly’ (it wasn’t bad – the bread’s the key thing) we had a few hours to burn.

We got a couple of beers (in daylight!  I mean, that’s straight up “Theatre of Pain” decadence right there) we ambled over to catch an early showing of Takashi Mike’s 13 Assassins.  Coliseum had seen it recently and said it was like ½ as good as Thor which means they thought it was awesome.  (The band is completely bonkers about Thor.)

Thad and I settled in to a theatre sparsely populated by seniors and the unemployed and were soon completely assaulted by the film.  I’m not going to spoil the movie for those who haven’t seen it, but it was pretty obvious that the whole thing was written backwards.  Basically the cinematic equivalent of a good Helmet song: here’s the gigantic riff that we’ll kill them with at the end, so what else do we need to put in the song to get to that riff and make it destroy?  Props to the movie also for giving us our theme for the trip: TOTAL MASSACRE. (Sometimes “massacre” isn’t enough.)

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Our number one homie Justin Foley is currently doing a mini-tour with his band, The Austerity Program, and graciously offered to do a tour blog for us. We can never say “no” to Justin and wouldn’t much want to anyway, so we agreed! Below please find his musings on the first two days of the mini-trek…

Monday, May 16, 7:43 AM
New York City

It’s early.  It always takes me a few hours to get to bed after playing, as the electricity of it needs a bit of time to bleed from my system ,at least enough for sleep to take hold.  Since we got back to the house pretty quick last night I just stayed up until 3 or so doing dumb shit like paying my bills.  Then, when my daughter was up at 7 I leapt up to get her.  So, yeah, now she’s watching the end of Elmo’s World and I have hit that “whut the fuuuuck” thing that happens when you’ve gotten 3 and a half hours of sleep and got the whooole day ahead of you.

Last night was us playing our New York residency, a little music box venue called Union Pool.  I like the place a lot – it’s a small enough venue with a bit of a weird theatrical feel to it: little light bulbs frame the stage for black-t-shirted bands like us.  We always have to play Tetris with our amp setup and barely manage to figure it out each time.

The load-in for an event like this is always some low level of absurd.  Four sets of guys, all dressed pretty much the same way, all wheeling and carrying amp after amp after amp into a not-so-big room, all to be stacked on top of/behind/in front of one another and quickly rearranged when it’s some band’s 26 minutes to play their music.  Certainly some rational observer would look at it all and say “why don’t you all just take the best collection of those boxes and just all play through that?”  For some reason, rational observer, it just doesn’t work like that – and I say this as the band that is about the worst offender of the “lbs of heavy shit per band member” rule.  And so we all politely and determinedly got our piles of gear in and sort of settled.  The sound guy bit his lip as it all unflolded.

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[Blackened doom metallers Woods of Ypres are currently touring North America on the so-called "Pain & Piss Tour." Bassist Shane Madden will be taking us along with him on his journey of pain and piss, to be delivered in four parts throughout the tour. Part 1 follows.]

Part One: The Manifesto

Were I to choose one thing to say about touring in North America it would be that it’s not a memorable experience. The day to day is exceedingly dull and occasionally overwhelming. The windshield and its filth don’t change no matter how long I stare at them; the view broken at a gentle curve midway by the one-and-only existing mechanical arm that continues it’s symmetrical dance partnerless. We roll through here and there, and admittedly it’s a nice time of year to tour. Everything is green and it’s warm, but not hot (until we get to the desert), and there are minimal expectations for anything. Folks in the northeastern States feel that it’s springtime when the weather is pleasant here for a few weeks, and there’s hope. Nothing can go that badly. Any wrong can be righted. It’s Aphrodite or Freya or the Easter Bunny fooling humans into procreation and continuation and perpetuation. All in all, probably the best season to tour.

Now, let’s get down to brass tacks:

The drives are long. We don’t always eat enough every day. Money is important to do this. The shows are good. The shows are okay. There’s booze and debauchery. We do it out of passion. Name-drops. Tour blog rehash. Tour blog falsehoods.

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Weed is an awesome so-called “drug”, but it’s NOT for everyone. And throughout certain periods of my life, it’s been that way for me too. Growing up it was fun and my friends and i smoked a whole lot (!) whilst jamming…but somewhere in my mid-twenties, it would/could make me paranoid and uncomfortable in my own skin, so I didn’t/wouldn’t partake as often.

I met Mike IX Williams, the legendary vocalist for EyeHateGod/Arson Anthem/Drip/Crawlspace/Outlaw Order and author, last year at Philip Anselmo’s hidden home somewhere deep in the woods of Louisiana. I’ve gotten to know the man more this year as we have spent some time together in Fort Worth and Austin while on the road with Arson Anthem. I asked Mike if he would like to share his thoughts with the MetalSucks readers. He eagerly and graciously complied. – CM

Okay, so you’ve been slaving away in the piss hot steaming garage, or alternately, an ice cold freezing cement basement tomb, writing and playing extreme music with various people of dubious degree, quality and background. The torn carpeted walls smell of stale booze, melted wax and illegal left handed cigarettes and the old bass player vomited behind his Peavy cabinet two months before you kicked him out and its still not cleaned up. The new bassist is a fat stinking bastard who probably has head lice but definitely has bad breath and an alcohol problem but comes in handy because he plays like a cross between Tom Araya and Geezer Butler.

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Shining’s Jorgen Munkeby with Melissa Auf der Maur

When Melissa Auf der Maur, one of the most metal not-really-metal musicians on the planet today, tipped us off that she was going to be collaborating on a new project with Shining’s Jorgen Munkeby, well, we pretty much got down on our hands and knees and begged her to write a guest blog about the experience. Luckily for us, Melissa is used to having men beg her for things, and she took mercy. And so here are her recollections of how she came to learn about Shining, befriend Munkeby, and the collaboration that ensued. Enjoy!

Belgium, Summer Festival 2010 : My bearded Dutch booking agent friend, Bob, insisted I check a band he works with: SHINING. Since I saw and heard them explode out of that festival tent, they have topped my favorite albums of 2010 list with their one of a fucking kind blend of industrial, metal, and jazz: the phenomenally original Blackjazz. Check this Shining shit out:

We became fast friends, bonding over full-time music making, independent music making, intensity, keeping a hold of wicked band members on top of doing absolutely everything else that needs to be done in a band, and much more. Shining  leader/visionary/detail-oriented hard-ass worker, Jorgen Munkeby, became a friend and peer. Later in the year, Jorgen, his sax, and his snake scream joined us on stage during my Out of Our Minds Tour in Europe, in both Istanbul and Oslo (below):

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I was inspired to put some thoughts down after reading Sergeant D.’s post about what a terrible decision it is to commit yourself to the band life at a young age, because eventually the wheels will fall off and you’ll end up just like some morose version of the Anvil story: Sad, old, broke, and disillusioned by shattered dreams of rock stardom.  I know his blog was supposed to be funny and sarcastic, and was even sprinkled with a hint of sour grapes: Not getting to be that “cool band guy,” but justice being served down the line by seeing how those guys ended up. But I have to say that post hit home for me, because in many ways it was about me. I mean generally, not specifically. I’m pretty sure Sergeant D. didn’t follow me around and base his post on me autobiographically.

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[To chronicle their current tour -- the U.S. portion of which features 3 Inches of Blood, Holy Grail and System Divide in support -- Swiss folk metallers Eluveitie will be writing an exclusive tour blog for MetalSucks. Read about the Brazilian tour in the Week 1 Tour Blog, and arriving in America and Canada in Week 2. Week 3 follows, in which Eluveitie learn to enjoy the old American West and encounter zombies in Vancouver. -Ed.]

Chicago. We had more than enough rest and we can’t wait to actually DO something again. Offdays are useless crap. After the traditional morning excursion to Starbucks we can face the day!

Nice location, good sound, great restaurant and a reasonable amount of fans making it to the show, so nothing to complain about at all. Jenna is the lucky contest winner (over a couple of weeks fans could record videos of them covering “Thousandfold” and we chose the winners), so she will be on stage with us tonight to play her “Flying V” violin (with fuckin frets, how weird is that?!).

And FINALLY we get our after-show party!

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Allo allo alohoyus out there. Here’s a vid update from the beginning of the tour with Motorhead and Clutch. We are quite behind on these because EVERY SINGLE night is a totally sold out insane fury of sweat, smoke, booze, friends, fans, women, and loud rocknroll jams! So – getcher self a taste here and stay tuned for more updates and shit asap.

Beard love from Detroit,
Valient Himself

[A longtime MS reader who comments under the name "isntaTOTALdouchebag10" wrote us a series of emails about Daughters of Mara, calling them an "underappreciated rock gem" (an assertion with which I'd agree). He pleaded with us to write a post about them on MetalSucks, to which I replied "If you do it, I'll run it." So without further ado, here's isntaTOTALdouchebag10's unedited story on Daughters of Mara. -Ed.]

Daughters of Mara in a nutshell…formed briefly by Shawn Zuzek back in 06 or something, wrote a debut album for a major label but got fucked over and it was never released, yada yada yada…they broke up and now Shawn Zuzek does solo shit which is just as fucking awesome. OK now the music.

Everyone has their bands that when you hear other people of similar taste say “Oh, I don’t like them”, it causes our eyebrows to raise because in our opinions it is just so damn good. It’s different for everyone, Daughters of Mara are that band for me. This, their only album, has it all, tasteful in every way, heavy, melodic, a sense of groove, peaks and valleys, and best of all, memorable. Each song has something unique about it

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[To chronicle their current tour -- the U.S. portion of which features 3 Inches of Blood, Holy Grail and System Divide in support -- Swiss folk metallers Eluveitie will be writing an exclusive tour blog for MetalSucks. Week one of the tour took them through Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Curitiba, Brazil; read about the Brazilian tour in the Week 1 Tour Blog. Week 2 follows, in which we learn that Eluveitie hate touring with other folk/pagan metal bands but absolutely love Walmart. -Ed.]

Sleep for 10 hours straight on the plane and wake up in the freezing cold. Awesome. Temperature shock FTW part II! BUT there’s a Starbucks at the airport which gets us all excited and stuff.

First stop, Philly! Apart from the bad news of people not making it to the show because roads are blocked and shit like that we’re stoked to see our good friends from Holy Grail. 3 Inches of Blood unfortunately can’t make it to the show because their van broke down… System Divide sound really good, great to be on a tour with bands that are worth listening to. Side note: We fucking hate touring with folk/pagan metal bands (apart from Finntroll). Isn’t it ironic ;-)

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