all that tour publicity down the drain

#@$#%@$#$#!!

My government’s bureaucracy is so FUN sometimes.

Diarmuid has been replaced for this tour by long time collaborator (and fellow Birmingham, England native) bass player

well, you know how i was hoping this sentence would end.

John Taylor?

I would think that any fan of Broadrick would want that sentence to end with Dave Cochrane. The bass on those Ice records is monstrous.

yeah, unlike that puny plinking on the godflesh records.

no ted parsons either??? hmmm, i wonder who justin will be replaced by. they should just have a jesu franchise in every country.

you know, this is EXACTLY why i missed seeing godflesh live back when except i didn’t find out they couldn’t make it due to “customs problems” until i got to the fucking door of the venue and saw a sign posted. wtf is broadrick’s problem anyway. i’m thinking its the weed

“Hi, and welcome to the Jesu family. This training video will provide all the information you need to provide the Jesu experience with flair and sadness.”

i mean, how hard could it be?

dave cochrane is great. wasn’t he in terminal cheesecake as well?

that sucks, but I’d probably still go see Isis even if it was just Torche opening

Bass on Ice (and God!) >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Bass on Godflesh.

Isis @ Cradle last time was pretty damn underwhelming

well, they’re playing somewhere in Charlotte this time, for whatever that’s worth

FUCK they were the only reason I was going to that Isis show!

Hope they still make the NYC gig; now that I’ve been promised Cochrane I totally want to see them. (I, too, got hosed out of seeing Godflesh once. They were supposed to open for Skinny Puppy, who I was only seeing because my then-gf/now-wife wanted to, only GF didn’t make it and we got stuck with I don’t even remember who—Thought Industry, I think—as the opener, so the show was pretty much a total wash as far as I was concerned, having never been an SP fan.)

Doubt I’d go for Isis alone. When I saw them open for Mogwai a couple years ago they were... Well, Jaufre put it just about right: “underwhelming.”

I was supposed to go to the headlining show/record release party. Now I just have to hope I get my money back, since Oxbow and Intronaut would certainly be cool to see as openers, but they aren’t enough to get me up to Silverlake on a Tuesday night. Emo tear.

Isis is headlining the show here; what’re the odds of a refund?

it’s worth trying, but dude: isis should be well worth the money alone.

Bass on Ice (and God!) >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Bass on Godflesh.

my nervous system >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> your nervous system.

And once more, Pitchfork cannot resist using a metal-related review to slag metal, metalheads, and anyone who has ever heard a metal song playing on someone else’s car radio:

http://pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/40857/Jesu_Conqueror

do they still do that bullshit metal column?

i liked this gem from the jazz dude in the new york times:

“The latest project of Justin Broadrick, once the patriarch of the industrial-metal microgenre called grindcore with his mid-’80s band Godflesh” (??????)

wherez da fak chekr?

i gave up trying to explain grindcore to people in 1992. at some point it was decided earache records = grindcore. also deicide.

Someone described it to me once as “hardcore played through a fuzzed out television.”

there is a lot wrong in that little sentence in the times! and yeah the pitchfork thing is bad too but whatever. indierockers being clueless shocker blah blah. the times thing is just bad cuz they get paid more. mid-80s is wrong. industrial metal micro-genre is wrong. grindcore is wrong. they spelled his name right though.

the one pitchfork dude in that thing who calls isis, pelican, etc, the “new metal baroque” might want to check out a dictionary. just saying.

haha

people use the word “baroque” as a sort of tonal flourish without having any clue what the word means—I think they usually mean “I’d like to have a Big Idea”

Normally I wouldn’t have even noticed, but they used a blurb from the pitchfork review on the website of the venue that was supposed to have the Jesu record release show:

“Justin Broadrick’s ongoing quest to spend the metal-cred capital he earned in Napalm Death and Godflesh like so much blood money has been both compelling and damaging to purists’ psyches. The noisy yet stubbornly melodic shoegaze anthems he creates as Jesu mercilessly drag his audience to an appreciation of a densely layered, deliberately emotional sound.”

Sort of implies that metal fans can’t/don’t want to appreciate, you know, emotions and stuff. Like exposing them to something other than a dude screaming about Satan is the musical equivalent of tossing a cat into a pool. As usual, my problem with pitchfork metal reviews comes down to: I probably sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about in my reviews, but at least I don’t sound pretentious while I’m doing it.

Meanwhile, my personal definition of grind core is: it’s fast and dissonant and generally makes my ears hurt. But then, that was my definition of black metal for a while, and that’s changed, so you never know. And that’s probably more of a definition than the New York Times guy has.

NYT says grindcore=Trent Reznor

i had emotions when i listened to metal.

Then you grew up and realized that emotions are for young people. Well done!

dude, it isn’t worth the effort it takes to bother with something like that. it’s just ignorance. seriously. the only reason i harp on the Times is cuz they are my paper of record. they are just as clueless in a lot of cases as pitchfork dudes though.

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this is the thing that really stuck out like a sad misshapen thumb to me in the pitchfork thing:

“So it’s no surprise that one of the biggest dents smashed in metal’s façade over the past few years came with Mastodon, whose prog/arena/fantasy hybrid merged metal’s volume, technical aptitude, and playful escapism in all the places the genre typically kept virginal.”

i mean, that’s beyond dumb. it’s embarrassing.

Someone described it to me once as “hardcore played through a fuzzed out television.”

i think that’s a better description of YDI, actually.

It doesn’t bother me so much as amuse me. I suppose I really shouldn’t be surprised that they used that quote, either. The venue is, after all, smack dab in the middle of Hipster Central, USA. The thing I find mostly entertaining is that metalheads view indie rock dudes as stuck up, closed minded pricks, while indie rock dudes view metalheads as unsophisticated Neanderthals. And generally both camps are happy to stay in their separate playgrounds. The problem comes when you get bands like Mastodon or Jesu or the “nu metal Baroque,” and they have to sort of venture over and meet in the middle. Then you get bruised shins and sand in eyes.

whenever indie rock goes thru a period of suckitude hip hop and metal look really tempting to people. it’ll blow over with a new radiohead album or whatever.

I would love it if the new Radiohead record sounded like Pantera or whatever, totally aggressive, boneheaded moshing material. The fan reaction would be amazing to watch.

Scott, that is a much more succint and reasonable point than the one that SR was making in his Pazz & Jop essay re: noisy music.

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I would love it if the new Radiohead record sounded like Pantera or whatever

They ARE about due to release another record that’s lauded as “groundbreaking” by critics unfamiliar with the genre they’re aping.

indie-metal has been percolating for a loooong ass time though, not just this year or whatever....like the fucking champs and shit like that, was around the turn of the century...napalm death and all that spinoff stuff has been super mad respect forever, or the melvins, patton stuff, etc.

i think lots of indie dorks have always dug metal, it’s just like blogs started to notice or something.

also, i finally heard mastodon, i was kinda bummed out.

it reminded me of anthrax w/the dude from armored saint, kinda.

i think lots of indie dorks have always dug metal

Weezer fans to thread.

haha i met pat (the drummer) from weezer at a party cuz he grew up in buffalo with a dude that used to work at game informer...we talked about dio, actually!

Precisely!

A Pitchfork writher (no typo) is caught felching a dead dog in the street: big surprise. I was very disappointed by the Times piece, though, because Ratliff has been on the scene for years ’n’ years (he was a major fan of Candiria) and knows his stuff.

Scott S OTM.

Mastodon “merged” things “in all the areas [metal] typically kept virginal?” What the fuck does that even mean? How does something that retarded fail to get failed on the first pass?