the yellowbus rider

dude..... god, i just dont know what to say....
just... dude my mind is totally blown, this is so good!

they are going dumb on that shit!

Aleksandr Hrustevich

dude, holy fuck.... who did you learn from? the grace of god himself? this kid has to be in his own class. i dont even know what the fuck that kind of multi-octave accordion instrument is called. i didn't hear any mistake in this performance. this is something like a 4-part vivaldi composition for strings and hes playing all of the parts. the first day i saw this i watched it like 10 times, and then another day i just listened to the audio of it on a stereo and was almost able to appreciate it more.

america should get with the program like romania, russia, china, and start producing these force-taught kids in a variety of subjects. just imagine how we could advance science, math, medicine, death metal.... teaching four year olds sweeps.

DAM

I first heard them on the soundtrack of a couple things and wondered who was rapping in arabic, then i was watching democracy now and they played it on one of their break segments and amy goodman said what group it was, DAM. I bought their cd this summer and it's pretty good.
unfortunately, i think its unfair to compare the state of hip hop in any other country with the USA, because it was born here and we live in an absurd fantasy land. while in palestine it might be hard to just come across electricity sometimes what to speak of a mic, MPC, and a place to play, in america if you produce a 4/4 hot club beat and rap about "shawty" and "bein up in da club", you can make a million dollars overnight. then you ride home in your hummer with 10 18's.

the highlight of their album is Al Huriye Unt'a (Freedom for my Sisters), one of the tracks featuring the female rapper Safa' Hathoot. once i read their lyrics (translations) thats when i knew these guys were legit. in that track here is safa's verse:
"The Arabic woman’s life is written
What should she do, where should she go, it’s all written
She’s like a wounded bird in the sky
Scared to land because of the hunters
Imprisoned in her own house, thirsty for freedom
And can drink nothing but her own tears
Then they dare ask me: why do I cry?
Because I’m a body without a spirit
U abuse it and then I’m wrong while u are right?
Who the hell are you to tell me how to behave?
Asking me “where r u going?”
What? You forgot where u came from? U came from me
But from now on I’m going to be independent
And the new generation follow suit
We should fight for our rights, let men ask questions
But let our sisters answer"


the albums price is worth it just to hear a CHICK rap that shit IN ARABIC. its like, fuck you islam, fuck you backwards ass koran culture!

also, fuck israel (the leadership and the expansion and the human rights abuses, not the civilians).

iron thrones - new stuff

I can't remember if i paid for their album or not, but i downloaded "visions of light" off of their website where they offer it for free or donation. all i gotta say, is GET THAT SHIT.


and while on that topic of them being unsigned and offering their album for free - i have something to say for that....
these are really transitionary and interesting times we live in. when i was a kid, to find new bands you had to march your ass down to the sketchy punk record store where all the "older kids" hung out and ask the kids working there what sounded like this band or that band, and asking recommendations. you bought albums to check it out. sure, there has always been DIY punk metal etc, but when i was a kid it was way more possible to make some money playing shows and selling records. now, while people will say otherwise by qualifying it with tons of preconditions, i just flat out assume that YOU CANNOT MAKE A DIME off of music, and when you do, it doesnt have anything to do with talent or quality of the music, but how you are marketed and how you are sold to the consuming public. as my homeboy immortal technique says "If you go platinum, it's got nuttin' to do wit' luck it just means that a million people are stupid as fuck".

and so in these changing times, how do we respond as musicians? do we throw a metallica-fit and say "OHHH NO WE ARE LOSING ROYALTIES BECAUSE OF DOWNLOADING! CALL THE FBI AND NSA!!!" or do we have to adapt and figure out how to be even more revolutionary than selling cds? we adapt, nukkah.

so i take it to mean iron thrones was saying F.U. to the record label system, the pay-to-play radio system, the download controversies, all of that, and just saying fuck, guys, we just want to do music. if this means we can get it to you the fastest and purest, then shit, its free.

so fuck yeah, distribute that shit, and support the band directly if you have the money to.

so on to today's video, i like how this is something they just wrote at one practice and recorded on a video camera, and it sounds better than anything i've done in my life. this is the kind of music that i get wet dreams off of imagining playing, but to them its just "we feel it's got a good framework to build off of."

DECAPITATED

this band is crazy, this performance is crazy. perfectly album-accurate. what dedication and talent, those guys. rip VITEK

kurtis blow

so sure, this father of hip hop is at his ultimate pop-disco-sellout phase here, but who fucking cares now! look how good this clip is!
If i were to rate video clips on their merits across different categories, this clip would score 5 stars on all criterion. the footage style, the soft filter, the lighting, EVERYONE's outfits, the hairstyles, blow's shirtless blazer stylings, blow's delivery is sooooo spot on and ahead of it's time! i mean if you added a strobe light, put stunna shades on him and added some autotuning to that backing track this would be a kanye west show! in 1980, man! destroying it.

Mare. the metal band. fuckin, MARE

Most bands that I would say are my favorite bands, I have some long background with... bands that were the soundtrack of my life for certain times, or bands that i grew up around... but i've only heard of MARE for less than 2 years now, after they were even still together, and from a single five song disc they became favorites.

It might sound like a little bit of an exaggeration, but it seems like when i look back on it from the future, i will view my understanding of music in my life in terms of per- and post-MARE.

I found out late that they had done a reunion show in toronto this year, if i had time i would have driven across the country to see that shit! i've been emailing the frontman tyler, hounding him to keep me posted on another reunion show, and he says it's coming!
I found what is most of their set from their reunion show, and i can never watch all these clips too many times it feels like. Mare is seriously fantastic.

cyann and ben

last year i complained to athena that there weren't enough bands that explored the black heart procession kind of sound, and challenged her to find me one. having a show at the college radio station, she had access to all sorts of obscure stuff. she came back with cyann and ben, that she had listened to for a while. i got "sweet beliefs" and the album is just beautiful! I definitely would place their sound in the same ballpark as black heart procession for sure, but leaning way more towards a more indierock-aware blonde redhead (which is a great fucking band to be compared to.).
while every track on sweet beliefs is sometimes laughably "gloomy" with that saddened distant lamenting sound, they are so cute that they just get away with it! they have delicute cute melody hooks in every track, and every track on the cd plays like a single. I love these guys and they look real fun to see live.
more proof that france is killing it, too.

samothrace

while you were sleeping on doom subgenres, samothrace came out of kansas and settled more appropriately in seattle, wielding with them the best metal cd of 2008, "life's trade". seriously, they are that good. i call it soul-metal, or metal with a purpose.

perhaps youve seen a band before, and all the dudes are good at playing their shit, their songs arent HORRIBLE, but you find yourself standing there thinking "what? what was the point of that part you just did?" I'm super jaded, but i feel this way about most bands i see that i've never heard of.

well samothrace is doing it RIGHT. even if they are spending a minute and a half just droning out during their live set, it captivates you. nothing goes on TOO long, nothing is too repetitive, but rather the music just grows organically, each piece lasting however long was needed to express what they were going for.

if there was one project i were to respectfully model my own musical project after, it would have to be samothrace. I'm dying to see them live again and i hope they keep coming out with material.

heres a really cool part of a house show clip from about a week before i saw them play in portland this year. that is an excerpt from a 9 minute or so song. its cool that you guys are doing house shows, but seriously you can't figure out any better lighting situation for a band to play than all the way on? shit.

Black Heart Procession

What you will find about me if you get to know me is that it's no secret that Black Heart Procession is among my top 3 favorite acts of all time, across all genres. I love this song, I love them live, I love this performance, so i thought I would share this as evidence of how fucking awesome they are. do yourself a favor and buy their discography and attend any show of theirs you can make it to.

dead to fall

anyone familiar with metal/metalcore in the last 6 years should not need any introduction to chicago's Dead to fall, who called it quits a year or two ago. more than just the broken up band that will not die on myspace, they established themselves early on as epic, serious, and above all brutal. They had mosh parts, sure, but you'd never lump them in as a mosh band.

as i am still just in the beginnings of posting to this blog, i am mostly for now just cataloging most of my youtube favorites, and early on in my list i rediscovered this video, which as far as i can tell i deem to be one of the best live performance videos of any band, any genre, any venue. kids right up against the band? fun. singalong parts? fun. inflatable beach toys? (this was right when they came out with their chum fiesta shark themed t-shirts, shows, and songs) fun. singer jon hunt taking the video camera from a random slovenian kid and then filming the crowd during the song? awesome. crowd surfing the guitar player? so much fun. shows like this idealize how fun a hardcore show CAN be.

take special note: there is an absence of military jock muscle douche bags in the pit marching around with some mean scowl and punching little girls in the head and asking if "you wanna go???". we should learn something from slovenia.

Korpiklaani

back in june, nancy thought i might like this band so she showed me this video of korpiklaani. did i EVER like it! man, pure gold. it doesnt even matter if you watch the rest of the video, because the your day is already made by the time you see the opening log chop timed to the hit followed by the shot of the fidlist mysteriously emerging from the outhouse with some DMT-induced permafried face expression while playing from the hip.

Before the time i saw this video, i did not realize that there was such a strong renaissance faire folkmetal scene, but there you have it. I listened to 5 or 6 of their other jams, but wooden pints is where its AT!

tablas

are great! I was reminiscing of some indian beat stylings that are so familiar to me from being raised around a lot of that music, so i went youtubin' for performance videos of the various instruments.

I found this father and son duo and i watched all 5 parts of their concert. if some of you don't realize, you'll notice that the two are perfectly in sync, so even on the random super-fast hand waving, it is all composed parts written ahead of time. they have very complex time signatures that can be nothing like what we find in any western music, i mean this is the kind of stuff these guys are doing in there head

motherfucking VOYAGER

So i've been going off about voyager for a year and a half now being the hottest shit in town. the new york / boston kids play fucking perfect melodic-doom-ambient-artcore metal, and they do it all just right. the guitar work and harmonies? great. the vocals? powerful clean and awesome. the rhythms? creative and interesting. In fact I go so far as to name their self titled release on forgotten empire records the best album of 2008.

the only problem voyager has is they cant provide us instantly hooked fans with an answer for the craving we have for more full albums from them. This is because they are spread across two cities and all busy with jobs and school with occasional shows, but fuck... you guys are so good and your material needs to come out because it would be a shame for it not to!

so go fucking buy their cd. every time i see this clip it makes me happy and dream of them coming to the west coast.




FLARES - Lynn, MA 1-31-09

VOYAGER | MySpace Video


http://www.myspace.com/voyageralpha

Laura Gibson - Kills It.

so i went looking for a youtube clip of laura to go with this post and i just saw brand new ones posted of a portland performance of her from about a week ago! one that i attended! and it was a great show and great footage. what i like is that at 3:50 in this video, its just me in the lower left and laura, she's playing just for me! funny. the song she starts 4 minutes into this video, i found to be the most moving of the show.





so anyways, apparently she's been killing it up here for a while as a portland-based artist, but I have just arrived on the portland scene here 6 months ago so i hadn't heard of her before that.

It was around july of this year, i found myself at the fucking awesome 3 day indoor/outdoor free pdx pop shows festival. what a great fucking idea, thank you people who came up with it. Way to enrich our city with awesome shit.
right, so it was around july, and i was at this show. there were a lot of interesting acts throughout the day i would have wanted to check out, but it was like over 100 degrees those days. i would try to go out, and feel like collapsing after one band and go home and just lay down til evening. so i was there in the lovely evening at around 11pm or 12 and it was still like 80 degrees out. t-shirts abound. on the outdoor stage, laura and friends took to it, and her beautiful music was able to silence and captivate the 500 or more kids, punks, street wackos, and music nerds into a perfect hush to hear her songs. she was really great and i enjoyed the performance right up front.

so i picked up her beasts of seasons album right after that and i'll be damned if there wasnt an early fall day or two where some of her songs would just be stuck in my head the entire day.



http://www.myspace.com/lauragibson

YEAR OF NO LIGHT

This was a band that i found out about and immediately said to myself, "what??? why havent i heard of this since 2006 when it was released? this shit is fucking fantastic, why didn't we get word of it in the states for so long?"

upon hearing one or two myspace tracks, i bought their cd NORD and it is a fucking masterpiece. Sure, people can draw comparisons in their unique sound to other acts that have come before, as varied as The Cure to Sunn o))), but this piece of music is so timely and visionary...

in my opinion, i think the art-metal scene has yet to hit its heydey, and i think only since around 2005 when bands like intronaut and pelican were getting post-isis enough, did we to really start to do the genre justice.

its booming now and there are so many great acts out with this sound - voyager, pelican, rosetta... and all of these acts and Year of no light all manage to keep from being redundant.

nord takes you through every emotion typical in the day in the life of emotionally charged (or damaged) person- very orderly and structured parts of songs, then beautiful dreamy parts that wash over you and you realize 7 minutes of them have just passed, chaotic, psychotic, figuring itself out as it goes, and pummelingly brutal parts.

there is not a dull spot to be had on nord, which is getting harder and harder to say for albums these days. for me, its so refreshing to hear something that had vision behind it, it was clear that thought was put into how the songs would flow, and what the scope of the album was going to be, ahead of time.

these guys are fucking great. oh yeah - and they shred out of france! +1,000EXP





http://www.myspace.com/yearofnolight

Too $hort

Lately as an adult, it has occurred to me that Too $hort was and is entirely underrated. Think of any other artist with that distinct of a delivery and that signature set of lyrics encompassing not much more than hoes, stereo systems, weed, and how great pimpin in oakland is. You can't. this guy has always been one of a kind.
Too $hort has epitomized the "self-generating success through excessive arrogance and self-image" model of hip hop that started in the early 80s and continues to this day. and he's been doing it longer than anyone.
Some of these old clips make me nostalgic for growing up in california in the 80s.

as soon as i get a car and a system set up again i full plan on bumping healthy servings of too $hort, just like i did in the 90s when i was 16.









and you gotta see that hyphy shit on blow the whistle:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUVfDvIP2EQ