Wrong way going down a one way road

Hey everybody it¨s been a while, but it’s time for a breath of fresh air.

A friend of mine recently presented me for an unknown track from John Butler and it’s just great.

Great lyrics.

So please “raise your hands if you believe in revolution”

Zappanale

It’s funny. I thought i would’ve discovered this festival sooner, since im a BIG fan of Frank Zappa, but i first heard of it today and started researching it a little bit. As i read more and more i became very excited about this project, which has been around longer than i have lived.

Well it’s called Zappanale and it’s a festival which tributes Frank Zappa with bands coming from all over the world to play at the Zappa-site in Germany. All playing the Zappa music we love. The festival runs for three days, just enough time to cover Frank’s material.

This really sounds like something i will go see next year since it was held in August. And i also think some of the other suspects should go if youre in on it.

For the suspects and the danish crowd, here’s an article about the Zappanale http://www.dr.dk/P2/lyttilnyt/tema/frankzappa/zappanale.htm

Go Frank Zappa!

Metallica

This is a respons to tobias post about the new album.

Metallica is an American heavy metal band that formed in 1981 in Los Angeles, California. Founded when drummer Lars Ulrich posted an advertisement in a Los Angeles newspaper, Metallica’s original line-up consisted of Ulrich, rhythm guitarist and vocalist James Hetfield, lead guitarist Dave Mustaine, and bassist Ron McGovney. These last two were later replaced from the band, in favor of Kirk Hammett and Cliff Burton, respectively. In September 1986, Metallica’s tour bus skidded out of control and flipped, which resulted in Burton being crushed under the bus and killed. Jason Newsted replaced him less than two months later. Newsted left the band in 2001 and was replaced by Robert Trujillo in 2003.

Metallica’s early releases included fast tempos, instrumentals, and aggressive musicianship that placed them as one of the “Big Four” of the thrash metal subgenre alongside Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax. The band earned a growing fan base in the underground music community and critical acclaim with the 1986 release Master of Puppets some calling it one of the most influential and “heavy” thrash metal albums. The band achieved substantial commercial success with its self-titled 1991 album, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. With this release the band expanded its musical direction resulting in an album that appealed to a more mainstream audience.

In 2000, Metallica was among several artists who filed a lawsuit against Napster for sharing the band’s copyright-protected material for free without the band members’ consent. A settlement was reached, and Napster became a pay-to-use service. Despite reaching number one on the Billboard 200, the release of St. Anger alienated some fans with the exclusion of guitar solos, and the “steel-sounding” snare drum. A film titled Some Kind of Monster documented the recording process of St. Anger.

Metallica has released nine studio albums, two live albums, two EPs, twenty-two music videos and forty-three singles. The band has become one of the most commercially successful and influential heavy metal acts. With 90 million records sold worldwide, including 57 million in the United States, the band has won seven Grammy Awards, and has had five albums peak at number one on the Billboard 200 which is a record they set in 2008. .^[1] The band’s 1991 album, Metallica, has sold over 15 million copies, which makes it the 25th highest selling album in the United States.^[2]

^{It’s from wikipedia}

Review: Metallica – Death Magnetic

Death Magnetic

This release is one of the most intensely discussed albums right now, both among various people I know and on the net. The mixed opinions seem to vary from utter disgust (often from older and ex-fans) to satisfied acknowledgement (often from newer, post-Master of Puppets fans). Having heard the entire album a few days ago, I can see that these arguments are not going to end anytime soon. I’m not particularly engaged in the argument regarding Metallica’s development over the last 12 years or so, So I’m just going to stick to reviewing the album instead of throwing in yet another opinion about the band.

Death Magnetic is the ninth studio release by the bay area metallers. As someone (I can’t remember who) commented, it sounds like the album that should have followed the Black Album back in 1991, and it would seem like Metallica may have been trying to recapture that era of their musical career somewhat.

Death Magnetic opens with “That was just your life”, which is definitely one of the best tracks on the album, strong riffs and energetic vocals reminding me of some of their earliest work. This solid opener is not, unfortunately, reflected very much in the rest of the album. The next few songs, “The End of the Line” and “Broken, Beaten and Scarred” are just plain boring, which is particularly due to the uninteresting drums and vocals (doesn’t Hetfield ever get tired of yelling ”-eah!!” in every line?). The single “The Day blah blah blah” follows this pattern aswell, and it is not until the fast and catchy ”All Nightmare Long” that anything really worth listening to is found on Death Magnetic. The rest of the album is fairly linear, the best of it cool and fast paced, the worst dull and uninventive.

To me, this album is driven completely by the guitarwork. There are some killer riffs and solos on here, but they fail to really take the album all that far. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a bad album, but it isn’t really good either. Metallica obviously tried hard, but can’t quite reach above mediocrity as a metal group. Damn, I just said my opinion about them as a band. Ah well. 

Songs Picks: That was Just your Life – All Nightmare Long – Suicide & Redemption

4/10 Lacking

Guitar Gods

As a guitar player myself and a BIG fan of music i felt this site needed a little touch of guitar history. So i thought i would post an article written by Pete Townshend about Jimi Hendrix, and afterwards add the top 10 os the top 100 greatest guitarists of all time, according to the Rolling Stone. I know this is a matter of taste but i think everybody can agree with some of this stuff. Enjoy.

Get ready, this is gonna be a looooong one.

Jimi Hendrix: The Greatest Guitarist of All Time

By Pete Townshend

I feel sad for people who have to judge Jimi Hendrix on the basis of recordings and film alone, because in the flesh he was so extraordinary. He had a kind of alchemist’s ability; when he was on the stage, he changed. He physically changed. He became incredibly graceful and beautiful. It wasn’t just people taking LSD, though that was going on, there’s no question. But he had a power that almost sobered you up if you were on an acid trip. He was bigger than LSD.

What he played was fucking loud but also incredibly lyrical and expert. He managed to build this bridge between true blues guitar — the kind that Eric Clapton had been battling with for years and years — and modern sounds, the kind of Syd Barrett-meets-Townshend sound, the wall of screaming guitar sound that U2 popularized. He brought the two together brilliantly. And it was supported by a visual magic that obviously you won’t get if you just listen to the music. He did this thing where he would play a chord, and then he would sweep his left hand through the air in a curve, and it would almost take you away from the idea that there was a guitar player here and that the music was actually coming out of the end of his fingers. And then people say, “Well, you were obviously on drugs.” But I wasn’t, and I wasn’t drunk, either. I can just remember being taken over by this, and the images he was producing or evoking were naturally psychedelic in tone because we were surrounded by psychedelic graphics. All of the images that were around us at the time had this kind of echoey, acidy quality to them. The lighting in all the clubs was psychedelic and drippy.

He was dusty — he had cobwebs and dust all over him. He was a very unremarkable-looking guy with an old military jacket on that was pretty dirty. It looked like he’d maybe slept in it a few nights running. When he would walk toward the stage, nobody would really take much notice of him. But when he walked off, I saw him walk up to some of the most covetable women in the world. Hendrix would snap his fingers, and they followed him. Onstage, he was very erotic as well. To a man watching, he was erotic like Mick Jagger is erotic. It wasn’t “You know, I’d like to take that guy in the bathroom and fuck him.” It was a high form of eroticism, almost spiritual in quality. There was a sense of wanting to possess him and wanting to be a part of him, to know how he did what he did because he was so powerfully affecting. Johnny Rotten did it, Kurt Cobain did it. As a man, you wanted to be a part of Johnny Rotten’s gang, you wanted to be a part of Kurt Cobain’s gang.

He was shy and kind and sweet, and he was fucked up and insecure. If you were as lucky as I was, you’d spend a few hours with him after a gig and watch him descend out of this incredibly colorful, energized face. There was also something quite sad about watching him. There was a hedonism about him. Toward the end of his life, he seemed to be having fun, but maybe a little bit too much. It was happening to a lot of people, but it was sad to see it happen to him.

With Jimi, I didn’t have any envy. I never had any sense that I could ever come close. I remember feeling quite sorry for Eric, who thought that he might actually be able to emulate Jimi. I also felt sorry that he should think that he needed to. Because I thought Eric was wonderful anyway. Perhaps I make assumptions here that I shouldn’t, but it’s true. Once — I think it was at a gig Jimi played at the Scotch of St. James [in London] — Eric and I found ourselves holding each other’s hands. You know, what we were watching was so profoundly powerful.

The third or fourth time that I saw him, he was supporting the Who at the Saville Theatre. That was the first time I saw him set his guitar on fire. It didn’t do very much. He poured lighter fluid over the guitar and set fire to it, and then the next day he would be playing with a guitar that was a little bit charred. In fact, I remember teasing him, saying, “That’s not good enough — you need a proper flame-thrower, it needs to be completely destroyed.” We started getting into an argument about destroying your guitar — if you’re going to do it, you have to do it properly. You have to break every little piece of the guitar, and then you have to give it away so it can’t be rebuilt. Only that is proper breaking your guitar. He was looking at me like I was fucking mad.

Trying to work out how he affected me at my ground zero, the fact is that I felt like I was robbed. I felt the Who were in some ways quite a silly little group, that they were indeed my art-school installation. They were constructed ideas and images and some cool little pop songs. Some of the music was good, but a lot of what the Who did was very tongue-in-cheek, or we reserved the right to pretend it was tongue-in-cheek if the audience laughed at it. The Who would always look like we didn’t really mean it, like it didn’t really matter. You know, you smash a guitar, you walk off and go, “Fuck it all. It’s all a load of tripe anyway.” That really was the beginning of that punk consciousness. And Jimi arrived with proper music.

He made the electric guitar beautiful. It had always been dangerous, it had always been able to evoke anger. If you go right back to the beginning of it, John Lee Hooker shoving a microphone into his guitar back in the 1940s, it made his guitar sound angry, impetuous, and dangerous. The guitar players who worked through the Fifties and with the early rock artists – James Burton, who worked with Ricky Nelson and the Everly Brothers, Steve Cropper with Booker T. — these Nashville-influenced players had a steely, flick-knife sound, really kind of spiky compared to the beautiful sound of the six-string acoustic being played in the background. In those great early Elvis songs, you hear Elvis himself playing guitar on songs like “Hound Dog,” and then you hear an electric guitar come in, and it’s not a pleasant sound. Early blues players, too — Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Albert King — they did it to hurt your ears. Jimi made it beautiful and made it OK to make it beautiful.

Now for the top 10:

1. Jimi Hendrix
2. Duane Allman of The Allman Brothers Band
3. B. B. King
4. Eric Clapton
5. Robert Johnson
6. Chuck Berry
7. Stevie Ray Vaughan
8. Ry Cooder
9. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin
10. Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones

The list includes many of my favorites, who didn’t make it to the top 10: Kurt Cobain-12, Angus Young-96, Johnny Ramone-16, John Frusciante-18 and Frank Zappa-45.

Upcoming Reviews

Starting tomorrow I will be posting a number of music reviews, usualy once a week or whenever. I buy/acquire a lot of music so I might as well use the blog to voice my opinion about some of it and make some recommendations. Reviews and stuff will probably mostly be about various metal-releases, but I will try and get some variation in as well. Tomorrow I’ll be posting my review of the new Mirror Faced Mentality album by the band Scamp.

Don’t want to get all political, but…

tragedy!

LOWER ALCOHOL consumption levels mean 2008 will prove to be “another challenging year” for the beer industry, Heineken Ireland said yesterday as it published half-year results showing a 3 per cent rise in turnover and “static” sales volumes.

Unbelievably awesome

Last night I went to see five metal bands perform live at the Present Aarhus Festival in heart of our home city. I’ve been to death metal shows roughly this size before, but this was unlike anything I have ever experienced. Ever. My friend and I managed to get way up to the stage, right in the center of the pit, and held our ground there for the entire set of shows, Pariah Syndicate, Oktan, Scamp, Exmortem and Hatesphere. 

I managed to get a few pictures to show here later, but for the most part I was completely absorbed in five hours of thrashing, drinking, headbanging, and roaring along with everyone else there. The bands were incredible, particularly Scamp (the lead vocalist, Mikael Rise, poured a gasoline-tank full of whisky on our heads) and Hatesphere (who had the entire pit thrashing insanely their entire set). We went there not knowing exactly what to expect, and staggered out of pure, metal awesome about five hours later.

All in all it was just f***ing amazing. Especially since this was on a goddamn thursday. Friday morning with three hours of sleep, several bruises and a hangover is kinda brutal, though.

(Sorry about long post and lack of pictures, I’ll post some another day.)

Drinking games

I found this very cool website called http://www.webtender.com/handbook/games/?sortby=type and there are  lots of fun games. I would love to try the one called baseball.

So Guys. be ready. (OHH YES! THIS IS A CHALLENGE!)

Naked Newz

Okay, this video is made by me and some of my friends from my boarding school (efterskole)
It’s in 3 parts so please watch all of them
Hope you ‘ll enjoy.

Just start from the top and go down