Variety Plate

New Music. I was farting around on iTunes (I think "farting around" is actually a technical term when it comes to iTunes) and found a complication album called something like NorthernBreeze II. It sounds a bit like King Haakon's yacht, but it's subtitled "Finnish metal compilation." Nice, except some of the bands are Norwegian, some of them aren't metal, and how can you possibly have a Finnish metal compilation without Children of Bodom and Insomnium? But it did have a song from an interesting new band, Mors Principium Est, which my schoolboy Latin translates as "Death Begins" or "Death is Beginning". Or is it "Death is Foremost"? I guess it doesn't matter. Carthago delenda est. Mors Principium Est sounds like blackened death metal to me, and it's not bad. It's not great - it's a bit of an acoustic mess, especially in the first minute or two of the song, and if I were engineering the thing, I'd have heavied it up just a tad (the effect we're aiming for is to make Nathan Explosion nod and say "It's getting nice and heavy") and cleaned it up considerably. It's not quite cold enough to be black metal and not quite aggressive enough to be death metal, but it'll do, for now, at least until "Dance With You" and "At the Gates of Sleep" stop getting all mixed up in my head.

New Game. I went to my mom's birthday luncheon today and had opportunity to play Rock Star for about 20 seconds before I was unceremoniously failed. Clearly I missed something, and it's probably just as well. Fun? It seemed like it, but one has to ask how I of all people ended up having to do a Hole song in Rock Star. Hole! Those whom the gods would destroy they first bemuse with intense irony. The only other option was "Orange Crush" by REM, which frankly isn't much of an option. Hole or REM. Wow. It's like having to choose between taking a sword in the groin or the throat. "I'll take hideous painful death for two hundred, Alex."

New Ailment. I haven't blogged much in the last week. I developed a low-grade sinus infection earlier this week, and its main function is to make my writing ideas seem dumb and sap my energy by about 15%, just enough to make me lazy and unproductive and to periodically awaken me with that unpleasant sense of drainage.