Today I received my first piece of mail for the Month of Letters challenge from the originator of the idea, Mary Robinette Kowal. Pretty sweet. She sent me quite a pretty postcard on fancy paper with shiny highlights surrounding the flowers. In case you can’t read the lovely (shit) photo my laptop took, let me transcribe for you.
February 1, 2012
Dear Joe,
I saw your blog post and thought I would drop you a line. I has been very exciting to see how enthusiastic people are about the challenge. I hope you get lots of mail.
Yours,
Mary Robinette Kowal
How nice of her! This postcard is, in fact, my very first piece of mail and it came all the way from Portland, OR. I am pretty excited about it. I do hope I get more (hint hint) and will be sharing anything I receive here barring sensitive or personal information. Want to get Black Lasered? Write me a letter or postcard.
Die Antwoord are back continuing their celebration of ugliness. Much has been written here on The Black Laser about the group, so I won’t waste your time. If you want to read what I’ve written, just click the “Die Antwoord” tag at the bottom of the post. But do watch the video and start to get excited for their next record. I am.
Wow. Just wow. Two dudes, two synthesizers, a drum machine, and a pair of the most boss mustaches I’ve seen in a long time. This thing is amazing. I especially like that there is almost no effort made to hide the fact that they are lip singing along to a track.
Continuing on their quest to release the best fucking music videos in all of heavy metal, Oregon’s Red Fang have released this video for the song “Hank is Dead” from 2011’s Murder the Mountains.
Not content to allow the wanton destruction of things in their station wagon to remain their peak, the dudes went and threw an air guitar competition. That is pretty fucking bad ass. And then they shot it and made it into a music video. Genius! I’d take 1 of these to a million “band in a warehouse” videos. I don’t care how sweet your song is; if you are a metal band playing in a warehouse I am instantly bored to death of you. I am glad to see Red Fang engaging their creativity to put out videos that are both fucking entertaining as hell and perfect reflections of their music.
And if you haven’t yet listened to Murder the Mountains (and I don’t know why you wouldn’t have since I’ve recommended it like a hundred times), go listen to it. It’s on Spotify. Don’t be a jive ass sucker.
I imagine the director pitched the concept for this video a little bit like this: a bunch of fashion model southwestern crust punks hang out on a garbage dump, ride dirtbikes, rob a convenience store, and then return to their squat to celebrate except that one is sad. Then she kills them all with a baseball bat in a slow-motion sexy way.
Did I get it? I think I did.
The track comes from 2011’s Living on the Edge of Time. It’s good. Check it out.
Orcas: between 6 and 8 meters long, weighing in excess of 6 tons (male); between 3 and 5 meters long, weighing between 3 and 4 tons.
Great white sharks: between 4 and 6 meters long, weighing between 0.75 and 1.25 tons.
The orcas have a decent weight advantage if not a real length advantage. But we’re talking about a god damned great white shark here, not some idiot school of herring.
My favorite part of the video is that the orcas just rip the shark’s liver out and let the rest sink. Like a giant, “Fuck you, enormous predatory fish! Mammals for life!”
I heard Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads the first time maybe a year and a half ago. I was in a telecine session with Ben over at Smoke & Mirrors and he put it on. One of the advantages of a telecine session is that you don’t need to hear audio from the cut, so you can listen to whatever the hell you want. I’ve discovered a load of new music that way over the years, and this record is a prime example of that.
When he put it on, I immediately perked up and was all, “What the hell is this?!” and he told me that it was Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads. “Murder Ballads?!” I said. “Murder Ballads,” he said. “I LOVE murder ballads,” I said.
“Where The Wild Roses Grow”
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And, really, what good, red-blooded son of a bitch doesn’t enjoy a murder ballad? I can only take so many love songs before I want to get sick. But dish me up a plate of songs about murder and you’ve got my attention the whole time. And we’re not talking your typical heavy metal, horror movie murder stories. No, we’re talking about salt-of-the-earth, regular folk kind of murders. The best kind.
Murder ballads are a sub-genre of the traditional ballad form, the lyrics of which form a narrative describing the events of a murder, often including the lead-up and/or aftermath. Traditional ballads are independent from broadsheet ballads insofar as the typical broadsheet form does not use the same formulas or structures and is rooted in a literate society: traditional ballads flourished within non-literate groups within society.
Pretty dry for something so juicy.
“Stagger Lee”
Armed with a direction and something to look for, I left my telecine and sought out the album. This was, perhaps, March of last year, and I was, even then, still buying a lot of music on compact disc. Remember those? Unfortunately the album was long out of print and not readily available. So I did what any conscientious consumer of music would do; I pirated Nick Cave’s entire discography.
I am glad I did it too, because the album is amazing. Originally released in 1996, I completely missed it the first time around. I was 14 years old and did not have ears for anything that wasn’t metal. I remember I had a CD alarm clock then and was woken to Napalm Death’s Fear. Emptiness. Despair. every day for a year or so. Murder Ballads would have been lost on me at this point in my life even if I had heard it. Besides, who wants to listen to some crap record that has not only PJ Harvey but also Kylie Minogue on it?? (Read: I do.)
I added this album to my “For the Phone” playlist on Spotify recently and it has provided a perfect companion for nighttime walks through the suddenly-below-freezing New York City streets. I wander around, looking at people, singing “I’m a bad motherfucker, don’t you know/And I’ll crawl over fifty good pussies just to get one fat boy’s asshole” from “Stagger Lee” to myself, and wonder what they would think to hear the music I am using to hide from them in plain sight.
Yesterday I was complaining about how the “singer” from The Man-Eating Tree can’t sing. And the truth is that Nick Cave does not have a good voice at all, but he’s in that same realm as Lou Reed or Tom Waits. That is, it doesn’t matter if he can’t sing, because that’s part of his schtick. His vocals would actually be worse if he had some dulcet singing voice. His coarseness complements his lyrical content, and that is what is important.
“The Curse of Millhaven”
Give the album a listen. And then listen again. It’s that good. Then listen again with headphones and pay attention the lyrics. If you generally like the recommendations I make here on The Black Laser, I promise you will like this.
Just another amazing track from Pulp’s 1998 release This Is Hardcore. I was listening to this on the train home today and it got stuck in my head so I am sharing it with all of you right now because it is wonderful. I often wish my life were like the lyrics of a Jarvis Cocker record, and, sometimes, it is.
