Every day we hear about people doing shit like this and we love to see it and it fills us with joy and momentarily restores our faith in humanity, but at the same time we hate that people HAVE to do shit like this, which once again makes us wonder if the world wouldn’t be better off getting hit with another dinosaur-extinction-level asteroid.
I guess this is just the world we live in now. Happy Thanksgiving Eve, y’all.
Good morning and Happy Friday, everyone!
I’d like to share a fundraising campaign with you all, which started today and runs through next Monday (the 20th).
We’ve often talked about fundraisers here, usually in the form of compilation albums. Like this one that specifically benefited birds, several (here, here, and here) intended to support people of Palestine, and even this one that sounded bird-related but was also for Palestinian people. And I fully encourage you to check out all of those if you haven’t already.
But today I’ve got one that’s a bit different: supporting Palestine AND bird-related, but surprisingly NOT music-related.
Inbox overflowing with messages from every band and label you’ve ever heard of (and tons you don’t even remember subscribing to)? Must be Bandcamp Friday!
If you need help wading through the oceans of stuff being marketed at you all day, I’m here to help with a few selections to highlight.
First: our good friends over at Philip K. Discs have dropped some sweet exclusive merch today.
Next, get yourself ready for winter weather with a brand new pair of socks! But not just any socks, these ones come emblazoned with the logo of Italian dark-occult/doomsters Messa. Wear them in good health!
And finally…
Hey there! I’ve got two (completely unrelated) things to bring to your attention today, both of which might interest you if you live in or around the Pittsburgh area, and one of which might still interest you if you are in any of several other areas throughout the eastern or central United States.
First up:
Join the American Birding Association for a fun weekend of birding in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania!
On Sat. morning, Sept. 20, we will bird together at Hartwood Acres Park where we will explore the trails around the estate buildings, meadows, and mature woodland areas. In the afternoon, we head over to Beechwood Farms Nature Reserve for two presentations, one by Brian Shema and the other by Nick Stahlman, hosted by the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania. In the evening, come down into the city and join us at East End Brewing for a little urban birding and socializing over pizza and local drinks on their outdoor patio.
On Sun. morning, Sept. 21, we will visit Frick Park, one of the area’s top birding locations, to look for fall migrants. Later we will gather at the Frick Environmental Center for a fun presentation by Mike Fialkovich, president of the Three Rivers Birding Club.
All bird walks, talks, and workshops are free and open to the public (with cash bar/food during the evening social), but registration is mandatory. The ABA’s bird-friendly SongBird Coffee will be served before and after each bird walk and presentation.
We are grateful for the support of Vortex Optics, who are providing a variety of excellent Vortex binoculars for participants to use during our field trips. There are limited binoculars available for loan, and we will distribute them on a first come first served basis, so sharing might be needed and appreciated.
Don’t miss out on this fantastic opportunity to connect with fellow bird enthusiasts and enhance your birding skills. Sign up now and join us for an unforgettable weekend!
All of the locations listed here are local hotspots for bird activity — especially Frick which has been buzzing with reports of migrating warblers and flycatchers over the past few weeks. As stated above, all of this weekend’s events are FREE, you just have to sign up here. I’ve been looking forward to this ever since the ABA first announced it early this year, and I hope to run into some friendly faces over the two-day gathering!
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and next:
WordPress has reminded me that this month officially marks 14 years since this website launched. So happy birthday, Valley of Steel. Meanwhile the entire world continues to circle the drain more and more rapidly, but I guess we all need to take comfort in the little things wherever we can.
Like… huge recent news I wanted to make sure to share with you folks — specifically, U.S.-based folks. There are finally new seasons of The Great Pottery Throw Down available for us to watch! If you aren’t familiar with this former BBC, now Channel 4, competition show, you need to catch up! While the rest of the world was spending the 2020 pandemic obsessing over the Tiger King documentary, HBO MAX quietly released the first few seasons of a delightful series set in a pottery factory in Stoke-on-Trent, central England — essentially the clay and porcelain sibling to the more widely-known Great British Bake Off.
I was immediately hooked on these amateur potters’ magical creations, and especially on the show’s endearingly gentle and positive vibes: the judges have been known to tear up, even more than the contestants, with pride over some of the final products. I absolutely couldn’t get enough through five whole seasons, until suddenly the well dried up. Announcements for a sixth edition came in 2023, followed by a seventh the next year, but HBO was too busy flip-flopping on what to call their streaming app to bother adding any new content. So for the past few years I’ve had a sad, pottery-shaped void in my life — that is, until just a few weeks ago when I discovered that the whole run (so far) of the Throw Down, all the episodes that were on HBO but also the two newer missing seasons, are now streaming for free on Roku Channel!
I would’ve told you all sooner, but I was too excited about bingeing my way through the new episodes to find time to write anything. But now that I’ve completed the sixth and seventh finals, I didn’t want to wait any longer to spread the news. Go check it out ASAP! We have one of these doodads plugged into our tv, but you can access Roku Channel content through other devices like Firestick or Google TV or just stream through their website.
I realize this is starting to sound like a paid advertisement for Roku, but I promise it isn’t (although if they wanted to throw me some $$ I would not turn my nose up at it!) — I’m just a really big fan of this particular competition show and I think more people need to know about it. Which is pretty much my whole shtick here, although it’s usually music I’m sharing with you. OH! Speaking of which…
Happy Friday!
I haven’t seen a lot of people talking about this (of course, having withdrawn from all major social media platforms, I don’t see a whole lot of much these days!) but a new album is coming out today that just might end up in the running for Album of the Year. At least, it’s at the top of my list of everything I’ve heard so far in 2025.
Although it wouldn’t be shocking for Hell, the Salem, Oregon-based purveyors of corrosive sludge-doom, to be flying under the radar. The single-member ensemble (though they did come together as a full band at least once, because I saw them perform in Pittsburgh approximately eleven years ago, and they absolutely killed it) have always been relatively anonymous and never seemed very big on self-promotion.
Part of the Gilead family (at least tangentially) for several years, and more recently affiliated with Sentient Ruin; over their first decade, Hell released four different albums called Hell (the most recent of which we’ll talk about here), in addition to various splits and EPs (some of which were also called Hell). And today, the next soul-crushing chapter has emerged, which for a fun change of pace, has been given a title other than Hell…
And just like that — we’ve reached the halfway point of 2025. When did that happen?
Where did the time go?
For me, I know I’ve been completely draining all of my mental energy with work crap every day, and at the end of it I can barely manage to drag myself downstairs to just zone out to some mindless nonsense on the tv until it’s time to go to bed, rinse and repeat the next day and every day ad nauseam.
But never mind all that, here’s a new (well, it came out earlier this month) compilation absolutely jam-packed with music you can insert into your ear-holes and fight off the encroaching ennui…
If you haven’t figured it out based on your email inbox bursting at the seams, It Is Bandcamp Friday.
Before we all head out for the weekend, real quick let me call your attention to two releases (one from early last year and one from early this year) by Pittsburgh’s Coffin Womb, self-described as “A bunch of losers who just want to ruin your day.”
Just announced: This Friday is Bandcamp Friday for the first time in 2025. So if you have been planning to make any music purchases, tomorrow would be a great time to do it, because 100% of the funds end up in the pocket of the band or record label (and not the corporate overlords who own Bandcamp).
However, if you have dollars (or euros, francs, dinars, whatever) burning a hole in your pocket and you don’t have anything in particular to spend it on — please feel free to browse the archives here at Valley of Steel for recommendations. And here are two more worth checking out, each a lengthy chunk of heavy doom, each originally released by the respective band last year, and each recently re-released as cassette tapes by our Dutch friends at Breathe Plastic Records.
Valley of Steel 