Hey Pittsburgh, it’s Friday! The weekend is just about upon us, so of course everyone is looking for something to entertain themselves with over the next few days, right? I’ve got all the answers RIGHT HERE!
Category Archives: Videos
Upcoming Shows: Orwell to Embark on a West Coast Tour
Hey readers! Here’s information about yet another tour that I’d like to share with you. Once again, this isn’t coming anywhere near my neighborhood, but the message I got from Orwell referred to visiting some foreign lands for the first time (this will be the Wisconsinians’ first trip to several of these western locales) and they politely asked for these details to be shared — which I am more than happy to do.
Any of you who live on the other side of the Mississippi, you need to check out the dates listed below. If, like me, you don’t happen to live near any of the scheduled stops for the band’s tour, you should still keep reading anyhow, because I’m also going to tell you how to grab a copy of their album A View of Heaven from a Seat in Hell totally free!
Coming Soon: The Faceless Reveal Details for New Album
Well. The last time we talked about those darlings of progressive death from California, The Faceless, it was way back in January when they had announced — and then dropped out of — a co-headlining tour with Dying Fetus. Around that time, and ever since then, there have been whispers about the band working on a new album. Now, thanks to Hold Tight! PR, I’m happy to announce that some details (including the official release date and a video trailer) have emerged…
Out Last Week: Monsterworks – Man::Instincts (FREE Download!)
Monsterworks – Man::Instincts (Mortal Music, 10 July 2012)
Whoah.
Despite all my attempts to stay alert and focused on doing my job, I think I might have accidentally dozed off a little bit just now.
And let me tell you — I had one fucked up dream.
Picture this: King Diamond and his band, Chris Cornell and the rest of Soundgarden, Rob Zombie, Glen Benton and the rest of Deicide, and all four dudes from Mastodon somehow all met up at a party, where they ended up playing cards and drinking and having a good time, and suddenly they decided they wanted to collaborate on a musical project. All of them.
Naturally, with so much talent in the room, nobody could decide who should be the vocalist, so they figured the only fair way would be to let everyone sing — sometimes they’d take turns, or sometimes they’d all join together in like this massive heavy metal choir. Something like the chorus in the Blue Öyster Cult song “Extra Terrestrial Intelligence,” just on a much grander scale.
Another issue arose when it came time to start writing songs, since they all came from such diverse musical backgrounds. But this supergroup soon discovered that they at least had some influences in common — all the great old-school metal, proto-metal, and hard rock bands. So they let this sound be the foundation for their new music, and as they began working together on the songs, they found that the little bits of death metal, stoner metal, thrash, NWOBHM, and whatever else kept creeping into the writing process seemed to mesh together surprisingly well. (I know it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense — I told you it was a pretty crazy dream!)
Upcoming Shows: What To Do In Pittsburgh Tonight (17 July 2012)
Allure of the Earth Productions presents:
Sons of Tonatiuh, Vulture, and Sistered
Mr. Roboto Project
5106 Penn Ave, Pittsburgh (Bloomfield)
17 July 2012 | 7:00pm doors | $7
http://www.facebook.com/events/285866544829061/
Atlanta’s Sons of Tonatiuh are making their way up to Pittsburgh tonight, to contaminate the Mr. Roboto Project with their southern sludge metal. This show is part of the band’s “Beckoning the End Tour,” which will continue through the end of the week with stops in Philadelphia, New York, Virginia, and North Carolina (see the image above). See their website for full details, including more upcoming shows in August and September.
Their new album Parade of Sorrow (just released in June) is available to hear or buy through Bandcamp…
…and here’s a video for “Consumed” from their 2010 self-titled LP (also available on Bandcamp).
Joining them will be those titans of Steel City Sludge, Vulture (who can also be heard on Bandcamp), and Cosmic Stoner Punk band Sistered (surprise, Bandcamp again).
Upcoming Shows: Some Bands are Playing in Delaware!
Hi. I’m in Delaware.
Good evening. I’d like to take a few moments to talk to you about the state of Delaware. For any foreign readers (or Americans who are just really bad at history and geography), Delaware is one of the fifty states that comprise the United States.
It’s noteworthy for being one of the original thirteen British colonies that declared independance from the UK and went on to form the USA. Furthermore, its biggest claim to fame was being the first out of those thirteen states to adopt the new national constitution.
In the two centuries that have passed since that time, Delaware has done pretty much nothing else to distinguish itself. This is clear if you ever see the license plate on one of the state’s cars: they all have a slogan that says “The First State.”
If you look at a map, Delaware is a skinny little piece of land hanging off the southeast corner of Pennsylvania — as if Philadelphia just came out of the bathroom and failed to notice it had a piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of its shoe. In fact, I suppose you could say Delaware is to Philadelphia pretty much what New Jersey is to New York City.
That’s weird, you know so much about Delaware. Who are you, fuckin’ Joe Biden?
Well despite all that, the residents of this state seem to think there is something more to the place where they live. I am basing this observation entirely on the one person I know who lives in Delaware, who happens to be a frequent reader and commenter on some of the same metal blogs that I read and comment on.
Recently he said something about how Philadelphia seems to attract all the good shows, and maybe if that city were destroyed, more bands would come to Delaware instead. I can sort of relate to this; although I live in the same state, I am almost six hours away from Philly, but it seems that many national touring bands feel one stop in Pennsylvania is sufficient. If I’m lucky, they’ll also come to Cleveland (Ohio) but that’s still three hours from here.
Anyway, the point of all this is that I just saw (via the always-helpful folks at Clawhammer PR) not one, but TWO bands who are playing shows in Delaware in the near future! Both are part of mini mid-Atlantic tours, and of course neither of them are coming anywhere near Pittsburgh, but when I heard about this, I felt it was my duty to pass the information along.
If you live in Philadelphia, Virginia, or New Jersey (or on the west coast), there’s some good news for you here as well.
Time for Another “Signmeto” Unsigned Band Profile: Wearing the Inside Out
Hey, what’s up, loyal readers? It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these “Signmeto Roadrunner Records” Band Profiles. For a few months I was doing them on a weekly basis, but some scheduling issues arose and — as you may have noticed — I ended up missing a few weeks.
So what the hell leads me back to the Signmeto website today — on a Sunday, no less, when I normally don’t even do any writing or post anything at all? Well I just learned that local (Pittsburgh-area) band Wearing the Inside Out, who have a few of their songs on that site, are in the midst of a campaign to raise funds for their upcoming east coast tour. I only just found out about this today, but apparently this is the last day (the deadline is midnight tonight, about SIX HOURS from now!), so I wanted to share it as soon as I could.
As I always do in these Signmeto Band Profiles, I’ll check out the songs you can hear on the website and tell you a bit about them. I’ll also tell you about the great gifts (CDs, t-shirts, etc.) you can get for helping the band out with donations…
Now Available: Undersmile – Narwhal
Undersmile – Narwhal (Future Noise Recordings, 28 May 2012)
If you spend any amount of time poking around this blog (and I highly encourage you to do so!), you’ll quickly notice that I have a fairly broad range of musical taste. Most of the stuff that I listen to would be classified under some metal genre or other, although not all of it. Everything else would usually fall into one or more categories of punk, hardcore, hard rock, or pretty much anything that’s heavy, but once again, you still couldn’t fit all that I listen to in such neat little boxes. Even just looking at the metal music, you’d find me all over the spectrum there as well, touching upon (at least to some degree) practically every subgenre ever invented.
However, one recurring theme you might discover, is that I’ve always had a certain affinity towards the sludgey, the grimey, the filthy, and in particular, the mind-numbingly slow. If it sounds like it was recorded with an hourglass instead of a metronome, chances are I’ll be all over it like zombies attacking a MENSA convention.
So naturally, when I first discovered Oxfordshire’s Undersmile (courtesy of American Aftermath including one of their songs on last summer’s Summer of Sludge compilation), I instantly fell in love, because they just totally hit all the right buttons for me.
Late last year when I heard the news that they were in the process of recording their debut full-length album, I was delighted, and later, when more details and some preview tracks started to emerge, I got even more excited.
Did you ever have something you were anticipating so much that you almost felt nervous about whether it would ultimately live up to the hype? Even if it turns out to be really really good, could it possibly be as good as you were expecting? Or even worse, what if the thing you were so convinced was going to be amazing — and that you’ve been telling everyone around you how amazing you think it’ll be — turns out to be terrible? Of course, you wouldn’t be looking forward to something that much without having some prior knowledge or some sort of basis on which to establish those expectations, so there’s a very small chance that it would, in fact, be awful — but there’s still that remote possibility. Isn’t that just nerve-wracking?
Well now that I’ve gotten my copy of Undersmile’s Narwhal and listened to it a few times, I’ve discovered that I didn’t even know the meaning of the words “terrible” or “awful”…
Hey Look: A New Beastwars Video! Plus, Album Update!
Good afternoon! Here are two pieces of good news all rolled into one news update. Both of them concern those disciples of the “tune low/play slow” philosophy, Beastwars, who (to be perfectly honest) also happen to be the only band from New Zealand I can name off the top of my head (unless you count The Flight of the Conchords).
Anyway, I’ve learned that their self-titled debut album — which has been available online since early 2011 — will see an official U.S. release in September of this year. Additionally, they’ve just announced the release of a video for “Empire,” the closing track on that album. Just like the rest of the songs on Beastwars, “Empire” is deliciously sludgey and grungey and noisy, as well as giving me the impression that one or more of the band members may possibly have owned (or at least listened to) a copy of Masters of Reality at some point in their lives.
Here is the new video, directed by Hamish Waterhouse (full credits available here). They say this took five months to put together, and looks to be worth every minute of it!
Free Music Alert: Azoic – Gateways
Azoic – Gateways (Self-released, 20 June 2012)
Hello readers! Since it’s been 90-whatever degrees here in Pittsburgh lately, and I’ve been sweating my ass off, sometimes it’s nice to think about people who live in other parts of the world, where it isn’t so infernally hot and humid this time of year. Now I’ll admit, I don’t really know that much about the climate in Iceland, but c’mon! They’ve got “ice” in their name! Even just thinking about that makes me feel better.
I don’t know what the weather is like wherever you are right now, Dear Reader, but in any case, wouldn’t your week start out a lot better if you had some new, FREE music to listen to?
Yeah, I thought so. I can help you out with that.
———————-
A short while ago, I was contacted by a nice Icelandic gentleman, who kindly pointed me in the direction of the band Azoic. Right around the same time, our friend Ben who maintains the Church of the Riff blog also contacted me, mentioning that I should check out this great band. If that wasn’t already enough, right after that I discovered that Phro, who writes short fiction on his own blog PhroMetal, had written about this same band in a guest post over on No Clean Singing!
Well with that many endorsements, I became really curious and had to check these guys out for myself. I’m glad I did, and I think you will be too. Late last month they announced that they were releasing the album to be freely downloadable, so keep on reading and I’ll tell you where to get it.
Valley of Steel 