As an age old battle rages amongst the stars, Kainan’s ship burns brightly as it crashes into the Nordic coast. As his space craft comes to rest in the fjords of ancient Norway, it’s with dismay that Kainan realizes that he wasn’t the only survivor. A second passenger, a Moorwen also emerges from the wreckage. A Fierce and animal-like creature, the Moorwen is intent on causing harm to those it perceives have wronged it. As the Moorwen kills everything in its path, Kainan must work together with the Vikings to destroy the beast before it destroys them all.
Okay, so there’s only one alien. And they probably should have found someone other than a 7th grade remedial English student to write their plot synopsis…
Bear with the somewhat sluggish posting schedule, folks. We’re slogging through last-minute corrections to the final proofs of Issue 02 and losing our minds in the process. I do mean that literally. Earlier tonight, poor Nadya sneezed and a big chunk of her frontal lobe fell out. I called her just now to discuss a kerning issue and the conversation went a little something like this. Meanwhile, Zoetica’s delicate alien grey matter has liquefied entirely from overexposure to laptop radiation. As for me, well, I’m having flashbacks of that one time I accidentally took ‘shrooms laced with bathtub LSD and ran out into traffic on the I-580 yelling “FLESH TETRIS, FLESH TETRIS, EVERYTHING FEELS LIKE MATH, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP THE FLESH TETRIS, STOPPIT, HNNNGH” until someone threw a tarp over my head.
It certainly doesn’t help that this 8-Bit version of “Angel of Death” has been lodged in my noggin for several days now.
In 2007, the documentaryHeavy Metal in Baghdad chronicled the trials of Acrassicauda, dubbed “Iraq’s only heavy metal band.” No doubt many did a double take at trying to reconcile visions of headbangers with environs like Iraq or Lebanon.
Part of that surprise comes from the tremendous heaping pile of bullshit out there about the Middle East. This is, in mass-media world, the land of They. Here is one teeming mass of zealots, driven as by incomprehensible creeds towards destroying you, dear viewer. Fear! Cower!
This is a lie. Growing from the very real repression and devastation faced in these lands, metal of all varieties is thriving from North Africa to Pakistan. As Moroccan metal founding father Reda Zine proclaimed: “we play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal.”
The resulting fusion sounds both old and new. Middle Eastern metalheads have gathered in the hundreds of thousands, rivaling the Islamist rallies that induce so much hand-wringing in the West. In defense of the most basic freedoms they’ve had showdowns with dictators and fundamentalists. Sometimes, they win.
Elgar, Pooyan and Fasrshid at the Desert Rock Festival. Photo by Megan Hirons.
In the West, critics and popular imagination have long dismissed metal as unserious, adolescent stuff. Across the ocean, forget it: this is one of the gutsiest musical movements in the world — and they mean every damn word.
Morning, mein lieblings. Not that it looks much like morning out there, with the streetlamps still on at nearly 7am and a sky as cold and dark as Satan’s bunghole. The only sign of life in the street below my window: two scabby possums going at it atop a mildewed stack of phone books over by the garbage bins. Dunno what drugs they’re on, but I could really use some right about now. Stupid uncontrollable yawning. Stupid irrational mid-November mood slump. Stupid Seasonal Affective Disorder with its stupid, STUPID boohoo abbreviation. How is anyone supposed to take that name seriously, anyway? “Hey boss, sorry about my general nonproductivity, irritability and/or copious drooling… I haz TEH SAD.”
Guten Morgen. We’re German, we’re mod, we’re impassive, and inexplicably, we’ve changed Ozzie’s lyrics to reflect our deep admiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s masterful mystery story, The Hounds of the Baskerville. PS: Bert took the brown acid. Do not make direct eye contact.
Consider this week’s Better Than Coffee clip a kind of “could be worse” meditation. Judging by their sickly pallor and glazed eyes, phlegmatic-bordering-on-undead “dance moves” and seeming recalcitrance to the sainted spirit of Sabbath, I’m certain that Cindy, Bert and the rest of the Hits a Go Go kids are in far more desperate need of full spectrum light therapy than any of us. (Especially that one ‘luuded up little bitch with the unfortunate Friends-era Jennifer Anniston hairdo. Gah. What a dog!)
No, home-brewed coffee just ain’t cutting it today. If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to catch one of those possums and gnaw the hot, steaming pineal gland right out of its face. Tschüss!
You know, there’s really nothing I enjoy more than banging my head to relentlessblackmetal. Unless it’s making and consuming baked goods. Fucking A, dude, I love cookies. In some parallel universe, a far more brutal and satanic Mer than I is seated on an obsidian throne atop a baronial mountain built from the bones of her enemies, gorging on bottomless trays of red velvet cupcakes and snickerdoodles while truly epic tremolo-picked riffs reverberate through the charnel canyons. Occasionally she pauses to issue forth a soul-rending shriek. Dark chocolatey death spews from her corpse-painted mouth. HAIL.
Yet even this nightmarish Mer incarnation would grovel in terror before a certain gastronomical overlord known to worshipful initiates as All-Devouring Megan the Bae Korr. Megan currently resides in this world (in Oakland, California, no less! I must find her and become her minion!) and recently started a baking recipe blog called The Black Oven. It is kvlt as fuck. An excerpt:
Boiled down to its very essence, metal is nothing more than a mixture of molasses and alienation. By that definition, these cookies are black fucking metal. Packed full of grim and evil spices, they will leave you feeling despondent and isolated within their stronghold of flavor.
Make it:
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1/8 cup honey
1 egg yolk
1 cup crystallized ginger pieces
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
1 1/2 tblsp cinnamon
1 to 2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp nutmeg
Preheat oven to 350 degrees
Cream together butter, sugar, molasses, and honey. Beat in egg yolk and ginger pieces.
Sift together flour baking soda, baking powder, salt and spices.
Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients in thirds.
Chill for an hour.
bake 8-10 minutes
DO NOT OVER BAKE. To do so would not be brutal.
Enjoy, and sacrifice one to Space Odin.
I’ve just made a batch of her “Where the Chocolate Beats Incessant” brownies. Doom never tasted more delicious. Megan, I raise my fist and my flour sifter to you!
Being mettul is hard on the joints, and no one understands our needs better than German agricultural marketing firms.
Number of the beast (er, cow?)
With a tag-line like “Hard types need hard bones… drink milk!”, beer is now officially relegated to Trivium fans, folks. The campaign was developed by Hamburg Technical Art School, who will hopefully not besuedbyMetallica for using their font.
Advertisers are becoming increasingly metal-friendly, although admittedly the genre is used largely as a vehicle for some ill-conceived punch line. But who can blame them? Metallers look like wankers and write shittier lyrics than Mariah Carey. Everything they touch turns into comedy GOLD:
I’m making a post on Christmas day, which if nothing else should indicate the degree of reverence I have for the holiday season.
Christmas, and the train-wreck of bad taste that ensues, is not entirely without its benefits, particularly the unquestionably awful effect it has on rock music. Artists struggling to maintain their hair-flicking, could-give-a-fuck bad-assery through a three-and-a-half minute ditty about magic always makes for priceless entertainment. So without further ado….To the YouTube!
I realize the fog machine/polyester armpit vapors of my last post are still fresh in your nostrils. Apologies if the following clip is officially too much of a good thing. Then again, can’t everyone can use one more reason to love this man?
Yep. That’s Richard Pryor fronting a deadly funk/metal band that looks like Sunn O))) on national television in 1977. This is indeed a strange and glorious universe.
