I’ve been to many a gig over the course of the past twenty years or so. I’ve seen them all. But when it comes to outright brutal heaviness, I have never seen, heard of experienced anything like Meshuggah before in my life. To call them Heavy is really selling them short. These guys are way beyond that.
Hailing from Sweden, and proliferating their tunes with polyrhythmic structures that require intense concentration for one just to find a solitary groove - Meshuggah are not for the layman Rock fan.
Last night featured a literal barrage of sound delivered to a sold-out raucous maniacal crowd that was lapping it all up with gratitude and fists held high.
The set was only a little over an hour but in all honesty, that is about as much as I could take. I felt as if I had been battered from pillar to post. An aural assault of intricate time shifts, and a bottom end that had the fillings in my teeth shake, rattle and roll! Pure intensity topped only by the magnificent specimen of a barmaid, but we’ll leave well enough alone hey?
I couldn’t even begin to tell you the set-list as I am really not that familiar with the band’s repertoire, but I left the venue last night knowing I had experienced a truly unique sounding powerful band. Just intense! That’s the word that keeps repeating on me and that’s what we’ll stick with…
Continue reading ‘Meshuggah - Melbourne, Australia: The Palace’
I always get nervous around every Apple keynote. The Apple rumor sites start to froth at the mouth weeks in advance and for the most part, I try and keep away from them so the element of surprise is always intact come Steve’s keynote!
From the outset, I’m a huge fan of portable computing. My first Mac was the 17″ Powerbook G4 which I bought in 2003. I loved that machine to death! Since then, it’s been upgraded to a 17″ Macbook Pro and now a Macbook Air. My gal uses the Pro, I refuse to let the Air outta-my-site! Love it beyond muchly! the LED display is worth the price alone as it is so damn pristine and clear. I wish the Pro had such a display.
Well now it does.
Overnight, the new Macbooks were released. There’s been a slight upgrade of the Air but not enough to warrant me fretting over my two month old one. These are quite a departure from the previous models but the pricing remains extortionate. As amazing as these machines are, the price range is albeit on the expensive side.
I won’t bore you with the techs and specs, that’s what the Apple site is for. But do check ‘em all out. And remember, “once you go Mac, you’ll never go back!”
Man who believed he was raped by Sopranos boss jailed over killing.
A schizophrenic Victorian man who believed he’d been raped by the mob boss from the TV series The Sopranos has been jailed for seven years for stabbing his friend to death.
Orion Books has set an October 16 UK release date for author Mick Wall’s “When Giants Walked The Earth: A Biography Of Led Zeppelin”. A description of the 400-page hardcover book reads as follows:
“Forty years since their formation in a grubby Chinatown basement comes the first truly definitive biography of the world’s most legendary rock band — Led Zeppelin.
“They were ‘the last great band of the sixties; the first great band of the seventies’; they rose, somewhat unpromisingly, from the ashes of THE YARDBIRDS to become one of the biggest-selling rock bands of all time.
“Mick Wall, respected rock writer and former confidant of both Page and Plant, unflinchingly tells the story of the band that wrote the rulebook for on-the-road excess — and eventually paid the price for it, with disaster, drug addiction and death. ‘When Giants Walked the Earth’ reveals for the first time the true extent of band leader Jimmy Page’s longstanding interest in the occult, and goes behind the scenes to expose the truth behind their much-hyped yet spectacularly contrived comeback at London’s O2 arena last year, and how Jimmy Page plans to bring the band back permanently — if only his former protégé, now part-time nemesis, Robert Plant will allow him to. And Wall also recounts, in a series of flashbacks, the life stories of the five individuals that made the dream of Led Zeppelin into an even more incredible and hard-to-swallow reality: Page, Plant, John Paul Jones, John Bonham, and their infamous manager, Peter Grant.
“Above all, a book that tells the full, shocking story of Led Zeppelin from the inside, written by someone who has known Jimmy Page for over twenty years, ‘When Giants Walked the Earth’ is the culmination of several years research. It is based not just on the individual interviews with every member of the band that author Mick Wall has conducted over the years — as well as those who knew and worked with them - but on the insight that only thirty years working in the music business alongside its biggest artists can bring.”
Official mini-documentary on the making of the new 180 Gram vinyl boxsets for Led Zeppelin: Mothership and The Song Remains the Same. Really freaking cool! I bought both these recently, and everything is amazingly crafted from the thick stock for the sleeves to the beautiful booklets and astounding 180 Gram vinyl goodness!
Check out the video, after the jump!
Continue reading ‘Led Zeppelin ‘Mothership Special Edition Vinyl’’
Here’s some selected faves from the past couple of weeks of shooting…
Neil Gaiman Gives Away The Graveyard.
Goth god and New York Times best-selling author Neil Gaiman is giving away his new work, The Graveyard Book, one chapter at a time.
Jersey-based Shocker Toys has licensed likenesses/characters from Dethklok and Gwar for its upcoming line of action figures. The 5.5? Dethklok line, featuring Nathan Explosion, Murderface, Skwisgaar, Toki, and Pickles, is sold as a limited edition set (click here to order).
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The Pulse of Radio reports that film director Larry Charles has spoken out about his involvement in the biographical Mötley Crüe film The Dirt, which was originally set to be produced through MTV Films/Paramount Studios but is no longer on the company’s slate. Charles, who directed many episodes of ‘Seinfeld’ as well as the movies ‘Borat’ and the new Bill Maher documentary ‘Religulous’, said, “The Mötley Crüe thing I was really into and I did a lot of work on it…but it was at MTV Films which then got swallowed by Paramount Vantage which then got swallowed by Paramount. All those people were gone that developed it and it got put to the side, so I don’t know what’s going to happen to it.”
Charles added that he thought the film “had to be an NC-17 (no one under 17 admitted) movie, and I thought, ‘Well that would be ballsy to do. When was the last time they had a mainstream NC-17 movie?’ That’d be a good idea.”
Interestingly, Charles is not a fan of the Crüe, saying that the memoir the film was supposed to be based on was “so much better than they deserve, the book, because Mötley Crüe is a crappy band but (author Neil Strauss) wrote a really epic book about them. It’s really fascinating.”
The director also said that the “hardcore” nature of the band’s history might have affected its chances as a movie, explaining, “They’ve killed people, they’ve hurt people, they’ve crippled people, they’ve done all kinds of crazy things. You’d have to show that for real and I think there was a little bit of reticence about doing that ultimately.”
A deal to bring the 2001 memoir to the screen was first announced in 2006 but has since gone nowhere. Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx told Reuters that MTV was “not the right partner.”
Former Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul will publish a paperback photo book/DVD on his late brother, Dimebag Darrell Abbott, on November 18 via Vinnie’s Big Vin label. Entitled ‘He Came To Rock’, the book will contain over 400 pictures of Dimebag along with a biography of his life written by authors Susan Doll and David Morrow (’Elvis, Forever In The Groove’, ‘Marilyn Monroe: Her Life And Legend’). Also included will be personal tributes from a number of metal’s most prominent musicians, among them Slayer’s Kerry King, Anthrax’s Scott Ian and Black Label Society’s Zakk Wylde. The DVD portion of the package will consist of the previously released ‘DimeVision - Vol 1: That’s The Fun I Have’, complete with never-before-seen bonus footage.
The book was compiled by Vinnie and his father Jerry Abbott and has been in the works for more than a year. “We are very excited about this as it’s a true tribute to the King himself!” Vinnie previously stated.
Dimebag was posthumously inducted into the Hollywood RockWalk last May in a ceremony attended by Vinnie Paul, their father Jerry Abbott and Dimebag’s longtime girlfriend, Rita Haney, along with members of Alice In Chains, Anthrax, KISS, Slayer and Ozzy Osbourne’s band.
A bronze bust of Dimebag was unveiled during the ceremony and later installed on the RockWalk’s posthumous inductee wall, alongside luminaries such as Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix and Robert Johnson.
