As much as I try to not have all metal content on this blog, it worms its way in like, well, a burrowing worm. I figure that even if you don’t enjoy metal, but wonder what I listen to while I compose pretty words for grocery stores and hospitals, this would be a good way for you to find out.

Black Sin (Spit On Cross) by Black Breath
These guys sound like, well, they sound like old thrash. And the next album? Holy shit, I’ve heard some of it and I am certain that I will be discussing it here several times. They also have amazingly creepy album art.

Farmed by Baptists
Just pure, straight ahead speed and brutality. And let me share these lyrics with you:

Whole days spent digging holes
Jagged edged shovels
Chipped on rock soil
Dirty everything
Blistered hands sweating
Mouth too dry to sing
This well’s been tapped.
Poles sledged like stakes to vampire hearts
Cutting metal with metal
The day’s been parched
The more you sweat
The less sparks you’ll feel
The less you’ll care
The more money you’ll make
The less feelings remain
The more shit you’ll take
You’re farmed, you’re fucked.
These days are long and i don’t work for you , i work for me
I’ll give what i got, but at day’s end, i’ll be free
You’ll take my time and i’ll take every cent that you will pay
This trench i’ve dug will separate both parts of my day.

Wow. It’s summing up pretty much exactly my philosophy on work.

Merrimack by Tombs
I’m uncertain how to sum up Tombs. They are certainly much prettier than several of the bands in this mix. There is some awesome noise in here. How’s that?

I Will Not Follow by Nails
Two posts on Nails in one day. Yeah. It’s not all about metal, is it?

Blodtørst by Kvelertak
They’ve gotten more than enough pixels on this blog. Here are some more.

The Blessed Void by All Pigs Must Die
This might be in the top albums of the past year for me. The drums are as perfect as drums can be for me: top of mix and sounding like punches to your mushy grey brain.

Where It Ends by The Secret
Get it? Because that’s where the mix ends.

You should probably check out the amazing video, too. And yes, I have the shirt that matches it. Of course.

You ever heard Nails? Their first release, Unsilent Death, is a little over or under fourteen minutes long and has ten songs. It’s what I like to call fucking perfect. It also sounds like it wants to emerge from your speakers, punch you in the throat and steal your car, then wreck it into a wall, leaving behind a fireball and the dead body of some insane person that could never make it in this world.

Also, the cover is pretty much a rip-off (or tribute) to Hellhammer’s Triumph of Death…

I wear this shirt all the time. There’s so much white on it, it cracks under repeat washings. This shirt should look old and destroyed. It should look well worn. It deserves it.

Check out some Nails and get the shirt for yourself at http://www.bluecollardistro.com/southernlord/product_info.php?products_id=4812&cPath=956_960&store=#.T0J3_XO4vEU

They did better songs, too.

Yet according to Sire Records chief Seymour Stein – and Wikipedia, natch – it’s the Stairway to Heaven of the 80s. Well, I’m really fucking sick of hearing that song too, thank you very much.

Maybe here in the US, it’s the only song that we know as it’s one of the few to get a video. And that video? A girl dancing, a city and some rough footage of the Smiths. Good ole angry Moz himself said, “We saw the video and we said to Sire, ‘You can’t possibly release this… this degrading video.’ And they said, ‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t really be on our label.’ It was quite disastrous.”

Or maybe it’s because the riff was sampled in Soho’s Hippychick.

Or maybe you watched a lot of Charmed.

Really – the LoveSpitLove version ruins one of the only reasons that I can still listen to this song, Johnny Marr’s guitar work. Oh, but the horrible covers did not end here. Snake River Conspiracy did it. Who? Yeah, only I remember them. And t.A.T.u.did a version as well.

When asked about their cover, Morrissey was, well, Morrissey:

Interviewer: Did you hear t.A.T.u’s version of ‘How Soon Is Now’?

Morrissey: Yes, it was magnificent. Absolutely. Again, I don’t know much about them.

Interviewer: They’re the teenage Russian lesbians.

Morrissey: Well, aren’t we all?

Look – I’m not going to subject you to that version. I can’t even be that cruel.

Just about every industrial bandwagon Cleopatra Records band has tried their hand at this song – and really – is it not time to find another song to ruin? Hell, I even found a version with blast beats.

I am just asking for a plea for sanity. A hope that perhaps, we can all stop listening to this song and play maybe one of the two or three other songs that the Smiths recorded. Thank you.

“A mighty pain to love it is,
And ’tis a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.”
-Abraham Cowley

http://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/what-happened-to-whitney-houston

I love it because after I watch something, I can go back and learn what I really did watch.

I love this message, posted onto Facebook:
I was very disturbed by the performance (?) by Nikki Minaj. Never heard of her. I decided to look her up on wikipedia. Here is in part what I found out. (Sad to say, our young people and the media are glorifiying demon possession, vulgarity, blasphemy and a host of other things!. The poor girl needs help and healing!)

Everyone is certain to take pop culture one way or the other. Some people take it to, well…well they make their own conclusions.

I did Saturday night. I was watching SNL and they closed a segment with Whitney Houston singing with Mary Catherine Gallagher as the audio went to pure silence. We were supposed to somberly reflect upon this and wonder, how does the bright light of a life get snuffed out so soon.

And then, seconds later, Karmin was waving and jumping up and down, waiting to be the next grist for the mill of celebrity.

Last night seemed like they were anointing Adele as the queen, the current flavor. But would you want to be? What if all your life, you dreamed of being a rock star and now, there aren’t really any rock stars?

Also of note: nearly every song I write glorifies demon possession, vulgarity and blasphemy. Again, this is written by folks who whipped up a conspiracy in my hometown involving atheists coming from Wisconsin to destroy the nativity scene that exists on government property.

The fact that people are still battling church versus state and Roe vs. Wade kind of scares me, to be honest. A lot more than one or two album wonders that will be here today and gone later on today.

Anyways. Whitney Houston is dead, but she died a long time ago. Michael Jackson died long before he died. And I have some experience in this world of drugs – thanks to being a pro wrestler. Every addict that I have ever met in that sport puts the blame on being in wrestling. It’s like putting the blame on being a celebrity.

Nope. They’d all have done drugs anyways. And then found another one after. Like religion.

This is one hell of a ramble, huh?

Skid Row is that most unique of their hair metal brethren: they got harder, instead of softer. And yes, rock ‘n roll is full of sexual cliches.

Starting with the self-titled 1989 album Skid Row, these guys may have had the rougher look next to Bon Jovi, but that’s just how they got signed…thanks to Dave “the Snake” Sabo’s friendship with Bon Jovi. They got signed by Bon Jovi manager Doc McGhee and well, that kind of ended messy. But what do you expect for having a manager whose plea bargain on drug trafficking charges is to send every band he manages to Moscow to perform a concert? Ah, the 90s.

But Skid Row never really fit into the whole clean-cut dirty boy rocker mold, what with Sebastian Bach, the lead singer, beating up a fan who hit him with a bottle (and not even picking the right one) and wearing shirts on stage that said, “AIDS kills fags dead.”

Subtlety has no business in rock ‘n roll, right? Neither does intelligence, most of the time.

Regardless of your feelings on hair metal. Skid Row’s first album produced Piece of Me, 18 and Life, Rattlesnake Shake, Youth Gone Wild and I Remember You, all songs that you can hear nearly any time ever at any time of the day. As Sebastian Bach himself said in a recent AV Club interview, “These days it’s bittersweet for me to talk about these songs because radio in the United States of America completely fucking sucks. There is nowhere a guy like me can get a new song on the radio, because there’s like over 1,700 radio stations in America and only 60 or 70 of them play rock music. And, those stations that do play rock are all classic rock where they’ll play “Youth Gone Wild” and “18 [And] Life” from 22, 23 years ago…”

And my Lord, 18 and Life was fucking everywhere when it came out, with a video that to this day makes me laugh my ass off.

If you were 18 when this came out – and sadly, I was – this would be all you would see ever ever forever ever. Forever ever? Forever ever. When the dad throws him out the screen door, his buddy is just sitting there like, “Oh hai.” No selling the glass going everywhere and then he’s like, “Hey bro, wanna hand,” and the kid is like, “Where the fuck were you when my wifebeater wearing dad threw me through a FUCKING SCREEN DOOR?” So yeah. Those guys fuck at some point, but it’s not in the video.

And Youth Gone Wild? Sebastian Bach liked the song so much, he got a tattoo of it before the album came out. Good thing it went well, or he’d be explaining that to, well, not a lot of people. That said, his nasty reputation did take him everywhere.

I don’t know where to shoehorn this in, but Dave Sabo also played in Doyle and Jerry Only’s post-Misfits shitfest, Kryst the Conqueror. What a transition.

That brings us to Slave to the Grind. The other day, I got to work and you know, they don’t call it work because it’s fun. I also know why they call it dope, thanks to Love/Hate. And work.

Love/Hate sponsored that, by the way…

Anyways…

I got to work and I heard Monkey Business and it reminded me of 1991, when I had blue hair and, well, I worked all the time then, too. But it did remind me of my youth not gone wild and I tucked it away just so I could write this article. Yes, I closed my eyes and sat in my car, whilst people stared at me and walked into the office, and cranked out some Skid Row.

There are some pretty great songs on this album. Also, word to the wise, I say pretty great in the context of a hair metal album from 1991. I can honestly say that I have an affinity for, besides the aforementioned single and album-titled song, Quicksand Jesus, In a Darkened Room and Wasted Time. And all of these songs were, again, played the fuck out, as the kids say.

With twenty years distance, the solo at the beginning of In a Darkened Room and Bach’s nuanced voice – go with me on this – work even better than I remembered. And Wasted Time may have even more resonance now with lines on my face and white in my hair. Or maybe the guitar is just this side of too glimmery, overproduced in the beginning. Who can say?

Bob Rock produced the next album Subhuman Race, but as any hairspray addled metalion will tell you, grunge was in charge and no one listened to any hard rock or metal. Or, as VH1 would like to inform you, grunge is but another metal subgenre.

It was at this point that Skid Row would turn into, much like every 80s metal band, a game of “what band did that guy used to be in?” And Sebastian Bach? Well, he’s had a solo career. He’s been on every reality show you’ve hated. And he’s pretty much let you know, via VH1′s Supergroup, that he may be one of the most annoying people to ever be around ever.

But you didn’t know all that in 1989.

And I didn’t know all that in 1989.

This whole thing is like Jell-O. You can’t be eating it for years and suddenly be mad that it’s made with animal bones. It always has been. Always will be. Being mad now – after years of it and taking it when you probably even knew the truth – is pointless.

The virulence directed at her after SNL – which, let’s face it, is no longer the social arbiter it once was and hasn’t been since, oh what, 1978? – is kind of laughable. It’s like the prom queen finally got knocked up and every fat guy she wouldn’t fuck and zitty girl she ignored could finally come out and laugh at her as the metaphorical pigs’ blood reigned over.

Other than that? I don’t really have an opinion.

Ghost is on tour – coming nowhere near me.

My friend Invasion hooked me up with this amazing design. Ghost is working on a new album that is going to be about the antichrist walking the Earth. I hope they continue to ripoff every Mercyful Fate song ever to deliver it.

I was thinking about the mixtapes I’ve made in my Rob Gordon-like past. Some of my mixtapes (let’s just say CDs, no one has made a mixtape in years outside of some hipsters who have decided that inferior formats are cool and vinyl is over, so let’s just release stuff on cassette) have stayed in people’s possession for years after I am no longer in their lives. And sometimes, I piss people off to the point that they throw my CD out their car window at a high rate of speed (and then ask me, months later, to replace that mix for them. What can I say, I get forgiven easily.).

But it all hit me last night that perhaps 3 AM is not the time to listen to an alt country mix on Spotify. The chance to dredge up emotions at a late hour and no sleep has a tendency to leave me staring into space, mouthing lyrics and wishing the song would stop.

The song did stop.

I’ve gotten much better.

I kind of know when to press fast forward now.

When I first started getting into metal, past the Whitesnake and Cinderella that everyone else was sure was metal and the Motley Crue everyone would tell you was completely depraved and Satanic, I would always see one of the older stoner kids in school wearing this shirt.

The back of it with REIGN IN BLOOD in big block sans serif with DO YOU WANT TO DIE scrawled in blood? There has never been a metal shirt better than this. And when you get to the front, with the Slayer sword pentagram and the can it get any more metal than this logo, and you realize that yes, at one point, Slayer was the end all, be all of scary metal. At least in Ellwood City, PA.

Now, I realize Kerry King looks silly with his head of tattoos and Tom Araya is Catholic and most of the solos are all off key, but you know what? I don’t really give two shits. The other night, I blasted Reign in Blood and was screaming along, word for word, piece by piece with every single song.

My favorite Slayer lyric? Enter to the realm of Satan! Yes. That was an easy pick. I’m also partial to this part of God Hates Us All: I have no faith distracting me. I know why your prayers will never be answered. God hates us all.

Look, I’m not claiming Slayer is poetry. But when you release arguably the best metal album of all time, you can do whatever the fuck you want. As for me, I’ve never been able to find this shirt. I wasn’t ready for it when I was in 7th grade. But now? I would wear the, well, hell out of it.