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I saw them last year with Exhorder. I'll admit, I've never been an Overkill fan. Just one of those bands that flew under my radar. Really good live. Blitz sounds great although you can tell that performing is physically taxing for him at his age. A lot of the old guard still bring it live. Exciter, Razor, Possessed, Megadeth, Suicidal, Sodom... I'm just trying to see as many as I can while I can. Never know how many more opportunities we'll get. Having grown up in an area that never saw many tours, I missed pretty much everything back in the day, so now I travel to see everything I can. Anyway, lazy Sunday morning. Schizophrenic Florida has decided we needed one more blast of winter and it's 40 degrees outside. So coffee and tunes until it gets tolerable outside. The Sound - From the Lions Mouth

Incantation - Diabolical Conquest, 1998 Despondency - God On Acid, Germany 2003 Severe Torture - Fall of the Despised, Netherlands 2005

I probably ran into The Sound around the end of the 80's. They were in the group of bands similar enough to the more well known goth/Post-Punk acts like The Cure, Bauhaus, Joy Division etc but a bit underground for the states. Iirc, I was dating some goth chick who had all sorts of stuff I'd never knew existed. The Sound, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Chameleons, Clan of Xymox, Fields of Nephilim... Some stuck with me, some didn't. The first 3-4 from The Sound are excellent and the live album from 85 is one of the better from that subgenre. Hope little 'Noise gets back on his feet soon. The Cult - Electric Fields of Nephilim - Dawnrazor And Also the Trees - Virus Meadow Depeche Mode - A Broken Frame New Model Army - Ghost of Cain

Swans - White Light From the Mouth of Infinity, 1991 Bauhaus - In the Flat Field, 1980

This Lion's Mouth record is pretty cool man, I dig it. I know to some it would seem out of character for me to like something like this, but I like laid back mellow shit like this, it's mostly the mainstream mass appeal poseur metal that I just can't stomach. Was this something you heard back in the day or a more recent discovery? Now that I think about it for a sec I guess you were still a child in 1981 so you probably ran across it more recently. Many of us like to complain that there's just too much music out there to keep up with it all, but the other side of that is that you can always discover something cool from 40 years ago, we'll never run out of hidden gems like this we missed. Couldn't sleep much last night so I ended up crashing out from 11am til 2pm, my kid's sick now with whatever I had all last week, so I got him his medicine and some oatmeal and blueberries and now I am enjoying my lazy Sunday "morning" coffee at 4:30pm with my cool new post punk discovery. Cheers my friend, don't stop posting these non-metal sleepers.

Agent Orange - Living in Darkness

Meanwhile, Vermont has finally remembered what fucking season it is! 4°F this morning. Tired of all this mucky "above freezing" nonsense. This album is always welcome here.

Warloghe - Three Angled Void, 2021 Elitism - Requiem Pour Une Race Mourante, France 2021

Nice writeup. Pretty cool to have another Finnish black metal fan here. Warloghe, like so many of their fellow Finns are excellent. And I just finally got into Graveland last year after basically ignoring them for a long time. Must've listened to the wrong albums first, they can be hit and miss, their sound can vary wildly from album to album. I did listen to that first Branikald album you posted a couple of weeks ago, not sure what the title was now, but I thought it was very good. I couldn't even come up with a top 5 favorites, I listen to so many different bands I find 5 too limiting. I could probably come up with a different 5 every day.

Top 5 bands? These have been spinning quite intensely as of late: 5. Immortal I’m a latecomer to Immortal. I went back to the black metal roots listening to some Black sabbath, Motörhead, Manowar demo, Hellhammer/Celtic frost, Slayer, Bathory etc.. and after having those bands fresh in the mind Immortal finally hit me and now I think the first three albums are some of the best Norwegian black metal there is. Darkthrone, Burzum and Immortal are still getting active listening out of the Norwegian scene these days. I want to howl out “Cryptic winterstorms” which is an example of a song that got me inspired. 4. Warloghe Another band in an ever growing list of the Finnish black metal scene. Warloghe sounds particularly cruel compared to many others even within the Finnish scene. The band is almost 30 years old and they only have three full-lengths but that’s not a problem. Quality over quantity is always better. The first album sounds little different compared to the other two and the latest album sounds a little more hmm.. “refined” I guess. I’m not very good at reviewing albums especially when comparing two albums that have very little variety. Anyway, Warloghe is a satanic, cruel and raw sounding band without any flaws and I feel really happy listening to them. 3. Moonblood I don’t know if I like to listen to Moonblood more than I like the overall appeal of this band. There’s been a set of reissues over Moonblood’s “lost” rehearsal tapes which I have like five of them. It’s like dropping in Vlad tepes or Ildjarn level of poor quality which probably even 90% of those who enjoy black metal would throw the album out of the window after a few minutes. But I am getting inspiration out of Moonblood for my own musical experiments. Currently listening only to those rehearsals. I should get into the full lengths at some point. 2. Graveland I should say Temple of the Fullmoon really, but Graveland and Rob Darken are the founding factors of this polish group. I’m still not very deep with the history of this group and there’s problems with the politics and all that (there’s problems with the nr 1. as well so I’m getting this away here and now), but none of it takes away the fact that Graveland and the other projects within the Temple of the fullmoon are some of the most inspiring black metal ever created. Other projects I enjoy include Veles, Infernum, Thor’s hammer and especially Legion which has managed to put only one demo out, but the vocals on that demo are something I have rarely heard. It sounds like a grilled peacock coughing in agony. 1. Branikald/BBH Branikald is best described as the beauty, simplicity and cruelty of nature put together. Cloaked in raw black metal of course. The first albums are very Darkthrone/Burzum inspired, but from the fourth album, Rdyandalir, onward the sound changes into this dream-like atmosphere which really is a nice place to delve into. Rdyandalir is probably the most atmospheric while other albums have more attacking sounding parts or full scale aggressive full lengths, but I don’t think any of the later albums go back to the first three Darkthrone inspired sound. I have four Branikald records: To Kampf, Stormheit, Frost vision (or Blikk av kald or whatever) and Rausch der misatrophie. Out of those four, two albums, Rausch der misathropie and Frost vision get regular plays every week. I am bound to find more Branikald records in the future, especially Rdyandalir at some point. Just for the record I am not only listening black metal. Other bands I could include are Vomitory, Damnation(POL), Crowbar, Type-O, Black Sabbath, Uriah heep and even some Beatles that have regular plays every other week. But for top 5 I had to go for these five for now.

All of this.

Picked up quite a bit lately: Vinyl My Dying Bride - As the Flower Withers My Dying Bride - Turn Loose the Swans My Dying Bride - The Angel and The Dark River Opeth - Damnation 20th Anniversary Mastodon - Leviathan Depeche Mode - Violator Clutch - s/t Anathema - Hindsight Circle of Ourobous - Mullan Tuoksu, Pehmeat Kasvot, Sisaan Katsovat Seppelesilmat (comp) CD Inquisition - Veneration of Medieval Mysticism and Cosmological Violence (CD box set) Circle of Ourobous - Islands

Got my copy of The Eve of Darkness today, a book all about the impact of the Toronto metal scene, my friend Harry contributed a lot of the artwork used in the book. Still have a lot of vintage venue ad posters from the 70's to 80's and was lucky enough to attend most of the concerts posted, good times.

Vietnamese iced coffee, the best kind of iced coffee if you ask me

The speakers in their cabs had a bad reputation. I've never heard them. You can still get the old heads pretty cheap. Especially since they're a Canadian brand, you could probably find a good deal up there. There are way better standalone options for metal tones. I had to do a lot of tweaking and messing around with gear to get a guitar sound I really like. But I would replace this one if it died, it's a great pedal platform and I love it on bass.

Home electrician for decades. I love making circuits. I once made a guitar pedal for my cuz. I'm currently making a voltage sensitive relay to switch a battery in and out of a solar system.

Vinyl shopping today. Brought home a few classics. Depeche Mode - Violator (gatefold reissue) Mastodon - Leviathan Clutch - s/t

I suppose it really comes down to Bobby and how long his voice holds out. He'll be 65 in May, a couple years older than me even, but on last year's Scorched he still sounds like he's 32 (Horrorscope era). Maybe even a bit better now that he's apparently living clean and abstaining from alcohol and drugs. I'm the first one to speak up and admit when my metal warriors start losing their edge, and I can't imagine anyone could sing like that forever. I really don't want to see 80 year olds onstage trying to thrash it up. So sooner or later the time will come when they'll decide it's time to pack it in. I'm not worried about how many more albums they might release, they've given us 20 already, 15 of them good ones by my estimation and several of those are all-time genre classics. So that's already a lot more than most bands will ever give us. They still bring it live (as of March 2022) they've unquestionably given us hardcore fans our money's worth. Their body of work speaks for itself, they really don't owe us anything more. Whatever else we get from them will just be gravy. Killbox 13, 2003. This was the album that really renewed my interest in Overkill. I remember I stopped looking forward to their new albums at some point in the 90's after FTUAB and KK. But this one's in their top 5 afaic. Wall to wall bangers, the only song I don't care about on here is track 4, The One.

This all comes down to your guitar and your rig and personal preferences. I hate actives. I had three guitars with the Fluence Moderns in, and I wanted to like them, but they just didn't have teeth through my setup. If you're an EMG 81 player, the Fluence Moderns have a lot to offer, I just don't find them dynamic enough or strong enough on the attack, and somehow their EQ profile gets on my nerves. I'm a Bare Knuckle fan. My two main guitars are Gibsons - a 6 string Explorer and a 7 string Les Paul. They're both warmer-sounding guitars that benefit from brighter pickups. I have a Rebel Yell in the Explorer and a ceramic Warpig in the LP. The Warpig had an alnico magnet when I got it, but I swapped the magnet and it really brought the pickup to life for aggressive stuff. I also love their Cold Sweat bridge pickup. But again, these guitars are heavy in the low mids and they're going into an amp (Fryette Pittbull 100CL) that loves being hit with a high mid spike, so the pickups balance them out and add some sparkle and make the amp break up in a pleasing way. I wouldn't recommend a Rebel Yell in a bright guitar, but maybe it could be a good fit with the right pot values. Worth mentioning that both guitars have the bridge pickup wired to the jack, again not something that works on every guitar or for every pickup. I just happen to like it this way. Bypassing all the pots can make pickups sound harsh and unnatural. That's been the case with all the Duncans I use and in all of my brighter guitars. The 7 string LP came with a JB and it was almost great. I have another 7 string with a Distortion in the bridge and a Schecter 6 string with a set of Invaders. They're all ok. If I played simpler stuff I'd probably love them, but for what I do they feel a bit muddy.

Schilling Brücius doppelbock these guys do not fuck around