AlSymerz

Evil Dead - The Underworld

Billabong Of Blood - S/T

Rollerball - Lost In Space 20th Anniversary

He spills a lot of beer and bourbon at Lemmy's Bar each night.

I can agree with that.

Shit, I know that bloke! I have no idea why there is so many brands. It's the inner city yuppies that drink all the IPA and shit and that's what many of the new names on the shelf are. These numpties have no brand loyalty and they drink a different beer on every corner they come too. They talk about things like fruitiness, tang, breathability and odd words like that when they describe beer. In general cider and other mixer drinks have over taken beer, but the traditional beers like VB, XXXX or Toohey's don't sell in any where near the numbers they used to, which is part of the reason our breweries all got sold to overseas companies.

Cyco Miko - Lost My Brain Once Again.

We have high taxes on booze that increase every six months and makes many imported liquors extremely expensive so many of the local breweries got bought out by big international breweries who bottle their product here and avoid the import tax. Still makes them expensive but local booze only gets three taxes on it, imported gets four. But it's increased the brands astronomically. At our major booze stores now there is over 140 different branded beers and many of those have multiple flavours in their range. Most boozers wouldn't handle the full range and depending on the area (inner city yuppie, urban, rural) would depend on the brands stocked but the big ones stock most of them.

Destructor - Maximum Destruction

In the 90's it used to cost us $10.50 to send a CD mailer or a t-shirt to the UK, $12 to the US and Canada. Now days it's $14.30 to the UK and $13.55 to the US. Both are economy air travel and up to about 15 days delivery. The same CD or shirt from a UK band/label ranges from about $25-35 (converted) and from $40 to about $90 (average) from the US. If I could buy the CD or t-shirt from Amazon like I used to it would be free postage.

I'd pay a fat bastard tax if that's what it was. But even an S or L costs that much to send. Europe is slightly less, although I still haven't found anywhere as cheap as the Helloween store yet. But pre-pandemic a shirt from the US used to cost us about $20 postage, then there was discounts for more than one. Back in the 00's when we almost had dollar parity we could often get free postage. (Obviously free postage is never free but the shirts where only $25 too) The shirts were always just a token gift from the kids and I could have a decent shirt made and delivered from a local company for less than $50. If I wanted it identical I'd have to lie and tell them I own the copyright but they don't actually check copyright on one off prints anyway. Or I could make it my own design for whatever band I wanted. But I've always had a silly notion that I was supporting the bands, which in some cases I know I'm only supporting labels and merch companies. Amazon AU sucks. The prices are nowhere near as good as Amazon US and never have been, we also can't get half the range of stuff the US site has. It was only ever an exercise to bite back at the Australian Tax Office who wanted to be seen 'being tough' on US companies not paying their fair share of Aussie taxes. Amazon actually restrict us buying a heap of things from the US site because we have our own local site. It sucks and must be costing them money but it wont change. I used to buy CD and DVD's from Amazon US every few months, but now everything for us defaults to the Aussie site and 90% of the stuff we used to be able to get is not available to us. The price we pay is that we can order direct from the bands and labels but the shipping is so much more.

Vulture - Sentinels

Diamond Head - Lightning to The Nations

Pre-pandemic the kids used to buy me a band t-shirt for my birthday. I'd get in a few months early and order it from wherever it came from, give it to the kids when it arrived and then forget about it until they turned on up the day with a wrapped parcel. But shit it's hard to do that these days. I went looking the other day and the cheapest I can get a shirt or hoodie mailed to me is about $18 from the Helloween shop in Europe. Every other label or band shop wants up to $40 just for shipping, with many of the US labels starting at $45 and getting as high as $125 for one single hoodie. One of the costs of buying from overseas has always been our dollar against the world. Long gone are the days of the 00's where the Aussie dollar was hitting 90c. It's just something we have to accept, but $40 to send an item worth only $20 is just not going to happen. US post, DHL mainly, was always expensive but never as expensive as it has been since the pandemic. Labels like Roadruunner etc used to have a reasonable supply of stock in their Aussie store but these days even that's diminished when bands don't have albums out or on tour.

Phil Campbell And The Bastard Sons - Kings Of The Asylum

Besieged - Violence Beyond All Reason

Slough Feg - Traveller

Motorhead - No Sleep Til Hammersmith 40th anniversary

Electric Wizard - Wizard Bloody Wizard

Wraith - Absolute Power

Helloween - Walls Of Jericho

Yeah, they've been recording for a little while now. In the last 18 months or so they have been playing less gigs than they were so I guess it's given them some recording time.

Lazy bloody Aussies should give us a new album, 5 yrs is too long. NP: Lord - Fallen Idols

Gamma Ghouls - No Recollection EP

Nah not really. To be honest I really loathe Dee Snider these days but it came on while I was out walking. I think I'm over Twisted Sister again for a while. About to go shopping, I'll see what niceties the car stereo has for me.