FatherAlabaster

Soundgarden/Badmotorfinger-I love this album. listening to this album makes me want to sell my soul to the devil to have a voice like Chris Cornell at which point I would rip my lungs out of my chest singing this song. The pipes on that dude.  So sad. The guy had everything. Actually, I would probably just go back in time to 1990 and see Soundgarden at the peak of their powers before the band blew up into the mega stadium rock star band they became. 
 

There you have it... even their fans admit the music puts them to sleep

There you have it... even their fans admit the music puts them to sleep

There you have it... even their fans admit the music puts them to sleep

There you have it... even their fans admit the music puts them to sleep

My daughter has been home with diarrhea for a full week, so I can attest that this is accurate.

Alrighty then. I dismissed Hate Eternal years ago as one of those boring American one-dimensional rapid-fire blasty-blast death metal bands that just aren't for me. But you and JT just keep bringing them up. You just can't stop yourselves. So I guess the time has come for the old goat to revisit them. You say this is your favorite Hate Eternal album, so I'm going in, wish me luck. 
#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#
Well ok I'm back. They're not quite as bad as I'd remembered, not terrible at all. There were even a few spots where I almost found myself enjoying this. Almost. Vocals aren't annoying or anything, but they're really not that good either, they're just there. These horribly clickety rapid-fire drums definitely aren't good at all, that's the worst part of this for me. The overdubbed guitar solos seem weird and out of place and take my head out of the song. These songs aren't memorable, can't hum along with any of them, and they all have the exact same rapid-fire tempo that becomes a blur. This became quite tedious by like track 3 or 4. I won't say I hate them eternally, but this style of death metal semble fastidieux et ennuyeux.
Makes me a bit curious as to why people who don't listen to a ton of death metal like you and JT would latch onto this band out of all death metal bands. Leprosy or Cause of Death this is not. What's the main appeal here? It's not overly accessible, it's not very melodic, it's not particularly brutal, it's not breakdown city, it's not dynamic, riffs don't stick in your head, totally one-dimensional. They're not really bad, any one song taken on its own is reasonably listenable, but a whole album full of these is just not good. It's unremarkable, middle of the road, generic American rapid-fire clickety drum death metal that I'll forget as soon as I go downstairs to make coffee. They'd be serviceable as an opening band maybe, acceptable background noise for while I'm over at the bar purchasing a tasty cold beverage. Don't see these dudes as headline material. 
 
NP: Siniser - Hate, Netherlands 1995. Another legacy band I haven't spent a ton of time with, but right from track 1 this is far more interesting to me than Hate Eternal.
 

Maybe listening to this record could overcome it?
 
Not so long ago we were all having a whole vomit battle (2 kids, me and wife)

My daughter has been home with diarrhea for a full week, so I can attest that this is accurate.

Black Reaper - Birth of Extinction
Tømhet - Dødsblikket
Killing Joke - Killing Joke 
Vauruvã  - Manso Queimor Dacordado
 

Went to Cattle Decapitation on Friday night. The highlight was probably not the gig but meeting up with a mate and going to the pub afterwards until 1am, which is pretty much unheard of for me these days. Luckily I didn't have to get home afterwards, but nearly missed the last northbound tube to where I was staying. 
Anyway...to the show:
I missed the first band but saw the whole set from 200 Stab Wounds. Slave to the Scalpel | 200 Stab Wounds (bandcamp.com) Enjoyable, if unremarkable, fairly old school death metal.
As is the curse of opening acts, the guitar tone was pretty muddy so I just concentrated on watching the drummer. By the end of the set the balance was pretty good. I will give this a few listens and probably pick up on a BC Friday.
The next band was Signs of the Swarm. Absolvere | Signs of the Swarm | Unique Leader Records (bandcamp.com)
Oh dear. I believe this is what the kids call "deathcore." The above link doesn't quite capture what I took away from watching this band live. Every song was a prolonged breakdown. Each breakdown a raging torrent of breakdowns, flooded with rivulets of breakdowns, cascading into a waterfall of more breakdowns.
The typewriter drum sound and one trick vocal delivery, interjected with "circle pit" was so distracting I couldn't derive much enjoyment from this. Others around me seemed to "get it" but I was minded of the discussion of Slipknot on that other thread. This is metal made by AI for people that think lots of tattoos and flesh tunnels equate to talent. Tasteless.
Earlier in the day I had been genuinely worrying that I was just liking too much stuff I was listening to lately. I have been enjoying the shit out of the likes of post black Underdark and surf rock King Gizzard wondering if I was losing perspective. But this band renewed my faith in misanthropy. 

The main event, Cattle Decapitation, is a band I hadn't even heard before a few months ago. I had always assumed they were some joke grind band, but the AOTY accolades for Terrasite were too frequent to ignore. I am a convert, and had picked up a few other albums to cram for this gig. 
Luckily for me, I seem to have picked the albums they decided to pull pretty much the whole set from. There was only one, perhaps two, tracks I did not recognise.
I have the same gripe about the drum sound as Signs of Breakdowns mentioned above. Triggered to the point of distraction and outright offense, so that it removes any soul from the kit; I just can't fathom why any band would want this sound.  200 Stab Wounds' drum sound was so much better.

Apart from that, CatDecap were great. Vocal delivery was about what I knew it would be - flawed but so difficult to pull off live I was not expecting perfection. Still Travis Ryan is a great front man that did not once feel the need to request a circle pit or wall of death or make any other cliched idiot frontman comment. All class.
Lead guitar work is excellent with tasteful solos. Great bass tone. Rhythm guitarist had great hair and tight jeans.
From photos, it is obvious that unless I can fly, pics were taken from a balcony which was almost too steep of an angle, but a good vantage point. I stood in the same spot for 3 hours so as not to lose my place.
Finished at 11pm which vindicated my decision to stay in London rather than try to get home on a slow train and risk waking up in Crewe or Glasgow.
But, as mentioned, highlight of night was probably talking metal with buddy I don't see that often. He'd bought an autographed Terrasite LP, the bastard.

Voices - London

Dødheimsgard - Black Medium Current

Voices - London

Dødheimsgard - Black Medium Current

We moved a lot. Easthampton, Hampton Bays, Sag Harbor (not the fancy parts), and Shelter Island. My parents had finally been able to buy a house there and it seemed like we were done moving, but life had other plans. That's been a theme for all of us. NC was a fluke, we went there to stay with some friends of theirs from the upstate days and wound up staying. I wanted to move back to NY from the moment we got there and finally had my chance when I went to college. 
Oddly my dad's parents (from Bedminster) retired to Vermont, my mom's parents (from Great Neck) retired to Delaware, and even though my parents were both kind of the black sheep, both sets of grandparents moved down to their neighborhood in North Carolina for their final chapters. 

Excuse me, I didn't realize you were a fellow Long Island dude. I just knew you said you went fo school in NC and your parents still live there. Figured you'd probably left after graduation for the big city to find yourself and start a band or ride giant sandworms or something. Didn't mean to assume things not in evidence. Where'd you live on LI?

I'll definitely watch it again. I liked the first part better after I watched it a second time. I thought Jessica and Stilgar were too one-note, almost cartoonishly so, and I'm not sure I buy Chani as either the avatar of a non-religious anti-BG coalition or the jilted lover riding off in frustration.
I see that they wanted to focus on the "mostly reluctant participants in a cynical manipulative plot that offers the only alternative to complete annihilation" angle, and they made all of their storytelling choices in service of that. In a big-picture way it makes sense. But I think there's a lot of nuance and depth between the characters that they left out by doing that, not to mention interesting world-building stuff and the feeling of immersion in a sometimes jarringly different culture with different values and mores, and it made the story feel less consequential to me.
For instance, when Chani got hurt by Paul's demand for Irulan's hand in marriage, I felt a little like I was watching that dumb Beowulf movie from a few years back. In the book, Paul had to take the wife of Jamis as his own after he won that first fight - culture shock! - and he and Chani were together for a few years, and they'd had and lost a child together, and she understood exactly what was going on when Paul married Irulan out of pure political convenience. And I think Jessica's character would have been deeper and more sympathetic if Alia had been born and we'd seen them interacting. There are other things that I think would have helped too. And it would have been cool to see some of the other characters who got sidelined. I can understand how all of that is of less consequence to the part of the story they wanted to tell through this movie, but for me, the characters are the focus, and when they're not served well - like in those fucking awful sequel books by Frank Herbert's son - I have a hard time swallowing it.
But look, I read the first book when I was 7 and loved it immensely as a "coming of age" story. It took me a few years to get into the rest of the series - Paul was maybe a childhood hero and I didn't want to see him as a tragic ruined figure - but all the original books became favorites and I've read them a bunch. I might be too much of a purist about them to be happy with anything that isn't completely exhaustive.
You might get more out of it than you think. Frank Herbert's world-building was meticulous. The mechanics of the sandworm/spice/desert ecosystem and the tools and methods the Fremen developed to interact with the worms are pretty thoroughly detailed, they're not just a stand-in for the "mighty steed". I like hard sci-fi too, but from my point of view anything relying on technology that doesn't exist yet is a kind of fantasy. 

I think it warrants a second view and I want to do it as a double bill. I bet if you do that you won't think it is too short! They couldn't continue with all the characters - too confusing. My wife - who has not read the book and has no interest in science fiction - had no real idea who anyone was and her overall take was it looked good but too much fighting. 
The daughter who hasn't read the book either but who likes fantasy and science fiction enjoyed it and understood it well enough. The son and his wife thought it was a 5 out of 5.
I first read the book when I was 14 and it blew my little mind. I haven't re-read it for many years. I don't think the storyline was significantly altered - true, the timespan was compressed and I would have like to have seen Alia as a creepy grandfather killing toddler (but 2024 is probably not up for that). There was not enough weird mysticism and I think Paul's visions of the future and how he was forced to mould his fate could have been explored more deeply and clearly. And riding sandworms is intrinsically weird and a bit silly but was done as well as could be. Still looks silly though.

You've dodged a bullet.

Weird. Almost three hours and I felt like it was too short and lacking in character development. I think I get why they took the angle they did, but I feel like a couple of major characters got short shrift, and somehow that bugged me more than the significant liberties taken with the storyline. Not really sure how I feel about it.

About to watch Dune 2. First time in the local theater and damn it's tiny. On the upside it seems like everyone clogging the entryway is here for Kung Fu Panda.

Debussy - Preludes (Walter Gieseking)
Ulver - Themes From The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell

Messiah - Christus Hypercubus
Disgrace - Grey Misery
Ripping Corpse - Unreleased 2nd Album
 

Howling Sycamore - s/t
PoiL Ueda - Yoshitsune   ...grabbed from the Thatguy pile.
I'm not sure I can properly dig into this with everything going on at the household today, but I like it, wild stuff.