Category: [Music]

“Morals”?

I’ve never actually heard a note of As I Lay Dying’s music, cos metalcore just isn’t really my thing, but I know all about their… difficult history; it’s not every band whose lead singer causes the breakup of the band by hiring a hitman to kill his wife, then reforms the band after getting out of jail and carrying on his career… but over the years most of the rest of the band got jack of him, and now the ringers he replaced them with have done the same…

American metalcore band As I Lay Dying now contains just two members after guitarist Ken Susi, drummer Nick Pierce, and bassist/singer Ryan Neff departed the band. At the time of publication, As I Lay Dying now consists of vocalist Tim Lambesis and rhythm guitarist Phil Sgrosso. […]
“My time playing with As I Lay Dying has come to an end today,” Susi wrote, adding that he left with “so much gratitude” for everyone who’s supported his career to date.
Explaining that he had “full knowledge” of the band’s “heightened dramatic history” before he joined, he said that he had a “drive” to play “great music with great friends.”
His statement continued, “Unfortunately, my personal morals have recently been tested to a breaking point, and it’s now the saddest ending to what could have been the greatest second chance for this band.”

Ken, my brother in metal, FUCK YOUR PERSONAL MORALS. You knew the band’s history, by your own admission, and you were still happy to join it. Where were your personal morals two years ago when you did that? I mean, I don’t respect ANY of the other band members for rejoining Lambesis (I do think it’s faintly hilarious that the only one apparently still with him is the one who reportedly took the most convincing to come back to the band), except insofar as three of them quit again later, but I respect these other three replacement characters even less. Morals? Morals had piss all to do with it…

RIP Paul Di’Anno

Apparently even he agreed Bruce Dickinson was the definitive Maiden vocalist, but let’s not discount his own good work out front of them on those first two albums; and, to be fair, he was in the band a lot longer than most of the other early members of the band, which was a chaotic affair that didn’t really settle down until a couple of years after this stuff…

RIP the Angel of Frequency

And it’s goodbye to Ollie Olsen, pioneer of electronic and experimental music in Australia since the punk era. He’s been an exceedingly ill man for a lot of years now with multiple system atrophy, so his passing isn’t surprising, but still it’s another door closed on that time and place…


Firstly, here’s one I’ve only just discovered via a friend on FB: Olsen’s own Whirlywirld version of “Rooms for the Memory”, which would be redone by a certain Michael Hutchence from INXS for the Dogs in Space soundtrack…


…and the aforementioned pop hit version. Obviously sounds much bigger and more mid-80. I love this. I also love that it was a top ten chart hit here when the film was rated R, so a bunch of Hutchence’s younger fans wouldn’t even have been able to see it…



Logically, therefore, we continue with the other great Hutchence/Olsen collaboration, Max Q. “Only fear under another name…”


And we probably shouldn’t overlook Ecco Homo, which Olsen put together for another kind of extraordinary figure, Troy Davies…


This was where Olsen went in the 90s, you can kind of hear it starting to happen on “Sometimes” but he started properly trancing out with Third Eye and the Psy-Harmonics label…


I can’t find a Youtube video for The Reals, Olsen’s first band in which he played guitar, and whose “Nothing to Say” (on the old Do the Pop Redux compilation from years ag0—try hunting that up) has one of the most obnoxious guitar sounds I’ve ever heard (and granted that recording is a rehearsal demo so not an even remotely professional one, but still), so I’m ending us instead where we began with Whirlywirld. RIP Ian.

Karajan would never

I don’t suppose classical music actually has much of a public reputation for its practitioners misbehaving. Obviously it’s a field in which there have been and must still be dickheads, but I can’t think of many stories of orchestra members attacking each other mid-performance Jane’s Addiction-style, or so fucked on drugs they couldn’t play like Syd Barrett, that sort of thing. However, John Eliot Gardiner recently chose to make a public shithead of himself by physically assaulting a singer for the heinous crime of coming off the podium on the wrong side (?!) during a performance of Les Troyens last year. This, however, has had fewer complications for his career than you might think, apparently:

We learned some time ago that two of the ensembles Gardiner founded, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, would no longer be working with the conductor following his physical attack on a company member during a concert last summer. The rest, you could hardly make up. In a move that looks dangerously close to being motivated by spite, Gardiner looks set, at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, to gazump those two ensembles in the most brazen manner.
Does the following sound normal to you? On 14 December, the Monteverdi Choir and EBS will perform two Bach cantatas and a Charpentier Mass at the concert hall in Hamburg, fulfilling a contract agreed many months ago. Given the decision by those ensembles not to continue working with Gardiner following his violent conduct, the conductor Christophe Rousset was engaged by the ensembles themselves to lead the concert.
Then, a few weeks ago, the Elbphilharmonie issued an oddly contorted press release. It announced that Gardiner would conduct exactly the same programme, a week earlier, with the musicians of his newly established ensemble The Constellation Choir and Orchestra. Just to make sure the Monteverdi Choir and EBS were thrown completely under the bus, the Elbphilharmonie got all excited about Gardiner’s new ensembles and offered anyone who had booked tickets to the Monteverdi/EBS concert the chance to exchange them for tickets to the Constellation one instead.

Damn. I suppose this is kind of the classical equivalent of Taylor Swift re-recording her old albums, except that “Jiggy” doesn’t own that music in the way she owns hers. Any ensemble’s entitled to perform it, Gardiner has no exclusive right to it, and this is just him being a dickhead. Kind of impressed by the apparent speed with which he’s pulled his new orchestra together and made it ready to do these shows, just not so sure how I feel about the people who’ve agreed to join it, cos I assume they know about the punching incident (the latter, for what it’s worth, seems to have just been the last straw, with Gardiner apparently having had a reputation for being short with his performers for years)… but that’s the show for you, it has to go on, doesn’t it.

What every music festival needs

Metal music festival loses headliner, multiple bands after announcing Kyle Rittenhouse as guest

If you were planning to go to the Shell Shock II music festival in Orlando and you like Kyle Rittenhouse … well, you are in luck.
But if you were hoping to see a handful of the bands — including the headliner, Evergreen Terrace — there, well … they apparently don’t want to be on the same card as Kyle Rittenhouse.
So, instead, the new headliner for Shell Shock II, per Loudwire, will be a Slipknot cover band.
You read that right, the festival is now, apparently, down to a cover band as its headliner after announcing that Rittenhouse would attend.

I have no idea what this festival is like, nor do I know anything about the apparently four bands that have pulled out of it, but I have even less idea what the organisers were thinking. I mean, music festivals generally don’t need people making speeches anyway, metal festivals need them even less, and none of them need this cunt. So what do the organisers have to say for themselves?

“We have been silent,” a post on The Antihero Podcast Instagram reads. “But we are prepping. The liberal mob attempted to destroy Shell Shock. But we will not allow it. This is now about more than a concert. This is a war of ideology.”

Oh. So it wasn’t ideological when they hired (I nearly wrote that as “whored” for some reason; Kyle whores himself) Rittenhouse to speak at the festival, of all the fucking people they could’ve hired to speak at it if they had to hire anyone to speak in the first place? And getting a Slipknot cover band as your replacement headliner… THAT was the best you could do? None of the other bands still playing were good enough to promote? The Antihero Podcast, by the way, are a bunch of Trumpeters, which I learned from their Instagram and was somehow not surprised by this. I can’t find anything about the bands still playing the event, but whoever they are I’d be looking at them at least slightly askance from now on if they’re still OK with sharing the stage with Kill Rittenhouse. Damn shame, cos the festival’s actually in aid of veterans with PTSD, it’s a worthy charity event and that’s evidently what the bands thought they were signing up for… after this, though, I’d be surprised if Shell Shock III is ever a thing.

Hi, I’m Pete Townshend, apparently

Stupidest news story of the last few days has been the one about the guy who bought at auction a guitar signed by Taylor Swift, which he then immediately proceeded to smash to bits.

Gary Estes, 67, says he paid $4,000 for the instrument at the Ellis County Wild Game Dinner in Waxahachie, an annual charity event that benefits agricultural-based education efforts for local youths.
When he went to get the guitar, Estes took a hammer to it in a moment captured on video that has gone viral — but he insisted he has no will against Swift.
“There was nothing malicious or anything about it,” Estes told NBC News on Tuesday. “It was just a joke at an auction that we had to raise money for kids, right? And that’s all it was. There was nothing mean about it, nothing bad about it. It was just a joke that they were making up on the stage, and we just followed through with a joke.”
uctioneer Craig Meier, a spokesperson for the event, said the guitar-smashing played well in the room.”It was a funny, light-hearted thing. I know maybe it seemed to be malicious, but everybody was laughing,” Meier said. “There were people there, at the time, who joked around that he’s mad because he doesn’t know how to play the guitar.”
But after having talked to the man, Meier said it was an obvious political statement.
“Taylor Swift, it became a political thing, and that was kind of the gist of it, just a light-hearted bit of a dig at Taylor for coming out politically and entertainers using their influence to influence politics,” Meier said.

Obviously the only people laughing at this bullshit are laughing at brother Gary, of course. Especially now that there appears to be a twist in the tale:

The guitar supposedly signed by Taylor Swift that was sold for $4,000 to a Texas man who immediately smashed it with a hammer wasn’t authentic, a source close to Swift’s merch company told HuffPost on Tuesday.
The source said an authentic Swift-signed guitar would have come with a certificate of authenticity, which Swift’s team doesn’t believe the auctioned guitar has. In any case, they said, Swift didn’t sign it.

Good grief. There is, of course, a kind of magical thinking at the heart of this sort of idiocy, I’ve noticed it for a couple of decades now; it’s like particularly stupid conservatives (I can’t think of any comparable left-leaning examples) think there’s some sort of cosmic balance they can affect with moronic shit like this. As if this actually affects Swift in any way. Oh well, at least the charity got four grand, and Taylor got something to laugh at if she was paying any attention at all…