So, having had literally zero time to force my friends to watch cannibal movies with me, I've felt a little guilty about updating the webzone here, because I promised all the cannibal juiciness. Don't worry, I've not given up- I just need a little time to watch the shit some more. In what little free time I've had, I've been listening to a lot, and I mean a whole lot, of music, and I thought I'd do a quick rundown on my top ten favorite albums of all time. I know I'm taking a huge chance by admitting I actually like stuff on the internet, and the stuff I'm going to admit to liking honestly is gonna make it a lot worse. A lot. So gird your loins, here's numbers 10 through 6.
"I'mm let you finish!"
#10: "Warp Riders" by The Sword
Ok so yeah, this album came out literally six seconds before I finished typing this sentence, but that just proves how amazing it is. The Sword is one of my favorite bands, mainly because they write oddly-catchy doom metal songs about Conan the Barbarian. Imagine my surprise when I popped this into my ipod and found that instead of droning dirges about swords and loin-cloths, I was listening to late seventies hard rock about robots and spaceships!
A shocking swerve, Tony Schiavone!
A concept album about a space archer on a planet that is stuck half in perpetual night and half in perpetual day? With witches and space pirates and a sisterhood of space warriors who bend spacetime to travel the universe? FUCKING A, dude. Nerdy space opera aside, the actual music part of the music album is so vastly different from anything else the Sword has done, I can only imagine that the Sword lost 50% of their fan base from it. Because us metalheads really can't handle change. We're a group of people who, though we deny ! it, still by and large take Immortal seriously.
INVISIBLE SANDWICH.
Here's the lead single off the album:
So yeah, even though it's brand new, it's all I've been listening to for like three days, and easily earned it's number 10 spot. Even if you're not into doom metal or Conan, you should try it. Especially if you like to imagine if Kiss was a little bit harder and sang about space wizards.
#9 Five Years of Fireworks by Grand Buffet
#9 Five Years of Fireworks by Grand Buffet
You know how up there in the Warp Riders entry I called myself a metalhead? Well, between this one and the next one, here's where all the other metalheads are gonna hold me down, tear my combat boots and spikey wrist gauntlets off and call me a faggot, because I have two things on here that aren't metal albums. Real metalheads only ever listen to metal, you see.
"Hand in your sideburns and black t-shirts, AJ. You're off the force."
Ok, so most of you guys have never heard of Grand Buffet, which is really a shame. They're a Pittsburgh-based whiteboy hip-hop duo, comprised of two stoners who write funny, satirical, vaguely surrealist songs that have completely meaningless lyrics (when they're not obviously making fun of the Christian Right). Seriously. Here's an entire verse from a Grand Buffet song. I'll buy yo! u a goddamned pair of shoes if you can contextualize this:
Prepare to double date, tolerate pain,
evade formidable foes in portable games.
I'm lookin' over the edge of a carnival ride
at the machine operator, clean cut and qualified.
Pathological tea cup jockey
half my life, racking points up at air hockey.
I emerge from a cloud of hickory smoke
to ride mechanical bulls at fictional watering holes.
Golden ages, theirs for the taking,
old souls not yet content on vacating.
Ice skating with wildlife watching,
figure eight turns, devoid of all caution.
Password pad fusion, fuck raffle tickets,
the chips are down natural habitat digits.
Ah-read 'em and weep as my snake bite swells,
cool cucumber bobbing my head to the death bells.
Pictured: Grand Buffet, cigarettes
Now granted, I am totally cheating by citing "Five Years of Fireworks" as my favorite album of theirs, because it's a greatest hits album. But I'm gonna fall back on it being my first exposure to their work, and the only album of theirs that I had for a very long time. All my favorite songs came off this one album. Not that their other albums don't have awesome songs, but this is the one I fell in love with. And come on, with songs like this, how can you player hate?
And yeah, Tom Green likes them, which officially puts the list of things Tom Green and I both like at two.
#8 The Green Book by Twiztid
Ok, so there comes a time when one has to look deep inside one's soul and face the ugly truth. The shames of the past, the sticky fumblings in public restrooms. And trust me, if theres any part of my past I'm not proud of, it's the musical glory-holes of Psycopathic Records. Because there is no way to deny it, this is the house that the Insane Clown Posse built.
Just look at these assholes. I don't even have to make a joke.
Ok, so yeah, ICP sucks. We all know that. I've tried going back and listening to their albums now that I'm not an insecure fourteen year old trying to fit in and it's impossible. It's not the gimmick, it's not the legions of myopic fanboys, it's not even the god awful Faygo soda. It's that the motherfuckers can't rap. And I know alot of ICP fans who will readily admit that, which opens up a whole other bunch of questions.
Questions that have no answers.
But you know what? I'm gonna say it: Twiztid, ICP's similarly face-painted buddies, are actually *cough* good. They can rap, they're clever, and The Green Book was the soundtrack to my freshman year in college. It's certainly not perfect (One of the guys from ICP inevitably pops up on this track or that and the whole thing takes an incredible turn for the terrible) but it is really enjoyable horrorcore and some of the songs are so fucking catchy. Lazy Bone is on the album for fuck's sake! I'm certain theres a nostalgia factor, because it was what I was listening to at such a memorable time in my life, but putting it on again, I found myself singing along and doing that aggressive gesticulating rapper hand thing.
Word.
So yeah, now that I've not only lost all my credibility but also everybody reading, I'll post a track from the album and move along.
#7 Load by Metallica
And the hits just keep on coming, don't they? Between Twiztid and this, how many of you guys are preparing to wallop the ever-loving fuck out of me the next time you see me? Raise your hands.
Ok, so flash back to 1996. I'm eleven years old. I've never been exposed to any sort of heavy music. Or really, to any sort of music. It wasn't important. I listened to whatever was on the radio in my parent's car at the time, which meant mainly listening to a lot of black guys in suits standing in a line and snapping their fingers.
Then, by accident, I catch the video for "Until It Sleeps". My doors of perception are torn open like a hymen on prom night. You have to understand this was the heaviest shit I had ever, ever heard. And the video was this nightmarish mix of pseudo-religious imagery and twisted, surreal horror, like someone had taken the video to "Losing my Religion" by REM, chopped it up and inserted clips from a black mass into it. My mind was officially blown, and I had to have more of it. I went out and bought the album pretty much immediately.
And you know what? FUCK YOU GUYS WHO DIDN'T LIKE LOAD.
Sorry, sorry. Now I'm not fan-boying. Metallica is not perfect, I'm not saying that. They have done plenty of things, musical and otherwise, that are very very worthy of criticism.
Exhibit A.
But even ignoring St. Anger, Load is far from their most terrible album. It's was dark, it was melodic, it was full of bitching imagery and some really bad-ass riffs. Ok, so it's not the same kind of music as Master of Puppets, but it was awesome in it's own right, and without it, I would never have started listening to heavy music. If Metallica hadn't released Load, I might be typing this entry listening to Dave Matthews Band instead of having Sleep playing in the background. And then imagine what this top ten list would look like.
But even ignoring St. Anger, Load is far from their most terrible album. It's was dark, it was melodic, it was full of bitching imagery and some really bad-ass riffs. Ok, so it's not the same kind of music as Master of Puppets, but it was awesome in it's own right, and without it, I would never have started listening to heavy music. If Metallica hadn't released Load, I might be typing this entry listening to Dave Matthews Band instead of having Sleep playing in the background. And then imagine what this top ten list would look like.
"And at number six, it's Phish with another album pretending to be the Dead..."
#6 Witchcult Today by Electric Wizard
Ok, here's where I begin to earn a tiny bit of cred back. Electric Wizard is a Dorset, England-based doom metal band and is sort of the doom metal version of the Beatles, Metallica, and Beethoven mixed together. Not that they sound anything like any of those people, but in that they're basically the single most dominating, creative, beloved, and awesome group of fanatics ever to stick a thirty year old guitar into a forty-year old amp and play music about witchcraft at a graveyard pace. They've been called "The Heaviest Band in the Universe" and they deserve it. They don't so much play music a! s they play slowed-down thunder. They also look like what I pretend I look like:
Now would it surprise anyone to know I actually own that book on their altar there? Seriou! sly. Hold on. Lemme find it.
This is taking me longer to find than I thought. Wow I have a lot of these kinda books.
Electric Wizard is one of those bands that really hasn't ever put out a bad album, just slightly less-awesome ones. Albums like Dopethrone and Come My Fanatics are legitimate classics, and even the slightly scrappy Let Us Prey still has some bitching moments. Every single album has at least two tracks that will rattle the fillings out of your head with the unholy power of it's rocking, and being that they are a doom metal band in the truest sense of the genre, two Electric Wizard songs will last you a while.
He started listening to Dopethrone when he was fifteen. He's on track three.
But for me, their landmark album really is Witchcult Today.
Witchcult Today is one of those perfect albums that you just keep turning each track up louder and louder and going "Oh! I fucking love this song!" It's the kind of good that I have a hard time writing about it, because writing about music is inherently a poor way to convey what the music is like, and when music is as fucking awesome as this you just start babbling and handing people the CD going "Just listen to it. Go on. I'll wait." So go on. I'll wait. Fe! el free to roll a doobie while you listen, this is weed-smoking music par excellence. So go ahead, take a sailing trip on the Astral Sea with Electric Wizard. I'll have numbers 5 through 1 up when you get back.
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