I think I remember that this album was bought for me by JH. I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t think I’ve listened to it. I think generally I’ve moved on and have discovered enough Maiden. The albums produced after the 80s don’t have anything new for me. I know there are a few good songs post 90 by Iron Maiden but I’m not that bothered to discover them. I’m currently going through an “industrial” phase along with aggrotech and EBM. Sometimes I’m sad that the older music doesn’t bother me anymore but at the same time the discovery of new bands really thrills me. I am about to look up one of my current favourite music labels and see what bands on there I’ve not heard before and see if I can buy something.
The Crimson Idol – W.A.S.P.
I had this album playing in the background yesterday to prepare for writing this communication. It was a W.A.S.P. album and that’s pretty much it. When I was younger W.A.S.P. were a bit of a shock band. They went out of their way to be controversial with their music and their antics. I suppose they were a bit like the Alice Cooper of the 80s but without the higher levels of fame. There are two albums by them that are stunning in my opinion and they are Live . . . In The Raw and Headless Children. I think when you are a stupid teenager this stuff seems edgy and amazing especially the songs: Mean Motherfucking Man, Animal [Fuck Like A Beast] and even D.B. Blues. Don’t get me wrong all of those are very good metal songs in their own right but are made better by shock value. In my current age it’s just rather hard to be shocked.
As for this album, I don’t remember what it was like. It’s W.A.S.P. sounding and therefore listenable.
Not From ‘Round ‘Ere
It’s in the name but there are problems with people not understanding these things and using the words incorrectly. It’s out job to point out where people go wrong. I don’t think it’s being pedantic, I think it’s making sure that language is used correctly so that meaning is clear. We have developed this vocal ability over the years and created rules so we can be specific in what we mean and the ideas we are trying to communicate. If you can’t be clear in your meaning then you need to change your words so that you are.
The Internet – the physical network of wires and optical fibres that the traffic runs through. Has been around since the early 60s when US Strategic Command wanted a computer network.
Internet Protocol – the rules that govern the movement of information around the internet.
www – world wide web – a mass of documents all linked together with “hyperlinks” creating a web of information. This has been around since the early 90s.
HTML – the language governing linking documents together on the internet, created in the early 90s.
And so onwards for many different terms that people use interchangeably when speaking about computer things but don’t really know what they are talking about. I can cope with it normally but the problem arises when there are specific issues with a piece of equipment when the difference between these terms becomes really important. Just saying it doesn’t work is not that helpful. It is the job of the support person to decode the words used by the layman and ask gentle probing questions to get to the root of the issue.
The above is a map showing where people who read this shit come from. I do suspect that most hits are not people who actually read this though. I suspect many people accidentally find this site and then don’t care because who would care about the musings of a white male from the UK. This site operates by delivering HTML to a BROWSER via the INTERNET. The HTML is created using PHP and a SQL database. Your BROWSER decodes the HTML and creates the words and images on your screen. blah blah.
The Best Of Coal Chamber – Coal Chamber
I saw Coal Chamber at Download in 2013 and I remember thinking they were ok. I did note that they had a female bass player and I was impressed with her leather coat. Now, before I Google images to see how my memory matches up to reality we could have a discussion about how memory works. But maybe I’ll leave that for another time. The short version is that memory doesn’t work the way you think it does and is quite fallible.
OK, so it wasn’t a leather coat but rather a denim outfit. I was close. I suspect I conflated my memory of Coal Chamber and Gary Moore from a Wembley Arena gig back in the early 90s when he came on stage in a glorious long leather coat.
You know when you buy a “best of” and then you do sometimes wonder. If this is the best then was is the rest like? I would say the first four songs on here are really good. But after that I’m not that fussed by them. I think it might be something to do with the sound of this band. It has a Korn feel to the sound and I’ve never quite got on with that. I’m not sure why given that I have been having an industrial revival recently. The overall sound of this band just misses me.
The song Sway contains lyrics from the 1984 single “The Roof Is On Fire” by Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three. I guess for shocking the establishment it works perfectly.
Finally Somewhere Else
I actually drove out of the county of Kent for the first time since last August recently. I didn’t go far, only across the Thames to Essex but it felt like a whole new place. I think I’ve been separated from Essex for long enough now that I don’t really have any urges of “home” when I go there. I do look around the village and think it’s very pretty but all around it’s changed so much with building and “improvements” that it’s not the Essex of my childhood anymore and I don’t feel that romanticism. I did go for a walk with the family and we went to some lovely local reservoir lake things. It was pretty and the sun was shining.
As much as I’ve labelled that picture as my homeland curiously I didn’t even know these lakes existed for all the time I lived in the village. I had never explored them as a child. Doesn’t really matter. It just adds to the alienness of wandering around somewhere so familiar and yet so different.
As a slight contrast I did find this work of art on a walk around the lake area near me in Kent. I have to say it is stunning. I’m not entirely sure about any of it though. I’m a republican and couldn’t care less about what happens with the royal family. It does appear that this picture has likened Kate to the virgin mother of Jesus and quite literally sanctified her in image. It’s such a strange sight and one of conflicting impressions.
Does this image mean it was paid for by arch royalists? If so then I’m not sure why the person in the image isn’t part of that bloodline – I guess the child is [?] assuming it’s actually one of Kate and William’s children. I honestly don’t know. I also feel that the people who did this are particularly on the right of politics as that is what I mostly associate that particular colouring of cloth in the background. This image has me conflicted in many many ways.
Heading just a few miles from the graffiti we see other iconography in the local friars. Now, it turns out that the monastery near where I live isn’t a monastery it’s actually a friary. It also turns out there’s a difference. Let’s make this clear here. Monks are selfish twats who give their lives over to serving and praying to god. Friars are less selfish twats who give their lives over to serving god while at the same time being allowed out to do things in the community. So, friars are the better of the two wastes of time. I guess anything which has use to the community is better than a thing which does not.
This image has another mother and child in a system which allowed rape, slavery and murder of the right people. Is Mary crying in this image? Perhaps she’s upset at the lack of consent for her pregnancy – which makes god a rapist. If you look at the bottom images on the front of the alter it looks like there is a snake climbing a crucifix which I suppose I understand and then there is also a badly drawn T-Rex with a halo! I know it’s a sheep but it’s much more fun to think of it as a terrible lizard. Damn, I wish I had looked more closely at this when I was there. Perhaps I’ll pop back for another look soon.
The Best Of 1980-1990 – U2
I think I bought this is around 1996 or so. I got this album in a moment of weakness I think. I don’t like U2. I don’t really like their music. I don’t really like them. I just remember having a conversation with MD after I bought it and he was surprised. I genuinely can’t remember when I last played this album.
The Age Of Nero – Satyricon
I got this album as I think this band were going to play a festival I was booked to see but that ended up being cancelled. Not sure I’ve ever played it. I seem to recall that the music was quite dark metal-goth. Not my thing really.
That One Night – Live In Buenos Aires – Megadeth
This album made me re-evaluate my relationship with Megadeth. I’ve always liked Megadeth but this album helped me rediscover all the great songs and how they varied them slightly for live performances. I love this album. I will admit that I skip some of the newer songs because I only have so much time and brain space for new songs. I’m not bothered by the songs:
Blackmail the universe
Die dead enough
She-wolf
Reckoning day
Return to hangar
But I absolutely love the following songs:
Set The World Afire
Wake Up Dead
In My Darkest Hour
Hangar 18
Tornado Of Souls
Symphony Of Destruction
Peace Sells
Holy Wars
It’s such a shame that Dave got religion as it would be awesome to hear the band play The Conjuring.
O-AZ
Yesterday I had the first part of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine against the SARS-Cov-2 virus. I was expecting to feel rough today but so far I do not. It’s been around twenty four hours and all good at the moment, perhaps later today will be rough as fuck. I’ve read and heard on podcasts about people’s reaction to the vaccine and so I’m curious to see how I react. The most important thing is to get vaccinated and help reduce my reaction to getting Covid.
There are some things we don’t yet know about any of the vaccines. What we do know is that they don’t stop you getting Covid-19 but they do minimise your reaction to it. It’s highly likely you won’t be hospitalised if you get the real virus. We don’t know if vaccinated and infected people are still contagious and we don’t know how long the vaccine lasts and we don’t know if it helps you recover from all the Covid variants. But we do know it stops you being hospitalised if you catch Covid. So, while we don’t have the data yet on various aspects of the vaccine we do know it lowers your chances of dying from the virus. Seems a good idea to get vaccinated because your chances of dying of something else while waiting to be vaccinated are higher than the chances of you dying from the adverse reactions to the vaccine.
In the mean time here’s a video taken from inside the Prius as I did a lap of the Brands Hatch GP circuit. It’s a four minute lap time, roughly, which is amusing as it should be closer to one minute forty had we been allowed to race. However, that’s not the point. I’m happy to leave my racing to playing Gran Turismo.
Irritating But Ultimately Not Too Much Of A Problem
When I started writing album reviews the aim was to always have something to write about. I can’t always have a polemic ready to go and publish on this glorious site. I would like to be that person but I also feel that my writings or attempts to express my thoughts would be diluted if I wrote too much about society and politics etc. So I decided to write about music and rather than have me concentrate on every band in a particular order I chose to describe my relationship with each album I own in alphabetical order. This would mean that the artists are mixed up and it’s a pseudo random order for the reviews. I would normally be surprised by what I had to write about next – screw Led Zeppelin for naming their first four albums numerically but I don’t own number 3 so I guess I saved myself some work there.
When I started doing the reviews in 2013 I think I was using the order of albums on my phone and the iOS system doesn’t really include the “The” at the beginning of an album name. So the list is ordered by whatever the name of the album is subtract the “The” at the start. This makes sense and works well. At some point over the last nine years I started using the Sonos App to get the albums alphabetically. Now Sonos does not remove the “The” from the start of the album name and so somewhere my system of ordering the albums changed from one system to another.
So now I have to see what album is next on my list in the Sonos program and then check whether I have already reviewed that album and then write or not-write depending on what result I get when I search this site. See, it’s a little irritating but easy to solve and while I’m miffed at myself I’m not bothered particularly. Once this round of album reviews is over I’m going to start a new list covering the aggrotech and EBM stuff that I’ve bought since 2013 but I have searched this site and some of those have already been reviewed and some have not. So it’ll be a similar issue when that happens, if that happens. I’m not sure how many albums there are to go but I guess I’ll finish them at some point.