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.
Ten – Pearl Jam
Hmmmm. How to write this without annoying the legion of fans that Pearl Jam have? Well, it’s not a problem as these communications aren’t seen by more than about ten people. There are people for whom Pearl Jam are a fantastic band and produce brilliant music. Then there are people like me who think it’s ok but I rarely play any songs from the album. This music just doesn’t affect me.
Temper Temper – Bullet For My Valentine
I’ve see this band. I’ve even enjoyed some of their songs and if they come on when I’m in the car I don’t normally tend to skip. This album is playing now and, while it isn’t terrible, I don’t think it’s something I would put on deliberately. It’s not that good.
It’s All Electronic Now
I’ve got a couple of things happening at the moment that are slightly frustrating for different reasons. Firstly I’m waiting for my gas boiler to be fixed and I’ve been waiting for about three months. This isn’t me waiting for bloke around the corner it’s me waiting for a technician from a service a pay a lot of money for. The organisation have been really bad at communication and, oh did I mention, I’ve been waiting three months to get my boiler fixed.
I’m also trying to prove my identity to a financial company and while it can be done online they are only accepting scans of specific documents from within the last three months. Now, I do understand why these rules are there and I’m happy to play along but the frustration is that none of the documents they want are ones that I have paper copies of. I don’t get paper statements and things sent to me. Why would I in this age? The one type of document that I can supply only comes to me once a year so I have to wait for that to come through the post box. Oh well. Not a huge amount I can do so probably best just to keep trundling on.
Take To The Skies – Enter Shikari
Don’t think I’ve ever listened to this album.
Surprising Compression
Recently I went somewhere for a thing! Given the last year of lockdown and nothing really happening this was a super treat. Motorsport Vision emailed earlier in the year offering the chance to drive the GP circuit at Brands Hatch and as I considered the price to be suitable I booked a place. There were rules to follow once on the circuit but it was nice to experience the route in the sun and in my Prius. There were quite a few “showy” cars in the queue for the sightseeing but I didn’t care. I enjoyed it even though our speed never really exceeded 50 mph.
I will say that even at the pedestrian pace we were going the compression going down Paddock Hill was surprising, it also started earlier than I had expected but now that I’ve had time to reflect it makes sense that you feel negative g as you go over the top and then the onset of positive g is fast as you approach the inflexion.
This was great fun and something I’d love to do again. I should probably see what lap time I could get by driving on Gran Turismo. Unfortunately the current GT version doesn’t have a Prius so I’ll try and find something else with similar power and torque.
Stone Sour – Stone Sour
I think I bought this album after seeing Stone Sour at Download. I liked them live and they put on a good show. I think I would say that I don’t really listen to this anymore as it’s just metal. There isn’t really anything that stands out about the band.