"Nothing but the rain"
I don’t thin that as a metal head it’s wrong to really like Prince. This album comes after Diamond and Pearls and was when he changed his named to a squiggle.
There is a level of funk in this album which is delightful. I don’t listen to this album as much as Diamonds and I think that’s because the latter has more of a personal connection, I did see Prince on tour at Earls Court.
Turn the bass up and play this loud on a sunny day and it can’t do anything but brighten your life.
I can remember a poster of the singer of Poison on the wall in our sixth form centre at school and I couldn’t tell if he was a he or a she. It’s good that these things matter less these days and most people don’t really care, be what you want to be. I haven’t seen Poison and that may be a good thing, I dread to think what the audience would be like.
This is classic terrible 80s rock and it’s brilliant. This is an horrific look at the culture of cock-rock and what it does to a generation. I love this stuff but at the same time I can inform you that it is terrible [sorry Pom].
This album has some classic songs on it and everyone would be singing along.
My problem now is trying to imagine four chaps in their sixties with balding heads running around in drag-queen make up singing these songs. It was and is a product of its time and is a bloody good examples of that time.
This band was a spin-off from Senser. The singer and a couple of others created this album and toured for a while in 1996 or so. I can’t remember when I bought this album. The wiki page for them seems to indicate they are a prog-rock band but it’s not as boring as prog rock and quite upbeat. I enjoy it and some of the songs run through my head now and then, the sign of a good album. It’s worth a listen.
Yesterday I drove to the western half of Kent to see the film Us. I had to cross the Medway, much like the Romans about two thousand years ago but without the battle and invasion part. The cinema I went to is the Cineworld at Rochester. I picked the film Us because it was lowest on the list of films I’d least like to see that were being shown.
If you look carefully at the picture of the bridge you can see the work done to strengthen it. It has been reduced from four lanes to three due to the increased sizes of lorries allowed on UK roads by previous governments leading to a drop in rail freight and an increase in traffic. You can see the tide was middling.
As is custom I rated the film on IMDB and tweeted the result, this communication deals with the rating system:
I rated Us (2019) 4/10 #IMDb https://t.co/XDxzCsQgRW
— Ian Parish (@iparish) April 7, 2019
I rarely go to see horror films because most of the time they are stupid. Once you accept that supernatural stuff is just that – outside of natural and therefore doesn’t exist – you find ghost stories quite terrible. I’m still working through what I thought about certain aspects of this film, I guess it has got me thinking.
This film crossed many genres and I was surprised by that. But overall I found it a little boring and tired. Maybe I’ve seen too many of these types. Maybe I haven’t seen anything new for a long time. The reason I went to see this was I had heard it was meant to be pretty good. Shortly I am going to read some proper reviews to see what they say, to gain some insight into why other people thought the film really good. I can’t write too much here without spoilers.
There was a bible passage mentioned a few times throughout this film, it was Jeremiah 11:11. This is what it says:
Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.
Not sure what it’s about but it does seem that the Lord is being a bit of a malicious prick.
I suspect this film is full of metaphor and I’m just missing the point.
I have just been and read the review of this film written in The Guardian. I don’t think there’s a great deal of insight in the review. It got 4 stars and I’m not really sure why.
UPDATE: I found someone who’s better at metaphor than me so if you want please read Eli Bosnik’s blog post.
I bought this album because I heard somewhere that the lead singer of Iron Maiden said that this band were one of his influences. I have listened to it and quite enjoyed it, but it is generally slow and not metal. It’s good for having on in the background on a summer’s evening while sitting outside.
Last night was a chance to listen to some classic Austrian Industrial music at Electrowerkz. It’s in Torrens Street, Angel, which is a tiny little cul-de-sac with a smart pub at its entrance and an Alien-themed industrial-alternative club for other people at the other end.
I think last night was the forth time I’ve got clothes on and ready in another person’s driveway. I park in spaces that people don’t use, but I’m not a thief, I pay for the privilege to keep my car there.
First band on at Electrowerkz was Dunkelsucht. This probably translates to either dark thoughts or depression. I’m not sure and in this day and age it’s terrible that I haven’t looked up which it is. Maybe I’m too lazy. OK, I just went and did it and it apparently means Dark Investigated. I suspect not!
This band comprised a male singer and a female computer controller type person. They are from Switzerland and I quite enjoyed them. It seemed quite pop-like to me, but I suspect that in reality it’s quite heavy stuff? I’m never sure and I hate the fact that it’s all so subjective. I wrote in my notes that it was OK, they had good beats and I enjoyed it overall. I did find that in the middle of a few songs it suddenly went strange with melodies that seemed out of place.
The next band on were DKAG and I’ve seen them before a number of times. Smith and I stayed in the bar. I spent thirty seconds watching them, just to check they were the same. There’s a limit to how much I can take. I’ve kinda come to the conclusion that I really enjoy about forty five minutes of any band and show but after that I start to get bored because all the songs sound the same. I think that’s either because I enjoy M’era Luna and the shorter sets that I generally see there or the causation is the other way around and I just find shorter sets more interesting.
The headliners were Nachtmahr. As with the last time I saw them here there were only two of them. The singer, Thomas Rainer, and the computer controller were all by themselves. I know there were about five people on stage at M’era Luna although two of those were female stage show actors.
Nachtmahr played for a solid ninety minutes and if I’m honest I only started to struggle in the last fifteen or so, even given my rant a couple of paragraphs ago. They were pretty good, but I don’t think Rainer is a natural frontman. To me he looks like he’s playing an act, which all singers are to an extent, but he seems uncomfortable with it. I don’t mind that though. I’ve paid to see a show and I don’t want my musicians to look like they aren’t enjoying it.
This set had a load of classic songs you would expect to hear. I enjoyed it a lot.
What I found most interesting at the venue was that I would say it was easily a 50-50 split in the sexes of those attending. There was also a wide age spread from around 18 to around 65 from the looks of the people I saw. It was quite probably the most diverse audience I have seen yet for a gig. It was such a nice atmosphere, really enjoyable. A good night.
Ah, when I was young W.A.S.P. were seen as a dangerous band. They were edgy and scary. We heard rumours they threw raw meat into the crowd and they swore a lot. Nowadays I look at things like that and yawn. I mean, it’s all been done hasn’t it? Every generation has to find their edge and music performances get reinvented all the time.
When I saw Slipknot at Download in 2013 I thought it was going to be an edgy show, because Slipknot had that same feeling as W.A.S.P. – a band on the edge trying to go further than others and trying to make a statement. Now, their performance at Download was excellent and I was certainly made a stronger fan but was it edgy? Not really. The next morning in the B&B, I’m old and camping seemed a bad idea, there was a young couple talking about the performance and they were really impressed with the percussionists kit going into the air and turning while the guy played. This impressed me not as I saw Tommy Lee do that with the Motley Crue back in 1991 or so when they played Wembley Arena, but then, I reminded myself, I’m old.
If we want to see the proper shockers then I think we need to look at the generation before mine. Alice Cooper scared the world with his stage magic shows and ritual beheading. Throbbing Gristle combined music and performance art in the 70s with overtly sexual body mutilation. All this stuff is nothing new it’s just that every generation has to find their own way I guess.
I now inhabit a world of people who would be called freaks and perverts but I don’t really see it that way. It’s just people who dress a little differently and enjoy different things. What you may think as strange and shocking is just another person’s every Saturday night out. What I can say is that the community and safety in these environments is better than just walking down the high street on a Saturday afternoon. People’s inability for empathy and tolerance saddens me.
Long Beach Arena, for the final night of their 1986 87 world tour the most outrageous band in the world – W.A.S.P.
I’ve been told that this album was recorded while W.A.S.P. supported Iron Maiden on their world tour and I haven’t checked it but it sounds legit. What a gig that would have been! I first saw Maiden in 1988 and it was good but two years earlier and I would have seen W.A.S.P. rather than White Dwarf!!
W.A.S.P. were most famous to me as a teenager for two main things and they are both song based. One was the song officially called “Animal” but really it’s called “Fuck Like A Beast”, what an outrageous title! The song is so-so but it’s good fun. They also had a song called D-B Blues and while I have no idea what that is there was a line about pussy juice. I mean, how bad do you want to be? [It’s probably best to not mention the cover art for the song Animal].
I love that whole trashy 80s metal sound. I can’t help it. It does something to me. This live album has it in buckets. Plenty of simple chugging and gang vocals. I love it. I have played this album over and over and I definitely have it in different formats. I think it’s amazing.
You should get this album and play it loud while drunk on JD. It’ll really take you back to the 80s. As a native bass guitar player I like the steady combo of a bass and drums and this album has plenty of that. It works really well from a song construction point of view. I love rolling bass lines with drums blatting away being the force behind the main song. It almost doesn’t matter to me what the guitars do. It’s probably why I love AC/DC so much.
I’m not going to do a song by song breakdown of this album. There are some bad songs but mostly they are great and this has such a summer feel it’s good for playing in the garden while you relax on a nice summer’s day drinking Pimms or a bottle.
Now, W.A.S.P. have been accused of being named after a selection of religious idiots who are White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Now, there may be a selection of people out there who would happily wear this label it’s quite likely they are racist pricks. This band can’t be accused of being like that, their singer is a native american FFS. The mainstream likes to pick on all of that which comes across as a little different and demonise it because it’s a good feeling to be outraged by something and when you get to middle age you can’t stand the fun that the youth have.
Go and stream this album or even better buy the damn thing and make sure that the artist gets a fair reward for causing you some moments of joy.
I’m pretty sure a friend gave me this album after he tried to clear away some of his music. I have listened to the whole thing a few times and it is quite nice. It’s a live album recorded in 1993 which I think was long after the Velvet Underground had exploded. This is an album of early rock music recorded in the 90s and is pretty good. You can see how this band influenced an entire generation of music makers. It’s worth getting.
This afternoon, St Patrick’s Day, I went to the cinema to see the latest Marvel super hero offering – Captain Marvel. I noted the state of the tide and it was low, but there was also a new area of the mud bank that had been dredged and two barges were anchored in there properly afloat. I rated this film on IMDB and there’s a communication dealing with how the system works here.
I rated Captain Marvel (2019) 8/10 #IMDb https://t.co/9B6mmsxW8p
— Ian Parish (@iparish) March 17, 2019
I note that the poster for this film outside the cinema had an F-15 Strike Eagel based at RAF Lakenheath on it and this excited me, I thought I might get to see some decent military flying by the USAF but there wasn’t really any. Also, all the flying action took place in sandy places, even when returning from space because it would be impossible to associate any other kind of land type with aliens.
I really enjoyed this film. The first thirty seemed a little slow and I did think about having a nap but I didn’t want my head to lay on either person at my side so I forced myself to stay awake. I’m glad I did because I really enjoyed this film. Well worth watching.
The best thing about this movie was the positive and strong female role models within. Most of the soundtrack was by female artists and the whole thing effused oestrogen. This is how films should be. Strong positive female role models. Women should be doing these roles and they will kick your butt. Such a force for good in society.
Obviously there’s still all those issues about winning by hitting someone until they don’t get up. I’m not keen on those messages. I think we see enough of that from the G5 in the world. Oh, there was Jude Fucking Law, yeaugh.
I saw Senser at the Underworld when they supported the mixer chap from Slipknot. That was the first gig I ever took my niece to. I think she enjoyed it. I’m not sure where this CD comes from, it might be an extra as part of a DVD I bought. I’ve not really listened to it. I like the studio stuff very much.