Just because I felt like making it official. Expect more inconsequential garbage from this mostly uninhabitable corner of the Internet around mid-June.

Until then, I dunno. Learn how to juggle or something.

Allow me to make a brazen statement: heavy metal, as far as genres of pop music go, is among the most powerful and affecting. I can already see some of you hipsters out there sneering at me. And that’s fine; a style of music so blatantly aggressive and just plain there is bound be divisive and amplify prejudices. But if you really need proof of metal’s power – and this should really go without saying – look no further than a mosh pit. It’s chaos defined, a complete surrender of self to music. These kids look like retarded gorillas, but they don’t know and don’t care. The music they love is telling them what to do and they’re compelled to obey. I don’t see this sort of shit going on at a Joanna Newsom show.

And nor should it. Music can offer us far more subtle and beautiful sounds than that of a tribal apocalypse, but the latter is metal’s province and there’s no denying its pronounced ability to make someone either flee in disgust or embrace it and start breaking things. So, there’s really no arguing against the visceral appeal of metal. It’s the horror literature of pop music, a genre that elicits an immediate, identifiable physiological response in its audience (for horror novels: fear; for metal: empowerment).

And because of the face-punching, addictive sense of empowerment that metal can give to its listeners, it’s – and this should really go without saying as well – a genre that’s being constantly diluted by stupid people. It’s a veritable beacon for those who don’t exactly have the artistic experience needed to appreciate the subtleties of other less intense forms of music. So, predictably and sadly, few intelligent artists attempt to create metal music and leave those of, shall we say less refined taste to inbreed their already lacking creativity. Have you watched Headbanger’s Ball in the past few years? My God.

But when intelligent, creative people do delve into the poorly lit dungeons of metal, incredible things can happen. Hence Mastodon’s excellent 3rd LP, Blood Mountain.

Let’s examine breathlessly frantic album opener “The Wolf is Loose,” which contains every one of the band’s most potent elements. Over some massive, complex but beautifully listenable riffage courtesy of guitarist Bill Kelliher, dual vocalists Brett Hinds and Troy Sanders take turns howling out a couple of rapid-fire verses that range from blood vessel-popping to sludgy as all hell before – surprise, surprise – they somehow find their way into a perfectly harmonized chorus. But don’t fret, purists – those surprisingly well executed, brief 20-seconds are the closest the band comes to flirting with mainstream acceptance. And they’re unceremoniously sandwiched between a pile of ever-morphing time signatures and Brann Dailor drum fills that can only be described as astonishing. And, as should be expected from a metal band who has one unselfconscious foot in progressive territory, the song structure is exhilaratingly unpredictable while still managing to, through some dark magic, remain perfectly balanced.

Now that we’re on the subject of dark magic, I may as well mention that the Blood Mountain song cycle is linked together by a conceptual plot that could have been plucked from the pages of Tolkien – if Tolkien routinely dropped acid. It involves the band members (yes, the actual members of the band Mastodon play the lead roles) on a journey up the eponymous Blood Mountain to obtain the Crystal Skull, which will supposedly let them reach the next stage of human evolution. But good luck finding all that out from Hinds’ and Sanders’ co-written lyrics.

Which is not to say by any means that the lyrics are bad. In fact, most of the passages have a beautiful, haiku-esque minimalism to them (“Floating in red again / A deepened soil / Nothing”) But, like much poetry, the lyrics are filled with vagueries and allegories, with only a few flashbulb glimpses of the haunting reality behind the band’s journey. And this is all just as well: could there be any possible way to take this album seriously if the lyrics were explicit? I’d rather not delve that far into DragonForce self-parody. It’s commendable that the band has taken a high fantasy concept that few respected artists would be willing to touch turn it into something far less than embarrassing.

And while “The Wolf is Loose” may contain the riff showcases and general musical propensity that makes Mastodon so special, it’s by no means a microcosm of the rest of the album. From that triumphant opener, things splinter out into several different directions while still remaining true to the virile image that the band have etched out for themselves.

In other words, no sugary power ballads on this one. The closest the band comes to that is mournful closer “Pendulous Skin,” which contains wholly impenetrable, formless vocals that sound as if they’re being sung from the bottom of the swamp. And some metalheads have been complaining about Mastodon “selling out” because of their implementation of syrupy vocals? I frankly have no idea what the hell these people are talking about.
The only instances in which Hinds’ and Sanders’ vocals become anything less than intentionally abrasive is in two tracks: “Sleeping Giant” and “Colony of Birchmen.” And their performances on these pieces approximate the soul of early Black Sabbath – a far cry from any alt-metal you’ll hear on the radio today.

“Colony of Birchmen” is equally remarkable for its beautiful structuring. Centering around a surprisingly catchy riff, the song contains instrumental breaks at just the right moments to keep things interesting, and its climactic chorus of “Gone awayyyy / My heart’s gone awayyyy / Taking everythiiing / Take it now” reveals itself slowly, with practiced restraint. And, just as a more profits-concerned band would bring the song to an end, leaving the chorus fresh in the listener’s mind, Mastodon gives us another minute or so of a slowly coalescing guitar solo that manages to avoid any sense of cliché.

It’s unfortunate, though, that after the inarguable high-point of “Colony of Birchmen,” the band seems to begin descending Blood Mountain right as they should be reaching its summit. The remaining five tracks do far less to distinguish themselves than those on side-A. We still get technically excellent performances out the band – particularly out of the Bill Kelliher and Brann Dailor rhythm section – but things simply don’t mesh as well as they did in the album’s inspired first half.

Which isn’t to say that any of the later tracks are bad. In fact, the expertly paced “This Mortal Soil” is an easy album standout. It’s just that the sludge becomes a little too homogeneous to command the rapt attention that it once did. The seams also begin to show in the song structures, which slowly start to resemble Frankenstein’s monster than one of the nightmarishly organic creatures that Hinds and Sanders have been screaming about for the greater part of the album.

But, though there are a few intermittent stumbles, the band never lapses into the self-indulgent prog-metal of say The Mars Volta (which is thankful, as Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s involvement in late album track “Siberian Divide” had me a bit worried). Mastodon’s mastery of their respective instruments remains seemingly supernatural, as it should in any metal band someone would want to take seriously – and still, one gets the overwhelming sense that the band is doing this because they want to entertain you, not because they’re trying to please themselves and themselves alone.

Blood Mountain is a testament to the fact that there are no shallow genres in pop music – only shallow performers. They’re one band I wouldn’t feel guilty or hesitant about throwing up the devil horn salute to while getting my ass kicked by a bunch of large, sweaty moshers. And that’s really saying something.

4.5 Stars (out of 5)

It’s a remarkably intricate amateur stop-motion video put together by a friend of mine. An absolutely perfect thing to watch if you somehow find yourself stoned and on your computer at 2am. Or anytime really, stoned or not. Enjoy:

If I could choose to live anywhere in the world, it would almost certainly be in Walt Disney World’s Haunted Mansion. So, predictably, THIS post on Haunted Mansion fan-site DoomBuggies.com, which uncovers the actual, original 1969 proposal papers for the whimsically macabre attraction has me all giddy.

I think one of the things that makes the Haunted Mansion so cool is that something so blatantly and willfully eerie actually exists in a Disney park in which more and more attractions are being eaten up by nauseating movie tie-ins. I was saddened when Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride was closed in favor of a more profitable and kid-friendly Whinnie the Pooh attraction, and actually somewhat angered when they actually felt it necessary to add fucking Jack Sparrow into the old Pirates of the Carribean ride. Which is a little weird, considering that I had such an investment in an amusement park ride that its desecration could stir me to palpable anger, but still.

Thankfully, the Mansion still maintains that elegantly timeless, dark atmosphere that speaks to the closet Goth in us all. If they ever decide to shoehorn Eddie Murphy into the damn thing, though, I’m honestly not sure if I’ll be able to handle it:

Say what you will about System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian, but you can’t fault him for not having a delirious amount of faith in his art. Case in point: every single song off of his upcoming solo effort, Elect the Dead, is going to get the full music video treatment. For Serj, “enthusiastic” is a vast understatement. Here are his thoughts on this recent announcement:

“For me, the great pleasure of ‘Elect the Dead’ has been not only to make the record with the pure vision of what I feel artistically through my music and poetry, but also to multiply the art factor by bringing in other great artists, in this case directors, and putting forth their interpretations of my music and words. This serves two functions: to create more art from the original source, the album, and to offer more than just a CD to people interacting with the music, thus giving us more points of connection with each other.”

And the list of directors is every bit as manic and eclectic as one would expect, based on his previous work in System of a Down. Because I’m too lazy to paraphrase, here’s a sample list from the blabbermouth.net story:

“[Contributing directors] include music video director Tony Petrossian (TAKING BACK SUNDAY, SLIPKNOT, AVENGED SEVENFOLD), who shot the video for ‘Empty Walls’, the first single from ‘Elect The Dead’, photographer/video director Greg Watermann (MUDVAYNE, LAMB OF GOD, HOWIE DAY), Oscar-nominated Puerto Rican playwright and screenwriter Jose Rivera (‘The Motorcycle Diaries’), French film director Diran Noubar (‘Armenia: A Country Under Blockade’), digital artist Roger Kupelian (‘The Lord of the Rings’; ‘Flags of Our Fathers’), documentary director Sevag Vrej (SYSTEM OF A DOWN, FAIR TO MIDLAND), and Beirut-born filmmaker Gariné Torossian (SPARKLEHORSE), among others.”

I’ve always considered Serj to be the more intelligent half of System’s creative force, the other half being composed of Daron Malakian. If there’s one thing that disappointed me about System’s Mezmerize/Hypnotize double album, it’s that Daron essentially seized creative control of the project. Which isn’t to say that Daron is a complete moron by any means, but Serj’s remarkably literate, impressionistic lyrics on the previous System albums were a far cry Daron’s stuff on Mezmerize/Hypnotize – much of which sounded a lot better if you didn’t pay attention to it. And Daron’s high-pitched atonal voice with limited range generally just sounds less appealing to my ears than Serj’s ever-shifting, coarse bark.

And hell, the whole concept of a string of films springing out directly from a collection of songs just intrigues me. It’s like one form of art giving birth to another. Or something. So, yeah, I’m excited about all of this. Are you? You should be.

Judging from THIS recent “Permanent Records” post, the A.V. Club collective (or at least Jason Heller, the guy who wrote this particular piece) has at least one quality that I deeply respect in another human being: a thorough admiration for goth godfathers Bauhaus. The post deals with “The Sky’s Gone Out,” easily the most eclectic, and possibly the most wonderfully unsettling of Bauhaus’ four LPs. If only bands today were adventurous enough to put reggae dub and classical waltzes within shouting distance of each other on their albums. And, of course, managing to pull off some amazingly non-embarrassing graveyard-friendly lyrics doesn’t hurt much either. A snippet:

“Born of punk, glam, and what must have been some seriously twisted Catholic upbringings, Bauhaus entered the world fully formed with its 1979 debut single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” a torturously distended track of lurking mood and menace. The band followed that up with two near-perfect full-lengths, 1980’s In The Flat Field and 1981’s Mask, which congealed its reputation as gothic rock’s guiding black light. In the midst of post-punk’s jerky robotics and worship of the amateur, Mask introduced a fluid, accomplished, and morbidly graceful style that dared to celebrate florid showmanship and mystery. But where Mask dipped its toe in Grand Guignol-esque perversion and theatricality, 1982’s The Sky’s Gone Out did a belly flop: Incorporating everything from proto-thrash to dub reggae to Tchaikovsky, frontman Peter Murphy and company turned their penultimate album into a disjointed yet extravagant sprawl of warped, sinister beauty. “

The Orsinal Morning Sunshine flash games are pretty much the only reason I made it through my college Computing Environments course without attempting to eat my keyboard out of sheer boredom, and it tickles me in ways you can’t imagine that the site is apparently still around. Although it seems as though creator Ferry Halim has, I assume, found real work and stopped adding new pieces. Good for him.

These are, though, without a doubt still some of the most artistically sophisticated and innovative flash games out there. The games each have this underlying, blissfully calming aesthetic that makes it clear they were all made by a creative person with a vision rather than some bored teenager who thought it would be hilarrrrrious to give Mario a machine gun so he could make goombas all bloody and shit lmfao . A far, far cry from the Dragon Ball Z dating sims you’ll find on Newgrounds.com these days. Actually, I have no idea what’s going on with Newgrounds; I just assume the worst when it comes to the Internet.

I went to my local record store the other day (yes, I do prefer CDs to the stuff of questionable quality that can be found in some obscure torrent server; I’m just a snob like that) to restock Black Sabbath’s Paranoid into my music collection, which for whatever reason was one of the few unlucky albums to be lost in the ether during my transition from PC to Mac. Other casualties included Metallica’s Black Album and Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power.

Now, as any sane person would, I at first thought that my new MacBook was self-aware, and had some sort of elitist bias against heavy metal music. But now, after re-experiencing it for myself, I’m pretty sure that the computer – while still almost certainly self-aware – was just genuinely freaked out by Paranoid’s album cover:

I really don’t know how to make a picture of one of Ozzy’s drunk friends running around in a children’s Halloween costume any funnier than it is on its own, so I won’t even try. Then again, I guess you could make it funnier if you selected it as the cover for one of the most highly regarded metal releases of all time. Which is exactly what happened.

And what’s particularly awesome, metal isn’t exactly known for taking itself lightly (you know, hence the name Black Sabbath). Considering that the actual album sounds like what the apocalypse might sound like if it involved guitar solos, Sabbath probably intended the cover to instill a deep sense of foreboding in the listener. And, of course, nothing says “menacing” like a space warrior in tights playing flashlight tag in your neighbor’s backyard.

Japanese arcade machine “Arm Spirit,” which challenges players to arm wrestle with a mechanized arm, is now responsible for BREAKING THE ARMS OF THREE PEOPLE. Atlus Co. spokesperson Akano Sakiyama made fun of the wounded persons and playfully belittled the entire female sex with this remark:

“The machine isn’t that strong, much less so than a muscular man. Even women should be able to beat it.”

And, because remember that this is Japan we’re talking about, the game involves players battling a French maid, a drunken martial arts master, a pro wrestler and a Chihuahua.

No word yet on whether or not “Arm Spirit” had become self-aware prior to the injuries.

LINK to the story.

Here’s a LINK to a video that was used in a presentation at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Las Vegas, a symposium that, in part, deals with how professional magicians exploit the natural faults in our attention and logic of reality to make us believe that the unbelievable has taken place.

In order for the video to work, you have to attempt to count the number of times the people in white shirts manage to complete a successful pass. And pay really, really close attention to counting. Something ridiculous happens at one point, and chances are that if you’re genuinely concentrating on counting you’ll hardly notice it at first. Pretty crazy.