May 8, 2016 -  Documentary Watchin: Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992)



I'm pretty sure the story of Aileen Wuornos is fairly well known, but just in case, a brief recap: She was a lady who fell on hard times and had to turn to prostituting herself out to dudes, in spite of the fact that she was into other ladies, and eventually, she ended up murdering a whole bunch of them. She got tried and convicted and put on Death Row, (the place where the government kills people, not Suge Knight's label) despite the teensy-weensy chance that it could have been self defense and lingering suspicions that she got straight-up railroaded for political purposes. Eventually, she got executed and they made a movie about it and Charlize Theron tucked her chin into her chest and stuck her upper teeth out and won an Oscar and inched closer to the goal of every good actor (as well as every good human being) to be in the best Mad Max movie. And I'm pretty sure the life and times of Wuornos was what this was originally intended to be a documentary about, but it didn't happen, folks.




Somewhere, there is an alternate universe where things went as planned, and in that universe, there was a movie with the same title and same poster art that mainly consisted of prison interviews and respectable looking people in suits explaining and analyzing things; a documentary film that got into the details of the tragic events from various perspectives and tried to form some coherent vision of what the actual truth was. A dry-ass documentary that no one would have watched after 1994 or so, except maybe when they were tricked by shady DVD packaging into thinking it was Monster. But this isn't that universe. This is an amazing universe. This is Nick Broomfield's universe.





In case you're new around here, Nick Broomfield is the dude who also made Kurt & Courtney, (which I talked about a couple months ago) and he is the most useless member of the X-Men, whose mutant power is to create a field of absolute chaos (a Broom Field, if you will) wherever he goes. You could send him to do a quick piece on the time the Bravest Fireman saved the Cutest Kitten from the Most Beautiful Tree, and by the time he got there, reality would have been warped to a point where the kitten had sixteen arrest warrants pending and was running an insurance scam on the family of white supremacist survivalists that owned the property the tree was on, and the fireman would be revealed to literally be a resurrected G.G. Allin. This is a curse that Broomfield has had to bear for many years, which has resulted in many unintentionally amazing films, and I can only assume has cost the poor bastard tens of thousands of dollars and resulted in the need for numerous rabies and tetanus shots.




As a result of the Broomfield Effect, instead of telling a tale of sex and murder and the questionable application of justice, it's mostly a documentary about the attempts to make that documentary, which didn't actually get made until 2003. Let's put it this way: What do you expect from an interview with someone's lawyer? It's probably a quiet chat with a one of the aforementioned respectable-looking, suit-wearing people, and it's probably somewhere with a desk and a whole bunch of law books in the background. But in this, Poor Ol' Nick has to drive out to a mobile home in the middle of East Jesus somewhere, and the lawyer is a dope-smokin', guitar-strummin' Mark Boone Junior look alike, and I swear to any fucked-up god you can offer to me, he is sitting on the porch with his fucking imaginary friend. He has an imaginary friend that's some kind of homemade scarecrow/Tor Johnson hybrid thing named Lothar, and after a brief introduction, this is never mentioned again, because Nick Broomfield sees shit like that so often that he thinks it's normal, because of his goddamned mutant chaos projection.




After that, the bulk of the movie involves Broomfield negotiating with Aileen's adoptive mother for the right to go see her in jail. This wouldn't sound so bad, except that Aileen's new mom is only a few years older than her, adopted her after she got busted for hella murders because she sensed she was her Friend in Jesus or some such nonsense, and she's asking for fifteen thousand dollars for the interview. She also raises wolves. And after he manages to negotiate the fee down to a mere ten grand, it seems like a lot of the conversation with Wuornos is a lot of mutual "man, this whole thing is fucked up, right? LOL." Of course,she wouldn't have actually said the letters L-O-L, because no one does that and it was '92 and chat speak didn't exist yet, but fuckin'-A, it's a Nick Broomfield flick, so if she had, it wouldn't have surprised me. I'm honestly shocked that El Duce didn't just pop out of the bottom of the screen going "YAAAAHHH" like the "Toasty" guy from Mortal Kombat at some point.



R.I.P.; he's getting his anal vapor smelled by angels now

In the end, the result is that the story being told is the one that's unfolding right in front of the cameras in real time, which ends up being way more interesting than what was the original intent. This is some real-ass Gonzo Journalism right here, but only more so, because you actually get to see that this shit really happened. When you read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you have your doubts, because you know that Oscar Zeta Acosta wasn't actually a 300 pound Samoan, you're pretty sure that there were no dealings with a skag baron named Savage Henry, and it seems unlikely that anyone really tried to sell Dr. Thompson an ape. But this shit is being captured right before your eyeballs, and the Nick Broomfield Universe, where a convicted serial killer totally comes off like someone who would kill a bunch of people, yet seems more sane than a lot of the people surrounding her, is an undeniably true place. And in this world, this poor schmuck will continue to produce amazingly-doomed movies that we'll all watch with an uncomfortable tingle in our gut, hoping that if anything fucked up enough to make us famous ever happens, that he's not the guy who wants to tell our tale.




May 14, 2016 - A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION

I've been watching professional wrestling off and on (mostly on) for roughly thirty years now. It all started when happening across a comedy skit of Outlaw Ron Bass trying to teach "The Mouth of the South" Jimmy Hart to do lasso tricks led to a dark spiral of Hulk Hogan worship and spending the early 2000 on message boards having SERIOUS OPINIONS about the PRODUCT. Now, with some time to look back and examine my life, it's become apparent that wrestling is what's wrong with me. It's a Bad Thing that will rot your brain, and like most sinister institutions of self-destruction, it hooks you  when you're young, and it will fuck you up bad if you're not careful. So that leads us to this thing right here - another ongoing website project that I'll never finish and barely even really start - which will be an examination of the times when the rasslin' betrayed and traumatized me as a youngster. So without further ado, here is the first installment of WHEN IT COMES CRASHIN' DOWN AND IT HURTS INSIDE.

WHEN IT COMES CRASHIN' DOWN AND IT HURTS INSIDE #1: GLOW 1986 - Susie Spirit's Elbow Returns to Its Home Planet


THAT KITTEN IS THERE FOR A REASON, PEOPLE

I probably should have put this in the introductory paragraph up there, but I was a pretty seriously loyal WWF kid, so most of the traumatic rasslin' moments of my childhood originate there, and most of them involved terrible storyline-based things happening to Hulk Hogan. But this isn't one of those; this is about real-life bad things happening to someone from GLOW. There are probably decent, normal people that might read this someday who don't keep up with bizarre second-tier wrestling promotions from thirty years ago, so I'll have to provide some background information. GLOW was a bizarre wrestling federation that popped up in the late eighties, whose name stood for Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, and you can kind of guess what sort of thing they specialized in, based on the name alone. And on one hand, it was exactly the sort of weird sleaze you're probably thinking of; barely-trained "wrestlers" rolling around and grappling with each other in leotards, with big ol' eighties Aqua Net hair and glittery shit glued to their faces. It got weird though, with a real heavy emphasis on comedy, complete with weird, corny-ass comedy segments (complete with laugh track) between matches that were like what would have happened if the creators of Laugh In were wrestling fans, rather than just Nixonites trying to infiltrate the counterculture, and pre-match wrestling promos replaced by the Gorgeous Ladies doing terrible "white people who don't know anything about rap" style rapping that bit heavily off the Super Bowl Shuffle instead.

Weird thing was, Vince Russo and Tammy Sytch didn't exist yet, so this was back when it was unheard of for anything truly risque to happen in televised wrestling. So as much as it was jiggle-TV for lonesome strokers who were up late when the free Cinemax preview weekend was over and USA Up All Night was showing a Chuck Norris movie, GLOW was also somehow a straight wrestling show that based itself heavily off the WWF Sports Entertainment Style of All-American Heroes saving the world from Evil Foreigners and Evil Broad Ethnic Stereotypes. It was the same thing, seriously. Tina Ferrari was the Hoganesque excessively-tanned superheroic champion of goodness, Colonel Ninotchka and Palestina the Syrian Terrorist played the same evil Russian/Arab roles that Nikolai Volkoff and the Iron Shiek played, Amy the Farmer's Daughter was Hilbilly Jim, the Heavy Metal Sisters were like if Demolition got really into Mercyful Fate, and Attache had the Sgt. Slaughter thing going, where she was the military character who was evil, despite 'Merica. And if you really think about it, Mount Fiji and Matilda the Hun (aka Queen Kong) each represented the duality of Andre the Giant, with Fiji as the gentle giant who fought for righteousness, and Matilda as an angry monster who smashed things and ate people. So as a little 7 year old kid who didn't see what the big deal was about boobs and butts, it was just another wrestling show that came on after WWF Superstars went off on Friday Nights. Of course, my brother was older and into it on a much different level, and I'm pretty sure somewhere during a match involving the vaguely gothic, goggle-eyed maniac wrestler called Dimentia, he became a man, but I'd rather not think about that right now. For me, it was like 80s WWF without dudes, and that's a helluva thing right there. I'm not sure if there's ever been a TV show, rasslin' or otherwise, that's toed the line between smut and children's programming so successfully. (Although I'm assuming a very specific breed of modern perv would probably throw out recent iterations of My Little Pony cartoons as an example, because God is dead, and we have killed him.) 

But anyway, here's the match in question, WHICH YOU SHOULD NEVER, EVER, EVER WATCH, OH GOD. (Seriously, Ghoul Shit Warning is in full effect)



Unless you're a fucking ghoul who clicked play just now, I'll try and explain what happened here. It's a match between Susie Spirit and Debbie Debutante, who seem to just be two generic GLOW wrestlers, and The Headhunters, who were GLOW's somehow even more overtly-racist version of the classic Wild Samoan wrestling gimmick. Like if the Revival wrestled the Usos today, except Dash and Dawson would have less personality and Jimmy and Jey would have a lot more. Anyway, not much of note happens for the most part, until all of a sudden, somebody screws up somewhere, and Susie Spirit absolutely eats shit on an attempted sunset flip, and her elbow joint just ceases to exist, basically. The ref breaks it up, and it's awful. Like her forearm was just not connected anymore in any meaningful way, and bones are pointing in directions they aren't supposed to, and they zoom in on it, and they just show it over and over and over and over like when Lawrence Taylor broke Joe Theisman's leg, and you can see shapes and outlines and shit, and aw fuck, I'm covered in cobras again.

And here's the thing. When this happened, I was probably six or seven years old, (all the info I've found online says it happened in 1986, but I don't think I even watched wrestling until a year later, so it must have been a rerun in syndication) and I fully believed in the Truth of Wrestling. It was real to me, dammit. Thing was, like most tiny rasslin' fans, I was constantly hearing that it was all fake from various classmates and 60 Minutes correspondents. and while I knew that they were all damnable liars attempting to decieve me, I really think that some part of what they were saying got through to me and sat there in my subconscious mind. So while I was sure that rasslin' was real and Hulk Hogan was the Earth's mightiest hero, I think there was just enough of a seed of doubt - even if I didn't realize that it was there - to put my mind at ease when something really bad would happen in the ring. That tiny spark of disbelief let me know that it was all going to be okay; the blood was just ketchup, these guys were all best friends, and Andre probably apologized to Leapin' Lanny Poffo after he nearly headbutted him to death on Saturday Night's Main Event. Everything was going to be cool. Until this. When Susie Spirit's elbow dislocated, it showed me definitively that WRESTLING IS REAL, and rather than fictional superheroes, wrestlers were regular humans with bones and blood and organs, and they could all feel pain and bleed and die, EVEN HULK HOGAN. The stakes were higher than ever, and life and death and justice and freedom were all riding on whether or not the good guys won. Honestly, this match was probably the one that opened Pandora's Box inside my brain and made it possible for wrestling to traumatize me as a child in the first place. So thanks a lot, Susie Spirit's Elbow, you're what's wrong with me today.



I have to add this extra little thought at the end, though, after making the mistake of rewatching this match. Wrestling is a violent, brutal pseudo-sport, and as a result, there's a long history of Bad Motherfuckers and Tough Sumbitches participating in it and working through their own horrifying injuries. Like when Vader had to push his eye back into the socket and still finished the match, or when Stone Cold Steve Austin literally won a match while being partially paralyzed. There was another time when Akira Hokuto broke her neck in the first fall of a three-fall match and held her head in place with her hands for the next two falls, not to mention the time when Ric Flair sustained career-ending back injuries in a plane crash and retired almost forty years later. But do you see that picture up there, and what's happening in it? THAT CRAZY MOTHERFUCKER IS SMILING. She's literally having to hold the lower half of her arm in place, but she's so dedicated to the gimmick of... uhhh, being a person with a lot of spirit, I guess, that she can't be seen screaming and crying and pooping everywhere, which is what I'd probably be doing if it was me in such a damn predicament. So yeah, it's real impressive that Vader popped his eyeball back in or whatever, but you know none of those folks would've been able to cheese for the drunks in the front row while any of this was going on. So the toughest wrestler isn't Vader or Austin or Hokuto or Flair or Funk or Foley or any of the obvious names that come to mind. The toughest motherfucker of all times is Susie Spirit, and it always has been, you guys.


May 28, 2016 - Y'all Should Listen to Only Living Witness

God damn.

PERFECT TEN-SONG MIXED TAPE FOR YOU TO SEEK OUT ON YOUTUBE OR SPOTIFY OR WHEREVER THAT I'LL DISAGREE WITH IN A MINUTE, PROBABLY:

  1. "No Eden"
  2. "Prone Mortal Form"
  3. "Some Will Never Know"
  4. "Strata"
  5. "Voice of Disrepair"
  6. "Knew Her Gone"
  7. "Freaklaw"
  8. "Dying System"
  9. "Downpour"
  10. "December"
May 30, 2016 - RASSLEMAN SPOTLIGHT: Eddie Guerrero (1967-2005)
eddy

(aka Eduardo Gory Guerrero Llanes, Eddy Guerrero, Black Tiger II, Mascara Magica, Gory Guerrero Jr., etc.)

Eddie Guerrero was the best, you guys. God damn. If you are any sort of wrestling fan, and you don't think so, I hate you. Seriously, I am making a judgment of your character, and I am telling you that you are a bad person that should suffer daily. I wish you ill. I promise you no matter what, I will never be your friend, and I will never forgive you, and I will hate you for the rest of your life. I deem you false™ and I rebuke you. But man, for the rest of you, Eddie Guerrero was so dang good at everything, wasn't he?

SELECTIONS FOR YOUSE GUYS:

AAA - Los Gringos Locos (Eddy Guerrero & "Love Machine" Art Barr) vs. El Hijo Del Santo & Octagon (Mascara contra Caballera, 1994) - This is the sort of evil shit that you're just not allowed to do anymore in wrestling. Basically, Eddy and Art Barr are evil, because they're the worst sort of Americans, doing American Shit, all "ha ha fuck you Mexicans! You're Mexicans! Go swim across the border, you stupid Mexicans!" and it's a AAA show in Los Angeles, so this is not welcome behavior as much as it was when Jack Swagger and Dutch Mantell were doing it a couple years ago. But in the end, it's all okay, because they're up against some real-life goddamn Mexican Superheroes, and even after Octagon gets laid low due to sneaky American Bullshit, Santito saves the day and defeats the invaders for the good of the nation, and Mexico's national sovereignty is secured, and the bad guys have to shave their own heads. Justice. But yeah, everything about this is awesome, and you have to wonder what Art Barr might have managed to do if he made it to the height of the WCW cruiserweight division or those couple years when WWE Smackdown was actually good. Cocaine is a helluva drug.

IWA Mid-South - Eddie Guerrero vs. Rey Misterio Jr. vs. CM Punk (IWA Mid South World Championship - 2002)

Man, it's just weird that this match even happened where it did. IWAMS is (Or was? Hell, I dunno. They were having "(insert most recent dead WWE guy) Memorial Spaghetti Supper and Deathmatch Tournament" fundraisers almost monthly at one point to keep the place from going under last time I paid attention, but I always assumed it was Ian Rotten trying to crowd fund a jet ski.) mostly known as a greasy-ass deathmatch promotion, and even though they cleaned that up a little, it hadn't really happened by 2002. So all of a sudden, here was Eddie, fresh off a Steven Regal-style "you're fired, but you can come back when you can pass a pee test" firing from the WWE, taking on a post-WCW, pre-WWE Rey Misterio Jr., and CM Punk, who was pretty much every mouth-breathing, Mountain Dew bottle-pissing internet wrestling nerd's top dude at this point. From here, Eddie would go back to New York and work his way up to being a main event, world champion style dude, and Rey would get hired and meet similar success, after getting stripped of the "Junior," getting so gassed up on various PEDs that he probably won't live to be elderly, (which, oddly enough, is pretty much what happened to Eddie) and betraying the ritual purity of lucha libre by unceremoniously putting back on the mask that he lost fair and square to notorious rudo "Gran Atractivo" Kevin Nash. Punk would go on to spend a few more years as the official "oh man, this guy is so good, but it's a shame he'll never get paid on account of scrawniness," guy before actually going to the WWE, becoming bigger than John Cena and the hero to millions, and then quitting the business as the Righeous Man who finally beat Vince. From there, he would sign with the UFC and start a downward spiral toward becoming the most despised man in both wrestling and MMA, for doing the same sort of shit he accused the WWE of doing to him, but on a grander scale, on account of Dana White paying UFC dudes so little that they gotta flip burgers and dig ditches during the week. I don't even have an opinion of the match, aside from that CM Punk's greatest achievement was somehow becoming a bigger asshole than Vince McMahon.

WWE - Eddie Guerrero vs. Bubba Ray Dudley (2004)


This seems like a bizarre choice for being something for you people to watch, being the worst-possible quality recording, like someone bootlegging Smackdown in a movie theater or something, and it's just Eddie in a match against a tag team guy, but this match is special to me. You see, I was at the show when they taped this match, and earlier in the night, either during the Velocity taping or some dark matches (which included a pre-debut Mordecai,as well as Funaki totally acknowledging me, because I was the only one in the crowd who understood that Kaientai DX was the greatest enough to cheer for him) I was being a shitty internet nerd wrestling fan. I don't remember who it was, but there was either someone who was the good guy in a match that I hated or a bad guy that I liked, and I was cheering and/or booing the guy I wasn't supposed to. The obvious answer would be that I was booing John Cena, but this was back when he was still Rapping Smartass Throwback Jersey Cena that people actually liked, before his transition to being Poochie the Troop Respectin' Dog Cena, so that probably wasn't it. A mystery for the ages. But anyway, I'm being a dick, and this little kid in the row in front of us turns around and gives me this look. Like this completely heartbroken, wounded look, like he's just finally learning that there are bad people in the world, and I felt like a huge piece of rotten dirt before I went back to being Terrible Internet Guy again. Then, later in the night, Eddie fights Bubba Ray in the main event, and the place is going absolutely BONKERS for Eddie Guerrero. Like the entire world converged on the Ford Center and started chanting "EDDIE! EDDIE!" in unison, and I'm doing it too, and that little kid from earlier turns around and kinda smiles and nods, like I had redeemed myself for all my past transgressions and everything was going to be okay, because pro wrestling is beautiful sometimes, and Eddie Guerrerro was probably the best ever to do it.



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bonus

All-Time Top 10 9 Albums I Paid Actual Money for That Only Had Like One Good Song

huh

(NOTE FOR DVD-EXTRA TYPE BONUS CONTENT: This was one of the last things I was typing up when I got sick of Wordpress and decided to unblog things, and I never actually finished it, hence only being nine CDs I'm talking about. Also, it was mostly "typed" on my phone in the parking lot before work, so I'm just going to assume there are a lot of typos and unintentional weirdness from autocorrect and extra errors from copying and pasting it here. Warmer tones in the source code, you guys. Warmer tones.)

Life, Sex, and Death - The Silent Majority (1992 - The song: "Tank")

 

The title should have explained pretty clearly what this whole thing is about, so I'm just gonna dispense with the pleasantries and just plow forth, like some sort of large, armored, war-related vehicle, whose name I can't recall at the moment. Anyway, in the unlikely event anyone ever comes here for reasons other than Google Image Searching for nipples or whatever, and in the even unlikelier event that anyone actually clicked play up there, it's plain that something was very wrong with this band. The exact details are shrouded in mystery, seemingly by design, but these guys started out as a pretty standard late 80s hair band, until the lead singer had some sort of mental breakdown, cut his hair, stopped bathing, bought some ill-fitting suits from Goodwill, started singing and talking exclusively from one corner of his mouth, and became known simply as Stanley. I think the best description I ever heard of the dude was in a late 90s issue of Metal Edge, where he was referenced as "an unwashed maniac," but for ease of description, just imagine Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys in a darker timeline where local authorities seized all his kitties, so be became bitterly, slobberingly insane and moved southwest to become a rock star. It's unclear how much was real and how much was an act, but the reek of body odor was apparently very real, despite the band's denial that he was ever actually homeless. Who knows. But a good time heavy metal rock 'n roll band fronted by a hunched-over, shambling madman is one of the best concepts for a band ever, and like a lot of gimmicky bands, it made me really sad to realize that they weren't all that great. (Unpopular opinion, but Ghost is kinda in the same category for me) Honestly, The Silent Majority is probably a lot better than most of the stuff on this list, possibly even to the point that it's unfair to stick it on here, but it's still hard to get excited about anything from it other than "Tank," which is the band's closest thing to a hit single, by way of its appearance on an episode of Beavis and Butthead. (Which was actually a big deal; the only reason most of you know who Rob Zombie is now might be because of "Thunderkiss '65" getting exposed to the general public there after it had already been out for like a year) And the song itself is an absolute heavy-as-hell shit-kicker of a song, like an entrance theme for a 500-pound giant pro wrestler that never existed. BRB, gotta go learn the secrets of the piledriver while somehow reversing 20 years of physical neglect and simultaneously gaining several hundred pounds.


Chrome Division - Doomsday Rock 'N Roll (2006 - The song: "Serial Killer")



It's a grand concept for a band, where Shagrath from Dimmu Borgir got together with a bunch of other musicians from the cold, bleak, desolation of darkest Scandinavia to form a band of leather-clad outlaw rocker dudes, running Motorhead and Turbonegro through a filter of years spent doing black metal. I first heard these guys on a compilation CD that came free with a magazine, (Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles or Metal Hammer, probably) and the song, "Serial Killer," is the baddest goddamn song ever. It's like what would have happened if Antiseen had been born in Norway instead of South Carolina, and grew up on Bathory instead of Skynyrd, and then wrote a Motorhead song about murders. The official video is kinda sketchy as hell though, in a way the cool Tumblr kids would probably call "problematic," where the band plays the song with a bunch of strippers grinding all over them, followed by said strippers ending up dead in a trunk somehow, so I went ahead and just used somebody's "I uploaded a song for you with just the album art" version linked for this thing. I figure I had enough weirdos coming here looking for naked Bella Twins pictures after the Wrestlemania posts, so I shouldn't give them any reasons to come back. Anyway, I got hit by the Curse of the Free Sampler CD hard here, because I spent actual currency on the full CD, and aside from the song I had already heard and already had on a compact disc, the rest of the album blew dicks for about forty minutes.


Stabbing Westward - Wither Blister Burn & Peel (1996 - The song: "Shame")



This one's weird, in that it's a band I should've hated, playing a kind of music I should've hated, who did a song I should've hated, but I liked it for reasons I could never explain, so I ended up spending 99 cents on it in a bin at Goodwill in 2008. Maybe I got sucked in by the video, which was a tense, 90s style, psychological thriller movie crammed inside of a music video by a band doing some sort of techno rock thing from somewhere on the outskirts of the nu-metal scene, like Filter's shitty little brother. And the rest of the album sucks while sounding pretty much exactly like "Shame" being played over and over, so maybe that is what happened? Hell, who knows. I'm pretty sure I also got vinyl LPs of In the Hall of the Mountain King by King Crimson and a couple old Kiss albums for like a buck fifty altogether, so the trip wasn't a total loss. Then again, I also bought a Smiths record in the same trip, and trying to figure out why I would have ever considered doing such a goddamn thing will probably drive me insane for the rest of my days. Maybe I got too excited to look in the Goodwill bin and find somebody other than Herb Alpert or 1,000 Strings? The world may never know.

Various - Masters of Horror (2005 - The song: "Megalodon (Live)" by Mastodon)


(this isn't the actual performance that was used, but it's close I guess?)

 This one is kind of my bad, because I should have known damn well by flipping the CD over and looking at the track listing that this wasn't worth buying. This came out in 2005, right as the New Wave of American Heavy Metal was getting in full swing, and the gates of Hot Topic Hell opened, flooding the earth in shitty "-core" suffix bands, and they all got together with the somehow even shittier remnants of what was left after the ninth or tenth time punk rock had died to release this festering butt of a double album. I should have known to leave a CD that had Norma Jean, Avenged Sevenfold, Scary Kids Scaring Kids, (what the hell) and stupid Mudvayne well enough alone, but goddammit, it had a Mastodon recording on it that I owned no copy of, and this was around 2007 or so when I bought it, right around the height of Mastodon-o-Mania, which I'll get to in a minute. And to boot, it was on sale used for $3.99. (Although looking at the receipt later, the shitholes at Hastings charged me $8.99 for it, but I suppose that isn't the fault of the Cd itself.) In the end, it also included 29 other tracks of bullshit, (although The Bled doing Black Flag's "Nervous Breakdown" was at least kinda inoffensive, I guess) and despite being good overall by virtue of it being Mastodon at the height of their powers, the live version of "Megalodon" still suffered from the same thing that all live recordings of Mastodon have: That it takes a lot of studio wizardry to make it sound like Troy Sanders can sing, and another sixteen thousand layers of darkest forbidden studio black sorcery to do the same for Brent Hinds, hindered further by his live performance habit of just disregarding the actual song and going "RREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEARGH" out of the corner of his mouth, in place of signing. Dude should hook up with Stanley from LSD someday, so he can show him how the corner-of-the-mouth thing is done.


Demolition Hammer - Time Bomb (1994 - The song: "Under the Table")



This... I dunno, it was a buck, what can I say. I was pretty unfamiliar with Demolition Hammer's stuff at the time, because this was at a time when the internet was enough of a thing that you could go somewhere like Metaldisc and buy obscure metal CDs for 99 cents on clearance, but not yet at a time where high speed internet meant you could hear stuff ahead of time with any real efficiency. This is Demo Ham's (I don't think anyone else has ever called them Demo Ham, but I'mma start that trend) universally shat-upon final record, where a pretty underrated band known for doing head-smashing, pre-Chaos A.D. Sepultura sounding stuff got sick of the world at large not giving a rat's ass about them, just kinda threw up their hands, and went, "fuck it, we're Pantera now." The result was a really awkward groove metal record from a band who had previously been putting out songs with names like "Skull Fracturing Nightmare" and "Infectious Medical Waste." That being said, the opening track isn't bad, and I'm just gonna assume it was on a compilation Cd at some point that tricked someone into buying this turd. Meanwhile, I don't know who uploaded this to YouTube as the background music for a bunch of people injuring themselves up on playground equipment, but I'd like to give them a big, warm hug.


Hellfueled - Volume One (2003 - The song: "Let Me Out")



Blame Pandora for this one. Hellfueled is a band that is apparently really, really into Ozzy Osbourne. Like into him on a completely diabolical level, where there's a false wall in their practice space that slides back, revealing a secret room wallpapered in photos of Ozzy with the eyes cut out, and the lyrics to "Flying High Again" inscribed over it in something you really hope is just ketchup, oh god, let it be ketchup. Anyway, they play Ozzy-like songs in an Ozzy-esque way, and specifically Zakk Wylde era Ozzy, as evidenced by the fact that the main riff in "Let Me Out" is almost entirely made of pinch harmonic squealy shit. It should be an absolute shameful thing to copy someone so blatantly, but hell, Ozzy Osbourne's own Ozzy impression has pretty much sucked since some time in the 1990s, so I can't fault these dudes for trying to step in and fill that void. Still though, after the track that sold this CD to me, it just sort of gets blandly boring, which again is still better than what the actual Ozzy has been doing lately, but not good enough to matter.


Skid Row - Subhuman Race (1995 - The song: "Firesign")



There was a time when I was just too goddamn cool for school, and I had to be super Underground Metal Guy, evangelizing Exhorder records as though I had heard of them before five years after the band broke up, and making fun of all those lame-o blonde haired bands making kissy faces at us from the 1980s. But at some point, I got old, got a girlfriend, let love open the door to my heart, and had to admit that Skid Row was okay sometimes. But man, overall this album kind of blows, and that combined with coming out right as grunge was killing off every band that ever prefaced a guitar solo by yelling "GUITAR!" spelled the end of Skid Row. I mean yeah, they replaced Sebastian Bach with some other guy and probably still tour today, but no one cares, and people who go to the shows probably get shocked and a little sad when it's some of the actual guys instead of a cover band. And I bet when the "new" singer who's been there for like twenty years says "How ya feelin' out there, Des Moines, here's a brand new song for ya!" the crowd audibly groans, and singer dude gets that look where he's dying inside but still has to keep a fake smile plastered across his face, and you just want to hug him forever. What can I say, I'm a hugger. That being said, "Firesign" is one of the best things they ever did and could stand right up there with "Monkey Business," "Youth Gone Wild," and all the other songs they did that people actually cared about. Weird added note for this one is that when I pulled out all these CDs for the blog post featured image thing, I couldn't actually find this one. So good luck and godspeed, copy of Subhuman Race that I apparently no longer own. In whatever mysterious limbo realm you reside in, say hi to that Blood for Blood CD and those Jerry Clower tapes that disappeared under similarly mysterious circumstances. Also, if anybody can find me cheap cassette or vinyl copies of Starke Raving or Dogs I Have Known, let me know.


Mastodon - The Hunter (2011 - The song: "Black Tongue")



When the first Mastodon album, Remission, came out, I can remember only kind of liking it, but having the strangest feeling that this was a band that could be absolutely amazing in the future. Then they put out three consecutive crazy-ass concept albums, Leviathan, Blood Mountain, and Crack the Skye, and it was re-goddamn-diculous, one of the craziest hot streaks a band has ever had since Metallica still mattered. It was a beautiful time to be alive, and I wanted all the Mastodon I could get, and at one point, I had three of their t-shirts, a DVD, a fancy $40 box set version of Crack the Skye, actually double-dipped on Blood Mountain to get the fancier two disc version, and I even bought that shitty Masters of Horror thing for one live track. Needless to say, I was super hella pumped for The Hunter. And hoo boy, that was like thirteen bucks I could have saved and spent on cheeseburgers or wrestling action figures or something. Best I can tell, they just stopped giving a damn. All the crazy prog rocking and bizarre, convoluted concept album styles went away, and Mastodon replaced them with "here are some songs we wrote because it had been a couple years since we did that, and I hope you guys like the 'verse, chorus, verse' song structure, because we all bout that now." To give you some idea of what happened, the album that followed this one was called Once More Around the Sun, literally a reference to just going through the motions. So Mastodon went from being the New Best Band in the World to just being sucky and boring in a jarringly sudden way. But "Black Tongue" actually sounds like a pre-crisis Mastodon song, and it's the first track on the CD, and this huge epic guitar riff starts, and you're like "awwwww yeah, we are going on another mystical magical journey through space and time, y'all!" But then the song eventually ends, and "Curl of the Burl" or whatever starts, and the album just dies a horrible death and you realize that everything is bad forever and you're going to be dead someday. Fuckin' Mastodon.


Fleshcrawl - As Blood Rains from the Sky, We Walk the Endless Path of Fire (2000 - The song: "Graves of the Tortured")

 

Ha ha, oh man you guys, now that right there is an album title. It is a title that someone thought up for a music album, and they actually used it. It is a thing, you guys. Anyway, this is death metal, and I've never been Death Metal Guy, and what little stuff in the genre that I've actually liked is way over on the more easily accessible side of things that real ghoul-ass motherfuckers probably scoff at, like recent Amon Amarth stuff, or that Dismember album that everyone hated for being "death 'n roll" or whatever. And Fleshcrawl is that most basic sort of death metal, with the Cookie Monster vocals over guitars tuned so low that hitting a string ten times sounds the same as hitting it twice, and things are generally Cannibalistically Corpselike enough for me to be too bored to hate this. But I got here once again through the one-two punch if the Curse of the Free Sampler CD and the Misfortune of the 99 Cent Clearance Sale, because damned if "Graves of the Tortured" isn't pretty much the best death metal song ever. It's crazy, you guys, it is GOD DANG HEAVY AS HECK, like I want to see a "making of" documentary about this where they recorded this CD in a quaint cottage in a peaceful meadow somewhere, but for this song, they constructed a special crane capable of lifting a Nimitz class aircraft carrier 100 feet into the air, and then recorded the sound of it being dropped on the cottage. This song will smash your house and all your pets inside, and the part from about 1:20 to 1:40, where they just BREAK IT THE HECK DOWN is a thing that is the best thing. The CD sucked overall, but I hope these dudes bought something fun with whatever fraction of my 99 cents went to them. They earned it.

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