I cleaned out the KV HQ but only by a tiny bit. A few records here, a few records there, here a book, there a book. It helps make the place a tiny bit tidier, especially the KV Man Cave / Production Office.
This allowed me to pick up a few albums in exchange for what I brought in. Obviously this is done at a loss but the time it takes for the ebay listings and subsequent ebay billing, if I DO sell the items, well, it's worth it to get out of the house and go to a place that at least gives you a respectable trade in.
The wife included Parks And Recreation Season 2 on DVD for her part of the trade, and gave it to me. That was nice of her. I can now watch this in the other room while she is watching Star Trek: Voyager on the PS3. This can be a comment on the soullessness of society, that our lives our empty to the point where we both need a separate distraction in separate rooms. The dissolution of our marriage? Separate TVs, separate lives?
No, dummies. Star Trek: Voyager sucks. I'm not a Trekkie but I'm married to one and I'll tell you as a NON Trekkie who avoided Star Trek, it's not so bad. Actually, Next Generation is pretty damn good. Hey, they had Lawrence Tierney on an episode and lived, so they must be some hard working guys n girls to produce a decent sci-fi show, though occasionally I do feel like the show should be renamed "Time Travel In Space."
But Voyager, ugh, is a pit of hell. No, it's a black hole that Captain Janeway refuses to dive her dumb ass ship, full of 2nd rate cardboard-deep characters, into. I was dismissive of NextGen but when the wife had it on, I could watch it. Voyager? I can not watch. "No, give it a chance. Give this episode-" I'm going to stop you. I'm going to turn off the TV and do something else. Anything else other than watch this hokey supposedly dramatic show with the worst framing for suspense and an amazing lack of respect for its own rules set in the plot to create drama and suspense. "We can't beam down. We can't beam down. We can't beam down!" "We're in trouble!" "We better beam down!"
That's all I'll say about that. So, I prefer to watch the same episodes of Parks N Rec over and over. I tend to do that with shows I really like. Watch them over and over and take mental notes of everything going on in the background. How the character reacts to the punchline. How the momentum gets ruined by the laugh track or studio audience and how the actors handle it. Not that I'm studying to be an actor. But I do write stuff, quality of which is debatable, and what I think works I obsess over. I'm a fan of Dan Harmon because of the way he answered "fan" mail in the back of his friend's comic book. So it's nice to have these on DVD to do that if the big TV is taken up with unwatchable Star Trek (Voyager, but "unwatchable" should include that) episodes.
Here's some CDs or stuff I got:
AEGIS - The Bridge
This band features one of the guys from Pelican, so I had to check it out. I had actually avoided "Tusk" and "Chord" and the other noisy Pelican related bands because why go to the even-more-artsy-noisy side project(s) when you can have the real thing? Well, now that the lead music-writer of Pelican has left the band, though they are still playing without him, there might be questions of their longevity. So I figure I better check out what they're setting up to do musically in case the best heavy instrumental band ever breaks up. This has singing on it. It's "post hardcore," which means that the record store didn't want to call it "emo" or "screamo" because it's hip to them and they add that they don't understand why bands like this get put into the metal section. Look, I get it. You hipsters don't want to admit to liking metal. But 99% of your indie stuff is boring and terrible, just like metal. Get over it. It's got guitars, lots of distortion, it's fast, and when it's not fast it's crushingly powerful. As a metal person, I can tell you that they won't be opening for Poison, and I think that's great.
It's pretty good but, like a lot of "post hardcore," meaning "heavy but not anything like the actual early 80's hardcore scene, and everyone looks kind of normal, so it's not metal by the way, stop calling it that," a few things kind of run together, and when they do, it sounds flat. This sounds best when their material is closer to rock than snooty challenging "post-metal." The opener "Wrong" is a perfect example of this. Starts off strong and rocking and then it gets to this light chorus thing. I want to say to them "wow, you guys remind of Helmet (the later stuff)" and they'd be all "Uh, hey, 'duuuude,' okay, whatever, pfffft. Dumb METALHEAD." I'm pretty sure that's how it would go. Anyway, there's some solid hooks and riffs, like in "Roaches" and "The Words We Say," and those liven up what could be an anonymous sounding "post hardcore" record.
BEASTIE BOYS - The Sounds Of Science
This is NOT a new record. But it's somewhat new to me. Lots of big cuts and a few things from their tribute to their own punk rock past. Do I have a newly found respect for this band? The punk rock stuff sounds like nothing new to me. I have a lot of the instrumentals that are on here thanks to someone making a copy of In Sounds Of The Way Out. I am not a rap fanatic but I give them props for making their own music. This was a few bucks, so why not? Now I have a good chunk of their hits...and those are pretty good. I don't their lyrics or music is as deep as everyone else says they are, but they make a lot of fun music...and I mean that literally. More rap acts should play their own instruments. Write their own music and sample it like this if they're not performing it. I don't mean your Rage Against The Machines, I mean stuff like Optimus Rhyme. There might be more but I'm ignorant of it, so if I stumble upon more and better examples I'll let you know.
BLACK COBRA - Invernal
I saw these guys open for COC and Torche in San Francisco. I thought they were pretty good. The CD doesn't have a lot of range. There's a lot going on and sometimes you can't tell what that is. Maybe because of the amount of stuff going on. There's also a lot of headbanging to be done, because it's still pretty rockin'. This is honestly just one step above Aeges. The singer sounds like Al from Ministry in the late 90's. I don't have more of their music to compare; I will say that the barrage of fast drumming and noise doesn't help distinguish one song from the next, but I still dig this, and will be giving it more spins.
JUAN GARCIA ESQUIVEL - More Of Other Worlds, Other Sounds
Bombastically loud KAPOW type orchestrations to start and end otherwise moody and groovy jazz background music. I know little to nothing about this Esquivel person but I am so intrigued at this point that I must here more. My friend called it "Space Age Music" but I thought he meant that sort of ambient keyboard with a hell of a lot of echo kinda crap. The kind that people use in their youtube videos to show you that aliens ARE real and the model the guy who faked the photo with is REALLY just a government coverup. You know what I'm talking about because it's three am somewhere in your life and you're curious to know if that one UFO the news reported on really WAS a UFO or did someone have an explanation and that part of the story didn't get publicized the next day.
One of the other things about liking metal is that YOUR FRIENDS WILL ASSUME THAT THAT IS AL YOU EVER LISTEN TO. This has never been true for me. Sure, it's a big bulk of my CD collection. Sure, I listen to a LOT of it. But before and today, I have always listened to oldies. I fell in love with Anthrax further when Scott Ian listed The Ventures as a major influence in Attack Of The Killer B's. Finally, he speaks my language! I have had a huge love for Henry Mancini's commercial music, the TV jingles and movie scores, no matter how cheesy you might think it is. And I'd like to expand my horizons just a tiny bit.
When I wrote Scott Janus Monster Hunter, I listened to a lot of 60's and 70's instrumental music. Instrumental-ish. The kind of stuff that you hear and think "this should be a soundtrack to a great movie that has yet to be made." The "Man From U.N.C.L.E." soundtrack I stole from my mom's record collection is still with me and still more interesting than any "Man From U.N.C.L.E." episode I've ever seen. A lot of this material was used for scene change music. I almost cried and was ready to start a fight when I was told that they wanted to use a different song for the opening. I don't know if it was the Monster Mash or some such crap but it wasn't going to be Cal Tjader's "Soul Sauce," which I had written into the script, and set the tone for the whole show for me.
Anyway, my friend the Fresh Aesch mentioned he was into "space age" jazz and I was like, "huh?" My wife answered that I totally loved stuff like that, and I was like "wait, I am?" Apparently I am. This Esquivel guy is right up my alley. No, he lives next door. There's some things that sound like "Rhapsody In Blue" meets your favorite vocal standards head on "I get a kick out of you" and there's stuff like "Chant Into The Night," which is the sort of thing I hear in the credits of my western-mystery-with-the-first-shot-of-a-city-skyline movie. Which I better start working on. Gotta love it. So I will be checking out more of this when I get a chance.
That's it for now.
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