SOUNDTRACK: ALTAR OF PLAGUES-“Scald Scar of Water” (2013).
I never think of death metal coming from Ireland. I think of punk and metal and obviously the Pogues, but noise metal? Unlikely. And yet here is some. And why shouldn’t Ireland produce music like this? There are fans everywhere.
I heard this from good old Lars at NPR. I’ve come to expect the unexpected from Lars’ picks. And this is no exception. The song is six minutes long. It has some traditional death metal stuff–growling vocals, incessant drumming and lots of noise. But there’s a lot more going on here. It opens with electronic noise and thudding drums. The drums are punctuated by alternating abrasive guitar riffs. The song meanders along until it settles down to some heavy heavy verses (I have no idea what the man is screaming about). After returning to the buzzsaw riffs, and repeating the verse, the song suddenly stops.
At 4 minutes the whole thing stops. There’s some scratchy noises and then some slow pulsing bass and suddenly the whole song turns into kind of alternative metal song, complete with chanting. It’s pretty unexpected. I can’t imagine what the rest of the album is like.
[READ: April 17, 2013] Between Heaven and Here
This was another book that I did not like in the beginning. Well, that’s not exactly true, I enjoyed the beginning but I really didn’t like the middle and really wanted it to end soon. Not a good way to feel about a book. The reason I didn’t stop is because it was so short. It turns out that an excerpt from this book was in a McSweeney’s issue that I recently read (and which I haven’t posted yet). I didn’t “get” the excerpt then, and while it makes more sense in context I still felt the section was really hard to follow.
And so was much of the book.
This is the story of Rio Seco, an area of California, and the citizens who live there. As the story opens we learn that Glorette Picard is dead. Glorette was a crack whore, the kind of girl who would get killed and no one would miss her. Except that people would miss her. She had a lot of friends and relatives who cared about her. She even had a son, Victor, who is 17 and studying his ass off to be able to go to college. When a boy in town finds Glorette’s body dumped in a shopping cart, he feels compelled to move her, to bring her to her Uncle Enrique because he knows that the police won’t care if some crack whore was killed. So he moves the body and that sets in place the rest of the story.
What was confusing to me was that the novel was constructed like a series of short episodes–different people and how they knew Glorette and how Glorette affected them. That’s not a problem, except that there’s very little indication that that’s what was happening. It felt increasingly difficult to know who was the main character was in each section, especially since so many characters overlapped. Which again wouldn’t have been a problem except that I really couldn’t tell which person was the narrator or at least focus of each section. Sometimes they were never identified, other times only after several pages. The chapter that was excerpted in McSweeney’s has virtually no names in it, it is just dialogue. And sure the dialogue was interesting and with the novel’s context made some sense, but I’m still not sure who was in the conversation. (more…)
