Welcome To Stopgap City.

Band stuff: Been really digging in and trying to get better at writing coherent drum parts… still very much a work in progress, but the improvement is starting to show both in the actual beats and in getting them to sit in a mix. Gonna spend the next week or two focusing on fills and transitions. Plan is that our next album is gonna be full-on black metal/ doom with elements of industrial/ harsh noise/ ambient/ and tribal drumming. Kind of a nod to what we were doing waaaaaay back in the day when DD and I first met and we were playing in a band called DOTS. Oh yeah, I also just started working on the first set of lyrics I’ve written in a bunch of years. Which I guess means the new album is probably gonna have vocals. - Muzak: Old Man’s Child - Mid-tier black metal from a guy who I guess is also in Dimmu Borgir. This is one of those albums where I tend to throw it on less for the music and more for the memories of people and places that the music is wrapped up with. I dunno... The area...

Sure drum machines have no "soul" or whatever, but you know what they beat the absolute shit out of? Every single drummer I've ever played with... They don't whine, the don't cancel practice, and if you accidentally leave one blasting for 24 hours straight they don't collapse and die. Anyway, I listened to music today... - Khost - Heaviest band on earth continues to be heaviest band on earth. - Tzompantli - What if Mortician was a doom band? What if they swapped the horror samples out for rain sticks and those weird flutes that sound like they're screaming? What if they sang about ancient Mayan culture which is probably the most Mortal Kombat of all cultures to sing about? It'd fucking rule that's what...  - Primitive Knot - Crusty drum machine powered Killing Joke meets Motorhawkwind? Christ, it's like someone peered into my subconscious and created literally the exact thing I've always wanted to hear. - Aeternum Infinitus - Creeped ou...

Took a couple days off because we were busy recording stuff for the next THNGRVD album and I was feeling completely uninspired to write much of anything... Back today, despite the fact inspiration is still at terminally low-ebb. Oh well, habit over motivation. Honestly, you know why it's hard to write lately? Because I've spent the past fucking decade sorting through my bad mental wiring and learning it's better to work on shit I can control than bitch about shit I can't. So, when I'm bummed out or pissed off I'm usually heads-down working on music. And that's where I'm at mentally so that's what I'm doing. If you really wanna hear about it (you don't), the album will be out eventually. - Antigama  - Futuristic tech-grind from Poland. Heavy dose of Voivod-inspired guitar mangle puts this stuff in a pretty different zone than most bands that do a similar thing. - Corrections House  - Mike Williams from Eyehategod, Scott Kelly from Neurosis, an...

Took yesterday off ‘cos we were running some errands then working on music. Back today. - Luke Schneider - Spaced-out ambience ala Fripp and Eno or Stars of the Lid channeled via pedal steel guitar and what I have to assume is an entire assload of EFX pedals. Great album to wake up and drink coffee to. - Steve Von Till - I liked the newest Steve Von Till album well enough, but I like this alternate instrumental/ ambient version of the material even better. - Bathory - A while back I saw a video of some dude doing a crazy piano arrangement of One Rode to Asa Bay and I’ve been on kind of a Bathory kick ever since. - Dusk - Mid 90s death/ doom from Wisconsin. - Ossuarium - I spent most of the past couple years not buying much in the way of new music so I’ve been catching up on some of the stuff I missed lately. This Ossuarium stuff is killer. Gnarly DM with just enough speed to make the downshifts into chunking chugging doom feel like a long fall into an open sewer. Heavy. Gross. thu...

Man, 20 years since 9/11. Feels like a lifetime ago but I guess I still remember where I was when it went down... Living and working a shitty construction job out in the MA burbs. Boombox we had at the job site was tuned to WBCN. Howard stern was doing his morning show thing. Then the planes hit. Then the towers fell. Stern sounded rattled and signed off and the radio cut to some emergency broadcast thing. My boss came over and asked what was up with the radio and I told him that two planes had just hit the Twin Towers. He looked at me like I was fucking with him, made a couple phone calls, came back looking spooked, and told us all to pack it in for the day. I asked him what was up and he said his daughter worked right near the towers and he couldn't reach her. Caught a lift with him back to the company office/ garage thing, where my car was parked... He kept slamming on the steering wheel muttering "Fuck man, Fuck!" under his breath. I went home, hit a shower, called hi...

Got some sleep last night... Still feel pretty shaky, but I'm hanging in there. Sleep helped. Food will probably help. Might take a walk... We'll see. - Dirge - Super heavy Aztec themed melodic Sludge/ Death from Mumbai India. First impression of this was that the desperate raspy vocals sorta reminded me of Cult of Luna/ Heaven Shall Burn which is not at all what I was expecting based on the description. But holy crap... Some of the riffs on this thing are fucking massive... Almost winds up sounding like the bastard child of Eyehategod and Bolt Thrower with a hint of the above mentioned Cult of Luna and the occasional Crowbar style melodic lead thrown down over top.  Yeah, damn. This album is way better than I expected. Great bass tone too, whenever it manages to peek out through the din. Might wanna rethink the name though guys. Since there’s been a French band operating under the name Dirge for like 20 years now… - Xolotl - Rip-roaring Mayan themed black metal with some of ...

What's that one Fistula lyric? Something like: "Surprise! I feel like shit again today!" Yep. That pretty much sums things up right now... Not sleeping well and it's definitely taking a toll mentally and physically. Fucked up nightmares non-stop. Depression. Anxiety. Paranoia. And kind just wanna be held while I cry, but I'm six foot two and two hundred and fifty pounds of pissed-off space-viking so I'm expected to be strong and maintain. So I do. So I will. So it goes. - U-Men - I’ve always heard that the U-Men albums pale in comparison to their live sets, but they called it quits when I was like 9 years old so I guess the albums are gonna have to do. Killer noisy/ gothy/ punky skronk that is probably about as close as a band from the US has ever come to sounding like The Birthday Party. - Moura - Awesome, folky, "retro" doom from Spain with sort of a Mutterlein/ Los Natas/ Pink Floyd/ Galloping Coroners thing happening... My friend Rennie hipped ...