Ping!

Still here good people, just been quiet, working out how life works now, and you know what? I think I might just have the hang of it. Sick, but no no sicker, and considering what I've got, that's as good as it gets, so that's good enough for me.

I will be writing more again now, both here and on Twitter, just needed a break from the whole blogging thing to get away from the idea of writing about being sick and well, it's such an integral part of my life now I don't really feel the urge to bang on about it.

Anyways, fuck all this, hope y're all good out there, and I'm actually going to catch up on all yr writing (you know who you are) and, I should imagine, roundly take the piss with the comments. In the meantime, I'm going to listen to Tony Oxley's Four Compositions For Sextet (which is a hell of a lot less dry and academic than it sounds) and Andrew Hill's un-fucking-touchable Compulsion!!!!!*. Oh yeah, it's a free jazz Monday, no doubt 'bout that.

And, this is important, if you like sludge, old AmRep or just good old-fashioned low end filth, go and buy a copy of the new Palehorse album, Harm Starts Here (Candlelight) immediately, it's exceedingly toothsome and your ears will thank you.

*Yep, it really does have five exclamation marks in the title. It was the 60s.

Borracho Y Colocado Y Contento

Now there's doom, there's Doom, and there's DOOOOOM. In the latter category, in the select company of Sleep, Warhorse, Ufomammut and early Electric Wizard, there's a band which way too fucking few people seem to have heard. Possibly because they're Dutch, and Holland doesn't really get a look in musically, even in Metalworld, but probably because they have the worst name I've come across in fucking years: Toner Low. Yes, they named themselves after a warning light/message on a photocopier. Now I've spent the better part of the last twenty years stoned, and I'd have thought that was a shit name for a band even if I was more fucking twatted than I am at the moment, which is very*.

Seriously tho, Toner Low fucking kill, their last two albums are simply fucking awesome, properly psychedelic mucky doom with a side order of foolish samples (see also Ufomammut) and (latterly) some properly Hawkwind style wibble. Hard to argue with that combination really, especially when it's allied with some serious songwriting/arranging nous. Of all the doom that's passed through my head in the past fifteen years or so, their last couple of LPs are up there with Sleep's Holy Mountain and Come My Fanatics in the stoned, heavy and simply fucking wonderful stakes. The last one, II, is a particularly juicy slab of earfood, four songs all hovering around the 15/20 minute mark, but with not a note, a noise wasted.

But it's a track from the self-titled LP I'm going to leave you with, the excellently named opening track; Evil Machinery On The Rise, featuring Ripley's waldo**, and the best entrance of a fantastically fucking loud bass I've heard for fucking years. Oh, and Dalek vocals.



Now that is the fucking shit. It's what Kyuss might've sounded like circa Blues For The Red Sun***if they hadn't had that fucking twat on vocals and even less regard for their record label.

*I'm listening to Motorhead at the moment, specifically 1916, a seriously fucking underrated LP in my opinion, but one which, even if it was complete shit, should reside forever in the pantheon of rock genius just for Lemmy's opening line on I'm So Bad (Baby I Don't Care); "I make love to mountain lions". Now that's fucking class. You may have noticed this footnote has fuck all to do with the main text. Oh well.

**Aliens, when Ripley's in the robotic exoskeleton kicking the crap out of the alien. All the mechanical samples are from that scene. Yes, I'm a fucking nerd sometimes. What of it?

***Don't knock it, that album fucking rocks. Sounds like a bluesier Fudge Tunnel with a Can fetish in its best moments, admittedly John Garcia is singing on it, but there's not as much of his macho caterwauling, and the lyrics aren't quite as laughably fucking juvenile as on the next two albums. Put it this way, BFTRS had almost as much of an influence on Boris and Green Machine as Earth and the Melvins did. Make of that what you will.