Long time, no updates. Yeah, I know. My life has been a mess as of late. Internship leaves me brain dead, senior project leaves me a nervous wreck and school in general is eating at me. On a side note… starting your own business with no capital is a lot of work.
Recommended Listening – Lil Wayne “Always Strapped”
I got nothing to say. I got nothing to do. All of my neurons are functioning smoothly but still I’m a cyborg just like you.
Stage 1 (aka mock website) up and running. You can check it out here.
www.downpourcreative.com
Still so much to do. So much to do. No pain, no gain, right? Also, www.downpourcreative.wordpress.com and www.downpourcreative.bigcartel.com are up. Nothing there yet, but hopefully someday. In other news, does anyone know a good drummer!?
Losin’ my mind. 1.5 months and I’m gone. Out of here. Still so much to do. I’m not ready for this. Stay in school kids. Don’t ever grow up. It will ruin your brain.
Few pictures of a new painting I’m working on called “Float”. I like illustration but sometimes I just got to let some stuff out. I guess we’ll call that my “art” huh? I kind of know what the difference between “art” and “illustration” is, illustration is backed by a client/content/commission where art is kind of what you can bring to the table on your own from your feelings, life experiences, etc. Learning “illustration” has made it hard for me to do any artistic pieces because I always need reason to do something instead of just expressing something. Anyway, I sat down the other night and read through some lyrics I had recently written and decided to throw some of them on a piece of paper and build an image out of them. We’ll see how it comes out.
Sometimes it takes a lot of filtering through garbage to find a certain song I want to hear. Well, Google just made it easier with GoogleMusic. Type in a band, artist, song, lyric, or album and it pulls any website offering a stream of what you entered.
Just read Pitchfork’s Review for Converge’s new album “Axe To Fall” and let me say it’s dead on. So I’m not going to attempt to write one. I haven’t received my vinyl in the mail yet but did get a chance to stream the album from myspace a few million times before they took the stream down. You can read the review below. I also want to note that this is some of the best writing I have read in a while. While Converge’s new album is extremely passionate and well written so is Lee’s review.
Converge are this generation’s Black Flag. This generation might not remember Black Flag, so here’s a refresher. In the early 1980s, Black Flag and peers like Bad Brains and Minor Threat took punk beyond “three chords and the truth.” The result was hardcore punk. It was deliberately ugly and harsh; Clash-fetishizing critics have mostly ignored it. Black Flag epitomized DIY– they booked their own shows, handed out their own flyers, rehearsed with military discipline, and put out records on guitarist Greg Ginn’s label, SST. Despite shifting lineups, their mission never wavered: to destroy.
Destruction isn’t Converge’s agenda. They differ from Black Flag in that aspect: They build things up, not tear them down. But they can do so because of Black Flag’s groundwork. Black Flag made it okay to fight cops, to fight fans, and to do what punk always promised but rarely did: be oneself. The band was both explosive and implosive. It was destined to end.
Converge have learned from Black Flag’s mistakes. They work as a team and have taken DIY to new levels. Singer Jacob Bannon runs the Deathwish, Inc. label and does artwork for Converge and other bands. Guitarist Kurt Ballou runs a recording studio and has become this generation’s Steve Albini. Bassist Nate Newton and drummer Ben Koller have made waves with other bands like Doomriders and Cave In. Together, they whip up a catharsis matched by few. They play hard and wear their hearts on their sleeves. As a result, kids in droves wear Converge on their sleeves. (The band’s Twitter handle is “convergecult.”) No other current punk band’s imagery is as iconic. The face on the cover of 2001’s Jane Doe, the hand on the cover of 2004’s You Fail Me– they are the Black Flag bars of today.
The band wasn’t always so potent. It took a few albums to work through a wiry hybrid of mathcore and metal. Jane Doe was Converge’s watershed, honing their sound to a lean, abrasive essence. Over You Fail Me and 2006’s No Heroes, it expanded to include slower, abstract sludge. Black Flag went through a similar transformation. Their landmark album My War was equal parts lightning and Black Sabbath. Axe to Fall is Converge’s My War.
The album is, to quote The Exorcist and Pantera, a vulgar display of power. Bannon’s howl is exfoliating. His lyrics aren’t hard to parse: “I need to learn to love me”; “No longer feel anyone/ No longer fear anything.” Basic stuff, but it reaches deep and pulls no punches. Ballou’s guitar dials up the crackle of Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All. It gallops, shoots electric arcs, dives down to subterranean depths. Ballou mines the upper register more than ever before, turning leads into leitmotifs. The frenzied pull-offs in “Dark Horse” are pure Kirk Hammett; the supercharged chug of “Reap What You Sow” recalls the fire of early Megadeth. Ballou isn’t really playing metal– his band is too short-haired and quirky for that– but he’s out-metalling 99% of metal bands today. Newton’s bass heaves dirt divots; Koller’s kit is so murderous, it’s practically the sound of ethnic cleansing. The title track rotates through thrash beats, blastbeats, and d-beats like a race car driver shifting gears. It’s fast, greasy, and loud as a motherfucker.
Axe to Fall isn’t all axes, though. It’s also anvils and stone pillows and beds of fallen leaves. The record is perfectly sequenced. It starts with three seamless barnburners, then settles into smooth toggling between slow and fast. The slow numbers likely won’t get live airing– kids prefer speed– but they’re amazing constructions of texture and friction. Near the end, piano and glockenspiel make like Tom Waits and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. They’re elegiac and haunting, an inversion of the napalm death that preceded them. A huge array of guests help out, representing acts like Disfear, 108, Genghis Tron, and Neurosis. They are too many to list, but the bottom line is, they work. Whether they’re yelling, singing, or laying down leads, they fit their songs. And that in itself is fitting.
— Cosmo Lee, October 29, 2009
“A year now and nothing much has changed. Holed up in a motel in El Paso. This was meant to be my great escape. I got lost along the way. Amongst free HBO and take out. I’m gonna write my Moby Dick. More like scratching lyrics on paper plates. I spent the best years of my life. Waiting on the best years of my life. So what’s there to write about? What have I done? So is this my destiny? From starlight into eternity. The gods must be laughing down at me. Ha ha ha. A traveling salesman at twenty years old. Stranded in Ann Arbor with a flat tire. I watched the sun sadly set. Any younger I may have wept. Much older I wouldn’t have noticed. But I was out there in the world. And the world it passed me by. I was telling everyone back home. That I was taking it by storm. Instead I watched it from the roadside. What have I done? Are these the best tales I can spin? A boy waiting to begin. A man of no memoirs. What have I done?And you’re young and you’re gonna be someone. And you’re old and you’re ashamed of what you’ve become. Well take a look around you… You’re preaching to the choir. Ha ha ha!
Cursive – What Have I Done?
I need a web programmer, designer and copy writer who are down and in it to win it. Anyone? Love of fooseball, basketball, great tv shows and skateboarding are a plus.
Does anyone have or remember the “Skies Bleed Black” winter knit hat? I never got one. Along with a bunch of other old SBB merch.
14 years and counting.
