My bass

I bought these yesterday!

RATM becomes Melt-Banana

The cassette player in my car got screwed a few weeks back. It plays songs at about 4 times their original speed. I've listened to Renegades of Funk, the album, almost always while driving. So the tape player getting screwed didn't stop me from listening to it. I still play it everyday, side a and side b. The extra revolutions make RATM sound like a groovy Melt-Banana and its just mind blowing. You should try this at home.
I listened to The Bedlam in Goliath by The Mars Volta just now, twice back to back. This is the first time I'm listening to these guys and wow they kicked my ass. Great prog music. Downloading Amputechture and listening to Hawkwind's In Search of Space in the meanwhile.

Hydrabad

I’m taking the elevator a lot these days at work. It should come as no surprise as I am a lazy ass. I noticed that the doors-open button was looking brand new and unused and the doors-close button was looking so worn out that it is difficult to imagine that it’s a button. I mean wtf? This demonstrates how concerned Hyderabadis are about not wasting time. You can see the same behavior on the roads too. If you were to drive in Hyderabad, be very careful while you put on your indicator to change lanes, because people will ram you down if you aren’t too rash and random in your lane-changing act. In fact you are likely to get rammed down even if you drive in a straight line. To maximize your chances of survival, the trick is to drive in as random a path as possible. Beautiful city this is, truly a blessed place.

The pwnerers

What good is it to blame the system. System here meaning the government, institutions etc. Any large group of people tends to behave like a machine - a complex machine - but a machine, whose behavior is predictable. That is exactly what pisses me off. I'm typing all this while listening to The Melvins. Non linear thought. Randomness. Psychotic grooves. Some of the words that come to mind. Now I'm thinking why the fuck I even began writing that shit about the System. Divine bassline, meditating drummer, corrosive guitar riff, fuzz jazz, a million ideas. The Melvins will smash your head. There was a kid who wrote a review of an album of The Melvins, praising them to the skies on an obscure kvlt website. A week later his head was smashed by The Melvins. I mean, literally. They landed up at his house one morning and simply smashed his head, and played stoner rock at his place. And they didn't stop at that. Later that evening they thew a party at the kid's place. Their main claim to fame came in 2007 when they became the first band to kill more than 2000 lazy ass teenagers who listened to The Melvins religiously. Its surprising how few people know about this wonderful band. Now they will be remembered at least for their famous killer parties. Curiosity might have killed the cat (no one seems to know exactly how, but they are pretty sure that it did), but The Melvins definitely did kill and they will kill. Didn't someone kill the government?

Desmond Morris

The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris is a brilliant attempt to explain the evolution of man, in a sense. It is a very interesting commentary on how man fails to grasp that he is just one more species on the surface of the planet. Man surely has achieved a hell of a lot of more things that our animal counterparts haven't even got the ability to begin understanding. But the biggest drawback of our evolutionary process seems to be that our biological system has failed to evolve on equal terms with the immense evolution of the human brain. Biologically we aren't much different from the monkey - as a result, at some fundamental level, the big urban societies we have built for ourselves suffer from essentially the same problems that animals in captivity have to face. The book takes us through a brilliant analysis of the human zoo.

Gonzo

I read The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe not so long ago. It had some of the most entertaining short stories in the first person narrative. They aren't exactly short stories, as one could call them essays or journals or articles or even, poems, sometimes. I need to get into more gonzo journalism.

The Dillinger Escape Plan

Its been a while since I've written anything here. Life in the last one year has for a large part been a vague blur. Owing to no broadband at home I haven't listened to any new music and the only listening I've been able to do is on my train ride to work. If there's one band that has really rocked my world in the recent times, it is The Dillinger Escape Plan. Fans of music in the extreme-hardcore realm will do well to check out the band's twisted debut EP Under the running board, which has a total running time of 7 minutes and 33 seconds. I will write about that album in another post. What I'm here to write about is the band's second EP Irony is a dead scene which features one of the greatest vocalist of our times - Mike Patton. Mike Patton is an enlightening musician. When did vocalists forget that language and lyrics were just convenient tools for making melodies? The true vocal melody should bend the mind by using not mere words, but by chanting and sceaming. Mike Patton's vocal style is a marked departure from the convention, emphasizing clearly what we expect to get out of music - madness and bliss. To see my point, go listen to the song When good dogs do bad things. The guitars and drums on the album are also equally genius - end result - a masterpiece of sound.

destroy your throne. wander off into the street. the monkey is trying to kick the dust and smell the coffee. get some sleep. walk some more. gateway. can you see the light at the end of the rainbow? or what is it that one is supposed to see at the end of the rainbow? garbage. crave. bleak. grime. how many balls can the monkey juggle at a time, you think. but the monkey doesn't care for the circus. the monkey is mad. the circus got it all wrong. way, way wrong. fruit.

The Great Doom

I like Kyuss a lot. I worship them. Their style of groovy rock and roll has been growing on me ever since I first listened to the mother of all stoner/rock/doom/desert albums “Welcome to the Sky Valley”. It is a collection of 10 mammoth tracks which are driven by a relentless rhythm section comprised of Brant Bjork on the skins and the mighty Scott Reeder on the bass. The guitarist Josh Homme is a god of desert-blues guitar playing, always walking the line of groove and craziness. John Garcia, the vocalist, achieves what I call one of the best vocal performances in the history of rock and roll. Listen to the tracks “Supa Scoopa & Mighty Scoop” and “Odyssey” and wander off into the burning desert. Naturally I began searching for all things doom. This led me to a dirty, muddy, druggy, bluesy land of music called The Great Doom, where I found other bands like Sleep, The Obsessed, Greenleaf, Earth, Eyehategod, Goatsnake, Unida, Acrimony, Electric Wizard, Melvins, Neurosis, Old Man Gloom, Wolf Eyes and many more. “Tumuli Shroomaroom” by Acrimony has to be one of the greatest stoner/desert albums released after Kyuss disbanded. Acrimony has a mystical, dreamlike, almost medieval nature to its sound. Listen to Sleep’s Dopesmoker. Its probably the greatest hymn written in praise of the herb. Its deeply meditative groove is destructive. That one song has the power to conjure up images of scorching earth and molten lava. The Melvins is an other three member mad clown carnival. It will take forever to listen to their entire discography and their music is noisy doom rock which is essential for anyone interested in madness. The ambient/noise/sludge/doom band Wolf Eyes introduced me to a few noise freak Japanese bands like The Boredoms and Acid Mothers Temple. I discovered post-punk or whatever the fuck people want to call it. Steve Albini’s genius projects like Big Black, Shellac, Rapeman are about raw, pissed off, garage recorded punk. Eyehategod are sludgy psychedelic maniacs who tell their wicked drug addled stories to make you want to kill yourself. This is Heavy, motherfuckers.