Thursday, July 03, 2025

fictional note A47

I walk around town and observe homeless activity. The city deploys staff to calculate my next movements. I confronted one staffer and said, "This is gonna be rough if you want to follow me over here and see this for yourself. I am the one having to go into these situations." He did not say anything, but we shared an understanding.
 

Friday, June 27, 2025

(posts) an excerpt about a glimmer of hope

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

 

Thursday, June 19, 2025

a quick review of a crossover punk band from Salt Lake City

Deathblow’s new EP offers more tall-guzzling thrash metal

I reviewed Deathblow’s three-song EP “Rotten Trajectory” in 2023. Those denim-and-high-tops songs sounded mosh-ready. The new EP, “Open Season,” tries to pick up where they left off.

The title track starts with some head-nodding hardcore, then steps into a fast punk-rock chord progression 40 seconds in. A textbook sound.

My favorite song is “Tormentor.” It attacks from the get-go with a rapid-picking riff. The song has a little of the old, nourishing energy heard in much of their 2023 release. And thrown in for the bargain is a hot little lead after the first verse.

But, man, the singer falls on his face trying to hit a high note at 50 seconds. I’d hate to hear the vocal tracks that didn’t make the cut.

The good news is “Open Season” includes some tidy thrash and punk compositions.

But the effort overall lacks inspiration. The music too often sounds rote.

The Salt Lake City band released the EP June 16, 2025, on Sewer Mouth Records.

Saturday, June 14, 2025

about Linkin v Dillinger

In my freshman year, I went to a guy's dorm to play guitars. I was pretty good. I played Slayer and Ozzy. A few years later he asked if I wanted to start a band. He wanted to sound like Linkin Park, but I was into The Dillinger Escape Plan by then.

He had never heard Dillinger, so I played "Calculating Infinity" on my car stereo for him. He didn't like it: "Who wants to listen to this?"

I asked the same question about Linkin Park: trend-chasing commercial music for idiots, I thought.

Since then, I shed some snobbery and learned to see his side of it. It's fine if you care whether people like your music. Like, when I listen to music, I usually decide within two minutes minutes, asking, "Where is the bite? What's in this for me?"

But on the merits of sounding like Linkin Park versus The Dillinger Escape Plan: Dillinger was an admirable success for over 15 years. Its audience was loyal, and the band's influence continues. Linkin Park changed nothing and shed fans rapidly after a few years. The lead singer killed himself in 2017.

Note:
- Success in the music industry is the Holy Grail, anyway.
- Funny, all the little details of these two moments.


Saturday, June 07, 2025

a review of a Thirdface album

A second listen reveals the pleasures of this rush of raw, invigorating hardcore, noise rock, and metal from late 2024

I listened to this album last winter and decided to pass. Big mistake!

Thirdface’s “Ministerial Cafeteria” is beautiful savagery—slam-dance energy courses through body-blow rhythms and face-raking vocals.

I rescued my download of this album from the recycle bin after “Sour” played on some playlist. The song offers so much.

It’s the most measured and spacious song on the album. The bass guitar steps up, and a patient but hard-hitting beat stalks menacingly amid a claustrophobic guitar. The effect is a gross, dangerous tension.

But urgency and abundance power most of the songs. The exemplar is the groove-chewing “Pure Touch.” This fucker is exciting—a nearly perfect song with its ferocity and change-ups. A coiling guitar riff sounds like rock n’ roll under spittle-fly vocals. The song is part Dillinger, part Jesus Lizard. I also love the spastic, syncopated “Bankroll.” The song runs into a few danceable grooves, including a great harmonic-driven riff near the 1:20 mark.

The Nashville hardcore-punk quartet released “Ministerial Cafeteria,” its second full-length, on November 1, 2024, via Exploding in Sound.

I mean, don't most of us wish we were back in November 1, 2024?

Saturday, May 31, 2025

about "The Plague" by Albert Camus

Rats wobble out into daylight and begin dying in ones and twos. Then by the dozens. Then by the thousands. This is how The Plague begins.
 
The authorities are slow to accept the looming tragedy in 1940s Oran, a port city in French Algeria. But Dr. Bernard Rieux, with a growing sense of urgency, finally goads the medical community into action. Rieux is the main character, and most of the novel's action unfolds in the hearts of the men in Rieux's orbit. They experience fear, defiance, isolation, desperation, and resignation. And in their trials they achieve moments of shame, faith, solidarity, courage, and compassion.

Philosophy—existentialism, of course, by Albert Camus—seeps through the pages. The human condition? Weakness and suffering and the exercise of moral freedom and responsibility in the face of an absurd and indifferent universe. Camus writes a dark story in which redeeming human moments sometimes catch the light.

The Stranger is probably my all-time favorite book, but no other Camus book, including this one, has connected with me the same way. The prose here is lovely, but the characters remain distant, and I never invested in them.
 
It could be my timing: when I read it, I had just spent weeks soaking in the raw inner lives of Richard Yates's characters; Camus's men seem aloof by comparison.

Note: The Plague was published in 1947.