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»7th June 2006

Heat

This room is too warm. Being in the roof, the roof tiles and my ceiling have turned into a giant radiator. The window is wide open, I'm wearing my jorts and it's still too bloody hot. It starts getting warm in here at about 9am, which is rather worryingly the time I've started waking up in the mornings, far too early I'm sure you'll agree. Waking up so early has played havoc with my routine, usually I'm rolling out of bed at 3pm and can roll straight into a guitar solo. I now have a whole six hours added to the beginning of the day. I bet you're thinking 'but surely that's great, you'll be able to do more stuff in the day, right?'. Well you'd be surprised how little I can do. Usually when I wake up, everyone else is already awake and I can crank the guitar up and run through Kill the King AGAIN. Before twelve, who knows who's awake? I was woken up once by someone playing Eruption on a guitar, which I thought was great, but I'm weird like that. I don't know how much my neighbours would appreciate being woken up by my retarded minor soloing and E5 riffery.

The main reason I don't know the morning condition is because I've never met or seen my neighbours. The person in the house next door is probably a girl, as they were playing disc one of the same Power Ballads CD I have once and have been known to play shitty R&B. Now I proudly endorse Power Ballads and I do think Har Mar Superstar is really cool, but I also have a five foot long poster of Scarface and didn't feel like putting a t-shirt on today. Well, now that we've establish I'm not a woman, that getting up later is better and that my neighbours suck we can move on to something more contentious.

Channel 4 In The Morning

One thing I've noticed about the fourth channel is how bloody depressing it is before 12. This morning a programme about debt amongst pensioners, where we were shown old people cheated out of their life savings and saddled with debts from credits cards they had no hope of paying, was followed by a programme about teenagers who like to self harm. After this depressing start they went onto this stand-up comedian Sikh guy who was talking about how rubbish religion which was amusing. Mainly because the presenter is a stand-up comedian and he met a bunch of pagans in the woods marvelling at nature who didn't take too well to him repeatedly pointing out their priest guy had a dagger and that daggers are cool. After this shaky start I decided that the TV was contributing too much to the heat problem for all the 'entertainment' it was giving me, so I turned it off. Hopefully it'll pick up later on when Countdown, Deal Or No Deal and Paul O'Grady lift the bar.

Things to do before I leave Beechwood Terrace

There's a few things I've been meaning to do at the house all year which I now have a great opportunity to finally achieve. Firstly, I'm dettermined to use the bath, don't worry I've been maintaining levels of cleanliness with the evil, festering shower down in the dungeon. I figure having the bath so close to my room is a good enough reason to actually use the bath, however, there is the problem that there isn't a lock on the shitty 'sliding' door which the retards at Parklane stuck on the bathroom instead of a proper door on a hinge. In no particular order, here is a list of things I intend to do before pulling out of this house.


It's way too early on in the day for the oestrogen overload which is a Susanne Vega song so I'll put that down to the heat and put some different music on. Whilst I'm on the topic of mentioning anything that pops into my head I better remind you that there's an archive for all these blog pages which can be found at the top of the page. It took me bloody ages to type out all those links you know, so you better appreciate it. It's hardly a great way of sorting these pages but I'm looking for a more sensible way of displaying them and I need somewhere to put my huge Dungeon Keeper Guide which I spent too long thinking about. Expect a new 'Text' section or something equally pretentious to pop up on the menu. This site has become a real nightmare to manage thanks to my non-use of frames and other smart cool HTML techniques. Well, this is the price you pay for doing the code yourself in Notepad and not letting Frontpage or Dreamweaver stick loads of unecessary code in.        

I just had a great idea. Well, okay, maybe not so much 'great', but you've got to take things as far as they'll go on this site. I'll review a bunch of CDs I bought recently in a short and succinct way. That will be just super!

Possessed - Seven Churches (1985). After I bought the cool t-shirt I thought it only fitting to get the actual album and it turns out that along with a bunch of other bands including Slayer, Possessed kind of kick started the Death Metal movement. It's surprisingly good, a bit untidy in places, but then again I'm used to the likes of Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer etc. The vocals, which are mostly grunted and one of the main things I dislike about much heavy metal are actually fairly tolerable. Some far more informed reviewer said that the grunt on show in Seven Churches isn't quite as extreme as the guttural shit they produce now. Works for me. 7/10

Massive Attack versus Mad Scientist - No Protection (1995). Mad Scientist remixes a bunch of Massive Attack songs into dub. I haven't heard anything that's called itself dub before, but I can see similarities with what stuff by Leftfield I've heard. Regardless of my ignorance of this realm of music, I quite like this. It makes me want to get more music by Massive Attack and Mad Scientist at least. The eight songs are all pretty long but it's the sort of music you can have on in the background and really enjoy. You could criticise it for being repetitive but I like the overall sound. 6/10

This artwork had a lot to do with me buying the album, plus it was only £5.99

Minor Threat - Fist Demo Tape (1981). If you didn't guess by the title, this was Minor Threat's first demo tape, and they recorded it in their friends basement. It's ten minutes long and it obviously sounds like it was recorded in someone's basment. The shortest song is 48 seconds and the longest is 1:38. This apparently led to the emergence of 'Straight Edge Punk' (opposed to drink, drugs and the hedonistic lifestyle in music) which sounds like a load of bullshit to me as the inspiration comes from the song Straight Edge which is about not wanting drugs as a crutch to your life, the usual punky rebelion individualism streak there. Enough of punk politics, I like this record because it's short fast and angry even if the songs are simple and you can't tell what the guy is saying half the time. 9/10

Ministry - Houses of the Molé (2004). This is supposed to be Ministry's return to Psalm 69 glory and they largely succeed via their hatred of George W Bush. Houses of the Mole was brought to you by the letter W. The first song is absolutely awesome, however there's a decrease in the quality and speed of the songs throughout the album. I'd rather have had a 'Corrosion' style grinding instrumental rather than the singy harmony style shown on tracks like 'Worm'. This album would have got 6/10 were it not for the first secret track on track 23, cleverly named Psalm 23 (check the psalm out then check the song out and it'll make sense) which is just a re-hash of the first track 'No W', not a bad thing I suppose, but it's the fucking awesome solo they stick on at the end of the solo in place of the choir sample from 'No W' which gets this albums into the higher scoring regions. Stand-out tracks are 'No W', 'Waiting' and 'Psalm 23', however 'Walrus' is a waste of a track. It seems a bit of a shame that the best song on the album is a secret track. Ministry are really good at making really great songs and pretty dull ones, still, Psalm 23. 8/10

Aphex Twin - Come To Daddy (1997). I finally capitulated and got myself an Aphex Twin album. It's really cool, the first song everyone has heard but is pretty different from the much more relaxed tone on the rest of the album. It's pretty short but all the songs are pretty likeable. 7/10

So what if all the reviews were fairly high scoring. What's the point in me buying and then reviewing music I don't like, it's not like I do this very often. These reviews have really bored me anyway so I probably won't do them again. 3/10

This update is getting bogged down, better cut my losses now.


Extar, over, out.


Holy shit a new avatar! Isn't avatar a stupid, unecessary web-word? (I was being rhetorical there Your thoughts can be sent to the Valley of the Kings.