PORTAL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emrBZZtGFgI ok so this show actually happened before the EHG god show but i wasn't moved enough to blog about it till after i gushed about EHG. In general i was pretty interested in seeing Portal play hearing how they were more or less the new "cutting" edge in death metal and what not. The show had lots of appeal too.. you know touring from Australia, and playing with Krallice at a small club i like (kungfu necktie) seemed like a winning combination. but at the end of the night i was sort of underwhelmed in general. The band wore "costumes" which to me is a huge lets hide we suck by playing Halloween with our dress up party. If you try to dress up the visual element and presentation of your band is that because i'm uninterested in what you're doing??? Back to EHG and one of the refreshing Black Flag elements of that band that i love is that they are what they are kids!!!! But anyway if you watch the youtube clip of Portal i agree that shits pretty impressive. Live maybe I'm underwhelmed because all that sick technical playing is sort of hiding by the lack of of it being conveyed in a shitty small club with a mediocre sound system. They had a pretty impressive mechanical Armageddon type of throb but what they are doing live i just don't think it translated enough in the setting i saw them play in.

post brought to you by even more Yuengling forgive all the bad grammar and spellings

NEW SHOWS

fuck yeah fuck yeah ... Eye Hate God/ Brutal Truth in Philly. 20 something years later EHG are pretty old hat but god damn they were just blistering in Philly last week. and all ages show at the church basement that i assume was sold out and sweaty and hot as hell. Amazing stuff heavy wild and even reasonably tight for EHG. I was thinking about this while they were playing that for a guy about my age and 5-6 years younger seeing EHG is more or less our Black Flag. just a totally different edge to them then every other band you're going to see these days. nothing seems premeditated and they truly seem dangerous and explosive on stage and un-contrived in anyway. and sonically they just smoking. Hats off to the sound guy/ mobile sound guy from the Church (John something or another). If anyone knows me they know i hate hate hate house sound men with a passion. laziest fuck heads in club who just want to get shit over so they can smoke out back. But fuck yeah dude had the balls to run guitars through the PA!!! Hats off!! recording is smoking you rule.

Beyond gushing about EHG Brutal Truth was pretty cool as well. I don't know though I'm not a huge grind guy, unless your Discordance Axis or something I'm generally unimpressed or mildly entertained.. I mean its nice as a change of pace to see some non-psych rock thing now and then and get some speed on but in general i'm like this is dumb.

Funny thing too prior to the show i was trolling online and saw some Sonosax recorder and it jogged my memory that i own one of these Sonosax sx-m2 mic pre's. basically its a portable phantom power unit that DPA recommends to be used with my mic set (4052's). I had been using the 48v phantom power that's built into the Sound devices 722 recorder that i use and its always been pretty good but lately I've been really bummed out when i can't use my millennium media tube preamp to run my mics. Something totally magically about tubes isn't their??? Anyway, so i remember i had one of those portable sonosax pre's that i used literally twice like 4 years ago. I tracked the thing down pulled it out and stopped at Home Depot on the way to the show to get batteries. ( fucker uses 2 9volts for about 8 hours of record time) rigged it all up in the uni-bomber bag i carry. So after the show on play back after dodging crazy stage diving and the chaos of the show recording totally smokes. It's not as sexy as the millennium tube piece i use when i have access to power, but fuck for a portable unit standing in a crowd running my music stealing device out of a bag it fucking kills. why wasn't i using that thing for like the last 4 years?? duhhhhhhh. awesome stuff

Then on the back end i get bummed about the label taking a total shit.. recording is so good, the band was so raw and gnarly, just a totally shame no one hears it?? Be cool to just do like a bootleg club for like a nominal fee like $5-10 to cover expenses and postage and have 50 people pre-subscibed to just get random CDR offerings in the mail of recordings. no copy write bullshit, just stuff that was cool and sounds great in minimal packs. No respect for what a band wants to do or any of that shit. I can post shit on the blog i guess but MP3's are such totally shit. (ok i wont go back to a rant on mp3's and the Ipod but fucking A compressed music sucks)

PS this Sunday night rant has been brought to you by yuengling

NP sisterfucker!!!!!!