All I know about Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is that they've supported Secret Chiefs 3 in the US.
Why I bought it: I downloaded the track "Helpless Corpses Enactment" when it was released online a while back and absolutely loved it. It was also highly recommended by a friend.
In a sentence or so: A glorious and unusually well crafted metal album. But perhaps it isn't technically "metal"?
Tell me more...
I'd describe the style as progressive doom metal, although often it isn't metal. Wikipedia calls them "Avant-rock" but that makes me think of Zappa which isn't right. Although the distortion is often left off...
The songs are slow, but often heavy and guitar filled. The lyrics are screaming in a doom style at times, but the band changes singers often and some tracks include beautiful melodic female vocals over unusual ("not 4:4") drumming. Lots of minor key. Often operatic.
While listening I had visions of a story a friend told me once while listening to Mr Bungle's "Disco Volante". His house mate entered and said "this isn't music". I think this CD will have similar reactions.
This is music. It's filled with melody and complex composition. At times it rocks. At times it confuses with time changes. At times it might even be a little dull but it's building up to something you won't regret waiting for.
Highly recommended but not for the easily confused.
"If they can sack Kevin Sheedy they can sack you."
I still think it's overly harsh to have a photo of Mr Howard falling on his face on the front of the Herald Sun. I mean anyone can fall over. If he'd broken his hip, THAT would have been news.
I don't even intend to use the drive for permanent storage, it's just so I have some room to move when pushing video and backups around. My little 80Gb "project" drive is starting to get sore.
The new drive will allow me to start a project I've been putting off for a while... the great Walken backup clean up. Going through tens of CDr and DVDr of Walken demos, jams and live recordings and organising everything nicely, backing everything up to new DVDrs and then putting the whole lot in the shed to rot.
Now if I could just get those videos of the demo recordings from Bruce...
LONDON (Reuters) - The British government rejected a plea to extend copyright laws for sound recordings to beyond 50 years on Tuesday, prompting the music industry to accuse it of not supporting musicians and artists.
The article goes on to quote many in the music industry complaining about the decision.
It's a pity the article has no commentary on why this might be a good decision, beyond the government line that extending copyright will not benefit the majority of musicians while increasing costs beyond that benefit.
Personally, regardless of my personal anarchist beliefs on copyright lengths, I think if you signed up to creating something under a certain copyright law and length then you shouldn't complain about it when it expires.
I'd probably support the UK extending their audio recording copyright to 70 years, but only for new releases. And only for the reason that you could argue life expectancy has improved in the last 50 years. 70 is the new 50.
The difference between sound recording (what this copyright decision is about) and composers is vaguely explained in the quote from the article below:
Under current rules, performers can earn royalties for 50 years from the end of the year when a sound recording was made. In comparison, novelists, playwrights and composers enjoy copyright protection for their life and 70 years afterwards.
So many older musicians who's recordings were made in the 50s are complaining so hard about this decision because so often they didn't compose the song, they only recorded it.
Do we really want to give the same benefit to cover bands as we do to composers?