I’ve talked about good albums with terrible album art before, but I’ve lately noticed several albums covers that, while not bad art, all share the unfortunate quality of looking like a particular part of the male anatomy. By “several,” I mean four, so I can’t even call this a top 5 list, but not for lack of trying; I spent more time than I’d like to admit on the Metal Archives looking for the fifth accidental member to complete my collection, but to no avail. If you find my lack of success surprising, please keep in mind that I only considered unintentional resemblances to manhoods in the album art for this list, so you pornogrind fans can keep your album covers to yourselves, thank you very much. This is a family-friendly blog. Glam fans, the same goes for you. I don’t want your album art and its very intentional allusions […]
10 Halloween Movies for People Who Don’t Like Horror
It’s the best time of the year. The leaves are changing into an arboreal fireworks display, it’s getting a little cooler out, fresh apples are in season, and Halloween is right around the corner! That means trick-or-treating, costume parties, an unhealthy amount of sugar ingestion, carving jack-o’-lanterns, and horror movies! Alright! Let’s watch some axe-wielding psycho chop up teenagers for the nine-hundredth year in a r-what’s that? Whaddaya mean you don’t like horror movies? Don’t like being scared? Uhhhhghghg… Okay, fine. I have some other movies we can watch that don’t match the definition of “horror,” but will still get you primed for the season. I haven’t actually rewatched most of these movies recently, since I’ve been spending any free time I can get watching horror movies like a normal person, so my descriptions are all based off of my memories of whenever I last watched them, IMDB summaries, and […]
Bands With the Most Misleading Names
As a metalhead immerses himself into the chaotic void of despair that is metal, he eventually becomes accustomed to some of the lyrical and artistic themes that define and distinguish the seemingly unending variety of subgenres that populate the genre. Eventually he is able to guess the subgenre of a band by its name alone, even if he has never heard of the band, never heard their music, or even seen their album artwork or band logo. Fleshcrawl? Your “flesh crawls” when you are exposed to something gross, gory, or disgusting. Probably death metal. Bestial Warlust? Well, “bestial black metal” is often used to describe war metal, and this band has both “bestial” and “war” in their name, so they must be war metal. Bongzilla? Oh, come on. However, this is not a foolproof method. For one thing, many of these subgenres are all still metal and unsurprisingly share many […]
Dear Metal Bands: Stop Changing Your Logos
Despite me branding myself as the only real metalhead (which is true, shut up), I am actually pretty open-minded when it comes to metal bands experimenting with their sound. Hell, my favorite band is Katatonia. Not only are they my favorite band, I’ll even go as far as to say they have never released a bad album, even with their continuously changing sound. But just because I grant them permission to change their sound does not mean they can go around changing their logo all willy-nilly! I don’t care that a band’s image should reflect its sound and should change with the sound accordingly. I still want to see the exact same logo that the band had designed when they had barely become legal adults (if that) on every single album, every single t-shirt, every tour poster, and every other piece of band merch until the heat death of the […]
This New Convenience is Rather Inconvenient
I hate flying. I don’t hate flying because I’m afraid of being on a plane. I have a good enough understanding of statistics to know the likelihood of my flight crashing, being hijacked by terrorists, being shot down my a hostile military, or disappearing altogether are next to nothing. My basic understanding of statistics also lets me know that I have an almost guaranteed chance of encountering at least one of the following: I could write an entire essay on how utterly useless and ineffectual the TSA is, but the fact that you can now by a FastPass to skip the line has already done the job for me by proving what we knew all along: that they’re completely full of shit. However, to the TSA’s credit, they’ve actually started to implement a few changes in their security screening process that has made it slightly less of a pain in […]
All Hail the Mighty Skullet!
Metalheads are sometimes labeled as “nonconformists,” but I think that’s a mischaracterization. The way we present ourselves may not conform to the norms of the general population, but within the metalhead community we have our own norms and standards that let us easily identify each other as part of the same subculture (and more importantly, to judge poseurs who aren’t). Maybe those who pioneered the metalhead subculture were nonconformists when they started the trends of battle vests, bullet belts, camo pants, and long hair, but now that those are the established metal uniform the rest of us are just following it to the best of our ability. And some metalheads ardently follow that last part, long hair, and they’re not about to let their inability to grow it stop them. These are the SEAL Team 6 of the metalhead community. The elite of the elite. The ones who are willing […]
The Tyranny of Touch-Sensitive Controls
Do you like your electronics to be easy to use? Have good functionality? Not require regular referrals back to the owner’s manual? Apparently not, because if you did, I wouldn’t be writing this article. As a capitalist, I understand that businesses are incentivized to appeal to consumer demands. The greater variety of demands in the market, the greater variety of choices. But the inverse of this is also true, which must be why every headphones customer other than me prefers they be sleek, solid pieces of plastic, because god forbid someone prefer to have a few unsightly buttons sticking out. I used to have a great pair of Sony headphones. They had a power button, a button for play/pause, a button to turn the noise canceling on or off, a volume switch, and a fast forward/rewind switch. Each gave me an unmistakable “click” to know when I had pushed it. […]
Great Albums With Awful Cover Art
Making an album is hard. I’ve never done it, of course, because I have a real job. But I’ve listened to enough crappy albums to know how hard it must be to make a good one. You’ve already had to collaborate with your idiot bandmates, the producer, the various studio techs, your record label, to finally release your work to the world. Except how are your fans going to know what to buy? The trick System of a Down pulled with Steal This Album! only worked once. You’re going to need some original artwork for your album. Let’s hope you got a better artist than the ones who made these: Illdisposed – Four Depressive Seasons One might be able to forgive Danish death metal outfit Illdisposed for the artwork of Four Depressive Seasons. It was their first album, released on a small record label, and limited to only 500 copies. […]
And the Moral of the Story is…
I learned many lessons one night a few months ago. I was split between attending an office party for my day job, and seeing the stoner doom metal band Elder play. I wasn’t dead-set on either, since I didn’t know how many people I’d know at the office party, but I had only gotten into Elder’s music a few weeks before. Since the office party began first, I decided to start there. If it held my attention, great, but if not I’d leave early, go to the concert, and buy a ticket at the door. I had never been to this venue before, but it looked like a small dive bar when I looked it up. Elder was no Metallica, I was sure there would still be tickets available the night of the show. The office party was alright. I talked to a few people I knew, had a few drinks from […]
Popular Bands With Terrible Band Photos
With its unending list of subgenres, the genre of “metal music” consists of a wide variety of musical styles. However, the variety of ways metal music can look is almost as wide as the ways it can sound. Some bands go all-out with intricate band logos, album art, and live performances, others take a more minimalist approach, and some use a combination of both depending on the medium. One medium that is no exception to this variety is the band photo. While Mgła requires their trademark hoods, leather jackets, trees, and fog, a simple black background and street clothes are sufficient for Obituary. However, some band photos even fall short of the minimalist threshold and are just plain sloppy. Due to the inevitable fact that any metal band, no matter how popular or talented, will have some terrible photos, I will be limiting my selection to photos from Encyclopaedia Metallum. […]