A Bloggerless Endeavor

One of the greatest most epic songs that I've heard in years.  Perfectly grinding and emotional.  I would describe it more but the only adequate way to experience it is to listen for yourself.

Modwheelmood is a nice little known project started by a former member of Nine Inch Nails.  Don't let that fool you though, this is by no means an industrial rock band.  Rather than try to recapture the same aggressive edge that his former band did so well to employ, Cortini's duo plays a far more calm and melodic form of electronic music.  Check it out.

Haystacks Balboa is a great psychedelic rock band that put out a single album in 1970.  Their sound borders on early heavy metal at times and at others is populated by organs or meandering acoustic guitars in extended progressive passages.  As in most of their songs the lyrics of The Children of Heaven are centered around 'satanic' themes with the chorus continually shouting away "The children of heaven are throwing their dollies away" and the verses describing a joyful funeral and more.

Music is great and there are a lot of really cool real recordings being produced all the time.  However, I just want to take a few minutes of time from anyone who is willing to listen to point out a few really cool imagined bands.  No, I'm not talking about ideas randomly bouncing around in my head I'm talking about fictional bands with music featured in movies.  There are a handful of real gems that may have been overlooked as amusing little novelties and forgotten after viewing a movie.  Just scroll down and take a look.

Sex Bob-omb is proof positive that when it comes to fictional bands Michael Cera does no wrong.  Featured in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World this band plays a kind of distorted indie garage rock that plain rocks.  Another notable imaginary band mention from the movie is Crash and the Boys.

Michael Cera should stop taunting the world with the great bands that appear in his movies or at least make some of them a reality.  The Jerkoffs are a fictious indie punk group from Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist whose thematic focus is on homosexuality as evidenced by the lyrics of this song, what more is there to say than “screw the man, screw the man, I want to screw that man!”

Russell Brand’s comedy Get Him to the Greek serves up the great and hysterical band Infant Sorrow (previously referenced in Forgetting Sarah Marshall).  Infant Sorrow is a fictious famous rock group who released a horrendous flop (African Child) but eventually recover as evident from this track, inspired by the events of the movie, that wraps up the hilarity.

Supergroups are a funny thing, typically they go one of two ways, either they're great, even stunning or they are somehow less than the sum of their parts.  Mad Season, luckily, belongs in the former category.  Grinding riffs and angst ridden vocals are delivered courtesy of Staley and McCready while Saunders and Martin do a great job of holding the rhythm section together on bass and drums respectively.

This is a cut of depressive black metal that features beautiful, sorrowful violin playing to go along with it's droning, buzzing guitars and harsh distant vocals.  It evokes vacuous images of a barren winter land devoid of light or life but perhaps for the listener, a traveler through the depressive soundscape.

Hell's Winter is a masterwork that encapsulates and conveys Cage's unique struggles and sorrows from his broken childhood to his extended stay in a mental institution.  This title track is the sum total of Chris Palko's life in musical form and is as complex and emotionally beautiful as anything else that he has ever produced.

Letting the Cables Sleep is a hauntingly beautiful piece that shows up just before the close of The Science of Things, listen for yourself, my words can't adequately describe it.

You like grunge but you haven't heard of Love Battery?  Well they're a great atypical group that doesn't sound quite like any of their contemporaries.  Love Battery's sound has a more psychedelic edge that might make their music sound a little odd in comparison to the other Seattle bands but they're still awesome.

Slaves to Gravity is a modern post-grunge band but they're a damn good one at that.  This is one of my favorites off their debut album, Scatter the Crow.  They just released a new album (Underwaterouterspace) in Europe earlier this week, check 'em out.

Everyone seems to know about Alice in Chains'  Dirt and Facelift thanks to the popular singles that appear on those two albums but the self-titled album seems largely unknown or ignored.  This is both a great injustice and a shame as the self-titled is a masterpiece.  This album is very doomy and sludgy and making the third track (Sludge Factory) the title track would have been as appropriate as self-titling the album.  One of the greatest strengths of this album are that it features a good mix of both very heavy pieces (like Grind or Again) and more laid back, beautiful pieces (or at least segments) like Heaven Beside You.

Coroner, simply put, is one of the greatest thrash bands to have ever existed.  However, this isn't a thrash metal song, rather it's an odd kind of atmospheric groove metal with some electronic influences, a style that I don't think any other band has produced before or since they released Grin in 1993.  While Grin has been dismissed by some of the more hardcore thrash fans of the band it nonetheless stands as a true masterpiece among the band's catalog.