king rat on the streets in another life

I need to follow up to say I reblogged this last night, and this morning I got some of the best news of my life, like, a life dream come true news thing.

FUCK, I though it was just another lucky meme but LISTEN. Since a week ago I was waiting a phone call to confirm me if I got a job or not in my university. I reblogged this yesterday’s night “just for fun and because I don’t want any bagel to be mad with me”, and today’s afternoon, while I was losing my time as always, the professor I was supposed to work with called me and asked me for my personal information to start working with her.

and by this i DON’T mean “the virtuosic, technical one” and “the passionate, instinctive one” – my point is that neither of them fit the roles you’d expect them to. it’s more complicated than metal vs punk and it’s way more complicated than lead vs rhythm and it’s way more complicated than technique vs passion. ray’s one of the most emotive players i’ve ever heard and frank is a hugely accomplished musician in his own right and like. ray largely learned by ear playing along to metal records in his bedroom, but he’s also really into classical guitar, and him incorporating those classical sensibilities and interesting chord progressions into bullets really set them apart from other punk/hardcore bands on the scene and was one of the things that initially drew frank to them. and frank had lived and breathed the diy punk scene and was playing in bands by the time he knew three chords, but he’s also a legacy musician who grew up surrounded by blues music and musicians and it shows. ray plays the solos but he also often plays ostensibly “rhythm” parts (groundwork chords, power chords, keeping time), and frank often plays licks and melodic embellishments typically associated with lead, and if you track through the albums you see them starting to experiment more and more with what you can do with dual guitars as a partnership rather than trading off lead and rhythm parts or just harmonising with each other – by danger days (besides the solos) it’s genuinely difficult to blindly guess which guitarist is playing which part because they influenced each other so much. and according to frank, they literally never even argued until the very end.

'no man you don't understand the second album's live version has this track called desert song that they never did a studio recording of and it exists in this mythic space because the lead singer was apparently only able to perform it blackout drunk, like near death, which of course isn't probably true but in framing it that way it's like they killed off an entire persona, this version that only exists in recordings, and it's hauntingly powerful that way but then this motif of death of the self expands so far that it eventually becomes universal, the death we all experience, and then they killed the band man do you get it. they had to kill the band..they were characters and then he literally destroyed the band. he killed the whole band because he knew that shadow people worship is more powerful than the thing itself, but not in the plato's cave way, in a way that's specific to rock music and how we see the members of the band as part of its living tissue'