Yeah that's a good point. I just got the impression the photog was being a little antagonistic at the event and slightly disingenuous after the fact, and I didn't include all the many accounts of this story that have arisen since the first photo/allegations went viral. I definitely didn't mean to suggest that all victims of assault should be expected to act rationally immediately after being assaulted. Anyway this is the most detailed account of the story that I've seen (again via Metal Injection); btw "Neil" is the photographer/alleged assault victim in question:
I was at the show last night. First off, there were signs all over the venue telling people that taking photos / videos was not allowed. The security dudes were reminding the audience not to take photos all night, even before Danzig went on stage. Here's what I witnessed:
Earlier into the show (maybe a half-hour after they started playing) Glenn briefly stopped singing to call Neil out. He told Neil to put the camera away, stop filming, because it won't end well. I guess Neil cooperated that time since the show continued on well. That first confrontation lasted maybe 30 seconds at the most. Now, the main incident of the night: Neil's filming the show and Glenn points to him and says "You. Goatee Fucker. I see you. Yeah, you! I'm talking to you, Goatee Fucker!" And starts telling him to stop recording. Whole crowd is all tense and excited at this point, everyone craning their necks to see what's gonna go down. I couldn't quite hear Neil but I know he had to be mouthing off and continuing to film since Glenn got more and more aggravated, starts calling him a motherfucker over and over. Glenn tells Neil to come up onto the stage so Glenn could "break his spine" / "smash his skull". Neil decides to try going up on stage and he moves up through the crowd to get closer to Danzig. Glenn was crouched down by the edge of the stage at this point, and there were three or four security guards between the crowd barrier gate and the stage to keep Glenn from actually pulling Neil onto the stage and beating the shit out of him. Once Neil got up to the crowd barrier gate, the security dudes escorted him out of the venue. Glenn was still pretty pissed about the whole thing for a minute or two after Neil was removed. He said, "There's always one or two people– Everyone else here is fucking awesome, but there's always one or two people who are fucking assholes and feel like the rules don't apply to them. They think the rules apply to everyone else but them." So Glenn had a few words to the rest of the audience about the incident, how shitty it is that people can't follow rules, and then the band starts playing again and everything went well for the rest of the evening.
There was another claim that the security guards were unfair. I thought they were excellent and just doing their jobs. In fact, the security guards let me and my friend take photos of Danzig's stage set-up before the band members came out. One of the guards was caught in the photo and even smiled for the picture! They were shining flashlights at people with phones / cameras during the show, then telling those people to stop it, and they shut down a lot of people during the show so that they never had to be called out by Glenn. They know that this is the kind of stuff Glenn does when someone films him so they were doing their best to stop it before it came to that. When Glenn threatened to fight Neil and Neil was moving towards the stage to take him up on that offer, they had no choice to intervene and remove Neil since they can't remove Glenn. What do they expect security to do? Allow Glenn Danzig to fight a dude on stage?
I think VHOL was maybe gonna be #1 this month but the track they shared was not one of the album's big bangers so it got dinged a few notches. (Doug can confirm that one way or the other.) Tough month. I would say there were like five or six #1 contenders, including Panopticon, which we fucking forgot like chumps. We'll get another bite at that one in October though, surely.
Aaron is hilarious. He's super-busy with law school and taking care of his baby daughter, so he asked us not to assign him much to write this month. Which, like, no problem, we got your back, etc. But then ... he writes 5,000 words in the comments about all the records we missed.
And yeah we DEFINITELY fucked up not including Panopticon IMO. That was a total oversight on my behalf, I think I forgot it was new this month or something. That song is incredible.
This is crazy but I just keep reading that Slugdge blurb. I've read it like 10 times since editing it this morning. It's haunting me, man. I know Ian is trolling me a little bit but it really HURTS because that writeup is so fucking good that it makes me jealous or ashamed or something.
Just want to say thanks to Ian for thoroughly rubbing my nose in the dirt re: Slugdge's lyrics in response to my ineffectual attempt to rub Doug's nose in the dirt re: Slugdge's lyrics here. Thanks, Ian!
Pretty sure Scooter Braun is paying someone at Slate to cover our commenters' accusations of us taking money from Scooter Braun to cover Carly Rae Jepsen.
Guys, before I leave the office for the day, I just wanted to say thank you for the unbelievably generous response you've shared here. I'll be back tomorrow and will respond to some more of this stuff then, but so many of you said so much nice stuff about the review I wrote, and I just wanted to let you know it's really appreciated and I'm really touched. I'm gonna listen to the record again now while I walk home. You should too!
I actually stopped listening to it because I'm afraid I'm just gonna play it out and end up skipping past it every time when I get the full album, and I don't want to do that. But I would say I listened to it a thousand times before I got to that point.
It's not so much the lyrics but the way Het delivers them -- he's 100% viscerally embodying and expressing that energy. I actually find those lyrics more compelling because he's channeling something personal and real, instead of looking to outside sources for inspiration, even though he grew exponentially as a writer on the next few records. THAT SAID: Go back and check out Mustaine's original lyrics to "Four Horsemen" (fka "The Mechanix") if ya want to see how much worse things could have gone on KEA.
Oh Christ, not only do you invoke Cosmo but then that story opens with a shot of the original lyric sheet to my favorite Metallica song. Killing me, man.
I should say, too, that of all the decontextualized captions I appended to those New Yorker cartoons, Doug's was the one I felt guiltiest about, because he's a singer and lyricist himself, so his focus on words is, by nature, gonna be way more intense than mine. BUT I think it's safe to say we both love the early Obituary records, and I'm not entirely sure John Tardy even wrote lyrics beyond the couple coherent (and inane) words reflected in the songs' titles. He just opened his mouth and sounded like an undead army singing in unison and his disgusting dumpster voice was the best thing ever. Still, not gonna argue with Doug on this point because I'm gonna get my ass handed to me 10 times outta 10.
I can't believe you actually invoked Cosmo! I thought you were joking about that! Man, you really know how to hit a guy where it hurts. And after I made you the viking!
RSJ comes out of the woodwork. Yeah, I'm gonna hear it about the lyrics thing, no question. That's totally fair! I was just saying it didn't seem to me a dealbreaker unless it was egregious. But I'm not a lyrics guy in general, especially when the lyrics are unintelligible. I'd actually be tempted to agree with you about the traffic report being a reflection of the broader concept of life's mundanity or whatever -- that would make sense -- but the band lives in L.A., and the title "New Bermuda" is a reference to L.A., and L.A. is kinda known for having traffic issues ... so why a traffic report about the conditions on a bridge in New York?
I liked it OK, but it never connected with me as being substantively better than a lot of the Cascadian (or Cascadian-style) black metal coming out at the time -- this was a year after Agalloch's Marrow Of The Spirit (an absolutely towering masterpiece, IMO) and the same year as WITTR's Celestial Lineage and Altar Of Plagues' Mammal (two albums that totally floored me) and Bosse-De-Nage's II and Woods Of Desolation's Torn Beyond Reason and that first Ash Borer record PLUS you also had those first three Krallice records from 2008 - 2011 (all godlike) ... there were just A LOT of bands playing REALLY FUCKING WELL in that style at that particular moment, and Roads To Judah didn't hugely differentiate itself from the pack for me. I was editor of Invisible Oranges when that record came out, and I interviewed George for the site in 2011, but I was ultimately unsatisfied with the piece and it never ran. That said, I went to see them in November of that year and I got put on notice REAL FAST.
Deafheaven is exactly what I want in a band. In the next 4-5 years they'll release a masterpiece. Killing it now at Bowery.
I was using those links to highlight the fact that Thursday/Geoff Rickley is a direct point of connection between Deafheaven and My Chemical Romance. I was agreeing with you and providing evidence to back up your assertion. Sorry, I thought that was self-evident. I think everything you're saying is a hundred percent accurate. The whole "metal" thing is just a sidebar conversation that I personally find interesting, especially in light of the degree to which the band have increased the metal elements of their sound on the new album -- and ESPECIALLY especially because those influences are more thrash and death metal than black metal. But I ain't arguing with you; I understand if this line of conversation seems tiresome and/or tired.
Yeah well I mean:
http://thetalkhouse.com/music/talks/geoff-rickly-of-un-talks-deafheavens-sunbather/
http://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/blog/an-oral-history-of-emo-with-gerard-way-and-geoff-rickly
But to say Deafheaven isn't a black metal-derived band is inaccurate; they openly draw from Alcest, Burzum, Weakling, etc. I wrote a whole essay about THAT too.
http://www.stereogum.com/1617782/deconstructing-alcests-shelter-and-metal-in-a-post-deafheaven-world/franchises/deconstructing/
That said, call 'em what you want. I love screamo, too! I'm wearing a Planes Mistaken For Stars shirt AT THIS VERY MOMENT.
Right, I was just drawing a through-line with the Mutt Lange stuff, I wasn't saying that Deafheaven are a modern-day Def Leppard (...or are they?). That was meant as an archetypal example of the way the mainstream embraces metal, but metal doesn't embrace the mainstream; it recoils and redraws boundaries instead. And those boundaries cover increasingly smaller territories that are increasingly heavily policed. With a different worldview, metal could be both inclusive and justifiably proud of its substantial influence on culture. Instead, metal disowns everything that slips outside its borders, even if it's a result of the borders shrinking.
Dan I think you're making some real salient points here. I think super-devoted lifelong metalheads (a group to which I belong, ultimately) have been conditioned to be suspicious of "gentrification" (for lack of a better word) for a whole bunch of reasons: partly because if you claim metal as part of your identity and pledge allegiance to that whole culture -- which is a fringe community by nature -- there's a tendency to feel as if the substance of your own life has been diluted or devalued when outsiders start co-opting bits and pieces of that culture WITHOUT pledging allegiance. That's mostly paranoia but I can't say it's entirely without justification. (To wit: this unforgivable nonsense.)
But it's also partly, honestly, because a lot of metal-mainstreaming has led to bad music. "The Black Album" is the best-selling album of the Soundscan era, but no real fan will tell you it's their favorite Metallica record, and that's because it's objectively much, much worse than the four records that precede it in the band's catalog. (That's just one example; I won't get into, like, Warrant or Limp Bizkit or Disturbed or whatever.)
It gets confusing though because the sound of metal in general has been adopted by non-metal music. In 1983, Def Leppard released Pyromania, which sold more than 10 million units. That was a celebrated, commercially ambitious record by a metal band that sort of asserted the genre's dominance as it was reaching its peak moment. That record's sound is owed in large part to its producer, Mutt Lange, who in 1997 applied that same sound to Shania Twain's Come On Over, which sold 40 million copies -- and is in no way considered to be a "metal" record" despite its roots. That's just one example; there are a billion more. Kurt Cobain insisted on Andy Wallace to mix Nevermind because Wallace had mixed Slayer's Reign In Blood. For that matter, Kerry King played guitar on "No Sleep Till Brooklyn." The list goes on FOREVER. Hell, both Max Martin and Shellback were in metal bands before they were platinum-pop hitmakers. Etc., etc., ad infinitum.
Obviously that's all part of a natural and valuable cultural evolution and it has resulted in a universe of great music, but if you're a staunch metal-only traditionalist, you might feel as though you've been robbed of something essential to you, and you've been forced to retreat into darker and smaller corners in order to maintain that essence and maybe even what you perceive to be your own identity. (I feel like there's a reasonable parallel to be made here with Donald Trump's demagoguery.)
No, you're right, it's totally harmless. I just found it kind of cloying and aesthetically unpleasant. But I wouldn't have cared at all (or even noticed) if I hadn't hyped myself up for something else entirely, and that's on me, not Colbert. My b. Sorry guys!
Oh nah, sorry man, I was being sarcastic -- I didn't really think it was genius at all. I thought it was unfunny and awkward and obvious and extremely pointless. I think I was expecting something more along the lines of the Colbert Report -- like, smart and subversive -- but as I watched this and saw the broad, slapsticky, dad-joke tone he was striking throughout, it occurred to me that the audience he's trying to reach is not the Comedy Central crowd and a lot of them might actually just take him at his word if he were to introduce Vampire Weekend as a Paul Simon cover band. I was super disappointed! I got no joy watching Colbert take a verse on "Me And Julio." It kinda made my skin crawl actually.
CROW EATEN.
Genius comedy right there.
The lesson to be learned from this gigantic mess? Occam's Razor, you guys: When you're presented with an elaborate prank involving the promise of a clearly nonexistent Paul Simon tribute band performing on a late-night TV show hosted by a fairly subversive postmodernist entertainer, don't start parsing Twitter timelines and font similarities and nipple placement looking for hidden clues. Just expect Paul Simon.
I'm a hundred percent wrong. I didn't look closely at them, and was thrown by the tight kerning on Modern Vampires. Ran this test myself and came up with this:
My apologies, Doris. WE ARE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS HERE, PEOPLE.
Nah, V-Dubs are legit a pretty big-ish deal. Right?
This line from Troubled Waters' bio makes me want to put money on it being VW:
"Evoking the heavenly vocals, poignant lyrics, and sensible wardrobe of the greatest folk-rock artist of all time, Troubled Waters has taken every effort to mimic that classic P-Sim sound, with the exception of some of the more complex arrangements on Graceland."
"Sensible wardrobe"?
"That classic P-Sim sound, with the exception of some of the more complex arrangements on Graceland"?
Gotta be Vampy Weeks, I'm sure of it. I'll come back later when this has been conclusively solved to either eat crow or accept congratulations for this fine bit of detective work.
So this is why we held Sivyj Yar for Sept. Black Market. You don't have to wait anymore to hear the album: http://www.stereogum.com/1828282/stream-sivyj-yar-burial-shrouds-stereogum-premiere/mp3s/
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