TELEPATHIC HIGH-FIVE, PUNGENT PLAGUE BEARERS!

Very few things grant the orifices on this flesh-prison much solace when they are relentlessly bombarded by horrendous demos, urban decay, and chemical substances, but luckily for all of everyone the best season of the year is HERE!

I have to admit, Halloween is more the start of Canada’s best unmentioned season;

“WHY THE FUCK IS IT SO COLD, THERE’S NO SNOW!”

I relish it. Lap it up like dog. It soothes a really odd part of me to see all the trees stripped of their vanity and the bright colours of summer swim shorts abandoned for thick black fur-lined coats. I hate sweating. When summer rains down full force and even your air conditioners frigid breathe can’t slightly deter the torrent of nasty seeping out of your skin; zero percent my jam. Give me those grey skies and a golden crackle underfoot, a thick skin and wrecked mind and I’ll be fine.

As we all know, everyone and their mom knows a Halloween song of some sort, be it Misfits or the always appropriate Monster Mash, suffice it say that those are actually rather far from the first place my mind goes when I want to make the boils and ghouls swing~

Take for example this bomber song from the 2004 release “No Survivors” by THE MOST APPROPRIATELY NAMED BAND:

If you’ve ever enjoyed Inepsy, Drunken Bastards, Motorhead, Speedwolf even, October 31 is pretty killer, bud. It’s very important to have a solo after most every chorus, and it’s very evident in quite a few of their songs, but that’s just rock and roll, baby. You get on board or you get ruuuuun over. Catchy riffs and speed picking aplenty, with a pretty standard backing to most tracks drum-wise, but other then that you really can’t hit the nail on the head much closer than literally calling yourselves the date of the coolest day of the year. Give them a listen just for that.

Up next on the docket is a band that I love thanks to my dad raising me right. We rarely spun records when I was a kid as my brother was the same as every 17 year old, “gotta have the coolest newest music thing” which at the time was this boss ass bitch of technological prowess:

That’s right, ladies. Two cassettes AND a CD player, the world is your oyster. Needless to say we rarely heard anything we liked at the time come out of it, so when we would venture off on family car rides my parents would stop at a gas station and I could pick a something to listen to on the drive from all twenty non-country CD’s that gas station’s tend to have. One such time, I picked up an album and before I knew it my dad had it out of my hands, bought, and in our toyota’s sub-par speaker system as he slowly turned the volume knob up higher than my mom usually liked it, and yet she didn’t say a word. The rest is kind of history. Know your roots.

This song is actually the byproduct of Don Henley strumming a chord pattern that sounded something like the “Hollywood movie Indian music”, but he began writing it before he was in The Eagles when he was in a band that faces the most vicious decile in name coolness I’ve ever seen:

’68-’72 – THE FLYING BURRITO BROTHERS

2002-2009 – BURRITO DELUXE

2009-2012 – THE BURRITOS

2012-Now – THE BURRITO BROTHERS.

Over all, I guess they just lost the ability to fly and re-found a brother a few years ago, but they were somehow cooler for a bit when he wasn’t there? Good for them, I guess.

Last up, and I hate to do it, but I have a confession to make.

I don’t like Helloween.

Maybe one or two of you caught it, but that isn’t a spelling error, because someone managed to take the most beautifully named time and just poop in it.

Pooped right in it.

Helloween is a power metal band from Germany and while people reeaally like them, Andi Deris’ vocal style on the early albums sounds like a dude who is trying too hard at a local pub’s karaoke night, really keening for notes that just don’t seem in his range. Other aspects of the band usually appealing to me, but that voice has also changed significantly over the years and I would say it’s lost some zeal. Perhaps a little of my disdain spurns from the fact that they have so many albums and now they keep seem to be money pumping older content dry. For example, this year alone they have released four albums, and one of those is just a best-of, OF CERTAIN YEARS. Anyway, I wanna wash it from my soul, so here is one of Helloween’s latest attempts to keep profiting off popularity over taking the time to write a worthwhile album.

Hopefully your evening is more witchy than anything, my friends. Go find a house that made the mistake of leaving the bowl unguarded, then steal the bowl because those are expensive.

Wash it and return it after, you’re an adult.

Boo,
-BEAR