Blindfolded and Led to the Woods have a lot to say on their brain-scrambling new record, The Hardest Thing About Being God Is That No One Believes Me. But more than that, they have a lot of appeal in concert, which the New Zealand prog/death-metal quintet will prove tonight at the Shredder in Boise. The Bad Penny caught up with the band’s guitar/synth player, Stu Henley-Minchington, to discuss the album, which came out two Fridays ago via Prosthetic Records; their first tour of the States; and what makes a BFALTTW show great.
“You have to be really cognizant when a band says, ‘We’re not political.’ We don’t have that privilege anymore.” -Truculent’s Dan Timlin
—
As The Bad Penny nears the 50th installment of our On Tyranny series, we began to worry that our conversations with musicians, enriching as each and every one of them has been, might begin to become redundant. But then we connected with Dan Timlin, a musical and intellectual genius who opened entire new doors of thinking about the destruction of democracy in America in a hyper-informative interview he so graciously granted us last month.
We’ll even go so far as to say that, if you read only one installment in the On Tyranny franchise, this is it. Timlin spoke with us shortly before the release of Born for the Gallows or the Wheel, the latest album by his avant-garde project issued via Strange Mono Records. Interspersed in the below conversation are clips from the record to provide you with a soundtrack of sorts and to assuage you through something of a master’s-course-level class in music, psychology and politics that Timlin presented to us.
In the first video edition of The Bad Penny‘s ongoing Pet Sounds series, in which musicians gush about their love for their pets, Erich Specht – frontman for Chicago indie-rock band Push Puppets – introduces us to his 7-month-old basset hound buddy, Grizz. The big-hearted lead vocalist and guitarist of the quintet also shares fond memories of his late companion Louie, to whom he pays tribute in Push Puppets’ song “Probably,” and also chats about his participation in yesterday’s No Kings 2 action to boot.
“[At the Gates] are awesome human beings, and Tompa was the fucking unicorn.”
—
Many of us are still trying to cope with the sudden loss of Tomas “Tompa” Lindberg, arguably the best vocalist and lyricist in Scandinavian melodic death metal, last month. At the Gates, the band he led, helped pioneer one of metal’s best subgenres, also known as melodeth. Lindberg family, friends, bandmates, fans and anyone who reveres At the Gates are still processing and trying to make sense of his passing at age 52 due to a rare type of cancer called Adenoid cystic carcinoma.
But while people continue to shed tears over the loss of Lindberg, another iconic member of Scandinavian melodeth tried to help those still grieving by exclusively providing The Bad Penny with a downright hilarious story that could only happen in the world of heavy metal. Fredrik Andersson — who played drums for another legendary melodic death metal band, Amon Amarth, from 1997 to 2015 —simultaneously expressed his admiration for Lindberg and shared an Irish wake laugh during an interview this writer conducted earlier this month.
It’s something of a mass delusion among hard-core music fans that they’re the only ones who pine for special vinyl versions of albums by their favorite bands. What’s overlooked all too often is that such fancy pressings bring equal delight to the musicians who spent so much time creating their records and dream of them getting reissued in classy form.
To that end, Organ Dealer presumably ascended to cloud nine upon hearing that Horror Pain Gore Death decided to reissue the band’s first album, Visceral Infection, on vinyl for the first time. Released last month through the aforementioned label from Philadelphia, Organ Dealer’s first full-length is re-presented in glorious form for the 10th anniversary of the album’s initial release.
Below is our spanking-new (people still use that expression, right?) interview with Organ Dealer, conducted less than 24 hours ago.
[This article was originally published on Indiepit on June 18, 2009.]
Methodical. Serious. Fulfilling.
Those are three words that aptly describe Isis, one of the best things to happen to prog-metal since Maynard James Keenan first shook hands with Adam Jones in 1989. The band’s carefully calibrated, efficient – read: not a single note gone to waste – songwriting and live presentation have, over the course of their dozen-year history, graduated Isis to untouchable status. It’s gotten to the point where fans talk about Isis’ music as if it were a religion: each album an obligatory mass, each song a sermon that feeds both the mind and soul.
Coming off a string of their biggest concerts to date – and with their new album, Wavering Radiant, still sitting pretty on Pitchfork’s “Best New Music” lineup (it’s been months) – the sludge-slingers are at the top of their game. And best of all, as they’ve proven with each subsequent release, they just might find a way to top themselves the next time around too.
Phoenix, Arizona’s sludge-doom destroyers Goya have been bringing the heat of a thousand suns to the world of American metal for almost 15 years, and if you want to challenge that statement, tonight’s your chances. They return to Boise for what is bound to be a barnburner of a show with like-minded Denver pals In the Company of Serpents.
Goya will stage their gig in support of In the Dawn of November, released in June via Blues Funeral Recordings, while the opening act will dip into their new LP, A Crack in Everything, which theyissued the following month (and which features a guest spot by Goya frontman Jeffrey Owens).
In the latest installment of On Tyranny, Brian Amalfitano (Deaf Club, ACxDC) criticizes the right wing in America for abusing free speech to further their racist, sexist, anti-immigrant and fascist aims—including, shockingly, in quarters of the punk-rock underground. Amalfitano also provides insight into Deaf Club‘s newly released album, We Demand a Permanent State of Happiness (Southern Lord), what nihilism means in the guitarist’s point of view and how it might take longer than a generation to undo the catastrophic damage that the Trump regime continues to inflict upon America.
Following our Wednesday night conversation, Amalfitano touched base again with The Bad Penny to share sentiments expressed by a hero of his and of this website, Kurt Cobain: “If any of you, in any way, hate homosexuals, people of a different color or women, please do this one favor for us — leave us the fuck alone.”
Additionally, Newsweek reported Thursday that the Trump administration indeed may double it’s “bailout” of Argentina to $40 billion, while the cost of extending the Obamacare subsidies that is apparently at the heart of the U.S. government shutdown would amount to about $35 billion for the next fiscal year. (Meanwhile, the same Congressional budget resolution has already granted $29 billion in new funding for ICE, swelling its budget to a size greater than the national military of all but 15 to 20 countries.)
Read the interview to end all interviews with woefully underrated Brett Bradford, guitarist for Scratch Acid and frontman for Suckling. Check out previously unpublished photos of Bradford with his Scratch Acid bandmates, including David Yow, in my extensive feature for Post-Trash.
Mia Lin of L.A. DIY guitar band MyVeronica engages in a stimulating conversation about the impetus of real punk-rock artists meeting the moment and calling out authoritarianism and discrimination when they see it. We caught up earlier this week, following the early August release of Farewell Skylines, their split EP with Friend’s House.
The Bad Penny (beta) 