From the Vault: Live Blogging FYF Fest’s Save Our State Parks Festival 2009

Posted in Concert Reviews, Reviews with tags , , , , , , , , , on 11/17/2025 by Kurt Orzeck

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It’s a bright Saturday in L.A., and while throngs left town to get their holiday on elsewhere, the hipper masses stuck around to suck in the Save Our State Parks festival. A three-stage charity throwdown designed to offset the ever-looming California budget cuts, it’s taking place at the Los Angeles State Historic Park and featuring just about every “now” band you can name.

We’re talking Wavves, No Age and other frequenters of the Smell. We’re talking Dillinger Escape Plan, Converge, Torche and other smart metal bands that don’t have long hair. We’re talking Black Lips, the Thermals, Lightning Bolt and acts every other indie-rock blog out there is also yapping about. And to top it all off, Tim and Eric – they of Adult Swim fame – are conspiring to do something weird for 40 minutes.

We’re about to head off to the fest, and we’re going to try to pull off this while live-blogging thing, for the first time, at a show. We don’t know how the cell phone reception will be up there, we probably won’t be able to upload imagery till later on – hell, we’re not even sure if this is going to work. But if you wish you were going where we’re going, maybe you’ll want to pop over to the IndiePit Blog throughout the day, ’cause if we can actually pull off this experiment, it could be cool.

All right, enough dilly-dallying, Sally Salami. Time to get to the show, or we’ll be late.

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Poll: Which Intergalactic Brutes Are the Best, Gwar or Kiss?

Posted in Polls with tags , , , on 11/17/2025 by Kurt Orzeck

Following last month’s death of Ace Frehley, a founding member and the lead guitarist for Kiss, it seemed like a reasonable time to present a poll pitting Gwar and Kiss – bands that are pretty much equally loathed and loved – against each other.

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Chief Broom to Bust Out New Songs at Diles Que No Me Maten Show Tonight in Boise

Posted in Interviews with tags , , on 11/17/2025 by Kurt Orzeck

The Shrine in Boise is on fire this week, having hosted tastemaker-appetizing performances by the likes of Greet Death, Brian Jonestown Massacre and Bass Drum of Death in the last three nights alone. The venue aims to continue its hot streak with another must-see gig this evening, featuring Mexico City-based post-punk quintet Diles Que No Me Maten with local band Chief Broom of Boise’s own Mishap Records handling opening duties.

Chief Broom frontman Shadrach Tuck (also of Trauma Kit and owner of Mishap) and drummer Max Voulelis (also of Porcelain Tongue) imparted their excitement for the gig to The Bad Penny on Sunday night.

Diles Que No Me Maten “came through [Boise] last fall, and the whole band couldn’t make it, so I ended up doing an acoustic, stripped-down version of the set,” Tuck recalled. “It was just guitar, vocals, cello and pedal steel. It was fun. We kind of became friends after that show.”

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Exclusive Song Premiere: Ghoulhouse’s ‘Rotten Rancid Remains’

Posted in Exclusives, Interviews with tags , , , , on 11/17/2025 by Kurt Orzeck

Ghoulhouse is a band for the people. The people of Philadelphia, specifically. The metalheads of Philadelphia, even more specific than that. Sealing together grindcore and extreme metal – or “old-school, rotten, crusty grindcore/death metal,: as the band’s label, Horror Pain Gore Death illustriously describes it – Ghoulhouse’s new album drops Dec. 5 on said label.

If you need even more convincing to check out the band, Ghoulhouse recommend them for fans of Repulsion, Autopsy, Coffins, Dismember and Exhumed, among others. While Realm of Ghouls doesn’t street for a few more weeks, Ghoulhouse graciously offered The Bad Penny the chance to premiere one of the cuts from the record, “Rotten Rancid Remains,” weeks in advance.

Read our interview with guitarist/vocalist Rogga Johansson (also of Paganizer and Revolting), then check out The Bad Penny‘s premiere of the Ghoulhouse’s brutal new song.

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Exclusive: Mystic Circle Just Dropped New LP – and Have Demos Done, Producer Set for Next One

Posted in Interviews with tags , , on 11/16/2025 by Kurt Orzeck

It’s always unsettling, surreal, perplexing – pick your adjective – to see a black-metal musician filled with delight. But Mystic Circle’s Beelzebub had every reason to be when The Bad Penny recently caught up with the vocalist/guitarist/bassist/keyboardist who comprises one-half of the legendary German band for a video interview a couple of months ago. He and his partner A. Blackwar (drums, guitars, keyboards) had recently polished off the third and by far strongest studio album Mystic Circle have conjured since getting back together in 2021.

The harrowing Hexenbrand 1486 is a punishing audio experience through and through, and features grisly subject matter well-suited for the blood-curdling occasion. On the record, Mystic Circle explore the legends of Jack the Ripper and the Boogeyman, along with the Catholic Church’s nauseatingly cruel treatment of supposed witches and other nightmare-inducing topics. Marking something of a departure from the band’s blistering black-metal sound are allusions to horror filml soundtracks by Dario Argento and like-minded B-movie directors.

What follows is a surprisingly candid and extensive discussion with Beelzebub about the record, Mystic Circle’s career and other subjects that he graciously chose to discuss with us.

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On Tyranny: Australian Punk Project Schkeuditzer Kreuz Says Authoritarian America Would Ban Band From Playing New Song Live

Posted in Interviews with tags , , , , , on 11/16/2025 by Kurt Orzeck

“People forget that yes you’re allotted certain freedoms as a citizen of a country. It just seems like the notion of responsibility has gone completely out the window.”
-Kieren Hills of Schkeuditzer Kreuz

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The land of the freedom to commit crimes, the home of the craven. That’s what America is increasingly being perceived as by artists living elsewhere in the world, according to Australian punk project Schkeuditzer Kreuz (and anyone else with a pulse, frankly).

With the Trump Administration canceling visas for foreigners who have published a single social media post criticizing the US government, deporting authorized workers to gulags in countries where they’ve never previously set foot and directing masked thugs to shoot ministers in the head with PepperBalls® (did you know those projectiles are trademarked? Isn’t that rad?!), is anyone reading this article still arguing with a straight face that Authoritarian America hasn’t arrived?

But back to Schkeuditzer Kreuz, a project comprised by independent electronic music producer Kieren Hills. We caught up with him in late September, shortly after the release of his band’s new album, Swan Grinder, which he’s now supporting in Australia and New Zealand (dates below). Schkeuditzer Kreuz refers to a major junction in Schkeuditz, Germany – specifically the interchange that connects the A9 and A14 autobahns. The band’s motto is “one human and some machines, making noise, in the face of it all.”

With that badass info in mind, it’s our pleasure to welcome the first Australian musician to participate in On Tyranny, The Bad Penny‘s ongoing series about how authoritarianism directly damages artists.

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Darkness Light Up Boise With Joyful Set; Justin Hawkins Lights Into Crowd Over Cell Phones

Posted in Concert Reviews, Reviews with tags , on 11/16/2025 by Kurt Orzeck

The Darkness played a gig in Boise on Saturday night, and as to be expected, the always-entertaining British rockers delivered plenty of theatrics and pleased the crowd to virtually no end.

In what appears to be the Darkness’ first-ever concert in Idaho, frontman Justin Hawkins hammed it up in front of the packed crowd at the Knitting Factory Boise. He leaned hard into the glam-rock swagger that made the band stand out from the pack of detached fashionista indie rockers in the early aughts.

To that end, the Darkness tapped heavily into their 2003 debut, Permission to Land; six of the 20 songs they played derived from that record: “Get Your Hands Off My Woman,” “I Believe in a Thing Called Love,” “Growing on Me,” “Givin’ Up,” “Love Is Only a Feeling” and “Friday Night.”

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Fimbul Winter Has Come; Ex-Amon Amarth Players Call EP ‘Best Thing’ They’ve Recorded

Posted in Interviews with tags , , , , , on 11/15/2025 by Kurt Orzeck

“It’s much heavier than the stuff we did in the past. Yeah, it’s very brutal, but it’s also mellow and melodic. I love it. I haven’t listened to any other band since we recorded this, because it’s so amazing. It’s the best thing I’ve ever recorded.”
-former Amon Amarth and current Fimbul Winter drummer Niko Kaukinen.

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Fans of Scandinavian melodic death metal are notoriously persnickety. That’s particularly the case when it comes to evaluating whether a band in the narrow yet revered sub-subgenre has “sold out” over the years. The criterion is pretty straightforward: Has the band strayed from the raw, grisly production sound that characterized the first recordings by In Flames, Dissection, At the Gates, Dark Tranquillity and Dismember in favor of a more polished or – gasp! – mainstream sensibility.

If you consider yourself a devotee of MDM from the aforementioned locale in northern Europe, you may have noticed a key contributor to the rise of the subgenre missing from the last sentence: Amon Amarth. While perhaps more singularly responsible than another other Scandinavian death-metal act for getting Americans and others hooked on meth – oops, we mean melodeth – they, like many of the other progenitors, have taken a licking and even faced threats of getting exiled from the community they helped cultivate in the first place.

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Rock ‘N’ Roll Rebus #12

Posted in Fun And Games on 11/15/2025 by Kurt Orzeck
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From the Vault: Trivium’s Lyrics Don’t Make Any Sense

Posted in Essays, Sound Off with tags , on 11/15/2025 by Kurt Orzeck

Trivium is quite possibly The Bad Penny‘s guiltiest of pleasures, and we’re gunning to see them in concert for the 10th-or-so time Nov. 29 at Revolution Concert House in Garden City, Idaho. But to balance out this website’s legitimacy, we’re counterbalancing our affection for vocalist/guitarist Matt Heafy’s band by unearthing this harsh but fair analysis of his lyrics that IndiePit originally ran in 2009.

Hey, what can we say? Trivium is pretty good at breakdowns; The Bad Penny ain’t too shabby at takedowns. Also, any guilt we might feel over this lambasting of Heafy’s lyrics is rendered moot by the band charging $55.70 to attend the aforementioned show. Not cool in the economically devastating times in which the non-billionaires among us are currently trying to survive.

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