Venus Blue's November Promo

Who the hell is Venus Blue? The short answer would be a bizarre, up and coming metal band from Texas whose material is free and, in this reviewer's opinion, well worth your time. The long answer, unsurprisingly, will take a bit longer to say.

But first, you should know that Sean Carroll, main man of Venus Blue, is one of my close friends.

Pimping one's friends is generally considered bad form, the purview of desperate self published authors, spammers, and other pushers of dubious products. There's some truth to that. After all, it's difficult to give an objective opinion to someone you know personally, let alone to publish such an opinion.

And yet I did not start listening to Venus Blue because I was Sean's friend. I met Sean a few years back through internet music forums, and we've stayed in contact in part because of how much I enjoyed his work. This is not a case of listening to someone's work to appease their feelings but rather the opposite, a friendship established due to the strength of said work.

So now that we've gotten through the disclaimer I'm given the task of discussing, perhaps even classifying, Venus Blue. But pinning down a genre is difficult here. Venus Blue is a synthesis of disparate influences, a project equal parts Acid Bath and Tom Waits, Manowar and Pentagram, the music itself a mixture of demented and furious metal, melancholy acoustic pieces, and outspoken stoner-style charm.

So, regardless of what they are, why should you be interested? Well, two reasons. First, I'm assuming that you readers of this blog are interested in both powerful uses of language and also the fantastic. Venus Blue is a damn good provider of both. Sean Carroll's lyrics can all be found at his blog. To give you a few samples, there's the first verse of Moonlight:

I feel the screaming cynicism of a brain-cell as it pops
An angel in a syringe that I'm powerless to stop
Nothing rhymes with suicide
Meaningless morning tears
I knew this day would come
For I've dreamt of it for years

Or, if you're more inclined, take the overpowering imagery of The Troupe's opening:

Star-born courtesan
taste the sun-side on your tongue
Sun-flavored courtesan
Taste the star-side and carry on
The witch curses the skies
Somewhere someone's lover dies
The Death Jester softly cries
The harlequin dances on and on

The second reason Venus Blue's worth your time is less specific to this blog. Simply put, Venus Blue makes great music. Of course, the November Promo in question is over an hour and a half of music, and a huge variety of styles, and it can be a bit overwhelming to start with. So, if you just want a taste, I'll say some of my favorites.

Dawn Over Moscow would likely be my pick for best song of the bunch. Red Death Blues is the band at its most crazed. Feast For the God of Ashes is likely my favorite of the acoustic numbers. Finally, Phobos Anomaly is, once it gets going, a warhammer-esque, groovy number that is ludicrous amounts of fun.

If you're interested, the November Promo can be hard in all its sultry glory right here.

Metal in Fiction (Heart-Shaped Box)

The overlap between horror and metal is fairly easy to spot, and perhaps that’s why a fair few horror authors have written something that, in some way, touches on the genre. Unfortunately, a decent amount of them don’t know enough about it to fill a guitar case. Like with any other subject, writing about a genre and having your description riddled with errors is liable to turn those who know off. Very, very far off. The offender here is Joe Hill’s Heart Shaped Box. I’m not saying that the metal inaccuracies ruined the book – this isn’t Dean Koontz’s Midnight – but they did grate at times.

See, “Death Metal Rocker” Jude Coyne has, at best, a very passing resemblance to a death metal musician. The timeline is the problem. We learn that Coyne was “just beginning his career when Sabbath hit it big.” (p. 46) Excuse me, a death metal musician starting up at the same time that the band that started metal was starting up? Years before anything even remotely resembling death metal would be heard?

Furthermore, we know that he toured with Led Zeppelin in 1975. The odds of a death metal musician touring with Zeppelin in ’75 were…well, zero, because death metal simply didn’t exist yet. There’s little agreement as to what was the first death metal album, but some of the main contenders are Possessed’s Seven Churches (1985) and Death’s Scream Bloody Gore (1987). The other two quintessential old school death metal bands, Morbid Angel and Obituary, did not make their debut albums until 1989. Even if we extend the question to demos and take Mantas’s earliest (1984), we are still nowhere near ’75. Hell, in 1975 Iron Maiden hadn’t even released their first demo (1979), and Judas Priest had only released Rocka Rolla (1974), an album that was as far from death metal as it was from being an automobile. The band most credited as an influence on death metal, Slayer, did not release their debut, Show No Mercy, until 1983, and that’s not even the album that’s viewed as an influence.

Finally, there’s the question of fame. Jude Coyne is famous. Recognized-by-children-while-parking-a-car famous. Simply put, death metal musicians don’t get famous like that. It’s debatable whether any metal musician does, though I suppose that Metallica could expect to be recognized with some regularity. But, if we look to death metal, how many of you think you could spot the highest selling death metal artists of today? Karl Sanders? Alex Webster? Adam Darski? Even if we go to the “father” of the genre, Chuck Schuldiner, I don’t think we’re going to get recognized by many people on sidewalks. In fact, I’m betting that any member of Black Sabbath besides Ozzy would be relatively unknown to the average American in a social setting.

No, it’s not an issue that killed the book for me, and I’ll admit that Hill captured the personality of a general metal musician quite well (and, occasionally – as with the grotesque collection – managed to nail his target), but I can’t say that it’s something that ever stopped bugging me while reading.

So, authors, next time you do a genre of music, may I suggest that some research may be in order? It's certainly not as objective a field as, say, researching criminal law, but there are still things that you can get quite, quite wrong.

Iron Maiden's Final Frontier

Today’s the day that Iron Maiden releases their fifteenth studio album, The Final Frontier. To say that I’m waiting with baited breath is to say that the Night’s Dawn Trilogy is moderately lengthy. Iron Maiden’s the band that got me into metal (still the my genre of choice), and they’re a huge inspiration on the music that I write to this day.

Which is not to say that I’m only interested in Maiden out of nostalgia. That couldn’t be further from the truth, right about now. I’m a relatively new Maiden fan, at least in terms of their overall discography, and the only one of their albums I’ve ever had to wait for until now was A Matter of Life and Death. When I got it, I thought it was one of the best things ever made, for a few weeks. After that, though I wouldn’t let myself admit it wasn’t as awesome as I thought it’d be, I didn’t listen to it all that much. I only gave it another spin recently…and it floored me. Back then, I was hoping for another Number of the Beast, something fun and catchy. A Matter of Life and Death was anything but fun and catchy. It is dark and brooding, epic and progressive, an album that threatens to drown you in its expansive soundscape. Though it’s nothing like Piece of Mind, Powerslave, Killers, etc, A Matter of Life and Death was a great album and better off for breaking new ground (the culmination of the sound that Maiden had done good work with on Brave New World and A Dance of Death and begun on The X Factor).

So, The Final Frontier’s got a bit of living up to do. There’s my childish glee whenever I get anything with Maiden’s name on it, augmented with the fact that my musical expectations are somewhere between Jaw-on-Floor and Greatest-Thing-Since-Sliced-Bread. It’s probably a bad thing to go into any album with expectations like that, but if any band can pull it off, it’s probably Maiden. So, if you’re a fan, you’ve already got the album on the way, and if not…you probably don’t care. All the same, I had to come out with this. Now I'm off to go check my mailbox...

Ronnie James Dio

[Note: The following has absolutely nothing to do with books, but it’s something I had to write.]

I just found out that Ronnie James Dio died. It’s strange, in a way. I’ve never met Dio; I’ve never seen him perform; I’ve never heard his normal voice; and I’ve only seen a few pictures of him. And yet, I feel like some of the color has the left the world forever, and it’s not coming back.

I’m listening to Rainbow’s Rising as I type this, and I think it’s the twenty-fifth time that I’ve heard it, but now the real world’s seeped into the album. The music’s the same as it always was: the chorus of Starstruck I can never stop myself from trying to sing along with (The Lady’s starstruck; she’s nothing but bad luck!), the epic journey of Stargazer, where Dio’s voice draws the listener into his own visions and where the listener beautifully bleeds for each laid brick alongside the narrator (Where is your star? Is it far, is it far, is it far? When do we leave? I believe, yes, I believe, I believe!).

Now, though, an extra note has entered the album; it’s a quiet note, inaudible compared to the rest, but it’s there all the same. The album’s highs and lows have something else added to them: the knowledge that the man enveloping us in his world is never going to sing again. That he’s gone, and that something as iconic as Stargazer, or Children of the Sea, Heaven and Hell, Holy Diver, The Bible Black, and so many others, can die.

But can they? No, I don’t think that they can. Dio’s gone, and the man of 67 that stood in front of crowds and sang with Heaven and Hell, the man that had to cancel shows to try and fight his stomach cancer, he will never sing another note. The man that stood in a recording studio in 1976 and sang A Light in the Black, though, he’s still here. The man that jammed with Tony Iomi in 1980 and made up the lyrics to Children of the Sea on the spot, he’s still with us. Just because he’s not there to lead us doesn’t mean we can no longer give him the horns.

In the misty morning, on the edge of time
We've lost the rising sun, a final sign
As the misty morning rolls away to die
Reaching for the stars, we blind the sky

We sailed across the air before we learned to fly
We thought that it could never end
We'd glide above the ground before we learned to run, run
Now it seems our world has come undone

Oh they say that it's over
And it just had to be
Ooh they say that it's over
We're lost children of the sea, oh

We made the mountains shake with laughter as we played
Hiding in our corner of the world
Then we did the demon dance and rushed to nevermore
Threw away the key and locked the door

Dio the man is gone, but his music is still here, and it’s the most incredible legacy that any of us can aspire to leave behind us. As long as his work is still with us, Dio is too.