magic on my block

Eggplants and flowers offered to the orisha Oya, deity in Santería and Yoruban pantheons, goddess of cemetery gates.
Left at the fence of Astoria's Our Lady of Mount Carmel cemetery, popularly known as the Irish Famine cemetery.

bonsai rose experiment no. 1

The rosebush in front of my house (which you may have heard about before) is especially vigorous this year. I, of course, credit my judicious regimen of trial-and-error deadheading and pruning which began last year. I'm forced to curate this plant semi-clandestinely, as my landlords' parents feel the rosebush is theirs. For my part, I feel I'm the one who's pushed it to produce so well this season and as such I have certain rights of my own.

Like taking cuttings, for example.

I've decided to see if it's possible to train a rosebush into something approximating a bonsai-like size. I picked a cutting which had an abundance of branches while still being small enough to start in a pot. Internet research led me to believe that the success rate of rooting new cuttings is fairly high, so I got myself a pot and bag of organic potting soil and went to work.

This cutting, my first experiment, has a dab of honey on the cut end to stimulate root production (apparently this is a thing?), and I'm hitting it with 700 lumens of artificial daylight from a compact fluorescent bulb at least until it shows some evidence of new growth. Let the experiment begin.

Flaming Tusk media barrage

It's been quite a week, mediawise, down here in our spectre-haunted practice space.

First, on Monday we received an alert about a new review of Old, Blackened Century on the Penny Arcade affiliate metal blog From The Dust Returned. Writer/editor Autothrall writes, in part:

They've here written a pretty tight debut showcasing their potential, which rests heavily on the killer riffing of Don Blood and 'Zosimus'. Seriously, these gentlemen can groove, and though many of their riffs recall the primal, morbid ascensions and declensions of an old Slayer, or the more creative sludge of The Ocean, Cult of Luna or the later Isis records, I'd say on the whole what they evoke is quite an original trip, worth taking even if the vocals require a little adjusting (unless you're already into extreme sludge like Soilent Green or Eyehategod).

The entire review is available at From The Dust Returned.

On Tuesday the May/June 2010 "Golden Gods" issue of Revolver magazine was released into the wild, and on page 48 they include Flaming Tusk as a "Quick Fix", showing here (click to enlarge):



Revolver describes us as sounding like "...High on Fire and Immortal mud-wrestling in a blackened sludge pit full of blood, bile, lava and more blood." Evocative, no? Go out and buy every copy you can find, though Revolver tells us that last year's Golden Gods issue was their biggest-selling of the year, so tracking it down may not be easy.

And finally, Veteran free weekly paper NY Press devoted a half page in their music section in their May 12-18 issue to Flaming Tusk, describing us in the headline as "gentlemen metalheads".



The full text of the article is available on the NY Press website in the Music Features section.

To those who can make it, we'll see you at Lit Lounge on Monday, 5/17.

more praise for Old, Blackened Century

No Clean Singing has heaped high praise upon Old, Blackened Century in an extensive, entertaining and perhaps somewhat stalkerish review. Here's a taste:

Maybe it’s enough to say that if you’re starting to get bored with the metal you’ve been cranking recently, and you’re after something out of the box, you should go listen to Flaming Tusk’s horrifyingly enjoyable opus. (But really, be forewarned about the last song on the album — “Icy River”, which clocks in at nearly 10 minutes — it’s like the sonic equivalent of being tied naked to your bed with a dozen giant, oily black centipedes slowly crawling toward your face.)

I'd say that's pretty much what we were going for.

cab ride

About twenty four hours from now I'll be on a jet plane off to Granada, Spain and the beginning of my Morocco excursion. Expect plenty of photos and possibly some interesting audio clips after my return.

this week in Flaming Tusk

Atanamar at Sunyata: Mindful of Metal dropped in on the most recent Flaming Tusk show and I guess he liked what he saw because he's posted a glowing (uh, I mean, blackly glowing... in a totally metal way) review of the show to the internet. With pics!

This coming Saturday, March 6, Flaming Tusk will appear live on WNYU.org streaming radio's SOMA DEGENERATE metal show between 4PM and 6PM Eastern Time. We'll be playing about a half-hour live set followed by an interview with the band and you should tune your internet into the waves and listen. I'm not sure at what point or points in the broadcast we'll be on-air, but if you're a metal listener I strongly encourage you to set aside the whole two hours because metal selecta Navjot does a killer job putting together a playlist.

OBC gets a review

And the reviews of Flaming Tusk's Old, Blackened Century have begun to come in. First out the gate is Atanamar at Sunyata: Mindful of Metal. Among other things, he writes:

"...dissecting the influences here may be computationally intractable, and that is a wonderful thing. Flaming Tusk have a truly unique sound... Old, Blackened Century has violently appropriated my attention, much like Cobalt's Gin did last year... The songwriting is superlative."

The full review can be found here.

irrefutable wisdom about the Oscar nominations

Because the world is waiting for them with breathless anticipation, I bring you my thoughts on this year's Oscar nominees (or the ones I care at all about, anyway). To follow along, please find the official nominee list here.

BEST PICTURE
I was pleasantly surprised by this group, and for once I've seen half of them. The selections are really interesting to me: two sci-fi movies, an animated movie (well, 2.5 of them if you count Avatar and District 9, the former moreso than the latter), a small indie film with limited audience appeal, an orgy of profane ultraviolence, and an Iraq War movie. I haven't seen "Precious: unnecessarily long subtitle featuring both the source novel's title and the pseudonymous author's pen name" or The Blind Side, but in some ways I sort of feel like this is equivalent to nominating both Deep Impact and Armageddon.

So, Avatar. Have you seen it? It's statistically probable that you have. Yes, it's essentially "Dances With Alien Catpeople" with (possibly) goofier writing. Avatar's categorymate District 9 provides us with the contrast of a sci-fi adventure that's actually intellectually stimulating, but let's not kid ourselves; Avatar is the clear favorite in this category for reasons both cynical and pure. As for purity, it's totally undeniable that Avatar is a major triumph of visual cinema. The 3D is certainly the best anyone's ever seen, and it's used very effectively (ha) without being gimmicky most of the time. James Cameron has legitimately done something nobody else has really managed to do before, and he deserves his kudos for that. Cynically, however, I'm forced to acknowledge that the Industry NEEDS Avatar incredibly badly. 3D is likely the last major effort the Industry can make to get audiences back into theaters, and it's their opportunity to get 3D into the home viewing market (see also the 2010 CES conference). The Industry can only make massive profits when they successfully control content distribution, and 3D provides one last way of attempting that kind of control. Exhibitors, studios and consumer electronics manufacturers all needed Avatar to be a huge, massive hit and they got their wish. Whether the movie's success actually translates into the salvation of Hollywood remains to be seen, but they're definitely going to pile on the justificatory awards, as we saw at the Golden Globes. Do not be pissed off when Avatar wins Best Picture; there are Reasons.

Now, I would argue that Avatar's shoe-in presence in the Best Picture slot actually provides the space which allows such odd and interesting and probably doomed choices for the other nine nominees. District 9 is an excellent movie on all fronts, but typically the Best Picture category goes nowhere near sci-fi when they can help it. The inclusion of A Serious Man makes me feel like it's the mid-90s again, when the Academy was interested in paying some lip service to small, independent films. Inglourious Basterds is an idiosyncratic, ultraviolent, over-the-top piece of catharsis porn with some unbelievably excellent acting and the best object lesson in building tension that I've seen in a very long time. As such it could well have been nominated without Avatar's snowplow clearing the way, but, again, this feels like a very mid-nineties style choice for the Academy.

The rest of the Best Picture nominees are films I either haven't seen (Up, The Hurt Locker), or I haven't seen and also don't care about. It's entirely possible that Precious... is an incredible, moving social commentary, but I have serious doubts that The Blind Side is anything other than pukeworthy treacle.

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Christoph Waltz, please. That's one perfectly compelling, frightening Nazi.

In general I don't have a lot to say about the acting awards this year, but look for these categories to be go-tos in which the Academy will recognize Best Picture nominees that aren't Avatar. They may pull one of their favorite shocker moves and give the Best Actress statuette to an unknown first-timer in the person of Gabourey Sidibe, but... actually, now that I think more about it, that's a pretty likely outcome.

ANIMATED FEATURE
Up will likely take this because it won't win Best Picture. Before I saw Avatar I felt Coraline was definitely the best 3D movie I'd yet seen, so that's a contender. Fantastic Mr. Fox is great and fits well with the mid-90s vibe happening in the Best Picture category, but I think the award is more likely to go to Up. I, personally, would have liked to see Avatar nominated in this category, but those who know me are familiar with my feelings on just what the hell an "animated feature" is these days.

ART DIRECTION
Lots of strong contenders here, but c'mon... Avatar invented a whole world in incredibly rich detail (what up, Richard Taylor!), and this is a category the public understands very little about so it's a good one to toss at the Best Picture winner as support for the decision. Then again, it's also the only category The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is nominated in, so the Academy might want to make a final nod toward Heath Ledger and any kind of a nod at all toward Terry Gilliam. But it's an outside shot.

ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATOGRAPHY
Uh, duh... its achievements in cinematography are the primary selling point of Avatar. If the movie absolutely deserves to win anything it's nominated for, this is the totally noncontroversial category. Maurio Fiore had better be clearing a statue-sized space on his mantle. In any other year, Inglourious Basterds would win.

DIRECTING
Again, the favorite is Avatar, if for no other reason than it was clearly the most obviously difficult and consuming of the nominees to direct. Best Directing should be the confluence of the greatest performances, the most artful framings, and the most skillful elevation of stock elements past cliché... as such, probably every nominated film OTHER than Avatar has a legitimate claim to this award, but unless the Academy starts to feel guilty about the kudos it's laying all over Avatar they're not going to give it to anyone other than James Cameron. The other nominees are victims of bad timing.

FILM EDITING
A category close to my heart. While I haven't seen all of the nominees, I would really like to see Inglourious Basterds take this statue. Avatar was no slouch editorially, but the editing was hardly the overriding feature of the movie (and c'mon... three editors, one of whom was the director/writer/producer/overlord). Inglourious Basterds is a masterpiece of tension and tension is almost entirely about the skill of the editor. Sally Menke has proven her genius many times; let her take this one home.

ORIGINAL SCORE
Avatar will win this, which is lame because James Horner is laaaaaame. I'd love to see Fantastic Mr. Fox take the win, personally.

SOUND EDITING / SOUND MIXING
These are probably more gimmes for Avatar, though all of the nominees could probably lay equal claim to the awards and it would be nice to see some variety to the night.

VISUAL EFFECTS
Again, Avatar, and rightly so. Though in any other year it would be District 9... the seamless blend of live action and CG animation in District 9 was incredibly impressive and tasteful.

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
This is where Push... will win, probably. The Academy obviously wants to recognize this film somehow and a writing win is a pretty legit honor. Also, this movie is largely about the story of the movie itself, so there are metareasons to give it a writing nod. I just hope "Sapphire" comes up on stage with the screenwriter.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
I think we have a battle here between A Serious Man and Inglourious Basterds, though The Hurt Locker (which I haven't yet seen) might take this to satisfy the Bigelow/Cameron battle and because it's apparently quite a good movie which the Academy would like to honor in some way. A Serious Man is the nominee most dependent on the sheer quality of the writing, though Inglourious Basterds certainly doesn't lack Tarantino's skill with a screenplay.

And that's all I care to prognosticate about and this point. Enjoy your Oscar parties, everyone.

Old, Blackened Century

Tremble, world, for the moment is upon you. Flaming Tusk has released Old, Blackened Century as a pay-what-you-will download. YOU WILL. Try before you download by using the streaming widget above.

boozy musings

After a rather inexcusably huge gap in posting, I've published a short reminiscence of my time in Ireland over at Blotto, the Journal of the North American Booze Council. It is, as one might expect from the venue (both of publishing and of subject) largely focused on drinking.

I've reproduced the introductory paragraphs below, and a link to the balance of the essay immediately follows.

Ireland is, first, a blur of ancient stone walls flashing out of the night as we blast down back country lanes, fifty kilometers per hour on the black left side of the road. Sarah has only been driving for a month. She and her sister Emma collected us after we touched down at Shannon, we weary and bleary and them bearing broad smiles and accents. They were, immediately, the most fun people I had ever met, but it was now obvious that in this Rover was where we were going to die, grinning, sung off to heaven by broadcast American blues music.

No one dies in Ireland before they’ve had a pint.

Second Class on the Overnight to Drunkistan, or The Boozy Foreigners – Part 2

from the mouth of the Squirrel

Recording engineer Tom Beaujour took to his Nuthouse Recording blog recently to describe the "punishing task" of tracking the forthcoming Flaming Tusk full length:

"The absolutely massively named Flaming Tusk and their debut album was up next. Crazy-ass extreme underground metal. A smarter, more well-read bunch of guys you have never met. They are obsessed with bizarre spirits (of the alcoholic, not supernatural type) and had bottles of some of the weirdest shit I have ever seen (artichoke liqueur, anyone?) at the ready at all times."

Read more about Tom's further adventures recording Five Finger Death Punch, Mutiny Within and Upon A Burning Body here.

The new Flaming Tusk full-length will be out Januaryish.

douse the stars

The Flaming Tusk recording session has been going tremendously well so far. In the first four days we got eight songs tracked with the full band, and our remaining four days will consist of guitar solo overdubs and the remainder of the vocals. I, personally, am rather astounded at the amount we've done so far and how incredibly rad it's all sounding even before any kind of real mixing work has happened.

While the band has been relying on a combination of NJ Transit and the MTA to get to Nuthouse Recording in Hoboken, our intrepid engineer / producer Tom "The Squirrel" Beaujour prefers to arrive in a much more rock n' roll manner, i.e.:

This being our first time in a Real Recording Studio, we've all been working out various methods of expressing what we're trying to get across. For example, our drummer Dumnorix Χριστόφαγος conducts guitarists through the control room glass in this manner:

We haven't decided on a name for the album yet, though we have a good amount of time before doing so becomes necessary. Days Without God is a popular choice on the shortlist, but I imagine the brainstorming will ratchet up during the mixing and mastering process. Album art will likely wait until we decide on which of the many metal labels out there deserves to release our apocalyptic awesomeness, but I assure you it will be great.

I leave you with a little taste of what's to come...

Visit flamingtusk.com for lots more video snippets of the work-in-progress. As always, the Abigail EP is available for free download from music.flamingtusk.com

"The USA Today" and Dan Brown deserve each other

I do not intend to read Dan Brown's new novel. I DID read The DaVinci Code because the entire world would simply not shut UP about it ever ever ever, and I completely hated each individual page.

Because I am a very petty man, I was incredibly delighted to find my rubbernecked reading of "The USA Today"'s, uh... words... about Brown's latest justified by the gift of the following exquisite sentences:

Langdon is a professor of "symbology." (Brown says there's no such academic field. "The closest is symbiotics.")

If there were such a thing as "symbiotics", I assume it would actually be the study of the lucrative synergy between hack lowbrow novelists and remedial newspapers written by and for the lexically challenged.

and... go

This is it, eleven days until Flaming Tusk charges into the studio to begin recording the followup to the Abigail EP. It's a fairly un-metal thing to say, but I'm a big fan of Nada Surf's Weight Is A Gift so it's quite exciting for me to work with producer / engineer Tom Beaujour seeing as how he was responsible for the recording on that there record. Also, hell, he's the editor-in-chief of Revolver Magazine so you know he's got an ear for the heavy stuff. We're going to be knocking out this whole thing really quickly, but we've been rehearsing the material diligently and I'm pretty confident we're going to make excellent use of our studio time.

these are the bands I know, I know

Music!

photo by Michele DiBernardo

Seize Them! played the main stage at the Astoria Music Now! festival (because of the exclamation point, mostly) on July 25th. It was fantastic to see such a concentration of great Astoria bands and musicians, and I hope we get to play it again next year. As usual, the recording of the show is available for free download at seizethem.com.

---

Flaming Tusk will be taking a good chunk of September to record our new, uh, record with engineer/producer Tom Beaujour at Nuthouse Recording in Hoboken. We're hoping to get a bunch of our new songs tracked, and following immediately after our last day of recording Flaming Tusk will be playing a show at The Cake Shop on September 20th with Athens, GA's own The Dumps. We're probably going to be playing GREAT after two weeks in the studio, so you definitely don't want to miss this show.

Seize Them! in print

At long last, Seize Them! has been recognized in print. The luminaries at local press outlet Ins&Outs Magazine have released their article on us which began with an interview way back in December.

The actual article, unfortunately, is not on Ins&Outs' website, but I did take the time to type it all out and post it on Seize Them!'s site so you can read it here in its entirety.

motion pictures

Flaming Tusk played Hull's Sole Lord record release party on May 26, and here is a video clip of us playing "I Nap In Blood" from The "Abigail" EP.

doing the Charleston

Here's a great set of pictures by Vanshnookenraggen from last night's Flaming Tusk / The Witches Tit / Hull show at The Charleston.

rose

The rosebush in front of my house is doing rather well this year.

Mastodon 5/9/09 at The Fillmore New York

Last night I caught one of Mastodon's two NYC shows at which they are playing the entirety of their new album Crack The Skye. I'm a big Mastodon fan, but I'm upfront about my favorite stuff of theirs being Leviathan, two albums back. Crack The Skye is a good record, but it is significantly more "rock" than Mastodon has been in the past (though some folks said that about their last record, Blood Mountain, too), with clean vocals and, y'know, choruses. I predicted (to my friends and bandmates) it would be a huge crossover hit, and that seems to be coming true what with CtS's activity on the Billboard charts of late. My hope is that their next record will be extra-brutal, leaving all the new fans going "...what?".

The show went off well; they started with album opener "Oblivion" and went straight through, guitar-exchanging time between songs smoothed over by atmospheric keyboard washes and video projections that seemed primarily derived from the film Alexander Nevsky. The crowd, somewhat to my surprise, seemed both very familiar with the new songs and definitely on board with them, if the fist pumping, singing along, and mosh pit activity are any indication (despite all of the above tapering off as time went on). The material does come off a bit better live than on record, in my opinion, which is a credit to the crushing power of Mastodon's live presence.

Speaking of which, the band (and especially lead guitarist Brent Hinds) really came alive after the CtS portion of the show had ended and they moved on to a selection of hits from Blood Mountain and Leviathan (okay, and "March of the Fire Ants" from Remission). I don't know if that stuff is just more fun for them, or if they were psyched to have finished with the "business" portion of the show, but it definitely left me wanting to see a more typical Mastodon concert wherein they play anything they feel like playing.

The night's two opening acts were Intronaut, from LA, and Kylesa (fellow Atlantans to Mastodon). Intronaut were decent... Most of their songs had a few cool moments and a couple of songs were rocking all the way through, but overall I found them to be too pretty too much of the time. Kylesa is a band I'd wanted to see for a while, and I did enjoy them, though you have to work pretty hard to convince me that your band really needs two drummers and I'm not sure they really did. Musically, they're certainly heavy and can bring the crushing riffs, though the lead guitar work tends to be a little simplistic.