If the trailer is anything to go by, then this is a film I can't wait to see!
For one weekend every year, the quiet rural village of Wacken in the northern German province of Schleswig-Holstein becomes the setting for a festival of metal music that attracts acts like Cannibal Corpse, Celtic Frost and Napalm Death, and pulls in crowds in excess of 50,000. Last year, South Korean director Sung-Hyung Cho went along to interview the locals and document this annual maelstrom of mayhem that descends upon their bucolic little town. The resulting documentary opened in German cinemas last week and will hopefully find its way to screens further afield very soon. (via Swen's Blog)
Rummage's ongoing commitment to metal-based humour continues with this piece of guttural-along shockwave silliness from Danish madfuckers, Cigarfar. (via shiner.clay)
It's Friday and work's been utterly manic, so when I did get a chance to catch my breath and do some surfing, it was a great to find this glorious piece of metal madness... It's a review of a Japanese black metal concert, and what makes it oh so special is the fact that the second band on the line-up has a keyboard player... who uses sheet music!
The review is just one of the many hilarious pieces of Japanese pop-culture madness on a site called Tokyo Damage Report. Also worth checking out on the site are the gangsta hip hop punk concert, the Japanese hip hop fashions, and the always reliable Engrish T-shirt slogans. (via shiner.clay)
Ah yes, the metal madness never stops here at Rummage... Introducing Tazina, Teisha and Cleopatra, three women from New York who belly dance... to heavy metal music! This inspired marriage of head banging and hip shaking was dreamt up by the girls back in 2002 and first burst onto the scene in that year's Rakkasah festival (America's premier Mid Eastern folk festival) where the troupe ripped into a routine set to Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train". Since then, they've become something of a fixture on the metal festival circuit and their chief metalhead Tazina has scored regular gigs with NY Metallica tribute band, Master of Puppets. Apparently, it all works because "Metal has a lot of similiarities to Middle Eastern music"...
Videos of Tazina and the rest of the troupe in action can be found on their OTT "flaming casbah" website. (It even has an "is she hot or not?" page dedicated to Taz.)
This kind puts all those church burnings and murders by Norwegian black metal hoons into perspective... Because, when you look this ridiculous, you need to do something to convince people that you're a hell-borne threat to the moral order (and not just an escapee from some bad Halloween panto.)
(via shiner.clay)
Parrot Death Metal?.. Pitbull Grindcore?... In a genre of music where the vocals bear next to no resemblance to anything that might actually emerge from a human throat, the idea of satanic squawks and gutturals being supplied by animals doesn’t seem that unusual…
Hatebeak are the first death metal band to use a parrot for a vocalist. Here’s a lo-fi mp3 of God Of Empty Nest off their debut album Beak of Putrefaction. Meanwhile, from the land-borne mammal kingdom, comes Locking Jaws from Caninus, a grindcore act with two pitbulls on the mic. (via Boing Boing)
I’ve always thought that the Cookie Monster would make one hellraiser of a death metal vocalist... And it seems I’m not alone in that…
Cookie Mongoloid are a "Sesame Street-themed speed metal band" (which is bit of a misnomer as the music is more mid-tempo grind). They come complete with a lead singer in full leathers and a Cookie Monster head, and a scantily clad bevy of Cookie Girls who “throw treats into the audience”. Their repertoire includes such “educational” numbers as C Is For Cookie, The Number 6 and Wash Yourself (…!?) All good clean fun, which recently earned them a Best Concept Band guernsey from the San Francisco Weekly. COOOO-KKIE!!
Rondellus are a Renaissance/early music group from Estonia who in 2003 recorded Sabbatum, an album of Black Sabbath covers performed in a medieval style, using instruments such as the lute, harp, hurdy-gurdy, psaltery and frame drum, and sung entirely in Latin... The result is a thing of transcendent beauty dominated by vaulting Gregorian-chant-style vocals that one would never associate with Ozzy Osborne and co. Samples of these angelic renderings of the Sabbath's work are available from the album's website. (The album itself can be purchased through CD Baby.)
(Footnote: Sabbatum actually won best classical CD at the 2003 Estonian Music Awards... Pretty damn enlightened people, these Estonians!)
If you like the idea of high concept reworkings of metal standards but prefer something that actually rocks, then check out Japanese vocalist Dokaka... When the bassplayer in the band he drummed for failed to turn up for a practice, Dokaka tried humming his basslines and turned out to be so good that the band's singer suggested he do a professional recording. Dokaka took up the challenge and applied his talents to other instruments; ultimately producing entirely acapella versions of songs by Metallica, Nirvana, Iron Maiden and even Stevie Wonder.
He posted these recordings on the IUMA website and, in no time at all, he was a star with offers of gigs as far afield as Seattle. Now, he's moved to a dedicated domain and the latest news is that he's just finished recording with Bjork.
For the final portion of this segment, we turn to the strange and frightening world of Norwegian black metal... With their heyday of church burnings and murder trials behind them, some members of this satanic doom-core fraternity have decided that it is time to "mature" musically. This has meant embracing techno-pop and becoming as "unmetal" as possible...
The result is a genre which has become known as "lounge-core". The foremost exponents of this not-really-metal-anymore music are Beyond Dawn, who sound like Depeche Mode on lithium. (Their latest, and most lounge-core album, Frysh, is available from Aquarius Records. Here's an mp3 off it called Righteous Underground.)