Welcome, once again, to the dark evil ritual of sonic madness known as Terror Track Tuesday! Now, I know in the past I’ve been touting older songs and bands, but I’m looking to change that. If you know of any upcoming releases I oughta stick my ears towards, be sure to leave a comment here or in the forums and I’ll give ‘em a spin.
This time we’ve got a hot one! It’s supposed to hit the airwaves today, July 1st, 2008. I managed to scour the tube sites and find a version to show here so I’m doing that. It’s Slipknot’s latest single, Psychosocial and they promise it’ll rip your face off. Then again, what metal band doesn’t promise that with pretty much every single they release, right? However, I’ve given it a listen and it looks like Slipknot might finally be back in the saddle. After Rick Rubin gave them a sour experience in 2004 with Vol. 3 (The Subliminal Verses) I never truly felt they recaptured the momentum of their first couple albums which I was a big fan of. Not quite willing to take on the title of ‘maggot’ for myself, but a fan.
If you enjoyed their big hit, ‘Wait and Bleed’ then I believe you’ll find a whole lot to enjoy with this new one, ‘Psychosocial’. It’s off the album All Hope is Gone and the band’s taken their time to craft a damn fine album if this single’s any indication. They’re leaning more towards experimentation and innovation in the thrash metal genre, but it’s nothing so far out as to be irritating. In fact we’ve got that dead-on blend of hardcore metal with quality chorus vocals that I think brings things to a new level. It’s a good deal more accessible than some of their other tracks which I’ve scared the living crap out of people with. I don’t know how a band can really sound that "scary" but I’ve played their stuff for friends and been told it was "too much" and "too evil". Obviously, none of these people delved into death metal too much or they’d know Slipknot’s not the most evil out there, but to each their own.
Now, here’s a few things I’m not sure how to feel about. For one, the band’s working with AOL (American Online) to reveal their new masks. I’m all for new masks but… AOL? Could AOL really have that many metal fans? Maybe I’m behind the times or something but I just don’t see AOL as terribly relevant when it comes to serious musical releases. That and this track was played each hour at Hot Topic. Now I’ve got nothing against that mall chain, but I know alot of ‘hardcore’ music fans just hate the hell out of Hot Topic and the "poser mallcore" crowd. I’m wondering how this marketing move will wind up affecting sales.
Now you can pre-order All Hope is Gone (and I intend to) on Amazon right here which is where I get my albums from. They’re also touring right now with the Mayhem Festival, put on by Rockstar (energy drinks, not the game company). They’re the headliners, matter of fact – that’s a festival I can’t say I’d mind seeing! The album’s going to drop on August 26, 2008 so be sure to check here in case I get lucky and wind up reviewing it. Below you’ll find a YouTube video where you can hear the whole song, also!
So, until next time this has been GlowStormLion doing his best to corrupt those of you with even an ounce of purity left in your dark fluffy hearts.
Ah, the breeze today carries the scent of terror and that can mean only one thing: it’s Terror Track Tuesday! That’s right, Merry Readers, the musical extravaganza you’ve come to know and love has arrived once more to give your dark minds a delightfully devilish tune upon which to focus.
Yet, I may shock you with what I’m about to reveal. You already know I review music here on Happy Horror, but I’ve a confession to make. I recently began whoring my words out to another site, as well. Here’s where you can find that review, but I wanted to get that off my chest. I made my first full album download in the wee hours of today for… are you ready for this? Coldplay’s latest album: Viva la Vida (or Death and All His Friends). While it might not be my typical fare, it’s not too shabby of an album by current pop music standards.
Oh, and I’m gleefully breaking a Terror Track Tuesday rule by bringing you an entire album in celebration of my first full album download over at Amazon. So this week, feast your ears on the soundtrack to the movie Queen of the Damned!
Obviously, this album’s the music behind the movie which bears its title. In case you haven’t seen the movie (and it’s been a very long time since I have), allow me to quickly fill you in. Queen of the Damned is based on an Anne Rice’s novel of the same name which is part of her Vampire Chronicles series of books. So, if you’ve seen Interview with a Vampire, then you’ll probably recognize the setting and characters. In the flick, the character Lestat (the vampire) has a band so there’s quite a lot of music in this film.
The movie’s star is Aaliyah, whom I was much enamored of back in my younger years. In fact, since she died in a plane crash six months before the film’s release, it’s dedicated to her memory. She does an exceptional job protraying Akasha, who is, well, the Queen of the Damned!
This album’s got a lot to offer in terms of quality music. While Jonathon Davis of Korn wrote and performed the songs for Lestat’s band in the movie, he couldn’t legally lend his voice to the soundtrack due to legalities concerning his record label. Instead, you’ll hear vocals from the following bands singers: Marilyn Manson (on the song ‘Redeemer’), Orgy’s Jay Gordon (on ‘Slept So Long’), Static-X’s Wayne Static (‘Not Meant for Me’), Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington (‘System’) and the ever-growliscious (tm) David Draiman of the band Disturbed (‘Forsaken’). Those powerful names promise alot in terms of rockstar power and you won’t be disappointed!
Aside from the star-studded vocalists who sing on those tracks, you’ll also hear:
‘Body Crumbles’ by Dry Cell
‘Cold’ by Static-X
‘Headstrong’ by Earshot
‘Down with the Sickness’ by Disturbed
‘Change (In the House of Flies)’ by Deftones
‘Dead Cell’ by Papa Roach
‘Excess’ by Tricky
‘Before I’m Dead’ by Kidneythieves
‘Penetrate’ by Godhead
As you can see, that’s quite a list of great bands, to boot! What you’ve got here is simply a great collection of songs that truly rock on their own, but create solid atmospherics as a collective audial force. If you’d simply like the film’s score, this is it.
I’ve got no qualms giving this CD a 5 out of 5 due to the variety of hard rock songs and maybe a little bit because I adore Aaliyah.
Oh and an additional bonus:
You can listen to, remix and broadcast Nine Inch Nails‘ songs for FREEright here.
NOT ONLY THAT, but you can download their entire new album, The Slip (which hits stores this July) at this location. And yes, it’s all completely legal!!
Finally another Tuesday (sorry I wasn’t clever enough to wait until tomorrow – d’oh!) which means yet another opportunity to assault the ears of you Merry Readers with music I favor. Well, okay, really I hope to expose you to something cool or remind you of a long lost loved song or something more positive, but it still needs to look cool! That said, this week’s Terror Track is Rot for Me by the band Wednesday 13. Not Wednesday Thirteen, but 13. Like the number.
First, let me tell you a brief but touching tale. See, I first heard of this band rather randomly during an era of my life which I spent drinking boxed wine and chatting way too much while writing a lot of poetry. The poetry actually turned out pretty good, but that’s a whole other story. During this era I met and became entranced by a certain Southern girl and we fired up a long distance relationship. Rot for Me was our song. Note I said was. I guess that makes sense, right? Probably not the best couple song on the planet, but hey, at least this song’s probably not widely used for that purpose. We were original! Besides, other than that she liked top 40’s hip hop and the Pussycat Dolls.
The band Wednesday 13 seems tricky to describe. One of those "you hafta hear ‘em" bands, I guess you could say. Descriptions of their sound range from horror punk to death glam to horror metal – but one thing’s for sure: they love their horror movies! A good deal of their inspiration, particularly lead singer Wednesday 13 (from whom the band took its name, shockingly enough). Musical inspirations would be KISS (Knights in Satan’s Service, dontcha know!) and the venerable Alice Cooper. They’ve got a catchy style and great antics to keep the crowds interested and their fans (the ‘Ghoul Scouts’, as Wednesday fondly calls them) rockin’ along.
Wednesday 13 himself, who hails from Charlotte, North Carolina, has been around the music scene since 1992. Not only does he perform duties as frontman (lead vocalist), all the lyrics are penned by his hand, as well. He’s been part of a great many bands, all of which share a horror vibe. There’s the Murderdolls (which features Joey Jordison of Slipknot and Ministry fame), Maniac Spider Trash, Frankenstein Drag Queens from Planet 13 and Bourbon Crow (a sort of dark villainous take on country music). All great stuff if you ask me! He’s got a clothing line called Thirteen Dead Kids, but I can’t seem to find a website for it, sadly, or I’d link to it, as well.
Rot for Me is on the 12th track of the album Transylvania 90210: Songs of Death, Dying and the Dead.. here in the US we totally got robbed because only in the Japanese version of the album can you get the bonus track: Thank You Satan (not to be confused with this or this or this which are from different groups altogether).
Now, as for the song specifically I truly do like the lyrics because they’re pretty clever. It’s catchy and that’s why the ex really dug on it. Any time you find yourself humming the tune to phrases like "Rot! Rot for meeee, my darling" you know the artist did a damn fine job of composing a memorable melody!
If you’d like to grab the mp3 of Rot for Me, you’ll be happy to know it’s available for download at this location.
The band’s also got a well-established Myspace profile you can visit. Maybe you’ll want to friend them like I did on my profile. Transylvania 90210 isn’t their latest album, though. At the end of April they released Skeletons, which you can (usually hehe) only get at Hot Topic.
We’ll close with a video, shall we?
I also found THIS VIDEO which was too frickin’ cool not to include, enjoy!
Until next time, this has been GlowStormLion reminding you that when you pick a song for you and your sweetheart, maybe don’t make it about embittered love the way me and my Pisces did – unless you’d be better off without ‘em!
As a kid, "heavy metal music" was strongly forbidden in our household. Growing up, the only real exposure I had to it ended up being whatever the cool neighborkids blared from their cars in the summer. See, my parents had seen this little video called Hell’s Bells with some of their religious friends and firmly believed all loud music to be unquestionably Satanic. Obviously, I too lived in terror of becoming possessed if I listened to it. It wouldn’t be until my senior year of high school, during my brief stint in a religious school, that I’d see the video for myself and realize what a crock it truly was. Pretty hilarious stuff now that I’m old enough to know better.
This time when I saw the Hell’s Bells video, though, it made me seriously admire this guy Ozzy Osbourne that they kept mentioning. Brief bits of music were played and I got hooked. The video had the reverse effect on me, oddly enough. That day after school I went online, loaded up Napster and grabbed every Ozzy song I could find. Of course, during the whole RIAA panic I deleted my vast collection, but I do intend to re-buy the track once I have a proper iPod. This song, Mr. Crowley, was one of the ones I loved the most. So if you’d care to grab the mp3 for yourself, Amazon has it. That link leads to the album version and let me tell you, Blizzard of Ozz (the album the song comes from) got a kickass cover!
Looky:
Pictured: Ozzy in a cape, crosses, skulls, what more could you ask for from the Prince of Effin’ Darkness?
Now, a little forewarning. The song’s from the 80’s, in case that’d bother you. It’s got a terribly rad guitar solo that got hammered out by an angry Randy Rhoads after Ozzy told him the first guitar solo he’d come up with wasn’t good enough. This one turned out so awesome that Guitar World Magazine ranked it #28 in their list of top 100 guitar solos. It’s been covered by Cradle of Filth, Moonspell and even The Cardigans – if you can believe that. It even makes a brief appearance in the game Guilty Gear XX – as part of her win pose, the character I-No performs a brief bit of the solo from Mr. Crowley.
As to what the song’s about, well, it’s intentionally cryptic. Obviously it’s referencing one Mr. Aleister Crowley, a famous British occultist from the early 1900’s who’s been called the "Wickedest Man in the World." However, Ozzy pronounces the man’s name incorrectly, it should rhyme with "crow", like the bird not sound similar to "plow". Betcha didn’t know that!
So, there’s all sorts of interesting lore for this tune and that’s why I thought it’d make a good Terror Track. Here’s a fan made video if you feel like taking a peek, courtesy of our friends on YouTube:
If the creepy pipe organs at the beginning don’t win you over, then Ozzy’s soaring vocals and that undeniably awesome guitar solo shall!
Tune in next Tuesday to see what I’ll be diggin’ up! Until next time, I’m GlowStormLion, pretending that I’m a lot younger than I probably really am by listening to My Chemical Romance and Death Cab for Cutie.
I’m proud to introduce a brand new weekly feature to Happy Horror: Terror Track Tuesday! Each week I’ll be bringing a new legal mp3 that you can download, as well as linking to the single and album from whenst it came. I’ve waited a long time to be able to cover music on our site, so I’m quite stoked about this.
What will we cover? Songs from horror movie soundtracks, for one. We’ll also include darker music from all kinds of other genres such as rock, metal, industrial and certain strains of hip hop. My goal is to expose you guys to some different sounds out there while at the same time satisfying my own craving for horror themed and inspired tunes! Here’s hoping you end up finding music you can dig on. Without further babbling from me, let’s hit the first track.
I chose Living Dead Girl by Rob Zombie to consecrate this new weekly feature. Quite simply it screams horror to me. For one it was in Bride of Chucky (click HERE for my review) and for another, it references plenty of other horror movies in its lyrics. If you enjoy heavier music, this one might be right up your alley. I’ve enjoyed the song for years since it first hit the radio in 1998 and I got to see it performed LIVE, as well. It’s a hell of a grinder and just look at that CD cover, wouldja? Oh, by the way, that’s Sheri Moon Zombie, Rob’s wife there in the bikini.
So that’s it for this week. Tune in next Tuesday and see what I’ll be bringing. Hazard a guess by leaving a comment if you’d like. If you make a good suggestion I may just take it, so be forewarned!
"Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of his name. This calls for wisdom: let anyone with the understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six."
- Revelations 13 : 16-18
Rather ominous, ain’t it? Now, I don’t know about you but I’ve been awaiting this day for several years. There’s something almost magical about 06/06/06, I mean we only get to experience it once every hundred years and all. This is the Year of Aquarius in the western astrological calendar and the Year of the Dog in the Chinese. So many theories on the meaning of the unholy trio of 6’s and so little time to figure it out. Actually, we’re too late it’s already June 6th. We’re doomed.
On a more serious note, in homage to this once in a lifetime opportunity to celebrate the Day of the Beast, I thought I’d give you a rundown of what all is happening today. It’s more than just the opening of The Omen, you know. (Read our Omen review by clicking HERE) So here we go with a quick tour of today’s events!
Pictured: Damien from The Omen, a little Beast
- Today is the National Day of Sweden! Utomordentligt!
- In Los Angeles, California, the Church of Satan will be holding a high mass at the Steve Allen Theater. Satan is scheduled to attend (joke).
- Baptist preacher Tim LaHaye will release The Rapture, the last of his "Left Behind" series of books based on the biblical book of Revelations. Thanks for scaring the crap out of me as a kid, Tim!
Pictured: Slayer, hoping to reign in The Beast (get it?)
- The venerable Slayer will open their Unholy Alliance Tour – Preaching to the Perverted, in San Diego, California. Today is actually the National Day of Slayer, in case you were unaware. Not only that, it’s their frontman Tom Aray’s birthday. Happy birthday, m#&^@f@#*er! \m/
- Death metal shock act, Deicide (known primarily for being in favor of animal sacrifice(BOOOO!), will release their album The Stench of Redemption.
- David Lee Roth will release his bluegrass tribute to Van Halen, cleverly titled Strummin’ with the Devil.
- Blood Runs Black is set to release their latest album Allegiance.
Pictured: Ann Coulter, most likely candidate for actual Beasthood (look at those eyes!)
- Serbia and Montenegro are now formally dissolved.
Not only do we have all THESE earth-shattering events occurring, there’s some new DVDs coming out. Here’s the list of ones I thought you guys might want to know about:
So, that sums it up! Hope each and every one of you precious viewers have a very special day. Remember – we get Halloween once a year, but the Day of the Beast only happens once a century, so make the most of it! Feel free to leave a comment if you had any exciting exploits, we’d love to hear about them. Until I write again, this is GlowStormLion, rising to world domination. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.
. While it might not be my typical fare, it’s not too shabby of an album by current pop music standards.
