Ski Beatz got wind that we just received our Spring-1 collection and wasted no time in making his way down to 350 Broadway. Ski got a sneak peak of what was to come for the Spring season and immediately fell in love with our Trailblazer satin white jacket with the embroidered back.

Last time Ski was here we were discussing the release of his 24 Karate School album which is overloaded with a variety of Hip-Hop and R&B artists doing their thing over Ski’s beats. Since then just to tease us he’s released the 24 Hour Karate School (Snippets), a mixtape with quick clips of all the featured songs on the album just to wet your appetite until the release of the actual album in late March. To keep up to date with what’s happening with Ski at the Dojo check out the 24 Hour Karate School website.

But if the snippets of the karate school mixtape isn’t enough for you, then check out Ski Beatz and the rest of the DD172 collective as the jam out tonight at The Gramercy Theater tonight. The BluRoc show will feature many of the artists from the album along with a whole heap of special guests and surprises as they will be performing live some joints from the up and coming album. It should be a great show!

Мишка
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
718-388-1725

J/M/Z to Marcy Ave.
G to Broadway
L to Lorimer

I don’t really fully fathom how the Toilet Cobra convinced Ryan Keely to let him film her while she burned comics, but he did and here it is for you to enjoy. I hope for Ryan’s sake there was no Creepy Touching involved… you never know where he’s been.

Fear of a 12th Planet is taking a short break this week to regroup! In the meantime take in this MIT radio broadcast regarding the Nazi’s ultimate weapon Die Glocke or better known these days as the Nazi Bell! The Nazi Bell centered around concepts of occultism and anti-gravity, frightening stuff.

We’ll be back running new nuggets for your brains to wrap themselves around next Thursday.

Arsis – Starve For the Devil (2010) [Nuclear Blast] // Grade: B+

If you’ve ever met me, you’ll know I have a pretty shitty habit of forming extremely strong opinions for no particular reason about things that I’ve never really come in contact with or paid attention to. For example, I was pretty sure that the Murder City Devils and the River City Rebels were pretty much the same damn band for probably close to a decade. Then I actually listened to MCD and had to devour my shit covered words.

Some of you may also know that I formerly worked for and was unceremoniously fired by Sirius Satellite Radio as a music coordinator (and outlaw country DJ for about 3 shows… that ruled).  During this relationship I pretty much learned the hard way, that most corporate radio, even the kind that doesn’t have commercials and can play shit with cursing all the fucking time and is supposedly “against mainstream and has hosts like Howard Stern and shit” bows to basically what the industry wants. Fortunately, the dudes running metal channel there (formerly called Hard Attack) were a bunch of died in the wool heshers with their heads on right and generally (you know, how specific assholes like me can be…) good taste in jams. Unfortunately, apparently their main clientele was a lot of douchebag nümetalers from Kansas and thus the music reflected this (think lots of Godsmack).

Coming into this review, I was totally fucking bummed because I had distinct memories of Sirius playing a shit ton of Arsis a couple of years ago and I remember thinking it slobbed a fucking knob at the time. What I remember was a techy uber-modern death metal band doing nothing interesting or good.

Eating your words doesn’t always suck, at least when it comes to Arsis being a lot better than I remember. This album is definitely a listenable chunk of modern thrash/death with a ton of throwbacks to bands like Slayer, At the Gates/other melodic Gothenbergers, and even some Death jams. It’s definitely still fast, highly technical, progressive shit (progressive tends to be an insult in my musical world…) but they make sure to keep it catchy, moving and even fun.  I was definitely surprised to find myself comparing licks/feel to bands like Skeletonwitch and grinning like shit at some of the Twin Guitar-monies.  Fuck man, on some of their jams they even throw in some straight up NWOBHM riffs, and as you know, NWOBHM is possibly the fastest way to any hesher’s heart.

I’d say overall, I probably won’t listen to this shit every single day or even every week but I definitely put this album down as a well composed, well executed album by some insanely good musicians with strong anchor in songwriting in the context of an album (as opposed to just playing blastbeats for 45mins and calling it a day). It stays lively, it’s got totally upfront roots in a bunch of types of classic metal as well as a stylistic look to the future.

Arsis, yer all right by me fuckers.

Russia got knocked out like Ivan Drago in yesterday’s quarterfinal bout with Canada. Admittedly, that’s an imperfect analogy for a bunch of reasons: Balboa was of course wearing starred & striped shorts and not the maple leaf when he avenged Apollo Creed’s death in Rocky IV, Creed was famously introduced by James Brown and not Celine Dion, the cold war’s long over and Russia isn’t the CCCP, etc. But you get the idea. (I was gonna photoshop Doug McKenzie’s head onto Rocky in this picture, but thankfully lost momentum.)  Canada landed a Hollywood-style haymaker on Russia last night, winning hockey’s clash of the titans by the unlikely score of 7-3.

While a final score like that might indicate a compelling defensive showdown in the NFL, it’s comparatively boring in a hockey game. And as lopsided as it is, 7-3 somehow makes it sound like the contest was closer than it was. By the end of the first, Evgeni Nabokov had already been torched 4 times by the Canucks. A few minutes into the second, Canada had scored six times. For some bizarre reason, Russian coach Vyacheslav Bykov only chose to yank Nabokov at that point – with the score an unmerciful 6-1 – thus handing Ilya Bryzgalov an impossible mess. Unsurprisingly, Bryzgalov didn’t spark the miracle comeback, and after 60 minutes the mighty Russians had been felled. Coach Bykov has brought home back-to-back world championships, but this all-star squad seemed weirdly out-of-sync and sluggish for much of the tournament. So forget my last post when I said Russia was gold medal favorites; instead, just remember the part where I said you shouldn’t count the Canucks out. 

Team USA, meanwhile, won a quirky game against the Swiss that was far closer than their 3-1 meeting in the preliminary round. Ryan Miller notched his first shutout of the tournament, but the real story was Jonas Hiller in the opposing net. Hiller stopped 42, letting in just one from Zach Parise who also collected an empty-net tally in the closing minutes. The Americans will face the Finns tomorrow at noon pacific. The unfortunate start time means I will most likely contract an unexpected illness at around 2:30 PM EST and be forced to leave work, return home and self-medicate with beer.

Finally, the Slovaks proved they’re not fucking around by dispatching the Swedes, reigning Olympic champions, by a score of 4-3. Tomas Kopecky, pictured above, scored what proved to be the winning tally and the surprising Slovaks earned the right to battle the resurgent Canadians tomorrow evening. While a Slovak victory tomorrow would undoubtedly have to be called an upset, the team has plenty of talent: Gaborik, Chara, Halak, Demitra. But I think Canada’s on a mission, and I think the hosts will earn a trip to the gold medal game. Finns or Yanks? I can’t call it, but I’d love to see a USA-Canada rematch – I’m sure all of Canada would, too. Gotta admit tho: I’m kinda terrified of the prospect. Vengeful Canadians… fuck, man. Look out.

If there we were to crown a Miss Lo-Fi, Frankie Rose would be the undisputed queen. Lets review Frankie’s resume shall we? She’s the former drummer of Shitstorm who are now known as Grass Widow. She was an original member of the Vivian Girls and happened to pen the bands break out (and best) song “Where Do You Run” before leaving to joining an other NYC Lo-Fi sensation in Crystal Stilts, only to leave them soon after. Nowadays Frankie is front and center playing guitar and singing with with her own band, Frankie Rose & The Outs.

Not unlike her previous projects, The Outs play a mix of fuzzed out 60s girl group and Twee inspired indie jams. So far they only have the Thee Only One 7″ on none other then Slumberland Records, the same label that released Crystal Stilts fantastic first LP. The Outs are in the process of recording a full length and have 7 upcoming shows, 5 of which will be in Austin during SXSW. So if your in Austin and you want to hold on to your hipness I would set aside some time for catching at least 3 of their sets.

This is one of the Мишка LA opening recaps that I had been really looking forward to seeing. Karmaloop TV sent down a crew to Los Angeles to cover the festivities and had Greg give a tour of shop and talk about some of the details and product in-store.

The whole shop cost us like $78 million dollars to put together so we need all the press we can get. Support!

TOTALLY4TEENS is the brain child of Derrick Beckles, the same video genius who brought you TV Carnage, and who has brought myself countless hours of video-watching-ecstasy, over and over and over again. Not too long ago, he was commissioned to develop a show for Adult Swim, along with some of the people behind Wonder Showzen and the Daily Show, and it’s finally about to see the light of day… but it may not last!

Adult Swim is pitting TOTALLY4TEENS up against Soul Quest Overdrive in a death match for which show gets to make it onto the station’s regular programming during its Big, Uber, Network Sampling (click here to vote) competition. The voting ends at midnight tonight so please, please, please do me a favor and and go to the site and vote for it and give me the gift of something new to constantly get blazed on my couch to. It’s losing pretty bad right now and I assure you, in the long haul, it’ll be the better show!

This isn’t just TOTALLY4TEENS but TOTALLY4STONERZ as well!

Has anyone tried watching The WWE recently? Is it me or has it slowly mutated into recruitment propaganda for the Marines? It’s amazing that this thing is still going on! Why are they even trying? There’s nothing in the world that could touch the golden era of the WWF (circa 1985-1990) — not movies, not cartoons, music, comic books, NADA. We fell into a bit of a renaissance with The Rock, Goldberg, Triple H, Stone Cold, et al. But man, the spectacle of the golden age was our generation’s Vaudeville. This was EPIC drama with Meth-addled Barbers, Loud mouthed Scotsmen, Weasels, Pimps, Hitmen, Giants, Hacksaws, Hammers, Commies and Snakes! Now that the best is behind us from the House McMahon, it’s evident that one Swatch sunglassed, sequened robe rockin’, feathered haired man stands as the Greatest Wrestler of All Time.

MACHO MAN Randy Savage.

Come join me in this retrospective in OH YEAH!

Early Years – You can see the impetus of a schtick which will eventually explode into the luminous nebula of Macho Madness!

In my pre-teens, I was partial to Hogan and later Ultimate Warrior — the former being a horrible wrestler with inspiring charisma, the latter being just what a young hessian needed. I loathed Macho Man back in the day!!! That sleazy, scary, abusive, arrogant, rude and crude cretin!!! It would be years until I realized that these very same qualities are what add to his legend of the WWF’s G.O.A.T. Savage owned it all! The charisma, the acrobatics, the gimmick, catch phrase, overall steez, and man oh man, could that dude improv in a promo!

I like to fantasize about Macho snorting a huge rail of coke in the Gold’s Gym locker room with Hogan when he came up with his infamous “OH YEAH!” catchphrase. His Intercontinental Champion era was his finest if you ask me. He jumped the shark as the Macho King with Scary Sheri!

A Goldmine of Macho

It’s no revelation to speak of his rivalry with Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat yielding the most amazing WWF match in history. Now, if you were like me you were down with Team Steamboat and those Chinese Stars and Tiger Claws stuck in your backyard tree were indicative of that. But looking back, Steamboat is such a herb!

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Nothing People – Soft Crash (2010) [S.S.] // Grade: A-

Sacramento’s surreal electro-garage Nothing People may be rad on, like, a billion different levels—not least of which being their ability to put out back-to-back great records that don’t really sound the same—but maybe the coolest thing about them is just how much they sound like California. We’ve seen this before, even with some Nothing People references: Chrome had a certain sun-damaged vibe, plus I Am Spoonbender—that bright, restless, try anything once and not give a fuck thing that permeates every corner of the Golden State from Che Café northward.

But Soft Crash isn’t the California of legend, all sun-soaked glamor and surf-freckled kids in board shorts and anklets; this is pulp California, the sci-fi and B-movies, the careening anarchy. All manner of dark alleys, you know? Whether it’s the gruff, visceral thump of “Marilyn’s Grave” or the paranoid, lo-fi electronics jittering around “Avoiding Needles”, the album is filled with the sense that something weird, and maybe awful but also maybe freaky and awesome, is lurking just around the corner.

And though Nothing People are at their best, you know, pretty much always, they’re really perfect when they fuse their nervous proto-punk and carefree-ish garage into one song. Sure, Soft Crash skitters to both extremes a little more than Anonymous or even last year’s Late Night—the dark moments pitch black and langorous, the freneticism straight-up manic—but tracks like the slow burn of “It’s Been A Bad Day” pull everything together into one creepy, expansive whole. Another one destined for the 2010 Best Of lists.