Eric Northman has spent this season on a butt-fucking rampage of revenge. He has pouted, killed, pouted more, brooded, killed, and ultimately pouted some more. Going into last night’s episode, I was fucking stoked!, shit was about to go down.

But then? Then Eric just pouted a real lot, signed some court documents, and pouted some more.

Oh True Blood, if you were as good as your previews, we’d have such a great relationship. I’d buy you ice cream, and we’d swing on the swing set near the lake and talk about the time when you locked your keys in your car and you came over and we snuggled and watched Man Vs. Food until you fell asleep on my shoulder.

But seriously, last night, what the fuck?

We finally got the big reveal! Sookie is…Navi from Legend of Zelda? Or something like that? I actually think its sort of dope, despite the fact that it’s also sort of seven shades of lame. Sookie herself knew it, and the writers had her drop the self-aware “That’s fucking lame!”, which of course makes her existence as a Fairy Lady a bit more bearable.

Unfortunately, Sookie has to be the dumbest fucking fairy ever, running off as always when she’s explicitly told not to. Bill wakes up and he’s all like RAWR, RAWR, WHERE ART THOU, SOOKIE?! Then he gets up in Jason’s face like it’s his fault that his sister is the most aggravatingly impetuous bitch ever.

Seriously. Sookie is every annoying chick in a horror flick rolled up into a ball of hot buck-toothed misery. She deserves a pickaxe in her dumb chest. But she’d just catch it with the gap in her teeth and then use it to mow the lawn or some shit.

If you take a step back, the entire episode, much like the entire series of True Blood, was just Sookie running back and forth from Bill and Eric. Like, seriously. But that’s okay, because the rest of the denizens of Hick Trash, Louisiana can fill up the episode with sugar-pop bullshit.

First off, Tara’s got to fucking go. Like, seriously. Let me describe Tara to you in one sentence: Annoying ass chick who just bulges her eyes, quivers her bottom lip, and acts really pissed off.

There you go. Find me a scene where at least one of this qualities isn’t true.

She’s in the good though, because she may be soon fucking Jason. But Jason’s wrapped up with a Were-Panther, from Nearby Hick Trash, Louisiana. As an aside, Were-Panthers are probably the coolest thing in the show since good old vampires. So there’s that, for Crystal.

Meanwhile, when did True Blood become LOST? The whole flashing to Sam’s life of douchery wasn’t needed, and sort of just jumbled up the narrative. Do we really need to complicate Sam’s life? He’s already a shifter with yokel parents who fucked a Tree Goddess, and now he’s also a thief and a murderer.

I only got a place in my heart for one Sawyer, yo.

But Sam’s back-story wasn’t the only thing that was hacking the narrative structure to pieces. Lafayette and Jesus go on a ridiculous V-Trip on some Universal Islands of Adventure ride. The entire five minutes it ate up were entertaining, but I was left wondering why the fuck it was in the episode. Like, do we really need another storyline involving more characters on some epic bullshit? Isn’t this show already a disastrous potpourri of storylines?

I would have enjoyed it, if it wasn’t wedged into an episode that was doing absolutely nothing to the main narrative, other than having Fairy Gap Tooth run around and get rubbed down by the two guys she’s sweating.

That’s my main qualm with this fucking shit at this point. There’s so much bullshit going on, with so many characters, that the entire thing comes off as a tonally-uneven, fractured narrative of misery. There’s so many storylines going on, that the pacing is total fucking bumper cars, and everything is tethered together more by wishes than anything.

What is connecting the Eric Buttfucking Rampage storyline to the Jason Stackhouse Fucks Panthers storyline to the Sam is Sawyer From LOST storyline? I’m not really sure. But they hop and skip between the lot of them so quickly it’s some jerky, hodgepodge of suck. Sure they’re characters that existence within the same universe, but beyond that?

As far as the main storyline goes, the entire episode was high-fructose bullshit. Pure filler. By the time Russell finally appears on screen, almost the entire episode had been burned up with a bunch of different characters accomplishing almost nothing. Sam was sitting in the woods, Tara was probably just quivering somewhere and stammering, Sookie was in-between running to/from Eric/Bill.

And god dammit, I like Russell’s storyline. I also enjoy Eric’s butt-fucking fiascoatron. I love Hoyt and Jessica’s relationship more than both. But I’m given so little time with every character, it’s like I’m watching a bunch of vignettes tied together under the same umbrella.

There’s two episodes left. And as I always say, if the episode is as good as the preview, I’ll be happy. If it’s “The Lives of Hick Trash” again, I’ll be here next week. Lamenting and groaning and whining like I’m just another member of Bon Temps.

Hi. I’m Marcus, and I’m new here. I’m 32, from DC, and I’m a three time elementary school spelling bee champion and a pro wrestling manager. I enjoy insomnia, music, sociology, doing cardio, grilling steaks and writing. For the last two years, I’ve been writing about music for my own site True Genius Requires Insanity, DC cultural megablog Brightest Young Things, and leading East coast urban alternative site The Couch Sessions.

Now, I bring my rants on music and culture to the Bloglin. There is a method to my madness, and I hope you find what I have to say as provocative as it is entertaining.  My first post is actually something I wrote last week for TGRI, but felt was a great icebreaker between myself and The Bloglin. For more about me, follow me on the Twitters. Thanks and enjoy.

They say we can’t be livin’ like this for the rest of our lives
Well, we gon’ be livin’ like this for the rest of tonight
And you know they gon’ be bangin’ this shit for rest of our lives
So live fast and die young, live fast and die young, live fast and die young
- Kanye West, “Live Fast and Die Young”

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…
- George Bernard Shaw

Like all great black men, Kanye West has a God complex. As the most innovative man in hip hop since Afrika Bambaataa, Kanye West as a producer transcended the genre. As an artist, his persistence in resolving the multitude of issues with his own life and with understanding the nature of how unfairly the universe operates in sound and rhyme transcended music. And in boldly declaring that Taylor Swift didn’t deserve to win a 2009 MTV Video Music Award, he transcended justice. Now, in the prelude to his forthcoming release Dark Twisted Fantasy, Mr. West is on a mission to not just transcend hip hop, all of music, and the nature of justice, but he is instead on a very culturally necessary mission to become culture itself. You may find ignorance and audacity in such a claim, but it is absolutely true.

Nearly three weeks ago, Kanye West joined Twitter. The 140 character immediate update of instantaneous snatches of the universe is the first time that news, culture and opinion have been blended and mashed in such a unique format. Everyday life and life altering events coexist on the same timeline, birth meeting death, joy meeting pain, love meeting hate, all with corresponding opinions. In order to make Twitter stop internationally and focus on a singular event happens for even the most culturally significant people once a month or so. Let’s compare this to Yeezy. Yeezy joined Twitter and in less than 30 days has nearly 800,000 followers. By comparison, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder has nearly 1.6 million followers and he’s been on for almost five years. Kanye has singlehandedly made Clydesdale horses, re-visiting the idea of Kobe Bryant as as a rapper, gold goblets, partying in Sweden and a passion for fashion not just hot in the streets, but pushing ahead the groupthink of universal culture. Just last Sunday as well, he singlehandedly and successfully built bridges to new audiences for artists struggling to find them in hipster degenerate punk hop disciples Ninjasonik, ebullient pop masterpieces Matt and Kim, the oft assailed M.I.A. and the popped by bottles Justin Bieber, who now has become the world’s most important 16 year old as the only person followed by the force of culture itself, the Louis Vuitton Don.

Kanye West has set the new cultural shift. Live fast. Die young. This is different than the hipster idea of do blow and die fast or the recessionary ode of live cheap and die sad. Kanye West is happy to be alive, and wants us to echo his sentiment. If I were him I’d be too and want the same. A noted and proud mama’s boy, his mom died. He then released a Depeche Mode album that people forcibly tried to like and many succeeded in liking to deal with what his life became after that. From there he decides it to be a great idea to make Taylor Swift a cultural icon by merely showing his ass on international television in an epic and comic manner. He does this while dating a bodacious and bald German supermodel rebound chick who left him for a football star. If this were your life, and you survived? You’d be Tweeting your ass off about getting to watch Batman on a thirteen foot wall projection TV as well.

For his first single from his new release, “Power,” he filmed a video with him under a halo surrounded by cherubs, angels and seraphim while bathed in a golden hue. The video is directed by Marco Brambilla, a director and graphic artist in the moving portrait realm. Obsessed by imagery straight out of the Hieronymus Bosch genre contrasting and discussing the nature of the necessary contrast of good and evil, “Power” doesn’t just ask “what can a man do with all this power,” over a stadium rap track that sounds like it’s meant to be played at the Parthenon and not your car speakers, but will instead be a 40 minute film that will address the nature of man’s quest for glory and iconic status.

Kanye West drives culture because he can. Deny him his goal of being a cultural identifier or culture itself, and you’re likely to hear about it. On a track, in a blog post, or now, on Twitter. He’s sucking the marrow out of the most dramatically creative forces in the world. From emotional synthesized sounds to Takeshi Murakami to live orchestral backgrounds for Unplugged performances, and so many more examples, Kanye West lives only for the extremes of this universe, and in doing so is one of the most polarizing figures of this, or any generation. He perpetually lives and dies for the public, his emotional well-being decided as a public referendum. As we head into a new generation informed by the instantaneous shifts of culture being reflected by technology, life has reached a point where man can be culture and culture can be man. Let’s not be angry about this proclamation, but accept it as a statement of the degenerative nature of society that has led us to this point. 9/11 ruined our generation’s faith in good people. A pointless war ruined our faith in good government. Our faith in good religion has been shaken by a plethora of horrific acts of nature that have proven many things true, including Kanye stating that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.” What man did with all that power in portrait form.

We are a culture with nothing left to believe in. The underground hipster development was more about dancing to Nero fiddling while Rome burned than any sort of forward thinking cultural development. It was the lack of rules and lack of adherence to any standards of decency, sincerity, or much of anything else. We’re at a point now where in the mainstream, on the underground, in the streets, and in our minds, all that we know as hope, all that we know as fantasy, all that we know as reality, is gone, and everything in its place is frightening, unusual, terrifying, altogether too frank, honest, open and new. Nobody truly knows what to do in a socially and culturally lawless and wide open environment.

“What does a man do with all that power?” The question of the moment. Kanye West, as culture itself, and having more of all than all of us combined, is about to find out.

Caw! Caw! - Bummer Palace (2010) [Fanatic] // Grade: B-

Two Chicago-based bands working under very similar names—Cacaw and Caw! Caw!—has been a confusing annoyance point with me for some time. Luckily, the two acts sound nothing alike, the former masters of slimy, heavy noise rock and the latter, as evidenced through their debut full-length, Bummer Palace, spreading a sound of wide-ranging, rainbow-tinted pop-punk.

Caw! Caw! could nearly be classified as a strictly live band, playing around the city from informal house shows to proper venues for nearly a decade, but until now only having a single formal EP to their recorded credit. For a band known for their unbridled energy, and love for the interactivity of the live space, cramming that spirit into album format is a daunting task.

The band take on the challenge with the straightforward vision of “let’s just be ourselves”. “Toothless” kicks of Bummer Palace as a rightful introduction for new ears of the vast amount of explorations you’ll get on any one Caw! Caw! track. Clanging percussion pushes off-kilter punk falsetto interspersed with expanses of psychedelic guitar jam outs. “Vacuole” puts the band’s punk roots at the forefront, a frenzy of delightfully sloppy vocals and rushing guitar.

Caw! Caw! seem blind to terms like “cohesion” and “structure”, but this naivete comes off as charming. If their goal was to create an album that is representative of their live experience, then Bummer Palace is a total success. The vocals across the album are a zip line of stylistic shifts, issuing a bedside serenade in “Basement Apparitions”, touting hook-heavy, snot-nosed indifference in “Conjunctivitis” and howling in time with the riffs of “My Starship”. The instrumentation is equally unpredictable. Cascading avalanches of guitar give way to singsong head-bopping only to end up in a wall of noise by any given track’s end. And through all the bipolar transitions, the band seem blissfully unaware, smiles plastered to their faces happy to be able to claim: “Hey, we’re not boring. Wanna hang out?”

Caw! Caw! are probably always going to be better experienced live. Screaming in your face in an intimate setting is where they belong. While Bummer Palace is unstructured, and generally spastic, its messy eccentricities feel right.

Sludge is an often maligned genre that gets missed by most people, not exactly Doom, not just stoner rock, part grunge and all kinds of heavy! Sloath are a band that ploughs the rugged furrows of the genre with a blade of solid lead. It’s heavy and ponderous and so fuzzed out that the howls of the chanting vocals seem to be drowning as they emerge and submerge from the crushing guitar and bass wall of grunge. If you like your riffs slow and repetitive each one more ground out than before until your speakers are having trouble with the overdriven recording than Sloath are for you.

Now a lot of bands do this kind of thing, it’s not hard to play roughly in time if you play slow and it’s easy to crank your amp up to eleven but what’s not easy is making sure what you do is interesting and has a dynamism about it. As a five piece these guys start with a bit of a trad blues-ish riff cycle but then take it into a droning, psychedelic, noise direction, all sub bass and guitars that play amongst each other’s feedback, layering up white noise until your ears are picking out the tiny changes in the hiss and crackle and the doom laden riffs stop trying to keep time to some kind of beat and come rolling out when they’re good and ready!

I’ve only once seen them play live, in a now closed basement club in Brighton, the sort where the sweat drips of the ceiling before the audience even get in, they were so loud that my ears rung for day after but it didn’t matter too much because it was at the those volumes that the real crushing weight off those barely held together riffs really fell into place, their singer Kai rocking back and forth summoning up the kind of moaned laments reserved for the denizens of the second level of hell.

I can easily get bored at gigs even when I’m watching bands I really like but Sloath kept me totally connected with the ear blistering, feedback surfing moment, throughout their set which in my book means they kick ass.

If you want the an example of them at their blast explosion best then check out their Myspace for the song “Cane Trader” which was featured on their recent self-titled, vinyl only, 12” EP available on the Riot Season label. The EP has only three tracks but each one is between eleven and twenty two minutes long and the artwork is super.

The video here of them live has the strange element of relatively good sound quality and implies they are cleaner sounding than they really are, while their actual demos and studio recordings strangely serve as a better representation of them live!
Finally if you live in Spain which probably most of you reading will not then you can check them out when they do a mini tour over there in November!

In today’s age, we’re certainly no stranger to the horror/thriller theme of isolation and, in particular, the “I wake up and wonder where everyone is and what happened” scenario.  We’ve gotten “28 Days Later”, “The Road”, and literally countless others.  You can count another one in the genre’s oeuvre…

A few days ago, a trailer dropped for Brad Anderson’s latest flim. Upon first look, it seems to be dealing with the same sort of theme but with the added element of supernatural(?) creatures and light being the only means of safety for the isolated people who come together in a diner to try and figure out what’s going on.

This is the same guy who brought you the creepy thriller, Session 9, which featured a small cast and the imposing setting of Danvers Mental Hospital to weave a strange, unsettling descent into madness. He also brought you The Machinist, which featured an emaciated Christian Bale as Trevor Reznick who hasn’t slept in a year and also descends into madness as things get more surreal and harder to discern reality from fantasy.

The guy’s got a knack for portraying that descent in a thoughtful and believable way and definitely is keen on developing an atmosphere and sense of space which enhances that and sort of envelops the viewer. Let’s hope that this endeavor furthers that forte and delivers…

I’m sure to some of you here Steve is no stranger.  think he’s the most heavily Мишка tattooed person in the world. He’s got tattoos here, here, here and well now obviously up there (the inside of his lips)!

Dude that’s some fucking dedication to the brand. Email us a high rez shot of that pic and it’s going up as one of the Bloglin header images. Seriously, wow…just wow!

I unfortunately can not claim to know the provenance of this epic metal menu, but I wholeheartedly endorse this establishment wherever it may reside and would gladly gorge myself on these delicacies. I mean, seasoned with “the sorrowful cries of freshly widowed women?!” It doesn’t get much more satisfying…

Go here to view the menu in all of its black glory!!

I don’t know who these guys are, but I’m liking what I’m hearing! Don’t be an asshole and download their FREE EP right now!

Via All, Everyone, United

So you guys all got the heads up a few days ago on our lookbook for the Fall 2010 season. Today we’re happy to bring you this little video/promo commercial we did with Fame Giant. You get to see more of the graphics and it’s just really fun and sexy thanks to our model, Chloe Wise.

Music for the clip is Wavves “Take On the World.”