Go here to listen live. Saturday 10 PM – 1 AM CST.

Support your local scene (not the “seen”):

Lone Star Massacre A Texas Metal Tribute on Throne of Metal Radio Show This Sep. 10th Sat @ 10 am cst Tx time www.metalmessiahradio.com Here in Texas we have some of the best bands around Thrash Death Black Doom Power and Some of the best underground bands in the world. This will showcase classic bands to some of the newer exterme metal bands.If you know of a band are a band that would like airplay on this show let me know deadline is Friday Sep 9th i will try to fit all i can in this show so get ready for 3 hours of Texas metal this sat.

• Listen live

Austin’s longstanding head-shredding ultra-orthodox metal show Metal Enema returns with a new venue:

METALENEMA – Death, Black, Thrash!
Metalenema began in 1994 on KVRX FM Radio in Austin, Texas. Hosted by The Undertaker and Agapornis Epicac, it was the only radio show broadcast from The University of Texas to local, and later international, acclaim. The show was tied to numerous touring underground concerts and boasted hundreds of listeners at the height of its popularity. It resurfaced as a guest program on BCR in Bridgewater, England, in 1999, and was then revived once more for a series of popular podcasts on Solarfall.com from late 2005 to the end of 2007.

The focus of the show is Black and Death Metal spanning the ’80s, ’90s, and the new millennium, as well as some good old timeworn Speed and Thrash Metal for good measure. While the music is always serious, your intrepid hosts are rarely anything but irreverent, ridiculous, and occasionally patently offensive in their quest to promote the long-lost lighter side of an art form they hold so dear. Tune in and give your brain a Viking funeral every Saturday night on No Control Radio on 107.1 HD2! – No control radio on 101x

Check out the older shows (2004-2009) at the Metal Enema website, or tune in on Saturdays from 10 PM – 1 AM CST:

• Metal Enema
• No Control Radio Live Stream (MP3)
• No Control Radio website

See a blast from the past, etc:

Liberally borrowed from these guys.

It’s easy to type words:

In tens of millions of reviews on Web sites like Amazon.com, Citysearch, TripAdvisor and Yelp, new books are better than Tolstoy, restaurants are undiscovered gems and hotels surpass the Ritz.

Or so the reviewers say. As online retailers increasingly depend on reviews as a sales tool, an industry of fibbers and promoters has sprung up to buy and sell raves for a pittance.

“For $5, I will submit two great reviews for your business,” offered one entrepreneur on the help-for-hire site Fiverr, one of a multitude of similar pitches. On another forum, Digital Point, a poster wrote, “I will pay for positive feedback on TripAdvisor.” A Craigslist post proposed this: “If you have an active Yelp account and would like to make very easy money please respond.” – NYT

Label sends stuff to blogs, blogs fawn, label reprints, and on it goes.

What gets lost? Any notion of music quality.

You can be a wank metal blog, and be popular for some time, but you’ll never touch the popularity of the metal that really made life more intense for people.

A repo man’s always intense. Come on, let’s go get a drink.

Free streaming radio from grubster capital of the world Austin, TX that manages to pull some punches:

# Artist: Oblivion
# Title: Your Mom’s Metal Show
# Genre: Other
# Year: 2010
# Length: 132:05 minutes (120.94 MB)
# Format: MP3 Stereo 44kHz 128Kbps (CBR)

• Download/Stream here

Metal Maniacs / Metalhit.com Offer 11 New Songs for Download + Enter to Win a TEXTURES CD from Nuclear Blast

Metal Maniacs, America’s online source for underground metal and Metalhit.com, metal’s premiere digital download store, are offering up their newest installment of their free monthly metal compilation for download worldwide!

The latest compilation, available from August 15th – September 14th, includes free, as-of-yet unreleased, downloadable tracks from:

TEXTURES (Nuclear Blast)
ANTHRAX (Megaforce Records)
DIAMOND PLATE (Earache Records)
MORDBRAND (Deathgasm Records)
ANTERIOR (Metal Blade Records)
GHOST BRIGADE (Season of Mist)
ARKONA (Napalm Records)
NOCTURNAL FEAR (Moribund Records)
NIGHTBRINGER (Season of Mist)
THE BROWNING (Earache Records)
VAN CANTO (Napalm Records)

Visitors may also enter to win a free copy of TEXTURES “Dualism” CD, courtesy of Nuclear Blast Records.

To download the compilation and enter the contest, visit: http://www.metalhit.com/metal1st.htm

Check back in mid-September for a new set of free unreleased songs and a new contest!

www.metalmaniacs.com
www.metalhit.com
www.nuclearblast.com

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www.metalhit.com – extreme metal Mp3 store, label, distro.
www.metalmaniacs.com – the voice of the underground online
www.fossildungeon.com – ethereal / electronic / heavenly voices label
www.riddickbros.com – art + design

This reviewer noted something many of us have seen — that of the multitude of blogs, sites, magazines, etc. no one actually knows much about the music. They take two lines and a concept from the press release, and then blow that into a chatty review, in the meantime missing the point.

Here’s Ray Miller from Metal Curse on the incompetence of metal journalists:

I am fucking sick of reading bullshit reviews of this album written by clueless dickholes who all seem to think that this is the first time Cianide has ever played at a pace any faster than Godzilla’s slow march to Toyko to rape the Diet building. Satan’s speed is Cianide’s speed, you hydrocephalic living abortions! Go listen to “Human Cesspool” or anything from 1996’s Rage War (I don’t think anything here is faster than “Deadly Spawn”) onward for examples of Chicago’s Most Brutal kicking 666 spectrums of ass at whatever tempos they see fit. Almost all of the band’s previous album, 2005’s Hell’s Rebirth, is this fast or beyond. – Cianide – Gods of Death

This is him writing about the new Cianide (which is great) that has gone over the heads of most reviewers who have no idea why it’s (a) good and (b) deserves attention, but most of all are easily distracted and so have wandered over to the metalcore band that uses a harp and a female vocalist and are gushing over its mediocre music (but excellent production! ironic instrumentation! groovy name! good back-story!) instead.

Metal journalism is incompetent because record labels simply imported a new audience — hipsters — to replace metalheads. The new people have no clue and so they gush, drool, and gibber excitedly over trivial stuff. The labels don’t care — they just want a nice easy extension of their press releases. They might have had opposition back when metalheads chose magazines carefully, and read informative websites only; now, the endless sea of blogs is excited chatter with no substance, and that’s perfect for marketing.

From a reputable source, contrasting that which inspires us with that which makes us pity ourselves:

In the movie [The Matrix], the protagonist discovers not only the awful truth about the world, that it is a living nightmare where computers use humans as batteries to power their mechanized metropolis, but that he has powers beyond that of which he has ever dreamed, eventually destroying the matrix and becoming the savior of all humankind.

Thus the truth, while awful, gives the protagonist something wonderful in return: a cause that turns his dreary existence into a glorious fight for freedom against a merciless robotic enemy. This is the notion into which philosophical references to the red pill/blue pill analogy try to tap, the idea that while the truth makes the world seem to be a frightening and draconian place, that the cause of revealing the truth will take on noble characteristics and transform the reader into a persecuted hero. I’ve referred to this idea as a “persecution paradigm” and went into describing it at length in The Burning Blade 13.5.

The basic idea expressed there is that these persecution paradigms play to feelings of alienation and exclusion in the potential convert, making them believe that their suffering has a mysterious and nefarious external cause, and that by defeating those responsible that all can be made well again. The paradigms give the downtrodden convert a sense of purpose, transforming their suffering and other negative feelings into hope and positive feelings. Furthermore, the paradigms make belief systems self reinforcing by bringing the believer into conflict with the world, encouraging them to fight with righteous anger, and confirming their belief that the world is aligned against them when they encounter resistance.

Such persecution paradigms have been wildly successful on the internet in convincing people of all sorts of conspiracy theories and other wild ideas. People seem to love a good secret and long to share it with others, oftentimes arguing vehemently in support of those ideas in chat rooms, forums, and anywhere else they can.

I would like to compare this aspect of the movie “The Matrix” with another movie about a protagonist who is also being crushed by the machinery of an uncaring world: “Brazil,” which I highly recommend. In “Brazil”, the hapless protagonist daydreams that he is a valiant warrior: complete with wings and a sword and shining armor; and in those dreams he fights numerous villains in his quest to rescue his angelic dream girl, who, by contrast in real life, is a lowly and somewhat butch delivery woman. His daydreams make his life more interesting and serve as an escape from his difficult and mind-numbing job, but the protagonist isn’t content to merely just dream about such things, and he tries to make his dreams come true, chasing after his reluctant dream girl and battling real life “villains” in the process.

I won’t spoil the ending, but the contrast between the two movies is quite stark. In “The Matrix”, reality is the dream and the dream is reality and the protagonist is able to escape the bonds of what he thought was real to become something much more than what he was. In “Brazil” the dream is just a dream which the protagonist tries so very hard to make real so that he can escape from the drudgery of his existence, which seems to me to be a more apt analogy for what “Matrix” style allegories and ideologies in general do for people. The way I see it, “The Matrix” is entertainment in the form of a persecution paradigm while “Brazil” is social commentary on what effects such paradigms can have on people. – The Burning Blade

Do you want to create, or try to dominate what already exists?

Do you seek something better, or merely to exclude current problems?

Do you pity yourself, or use yourself as a means to greater ends?

Mr Cameron will attempt to rise above the row, offering a damning analysis of Britain’s moral decline and promising a raft of reforms in response.

Ministers began to set out some of those changes yesterday, signalling moves to end legal anonymity for under-18s accused of rioting. Tougher enforcement would “make life hell” for gang leaders, the Government promised. – The Telegraph

All politics aside, that seems to me the wrong path. You are following the path of victimhood that way, like punk bands complaining about low salaries at their grocery-store jobs.

Your society lacks a direction. You can’t control/discipline/propagandize people who are essentially rotting in disuse.

Metal is the solution to all problems, including shitty movies like The Matrix and boring riots like these Brokeback Islanders torching their local malls. It’s an antidote to a boring, purposeless world.