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er, Pagan Knights Tour '09.
My attempt at reigniting my blog. Missed a few shows, which may eventually come out of their draft status.

Pirate Metal Post!
( SuidAkrA, Alestorm, Týr )

I've listened to 50,000 tracks. I managed to coincidentally look at my page right at the 50,000th track, Earth - Harbey - Justin Broadrick I think I was planning to click through to Alcest's page, to upload this image of neige (from sanguineheart):

The 2008 year end list post is up at archGFX - including MP3's for the wierd shit you haven't heard:
Top 5 Albums, EP's and Metal Albums

Top 5 metal albums
5: Nachtmystium - Assassins: Black Meddle Pt. 1
4: Torche - Meanderthal
3: Enslaved - Vertebrae
2: Cynic - Traced in Air
1: Burst - Lazarus Bird

Top 5 EP's
5: Mogwai - Batcat EP
4: Jesu/Battle of Mice - Split
3: The Gaslight Anthem - Señor And The Queen
2: Cassettes Won't Listen - Small Machines
1: Agalloch - The White EP

Top 5 indie(ish) albums
5: Dengue Fever - Venus On Earth
4: Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
3: Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV
2: Why? - Alopecia
1: Cloud Cult - Feel Good Ghosts

Reasoning, explanation, and general gushing on the blog (link at the top)

Sun 26 Oct – Alkaline Trio, Rise Against, Thrice, The Gaslight Anthem

Due to sitting home alone rather than going to a show last night, I got pissed, and removed Tim and his bandmates from my library. Along with In Flames. I really only wanted to remove the scourge of A Sense of Purpose, but apparently it's all or nuthin.

Buckshot review at archGFX.

upshot:
Avoid Monarch, although Opeth always rules. Red 7 always rules too, because it's always 2 shows, and Maker Faire is hilarious and awesome, much like Mucca Pazza.

Thu 16 Oct – Opeth, Baroness, High on Fire at Monarch
Fri 17 Oct – Wolves in the Throne Room and Nachtmystium at Red 7, with a side of Bridge And Tunnel
Sun 19 Oct – Mucca Pazza @ Maker Faire

Ok, this is really weird. I haven't really felt like there was anything gluing my musical taste together. I thought I was just kind of floating aimlessly between disconnected ideas.

Apparently, I was wrong. Pink Floyd, or more specifically, Syd Barrett is the glue that holds it all together. I found this out via dredg.com, where they noted that they'd just contributed a cover to Like Black Holes In The Sky: The Tribute To Syd Barrett. Looked it up on amazon, and here's what I see:

* Kylesa, who I just saw open for Pinback a couple weeks ago
* Intronaut, who I saw in August, and just recently picked up their album
* Stinking Lizaveta, who opened for Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's album release party last year
* Jarboe, who's been involved with Jesu and Neurosis of late.
* Yakuza, chicago sax metal band that I first tweaked to at a bar near my first apartment
* dredg, obviously, who's been my favorite band for the better part of this decade, who I'm seeing on tuesday

This shouldn't be a huge surprise, my dad raised me on Floyd, albeit from Wish You Were Here to Roger Waters' departure. Nonetheless, it's a bit disconcerting to see so many unrelated bands that I've been impressed by this year, on the same tribute album, completely out of the blue.

amusing that:
cupcakepants is still highest - something to be said for affecting each others' tastes

blueprintds, the user for my office, which pulls from the music left on my old hard drive, is outpaced by a couple random internet friends, i'm not even sure how i know.

there's a pretty damn even split between metal friends, folk/indie friends, and emo/punk friends. my trending towards metal hasn't completely taken over my tastes.

I say obligatory, because I've been re-reading my old festival review posts (Intonation ('05), Lollapalooza ('05), Pitchfork ('07)) to figure out if it's always been this much work to get our "money's worth" out of a festival. My conclusion is that ACL was, in fact, a mistake. Next year we'll be doing afterparties only.

Friday
Mates of State where dependably enjoyable. It's funny to see a band like them on a festival stage. They fit better in bowling alleys and tiny pubs. On a big stage, they look lonely, too far apart from each other. It's also odd to see them with other people (strings section) on stage.

We left after about 2/3 of the set, to go see Jenny Lewis at the WaMu JP Morgan/Chase stage. Unfortunately, the stage had an awkward roof and bleachers, so that if you weren't queued up early, you couldn't see or hear her. That was a lot of my issue with the fest, that for every set you had to try to beat the crowd there, or risk completely missing out (unlike Lolla, where you could at least hear/see monitors from a great distance).

Saturday
I got there early for Fleet Foxes, since they sold out last time they were in town. It was a great set for early in the morning (okay, noon-ish), very chilled and comfortable (albeit hot). By the end of the set, though, they had to compete with the leaking sound from other stages. My other main gripe with ACL is that there's much poorer coordination between the stages, so if you're not really close to the stage you want to be hearing, you're going to get a mash of sound.

cupcakepants and hhuynh512 didn't get there early enough to catch the show, so it wasn't quite as much fun by myself. Attempting to meet up with people for The Fratellis was also fail, so I gave up for the evening, since I was going to see Conor Oberst at the afterparty on sunday. After a long walk home, I was sunburnt (hah) and exhausted.

Sunday

Stars were our first set, although not as relaxing as fleet foxes. They're more of a CD band than I live band, I guess. Rather than trying to deal with fighting through the crowds to see anyone else, we stayed in place for Okkervil River (meh) and Tegan and Sara. Sara actually apologized for passing out during the Lollapalooza we saw them at, which was hilarious. Darkness had fallen before they came on, so there were no such difficulties this time.

In the end, even with only getting up for beer/food/bathroom, we were still to tired to make it to Conor's afterparty.