Posts Tagged ‘Metallica’
Study Finds Metal Soothes Monkeys
If you want to mellow out a monkey, play him some Metallica.
That’s the surprising result of a new study by Charles Snowdon, a
University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor. The researchers played clips of music— including Metallica’s
“Of Wolf and Man,” Nine Inch Nails’, “The Fragile,” Tool’s “The
Grudge,” and Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”—for cotton-top tamarins.
Dethklok and Mastodon Touring 34 Cities
Not only is Dethklok getting its own video game, but Brendan Small’s once-imaginary band has somehow managed to arrange a 7-week tour with Mastodon, the most popular metal act to come out of Atlanta and Metallica’s current tour opener. Mastodon’s Crack the Skye hit the streets in March of this year, and Dethklok’s Dethalbum II drops Sept. 8.
High on Fire and Converge will open the 34 shows–one of which will be at GMU’s Patriot Center on Oct. 31.
Electronic Arts is sponsoring the tour (which is sort of odd if you consider the new Dethklok video game is a Konami product), thus every concert will have console stations where audience members can try out Brutal Legend, EA’s new video game featuring voiceover work by Jack Black.
More deets after the jump.
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Misfits @ Jaxx October 25
Punk leftovers-cum-merchandising powerhouse the Misfits have announced a fall tour, stopping at Jaxx Sunday, Oct. 25. It’s not quite Halloween, but close enough.
The Jersey-bred musclemen/metal punks emerged in 1977, developed a crude catalog of ’50s B-movie themes banged out and recorded with even less tact, and, technically, disbanded by 1983 (when head howler Glenn Danzig left the group). But since 1996, a Frankenstein-ian composite of aging shredders and hangers-on have been keeping the monster alive. Founded by the incomparable Danzig and Jerry Only, Marky Ramone and Black Flag’s Dez Cadena were once part of the deciduous line-up.
SXSW Recap: Friday
Medications: When Medications performed at Fort Reno a few years back, I told drummer/bassist Chad Molter that I thought his band’s new songs sounded sort of like mid-’70s Fleetwood Mac, in a good way. I’m not sure he really liked hearing that, though. At any rate, when they played Friday, at this funky art-space/theater, the new songs were a bit more heavier and more progressive. So, maybe more like Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac?
Earthless w/ J Mascis: The San Diego-based psych-rock trio, augmented here by Dinosaur Jr guitarist J. Mascis, basically improvised a 30-minute space-rock crescendo that never stopped, it just got louder and louder.
Metallica: Metallica is pretty much the last of the superhuman mega-bands, at least in my opinion. Any personal obligations that they might have as grown men with families seem totally secondary to their lives as rock stars. Metallica will always go the extra mile for rock. Like, if you’re sick and dying and you love Metallica, I feel like there’s still a chance they would show up in your hospital room and surprise you with an autographed guitar. Not a lot of bands will do that anymore, certainly not a lot of the bands playing at SXSW. But the line was long–all the way around the block–so I skipped the show.
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Photos: Metallica @ Verizon Center last night
(Full set of photos at Flickr.)
In my City Lights pick of The Sword at Rock & Roll Hotel, I didn’t really have particularly glowing things to say about Metallica. Like many metalheads, I’m a big fan of their early material, up to and actually including the Black Album, but they completely lost me after that. Death Magnetic was clearly better than any of their other recent work, but at this point I’ve moved on to other kinds of metal and was left largely unmoved by it.
Still, last night’s show proved one thing: they’ve still got the knack for performance. I didn’t have a ticket so I couldn’t stay past the first three songs that I was allowed to photograph, but from what I saw and heard, this was probably one hell of a show. Energy levels through the roof (the stage was in the round with eight mics set up in different spots, and all the band members were constantly bouncing around between them), and they sounded great. The first two songs they played were the first two songs off of Death Magnetic, and while I’m not crazy about either of them, the performances were pretty much flawless.
The crowd was into it too, all 20,000 of them – the arena was sold out all the way to the upper decks. Dinosaurs past their prime maybe, but people do love a good dinosaur, especially when they’re still this vicious.
