Just one month after it was announced that frontman Ben Ward was leaving Ravens Creed, in a statement directed solely to me, UK thunderdoomers Orange Goblin said the following:

“Oye! I bet you’d like us to go ahead and put out a bloody new album so you could review it and talk about how fucking awesome we are. Well, fuck off, mate. We’re not gonna put out a fucking record this year. In fact, we might not ever put out a new album at all. What about that, eh? Ah, bugger off, you bloody tosser…” [At this point the statement devolved into a long series of specifically British insults that it would be pointless for me to print since no one would understand them.]

Yes. That definitely happened. Or, they said this:

With everybody’s commitments to work, family and other things, we have decided that it is best that we do not commit to any deadline for the next album as we wouldn’t want to rush and deliver a record that we are not 100 percent happy with. Songwriting will continue as and when we can, but we honestly couldn’t say when we will be ready to go into the studio to record again. It will definitely NOT be in 2010. Please rest assured that it will happen, but sometimes it is better to stop and think of what is best for Orange Goblin as a band!

I’ll leave it up to you to decide which one’s more plausible. Any way you slice it you don’t get an Orange Goblin record, so knock yourself out.

…Just because I have. Yet again I’ve fucking failed to grab the code to stream a song from Spin and put it on this site. This time it’s the title track to the new High on Fire record, Snakes for the Divine. Pleh. Download it here, along with some nifty Jay Reatard and MC Frontalot, whoever the hell they are.

Not much for obits, but let’s give this a shot:

Yes, we all rejoiced seeing him stroll down the lane each year at the Academy Awards, the Grammys and sometimes even those pesky Golden Globes, but alas, author J.D. Salinger, who so loved the limelight, is dead today at 91. Much like after the 2009 passing of Michael Jackson, his fans have lined the streets of Los Angeles in poorly-printed bootleg t-shirts bearing his image, and there seems to be no end to the public grieving in sight.

In all seriousness, I’ll say this for the guy: J.D. Salinger totally hated your guts. He didn’t even know you. In fact, in all likelihood he hated you before you were born, and he hated your parents too. And he meant it. A genuine American misanthrope in the 20th Century; the age of ever-increasing access and he wouldn’t have it. I guess that’s admirable. Much as anything, anyhow.

And where would we all have been without his most famous work, 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye, to validate all our directionless teenage angst and ennui? To tell us who “the phonies” were and who were the real people? Certainly we were all made real by Holden Caulfield, and you can be sure that had the book never existed and someone actually come along to tell us that, at 15 years old, we weren’t the center of the universe and that whatever trivial emotional turbulences we were experiencing amounted to less than nothing on the scale of human suffering, we wouldn’t have believed them anyway. With Catcher in the Rye, we didn’t even have to pretend to buy it. We really were the center of the universe.

Salinger so loved and understood teenagers, in fact, that at 35 he married one. In strict defiance of the “half your age plus seven” rule and in what can only be called his “living the dream” phase, he rejected the fame and literary praise being heaped on him, took a 19-year-old bride and lived as a recluse for the rest of his days (not that the marriage lasted that long). A quick question: would you ever leave the house if you were 35 and newly wedded to someone 16 years your junior? Seclusion seems an immediately more logical option.

The good news in all of this is now his offspring can plunder through the reported 15 completed manuscripts he left behind and sell the movie rights for his life at top dollar to Paramount (I think Ben Affleck would be perfect for the role, don’t you?), pissing all over his legacy, yes, but breathing much needed new life into freshman high school curricula everywhere. Jerome David Salinger: you will be missed?

After liberally throwing out a bunch of, “See you tomorrow night”-esque promises to folks I knew at the Starlight Ballroom in Philly and telling myself that Sunday would be my chance to not be a total jackass, I was really looking forward to the show in New York. A couple friends were in from Michigan and we were meeting up for a couple beers beforehand. Sitting around, listening to Lucifer’s Friend, talking about music and whatever else, it was all going pretty much as planned.

Then I flushed my car keys down my buddy’s toilet.

Yup, same guy to whom the night before I’d been such a prick. I was using his bathroom, and when I leaned in to flush, my car keys (there was nothing on the keychain but the key and the remote, so it was small), fell out of my hoodie pocket, into the swirling water, and before I knew it, were gone.

I stood there and looked at the empty toilet for about two solid minutes, and said to myself, “I’m going to have to go into the next room now and say that I flushed my car keys down the toilet.” And that’s just what I did.

I have a lifelong history of half-self-caused/half-bad-luck buffoonery. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t one single word in the English language that means, “I’m an idiot, but not everything is completely my fault.” The Germans probably have one, but if they do, it’s probably just five other words put together, so maybe that doesn’t count.

My buddy, his wife, another friend and the out of towners offered an appropriate mixture of sympathy and joshing, and I’m glad to say that at least for everyone else, the jovial mood didn’t seem completely spoiled. When you flush your keys down the toilet, you take comfort in what you can.

Of course, they were the only set of keys, save for the valet key, which was locked inside the car. A complex series of phone calls to The Patient Mrs. and AAA later, it was painfully apparent there was no way I was making it to B.B. King’s to see The Gates of Slumber and Pentagram again. The tow truck driver came and got the car unlocked, setting the piercing alarm off several times in the process, I got the valet key, put the car in neutral, and got it towed to the dealership, where as of Tuesday morning and this post, it’s still residing.

Not only did I not see Pentagram, but my lack of vehicle prevented me from fulfilling a promise to show my support for local bros Alkahest at Precious Metal at Lit Lounge last night. Wow, maybe I’m just an asshole all the time and my flashes of good nature are nothing more than blind self-perception. Quite a journey of discovery this series of “reviews” has turned out to be.

I figure I’m in the hole about $300 for the new key and remote, because it’s a Volvo and you can’t fart in that car without it costing you at least $300. Fortunately, The Patient Mrs. took a “Shit happens, and no, the universe is not out to get you” position on the matter, and though I stand by my position to the semi-contrary — namely that not only is the universe out to get me, but I’m willing to help it every chance I get — survival seems imminent. Dignity was a farce anyway.

And how did Weedeater frontman “Dixie” Dave Collins blow off his big toe? Oh, he was cleaning his favorite shotgun. For any of you non-American Obelisk attendees out there, let me explain something to you: this shit happens in this country. All the time. We are all fucking insane, and in case you haven’t watched the news, um, ever, incredibly dangerous people, even to ourselves. Hell, especially to ourselves. Especially ourselves and brown people. Actually, to pretty much everyone.

While I don’t necessarily have a favorite shotgun (or a gun at all, let alone many, which would necessitate an entire rack), my heart goes out to ol’ Nine Toe Collins, who obviously didn’t intend on shooting his toe off, and finds his plans to record with Steve Albini similarly obliterated. It’s a bummer all around. Here’s what the band, via the PR wire, had to say about it:

Hi folks,
As most of you know, here in the Weedeater camp we pride ourselves on a long tradition of shooting our band in the proverbial foot right before we’re supposed to do something important. Whether it’s a big tour, a recording session, or whatever else we’re supposed to do, invariably we will find some way to try and thwart our grandiose plans. Well, it’s no different for this recording session, except that this time we really did shoot ourselves in the foot. In fact we regret to inform all of you that this weekend, Dixie Dave shot his big toe off whilst cleaning his favorite shotgun. Yup, that’s right. When reached for comment, Mr. Collins gave a quote that speaks for itself: ‘It wasn’t my intention to shoot off my big toe. This really fucking sucks and the pain is unbearable.’

Mr. Collins’ doctors have advised that he is to be bed-ridden for the next few weeks during his recovery. This will obviously affect the recording session (and the few surrounding shows in Jan./Feb.), which will now have to be postponed until after the March/April “nine-toe” tour. Said tour is still 100 percent on, however, so check back soon for updates on venues and exact dates. It looks like the support bands will be awesome and the band is really stoked to play this new material after touring for so many years on the same basic set. Yeah… we knew that too, sorry but we’re about to make good on it. And of course after all, we gotta keep workin’, like workin’ men do. Shooting your big toe off isn’t free, for fuck’s sake!

So to re-cap…Keko sacrificed his pinkie for Down/Melvins, Shep broke his hand for Today is the Day, and now Dixie has generously offered up his big toe for Steve Albini to nibble on. Unless overtly fond of Limburger cheese and rotten flesh, Master Steve is advised to decline. Good day. — Weedeater

Mankind is unkind, man…

Here’s a quick tip for those of you on either side of the buying and selling of goods via the webunets: USE A FUCKING PADDED ENVELOPE.

Doesn’t seem like too much to ask, right? And perhaps you’re thinking to yourself, “What the hell does it matter? I sandwiched the disc between two pieces of cardboard and sent it in a regular envelope, it should be fine.” NO. It makes a difference, and two pieces of cardboard is not the same as bubblewrap. This should be kindergarten level shit, but apparently it needs to be said.

And I say “apparently” because twice in the last month have I received packages of CDs — one off eBay and another from the StonerRock.com message board (not the All that is Heavy webstore, with which I’ve had no such issues) — where, after dashing to the mailbox and rejoicing at seeing the wanted package, I’ve opened it up and found the jewel cases smashed all to hell.

No problem, right? I’ve got extra jewel cases, and a switch is easy enough. But hey, maybe after paying $35+ for a copy of Spirit Caravan’s rare-as-fuck Jug Fulla Sun, I’d like to get it without the back liner ripped because broken shards of jewel case plastic punctured it? Same fucking thing happened with the Man’s Ruin issue of Brant Bjork’s Jalamanta a couple weeks ago, so clearly, for the good of the internet buying community at large, I need to repeat myself: USE A FUCKING PADDED ENVELOPE.

This concludes this public service announcement. Remember kids, padded envelopes save lives, or at very least make you seem like much less of an asshole to the people buying out-of-print albums from you.

Seems cheap to mention it since it’s not like I knew the guy or ever talked to him, but I’d be remiss somehow if I didn’t. Dec. 8, 2009. Five years since Dimebag got shot. Here’s the “Floods” solo:

I had to throw “the Movie” in that title so as to not confuse it with Ichabod’s recently reviewed album.

Now, I’m hardly a movie critic, and usually I like to keep this site as on-topic as possible, but I just finished watching the John Cusack-ified film 2012, and I feel compelled to comment on it. No, this isn’t going to be a rail against it in the sense of some long-winded diatribe about how such an ever-lowering common denominator orgy of destruction ultimately devalues our culture as a whole, satisfying only on the level of our basest masochism in a “safe,” “fantasy” context. No, having sat through the entirety of its two and a half hours, I’ll go as far as to praise 2012 for this and this alone: structurally, it is a perfectly written pop song.

If the verses are the love story between Cusack and female lead Amanda Peet (whose on-screen chemistry together was slim-to-nil) and the choruses are the CG end-of-the-world scenes, with flourishes of tertiary characters and government conspiracies to serve as bridges and increase an alleged universal appeal, then right up to the ending, which was so ridiculous as to be insulting — not to mention the imperialist overtones — it had the exact structural soundness of some of the biggest pop hits of all time. No wonder it made $225,000,000 (that’s about 3.75 Euros) its opening weekend.

Only trouble is a pop song says all it has to say in about three minutes and this was 150. C’est la vie. Most pop songs are garbage too. Can’t hold it against them, though. As long as people keep watching, they’ll keep making it, and I by no means exempt myself. Hell, I saw it. Commerce speaks loudest.

Following the recent suicide of StonerRock.com board member Tariq Ali, there’s been an outpouring from the community there of sadness and sympathies. Now there is a benefit concert for his family. Tariq’s band, Couldron (not to be confused with the crappy Earache retro-metallers of the same name), will be playing as well as Lair of the Minotaur and others. The flier has the rest of the info, and if you look for it as an event on that newfangled Facebook, do so under “A Tribute to Tariq Ali.”

The press release pretty much says it all. If there was a chance any of us was going to turn out immortal, it would have been him.

Los Angeles, CA � Friends, fans and heavy metal rock and rollers around the world are mourning the death of Blue Cheer bassist and lead singer Richard Allan �Dickie� Peterson (b. September 12, 1946), after a long fight against cancer.� Peterson, age 63, died in Erkelenz, Germany, where he lived, on the morning of October 12, 2009.� He is survived by wife Ilka Peterson, ex-wife Marilyn (Peterson) Stephens with whom he had a daughter, CorrinaPeterson-Kaltenrieder, and a grandson.� He was a founding member and leader of the San Francisco band Blue Cheer; a band known to heavy metal fans for being louder and heavier than any band before them and for laying the blueprint for much of what would come after.� The band debuted with a ground shaking cover of Eddie Cochran�s �Summertime Blues� on their 1968 album Vincebus Eruptum.� In the early days, the Cheer regularly played shows with their San Francisco peers including such era luminaries as The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Big Brother & the Holding Company and Cream.

The band�s last US tour (members Peterson, founding drummer Paul Whaley, and guitarist Andrew �Duck� MacDonald) was in support of their 2007 release What Doesn�t Kill You� and had the band playing shows with the fourth generation of bands to follow in their path.� �He loved the younger musicians,� said MacDonald of his bandmate, �he thought of all of them as his children.�� Zach Gabbard of the band Buffalo Killers, one of Dickie�s favorite new generation rock bands, said, �You never know what it is going to be like to play with your heroes, but we walked into the club and Dickie stopped and said, �Buffalo Killers, cool name.�� We played and hung out with Dickie and the rest of the band all night.� It was a gift.� Dickie was worthy of his hero status and will be missed by many.�

Plans were underway for the band to tour in support of the 2009 Rainman Records DVD release of Blue Cheer Rocks Europe when Dickie�s cancer was found.� Tour plans were put on hold, but the first full-length concert DVD in the band�s more than 40 year history was released without delay.� The DVD includes not only the concert footage with 5.1 audio, but also included a Peterson voiceover commentary and a complete interview with the late leader of the band.

Dickie and Blue Cheer cherished their fans, the 1%ers as they were called, and considered them the fourth member of their band.� �Without you, what we do is completely pointless� Peterson said to an audience in 2006, continuing �you�ve got to take care of each other, you�re all you�ve got.�� MacDonald says that Dickie believed in the best of people. �The people loved him and he loved them right back. It was the best relationship he had in his life.�

Fuck you, dude. Seriously. Fuck you.

Slayer’s World Painted Blood is out Nov. 3. Only assholes steal records. And only real assholes steal records and then leave the torn envelope to go through to the recipient anyway, so they can know they’ve been ripped off.

You know, I fucking woke up this morning with my god damn left eye swollen shut from a fucking stye. I had this whole fucking day planned out, was gonna go visit the family, was gonna review a couple records, do some writing for school, and all I’ve done all day is sit here and be in fucking pain and then this bullshit?

Fuck it. Day over. I’m punching out. If anyone needs me, I’ll be hosting my own private Dexter marathon on my couch and wishing it was me stabbing everybody.

StonerRock.com, which has been following the story of one Tariq Ali, one of its board members who went missing Sept. 13, has posted an update that his body has been found in a forest near his home, dead in an apparent suicide. Again, I didn’t know him at all, we’d never spoken, but the scene around this music is small enough that there’s a genuine sense of community and to lose someone under these circumstances hits us all pretty hard. The Obelisk sends condolences to his family and friends.

Here’s a local newspaper story.

I don’t regularly post over at StonerRock.com, reviews aside, but I troll the discussion forums almost daily just to see what’s up, and I was saddened the other day to learn about the disappearance of forum member Tariq Ali, who has been missing for nine days as of Tuesday, Sept. 22. Never talked to the guy, but I figured I’d post the flier here and if anyone has any info, they can get in touch with the Midlothian police at the number given.

Nothing like starting a short week off with some righteously sad shit. StonerRock.com posted the ellipse-filled update below from Dozer guitarist/vocalist Fredrik Nordin, and while I can hardly fault the dude for pursuing an education — life, after all, is bigger than stoner rock — I certainly hope this isn’t the end of Dozer, who are quite simply one of the best rock bands on the planet. Their latest album, Beyond Colossal is out on Small Stone, and if you haven’t heard it yet, you should.

Here’s the story:

“Howdy Folks,

Well I don�t know where to start really. But the story�s like this…

I just started school, for the third time. I know we had an upcoming tour in England (and shows in Holland, Belgium and Greece). But the tour and school collided in a such bad way, that I won�t be able to do the tour. Seeing this might be my last chance at an education, I just can�t give it up. So what that means in short…

We�ve decided to take a break for an indefinite period of time. On the 13th of November we have a gig in our hometown. If it will be the last gig? Only time will tell. But we�re pretty confident that it won�t be…

Take care / Fredrik in Dozer�

Note that the tour he’s talking about having to cancel was a run of dates with fellow Swedes, Truckfighters, which would have been some of the awesomest shit of the year to see. I’ve been trying to convince The Patient Mrs. that we really need to go to the UK in November, so I guess I can stop bugging her about that. What a bummer. Hopefully they’ll be back soon.

I�m not even going to attempt to write a memorial. You might as well eulogize a mountain. Guitar and recording legend Les Paul, dead at 94. He made lightweights of us all. Story�s pretty much everywhere. I found it here.