Welcome!

Somehow you’ve stumbled upon my blog and I’m not quite sure how!

Right now I am in Melbourne and taking photos, making art and music (www.deathoconnor.com) and writing my tits off!

say hi at danny.crombie[AT]musicvice.com!

Adelaide

Wow, that’s me back from Adelaide and Melbourne is just as bloody hot – bring on gallons of water and thousands of bottles of lemon and lime bitters!

I’ll be back in my writing saddle as of tomorrow and have around 10 reviews to crank out(with waaay more to come!).

Anyways, here’s the first half of photos from Adelaide (albeit going backwards)

Adelaide

I’m sitting in the library in Adelaide right this moment, it’s a nice place and I’m sure I could spend a few weeks here to explore. Will hopefully come back with the missus and get to see more!

Highlights:

Day 1
0730 -Cut finger and start bleeding a lot.
0930 – Trip in McDonalds car park and my toe starts bleeding a lot, luckily I have no toe-nail there.

Day 2
Have to work with the boss all day and pretend I know how to use a drill, I’m certain I’ll fall off a ladder, drill my hand or hammer a nail into my finger – luckily my luck has changed considerably from the day before.

Day 3
Find out there’s a lot less work than we were told there was and are given 4 days off, have lots of blisters on my feet.

Day 4
See Bernd and Hilla Becher piece in Art gallery – WOAH!
More blisters on feet and legs are in agony.

Day 5
Get sunburn and cuts in feet from flip flops.

Day 6
Get more sunburn and go to beach, go into sea and pick up lots of mussels.
Big blister on foot bursts, seawater may be good for it?
Big fight at motel, lots of anger going around so I hide in our apartment and keep away.
Fabien has sunstroke and Garrath looks like a lobster.

Today I went to the market and not much else, I’ll maybe steal a magazine from the library and buy some sandpaper for my shells and then spend like 12hrs working – FUN!

I can’t wait to get back to Melbourne and see what happened at the end of my street, literally 1 minute away from my new flat a building collapsed – how’s that for good luck?!?!

I am 21 on thursday, I will celebrate with a pizza in the mice infested Bimbos and maybe build a guitar in the daytime.

All the best for now, regular writing et all will resume on tuesday with great ferocity.

hallo!

hey y’all,  lots to report but not much you’ll be interested in!
I’m back in melbourne and my first week here i landed a flat and something vaguely resembling a job!
Will be in Adelaide next week but hopefully will interview Steve Vai on weds if I have free time and review some CDs if I can get the time etc etc.

Right now i’m downloading Frank Turner and Rolo Tomassi’s new records whilst listening to Dawn Landes’ Sweetheart Rodeo – real good!

Bakteria – Defecate! Suffocate! Mutilate! Masturbate! album review

 

Title:	Defecate! Suffocate! Mutilate! Masturbate!
Artist:	Bakteria
Label:	Anstalt Records/ Nuclear Blast Distrubuted via Riot! Entertainment – Australia
Released:	13 November 2009
In one word:	Tasteless

Bakteria are a rare kind of band, a bunch of guys who’ve been around since ‘92 who sing songs to piss people off and (I hope) get some cheap laughs at the same time. What drew me to review this piece of filth was, A. The fantastic manic cover art and, B. The title of the record, Defecate! Suffocate! Mutilate! Masturbate!.

I have some sort of perverse attraction to silly and sick music and this seems easily set to be the death-perv-thrash-core release of the year unless Scottish legends Rectal Examination make an unexpected and quite frankly, unwelcome comeback.

I’ve never heard of Bakteria in my life but these guys are supposedly banned in Canada and Germany and singer, Umberto Torres killed a guy at a show with a handgun (whether he shot someone or beat them with it I’m not so sure).

In comparison to Behemoth whose latest release I covered recently, the music is not as brutal and resembles that of early 80’s thrash like Napalm Death, D.R.I and hints of Black Sabbath at times – it’s also a lot less imaginative.

Their songs have questionable and rather disturbing titles like Platypus Bestiality, Shit on My Pubes, Hospital Fuck Fest and Castrate with a Rusty Skate. Lyrics like “fuck your kids with a knife” and “feed faeces to the foetus” will never gain them a prevalent audience and are best described by my disgusted girlfriend as “tasteless”. If ever an album deserved a Parental Guidance warning sticker, this is it.

Bakteria’s songs are so utterly ridiculous and offensive for the sake of it that they’re incredibly entertaining and fun to listen to. The music and lyrics are one dimensional and seems to be no more than 4 guys trying to irritate as many people as possible and that’s what’s so great about it.

© Danny Crombie

Pitbull Terrorist – CIA review

	Title: Contrabrand International Audio     Artist: Pitbull Terrorist   Label: Anstalt Records/ Nuclear Blast Distrubuted via Riot! Entertainment – Australia     Released: 11 November 2009   In one word: Crusty

Pitbull Terrorist is a musical syndicate of international freedom fighters hiding from the authorities in Finland of all places; they’re trapped in a web of acronyms, terrorist conspiracies and raging thrash music. All those filthy guys dressed in black, camo and Crass patches at your local punk gig will love this record though how they’ll afford it I don’t know!

The music contained in Pitbull Terrorist’s new record Contrabrand International Audio is pure filthy thrash and is merciless from start to finish. I always think it’s brilliant when an album barely has more minutes than the amount of tracks on it, my favourite one is In God We Trust Inc by Dead Kennedy’s and CIA is a similar deal; only one of the eighteen tracks within actually makes it over the 2 minute mark and that’s because there’s a sound-clip at the start of it.

The gimmick of it all is very funny but there’s also a serious social comment to it all: the lyrics are indistinguishable but you get the drift of what it’s all about with titles like The Shit Of The System, Economaniac and Let The Gods Do The Fighting. Politics and music are a hard one to get right and there are only a few people like Joe Strummer, Jello Biafra, Ian Mackaye and Woody Guthrie who made brilliant music whilst saying something serious.

These guys obviously aren’t in the same realms of punk legends like the aforementioned or even crust favourites like Oi Polloi but their music will almost definitely be appreciated in the small circles it was created for.

I’ll be totally honest – I hate crust with a fervent passion and I’m sorry about that, as an unbiased reviewer I can tell you though that Pitbull Terrorist is a band who care about the music they’re playing, the subjects they’re singing about and they are most certainly a bunch of loud and angry guys.

© Danny Crombie

Death O’Connor has a website!

Wowza, I’m so excited and all that shit and Death O’Connor now have a website to go to called……www.deathoconnor.com which will soon be full of crap you can look at, listen to, buy and be disgusted at – huzzah!

GO NOW

Curb your enthusiasm/Seinfeld

It was slow to start but picked up in the middle, it leaves you wanting more but was unsatisfying to not see any sort of conclusion in the end. I love how in CYE how they always play things out that seem insignifigant but come around in the end, I was missing that element a lot.

Also, it it usually on channel 9? They must’ve paid so much for that show! It will be so satisfying to hear Jerry say cunt!

Behemoth – Evangelion record review

Behemoth’s new record Evangelion seems initially easy to get the idea of very quickly with fast d-beat thrash starting off in Alas. Lord is Upon Me but halfway through the song it turns into something totally different resembling a grindcore Dio solo which totally throws you off and this is something that happens a lot throughout the record.

He Who Breeds Pestilence is one of the heaviest tracks on the album and listening to it full blast will probably give you brain damage or at very least loss of hearing for a few days ago, tracks like this and the latter part of Lucifer are pure evil.

Final track Transmigrating Beyond the Realms of Ament is my personal favourite song on the record that sounds almost like a soundscape at times and is most certainly their most complex song on the record jumping from one style and bpm to another at any given moment.

The production of the record is excellent, although loud it sounds well levelled and extremely palatable for non-metal fans like myself. Like the music itself the production is extremely modern similar to that of Mastodon which should open up a whole new fan base for Behemoth.

This album is full of surprises and interesting little bits you’ll notice each time you listen to it from it’s thunderous drum blasting to its intense vocals this is surely one of the best metal albums this year.

Lord – Set in Stone album review

The inside of the booklet smells like a porn-mag you’d found in the woods when you were 12… I don’t know if Lord are looking to create whole spectrum nostalgia with their art or it’s just me concocting crap once again.

From the get-go the music is extremely like neo-classical Iron Maiden or Judas Priest but with the smoothness of digital production. I’m really no fan of this kind of music but the solos are hard to not appreciate as I feel my face melting just from being in their sheer audible presence.

At times the songs hit an 80’s hair metal point in their choruses which is pretty different, songs like 100 Reason and Beyond the Lights are easy to sing along to and remind you of Van Halen at times – and those guys were brilliant so don’t scoff.

This is guitar metal for guys who like playing X-Box and do well at school which isn’t a bad thing in my eyes. It’s a bit like a legitimate alternative to Dragonforce, whose lyrical content seems questionable at times but still have an extremely loyal fanbase.

All the songs on this record are epic and there’s not one bit of filler on the record at all. This album is already something the band can be extremely proud of and the fact I’m getting a full jewel case CD shows the pure effort and enthusiasm into this release. They sound like ordinary and genuine guys and you can see this in the amount of thanks they give at the back of the liner notes – drummer Tim Yatras gives a no thanks to his old neighbours Tracey and Ian – haha, shamed! (Incidentally, Yatras is no longer in Lord having left the band just after recording was finished on this album.)

The album is being hailed as the Australian metal album of the year, as audacious as it sounds this is probably true and like Airbourne last year they seem set to take the world by storm.

Danko Jones Interview

from www.musicvice.com

I caught a quick word with John Calabrese, bass player from Canadian tour monsters Danko Jones, we had a chat about Angus Young’s nephews, clown car tour buses and Paul Stanley’s Love Gun.

Photo credit: Ron Boudreau

So, you guys are (finally) releasing Never Too Loud here in Australia after it being out a year or so in Europe, are you guys heading over soon?
John Calabrese – Yeah, it’s finally out over your way and the USA the week before. We toured Australia over around 6 years ago and we’re definitely long overdue a trip over there.

One of the standout songs on the record is Code of the Road – what is the code of the road? Is it the sex and drugs or something a bit deeper?
JC – To me the code of the road is playing hard, delivering the goods every night and all that sex and drugs stuff happens but we’re just happy to be playing. When we wrote the new record we’d just come off of tour and a lot of the songs reflect that time of constant touring.

You guys tour Europe a lot, where do you get your biggest crowds and who would you love to tour with?
JC - Some of our favourite places to play are Germany, Holland and Scandinavia definitely; we always get good crowds there. We’re off on tour in the USA in a short while where we’ll be playing with The Damned and next year we’re touring with Motorhead and The Damned. I’d absolutely love to play with AC/DC or Kiss; they’re two of the best bands out there.

We actually met Angus’ nephews once at a gig in Holland two years back, they were around 15 or 16 and came up to the merch table and asked “who do you look up to”, I said AC/DC and they asked their dad if they could tell us who their uncle was and said “Angus is my uncle and he taught me how to play The Sound of Love on guitar and he has your records!”

Wow, quite a compliment! Who else are you listening to at the moment??
JC - Apart from AC/DC I always listen to Thin Lizzy, music always comes in waves for me whether I listen to Thin Lizzy, Slayer or whatever but right now on my iPod I’m listing to the new Converge record, Immortal, Fleetwood Mac, Future of the Left, In Flames and Pearl Jam.

I see you thanked Quit Your Dayjob (crazy Swedish electo punk) in your liner notes, they’re my favourite obscure band. You guys are on the same label aren’t you?
JC – We’ve taken them out on the road a bunch of times too, we love them. I heard their demo once and met up with their singer Mark in a bar and he didn’t know we knew who he was and I went up to him and said “Look, A Dollar!” [QYD song] he cracked up.

It’s so much fun to tour with them, we had this bus and they had a tiny little van and they were so happy it had seats!

I saw you guys released a Having Fun on Stage with Danko Jones 7”, how did that come about and I’m guessing you guys are familiar with the Elvis version?
JC - I don’t know the Elvis one actually; I have the Paul Stanley one!

I’ve never heard of the Paul Stanley one, the Elvis record was released by the colonel so he didn’t have to pay royalties to the record label and sell them at shows, supposedly Elvis hated it.
JC - I’ll check that out! the Paul Stanley one is really funny where he goes on about his love gun a lot of the time.

You guys are on the Saw 5 soundtrack, are you a fan at all?
JC - I’m not sure actually, I think on of the producers is actually a fan of ours and managed to get us on there. I’ve actually not seen any of the Saw films either, I had no idea there were so many so I think I’m going to try and watch them next time on tour.

I heard you had a fight with a Canadian rapper a while back and he called you Stanko Jones, what happened?
JC – Oh yeah, he’s supposed to be a wordsmith and he called us that! He’s not going to go far in his business if he can’t come up with anything better!

We got “Wanko Jones” from Motorhead, they called up the organisers of a festival we were playing with them and made them put that on our door.

You guys toured with them last year in the UK didn’t you?
JC – Motorhead are the loudest band we’ve ever played with and are always great, fans always show up whatever day of the week and whatever the weather. A lot of people said we were going to have a tough time opening up the shows but the fans were really cool to us.

You guys have quite a dedicated fanbase too?
JC – Oh yeah, small but dedicated and they always support us whatever we do, it helps us keep touring as we don’t have a big label or much money behind us. We rely on playing live and we’re lucky to have such great fans.

Any final words?
JC – Yeah, tell people to ask us to come and play over in Australia. The more people that ask the more of a chance there is we’ll get to come over!

© Danny Crombie

Danko Jones’ record Never Too Loud is out in Australia and USA now on Bad Taste Records and distributed through Riot! Entertainment. Find Danko Jones online; MySpace and official website.