This track was a fast growing internet meme in February of 2009, after Christian Bale’s rant was leaked from the set of Terminator: Salvation. There was something about his tirade that I was fixated on, probably the obnoxiousness of a person in a position of “power,” lording his ego over those beneath him.

My girlfriend loves web hijinks like this and began playing Revolucian’s “Bale Out” dance mix of the tantrum around the house repeatedly. I was resistant at first, but it eventually grew like a worm in my brain and through the day I would find myself just mumbling, “What don’t you fucking understand?” for no reason at all. Still today, almost a year later I’ll occasionally turn to her and tell her, “Seriously man… you and me? We’re fucking done professionally.” Best joke ever with your eight-year partner.

We did not go see the movie and from the reports, I’m glad we didn’t. I do however hope that cinematographer Shane Hurlbut got some kind of absolution out of Bale’s behavior going public, making him the laughing stock of the internet for months on end. No one deserves to be treated like that.

You can listen to RevoLucian’s “Bale Out” remix on youtube here.

“Bale Out” is the fifth song on my 2009 Retrospective mix on 8tracks.com.

Boris seems to be the soundtrack that has accompanied me since moving to Atlanta, GA in 2006. I moved here to start graduate school but there were 3 months where I temped as a production artist before I began classes. At the first job, I worked with a great guy named Jason, who brought me to Atlanta’s art/music studio Eyedrum. He also burned a disc of Boris’ Akuma No Uta for me, introducing me to their unique brand of heavy metal.

Since then, I’ve seen them live here a few times (including at the Scion Fest I mentioned in the last song post) and they’re always stunning. “Floorshaker” is a song that I discovered after I started my current job (with grad school now behind me). For the first few months of working there in 2009, I would listen to last.fm in the afternoons, particularly the Boris “station” they generated. This song stood out immediately. Its almost poppy song structure feels different from their usual style, almost like surf rock, but it is still recognizably Boris. The last thirty seconds of feedback and thumping drums are especially familiar.

After checking, I found it was the second song on their Statement EP. There were afternoons where I just listened to “Floorshaker” repeatedly, finding design inspiration in Boris’ unique album covers and gig posters. I couldn’t find a digital version of it then. So, when last.fm took away their users ability to listen to a song more than once, I stopped using the site. I just wanted “Floorshaker” twenty-four-seven and they wouldn’t offer it to me. Either the company changed its business plan, or record labels pressured them into a less appealing model. Thankfully, the EP is now available online and I was able to finally buy a copy.

There is a YouTube file of “Floorshaker” here.

“Floorshaker” is the fourth track on my 2009 Retrospective mix on 8tracks.com.

In February, Atlanta hosted a free, all day, Toyota-funded metal festival at The Masquerade called the “Scion Fest.” My usual companion in metal (the eminent Doctor Jones) and I attended, showing up bright eyed at 11:00 am. I was excited because a number of my favorite bands were playing: Converge, Coalesce, Wolves In The Throne Room, Boris etc. I think it was Lewis Black that I recently heard say that anticipated moments are rarely as good as the anticipation itself. Scion Fest exemplified his philosophy. I remember a few things about that day:

1. It was disgustingly muddy.
2. Someone in line made fun of me by yelling, “Nice muscle shirt!” and I think he might have been right.
3. By 3:00 pm I wanted to go home and take a nap. This made me feel old.
4. During Mastodon’s closing set, it seemed from afar as if Toyota had hired actors to stand on the side of the stage, pretending to love Mastodon. One of these maybe-actors kept “raising the roof” during their set, then turned to someone calling to her off-stage and then returned to the stage with new dance moves more apropos to heavy metal. Large camera cranes loomed above the crowd as Mastodon played their new songs from Crack The Skye. Maybe they were filming a metal car commercial?
5. Vice magazine must have co-sponsored the event because they had volunteers handing out free copies of their Guide to Atlanta. This mini-magazine capitalized on Atlanta’s industrial blight, a photo of an indie girl pretending to give oral sex to a shotgun, ads for strip clubs and cheap beer, a prose style that attempted to be ironic but actually came across as boorish, and several listings of “cool” places to hang out in Atlanta that were listed in the incorrect neighborhoods. In other words, it seemed like someone from New York had written a guide to living in Atlanta for hipsters. I read an article later that summarized Vice’s involvement as the following. Their editorial staff believed Atlanta to be the next urban musical Mecca, but because of this city’s disjointed network of musicians, they took it upon themselves to cultivate their own profitable “scene” here.
6. Krallice were awesome.

A few weeks before, I had purchased Krallice’s self-titled EP. I’ve been a fan of Mick Barr’s guitar work since Crom-Tech and had the opportunity to see Orthrelm play at Mass Art in Boston back in the early 2000s. One New Year’s Eve in Maine, I remember driving around with friends, trying to listen to the entirety of Orthrelm’s OV without stopping. This album is described on wikipedia as, “a single, 45-minute track based on extremely intense repetition.” I personally find that it actually starts to physically hurt to listen to OV after about ten minutes.

Krallice works on an entirely different level than those bands. Live it was stunning. The speed of the band gelled into one sonic wall that actually seemed almost ambient rather than black metal. It is amazing to me that a band can play so fast that the waves of music actually feel like they’re slowing down… as if there was some temporal shift happening. If ever there was phonomancy at work, this is it. Krallice’s set was the highlight of the day, a moment when my anticipation was truly surpassed.

I can’t find an online mp3 of “Cnestorial” but it is the third track on my 2009 Retrospective mix on 8tracks.com.

In March we visited New England for a week, catching up with friends and family. While in Amherst, Massachusetts my girlfriend picked up the The Essential Leonard Cohen so we had something to listen to in the rental car. This track stood out among the pack for me, even though I’ll always associate Leonard Cohen with Pump Up The Volume and Samantha Mathis. Even though it’s about West Germany in the 1980s, something about it made me think Cohen was really channeling his inner super-villain. When he says, “You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline,” I imagined Lex Luthor singing deeply in a cocktail bar to a distraught Clark Kent. Then, oddly enough, the song was played a few months later over the credits of Watchmen that spring. Kismet (daughter of Nevir) in action?

There is a blip version of “First We Take Manhattan” here.

It is also the second track in my 2009 Retrospective mix on 8tracks.com.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t really start listening to New Order until the beginning of 2009. At the end of 2008 I saw Control, the Joy Division biopic. I found that it made me curious about the aftermath for the other band members after Ian Curtis’ suicide. New Order is legendary but I didn’t know where to begin with their massive discography. There seemed to be several different “greatest hits” albums so I finally just purchased the Singles collection and loved it.

Coincidentally, right around this time our veterinarian called and asked if we would be willing to foster an albino ferret they had recovered. One of their nurses’ friends found it in the yard of her apartment complex, cornered by a cat. We were the only ferret owners the vet knew well enough to call, so we drove up to Alpharetta, GA and picked him up. It took about 24 hours for us to realize we weren’t going to give him back.

After a lot of name juggling we finally settled on “Ood,” after the strange aliens from Doctor Who. His red eyes and stationary staring were very un-ferret like, so the name seemed appropriate. What does this bizarre ferret have to do with New Order you ask? “Temptation” has the lyric, “Oh you’ve got green eyes, oh you’ve got blue eyes, oh you’ve got grey eyes…”  With Ood war dancing happily in the office one night while we were listening to New Order, the lyrics quickly became, “Ood you’ve got red eyes…” A year later and I’m happy to report that he’s almost adjusted from the post traumatic state he was in when we first adopted him.

He’s still damn weird though. “Oh I’ve never met anyone quite like you before.”

There’s a blip of “Temptation” posted here.

It is also the first track in my 2009 Retrospective mix on 8tracks.com.