jaykeeley

Together. 2025. Dir: Michael Shanks. Way better than expected. An homage to 80s Cronenberg romance-body horror. Unlike Cronenberg, however, is that it’s less FAFO noodling-with-science and more occult-folk mystery theater, but the “why is this shit happening?” doesn’t matter, you just let it happen.

Yeah I mean this is all me guessing. We could tag Alex and ask him but it might be awkward 🤣 look, even Ozzy hated once of his best albums Ultimate Sin!! And all we ever played from that was Shot in the Dark — which was a cover to begin with!! 😂

Yeah I figured

I don’t think they like Souls of Black, honestly. The whole thing about it being rushed just to make the Clash tour possibly means they never really had any emotional attachment to the album itself. I looked up their average setlists from The Ritual, Low and The Gathering. Sob was forgotten by Low.

Yeah that must have been awkward — it’s not like KD was some young pup either, he was already in his late 20s when MF debuted. Thing is, after 2 albums he went solo — and all his KD albums were fantasy-horror rather than satanic. I think he eventually admitted it was all theatrics & showmanship.

No need to mince words, anything outside of top 4 is failure. It will be the worst transfer ££ to performance ratio, and we’ll have to take our lumps.

The data science that went into targeting the new players isn’t aligning with Slot. He needs to go back and review WHY we bought the players we did.

This is their ‘song distribution’, as of October

Ray Palmer was the Kerrang photographer at the event, and ironically, captured one of the best live shots of King Diamond I’ve seen. There is a warm glow in this photograph, almost as if he is in a room of golden air… 😏

#metalsky #kerrang

Note that Kerrang was one of the biggest metal zines back then. This gig review from 1983 written by Neil Jeffries — 24 at the time — reviewing Fate’s sound: “like 4 guys playing 4 different numbers. Nobody could be this bad without trying. 90% of the crowd loved them but I couldn’t understand why”

Mercyful Fate. “Doomed by the Living Dead.” 1982. To think this band can headline fests today, whereas in ‘82 — at a time when you were at the mercy of journalists & DJs — they were burned on the cross like that lass on their debut. Critics who grew up on classic rock simply weren’t ready

#metalsky

… but then, you look at their live sets and 9 of the 14 songs are from debut thru’ Low, so they’re definitely catering to fans of their old school era 🤷‍♂️

So I did a spin through of all their albums since Alex returned — and effectively that’s been the same formula since, at least in terms of really trying to push their vintage sound into a modern template, so it’s entirely plausible that I’ve just ‘aged out’ and kids prefer this modern era…

90s soundtracks >>>

[making the distinction between score and soundtrack btw]

Yeah, I mean, it’s easy to shit on the Big 4 in the 90s and thereafter, but holy crap Megadeth didn’t devolve anywhere near as bad as their peers.

On the Youthanasia tour in ‘94 at the MTV Halloween special, it’s nice for once that we get a camera shot of Dave and Marty playing their “Victory” trading solos, respectively

Megadeth. “Angry Again.” 1998. Seoul, S Korea. I can only imagine that if you’re the lead guitarist in a band, you really want an expansive rhythm section behind your solo. Riff, tempo, and key changes — just to give you room to groove and maximize the fretboard.

btw best Testament logo — with that floating pyramid for the “A”

Have you heard the new Testament yet? This is the one song Alex wrote — it’s almost 8 mins long — and holy crap, Chuck and Eric should have just let him rip here; you can tell this solo is just about ready to launch into the stratosphere…. and then it just ends? wtf! He needed 8 more bars!!

Testament. “Neptune’s Spear.” 2016. You can tell when Skolnick writes his own rhythm sections to his guitar leads because those are his better solos — see: their first 5 albums. Meanwhile, this is my fave solo since Formation of Damnation; his neo-classical arpeggios are one of his best signatures.

$1.25M back then would be worth $10M today, and he took the role knowing he would donate it all — the only thing he asked for in return was 2 movie projects that weren’t 007

On a side note, Sean Connery needed a lot of convincing to return to Bond. So they paid him $1.25M, making him the highest paid actor in history at the time. He donated it all to Scotland charities for impoverished children.

I’ve said many times, OHMSD is objectively the best looking Bond film — its cinematography is one of a kind for a Bond outing, no other 007 flick had this artistry in how it was photographed

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It’s such an awkward line to say as well, especially for a non-actor. If Connery was still the lead, he would have tweaked it to say: “I have to hand it to him, the man had gutsssh” — just as a severed hand plops out of the snowblower

The irony being that he incentivized them in the first place with the verification nonsense. Who knew people would figure out an easy way to make $$! 🙃

Damn, never knew any of that! Also yeah James Murphy nailed it at the Fillmore.

Testament. “Return to Serenity.” 1992. When the solos were songs-within-a-song.

#metalsky #guitar

Megadeth. “Liar.” 1988. Written after Chris Poland stole Mustaine’s one-of-a-kind BC Rich 10 string, a Jackson Soloist, and a bunch of Marshall amps and sold them for smack. They found out when they discovered the pawn ticket with his name on it.

As Slayer and Megadeth are calling it quits now for real *cough* this was them saying hello —

“ #speed #thrash #death #gloom #black #heavy #hard #jazz #fusion #heavymetal “

To say it’s the AotY almost feels too constrained for what this music genre has been dying for since around 2005 when everything started to recycle again

Dissection. “Night’s Blood.” 1995. The one thing that never really gets much mention about The Somberlain and Storm of the Light’s Bane is Ole Öhman’s drumming. Damn, that kid could play.

#metalsky #blackmetal #sweden