Category: Andrew Earles

What I pasted below can also be read in its edited/less-embarrassing form if you loiter in a bookstore, flipping through the latest issue of D.I.W. Magazine.  

START!!

Check it out, Skank Williams Jr., I’m back with another installment of Pussy Eraser, DIW’s I’m-Not-A-Metalhead-But-I-Play-One-In-This-Column extreme music examination!! I recently started a sluggish day with the 2 CD live Sentenced set, Buried Alive (Century Media). The day remained sluggish. Bless their sort-of black hearts, they spent 14 years (and a lot of albums) trying to be In Flames, but Sentenced started out DECENT (not GREAT), and went BAD (not catchy BAD). Ever wish that Anal Cunt were smarter, less self-destructive, and more musical? Of course you did. That’s why I’m telling you to run into the loving arms of Chicago’s 7000 Dying Rats. Their expansive Season In Hell (He Who Corrupts Inc) assaults with coherent blasts of grind mixed with genuinely hilarious novelty hip-hop and a track that makes fun of free jazz. I love it!! If you’re the gambling sort, go ahead and bet that Jesu’s Conqueror (Hydrahead) will make every top ten list forced upon bedraggled freelancers come December 2007. Unsurprisingly, but good for us fans, it combines the pop of Silver and the pummel of the debut with at least four songs that annihilate anything on those two discs. Continuing the obligatory Hydra Head string (we are, after all, an indie magazine and not Metal Maniacs), let’s recall when Cave In, uh, caved in (HAHAHAHA!!!) to bad radio metal, then tried to get all loud and shit to save face. That’s applicable here because our favorite label has issued not one, but TWO Cave In side projects. Clouds is the effort of Adam McGrath, and it resurrects the LET’S ROCK….WHAT A FUN IDEA!!! movement of the mid-90’s – you know, when hardcore crusties discovered ZZ Top? Too bad he cut class when they were hitting the How To Write A Good Song portion of the course. Zozobra is Cave In’s bassist, Caleb Scofield – a far more experimental in a Melvins-meets-Wax Trax adventure. If you haven’t figured it out by this sentence, that means it sounds like mid-period Godflesh with a touch of Harvey Milk. Midwestern, cargo pants-rocking, meth-blowing fathers of three at age 20 are problematic on many levels, and I wonder if they’d use contraception if someone invented condoms that felt and appeared like the members of Slipknot. Collect all nine and avoid having nine kids!! Are their babies born wearing visors? Voliminal: Inside The Nine (Roadrunner) turned up in the PO Box – it’s a live DVD set – as far as I can tell, cuz I will not be venturing “inside the nine.â€Â The Handshake Murders (Usurper, on Goodfellow Records) just spent an entire song telling me that they’ll “rip my throat out,â€Â which they are attempting with rearranged Prong riffage and your standard issue metalcore throat shred. To conclude with uber-worthy reissue alerts: Snatch up both of the Trouble reissues (Psalm 9 and The Skull…on Escapi Music) and educate yourself on how lonely it must have been to be a an amazing, prescient, and Christian doom band in the early-80’s. Follow that up with Armored Saint’s CLASSIC March of the Saint on Rock Candy….wow, there was never a more perfect combo of thrash and L.A. pop-metal….fans of ANY metal variation will not deny the brilliance of this record. Check please!!!

–Andrew Earles

Hey, here’s the last minute/last hour notes taken and used during a recent “performanceâ€Â as an MC (some bands played!!!).

-Beale Street Music Fest

-Stooges

-Yoga

-Lou Reed/Yoga/Meditation

-Joy Division Nikes and the idea that they have slippery soles

-Black Eye Joke

-TV Guide….I’m going to read it to you, so you don’t have to burglarize an elderly family

-Powers Booth Q and A

-Battle of the Bands

-The only way I would endure the Beale Street Music Fest is if Yoko Ono promised to decapitate herself before a live audience, or if Tom Waits agreed to a spoken word set in which he apolozies for tricking people into accepting the past 30 years of his music

-Iggy Pop Brick by Brick jokes

-TV Guide My Name is Earl cover…here’s some easy hillbilly humor for the creatively bankrupt in the audience

-The guarantee joke

-â€ÂCan I get more jokes in the monitor please?â€Â

-Make a joke about the jokes that I crossed off of the list

 

Viva la American Deathray or whatever they’re calling it, and Data Drums, and me reading aloud from the latest issue of TV Guide.

Tonight

11pm

Murphys 

 

Jensen wrote:

Dear John,

90 Manhattan Ave @ McKibbin St 

and it starts off on the right track…

from the Letters section in Magnet 75:

I’ve never quite understood why MAGNET readers take Andrew Earles so seriously. It’s an intentional shtick: 95 percent of the time he’s abrasive or idiotic, five percent of the time he’s actually amusing. I think those are the actual percentages he’s hoping to achieve. Earles reminds me of the frontman for the late-70’s San Francisco band No Alternative; he called himself Johnny Genocide. In the long periods between songs, Genocide would accost the audience by spitting, throwing beer cans and calling us “a bunch of fuckin’ fags.â€Â I always thought this was stupidly hilarious – even funnier when the audience became upset. When Genocide actually got down to playing his guitar and singing, No Alternative was a damn good pre-thrash punk band. Yet I could never quite take them seriously because of the spectacle they created. In the same way, I have difficulty taking Earles seriously when he’s doing reportage or reviewing outside of the Street Team column. That’s the real problem with Earles, not all these other reader complaints. How much of his non-column work can I trust? Eventually, No Alternative disbanded. Genocide went on to dye his hair black and start a band called the Swingin’ Possums, playing rough and exciting punky rockabilly. Genocide dropped the abuse shtick and let the music speak for itself. Earles might want to take a lesson from him.

– William Breiding

Somewhere

 

 

Your favorite band, living, active, dead, or defunct….can’t touch The Embarrassment.

It wasn’t that long ago that one could get this for .99 cents.

Watch this.

Then watch this, and this, and this, and end with this.

It wasn’t very cool to look like that in 1981. In Wichita.

The compilation is the way to go. Look hard.

Reading.

Stay tuned for fresh Street Team hatemail!!!

Stay tuned for new Just Farr A Laugh news!!!

Stay tuned for my new positive outlook!!! My love of early Jonathan Demme!! My review of Lake Placid 2!!!

Stay tuned for 50% less negativity on Failed Pilot.com!!!

 

 

The Jensen part of the Earles and Jensen comedy partnership recently assumed a character, traveled over the pond, and harrassed the Arctic Monkeys for the purpose of creating a viral video YouTube craze. All parties were in on this, though band and management didn’t really understand what they bit off.

Here’s Jeff’s message to the people:

“So as some of you may or may not know, I went Europe a few weeks back to terrorize the Arctic Monkeys. They’re a hugely popular â€Ârockâ€Â band from Britain. Here’s a couple installments of the â€Âviral videosâ€Â. Unfortunately the label and Band’s management and I didn’t see totally eye to eye on this and I feel that most of the truly fucked-up stuff stayed on the cutting room floor due to it’s crude and abusive nature. C’est la vie. There’ll be a few more installments. Feel free to check youtube in a week or so. Query ’Artic Monkeys and Mooch.’â€Â

Check some of it out….RIGHT HERE.

 

I love TV writing, but I’d like to thank Slate for exercising the exact way in which I don’t want to read about TV. Let’s make TV criticism and discussion HARD TO GET THROUGH!! Yecchhh!!!

…this application is being very cranky. Please stay with me.