I’m a bad blogger, I know… two weeks on holiday and not a single peep out of me. Rather than make excuses however, or use the The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator, I thought I would summarize the three stages of my holiday so far with some little haiku that I thought up at 4am when I couldn’t sleep last night. So without further ado…

Krakow

charming, lively, old
pierogi and alkohole
zomg! Dave has a bro

Jesenice, Slovenia

mountains and Laško
friends with spiral staircases
mum has mauve hair too

Rome

hot, dirty, crowded
bloody yanks everywhere - but
o-m-g, the food!

Photos and posts when I get back, I promise… internet access has been less than awesome in Italy, and in Slovenia and Poland I was too busy most of the time.

Picture: The Forum in Rome. I’m going to Rome. Next week. Heh, did I neglect to mention that? No?

As of this month, the Aussie Bloggers’ Forum has been up and running for six months. Congratulations to the admins – community building is an art and they’ve done a great job of nurturing this one.

The Aussie Bloggers’ Forum is open to anyone with an interest in blogging – not just Aussies! There’s areas for WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type and other blog platforms, as well as monetizing, blog pimping and using social media. But the real fun is in the Kaos and Mayhem forum, where pretty much anything goes. Some of the longest (and still) running threads are about what you’re cooking for dinner, TV shows like Dexter and how your day is going.

I have a soft spot for forums and for me, sometimes it’s nice to hang out online with people who are geeky enough to have blogs and visit forums, but who are not web developers. Not that I don’t love all you web developers.

Just sayin’.

Last week I asked for help in naming my new Siamese Fighting Fish. I got lots of good suggestions, both on the post and also on Twitter and Plurk.

In the end I decided to go with Al’s suggestion: Bruce Dickinson. It just seemed to fit – I was talking to them while I was dangling wriggly worms above their heads (yes, that’s absolutely normal) and he seemed to respond to Bruce. No really, he did. Seriously.

Bruce is now well adjusted to his new home, and Rob is not looking sad any more – it took a few days, but now they are flaring their gills at each other in mock displays of bravado for hours at a time. So cute.

For Christmas last year, my good mates Al and Gem got me an awesome present: a tank with two Siamese Fighting Fish.

I named them after metal legends: Rob Halford and Ronnie James Dio.

Sadly, Ronnie passed away a few weeks ago. Rob (above left) seemed kind of bored with no one to pull faces at through the glass, so yesterday we went and got him a friend.

The new, as-yet-unnamed fishy is purple (like me). Although fish are a pain to photograph his colour actually comes out quite nicely, although a bit bluer than in reality, unlike poor Rob who is rather iridescent and always looks weird in photos.

He’s a bit smaller than Rob and I can’t decide what to call him. At one point I thought of calling him after another metal frontman also called Rob – either Rob Flynn (Machine Head) or Rob Zombie (who needs no introduction). However, as the new arch-enemy of Rob Halford, I could call him Ripper Owens (who replaced Rob Halford in Judas Priest between 1996 and 2003).

Or I could call him something else entirely. Any suggestions? I would like to keep with the metal theme. All I can tell you about his personality thus far is that he enjoys showing off his fins and eating worms, particularly the lively kind that need to be chased down first. Kind of like every other fighting fish, actually.

So, this has been my evening: we went to see Sebastian Bach play at Burswood Theatre. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant show…. stupid, stupid, stupid venue. There were seats for crissakes (we had second row). And bouncers attempting to keep people in their rows, if not sitting down. Fortunately as soon as the guy closest to us turned his back to deal with some other dangerous person daring to stand up at a heavy metal show, I grabbed Dave’s arm and pulled him around the end of the row and to the centre front, where a group of enthusiastic fans were showing their appreciation the old-fashioned way.

The show was nuts - Baz is a total showman. Dave got some awesome video which I’ll get onto YouTube. I got a hand slap…  Yes that’s right bitches, I touched Sebastian Bach. Twice.

Tired and sweaty, we finally get home… and I decide to do a quick RSS feed check before crashing for the night. And what do I find but the official announcement that Judas Priest are touring Australia in September and coming to Perth (September 16), which I actually already knew as it is a FasterLouder Presents gig and I’ll be reviewing it… but what I didn’t know is that Cavelera Conspiracy - Max and Igor Cavalera, founding members of Sepultura, reunited after 10 years and making awesome old school thrash together - are going to be touring with Judas Priest. Seeing as I’m a huge Max Cavalera fan - the only two wall adornments in our lounge room are two Soulfly blockmounts - this little bit of news nearly sent me over the edge, into some kind of metal overload coma.

In fact, I have only just managed to get this blog post written up. I’m off now. But I’ll leave you with this little story: yesterday when I found out that Judas Priest were coming to Perth, I called my mate Gossy - at 6.30am. Now admittedly she lives in the Northern Territory which is an hour ahead of us… but it went to message bank anyway. I left a message along the lines of “call me when you get this, I have the singlest most massive piece of news I could possibly ever give you” and so when she returned the call (and the favour, at 6.30am this morning) she immediately suggested the two most far-fetched and preposterous things she could imagine: “either it’s Judas Priest or you’re getting married”. Got it in one, mate - JP it is.

Nostradamus… Nostradamus… is avenged…

It’s HUGE. Massive. Epic. Rob Halford has HUGE LUNGS and he’s not scared of opening up.

Just check it out and be blown away by awesomeness.

After pirate metal, my favourite “novelty” genre is definitely Viking metal.

Swedish band Amon Amarth are the heavyweights here - we saw them live at the beginning of the year and it was truly kickarse. In fact, it’s still probably the best show I’ve been to this year (admittedly it’s only April).

Here’s the video for Runes To My Memory - a highlight of their live set:

YouTube - Amon Amarth - Runes To My Memory

Today I heard of another Viking metal band - Norway’s Helheim. They are releasing a new album this week and playing at a Norway kindergarten to celebrate. That’s the difference between Norway and Australia. When I was in kindergarten we made artwork out of glittery pasta and did the hokey pokey.

Here’s a Helheim video clip. I picked this one for the Krollster because it has some blacksmithing (blacksmithery? forging? smithing? messing with fire and tools?):

YouTube - Helheim - Jernskogen

According to Wikipedia, there are quite a number of Viking metal bands in existence, mostly from Sweden and Norway. Guess I’m going to be busy checking all of them out.

I think Dave was the first person I know to discover the genre of pirate metal - pirate as in “arrrrr matey”, not pirate as in illegally downloaded, that is.

The concept sounds weird until you hear it, but the combination of blistering metal riffs and the lore of the high seas actually go together really well. Pirates are back in vogue thanks to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, and what group of musicians are more like lawless outlaws than metalheads?

The first band Dave discovered was Verbal Deception, a Canadian band. Here’s a live clip:

YouTube - Verbal Deception - Pirate Attack

We are of course going to Wacken this year and one of the bands on the bill is Alestorm - Scottish pirate metal, of all things. Metal Sucks recently posted about them. Here’s a live clip:

YouTube - Alestorm - Captain Morgan’s Revenge (Live)

While Verbal Deception are awesome metal first and pirate second, I think that Alestorm are less metal and more pirate/folk. I recently found a third band which takes the cake as far as I’m concerned - Swashbuckle. They are very metal and very, very pirate. Carn, the dude plays with a stuffed parrot on his shoulder. And check out the background of their MySpace page = that’s my new PC wallpaper. Live clip:

YouTube - Swashbuckle - “Crewed by the Damned” Live

Apparently pirate metal is not a new thing - there was a German band called Running Wild in the 80’s. I haven’t tracked any of their stuff down though.

So there you have it, ye scurvy dogs…

Tickets to world’s largest metal festival (already sold out): check
Airline tickets to Germany: check (well, booked and will be paid for soon)
Backpacks (for very lightweight travelling): check
The Metal Horns: always at the ready

Yep that’s right kids, we’re going to Wacken Open Air 2008.

We’re even blogging about it.

Everyone knows by now the traditional record industry’s dead, yeah? I talked a bit about how impressed I was with the gear we ordered from Amon Amarth a while back, their record company actually seems quite switched on. Radiohead had this great idea to let people pay whatever they wanted for their album, and while they made money they were also shocked that a large number of people didn’t want to pay anything at all. Now Trent Reznor has shown everyone’s that there’s a better way to do it with the Ghosts release by giving away some stuff for free, but stacking the goodies in for the people who want to pay a little more.

The deal is multi-layered, but essentially you can download some of the tracks for free, pay $5 to download the lot, pay $10 to download the lot and get a double CD shipped to you, pay $75 to download the lot and get a deluxe edition shipped to you with a data DVD, printed booklet, Blu-Ray version etc etc OR for 2,500 of the super-serious fans, $300 gets you limited edition vinyl personally signed by Trent.

The super special edition sold out in 28 hours. We bought the $75 version (and it took several days to get through as the site was swamped). The international shipping was very high. We actually thought twice about the whole thing because of that, but in the end decided hell, it’s Trent, and it’s bound to be a historic release, so it was worth the extra cost.

Some people have worked out that Mr Reznor has made a quite tidy profit from this little exercise in marketing. I’ll let them go through the numbers for you but essentially, it’s not bad work if you can get it. However, I think it’s only the Trent Reznors of the world who can get away with that kind of deal.

I’ve said before that as this current shift in people’s attitude to buying music progresses, the fallout will be that successful recording artists will no longer be multi-millionaires - and that’s a good thing. Everyone deserves to make a good living doing what they love, but the death of the traditional label system may mean an end to the ridiculous excesses of the Michael Jacksons and Britney Spears’ of the world.

An unknown band is not going to be able to pull a $750,000 profit, Trent-style. But I can see a system coming into place where the big, well known artists introduce newer artists they they dig to their own fan-base. And bands will always need help with business - they’re musicians, not accountants, which is why we like them - so “artist development” companies like LaMafia Records (set up by Chimaira’s bassist and others), seem like an interesting solution to that problem. 

At any rate, we’re eagerly awaiting delivery of our Ghosts package. Good one Trent!