MY VOICE VS. THE VOICE

The results of the 2007 Village Voice Pazz & Jop Poll are out. My Top Ten is here. I think this may be a new record for me, as I was the only person who voted for six of my 10 choices (Tego Calderón's El Abayarde Contra-Ataca, Arch Enemy's Rise Of The Tyrant, Belanova's Fantasía Pop, Wisin y Yandel's Los Extraterrestres, Demiricious's Two (Poverty), and Behold...The Arctopus's Skullgrid). The fact that no other critic in the whole U.S. of A. thought most of those discs were Top Ten candidates doesn't bother me much - I suspect that Wisin y Yandel were hampered by a late release date - but seriously, folks are sleeping on that Tego album and it's their friggin' loss. Not only is it a brilliant album, but not recognizing it as such speaks volumes about their cultural blinders, if not their taste, period.

GREETINGS FROM STOCKHOLM

I am in Sweden for a couple of days to work, but of course I found time to go record shopping. (Hey, I'm the editor of a music magazine - not only will I be reimbursed for what I pick up, but it's a tax write-off to boot.) I hit Megastore, which is the Stockholm equivalent of Tower or Virgin, only apparently not dying or dead. I asked the dude for early '70s Swedish progressive and/or hard rock without knowing any specific band names to request, and he (being about 19) drew a blank; he told me they'd had a CD in stock by the band November the previous day, but they'd put it on the house system for about two minutes and someone immediately snapped it up. I'm not surprised by that - November are a heavy power trio I'm dying to check out. There's a single track by them on the one thing I did buy, the 4CD boxed set pictured at left, Pregnant Rainbows For Colourblind Dreamers: The Essence Of Swedish Progressive Music 1967-1979. (That's a very good price at that link, by the way - I paid 499 kronor, which breaks down to about $80 US.) It's got 71 songs by as many bands/artists, some of whom I'm familiar with (International Harvester, Träd Gräs Och Stenar, Baby Grandmothers, November, Pandora, Bo Hansson) but the majority of whom are brand-new to me. Hope it doesn't suck!

What's Stockholm like, you ask? Well, the city is clean and old and European, the cabbies are not from Sweden (So far I've ridden with one Ethiopian dude who liked it here very much but said I shouldn't move here as coming from the U.S. Sweden would seem like a village, one Iranian woman who didn't like it here because the people are cold and unfriendly, and one Iraqi man who's been here seven years and has family stuck in Baghdad and wanted to know who I wanted to be the next U.S. president - I said my choices were, in order, Edwards, then Obama, then Clinton.) My hotel room is tiny and frighteningly efficient, with a hard wood floor and blank white walls and a TV hanging from the ceiling. In the bathroom is a shower not unlike one you'd find in a YMCA locker room - nozzle attached to a pole in the wall so you can raise and lower it, and a drain in the middle of the floor. I haven't really risked much in the way of local cuisine, but neither have I been desperate enough to eat McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, or the local fast food place, Max.

That's all for now!

IDOLATRY

The results of the 2007 Idolator critics' poll are up. My individual ballot can be viewed here.

NEWS OF METAL

There's a fuck of a lot going on in Metal-world as this week kicks off. The full-length Dead Child CD, Attack, is a pretty major improvement over the self-titled EP from last year, which was mind-roastingly shitty. As I type this, though, I'm listening to the Genghis Tron album Board Up The House, which is also kinda awesome, if maybe a little too much for my present, already somewhat frantic 'n' skittish, state of mind. GT have one of my favorite band names ever, and their music, which mixes crunching and somewhat spazzy riffage with John Carpenter-esque oozing analog synths and staticky noise, matches it very well. Other promising things in today's mailbag: the self-titled Kingdom of Sorrow album (which features Jamey Jasta of Hatebreed and Kirk Windstein of Down, two bands I am alternately neutral on and consumed with hatred for, but somehow I'm still hopeful), Grief Of War's A Mounting Crisis...As Their Fury Got Released, the Earache nü-thrash compilation Thrashing Like A Maniac, with tracks from Bonded By Blood, Evile, Municipal Waste, Dekapitator, Fueled By Fire, Decadence, Warbringer, SSS, Gama Bomb, Merciless Death, Deadfall, Lazarus, Toxic Holocaust, Mutant, Violator and Send More Paramedics, and the reissue of Hellhammer (pre-Celtic Frost) demos from Century Media.

In other news, the 2008 Gigantour lineup sounds fucking great (Megadeth obviously, plus In Flames, Children Of Bodom, Job For A Cowboy and High On Fire), and I will definitely be there when the tour hits NYC in April. Oh, and my new Iron Maiden Vans (with artwork from "The Trooper") came in today. They'll be in stores in February, and one more pair, with the artwork from Piece Of Mind, is supposed to come out later this year. Horns in the air!

BACK TO SEATTLE

I'm making my triumphant return to the EMP Pop Conference this April, once again flying the flag for metal. (The text of my 2005 paper can be found here.) My topic this year is "Charred Neighborhoods: The Rise Of The Colombian Death Metal Underground." Basically, I'm going to be interviewing Colombian death metal and goregrind bands to see how - if at all - the violence and chaos of Colombian society impacts their music, which is some of the most brutal in the genre. (Check out the excellent compilation A Bombardment From The Southern Paradise; the other big recent Colombian comp, From Colombia With Hate Vol. 2, contains a broader range of sounds, including some pretty ambitious black metal acts.) I'm also going to talk about the relative futility of couching protest in a medium like death metal, which features indecipherable vocal grunting and an instrumental mix of downtuned, grinding guitars and pummeling, machine-gun drums that's pretty much guaranteed to send the uninitiated straight out of the room.

I had a lot of fun last time, and realized some tangible benefits, too - a good 1/3 of the Marooned roster was folks I met, or heard speak, at EMP '05. So I'm very much looking forward to getting back. If you're gonna be in town for the event, find me!