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I'll tell you one thing - start a music blog, slag some fave bands, earn some good activity in the comments section. But write about books? Holy catshit. And I'm not complaining, but wow. The comments section comes alive like Kiss. And I haven't yet written: David Mitchell's Black Swan Green? quality. Eliot Perlman's Seven Types of Ambiguity? well-written, but feh.
Enough of books. Enough of us glorified cro-magnons using our new capacity for language to destroy our competition, ourselves, and the earth with our need to categorize everything by rank.
Which ineluctably brings me to this new-ish, emerging genre of 'heavy' music, which I suspect only earns its own section at your cooler record depots because 'heavy' helps just separate smart music inspired by metal from the rest of metal. 'Heavy,' as in: twee-exclusive wussies and suburban lobotomy jobs will find this stuff confusing, threatening, and sometimes unlistenable. That doesn't imply it's all screaming cacophony; some of it is quite beautiful. We're talking bands like Earth, Boris, SunnO))) etc, where drone can easily top nine minutes, and where psychedelia and death metal meet, as in the case of Big Business or the Sword, or where the MC5 meets Spacemen 3, as in the case of Boris. Maybe even Lighting Bolt, Usa is a Monster, Parts and Labor and other similarly adventurous but loud guitar-and-drums outfits can be included.
Inadvertant genre founders include the Melvins, Deadguy, Black Sabbath, and the Boredoms, whom I include here. I'm sure there's others I've forgotten. Correct me. The Boredoms tracks come from Vision Creation Newsun, their second incarnation, as a Can tribute band, but shot through with the crazy, junkyard speed metal noise of their spazzcore past. Boris is just - well, Boris. The Japanese dominate this genre.
And here's some random tracks I've also been digging, but too busy to post on while slugging it out with literary anonymouses in the comments section. I was also busy driving to Pennsylvania over the weekend. Did you know there are still sections of NJ where you can find Steve Miller on three different stations, at once, with the radio on seek?
Electrelane - I'm on Fire Fave cover of the last few years. Wait for that last verse. Saw them do it live in 2004 for a crowd of 15 accompanied by my then-pregnant wife, and our unborn daughter went nuts, I'm told, for this number.