Come See The New Digs!

Hey, guys: I'm moving Sloth over to Wordpress, so update those bookmarks of yours. You can see the new site at madkevin.wordpress.com.

I've Been Waiting For A Guide To Come And Take Me By The Hand

Cover of "Disorder" by Joy Division, first track off of Unknown Pleasures. It's obviously not as good as Joy Division, but then again what is? Please to enjoy.

Oh, and Mediafire is being weird, so my previous uploads are pooched at the moment. You can just hit play on the little player here to hear Disorder:

It Stains Your Dentures

A banner day here at Sloth Music Corp. This next song I'm about to unveil features... ready for it? ... VOCALS.

Well, sort of. I have a deadly combination between a) not being able to write lyrics and b) hating my voice. So to test out the ability of my computer to manipulate my crappy voice into something unrecognizable, I decided to take a song from my old high school band and use that as a test.

The song is called "Blood". It has what must be the easiest bassline in the universe. The lyrics, which if I recall correctly were written mostly by my friend Bill when he was drunk, are as follows:

It's in my veins
Blood!
It's on your shirt
Blood!
It stains your dentures
Blood!
It smells bad
Blood!
Ha ha ha!
Ha-ha ha ha!
Ha ha ha!
Ha-ha ha ha!

There were more, but I'll spare you. Although honestly, Flipper would have been proud.

Anyway, please to enjoy. It's short and painful - sort of like pulling off a band-aid. Click on the lyrics to download

OH AND P.S.: New GenX zine is out today, number 8 for those of you counting. Your ol' buddy Sloth continues his Dude Movie column there with a look at post-apocalyptic cinematic horrorshows ==> Click here to download a PDF.

Random Rules

OK, so here's my attempt at starting a blog meme. Well, not really starting one, because I'm essentially ripping it off of the Onion's AV Club. But, good ideas are good ideas, so here goes:

The idea is that you load up your mp3 player or iPod or your Winamp playlist with whatever you want and shuffle it so that ten random tracks come up. (This tends to work better if you have TONS of music on your player. It also works better if you have forgotten what you've put on, like I have.) Then, you talk about those songs - how cool they are, or what they mean to you, or whatever pops into your head. The big rule, though, is NO CHEATING - no matter how embarassing to your hipster cred these songs might be, you can't skip over any.

Sounds like nerdy fun, right? So all six of you who read this blog, go ahead and do this on your own blog or Facebook or whatever. MEME POWER!

Here's the Sloth Random 10:

1) The Undertones - "Family Entertainment" - Off to a good start! Hooray for The Undertones! Sort of a forgotten band nowadays, The Undertones were famous for recording John Peel's favourite song, "Teenage Kicks". "Family Entertainment" is from that same album, and it's an effortlessly great two-chord pop song, until you listen closely to the lyrics and realize it might be about incest. Oh, those crazy punk rockers.

2) Dethklok - "Go Into The Water" - Awesome. If I'm not mistaken, this was originally from the album "Underwater", and was therefore never supposed to be heard by human ears. It's intended audience was the creatures who live on the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, because they are the only ones who can handle music this heavy. How heavy is it? When they played this song live, the first twenty rows spontaneously exploded. Now that's heavy.

3) Von Spar - "KkljdsopizdoASlibgvdosndgvl" - OK, that's not really the name of the song, but it's something in German that I can't spell. Von Spar are this wacky dance-punk band from Germany, and this is from an early EP I think. It's nice and boppy with a cool piano bass line and a backup chick breathing "von schpaaaaaaaar!" every now and then. Weirdly, their album after this was like some crazy neo-tribal-prog-doom-metal thing with like twenty-minute long songs. If there's one thing crazier than punk rockers, it's German punk rockers.

4) The Cure - "Charlotte Sometimes" - Gosh, what were the odds a Cure song would come up? A classic from their early wrist-slitting depressive era, the lyrics are apparently the first paragraph of the book "Charlotte Sometimes", which I assume is about a girl with really big hair and smeary red lipstick.

5) Nomeansno - "More ICBMs" - From the odds-'n'-sods collection "Mr. Right and Mr. Wrong", this is like embryonic Nomeansno - drums, guitar and piano (?). This must have been recorded when they were still teenagers or something because they sound like demented chipmunks. Not exactly an essential Nomeansno track.

6) The Jesus & Mary Chain - "Down On Me" - Mmmmmmmm, more depression. It never ceases to amaze me how the JaMC have managed to take the same five songs and make a whole career out of them. This is from "Darklands", an album I was really down on when it came out because it didn't sound like "Psychocandy", but I recently went on a big re-listen kick to all of my JaMC stuff and I gotta say this album is a lot better than I remembered it being. It's just scruffy and rough enough to be awesome. I hope they paid Lou Reed some royalties, though.

7) Sugar - "Man On The Moon" - Fuck I love Bob Mould. Shorty had a great idea where she would get her favourite singer-songwriters together and do the "I Fucking Wrote This" tour, where each of the participants would introduce each song by saying: "Oh, by the way - I fucking wrote this". Bob Mould could headline that one, I think.

8) The Who - "Sea And Sand" - From "Quadrophenia". I know everybody loves "Tommy" and "Who's Next", but "Quadrophenia" is the tits: Pete's best guitar playing, Roger could still sing, and classic rock hasn't played the songs to fucking death. Too bad I was always too fat to pull of the mod look. Well, that and I'm a huge slob. Oh, and I can't dance. Fucking mods.

9) Jackson 5 - "Daddy's Home" - From the "Ultimate Collection", although I'm almost positive this isn't an actual Jackson 5 song. I think it's a Jermaine solo single. Whatever, it's still some awesome Motown sappiness - lots of strings and vibes. It sounds like Jermaine is multitracking his own backing vocals. This is the kind of thing I like a lot more than I probably should.

10) The Damned - "Help" - Wicked cover of the Beatles song that The Damned rip through in about a minute and a half. Hey, remember when punk rock was supposed to be fun?

I'm just looking for a place to fit in.

SOME FOLKS LIKE WATER!!!!

SOME FOLKS LIKE WINE!
BUT I LIKE THE TASTE!
OF SWEET STRYCHNINE!!!

Cover of "Strychnine" for all y'all. It's loud, it's fast and unlike my other songs, it's short. Please to enjoy.

Seven Random Facts About Sloth

So the lovely and talented Megan "Asteroidea" Butcher tagged me in her blog for this: seven random facts about me. Normally I try not to go too much into personal detail on this here blog, mostly because people like Megan do that kind of writing about a million times better. I'm merely content to wallow in my sea of videogames, heavy metal, music uploads that I'm sure everybody is sick of by now, and pop-culture referencing. But seeing as I was CALLED OUT, on the INTERNET, I can only comply.

Fact 1: I was exorcised. Not "exercised", as anybody who's seen me in person can surely testify, but "exorcised", as in the Linda Blair, head-spinning, pea-soup-vomiting kind. It's a long story, which is really worth a whole 'nother post, but here's the short version: it didn't take.

Fact 2: I have reoccurring rock fantasy dreams. I don't think this one is particularly unique, but the only reoccurring dream I ever have any more is this one: I'm at a concert - let's say New Order, because it usually is in the dream - and everybody's waiting around for the show to start. Bernard Sumner hits the stage and says: "Hey, sorry folks but Peter Hook is detained and he's not going to make it. We'd sure like to play, though. There wouldn't happen to be anybody in the audience who knows every single note of every song we've ever written, would there?" and I'm all like: "YES! I DO! RIGHT HERE!" and then I get up on stage and BLOW EVERYBODY'S MINDS. I get this about once every six months, and it's awesome every time.

Fact 3: My favouritest movie ever is Singin' In The Rain. I used to keep count of how many times I watched it, but I stopped after I hit about fifty in first-year university. It's easily over one hundred times by now.

Fact 4: I can spit like a snake. See, there are these two saliva glands right underneath your tongue that if you kind of arch your tongue upwards towards the roof of your mouth and push down you can squeeze and shoot a stream our of your mouth in a snake-like fashion. Apparently, nobody else in the history of the universe has ever discovered this. I don't do it all that often (because I'm no longer eight years old), but it brings me great joy to know that I have that in reserve.

Fact 5: I once broke a toilet with my head. This is another one that could probably take up a whole 'nother post, but suffice it to say a) it wasn't on purpose, b) when I mean broke, I mean broke - like split-the-bowl-in-half, and c) I'm fine, thanks for asking.

Fact 6: I have flat feet. Which is why I tend to walk like Grouch Marx. So, let's review: flat feet, overweight, and bad eyesight. Like Woody Allen said, according to the army I wouldn't be 4F, I'd be 4H - if a war ever broke out, I'd be a hostage.

Fact 7: My middle name is Danger. Ok, I made that one up.

Hooray For Noise!

It's been a week, so here's another song. This one gets really crazy noisy - lots of fuzz and distortion, and I think at one point there's like five layers of guitars. I like this one a lot, mostly because it's wicked fun to play.

If you want to download it directly, click here - or you can hit play on the little player widget thingy below.

Sloth Vs. The Record, Part III

Seeing as they published a letter from me fairly recently, they probably won't publish this one, but I thought it was too much fun not to share.

Today's Record had a letter from a Mr. Kraemer, who has written before.

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The teaching of atheism

DAN KRAEMER

Despite Premier Dalton McGuinty claiming "evolution is a science," (Record, Sept. 7) he cannot demonstrate a single repeatable fact of evolution.

If evolution is true, it does not need a god to guide it. Evolution stands on its own as the cornerstone of atheism. And so our public schools cannot be neutral on the issue. If they teach evolution, by default, they teach atheism. God is a myth.

No wonder there is an outcry. Intelligent design needs to be taught to balance the scales. We may argue over God's name, nature and plan, but to make the teaching of creation unlawful establishes atheism as the state religion, represses freedom of speech, stifles intellectual thought and oppresses all other religions.

Yet McGuinty is against faith-based schools and calls evolution a science.

Dan Kraemer
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Here's my response:

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Dan Kraemer's letter of Oct 2, in which he decries evolution as the "cornerstone" of atheism, reads somewhat like the greatest hits collection of the anti-science crowd who, it seems, must resort to falsehoods in order to defend their intellectually untenable position. In the space of just a few sentences, he manages to obfuscate evolution with abiogenesis, claims that the teaching of a non-intellectual, non-scientific "theory" like Intelligent Design is a freedom of speech issue, and implies that the only goal of high school science class is to "balance the scales" between religion and science. Apparently, Mr. Kraemer would like nothing more than a educational system built on the precepts of, say, Fox News instead of actual, you know, facts.

Ironically I, like many fans of science, believe there is a place for Intelligent Design in Canadian high schools. For example, it would make an excellent addition to a comparative religion class, where it could be added to a near-infinite list of other creation mythologies. Or perhaps it could be used in a history class as an modern example of how religious dogma threatens to overwhelm rational thought even today.

Of course, if I'm being honest with myself, it might be that I'm simply jealous. Because if Mr. Kraemer gets his way, instead of having to learn all of those tedious facts and apply critical thought in high school like I had to, kids today will simply be able to write in "God did it" on all of their science tests.

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Double Shot Music Weekend, Take 2! And More TV

Another song for all y'all. What can I say, I've been productive. I'm trying something a little different - you should see a little embedded player in this post, so you can click on the Play icon to hear the song.

This one's mostly an excuse to try out a new drum program, which sounds pretty good even if I do say so myself. If any of you cats want a copy of the mp3, just email me or leave me a comment here.

TV: So far, the best new show of the season has been Reaper. I don't want to give too much away, except to note that a) it's awesome Buffy methadone, b) executive produced by Kevin Smith, and c) RAY WISE PLAYS THE DEVIL. If you don't know who Ray Wise is, consider your life to be an empty, empty place.