Author: J T. Ramsay

  • Cometh Down Hessian

    Tonight @ First Uni­tar­i­an Church, 7:30 p.m. Pre­view here (via Youtube.) No sur­prise, right? Wrong. Even after Blessed Black Wings marked met­al’s resur­gence into the main­stream along with Mastodon and Isis, it seems that they’ve joined the flot­sam and jet­sam. For me, Blessed Black Wings remains an album for these times: the oily gui­tars revive…

  • Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine

    When I next real­ized that the Philip­pines had dropped into our laps I con­fess I did not know what to do with them… And one night late it came to me this way…1) That we could not give them back to Spain — that would be cow­ard­ly and dis­hon­or­able; 2) that we could not turn…

  • The Face of Battle

    Occu­pa­tion: Dream­land, dir. Gar­rett Scott and Ian Olds @ Int’l House, 7 p.m. A few days lat­er, when every­one is more relaxed, the inevitable necrophilic humor of impe­r­i­al war-mak­ing comes out: “How much mon­ey would it take for you to have sex with a male corpse at the fifty-yard line dur­ing the Super Bowl half­time…

  • Eh…What’s Opera, Doc?

    When Mike Pat­ton played Sus­pend­ed Ani­ma­tion for an April Fool’s joke last year, not every­one got it. The com­bi­na­tion of jump cuts, cal­cu­lat­ed mis­cues and caf­feinat­ed exper­i­men­ta­tion was too heavy for the avant garde (with excep­tions) and too car­toon­ish for any­thing but the art met­al scene, leav­ing it orphaned for ADHD weirdos and nos­tal­gia freaks…

  • On The Boards

    Pearls and Brass, with Pho­ton Band and Jack Rose @ The Khy­ber. 9 p.m. Let’s not bela­bor the point: Pearls and Brass are unabashed­ly the prod­uct of past gen­er­a­tions of Delta and South Side blues­men, Nuggets era Anglo-Amer­i­can psych rock­ers, and the pan­theon of clas­sic rock icons. There’s noth­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly weird or pecu­liar about them…