Diary of A Sane Man

This past Saturday my friend Mike and I did a whirlwind attack on New York City: We drove down at 3pm Saturday, saw Skinny Puppy, went to the after party at Club Pyramid, and then drove home, arriving back in Albany around 7:30am. It was a grueling trip. But the trip isn’t the part that annoyed me (it was actually fun). No, what annoyed me is the fact that Skinny Puppy needs to break up and move on in life. ARGH!

Here’s the deal: the lead singer is what pulls peoples’ attention to the stage. Failing that, the guitar players. The drummer and keyboard could have all the presence in the WORLD, but it won’t matter: the stage will seem empty if the guitar players and lead singer can’t pull it together. Skinny Puppy, being Skinny Puppy, didn’t have any guitars on stage, so the whole thing fell to Nivek Ogre. Many people consider him a titan of industrial or something, so he should have been able to pull it off, right?

*sigh*

Wrong. Want to see what I had to deal with?

That’s right: Ogre was behind a fucking sheet the whole time. The stage seemed really empty and devoid of energy. Sure it was nice and artsy at first – “Ooooh, look at the cool shadow play when he sings.” But the keyboardist looked bored and the drummer looked like he’d rather be somewhere else, so it really was up to Ogre to pull this shit together. Of course he didn’t. My friend Mike thinks he was on some serious drugs and too wasted to sound like Skinny Puppy (seriously, he sounded like shit). I think he just needs to call it quits for a while. His voice sucked and his presence wasn’t there. BORING. The whole damned band wasn’t there, mentally or emotionally. I felt like I was watching some crap high school band or a geriatric ward slowly die of old age, not Skinny Motherfucking Puppy! The thing is, once in a while Ogre would come dancing out from behind the sheets and start singing to the crowd. Then there was a noticeable surge in crowd energy; they went from zombies standing there looking confused by the bright lights to something resembling insomniacs trying to dance. The latter was an improvement, trust me. But I don’t blame the crowd at all. You can’t get into a show that isn’t there. Even when Nivek came frolicking out from behind the curtains to scream in the crowds’ faces it still wasn’t anything to get excited over. Sure he *looked* cool, but image only goes so far.

This is boredom:

To make a long story short, Skinny Puppy was a waste of money. Mike and I left before the set was even over. We just couldn’t take it any more. The after party was fun though, but I admit that we mostly hung out outside with my other homies that we met there. Gnargh! Friggin’ Skinny Puppy. What a let down. But like I said, what we did before and after was cool, but that’s all for another blog.

-=Grim=-

…at least don’t look like a basement-dwelling World of Warcraft dweeb. Yea, sure, whatever. I’m a callous prick or whatever you want to call me. But this shit had me cracking up:

I mean COME ON. What, were they out of Black Metal drummers in Norway (or whatever Midwest town this group is from) so they had to ask the high school marching band snare section to come lay some tracks with them? Look at this guy! They even gave him sad clown makeup instead of corpse paint! *sigh* It really ruins a band’s image when people like this try to do the rock n’ roll pose for photos. I don’t give a fuck if you’re gutter punk or some other anti-establishment band, image is everything (the gutter punks would have the image of “we don’t need an image!”, usually the standard punk image, i.e. “We really do have an image, but we like to think we don’t.”). For Black Metal image is about eating babies, skull-fucking the pope and destroying all things pleasant. You can’t pull that off when your band has that one weak link in the photo. Look as bad-ass as you want, the weakest link is the image presented. Yo, it’s even funnier in the unmarked photo:

Holy D&D dork, Batman! He probably goes by the name Zamoth Gar, Bane of Light. Why couldn’t they give this guy a mask or something? Some mean looking thing with rusty nails and fangs or whatever is this years trendy thing in the Black Metal scene. No, they give the Chess Club looking guy sad clown makeup. Whatever, I’m an asshole. Bite me.

Christ…

-=Grim=-

P.S.: For the record, the band is called Emaciation. I have a feeling there’s another 30 Black Metal and Death Metal bands with that name, probably meaner looking too, but whatever.