oh, my.

I love Metallica (no one would've ever guessed that, amrite?) and I'm more than crazy about Pendulum, and I actually think this is proper badass, sounds like Metallica after doing a bag of ecstasy pills.

Cyanide

Happy 24th Metallica day! A very boring, boring-covered with boring filling 24th Metallica day...and past week. Weeks. Isn't fall just beautiful?

Shamefully updating the blog now, I just wanted to post this track that I've been listening for the past few days, and that is now my ringtone, and that starting blasting out of my pocket in the middle of the math test today. Oh, joy.

Whiskey in the jarroooohhhhh

Day o'Metallica number eleven.

Nothing to say tonight.

Except maybe

best cover ever.

Dum-a-doo-dum-a-dah,

Whiskey in the jar-oooooh

(Excuse me while I dance to this song in my underwear.)

Doris

I'm three days behind on the 31 days of Metallica project whatever, I started my weekend by sleeping for exactly 15h and a half, I only got myself out of the bed to get some lunch and make tea, I am, therefore, partying hard. So I am going to be mega-productive today and write a proper post (while still in bed) on one of my favourite LPs of all times, ...And Justice for All.

Released on August 25th, '88, ...And Justice for All is Metallica's 4th studio album and the first recorded since Cliff Burton's death. It differs from their earlier work through more complex instrumentals and more elaborate guitar riffs, giving the former thrash metal trademark a more progressive sound.

The main lyrical theme is political injustice, as the cover artwork suggests, portraying a cracked statue of Lady Justice, sometimes named 'Doris' by the fans, bound by ropes, with her scales filled with dollar bills.

Justice is nothing less of a materpiece throughout all of its 62 minutes and 25 seconds. Right from the very beginning, it hits you with what is the mother of all intros, the guitar solo opening Blackened, then unfolding into 9 tracks of heavy, complex riffs and constantly changing tempos, telling stories of war, corruption, and limitation of freedom of speech. Justice features One, my favourite track off this tracklist and of all the tracks ever released Metallica, based on the fate of a solider who was left limbless by the war, blind, deaf, mute, hooked to machines and unable to communicate with the outer world, despite the fact that he is fully conscious. The other tracks that stand out are Blackened, rather agressive, speaking about mass destruction, Eye of the Beholder, on the subjectivity of freedom, Harvester of Sorrow, about mistakes and grim happenings repeated as a mark left by an earlier generation, and To Live is To Die, a mainly instrumental composition written in the memory of former bassist Cliff Burton.

...And Justice for All is a definite classic, ageless heavy metal, a shout of protest still heard loud and clear through the decades. Horns up.

When a man lies

He murders some part of the world

These are the pale deaths

Which men miscall their lives

All this I cannot bear to witness any longer

Cannot the kingdom of salvation take me home?

Exit Light, Enter Night

Metallica's most played song on the radio, Enter Sandman is a kickass classic, powerful, and with every note falling in its exact place. A milestone for the band, it was the first single from The Black Album/Metallica (self titled) album in '91, when the band headed towards a slightly more mainstream direction. The song became a huge succes after its release, battling Smells like Teen Spirit for popularity at the time.

Kirk Hammet wrote the intro trying to capture some of Soundgarden's energy into a powerful guitar riff, so after various attempts, Hammet recorded the final version of the solo on a tape that he later showed Ulrich, and the songwriting took off from there.

The band quickly put together the rest of the instrumental part, but the lyrics took a longer while, as Hetfield said that the commercial sound needed a dark story, so that it would be balanced. He first wanted the theme to be death, with references to crib death and destroying the perfect family. However, the band then decided to make the song the opening track for The Black Album and the first single, so they changed the lyrics' theme to something lighter, which was a child's struggle with nightmares.

Dreams of war, dreams of liars

Dreams of dragon's fire

And of things that will bite

September chills

Autumn is the time of the year when I turn into a potato. An anxious and depressed potato. I hate it, and even worse, the last few years didn't exactly provide me with happy memories linked to this time of the year, just a bunch of happenings that now cause a mess of mixed feelings, so by "autumn" I understand "3 months of daily anxiety, possibly depression and mood swings from negative to slightly less negative or far more negative than a few minutes ago". And what's worse, winter follows, which is pretty much the same thing, just that by December I'd have already gotten used to my new bleached self. So I might aswell just walk around with a sign around my neck that says "Servers down till March 01. Wait, make that April 01".

I just hope this year is going to be the last, since next year's going to be my senior year and we're all going to be cherishing every single moment from September to June, and then I'm off to a completely new nice city where autumn won't seem so depressing. Hopefully.

Done with the personal inshight now, what I'm trying to say is that I should start working on a anti-depressant playlist. Thrash metal and grunge could work pretty well. Metallica(they're omnipresent though, with at least half of the discography), Alice in Chains, Sepultura, Soundgarden, Nirvana. Some people lift their spirits with dancy upbeat music, for me, though, anything that sounds like this or like this works like a charm. For the 4 ongoing minutes at least. The kind of music you can just not give a single flying F about anything happening outside your music player while listening to it.

Heh, especially when listening to Nirvana. What I love about their music is that that it somehow gives away the fact that the band members were each lost in their own mind, completely ripped from the outer world when writing and later recording their songs. By that I mean completely F-ed up after smoking tons of pot and inhaling piles of magical fairy dust (cocaine).

Oh, Kurt, my necrophiliac love.

I should also look concerts and events happening in the next few months, and hopefully, get to some of them too. In flames @Bucharest, October 1st. Amorphis @Oldies Pub, Sibiu, November 8th. Oh my god. I demand tickets to be materialised out of thin air right now.

(Speaking of events, the internet is already full of pictures and articles on how awesome Peninsula is so far. Very funny, internet. Very funny. -___-)

Shaking the grounds of Transylvania once again

two days have have passed since the wonder has come to an end. *sigh*

Artmania 2011, 6th year, is over. And it was ABSOFUCKINWONDERFABULOUS. I'm not going to start an ode regarding my exact feelings and all the happening in those 48h spent in sibiu and a review of each band's on-stage performance, since that would be never-ending, would get boring at some point and not many really care. But just as a sidenote, all the bands ruled, obviously. Here's a bunch of pictures each worth a thousand words+my comments to help me tell the story instead, they would've been more in number and more accurate if my lens weren't partially retarded. But. Moving on. :)

tarja turunen soundcheck, 1st day, 1 PM.

fabulous. checking for tickets one last time before we left.

the chillax before the big rock-out.

taken while lacrimas profundere were on stage, a picture within a picture.

this guy, tony berger, lacrimas profundere guitarist, ruled. the band itself ruled, actually, best choice for the 1st concert of artmania this year.

1st day, 1 AM, lucky us, we got pics with them. oh, and my face? these gentlemen are just about enough to complete the picture, my face after 4 hours of concerts is...nah.

2nd day, 2PM, lacuna coil meet&greet, taking pointless pictures of the artmania brochure while waiting for the band members to show up.

intense autograph-signing-smiling-for-pictures-with-fans session afterwards.

my friend's life just got better after she shook hands with the singer, who she absolutely loves. and i got to take this pretty picture.

"oh my god i just shook hands with cristina scabbia!"

2nd day 7 PM, and now i'm quoting my dear friend, 2nd on the left, "we' mah bitches at, ah?"

dude in the crowd holding this awesome sign up for sonata arctica, i don't think he got a pick after the concert, though, hm.

my partially retarded lens limited me to one single decent picture during sonata arctica's show. still better than no decent pictures of tarja, helloween and lacuna coil on stage :(

"oh. my. god. that. was. so. fucking. awesome. i can't move, my body hurts, i need water, i wanna lay down for the next 2 weeks", was the general reaction at the end of the 2nd day.