ST.com: “So, Ryan, what brings about the sudden talk of a reunion/farewell concert?”

Ryan: You’ll never get me lucky charms!!! [Ryan runs to the next room and hides behind the sofa]

ST.com: “Donnie, there is speculation that this concert may be more about the money than the music. What do you say to that?”
Donnie: “Well no shit. We haven’t put out a record, hell even a single song since, well, ever really. We just looked at this as a quick way to score a huge sack of cash.”

ST.com: “Regarding the lack of any studio albums… Some critics have argued that DBS doesn’t qualify as a “band” since they have never released any music. Would one of you card to respond?”
Ryan: “I’ll respond to that.” [he pauses for 20-30 seconds] “They’re magically delicious!” [he again retreats to the other room and hides behind the sofa]
Donnie:“If I may… DBS has never been about the music, we have always been about a clever name creating false recognition -really just straight ripping off another group. When we came up with the name back in ’98 or ’99 we knew that we would never have to write a song to sell out stadiums, and to date we haven’t.”

ST.com:”Haven’t written a song or haven’t sold out a stadium?”
Donnie:“We’re here to talk about the future, not the past.”

ST.com:”Donnie, much has been made of your highly publicized battle with mediocrity. The critics say that there’s no way a second-rate guitarist can propel this band to stardom. How do you respond to that?”
Donnie:“Perhaps one second-rate guitarist can’t, but we have two [Burgess motions to the sofa in the other room; Ryan quickly ducks behind it]! And if two isn’t enough we will add another one… and another… We will just keep adding second-rate musicians until the group is so big people have to take notice, it worked for Earth, Wind & Fire.”

ST.com:”Your answers are so crass, it seems you’re not too concerned with offending or alienating people…”
Donnie:“Look, we’re not here to talk about music, we’re here to talk about reuniting long enough to grab that huge sack of cash and run. If you ask questions on that subject I could certainly give you a more polished answer.”

ST.com:”Fair enough. What do you plan to do with the huge sack of cash?”
Ryan:“I’m going to use my share to buy a small island of the coast of Tanzania… I’ll build a huge castle with a mote, pitfalls, secret passages, booby traps… Then me lucky charms will finally be safe!”
Donnie:Lottery tickets. Quickest investment on the planet. I’m going to put all my money into the powerball.

…
Stay tuned to Shadowtwin.com for this interview in its entirety and updates on the proposed July 2014 DBS reunion/farewell concert.

While trudging through the content of all those old pages, I did happen across a few things that I had completely forgotten about.  The first is Pandora. This is basically a radio station with a 30 second commercial every 15 minutes or so. You tell it a song or band that you really like and it will start picking out songs and artists similar to that. If you like what it is playing give it a thumbs up, if not give it a thumbs down. It will then find more songs and artists like that one, and on and on. I remember liking this a lot when I first started using it years ago, but giving up on it because I was crippled with a 56k modem connection that made the songs break up pretty bad. Now I am getting back into it. Even though my mp3 library has some 82hours of music on it, I find that I am getting pretty tired of hearing the same stuff all the time, and Pandora likes to throw in something I have never heard of from time to time. It’s a bit refreshing to hear something new now and then.

Cartoons I’d Like to Fuck (C.I.L.F):

This is a pretty damn funny song. I remember laughing out loud, alone, in real life the first time I heard it. I posted it previously, but it is worth putting up again.

The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny:

This is another amusing song/video that I posted about some time ago.  It is also elol-able enough to warrant a second posting.

This last one is a group called “Tripod” that has a wonderful love song.  They do love their video games:

I strongly recommend that no one else click anything prior to mid 2005 in my archives.  I did take a few things away from going back through them though, the videos above, for instance.  I also realized that the old posts weren’t nearly as bad as I remembered them, at least once they were set into the new format.  Amazing how the visual presentation can make them seem less like they were written by a retarded three-year-old who was very sleepy while writing.

]]> http://shadowtwin.com/archives/1656/feed 0 http://shadowtwin.com/archives/192 http://shadowtwin.com/archives/192#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:19:49 +0000 Shadowtwin http://shadowtwin.com/?p=192 My recent small flurry of website related activity seems to have stopped almost as quickly as it started. I got the pages that I wanted to reformatted, and started on a couple of the features that I had been thinking about for a while, and then my Laptop crashed.

There are two extremely annoying aspects to the Laptop crash. The first is that it was just after we got back from vacation, and aside from the photos that I have posted on the Vacation Photos page (in vastly reduced size and quality), I had no backups of the images that I lost. A total of roughly 300 pictures, from vacation photos to pets, just gone. Damn it. The other annoying aspect was the loss of all the programs I use for the website: Leech FTP, Screen Hunter (image saving program, saves pictures to file with a click of keyboard button), Audacity (music editing), and numerous others. Some of those are easy to pick up again, just a click through download.com, but others I was using older freeware versions instead of new trial versions so I could have full functionality. Those are harder to come by, and usually require going through a seedy website and praying you come out of it without a virus (much like picking up a hooker on Van Buren). And I didn’t want to waste the time doing that on the Laptop since the crash, coupled with heat issues had cemented in my mind that I needed to get a new PC anyway.

I ended up getting a new PC from NewEgg. If you have read my page in that past, you know that I like them so much I am practically a spokesman for the company. The last time I bought a computer I stuck with a name I knew. This time, before I even went to shop for one, I knew that I was going to try a PC built specifically for gaming. Either a CyberPower PC or an iBuyPower machine. Both of these have an entry level price that is roughly the same as an entry level eMachine or a Compaq, but they are (theoretically) built for gaming. The one I chose this time was a CyberPower PC.

The CyberPower was my second choice. I had actually already put one from iBuyPower into my cart and went through the payment process, but due to a changing zip code my order was put on hold. Three days later it still hadn’t processed so I cancelled the order. By that time the machine that I wanted had sold out, so I went to plan b. The CyberPower machine I chose came with a 2.9ghz processor, 4gigs of RAM (upgradeable to 16gigs), a 1gig GeForce 9500 video card, and integrated 5.1 surround. I ordered an additional 4 gigs of RAM (to upgrade myself) and got the whole setup for just a shade over 600 dollars. And boy am I ever glad that I chose to go with a name I hadn’t heard of.

The tower is huge, but that is pretty much my only complaint about the system. When I fired it up for the first time and got to the desktop I was ecstatic to see that there were no icons there. The machine came equipped with 64bit Windows Vista and nothing else! This was a huge plus for me, though I could see how it could be a minus for someone who actually uses anti-virus software. The thing about anti-virus software is that it has always bogged down my machine so much that the tiny amount of security it provided (let’s face it, I have been on the internet for 15 years, I know how to keep myself virus free) isn’t worth sacrificing the performance. Honestly, I think the anti-virus software does more to harm the system by constantly running and updating, keeping you from running programs -even windows update won’t run under some of the bigger names-, than the actual viruses they are meant to protect against. In addition to the lack of anti-virus, there were also no trial software offers for AoL, NetZero, MSN, and all that other crap that usually clutters up a new machine. In fact while looking through the start menu, the only trial offer I could find was Microsoft Office. There were only a recycle bin and two other icons on the desktop, neither of which necessarily needed to be removed. The lack of third party software is why my next PC purchase will definitely be from these guys.

I do have one petty bitch about the machine though. For reasons unknown the 5.1 surround that it comes pre-installed with has all of the tools turned off. Instead of having an audio manager with an equalizer and such, the only thing it shows when you click on the “Via HD Audio Deck” is the ability to change the input/output assignments of the audio ports on the tower. It took me a lot of toying around to find out that if you go into the control panel and get into the sounds settings, under the advanced tab there is an equalizer option (which has presets that sound so terrible and tinny that they are of 0 use to anyone) which I was able to use to get it to sound great -but not through headphones. I am not sure if the headphone issue is my hardware or a software issue though, so I will hold back my tirade on that bit of it for now.

So in order to set the equalizer, I needed to get some samples of different types of music onto the machine. I have an external hard drive networked here in the, well, let’s call it an office, that all the pcs have access to, so I copied the library here. I started tweaking the settings while playing different styles of music until I got to where it sounded great for the Heroic Power Metal that I seem to listen to the most, and it still sounds good for the more popular Rock and Metal that makes up the rest of the library.

While I was copying the entire library from the external drive, I realized that my taste in music has changed quite a bit over the last decade. I used to listen to almost exclusively death/thrash metal, but that has been slowly evolving to where I now enjoy melodic stuff more. I still like the music to be in-your-face and pounding, but with death metal getting ever more bestial in the lyrics (the sound, not the content), and me with no particular desire to listen to the Cookie Monster doing death metal, I have been gravitating to the other type of music that seems so prevalent now: Heavy Music with a woman doing harmony over it.

I heard a song by the band Luna Mortis a couple of months ago, but wasn’t able to find the album online until recently. This is just the type of thing I am talking about, but with a twist. The music is heavy, but the vocals on this one range from beautiful and melodic to just a hint of the cookie monster-esque death metal that turned me off to death metal in the first place. For unknown reasons it doesn’t bother me in these songs, perhaps since there is actual singing to compliment it? That well could be, as I also like the band Bullet For My Valentine, who also have normal vocals mixed in with the Jaba the Hut chorus. Here is a sample of the song “Ruin” from Luna Mortis’ album The Absence

And speaking of newer, popular rock, I can’t stop listening to Halestorm, even though every time I find myself enjoying it I want to kick my own ass. They are another band with a female vocalist, but very clearly trying desperately to be mainstream. All of the songs are three minutes long, they all have very easy to remember hooks for the chorus, and let’s face it, if you have a penis, you can’t help but want to bang the singer. She does display some amazing vocals in a couple of the songs, but every time I started trying to find an example of that to sample, I just ended up scrapping it and going back to this:

I had to trudge through all my pre-blogger posts to find as many of the songs I had featured there as possible, and was a bit irritated that the links to samples of the songs were now all broken. So I decided to figure out how to do the samples myself. First I had to figure out how to embed them. Of course I know the standard HTML functions for embedding .wav files, however since a 1 minute wave file weighs in at about 11megs, I wanted to try to get a slightly smaller format. That was when I found out that a standard MP3 can’t be embedded unless the user (you) has a third party plugin to play it. I also found out that the third party plugin that had been in use for Firefox browsers has been blacklisted for allowing remote code execution. So I had to find another way.

A bit of hunting around on google found me a number of audio embeds, but the thing they all had in common was that the source was stored on their server. These are available from Google, Yahoo, MSN, pretty much any name that you can quickly link to anything internet related. Since the actual source is stored on their server, it is subject to being moved/renamed/changed without warning, thus leaving all my links just as dead as they currently were, so that was straight out the window. Most of these players are running in Shockwave Flash though, so I started searching for shockwave audio embeds rather than MP3 embeds and soon found myself at this site, which was offering just what I wanted: A source that I upload to my own directory for embedding the files. Bonus is that it is so lightweight and hides away (mostly) when not in use, and is easily resizable. Here is a sample:

So now that I was able to embed it, I had to find a way to edit the MP3′s so that -hopefully- I won’t get any angry emails from the record companies. I am going on the logic that if I am only offering a small sample of the song I am more likely increasing their revenue (by forcing readers to seek out the MP3 and pay for a download) than advocating piracy. I don’t know anyone that has an MP3 library filled with about a minute’s worth of each song at the very least.

In the past I have used Goldwave for my audio editing needs. At least I have tried to. Since I lack any post-graduate work in audio engineering, I am barely able to figure out how to make it do a damn thing. I’m sure it is extremely versatile (hell it has to be with that intimidating wall of sliders and buttons), but I’ve no inclination to become a sound engineer just to sample a song. Thankfully I happened across Audacity.

Audacity is great for what I am doing. The intimidating wall of sliders and buttons are neatly stored in drop-down menus so I don’t have to look at them. There was a minor situation involving being able to extract my edited songs as MP3′s, which required downloading a “Lame.DLL” encoder, but that went fairly smoothly. Now I am able to open up the song, slide the bars to the section I want to sample, extract it as MP3 and upload it. It only takes a minute to get all this done (a huge plus since I am so lazy), so I have no excuse not to do it.

If I would have known how easy it would be to find the tools I needed to complete this project I would have done it years ago. There are so many programs and applications available for just about any task you can imagine now, it boggles the mind. When I first set up this site I had a problem finding applications like this, and if I even could find them they were ridiculously complicated to use. I’m glad to see that so much of this stuff is so readily available now. Perhaps it will motivate me to take care of a few other things I’ve been meaning to do here…I still haven’t changed the rest of my navbar since 2005, for instance.

I don’t know a damn thing about music. Sure I can play the guitar (not as good as I could back when I practiced for hours on end every day, but I still have the gear just in case I get the call from Metallica..), but my musical tastes are, at best, questionable. The Dungeon Metal that I wrote about in the last post, and one some time earlier, generated more feedback than anything I have written here that wasn’t poker related. There are two possibilities here: 1) There are a lot more people who like this type of music than I had ever thought. 2) There are only a few people who like this type of music, so few that they found my site because there are no other sites talking about it. While I refuse to believe the latter -can anyone seriously be coming to my site for actual information?- it is almost as difficult to believe the former.

Spending in excess of two hours in a car every day really gives me the opportunity to listen to a lot of music. The first few weeks I just listened to cds, but after I had worn out just about everything in my collection, the wife added me to her Sirius Radio account. There are dozens of stations on there dedicated to Rock, and many different types of it. I am partial to Octane, which plays mostly new Metal, mixed in with some classic Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, and the such, but when a band that I don’t care for comes on (System of a Down, for instance) I venture to other stations. Mostly Hair Nation (big hair bands rock!) and Hard Attack. I can’t listen to either of those stations for long though; I hate the growling, cookie-monster-esque voices of most of the bands on Hard Attack, and one can only take about so much Bon Jovi. During those times when I am listening, however, I do occasionally hear a band that I like, that I had never heard of previously. And since I had to listen to hours of mediocre crap to get to these few shining gems, I am really doing you a service by pointing them out here.

A lot of the times when I do hear a band that I like, it never merits a post here. Some of the bands, Forced Entry and Dark Angel come immediately to mind, are bands that I should have heard back in the early 90s, but for some reason missed. Since they aren’t putting out albums anymore, I don’t see a reason to tell anyone about them. The ones I put up here are currently putting out music, or at least currently enough that they have an album released within the last year or so. The one that I discovered today though has about 30 cds in the last 10 years, how the hell had I never heard of Nightwish?

These guys are like the Dungeon Metal I love so much, but take it to another level. The music is really fast, the beats are awesome, you can certainly bang your head to it… But, and I am sure I am going to lose some of you here, there is actual singing. I am not talking about a gruff sounding man barking out lyrics, or words for the sake not being an instrumental, I am talking about full-on, almost operatic singing. Looking for an example on Youtube, I found this version of Kinslayer(which is laid over clips from Silent Hill, and looks pretty good IMHO).

I understand that this isn’t the music for everyone, but if you have listened to any of the other Dungeon Metal I have posted and enjoyed it even a little bit, and if you haven’t heard any Nightwish, go listen now. You won’t be disappointed.

I happened to catch a Dragonforce video on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball (I thought they canceled that when grunge and hip hop pushed metal into the underground in the mid 90′s), and downloaded a couple of albums. Pretty good stuff. The guitarwork is excellent, the beat is fast, but the vocals are mixed so loud that they really take away from the song. In this type of music, the vocals are really irrelevant IMHO, the less you hear of them the better. This guy’s voice in particular sours me, it is just too … I dunno … happy maybe? Not looking for growling here, but it really shouldn’t sound the like the vocal track could be taken as is and laid over an Irish Spring commercial. Like I say, the music is awesome, and the vocals aren’t really that bad, but I can’t just sit and listen to it, mostly because of the vocals.

Last night I happened to hear a song by Symphony X on Sirius satellite radio, and was curious enough to look at some song samples from recent albums. This is exactly the kind of music I am talking about. The one I linked above is heavier than most of their stuff, but it sounds great. Probably a more representative song would be Paradise Lost (the vocals are mixed pretty heavy in that as well, but you get the idea). The music is awesome, and the vocals just add another layer to it. It could almost be classical music if you were to take away the distortion -which is pretty much what I am looking for.

I’m sure this isn’t the type of music for everyone, but if you really like the musical side of some of the great Metallica songs, particularly the instrumentals, you should check these guys out. They write excellent melodies and the songs flow smoothly. Not so overly loud as to be deafening (again, IMHO), but heavy enough to be rock. Sort of like an opera without the the falsetto vocals and done in English. Some songs are relaxing, some are invigorating, and I have yet to hear one that I just dislike.

And coming from me, that is something.

The Showdown’s song Head Down has been getting some airplay on Sirius Satellite, and unlike most new music out, it hasn’t been getting beaten to death with a 4x an hour rotation. In fact I only hear the song once every few days, and when I hear it, it always leaves me wanting to hear another song. It is not nearly as heavy as most of the music that I like, but the guitar is awesome and the songs are short and to the point. They hit me sort of like Nickelback did; I never dreamed of buying their album, but when I found that I was turning up my radio for 5 different Nickelback songs (I didn’t know what songs Nickelback did at the time) I went ahead and got the album. This is the same way. I wouldn’t have imagined that I would actually be buying the album, but I have the available songs (from their website) on my mp3 player, and I find that I crank it up when they come on. Unfortunately, I have yet to see the album in stores, and my mp3 downloading service of choice doesn’t have either of their albums available yet. Definitely a release that I am looking forward to.

Also to note, The Showdown has a cover of the song Carry on Wayward Son on one of their albums. If you have been to my site when I was talking about music, you likely know that I generally despise remakes of classic songs. As it stands, I think only Disturbed’s song Land of Confusion has actually gotten a thumb’s up from me as far as remakes go. The Showdown’s is falling into that territory as well. It is impossible to quantify why I think this remake is alright while I think others are crap, it is totally subjective. If I can listen to it without thinking that someone, somewhere is crying about their song being destroyed OR if they take a song that I didn’t really like and make me listen to it, thumbs up. This one is a bit of both. They didn’t destroy the source material Evanescence style, they didn’t remake an 80′s synth hit Marilyn Manson style, they took a song that was great a couple of decades ago and made it sound current again. Which, when I think about it, is basically the same reason I liked Land of Confusion.

Room 13 is the latest band of Aliester Wytch. He was the lead guitarist for Eisenblakk when I got to know Dwight (the singer) back in the nineties. Aliester is the reason I really started playing guitar. Well, I played guitar before I met him, but he is the reason I started trying to learn how to play well. I started playing Jackson Charvel guitars because of him (I still do to this day, though I also play a Jackson Kelly for ease of fretting in the second octave), I started using guitar picks that were in excess of 1.2 millimeters because of him (most people call them bass picks when they see them, since not a lot of guitarists use picks so thick. You break a lot more strings with thicker picks, but the attack comes through a lot more with a thicker pick -it is like hitting a piano key harder; with a thin pick, it is only going to hit so hard before the pick bends, with a thick pick, it is like hitting the string with a brick. It never bends, so the harder you hit, the louder it gets. Not sure if this is why he used the picks, but that is why I continue to use them.), I idolized him as a musician. I always enjoyed his solo albums more than the Eisenblakk albums though, because I loved his voice, and he didn’t sing on Eisenblakk’s albums (except backing vocals). It is only fitting that he is the singer for the new band.

I haven’t heard enough of Room 13′s music yet to say whether it is something that will be in my mp3 rotation a year from now, but I figured I would throw out a link. Now if I could just convince Aliester to remake his songs Evil Speak and Vampire Lust, then it would surely be there (his solo albums were done in a home studio, and left a lot of room for improvement on recording and mixing -probably a limitation of the hardware at his disposal). I have to admit that nostalgia is probably playing at least a bit of a role in listening to the new work, but check it out anyway, for the voice if nothing else.

And speaking of voices…

Megadeth‘s new album, United Abominations is releasing on the 15th of May. I have heard a couple of tracks from the new album. Gears of War and Sleepwalker are exactly the kind of in-your-face shredding that the last two bands I talked about aren’t. A double-bassed, double-picking frenzy that makes you want to beat your dog. Of course as a rational adult, I don’t beat my dog; I pretend my car is a tank and take on all comers!

I was really stoked about Megadeth’s last album, but kind of soured to the preachy, Creed-like lyrics of a couple of the songs. This album has (at least the songs I have heard) gotten away from that. Of course I know that if you know anything about Metal, you already have this release date circled on your calendar. In fact I had no intention of mentioning it at all… Until my inner voice started calling me a pussy for posting about a couple of bands that do not actually “make my ears bleed”.

Now if my inner voice is done measuring his figurative penis, I am going to get back to listening to The Showdown -as my pc is the only place I can until such time as I find the album in stores.

It was twenty years ago today that Cliff Burton died in a bus accident in Sweden. This happened only months after Metallica had released the Master of Puppets album, which set a bar for the genre that I think has yet to be matched. Cliff wasn’t around to see Metallica’s meteoric rise to fame, but much of his music made the trek along with them. When the …And Justice For All album was released a couple of years later, the band paid tribute to him with the song To live is to Die.

With the release of …And Justice For All, Metallica finally got into the video generation with their video for the song One, which received a grammy nomination the following year. The video brought mainstream airplay on both MTV and national radio stations, which would lead to Metallica producing more radio-friendly songs on all their forthcoming albums. For that reason alone, many fans cite the release of the video for One as the end of the “Old Metallica”. If you have never seen the full video for One, go watch it, it is one of the best videos ever made.

Metallica would release their “Black” album in 1991 to much mainstream success and critical acclaim. But in doing so, they were perceived to have “sold out” by releasing what others wanted them to instead of what had gotten them to where they were. For me, this was driven home when Lars responded to the question “Many fans say that you have sold out. Has Metallica sold out?” with the response, “Yeah, we have sold out every stadium and record store in the country.”

I have often wondered if Cliff hadn’t died in that crash if Metallica would have gone on to release albums as powerful as the first three, or if they would still have gone down the path to pop rock. Of course there is no way we will ever know.

If you have a spare moment, I urge you to dust off an old Metallica song today, and just listen to it and wonder about what may have been. If you don’t care for instrumentals, you could always just play Fade to Black, because really, you can’t go wrong with old Metallica. Rest in Peace, Cliff.

Last night my wife and I had the opportunity to go see Godsmack in concert, along with Rob Zombie and Shinedown. Now that is a concert!

Shinedown is probably best known for the song 45 (or possibly Save Me), but they actually have two studio albums, both of which have several singles that are getting a lot of airplay on rock radio (at least on my rock radio). They are one of those bands that you don’t think you have heard of, but as the songs start playing you realize that you have heard everything that they are playing, and beyond that, it is pretty cool. Pretty mellow stuff by my standards, but still some good music. You have to give those guys some credit though, the show was supposed to start at 7:30pm, but they hit the stage and started playing at 7:00. Even starting their set a half an hour early, they managed to get at least 2/3 of the crowd on their feet -something that the opening act on a double billed show with big names rarely pulls off, at least in my experience. They didn’t have much in the way of a stage show, not that you would expect the opening band to. Just before their last song, the singer went into an A’Capella version of …Something… At which point the rest of the band left the stage. I didn’t like that -not because it sounded bad, it didn’t, it actually sounded great- because it put me in mind of the ‘too cool for the band’ attitude that eventually led to Creed breaking up. But who am I to judge? The band sounded great, and it got me pumped up for a couple of bands that I have always wanted to see live.

I have to be honest, I really expected Rob Zombie to do a show that left Godsmack unable to top it. You just kind of get that feeling that someone like Rob Zombie is going to have a freakshow type thing going on that will make it worth the price of admission to listen to the songs that they are playing on the radio every day anyway. He did have a great stage show, there were dancing girls, a huge alien mock fucking the guitarist (that was funny) and three enormous screens showing themed anime during the songs (though one of the songs featured Charles Manson and the family along with their sentences for the Tate-LaBianca murders -WTF was that about?) His showmanship is unquestionable, certainly second only to Marilyn Manson in all the stage shows I have ever seen -and I have seen A lot of bands.

Rob Zombie was also the most disappointing of the three bands. The band sounded worse than any other band I have ever heard live, bar none. I have been to Ozzfest, where the main stage opened at 7:00pm, but local bands were playing the second stage as early as 9:00am. Even the local bands, using nothing but their own equipment amplified through the PA, sounded better than Rob Zombie. It was as if someone took the equalizer and pushed all the sliders right the fuck to the top. All you could hear was noise. The only way you ever knew what song was playing was by the spacing or an occasional guitar riff that you could make out over the cacophony. I did enjoy the show, it just would have been a lot better if they had maybe turned down the mid-range on it so you could make out the damn songs. Seriously, the only two songs that I recognized immediately were Living Dead Girl and Dragula, and that is only because of the intros. Though I suppose I should have expected it; he does look like he is from the “the louder the better” school of rock, and they certainly pulled off loud, just not in a good way.

As for Godsmack, they can be summed up in two words:
 

They actually started their show by blasting For those about to rock (we salute you) over the PA, while showing a montage of tour footage. It ultimately ended with a live backstage feed and a huge pyrotechnic display. I am not going to say that their stage show was creative or imaginative, but they did manage to keep everyone there on their feet for an hour and a half, belting out some awesome songs (of course the songs are awesome, it is Godsmack). They also seemed to understand the concept of volume a hell of a lot better than Rob Zombie did. Their show felt twice as loud. I say felt because you could actually feel not just the drums, but the rhythm and bass guitars as well. Not only that, but you could also actually hear each of the instruments -four separate instruments mixed together in such a way that they each added depth to the song, what a concept!

Godsmack also had more energy to their show than any other one I can remember seeing, the only act that even comes close is Iron Maiden. When you watch Sully running around the stage singing, then playing the guitar, then playing the drums, and you see the big smile he has on his face, you just get the feeling that he really is happy to be there. I know they all say that they are happy to be there, but he just looked like he was having so much fun that it was impossible not to enjoy it. It had the effect of making this huge venue (with the lawn seating, I can’t even guess at how many people were there) seem like it was going on in his own garage, and you were one of his buddies just hanging out. Yeah, I probably read a bit too much into it, and a good showman is supposed to make you feel that way, but he is the only one that has ever actually done that for me. I have had the opportunity to see a lot of bands that I really like in concert; Megadeth, Ozzy, Iron Maiden, Whitesnake, The Scorpions, Dio, Korn and dozens more. Not one of them came into it with the same energy and attitude that Godsmack did.

I left that show a much bigger Godsmack fan than I went into it. While I am not planning to rush out and buy a Rob Zombie cd, and I already have both of Shinedown’s (it’s some pretty good stuff. Nice hard rock, but mellow enough for daily listening. I recommend it.) I certainly plan to complete the household collection of Godsmack cd’s (the wife has always been a fan, I have never had much of an opinion). If you get the chance, you really should go see them live. The stage show isn’t much to write home about, but you are certainly going to get an energy and vibe that is damn hard to find nowadays. It really is rare for a band that is as big as they are to actually enjoy (or fake it well) what they do day in and day out. Of course don’t plan on sleeping for at least a good 4 hours after the show, even if it doesn’t end until nearly midnight, because you are going to be way too amped up to even sit still for that long.