Tired Wings: “While You Were Sleeping”

April 24th, 2012

I’ve had the privilege of seeing Tired Wings in concert a couple times in my life and I always came away impressed.  It’s not often that I take time to step outside the metal world and enjoy some good old fashioned rock n’ roll, but every time I head to a Tired Wings show I know I’ll have a killer time.  Simply put these guys play with groove land swagger.  It’s what makes the show fun and the music totally head-bangable.

That sense of groove and swagger was also the first feeling that came to my mind while listening to their latest album, “While You Were Sleeping”.  The album is just chock full of big-balled, elephant marching, stomping riffs.  The music flows at you with a familiarity of all things rock, but also with it’s own unique flourishes of metal.  I had a visions of a super group featuring Lemmy, Vinnie Paul,  and Geezer Butler (and I’m making Lemmy play guitar because I can’t have 2 bassists).  I think the vision of that super group is what I love the most about Tired Wings.  The vision to me is proof that theses guys really love music and appreciate it’s history.  Their songs just seem more from the heart than a lot of what I usually hear, and thank god for that!

The album opens with one of those aforementioned elephant stomping riffs mixed in with a tribal drumbeat on the track “Wolf King”.  An excellent opener because it lets you know exactly what to expect, it’s like walking into a party that’s already full steam ahead.  Yet this track also hit me with its uniqueness once I had gotten through the whole album.  It’s the one song that features a predominance of “clean” vocals from frontman, Rev. Mongoose.  And while I love the gruff Lemmy-style vocals throughout the songs I also would love to hear more of what I heard on “Wolf King”.

My other favorite tracks on the album were “St. Christopher”, “Mammoth”, “Down for the Cause”, and the two instrumentals “Shadow Cast” and “Dronology”.  “St. Christopher” and “Mammoth” are both tracks that drove with that same force as “Wolf King”.  But, god damn, “Mammoth” is the one, the one track you have to listen to!!!!  It just opens with the most peanut buttery thick bass line that slams right into the heaviest groove I’ve heard in a long ass time.  For me this is Tired Wings at their best.  There’s also a killer section, oddly enough starting around 4:20 in the track, where Luis (drummer) shows off some nifty footwork on the double bass.

Simply put, bands like Tired Wings make me feel happy to play music in NYC.  It’s genuine, honest and rocking music.  If this album doesn’t make you feel good then you have no soul.


SEE YOU IN HELL by Chris Krovatin

April 22nd, 2012

Chris Krovatin is a twice-published teen author and a journalist for Revolver Magazine, as well as the singer for Queens-based metal band Flaming Tusk. He lives in New York City, which he loves even though he is almost positive it is trying to kill him.

Warm air blows lovingly across my skin, filled with a whole menu of scents I thought long gone—fresh soil, green leaf, clean rain. Every tree seems to extend its bud-braised branches high into the sky, soaking up the suddenly ever-present sunlight that fills the blue sky. Grass burns up from the ground, a blast of green so fresh and verdant I almost feel like it’s fake. The sounds of rustling branches and chirping birds follow me wherever I go. T-shirts and dresses suddenly appear; the world becomes a forest of long, bare legs and deliciously revealed shoulders and collarbones. Everything is great with possibility, with growth, with unbridled, passionate joy. And I want to listen to Exhumed. And Impaled, and Repulsion, and Aborted. It’s all I crave—crusty, raging DIY viscera-worship, paeans to zombies and dismemberment and cannibalism. I want songs elbow-deep in human carnage. It is spring at last, and I’m in the mood for gore metal.

Every year, this happens. The world comes into bloom, its flora and fauna budding and releasing refreshing burns of fresh air and good vibes, and I suddenly become obsessed with gore metal again. A few years ago, it hit me hard—I remember the sunlight playing on my floor in golden patches and wondering over and over if I could find Mortician’s Chainsaw Dismemberment on vinyl somewhere—and since then, I’ve found myself deep in the throes of gore every spring. There is no great change or grand moment of realization, but instead a gradual creeping craving that I one day realize has gone full-blown insane. Each year, there is a single album that has dominance, usually from my youth (though to be fair, about two years ago I went apefuck bugshit for Aborted, who I’d never cared for before then), but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. So long as the music shreds, the vocals gurgle, and the lyrics focus on the gross corporeal garbage of man, then I’m happy.

My history with gore metal is pretty standard. When I was getting into metal as a teenager, really brutal gory death metal was huge amongst my friends; my buddy Dan was an especially hardcore fan of the stuff, and inundated me with plenty of cool music while showing off his Malignancy “Benoit Baby Heads” shirt (Dan went on to be in Copremesis, one of the greatest metal bands to every focus on poop and transsexuals). I was never that into those bands, though, favoring old-school thrash and proto-death at the time, bands like Dark Angel and Possessed. Sure, I loved Cannibal Corpse, and was always a big gore film fan, a devotee to Romero and Fulci and all of that, but I hadn’t yet discovered true repulsive gore metal. Then, on a whim, I bought The Dead Shall Dead Remain by Impaled. Everything about that album blew my mind—it had so much power, so much Sturm und Drang, but it was just filthy and melodic as fuck. There was plenty of the stuff I liked on there, punk and thrash and death metal, but there was a carnal decadence that I couldn’t deny, one that justified its total gross-out cover (and whata cover!). And that was it. Suddenly, I got it, this sound, this vibe. I was, as the Corpse would say, gore obsessed.

The Dead Shall Dead Remain

God, remember that summer?

But while Impaled introduced me to the genre and the aesthetic, the band who are gore incarnate for me—the band who won me—will always be Carcass. Predictable, maybe, but who cares—the boys from Liverpool took my love of death and gore beyond mere splatter patterns and deep into the annals of human anatomy. At the behest of Terrorizer’s Best Of The 1990s issue, I hunted down a copy of Necroticism: Descanting The Insalubrious at a long-gone St. Marks Place record shop named 13 CDs (remember, kids, this was when nu-metal reigned and actual extreme metal was hard to find as a teenager). That record rewrote the book for me—unlike Impaled, Carcass were revolting without being tongue-in-cheek. They were death metal, yes, but their lyrical focus gave them a severely anatomical outlook, reaching the very soul of gore—we’re all made of meat, and this is an undeniable truth of the world. Our souls are electricity pumped through masses of grey jelly. Nothing is truly sacred. Also, killing dogs is fucked up.

So why does spring get my gorge up? Obviously a lot of it has to do with seasonal affective disorder. The seasons dictating my musical tastes aren’t a strange thing—in winter, I definitely lean towards frostier blackened music; summertime brings out my thrash and hardcore sides, causing me to crave big outdoor concerts and inexpensive whiskies; and autumn is my spooky season, Halloween bringing out my love of the campily macabre. But these all make sense—why does the season we most associate with sunny pastures and fluffy bunnies make me dream of filth-caked zombies biting the skin off of someone’s face, or a man with a hatchet hacking his best friend into a quivering pulp? Maybe it’s reactionary—perhaps I’m growing so gore-obsessed in response to the niceties of spring. Or maybe it’s just my mind rounding out my musical tastes—since I’m so into every other genre of music throughout the year, my mind craves death and gore to even the score and give the bloody demises of my music their due.

And yet, another idea, strangely sensible to me, arises. Perhaps it’s not me alone that’s getting hellishly anatomical, but the world. Think about it—every blossom is really just a plant opening up its guts to try and get more direct sunlight, right? Trees and plants, like so many veins wriggling up out of the earth, are spreading wide their innards to soak up the nutrients around them. Animals aren’t chirping and fluttering hither and yon out of reverence towards the gods of spring, they’re doing it because they’re either filling their gnawing stomachs or they’re fucking like crazy, spreading fluids and genes every which way. And even the warmth around us doesn’t just lift spirits, but reveals flesh, soft and attractive but undeniably anatomical. Maybe it makes perfect sense, with the world around me revealing its soft vital organs, for me to become so entranced by all things gory.

Outside, the sun rises, spilling hot yellow blood into the air. Grass sweats its way out of the ground, putridly verdant. Flowers open up their photosynthetic genitalia, inviting insects and moisture. Humans reveal their skin, carnal at its heart, to each other in a celebration of the planet’s yearly physical mutation. The breeze is alive with smells long forgotten—sweat and rot and piss and the blood of Mother Nature. If winter is the death of the year, than spring is both its squirming, glistening birth and its slow, wretched decay rolled into one. And I can’t help but smile. This is the autopsy of the planet. It’s a gory world.


Weekly Metal Guide (4/20-4/26)

April 19th, 2012

Well it seems this Friday is one of those very special unofficial days of celebration, which means there’s no time like the present to get this party rolling in the right way.  Here are all the shows happening in NYC this week.  Have a Green time!

Friday (4/20)

St. Vitus Bar: Family / Caltrop / Hull.  Doors @ 8pm, $10, 21+.  1120 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn

The AcheronYork Factory Complaint / Anasazi / Rosenkopf / Puerto Rico Flowers.  Doors @ 8pm, $10, ALL AGES.  57 Waterbury St, Brooklyn

Union PoolWith Knives / Mt. Olympus / Across Tundras.  Doors @ 9pm, $10, 21+.  484 Union Ave, Brooklyn

Fontana’sGod’s Geen Earth / Ruppthritis / Wrench / SOS / Thinning The Herd.  Doors @ 8pm, $10, 21+.  105 Eldridge St, NYC

Cake ShopParasitic Extirpation / Death Sick / Meathook / Coathanger Abortion / Necrotic Disgorgment.  Doors @ 730pm, $13, 21+.  152 Ludlow St, NYC

Gramercy TheatreToday I Caught The Plague / The Safety Fire / Jeff Loomis Band / Periphery / Protest The Hero.  Doors @ 630pm, $20.  127 E 23rd St, NYC

Saturday (4/21)

St. Vitus BarEast of the Wall / Fight Amp / Giant Squid / Rosetta. Doors @ 8pm, $12, 21+.  1120 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn

The AcheronPutrida / Deformity / Rational Animals / Crazy Spirit / White Lung.  Doors @ 8pm, $10, ALL AGES.  57 Waterbury St, Brooklyn

Hank’s Saloon:  Buzzard Wagon / World War IX / Loafass  / Blackout Shoppers / The Von Frankensteins / Aniseen.  Doors @ 10pm, 21+.  46 3rd Ave, Brooklyn

Santo’s Party HouseA Lot Like Birds / A Bullet For Pretty Boy / Greely Estates / I Set My Friends on Fire.  Doors @ 6pm, $17, ALL AGES.  96 Lafayette St, NYC

Tattoo Shot LoungeConey Island Metal Fest.  Show runs 3pm – 4am, $10.  1205 Surf Ave, Brooklyn

Sunday (4/22)

Gramercy TheatreHuntress / Holy Grail / Dragonforce.  Doors @ 630pm, $20.  127 E 23rd St, NYC

The MorganAntithesis / Upper Hand / Model Home / Sicker Than Most / Rockbottom / Naysayer.  Doors @ 6pm, $12, ALL AGES.  250 Varet St, Brooklyn

Monday (4/23)

Lit LoungeMarching Teeth / Alekhine’s Gun / Czar.  Doors @ 9pm, $6, 21+.  93 2nd Ave, NYC.

St. Vitus BarVillians / SuperChrist.  Doors @ 8pm, $5, 21+.  1120 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn

St. Vitus BarPrimitive Weapons / Pygmy Lush / Young Widows.  Doors @ 10pm, $14, 21+.  1120 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn

The Studio At Webster HallDream For Tomorrow / The Doomsday Prophecy / I, the Breather / Betraying The Martyrs / Upon A Burning Body.  Doors @ 6pm, $12, 16+.  125 E 11th St, NYC

Tuesday (4/24)

St. Vitus BarGuardian Alien / VAZ / Racebannon.  Doors @ 8pm, $8, 21+.  1120 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn

Club EuropaFace of Ruin / Battlecross / Rings of Saturn / Aborted / Decrepit Birth / Cattle Decapitation / Origin.  Doors @ 7pm, $20, 18+.  98 Meserole Ave, Brooklyn

Death By AudioCrabes / Leamers / Dub Trio.  $7, ALL AGES.  49 S 2nd St, Brooklyn

Thursday (4/26)

St. Vitus BarTrenchgrinder / Woe / Black Anvil / Inquisition.  Doors @ 8pm, $14, 21+.  1120 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn

 

 


Weekly Metal Guide (4/6-4/12)

April 5th, 2012

Friday (4/6)

Local 269:  Crooked Man / Steve Brodsky / Fashion Week / $50 Trumpet.  Doors @ 8pm, $10, 21+.  269 Houston, NYC.

The Acheron:  Self Defense Family / Restorations / Marine Electric / Model Home.  Doors @ 7pm, $10, ALL AGES.  57 Waterbury St, Brooklyn.

Late Show:  Backtrack / Urban Blight / Creem / Violent Future.  Doors @ 11pm, $10, ALL AGES.  57 Waterbury St, Brooklyn.

St. Vitus:  Bone Awl / Viallains / Negative Plane.  Doors @ 9pm, $10, 21+.  1120 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn.

The Studio at Webster Hall:  Dub Trio / Bangladeafy / Dont.  Doors @ 7pm, $10, 19+.  125 E 11th St, NYC.

Saturday (4/7)

D’antigua:  Thrash In.c (Metallica tribute) / Trial By Terror (Sepultura tribute) / Resolution 15 / Metalfier / Eternian.  Doors @ 830pm, Pre-sale $10, 21+.  84-16 Northern Blvd, Queens.

The Charleston:  Zombie Fight / Torch Bearer / Fashion Week / Ashes Forever.  Doors @ 8pm, $7, 21+.  174 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn.

The Acheron:  Midnight / Parasytic / Villains / Trenchgrinder.  Doors @ 8pm, $10, ALL AGES.  57 Waterbury St, Brooklyn.

St. Vitus:  Onslaught / Mpire of Evil / Indestructible Noise Command / Brohammer / Hypoxia.  Doors @ 8pm, $20, 21+.  1120 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn.

The Grand Victory:  Eye / Chron Turbine / Gentlemen.  Doors @ 7pm, $8, 21+.  245 Grand St, Brooklyn.

Santo’s Party House:  I Am The Avalanche / Hostage Calm / Banquets.  Doors @ 6pm, $12 ADV / $14 DOS, ALL AGES.  96 Lafayette St, NYC.

The Studio at Webster Hall:  The Day Will Come / When All Else Fails / Blacken The Fallen / More Than Fate / We The Living / Live For Today.  Doors @ 630pm, $10, 19+.  125 E 11th St, NYC.

Monday (4/9)

Santo’s Party House:  Witch w/ bands TBA.  Doors @ 7pm, $17, 16+.  96 Lafayette St, NYC.

Wednesday (4/11)

The Acheron:  Dads / Glocca Morra / Gung / Daido Loori.  Doors @ 8pm, $10, ALL AGES.  57 Waterbury St, Brooklyn.

Sullivan Hall:  Bile / Lockdown / Abandon All Hope / Seas of Wake / Edge of Existence / Dropdown / GAS / Regalia.  Doors @ 7pm, $15, 21+.  214 Sullivan St, NYC.

Roseland Ballroom:  Mastodon / Opeth / Ghost.

The Grammercy Theater:  Man On Earth / Apophenia / Makeshift Lullaby / Tired Wings / Midnight Foolishness / All Choked Up.  Doors @ 630pm, $15, 16+.  127 E 23rd St, NYC.

Thursday (4/12)

The R Bar:  Lydia Can’t Breathe / Cousin Sleaze / Cut Your Teeth / Lynch Pigs / Medusa Scare.  Doors @ 7pm, 21+.  218 Bowery, NYC.

 

 


A Journey of Discovery: OVLO

April 5th, 2012

I recently took a little road trip with Demilitia which took us the good ol’ Allentwon, PA for the March Metal Massacre on Saturday, March 24th.  It was a killer night of metal with tons of heavy and groovy metal bands all around, but the one band that just absolutely stuck with me was the local group Ovlo.  It’s a very rare moment when you have the opportunity to find a band you’ve never heard before doing something completely original, fun and inspiring.  To put it simply these guys just absolutely ripped.

Thankfully the dudes in the band were kind enough to give me their CD gratis, and I must say that I have given it more spins than I can even count since loading it up into my Ipod.  The band has such an amazing sense of songwriting, knowing exactly when to pull back into a sexy groove and then push the tempo into a heavy elephants marching stomp.  Imagine a cross between Tool, System of a Down, Sevendust and every great breakdown you have ever heard and you have Ovlo.  The most amazing thing is that all of this chaotic brew is so finely crafted and pieced together that it seems perfectly natural.  And while the album will receive many more listens I must also say it was the live show that got me pumped about these guys in the first place.

These dudes were just full of non stop energy and headbanging.  Yet you could also feel how much love they have for their hometown and vice versa.  It was smiles all around and pure joy to be had, exactly what I always love to see at a show.  Ovlo is a band that just takes over the room when they play, when they are on stage it is their time and place no questions asked.

So don’t be a fool and check out some Ovlo.  Maybe if you’re lucky I’ll convince these dudes to come through NYC some time very soon.

Check out some sweet Ovlo jamz right here.

“Like” ‘em here.

 


Back in Business

April 2nd, 2012

After spending many months away from writing blogs for the website I’ve finally decided to return.  My absence has been mostly due to taking on more musical responsibilities (i.e. playing in a second band).  Well, that chapter in my life has recently ended after many great adventures, and I decided I wanted to get back in to the website activities that I was avoiding for the past year.

Yet, as I thought about starting this up again I had to make many realizations about how I worked before and how I need to work now.  I think in the past I was focusing too much on this being a sort of formal, serious blog reporting on events and shows in NYC.  And while all of that will still remain I think it will ultimately be more fun for myself, and you the reader, if I start just thinking of this as “Shit that entertains me”.  To that extent the most entertaining thing that happened for me this weekend was definitely the Edge of Existence / Eyes Like Cyanide show at Trash Bar this past Friday.  Needless to say many beers were consumed as Billy, Hunter and I banged our heads to some epic tech death metal then some how ended the evening enjoying some herbal refreshments in a van, with the best 1970′s airbrush artwork ever, with some of the craziest members of Eyes Like Cyanide.  so for your viewing pleasure some footage of Eyes Like Cyanide and Edge of Existence  and then the cold hard reality of how most awesome nights end in NYC.

 

 


SEE YOU IN HELL by Chris Krovatin

February 21st, 2012

Chris Krovatin is a twice-published teen author and a journalist for Revolver Magazine, as well as the singer for Queens-based metal band Flaming Tusk. He lives in New York City, which he loves even though he is almost positive it is trying to kill him.

Sunday morning. I shudder awake around eight-thirty with mild heartburn caused by overeating. The remnants of a cold hang on me, and I take a moment to lurch to the bathroom, my back aching from spooning my bunched blanket, and empty my throat of swamp-colored phlegm. This involves making a series of hacking, scraping, and gurgling noises that undoubtedly wake my roommate. In the apartment I shared with my brother, we had just enough room between our bedrooms that the purging process could go unheard, and anyway my brother is somewhat of a family celebrity for the suppurating noises he makes when hocking loogies in the kitchen sink before dinner. One doubts my roommate is as accustomed to them.

After coughing up crap for about ten minutes, I return to my room and sweat some more of the cold out. My room is heated by a pipe that leaves it either an igloo or a sauna. I prefer the igloo, which provides cool relief and the encouragement to bundle up in a snug little burrito, but I feel the sauna has been helping me get rid of the germs via sweating. Soon, though, it’s getting late, nine-forty, so I decide to get up. My room is a pit at the moment. On Friday night I came home at an odd hour and found my bed covered with stuff, clothes and books and fine baubles and all that sort of shit, and given the circumstances decided it fitting to fling it all on the floor in a dramatic sweep. Now, my floor and desk are covered with my niceties, either strewn about or precariously stacked. Later tonight, I have to get it back into shape. Not now, heavens no.

KILL IT! WE HAVE TO KILL IT!

WHY HELLO.

In the bathroom, I wash my face, blow my nose, and check myself out in the mirror. Not bad. The past week has been a good one for working out—three runs, two days with the weights—and I’m in the shallow end of the Fat Spectrum. This is unexpected, seeing as yesterday was spent sitting and eating (this is pathetically true. From one in the afternoon until eleven-thirty at night yesterday, I did nothing but sit on the couch, watch Internet TV, and order takeout, except for a moment around eight-thirty at night when I ventured out to buy peanut butter and cupcakes). Normally, after that kind of Saturday, I awake looking more like Humpty Dumpty than Pan, but the consistent exercise has left me in the official Not Terrible zone.

On to the kitchen to make tea (still sick, and band practice later today) and do some dishes. The rack is full, and the kitchen is right by my roommate’s room, so I try to be quiet, which of course only results in my being clumsy and loud. I lose my grip on cabinet doors and they slam. Slow-handled silverware, usually only clattery and metallic, casually knock into things and make low, vibratory noises only emphasized by the silence. A swiftly-cleared drying rack, I decide, is a big clatter, but a slowly-cleared one is the soundtrack to an Asian scene in a 007 movie. Then, it’s wrist-deep in soapy water. I’m still careful with the glasses—on Wednesday, hours before a job interview, I shattered a beer glass around my hand, slicing it in four different places. All the cuts are superficial but lay on just important-enough finger fault lines that I have to worry about reopening them. Midway through the dishes, I grab a mug on the sideboard and begin scrubbing it, only to realize that it contains my pre-prepared teabag, and now my sponge is tea-infused. I toss it out, get a new bag, make the damn tea, and get out of this stupid room.

Back in the bathroom, I’m hocking up more flu jello. At least this means it’s leaving my body. This cold hit me without warning. Thursday night, I was out feeling great at the Lock-Up/Goatwhore show, and even went drinking at Lucky 13 afterwards. Friday morning, I was a full-blown carrier: aching muscles, clogged sinuses, hacking dry cough, complete disorientation. Somehow, I managed to run two and a half miles and go out to dinner and drinks without fainting in a feverish heap (between the run and the dinner, I did wonder if I was going to die). It slowly dawns on me that Tomas Lindberg was sick at the show—he was coolly apologetic about his half-there vocals, citing throat soreness and flu—and that the At The Gates and Great Deceiver frontman might have gotten me sick when he slapped me on the back to get past me earlier in the night. Silently, I curse the famed death metal vocalist for infecting me, because it was definitely he, not the four hours of hard drinking that followed the Lock-Up show, that destroyed my immune system. That Swedish bastard.

We have a pull-up bar now, so I do a couple of pull-ups, meaning literally two. They are still an exercise I have yet to master. I blame my muscles. I am achey like an old man these days, especially in my lower back. Lately, I’ve been talking a lot of shit about going to get a professional massage, but this week I might go for it. My muscles are all knots; sometimes, scratching certain parts of my body causes severe pain to run through my entire shoulder. My calves feel like they’re going to explode. More and more, I wonder if having the tension kneaded out of me would keep me from being so violent and compulsive. If it doesn’t work, I’m moving on to acupuncture. For some reason, that has always made sense to me—by piercing and tapping into a specific well of tension in the body, you can bleed the stress out like a pimple (I find it helps once you stop thinking of these practices as concerning chakras, crystals, and tantra, and instead personify them as corporeal purging, like lancing a blister. You feel less like a pussy when you imagine yourself literally squeezing congealed hate out of a sore on your spirit).

Eleven in the morning, and my roommate still sleeps. Out my window, south Brooklyn stretches like coral, squat red bulges etched with geometric lines, ancient in its architecture but flashy in its signs, dead trees poking up furry and grey-brown along the streets, exhaust vents and chimneys and gables reaching up toward the cloud-choked sun. In the distance, there’s the rise of the hill, the dropped skyline around the cemetery. The two gates of the Verazano loom, the connection of their cables hidden by buildings, so two of the same dinosaur herding together. My iPod doc screams grindcore. My room swelters, and I sit and drink hot tea and bead with sweat and stink, both from Friday’s extracirriculars and Saturday’s lack thereof. Soon, I’ll shower myself into a state of blissful cleanliness and head to band practice, but for now I’m content to sit and fester, just a dude, an electrical charge wearing a disgusting meat costume, staring out over the sprawling beer gut of Brooklyn.


SEE YOU IN HELL by Chris Krovatin

January 28th, 2012

Chris Krovatin is a twice-published teen author and a journalist for Revolver Magazine, as well as the singer for Queens-based metal band Flaming Tusk. He lives in New York City, which he loves even though he is almost positive it is trying to kill him.

Death metal is meaningful as music because it is entirely true. It is a genre fixated on a genuine fact: there’s life, and then you die. Sure, there are plenty of embellishments, with the fixation on some kind of afterlife, be it as a bloodthirsty zombie or just a soul sauteeing in the bowls of Hell. But at its core, death metal, in all its incarnations, is focused on the idea that the end is near. For me, for you, for us, this building, this city, the country, the earth, and eventually the cockroaches and the Styrofoam. The genre’s tendency towards the grossness of human anatomy in the face of violence comes from a fascination at what happens to the meat vessel when the electrical storm that is my personality detaches from it. Death is coming, no, not coming, here, now, behind you. At the end of the day, everyone’s face is a skull. Period.

The fear of Death is the lubricant thanks to which spins the axis of our world. This is how it is, how it’s always been, and there’s not too much we can do about it. It’s honestly pretty funny, how one minute we’re these fonts for creativity and strength and the next we’re a lump in a box with some flowers on top. And I love it, just like most people. When I eat a peanut butter M&M, it’s killing me. When I drink orange juice, it’s not. When I watch a funny episode of something on my TV, it’s something pleasurable I did, something funny and original that I experienced because I’m not dead yet. Every birthday is a reminder that I didn’t get shot or choke on a household product that year, and gifts are happily accepted. Thanks for the sweater, I’m still here to wear it. We’ll see how this next year goes.

Back in the times of our initial ancestors, when the wolves circled and the fire burned low, humanity’s grasp on the Reaper was clearer. Sometimes the hunters never came back from the freezing darkness outside the cave, or dinner got you first. Old people were seen as either freaks or mystics, consulted and feared for the sheer amount of knowledge they possessed after outliving seventy snows. But feeling old, even as what we now consider a young man, was as inevitable as Death. By the age I am now, I would’ve seen enough mammoth intestines to leave me scarred for life, or fought a war using rocks as the primary weapon. There were no teenagers, just men who hadn’t witnessed enough horror yet. It seems romantic, but it was probably just awful. That’s the extreme fear of Death, the simple base-brain instinct that keeps us sprinting from the beast.

Look at the dog!

He knows if you've been bad or good/So be good, for goodness sake

People live so long these days. It boggles my mind. Being old seems rough. In my late twenties, I feel lame and helpless all the time, so I assume from some quarter century’s worth of observation that it just gets worse. It can be done more gracefully than not. Exercise, diet, and worldview can be used to adjust well the old age, if one chooses to accept it. Some of my favorite pleasures are Old Man stuff, like drinking a few whiskeys while reading on a sunny porch, or carving a jack-o-lantern and talking jive with a nephew or niece (I’m not a weird uncle yet, but the idea tickles me). It’s just that being old means much of the time I spend these days carousing with my friends and laughing like crazy is going to be replaced by finding new methods of warding off Death. Falling in love will be replaced with medication. Being young at heart is all you can do, but it’s amazing how few people make a point of keeping up the act. It’s gotta be hard. These days I get tired washing the dishes.

I was once having a beer with my sister and some of her friends, and we were talking about life, and one of them, a woman in the process of becoming a midwife, brought up my general demeanor, my thing—the tattoos, the metal, the endless obsession with Death. I replied that my perpetual morbid streak was because most everything relates to our fear of the end, from plastic surgery to chocolate. I went on to say an idea I’d formulated some time ago, that Death was the one thing all human beings had in common. Kings and paupers, saints and sinners, they all ate the casket sandwich one way or another. She countered that I was forgetting that we all came from somewhere too, that all human beings are born, and she said it in such a way to imply that she found birth far more relevant than . In a way, she is right—stories always have better beginnings than endings. Decay and nonexistence often comes in a clumsy charnel house way, while birth is intricate beyond belief, every time. No one has ever waxed poetic on the miracle of Death. But I like my idea better.

There are outstanding beauties to life, moments of sublime clarity and spiritual awareness that make the whole march worthwhile and at the same time meaningless. We can’t live without them. There is no point to life other than happiness, and everyone must fight to find it. Obviously, contentment comes in many forms, and in the specific cases of human monsters, sociopaths and narcissists in which the human machine has obviously broken along the way, obtaining it is horrific. For most of us, even the perverts and the primates and the off-kilter realists and the straight-up nerds, these basic moments of happiness are easy to achieve if we apply ourselves to them. But they’re glowing buoys in a sea of plan grey Death. Every piece of proof that something like God exists is surrounded on all sides by cold dark space, which, at the end of the day, swallows it.

There was a time where I felt Death’s awesome presence, but it was far away enough to watch it unscathed, like the sun. These days, I am too close, and my skin has begun to burn. I run at least fives miles a week and lift weights at home. I eat more salads than I ever imagined I could stomach. I feel lousy if I don’t get my eight glasses and eight hours, so I tone down my after-hours tomfoolery. And yes, these are selfish moves, tolerated more to help me get laid than healthy, and they remain underwhelming given how often I drink liquor to excess, smoke more than I should, and consume fried foods at hours not believed in by our forefathers. No one wants to press their body against someone who looks and feels like they’re not trying. But at the end of the day, even that base desire is related to my fear of the final curtain. If I can get laid, I’m trying, and if I’m trying, I’m winning. Every bite of baby spinach is a crucifix in my window, warding off the shadows. When I throw on my sneakers and jog out into Central Park, I’m well aware of what I’m running from.

I exist in a world where Death rules. Everything I see outside of my door, and indeed all over the entire world, are images of beauty, desire, and order that all translate into quick, panicked breaths on the last glowing ember. There is nothing else to do in life but forge ahead, try to make my garden grow. Because it’s coming. This I am sure of. It is a fact, and one that I share with each and every one of your who reads this blog post, and each and every one of your who doesn’t. I’m not going to escape it, and honestly, that’s fine. To do so would be inhuman, and I am content with the animal I was born as. My name is Chris Krovatin, I’m twenty-six years old, and I am dying.


SEE YOU IN HELL by Chris Krovatin

November 7th, 2011

Chris Krovatin is a twice-published teen author and a journalist for Revolver Magazine, as well as the singer for Queens-based metal band Flaming Tusk. He lives in New York City, which he loves even though he is almost positive it is trying to kill him.

The first Thursday of November, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. You stroll north on Manhattan Avenue past dollar stores, delis, and old Polish men. Slowly, you see a smattering of couples heading my way. Each person is dressed in black from head to foot and has a book under their arm. All of them are grinning like children.

“How is it in there?” you ask one scruffy passerby who resembles Geddy Lee.

“It’s thinned out a bit,” he says. “You should be able to get in there, no problem.”

St. Vitus appears, its exterior surrounded by long-haired older men in flak jackets and hoodies looking either stoked or nonplussed. Inside, the all-black bar is as hard to navigate as always, the few votive candles scattered throughout the bar doing little to fight away the fluid shadows of the place. This place, you remember with a smile, is such a great damn metal bar. It’s just so fucking dark. Everyone inside is laughing, chatting, and drinking pint after pint. All of them have the same book either in their hands or under their arms. You get a couple of noncommittal glances on the way in, but then everyone returns to their brew. The side of the beer makes you lick your lips, opens a whole in your stomach, but you cast it from your mind and keep slithering through the mob. Booze can wait until the Mayhem show tonight. That’s not why you’re here.

At a nearby card table, you find a long-haired dude who almost could be the guy from Main Street Jukebox in Stroudsburg sitting at a card table. He has a box of the book everyone’s holding, and surprisingly tells you that you canpay for it with a credit card. He hands you a copy—Christ, it’s heavier and thicker than you’d expected, but then again, the man’s done no small amount of living—and then swipes your credit card through a small fork-ish card swiper he has plugged into his iPad. “I can text you a receipt,” he says, “or not, whatever.” Technology boggles your mind these days. Tomorrow’s dream indeed.

Figure in black

The back room of St. Vitus has a line stretching through its black interior that goes all the way to the stage. The ribbed black walls on either side of you boast huge screens featuring crosshatched drawings of abstract blasphemies—dead trees, looming churches with inverted crosses, winding serpents, skulls. You wonder if they’re just for the signing, or if they’re now part of the bar’s décor. One of the booths on your left is filled with a gang of relatively square-looking men and women quietly talking with grave looks on their face—publicity folks, no doubt. One long-haired gentleman nearby makes eye contact and smiles at you, and for a second you remember him from all the magazines and documentaries and nosebleed seats, but his name alludes you. Balls.

You inch forward bit by bit until you’re standing in front of the two small steps that lead to St. Vitus’ stage. Atop it, a card table covered with votive candles sits flanked by the owners, whose names you forget, of course. A tightness grows in your neck, your head, the hinges of your jaw, your fingertips. It’s something between buzzing and pulling. You told yourself this wouldn’t happen. You’ve interviewed, fuck, everyone by now—they’re all just people. This guy’s just a guy, sitting in a chair, sipping some tea. And yet here you are, practically vibrating, feeling the air grow thicker and the shadows around you shudder with energy, with presence. It’s like in Dracula, where Jonathan Harker describes the anxiousness of even being around the Count. Like you’re here in your little podunk reality, but someone from another dimension, who breathes different air and has seen ages beyond your comprehension, is next to you.

As you ascend the stairs, the skinny owner of St. Vitus takes your book from you, nods half-knowingly at you—probably thinking That’s the drunken goon at Impiety who kept thinking he’d lost his backpack—and opens the book to its front page. He slides it along the table.

“Hey, Tony,” you hear yourself say.

Tony Iommi, lead guitarist of Black Sabbath, picks up your book and signs it. He looks up at you with soft, weary eyes.

What is this, that stands before me.

“Thank you,” you say. “Thank you, Tony. Not just for the signature—I mean, Jesus, I appreciate you coming out to this far-off metal bar in Greenpoint to sign copies of your book—but for all of it. For the way you play your guitar. I don’t play, myself, but I worship the guitar, I stand in awe of its undeniable power, of the way it can grab my heart and mold it like clay. You have the ability to do that with a guitar—you have for ages—and that deserves all the gratitude in the world. Thank you for tapping into the sounds of darkness and touching the weird, brittle souls of me and hundreds of people like me. There are so many of us, Tony, who walk this earth feeling tortured and betrayed and present in a more sinister game than anyone wants to admit to being a part of, but your music, the organic bestial drone of your guitar, makes sense to us. It’s the sound of what we stand for, what we want to be. And sure, we might be more focused now one whatever pack of strung-out twenty-somethings are channeling the new variation of this spiritual longing, this desire to master our reality, but at the end of the day we are all here because of you. Black Sabbath fathered this thing that seems so extravagantly and obviously beautiful to us, but you were Sabbath’s driving force, even when the drumming sounded light and the bass could’ve used more reverb and Ozzy was singing a clichéd lyricthat we patiently overlooked. You were always there, at the base of it, emanating a force that gave us purpose. Thank you for that, Tony. Thank you for making me feel less alone.”

Heh. You wish.

“Here you go, man,” he softly intones.

“Thanks so much, Tony,” you manage. “I really appreciate it.”

He reaches out his hand, the Hand Of Doom, two fingers wrapped in black. You shake it carefully.

“Take care,” you think he says.

“Watch your step,” says the other owner of St. Vitus, the short stocky one, handing you your book back and gesturing you back toward the bar.


SEE YOU IN HELL by Chris Krovatin

November 1st, 2011

Chris Krovatin is a twice-published teen author and a journalist for Revolver Magazine, as well as the singer for Queens-based metal band Flaming Tusk. He lives in New York City, which he loves even though he is almost positive it is trying to kill him.

When you stumble out of your room, your eyelids heavy with liquor and your stomach great with candy, the sight of the starved pumpkin almost offends you. Its color, the ruddy organic orange of a turning leaf in the light of a setting sun, hits you with a sneer when for the past month it has sparked in you nothing short of giddy life-affirming excitement. As you shower and brush your teeth, you wonder if the cockroach you saw the other day was attracted by the rotting gourd. The Internet said no, and you were so full of holiday spirit that you decided that you’d rather live with roaches than without a jack-o-lantern, but now you’re suspicious. Better throw it out by tonight, or tomorrow at the latest. It might stink up the place.

I'm in your house!

One glance at the fridge makes you shudder—you could not drink a Post Road Pumpkin Ale for the rest of your days. As you head out to buy milk and coffee (good job getting it on the way home, retard), you take stock of the things sitting in front of your apartment door—a plastic skull, two rubber rats, a latex severed hand, a pumpkin pail, and a large rubber bat dangling from the burglar hole. Those you can stand to leave around a day or two; they’re metal enough to not evoke the holiday and the holiday only. Outside, the streets are littered with the expected detritus: broken eggs, a paper Frankenstein mask, candy wrappers, scraps of streamers, and a single red vinyl high heeled shoe. At C-Town, you get the basics, the whole time smiling sadly at the paper ghosts and witches that dangle overhead. Bulk chocolate is half price today. You wonder how cheap things are going for at Abracadabra. Maybe you should swing by and get some make-up stuff while the prices are still down.

Back home, you’re stunned by the sheer amount of work you’ve let back up. There are a ton of reviews to write, e-mails to send, invoices to check on. You wish you had no idea how this happened, but you’re no fool, you know. The work went undone while you hauled cases of Post Road back to your place from Eagle Provisions, while you pushed through the racks at Ricky’s around the city trying to discover if they had snap-on shark teeth, while you were out at the dry cleaners’ getting your black tux cleaned, while you were sitting on the couch watching one Simpsons Treehouse of Horror after another. And your slacking wasn’t even out of ignorance. You knew you had this work to do the whole month. It came to your mind immediately today. You just didn’t care. Wasn’t creepy, kooky, mysterious, or spooky. It would have to wait.

Your mailbox contains the late-arrival copy of Young Frankenstein from Netflix, and you immediately seal it up without watching it. Not in the mood. A glance at your DVD queue brings about a similar sense of aimless annoyance. Tossed down are Zombie Holocaust, Children Of The Night, and Slaughterhouse, and bumped up are Thor, Michael Clayton, and Total Recall. Sitting on the can, you find yourself with nothing to read except two trade paperbacks of The Walking Dead and a book of foreing horror movie posters, none of which you particularly want to read. Again, you can’t help but smile at the difference. You wouldn’t have read anything else yesterday. If someone had offered you the book of your life, you would’ve handed it back and asked for something by Clive Barker. Now look at you.

In the next room, the cat knocks something breakable to the floor, and you spray-bottle that little fucker into a corner before picking up the two items that’ve fallen, a collins glass now dissected into a million shards and your mask from last night, a simple plastic children’s goat mask. It had looked amazing on top of your black tux, somewhere between Eyes Wide Shut and The Devil Rides Out. Even with your drained holiday spirit, you have the nerve to put it back on, and immediately you see why you wore it so sparingly at the Sleep No More after-party last night—the wide-set eyes give you a Hell of a blind spot in the middle. You’re surprised you didn’t slip on some dog shit and break your neck walking around in this thing last night. If you do something similar to Sleep No More next year, you have to find something with the eye holes a little closer together.

Your forearm stings, and you remember that oh yeah, you got a tattoo yesterday, dumbass. In the bathroom, you wash, apply ointment, and then give it a good look in the mirror. It’s the mask from the first chapter of Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, your favorite book of all time. Each chapter has a scare mask over its title, and you intend to get a new one added to your arm every year. This one’s a skull, one eye outlined white and hollow, the other outlined black and dotted with a maniacal pupil. The strings of the mask flutter in the air next to it, and its mouth is opened in a childishly disturbing cackle, as though it’s flying through the air at you, screaming that death is here, he’s arrived for one night only, and they’re having a big party for him downtown, you should come, wear a mask.

Put an apple in the pillowcase, bitch. I dare you.

And that’s when it hits you—the good feeling, the release. All day, you’ve been wrestling with the leftovers of your holiday cheer, the hangover that’ll make you puke if you so much as smell Frankenstein or candy corn. But this tattoo is your reminder that you can head into winter with your head down and your chin up. Your monster muscle should be tired after the week you’ve given it, the marathon of ghoulishness that you’ve undertaken over all of October. It’ll be here next year, ready and rejuvenated; around July you’ll begin to get postcards from it, and by Labor Day, you and the Specter of November’s Eve will be in serious talks about costumes and microbrews. For now, the Reaper can toss his cloak and scythe in the corner, throw on some PJ pants, slump back in an armchair with a cheap watery beer, and throw on some football or a superhero movie.