The Orange Noise

The Hell You Say is rowdy as fuck.  There it is.  I'm not sure how else to put it.  Rowdy. As. Fuck. Both their stage performance and recorded material are pure canned chaos.  At a The Hell You Say show, the current state of affairs doesn't mean a thing.  It's the spectacle that matters.  It's the sounds and the sights. It's the anger and the insistence and the movement.  Make no mistake, you ARE in danger.  But "danger" is relative, and subjective, and you're in danger just putting your fat foot on a wet bathroom floor in the morning, but you do it all the time. The Hell You Say have things to scream about, and reasons to take rock'n'roll to ballistic levels of volume and intensity. They obviously have some existential shit they need to work out, and I think we should all feel lucky that music is their creative outlet. A The Hell You Say experience is one to give yourself up to completely.  Resistance is basically futile. Whether ...

Prayer Line has a thing.  Let's not call it a schtik. I guess we could, but please don't.  Let's call it a theme.... or maybe more of a disposition.  A disposition towards all things dark, and shadowy, and creep-like.  Prayer Line walks, if not defines, the disturbingly foggy line between dark culture and camp.  Are they cannibalistic satanists back from the underworld to low-key indoctrinate Louisville's counter culture? Or are they friendly zombie rockers giving tongue-in-cheek homage to horror and gore icons of the past?  I think Prayer Line is likely all of that. Like a blood-red smoothie made of equal portions Misfits, Ramones, Duran Duran, Bela Lagosi, and John Carpenter, Prayer Line rock faces with dark hooks and macabre verse that leave you sucking meaty chunks through the straw.  They caught my attention with their dark disposition on my first spin of their 2019 release, Drink the Blood .  Sure, it was heavy hitting, with not-so-sub...

Shi - 死 Shi - 死 are metal-monks who have served at the Temple of Weed and Riffs and returned home to teach by example the ways of Doom.  Their live shows are metal meditations with dark fuzz, rolling bass lines and growling vocal emissions. Reportedly, their drummer utilizes drums and cymbals. Bob from Shi - 死  was recently agreeable to filling out a 13 Questions interview for me. Knowing they're a personal favorite of many local metalheads, I was looking forward to his feedback and getting some more insight into what this group of headbangers is all about. You can catch Bob and the boys in Shi - 死 at Highlands Tap Room for Terrifying Tap-O-Ween on Thursday Oct 31st, sharing a stacked bill with Bazookatooth (Nashville), Louisiana Lot Lizards  (IN) and The Hell You Say (Louisville). You can also often catch these guys out enthusiastically supporting other local acts around town.  If you spot'em, giv'em a "Hell, yeah!", a fist pump, and some horn...

The Corrupting Sea I used to have a reoccurring dream of clutching the top of a flagpole that had the elasticity of a glow stick.  A strong wind would build and the flagpole would bow tremendously, lowering me to within feet of the ground but never allowing me time to dismount before rebounding and repeatedly rushing me back to the top of the arc. The sway of the pole had a predictable and terrifying tempo. My parents live in the country. The road to their house intersects a large electrical utility right-of-way that spans a miles-wide valley. When passing under it, above the noise of the wind and wheels, cicadas and mowers, is a crackling hum. It's static tide, suspended hundreds of feet in the air, slices through the landscape like roughly sheared sheet metal through a Bob Ross canvas. Jason Lamoreaux, recording and performing as The Corrupting Sea , provides eerily appropriate soundtracks for these scenarios. His compositions leave one questioning whether the signals be...

Maybe it was memories of melodies that my brain came up with while I was driving to work.  Maybe it was guitar riffs and gear tests that were fleeting in the moment, but had logged some harmonic importance in my brain bank.   Maybe it was playing in the background of a movie that I wasn't really watching.... but I'm pretty sure I took a nap on a Tuesday and when I woke up droneroom was on my musical radar like it had always been there. Blake Conley makes music maybe you've never heard, but you're happy to hear again. The new droneroom album, I'll make it up to you, I Swear  , is available for pre-order CD and digital d'load from Somewherecold Records . Maybe more machine than man. Maybe more breath than song.  Maybe more circular than linear. Many maybes lead to many questions. Luckily I had those ready to go.... 13 Questions with droneroom. 1.What's the story with your band/stage name? BC: Well, like all project names, it’s rooted in somet...

Bad Wires had me hooked from the time I walked into their set in a notoriously terrible sounding room.  I'd soon realize that their sound and their amplifiers were so big that it wasn't going to matter if the house PA could handle it. Vocals were mic'd and that was enough.  A true power trio, they plowed through an all original set like a speeding rat rod through a post apocalyptic casino town.  Backed by hard-driving intelligent bass lines, and a machine gun of a drummer; a noisy, psychedelic, beautiful-schizophrenic-roller-coaster of guitar riff lay waste to what was left of the sound stage.  The vocals were mic'd...I think.  It was loud.  It had intent.  It sounded old and new at the same time.  BAD WIRES worked for me and I stayed for the rest of the ruckus.    I usually don't care to hang around and engage artists after their sets, and rarely hang out long enough to catch them after they cool down, but i needed to let these ...