So, last night I had the privilage of seeing that most splendid of drum’n'bass acts, Pendulum, doing their thing in Brixton Academy. In the style of my summer holiday review, here’s some thoughts on the evening.

• My santa hat got more action with the ladies than me. And I don’t mean in a “that’s a sexy hat!” way, I mean as in a “being stuffed down a very ample cleavage” way.
• Sixteen thousand crushed plastic cups are very hard to dance on.
• Over one thousand people trying to start a mosh pit in an approximatly hundred square meter area are very hard to dance with.
• Give the man handing out free badges a fake email address, you cretin.
• Don’t believe the official timetable on the venue website. The headlining band will not finish just before the last train home, it will start at the same time as the last train home.
• Do not believe the 3am bus driver. You will not be dropped by a pub in the middle of town, you will be dropped by a random A-road in the middle of nowhere.
• OK, I can see you need a smoke, and don’t want to leave the front of the stage to go to the smoking area. So yeah, ducking down to have a smoke is a genius plan. But why aren’t you dying of dehydration as well? And how does that make a fag palletable at all?
• When buying your tickets on eBay, check they’re on the main stalls, and not in the balcony a hundred miles away from the action. That took a bit of work to sort out.
• Do not try starting a circle pit to Pendulum, for fucks sake. They’re a drum’n'bass act with metal influences, not a goddamn metal band. You want to pull that shit, find Shellshock, they’re a metal band with drum’n'bass influences, you can do that shit with them. Let me have some room to dance already.
• London prices are always London prices.

You know, I’ve been looking solidly for three years for one of these:

And the only sign of one I’ve seen since I found on in 2005… was when I was looking through the archives of my old LiveJournal, and found that picture… in the entry saying I couldn’t find one.

Brilliant use of my novel-writing time there, but I’m over 10,000 words, and I’m hoping to pump out more when I’m not working next week.

As long memoried people will remember, I loves me some Slipknot. One of the first articles I wrote on the Internet was a pictoral review of The Subliminal Verses. So much so, that I was going to release a compilation of blog updates called The Moronic Verses, without realising that such an unnessersary book would be self-fufilling in name. But the album was good, their best by a good lead, and so I was pleasently surprised when I found out they’d released a new one when I was busy being told how much horses smelt this holiday.

With a title like All Hope Is Gone, its either going to be an awesome album, or a rather lacklustre one. Wikipedia tells us that we were to expect something with all the experimental properties of The Subliminal Verses, with the brutal heaviness of Iowa. And?

Erm, no.

The Subliminal Verses was a wonderful move for Slipknot, blending wonderfully quirky new sounds into something quite like their old sounds, and by fuck it was good. All Hope Is Gone, however, is a band that made a move, found it worked splendidly, and had no idea what to do with it after that. There’s supposed to be a lot more political undertones in there, but I just heard a large number of words that I could have written in Year 11. Politics and music are very comfortable bedfellows, but you have to do it whole-heartedly, and I don’t think Corey Taylor did in this one.

We didn’t get the bloody-minded madness that was Iowa, but we do occasionly get Corey chanting whatever the title of the song is, like happened in some songs in Iowa. And it didn’t really work then.  And these sounds didn’t have the same  quality as TSVs new sounds. They just sounded… bland, I’m afraid. A band who’ve done many mad things over ten years, and are starting to run out of ideas. Its very depressing, getting all excited over a new album, then being… not disappointed, it was still quite good, but not awesome. I will tell my girlfriend, another devoted maggot, “Slipknot released an album when you were down here with me”, she will say “Really?”, and I will say “Its not very good”. And I will write pointless sentences like that.

But to carry on, the best song on the album was… a bonus track, a remix of Vermillion Pt2. Yes, a song from their last album. Basically, I’m surprised it got so far up so many charts, and I think they’re going to be hanging up the masks for the last time after they’ve toured this one. Unless I’ve been wrong for six years, they stopped being truthful about being in it for the music, and they want to wring out something I don’t know. Album not amazing, me inarticulate. Boo.

As many of the stoned, over fifties demographic will tell you, if you put on the film “The Wizard Of Oz”, and stick on the Pink Floyd album, “Dark Side Of The Moon”, you have obviously smoked enough draw in the Seventies to do something so utterly pointless. Also, you’ll see an eerie synchronisation between the two. Thinking this was an awesome idea, I hunted down a mashup video off of a perfectly legal download site, then had a watch.

By sheer force of willpower, I managed just under half of the video before declaring “Fuck this”, and throwing it out the window. And by ‘declaring “Fuck this”‘, I mean ‘thinking it to myself, because there wasn’t anyone else there’, and by ‘throwing it out the window’, I mean ‘closing Media Player’. Much less exciting, but I do pride myself on my accuracy. And my good looks. And my command of thirteen languages, incluiding binary, Morse code, and whatever language light bulbs talk in.

I was expecting a marvel of weird, cross-media perculiarities. At the very least, I was expecting something that vaguely resembled a similarity. I think I got two things. Could have been a dodgy video, but I think its because, as I’ve already mentioned, there wasn’t anything better to do in the Seventies when having a spliff. Somebody tried looping them up when stoned off their face, thought it seemed a bit similar, and created a phenomena. This is not something you should do.

Case in point, coupled with another student-life story. One time in Hull, we had a bit to smoke one evening, and that means quite a bit. We then put on a DVD of a program called Phoenix Nights, which I thought to be a documentry series about the unluckiest bar in the entire country. An hours worth of what I thought were horrifying coincidences in bad luck went by, before I realised that it was Peter Kays Phoenix Nights, was supposed to be funny, and was in fact a sitcom, and in no way real whatsoever. This is the sort of mindset I refer you to.

Coupled with that, and hastening my angrily closing the video, is the fact that Pink Floyd is as boring as shit. I recall Jeremy Clarkson, an otherwise impeccably right gentleman, writing that he enjoyed his music to take its time in such a manner, and why do all songs need to be three minutes rushed along and suchlike.

Because if everyone followed the Pink Floyd method, Mr Clarkson, songs would still have one verse, then fifteen minutes of long, repetitive instumental interlude, before another such interlude, and maybe an extra line if you’re good and don’t complain, and have another half an hour of monotonous guitar as well. I don’t follow this. Prog rock is supposed to be the stoner music our fathers had before us, but even with my head submerged in liquid THC, you couldn’t make Pink Floyd sound interesting. When I smoked, you could have said my name in a different accent and had me in a fit of giggles, and I’d have still told you to turn that shit off.

Basically, don’t go playing Dark Side with Oz, or you’ll fall asleep, knock over the ashtray, set you house on fire, then sue me for giving you head trauma. I don’t have a lawyer. I don’t have money. I have some blue cotton thread I found on my desk when I tidied it up earlier. Please don’t do it.