Sunday, February 9, 2014

I'm back...with ninjas

So, after a nearly three-year absence, I'm thinking about trying to write about music again. I'm not even listening to the same kind of music that I was three years ago. Nowadays I'm really into southern metal and heavy math rock, in equal measure. And I've been making playlists of new tunes on 8tracks.com every week, so the title of this blog is even more fitting now than it was before.

The plan for now is just to write whatever I want about any kind of music, whenever I want. I'm challenging myself to write at least once a week.

Today I just want to promote my most recent playlist on 8tracks.com, which happens to be my 40th. I started the weekly playlist last July 4th. I get all the new tunes from Bandcamp.com. It's mostly artists I've never heard of, but I find great stuff there all the time. My new playlist, like most of them, is a mix of southern metal, stoner metal, math rock, and mathcore. That's just what I do. It's great music for working out or driving.

For this week's playlist theme I chose the anime Naruto, but in the future. I've been thinking of ideas for a future novel I might write someday, and one idea I had was "No Country for Old Naruto"...I won't bother explaining it, but I decided to make it the theme of my playlist. I did a search for an image and found an awesome painting on DeviantArt of the two central characters of Naruto as older men with mustaches, returning to their village arm in arm after years of absence. It was perfect. And nearly every tune I had chosen, before I even picked the theme, had a title that seemed to fit this theme perfectly. So it turned out to be one of my best playlists. I ended up calling it No Country for Old Ninjas.

The only band I'd heard of before was The Last March of the Ents, from Phoenix, and only because I had chosen them for another playlist months ago. Their new track "Blood of the Giver," released four days ago, is pretty awesome and is one of my favorites this week. It's a creative hardcore punk tune with lots of shouting. I'm not sure what I find appealing about it, except that it has lots of energy and just feels novel somehow.

I'm no music writer, but if I can help some of these bands get noticed, I'm happy to try. So check 'em out if that sounds interesting to you. They've been releasing music for a few years, including an EP last July 4th called The Ever Distorting. So yeah, they were actually one of the first bands I heard when I started making these playlists.

Here's a link to No Country for Old Ninjas. Maybe these blog posts will get better. Here's hoping.


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