Monday Music Mayhem

     At the risk of sounding like I'm making excuses (which I suppose I am... shut up...) I'm going to lay a good chunk of the blame for my apparent inability to keep to a schedule lately on my early morning starts at work. My normal day starts at five in the morning, and the combination of that ungodly hour and an average of probably only five or six solid hours of sleep beforehand, on a regular basis, is that, unless I catch up with naps or keep myself well-caffeinated, by the end of the week I often end up falling asleep well before I mean to, and before I've gotten all of the day's shit done.

     But, to paraphrase the words of House Lannister, "a bearded man always pays his debts", so once again you're getting a hat-trick post today (that's three goals in a single game, for you non-hockey types out there), covering Saturday, Sunday, and today all in one shot. So let's get started.

     For your Saturday song, I'm going to need you to close your eyes and picture the following: old-school prog-influenced death metal (think old Opethy kinda stuff) filtered through the lens of a band like Baroness, if Baroness drew its melodic sensibilities and plaintive passages more from straight forward rock and less from countrified bluegrass. Now open your eyes, and find that you're gazing at the totally badass album art for Cormorant's 2011 disc Dwellings. There's a good chance you don't know these guys, but you should, especially if the word picture I painted you above sounded at all flavourful to you. A caveat, however: only two of the seven tracks on Dwellings clock in at less than five minutes long, so first time listeners are in for some attrition. But if you give Cormorant a chance, songs like "Funambulist" will take you for a ride.

     Next up, Sunday, and I'm going to do the unthinkable and take a single track out of the context of its "greater than the sum of its parts" album. You know the kind of album I'm talking about, even if I'm not doing the best job of articulating it right now: those magical records that work perfectly as a single piece of music rather than merely a collection of separate songs. Sure, those songs are good, but put 'em together and you've got a real slice of fried gold on your hands. Such is the case with "Quittance" from the debut LP Februus by Uneven Structure, a cool tune in its own right but also a piece of a much more awesome whole. Listen to "Quittance", but by all means listen to Februus from start to finish if you haven't already. Djent has become kind of a bad word, but Uneven Structure will show you one example of how powerful that kind of a sound can be.

     And for today, Monday, we're going to do a bit of a throwback to how I used to run Mondays around here with a Metallica Monday.In particular I'm picking "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)", an old favourite of mine from way back when I was in high school and we used to attempt a few Metallica covers when jamming. Between us, we knew all the obvious ones, but we also liked to dust off this lesser-known (or lesser-liked, anyways) cut from 88's Master of Puppets, so I encourage you to dust it off too.

     Whew. Caught up. Again. Meet you back here tomorrow? Deal!