Thursday, July 27, 2006

but in the meantime


New mix will be up on monday is was made courtersy of maddog 2020 and the makers of whisky, more on that later. Beat Pervert wll be in New Jersey this weekend. I would leave you with a track off the New Jersey Drive soundtrack but I am gonna leave you with something good instead.

mean joe greene ft, juvenille - down bottom

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

You asked for it


Back by popular demand you guessed right the mother fucking gauntlet recap. Anyway some interesting thangs been going in the gauntlet, first things is wes and casey are still there. Wes might have vaulted himself into the reality show hall of fame with this effort. First he has alienated everyone around him, he constantly bashes his teammate and call her worthless, all his maneuvers for alliances and what not backfires, and yet dude is still in the game. He's like a bizarro A-rod that comes through in the clutch. Anyway while I was on hiatus tanya's team got eliminated and I don't know or care how it happened, and neither should you.

Anyway to set up this week's episode we go back to last week and evan and coral, the team who couldn't lose at the beginning haven't won in a few missions and to boot evan has hernia. Yep the dudes balls are killing him but he wants to be a tropper and play it out. Plus coral would cut him if he backed out. Elsewhere for the first time casey and wes did not get voted in, instead it went to big assed tina and her partner some italian dude. The fat dude and katie got voted in by shane and linnette after they won a mission where they swam with sharks. That's two wins in a row for them and making them the Minnesota twins of this gauntlet shit.

Now this weeks mission was some sled pulling shit, they first broke the teams into two groups to pull a sled that weighed 350 pounds. Than the winning team split back into their groups to pull an 85 pound sled. Wes proved he was the world's greatest teammate by quitting two minutes in and calling casey worthless and leaving her stuck in her harness. I am not sure if I hate or like wes these days. Dude is on another level and what the level is I have no fucking clue. Darnell and Aviv win. And the gauntlet is set for tina and the italian vs the fat guy and katie. In another move that backfired wes tells the fat guy and katie all about the gauntlet in hopes they can beat big assed tina. Big mistake tina and the italian trounce the fat guy and katie.

Also of note Coral fucked up her knee in the mission and had to go to the hospital, and evan got his hernia checked out and his balls are pretty much in his chest know. Actually what the fuck is a hernia really? I keep thinking back to prince paul's pyschoanalysis albulm when paul talks about his balls sucking up to his stomach or some shit, man prince paul is the wierdest. The big story next week will be can a banged up evan and coral stave off elimination, and I got five on coral's boobs for winning this, them shits store secret powers I tell ya and they will probaly even one day make peace in the middle east, or at least be used to bomb some civillians

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Rock 'n' Roll Handjob (Slight Return)

I apologize for my woeful lack of rock 'n' roll posts as of late (like anyone actually reads mine anyhow). I've been living the exciting and glamorous life of a rock star. As such, I couldn't afford to pay for internet access. But I'm back and I've got some serious kick-ass for all of you loyal drunkards. Instead of the usual one song + band explanation - proper sentence structure = (me being an asshole)^2 formula, I've decided to modify it slightly on this one occassion. Partly because I owe you for my lengthy absence and partly because this band rocks so fucking hard that they deserve it, I'm posting two songs!! And one of them's over 6 minutes long! Boobies!




Simply Saucer rocked so fucking hard it should be illegal. I think it actually is in a few states. But, these fellows didn't have to worry about that because they were from Hamilton, Ontario....which is in Canada for you non-geographically inclined readers. Consisting of Edgar Breau (principal songwriter and guitarist), Steve Park (guitar), Kevin Christoff (bass), and Don Cramer (drums), Simply Saucer was quite a force to be reckoned with. Unfortunately, they were playing slash and burn Stooges-type rock with psych, krautrock, and weird electronic noise thrown in for good measure. Which addds up to instant fame (in my book) unless of course you're playing this sort of thing in 1974 in Hamilton, Ontario and you're very lazy about touring...which is exactly what happened. And that's the only conceivable reason this band never got fucking huge.

They only have one actual release from after their break-up which gathers their demos and some live stuff from a show they played on the roof of a mall. Nazi Apocalypse is from the demo side of the record and it fucking tears!
Here Come the Cyborgs Pt.2 is one of the live cuts. Oh my sweet jesus! At about 1:40 in, when things start to slow down, Edgar plays the single greatest piece of guitar screech feedback ever commited to tape. After that, comes a fucking monster of a guitar solo. Straight awesomeness, no wanking in sight.

If you download and listen to these songs and don't immediately want to go out and buy this record, A) Your ears aren't working properly B) You haven't downloaded and listened to these songs at all and/or C) The terrorists have won.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

more drunk than focused


Drunk and Focused vol. 1 more drunk than focused

Yong Jeezy ft. bun b - over here (beat pervert and evaredy pushing square pints of liquor to the kids bootleg blend)
zilla - killer vs. killer
TI ft. beanie siegel - 2 glock 9's
brand nubian - allah u akbar
caural - red sunshine
freeway ft. jay z and beanie siegel - what we do
daedelus ft ttc - cadavre exquis
tbd- 12 flowers
bjork - hyperballad (dj ayres remix)
bonde do role = melo do tabaco (diplo remix)
black dice - endless happiness (eye remix)
scottie b and king tutt - African chant
suba - samba do gringo (zero db remix)
amon tobin - agent of theft
sonic youth - james run free
dj shadow - devil's advocate
1 2 3 teeth - opers of houration

Beefin' Up the Ranks.

Aww hell, there's a time and place when alcohol decides to leave you. You've smacked it around, you've shit on its chest, it's taken a lot from you. But one night, it'll turn on you. It'll cut your dick off and toss it out the window. Consequences, kids. I let hard liquor grab ahold of me for years, putting it in me daily, slowly putting bloody holes in my stomach. Then one night, I gangbang a bottle of 151 rum and up comes the rum and something else, dark, almost purple. And someone's twisting a Phillips-head screwdriver into your gut. Congratulations, a new kind of pain. So I spent months sober. Months on months. Christ, seems like the best analogy I could give is like relocating from Brooklyn to a beet farm in Wyoming. Going wild with a clear mind, forced to deal with the real world without a filter or a machine gun to mow down annoyances. But one day, someone offers me a bottle of wine and my stomach mans up. It can take Pinot Grigio or a decent Chilean wine. But the results are no good, alcohol is alcohol to my body now. The outcome is dirty, unkempt, the fun is gone. I devolve.

Coming back from Chicago recently, I found a stain on the sidewalk in front of my boy Saleem's apartment. Some poor kid got his head canyoned open the night before, must've been a big bullet. The murder rate is about to rise up, again, to where it was before the FBI rolled into town with shotguns on their shoulders. The local cops broke with the Fed gang-unit recently, supposedly about to create their own division. Welcome to the eye of the storm: three to six months before the locals get on their feet gives a window of time to the out-of-town down-syndrome-Scarfaces to get their White down south, over and over through this hollowed-out city. And in the meantime, kids caught in the crossfire and genocide popping out of the barrels of glocks. I hear good ole boys in the rural country count the seconds between lightning and thunder to determine how far away the storm is. We got our comparison, counting the minutes between the gunshots and the sirens. What a sense of humor. 'Cause there's a Mexican and a nigga in the whip, who's driving? The boys in blue, kiddo.

B.P. was in an earlier post talkin about us cats that ain't post too often on here. Yeah, I apologize. I really ain't ever got shit to say when I'm live through phonelines; I get everything out over coffee in the 9th Street diner with my peoples, or painfully downing warm saké on the front stoop. But, hell, shit ain't ever as bad as it sounds. You get a roof over your head and enough money to eat daily and everything's just fine. Peace to the labor office and the blood-plasma donor center.

Puttin' it down,
-V.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Tuesday Scissor Test



Stoner metal gods 1 2 3 teeth make their scissor test debut, also known as one of dude justins 37 bands.

Saturday, July 08, 2006

I am free from the chain gang now


The new johnny cash V recordings is fucking dope as fuck. Yes thats my review shit is fucking dope as fuck. This ain't some bullshit pitchfork review where I used a bunch of bullshit to describe his new albulm, and show off that graduated college with an english degree. Or should I just assume they problay hate this new albulm cause more than five retards with bad hairucuts know about it and like it. Fuck it this albulm is great and simple. Just johnny cash looking at the face of death and singing about with pure rawness and honesty over folksy and bluesy shit. If you don't like this shit you probaly don't have what rakim rapped about and for you pitchfork writers thats soul.(side note if pitchfork gave this a good rating which I assume they did regardless of my before mentioned rant, I am sure its for all the wrong reasons,drunk and focused officially wants to the world to know that we skeet skeet skeet all over pitchfork and their bullshit review system.) You know you got soul if you like this otherwise go back to listening to the new j5 and dave mathews band song and thinking about how great sandals are.

Free from thechain gang now

if you could read my mind

Like the 309

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

we are back bitches and yes a return to normalcy


Yeah yeah fuckin yeah drunk and focused hasn't update their shit in a bit. Kids might even wonder if we fell off. First things first you have to be on top to fall off. Hell let us not kid ourselves we are fringe cult blog at best. Sure are homies like lemon red might be big stars and the 19th best music website according to entertainment weekly etc but guess what we never got any of that hype to come here. Drunk and focused is the forgotten blog of the world, we got five loyal fans, a bunch of dudes who never post any shit, and a drunk dj slash writer slash new grad student named beat pervert running the ship. My posse fell off, only dude justin has a legit excuse why he doesn't post cause dude is in 27 bands and does not have the internet. I am assuming varick is writing a novel that will bring him riches (dude is talented with them words), I am guessing en p is playing basketball trying to get noticed by fat joe for the next rucker tournament, and B2, well I love b2, but dude is old and would rather play cribbage then post for drunk and focused, which means is all up to beat pervert to bring back the site. Which means things done changed. No more gauntlet reports cause the gauntlet fucking sucks and I am sick of people thinking I am that dude that does tv show reviews, especially when its for a show I don't even want to watch any more, so that shit is done unless I get 5 folks to leave comments or email me saying they want the gauntlet report back. Fuck that one person leaves a comment saying they want the gauntlet back I'll bring it back. Unless that happens I am jacking off to coral boobs alone for now on. Also we are bringing back the review shit, mostly cause I get paid more to write a 75 word review for the boston phoenix on b-more club shit than a feature for the wire who bounced a check they gave me for my monthly features and column they get out of me. Yes drunk and focused truly does not give a fuck anymore and will burn bridges from now on cause we are bored as fuck. And yes bounced checks will get you fucking called out. Next up is the new Johnny Cash review. But first up is all my fucking articles I wrote for the Wire which people can't find on the internet because in addition to not paying me on time, apparently they haven't paid their webmaster cause that fucking site hasn't been update since my scotty b article which you can find here
Scotty b

Anyway my next feature article was on my homie and one of the most talented motherfucking musicians I have ever met Eat Cloud. Here's is the article

When the robots try to take over the world the only person that will be able to stop them will be Eat Cloud. He will be the one to provide the soundtrack to world destruction, and it will be the sound of beautiful chaos. Music will eat itself, and out of its ashes will be electronic drums pulsing all over. The master of these drums will be head banging and thrashing about, pushing buttons and slamming pedals to get the sound that is midnight in a beautiful world of destruction. The robots will begin to dance and gyrate and bust into makeshift soul train lines, and some of the newer androids will even start break dancing. Then the music will stop and a haunting melody will attack them as Eat Cloud drops the drums out and begins to play a song on a guitar and bow that seems birthed out of the lost sadness that is found in the hearts of abandoned children. The robots will begin to weep and through their tears they will self destruct as Eat Cloud saves the world for mankind.

In the world that is Eat Cloud (government name Andrew David Tomasello) the robot scenario might actually happen. He may be making music to one day save the world, and it may be Tomasello's only connection left to reality. He seems to see the world through the eyes of five year old trapped in a Super Mario Brothers cartoon who can't decide if he wants to save the princess, or just hang out and chill with the walking mushrooms. Talking to the twenty-one year old you find a kind soul who seems to have stepped straight out of the "Dazed and Confused" movie complete with shaggy hair, a cigarette hanging out his mouth, and his laid back "everything is cool man" disposition. Believe me, he is definitely "cool." He's also a weirdo, but the best kind of weirdo - one who just loves playing music.

Tomasello is a one man band. It seems like he can play virtually any instrument in the world and you can even find him these days moonlighting playing guitar with Portsmouth's favorite noisy rock band the Antithesisters. But his real talent comes in his ability to manipulate drum machines and samplers into the beauty that is syncopated chaos. He released his first album under the Eat Cloud moniker a few months back after four years of trying to realize the sound that was violently trying to erupt from his mind. He describes the process as a lot of trial and error and the evolution of of trying to find a new sound.

"I just always liked music I found to be intense,"  he explained. This need to create an outlet for intense music led him to buy a drum machine at the age of 17, so he could make a grind core record, which was a fusion of noise, hardcore, metal, and thrash for an intense thick sound of agression, explaining of that process.

"I did a few noise songs on there and I never played a show with it, I just had a record",  he said, "From 17 till 19 I was pretty much locked up in my room screwing around with tapes, mostly doing really odd folky type music, but I got a really cheap sampler and started doing things with that and just the drum machine and thought it was crazy, then I started hooking up guitar pedals to the sampler and so on till I realized what could happen with certain equipment."

So far it's working for him as he explains his leaving of his hardcore roots and immersion into this current electronic sound explaining,

"I came out of hardcore mainly because I did not like how violent it was. I just always liked music I found to be intense. It has really just been a lot of personal trial and error from the start learning what I can and can't do and teaching myself to do the things I can do that I didn't think I could."

What emerged was an assault on sound that was a melding of Aphex Twin melody and electronics with J Dilla drum patterns- that is if J Dilla did way too much acid while watching seven naked hippy chicks gyrate to bass music while they were reading passages from William Burroughs "Naked Lunch." The one golden rule Eat Cloud follows is he records all his music live straight to a four track with no studio trickery, over dubs, or the aid of the computers. He can't see himself ever using computers because as he states,

"I need to be able to feel the music, and manipulate it with a human touch, and I am afraid I will lose this ability if I used computers."

If you are looking to buy his new album just walk around downtown Dover and sooner or later you are sure to see him shredding about searching for the elusive brown note, or you can just visit his myspace page (mysapce.com/eatcloud) where you can download a few songs and get in contact with the man himself. He recently quit his job at Bullmoose Records in Salem, NH and is looking to make the seacoast his new home, and in the mean time he is couch surfing and living strictly off the money he makes from his live shows and selling cds. He explains,

"A lot of promoters are scared off by the sound because its really odd music, but the seacoast has embraced it and really motivated me to keep going. The music itself is the most important thing to me."

Eat Cloud is a human robot connecting to the world through beeps and drum patterns. And when the end of the world comes he may be our only savior and hope of survival, and thus in drums we trust.

And here is my last column
There is common misconception in these parts that the old man of the mountain actually fell off the mountain and died. Some have even spread lies that he is just a pile of rocks on the side of a mountain now. Well that is just ludicrous because the truth is the old man of the mountain moved to California to start a rock n roll band with a whiskey jug playing german Bigfoot named Gerhard Reinke, and a hollywood director, turned slide guitar player, Steven Spielberg . When out searching for “My Teeth Itch”, that is the old man’s new band, I ran into some other live free or die natives who left the granite state to head west for warm weather, a governor who starred in the hit comedy “Twins”, and a music scene they have thrived in.
Are search leads us first to the bay area where we find central New Hampshire natives the Restiform Bodies, whose sound can be described as the picture you get in your head after you have just watched a fat, forty year old women in spandex dance to Wrecks n Effects “Rump Shaker.” for a solid hour. Also while you were watching this dance you have a head full of acid and headphones bumping out the sounds that is Brian Eno as interpreted by the Wu Tang Clan. This Restiform Bodies trio consists of Passage, the Bomarr Monk, and Telephone Jim Jesus, who aside from working together as the restiform collective, also each have solo projects of their own for Anticon records . They moved out to Oakland in 2000 and have not looked back since touring the United States and Europe alike while becoming fixtures in the Bay Area music scene. However, even with all this success they have still not played a show back in their home state.
Unfortunately in the Bay Area we were not able to find anything other than those fat women in spandex, so we continue are search for “My Teeth Itch” in the city of angels, Dr. Dre, and of course stupid spoiled whores with sex tapes, yes we have arrived in the beautiful city of Los Angeles. There have been some sightings of the old man of the mountain out on town clubbing with Lindsay Lohan, the girl from the classic “My Two Dads” series, and Nick Lachey, but we have yet to come in contact with him. As we continue the search we run into a dude I used to ride to school with in high school back in Manchester, NH. The dude is none other than dj Mo7s, elementary school name Stephen Manders, and currently known as the that dj tearing up the L.A. club scene. This NH native left his east coast roots for the west after slaying the NH and Boston clubs alike with his break heavy dance sets and turntablilist talents. In just under 10 years he has opened for dance acts such John Digweed, Hybrid and Adam Freeland and rap acts such as Dj Q Bert, KRS-One, and The Jungle Brothers. You can find him currently rocking to large crowds in the LA area, or if your in Nova Scotia you catch him playing one of the biggest dance events of the year, Evolve 7, August 5 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
As the sun sets out west over the horizon I think I see the old man swimming, but in reality is just a really big turtle named Clyde who has short legs. Things we have learned this month turtles have short legs , we may never find the elusive old man of the mountain or his noisy rock band, but we did find some local artists from our humble live free or die state doing it real big out west like Manute Bol on a pogo stick.

Next up a review for the new johnny cash albulm