A band that I have been spinning pretty heavily this week is Crystal Castles, and their new self titled album. This Toronto based duo produces catchy chiptune electronica straight out of your favorite NES cartridge. The mastermind behind this project is Ethan Kath who uses modded keyboards to recreate the lo-tech blips that make the Nintendo generation feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Add to that the squelching vocals of Ms. Alice Glass and you get an enticing palette of aural experimentations. The album runs a pretty wide gamut of tempos, which is pretty well illustrated in the first two tracks.

This is a continuation of Monday’s post regarding the new NIne Inch Nails release Ghosts I-IV. I finally got around to ordering the album by 8p.m. Monday evening which is right around the time that the site went down. I managed to place my order and after getting my confirmation email and download link I selected my file format and when I hit download… Nothing, just a “can’t connect to server” message. After a few minutes This message popped up on the site:

Unfortunately, the Ghosts I-IV site is down for the next few hours for maintenance.

Instead of writing any honest to goodness reviews—which I’ve noticed tend to get long in the tooth and I really don’t have to time for at the moment—I decided to just let you in on what new(ish) and exciting things I’ve been spinning.

For the record, I think that it is still safe to call it “spinning” since, while not exactly a record, your hard drive does a considerable amount of twirling around to play your music.

For the last half of our weirdo metal exploration, we’re going to leave the avant-black metal scene in Scandinavia and head all over the world for avant-death and avant-grind bands.

A very quick discussion of “black metal,” “death metal,” and “grindcore” is probably in order. There are differences in sounds, lyrical approaches, and historical origins of each macro-style. If a person wants to dive deeply into these distinctions, the following is pretty oversimplified, but hopefully this will be a helpful level of information to help folks who are just getting into these kinds of “extreme music” styles.

Many times I’ve heard my friends, musicians and non-musicians, complain that there just isn’t that much “good music” out there to discover. That’s certainly never been an issue for me. One just has to know where to look. Now that bands from all over the world have an online presence, it’s easier than ever to find music that suits your own particular tastes.

While The Golden Foretaste of Heaven’s sound is nothing revolutionary it does mark a new direction for Alec Empire and the DHC gang. Along with the new sound also comes a new label to distribute it—Eat Your Heart Out. With a bubbly lettered logo and a DIY ethos, Alec and the gang are primed to set the world on fire… or something to that effect.

When I hear of a band that has played a show with one of my local favorites Shinyville one of the first things that comes to mind is that these guys must be somewhat off their rocker. Luckily, when I heard the debut self titled album by New York based duo Rocket Surgery I was not at all disappointed. To say the very least, Rocket Surgery is a little eclectic.

Puscifer, yet another side project by Tool front man Maynard James Keenan, has finally released a full length album, titled V is for Vagina. To be completely honest I had no idea who Puscifer was until I did a thorough background check via Wikipedia. The only time I’d seem the name was while skimming the soundtrack for one of the Underworld movies. From the sounds of it, Maynard is attempting to some kind of word of mouth/street team promotion on this album. This must’ve payed off for him, since the first song off the album, Queen B. debuted at #38 on the billboard modern rock chart.