The Daily Procrastinator

Hello, procrastinators! We here at The Daily Procrastinator hope that your weekend has allowed you to catch up on your sleep, spend some time relaxing, and dedicate only minimal time to productive activity. I tried to model appropriate procrastinator behavior by spending four days at a hotel on the beach. Does everyone see how that’s done? Good.

As always, The Daily Procrastinator published a healthy crop of thoughts, opinions, reminiscences, and reviews for your reading pleasure. TallGirl really carried the team this week. Let’s look back at the week and make sure you didn’t miss anything.

The week began as TallGirl was wisked into the past by the Niles Canyon Railway, a historically accurate steam-powered passenger train that offers both passengers and observers a glance into the world their grandparents knew. The granddaughter of a railway enthusiast, TallGirl found herself mirroring her grandfather’s fondness for the railway.

TallGirl’s gaze remained focused on the past as her recollection of childhood Hershey’s kisses were refuted by eating one in the present. Have the kisses changed, or has TallGirl’s palate evolved?

As a follow-up to last week's grumpy koala, here's a jumping armadillo. Yes, they can do that.

BigRedPoet piped up with a review of the latest of the “I wish I was a rock star” video games, Guitar Hero: Metallica. Check out his assessment of the game’s graphics, the list of available songs, and the gameplay.

TallGirl returned with some ruminations on modern marketing, packaging, and branding practices, including some ridiculous claims about the purposes and capabilities of the new Pepsi logo.

Visit The Daily Procrastinator at any of the links above and sign up to receive daily email updates so you never miss an article!

The Daily Procrastinator: Contributing to the Dramatic Reduction of Your Personal Productivity

On Saturday night at midnight, my pre-ordered copy of Guitar Hero: Metallica became available at my local video game dealer. They opened the door at midnight especially for those of us who just couldn’t wait until Sunday morning. Of course, I was involved in a heated bout of darts and tap beers, so I ended up waiting until Sunday after all.

On Sunday, though, the glory of this latest installment in the Guitar Hero family of games shone down upon me. I spent hours playing the game, first tinkering with some of the quickplay options, later completing 48% of the story mode. I rate this game a rock-solid 9/10.

Like Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band, this game allows four-player gameplay including guitar, bass, drums, and vocals.

For starters, the game is amazing to look at. Every menu has been customized to reflect Metallica’s logos, old t-shirt designs, and other metalhead content. While actually playing the game, the animated James, Lars, Kirk, and Rob are more lifelike than any Guitar Hero characters ever. Having seen Metallica in concert many times, I can attest that the animated characters don’t just look like the real thing; they behave like the real thing, too. Trujillo stalks and storms, Hetfield gestures to the crowd, Lars stands up at the drum set, and Kirk wanders around like some confused, Satanic waif. It’s pretty much perfect.

Is it real or is it Guitar Hero?

The song selection available in Guitar Hero: Metallica is impressive. The vast majority of the tracks are drawn from Metallica’s career, with a smaller selection of songs chosen by the band from artists who influenced them. My only complaint about the game–the reason I rate it 9 instead of 10–involves the song selection. In the repertoire of Metallica songs, I just don’t understand the selection of “Frantic.” I hate this song. It feels like the game creators were cruising along and selecting great old Metallica songs…and suddenly thought, “Oh, crap. We should include something from St. Anger.” No. No, you shouldn’t. That album is trash. I’m also not crazy about “All Nightmare Long,” but I’ll get over it. In the non-Metallica track list, I can do without Corrosion of Conformiy’s “Albatross.” This song is repetitive and uninspired. It does not ROCK. Conversely, Mastodon’s “Blood and Thunder” does, indeed, rock…but the vocals are of the Cookie-Monster variety. That’s just not fun to try to sing. Even considering these weak points, the song selection is, as I mentioned earlier, impressive. Metallica songs from their best albums (Kill ‘Em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, and …And Justice For All) abound.

Guitar Hero: Metallica also raises the bar of difficulty in the world of “rock star” type games. There’s a new Expert Plus mode for drums that includes double kick pedals for the bass drum. Also, the complex guitar solos make many of the songs difficult to play on guitar, even on the Medium difficulty setting. I can see that I’ll be spending many, many hours trying to work my way up to Hard or Expert.

On the whole, the game creators responsible for Guitar Hero: Metallica have programmed a masterpiece. As soon as I can speak again (my vocal cords are shot from fronting my band), I’m going to tell everyone I know to go out and buy it.

LAMB OF GOD - WRATH

I am a huge fan of thrash metal.  There is just something about it that grabs you by the throat and won’t let you go.  The best metal of this sort has a “groove”:  riffs to kill for keeping time with hellaciously fast blastbeats, riding cymbals, and a pounding bass.   Back in the mid- to late 80s, there existed a sort of glory days of thrash.  This was exemplified by the four pillars of the genre (Anthrax, Slayer, Megadeth, and old Metallica) coupled with the “newcomers” Pantera.  Go ahead and throw in Prong (particularly Beg to Differ) and Testament as a couple of other favorites.

Lamb of God is today’s undisputed leader of the genre and is leading a renaissance of thrash.  Sure, Slayer and Metallica get the Grammys, but that is just a case of  name recognition on the part of the voters.  I was first turned on to LoG after hearing “Laid to Rest” from their album Ashes of the Wake, which was the first album I’d bought in a long time that simply ripped my face off.   And while I was never a huge fan of the “cookie monster”-style of vocal stylings, LoG just made it work for me.   Their follow-up, Sacrament, became a drop-date purchase for me, and it continued to impress.

But both albums have been eclipsed by the triumph that is Wrath.

Where do these guys get all of these wonderful riffs?  Seriously, if you don’t find yourself involuntarily headbanging during the bridge of “Dead Seeds,” you have no metal in your soul.   High points (as if there were low points) include “Set to Fail”, “Contractor” and “Choke Sermon”.    But my personal favorite is the closer, “Reclamation”:  the blues-based lick that provides the structure and, simply put, drive of this song is perfectly pieced together.  It is the juggernaut of the album.

Wrath is now the front-runner for album of the year.  It will be interesting to see what other bands are willing to put out this year in the face of this onslaught.

"We'd like to thank the Grammy voters' powers of name-recognition ..."

It seems Metallica received another nomination, this time for “My Apocalypse” under the “Best Metal Performance” category.

Of course Metallica got another nomination – I mean, they released an album, and that seems to be all it takes for Metallica to receive a nod. St. Anger proved beyond a doubt that the Grammys are based on name recognition solely — who actually listened to that phoned-in effort more than once before winging it out the car window like a frisbee? Meanwhile, Anthrax’s We’ve Come for You All was not even nominated.

Other proof? Slayer’s “Eyes of the Insane” winning over Lamb of God’s “Redneck” in 2007 and, the next year, Slayer’s winning with “Final Six” over Machine Head’s “Aesthetics of Hate”, both egregious errors. This is not to knock F*&KING SLAYER but their past couple albums just haven’t matched up to their earlier work. Meanwhile, Lamb of God’s albums are redefining metal and Machine Head’s The Blackening is stronger than any album either Metallica or Slayer put out in at least a decade (that would be since “… And Justice for All” in Metallica’s case).

It would actually be interesting to see what would happen if both Metallica and Slayer were nominated in the same year, but we all know that the more palatable Metallica would get the nod (barring a not-out-of-realm-of-possibility announcement of a “tie”). I guess when they start things off with Jethro Tull winning out over Metallica I shouldn’t expect much, though.

A band featuring a flutist beat Metallica. Seriously.

Here now are the also-rans for “Best Metal Performance” for 2009:

Dragonforce – “Heroes Of Our Time” (“Dragonforce” – snicker – if these guys win a Grammy it will be for “Most Annoying Music Accompanying an Anime Cartoon about Robots”)

Judas Priest – “Nostradamus” (name recognition got JP this nomination – how long has it been since they’ve been relevant?)

Ministry – “Under My Thumb” (always the bridesmaid, never the bride)

Slipknot – “Psychosocial” (they won in 2006 – Metallica and Slayer weren’t nominated)