Forgive the crowing

First, to briefly follow up on my previous post:

Joshua Holland, who writes for the very left-leaning AlterNet.org, has published a brutal takedown of Naomi Wolf's Guardian piece on Congress's "conspiracy" against OWS. In fact, if you haven't read my own post on the subject, then you should just skip it and read Holland's instead. He put in more time, did more homework, and produced a way better writeup. But at least I've proven that I know bullshit when I see it!

Second, a bit of self-congratulatory crowing.

My band's debut album was just written up in Decibel Magazine, America's best and most popular metal publication. We scored an 8/10 and a very flattering review:

"Quick history lesson: Pyrrhon of Elis was a Greek philosopher acknowledged as the father of Skepticism (the school of thought, not the Finnish funeral doom band). Many of the downstream effects of Pyrrhon's philosophies will be familiar to metalheads—doubt of inherited values, rational inquiry into the nature of things, disregard for that which cannot be empirically proven, etc.


What does all this have to do with Pyrrhon the death metal band? In many ways, these Brooklynites' debut LP, An Excellent Servant but a Terrible Master, embodies the ideas of the band's namesake. Doug Moore's lyrics deal a lot with the impossibility of making meaning in a society that doesn't value it. "All the debased logic/The spent, weathered values/And the ashes of intentions/Bear their witness against me," he growls on the godly "Idiot Circles," incontinence-preventing riffs flopping around underneath him.


Musically, An Excellent Servant fits the Skeptic mindset by clawing away at death metal's formal boundaries and re-envisioning them. Guitarist Dylan DiLella's riffs do more than just chug and pound—they throw up white-hot sparks, spin off into shadowy passages and arpeggiate the strangest chords, while Erik Malave's bass thumps in dissonant counterpoint. And few metal drummers treat cymbals as important as kicks and snare, like Alex Cohen does on "New Parasite" and "Glossolalian."


Pyrrhon's palette is much wider than just jackhammering power. And yet, outré as they get, everything Pyrrhon do emanates from an obsidian death metal core—just that this music is that much more expressive, its impact that much more disquieting than almost anything else in the genre. This is their first label release, and already Pyrrhon leave us very little to be skeptical about."

Woohoo!

Interestingly, the review's author is a guy named Etan Rosenbloom. The same fellow wrote a (somewhat tetchy) response to a piece I wrote for Invisible Oranges a few months back. Guess he likes me better as a musician than as a writer.