So when your friends come to you and say they are starting a metal band called Flaming Tusk you think that is bad ass as hell. You tell them you think that but in the back of your mind you are really thinking two things: first that ideas you thought up while drunk/high/tripping/etc sound great at the time only because you are drunk/high/tripping/etc, and second is a sense of nostalgia of when all your friends in high school were in metal “bands” which usually was nothing more then you all sitting around in their parents basement drinking/smoking pot/tripping/etc screaming while playing your instruments very loudly and very poorly (but it sure was fun as hell, wasn’t it?)

So after months pass by without hearing a sound from these guys I was pretty pumped when they let me listen to the first cut. I really didn’t know what to expect. When they said metal I was thinking something like pop-metal, Metallica or Tool or something (which is what all the high school kids tried to play). What came out of the stereo instead made my soul bleed. This is heavy, almost industrial, metal. This ain’t no frat boy metal, this shit is the real deal. This is music that will make you want to kill your pets and someday become a serial killer.

When trying to write a review of this record I realized that all anyone needs to know about it is that the title track is about Abigail Taylor, a young girl who’s intestines were sucked out by a pool drain and died shortly after. If that isn’t metal as fuck then you don’t know what metal is and you don’t know what good music is.

Flaming Tusk – Abigail (Guts Down the Drain)

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You can download the Flaming Tusk EP at http://tusk.bandcamp.mu/

If you check out my Last.fm widget down to the side there you will see some of the albums I’ve been loving on within the last few months. The one without a cover is this album, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill.

Man do I love me some dream-pop. It doesn’t get much dreamier than Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill by Portland’s Grouper (Liz Harris). DDD fits the genre title well as this entire album feels like the soundtrack to a dream; you don’t always know what is going on and you forget what happened when it ends but you are left with the feeling that you just experienced something magical.

Music aside that cover creeps me out, but in a good way.

Grouper – Heavy Water / I’d Rather Be Sleeping

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Type records

I met up with a London photographer last Friday night who had done some painting with light. I’ve always wanted to try it but when you are alone at night it isn’t smart to just leave your camera while you run across the street to act like a fool for 20 seconds. It turns out this is much harder than it looks because you have to paint in 3D something you can’t even see. Thank god for my hyper sense of spacial relations.

This last one was featured on Gothamist.

More here.

Another one of my passions is music. One of the first things I do every morning is sift through a multitude of music blogs and webzines. Living in a city with such an amazing music scene, one where so many bands come through, I am always finding out about new bands and music. I often take pictures at the shows I go to, though I have tended to not take pictures at the shows that I really want to experience because of how the camera makes you step back from what is going on (this is something I need to change). So now I’m going to start writing about new bands or new songs I’ve discovered and publishing shots from the shows I go to to promote the music I love and shine some light on these artists that fill my life with so much joy.

Wow, that was a long winded and sappy way to announce that I’m adding music to my blog. Screw it. First up is an indie pop band from Indonesia, Moscow Olympics, and then it’s the School of Seven Bells who are now on tour with M83 (I already have my tickets for that show).

Moscow Olympics – Still

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School of Seven Bells – Connjur

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Back when I made this map for the Boston Magazine challenge for the next big thing in Boston I was pretty burned out about the whole future map thing and I swore it would be my last map. I ended up throwing it together last minute and even though it is my most publicized map I was never happy with it and really wanted no more to do with the whole thing. What a difference a few years make. A little while ago I began to wish that I had made a map that actually expressed what I thought the MBTA could look like (rather than a map just showing the T decked to the halls with extensions that don’t even make sense to build). I also wanted to have a better quality map. The Boston Magazine map was made in Photoshop so it is pixel based and has no curves. I wanted to make a map that was much clearer, cleaner, and vector based so that I could change the size easily.

I started working on this new map until real life got in the way and forgot about it until a few weeks ago when I got an email from the owner of Boston Coasters who said he was a fan and wanted to start a line of products for the FutureMBTA. I realized the map he wanted to use was the one I hated (and would probably look crappy when resized) so I dug through my files and found this new one I had been working on. A few nights of intense redrawing produced what feel is my finest map and probably the (truly) last future MBTA map I will ever make.

What makes this map different? For one thing it is the only map I’ve made that incorporates my Green Line/Urban Ring which shows how you can create a network of light rail that will work as both a suburb-downtown connector (the Green and Brown Lines) and an inner city ring line (The Yellow Line). There is also the North-South Rail Link which will enable DMU/EMU service for new stops in inner suburbs where existing commuter rail exists but currently does not serve (This is the “Indigo Line” which runs along side the regular commuter rail). Someone left a comment on one of my sites asking why I hadn’t created a unified master plan for expansion. This is the first step. I have some time off this week so I plan on further explaining what this map proposes, sort of like a thesis for the FutureMBTA.

So pretty soon you will be able to have this on coasters, journals, posters, messenger bags, etc, over at Boston Coasters. I have also created different desktop background sizes available over at FutureMBTA.

Edit:
I also have this map with inverted colors because I think it looks bad ass.