Interview With a Drummer

Noah Reimer

RIDE THE LIGHTNING

Ok, so i decided to review an iconic thrash metal album, Ride the Lightning by Metallica!

Band lineup at the time

James Hetfield -Rhythm guitar and vocals

Kirk Hammet-Lead Guitar

Cliff Burton-Bass  

Lars Ulrich-Drums

The album starts off with song titled Fight Fire With Fire. It has what basically becomes the classic album starter for the band: a slow melodic clean guitar riff that suddenly gets replaced with a hard hitting thrash riff that sends your head banging! The song is a great start to the album and sets the mood for what is to come.

RIDE THE LIGHTNING comes instantly with surprising force. The song talks about the criminal justice system and outlines ideas of the death penalty and the electric chair. The song ends with the same intro riff and leaves you wanting more....

For Whom The Bell Tolls is and will probably always be one of the standby Metallica songs. (screw Enter Sandman) It is based off of the Ernest Hemingway novel and explores ideas of modern war. It is probably the most recognized song from the album, but I don't think its the strongest.

Fade To Black  starts with an acoustic riff that gets played over by a beautiful Kirk Hammet solo. The song slowly increases in speed and heaviness throughout. The lyrics outline a man contemplating life and truly wondering if its worth it to move on. Though it is somewhat a power ballad, it will still get you rocking quite hard... believe me.

Trapped Under Ice is song that gets the album back into its thrashier state. It speaks of a person who is in a helpless cryonic state and can only await the doom that will surely come. The song features many rolling drum fills by Lars and is possibly my favorite song 'drum wise' on the album.

Escape is a song that has a bad name with some people but others absolutely love it. Some people say that James was pushed to write a more 'commercial' type metal song, and Escape was the creation. Many reports state that James himself doesn't even like the song. Though James might have a bad look on the song along with many other metal heads that probably do, I, on the other hand have no problem with it. It feels like it fits right in, and if i wouldn't have ever found out the history behind it, i never wouldve guessed anything along those lines. If any song is going to be criticized because of 'commercial success,' go talk about For Whom The Bell Tolls, but whatever.

Creeping Death is equipped with heavy riffs throughout. It is arguably one of the best 'headbanger' Metallica songs ever. The song is completely biblical and talks mainly about the Plague of the Death of the Firstborn. The song refers throughout about the 'Creeping Death' being the force that roves through the land killing firstborn man. It continues to speak about biblical passages by saying "Blood! Lambs blood painted door, I shall pass." A very strong song.

Call of the Ktulu is the instrumental ender. It is an epic song that has clean, dirty, thrashy and heavy riffs throughout. Though it has no lyrics, it feels like the song takes you on a journey like no other.

So after listening to this album I can honestly say there isn't one song that i don't like, there are are a few that i favor more than others, but it is definitely a metal masterpiece.

If you like Metallica, this album is truly a must have.


5 out of 5 stars.

Being a Bathroom Bystander

                Observing WC Millers main floor boys’ bathroom during the fourth period proved what I thought to be true wrong.

 It turns out the bathroom gets used for exactly what it’s supposed to be used for. Most trips by the young gentleman were only about 3 minutes long, and from my observations, it seems like they all made their way back to their classes.

Both days of observations proved that there are regular goers of the fourth period time slot, and that there is always the odd newcomer, but most guys got in and got out in record times.

                The only stragglers that got caught up and had a ten minute bathroom break were currently on a spare class.

                It seems that teachers shouldn't have any worry when their students politely ask for a quick trip to the lavatories. Instead, they should let the boys go with freedom.

                The only major bathroom detour is the odd time when the lady janitor goes in for a quick clean and the young men must choose to head upstairs or downstairs.

                I had always thought that the bathroom was a quick way to skip out on class for a bit and do nothing, I have now learned otherwise.

Bowling

 Actions, Expressions and Emotions.

 Bowling proved to be an interesting topic for photography.

And at the end of the night, they posed on a car that is owned by someone we don't know.

writing

Its funny how lots of writing can get better after time. Whether its song lyrics that become more powerful, or a book that has a meaning that you couldnt see the first time through. Im writing this because I had set a certain piece of writing aside for a long time and came back to it. I found weak and strong areas. I revised a little bit and found that writing often needs a little time to 'ferment' and mix together, so that when you come back to it, you can see a whole new world of possibilities.

currently....

...at work. its 15 degrees celcius on this nice thursday. Having a good time. Almost done my shift. When i get home I will eat and watch That 70's Show. Yes yes. That is all.


 Have a good one

for the metal fans out there

If you like thrash, technical and heavy metal..... Listen to Tourniquet. They are a band that is quite often overlooked or not even heard of. But its unfair, they have just as much skill and hard hitting riffs as all the big metal bands. (their drummer is also phenomenal) They also have an amazing acoustic album titled 'Acoustic Archives.' Some songs to start off with would be: Sola Christus, Acid Head, Pecking Order, Ark of Suffering, Tears of Korah, Melting the Golden Calf, Where Moth and Rust Destroy, Caixa de Raiva, Erratic Palpitations of the Human Spirit, Crank the Knife, and Crawl to China.
After you have familiarized yourself with some of the songs above you will have no problem picking out your favorites and finding albums that best suit your taste in metal.

Happy Listening

Mastodon

So im super psyched on going to see Mastodon tomorrow. The last concert i was at mustve been when i saw The Black Keys.(which i highly recommend) I love concerts, even though my ears take a toll. The energy, the sound and the experience is like nothing else. Now, if you would like to listen to some Mastodon, i would recommend the following songs: The Sparrow, Sleeping Giant, All the Heavy Lifting, The Czar and Aqua Dementia. You'll be hooked on them in no time.

Part of my goal for this blog is to get more people listening to good music..... SO, here are some band recommendations:

Classic Rock:
Pink Floyd
Led Zeppelin
Ten Years After
The Doors
Deep Purple
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Cream
The Eagles
Jimi Hendrix
ZZ Top
Bob Dylan (...kinda....mid career, about 1965 and up. Hes basically too good to be put into categories, he went all over the map with his career, all very good stuff though.)


Folk:
Bob Dylan (Earlier career and some other albums as well,  Ex. John Wesley Harding)
Rodriguez
Neil Young (early stuff)
Oscar Isaac
Woody Guthrie
Ray Stinnet
The Band
Dan Mangan
Scott Helman (folk/pop)

Metal:
Tourniquet
Metallica
Precious Death
Anthrax
Megadeth
Mastodon
Mothership (metal / classic rock / heavy)
P.O.D.


Punk:
The Clash
The Ramones
Early Green Day
Suicidal Tendancies
Black Flag

Doom metal / Heavy Metal:
Black Sabbath
Pentagram
Place of Skulls
Little Free Rock
The Sword

Country:
Johnny Cash
Merle Haggard
Waylon Jennings
Hank Williams
Roy Acuff
George Jones


Indie Folk/Alternative/Hipster stuff:
Foster the People
MGMT
Arcade Fire
Jonathan Rado
Foxygen
Cold War Kids
Langhorne Slim
Neutral Milk Hotel
Tame Impala (psychedelic / classic rock vibes )

This is just a start..... I will continue to update when i can so that all of you readers have good tunes.

Enjoy the listening

Memoir

Somewhere New

                I remember my parents saying that we needed to have a talk after supper. I racked my brain and thought of instances at school that could be possible subjects. I dismissed those thoughts, I hated the thought of getting in trouble. After my mind had calmed down they explained that we were going to try and sell our house and move to Altona, because it would be easier on us as a family. I guess my sister had already been told the news, because she was absent. I shouldn’t have been surprised though, since I was always the last to be told anything. I don’t exactly know why, but I cried. Something in my ignorant young mind had always told me that we would live in that house forever, as one small happy family. That part of my silly childhood imagination was now face to face with reality. I must have had an intense value of that house in my heart, looking back now, I realize I still do.

                We moved away in fall. We had not found a house to buy so we were getting one built instead. In the meantime we rented an old place. The rental house was good and bad. The good part was the secluded upstairs loft where I played video games, the bad part was the awful smell. If you don’t know what mothballs smell like, you’re lucky. It’s nasty. The house reeked of them. Sometimes I wonder if the smell rubbed off on me and my clothes. Maybe for that period in my life I was that one kid at school that always stank in the most peculiar way. Did I become an unhygienic freak? I’ll never know.

                My parents despised the smell more than me and my sister and wanted it gone more than anybody. They thought that making a couple home cooked meals would defeat the smell, but they were wrong. In later weeks my Dad walked around the house in search of mothballs. His indoor and outdoor search ended in a whole ice cream pail full, but still the scent haunted us.

                It was the spring of the next year when we finally moved into our newly built home. I didn’t enjoy the process of moving, but arriving was good. My first memory of that house is that we were all so excited to be there. Even though it was littered with moving boxes and nothing else, it felt right. We ordered a pizza that night since my Mom didn’t want to cook. The one thing I’ll never forget was during our first Christmas there. We were together and my Dad asked,

 “So, does it finally feel like home?”

                I didn’t really understand what he meant.

                “It felt like home the minute we walked in,” I replied

He laughed happily and was glad about my remark. He replied by saying,

                “Well, good thing it doesn’t smell like mothballs right?” 

An Essay

Just One More Try

                I used to be the kind of guy that always wanted one more try. I would do it all the time in almost everything I did. I did it during sports, video games, and drawing etc. When I look back on it, the habit should have ended a lot earlier than it did.

                The moment it should’ve ended was in an accident that I call the ‘Altona Hill Neck Fold Epidemic.’

                I was at the Altona nature pond hill with my friend Bryan when it all went down. We had been snowboarding there for quite some time already and my mom called from the bottom of the hill saying that it was time to go. So, Bryan started his way down the hill.

                I stood up fast interrupting  him and said,                               

                “Hey, just one more try.”

                I turned my board downhill and slid towards the ramp that held the turnout and future of my ‘one more try’ decision. I hit the ramp fast, leapt of the edge. Weightless and helpless I was in the air, my feet to the sky and my body doing an accidental flip. I was considerably terrified.

                I soon came down from the air to land on my neck and have the wind get knocked completely out of myself. I stumbled around in the snow, worrying that my life would end at the tender age of ten. It was at that moment and the moments after that I could’ve realized my ‘one more try’ addiction was too deadly to continue. I realized and concluded nothing. I guess that sometimes a person needs something more obvious than a nearly broken neck to make them rethink their decisions.

                It was the spring of my grade eight year when I learned my lesson. My mom was taking my sister to her baseball game in Morden and she offered to take me to and a friend to the skatepark there. I had soccer practice that day but my commitments to the team were weak so I skipped out easily.

                I brought my friend Brody along with me and we started skateboarding as soon as we got there. We got bored at the skatepark and we went to find street spots. We found a stair set in which I got cheered on by a drunk guy to kickflip it, I did. Feeling happy but also very tired we made the cross town trip back to the skatepark.

                I had been thinking of boardsliding a certain rail at the park but I wasn’t too sure. I already had a bad history with skating rails. The first time I ever tried sliding a rail in my life I landed on my gut and choked for air, and the other famous moment was when I fell forward off of one and knocked half of my front tooth out. These moments were in the back of my mind but I blotted them out and decided to try the trick anyways.

                I tried to boardslide the rail twice and failed. Before I knew it Brody’s undiagnosed A-D-D kicked in and he started saying that we should go watch the end of my sisters baseball game.

                “I’m tired and thirsty man,” he complained

                I tried to avoid his notions.

                “C’mon man,” he exclaimed, “let’s buy some drinks and go home.”

                “Ok, Ok,” I answered, “just one more try.”

                He slowly walked back to his filming position, held up his iPod and gave me the go ahead to attempt the trick. I rode up to the rail rather slow, in my mind I knew I wasn’t going to land the trick but I went for it anyways, not fearing that I would get hurt. When I placed my board on the rail to slide it stuck instantly, I worried for an instant but began to do a routine bail. My right arm went out as instinct to brace my fall, but it instantly felt weird.

                I stood up faster than ever before and held my right arm carefully. I looked down in disbelief and saw my arm had a slight ‘s’ shape near the wrist.

                “Dude, I think I just broke my wrist!” I muttered, panicking.

                “Actually?” he responded

                I no longer had anything to say, my eyes pondered the offset shape of my arm. Sitting down on the grass a stranger came to me,

                “That was a pretty bad fall man.”

                “Uh, yeah, I think I might have broken my wrist.” I explained

                “Yeah, it looks bad.”

                And at that moment after my ears rang loud and caused me to go temporarily deaf. I sat looking at the stranger and Brody speak, not hearing a single word. When my hearing came back I stood up and tried but failed to lift my skateboard with my gimp arm. Things were getting serious and I was scared pale. I knew I had no chance of walking back to the baseball diamonds so we hitched a ride with the strangers’ friend.

                Tom Hamm was his name. I hardly knew him at all but it was a desperate time. He explained to me that I looked very pale and that my wrist was definitely broken. I didn’t want to believe him but every part of me knew he was true. He dropped us off at the diamond and my voice shook as I thanked him.

                I spilled the news to my mom as soon as I saw her. For some absurd reason I thought she would be mad at me. She wasn’t, instead she was quite helpful. She asked a nearby mom who claimed to be a nurse to look at my wrist.

                “Nope, not broken.” Said the Lady

                For the shortest moment I had hope, false hope. My mom drove me and Brody to the hospital and after about two hours of waiting and a couple strange faces I was given the news. Greenstick fracture was the medical term. Broken is the known term. It wasn’t the wrist though, it was just above.

                The doctor mentioned it was the best break that a person could have, I failed to see the enthusiasm in it. Soon the nurses gave me a ghetto cast and sent me home.

                I lay in bed that night confused, angry and sad. It would be over a month until I stepped on a skateboard again. I often wondered what it would’ve been like if I had gone to soccer practice. Was this my punishment for not going? Some sort of karma trip? Or was it just meant to happen, an, everything happens for a reason kind of thing?

                I learned a lot in the following weeks, mostly about people’s inability to say a comforting thing to a kid who broke his arm skateboarding. If I would have broken it from hockey or baseball, people would have related to it and understood. That was not the case. Most people would ask if I was going to quit skateboarding and some even said if I hadn’t quit baseball then it never would’ve happened. What the heck people? Those are basically the worst things to say.

                Finally, after five weeks of being in a cast and a surprise surgery somewhere in the middle, I was free. My arm came out of its cocoon, but much unlike a butterfly, it was not new and beautiful, it was skinny and gross.

                The whole experience taught me a few things; One being that I just shouldn’t skate rails, and two that my ‘One More Try’ addiction should end. That’s not the end of the story though, being a recovering addict from a made up disease isn’t the grand finally. It’s that I learned to take things slower, my addiction always made me live in the moment so much that I would forget about the future possibilities. I wouldn’t take time to think or take it easy, and the cast, it made me do just that. Now I have learned to stop when it is time, and take a simply more relaxed approach on everything I do in life.

                As much as I hated the pain, the cast and the break, I can ultimately be thankful.