"They should have sent a poet"

My brother and I had unusual childhoods. While we were devoted to metal from an early age, we were also pretty nerdy kids. That word, "nerd" is highly overused these days. Everyone is a "nerd" now, but this was back when it meant something. You see, our idea of fun was watching re-runs of Carl Sagan's Cosmos over and over again. If you're not familiar with Cosmos, it was a TV series devoted to astrophysics, exobiology, physics, astronomy, chemistry and science in general...topics that are usually like kryptonite to kids. Sagan was a Ph D in astronomy and astrophysics. He taught at Cornell. Makes me wonder if he ever met or hung out with Alex Perialas while living in Ithica NY. As I've told you before, Alex lives there, and teaches at Ithica college (Cornell's retarded brother).



What a meeting of the minds of minds that would have been! Can you imagine? Sagan would discuss his work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, while Perialas would go on and on about how he recorded the snare drum in Pro-Pain's album, versus his early work with Flotsam and Jetsam. My god...to be a fly on the wall!

But back to Sagan. anyone that knows me well will tell you that if you speak to me about a serious topic for more than ten minutes, I will end up quoting Cosmos sooner than later. I'm not necessarily proud of this, but as always, I try to be honest with our beloved readers. Actually, a few years ago, my brother bought the entire Cosmos series...and we watched the whole thing in one sitting. That's 13 hours in one sitting. Now that you know this about me, it should come as no surprise that from the moment I heard Nocturnus and their pseudo-scientific lyrical content I was hooked. You know that Death song "Cosmic Sea"? I love it.

Time travel? Droids entering? Sign me up!

Why am I telling you all this? Well...because I simply just wanted to. But also because I want to explain the title of this post. It's a line from the movie Contact, which Sagan wrote. In that movie, Jodi Foster's character is chosen from all of humanity to travel aboard a spaceship, so she can get back and tell the whole world what she saw. She travels and sees either outer space, or heaven or something..it's unclear. Whatever it is, she feels she's ill-prepared to describe it to the rest of the world, because of its unbelievable beauty...since she's just a scientist. Her response to seeing such beauty and feeling like she's unable to describe it, as you can probably guess is:

"They should have sent a poet."

Sometimes, I see great metal-related clips or pictures online...and I am just as humbled as Foster's character was in the movie Contact. I too, wish they would have sent a poet, since I am unable to describe such beauty to all of you. If you feel I oversold this clip...so be it. Enjoy.



If you want even more, check out the remix.





*Closing note: Credit goes to comedian Artie Lange, from the Howard Stern show. He reminded me of this quote, when he dropped it during the show, as he watched ex-Death and Iced Earth drummer Richard Christy get his balls and asshole waxed.

Cock-smashing brutality: The best death metal song intros

When I'm not thinking of ways to meet Lauren Conrad or the girls from 90210, I enjoy studying the intricacies of death metal songwriting. The best songs aren't just a bunch of mindless double bass and monotonous blast beats, they're finely crafted opuses that are painstakingly assembled riff by slamming riff, like a brutal ship-in-a-bottle. Perhaps the most important part of such a masterpiece is the intro, and with that in mind, I present several of our favorites...



Cannibal Corpse - Hammer Smashed Face
When we're talking about the best death metal intros of all time, you would be out of your hammer-smashed skull not to put this song at the top of the list. Cannibal Corpse is, without a doubt, one of the most generic, dullest death metal bands, yet this song is the perfect marriage of catchy hooks and cock-smashing brutality! I'll be honest, it's been a long time since I paid much attention to them, but what fucking happened?! Chris Barnes is writing song after ass-rapingly awful song about pot, wearing Jncos and Star Trek shirts, and Corpsegrinder would rather be playing WoW... I mean, I understand that as people get older they lose touch with the trends, and that's fine... but christ, these guys take irrelevant fossils to a whole new level. If there is a god, Chris Barnes will get hit by a meteor and spare the worl of another Six Feet Under performance.



Suffocation - Human Waste
As soon as the song starts, you hear the Hellraiser sample, and you're all "Oh shit, son, this is spooky as fuck... What's coming next?!" The hair on your arms stands up, because you know the song is going to be some super brutal brutality, and it doesn't disappoint!! The intro riff on this song is without a doubt the sickest thing ever recorded at the time, considering that this song is from their 1990 demo (I didn't hear it until 92 or whatever, though, on "Corporate Death"). The rest of the song is pretty slammin' too, but the first minute or so is really what will knock your dick in the dirt with pit riffment. Every time I hear this song, I put on a Trump Plaza shirt and some sweat pants and jump around my room pretending I'm Frank Mullen.



Obituary - The End Complete
Before wigger slam existed, I listened to Obituary when I needed a dose of groove in my death metal. Obituary are a great band because they always emphasized good songwriting over speed or brutality for their own sake, and this is a great example. Aside from having an awesome intro, it also has a super sweet outro- it starts AND finishes strong, like good porn. I am pretty sure I've posted about this video before, but the best part is Alan West's Rollins Band and Red Hot Chili Peppers shirts. There's nothing funnier than when fans are disappointed by how un-brutal a band is, like when you see Glen Benton taking out the trash or whatever. But that sort of thing is Lucho Metales' speciality, so I'll leave it to him to go into more detail.



Devourment - Babykiller
If there is such a thing as a flagship single for wigger slam, it is definitely this song- especially the original version on 1.3.8. The sorely-missed Wayne Knupp's incredible vocal performance started a whole generation of cricket vocals, and it all started with the cock-smashingly brutal intro to this awesome song. It's nearly 5 minutes long, but I can listen to it the whole way through anytime it comes on my iPod. This song showed the death metal world that traditional musical concepts like melody, dynamics, structure, and lyrics were outdated assumptions, that the only thing that really matters is pit riffment. If you think about it, it was very avant garde and postmodern! Hopefully some grad school egghead will write a paper about this song called something like "Operationalizing pit riffment: Contradictions and paradoxes in Texas slam metal."

More marriages of awesome hooks and cock-smashing brutality?
As always, please tell us what we missed. There aren't a ton of great death metal intros on the level of these, but surely the list is longer that this post.