"Cause we are the last disease"

I was listening to The Black Parade whilst studying today. Seriously, I was. Humming the words to dead and tapping my feet to that driving rhythm in The sharpest lives all the while memorizing functional groups and teaching myself about galvanic cells. I was thinking that perhaps it is my favourite album of all time.

My Chemical romance is probably not my favourite band, even though a lot of my friends will claim otherwise. I don't think I can possibly have a favourite band, my music tastes are too widely spread for something like that.

But favourite album... Fast songs deep songs, slow songs, fun songs... Creepy songs, mama.  Gerard Way's voice, Frank Iero's guitar... The story, the tightness... It's an amazing album, it really is.

And so I decided to have a look at the band's web page and see if anything new was on its way, and it was. In a sense.

Frank had done a Disney theme tune and Mikey Way is promoting his signature Squier but it's Gerard I really want to talk about.

He has a new song out with Deadmau5 called professional Griefers and it is intense. It's classic dubstep with Gerard's voice belting over the top and dare I say that it is much much better than most of the stuff on Danger Days.

It's about lawlessness and social degration and all the horrible things that plague our modern pop culture. It's a dirty, sweaty, lapdance-joyride through hell and I love it. You have to watch the music video though. It's not the same without that. The video is based around a robotic fight between Gerard and Deadmau5 and all the chaos that ensues. It contains scenes of people watching the fight losing control and this cat that moves around like the plague. When I was watching it I wanted to go out and hit something. I think that says a lot. It's well put together, slick, professional, dirty. An MCR fan I was speaking to said she hated it but I know that's because she dislikes dubstep. Open your mind before you watch it, it's quite a ride.

Less buttons, more strings!

The last pop song I remember liking is Schitzo by Iscream and the chocolate stix. It is named after a personality disorder because it has a personality disorder: It is hip hop, pop and rock with a thumping base line (thumping; this means it was created by a guitar, not a computer). It has a dubstep breakdown and a guitar solo at the same time. I like that a lot. So I heard the song a few times before I stopped listening to the radio altogether - I live on mp3s nowadays, South African radio just doesn't tickle my fancy anymore.

So when I heard these guys were playing at my favourite club, Live, I just had to go and see, because I think they're onto something.

And they are. They have a face man called chocolate stix - brilliant stage nad offstage personality and an good rapper. They have another rapper too: Iscream (now the name makes sense). He's a fairly ratty-looking stoner who bounces off his partner quite well. I think he's the talent from the way he explained all their songs. There's also a guitarist, a bassist and a guy with a mac, because acapella just doesn't cut it in the world of pop.

So yes, they're onto something: they've discovered that the future of music lies not just in strings or in computer-generated noise but rather in the bringing together of these two things. They've discovered balance, but they're still standing two far left on the scale.

They have too much Macbook in too many of their songs. They have a fantastic guitarist and a brilliant bass player and they need to make use of them more often; they need to get schitzo. I think if they bear this in mind while completing the face of a rolling stone it could be their best song. They played an acoustic snippet of that song and it sounded amazing. It sounded amazing because when you rap over a guitar you're being different and different is how you succeed nowadays.

What I'm really saying is that they make very good dance music, very good pop, but they have the means to make so much more than that, they really do. They have the ability to bring about a change in music either by being the band that changes things or by inspiring that band, because in a world where someone has already thought of everything, the best ideas are found in the blender.

Todays post has no title

As it is the first post in a while, it shall be nameless. Well not really nameless as its name is a declaration of no name but in spirit and theory it is pretty nameless. I also redesigned the blog as people - person: I think Weakley is the only reader here - may have noticed.

So, yeah. I'm listening to Panic at the Disco right now, they're very good on account of being extremely original, which is the only way to be good at anything nowadays: You have to be noticed.

You could be the most amazing accurate guitarist in the world but if your Solos are nothing new you will still somehow fall into mediocrity and although this may be sad for you, I think it is probably a good thing - Doesn't Darwin’s theory of evolution state that for evolution to occur you need to have variation?

It does, I checked. You need Variation, competition, mutations (i.e. mistakes) and random mating. The music industry is much the same: for a genre to grow and evolve it needs to be different (have variation), ideas are developed through mistakes and such (mutations), it needs competition for the best bands to emerge and we'll leave the random mating up to the groupies as I don't feel like making a profound allusion on that regard.

We're currently witnessing the formation of a very strange genre of music I think; it's this currently unnamed electronic stuff that uses both acoustic and electronic instruments, this beautiful Frankenstein’s monster of sound that emerges in the form of Awolnation   and  Vampire weekend (from which my blog's name stems). If done properly this sort of alternative stuff can work very well. The prospects are good.

I was a steampunk yesterday, it was a lot of fun.

What do you want from me?

I was on what used to be 9gag today but has now just become a wasteland of barely entertaining pictures. Seriously the humour of "Gaggers" has dropped substancially, it seems to have become a hotbed of insecurity and lust. Also every second post is about the avengers or Diablo 3. I am, however, going off on a tangent and missing the point of this post.

The point of this post is to alert your attention to this picture I found there; the only worthwhile picture on the once-hot page today. Voila!

I'm a huge Pink floyd fan, in fact the Division Bell is playing as I type. I wish I had lived in their era, that I could've seen one of those amazing performances but alas I have only Mp3s and Videos to show me their brilliance. There are other bands, current bands. I love Rise against and I think a My Chemical Romance show would be a massive treat. One day my feet will bring me to the gates of one of these but untill then I'll have to keep playing my CDs and my DVDs
Goodbye cruel world, there's nothing I can say.
Goodbye, Goodbye
Goodbye