It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible


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Stars on 45

I have a strange fondness for extreme metal cover versions of popular songs. Sometimes they work really well; sometimes, you wonder what the cover artist was thinking when they recorded the song.

Here’s one I like: it’s Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir‘ by a Czech band called Silent Stream of Godless Elegy. They play doom metal influenced by Moravian folk music and deserve a wider audience.

Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger‘ by Withering, on the other hand, is not so good. A rock anthem with growl vocals just sounds, well, silly. I should point out that Withering, a death/doom metal band from Finland, are actually pretty good. They’re not unlike Insomnium, a favourite band of mine. (I’ve seen Insomnium live twice, and they were excellent on both occasions.)


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Kul Wahad!

English can be a wonderfully expressive language. But sometimes you wish your first language were some other tongue… Like Arabic – which has the word khadhuf, meaning “a she-ass… so fat that, if a pebble is thrown at her with the fingers, or the two fore fingers, or with the extremity of the thumb and that of the forefinger, it sinks into her fat” (at least it does according to The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, edited by Robert Irwin).