...and wade through toxic clouds"

Oh man, got the new Muse album 'The Resistance' the other week. It's friking brilliant. So different from the last album. It's quite electronic based as opposed to 'Black Holes and Revelations' which had a sort of Spanish tone to it. Standout tracks for me so far would be 'Uprising', 'Undisclosed Desires', 'Unnatural Selection' and the first part of the 'Exogenesis' symphony. Truly epic. The rest are growing on me pretty quickly also. God I'm getting tickets as soon as it's stated that they're coming here.

In other news (lol) I stretched my left ear to 8mm this morning. Holy f*** did it hurt. So much more than 4mm. It's still aching now even. It looks pretty good though. It's a black taper around and inch and a half long. I'll leave it as an 8 for a while I think. I'll go onto a 10 once my right ear has been stretched. Which might be a while cause it was only pierced about 4 weeks ago.

My band has made some awesome progress. We're sounding really good now and our batch of covers is coming together nicely. We've resolved most of our timing issues and even started a new cover today. 'Bohemian Like You' by the Dandy Warhols. It's like the easiest song ever but it sounds real good. Basically pulled it off in one jam session today. Epic. We even had an audience. My mum and sister and a couple of my friends came round to watch. Hope you guys enjoyed the show. We'll be even better next time -_^ Can't wait for next Sunday now, haha.

End transmission.

Title of this journal is from 'Exogenesis part II: Cross Pollination' from the new Muse album, 'The Resistance'.

Buy it.

Now.

....your wet paint into the Mona Lisa"

Hmm, what to say. I'm basically only writing a new journal cause I'm sick of the old one, haha. Ah, thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday. It was much appreciated ^^ I had a great birthday. Well, the day itself wasn't that great. I had to work (it was a tuesday) and my workmates forgot it was my birthday but bleh, it's not so bad, everybody else remembered. Anyhow, I had a shindig on the weekend following the tuesday which was rather fun. Hadn't drunk anything for ages so it was nice to break out the alcohols and all. The next night I went to a dinner with the family which was just as good. It was an all you can eat thing. Can't go wrong with all you can eat, that's for sure -_^ All in all it was an epic weekend. *sigh* back to reality now......but I'm sure a bourbon would fix that.

On another note, the band is almost at the stage of putting singing with our songs. I've gone through 'The Red' on my own and can pull off the entire song playing and singing at the same time. It's not as difficult as I first thought. Hopefully this weekend we can do the song in it's entirety, including lyrics. Fun on a bun. We have another song lined up to cover too, 'The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret' by Queens of the Stone Age. These guys are brilliant. They're all I've been listening to lately. Bought all their albums (at least the ones I can find. Their first album is hard to come by but I think it's being re-released sometime later this year, I'll pick it up then) and each one is entirely different from the last and they're all brilliant. I don't understand how I didn't find these guys sooner -_- Hopefully we can pull this cover off.
Epic.

Oh and found out last week that the original cast from Futurama will be coming back for the 6th season. Woohoo! Originally I'd heard that the entire cast was being replaced cause Fox couldn't pay them enough. Luckily all was resolved and they're coming back. My prayers to the Robot Devil have been answered ^^

Song in the title for this journal is 'Martini' from the album 'Monuments and Melodies' by Incubus ^^

.....No more perpetual innocence.
With words we make shapes
And our angles can align'

Okay, I've had 'Monuments and Melodies' for almost a week now and have listened to it basically twice every night. Wow. It is breathtaking. Especially the rarities disc. Not just that but the two new songs on disc 1 are great too. Yep, that's right, 'Black Heart Inertia' is growing on me too, lol.

Anyhoo, here's my thoughts on the new songs:

'Black Heart Inertia'
- Originally thought this song wasn't overly great. But after getting the album, it started to grow on me. I'm still not the biggest fan of the Chorus, but the versus are ace and the bassline is awesome. Especially near the end. The solo is pretty impressive aswell.

'Midnight Swim'
- This was the other newly recorded song. Upon first listen I was kind of disappointed, but everytime I listen it gets better. The bridge part is epic and then when it repeats at the end it's even better. It's like a wall of sound. I noticed it has a similarity in song structure as some of Ben Kenney's solo stuff, which is pretty cool cause his stuff is great. Jose's drumming in this one is an epic win also.

'While All the Vultures Feed'
- Totally. Awesome. This track is my favourite of all the new ones. The verses are brilliant, the guitar and the bassline are ace. The breakdown after each verse is awesome too, reminds me of a Muse bassline, but without distortion or a fuzzbox effect. This has got to be one of the best Incubus songs ever. How this missed an album is beyond me, lol.

'Anything'
- A Morning View track that didn't make it. I wasn't overly impressed to begin with but now I dig it alot. The rawness of the sound is great. It's easy to tell it's from Morning View but it seems to be less 'glossed' than what appeared on the album. You can actually hear things like the guitar vibrating through the snare drum, it's rather trippy. Very cool track. Get's better each time I listen.

'Martini'
- This is one of my favourites. It has a 'Zee Deevel' type quality about it which frikken rocks. The way Brandon Boyd sings in the verses sort of reminds me of Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20. Then there's the solo, it has a huge similarity to the solo from 'Rogues' which was one of my favourites from Light Grenades so when I heard the 'Martini' solo I almost peed myself (well...not really but I was close to almost). Epic. This should have been on Light Grenades...

'Let's Go Crazy'
- This one is a cover of the Prince song. Took a while to grow on me though. Incubus does an awesome job at it. I'm not a fan of the spoken part at the start but the song itself is pretty fun. Then again, Prince's version was too. Mike does an awesome job on the solo in this. I'd say this would be pretty fun to see live ^^

All I can say is that I'm looking forward to 2010 when hopefully they release their next full album. They are brilliant and I can't wait to go see them live again too ^^


Lyrics used in the title of this journal are from the song 'While All the Vultures Feed' from Incubus Greatest Hits album, 'Monuments and Melodies'.

....I should really be more wary of the water'


Wary indeed.....not of water though. Maybe electricity.
My bathroom light literally blew up about 15 minutes ago. What the hell. I flipped it on. Looked up and BOOM! It blew up! Random. Anyhoo, that's not the worst of it.......it knocked out the rest of the lights in the house. Luckily it only knocked out the lights and not all the power but man I was creeped out that the thing was going to burst into flames.....it smelt so bad after it happen. You know, that electrical fire type smell. Scary stuff. Not to mention it gave me the biggest fright of my life. From now on the bathroom window stays open when I'm home so that NO dampness stays inside (I'm gathering that's the reason it happened). Can't have a repeat scenario of what happened here tonight, lol. I'll ring the landlady tomorrow about it. Hopefully it can be fixed quickly. I feel like a cave dweller or something, haha!

PS: My heart is still going at frikking 100 miles an hour and it happened almost half an hour ago, lol.

Anyhoo, on a good note, my favourite band Incubus is bringing out a greatest hits album on the 16th of June titled 'Monuments and Melodies'. I'm psyched. Usually I don't care for greatest hits or best of CDs. But in this case, the album has two new songs, 'Black Heart Inertia' (Heard it and it's not bad. Sort of So-so although it has a great bassline and a cool bridge) and 'Midnight Swim' (Heard a 30 second snippet and man it sounds epic!). On top of that the album has a bonus rarities disc (which I'm looking forward to the most) with a bunch of B-sides and unreleased material on it. Not to mention the CD will allow you to access an eclusive 'vault' on their website to get even more awesome stuff. Two weeks to go!! June is going to be a good month ^^

PPS: Obviously the title of this journal is an Incubus song. 'Beware! Criminal' from the album 'A Crow Left of the Murder'

Peace out Napoleon.

'... it's a fountain of youth and a patriot's weapon of choice!'

Wow, it's been a while since I wrote a journal.
Let's see.

My sister came to stay with me last week, which was cool. The main reason for coming was to look for a job in little ol' Napier. It was pretty good to have someone to yak to when I got home from work. Hopefully she can get a job at Hells..... might get free pizza, lol ^^

It was one of my best friends birthday today. Happy Birthday Lorilei. Hope you had a good one ^_________^ Me and JD went halves and bought her a bass amp and blue Cort Action bass guitar. Which leads me to the next thing I wanted to say......

The band is back! Yep, new name, new line up (well, basically the same line up with one less, lol) and a new jam room. The jam room is now in the lounge of your's trully. Cool thing is, there's still plenty of room for it to stay a lounge. The drums took up less space then I thought they would. We have a few new songs we're going to cover too. The most difficult being 'Hysteria' by Muse. It's a tough song mainly cause of the speed but I'm sure we can pull it off. Oh, by the way, the name of our band is FazeOut.

I'm still working through my Rita comic. The goal is to get the first volume done before the end of the year (seems a long time but I'm sure it'll go pretty quick unfortunatly). At present I'm going back through my old pages and reworking some pictures, then I'll continue from where I left off. Wish me luck ^^ I might post a couple of the new pages at some point so watch this space!

Adios!

PS: Title is from 'istola' from the album 'A Crow Left of the Murder' by Incubus.