My corruption would have been improved by cream cheese.

Every now and again, I encounter heavy metal, like some of what I hear, plead ignorance, and then forget all about it until the next encounter. However, in the wake of last month’s James Durbin show, metalladon and BellaRog came through with many lively and varied examples of metal, both classic and modern.

And after the concentration of Wordy Young Men With Guitars, late in the 50 States project, I was ready to bang some heads. At the very least, my education in metal — and this is going to be more about my reactions than about metal qua metal, as I’m still a newbie — is good for some eye-rolling and a pat on the head from the true afficionados.

This adventure required a particularly intense and edgy sweet roll, which I invented for the occasion. It includes chocolate, rye flour, and ancho chili pepper. It will grow hair on your chest, then kick you into next week for a barber’s appointment. Since the filling is too dark to show clearly against the dough, it’s logical to begin with the song that started the conversation: Ronnie James Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark.”

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Roughly once a year, I get a yen to have my ear drums smashed with live metal, or at least rock so hard you can take it for granite. This explains my enthusiastic, if ill-informed, presence at the Monster Energy Outbreak show back in February 2011 (here), and it also explains why I hied myself to Martini Ranch on Saturday night to see James Durbin (official site) with an opener of local band Kill the Lights (official site). At least, that’s my official explanation, and there will be a quiz.

Question 1. While waiting for the opener, Durbin fans were most willing to discuss:
a.  His new hair color.
b.  His pants.
c.  His anti-bullying work.
d.  How American Idol shortchanges  contestants by trying to pretend they’re just random people with a dream, when Durbin had a band and was playing dinky clubs and writing his own music and all that.

Answer: d. Give me another 10 minutes, and I could have organized the crowd into marching on Idol producer Nigel Lythgoe’s offices, chanting in unison and waving their fists. Put the shaven-head dude with the Queensrÿche tattoo up front, and Lythgoe would have wet himself. Read the rest of this entry »

Bread. In a can.

You probably want to know why the slices of my canned bread are not perfectly round. We’ll get to that. You may figure it out earlier in the cooking process than I did.

Reaching Massachusetts in the 50 states / 50 dishes / 50 bands project called for Boston brown bread (Epicurious recipe), which is traditionally steamed in a can. It also called for a different approach to the accompanying music, as Boston’s huge music scene was distracting me from my goal of pleasing obscurity. So I went to The Deli Magazine’s list of the 300 most popular bands in Boston at this moment and decided to include one song from each of the top three bands. That starts us off with electropop band Passion Pit (official site). Read the rest of this entry »

Whitesnake has been on my mind, a state of being that called for white pizza. There’s no snake on the pizza, as if there were, everybody would just claim it tastes like chicken, so it seemed simpler to use chicken in the first place.

Also, there was chicken in the freezer, while I have not yet quite evolved to being the sort of Arizonan who runs around the yard killing snakes with a hoe.

Whitesnake should properly be on one’s mind at least occasionally, as VH-1 named it the 85th greatest hard rock band of all time, a factoid that should make us grateful for the existence of music geeks who can take care of determining the fine distinctions between #83 (King’s X) and #86 (Foreigner). People who know me well will grasp that I’m not snarking: without music geekery, it’d be much tougher to figure out any larger patterns beyond one’s own preferences. Also, the band has a new album this year, Forevermore, which reputedly had bigger presales than Britney Spears’ latest oeuvre.

So are we ready to caramelize an onion?

Damn, that sounded dirty.

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An Irish bar on Independence Day is almost certainly wrong, but I justify it under the reasoning that the Irish historically aren’t that fond of England either, so it’s not like they’d collectively be horrified at the idea of declaring independence from it.

Also, Rosie McCaffrey’s is the Irish bar that has a few art pieces devoted to Irish radicals on the wall toward the back, so the proprietors presumably are really not opposed to hostility toward England.

Before anybody gets excited about Rosie McCaffrey’s proud claim to be Celtics supporters, let us take a long, hard look at the fact that the team shirts have sleeves and are striped, which suggests these Celtics are not a basketball team based in Boston but a Scottish Premier League football team based in… Glasgow?

I’m not going to ask why an Irish bar supports Scottish football, as the answer might require me to eat Scottish food, which is fine if we’re talking shortbread but not so fine when we’re talking sweetbreads and sheep’s stomachs. Let’s just declare Glasgow to be part of Ireland and move along to important things like fish-and-chips. Rosie’s is supposed to have the best fish-and-chips in Arizona. Given that our native form of water is called “suburban swimming pools,” any claims about fish may be dubious, but let’s get in the swim of things. Read the rest of this entry »

Saturday afternoon when one’s immersed in small containers of acrylic paint is an excellent time for comfort food.

Saturday afternoon when one’s neighbors insist on belting easy-listening hits of the 1970s with just enough syncopation (or forgotten lyrics) that one starts to relax, only to be blindsided by the lesser works of Diane Warren, calls for heavy metal.

And I don’t even like heavy metal. I also don’t much go for the big-band stylings of Frank Sinatra. So when AOL Music announced a listening party for Sin-Atra, the tribute album in which heavy metal heavy-hitters howl themselves blue in the face over Ol’ Blue Eyes’ repertoire… it was kismet. (listen). It’s just the thing to accompany chilaquiles. Read the rest of this entry »

I have spent the evening immersed in alternative metal, which I guess means I’m molten, but my resulting coating is one of those obscure metals like manganese, where nobody’s entirely sure what it is, but every now and again, pundits get their knickers in a twist over it.

“Not sure what it is” encapsulates my experience tonight. I think of the metal genre as consisting of testosterone-frenzied dudes banging on things and roaring. It turns out to be not quite that simple.

By now the logo has tipped you off that I must have been at the opening gig for the Monster Energy Outbreak Tour, featuring Aranda, Black Cloud Collective, Pop Evil, Hail the Villain (which did not play), and Rev Theory. Although free cans of the sponsoring energy drink were being distributed in the parking lot, I did not partake, as it’s a lay-up that if it’s neon green, liquid, and does not involve rum, I’m not its target market. Put on a nice black t-shirt, yell “Fuck yeah!”, and let’s take a listen to some bands. (Yelling “Fuck yeah!” at regular intervals will prove mandatory, to the point that one of the bands actually uses that as a song title.) Read the rest of this entry »

Chilly autumn days in the high 80s brought a yen for the rich, earthy flavors of mushroom pasta.

A concept as 1980s as fancy mushrooms calls for a 1980s band, so let’s revive Living Colour (listen — or don’t, as there will be vids), not least because if one chooses the wrong mushrooms, things can get colorful. To my astonishment, Living Colour is touring — as part of a Jimi Hendrix tribute.

Equally important, whenever I cook something with nuts, I end up invoking metal, and Living Colour is classified as funk metal. Or metal funk. But not fetal munk. Really. The band is also ranked #70 on VH1′s Greatest Artists of Hard Rock. Let’s start with the song that I heard played most, though apparently my local radio station was weird. Read the rest of this entry »

If the Pilgrims had landed in the Gulf of California, they’d have eaten these tacos.

The combination of Jackass3D mentions in my Twitter timeline and Elle‘s 12 Greatest Female Electric Guitarists had reminded me of Ruyter Suys of Nashville Pussy (listen if you dare), but this band is Not Safe For Work, not safe for small children, not safe for anyone on heart medication, and basically… it is not the country version of Josie and the Pussycats. Nor are the songs about kitties, chickens, and bunnies.

So in the interests of heavy metal incongruity, I’m going to instead run with The Great Kat, a Juillard-trained violinist who finds her art in doing heavy metal covers of classical music. Be brave, get past the jump, and we’ll have… Read the rest of this entry »

This is the corn muffin that roared.

I’d started to write about a more complicated recipe with a different band (both of which will happen in the near future), but some days, one just needs to make loud banging noises. That kind of day calls for metal, which seems like the occasion for local Arizona band Eyes Set to Kill (listen), now touring the west and southwest to support its new album, Broken Frames.

With metal, I’m good for about two-and-a-half songs, which is a nice timeframe for whipping up a quick and spicy muffin. Read the rest of this entry »

My discovery in embarking on Normal American Cooking is that we possess a hefty culinary heritage. And I mean that literally. I’d promised Curious_JG that macaroni-and-cheese was a must-do… before I looked at the recipes.

In keeping with the theme of classic American bands, today’s entry is Queensrÿche. Note the umlaut. I’ve wondered if it would be appropriate to use “my little umlaut” as an endearment. Read the rest of this entry »

Does eating chicken from a rooster-patterned plate count as cannibalism?

As part of my week of cooking Normal American Food, I’d committed (with trepidation) to khatoun‘s suggestion of fried chicken. The mere thought of deep-frying makes every fat molecule in my body want to blimp out, so a musical theme of Led Zeppelin (brought to my notice by the day’s Twitter trends) seems to fit. When I went looking for music–once again relying on The Covers Project for covers, though I’m not sure why I’m doing covers this week–I realized I had no idea what this band was. None. Its heyday was before I was ready to rock and roll. Read the rest of this entry »

These are heavy metal biscuits.

Note the irony of eating them on a flowered plate. That’s like finding out a source one appreciates for metal savvy listens to the Dave Matthews Band. Piquant.

My original pick for a metal band turned out to be punk (the punks!) which led me to research whether there is metal-punk fusion.

Answer: yes. There are half a dozen varieties, and the one I could not resist calls itself mathcore. A name like “mathcore” is an invitation to geek out (“le geek, c’est chic!”), so let’s prepare to begin to get started by queuing up Behold… the Arctopus. Presumably an arctopus is what you get when you draw cephalopods by the vector method.
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