Died Before K. ( dbk )

When I was but a small kid a radio was almost always playing in my house. And, of course, there was music. Mostly easy listening, commercial music. I always found it hard to understand how almost no one could come up with things that weren’t cheesy songs about love and all the shit associated with it.

Time passed, I grew up and started listening to music you don’t usually hear on the radio. Now THERE were some people who knew how to find something else to talk about. If I turn on the radio today I find the same lack of inspiration and overdose of superficiality I noticed back when I was a kid; I also greet these with the same “WTF?!” sensation.

So I decided to shove the solution right into the love poets’ faces and make a list of good, bullshit-free songs that address this feeling.

The list is surely not complete, but I’ll keep adding. Also, there will be a sepparate list for good songs that are still a bit cheesy.

Here goes:

KMFDM – A Hole In The Wall – Mildly sexual. Deadly as far as expressing feelings goes.

My Dying Bride – Base Level Erotica – Highly sexual, but not airheaded.

Ladytron – Another Breakfast With You – Very delicate, simple and expressive.

Ladytron – The Way That I Found You – Same as above.

Devin Townsend – Deadhead – Picked a special version. Yes, the Ugliest Man In Metal (TM) has positive feelings. And is pretty good at expressing them, because I really can’t count many things nicer to say than “You are a sun goddess”. Oh yeah and it’s such a good prog tune.

Devin Townsend – Slow Me Down – Stupidly simple. Mellow. High-school-ish. Again, simple. Sincere. Also, happy metal .

Cop Shoot Cop – Room 429 – “Don’t look to the ocean, restless in its dreaming / Don’t look to the heavens for they will tell you nothing” – I prefer to let the song and video speak. Also check out the Strapping Young Lad cover for this.

Nevermore – Dreaming Neon Black – Depressive and heavy, like the entire album. Also, note “Dreaming Neon Black” and “swim through me” as interesting.

Devin Townsend – The Fluke – As good as his hate songs are I have to mention Devin Townsend’s work again.

[to be continued...]

Post in engleză, pentru utilitate.

My employer gave me a nice HP 530 notebook some time ago. It’s a budget machine and a very good one actually. I cheerfully installed Windows XP and Kubuntu 7.10 but discovered a very annoying problem: when I plugged in my headphones sound would play trough both the headphones and the internal speaker when using Kubuntu (in Windows everything was fine).

After scouting a bit for a solution I found that all I had to do was add the line options snd-hda-intel model=laptop to my /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file. I did a reboot to make sure the new settings are applied and now it works perfectly. So now I can listen to Strapping Young Lad at work without ruining my coworkers’ day .

I’ve also seen other solutions for this and I’m not sure for what models this thing works, hopefully this will help solve the problem for at least some of you.