New Release: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart

Yay, indie pop. Any group of bands that willfully accepts the placement of the label "twee" on their genre has no right to complain if no one ever listens to them. Especially if they suck like this band.

New Release: Muse - The Resistance

Muse is just plain awesome. I loved 2006's Black Holes And Revelations, so I was a little psyched about the new album. The band refuses to disappoint.

New Release: Gnaw Their Tongues - All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity

Originally posted 9/15/09

I saw this album on a new release list; having never heard of the band, I thought I'd give it a shot. Turned out to be noise metal. That would have discouraged me from even trying it if I'd known beforehand. But it wasn't all bad...

New Release: Ensiferum - From Afar

Finnish metalists Ensiferum released their first album in 2001, and I hadn't heard of them until their 4th album was released just 2 days ago. Upon reading up a little, I discovered that they are considered to be "folk metal" or "viking metal," fusion metal genres I've only recently obtained more familiarity with than the simple knowledge of their existence. It sounded interesting, but I was merely expecting something similar to Amon Amarth or other bands of the genre. Not exactly so...

Future reviews...

I think my second review should be for a new album, to get into the habit early.  For a while, the concentration is going to be heavier on the Retro side, since I have a large backlog to work with.  Eventually, I'd like most of my reviews to be current or new releases, with maybe 1/4-1/3 being Retro Reviews.  I'll see how it goes.  It depends mostly on what I enjoy writing more, and partly on what people enjoy reading more (assuming I acquire an audience of some kind).

This morning I checked out a new album from a band I've not heard of before.  I was impressed by it, and decided that will be the review that goes up next.  Others will follow closely.

Retro Review: Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral

I have a very difficult time beginning to write about something so important to me. I think that's why I chose to review this one first--not because it's almost definitely my favorite album of all time, but because it will be the hardest one to write about.

Quick tip

I've been busy tweaking the look of the page, and needed to change some images to fit the new dimensions of the divs. In looking for a way to host the theme images, I ran across this post. The method involves saving the images you need in a draft post and copying the location to paste into your theme's CSS.

Great tip. Thanks, kranthi!

A (relatively) condensed bio

First things first. SaurianOverlord was a handle I adopted for chat rooms years ago. If you talked to someone online by that name between 1999-2005ish, it was probably me. The origin of the name is a story for another time. (I found out much later that it was apparently the name of a character on the short-lived Disney cartoon based on The Mighty Ducks; that has absolutely nothing to do with it.) These days, I usually just go by Saurian, or some variation thereof (Saurian3 on some forums, for example). Now that that's out of the way...

...and so it begins

Well, I finally did it. I created a blog. I wasn't sure I'd ever commit to an autonomous blog on a particular subject; I've had blog-like pages on my web sites, a LiveJournal (for about 2 months), etc., but I was never willing to focus on one subject to dedicate a blog to.

That's still pretty much the case. While I plan to use this blog primarily for yacking about music, there will be the occasional post about a video game, TV show, or movie that's outstanding in some way, as well as other general musings. It's really all experimental at this point; as much as possible, however, I'm going to stick to reviewing music albums.