Mike Armine = the fucking man

From an old interview from some Metal Odyssey

Mike: Musically, I can only speak from a lyrical standpoint. I can say that my lyrics are taken from my daily interaction with people, judgments that I make, and things that I see. My feelings on these matters come out during practice, get internally processed, then edited, and come out in song. Every lyric has something behind it and some connection to my life. Personally I can say that we are all "glass half empty" kind of guys, and view our environment with our own sense of skepticism, distrust. None of us really interact with our environment because we are uncomfortable in it, and we judge it. So when things are crushing, strange and intense, it's because the judgments we have made of our environment have made their way into our
music. We're people too, and we can't hold onto that type of bitterness--it has to come out somehow, Rosetta is our outlet. At least that's how I see it. That's how I feel when we play: bitter at all I have seen, and I feel overwhelmed at work trying to change it.

http://www.sonicfrontiers.net/php/story-23.html

Greatest fucking song EVERRRRR

Cult of Luna - Somewhere Along the Highway

What the fuck is there to say about this album? My lack of words to express the feelings I experience while listening to this and the love I have for this band BECAUSE they made this album. Its just great.

Here's an excerpt from their wikipedia article to explain a little more about it:

Cult of Luna albums tend to focus on a theme; guitarist Erik Olofsson states in an interview that this release focuses on "Male loneliness – I was very inspired by a book by J.M. Coetzee [Life & Times of Michael K] about a man in South Africa with a hare lip. [The character] escapes from everything and lives off the earth eating only pumpkins. Johannes [Persson] had similar ideas for the lyrics about loneliness, it all has a kind of countryside vibe to it."

ANd the thing about eveything else besides the lyics is that this album stands out in a genre where you can pretty much get away with tremelo picks, predictable crescendos, and screaming vocals. These guys do a lot more than that by truly making songs that feel like they are their own, not some structure their art is adhering to.

Cult of Luna - Somewhere Along the Highway
Mediafire

What sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise....

is in fact... the brilliant music of a genius... myself. And that music is so powerful, that it's quite beyond my control. And, ah... when I'm in the grips of it, I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Have you ever, have you ever felt like that? When you just, when you just, you couldn't feel anything, and you didn't want to either. You know, like that?
-Iggy Pop



The epitome of music lies in the artist's expression. Their getting of a feeling out. There are so many ways to falsify the expression, make it showy, make it pretentious, put too much into certain parts, or just plain old sound dumb. If nothing else, you have to respect metal musicians for the full on projectile approach they have to giving their all to a sound that was once in their head.