January Roundup

I forgot to chronicle my music purchases for January so I'll fix that in February. From Robotic Empire's distro arrived the last full length album from Raccoo-oo-oon. Sad news for me as they've become one of my favorite bands in the past year. Also arriving was Nachmystium's vinly-only release Eulogy IV. It's not as good as they album they released in 2008 but it's still some of the better black metal I've heard.

From All That's Heavy were some fantastic albums. Luckily for me Burning Saviour's debut album has been reissued after missing out on it and then not being able to find a copy elsewhere. I finally was able to pick up Ogre's new album which is an epic 35+ minute track of classic rock inspired traditional doom metal. Some new material from Los Natas has made it's way to a 10" split with side project Solodolor in a nicely done vinyl package. Elektrohasch has reissued Los Natas' epic second album on vinyl as well, 'Cuidad de Brahman'. It's one of my favorite albums of the genre so I had to have it on wax. For a freebie I picked up Abdullah's self-titled album after hearing that they were calling it quits.

On the 7" club front I received the last from Volcom Entertainments 2008 vinyl series, a split between Valient Thorr and HR. Sub Pop's latest in their 3.0 series were two new tracks from Finland's Circle.

November Update

A few orders and a trip to the record store resulted in the following additions to the collection:

Blood Of The Black Owl - A Feral Spirit
Hammers Of Misfortune - Fields/Church Of Broken Glass
Earthless - Live At Roadburn
Mogwai - The Hawk Is Howling
Hush Arbors - Hush Arbors
Nachtmystium - Assassins: Black Meddle Part 1
Asva - What You Don't Know Is Frontier
Religious Knives - The Door
Omar Rodriguez Lopez Quartet - The Apocalypse Inside Of An Orange
Giant Brain - Plume
Dozer - Beyond Colossal
Grails - Doomdayer's Holiday
Serpent Throne - The Battle Of Old Crow
Black Mountain - Lucy Brown 7" (latest in the Sub Pop Singles Club)

In gear related news, the VT Bass pedal I had on back order has finally arrived, good as advertised. I also added Electro-Harmonix's Micro POG to my board. I finished my Woolly Mammoth clone, which is currently on my board, bringing a total of three fuzz pedals to my current pedal board. The Tonebender clone has been built on my breadbaord but I haven't made a decision about it yet. I changed out some of the caps with larger values in hope of getting better low end retention for bass, but I didn't get as good of result that I was hoping for. So I need to find a better way to increase bass response, perhaps by adding a tone stack to the circuit and perhaps use different transistors. Currently the Brassmaster clone is on the breadboard but is not working yet so I have some troubleshooting to do.