Jared’s Blog

We just posted our Top 50 feature over at Decoymusic. Here’s mine.

This year, much like 2005, didn’t have me expecting much. There was only a handful of releases that I really thought would wow me. As it turns out, I was completely wrong.2006 also saw me fully embracing metalcore. I couldn’t get enough of it this year (yes, even all the As I Lay Dying rip-offs) and you’ll see that in my top 10.You may also notice my honorable mentions list is pretty long. What can I say, I thought a lot of albums deserved some attention this year, but couldn’t quite give them a spot in my list.

Honorable Mentions

36 Crazyfists - Rest Inside the Flames
A Static Lullaby - A Static Lullaby
Bigwig - Reclamation
Catherine - Rumour Has It Astaroth Has Stolen Your Eyes
Clifton - We Never Change
Destroy the Runner - Saints
Hawthorne Heights - If Only You Were Lonely
Himsa - Hail Horror
Ignite - Our Darkest Days
Into Eternity - The Scattering of Ashes
Katsumoto - Cadence
Killswitch Engage - As Daylight Dies
Lamb of God - Sacrement
Light This City - The Hero Cycle
No Trigger - Caynoneer
Rise Against - The Sufferer and the Witness
Thebleedingalarm - Beauty in Destruction
War of Ages - Pride of the Wicked

10. The Human Abstract - Nocturne

Nocturne was a complete surprise. Before I gave the album a shot, I had never heard of the band. It’s a fresh take on the metalcore genre that is quickly becoming stale. The generous use of clean, melodic vocals really makes this a standout record.

9. All That Remains - The Fall of Ideals

I was highly anticipating this release as I was in love with This Darkened Heart. From the moment that Labonte screams out on ‘This Calling,’ I knew I was in for a treat. Though The Fall of Ideals has been criticized as a neutering of All That Remains’ style, I think it is a very listenable release.

8. As Blood Runs Black - Allegience

Allegiance is another one that came out of left field and knocked me upside the head. It’s just the right mix of death, thrash, and metalcore. It definitely brings “the motherfucking ruckus.” It’s only weakness is it’s length.

7. After the Eulogy - Libertine’s Dream

I usually don’t put much stock in EP’s as I’d much rather hear a fully fleshed out release, but Libertine’s Dream was an exception to that rule. Every song on this album is solid. To make up for it’s length, I usually ended up listening to it several times over in one sitting.

6. Purified in Blood - Reaper of Souls

I usually take my metalcore with more metal than hardcore, but Purified in Blood just are the opposite. This is straight edge hardcore with a sprinkling of metal at it’s finest. I think breakdown of the year goes to these guys for Unmarked Graves. “Brutal” is the only word that can describe Reaper of Souls.

5. If Hope Dies - Life in Ruin

Having proven themselves with The Ground is Rushing Up to Meet Us, I was eagerly anticipating the release of the next If Hope Dies album. Needless to say, it met those expectations and even exceeded them in some cases. With the recent announcement that the band is going on indefinite hiatus, this may be their crowning achievement.

4. Saosin - Saosin

The hype for Saosin’s self-titled debut was immeasurable. Fortunately for the band, they put together a catchy, well-crafted release. The first few spins I gave the album left me disappointed, but I was coming from the standpoint that this was a progression of their previous EP. Instead, you must realize that this is somewhat of a new band. After doing that, I saw Saosin for what it is, a brilliant album.

3. In Flames - Come Clarity

In Flames have been around for a very long time. They’ve progressed quite far from their melodic death metal roots. This release marks both a return to their former style and a progression on their more recent albums. I had originally cast Come Clarity aside as just another In Flames album. Only after hearing some of the new material live, did I come to realize how good this album really is.

2. Underoath - Define the Great Line

Coming off the success of They’re Only Chasing Safety, a release that saw the band style evolve, Underoath were feeling the pressure. They not only managed to create a killer album in Define the Great Line, but they also managed to do it at a time when stress and media pressure was at it’s highest. They weathered the storm and are a better band and better people because of it.

1. Unearth - III: In the Eyes of Fire

III: In the Eyes of Fire is a blistering album packed with breakdowns and plenty of ferocity. Talent gushes from every single note. This album is a freight train barreling down the tracks at 100 miles an hour. Once it starts, it can’t be stopped.

I’ve been a last.fm user for quite some time now. I’ve actually been using the service since it was called Audioscrobbler mainly to track my music listening habits. I’m a dork, I like numbers and stats. Gimmie a break.

Recently, the service was relaunched with a few new features one of which is a Flash-based player. From what I remember, the player has been a part of last.fm for most of it’s existance, but it was always a download. I gave it a shot and it wasn’t work too well in Linux (probably because Linux only has Flash 7 when Windows has Flash 9).

I was surprised to find that Ubuntu’s repositories contains the last.fm player package. I installed it just to check it out and it’s been fairly good so far.

I fired up the “metalcore” tag station because I figured that would contain a lot of the music I like. It has been pretty close to what I would actually listen to. I wonder if it looks at my listening stats and makes selections based on that. It hasn’t been foolproof though. There’s quite a few bands I’ve heard that I would not consider metalcore at all and in one instance Britany Spears came up.

There’s also a few other flaws I’ve been dealing with. There is no volume leveling, so you end up listening to a really quiet song and turning the volume up only to have your speakers blasting when the next track starts. There’s also been quite a bit of skipping. It’s most noticable right away when the song starts (presumably when it’s doing most of the downloading). My experience would probably fair better on my home Internet connection as it is 3-4 times as fast as the connection at work.

After trying the last.fm player, I can say I’d recommend it. At the very least, it gives me a little hope for not having to sit through an entire work day in silence if I happen to forget my iPod. It doesn’t limit the amount of songs you can skip like Pandora

If you’d asked me a couple months ago, I would have said I’d never buy Intel chip. That was before Core 2 Duo benchmarks came out. Ironically, sitting on my desk right now is an E6300 and I couldn’t be happier.

After a week of abysmal computing on an old HP laptop that barely has enough oomph to run instant messaging and a web browser at the same time, I recieved my relief in the form of a package on Monday afternoon.

Day 1

Without much trouble, I went through the task of assembling all my new goodies. First I dropped the CPU in. Those Core 2 Duos are really tiny compared to my Athlon XP chip. I also like that they cover the actual silicon with a cover so that you can’t crack the core while installing the heatsink.

Next came the whopping heatsink. You can’t appreciate the size until you hold it in your hands. You know what they say about a man? Big heatsink means…ahh, I’ll let you finish it. The heatsink instructions could’ve been a bit more clear, but I managed.

The rest of the install was pretty tedious. I took my time getting the board in the case. I’ll admit I got a little antsy and finished the rest of the install out in a hurry. I didn’t bother to route cables very cleanly, I just wanted to make sure it’d turn on.

To my surprise, Windows actually booted fine even with the significant hardware changes. In my past experiences, it freaked out pretty bad and I had to reinstall. Ubuntu, however, refused to boot fully. Not a problem since I hadn’t had more than a day or two to do anything in it. I would later decide to move my OS partitions around anyway.

I did start messing around with the overclocking options on Monday, but I ran into some trouble and it actually worried me that I had gotten some bad components. For awhile, it wasn’t getting past memory detection and a lot of times I’d reboot itself a few times before posting. I researched it and found I just needed to disable some options in the BIOS. It turns out they have stuff in place to prevent you from frying your chip, go figure. It was getting late so I retired for the night.

Day 2

I knew that when I bought the motherboard it only had 1 IDE port and thus only supported 2 IDE devices. That meant I was going to have to lose some components as I had 2 IDE hard drives and 2 IDE DVD drives. What I ended up doing was getting rid of my old 40GB drive completely and putting the DVD-RW and 120GB on the IDE. I also had just gotten a USB to SATA/IDE adapater so I put my other DVD drive on that.I cleaned up my cables and I’m pretty happy with how it looks now. Finally, I’ve got SATA ports (6 of em actually), I am itching to get rid of those cumbersome IDE ribbon cables. The case would be so much cleaner without them.

The next item on my list was installing my OS’es on my SATA drive. First Windows, which installed impressively quickly. It was only about 20 minutes. During the install I was wandering back and forth between my roommate’s room and mine, so I wasn’t sitting at the desk waiting to move to the next step of the installation right away either.

With Windows up and running I could start messing with my overclock. After figuring out what to set in the BIOS, I was off. I tried a 300MHz FSB which it laughed at. It hit 320 without a hitch. I bumped it to 350 and it was fine. So right now I’ve got my 1.86GHz (1066MHz FSB) chip running at 2.45GHz (1400MHz FSB) and I’m pretty sure I’m not done yet. I did some initial testing by running Super Pi and playing some WoW. It didn’t even hiccup. Granted, I haven’t fully put it through it’s paces nor have I checked out my idle and load temperatures, but I’d be happy with a free ~600MHz and a 333MHz bump in FSB.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve read these chips hit over 3GHz on stock cooling. My goal is running the RAM at spec (400MHz) which would mean the chip would be at 2.8GHz. If I can get it stable and cool enough at that I’ll be happy, but I know I’m going to push it as far as I can go.
I hit another roadblock when it came to getting Ubuntu installed though. It turns out there’s a flaw in the Linux kernel so that it doesn’t recognize any IDE drives. That means when you boot the live CD, it just dies shortly after starting. I looked into it a bit and it seems there is a patch in one of the beta kernels around right now. Something about IDE actually using the SATA bus is what I read. Anyway, that means I’m going to have to find a different way to install Linux. I have been doing some reading this morning and found that I may be able to use my USB card reader to do the install, but I’ll have to wait until I’m off work to try anything.

On a side note, Rick and I saw Unearth and Bleeding Through on Sunday and they killed it. I even took home a few marks of battle. As soon as I get a chance, I’ll post photos.

I caught up posting what I had done for reviews and a few albums I’ve gotten the last couple of months. Hit the music section to see what’s new.

Last Saturday, the Sounds of the Underground tour rolled into St. Paul and Rick and I weren’t going to miss a minute of it. I’ll leave the show review to Rick as that was his responsibility. I was once again working on my photography skills.

First and foremost, I had a press pass. That let me go right up to the stage and take shots (during the first 3 songs). With my pocket camera, there’s almost no other way to do it. At larger shows like this one, being in the crowd isn’t close enough. Besides that, you get much better photos when you aren’t wrestling the rest of the crowd for space and trying to pay attention to what the band is doing.

This show started at 2 and finished a little after 10. Needless to say, I was stretching battery life on my camera just to make it through and it turns out I didn’t do that well. During Machine Head, the 3rd to last band, I noticed my batt low light flashing. I hurried in a few more shots and quickly turned it off. During the next band, In Flames, I ran into a similar problem (worsened by the fact that I was having problems getting a good shot of Anders, the lead vocalist). By the time As I Lay Dying came out, the battery was virtually cashed. I got in 4-5 blurry shots before it died completely.

I’m sure I could’ve gotten some extra mileage out of the battery if I hadn’t taken so much time to delete bad shots as I got them. I guess this is why they say to take as many shots as possible and edit later. Even though I knew that, I was working with limited resources. With 4 bands left to play, I had about 120 shots left and I was shooting more than 30 shots per band easily. The math just wasn’t going to work out. I guess in the end, the amount of editing I did wasn’t worth missing out on the headlining band of the night. Looking back, I was also a little trigger happy with the opening bands. I could’ve focused more attention to the later artists.
After getting home and seeing my shots, I proudly proclaim they’re my best yet. The shots from Trivium and Machine Head came out the best of all. Thank you Rob Flynn, thank you Matt Heafy (and the rest of Trivium) for the great poses! I’ve posted my shots on Decoymusic and you can expect Rick’s expose shortly.

I’m alive! That’s a feat considering Saturday brought 100 degree heat to my corner of MN. If you bothered to read my last post, you’d know I moved. Really, I didn’t do too much moving of myself on Saturday. I had moved several things over in the previous weeks which only left a few large pieces of furniture to move on Saturday.

After finishing work on Friday and coming home to find the cable and internet service had been shut off, I decided that there was no point in sticking around the old place that night. With that I grabbed all my vital possessions (namely my computer) and drove over and tried to get some semblance of order going in my room.

Speaking of my room… there’s one word to describe it, cramped. This is another story, but I ended up buying a queen size bed which takes up about half the room. Add to that my computer desk, a dresser, a file cabinet, and a TV stand and there’s barely enough room to walk. I just keep telling myself that I will only be there for 9 months and that I can deal with it until then.

Back to the Saturday move. To say things went as planned would be a great lie. It was anything but. I showed up at the old place in the morning as requested by Laura, but no one else did. I gave it some time and then called to see what was going on. The first truck they got was in Coon Rapids instead of the local UHaul place and broke down 5 min away from the UHaul garage. More than an hour later, they had a smaller truck and were on their way, only about 3 hours behind schedule.

After that it, the load went smoothly. As far as I know, we didn’t do any major damage to the townhouse while hauling things out and with 5 people, things moved very quickly. As the day progressed, it heated up to over 100 degrees outside. It was brutal, but we kept ourselves hydrated and no one had a problem. Besides the truck, our worst problem was trying to get Hank’s couch in the basement. In the end, we took a door off its hinges and managed to only scrape the wood railing going down the stairs.

Lately, my free time has been non-existant and it’s starting to wear on me. Having time to myself to do whatever I wish is important to me and to my mental health. Hopefully with all this moving out of the way, now things can get back to normal.

In fact, I even had time to check out a show on Monday night. It wasn’t hooked up by Decoy. Rick and I went just to have a good time and check out some really good bands. The lineup for Strhess 2006 was as follows: Still Remains, Bury Your Dead, Darkest Hour, Poison The Well, and Shadows Fall. I did still shoot during the show. I’ve uploaded the pictures over at Flickr.