Introduction and Foreword (Coming soon)
3. Thieves
5. Blessings and Curses
6. The Alpha Male
7. Goa Magic
No, don’t be upset, it’s just six months!
Fuck knows who takes Varg Vikernes’ racist bullshit seriously, except his own silly ‘race’ that can’t stop applauding its own ‘superiority’. As a Burzum fan, I say the old chap deserves those six months in prison just for making The Ways Of Yore. A fucking moron on LSD could make a better album hitting random notes, and I don’t know shit about European folklore/mythology or how to play a keyboard. It isn’t very nice to incite hate against Jews even if they’re Gujjus, and for what he said about Muslims and Islam, a fatwa would be apposite, as surprise beheadings are losing their
Yes, just sit back and compose Belus II.
charm faster than Mumbai metal bands desperately playing every gig they can bag. Back to my point – jail has done Count Grishnackh a lot of good – I’m one of those who think understand Belus is Burzum at its peak, and that Kristian ‘Varg’ Vikernes perfected Black Metal with that album. Fallen deserves countless flying kisses too, and that’s why I’m saying the wolf needs to be caged. Get angry, Varg, be very angry and let the hatred build up. Toss that keyboard out or just put the cover back on it for a little while… some of us from the “inferior races” are thirsting for new sounds of purity.
09
Jul
14
Food Review: Café Universal
(From an ancient age in which this writer was a borderline alcoholic.)
Attacking a restaurant without giving it another chance isn’t fair, and I have mustered the determination to revisit Café Universal because of that eight great wonder we call beer. The eatery and bar has an old-world charm (it used to be an Irani cafe) and uses every opportunity to tell you about itself. The menu says the restaurant was established in 1921, and there are framed reviews on the walls, singing Café Universal’s praises. Imported beers are on display on one side, other beverages and select spirits on another, but we’re going with a tower of draught; the larger your order, the cheaper it is. My hamburger is unappetizing – the partly cooked beef patty placed in what should be a bun. Ill-fitting, and the bread is thick and hard. My friends aren’t the type to complain about food unless it’s horribly bad, but their burgers are as haphazardly constructed. A spicy chicken dish and butter-garlic prawns are what we’re having on our second visit to Café Universal, and I’m poking the red slop of goop on the table, wondering why it doesn’t taste or smell like prawns, till the prawns actually arrive, bland even with all that garlic, unexciting even with all that butter. If there’s one thing I know about Continental, Italian and Mexican food, it’s that no matter how wrong the dish is, it can be fixed with a sauce. The red sticky matter I’ve been served as a chicken dish gets drowned in red pepper sauce, and the tasteless prawns are shrouded in mustard. Both are then flushed down my system with the beer that is fast getting warm. The highlight of the evening, though, is being presented with the check. Billed with stuff we haven’t ordered, we point out the mistake, and it gets taken away and brought back with more mistakes for us to point out. This happens three or four times, and every time it returns with a few items knocked off. Am I annoyed? Not in the slightest. I have good company, plenty of beer, and God bless Satan for sauces.
Address: 299, Shahid Bhagat Singh Road, Fort, Mumbai
More food reviews: Sernyaa | Tibet Kitchen | Pind Baluchi | Alfredo’s | The best meal I had in Karnataka
Take it from a fanboy: Burzum‘s new album fucking sucks. Those four listens gave me a headache that still hasn’t left and the only nice thing to say about The Ways Of Yore is that it might be slightly less torturous than the Bollywood movie Humshakals. The difference between the two is easily guessable: the Hindi film will jar your senses and this ambient piece of shit will 
numb them, but not in a good way like alcohol does. Earlier this year Varg Vikernes was reading reviews of his music on the internet but was distracted and flattered by all those memes floating around and that put him in a happy mood. He sent the guitar flying out of the window and it landed on a cop who’d come to question Varg about his only interesting blog post, How to Make a Laxmi Bomb. Looking out of window as if he could see the fucking future, the old boy realized rabbits are super cute and aren’t meant to be eaten, and brought out a dusty keyboard to compose an album that would end Anu Malik’s glittering career, and by god, he did it. With tunes lamer than AR Rahman’s AirTel ad and awful singing that would make Odin cancel his return, the bored bard did it. On the right is Shakti Kapoor at the album launch party, decked up for the occasion.
RATING: 1/5
23
Jun
14
Movie Review: Jon Favreau’s Chef
As a young boy I wanted to learn how to cook the vegetarian meals my mother made. As I grew older I tried and loved and began to relish meat outside home, at cheap eateries and in swanky restaurants. As other interests like music and writing took over, the enthusiasm to learn the art of cooking dimmed, and now I don’t give a fuck about cooking and only want to be fed. I want to sit at the table, or on the floor, with a fork and a knife and a spoon, or ready to attack with my bare hands. I certainly mind standing, because that’s no way to eat. That’s how you eat at weddings and receptions and other occasions where you can’t stuff your face with the buffet spread, no matter how delicious the food, and even if no one’s watching.
Chef, besides being a sweet little film, is absolute food porn. The movie can make a fully stuffed anorexic struggling model want to dig into a steak.
Oliver Platt will remain etched in my memory as Ramsey Michel, the city’s top food blogger, who pans chef Carl Casper’s skills. Ramsey Michel was thrilling to watch because he reminded me of myself: a person who loves to eat and is hard to please. Casper, played by Jon Favreau (who has also written and directed this movie), doesn’t take kindly to the restaurant critic’s scathing review. Hurt at being called needy and uncreative, and unfamiliar with how social-networking sites work, the chef unintentionally starts a flame war with his freshly found foe on Twitter.
It’s a change to see an ex-wife who isn’t a bitch, and it’s even better that this nice woman is Sofia Vergara. With her accent and in all her hotness, she convinces the chef to get a food truck. Having lost his job at the restaurant, and having become the latest viral laughing stock on YouTube, Casper goes on a road trip in the food truck with his 10-year-old son Percy, and his friend Martin (Jon Leguizamo, delightful). The father-son relationship is your typical one, and so, a bit of a bore, even if it’s about them bonding over running a mobile eatery.
But thankfully, Chef is about a man out to prove a point to himself, and about food. It’s about a man’s passion for cooking, a chef who’s lost in the moment when he’s at it, and at his creative best when no one’s telling him how to do it. What I’m taking from Chef is the scene of a father telling his son that the boy can have just one sip of the beer he’s been handed, and every scene that has Oliver Platt / Ramsay Michel. Jon Favreau’s Chef will make a lot of you want to start cooking, or become better at it, or do more of it. It makes me want to watch more movies, eat more food and watch more movies about food.
RATING: 3/5
With the singles that came out prior to the album release, “Our Endless War” claimed to be the tightest and meticulously crafted album in Whitechapel‘s ten-year history. Given how much time the band put in, in terms of writing, getting a perfect tone, producing and mixing, one would expect an equivalent result, yeah? But, it’s too soon to reach that conclusion yet. First, let’s hear the album. A traditional start to the album, Rise is an inviting instrumental with a calm tone. One thing that makes itself clear after a couple of songs is that there is a drastic change in song-writing, which definitely benefits the album and makes it quite easy and refreshing for the listener. But nothing seems that appealing until Let Me Burn. Oh boy! This is what Whitechapel is capable of – a perfect slow start followed by sheer energy, chug-tech riffs at their best.
What I had appreciated in their self-titled album though, failed to impress this time. Phil’s vocals seem so layered; moreover, stagnant and not what they are known for, although the catchy melodic riffs at the end of the songs make up for it. Not that one can’t get used to that, but it’s the vocals that primarily define Whitechapel‘s sound, especially the high (and yet guttural) singing which sounds so bad-ass and evil. I’ve been listening to Whitechapel for a nice six years, and l’ve always appreciated their lyrics. The song Worship the Digital Age is a prime 
example of downright brutal song-writing, and it talks about the current state of our civilization and our fucked-up means of entertainment, and how we sold our souls to worship the digital age. Again, layered vocals with so much of mixing; Phil’s style and lyrical content has taken a huge turn over the last few years. I mean, at some point Phil’s just writing shit, senseless and asinine lyrics. It also makes him appear to be quite a douche (refer to Mono lyrics). I’m a big fan of his style and irresistible energy… but not on this album. For the amount of work done on this album and going by their words “working harder on perfecting every song than they ever had before”, it fails to convince their listeners. There’s nothing noteworthy apart from the couple of songs I mentioned, until the halfway mark. Black Out is another good song – powerful and moving.
I’m afraid that’s all I have to say about Our Endless War. There’s nothing great about the album except that Whitechapel‘s song-writing has improved a bit, and the use of three guitars is now even more justified. It’s not only about chugging riffs and hardcore music anymore – it’s about some good song-writing and making great use of the instruments. I’ve always thought of Whitechapel as a mind-blowing band and I look forward to more releases from them.
The baap of Indian extreme-metal festivals is upon us, outdoing itself with the lineup as it does every year. For ordinary mortals who can’t read metal logos, these are the bands performing at Domination: The Deathfest VI: Killchain (OSDM from Mumbai), death-doom act Primitiv (that’s how they spell it), Navi Mumbai death/groove maniacs Wired Anxiety, Insane Prophecy (blackened death/thrash from Guwahati), Bangalore’s sludge lords Shepherd, Plague Throat (death metal from Shillong), and Bombay Death Metal Legion (18 death-worshipping beasts from aamchi Mumbai paying tribute to the unholy gods.) Bombay Death Metal Legion will headline Deathfest VI, playing songs by Deicide, Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse, Nile, Vader, Obituary, Death and other death metal monsters. See you at United 21, Thane!
