BOOK KLUB (Halloween edition!) · 2:14pm Oct 31st, 2018
Happy Halloween! May you consume enough candy to fall just short of a diabetic coma.
So! BY THE BLACK AXE OF NIGHTMARE MOON! was one of my more popular pony stories, surprisingly so. I guess I underestimated the crossover between 'bronies' and 'metalheads.' Which now has got me wondering about a brony metal band ... which is probably one of those things that exists but shouldn't. (Most brony music I've stumbled across happens to be various flavors of EDM, which is very much not my thing).
Still! With this in mind, I figured I'd recommend a recent book: Grady Hendrix's heavy metal horror novel, We Sold Our Souls.
We Sold Our Souls centers on a woman who used to be the lead guitarist for a 90's era power metal band ... that is, until the lead singer sold out to headline a nu-metal act (booo!). Years later, when said nu-metal act is doing one last tour, she decides to go on a road trip to confront her former friend ... only to stumble into a strange and merciless conspiracy that permeates nearly every aspect of modern society. And the only thing she has to stop it? Music. (Mostly metal, but there's some country & blues in there, too). It basically takes the 'retired heavy metal star facing her supernatural past' concept and does it SO MUCH BETTER than I did. As in, y'know, he actually takes it seriously instead of just using the genre to make jokes. Which, uh, is to be expected, as Hendrix is a legit novelist, and I'm just some dude writing silly pony stories on the internet.
We Sold Our Souls is a brutal novel-- not just with the requisite horror murders (of which there aren't quite as many as you might expect), but also in its scathing indictment of how hollow and soulless modern strip-mall America can be. So, like, literary merit! The book is wild and unpredictable, yanking the proverbial rug out from under the reader multiple times.
So yeah. If you dig horror, and you dig metal, and you don't mind things getting pretty dark (which you probably shouldn't if you dig metal and horror), you owe it to yourself to track down We Sold Our Souls.
On the topic of brony metal, I do know there's a band called Party Cannon that got some notoriety for being the one band on a concert poster whose logo wasn't in serious need of some pruning. Not sure what they play, though.
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Unfortunately Party Cannon is not especially easy on the ears. Very shouty and heavy on the noise. IIRC there was a pony metal band named Draconequus that was power metal.
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They play Party Metal. Like Andrew W. K. does. I’m surprised that this is a legit music genre, but there are worse ones so :shrug: This sounds like an interesting book, I’ll have to look it up.
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You know things have gone too far when Pinkie Pie is the most subdued act on the roster.
All of Party Cannon's stuff sounds like this, as a far as I can tell:
Basically, trip-hammer drumming, demonic barking and fairly simple guitar work.