Being a bit of a flying Dutchman myself, this is something I couldn’t refrain from writing about. I’m sure you’ll understand.

Dutch engineers of the National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR in Dutch) and The Delft University of Technology have been making a bunch of test runs in the weeks past with their PAL-V, a flying car offering room for two passengers. PAL-V stands for Personal Air and Land Vehicle and the and the nimble looking vehicle has been approved for both air and land use according the company behind it, proving not only the technical feasibility of the design, but also that it’s possible within existing – and let’s be honest, generally designed by safety fetishists – regulations.

I suppose its obvious that life is taking up all the extra time we Baboons have so I’m going to quickly share this. My friend asked me if I had seen this featured on MetalSucks the other day and of course I hadn’t, I haven’t had time to look at MetalSucks. Hell I’m so short on time I’ve had to learn to poop and walk at the same time. Anyway, I’ve got this playing while taking care of some chores and its cool as fuck. Some kid playing the entire Leviathan album front to back in one take on a piano. Enjoy!

It’s been a while since we did something not related to metal, but I discovered this movie yesterday, which is said to be the first horror movie. I won’t go into depth about who directed it or who has the main role etc. but I do want to tell you that it’s a silent movie, and that it’s an Expressionistic movie, which can be seen from the decors they’re using.

The story goes as follows:

A man named Francis relates a story about his best friend Alan and his fiancée Jane. Alan takes him to a fair where they meet Dr. Caligari, who exhibits a somnambulist, Cesare, that can predict the future.
When Alan asks how long he has to live, Cesare says he has until dawn. The prophecy comes to pass, as Alan is murdered, and Cesare is a prime suspect.

The movie lasts about 50 minutes but is definitely worth watching.

We don’t usually write about Rammstein. Shock therapy as it might be to most people, it just isn’t Extreme enough for us. But you have to give them something: that they put up a great fuckin’ image! On November the 25^th they added another item to their list of fucked-up but actually pretty damn awesome exploits: ”Coinciding with 2 shows in their hometown Berlin, German industrial rockers and bêtes noires for cultural mainstream, Rammstein, were celebrated with a mausoleum.”

”In front of the O2 World, Berlin’s biggest indoor arena, fans congregated for a procession including a horse-drawn hearse, which delivered the original death masks of the six band members to the mausoleum. Inside the black cubic building the busts were carefully placed amongst candles and a book of condolence and could be visited by fans in appropriate reverence.”

Bass player are always a bit the losers of the band. No disrespect for their skill, but they’d always be the last band member any groupy would have sex with. Compared to a vocalist and guitarist (who rank first and second on the will-have-sex-with list), they have about the sex appeal of a slouch. You know, they thump around a bit on their thick strings, pluck a bit when they feel like it or even worse, just provide a steady and fixed rhythm over four notes. You’ve gotta do a bit more than the regular if you want to stand out.

Now I’m under the impression that many bass players don’t give a fuck about this. They prefer to take the role of the funny man, glue of the group, yet annoyance in everyone’s ass. Or they take the role of rude fuck-ass who does his half our recording session drunk off his vodka breakfast. Did I mention I’m thinking of picking up bass playing? I really fuckin’ am, alright!

This morning we posted the first review by our guest writer Sean Golyer. Now he’s got something else for us. Something thrilling, that makes us feel honored and all that shit. Sean is active in a US band called Oak Pantheon and he hooked us up with a first and exclusive preview song off their upcoming EP! The song’s a pre-mastering version, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that it isn’t shit fuck awesome!

The EP is titled The Void and will be released on July 12^th, containing four songs and an interlude. Oak Pantheon is a Black Metal band, of the atmospheric type, and so you can expect the EP to contain a proper amount of playing time. Don’t expect heavily underproduced facemelting acid Black Metal, their material has a warm but sad feel to it and is stuffed with melody like an undersized turkey on Thanksgiving.

A quick bit of news about Poland’s legendary Decapitated. The band formed in 1996. Eleven years later they were involved in an road accident where their tour bus collided with a wood truck. It wounded vocalist Adrian “Covan” Kowanek and took the life of drummer Witold “Vitek” Kieltyka. Now, anyone who’s ever heard a Decapitated album knows the latter was a beast, tirelessly acting away on his bass pedals.

Obviously the accident had a major impact on the band’s continued existence and for a while they turned silent. Then, in late 2008 the decision to start up again was made and in 2009 the band finally reformed with three new members. One of them is Austrian drummer Kerim “Krimh” Lechner, whom we’ve already seen solo in a very short post back in 2009, when we had just started this site.

And now for something completely different! Those who know me just a tiny little bit know that apart from Metal I also totally fuckingly dig cars. More specifically towards this post’s purpose, I’m a huge fan of the Rally sport, for those drivers with muy grande cojones. Nothing beats going 200 km/h (that’s over 120 mph for our American readership) over narrow country roads, through dusty fields and through small rural villages!

About a week ago I received an e-mail from a dude named Shaun Klet, who resides somewhere in what isn’t just a country that’s increasingly outputting into the world’s economy, but also delivering towards the world’s Metal scene: India. He’s one of the contributors to a blog site, much like ours, called Indian Music Mug that focuses on Indian bands and artists (not just Metal though).

Now, that site has recently released a twelve-tracked compilation album, featuring a load of Indian bands, including one of our personal favorites, Demonic Resurrection, who’s front man Sahil “The Demonstealer” Makhija we interviewed in early 2010 and who’s 2010 album The Return to Darkness we reviewed extensively and very positively in May 2010.

So, obviously that triggered our interest in this release and we decided to check it out today. We’d like to share our findings with you, so that also you may enjoy some tasty Indian Metal. In fact, we suggest you have a Curry with it!

If you’re a bit of a Metalhead – and obviously you are, or you wouldn’t be visiting an obscure-as-hell blog like The Baboon – you may have looked into different schematics of Metal and its gazillion subgenres and sub-subgenres. Given the development of Metal, from its earliest beginnings in the early 1970’s, into so many directions, these schematics tend to become extremely complicated as you get farther away from the basis, which is simply called Heavy Metal, and its roots in Hard Rock and Blues. As a result, studying the lines of development can be a bitch and I’m sure you’ll agree with me that sucks! After all , we’re all scholars of the Metal religion. Seriously though, it can be very interesting to discover how Metal developed and is still developing!