» 2026-06-24

Truckfighters - Masterflow

It has been a long, long time since I've paid very close attention to the stoner rock genre. For as much as I'm constantly listening to new death and black metal bands, I'm pretty sure my list of favourite stoner rock / metal albums hasn't changed since I graduated college in 2005.

An old co-worker recommended Truckfighters to me years ago, but I never actually followed through. When Masterflow dropped in the middle of an album release drought, I decided to heed what I felt was a sign. As often happens in my music-listening journey, I very quickly felt like an idiot for sleeping on this band.

This album is exactly the right blend of Kyuss and Dozer that I needed. The guitars are thick and fuzzy, and the riffs — my god, the riffs — are catchy as hell. I've already lost track of how many times I've listened to this album in its entirety; safe to say, Masterflow will be on my Albums Of The Year list.

» 2026-06-23

Dustin Poirier's Bad Day

While I have been mostly checked-out of the modern MMA scene, Dustin Poirier is one of a select few fighters I have always liked and considered a somewhat rare example of a decent human being in a sport *cough* notorious for unsavoury characters. As such, recent news that he was arrested for public drunkenness at an Atlanta airport — on Father's Day, no less — was a little dispiriting.

It's a very common story; a former professional fighter — without the structure and purpose of fight camps — having difficulties adapting to 'civilian' life, develops a substance abuse problem. After ~20 years as a die-hard MMA fan, the number of fighters I've seen gracefully retire is vanishingly small. GSP and Kole Konrad are the only ones to compete at the highest levels who come to mind. And neither of them spent 2 decades of their life fighting, unlike Poirier...

Having to change your entire lifestyle at the age of 37 has to be challenging. Without the pursuit of fighting to focus on, it's possible for other personal issues to surface and / or grow in severity. There's also the physical toll of fighting for a living; chronic pain and an increased risk for cognitive issues. This is the reality for a lot of fighters — regardless of their success — and an aspect of fight fandom that has bothered me more and more as the years pass.

To his credit, Poirier has expressed that he needs help with his problems. I don't know the man at all, but his public profile has always been positive and I truly enjoyed following his career in the UFC. Even at my most jaded and cynical, I would still like to believe that Good Guys can exist in the seedy world of professional violence. Hopefully this is just a brief lapse rather than a sign of worse things to come. (I wouldn't put the odds better than 50/50, however.)

» 2026-06-21

The Day Nu Metal Died (For Me)

I listened to The P.O.D. Kast's review of Limp Bizkit's much-maligned Results May Vary album, and have to concur with one of the sentiments expressed right out of the gate. When that album dropped, I really did feel like the entire nu metal genre — of which I was always a strong proponent and defender — was absolutely done.

I have vivid memories of downloading the album and forcing myself to listen to it several times before I could admit to myself that it wasn't good at all. The arrival of third-stringers like Trapt and Breaking Point further highlighted the genre's descent into clichéd and derrivative joke territory. I had already been cultivating my fandom of extreme metal and increasingly weirder niche genres, so a disappointing album from one of my favourite bands was somewhat cushioned by the fact I'd already been moving on to broader pastures.

Since listening to that episode, I've had a growing urge to do some reviews of classic nu metal records. Some albums, like Significant Other, I have reviewed almost a half-dozen times, others I have never written much about at length. These would likely be shorter reviews, in the vein of the ones I've posted here over the past couple months.

» 2026-06-20

Johnny McBee Explains Bands' Recent Merch Fee Issues

If you follow the metal scene, you have likely noticed an increasing number of stories about bands playing certain shows and foregoing the opportunity to sell merchanise. This has most notably been an issue in Budapest, Hungary, among other places. Johnny McBee, of The Browning put together a detailed, well articulated explanation of exactly why these situations are occurring, and how badly bands are being chiselled for what meager revenue they can generate.

The following is a transcription taken from The PRP:

Today we are going to be talking about merch cuts yesterday at our show in Budapest, we did not sell merch, and I’m going to break it down for you guys, so you can see why you keep seeing this happening with different bands. I’m just going to get straight into the cost of these things. We sell our t-shirts in Europe for 35 Euros. The cost of making t-shirts is rising. The average cost I’d say for just a standard t-shirt here in Europe is going to be about $11 for me to make. Then there’s a 27% VAT tax coming right off the top. So that’s $8 to the government. Then the venue wants to take 20% that’s $7. Then my European manager gets 10% that’s another three and a half dollars.

Just those costs right there take me down to making $4 per t-shirt, and that’s not including me shipping the merch to our facility, that’s not including me lugging the merch around the continent, that’s not including me paying my people, that’s not including me paying for the shirt design, or me paying for the $300 in advertisements I’d spent to get people to the concert.

So, with all of that in mind, had I sold merch yesterday, the venue and the government would make two times more money than I would off of my merch to my fans. Now, the VAT tax is totally unavoidable. There’s nothing we can do about that, but the 20% to the venue is 100% unnecessary. If the venue did not take a 20% cut, then I would have made $11 per t-shirt, which that would have been a fine profit margin for me to sell yesterday. And not only fine, but fair. Whenever any business spends money and time upfront to make a product, there’s a certain expected return to be made on each of those products sold.

$4 a t-shirt is not an okay profit margin. These fees and taxes is one reason why, when you go to a massive festival or a massive show, you see $50 t-shirts, because the bands need to make x amount of money off their t-shirts. A bunch of people always ask, why don’t you just play venues that don’t take a merch cut? The reason is because sometimes you go to a city where the only suitable venue is a venue that is going to demand a merch cut, and it is more important to play our music in that town to our fans than it is to sell t-shirts in that town.

I don’t think it’s fair to the fans to skip over a whole country or a whole city just because we want to sell t-shirts. So it’s more important that we play the show and make less money than just ditching them totally. The only semi-fair thing I could see the venues maybe doing, instead of a percentage off of merch, maybe they could charge us a flat fee to rent the space, they charge a flat fee to rent the venue to play the show.

They could charge us, say, $100 bucks for this part of the wall to sell merch on. That I would deem as potentially fair. The perfect deal. And how most venues operate, we both make money off of tickets, they make money off of the bar, which is their product, we make money off of our merch, which is our product, and it’s really out of principle. I cannot let people that are not involved in my business make more money than the people that are part of my business, off of my fans who think that that t-shirt money is supporting us.

This is an unavoidable thing in some places, and whenever you’re dealing with certain massive companies that run a lot of shows and venues. This rarely happens. It doesn’t really bother me whenever it does. Yes, it sucks to make less money, but the worst thing is that the fans get mad at us. They’re like, 'Why aren’t you guys selling this stuff? Like, what the heck? I’ve been waiting to see you guys.' But we do have to protect our bottom line, our profit margin, so that we can function as a band.

Merch is the majority of money that we make, and the venues know it, and that’s why they want a piece of it. What I would do if I was you is the next time you’re at a show, I would ask the merch guy if there’s a merch cut. If the merch guy says there is a merch cut, then maybe that night you don’t go buy anything from the bar, because if they want to cut into 20% of our profits, maybe you should not be giving them 20% of their profits. On the rare occasion where we can’t sell merch, it sucks, but we still love being there and we still love playing the shows for the people all over the world. So make sure you come out and see us on tour, and we’ll see you soon. Okay, peace.

Between AI products being trained illegally on millions of songs, streaming platforms paying fractions of pennies per listen, and venues trying to bleed every last bit of money out of musicians, it's really incredible that anyone even wants to be in a band anymore.

» 2026-06-19

Jack Osbourne

Since his father, Ozzy, is dead, there isn't even a vaguely real reason anyone has to pay attention to this dipshit or anything he says.