Time To Move On To Greener Pastures, Kids

Christ I’ve been putting this off for ages, but I think it’s finally time I got my shit together and actually started blogging on www.slicktiger.co.za

So don’t come back here anymore! I mean it! We’re done here, it’s time to move onto bigger and better things!

From now on you can hit www.slicktiger.co.za for my daily rantings and unbelievably radass posts.

Ya got that? Lemme reiterate in bigger letters so we’re all on the same page here:

 

www.slicktiger.co.za 

 

I had all these plans to relaunch the site and make it 500 times more badass, but you gotta take these things in baby steps, so let’s just head on over to the new site (which right now looks EXACTLY like the old site) and take things from there.

See ya on the other side…

 

 

-ST

Treefiddy Review: The Kills – Blood Pressures

Ok, so I’m a little late with this one (the album officially launched in April) and for awhile I wasn’t going to write a review because once an album is older than a month it’s old news to cool kids like us, but I’m making an exception this time around.

 

 

Which is the long way around of saying this album is fucking awesome.

The Down Lizzo:

Alison Mosshart pissed me off when I heard her sing in the Jack White-lead supergroup The Dead Weather because it felt like she was faking it. Her vocal style and stage persona seemed contrived, something between Marla Singer and PJ Harvey, and it never sat right with me.

 

 

Then I stumbled on The Kills latest album Blood Pressures and literally one minute into the first track I found myself grinning from ear because of how dark and cool Mosshart sounded. Like butter wouldn’t melt on her tongue, like she was everything sexy and dangerous in this world, like she could kill you with a look or break you with a smile.

The Kills is her band, her little broody-beautiful world that she shares with guitarist Jamie Hince and there’s something about the fuzz and the mud and the malevolence and the majesty of it all that haunted me and continues to haunt me with every listen.

 

Sick Tracks:

Pick one. Go ahead. Close your eyes, wave your finger around and literally let it fall where it may and whatever plays will be awesome.

“You Don’t Own The Road” saunters like a drunk cowboy waving his six shooter with the safety off, “DNA” stalks purposefully through the woods at dusk, picking its way through an undergrowth of drumsticks clattering against drumsticks whilst wading through a quagmire of swampy basslines.

“Baby Says” has the melancholy of a Cowboy Junkies track, a lilting melody to keep you company in the hollow hours before sunrise, a song that echoes back to better times.

 

 

But “Future Starts Slow” is still my favourite. Stark, defiant, sexy, it has a drum track that plays like a striptease and one of the simplest, most powerful riffs I’ve heard in a good long while.

 

Should You Give A Shit:

I loved this album, but what the hell do I know? I got a dark streak a mile wide that this album really speaks to but that doesn’t mean you’ll love it anywhere near as much as I do.

If nothing else, it’s a great example of how simple, stylised riffs (played with truckloads of badass fuzzy effects) layered with amazingly complex drums and sultry, provocative vocals can seduce you to the point of infatuation.

If you want to know what the music playing in the jungles of my Tiger-mind sounds like, get your hands on this album and if you’re anything like me, pretty soon it’ll be playing through the jungles of your mind too.

Here’s “DNA” to sink your fangs into.

 

[audio: https://slicktiger.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/6-dna.mp3%5D

 

Final Verdict: 9/10

-ST

SlickTiger Industries presents: Awesome Work Time-Wasters!

Think about how much shit we can DO in one day thanks to the advent of the internet, emails and direct messaging communication.

I mean holy shit, what took our grandparents two weeks to do (ie. writing, posting and receiving a letter) we can now hammer out in literally 3 minutes and we don’t even have to use VOWELS mthrfkkr!

But where’s the goddamn upside I ask you with tears in my eyes? All that time that we’re saving ourselves, we just fill it with more work, what a load!

Well, I say it’s high time we stick it to the man and take back what is rightfully ours! From now on every time I find an awesome work time-waster I’m posting the link up on this site and filing it in the new category I’ve created on the right called “Awesome Work Time-Wasters”.

Hold my hand. Let’s goof off for awhile. Starting with this little gem I found the other day called “Solipskier”.

 

 

Hit this link and make sure no one’s walking behind you as you jam this fucking intense stickman / skiing game and try to break my all time high score of 1,173,996 (see below for proof).

 

 

And feel free to submit your favourite time wasters as well (tellthetiger@gmail.com) and let’s see how quickly we can all get fired!

-ST

Baba Indaba Attempts World Record, The Tiger Throws Up In His Mouth A Little

We don’t have a TV so it’s been awhile since I’ve been exposed to the wonder that is South African television advertising and I’m a little sad about that.

I love SA TV ads because (with one or two exceptions) they are really, really, really terrible and almost always leave me staring in utter disbelief at the screen or canning myself at how goddamn retarded people are.

 

 

But on Saturday night I watched an ad so unbelievably unbelievable that the second it was over I jumped off the couch and shouted, “Did you just see that?! Tell me you just saw that!?” at J-Rab who nodded mutely, on the verge of lapsing into full-blown catatonia.

The ad was for the upcoming Baba Indaba where they are going to attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the most number of moms breast-feeding at the same time under one roof.

 

 

Call me an insensitive, immature asshole but MY GOD! How DISGUSTING is that?!

Thousands of pregnant women of all ages, sizes, creeds and colours whipping their swollen mammaries out at the same time while their young suckle at them hungrily like the little parasites they are.

Jayzuz, even writing about it is making me feel ill.

Also, how the hell do you POLICE something like that? I mean the previous world record was set in the Philippines where no less than 3 541 woman “breasted” at the same time!

 

 

Three and a half thousand! You’d need a team of literally hundreds of officials walking around making sure the moms weren’t faking it to verify that shit.

How humiliating for the moms, it’s like “Sorry ma’am, I’m gonna have to ask you to lift that blanket.”

“What? What blanket? This blanket?”

“Yes, that blanket.”

“Why, there’s nothing to see under here, just junior having his lunch, that’s all…”

“The rules state I have to actually see the breast in his mouth while he swallows ma’am, otherwise you’re disqualified.”

I’m sorry, I know this is a sensitive topic and everything and sure, it’s all for a good cause, I get that, but still, bleaugh!

And the funniest part of it is they show this visual in the ad that’s basically identical to the one below:

 

 

“Yummm”, seriously? Who are they trying to sell this to?!

What mother is so stupid that she doesn’t know babies like breastfeeding?

“The baby’s saying ‘Yummm’! I get it! It’s saying ‘Yummm’ because it likes milk! Wow, I’m going to try that RIGHT AWAY!”

Also, think about this – when women breastfeed, oxytocin and prolactin, hormones that relax them and make them feel more nurturing toward their little grubs, are released.

So, if all goes according to plan, at Baba Indaba there will be over three and a half thousand women having the lactate furiously suckled from them at the same time while an ocean of feel-good hormones go racing through their brains, creating a gigantic rush of pure mammalian euphoria that will ripple through Nasrec like a wave of MDMA through a trance fest dance floor.

Huh. Come to think of it, that sounds pretty awesome. Wonder if they’ll fly me up there and swing me free tickets after this awesome post I’ve given them…

-ST

Mike Scott Is A Genius

All I’m doing today is posting a Goldfish video.

Yeah, yeah, I know this kind of commercial, mainstream, dancey-pop isn’t what I usually go for but Goldfish is definitely one of the better SA bands out there and one of the few whose music I can listen to without wanting to take a baseball bat to my stereo (if I listened to commercial radio I’d probably hate them though, I hear they get played to DEATH on pretty much a daily basis).

But enough of that. The reason I’m writing this is because Mike Scott is a genius.

I went to prep school and varsity with the dude and even when he was a kid, he used to draw the sickest, funniest cartoons.

I’ve still got an A4 piece of paper somewhere with some of his early scribblings… wonder if it’ll be worth anything one day (should probably dig it out and frame it or something. Even back then you can see it’s Mike, he started developing his big-lips, crazy-eyes style from very early on).

The story I remember reading somewhere was that back in 2009 Mike just went ahead and animated a music video for Goldfish and sent it through to the band and the guys fucking loved it and now they use him to do all their videos.

I used to read his cartoon “Bru & Boegie” every day and I loved the shit out of it, even the completely random ones he did that looked like they literally took about 2 mins to draw. Some of it was hysterically funny and some of it was downright tortured and some of it just made total sense to me in the way it made no sense to me.

He stopped for a long time and moved onto bigger things, like the video below which is fucking melting faces all over the world with its undeniable awesomeness.

Enjoy!

 

Check Mike’s site out here for more of his work. He’s a busy, busy guy but he’s doing what he loves and making a HUGE name for himself.

Keep on keepin’ on Mike and maybe one day those scribbles of “The Buttheads” you did back in prep school that I still have kicking around somewhere will put my kids through college

-ST

The Damage

It’s nearly half past three in the morning as I write this on the 16th of June, Youth Day, J-Rab’s birthday.

It was a night that started out like many others have, with some vague plans to meet up and have a couple drinks with some friends, the few that we have in Cape Town, and see where the night might take us from there.

As is often the case with my life whenever crazy shit goes down, it was Captain Albatross that sparked everything off. I was sitting at work, the sky completely clouded over and black as the pit from pole to pole when he called, cackling down the phone like the maniac he is.

I love that man. He’s family. But God knows he’s out of his fucking mind.

At first I thought it might be a full moon. They call them ‘lunatics’ for a reason, people like the Captain. But it was much worse than that. An eclipse supposedly happened tonight but none of us saw it.

We were too busy ordering drinks. Drink after drink after drink. Spirits. They call them that because when you swallow them something else starts to take over, something that isn’t you, and if you push it far enough you black out completely and for those murky hours to follow you change, and every bad thing inside you comes out.

By the time we met up with the Captain, it was already too late. He was two hours into his own private party and literally settled his tab moments after we arrived and left.

Deus absconditus. Loaded the dice and left the game.

Barbarian joined us at that exact moment and the feeling was good. The three of us, J-Rab him and I drank a drink or two. We talked a gigantic load of shit, we laughed and we drank more.

Me, I had a good buzz going. I kept it tapping along. That overwhelming need to drink myself out of myself was far, far away. It has been for some time. I must be getting old.

I was just enjoying the company of the people around me, listening to them get louder, smiling politely.

Fast forward to three hours later and all around me there was damage.

It was just people falling over other people, falling over other people. It was just shouting and spitting. It was just drinks tipping over and smashing to pieces on the floor, while cigarette smoke hung like a shroud of death above us all.

I wished I was more drunk but I was glad that I wasn’t. I’m the only person who’s going to remember what happened, but I was fine with that.

Until I got into the car to drive the three blocks between there and home and I started to think.

The people I choose to give a shit about, they are damaged, all of them. They have been bludgeoned by chance more than once and sometimes I feel like I have to squint to see them beneath all the scars.

It kills me, it really does, how ill equipped we to deal with this life. How innocent and pure we are at the beginning and what happens to us after that.

It’s a fucking hard life for us all, but instead of accepting that fact and trying to make it easier for one another we deny it and try to pretend that our lives are so much better than the next person’s and we are so much happier, so much more successful, so much more fulfilled.

We care so much about what other people think that we fail to see that they’re just as fucked up as we are.

We damage ourselves, we damage the people around us and we are damaged by them in return.

I saw that damage tonight, ugly as it was, and wished I could have done something to have prevented it or fixed it in some way, but I can’t.

None of us can. It’s just life. And tomorrow we’ll all wake up nursing aching heads and tongues dry as sawdust and we’ll just carry on with our lives, brush our teeth and pretend everything is fine and nothing ever happened.

Life is easier with the blinkers on.

If you’re lucky enough to afford that luxury.

-ST

Treefiddy Review: Arctic Monkeys – Suck It And See

Is this going to be an unbiased, objective review based on irrefutable, well-researched facts? Fuck, no! I love the goddamn Arctic Monkeys!

But if it’s any consolation, I know every album this band has ever recorded like the village drunk knows the sidewalk outside his favourite tavern so I can at least assess their latest offering having done my homework

 

 

The Down Lizzo:

Arctic Monkeys made a name for themselves by perfecting the art of writing gigantic, energetic hooks and hammering them home effortlessly.

Then came Humbug, one of the first albums I ever reviewed on this site and with it, a complete departure from the sound they had carved out for themselves in their first two albums.

They enlisted Josh Homme from Queens Of The Stone Age to produce Humbug and with his help their sound changed almost completely from infectious indie to dark, moody desert rock and God knows! I fucking love desert rock

 

 

Did they like the direction Homme guided them in? As dark and compelling as it was, were they happy with Humbug?

Give Suck It And See a listen and it’s pretty damn obvious that the answer to those questions is undoubtedly “yes”.

 

Sick Tracks

The first time around “Brick By Brick” with its simple chord structure, dirty guitar licks and harmonious chorous is a winner, but after repeated listens the lyrics and Turner’s vocal lines get a little weak.

“I wanna steal your soul / Brick by brick / I wanna rock and roll / Brick by brick / I wanna rock and roll / Brick by brick / I wanna rock and roll” are definitely not his best lines which is a pity because it’s a great song otherwise.

“All My Own Stunts” on the other hand, though it’s strikingly similar to “Potion Approaching” off Humbug is a great track. It has a cowboy twang to its chorous and a bassline that moves insidiously beneath the surface lending the song a powerful menace that Turner’s vocals compliment perfectly.

 

 

“Don’t Sit Down Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair” is the most powerful desert rock anthem on the album, a great and wasted track that comes on like a bad peyote trip and peaks like the cleanest MDMA you ever tasted.

There is more, much more. This album has a lot of meat to it, plenty to sink your teeth into and it gets better with every listen.

 

Should You Give A Shit?

Give a shit my friends, give more than a shit. Give two shits because while I have yet to decide if this is their best album to date (Humbug will always have a soft spot for me) it’s a spectacular effort from a band that I have the utmost respect for.

Here’s “All My Own Stunts” to play us out. Take it away boys.

 

 

Final Verdict: 8/10

This Is The Four Hundredth And First Post On This Site

And man, what a ride it’s been

Sadly I missed the fact that yesterday’s post was number 400, I knew I was fast approaching that milestone, I’ve gotten into a solid routine these past few months of posting every weekday at 8.30 and the numbers have been adding up fast.

It’s a great thing this junkyard site, the greatest project I ever embarked on and though it’s still very much in it’s infancy, it’s clocking up between 400 and 500 hits a day on average and continues to grow, slowly, like a troop of mushrooms pushing up through the asphalt of the information super highway.

I get nostalgic at moments like these because I never thought these fightin’ words would ever reach so many people in such a short space of time and that they’d keep coming back for more.

That’s the greatest thing about blogging. You can cook up the weirdest fucking post, you can go way, way out there on a limb and bang out the craziest shit you can think up and someone out there will read that piece of sheer insanity and not only like it, but understand exactly where you’re coming from.

 

 

I am constantly surprised by the comments people write on this site and how fucking cool they are, it’s a daily reminder that there are good people out there despite what a lot of people would have you believe.

It’s for those people that I stay up until the early hours or wake up while the world’s still dark and like some kind of mad scientist, cook up a fresh batch of fightin’ words to serve to them, piping hot and full of fury.

I’d like to always be here, fighting the good fight, even when I’m old and worn out, reliving the glory days when we were young and bursting with fresh ideas and ways to change the world and when I die, I want this site to exist until the end of time, floating around in the ether of cyberspace like some great and rusted old spaceship.

And somewhere in the bowels of that gigantic, belligerent tetanus-shot-waiting-to-happen, this song will echo through the empty spaces long since abandoned by the friends that used to gather there and shoot the breeze.

 

 

Four hundred and one posts in and life’s just begun.

Ain’t that wonder

-ST

Game Of Thrones – 3 Reasons Why You Need To Watch This Show

I got wind of this series from one of my colleagues recently called Game Of Thrones which he’d read about online but hadn’t had a chance to watch yet because he was waiting for a moment when his wife was busy with something else so he could watch it.

This immediately told me two things, 1) It was probably awesome (girls, with the exception of J-Rab, generally can’t handle shit that’s awesome, it cuts into their Gossip Girl time) and 2) I needed to get my filthy hands on it as soon as humanly possible.

 

 

So I dutifully trawled the interwebs for the first seven episodes and started watching them last week and while it’s not the most life-changing series I’ve ever watched (I’ve never managed to top The Wire, you HAVE TO watch that show if you haven’t already, it will blow you the fuck away) it is pretty cool for the following reasons:

 

1. It’s All Medieval And Shit

Ok, ok, I know how dorky that last sentence reads and yes, at first it is a little dorky what with all the “mi’ lords” and “mi’ ladies” and the olde English that everyone speaks all the time. It’s set in the mythical land of the Seven Kingdoms Of Westeros and is based on a fantasy novel series written by George R. R. Martin called A Song Of Ice And Fire that comprises four books so far with a fifth landing next month.

 

 

So yeah, it’s all namby-pamby olde English and prancing around and banquets and shit until they get to the SLAYING! Then it’s all about fucking hacking the living shit out of one another, getting lanced in the neck, stabbed with daggers in the eye, getting dragged behind horses and skewering one another with every imaginable pointy weapon known to man!

So for all its gay period drama-ness it has a lot of scenes of gratuitous violence as well – brilliant!

 

 

2. The Bad Guys Are Fucking Terrifying

This is probably the MAIN reason I’m watching the series right now. In the opening scene you see these things in the woods that have slain a whole bunch of people, hacked them up and arranged their body parts to form some weird kind of symbol in the snow.

You catch fleeting glimpses of them and then BAM! Scene’s over, and you’re left thinking what the fuck just happened?! So you watch the first episode to find out, but do they tell you? No sir. They do not tell you. Nor do they tell you in the second, or third or fourth episode and by then you’re totally drawn into what’s going on in the story itself.

 

 

It’s a great plot device and they use it really effectively. All you get are little hints dropped here and there by some of the characters, just enough to know that whatever it was you saw in the beginning is bad fucking news and it’s coming…

It’s coming…

 

3. Breasts, breasts and more breasts

Full, pert medieval breasts. Natural breasts, before they were pumped full of silicone. And sex, plenty of sex in pretty much every episode, just enough to counter-balance the violence and keep things steamy.

 

 

I’m an unashamed admirer of the naked female form and clearly so are the people that made this show so there’s another reason why I don’t feel like a total geek recommending this series to people.

It’s got nice boobs.

So there you have it. Of course Game Of Thrones also has a pretty killer plotline, some great twists and turns in the story, highly likeable (and more importantly dislikeable) characters and some very accomplished acting but yeah, it’s the violence, bad guys and boobs that sold me

-ST

The Friday Metal Band Name Challenge – PART II

Due to the all round awesomeness of the last Friday Metal Band Name Challenge and the fact that @JustinMGrove is a total badass and found me MORE fucking ridiculous metal band names, I proudly present to you:

 

THE FRIDAY METAL BAND NAME

CHALLENGE – PART II

 

Alright, alright, calm down. Don’t lose your shit just because I boosted the font size and made it red, I need you to sit up and FOCUS here.

This is no fucking around! These are some of the evilest, darkest, never-been-laid-in-their-LIVES metal bands known to man and to illustrate this point they have not only chosen band names that are fucking retarded, but have chosen to write them in fonts that make your brain swell just reading them.

So let’s get to it shall we? May I present to you: Contestant Number 1

 

 

Alright, I think we can handle this one, we’re definitely looking at a “Bor” on the one side and a “agar” on the other, possibly a “Bork” actually, now that I look at it.

What’s happening in the middle is anyone’s guess though. Could be nothing, which makes “Borkagar”, could be an “n” which makes “Borknagar” or it’s an “h” which spells “Borkhagar”.

I’m going for “Borkhagar” on this because, as anyone who’s in a metal band will tell you, Vikings are totally badass, and the most badass of  those badasses was fucking HAGAR MAN! RRAARARARGRAHRGAHGRHGHG!

 

 

Onto Contestant No. 2, feast your eyeballs on THIS badboy:

 

 

Huh, ok. Getting a little more tricky as we go along. I can totally see what these guys are going for though – there’s nothing that screams “we’re a METAL BAND!” more than blood, guts and gore.

Just look at GWAR (which someone once told me stands for “God What A Racket”), how badass were they!

 

 

Ahh, that was dumb. Now you can’t see the word unless you scroll up. FAIL.

Anyway, too late now. Scrolling up I think I can make out a “B” and an “A”, possibly two “Z”s another “A” and an “N”?

“Bazzan” would be my best guess on this one, you guys?

And lastly, let’s jump right into our final contestant for the day. Check this bad mother out:

 

 

Is anyone else out there totally BLOWN AWAY by how much fucking time these guys must have on their hands? A font like that doesn’t just come around every day. You cant just open up Word, select “Font Of Satan” and bang there it is, hells no!

You need to sit for hour after painstaking hour to come up with a font like that, tinkering away tirelessly, reading and re-reading it to make SURE no one can fucking read it.

Great job guys, you’ve really smashed it out the fucking park this time around.

It’s like playing “Where’s Wally” with letters. I can see an “L”, a “B” (?) and definitely an “E” near the top, pretty sure there’s a sneaky “of” in the middle there (axe-head for the top of the “F”, genius) and on the bottom I can see a “U”, an “N”, an “A”, an “L” a “U” and an “E”?

Oh wait, is that a “B” at the top there? Pretty sure that’s a “B”…

So what does that make, “Lube of Unalue”?

Hahahahahah! That’s the BEST band name I’ve ever heard in my life.

And with that I’m opening this one up to the floor. Civilian, you were great at this last time, care to step in and translate for us?

Have a killer weekend guys and take care of your bad selves

-ST