Out With the Old. In With the New

Those two pictures represent a huge change in the life of That Devil Music. As of today we will no longer be on the http://thatdevilmusic.blogspot.com. The new address is http://thatdevilmusic.net with a whole new layout. I commented on the first podcast of the year that this was going to be a goal and though I'm a month behind schedule it finally has happened thanks to Scott of Hook in Mouth and now here. So head on over to the new site, eventually anyone coming here will be redirected there , and give a look and let me know what you think. There will be a grand opening article with a bunch more news to share as well on the new digs.

I'd like to thank Guillermo at Loud Reviews and Randy from Official Metal Show Metal Blog for being early friends and I hope you guys continue to check in to our doings on the new URL. Also I'd like to say thanks to Cable Zombie for early commentary and providing us with some good content with the acoustic Metallica covers. If anybody needs to email us for anything the new e-mail is thatdevilmusic@gmail.com. Catch on ya the other side!

I AM \M/artin

I'm \M/artin. I'm a 9-5 slave in finance. I like music, particularly metal. I play guitar and bass, program drums, and do vocals for my own project Malastrana. I was the bassist in the prototype of an awesome Santa Barbara band called Backmask. They are still around today putting out kickass metal. I highly suggest you check them out. After that I went on to grad school and met up with some like minded troublemakers to create a one of a kind acoustic cover band for shits and giggles. I grew up on Van Halen, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and The Doors. The first song I remember hearing as a toddler was "Running With The Devil." The first music video I remember catching my eye was "Jump". Then it was Ozzy's "Crazy Train". I was hooked. From their I moved on to Motley Crue (hey, I grew up in LA), and a few years later I saw the music video for Metallica's "One". Game changer. I would never be the same. From there, I went to the back catalogue and discovered Master of Puppets and Ride The Lightning. A friend of mine let me borrow Megadeth's "Rust In Peace", another friend gave me Slayer's "Seasons in the Abyss", and yet another friend let me borrow Iron Maiden's "Fear of the Dark". At some point, Queensryche's "Operation Mindcrime" entered the picture. And then... PANTERA! Holy crap! These guys pummled like no one had ever pummeled before. I wanted more. I learned guitar and never looked back. Some of my favorite bands include: Nevermore, Opeth, Porcupine Tree, Megadeth, Fear Factory, Van Halen, Ozzy, Randy Rhoads, DevilDriver, Tesseract, Pantera, Dream Theater, In Flames, Faith No More, Alice in Chains, Rush, Deftones, Carcass, Meshuggah, Dimmu Borgir, Backmask, Cystrot, 'tallica, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Queensryche, Joe Pass, Soilwork, Anthrax, Testament, Death, Slayer, Prong, Tool, Arch Enemy, Hypocrisy, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Hawkwind, Dio, Sabbath, Motorhead, Deep Purple, The Cult, Roland Orzabal, TFF, Vito Bratta (yes, Vito is a badass player, get over yourself), Peter Gabriel, Converge, Threat Signal, Steve Vai, and the list goes on and on. So expect to read about a whole mix of different metal.

Joining the Evil Team

Hey, All!

Rob has asked me to join his Team of Everlasting Darkness and try my hand at this "blogging" stuff. I'm a nerdy, mild-mannered (glasses, even) low level bureuacrat who simply happens to like...questionable....music. Doom metal and blackened doom are my main musical interests, but I am pretty eclectic, so you may also see posts on things rather distant from metal. Apocalyptic, doom-laden experiemental neo-bluegrass from the son of a Nazarene Church preacher (Wovenhand)? Why not? Hope you enjoy my writing and learn about some new bands and music. That's the great thing about the internet! I'm new at this, so pictures will be coming eventually but not right away. In the mean time...something from the classic gothic doom band Fields of the Nephilim.



The Ranter

Draeden's New TDM Features

Just to let you all know, there's going to be some new features here on That Devil Music. On my end you'll be seeing a few reoccurring features each on it's own regular schedule.

I'm going to be spotlighting a kick ass guitar on Axe of the Month.

Rob Liz has his A to Z but I'm too impatient to wait to do certain bands so I'm going to randomly pick a band I've immersed myself into and give you a featurette about them on my Draeden's Artist Spotlight.

Sometimes you feel like going retro so I'm going to give homage to those bands of old that influenced and shaped the music we head-bang to today with my Draeden's Time Machine.

Revolver has it's "Women of Hard Rock". That Devil Music is going to spotlight its own smokin' hot babe with Draeden's Succubus Showcase.

We've done an interview here and there but I really want to make this a more common feature and give you guys our chats with these musicians on a more regular basis. That being said we will be giving you Devilish Interviewz. The Z makes it edgy.





Please visit and spread the word about these Links:


Songs of the Goddess - For and about all things Pagan music.
and
That Devil Music - For the best in Hard Rock and Metal.


That Devil Music's Last FM page!

E-Mail That Devil Music!

You Can Now Buy Music Through Us. So Do Eet..

That's right. That Devil Music is going corporate. Now due to being an Amazon Associate you can check out songs on the right and if you like them purchase them. Currently to kick things off theses are the albums from my favorite artists of late. As time goes on this will change to include albums from bands we review or even interview when they get released. You get music, the bands get some coin to keep going and we get the benefit of helping everyone out. Happy Shopping!

TDM Has a New Banner. What Do You Think?

As a preview to some new big things to come in the New Year I have put up a new banner with a new logo. Thanks to Alkahest of HBIH for doing the Photoshop work on it. I think it's sexy and more metal then the patchwork deal we had for over two years. Let me know what you think of it.

That Devil Music makes even more sweet love to Last.FM

A couple of additions to the site have been made in regards to Last.FM. For a long time I've had the embedded radio player which I hope people can and have used. Well I've also included a chart to show what bands I'm scrobbling. I've also created a That Devil Music group to further enhance discussions and get people to share music on. You can go here and check it out.My hope is this will get the networking in the metal community to broaden just a little bit.

Myspace is Dead to me

I gave it the old college try. I really did. But it seems like my relationship with Myspace had to come to an end. You see I just cannot be with someone who can't trust me. I did nothing wrong but it didn't matter, I didn't have the freedom to see other people and was continuously blocked from communicating. Here is the breakup letter after the jump.


Thanks for contacting MySpace.

We've recently discovered that BlogSpot pages are being used by spammers to send spam, so all links to that site have been disabled. Although you or your blog may not be associated with or linked to spam or spammers, to protect all MySpace Profiles from spam, phishing, and online scams, all links to BlogSpot are blocked.

You are still welcome to link to content you may have hosted on BlogSpot through your own top level domain that you own and control.

Please contact your registrar or hosting provider for more information regarding domain forwarding and linking your domain to your content hosted on a free hosting service.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Thanks for keeping MySpace a safe and secure place to socialize with friends.

Sincerely,
The MySpace Support team
Our response
Thanks for contacting MySpace.

This is an automated response to let you know we’ve received your message. Someone on our team is reviewing your question and will get back to you soon.

Sincerely,
The MySpace Support team

Your message
Why does my blogsite http://thatdevilmusic.blogspot.com come up as a phishing site? It's not true. I'm trying to post links when I write an article and it's being blocked. Please advise.

And here is my response to the breakup letter.

Thank you for your response. As Blogspot is a free site hosted by Google I will not be able to do as you are suggesting. I will continue to use Facebook for my promotional needs.Frankly our relationship wasn't going to work out due to the cluttered mess of your layout and the incessant copy and paste tactics of your users. Personally I can't wait for the day when music artists can duplicate the promotional tools they use for Facebook instead. Tkank you again for your time.

New Poll feature has been added

I'm going to try and each week post a poll question asking if something is overrated or under rated. It will probably pertain to either bands making the news or trends that have made the news. So go ahead and vote away and hopefully this will be a way to get some more interaction from people. At the end of the week depending on the results maybe I'll do a post discussing the why's and why nots.

That Devil Music to kick some Fantasy Football Ass

Yes that's right, That Devil Music will be representing in the all metal bloggers league Pigskin Destroyers 666 hosted by The Number of the Blog.

We will be matched up not only against members of TNOTB but also Reign in Blonde ,74000 Riffs, Thrash Hits , and Metal Insider among others. I'll keep you posted on how we do as the season progresses.
Oh yeah and the team is called Clowns with Downs because I hate juggalos and would love to see them smashed on a football field. Also the banner pic is of the Dallas Cowboys metal band , Free Reign. Check them out here.

That Devil Music on Myspace

Oh yeah, we're expanding into new territories of obscurity. While I was trying to contact Martin from Malastrana to get pics for a post I'm doing on his new project, i decided to create the Myspace page for That Devil Music. Being a complete noob to that I'm still fumbling with the workings of it.

Interesting sidenote is when I was creating the URL Myspace told me that the name thatdevilmusic was already taken. Really....so I typed the page in and it's a blues band from Scotland that formed the same year.

Anyways here is the MYSPACE page. It can also be found under the Pages section of the blogsite entitled "Where to find the Devil". So let the musician friend requests start rolling in. Because ideally that's what I'm looking for is to check out some new music. If anyone knows someone that needs exposure send em to that link:)

We've got mail! Yay!

You know the one glaring thing I've neglected all this time on doing, speaking of directions to take the blogsite? E-mail! That's right kiddies, even if you wanted to contact us without leaving a comment you couldn't have because I'm a dumbass.

Well here you go, if you want to contact us for whatever reason just e-mail us at thatdevilmusic@yahoo.com.
Thanks Guillermo from Loud Reviews for making me realize that...duh....I didn't have an e-mail contact yet:)

The State of my mind and Enlightened view of this blog

First of all I'm trying to spend less time on the computer when I get home. I work on them for a living and I have this propensity to come home and sit in front of it for a few hours more and other things are starting to be affected by it.

Secondly until recently there hasn't been anything out there that just screamed at me "Get on TDM and write about it!". I'll be posting a bit more here in the near future though as some things I've been reading need addressing.

Thirdly I've come to realize that I had a brief delusion of grandeur of how big I wanted this site to be. I read an interview awhile back with the Metalsucks writers and after seeing what they did to make their site one of the biggest in the metal industry there was just no way I was going to come even close to putting that much effort into this. At least not intentionally. We're talking quitting of jobs and forking out money I just don't have. I love the music and like writing ok but not that much to destroy my livelihood over.Plus I just don't have a network of resources or inside tracks to do some of the things that would be cool to do like interviews,podcasts, and partnerships with labels for contests.

Fourthly(Is that even a word?) I've been mining other sites for leads on bands I might have overlooked to listen to or just might be on par with some truly unique and awesome bands like Opeth and Draconian.I think I've found a couple here and there I'll be writing about.

Lastly I've come to evaluate where I stand as a metal fan compared to others that are writing blog sites. Not only am I approaching middle age in real life but I'm a virtual dinosaur compared to the writers on other blogs. It's like being in a sort of menopausal thing. I'm old enough to remember and appreciate the old stuff from the early 80's but I'm also digging new stuff from the the last decade or so. Some of these bands are the type I would never have listened to back in the day but my tastes have radically changed over the last few years or so. There were trends back in the day I hated just like there are trends now that I do.

I do appreciate everyone that does come to visit even if there are no comments though. I get e-mail notifications of the traffic that comes in and people are logging on which is cool. Continue to spread the word if you know anybody that wants to kill time and read opinions and reviews of the metal scene.

So where am I going to from here? Well I think I'm going to start and make some features I started be more of a consistent thing. Shuffled Playlist,Random thoughts for example. I'm also going to be starting a project that spawned from something I started doing early on (Devil's spotlight) that's going to be called Devil Music A-Z. It's going to be a platform for me to discuss every band I 've listened to and at least marginally enjoyed over the last 25 + years. I'm also going to look into including polls just to have some more interaction from the readers and then the results can then be discussed.I also need to light a fire under Draeden's ass to post more. His tastes are really starting to become drastically differant then mine and we need to spark up some debates.Plus even if I'm not posting someone is to keep the interest up.

So in closing That Devil Music will still plug along as always but I'm going to keep a more realistic approach to what I'm doing here and not be so caught up on things outside of my control. Thanks for tuning in.

You can thank writer's block for my new contributor

First I'd like to thank everyone who has taken the time to check in and read my nonsense. My hit counts have increased quite a bit over the past couple of months and I appreciate everybody tuning in.
With that being said there are some lapses in days when I post things due to situations like real life,writer's block,video games,really great porn...etc. Therefore I've asked my best friend Draeden to be a contributing writer to TDM.

Draeden and I go back over 15 years and while we do share an interest in metal music and some bands in the genre most of the time our tastes are completely differant as you'll soon see. But he's been my biggest supporter in this endeavor in fact the banner is his creation, he's been a frequent commenter,supplied live pics from recent shows, and provided us with the Epica concert review.

So in an effort to provide more consistent content please welcome Draeden to the TDM writing team. And show him no mercy if he posts something a bit off the wall. Ooops, I'm speaking out loud again.

Minor tweek to the posts

I've done a minor tweek to the site. As I was reading over some of my longer posts I got annoyed at how much scrolling I had to do on the front page. So I added a Read More function to each post. If the post is going to be a long one from here on out you can click the Read More link to get the rest of the text. When I get time I'll fix the long archived posts.

But this way I'll be able to fit more posts on the front page because I've got a feeling some people are missing stuff I've done in the past.Feel free to leave me feedback on this little tweek.

That Devil Music on Facebook

I've been struggling with trying to see how best to link this site up with Facebook. I would have preferred to have a Facebook logo to just link and send someone to the TDM Facebook page but this will have to do. If anyone knows how I can do that by all means share the info.

For now at the bottom I've set up a fan box so people can be a fan and suggest this page to any of their friends who might be metalheads and want to kill sometime reading my crap.

I've also added a share button so if there are any articles of interest to be shared among your Facebook bretheren fel free to do so:)Word of caution. The share button on the main page seems to want to just share the top article. For any other articles you'll need to click the title and then share that out.I'll get it sorted out eventually but hope this helps in the meantime.

A little site update

So I've changed my handle from Eclectic to Rob Liz. I was asked the other day "Why Eclectic?". I didn't want to use my old Teleconference BBS handle or my nerdy World of Warcraft handle. I figured my tastes were a bit Eclectic so that's what I went with.

Recently though I have a frequent comment contributor who knows me in real life and doesn't understand anonymity in the Internet circles therefore kept referring to me by my real first name. Hi Ken, Pretty Maids sucks and get well soon buddy:)Anyways I've changed it to Rob Liz which is a short version of my real name so if you see me on any other of my fellow Google bloggers sites as either Eclectic or this, there ya go.

Now that you've read this and said to yourself "Who the fuck cares?" I'll start throwing some more posts out there soon.

I've also added labels for easier navigation to some topics or bands. Thanks for checking in.\m/

Site Update

Just a quick word about some changes I've made to the site recently. Me being a web page noob I just figured out how to embed videos therefore I've inserted some pertinent videos and updated some older posts with video instead of a boring link. I also added what banners I could find for some bands to spruce up the look a little better.

A new background and new header has been posted along with a radio player so you can hear some of the madness that is my taste.

Stay tuned in October as I'll be posting quite a few articles in honor of Halloween.

If there are any suggestions on how to make this site better I'm open to hear em.