Some good stuff from this Slovenian avant-folk band.

Here's a remarkable recording of the great Zabelle Panosian from 1917, courtesy of Canary Records.

Simon Finn: Jerusalem, from the album Pass the Distance, 1970

Yep, not a bad comparison. Hala Strana is one of many recording names that Steven R. Smith uses--he's basically got one name for every style that he dabbles in, and with Hala Strana he was going for a bit of a Slavic music influence. All his music is pretty top notch hazy psych folk/post-rock...

Not too shabby, reminds me quite a lot of Burial. Here's the opening track from a favorite album of mine, School of the Flower, by Six Organs of Admittance. Starts out sounding like it's going to be a tripped-out mash-up of free-improv and weirdo-drone-folk (not unlike some of Alice Coltrane's...

Dang, some good stuff here. Thanks to WraithApe for the tip. Here's my contribution: Artist: The Gray Field Recordings Track: Nancy's Song to Charlie From the 2005 album Hypnagogia Genre: Broody wyrd folk

  Exactly--I think it's more about individual taste in humor than it is broad American vs. British humor. Also, often I find that if my friends don't enjoy a British comedy it's got less to do with the comedy itself and more to do with the accents/slang.

I'm not certain--I love Holy Grail and Life of Brian, but do really hate The Meaning of Life. I just don't think it's funny at all, full stop. 

Oh yeah, I didn't mean to imply that The Kinks are the most influential band on metal or anything like that, just that it can be fun to listen to the influences of the influences. Black Sabbath is the most influential metal band, full stop. They practically invented heavy metal and doom metal in...

I'd say, as others have, Black Sabbath, though certainly there are a few bands that predate them that had some significant influence. The blues were a major influence on Sabbath, so look to Robert Johnson and Howlin' Wolf for some proto-Sabbath sounds and lyrical themes. And you can't ignore the...

As a former long-time player of XI (I consider it to be my true MMO love, and yearn for the golden days when it was at its height) and a former player of XIV (played it for about a year), I can tell you that they are very different games. XI is very much in the vein of Everquest, and XIV in the...

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016): 9/10   And that rating is mostly just reflective of the stunning technical accomplishment that this movie is. Surely one of the finest examples of stop-motion animation ever.

Star Wars: Rogue One (2016): 7/10   I found that the back-half of the film almost entirely redeemed the bloated and scattered first-half, though some serious problems remained (the characters, mostly). Other problems include its frequent clunky callbacks to the original trilogy, the score...

I posted my top 50 albums of the year regardless of genre elsewhere on Head-Fi, but here is a much smaller list stripped down to metal only:   15. The Dillinger Escape Plan: Dissociation 14. Be'lakor: Vessels 13. Cult of Luna & Julie Christmas: Mariner 12. Destroyer 666: Wildfire 11...

There's always the possibility that my list will change (still waiting on a couple of reviewers whose opinions I hold in high regard to release their year-end best lists), but for the first time that I can remember no year-end best lists have otherwise swayed or forced me to re-evaluate my...

  Ooooooooooo thanks for the heads up.

Lots of activity here recently! I love lists, especially lists that are posted a month before the end of the year, which gives me plenty of time to listen to everyone else's and have mine pretty well cemented by the last day of the year. I tend to shuffle my personal list around a lot--something...

Finally beat The Witcher III and its accompanying expansions. Really enjoyed my time with it. Hearts of Stone in particular was fantastic--some of the best writing I've ever come across in a video game. Both the base game and Blood and Wine were a little rockier but still serious achievements in...

  If it makes you feel any better, I don't think I've ever played a game of Ticket to Ride where someone wasn't a mere 1-2 points behind someone else--usually behind the person in first.    Played four newish games recently--Epic Spell Wars, Smash Up, Mysterium, and Mechs vs. Minions. Didn't...

  Trailer made it look really cheesy, and the GF grew up in a Seventh Day Adventist family and had Doss's story memorized forwards and backwards by the time she was a teen--so she has absolutely no desire to see it. So it'll probably get a miss from me, even though I'm curious about Gibson's...

  Working on my first run-through still--just started the Blood and Wine expansion a couple weeks ago. The Hearts of Stone expansion is, I think, the best-written piece of game fiction I've ever encountered, and makes a strong case for games as literature. Blood and Wine has a lot to live up...

Alrighty, lots of pictures and play reports forthcoming:   Played quite a few games that are new to our group recently. We did not go forward with our previously planned 8 player Arkham Horror play through because its owners did come to the conclusion that it would take literally 8 hours and...

  New Testament?!?! Agggghhhh I thought I was on top of things but I'm not...

The Babadook (2014): 9/10   As a horror film, The Babadook is a bit ****. It's just not very scary, and the silly monster design (or its poor implementation in the film proper--as it appears in the pop-up book featured early in the film it's actually quite creepy) makes what ought to be...