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alcohol with caffeine withdrawal
Thursday, October 6 2011
Gretchen headed down to the City today to attend some animal rights function. She'd be spending the night, and I'd be fending for myself. I went to town to get some provisions (mainly more hardware for preventing a tree from falling on the house).
Today was day two of my caffeine abstinance program, and by this afternoon I definitely felt worse than I had yesterday. In addition to a headache (in the left front), I had some joint and lower back pain. I got back to the house and all I could do was watch teevee. I tried drinking some wine and beer, but it just made my headaches worse. This makes sense; a caffeine withdrawal should be like being on unpleasant depressants, and to add more depressants in the form of alcohol should just exacerbate matters.
Yesterday in the bathtub I'd read an article in The New Yorker about the American Black Metal scene, with a special focus on a band named Wolves in the Throne Room. While it's true that I was really into Thrash Metal back in the early 1990s, I never developed an interest in the more death-obsessed, extreme realms of the genre. Sepultura, Slayer, and Kreator demarcated the limits of where I was willing to go with regard to strangled vocals and demonic content. Beyond there, the music seemed to break down into an incoherent, vaguely comical, and not especially well-produced din. But I am the kind of metal fan who is willing to try new things, particularly if they are curated by such unexpected sources as The New Yorker. So today I found myself listening to the Wolves in the Throne Room discography (which took only about ten minutes to download). The standout feature of the music is that it has the orchestral, enveloping quality of movie soundtrack music, an effect achieved by the very rapid exercise of instruments playing what are actually rather slow melodies. The drums hammer away to create something not too different from pink noise, and the guitars play chords that are repetitively strummed on both downstroke and upstroke. The result, though seemingly coming from a dark place, can sound like a waterfall or the hum of wheels on the road. The style reminds me of the way I used to play when Josh Furr and I would get together, though in those days I liked to produce more accidental textures in the resulting walls of sound by not always fully-fretting the chords. The music of Wolves in the Throne Room functions more as ambient music than it does as anything from the rock and roll tradition. The songs are long (11 to 20 minutes) and the lyrics don't make much of a contribution. My view could change, but for now I feel that the songs (with the exception of one where they have a guest female vocalist) would all work better as instrumentals.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?111006 feedback
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