Monday, June 13, 2005

I'm sleuthing

I saw Judas Priest on Friday, with Queensrÿche as the opening band. I've been a fan of both bands for a while, though I was never as die-hard a Priest fan as I was for Maiden and Metallica. Queensrÿche's Operation: Mindcrime still holds up as one of my favorite Metal albums. As a young metal-geek in middle-school and High school, I listened to my tape so much, I wore it out. When I upgraded from tapes to CDs, Mindcrime was one of the first I purchased. So, that leads me to Queensrÿche's performance on Friday. Geoff Tate still has an amazing voice and on the whole, the band sounded great. Unfortunately, they only played Needle Lies from Mindcrime, though they did play a bunch of their older pre-Mindcrime stuff like Take Hold of the Flame and Queen of the Reich. Thankfully they DIDN'T play Silent Lucidity. The best news from them, though I admit I'm a bit nervous, is the news of Operation: Mindcrime II.

On to the Metal Gods. At one point during the show, Halford mentioned that Priest has been playing their form of metal for 40 years. Holy Shit. His voice was amazing even though he wasn't exactly spry going around the stage. He didn't need to be, his pipes made everything work. They opened with Electric Eye, after that, Halford changed his jacket for the first of about 10 times. The second song was Touch of Evil from the Painkiller album. Amazing and powerful. For my money, Painkiller is one of the very best metal albums from the 90s one of those rare albums without a bad song. Priest went through a bunch of their classics, Diamonds and Rust, Turbo Lover, with an encore of Hell Bent for Leather. The two best songs, I thought, were Painkiller and Exciter. Like I said, I love the album Painkiller and the title song is great. On the whole, a very good concert.

I went with my brother-in-law and there were only two problems with the whoe concert experience in general. (1) The group of people next to us kept bitching and complaining about Priest and almost making fun of the band. (2) A really fat guy, I'd say at least 280 pounds decided he was going to enjoy the concert without a shirt. Don't worry, though he didn't have a shirt, he made sure he had a beach ball.

Family Guy was, again, very, very funny last night with a couple of OH MY GOD moments. From Brian propositioning Meg, to the AIDS song, to Stewie wanting to touch Cleveland's hair, the line between offensiveness and humor was straddled very well. However, the two instances where I couldn't stop laughing, and thinking about it again as I type this I'm laughing, was when Peter put on the Quagmire mask and put the Loretta mask on Brian and they kept rolling around on floor simulating sex. Right after that, Popeye music cued up and Clevelend popped open the can of spinach and I was done.

I beat God of War last weekend. Even though I was on the Easy level (Mortal) It was still not the easiest game in the world, but it was a helluva lot of fun. The storyline was great and the graphics were probably the best I've seen on a PS2 game. This game is a great combination of hack'n'slash action with enough puzzle-solving quagmires to keep things.

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