hiidenkonttibeta

I forgot the arrival of new Therion albums for a while, so it was a pleasant surprise to come across them in new arrivals section.

It’s not a double album – it’s two albums, Sirius B and Lemuria. In this deluxe edition digipak they’re together, but the arrangement (one is upside down compared to other) makes it clear they’re diffrent albums.

I haven’t listened them enough to be able to say how strong this difference is in the music itself. In the beginning they sound a lot alike – less orchestrated than some previous Therion albums, more basic heavy metal parts. The opera singers are still there in most of the songs, but they still sound like a heavy metal album compared to Therion’s previous, the excellent Secret of the Runes.

So far they don’t threaten the best Therion albums, but I’m not disappointed either – I feel that it takes a lot more listening for these albums to “open up”. And Son of the Sun is probably as close to pop as operatic metal can be :-)

On the way back from the record shop there was something pointless to photograph:

A rainy day, a bus with fancy but wet window, a camera phone, a green view…

このしゃしんはなまえがありません. Or maybe “Wet bus window I-IV”?-)

Another postal packet from Hong Kong. This time they glued a sticker with a painting in it on the package:

And what did I get? Three movies, two of them by Shaw Brothers:

• The Five Venoms (Cheh Chang, 1978)
• The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (Chia-Liang Liu, 1978)
• Swordsman (King Hu, 1990)

In other news, if I figured out the note on Gonin-Ish homepage correctly, they’ll be performing live in June somewhere. I have no idea what this place called O-West is.. There seems to be some other strange bands too. If the gig was in July instead of June I might consider a trip to Japan – I’d really like to see Gonin-Ish live! Onmyo-Za too.. and The Brilliant Green, and Ars Nova, and …

Today was Helatorstai (whatever that is again..) which means a day off. うれしい!

I’m still hoping that the success of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy brings us more good Sword & Sorcery type fantasy movies. So far it hasn’t happened, so S&S movie fans can’t be too picky.

Subtv showed Kull the Conqueror today. Kull is another character by Howard, and pretty much a Conan copy. The story is a basic one, straight from the “hero saves the world from powers of evil” drawer, with some obvious glitches – for example, why does a king give his crown to an unknown man who stroke a sword in his chest?! The fighting choreography wasn’t too good and that Kevin Sorbo guy just isn’t very barbarianlike compared to Arnold :-)

The movie doesn’t quite compete with Conan the Barbarian or even Conan the Destroyer, but it’s a little bit better than Red Sonja and a lot better than some Sword & Sorcery movies – namely Dungeons & Dragons: The Movie, which should be avoided at any cost…

Last weekend was full of Real Work – carrying timber and roofing sheets, hammering nails and sawing. The results look like this:

These activities took place in Kittilä, in a lovely Spring weather: rain, snow, sunshine, hail and wind all took turns, both alone and together.

Dead Like Me looks like a promising TV series. It’s a dark comedy about … death. The main character gets killed in the first episode when a piece of MIR drops on her head, and she becomes a Grim Reaper (yes, there’s several of them). This series is created by Bryan Fuller, who has been working on Star Trek: Voyager and DS9 previously.

In this show’s universe Grim Reapers don’t seem to have enormous powers – they have to pick locks instead of walking through doors or walls and some have (part-time) jobs.

What other kind of Grim Reapers have authors/scriptwriters made up? I can list three from top of my head:

• Death, from Pratchett’s Discworld series. Archetypical figure, a skeleton wearing a hooded robe and wielding a scythe.
• Death, from Gaiman’s Sandman. A gothic girl.
• Joe Black, from Meet Joe Black movie. A suit-wearing young man.

If you’re bored enough, click the link below and add the ones I missed to the comments ;-)