Are you imagining a tropically twisted Japanese arcade version of Kraftwerk fronted Tom Waits and Ian Curtis reborn as siamese twins joined by the jugular? If so, this post is for you.

Silk Flowers followed up on their two intriguing 7-inch releases with a self-titled debut full length earlier this year on PPM. They also made us a pretty fantastic mix a half a year ago. How time flies. Since then I’ve been strangely drawn to their quirky electro-goth musings that seem to stem from the euro-trashy scenes of the late 70ties and early 80ties – naturally implying that we’re dealing with a New York band here.
Incidentally they’re now wrapping up their first European tour and will be playing Copenhagen tomorrow and we caught them in transit between Cologne and Berlin for a quick Q&A.

Vice: So how did you guys end up playing together?
Ethan Swan: Aviram and Peter played in a band together called Soiled Mattress and the Springs and I was a huge fan.
Aviram Cohen: Peter and I had met on an online dating site and Ethan worked at the place where we used to go on dates to, so one thing led to another.

Ah, that old story. So what are you about as a band? Your sound is both misanthropic and cheerful at the same time.
Yeah, we’re mostly in between, I don’t really want to be too much of either. I guess we’re red, white, and blue mixing into purple. But we’re also about freedom from mental slavery and pizza.

Pizza. What else goes with your music?
We all like candy bars, but I wouldn’t say that’s part of our music. Rainbows are cool. There’s something about seeing a band of color after a bad rain that makes for a good guideline of living. In that way, maybe nature is something that goes with what we do, but not in the sense that it’s natural. More like something that happens and you do what you can to live with it.

I was actually thinking about the cinematic edge to your songs and I know you are all movie buffs, so what movie would you most like to soundtrack?
Ethan: That Russian movie The Return, I would like to re-score that.
Aviram: The Coen brothers. Their last two movies had really great underlying concepts, that I felt say a lot about humankind. Spike Jonze is great too. I somewhat identify with the relationship between his intention and the final product.

Right, you have to board your plane, can you just give me your high and lows of the year, seeing as it’s almost over?
My highs were touring, especially going to the west cost and Europe. That and the No Age album. Lows would be stuff like scarce employment and family woes.
Ethan: The movie Drag Me to Hell and visiting Mexico for the first time, just barely escaping the H1N1 outbreak. I’d rather not remember the lows.

Well, I can fill that one then: You’re coming to Denmark right in the midst of H1N1 frenzy. See you tomorrow!

If you’re anything like me, your girlfriend probably thinks you’re a pansy because you tried to prove your manhood by opening that Gatorade but goddamnit, the cap was screwed on way too tight. Don’t worry though, this Thursday you’ll have yet another chance to show that you’re tough.

That’s because Vice, in collaboration with Scion, is putting on the punk show of mid-November, and it’s free. Go to it and prove to your girl that you’re the kind of dude who likes slamming into other sweaty dudes, and are therefore not a wuss. Headlining are Seattle’s best, The Spits, who are about to blow up. Critics will compare them to a lo-fi Devo, which is fitting but still kind of lazy. Also playing is Dan Melchior, who claims to make Southern Rock/ Folk/ Shoegaze, which would, by virtue of being the world’s only Southern Rock-Shoegaze act, make him the best Southern Rock-Shoegaze musician in the world. Awesome! The show is sure to be a smelly, sloppy good time. Check the picture above for more details and click here to RSVP. As a bonus, because we’re nice, the most wussiest story in the comments will win a consolation prize of an Almighty Defenders LP. It sort of fits the theme, right? Garage rock show? …Anyone?

I am an Ebay addict. I have to go cold turkey for months at a time or I get lost in an endless vortex of disappointment, bidding on things that are amazing but ultimately losing auctions because I am always, ALWAYS outbid. That’s the problem with being a cheap-ass I guess, I only win if no one else bids on an item. I am also unfortunately talent at finding weird things I want that are way way way out of my price range.

My obsession with concert shorts started off the internet. I scored a pair of David Allan Coe shorts at Willie Nelson’s 4th of July Picnic in Ft Worth, Texas. They are the best little yellow athletic shorts with “David Allan Coe Tour 2004″ embroidered across the ass. There is nothing like the sort of attention from having the name of outlaw country’s biggest badass across your bum.

Those shorts inspired me onto regular searches for similar items.  I quickly realized, however, that the world of Ebay music memorabilia is filled with gross Metallica board shorts and Pink Floyd boxers, but if you wade through the dregs you’ll find an occasional gem. I’ll never forgive myself for losing the auction for a pair of Death sweatshorts that only went for $20. Sure they were a size men’s large and probably once sheltered the sweaty balls of a heavy metal drummer, but still, they could have been mine. This gem, however, will never be mine.

I love Anthrax, but $225 for shorts that will make me look like a total butchie is out of the question. These have been online as a buy-it-now for months and I hilariously found them on multiple message board threads. Turns out they are torturing the metal masses, not just myself.

While I will never get sick of a classic metal or rock t-shirt, sometimes there is a desire to mix it up a bit. Aside from shorts, I’ve found the joys of painters caps and jackets in my searches. Hell, I even scored a Metal Church necklace for five bucks.

And this gem is due in the mail any day now:

Sure, Divine Intervention isn’t Slayer’s greatest album, but for $5, I’m not gonna complain.

Generally necklaces go pretty cheap because they were widely disseminated and shoddily made. Plus, since it’s a fairly gender-specific item the appeal is narrower. Hats on the other hand can break your heart.

I once got lucky and scored this Motley Crue Shout at the Devil-era flap hat with an amazing array of badges on it for only $20. Yeah, I’m a dick and hung it on my wall. This is a piece of history that I love, but who really wants to see me out there in the world wearing it? Though it is a hit whenever we have a house party. But they can go for much higher.

Rock memorabilia is a broad and loving world of merchandise that can nurture even the most rabid of fans. And you don’t have to be a serious collector to get into it. My budget and my apartment size result in me exercising considerable restraint. Things like this amazing 1983 Judas Priest Screaming for Vengance satin jacket for $125 are out of my range, even though they stay embedded in my imagination.

Why torture myself so? Why take the time in posting about things I can’t afford? This is a fashion post, that’s what the world of writing about clothes mostly consists of: dreaming over the unattainable. I’m just trying to be a little more honest here, and also I have the hopes that someone really cool will buy the things I can’t so I can rest assured that they are in good hands. Yes, this attachment is a little obsessive and yes,

I may just be a little sick, but come on, look at this thing!

It’s been sitting in my Watchlist for weeks now. I discovered after I first found my dream gift for my boyfriend, an ‘89 Slapshot shirt.

Unfortunately this tee is $150. (Fortunately I found the same one at an affordable price and made my Bostonian boyfriend very happy.) Lured in by the expensive dream tee I decided to see what else the seller had. This fucking Canadian has a store full of dreams at prices I can’t begin to afford, like the beautiful Priest jacket and this Iggy Pop tee:

Oh well, I’ll just keep telling myself I don’t need them. Just like I don’t technically need this terrifying hand-painted Barbara Streisand shirt that seduces and repulses me at the same time:

Aside from washing up cutlery, going to work is my least favorite thing to do. Even in Barcelona (sun, Gaudi, beach, you know) work is a drag. Especially when the office is located on the main route between a funeral home and the municipal crematorium. Every time I go out on the fire escape for a smoke and to try and ignore the interns having a nervous breakdown because no one acknowledged their existence for 30 seconds, I’m presented with another reminder of life’s ultimate brevity and insignificance as a hearse rolls by, fresh from either taking or having dropped off someone’s dearly departed.

To break up the monotony, face up to our fears, and have an hour’s fucking peace in the office, we sent an intern out to throw herself in front of a hearse and ask some questions about exactly what it is these death delivery boys actually do.

VICE: Hi, what is it exactly that you do?
Hearse driver: Our job is to help the coffin bearers get the coffin and the wreath out of the hearse, hang around until the funeral’s over, and then take the coffin from the church to wherever it’s going. Usually that’s the crematorium.

Have you ever worked as anything else? As a taxi driver, for example?
I actually used to drive a truck. But most of the guys here started when they were still in short trousers, when they were 14 or 15. It’s a job you inherit. Also it’s not the only thing we do–most drivers do other work on the side.

How many trips do you make on a normal day?
A maximum of four. Three in the morning and one in the afternoon.

Do you get bored of driving the same route every day?
No. Sometimes we’ll take different roads depending on the cementary or the traffic. And anyway, the distances aren’t that big.

Is there always only one driver?
Well yeah, but I’m never alone. There’s always the guy in the back.

Do you ever play i-Spy or anything to entertain yourself?
Play games? In the hearse? Er. No.

Have you ever crashed on the way to the crematorium?
Never with the coffin occupied, but yeah, I did once.

What happened?
I back-ended someone once at a roundabout.

Is that all?
Yeah but it wasn’t my fault, he braked suddenly.

I’m sure. Listen, that’s it, thanks for your time.
OK, but if you’re ever in a hearse, remember to fasten your seatbelt.

I always do.

Continuing the trip into the slightly thin forest that is 1994’s classic metal albums, we come to maybe the most brutal and genre-defining of them all: Darkthrone’s Transilvanian Hunger.

This is widely regarded as Kolbotn’s finest’s greatest accomplishment (although Under a Funeral Moon gets my vote), but some have dismissed the record’s lo-fi production as a step too far. Darkthrone continue the black metal sound they evolved on the previous two releases but the production on this one though is where it differs. Like 1994’s other black metal classic releases (De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and Hvis Lyset Tar Oss), this is as pure and black as both, yet it has a totally different sound and feel – a lot rawer than Burzum’s effort and more haunting perhaps than Mayhem’s. Like I mentioned before, these all do fall under the category of “black metal,” but are all very different in their approach to the genre’s title.

This record caused some controversy around its release, as the second half of it was penned by then-jailed murderer/arsonist Varg Vikernes (there is backmasked speech from the man himself on the end of “As Flittermice As Satans Spys”). Again, the notoriety and infamy of this record has possibly overshadowed what is a classic metal album. This is the record that produced a million imitators – some good, most awful.

Admittedly, the first time I heard this record it actually kinda scared me a bit. I mean, I always like to smoke a bowl or two before listening to a new record (it gets me focused), but this time it kinda backfired; I wasn’t expecting something as ferocious and feral as the tones on Transilvanian Hunger. It is like a sea of razor-sharp piranhas flooding the caverns of your mind and tearing the fabric of your inner ear away, then feeding it to rabid jackals. I guess it falls into that category where it sounds like it was recorded thousands of years ago by plunderers from the future in a cave under the ocean floor where the souls of Vikings lay. This, put plainly and simply, is True Norwegian Black Metal. You either like it or you don’t.

Darkthrone, “Skald Av Satans Sol”

Darkthrone, “Skald Av Satans Sol”

Darkthrone, “I En Hall Med Flesk Og Mjød”

America likes to think that nobody can make a crappier, B-er movie than they can. Bullshit. Canadians can hack out more awful exploitation flicks per capita than any country.  Take a significant brain drain to greener American pastures, add some enforced cultural protectionism, and you’ve got a formula for halfassed films by mediocre talent that live forever on late-night Canadian TV.

For example: in 1991, while Hollywood was busy crowning the action genre with Terminator 2: Judgement Day, we were busy with Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe, a film so bad it lured both Jesse Ventura and Sven-Ole Thorssen all the way up here to film it.  America somehow scores a hit with Porky’s, we let flop with Screwballs.  Outside the comfy confines of the National Film Board’s mandate, Canadian filmmakers have to try to do more with less to compete with Hollywood’s more established garbage dumps–sometimes with success, but many, many times without.  Bad news for our cultural identity, good news for bad movies that’re more fun to watch than drunk monkeys racing tiny go-karts.

VICE talked to Paul Corupe, probably the world’s leading expert on Canadian exploitation cinema, about his favourite films that had the misfortune of being Canadian and independent in a time before Lions Gate.

VICE: So what are the most worthwhile Canadian B movies out there?
Paul Corupe: One of my favourites is Rock N Roll Nightmare, a vanity project for a rock star based out of Vancouver named Thor.  He’s the star of a rock band and they head to a barn in northern Ontario to record their album because there’s a studio in the barn, and that’s when strange things start happening. One by one the members of the band start disappearing, until eventually Satan appears and accosts Thor in probably the craziest ending to a film I’ve ever seen. It’s pure cheese, but wildly enjoyable. I talked to Thor about it, and he’s not terribly proud of the film, but he knows what it is–one of those monster movies with bad heavy metal and a lot of fun.

I didn’t figure Thor for the bashful type.
Well, he at least realizes it’s not the best-made film in the world.

Next, I think The Mask is one of the best-made Canadian horror films that doesn’t really get its due.

Agreed. Jim Carrey scared the hell out of me.

No, definitely not that The Mask.  This one was shot in 3D in 1961, well before 1964, when most critics say that Canadian fiction film really started with Nobody Waved Goodbye.  There were a couple of films before then, and The Mask was one of the best.  You would go to the theater and they would give you a little cardboard replica of the mask with 3D glasses in it, and it’s about a psychiatrist who’s sent the mask of a patient who’s just committed suicide, and every time he wears it, he enters this surreal, 3D dream world with sacrificial altars.  But every time he puts the mask on, the audience is told to put their mask up to their eyes to experience these sequences. Not a lot of people know about it, but it’s a lot of fun to watch.

Anything that actually manages to be decent?
Crime Wave is one of the films that actually got me started on the site.  It was made in 1984 by John Paizs in Winnipeg, and it’s a comedy about a frustrated screenwriter trying to make the perfect crime film, and he can always get the beginning and end of the film, but he can’t come up with a middle.  He lives above the garage of a family, and he befriends their daughter, who narrates the film and helps him try to come up with that elusive middle.  The gems of the movie are the dramatized half-started and half-finished vignettes he writes for his crime film.  One’s about an Elvis impersonator trying to break into the world of… well, impersonating.  Another’s about a couple trying to sell Amway to people, and it ends with them at the Amway awards ceremony shooting people with shotguns.  It really is a brilliant dark comedy.  Although we have a lot of comedic talent, we haven’t had a lot of comedy films come out of Canada. This was a huge film to me–it showed me that Canadian films don’t have to be about cottages or the plight of bass fishermen.

There’s a new fun and educational amusement park opening up in India, where you can learn all about pesticide manufacturing and the effects it has when its toxic gases permeate a city, as well as consequently evading arrest and large moral and legal culpability. The Union Carbide plant in Bhopal is opening its doors to the public for seven days to commemorate the 25-year anniversary of the disaster it ravaged on thousands and thousands of people. This will be better known in town as Riot Week.

The government’s thinking this will “satisfy curiosity”—as if melting skin, organs, and limbs didn’t satiate their thirst. “I have visited the site numerous times and handled the waste on several occasions,” says Minister for Gas Tragedy (Relief and Rehabilitation) Babulal Gaur. “There’s nothing to worry.” Anyone who was gonna die probably already has, so what’s the big fucking deal?