Dan Briggs of Between the Buried and Me fame is one busy dude. BTBAM should really be enough to keep anyone busy considering the complexity of their music and their touring schedule. It seems like they make their way through the bay a few times every album cycle (not that I'm complaining). How he has the time for side projects like Orbs, Trioscapes and now The Nova Collective is beyond me.

I've never heard of post metal outfit Junius until they dropped their latest album. It ends their trilogy of albums, starting with The Martyrdom of a Catastrophist, continuing with Reports from the Threshold of Death, and ending with Eternal Rituals for the Accretion of Light.

Several members of The West Coast Get Down (WCGD), heard on Kamasi Washington’s hella bloated “The Epic,” are branching off with their own releases. Coming from the same marathon jam session that spawned The Epic, comes such fantastic releases as Thundercat’s Drunk, Miles Mosley’s Uprising, and now Cameron Graves’ Planetary Prince. The WCGD are really taking the jazz/funk/R&B world by storm, and giving a huge kick in the nards to one of the most unpopular genres as of late.  To quote Frank Zappa, “Jazz isn’t dead, it just smells funny.”

Black metal and blues, surely such an odd pairing shouldn't work. It almost doesn't, and it's downright bizarre, but something about it just keeps me coming back. 

I am now officially halfway through my training. I'm a little behind due to a back injury and a little vacay out to Monterey, but I'm catching back up and I ran my first long run of the training season. Last Saturday was a 12 miler in cold but sunny weather, hovering around the mid 40s. It's my ideal temperature and I don't look forward to the weather warming up.