The Crate Nerd: Pentagram
by Adam Ganderson
I’m not really a nice person. I judge books by their covers and people by the way they look. It makes things easier and solves the whole agony of getting to know someone. I especially don’t like junkies, because junkies look like vampires and vampires want to suck your blood.
With musicians however, one often hears the music before ever seeing them, especially if they’re an old band without a lot of recent publicity. Until today, I had only seen pictures of Pentagram from the 1970s. Basically they looked just like you’d expect: stoner teenage 70s kids, like from that movie with Matt Dillon, Over The Edge. Then I saw a picture from last year of front man Bobby Liebling and WOW. Dude, please lay off the chiva, you look like Dracula.
Pentagram has several crappy albums, some under different monikers, but only one kick ass album that wasn’t even released until 25 years after the music was recorded. That album, First Daze Here, recorded between 1972 and 1976, was released by Relapse in 2001 and will send the strong of the pack into a state of euphoria and the weaker ones running for their mommies.
Pentagram are also from my home state of Virginia. So since I’m like the President of this part of the page and have to make the tough decisions every day or something, I appoint them as head of the Department of Stoner Doom Destruction. Unfortunately, Pentagram from the 80s and 90s sounds a lot different from 1970s Pentagram. Sometimes I wish I could introduce Pentagram to themselves from the 70s and say: “Play like that, please.”
Still, I feel they are right for the job because they are among the originators of doom metal music in North America. Of course, all this must be taken in context of the 1970s, when metal was still an emerging genre. So although the stuff may not sound particularly hard by today’s standards, what we have here kids, is the formula for a whole ant farm of bands that popped up during the 1990s, mostly on the US West Coast. Adam Ganderson
With musicians however, one often hears the music before ever seeing them, especially if they’re an old band without a lot of recent publicity. Until today, I had only seen pictures of Pentagram from the 1970s. Basically they looked just like you’d expect: stoner teenage 70s kids, like from that movie with Matt Dillon, Over The Edge. Then I saw a picture from last year of front man Bobby Liebling and WOW. Dude, please lay off the chiva, you look like Dracula.
Pentagram has several crappy albums, some under different monikers, but only one kick ass album that wasn’t even released until 25 years after the music was recorded. That album, First Daze Here, recorded between 1972 and 1976, was released by Relapse in 2001 and will send the strong of the pack into a state of euphoria and the weaker ones running for their mommies.
Pentagram are also from my home state of Virginia. So since I’m like the President of this part of the page and have to make the tough decisions every day or something, I appoint them as head of the Department of Stoner Doom Destruction. Unfortunately, Pentagram from the 80s and 90s sounds a lot different from 1970s Pentagram. Sometimes I wish I could introduce Pentagram to themselves from the 70s and say: “Play like that, please.”
Still, I feel they are right for the job because they are among the originators of doom metal music in North America. Of course, all this must be taken in context of the 1970s, when metal was still an emerging genre. So although the stuff may not sound particularly hard by today’s standards, what we have here kids, is the formula for a whole ant farm of bands that popped up during the 1990s, mostly on the US West Coast. Adam Ganderson
