Brendan Baldwin Dot Com

At one of my previous places of work, there was an intern named Eugene who was into weird heavy metal as much as I was, and he sent me a link to a video for the song “Rational Gaze” by Meshuggah. I had heard of them but had never heard them before…

OMFG! Can I just say I almost immediately ran out to the store and bought the only Meshuggah album they had at the time, Catch 33.

This album is absolutely amazing. It completely re-opens the rulebook for what music can be and writes all over it in big red fv(k’n permanent marker.

The shock to my internal musical nervous system was so intense that after owning every Meshuggah album now, when I’m listening to music, 90% of the time I’m probably listening to Meshuggah.

The album Catch 33 in particular is really insane and it pretty much transports you into a wholly different dimension of mind when you listen to it. It’s dark but its also a spiritual/existential darkness. It’s a much deeper trip than the Nothing album was, and is much more of a concept album. I’m a sucker for concepts like these.

So check it out; taken individually, I’d say the songs “Sum” and “In Death is Death” are stand-outs, but the album should really be consumed from start to finish as its really a single piece of music.

Mindrenching.

I was introduced to these delicious hand-held pies-on-the-go two years ago on my first trip to London. When I had the opportunity to travel to London again recently, my first thought was “Cornish Pasty”—I was there for about a week and I had one almost every day… the last two days, I had 2 at a time. I really wish I could get them in America. Natalie and I talk about starting a Cornish Pasty shop in Chicago all the time now.