“Fans” of my Just Words editor’s column in Decibel may recall my recent public admission about joining a fantasy football league. Now that our season is officially in the books and Neurosis’ Scott Kelly and his Family Style team have been crowned league champions, I’m feeling reflective about my eighth-place finish. I suppose it’s not completely embarrassing for my maiden fantasy sports voyage, but there’s obviously room for major improvement. So let’s have a look at my performance, um, Under the Surface.

Negatives: I drafted way too many players from my favorite team, the Philadelphia Eagles. Sadly, RB Brian Westbrook wasn’t one of those players. In the ninth round I totally panicked and drafted former Eagle LB Mark Simoneau. That’s right, Mark Fucking Simoneau. I’m pretty sure he totally sucks in reality football, so please don’t attempt to follow that logic. That brilliance was only trumped by nabbing a kicker with my next selection. Oh, did I mention there were still eight more rounds left?

Positives: Since my draft position sucked (11th out of 12 teams), I had to be pretty crafty working the wavier wire. I picked up Minnesota RB Chester Taylor in week 10 right after some dude from Green Bay put a helmet on Adrian Peterson’s knee. Unfortunately, Purple Jesus rose again on the third week and smote Taylor in his featured back tracks. In week three I pulled Baltimore WR Derrick Mason off the scrap heap, and he went on to deliver a 1,000-yard season. Too bad he scored less frequently than Billy Anderson at an engineering convention.

Anyway, here are the final standings of the KMBT Football II league:

As we’re fond of saying in Philadelphia, just wait ‘til next year!

Just when you thought Obituary had the whole caveman stomp thing sewn up shut, along comes Goat the Head, a death metal quartet from Trondheim, Norway that dresses in loin cloths, wears ornamental animal skulls and plays songs with a distinctly Paleolithic viewpoint. Until Metal Hammer and Kerrang hype the fuck out of this and it gets picked up for distribution by The End or some similar label, don’t hold your breath for a release of the group’s full-length Simian Supremacy in America. The video for “Darwinian Minions” is a total hoot, though – at least until the music kicks in.

This one’s sure to piss off haters of “ironic” glam and cock-rock, but let’s face the facts: all glam and cock-rock recorded in the last two decades is ironic. In fact, the more ironic it is, the more entertaining it is, which is why Avenged Sevenfold gets a big fat zero in my book and piss-take acts like Rattler are a perfect “10″ like Bo Derek. I’m pretty sure that guitarist Scott Rattler moonlights in another well-known DC area band [see comments section], but when he’s not wasting his time time over there, he and the rest of the fun-loving dudes in Rattler are partying like it’s 1989. In relative order of absurdity, here’s two videos from the group’s recent split with Nitro Tokyo and a live performance that’s literally one orgy away from being the most debauched thing we’ve ever seen:

“Rattler Way of Life”

“Panty Incinerator”

“Getting Awesome” (live at the Black Cat)

Greatest metal band name belonging to a band that isn’t remotely metal? Jackie-O Motherfucker, no contest. Which is not to suggest that we’re not interested in riding the jocks of Tom Greenwood’s Portland collective. While 90-95% of what goes into any given issue of Decibel is metal, the beautiful thing about being an “extreme music” magazine is that there’s still a little sliver of the pie left to pay attention to things that are extremely weird, extremely minimal or otherwise extremely abstracted — all of which describe Jackie-O Motherfucker’s take on minimalist composition and free jazz by way of post-rock. The Wire generally classifies this shit as “avant,” which, if you really think about it, is a label that’s equally nebulous as “extreme.” Either way, the group’s new record Valley of Fire presents somewhat of a departure.

There’s a standard-issue 15+ minute marathon runner that sounds like it was recorded amidst the clatter of pots and pans in some dude’s kitchen (”We Are Channel Zero”) and a trio of much shorter compositions that veer a little closer to Dave Pajo’s solo stuff with Papa M. The shortest of the bunch (”The Tree”) features some lovely finger-picking and shows why Jackie-O Motherfucker tends to appeal to fans of Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and the “New Weird America” movement, but I can’t get enough of it when Jackie-O Motherfucker goes yard, plays with expanding the sonic palette and incorporates a ton of delay and effects (as on “We Are Channel Zero” or “Spirits” from Flags of the Sacred Harp). This mutant approach can be “extreme” in its own way, too — extremely disturbing.

Eugene Robinson threw down the gauntlet on the Deciblog earlier this month and challenged readers to write an essay about the most terrible thing that’s ever happened to them or a song extolling the virtues of the esteemed Oxbow frontman/ Decibel contributor. Some of the essays we received were too damn depressing to reprint here; some of the songs kicked so much ass that it made choosing tough. After reviewing all of the submissions, Mr. Robinson has declared a winner and a runner-up:

Winner!
Kevin Sheets, Hebron, IN
“Eugene The Fightmaster, From Whom a Mere Glance Can Set Churches Ablaze”

Runner-up!
Ian Morris, Santa Rosa, CA
“Eugene”

In case you’re wondering: these musical geniuses also play in their own bands! Check out our winner’s one-man metal project Corpses of Wolf Lake and our runner-up’s electric wizardry in Alab.

In Brent Burton’s short-but-sweet feature on Antigama for the July ‘07 issue of Decibel, guitarist Sebastian Rokicki seemed to be ducking the grindcore tag: “Grindcore is one of the areas our music employs, but I wouldn’t call our music pure grind.” As the quartet’s recent split with Nyia on Selfmadegod Records proves, Antigama is a grind band — albeit one that’s capable of shifting effortlessly between mid-tempo doom with lots of pedal effects (”Torture”) and technical grind (”ADV”) and what-you-see-is-what-you-get ambient soundscapes (”The Trio Infernal”). Nyia’s contributions to the split are decent enough, even though the vocals never really mesh with the music. But everytime I throw this on, I find myself skipping directly to the Antigama tracks — is there any band out there right now with the chops to do this much damage in two minutes or less?

Another classic Relapse Message Board thread…