Potpourri: Gothkill, Scion Radio 17 BPM Meter, and bands on Twitter

Since we’re primarily a music review website, we rarely get movies for review. So whenever they show up, I do make it an effort to get them reviewed. To keep in theme with music, I usually do and try to focus on its soundtrack or music-relationship.

The latest DVD we received is a horror movie called Gothkill. This is a straight-to-DVD low budgeted movie, starting America’s Got Talent’s Flambeaux (as Nicholas Dread), musician Eve Blackwater (as Kate) and Mistress Juliya (as Demonatrix, aka the Devil Girl).

Mistress Juliya’s name should come as no surprise to fans of heavy metal, she did, after all hosted Much Music USA’s Uranium, then onto its spin-off show, Metal Asylum. Her obvious sex appeal solidified her as a fan favorite, she now appears regularly on No. 1 Countdown Rock show on the MMUSA-turned-Fused TV.

Eve Blackwater’s other job seems to be as a fire-eating musician. Her myspace hilariously discourages creeps: “STOP TRYING TO GET IN MY PANTS!!! IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN!!!! sorry to disappoint you.”

The story of Gothkill is quite simple, Nicholas Dread, a Catholic Priest tries and save innocent women from accusations of witchcraft. His efforts lead the church to believe he’s in league with the devil and sentenced him to be burn with the women he “confessed”. This lead to Dread’s disenchantment with his religion and made a pact with Satan.

100 years (?) later, in modern-day New York, Dread comes back to finish his deal with the devil. His revenge is unleashed on a stripper/goth club and basically it ends in fire and hell.

The DVD cover artwork by world-famous death metal artist Mike Hrubovcak promises us: B-Movie (check), T&A (check and check), metal (check), bloody gore (check), hell (check), goths (check), and deaths (check). While I did not enjoy very short movie, I would recommend it if you are looking for a midnight gory b-movie with a heavy goth/metal theme (with all the checks above), this will fulfill what you’re looking for.

Also, it’s not quite as comedic or as cheesy as some of the reviewers made it out to be, sure there are some unintentional bad acting, but that’s to be expected with these type of film. I thought the Irish Scottish-punk looking actor, Flambeaux, did a decent job in taking the film seriously.

Gothkill was released May 12^th, you can netflix this (it’s available, I just checked). If you insist on buying a copy for your Mistress Juliya collection or for the extras (including audio/video commentary by director JJ Connelly, Flambeaux, and Blackwater), you can head over to Gothkill Store. Watch the trailer at Wild Eye Releasing.

SCION
scion.com

Scion’s unique marketing for their car through lifestyle and music have always interested me. Their latest venture is with an iPod application called Scion Radio 17 BPM Meter, which you can download for free via iTunes.

The application is really designed for DJs for determining beats per minute (BPM), for, what I’m assuming so they can match music to that thumping-thumping noise. The application was created and developed by Epic Tilt, who is the company-for-hire when big companies need to cross promote their product (such as that Be Like Lady Gaga application). It’s actually a smart way to promote, I’m just wondering why companies don’t concentrate their efforts on applications.

I did download and tested out the BPM application and discovered that this application was not meant for me. This is really for DJs, as I have previously mentioned. After testing four songs, the number given back to me ranges from 100-200 BPM and that’s pretty much it. You can then save the information on a playlist or assign notes to it or share them with your DJ friends…. but I found that since I did not understand the use of the BPM, it quickly became a useless application for me.

However, if you’re a DJ, or interested in DJ work, I think this application is valuable to you. Plus the price is just right: FREE.

TWITTER
twitter.com

It would seem like most current/modern bands all have Twitter accounts now. If not setup by the band themselves, it’s set up by their record label. Pretty soon, all musicians will have a Twitter account, like they do with their Myspace.

W♥M Twitter experienced a huge spike with all the bands migrating to the service – we had +63 adds since last night, mostly by bands. It’s not John Mayers numbers, but it’s big for us.

And I have said it before: I don’t get what all the fuss is about with Twitter. Why is the country in love with it? The limitation of 140 characters kills me…. plus people use it as a popularity contest. Also, once you add more than 50 people to follow, it becomes absolutely useless. I know hardcore Twitter users basically use 3rd party applications to keep them organize (since Twitter doesn’t offer such functionality).

The microblogging service hit mainstream media earlier this year with Ashton vs CNN and Oprah endorsing it. Recently, I was at a grocery store when I saw The Times with twitter for their front page story.

If you’re new to Twitter, or interested in being more productive on Twitter, here are some services that I use and endorse:

• Tweet Later: Automatically follow people that follows you – and the best part, it also drops people that unfollow you.
• Twitterfeed: Automatically post feeds (RSS).
• We Follow: A directory of twitterers, ranked by popularity.

Well I hope that helps.