I haven’t really fucked with metal since my career as a late-90s high school stoner jock came to an abrupt end. But ever since Synthesis Marketing Idiot and overall coward Cayle Hunter moved into the desk next to mine I’ve been getting a crash course in the latest badass deathcore and Scandanavian metal bands. Shit like White Chapel, Salt the Wound and probably my favorite yet, Bloodbath. Something of a Swedish metal all star band, Bloodbath wouldn’t even know where to find a fuck, let alone how to give one. The music thing more pissed than the music is the artwork, which features the obligatory illegible lightning bolt font band name and a wolf in a priest outfit bathing an infant in blood. In the liner notes, the band members are listed as “Those Who Unbless the Purity.” Thank god for Sweden, where the government is smart enough to subsidize death metal bands. Maybe that’s why all their bands rule and most of ours are fucking shitdicks. Fuckers.

Once upon a time, when a publicity company or record label would send you a CD of a band they wanted you to jock, they would just send you the CD, same as if you bought it in the store, with the artwork, booklet, etc all intact, and at worst, a hole punched in the UPC code or a “PROPERTY OF RECORD COMPANY” stamp on the front. These days though, most of the advances and promo CDs I get are:

A): Watermarked, copy protected (read, can’t be played on a computer) CDs in a bio-waste looking sealed container with no art, no credits, no nothing

B): Ultra-janky CD-Rs with Xeroxed tracklistings

C:) Links to stupid ass “streams” or “music players”

“Big deal” you’re probably saying “you can still hear the music, and that’s all that really should matter, right?” Well, in theory. But the actuality is, unless its a band that I already know about or am looking out for, any promo music I get that is not in the form of an actual, honest to god CD gets fucked off. I mean, I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but no one ever said anything about CDs. You can actually tell a lot about a CD by its cover. Like whether it’s gonna suck or not. So when there’s no cover, its a lot easier to assume a CD sucks since most CDs do.

“What the fuck does this have to do with Salt the Wound” you might be asking, if you were actually still reading this, which you probably aren’t. Well, you see, Salt the Wound, a metal outfit out of Cleveland, OH were actually smart enough to send along the full artwork and booklet of their debut CD, Carnal Repercussions (due out February 5th) with their advance mailings. If this would have been a CD-R, or worse yet, an e-mail to a digital player, I would have probably never got around to listening to it. But I took one look at the METAL AS FUCK cover art to this record and I knew that it had to crunch. And guess, what? It did. Better yet, the band, knowing that their cover art was pretty much the most bad ass shit EVAR, sent along stickers of it as well. Even if I hadn’t liked the record (which I do) I STILL would have slapped that sticker piece on my desk somewhere, thus cementing Salt the Wound’s ultimate fame. For basically ALL TIME.