Vine and Vinyl: Valborg- Endstrand

For this edition of #bazilsmetalpicks we're going to to continue on the path I started with my year end wine and metal pairings (which you can check out here) and continue with a new series of short articles called "Vine and Vinyl". As you've probably already guessed by the title, we're talking more metal and wine.

The first album I'd like to share with you brings me back to my youth. Before I fully switched to the world of black metal, I spent my youth entwined in the circuitry and cold machine sounds of industrial. I spent my early 20s booking industrial shows in San Francisco and DJing at several goth and industrial clubs around the city. At first listen this album filled me with a flood of nostalgia. Its been years since I've heard something new with an industrial edge that's really spoken to me (one of the many reasons I slowly drifted from the industrial scene over to the more metal side of things).

Manny-O-War over at Last Rites sums up the feel of this album pretty well when he said "Endstrand brims with Ministry-like influences, punk-laced ferocity and Ved Buens Ende noisy weirdness."

This album has a dirty mechanical feel, with an underside of unsettling emotion. The emotional impact feely starts to grab hold of me around the track "Bunkerluft" and just never lets go, leaving me coming back for more.

So what wine do we pair with this little trip down memory lane? Perhaps we should pair the nostalgia with another relic from my youth, cheap Trader Joe's wine. You see, back then I knew fairly little about wine, and the $2 Charles Shaw Merlot felt like a miraculous discovery. Drinkable cheap wine in the US is quite the rarity. Living in Greece now with a world of cheap and tasty wine at my fingertips, those days of the past seem a little sad, but it still stands as one of the better options for inexpensive drinking in the US (a world above the yellow tails or sutter homes of the world)...sometimes you'll even luck out and get a great bottle (you see, 2 buck chuck sources wine from different vineyards buying in bulk to keep the prices down, and sometimes you actually end up with something quite good, one bottle I drank recently actually won in a blind tasting against two much more expensive European wines...but it's always a gamble).

For those readers without access to Trader Joes, Pick yourself up a bottle of inexpensive red table wine, don't overthink it, and just enjoy the unexpected journey the album might take you on.

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Check out some more of my recent posts:
Travel: Twiske park in Amsterdam
Art: Oil on canvas portrait painting.
Travel: A quick glimpse at Cologne, Germany.
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