Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

15. Panopticon - Roads to the North (Bindrune) Panopticon is the project of Kentucky native Austin  Lunn and combines elements of traditional folk music with Metal, yet never seems like a Black Metal retread as it relies heavily on American musical folk styles. Panopticon's songs are an atmospheric reinvention of where folk and metal might intersect. Some, such as "The Echoes of Disharmonium" are thrashy, guttural metal numbers, while "The Long Road Part 1: One Last Fire is a distortion free traditional bluegrass fiddling interlude that merges with "The Long Road Part 2: Capricious Miles," a seven plus minute melodically epic track more easily than one would suspect. Panopticon makes these transitions look simple, merging heavy music and several American folk forms, including traditional Native American flutes and even banjos with startling clarity. Roads to the North builds on their earlier records and reflects the growth of this interesting amalgamati...

The buzzing of far away tools run roughshod over my static mind as the waxing of Lou Reed relates the modern state of "viciousness." Another day in the intellectual rat race of love, shattered by promises of work and relaxation, mugging for some far off camera Will you be the true prospect, or clear delineation and demarkation, of a confident future, nay past, clowning like a businessman? The terminus of this period of stagnation ends in three bangs, like celebrity deaths or folkloristic tropes or statistics -- the year is clearly marked as 2014, the jigsaw puzzle of being bailed out is consistently cut from my parent's best wishes. The lines of a Catholic school girlhood are marked clearly on your face; lines of my pagan youth mark mine like the aged face of a forgotten prom queen. Tell me again of your hopes and dreams. No rest is all that matters. We run. We fall. We continue on and on. The fuzzy cat with a scepter knocks us down like pawns. The leaves...