I’m not quite sure how to start this, but then again, you never truly know how to start an article in which a large part of your life is accounted for. Let’s just say that I got into all this by accident. Back in the old downloading days, there were several old forums and such where people would download music from bands they’d never heard of just to be able to experience them. This was partly because CD’s were expensive and import costs were wild. People just didn’t have the money to blow on foreign music and even publicists and band managers would jump in sometimes, because they would rather leak their own music and allow it to get heard by a few hundred people than to have no sales at all from a band that no one had ever heard of and was not getting any real promotion. Social media was still in it’s infancy back then, people preferred forums.
I simply found a local metal forum and decided to start reviewing records there. One of my first was actually a GWAR album, which made it even more insane that I would be able to interview them in person and catch a live show many years later. I even remember reviewing records with just two or three sentences, which was a sign that I was still a bit wet behind the ears when it came to this sort of thing and that I was going to need to keep working at it. I’d simply get more albums and review them after I finished the listening process. Eventually, I decided to move from the forum after massive review posts and start my own thing. That became The Grim Tower Of Observation.
Soon enough, I was getting emails from publicists like Clawhammer who wanted to give me records to review. For a guy who made six bucks an hour and couldn’t afford these things to begin with, it was kinda surreal to see publicists just sending them to me digitally and physically, which was how I listened to most music anyway. Around this time, I’d just have an MP3 player and dozens of promos to listen to, mostly going through one after another. Then after listening to between 10-12 records a day, I would go home and write about five or six album reviews a night. I’d even post them while on the job because I cannot operate a vehicle due to my autism, so I had to wait for my mother to get off work after my day shift had ended. It was around that time that I would update the website. A few years later, I’d become the night guy more or less and I just used that time to update. That went well, especially during my unemployment run in 2016 when I needed both a break and a psychological examination after being terminated from the facility after it had closed down completely. Yep, that’s kinda what happens when a store closes down.
Of course, there were several interviews on the old blog site which resulted from me simply messaging the artist and asking them for an interview (something you probably can’t do anymore) as well as a larger number of publicists trying to get in contact with me because I was in my mid-twenties and on fire. I was very passionate about this work, which was a double-edged sword, because while the scene was healthy and I was enjoying the work, I wasn’t really honing my skills in other fields nor was I really focusing much on a love life. However, I became red pilled in 2016 and that really changed things for me so I’m not interested in a love life with another human anyway. Casual sex perhaps, but people are too much of a general hassle to deal with any further than that.
Aside from that, I also landed my first magazine gig, which was originally for a metal magazine called Hails and Horns. I did very little work there before the owner decided to merge it with her punk magazine together in order to create New Noise Magazine which still exists today and is going strong. Their former web developer actually built and managed the original Grim Tower website for a while, but he had passions of his own and I had to get someone else to do it. That plan crashed and burned several times. Eventually, I had to teach myself how to manage these things which is something I am still learning, even with our new website.
In that time, I reviewed thousands of records. Records for New Noise, records for this site and games, anime, books, comics and other things. I interviewed hundreds of bands, even some that I can consider personal idols or influences to my own music. I wasn’t able to get everyone, but just getting a reply back from a few of these musicians really made my day. And I loved the fact that when I wrote interviews, I could literally ask that one question I always wanted to know about a song or lyric or topic on an album that always had me wondering as a younger man. I loved it. Interviewing bands was without a question, the best part of my job.
You know what the worst part was? Giving an honest opinion. One thing that I committed myself to doing (and still do) is that I will always give my honest, unbiased opinion on an album. This resulted in a lot of upset parties unfortunately and I even received a few negative emails back regarding some of my observations. However, some artists actually did thank me for the honest critique I gave, stating that this was what they generally wanted. The general state of product reviews is piss-poor to begin with and filled with trolls, so a person finds it very difficult to tell whether or not an opinion towards their release is legitimate. Even still, we have extremely lazy individuals who would rather just copy the press release so that they can get a free album. Of course now with Spotify and other platforms, everyone more or less does get a free album, so I expect many of them to stop reviewing things altogether. (Edit: Glad to see this is not the case!)
And that’s where I ended my journey, as the promos starting becoming stream-only, CD’s were being trashed in favor of vinyls and music in general was going from a per album basis to a subscription basis. The whole format of the music industry was changing and there was no real perk to listening to a record earlier, as it was just going to end up on my favorite streaming service later. I’ve also found that I like the anticipation factor, when you check your app and see that a record you wanted to hear is finally available. That brought back my giddy days actually and now I find myself getting hyped to jam a record on the day of release. Sometimes the disc won’t be up there yet, but if you wait a day or so, it usually appears. I was stoked to hear the new Old Forest record for example and the fact that I could just push a button and listen to it at work without having to download a thing was pretty fucking amazing. I can also support the artists on their Bandcamp pages later, so I’m glad that’s still a thing.
As I mentioned before, another big reason I left the industry is that it’s political landscape was changing. In the world of adult games, there are a lot of degenerates so to speak, and I’d rather cover games in that scene because quite frankly, it isn’t quite so political nor authoritative and they deal with a lot of crap from people on both sides of the political spectrum. Obviously, I have my own value structure as I mentioned, but it certainly isn’t one of authority on either the right or left wing of American politics. Many of the bands that I’ve covered over the years and respected have been shunned by current American politics and that is an issue. I’d rather cover filthy weeb games than to have to deal with all that entails regarding continuing to cover these sorts of bands. Besides, we have done very well with our coverage of adult games in the past and I expect we will continue to do well in this area as we look towards the future of the website. There have been a lot of twists and turns as well as unexpected surprises and I’m glad that we could catalog them all. Or, at least what was left after the old site was deleted. But hey, we tried.
– The Grim Lord