Orphaned Land is a progressive metal band from Israel. It combines oriental elements and Jewish tradition with slow doom/death metal. Orphaned Land is in the core a doom/death band, but it was highly influenced by the folk music and tradition of the Oriental Jews (Mizraḥim), making their sound much more progessive than typical doom/death bands. Their album Sahara (1994) was the first to include a combination of death metal and traditional oriental music. In their second album El Norra Alila (1996), Orphaned Land elaborated the combination of metal and oriental music, including the addition of song with traditional oriental Jewish piyyut and Arab melodies.

Wow.

Warning: This is a rambling, stupid-long, LiveJournal-esque, over-hypenated post. I apologize in advance.

The window from Haloween to CES is really the only time of year that I feel like making magazines is a grind, but thankfully this year the staff is back to full strength.

On a totally unrelated note, the new(ish) Bob Dylan album kicks ass. I’ve been listening to it almost non-stop for the last week or so. Also, new Shins on January 23rd. Can’t wait for that.

I’ve been making the most of the limited downtime I have by playing games and filling in my back knowledge of comics. I just finished Kingdom Come and The New Frontier, two of the modern DC “classic” series, and I’m on to either the first run of the Sandman (the Gaiman years) or the Crisis of Infinite Earths next. I’ve also started reading Skinny Legs and All and Busting Vegas, for completely different reasons. I decided to save Skinny Legs for the plane ride to Tennessee in a few weeks, but Busting Vegas (about beating blackjack) is entertaining and a very fast read.

On the games front, it’s been a lot of Gears of War in the evenings, with Rainbow 6: Vegas, various Wii games, and Final Fantasy III on the DS. I decided to stop playing FF3 so I have a good RPG for the trip back East. Vegas is suprisingly entertaining, and Gears is the most fun playing multiplayer I’ve had since BF2 and Halo 2.

That’s all we have time for this week. Come back next week when we talk about dog eye diseases and reading final pages.