Music Review: HORSE The Band

HORSE The Band is a unique fusion of several popular and obscure genres. Horse was started in 1999 by founding members Erik Engstrom and David Isen while they were in high school. The band booked its own self financed tours by 2002, including a self financed three month tour throughout seven countries. With Erik on synthesizer, and David on lead guitar, they created an obscure fusion, combining metalcore with "8-bit" electronica, or Chiptune - a nerdy sub-genre of nostalgic electronic music using low-fidelity synthesizers to recreate the sounds of classic 1980s video game systems such as the Nintendo NES. The band jokingly referred to itself and coined the genre "Nintendocore". By 2008, the band had booked the Horse the Band Earth Tour, playing in 40 separate countries. At this time, the band stated: "We've become disillusioned, bad-attitude nerds and pariahs of the established music industry." As well as becoming a remotely famous underdog in the chiptune fan base, their songs have great lyrical concepts, uniting metaphores of vocalist and lyricist Nathan Winneke's life with classic video game and pop culture references. The band's sound is not limited to just the genres of metal-core and 8 bit electronica. Their sound is diverse and can be described anywhere from alternative synthesizer-rock, to post hardcore rock, with even a little disco here and there. Currently, Horse the Band has five released studio albums, the latest being May 2009's Desperate Living, four EP's, and three live concert DVDs. The band is currently on a break from touring and recording, the first break they have taken in over six years of being HORSE The Band.

External Links:

HORSE The Band's Website
Music Video for HORSE The Band's A Million Exploding Suns

(By the way, they're really ridiculous.)

Commercial Spaceflight Success

This week, for the first time, a commercial spacecraft returned to Earth from orbit on Wednseday. The rocket was launched by private space travel company SpaceX designed and launched the Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral, with a total flight time of 3 hours and 19 minutes. The launch was a demonstration to NASA for how the rockets could be used to shuttle cargo and possibly astronauts to the International Space Station. The inside of the cabin of the Dragon capsule (the very top of the rocket where cargo is stored) already has a pressurized cabin, required to maintain people at high altitudes. These sorts of experiments are only the beginning of the future of commercial space flight.

Sources
-NY Times
-SpaceX.com
-Wikipedia