EARACHE VS. BURZUM

Our email inboxes have been flooded with links to a leaked version of the new Burzum album, Varg Vikernes’ first after 16 years of imprisonment, and the near unanimous opinion is that it sucks. But it seems like our readers aren’t the only ones sharing these behaviors and sentiments; Earache boss Digby Pearson posted the above from his Twitter account yesterday, as noticed by Second Period and re-posted by Invisible Oranges. Props to his hilarious use of hashtags!

The practical implications of this are probably negligible; the leak’s already out there and it’s doubtful that very many more people will download the album because Pearson posted a link. The bigger issue is that a label boss — one who Cosmo Lee points out has recently embraced file sharing — is advocating people steal an album. Opines Cosmo:

Pearson has gone through an interesting change of heart regarding downloading. He once called mediafire “media-nazi-fire,” and Earache’s download promo site for journalists has login credentials along the lines of “file sharing is evil.” But late last year Earache released Gama Bomb’s new record as a free download. Recently, Pearson used mediafire to illegally download Wormrot’s album before he acquired the rights to it and signed the band. Now he’s posted a mediafire link to a release that’s not his, i.e., file sharing.

It’s worth noting the above Tweet has since been removed from Pearson’s Twitter account… dude realized he made a boo-boo. I personally haven’t downloaded the leak yet (no really, I swear… but that’s got more to do with having just spent a week riding camels than ethics) so I can’t comment on the quality of the album. As if you needed an official invitation, what do you all think?

My head is swimming with hilarious possibilities involving various metal label head honchos tweeting about their competitors’ shitty albums. What’s next, Brian Slagel slamming the next Winds of Plague release? I love the Internet.

-VN