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It’s a hot Saturday night. Late June, 2005. All the kids your age are out riding bikes, setting off fireworks in parking lots, or sitting on a basement floor playing Tony Hawk Underground 2 on the Playstation 2, directly in front of the TV. You don’t have time for any of that. Because YOU... are different. You know something they don’t know... It’s time for “Sweet, Sweet Saturday Night” to begin. You set up your bed with blankets, pillows, and various snaks, preparing for the next four or five hours. You turn the radio dial to the local “Christian station” and sit back. This is your source for new music. This is the best way to learn “what new bands are cool” before any of the other kids in your Southern Canadian town can beat you to it. This is your weekly ritual. This is how you survive High School. Wave after wave, a barrage of heavy, artillery shelling assaults your eardrums until finally the local DJ, Zoltan Foxx, calls a temporary ceasefire as he lights up the airwaves with the words you are dying to hear. “Alright heavy music fans, it’s time for Rock It Or Drop It! Two songs are going head-to-head. Winner takes the crown! Call in and vote for your faveorite song and we will play the winning band a second time, later in the show!” With your translucent, orange cordless phone in hand, you are ready. You were born for this battle. A blunt reminder strikes your absent teenaged mind as last week’s winner begins booming through the box. “A Boy Brushed Red Living in Black and White” by Underøath. It’s your favorite song. You think to yourself, “Well, it’s a no-contest forfeit, then. There is nothing that could ever beat that song.” Suddenly, the reckoning comes by way of “unfriendly fire”… the grossly outnumbered, scrappy, underdog contenders’ response-in-song. Dueling guitar riffs bounce back and fourth from speaker-to-speaker in perfect unison. You have never heard anything like it before. The “guitar squeals” hit you in the face like a rocket misfiring. “Wha.. what in the h is this?” barely leaves your lips, when suddenly, the gnarliest screams begin to belt out the punchiest verse you have ever heard in your life. Before you can even see through the fog of your shell shock, a light penetrates you, beaming through the confusion. Catchy, clean vocals grab you by the scruff of your neck and hold you up to serenade you with a dripping-with-irony vocal deluge, “Tonight you die a Traitors Death!” The guitar manipulation in the background frenetically slides back and forth. You are entrenched in out-and-out chaos now. “You know no honor!” Mouth agape, eyes wide, you can barely process what is happening. Then the bridge hits you, unprepared. The guitars ring out, the floor toms blomp in what could only be described as the rival to an ‘80s arena rock anthem… and then, the guitar solo. To this day that solo confounds you. How can one man make a guitar sing so well? The most guttural, inhuman growl you could have ever imagined slurps out on top of the solo like the “How bout some more Sloppy Joes?” cafeteria lady in Billy Madison. There is no doubt in your mind, “This is the. Best. Song… I have ever heard in my entire life.” You call in and cast your vote. You know your new favorite song’s enemy is too powerful, too large in numbers, too finely-adorned in the latest, trendy Hot Topic-skinny wares, but you still have to ask the DJ “What the name of this new band and song is?” Grabbing a pencil and paper, you hastely jot down “Iscarot” by The Showdown. The next week you will be returning to your own battlefield, of sorts, navigating the local Christian Book Store to BUY THIS RECORD and strategizing a plan to learn as many guitar riffs from it as you can. The CD will become your manifesto. It will make start a heavy band with your friends at youth group the following Friday. It will not leave your car stereo for 16 months straight. It will create “a lifelong obsession with secret tracks,” as you figure out that you can rewind into a secret, “negative track” that’s hiding before “A Proclamation of Evil's Fate.” Twenty years (and hereto, forevermore) later, A Chorus of Obliteration remains in your top five albums of all time. Perhaps, no one out there who loves this album more than you, but undaunted, you will spend over two decades berating anyone who will listen (bands, labels, fake robot companies) to press it on vinyl for you. … Standing here now, as I hope you are, with a copy of the vinyl album in hand, tears in my eyes, and thinking back to those first moments, hearing it all first time. Remember how one Summer night, no matter how quickly it passed you by, had the brute force to change life entirely. Git snake bit!