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Friday, September 5, 2025

New Music from Blut Aus Nord!!!


From the forthcoming album Ethereal Horizons, out on November 28th 2025 on the always epic Debemur Morti Productions. Pre-order HERE

I am so psyched for this release! 



Watch:

I've been picking at Alien: Earth for a little over two weeks now. From the moment I sat down to watch the first episode, I hated it. It's funny - I love Noah Hawley's Fargo series, or at least what I've seen of it (seasons 1, 2 and 5), but it seems like everything else I try from him just doesn't gel with me (I tried Legion a few years ago and also hated it). Despite the disconnect, though, this is Alien, and because of that, I have tried to hang in there the best I can, hoping for something to latch onto. This past Tuesday night, they delivered. 

Big time.


Holy smokes, did this episode give me everything I wanted! True, I'm a bit disappointed they had to go back to the standard Alien formula of 'Xenomorph loose on a ship' to get there, but I don't care. This was fantastic, and it reaffirmed my hanging in there. Even if I hate the next three episodes, this one made it all worthwhile.

Most of my issues come from the show's heavy focus on Boy Kavaliar and his 'lost boys.' A cunty, twenty-something douche bag trillionaire and his host of synthetics that have had the consciousnesses of sick children uploaded into them. The concept is cool, and it works great with the premise of the show - that governments were done away with as functionless, archaic designs when 'five corporations' stepped up and took control of the globe. That's gotta be a Fugazi reference, right?

Granted, one of the things I probably have so much trouble with here is the fact that this all feels a bit too real. Corporate ownership has weighed heavily on my mind, and this is honestly exactly where I see us going. But the characters in this thread are all very unlikeable and, while that's surely the point, the show spends SO MUCH time with them. Then, when they give us some Alienness, it's akin to what happened in the second episode with the apartment full of rich c_nts partying in powdered wigs and getting slaughtered - off screen, btw - in what felt like an empty gesture; a softball pitch to keep us happy before they just went right back to almost exclusively following the trillionaire and his toys.

Episode four started to come around, and five just blew me away. Part of what I want to see so much more of are not just the Xenomorphs, but the other alien life forms they've introduced on the show. The Eyeball Kid, for instance, is my favorite new thing. Love this 'character' and am eager to find out more about it.




Playlist:

Steve Moore - VFW OST
Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy OST
Zeal and Ardor - Eponymous
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
Deafheaven - Lonely People With Power
Alabama Shakes - Sound & Color
Ghost - Infestissumam 
Goblin - 2013 Tour E.P
The Dead Weather - Dodge and Burn
The Body - All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood
S U R V I V E - Mnq026
Fever Ray - Radical Romantics
Cibo Mato - Viva! La Woman
Blut Aus Nord - Debermur MoRTi (single)
Boy Harsher - Careful




Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.


• Three of Cups
• XVI: The Tower
• 0: The Fool

Three of Cups really kind of owns me at this point. I stopped putting individual card metadata in these posts a while ago, but I'm starting to think I should remedy that just to see if I'm wrong or if this card comes up like every three days. That's what it feels like, so let's look at the card a bit more in-depth than usual. 

From Crowley's The Book of Thoth: 

"This card refers to Binah in the suit of Water. This is the card of Demeter or Persephone. The Cups are pomegranates: they are filled bountifully to overflowing from a single lotus, arising from the dark calm sea characteristic of Binah. There is here the fulfillment of the Will of Love in abounding joy. It is the spiritual basis of fertility. The card is referred to the influence of Mercury in Cancer; this carries further the above thesis. Mercury is the Will or Word of the All-Father; here its influence descends upon the most receptive of the Signs. At the same time, the combination of these forms of energy brings in the possibility of somewhat mysterious ideas. Binah, the Great Sea, is the Moon in one aspect, but Saturn in another; and Mercury, besides being the Word or Will of the All-One, is the guide of the souls of the Dead. This card requires great subtlety of interpretation. The pomegranate was the fruit which Persephone ate in the realms of Pluto, thereby enabling him to hold her in the lower world, even after the most powerful influence had been brought to bear. The lesson seems to be that the good things of life, although enjoyed, should be distrusted."

Abundance in Thoth, this card signifies good times and social connections, and Grimm did a great job illustrating that for his card. Mix this with The Tower - a change in paradigms, and the Fool, a new journey, and I'm thinking this may be telling me to make some new friends here in Tennessee, something I've had a relatively difficult time doing. 

Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo!

 
Mr. Brown sent this track to me at some point in the last week or two, and I'm just getting around to it now. Holy smokes! With a video directed by Writer/Director of 2014's Faults - fabulous film - Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo have instantly captured my attention.

It's been a minute since I've talked about my growing fascination with Chat Pile here; I got into their 2022 debut full-length, God's Country, late, and their 2024 album Cool World just narrowly missed being incorporated into my best of list last year. Hayden Pedigo, on the other hand, I am not nearly as familiar with, despite a dalliance with their 2021 album, Letting Go, last year, courtesy of a recommendation from my cousin Charles. 

The album, In the Earth Again, is due out October 31st and can be pre-ordered from Computer Students HERE



NCBD:

As always, a lot of great stuff this week, so let's talk about what I'm bringing home for NCBD September 3rd, 2025:
 

Jason Aaron's TMNT continues to drop at a bi-monthly pace and I love him for it! A great relaunch of the 2012 IDW reboot that I'm so fond of that really shines as we follow the four brothers into the trials and tribulations of adulthood (Janika has her own book).


Look at that Mignola cover! This tenth issue of the anthological Savage Sword of Conan apparently begins a new mini-series that will run through all three tales in this issue, all penned by Jim Zub. While dipping into The Black Stone spin-off mini taught me to stick to what's in this main title, I'm here for whatever they have to say inside this bi-monthly mag.


Third story arc, "The Horror Men," comes to a close and Jeff Lemire and Gabriel H. Walta's Phantom Road goes back on hiatus, much to my chagrin. I love this book, and I'm always a bit blue during its off-seasons. 
 
Revisiting Larry Hama's ongoing, now 43-year-long run on this G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero has been loads of fun and does not appear to be slowing down any time soon. Luckily, despite my card-carrying status as a completionist with comics, I feel zero urge to fill in the 150+ issues I missed that would connect the last time I picked up the Marvel iteration in 1994 and the first Image issue going on two years ago. That said, I have begun looking into filling in a few of the gaps for the central part of Hama's original Marvel run, eyeing connecting the dots that would give me a solid run from issue 26 through to issue 126. It's only seven issues, so I figured, why not?


And finally, a new re-start of the flagship Batman book being written by Matt Fraction? Definitely going to give this one a shot, as Hayden Sherman and Dan Watters' "Dark Patterns" is closing out in a few months and it's been so good, it's given me a taste for a regular Bat-book. 



Watch:

Monday night K took control of the remote and picked a film I'd never heard of before, Phillip Kaufman's 1979 film The Wanderers


First, check out this cast: Ken Wahl, Karen Allen, Dolph Sweet (!), Ken Foree, Linda Manz. The list goes on with a lot of people I recognized, but those are the heavy hitters to me. Ostensibly another "The American Teenagers of early 60s" story a la American Graffiti, The Outsiders, etc. The Wanderers does a pretty good job of adding to that pot with likeable characters and an intricate hierarchy of Street Gangs and the characters' allegiances/associations with them. Where this film really stuck in my head, though, is in three key scenes that introduce a definite Horror element. It dawned on me while watching the second of these scenes - a scene where a character stumbles into the Ducky Boys' territory - that this film may have been meant as a metaphor for the changes Hollywood underwent between the 1960s and 1970s. 

First, the Elements of Horror. 

The Ducky Boys appear in three scenes in this film. The first is while the main characters are driving and accidentally encroach on the Ducky Boys' side of town. The film takes place in the Bronx in 1963, and up until this key moment, it's a representation of NY in the 60s that's right in line with most of the other movies like this have painted. This, however... there's something so intentionally nightmarish and surreal about this scene that I was immediately taken aback. While watching, I assumed Kaufman had chosen this route to convey the 'we're out of our territory' fears of a teenager in the 60s whose entire world revolved around their block. Taking into account the next two scenes that feature the Ducky Boys—the one where a protagonist is killed while in their neighborhood, and the other, the climactic gang battle at the end of the film, which the film does a great job of subverting until the Ducky Boys arrive. It was a combination of these two scenes that led me to my second point. Is The Wanderers a cinematic metaphor for the changing American Film Zeitgeist in the 1970s? 

The film goes from the streets-of-New-York, day-in-the-life Golden Age of Hollywood storytelling trope to the more epic, artistic weirdness of the New Hollywood era. 

If this was intentional and not just me reading into things, The Wanderers is a piece of genius cinema that is content to masquerade as 'just another 60s West Side Story throwback.'



Playlist:

Steve Moore - VFW OST
The Cure - Pornography
Deftones - Diamond Eyes
Radiohead - Kid A
How to Destroy Angeles - Welcome Oblivion
The Knife - Silent Shout
Kane Parsons - Backrooms OST
Chat Pile/Hayden Perdigo - Radioactive Dreams (single)
Deftones - private music




Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.


• VIII: Strength
• Page of Swords
• XIII: Death


Tuesday, September 2, 2025

The Body - Lathspell I Name You


Somehow, I missed that The Body had a new album come out a few months back, even though by now I should know to expect a new release at least once a year. All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood is another challenging masterpiece from these guys, its majesty crystallized in this final track.




Watch:

I rewatched Toby Wilkins' 2008 film Splinter over the weekend. I had only ever seen this one once before, back when my good friend Grimm came out and visited me in 2011. He's the one who turned me onto this film, and rewatching it after so long, I had to message him a note of thanks. I don't know how I haven't rewatched this once more, but it's definitely on my permanent radar now. 


The creature FX in this film are outstanding. Sure, the filmmakers are a bit coy with the camera on the monster at times, but that gives this really intense, "What the fuck did I just see?" feeling that helps to put you in the place of the characters. In fact, it's Nelson Cragg's camera work that makes me think of Samy Inayeh's work behind the lens on another creature-feature favorite of mine, Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski's 2011 masterpiece The Void. I'm writing this Saturday afternoon, and I'd wager by the time this posts on Tuesday, I'll probably have rewatched Kostanski & Gillespie's film, too.




Playlist:

Blut Aus Nord - The Mystical Beast of Rebellion
Blut Aus Nord - 777 - Sect(s)
Blut Aus Nord - Codex Obscura Nomina
Anthrax - Persistence of Time
Anthrax - Stomp 442
Deftones - private music
Ruelle - Emerge
Dead Man's Bones - Eponymous
Man Man - Life Fantastic
The Dead Weather - Dodge and Burn
The Body - All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood
Spectral Tilt - Sleepers (single)
lords. - Bleeding Out (single)
lords. - aven (single)
leaving_forever & stream_error - nobody home




Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.


• XVIII The Moon
• Three of Cups 
• Knight of Cups

A lot of emotion can obscure what you're looking for. 

Not sure how to read this one. Work-related? Maybe. Also, Thinking it might be for someone else, but who that would be, at this point, I'm not sure.