13 Evil Fairy Tales Dead Under 30

 

Greg Puciato has become one of the most interesting artists working in music today. Setting aside Dillinger Escape Plan as the legends since their retirement, Puciato has done dark electronic music with Telefon Tel Aviv's Josh Eustis in The Black Queen, Hardcore/Thrash with Killer Be Killed, toured as part of Jerry Cantrell's band, and all that and everything in between with his two solo records, both of which I adore. Now, he teams with more like-minded souls (from Every Time I Die and Fit For An Autopsy) in Better Lovers. What's it sound like?

It sounds awesome.

The first single dropped the other day and big props to Mr. Brown who sent it my way, as I totally missed it. No word on an album proper, but after seeing tour announcements yesterday, the smart money's on something coming down the pipes in the next few months, so there's one more thing to look forward to.

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Watch:

Last night at 7:00 PM K and I caught Clarksville's first screening of Lee Cronin's Evil Dead Rise. I had exceedingly high hopes - never a good thing going into a movie, let alone a new installment in a series I have loved for a very long time. But Fede Alvarez's entry in 2013 blew me away (still blows me away, in fact), and all I wanted from this was that same feeling of Deep Horror Intoxication 2013 gave me. Did Evil Dead Rise succeed?

Yes and no. First, I really enjoyed the film, and I think Lee Cronin did a helluva job. However, those pesky expectations tapped on my shoulder for the entire runtime. 

MY problem, not the film's. 

Evil Dead Rise is not as intense as 2013; don't get me wrong - this film is f**king intense, but Rise spreads its assault thin and only really explodes in the last act. Common for a Horror film, of course, and not something to traditionally detract points for. That said, I did feel the set-up of the characters - all of whom I loved - affected the film's pacing, so that Rise felt stretched a bit thin when compared to 2013, which sets its tone and story up so quickly and efficiently and jumps into the carnage so eloquently that it's just not fair to compare. 

Everyone in the cast did an excellent job and the FX are fantastic - like REALLY fantastic. The violence and gore felt a skosh subdued compared to Fede's, but I realize all these comparisons between these two films are unfair. I've always retained a staunch "Don't compare 2013 to the original films" stance, so surrendering to this prejudice here is hypocritical. Also, Tapert produced Rise and Campell and Raimi executive produced, so their fingerprints are all over this new entry. Bearing all this in mind, I think once I'm over the initial viewing, I'll see it again (next week), and have a deeper experience.

All in all, SEE IT IN A THEATRE!!!

            

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Read:

Yesterday, I finished Stephen King's latest novel, Fairy Tale. My good friend and A Most Horrible Library Cohost Chris gifted me a copy while we were hanging out in LaLaLand last month, and I tore into it on the plane home. This is the first new King I've read since 2010's Doctor Sleep; I say this not as a point of dismissal or obstinance, but to illustrate that, although I've loved every book by Stephen King I've ever read, I just haven't read enough of his work. I've always thought that eventually would like to read everything, but I rarely actually work on that. There are so many other authors I love as well, most considerably more "independent" than King, and I tend to fall sway to their work one right after the other. "First world problems" disclaimer aside, what a wonderful problem to have: how do I read everything I want to before I die?

Anyway,  all this talk is really just to set up the fact that I had no idea what I was in for with Fairy Tale. I should have guessed, because it's quite fantastic. 

The story remains rooted in its very human, very relatable characters and their lives dealing with grief and aging for nearly the first two hundred pages, and if that sounds like it might be too much set up, it's not. I could have read about Charlie, his father, Radar and Mr. Bowditch for the entire 600 pages. That story sets up the bigger picture, and once it gets going, there are quite a few white-knuckle moments in this one, and that's the kind of reading I really enjoy. The book is Epic, and as I've come to expect with Mr. King, his epics are among the most readable I've ever encountered. 

Add into the mix the fact that the chapters are illustrated by Nicolas Delort and Locke and Key's Gabriel Rodriguez. King mentions in the afterward - which was just as enjoyable to read as the damn book, if considerably shorter - that the illustrations were key in giving the book the feeling of, well, old Fairytale collections, and I tip my hat to him at the wonderful attention to detail here; it just makes the book that much more enjoyable.

In 2010 I read Doctor Sleep and loved it, and now, thirteen years have passed without my even realizing and Fairy Tale blows me away. I've got a pretty intense list of reading planned for the next few months, but when the decks clear, I'm penciling in more King. I always forget just how much I love his writing.

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Playlist:

Cartoonist Kayfabe - TMNT 7 with Eastman and Laird        

Ruby the Hatchet - Fear is a Cruel Master

Better Lovers - 13 Under 30

AAWKS - The Electric Traveller (single)

AAWKS - (Heavy on the Cosmic)

Clutch - Blast Tyrant

Ruby the Hatchet - Planetary Space Chile

Led Zeppelin - Presence

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Card:

Switching it up back to my original Thoth deck for today's Pull:

Creative breakthroughs can arrive at a destructive cost and often must be tempered by keeping one foot in the 'Real World.'

This feels like a nice little indictment of the creative process, or I guess more accurately, an acknowledgment that my work ethic is sound. I learned a long time ago not to mix heightened emotional or perceptive states with writing. Yes, both can be useful for ideas, but actual writing while intoxicated by either substances or emotions never produces sound work. Not sure why I'm being reminded of this now, other than maybe I just needed a nice Jungian pat on the back.

 

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My Ten Favorite Albums of 2022

Whereas last year, I had moments that suggested I may not be able to cull ten new records for a list, this year I had no similar problems. LOTS of new music in 2022. What follows is the list of my ten favorite albums released in 2022.

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Top Ten Albums 2022:

10) Beach House -  Once Twice Melody

I've been a bit slow on the uptake with Beach House. While I've been partaking in their music for probably close to ten years, I always kept them at arm's length. In fact, it wasn't until two or so years ago that my cousin Charles recommended I give the track "Elegy to the Void" my undivided attention. That song, from the band's 2015 album Thank Your Lucky Stars, proved to be the track that opened an entirely new dimension to the band's music for me. Since then, every album that drops plays a slightly more important role in my year, culminating with this year's double album, Once Twice Melody, which, like Mastodon's Hushed and Grim last year and another 2022 album higher on this list, is a double album with NO fat. Every track is perfect, the order is essential, and it all builds into a fitting snapshot of the quieter moments of my 2022.

9) H6LLB6ND6R - Side A

Here's a first - H6LLB6ND6R is made up of the Addams family, who also have a film in my top ten films this year! The movie is likewise titled Hellbender, and just like this record, it's a really fresh take on what a stripped-down, independent project can accomplish. If this is bedroom-producing, I want more. Every track has a hook, and yet, the sludgy, pummeling goodness still hits hard. Add in an early Jucifer-vibe to the doubled vocals, and I just couldn't put this one down. 

8) Greg Puciato - Mirrorcell

Everything Greg Puciato does moves the needle well into the red with me. Mirrorcell is no different. That first single, "Lowered" with Reba Meyers from Code Orange is a massive track, and really helped to define my year. The rest of the album takes the slightly fractured feeling of Puciato's first solo record, Child Soldier, and smooths it into a more coherent whole. I miss the f*ck out of DEP, but I can't really complain when their singer is giving us albums of this calibre.

7) Carpenter Brut - Leather Terror

Until Leather Terror, Carpenter Brut's records always felt like they were half-there to me. I dig several of them to varying degrees, and the OST to Blood Machines is fantastic (but that's a score, and thus, something a bit different than an album), but there's always been a... I don't know, call it a whimsy that sneaks into the vibe and leaves me a bit cold. But that's just me. I also think my regard for CB may have suffered by my being such a fan of Perturbator-  anyone else working in that realm of "Synthwave" or whatever you want to call it felt a few notches behind. 

But as I said, ALL of that is my own baggage, and should not be misconstrued as judgment against the extremely accomplished musician known as Carpenter Brut, who proves me 100% full of shit on this new album. This one SLAMS, the guest vocalists all do fantastic work, and the one-two of tracks "Day Stalker" and "Night Prowler" is something to behold. 

Baggage ejected; can't wait for the next record!!!

6) The Mysterines - Reeling

My elevator pitch for this band is meant to evoke honor, and yet I realize it essentially sells the Mysterines short. "PJ Harvey singing for BRMC" is enough to convince folks to give this band a chance, but having listened to the record countless times and seen them live (my first post-vaccination show), a comparison like that does nothing to convey the raw gifts on display in Reeling's perfectly tight 13 songs. This is Rock n' Roll that lives and breathes with a confidence and cool that places it right up there in the lexicon of bands that will live forever - Iggy, Bowie, the aforementioned PJ and Motorcycle Club. A lot of that is owed to singer/guitarist Lia Metcalfe, who emotes a conjuration somewhere between Nick Cave's mystic knowledge and PJ's "Fuck U" attitude.

5) Final Light - Final Light

Brutal, majestic, mysterious: take the neon pentagram glow of Perturbator's music and wash it in the medieval blood of the north often associated with Black Metal and you still can't quite get close to capturing the sonic environment of this record. One thing's for sure though: It's a storm! 

I've spent A LOT of time this year using Lustmord's various instrumental music as a soundtrack to my writing because of the doorways his musical manipulations open. Maybe more than anything else on this list, Final Light provides a very similar experience. There are dark places herein, but they're inspiring and beautiful and, if you catch them just right, they'll take you places you won't be expecting.

4) Sylvaine - Nova

I'd never heard of Sylvaine until I saw them open for another band on this list, and live they absolutely blew me away. When I fired up this year's Nova album I found that, just like that live show, this band's studio mastery creates an all-encompassing experience that is visceral and beautiful and at times, sad and scary. That's pretty much exactly what I want from my Post-Black-Metal-Folk-bands, and Nova shot to the top of that list the moment I hit play on this one.

3) Zeal and Ardor - Eponymous

To quote my good friend Keller as we stood in L.A.'s Echoplex this past October watching Z&A tear through 80% of the new, eponymous record, "These guys are truly post-genre." Yep. Every album just gets bigger and better. Can't wait for the next. 

2) Ghost - Impera

I was not a super fan of Ghost's previous record, Prequelle, and while I've never stopped recognizing Tobias Forge's genius, his work doesn't always align with my taste or what I perceive as the promise whispered by those first two-and-a-half Ghost albums. So in the run-up to the release of this year's Impera, I had assumed this would be another quasi-disappointment. 

Wrong. This is easily my favorite Ghost album behind Infestissumam. Something about the arranging and songwriting on this one - I'm not sure if it's because I'm at a place where I have reassessed and embraced so much 80s Hard Rock I once detested, but I feel elements of a lot of that here, only transmogrified into something sleek and modern. Side A closing tracking "Watcher in the Sky" is my favorite song by the band behind "Year Zero," as well as my second favorite song of the year, and it carries a lot of weight here. That said, every single track moves me and gets stuck in my heart, even the mellowest ones, because they all fit together into this beautiful puzzle called Impera and make for a thrilling snapshot of an artist who has still yet to tap into his reserves.

1) Orville Peck - Bronco

It is a rare breed, the musician who can follow up a widely praised - and deservedly so - debut album with an even better sophomore record, let alone one that is a double album. Orville Peck, however, knocked this one so far out of the park, Pony seems like it came out a decade ago. Bronco is thrilling, with every track outshining the previous in lyrics, melody, and above all instrumentation. Like Impera, Bronco takes what has come before and influenced it - in this case the pomp and circumstance of 70s country instrumentation - and weaves it into a beautiful portrait of the years that preceded the album and those yet to come. Also, like Impera, one of the songs on the A Side - in this case, "Out of Time" - is my favorite of the year. What a perfect fit to my exodus from California and my move to Tennessee. 

No More Lives To Go, Elvis.

 

One of my most anticipated albums dropping this year is Greg Puciato's sophomore Mirrorcell. I pre-ordered this as soon as it was announced a few months back, despite the fact that I wasn't sure where I would be living at the time of its release on the first of July (I used my parents' address, but there was speculation that they might move to TN as well). Regardless, our trip is more than halfway done now, we made an offer on a house that the seller accepted, so once the inspections and everything go through, I'll be able to lift that pre-order ban. Regardless, the album hasn't shipped yet, but Bloody Disgusting broke the news that Mirrorcell dropped early on Puciato's Bandcamp.

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Watch:

On Saturday, K and I took my parents to the local AMC to see Baz Luhrmann's Elvis. I am NOT a Baz Luhrmann fan. Perhaps I shouldn't say that, because I've never actually been able to sit through one of his movies. I find his childish little "Look how anachronistic I am" proclivities to be infuriating, and the fact that he may be made the first good visual adaptation of my all-time favorite novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, only to eschew the Jazz music that is central to the book's themes for Hip Hop makes me want to scream at the top of my lungs directly into his face. I never bothered seeing that Gatsby (friends who did warned me to save myself, that the beauty of its visuals would only drive me crazy played under the soundtrack), but I'll say, this Elvis movie looked great. Plus, my Pops really wanted to see it. So we went.

 

On the way in, I almost made the statement, "If I hear one lick of Hip Hop or other modern music, I will get up and leave." Good thing I didn't, because of course, there are at least two instances in the first half of the movie with Hip Hop in the soundtrack. 

It's so embarrassing. I mean, it's not that it's Hip Hop; if Luhrmann was adding Portishead, or Mastodon, or whatever other 'future music' to the film, I would have been equally pissed. He reminds me so much of Tim Burton - Lurhmann's idea of who he is as an icon or "brand" gets in the way of the decisions as to what's best for the movies he makes. The film also spruces up some of Elvis' music with a sometimes irritating modern twist, and some of the editing is a bit ridiculous in the amount of effect and flair. It works sometimes - more at the end of the film - and other times, not so much. Just looks like they were cutting it together in weird ways for the sake of making it a "Baz Luhrmann joint."

Still, the movie - despite all this - is fabulous. Austin Butler is FANtastic as The King, and Tom Hanks - Jesus. Really well done, and the script is great. 

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Playlist:

Powerman 5000 - The Notable Rot

The Ronettes - Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes

Jackie Wilson - Higher and Higher

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Card:

Solid foundation - perhaps a literal nod to the fact that we made an offer, they accepted the offer, and now we have to go through the inspection process. One of those inspections? You guessed it: Foundation. A lot of work still to come.

Greg Puciato - Never Wanted That

 

Another awesome new song from the upcoming sophomore album Mirrorcell, by former Dillinger Escape Plan frontman Greg Puciato. 

You can pre-order Mirrorcell from Puciato's Federal Prisoner Records HERE.

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NCBD:

This week is another super fun one. Here's why:

I have NO idea where Rick Remender & André Lima Araújo's A Righteous Thirst For Vengeance is going. Hell, I'm not even sure how long this book will run. Is this a Deadly Class/Black Science, 30-50 issues kind of story, or a 10-and-done like Tokyo Ghost? I'm sure that information is available somewhere online, either in an interview with Remender or the book's solicitations, however, I prefer not to know. All I do know is it's swift, often disturbing, and yet still has a positive energy to it. 

I surprised myself in the weeks since Ghost Rider #2 - I would say this may be my most anticipated book now, below of course Immortal X-Men. I definitely detected some Clive Barker influence in the second issue of old flame head's new series, and that was enough to make me want more. Think about it - why not apply a Barker-esque Horror vibe to this title/character? 

See, you couldn't come up with anything there, could you? So here's to hoping the book delivers (that monster truck cover isn't doing the series any favors, but hopefully that's all it is - a cover).

I was on the fence with Little Monsters simply because I'm trying - totally unsuccessfully, I might add - to limit what I buy until I move. But the first two issues got me to come back for three, and the first page of three dropped my jaw, so I'm in.

After my recent re-read of issues 1-8 of James Tynion IV's The Nice House on the Lake, I've been waiting for issue 9 with a lot more anticipation. Such a great character study of people at the end of the world. If, that's what this actually is, which is in question at the moment.

Maybe it was just momentum from Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, but I loved issues 1 and 2, and this is a mini-series, so I'm sticking with Strange while Clea is running the show. 

I know nothing about this one, but a Horror book called The Closet that shows a little kid playing in front of a closet that no doubt scares him seems like a great set-up. When you add in the fact that James Tynion IV is the author, well, count me in.

Just began re-reading What's the Furthest Place From Here last week, so issue 6's release is well-timed to say the least. I love this one. 

Issue one wasn't really my thing, but I enjoyed it enough. I'm mainly buying this one because K is into it. 

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Playlist:

Ghost - Infestissumam

Alice in Chains - Eponymous

Various Artists - Lost Highway OST

The Mysterines - Reeling

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Card:

Hopefully, this card bodes well for renewed creative energy. Because mine needs some renewal. 

Mark Lanegan Covers Alice in Chains

 

Alice in Chains' "Nutshell" has always been a devasting song to me anyway, but hearing Lanegan sing it a few days after learning of his passing, well... damn. That's about all I can say.  

Thanks to Mr. Brown for sending this one my way.

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Listen:

New Greg Puciato record in June, and the lead single is f*&king fantastic!

 

I've become quite a fan of Reba Meyers over the last two years, and even though I didn't dig that new Code Orange single that dropped a few months back, I dearly want her making music in my life. Her presence her only makes this an even better song than it already is. Mirrorcell is out June 22nd on Puciato's own Federal Prisoner label, and you can pre-order it HERE.

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Watch:

Serial killer stories are not my bag, however, THIS is fascinating:

 

K and I mainlined Netflix's The Sons of Sam over the last two nights and I have to say, I nearly fell down a rabbit hole. Here's a case that sits at the very heart of the "Satanic Panic" era of our country's history. Watching this put me on a precipice of re-reading Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Fatale, which definitely dovetails with that dark, post-60s vibe I find so fascinating.

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Playlist:

Zombi - Digitalis

The Jesus Lizard - Liar

The Dillinger Escape Plan - Ire Works

The Dillinger Escape Plan - Miss Machine

sElf - What a Fool Believes (single)

Firewater - The Ponzi Scheme

The Twilight Singers - A Stitch in Time EP

Greg Puciato - Lowered (pre-release single)

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Card:

How perfect is this, what with all the Satanic Panic stuff I've ingested over the previous few days:

Take your influences where you find them, it's not wrong to follow your intuition.

New Carpenter Brut!

 

New Carpenter Brut album Leather Terror, out April 1st, and the first song has Greg Puciato on vocals! Pre-order HERE.

 

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Watch:

I know nothing about this new Alex Garland film, but it's an Alex Garland film, so I am excited!

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Playlist:

Ghost - Meliora

Ghost - Infestissumam

Alabama Shakes - Sound and Color

Blut Aus Nord - Thematic Emanations

Shawn James - The Devil's Daughter (single)

Drab Majesty - Careless

Carpenter Brut -  Blood Machines OST

Greg Puciato's Fucking Content

 

As if I'm not completely overtaken by my love of Greg Puciato's debut solo album Child Soldier: Creator of God, the former lead singer of Dillinger Escape Plan has put out a new, multi-media package. Available from his own Federal Prisoner label HERE, Fuck Content is a video/audio release featuring a ten-song live set and five new studio tracks. I love Puciato's music, but I've also become quite a fan of his aesthetic. All the glitchy, seizuring graphics, the black and white digital abstractions that almost resemble some cyberpunk version of newsprint. It's all very fitting for the noisy/melodic mash-up that defines this first album's sound, so the idea that his follow-up release is an audio/visual thing really just makes sense. Also, not nearly enough musicians do this.

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Read:

I finished my re-read of Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn. It'd been over ten years since I read this the first time and inspired by the film, I decided to revisit, not remembering a lot of specifics, except that the movie is very different. Still, I really enjoyed both. After that, I picked up that new Brubaker/Phillips Hardcover Graphic Novel Reckless, expecting to read it in several sittings. Nope. I blew through Reckless non-stop, and even though I just got done telling everyone Pulp is their best, Reckless comes in ahead of that one by about 100 miles. 

This book is the perfect iteration of these gentlemen's ongoing collaboration, and if this is the case, we have nowhere to go but up. Hot damn, go buy this and read it now; Reckless is FANTASTIC!

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Watch:

The Mandalorian's second season ended last night and I am going to feel every day between now and season three. I am absolutely floored, not only at how fantastic this show is, but how John Favreau has completely undone my hatred of star wars - a hatred rooted in a betrayal, the complete undermining and convolution of something that should have been so simple, namely, making new star wars movies. This veritable disgust that I feel for the franchise began to sink deep into my blood three years ago, when I sat in a movie theatre in LaGrange, Illinois and watched the trainwreck that is The Last Jedi.

Disney + has really been a gamechanger for the fan-driven content previously only associated at such a high level with movies released in megaplexes. If you watch The Mando show, you're missing something great if you skip the end credits (especially on this last episode. Whewww! and on that, I will say no more). When you watch all those names and roles scroll up your screen and realize that these television shows Disney is producing are every bit as accomplished as major motion pictures. That in itself just blows me away, the fact that Disney is so big they can change the game this much (also, I secretly hope all the Marvel/Star Wars stuff will go this route and we can go back to having non-blockbuster movies in theatres in a year or four).

Anyway, Favreau really should be crowned king Geek for what he did for starting the MCU with Iron Man and now reinventing and, frankly, saving Star Wars from itself by taking it back to its roots. This final episode brought me to tears. Not just because of the story, but because finally, after twenty years of new star wars material, SOMEBODY GOT IT FUCKING RIGHT.

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Playlist:

Four Stroke Baron - Planet Silver Screen

Opeth - Deliverance

Allegaeon - Apoptosis

The Plimsouls - Everywhere At Once

Preoccupations - Eponymous

XTC - Drums and Wires

Kevin Morby - Singing Saw

Calexico - Seasonal Shift

Squeeze - Argybargy

Slayer - Live Undead

Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery

Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun

Devo - Going Down (single)

Fleet Foxes - Shore

Greg Puciato - Child Soldier: Creator of God

Various Artists - Joe Begos's Bliss Spotify Playlist

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

Loathe - I Let It In and It Took Everything

Code Orange - Beneath 

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Card:

 

A solid foundation for a solid trilogy. That's what I've been thinking about as I approach a stopping point in Shadow Play Book Two. I have to wind this plot down just right by the end of this section of three sections, so after I do one last post-Beta Reader edit on Murder Virus and release it, I can hop back into Shadow Play and really make that third act SPRING.

My Top Ten Albums of 2020

 While the world around us went to Hell, I used a constant influx of awesome music to stay sane. There were A LOT of great records this year, here are my favorite ten.

Manuel Gagneux has proven he's not going anywhere, and on Wake of a Nation - an EP with a more robust run-time than some albums - he's begun to shift his work from clever Alt-History to a poignant contemplation on current global events to chilling, heart-pound results.

I've never cared too much about RTJ's other albums - none of it's bad, but none of it is irreplaceable to me - but THIS! Partially because of when it dropped, partially because of how it dropped, partially because they refuse to participate in all the Hip Hop tropes that make me skeptical of the genre, and especially because it's just that good. Killer Mike and El-P can both rhyme like madmen - a lost art if you do a quick who's who of the 'name brands' of rap at the moment - and on top of it, they can actually do so eloquently on pretty much every urgent topic of the day.

Two years ago, when I fell in love with Ms. Rundle's music, it never would have dawned on me how well it would mesh with Thou's. Imagine my pleasant surprise then when the first track from this album dropped. To Thou is one of those "Beautifully brutal" bands that transcend any genre or classification for me, and something about their stoic sonic textures meshes perfectly with Emma Ruth Rundle's dark, contemplative musings.

The most 'balls out' record I heard this year. Infinitely repeatable and perfectly balanced between hooking you and punching you in the goddamn face.

I can't even believe the range on display here. One might have thought Greg Puciato's first solo record would have come out sounding a bit like Black Queen and DEP in a blender.

One would be perfectly incorrect. This is... an evolution not many metal frontmen could ever pull off. I remember the days when I could see Mike Patton's influence on Greg Puciato. Now I only see his own personal creative resilience. 

Recontextualizing so many different sounds from Heavy Music's last twenty-five years: I hear Alice in Chains, I hear Fear Factory, I hear Bungle, I hear Slipknot. Only, that's not all I hear. I also hear a template for a band that sounds like none of those things exactly and nothing like anything I've heard before. And I want more.

The first Bungle album in twenty years is a redux of their demo - which I never gave a shit about listening to even at my most rabid Bungle fan stage - and it's being re-worked and performed with Thrash Icons Dave Lombardo and Scott Ian? There was simply no way this one didn't make it onto the list. Also the best concert of the year, although of course, there haven't been any concerts since about three weeks after I saw them, so that may be slightly skewed.

This band reminds me so much of the kind of bands I couldn't get enough of in the late 90s. I loved the first Exhalants record, then they went and deepened their sound into this and I had to do a double-take. These guys are for fucking real and I will follow them to the ends of the Earth. Which, incidentally, might not be that long to follow them for, but still. 

Another band that just can't do anything wrong. The Deftones continue to push the edges of their sound in unexpected directions, and while there's no mistaking this for anything but a Deftones record, ain't nothing wrong with that at all.

And actually, as my friend Jacob pointed out, there is at least one passage that could easily lead one to believe the tracks had unexpectedly rotated over to a Vangelis song.

I guess I needed some beauty in my life this year, and Fleet Foxes Shore definitely qualifies as the most beautiful new album I heard in 2020. 

It was a weird year, and some of these records I didn't even listen to as much as you would think for them to make such an impression on me. But I've begun spending a good deal of time on narrative podcasts and audiobooks, as well as a fixation on a lot of music that predates 2020. Maybe then, the less-listened to entries on this list won their spot by making such a large impression in so few listens? 

Down When I'm Not

This song literally makes me feel like I'm twenty-five years old again, about to head out with my friends for a night of adventure. 

When I set out to find the track above from Greg Puciato's Child Soldier: Creator of God and ended up finding this collaboration between Puciato and Jesse Draxler. I'm not gonna lie; I'd been putting off deep-diving into this record for the last few months because I wasn't sure where my head would be in relation to this project, which I'd been hearing mixed things about. I knew I would like it, but I wanted to LOVE it. And I guess I waited until the exact right moment because after two full listens, I'm floored. Also, reading about the album, I was reminded of Puciato's Federal Prisoner label, and in looking up their youtube channel, found this little curiosity.

 

I love what this man is doing! The dissolution of The Dillinger Escape Plan a few years ago filled me with nervous, awful energy. They'd been a mainstay in my life, both live and on record, for nearly two decades; when I fell out of most heavy music, they never waned in my heart. I'm happy as hell to see Greg Puciato doing something I consider pretty extraordinary in his post-DEP life. 

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Playlist:

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

The Ocean - Phanerozoic II

Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks...

Fleet Foxes - Shore

Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Bullshit Vol. 1

Greg Puciato - Child Soldier: Creator of God

Michael Kiwanuka - Kiwanuka

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Card:

Interesting to get a card that signals completion and success at this exact moment when my Beta Reader is back on track and about to finish the penultimate reading of Murder Virus. My original plan to release the book this year have transitioned into a 'first quarter' scheduling for 2021, and I do believe the finished product will be all the better for it.

Isolation: Day 170

Another song from the forthcoming first solo album from former Dillinger Escape Plan/current Black Queen frontman Greg Puciato. Child Soldier: Creator of God is out October 23rd, you can pre-order it HERE.

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Watch: 

Saturday night, K and I checked off a box and watched Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland. Man, I remembered this one being way better than it is. While it's hard to fault any slasher that uses a garbage truck for its first kill, Teenage Wasteland is mildly entertaining, but essentially little more than a perfunctory set-up to deliver a series of mostly uninspired kills. 

Yeah, it kinda all goes downhill after the garbage truck.

Friday, we did John Wick 3, and I continue to be amazed at how much I like these movies. The location scouting is unbelievable, and everything in the series, from the costumes, to the lighting, to the choreography, only helps establish a very unique and opulent atmosphere for unparralleled levels of violence to unfold within. Hell, not even Halle Berry - who is almost always a "No" for me, did a fairly good job.

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Playlist: 

X - Los Angeles

The Clash - London Calling

The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers

The Babies - Eponymous

Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey

Boy Harsher - Careful

Brand New - God and the Devil are Raging Inside Me

Brian Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets

Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon

X - Wild Gift

Windhand -  Grief's Infernal Flower

Ainoma - Manhunter

Ainoma - Necropolis

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Card: 

Referencing the importance of maintaining a clear head, especially when confronted with or analyzing former setbacks. This is a huge nod toward my thought process this morning in the car, where I kind of went over a previous project I'd let wane due to a reluctance on my part to bond with what I and a collaborator had come up with for an entry point to the story. Tossing that key point aside, respectfully, I think I have a much better idea. I just need to be careful how I explain that to the collaborator.