2018: May 10th 10:46 AM

I only knew about the surprise Dead Cross E.P. because Tommy still runs the got-damned best music blog around over at Heaven Is An Incubator, otherwise, I would have missed out entirely. Here's an awesome new Dead Cross video!




The new Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying is up. Read it HERE.

Playlist from yesterday:

Chris Connelly - Phenobarb Bambalam
Chris Connelly - The Tide Stripped Bare
Nachtmystium - Man Made
Nachtmystium - Doomsday Derelict
Nachtmystium - Reign of the Malicious
Peter Gabriel - Us
Brand New - Daisy
Eagulls - Eponymous

No card today.

The Soft Moon - Burn

Criminal, the new album from The Soft Moon was released earlier this month and so far, this is my favorite track on an outstanding album. Seeing these guys for the first time in April and I can't wait!

Tommy posted the pre-release Choke a few weeks back, check that out HERE.

2018: January 23rd 5:56 PM

Walked up to do my words today. About a nice mile hike uphill. Trying to regain some of what I lost with my health issues last year.

I finished Patrick Kindlon and Maria Lovet's There's Nothing There last night. Really cool book. The part that sealed the deal for me was when Oscar Zeta Acosta showed up. I mean - holy shite! He appears as something of a spirit, although maybe not exactly, and he drops the names of the other spirits that had previously appeared to the main character, Reno. Oscar's presence spurred me to do some research and sure enough, all of Reno's visitors were real people from history who disappeared.

Awesome!

Kindlon's afterwards are worth the read alone - they're all fantastic snapshots of the comic industry from someone immersed in it, and in the back of the final issue he teases that there's more to tell, that maybe he and Maria will get back to it some day.

Please do.



Fell head over heels in love with Viet Cong and their current incarnation as Preoccupations. I remember when all of the hullabaloo with their name was going on two or so years ago, but I never read up on it. Also never had the chance to check out the band, despite the fact that over on Heaven is an Incubator Tommy swore/swears by them up and down. Another great thing about Apple Music - everything I think of is at the touch of a button. These are good enough to own on tactile though, so I'm sure I'll grab the vinyls eventually. As I keep saying, Apple Music is great, but so is giving the artists your hard earned money for their art - not just the royalties they get from streaming services.

I'll be switching gears from the standard Deafheaven for those daily words today:

Heaven's Endless Loop

Tommy, the man behind the always wonderful Heaven is an Incubator, also writes a lot of great stuff for an online magazine my friends and I contribute to called Joup. If you've been here before you probably know about it. Anyway, one of my favorite things to come out of Joup is Tommy's Endless Loop column; a weekly jaunt into the substance of those songs he confesses to be able to listen to endlessly. I can relate; at some point in my early thirties I developed a habit of looping tracks over and over again when I become obsessed with the mood they create in me. My point is I know Tommy's taste from reading his writing and I know when he says he can loop something then I'm in for a great track, whether I loop it or not. And this has bore out - I've picked up some absolute GEMS from Endless Loop. This week though, this week he hits it outta the park.

Tommy has a way of really summing things up succinctly and nowhere is that more evident than in his brief piece about Pulp's This is Hardcore, from the album of the same name - arguably the group's best - released in 1998. Follow the link below and then go seek out Heaven is an Incubator and book mark it. I guarantee you Tommy will turn you on to some amazing music if you do.

Well played Tommy. Well played...



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Them Are Us Too

Let me take you to hell before I take you to heaven.

This afternoon, as is my Thursday custom while navigating home from work on the dreaded 405 I tuned my radio dial to 88.9 FM for Michael Stock's always brilliant Part Time Punks radio show. If was a fairly normal day and my mood was even keel. At about 3:00 PM the show's appropriated theme song kicked in and I readied myself for awesomeness. After Heavenisanincubator, Mr. Stock is about the best damn musical curator/gatekeeper I know of and I value the music he introduces me to more than I can ever say. Today however, as the Television Personalities's ebbed out and Michael came on the mic something was amiss. You could immediately tell he was fighting back tears. I became tense; this was raw and unexpected and I tend to empathize strongly with people I care for, whether they are of the variety that I know personally or not. My weekly guide into music delivered a heartfelt and very emotional explanation for his state: a friend of his, Cash Askew, had died last weekend in the Oakland, CA fire that has peppered national news reports since. My heart went out to this man who has given so much to me from such a distance; as I listened to him describe his affection for Cash's band, Them Are Us Too I felt his loss, a loss no doubt shared by many others. He closed his opening in distress and began to play the band's music.

And I fell in love with yet another band Michael Stock has played on his radio show.

I did not know the people involved in this drama but this music, like so much of what Mr. Stock has turned me on to, is beautiful, amazing, and worth a lifetime of attention. I ordered a copy of Them Are Us Too's album Remain on vinyl (if you dig this and wish to follow suit you can do so on their record label Dais Record's website HERE) and said a silent salutation to the Universe on behalf of this lovely, fallen artist. I can think of no better way to honor her memory than by listening and sharing her music and donating to the Oakland Fire Relief Fund.

Below I've embedded Them Are Us Too's Part Time Punks Session. Follow this bandcamp link to hear Remain.

Steve Moore's ST for Joe Bego's The Mind's Eye...

... is being released on December 2nd by Relapse Records! I am PSYCHED! Just received my copy of the Blu Ray for The Mind's Eye, one of my favorite flicks from last year and one that I saw premiere last October at the 2015 Beyond Fest. Now, almost a year later to the day, I get news of the awesome, synth-ridden nightmare score from Zombi's Steve Moore as well!

The final months of 2016 are proving to be ripe with awesomeness! (and bloody expensive).

Thanks be to Heavenisanincubator for turning me onto Begos in the first place with this write-up of his first film, Almost Human, on Joup!

Mike Mendez's The Last Heist

In his weekly column for LA Weekly sometime early last year Henry Rollins discussed how much fun he had shooting a new movie called The Last Heist. Now, I am a Rollins fan, but even moreso the director of this film turned out to be Mike Mendez, who is responsible for one of my all time favorite flicks The Convent back in the very early aughts. Mr. Mendez has not done a whole heck of a lot since then (not a criticism), so this news made me very excited. I waited for sometime, confused He Never Died* with the forthcoming film, and then dropped my guard.

And of course, then it hits. Played here in LA last weekend. Damn!

Anyway, I'll be taking a page from Tommy at Heaven is an Incubator's Joup column Thank God For VOD! and watching this one very soon. Looks fantastic!



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* Which is also great!

New Perturbator May 6th!!!

While I've been secluded trying to finish the novel that does not want to be finished I've almost missed out on a bunch of great music. Luckily while writing this afternoon I threw on an old favorite and was inspired to check up on what Perturbator has been up to.

Good thing I did because the new record, The Uncanny Valley, drops in just about two weeks!

I cannot wait to get this, as it feels like I've been listening to Dangerous Days for years at this point (probably because, like Heavenisanincubator, I haven't been able to stop listening to it in voracious aural jags since Dangerous Days was released!). The Uncanny Valley is a sequel to DD, taking place 40 years down the road and set in Neo Tokyo. What a fantastic description for such visual music.

Check out She Moves Like a Knife and then high tail it over to the aforementioned best got-damned music blog in the megaverse for the official, 8-bit animated music video to yet another new track from The Uncanny Valley, this one titled Sentient. And go pre-order the album from Blood Music, the hardest working indie record label in the business!

New GHOST in August

And you can download the first track for free on their website right now! Head over to Heaven is an Incubator to listen to that track - named Cirice - now!

Wolf Moon

Type O Negative. One of my favorite bands of all time. Lead singer/bassist Peter Steele's death is one of only two rock n roll deaths from my era that actually affected me - the other being Layne Stayley's. I don't listen to Type O all the time - favorite or not their music affects me so strongly that I have to be in a very particular state of mind to fully revel in it. And that state of mind really only comes around two or three times a year - Spring and Autumn definitely and maybe once at some other point. And when it hits me, I go into that headspace and their music super hard.

I've been in that headspace recently, and ironically my friend Tommy has too because he posted about it in his awesome Joup column Endless Loop.

I've posted this track before - I have TONS of baggage associated with it. I'm posting it again but wanted to do a different version, namely something live that does it justice, like this version from the band's Symphony for the Devil video does.

So Tonight that I Might See

Tommy from Heaven is an Incubator does a marvelous column over on Joup called Endless Loop. It's great - the idea being one that I can most certainly relate to: songs that you can listen to over and over and over again without getting tired of. This week's entry is Fade Into You by Mazzy Star. I love this song and the entire album it's on. Back in the day... well, I won't even bothering trying to describe what it means to me because if you follow this link right here and read Tommy's words I think you'll find that once again he nails it. I'm off work sick today and the first thing I saw when I woke up was this post. It inspired me to put on the song and then the album. I am now in the middle of my fourth go-through with the entire thing. It's perfect for how I feel today, so I have to thank Tommy for blindly hitting the right chord for me. Like I said, I love the entire record, however the title track is my own perfect Endless Loop from this one. There's something about its quasi-Doors desert psychedelia of it that just grabs me and never lets go, like it's always been playing in the static just below my conscious mind since the first time I ever heard it, waaaay back in that magical land called the 90s.

Iska Dhaaf - General Malaise

Tommy from the ever diligent Heaven is an Incubator posted an amazing piece about SXSW today over on Joup. In it he covers a full week of SXSW happenings in the way that only someone who lives in Austin and has been attending the, ahem*, "festival" for a long time can. You won't see any "It" band blow jobs here; Tommy covers everything equally, spending as much time in the less publicized venues with the less hyped bands as he does with the hype monsters that deserve it.

Case in point: Iska Dhaaf. I'd never heard of them before. As I began going through the names of bands he lists and checking into them for myself I really hit a very particular frequency with these guys. This song is one of the reasons why. They're on bricklanerecords and are very much worth looking into, as this track is only the tip of the iceberg based on my research thus far.

Thanks Tommy!

*Sorry, haven't been, always wanted to go but about six months ago when, while applying for a place playing there I found I had to write an essay about what it would mean to me to play there, SXSW quickly became as eye rolling as Coachella to me. I've never been to either and although there's no way I'll ever do Coachella I would absolutely do SXSW - despite the "essay" thing - if I could hang out with Tommy.

Adam Green's Digging up the Marrow & Joe Begos's Almost Human

Not only does Thomas Williams run the best damn music blog around, but he contributes A LOT to Joup, the online magazine my good friend Grez started a few years ago and I help run. One of Tommy's columns is Thank God for VOD, where he begins every entry with the acknowledgement that he isn't able to go to the theatre as much as he would like (same here) but VOD helps him see most of what he wants to. Of course, coupled with the difficulty heading out to the movies these days is the fact that a lot of the movies guys like Tommy and I want to see don't even open in more than one theatre in any given major population center, for a weekend at best, so VOD is a godsend. But I'm behind in my movies and I finally made it around to one Tommy wrote about last june, Joe Begos's directorial debut, Almost Human. I liked it a lot, it was a great nod to 80s sci fi horror, specifically as Tommy points out early Carpenter, and Begos crafted a very specific late night UPN tone - also as Tommy points out. I love the nostalgic approach when it's done right. And Almost Human is - there's definitely room for him to grow, but I got the same vibe from Almost Human as I did from Ti West's The Roost when it first came out, and if that's any indication, there's sure to be some great stuff following this debut.

Afterward watching the film, while researching Begos and the cast on IMDB, I stumbled across the trailer for Adam Green's new film Digging up the Marrow, and after watching it I am VERY interested. First, you had me at Ray Wise. Second, Green will forever get the benefit of the doubt from me because of Frozen. No, not the disney movie. I'm talking about the film where three college kids get stranded on a ski lift over a long weekend. Can you say traumatic?

Anyway, looking forward to seeing this quite a bit. And if you haven't given Almost Human a chance yet, you should. It's streaming on Netflix so that makes it even more accessible to most. Also, directly after I posted this I flipped over to Bloody Disgusting and found an article and pictures of Looper star Noah Segan on the set of Begos's follow-up to Almost Human, The Mind's Eye. Excited!

My Top Ten Albums of 2014

Tuneyards's Nikki-Nack is #1and Protomartyr and Jenny Lewis make an appearance. Read the full list over on Joup! Then go over and read Tommy's from Heaven is an Incubator, also on Joup!

Feuerbahn - The Fire Dance

I first heard this about a year and a half ago via Heavenisanincubator. I fell in love immediately. However this was at a time when I was so steeped in finding new music that an awful lot of bands I discovered ended up getting pushed off the plate by a constantly expanding wave of newer stuff. And newer stuff. And newer stuff...

Well, this popped up into my head again today, I spent about fifteen minutes searching through the incubator and once again found Feuerbahn's bandcamp.

Of particular note, I think, it track four, "Triumphwagen". Kind of Seventeen Seconds era Cure meets Fen. Kind'a.

My Favorite Article All Year Anywhere

I know that's a fairly hyperbolic statement, but Tommy from Heavenisanincubator just killed it. The focus isn't so much on the actual music related, but on the aesthetics of our relationship with music via technology. Reading this gave me that warm, fuzzy feeling that analog does and made me want to run upstairs, grab one of the several dozen still shrink-wrapped Maxell C-90's in a closet and get to making a mix-tape. Now that's inspiration!

The link to the article is embedded in the image - just click, link and read! Oh, and listen.

SAPPHIRE SLOWS Can I Get Out of This Silence (Eyedress Remix)

A couple of weeks ago Heaven is an Incubator posted the song Nature Trips by weird electro group Eyedress from the Philippines. I stumbled back across that post a little while ago and ended up looking Eyedress up on Soundcloud. This prompted a long listening session, the above of which was one of my favorite tracks out of a lot of tracks that I really, really dug. As with my previous post concerning Nicolas Jarr, the original artist here - Sapphire Slows - is completely new to me, so it looks as though I have my homework multiplying exponentially with this lackadaisical evening of reading comics and listening to new music.

Eyedress - Nature Trips

I know NOTHING about Eyedress. However, go to where I first heard this, my favorite music blog Heaven is an Incubator and you can read all about it.

Rituals - Our Blood

I like this quite a bit. Brooklyn Vegan has the whole record by Rituals streaming if you go here. Or just go to the band's label One Big Silence's soundcloud.

Some of the colors and editing techniques used here, juxtaposed with very simple imagery create a nice antithesis to all the overblown hype that I unfortunately haven't been able to avoid swimming around the more mainstream aspects of the music industry. Rituals seems to exist deliciously on the fringe of that industry - the fringe of even the underground of that industry. That's the thing - by now even the underground has been assimilated and is a copy of a copy of a copy. That's why it takes sites like Heavenisanincubator and Brooklyn Vegan to help see what else is out there. I'm not saying all major industry stuff is bad - I did just post a doc about Passion Pit before this - but a lot of it is and sometimes even the good stuff therein surrender to spectacle making just for the sake of spectacle making.

image via the band's soundcloud

Evolution of a Post: Black Walls

Tonight I've a restless, stirring going on behind my eyes. You may have noticed from the increasingly flowery way I'm turning these last few posts into prose. Part of that's because I'm still a little disheveled from last week's weird experience with the NIN/David Lynch video, and part of it is because I've had a kind of off week working on my book. Regardless, I worked today - been up since 5 or 5:30 AM (it's almost 1:00 AM here now). Came home, went to write from about 5:30 to 8. Watched Night of the Hunter. Then watched TV Funhouse. Now am surfing - it's been a slow couple of weeks for music stuff. I've always got Heavenisanincubator to turn me on to awesome new stuff, but there's been a general disinterest in my own head with a lot of the stuff I find on the other sites I frequent. Pitchfork, Brooklyn Vegan, Gigwise. Not too much going on in those quarters. Sick of hearing about jz, daft punk and north west's progenitor. Then on Exclaim I find a new song by an artist working under the name of Black Walls. Something about the image the soundcloud player they have up for the new song "Mary of the Shrines" catches my eye. It reminds me of Sunn 0))). The words "Folk" and "Drone" are used. I'm pretty damn hard on acoustic guitar (Zeppelin does it so well they ruined it for most) but the track's great, listen to it and read about it here. I google Black Walls and find a bandcamp page from last year. I'm excited.
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