New Mastodon before year's end and it's a double-fucking-album! In general, double albums don't work out so well, but Mastodon inspires enough faith in me that I don't think that will be the case with Hushed and Grim, dropping October 29th. Pre-order in the band's store HERE.
Watch:
Hell, what haven't I watched in the last two weeks? Laid low by what definitely turned out to not be COVID-19, I still spent a week and some change on my couch. I read three books (well, read one and finished reading two others), and watched something like 15 flicks. For most of those, you can see my Letterbxd. What I specifically want to mention here are two readily available new flicks that I absolutely loved, Ben Wheatley's In the Earth, and James Wan's Malignant.
I loved this flick. Wheatley seems to never disappoint - I even dug his recent remake of Hitchcock's Rebecca he did for Netflix - and this is a bit of a return to his previous dabblings in UK Occult/Folk Horror, only this time, with a technological twist I found very much needed. Folk Horror is becoming a bit like Steampunk, i.e. there's a checklist of images and themes associated with it, and all a filmmaker needs to do is add those ingredients to produce an entry in what is becoming a somewhat tiresome set of tropes. A Classic Horror Story attempted to do this as well, I believe, but failed, while Wheatley conjures what could easily be seen as a sister-work to some of what Warren Ellis did with his and Declan Shalvey's comic series Injection.
I had no interest in seeing this but changed my mind for review purposes (The Horror Vision's deep-dive on Malignant drops tomorrow). In a nutshell, the only things I liked about the first 33 minutes of this flick were DP Michael Burgess' cinematography and Joseph Bishara's score. Then, around 40 minutes I understood what Wan was doing and totally fell for the film.
Playlist:
The Cars - Eponymous
T. Rex - The Slider
Concrete Blonde - Bloodletting
Concrete Blonde - Eponymous
Electric Wizard - Dopethrone
Sleep - The Sciences
Ghost - Prequelle
Powerplant - People in the Sun
Pearl Jam - Vs.
Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full
An Autumn for Crippled Children - The Long Goodbye
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
Anthrax - Spreading The Disease
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Mastodon - Pushing the Tides (pre-release single)
Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments
Card:
This makes sense - I've recently found a new path into the second Shadow Play book, which was very much needed.
