From what I can tell, combing through my metadata, I've never posted anything from the band Silent's 2021 album Modern Hate. My good friend Jacob turned me onto this a few years back, and it's an album I find myself returning to again and again. I chose the above song for reasons that will be obvious in a moment, but the entire album is fantastic. There's some modern Post Punk that relies too heavily on the past, or tries to reduce the "genre" to a checklist. Silent does not do this. They feel breathtakingly authentic. Also, this album reminds me a lot of Savages' 2013 Masterpiece Silence Yourself, which I've kind of stopped listening to because it makes me mourn what could have been with that band.
UPDATE: Upon writing this, I happened to look up Savages on Apple Music - as I periodically do - just to see if there's any new music. Holy smokes, folks - THERE IS! Any guesses as to what my music pick will be for this Wednesday?
Watch:
I will never understand the hate this film gets. K and I rewatched it again this past Friday, and goddamn - It Follows still chills me to the core:
There's so much to talk about here: The liminal photography of Gregory Crewdson as a schematic. Disasterpiece's score comes out of the 00s hauntology vibe but with a decidedly more narrative-driven structure. The influence of John Carpenter's original Halloween, which I don't think I ever noticed until this viewing. How the film moves through events at a pace that, while slow and steady, also burns through ancillary information in elliptical edits that refuse to hold anyone's hand and never sacrifice clarity in the doing. A masterpiece, through and through.
Read:
I am currently rereading Grant Morrison's ambitious Seven Soldiers from 2005 and, to my utter shock, LOVING it. I mean, loving it more than I did the first time (which is surely because the last time I read this, it was in monthly installments. Those publication gaps do not help with Morrison's famed approach to story compression.
I read this series with fervor as it was released in 2005, but I would also say I was definitely suffering from a hearty case of Fan Inertia for Grant Morrison. That wore off some time ago, and in fact, a recent reading of Multiversity had me convinced I would look back and hate this as much as I did that series. I almost sold these issues to avoid experiencing that.
Boy, am I glad I didn't do this.
Whereas Multiversity just feels unintelligible for most of its run (except maybe for those basement-dwelling, card-carrying life-long DC comics fans that love Booster Gold and late 70s Hawkman comics. I'm being a glib cunt, I'll admit, but there's something so... off-putting about so much of comic fandom, and there are, in my opinion, far more avenues in the DC village than in Marvel's that trade on that level of commitment that wears "off-putting" as a badge of honor. One of the special talents Morrison has always brought to the table is taking cringe-worthy characters and reinventing them as sleek, cool new versions of themselves. Here, he does this in earnest, transforming, for example, both Manhattan Guardian and The Shining Knight into fantastic stories with fantastic characters. And while there's a lot of that, "No time to explain/Story compression" at work, I'm not lost like I was in Multiversity. And I'll say, I fully acknowledge that part of my issue with Multiversity is I'm not smart enough to understand some of what he's doing (the "Watchmen" issue, for example), but I also just feel like there's a lot of that superhero book gobbledegook that I hate; you know, the "final battle, bunch of shit happens, none of it makes sense because we don't fully understand their powers anyway" stuff that you find in my ambitious superhero projects. There is a bit of that in the lead-up to Seven Soldiers - JLA: Classified 1-3, which I began my reread with, but it's excusable once you hit the Zero issue because that just ticks along perfectly. There's even a battle that doesn't feel gobbledy at all (maybe because the heroes all die).
I specifically call out Manhattan Guardian and Shining Knight here because I believe in my first read, I liked those books the least. So far, I've read the JLA: Classified 1-3, Seven Soldiers 0, and the first two issues of Manhattan Guardian, Shining Knight, Zatana and Karion the Witch Boy, and I distinctly remember liking the latter two more than the previous. Not so this time. Not that there's anything wrong with Zatana or Karion, but they don't feel as triumphant because they feel closer to what I would like. I just look at the characters and titles of Guardian and Knight and instantly sense that these books will face a far greater uphill struggle to earn my approval. But they definitely do so, and they do so in spades.
I'm really looking forward to digging into the rest of the series, and as this reread is homework for Drinking with Comics, I'll post our discussions here when they air.
Playlist:
Pilot Priest and Electric Youth - Come True OST
Boards of Canada - Inferno
The Veils - Total Depravity
Mastodon - Hushed and Grim
Foxy Shazam - Dark Blue Night
Kyuss - Sky Valley
Blood Mother - Eponymous
Converge - Hum of Hurt
Jucifer - I Name You Destroyer
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue with the Stars
Silent - Modern Hate
Willie Nelson - Dream Chaser
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Eldritch Lace Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
I posting a spread that, literally, jumped out of the deck at me. This is a lot more than I normally try to interpret.
• Knight of Wands
• Three of Swords
• Three of Pentacles
• 14: Temperance
• Two of Pentacles
Faith and passion are a solid foundation for change through Art.
