Cycle Sluts From Hell - I Wish You Were A Beer

 

Wow! I have not heard this in a very long time! I first heard this via the Operation Rock n' Roll compilation cassette I spoke at length about HERE. The band's 1991 eponymous debut turned out to be their only album, but it's pretty great. I never made it past the two singles back in the day - not for lack of interest, but hey, we didn't have the luxury of streaming back in 1991, hahaha - but I'm listening to it now and it feels a lot like what I'd pretty much always assumed: a bit of a female take on Gwar without the Horror Fantasy theatrics. 

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Watch:

I had an impromptu Jeremy Saulnier weekend this past Friday and Saturday. Started Friday with Blue Ruin, which I'd not seen since somewhere around the time it first hit streaming.

This 100% holds up to the fairly lofty place that first viewing gave it in my head. I don't know if I've ever seen a revenge film with such heartfelt emotion. As big as this goes stakes-wise, Blue Ruin always feels grounded in the real world, with real people who do the things I think many of us would do in such a dire situation.

Next up, on Saturday I finally got around to Saulnier's 2024 film Rebel Ridge. 

This is one I'd rather not post the trailer for. I'd not seen it before viewing, and after watching it just now, I have to say, just go in as blind as possible. Saulnier's not reinventing the wheel here; he never is. The point is, he has such a unique style as a filmmaker who marries Suspense and Action. This one is about as tense as Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners, and that's saying something. Outstanding performances all around, but Aaron Pierre is just magnetic beyond words. 

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Read:

I blew through a re-read of Nathan Ballingrud's Crypt of the Moon Spider, the first book in his Lunar Gothic Trilogy on Saturday. I've been meaning to get around to re-reading this and picking up part two since it came out in October. Instead of giving the bezos corporation more money, I drove over to our local independent book store, Clarksville Book Shop, and asked them to order me Cathedral of the Drowned. I can't wait to read this one. 

In the meantime, however, I grabbed this off the store's shelves and am already over 100 pages in:

I knew nothing about this novel or author Isabel Cañas, for that matter, but if there's one predilection I tend to exhibit more or less consistently, it's going in blind. So far I'm pretty deeply immersed. Here's the solicitation blurb:

"When a demonic presence awakens deep in a Mexican silver mine, the young woman it seizes must turn to the one man she shouldn’t trust… from bestselling author Isabel Cañas. In 1765, plague sweeps through Zacatecas. Alba flees with her wealthy merchant parents and fiancé, Carlos, to his family’s isolated mine for refuge. But safety proves fleeting as other dangers soon bare their teeth: Alba begins suffering from strange hallucinations, sleepwalking, and violent convulsions. She senses something cold lurking beneath her skin. Something angry. Something wrong. Elías, haunted by a troubled past, came to the New World to make his fortune and escape his family’s legacy of greed. Alba, as his cousin’s betrothed, is none of his business. Which is of course why he can’t help but notice her every time she enters a room or the growing tension between them… and why he notices her deteriorate when the demon’s thirst for blood grows stronger."

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Playlist:

Carter Burwell - Blood Simple OST

Vitriol - Eponymous

Jim Williams - Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched OST

Testament - Para Bellum

The Atlas Moth - Coma Noir

Dance with the Dead - Driven to Madness

Meg Myers - Sorry

Perturbator - Age of Aquarius

John Coltrane - Blue Train

Odonis Odonis - Eponymous

Coleman Hawkins - Wrapped Tight

Cycle Sluts From Hell - Eponymous

Archspire - Carrion Ladder (single)

The Ocean - Fluxion

Oxcar Peterson, Joe Pass & Ray Brown - The Giants

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Card:

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

• Queen of Cups

• Knight of Cups

• Two of Pentacles

Pursuit of artistic endeavors can only be upheld with compassion for the world around you and the adaptability that requires. Because, in 2025, compassion can be a difficult thing. Maybe not for those in your immediate circumference, but definitely for the world at large. 

This is a fairly banal, vague reading, but there's something here. While I'm typing this, the Ocean's refrain, "Tonight we celebrate the human stain" echoes through my ears and makes me wonder if there might be a way to use art to connect to someone who I don't see eye to eye with. You can ask what's the point, but at the same time, partisanship and cynicism have all but bankrupted our culture and society. While art remains pure. Is there a way to use that purity to reach beyond our broken means of communication?

Telekinetic Yetis & True Detectives

 

Telekinetic Yeti's guitar tone is beyond anything I've ever heard before. I've been throwing last year's Primordial on here and there for the last year or so, and I dug it, but something happened this past week and I just can't live without it now. 

That tone!

I've recently begun playing guitar again after an almost eight-year hiatus, and as I run scales and modes and just generally fall in love with the instrument again, I'm listening to a lot of music specifically for tone. There's Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and this. Those are probably my three favorites at the moment. 

I've also discovered the band's 2017 album Abominable.  You can hear how they hadn't quite dialed in their tone and sound just yet, however, that doesn't prevent it from being another awesome long player! 

You can order Telekinetic Yeti's monolithic slab of music from their Bandcamp HERE, or, if you want vinyl like me, from Tee Pee Records HERE.

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Watch:

True Detective always revs me up and then ends up disappointing on some level. I mean, Season One is among my all-time favorite things, but I hate the ending. Hasn't stopped me from watching it nearly ten times since it came out, though. Season Two... well, let's never speak of that again. And I loved Season Three but it also ended so soft and convienent that it robbed some of the thunder.  

This new Season, however, has Iss López as show runner and, if I heard correctly, director. If you've seen López's film Tigers Are Not Afraid, you probably understand why I have such high expectations for this. Kind of the same high expectations I had for Season Three when they originally announced Jeremy Saunier would be series director. Saunier had some form of disagreement with showrunner/creator Nic Pizzolato (surprise), and bowed out after only two episodes. Pizzolato handled most of the directing for the remaining episodes, and I thought he did a mostly fantastic job, but I still wonder what that season would have been like if Saunier had been aboard for the entire thing.

Anyway, no hard date on the premier yet, but I'm betting August or October. Either way, I'm in.

 

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Play:

I had not played video games since the original NES - well, I did my fair share of DDR back in the early aughts - until I came across Puppet Combo and his game Glass Staircase. The game had a very Argento vibe, and Puppet Combo's love of 80s Horror VHS struck me as so endearing I couldn't say no. That was five or so years ago and although I bought it, I couldn't really figure out how to play it effectively on my computer. I was happy just to support them, though.

Fast forward to my birthday last year and I saw that Puppet Combo's newest game at the time, Nun Massacre, was getting a Switch release. I plunked down the money and ordered a Switch, bought the game, but ultimately became frustrated adjusting to its play peccadilloes and kinda forgot about it in my obsession with Game Kitchen's Blasphemous.

 

This is the newest game, and I guess it's only available on Steam, which is something I'll most likely never tap into. Still, wanted to spread the word and share this awesome trailer.

 

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Playlist:

Metallica - 72 Seasons

Telekinetic Yeti - Primordial

Telekinetic Yeti - Abominable

Church of the Cosmic Skull - Is Satan Real?

The Sword - Age of Winters

High on Fire - Death is this Communion

The Sword - Gods of the Earth

The Sword - Warp Rider

Ruby the Hatchet - Fear is a Cruel Master

Ruby the Hatchet - Planetary Space Child

         

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New ✝︎✝︎✝︎'s and Best Horror of 2020

 

New Crosses! No word that I see of a release date yet, but what a way to round out the year!

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Favorite Horror Films of 2020

Over on The Horror Vision, we did our "Favorite Horror of 2020" episode this weekend, and as I type this the episode should be hitting all major streaming platforms. Here's an embed of the youtube, although this and the IGTV version are considerably truncated for time compared to what you can stream from Spotify and the like. Either way, here are our picks:

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Watch:

 

This was one I had not even heard of until I watched it on Christmas Eve. HOLY cow. This one would make a fantastic double feature with Jeremy Saulnier's Hold the Dark (time for a rewatch!), there's such a stoic reverence for violence. Easily slid into my top ten of the year, as evidenced by the episode of The Horror Vision above. This is director Shawn Linden's third feature, and you can bet I'll be seeking out his first two films - The Good Lie, and Nobody - in short order. 

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Playlist:

Howard Shore - Crash OST

Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me

Vince Guaraldi Trio - A Charlie Brown Christmas

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - Hollywood (pre-release single)

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf

Electric Wizard - Dopethrone

Doves - The Universal Want

Nat "King" Cole - The Christmas Song

The Blueflowers - Relapse EP

✝︎✝︎✝︎ - The Beginning of The End (pre-release single) 

Calexico - Seasonal Shift

Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy OST

Black Sabbath - Master of Reality

The Blueflowers - Relapse EP

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Card:

 

Being that the standard reading of this card is the beginning of a new project, and I'm in the midst of wrapping one and finishing another, I'm not quite sure how to take this. There's also the "Big influences" reading, and although I'm not sure how to interpret that on a surface level, I suppose I should be on the lookout for inspiration.

2019: January 14th

There's a new Jozef Van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch album set to drop on February 8th via Sacred Bones Records, and so far it has my favorite album title in quite some time. You can pre-order An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil HERE.

Rounding the final lap on Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel, which I absolutely love. And interestingly enough, Cave's take on a gorgeous baroque, inbred Southern Gothic aesthetic hit a nice harmonic node with my impromptu re-watch of True Detective Season 1, as well as last night's True Detective Season 3, which takes place in Arkansas in 1980, 1990, and 2015 and has a similar tone.

Thus far, Season 3 follows Detectives Wayne Hays as played by Mahershala Ali, as he tries to solve an unsolvable case over the course of three decades. Two episodes in and I'm digging it; I find it a little bit of a lack of confidence that the show went back to the 'deposition and interview' mechanism that worked so well in Season 1, but hey, to climb out of the swamp of Season 2, do what works. With Jeremy Saulnier's episodes now under the belt and his leave approaching, next week's episode is helmed by Daniel Sackheim and then I guess HBO will announce directors as the episodes come up? I'm struggling not to take that as a bad sign, but for right now, doubts or not, the cinematography, acting, and atmosphere are so fucking tight and thick, I'm sticking.

I had actually planned at the last minute to do a new weekly wrap up show, a la my Evolution of the Arm series I did for Twin Peaks: The Return, however there really isn't a lot of 'mystery' to discuss yet. The one thing I'm wondering is, if this season drifts at all into Weird Fiction territory like the first season did, maybe the book we see in missing boy Will Purcell's bedroom while Hays is searching it for clues might come into play. The book is The Forests of Long, and anyone who knows Lovecraft mythos knows Leng as location of the infamous Plateau of Leng. I did a perfunctory search for the book online and couldn't find anything, making me think it was a prop deliberately constructed for the show, which means it is potentially important in some way. I doubt this is where the show is going, but you never know. If David Milch convinced Nick Pizzalato to stick with what made Season One iconic, we may brush up against some Weird after all.

Playlist from yesterday was non-existent.

Card of the day:

Sturdy. Is today that day? Maybe...

2019: January 13th

Previously, I'd not been much of a fan of Baroness. Yesterday though, Mr. Brown mentioned The Purple Album to me, and after spending a couple go-rounds with it on my iPod, I have to say, I really dig this album. This song, in particular.

New episode of The Horror Vision just went up:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Google Play
The Horror Vision.com

True Detective Season Three starts tonight. I'm going to watch it, but I am going to keep my expectations waaaaaay low. Based on the fact that, although Jeremy Saulnier was originally attached to direct the entire season - much like Cary Fukunaga did season one - but ended up only doing the first two, I'm hesitant to expect much beyond those first two episodes. Season Two is a catastrophe, and begins with Justin Lin directing the first two episodes - which were pretty good - and then has a different director for almost every remaining episode of the season, and the story crumbles. Season Three's IMDB shows Saulnier for the first two, and Daniel Sackheim for episode three, and then there is no director listed for the remainder of the season. That 'play-the-cards-close-to-your-chest' technique makes me think this will also end up being an unwatchable mess, but hopefully not.



Playlist from 1/12:

Baroness - Purple
The Black Angels - Death Song
David Bowie - Aladdin Sane
The Dillinger Escape Plan - Option Paralysis
John Carpenter & Alan Howarth - Big Trouble in Little China OST
Windhand - Eternal Return
Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy OST
Goblin - Dawn of the Dead OST

Card of the day:

Breakthrough!