Agriculture - Live on KEXP

 

Mr. Brown first put L.A.'s Agriculture on my radar, and while I've logged a couple evenings spinning their 2025 album, The Spiritual Sound, I'm not sure I actually "got it" until I saw this live performance on KEXP.

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NCBD:

A nice, easy week with two books I am very much looking forward to reading:

One issue left after this one, and I can't wait to see how David and Maria Lapham's Good As Dead shakes out in the end. Fairly ominous solicitation over on League of Comic Geeks: 

"The truth behind the Port Lindon disaster is revealed, but not everyone will survive to hear it."

Mystery, Crime and Suspense, the way only the Laphams can do it! I've loved having a new series from them, so much so that this might kick off a long-overdue Stray Bullets reread.

Apparently, Walsh and Tynion's Exquisite Corpses just got optioned for adaptation. Couldn't happen to a crazier, bloodier book. Already cinematic in scope, this one really kicks you in the face every month. Hold my beer while I put in my mouthguard, new issue

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Watch:

Last Thursday night, K and I hit our local theatre for the first showing of Nia Dacosta's 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. We were coming in hot off our first rewatch of Danny Boyle's preceding film, which we were both a little lukewarm on after our initial theatrical viewing back in July of 2025. 

Watching that first film again, I found I had warmed to it. Boyle is first and foremost an innovator, and I think my initial disconnect from the first chapter in his and Alex Garland's 28 Years Later trilogy had a lot to do with the visual language of the film, and not so much with the story. Jarring camera work, counterintuitive editing, stylized backgrounds and stock footage, and mixed-media injections all made for a unique but initially confusing undertaking. Having gotten that out of the way and acclimated to the expectation for these elements, the film played a lot better. 

And now we have this: a film so confident and viscerally affecting, not even the trailer takes away from it. 

I can't wait to see this one again on the big screen, and maybe more importantly, what a success like The Bone Temple will do to propel Dacosta's career into the stratosphere. 

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Playlist:

Muddy Waters - Electric Mud

David Lynch & Marek Zebrowski - Polish Night Music

Mountain Realm - Stoneharrow

Various - Twin Peaks (Music from the Limited Event Series)

John Zorn - IAO: Music in Sacred Light

Gylt - In 1,000 Agonies, I Exist

Deafheaven - New Bermuda

Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource Vol. 1: 𝝙𝝙

David Lynch - The Air is on Fire

Agriculture - The Spiritual Sound

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Card:

One Card from Thoth for today:

Who says you can't always get what you want? 

Nun Gun

 
I'd not heard of this Algiers side project until Heaven is an Incubator posted his favorite albums of the year list (read it HERE. Seriously. READ IT). If you've seen my last couple years of "best of" lists, you know Algiers' first two records claimed my top album spots in the years they were released, and then 2020's There Is No Year fell flat for me. Well, Nun Gun is a return to form - in a way, since, you know, it's not the entire band. Take all the weird shit from those first two albums and leave out the soul and you have Nun Gun's Mondo Decay. I LOVE this record, and this song... this song is the stand-out track on an album of all stand-out tracks. SO fucking catchy, in the oddest possible way. The vocals remind me of Rockwell, which, surprisingly, is just a great thing.

 

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Watch:

After re-watching the original, Bernard Rose Candyman the other night in preparation, K and I finally saw Nia DaCosta's Candyman.

Dubbed a 'spiritual sequel,' this Jordan Peele-produced entry in the Candyman mythos, this is one of the few examples of a sequel that makes the original better. The first Candyman (I've never seen two or three) focuses on a narrow width of a story that by the entire way it's handled you know is bigger. This sounds like it could be a flaw, but it's most definitely not. This unconventional approach is what I love about it. And now, three decades later, DaCosta's sequel then arrives to finally fill in all the background, and the way it does this is fantastic. The final image/dialogue is what really seals the deal, but the entire fill gloriously fulfills the original and its promise of one day telling us a much bigger story. 

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NCBD:

Let's see what's on tap for this penultimate NCBD for 2021:

Maw has had some of the gnarliest covers of the last few years. Here's to hoping I'm able to find this one.

The final issue of this Kang the Conqueror mini-series that will no doubt lead into the Timeless one-shot hitting shelves later this month. I'm fairly certain Marvel is positioning Kang to be the next Thanos-level big bad in the MCU, which is good news for those of us who adore the character. This series has been great, and while reading the previous issue, I was struck by just what a late 70s/early 80s/Bill Mantlo vibe this book has achieved. 

Loving this Moon Knight series, and what's more, it's getting me pretty pumped for the forthcoming Disney+ show featuring Oscar Issac as ol' Moony himself. 

I fell in love with this comic just as issue ten hit the stands, so this one is the first I've had to wait a full thirty for. 

Wasnt' easy.

Like a lot of this Hickman-era X-Men stuff, I've re-read several of these issues a few times now, which is something I haven't done since I was a kid, re-reading books the same month I acquire them. But there's enough going on here that multiple 'viewings' really open the stories up.

If issue twelve of That Texas Blood was the end of the "1981" storyline, this must be a coda before the book goes back on seasonal hiatus. Go on and get your rest Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips - you've earned it, and I'll be waiting right here when you get back. This one has really turned out to be the sleeper hit of the year.

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Playlist:

Godflesh - Post Self

Blut Aus Nord - Deus Salutis Meae

Kowloon Walled City - Piecework

Read Yellow - Radios Burn Faster

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Card:

I'm feeling with an increasingly chaotic state of mind of late, and I know what I have to do, yet still, I resist. I'm not sure why the idea of meditation puts me off so much at the moment, but The Empress here definitely suggests I need to adopt some more nurturing practices again.