New Music from Testament!!!

The first track off Testament's upcoming fourteenth studio album, Para Bellum, is out October 10th on Nuclear Blast Records. You can pre-order a copy HERE.

Fourteen albums? That just blows me away. I've dodged in and out of keeping tabs on these guys. Most of their records still sound fantastic to me, and if this first track is any indication, Para Bellum will be no different.

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Watch:

Last night I saw Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno's 2016 Shin Godzilla on the big screen for the second time in three days.

Unlike many of my friends, I did not grow up with Godzilla. Certainly, I knew what the monster was. Who doesn't? The big G has occupied a fairly lofty space in the cultural lexicon for longer than I have been alive. I'm not sure that, without that layer of nostalgia, I'll ever be able to go back and embrace the Godzilla movies of the past (maybe, though), but between this and Minus One, hot damn am I a convery. This movie is STUNNING. Some of the best effects I have ever seen theatrically. They build a world and destroy it and, although I know I'm not watching half a dozen skyscrapers in Tokyo topple, I believe that's exactly what I'm seeing. 

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Read:

I'm halfway through Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and to complement it as research for Shadow Play Book Two, I've also procured a $10 Kindle copy of Richard Ellmann's celebrated biography of Wilde, Oscar Wilde:

This is often shown titled as Oscar Wilde: Pulitzer Prize Winner; however, I find that adding the book's accolade to the title is a bit churlish, to say the least. 

I've pretty much accepted that despite the literal tower of books on my 'to-read' pile, the remainder of my 2025 reading will most likely be reserved specifically for research. Two exceptions are the Nathan Ballingrud and Laird Barron novellas due next month. Other than that, I'm all in on researching both Victorian and Elizabethan England, which have winnowed their way into my novel as main characters of the second act. 

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Playlist:

Windhand - Eternal Return

Sleep - Dopesmoker

White Zombie - La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1

Steve Moore - VFW OST

Blackbraid - Blackbraid III

Testament - Infanticide AI (single)

Mastodon - Leviathan

Testament - The Gathering

Portishead - Third

Faetooth - Remnants of the Vessel

Hall & Oats - Rock 'N' Soul, Part 1

Deftones - private music

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Card:

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

• XVII: The Star

• XX: Adjustment

• Eight of Swords

Struggling interrupts the path to enlightenment. 

That's a pretty vague interpretation, but I'm picking up what I'm putting down. This is a work-oriented Pull, letting me know that the theoretical middle finger roadblocks I'm throwing in certain folks' direction are perhaps counterproductive. I would argue that corporate backstabbing and rigamarole are also counterproductive, but that's just it - stop pointing that out and try to work past it. 

Steve Moore - Jimmy & Stiggs OST

I love that Steve Moore has done an original score for every movie Joe Begos has made except his first. I love everyone of those scores, own them all on vinyl, and am happy to share the news that Terror Vision. 

My god do I love the design on this one! You can pre-order the soundtrack HERE, and from what I'm seeing, Jimmy and Stiggs is still in wide release up until Thursday when the new stuff comes out. I'm going to try to drive into Nashville to see it again, and I have to implore the rest of you to make the effort as well. It's not a perfect film, but it's made for the big screen and supporting something so DIY in big box chains is VITAL to our way of life as fans.

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Watch:

Pierre Tsigaridis's new film Traumatika is getting a lot of hype coming out of recent festival screenings, and I'm super curious. I really liked his previous film, Two Witches, which I watched on the Arrow Streaming service back when it first landed in 2022. I can't say I remember the film very well, but that's definitely not the movie's fault. It usually takes a viewing or two for things to stick. 

Early reports and all the promotional material make Traumatika sound pretty daunting, but we'll see. I watched about a third of this trailer and it was enough to get me further on board, so I'm hoping come September 12th, this pops up on a big screen in my neck of the woods. The blurb on Letterboxd mentions two phrases that always suggest a promising formula for Horror: "Night Terrors" and "Demonic Possession." 

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Read:

I finished Stephen Graham Jones' latest novel The Buffalo Hunter Hunter over the weekend. This is the kind of novel that leaves a deafening vacuum when it ends, where you just look at the other books on your shelf or in your queue and can't quite bring yourself to replace it right away.

Luckily, while I've begun picking at my Sandman re-read again, my main focus for the next few months and possibly the remainder of the year will be on a list of titles I have determined I need to read to continue to work on the sequel to Shadow Play. Some of these are books I've known I'm going to have to read for a few years now, and some are new to the list. The point is, I'm finally working through this project the way I should have been all along. 

First up: The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. It's a shame I haven't already read this, anyway, so I'm finally making up for lost time. a handful of chapters in, I'm hooked, even if it did take me a few to adjust to the more flowery, 'purple' prose style. Once I readjusted, it fit like a glove.

I'm just reading the cheapie Kindle edition, so I thought I'd post one of the more interesting covers from previous editions here, published by Penguin Clothbound Classics in 2000. Yeah, not the best 'vintage' for a book with this much history, but honestly, after google image searching this one, I don't know that it ever received a cover I actually like.

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Playlist:

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Nell' ora blu

Secret Chiefs 2 Traditionalists - La Mani Destre Recise Degli Ultimi Uomimi

White Zombie - Astro-Creep 2000

Zombi - Shape Shift

Ruin of Romantics - Self Control (single)

The Dillinger Escape Plan - Calculating Infinity

Fvnerals - Let the Earth be Silent

Brittany Bindrim - Ever So Slowly (single)

Revocation - The Outer Ones

The Body - No One Deserves Happiness

Fantômas - Delirium Cordia

In Slaughter Natives - Sacrosancts Bleed

Ministry - Houses of the Molee

Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

ISIS - Panopticon

White Zombie - La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1

Steve Moore - Jimmy and Stiggs OST

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Card:

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

• Knight of Pentacles

• XVI: The Tower

• XI: Justice

I saw the Knight of Disks - which I often equate with saving money, and knew exactly what I had to do. I had literally been thinking about it just before the pull, so this was an easy one. Especially after adding in The Tower and Justice.