Rodney Crowell - Something Has To Change

From Rodney Crowell's 2021 album Triage. Mr. Brown and I have been doing record swaps for the last year or so; I lend him six, and he fires back six. One of the best records to come of those exchanges is Rodney Crowell's 2021 album Triage. Something "Has to Change" is the Side A closer, and it's a powerhouse. Throughout the record, I hear a lot of 70s-era Stones and Chicago singer-songwriter stalwart Ike Reilly. Also, as Brown pointed out, a lot of Catholics-era Frank Black (my favorite Frank Black). 

All that is not to say Mr. Crowell does not have his own sound. He does, and it's a sound grown from the same good Earth those others are - old-school Rock n' Roll, Rhythm and Blues and, well, just straight up Blues. The arranging on his albums continues to evolve, and you hear it best on this track. That trombone!!!

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NCBD:

Here's the Pull for this week's NCBD:

The Penultimate issue of Immortal X-Men looks like it might just answer my complaints about the Jean Grey series and tie the end of that into the current story. Granted, they did start to do that in Jean #4, so maybe I jumped the gun. We'll see. Either way, my complaints are small; overall, this era of X-Men is still my favorite since Claremont's. 

I feel like it's been longer than 30 days since our last issue of Tenement; however, that's likely because I love this book so much. I have a four-day weekend coming up; might be time to re-read the Bone Orchard Mythos to date.

Sadly, I won't get my hands on this until my next trip to Chicago, which is likely only a week away or so. Still, knowing another chapter of Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows' The Ribbon Queen is just out of reach may drive me mad. This one is escalating in a way that reminds me of Fincher's The Game; not sure anyone else is getting that, and I'm definitely not referring to the story itself. But as the pieces move into place, a bigger picture slowly emerges, the brief images of it we see suggesting Horrors beyond anything we've seen before. As the dread creeps in beneath the human dramas unfolding, page after page, we wait for awful things to happen. When they do, they are both a release and a harbinger of even worse, more cosmic monstrosities that await us. The feeling is... thrilling.

Time once again for my most-anticipated book of the month. Void Rivals has been a delight through and through, and having loved the experience of reading Kirkman's The Walking Dead month-to-month for most of its original run, I know what this man can do with a monthly. 

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Read:

Pat O'Malley, the Writer/Creator of one of my favorite comics of the year, Popscars, has a Kickstarter up for 12 more days. Jurassic Parkour 4 looks fun as hell.

I had Pat on The Horror Vision a few months ago; it was a great time, two Horror fans just geeking out on the stuff we love. Parkour 4 looks a lot more like - well, kind of like what if the Triceratons from TMNT were the lead characters. Being a TMNT fan, I gotta see what that looks like.

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Playlist:

The Cure - Disintegration

David Bowie - Black Star

Donny McCaslin - Beyond Now

PJ Harvey - Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea

Frank Black and the Catholics - Snake Oil

Willie Nelson - First Rose of Spring

Depeche Mode - Violator

U2 - One (single)

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Ten of Pentacles

•XIV - Temperance (Art)

• Page of Swords

The Ten of Pentacles/Disks again. Hmm...

Closure is dictated by the Creative solution to an upcoming problem. I'm hoping this refers to yesterday when our Realtor and I had to use some last-minute finesse to solve a problem with earnest money. Barring that, I could also see this as a reminder to not let the chaos in my life at the moment distract me from my writing goals, which is absolutely another facet of what transpired yesterday.

New Music from Baroness!!!

 

The first single from Baroness's upcoming album Stone, out September 15th. Pre-order HERE. Love this track - listen to Gina SHRED - you can hear the Randy Rhoads influence for sure!

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Watch:

I interviewed writer/artist/filmmaker Pat O'Malley yesterday about his comic Popscars, his short films, future projects and our shared love of cinema. Going into it, I hadn't realized Pat made short films, so I checked out his youtube channel HERE. I dug everything on there, but Pool Shark was, by far, my favorite. Check it out:

I was kinda blown away by the camera work on this. The first few times we see the Shark, they filmed it in a way that, at first, I thought it must be stock footage of a real shark. Talk about movie magic. My discussion with Pat should go up this weekend; Popscars issue #4 comes out this coming Wednesday, and if you're lucky, there might be copies of 1-3 still lurking on your shop's shelves. Published by the new Sumerian Comics - a rebranding of the company formerly known as Behemoth - this one is wide and, only the first chapter in a bigger story.

 

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Read:

I was so blown away by Laird Barron's The Wind Began to Howl that I'm still unpacking/reveling in it. Because of that, I've found it difficult to start my planned reread of Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart is a Chainsaw. This will be a quick brush-up before diving into the recently published sequel Don't Fear the Reaper. Meanwhile, over on his Twitter, SGJ revealed the cover to the third and final installment in the trilogy, The Angel of Indian Lake. 

Jones also linked the website Crimereads.com, who broke the cover image and have an excerpt from the novel up. Obviously, I'm not reading that until I get current, but it's cool that this is out there in the world. Talk about inspiration! You can read the excerpt at the Crimereads link above. 

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Playlist:

Witchskull - The Serpent Tide

Blut Aus Nord - What Once Was... Liber III EP

Spelljammer - Abyssal Trip

Jeff Buckley - Grace

Rina Mushonga - In a Galaxy

Godflesh - Purge

Mars Red Sky - Eponymous

Baroness - Last Word (pre-release single)

Bria - Cuntry Covers Vol. 1

Jawbox - For Your Own Special Sweetheart

Forhist - Eponynous

Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue with the Stars

Chamber of Secrets, Clement Panchout & Mxxn - Murder House (Puppet Combo OST)

Pegboy - Strong Reaction

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - PetroDragonic Apocalypse

            

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Card:

Two days of Pulls to put up here, as I was too busy with work yesterday to do a post:

• Nine of Swords again? My dreams have actually been fairly unremarkable or unrememberable the last few days.

• Ten of Disks - Wealth - The highest manifestation of the Earthly realms, which juxtaposed with Nine of Swords may explain why my dreams dried up all of a sudden. Earthly, material issues/items dampen the inner realms

• Prince of Wands - Airy aspect of Fire, or the intellectual thrust applied to conflict. In other words, Strategy.

Okay, so let's use today's Pull to try and make sense of that:

Today:

• Prince of Wands, sir, you have my attention. Something is amiss in my head, and I may find the answer if I can figure out (the aforementioned Strategy) how to 'unblock' my dream channel.

• Nine of Disks - Gain - Let's look past other interpretations of this card and go straight to its correlations to the Sephiroth. 

Yesod - Imagination and reflection, the first stop when one leaves the bottom, earthly manifestation of the tenth plane (Sephiroth) and into the higher planes. 

• VII: The Chariot - Control and Balance, but also the origin of ideas.

My overall read here is there's an idea locked inside me that I will need to access to finish something (my current project?), and I'm going to have to figure out how to get it. That probably doesn't mean I have to figure out how to get it out of my head, but how to recognize it when I 'see' it.

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Duration:

The irony is it's taking time away from writing to do these recent posts, so I'll probably reconfigure the duration portion to once a week. It'll show a better snapshot to. I'm definitely doing better, though, and the transparency posting here helps immensely. 

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New Queens of the Stone Age - Carnavoyeur

 

More new music from next month's new Queens of the Stone Age record, Times New Roman, available for pre-order HERE.

My friend Josh alerted me to this one, and I have to say, his "I hear Bowie" observation is spot-on. Not necessarily in how the song sounds (although there's that), but more in the type of experimentation the band's doing. Really cool stuff.

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NCBD:

Nothing in my pull this week, however, issue #3 of Pat O'Malley's Popscars drops, and I'll definitely be picking that up and adding the book to my Pull.

Now published by Sumerian Comics - formerly Behemoth Comics, the fine folks who published Andy Leavy and Hugo Araujo's Osaka Mime, not to mention the Turbo Kid and Spare Parts tie-in books. I met Pat back in 2022 at The Comic Bug when he was in signing issues 1 and 2 of Popscars, then completely independently published. I bought those issues, LOVED them and was supposed to have him on A Most Horrible Library, but then, well, I don't think we've done an episode since. He reached out recently and I need to get back to him and extend an invite to come on my functioning show, The Horror Vision, so he can talk about the book.

Here's the solicitation description:

"Popscars is a gritty Hollywood revenge story about a vigilante badass in a pink ski mask and the famous Hollywood movie producer she is out to kill, who also happens to be her estranged father. In Hollywood revenge is best served in front of an audience. As our pink ski masked killer pushes her way through a Hollywood crowd, prepared to take her shot at her movie producer father, she's quickly swept into a brand new revenge plot orchestrated by her own unsuspecting target."

 

I love the imagery in the book, and the seedy nature of, well, all of it. An exploitation book about exploitation flicks is, by its very nature, a fantastic story.

 

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Read:

I surprised myself by putting off my re-read of Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart is a Chainsaw after I noticed that my copy of Laird Barron's The Wind Began to Howl is due to land any day, and that technically, this book is labeled as "Isaiah Coleridge Novel #3.5." 

Interesting... and also probably a shorter read than clocking through Chainsaw and its follow-up, Don't Fear the Reaper, both of which I'm dying to read. But I've also been chomping at the bit for more Coleridge, and more Laird Barron in general, so I started re-reading Isaiah #3, 2020's Worse Angels.

I've read Coleridge books 1 and 2 twice each, or actually three times on book one, Blood Standard, but Worse Angels just the once, so this is a welcome return to a book that kinda blew me away (like they all do). Also, I'm eager to read it without reading book 2 Black Mountain, in close proximity. I love the entire series, however, Black Mountain was just something else, and because of this, I feel like it warped my only experience with Angels so far. Not this time...

 

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Playlist:

QOTSA - Era Vulgaris

High On Fire - Snakes for the Divine

Decima Victima - Los Que Faltan

The Mysterines - Begin Again (single)

Killing Joke - Fire Dances

Tangerine Dream - Sorceror OST

            

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Card:

Had an inkling to pick the Raven Tarot Deck back up and pull a single card. Here we go:

Temperance, or "Art" in Crowley and Harris's Thoth deck. Another small goad to get my ass back in gear, as my lethargy has crept through the weekend and into the middle of the damn week now. We've had a steady stream of vendors out to the house for various reasons over the last few days, and that continues today. Also, I am once again completely enraptured by Laird Barron's Worse Angels. That said, I need to develop a curriculum. One thing I was pretty taken by in Ivy Tholen's Tastes Like Candy - I mean, besides the awesome Slasher story - was main character Violet's practice routine with her violin. It reminded me of the benefit of commitment to the craft. I've been wanting to work up a schedule that includes not only writing - and of course reading has to be in there - but also guitar, as I've felt a pull back to that after nearly a decade ignoring what used to be my muse. 

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Pop Scars

 

Svarte Greiner's new record Devolving Trust was recorded in the "Once bombed-out Schneider Brewery, Berlin," and the acoustics are as much an instrument here as anything else. This is some serious atmosphere. Absolutely gorgeous in the darkest possible way, this brings me back to a headspace I lived in daily back around 2006. I found this one when comics scribe Warren Ellis mentioned it a few days ago on his Morning Computer, and within a few moments of checking it out, I was enraptured. However, this is not Wednesday-morning-at-work music, so I had to put a good solid listen on the back burner until later. 

And later it was. Loooong day Wednesday. It wasn't until about 5:00 PM that I had the chance to really dig in, and as I said, it did not disappoint. Once I was in Greiner's sonic conjuring, I couldn't listen to anything else for the next several hours. Actually, for the rest of the night.

You can pick up Devolving Trust HERE from Miasmah Recordings. 

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Watch:

A trailer for Brendan Muldowney's new film Cellar dropped a few days ago and it looks fantastic:

 

I've said it here before, but we need more Ancestral Horror, and this looks like a good start!

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Read:

I was completely blown away to walk into the Comic Bug this past Wednesday and meet Pat O'Malley, author of the new comic Pop Scars. I picked up the first two issues, and they're freakin' fantastic! A highly polished, super-bright grindhouse exploitation Hollywood Revenge flick delivered in the comic format, I love this book and can't wait for issue 3. 

This book is nuts: violent, funny, pop, and bloody. Very much the kind of book I look for when I'm scouring the shelves of a shop for something new and independent. The plan is to have Pat on an upcoming episode of A Most Horrible Library, so I'll definitely update here when that happens. In the meantime, here's a LINK to his Frightening Tales on youtube.

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Playlist:

Svarte Greiner - Devolving Trust

The Pogues - Red Roses for Me

The Pogues - If I Should Fall From Grace With God

The Pogues - Rum Sodomy and the Lash

The Tossers - The Valley of the Shadow of Death

Flogging Molly - Float

Exhalants - Atonement

Jim Williams - Possessor OST

New Radicals - Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too

Zeal & Ardor - Eponymous

Perturbator - Dangerous Days

Perturbator - I Am the Night

U2 - The Joshua Tree

U2 - War

Faith No More - Angel Dust

Ghost - Impera

Revocation - The Outer Ones

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction

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Card:

Roll with the punches - I had an incredibly unproductive writing session today. So what? I'm not going to let it keep me from trying again tomorrow.