If you need a reason to love Thou beyond the music, this is it. Order the new album UmbilicalHERE. I think Byran Funck's vocals are the closest I've ever heard to recreating that infamous "Stroke Me" effect Mike Patton used in old-school Mr. Bungle. And regardless of how much sludge this band piles on, I still hear the Staley-era Alice in Chains. Fucking love it.
Watch:
Joe Bob and Darcy did my favorite movie of all time last night. Here are those Drive-in totals:
Loved this episode.
Playlist:
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta III: Saturnian Poetry
Dean Hurley - Tales From the Library of the Occult: Flower
Faith No More - Angel Dust
Warning - Why Can Bodies Fly (single)
Calderum - Mystical Fortress of Iberian Lands
INXS - Kick
Thou - Umbilical
Card:
One card from Missi's Raven Deck to send me on my way to Chicago to see The Ravenonettes on Monday:
After loving the first season, I never really got around the second or third of Doom Patrol. K and I did have a false start where we watched a handful of episodes, but honestly, I barely remember anything about it. So I started up from the beginning of Season 2 this week, and I'm once again in love with this fantastically mad adaptation/distillation of (mostly) Grant Morrison's six-volume run on the C-Building X-Men.
Read:
After savoring it for over ten years, I finally finished Ramsey Campbell's definitive collection Alone With the Horrors.
This collection was curated by the author himself, so it represents the stories from his early career that he feels are his finest. It's dense, perhaps because a lot of the oldest stories in here, hailing from as far back as the early 60s when Campbell first began to write, read verbose in a way that often feels unnecessary. That said, all the imagery and all the concepts here are fantastic. As the collection goes on, however, you begin to discover some absolute short fiction gems among these pages. Of particular note for me were
Man in the underpass
The Depths
Down There
The Hands
Again
Seeing the World
The Other Side
Boiled Alive
End of the Line
That last one is nothing like it sounds like it would be. Campbell actually wrote the forward to this edition and talks briefly about how Boiled Alive is his attempt at Science Fiction. All of these are extremely British and characterized by solitude, rain, and a general social malignancy that fits with the Britain I've gotten to know through the New Wave British Comic writers of the late 70s-mid 80s. Likewise, the final story in this volume, End of the Line, feels about as close as a writer ever got to demonstrating literal madness in prose. A freaky and fantastic journey into a mind seriously deluded by knowing nothing of the world except the religion foisted upon him by a father that never let him leave the house and taught him everything in the world outside the window is evil. Now imagine that person having to go outside for the first time by themselves.
One week until the new Deftones Ohms drops! This video premiered last night - I'm putting it here for posterity's sake, and to pass along my excitement at having a new Deftones record on the immediate horizon, however, I won't be watching or listening to the track until I have sat and absorbed the full album. I'm planning on doing a full release event next week, which sounds bigger than it will be. Just me, a bowl of green, and the new record for at least one full spin, my attention undivided. Can't wait!
Watch:
I can hardly believe it's already time for me to re-subscribe to Disney+ for the new season of The Mandalorian. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.
Playlist:
Cibo Matto - Stereotype A
Cibo Matto - Viva! La Woman
Angel Olsen - All Mirrors
Zola Jesus - The Spoils
Zola Jesus - Stridulum
Ghost - Meliora
Ghost - Prequelle
Repugnant - Epitome of Darkness
Mastodon - Medium Rarities
Mastodon - Leviathan
X - Under the Big Black Sun
Firewater - The Ponzi Scheme
Angelo Badalamenti/Various - Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series OST
Card:
Self-control and balance, two things I'm sorely lacking at the moment. Things keep coming apart, and my attention span has been f*&ked! I'm going to try and remedy that this weekend. There's so much not getting done!
Not sure anything could have made me happier than finding out that Mike Doughty has a new project named Ghost of Vroom. Doughty's solo career is great, but I've kind of always had trouble getting past the dissolution of Soul Coughing, a band I would count as one of the most influential bands of my young adult era. Being that Ghost of Vroom feels more like it's in that particular wheelhouse, I bonded with Rona Pollona pretty much immediately. Also, what a great concept for a music video!
The EP, Ghost of Vroom 2, drops on mod y vi records this month, and was produced by Mario Caldato, Jr., better known as former Beastie Boys DJ/Producer Mario C.!
Finally got to watch Frank Sabatella's The Shed. I really dug this one. It seemed like a love letter to Fright Night, without directly taking anything from it. Can't wait to see what Mr. Sabatella does next!
I just posted the trailer for this one a few days back, so instead, here's an awesome poster! The Shed is steaming on Shudder right now, go check it out!
Have to say, recently, there's been more than a few stories - movies, comics, books - that have made serious inroads in updating the zombie mythos, which is exactly what The Shed does for vampires, simply by going full-in on the classic Vamp lore. Nothing new here, except a new approach to handling the old bloodsucker tropes. Maybe others will follow suit?
Playlist:
Anioma - Necropolis
Faith No More - Angel Dust
The Clash - Combat Rock
Ghost of Vroom - Rona Pollona (pre-release single)
It's official! October 30th, Mr. Bungle's The Raging Wraith of the Easter Bunny is out via Patton's Ipecac Recordings. Thanks to Mr. Brown for the heads up, because I've been slammed all week and would have completely missed the chance to snag a copy of that Ruby Red 2 LP vinyl! Pre-order HERE.
While I've been a Bungle fan since Brown turned me on to their self-titled debut back in High School, and I spent a good deal of my time on Napster in the late 90s downloading bootlegs of their older, demo stuff, I never really got into the original, thrash version of the band. That said, seeing these songs a few months ago, played by musicians who are older and wiser, I became convinced if they recorded it, Easter Bunny had the potential to be one of the greatest thrash records to come out in decades. If Raping Your Mind is any intimation of what is on the rest of the record, I'm pretty sure I was correct.
Sure, I'd love another weirdo Bungle album eventually, but in the meantime, I'm welcoming this one with open arms.
**
NCBD this week was another no-go for my pull, which is fine, because I haven't picked up my books in two weeks now. One of the companies I always look forward to checking is Vault, and this week, I notice a collection for a series I'd not noticed previously. This looks pretty damn interesting, and I've ear-marked it for a little research.
This collection just came out, however, I'm going to look for the individual issues first, as I love the art and design of the originals' covers. Here's an example:
There's such a throw-back feel to this, but not like a comic, more like the old paperback books I used to read as a kid. LOVE this.
**
Playlist:
Concrete Blonde - Eponymous
Concrete Blonde - Free
X - Wild Gift
X - Los Angeles
Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once
Contours - Essential
Carpenter Brut - Blood Machines OST
X - Under the Big Black Sun
The Birthday Party - Hee Haw
Tom Waits - Rain Dogs
Hank III - Straight to Hell
Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey
Francesco Zampaglione and Andrea Moscianese - Tulpa OST
Brainiac - Smack Bunny Baby
Vitalic - OK Cowboy
Aerosmith - Pump
Airiel - Molten Young Lovers
Moderat - II
Reverend Horton Heat - Liquor in the Front
Brainiac - Hissing Prigs in Static Couture
Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen
The Bangles - All Over the Place
**
Card:
Let's do another multi-deck spread:
For this one, I used one card from the Raven Deck, and two from my mini Thoth - both decks gifts to me from my good friend Missi, who now has my new book Murder Virus - that's the name I'm sticking with - as my first beta reader. Missi Birthday was yesterday, so there's a lot of her energy in this spread. The Tower is a toppling of old conventions, though here I don't take it as pointing to the 'Old Guard' publishing industry, but my perceptions of it. Work is the hard work and determination I need to maintain (another query sent a few days ago), and Lust is a warning about the lust of result. Those of you who know anything about Magick know lust of result is one of the major blockades to achieving one's Will.
Mr. Brown sent me this last night, and after watching it, both K and I are immediate fans. I can't wait to dig into The Hu's catalogue, which you can peruse and purchase from HERE.
**
A new trailer dropped for Season Two of The Boys.
The trailer is a bit overdone, but I'm still excited to see where this goes.
**
NCBD:
Not a lot this week. I did notice this coming from Vault, and I'm curious. Back in the early/mid 90s, I wasn't a RPG'r, but I loved Vampires. I know the entire genre is cliched now, and maybe it was back then, too. I didn't know that. I discovered Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire when I was a senior in High School, and I LOVED it. This was shortly before the movie - which I'm not a huge fan of - and reading that first novel in Rice's Vampire Chronicles coinciding with my purchasing Type O Negative's Bloody Kisses (the digipak version, of course). I'd smoke out and lay around devouring the novel, while listening to Peter Steele's voice sing of Blood and Fire, and Suspended in Dusk, and Steele's voice became Louie's voice. I haven't gone back to those novels in since I read them; I'm not even sure I'd like them now. Back then though, Rice's fiction had me ravenous for more Blood Lore, and in this way I discovered White Wolf Publishing's Vampire: The Masquerade. My Chicago comic shop Amazing Fantasy carried a lot of books as well (thank you Garrett!), and I believe that is where I bought my first Masquerade novel. I wouldn't even be able to tell you which oneit was, it left a bit of an impression on me. Enough that I'm curious to see a comic series reviving the line.
A few years back, when my friend Missi turned me on to Poppy Z. Brite's fiction from the 90s, it kind of scratched a long-standing itch for this kind of Goth-Pageantry fiction, and it's probably the hangover from reading her Lost Souls last year that has me tempted to pick this up.
**
Playlist:
Young Widows - Settle Down City
Protomartyr - Under Color of Official Right
Rezz - The Silence is Deafening EP
The Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro
Urge Overkill - Saturation
Metallica - Master of Puppets
**
Card:
Keep going despite fatigue. The wheel turns, so says Ka.
Vólan is a band from Moscow I'd never heard of until this morning when this live session from Audio Tree popped up on my youtube feed. Pretty awesome! You can hit their Bandcamp HERE for more music and merch!
**
I'm a pretty big fan of Robert S. Wilson's Nightscape Press, and as such I backed their recent Kickstarter HERE. I'd actually meant to post about this earlier, but there's still twelve days left, and even fully funded, this is absolutely worth contributing to. Nightscape is a fantastic and fully independent publisher, and my hope is they will be around for many years to come.
Previously, I've mentioned Nightscape's brilliant Ashes and Entropy anthology - easily one of the best books I read last year. I also recently picked up Dark and Distant Voices, Nightscape's short story collection by Tim Waggoner. I'm only one story in - ALL my pleasure reading is on hold as I work on final edits of two different versions of my forthcoming novel (I'll explain that at some other point). The point is, Mr. Wilson runs a top shelf company who deserve our support.
**
Playlist:
The Thirsty Crows - Hangman's Noose
Aerosmith - Pump
Motörhead - 1916
Nirvana - Nevermind
Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey
The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure
Urge Overkill - Saturation
**
The beginning of this song is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've heard on piano. I fell down a bit of a Don Shirley rabbit hole yesterday, and in doing so, came across again some articles that posit 2018's Green Book was a racist film. THIS is the problem with the left; everything is a problem. Every man's a rapist. Every white person is racist. Four years of captain goatfucker in office and everyone loses their fucking minds. The way forward is not to one extreme or the other. It's COMMON SENSE. Until the day this prevails (not holding my breath), I'll use music like this to remind me how beautiful the world is by listening to music like this. Thank you, Don Shirley.
**
The Final episode of HBO's I'll Be Gone in the Dark aired last night. Slightly anticlimactic, but of course that's the bane of most True Crime.
Next up, we're finishing the last half of the final season of Breaking Bad. halfway through, I realize there's a reason I've put off revisiting this show. The emotion destruction that accompanies Season 5 Part 2 is unlike anything else I've seen in serialized television. I love this show for the craft, the concise nature of the storytelling, but it really beats me up.
After that? I think we're going to do one both K and Mr. Brown have recommended to me - Halt and Catch Fire.
I've been looking forward to this for some time, so even though there's a boatload of shows to dig into, this one is next.
**
Playlist:
Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey
Led Zeppelin - Coda
La Hell Gang - Thru Me Again
Roly Porter - Kistvaen
The Jesus Lizard - Head
Jeffery Alan Jones - Most Beautiful Island OST
François-Eudes Chanfrault - Computer Assisted Sunset
Ghost - Opus Eponymous
Ghosts of Glaciers - The Greatest Burden
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
Underworld - Beaucoup Fish
Don Shirley - Don Shirley's Best
Don Shirley - Total Expressions
**
Card:
Time to pay closer attention to the rules for a bit, especially those I place upon myself. Things may have gotten a bit loosey Goosey of late, with Quarantine-Fatigue, or possibly from the contemplation of actually making it through the tunnel and out into the light again.
A couple years ago, I caught Sumac live opening for Converge. Fantastic band. I kind of forgot about them after that, but with this lead track off their forthcoming album out October 2nd on Thrill Jockey - Pre-order HERE - I'm all in.
**
NCBD:
Finally! We haven't been waiting for this new Brubaker/Phillips graphic novel for very long, but it's felt like a millennium! These guys are aces, and if you subscribe to Brubaker's email newsletter, you will have seen his announcement that they are releasing three original graphic novels over the next year as part of a new series. He hasn't released all the details yet, but he did include a few pages of the finished product, and it looks fantastic. Of course.
I'm a bit on the fence with this one, but I'm absolutely down to give Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips' That Texas Blood the benefit of a few issues to lock into place.
I LOVE this cover! So old school, black and white TMNT. This book just gets better and better, breaking new ground with world building no longer beholden to the old iterations.
**
Playlist:
Mitch and Ira Yuspeh - Seven Doors of Death OST
Godflesh - Streetcleaner
Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey
JK Flesh - Depersonalization
Baroness - Gold and Grey
Blueneck - Repetitions
Primus - Frizzle Fry
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
Black Sabbath - Sabotage
**
Card:
I was super excited to draw a card this morning from my new deck, one my good friend Missi colored for me. The deck is just the Major Arcana, but that's super cool. I know a few people who only draw with the Majors, and I've kind of always wanted a deck to do that with. Broadstroke answers can be insanely helpful.
Of course I shuffled the hell out of the deck - I could feel the energy Missi put into these things - and what card flips out on its own and lands face up in front of me? The Fool, of course, because I'm beginning a new journey with a new deck. Not replacing my beloved Thoth, but adding to it, in a way.
I've never been one to have multiple decks, but this is special and I love it. Look at how gorgeous this card is! I'm christening this deck the Raven Deck, after Missi.
