Faetooth - Remnants of the Vessel

Not entirely sure how I came to have Faetooth's 2022 album Remnants of the Vessel in my Apple Music, but I stumbled across it there the other day, and it provided a pretty big leap in my mood. Really cool, doomy, deathy album that doesn't sacrifice the downtrodden mood when it goes full-on death-growl heavy. The band hail from "The depths of Los Angeles" (love that) and the album was voted Spin Magazine's #1 album of the year? I'm shocked Spin has such good taste.

 

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Read:

I blew through Alan Campbell's Scar Night over the last week and started book 2 of his Deepgate Codex series on Sunday. I'd read Iron Angel sometime around 2010, so there's not too much I remember. 

Fifty pages in and it's a perfect follow-up to book one, which really fleshes out the world and adds a host of new characters who really up the stakes. We're outside Deepgate and moving into a bigger world, and I'm just as enraptured by Mr. Campbell's prose here as I was in Scar Night. This really is one of the best Fantasy series I've ever read, with just the right amount of Steam Punk influence, without trying to tick all those "Write a Steam Punk Novel" boxes that, while I admit I sometimes have a soft spot for, began to feel endlessly tiring around 2012. 

Also, I think the last time I read these, I had not yet read Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy and reading the Deepgate books now, I can very much appreciate the influence Peake's seminal series had on Campbell. That said, the influence is in no way overzealous, but rather hard-coded into the prose, which makes the experience of re-reading these ever more pleasant than before. 

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Watch:

Speaking of Steam Punk Fantasy, check out this trailer Bloody Disgusting posted about a few days ago:

 

Moon Garden looks like a film that will harken back to the Fantasy epics of my 80s youth - The Neverending Story, Legend, Etc. Totally blown away by the first half of this trailer, and then I turned it off so as not to see too much. Ryan Stevens Harris' new film can't come soon enough.

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Playlist:

Trombone Shorty - For True

Odonis Odonis - Spectrums

Wolfpack - Lycanthro Punk

Metallica - ... And Justice For All

Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments

Deftones - White Pony

Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit Vol. 1

Fvnerals - Let The Earth Be Silent

Faetooth - Remnants of the Vessel

Feuerbahn - The Fire Dance EP

Television - Marquee Moon

Brainiac - The Predator Nominate

Kaiser Chiefs - I Predict A Riot

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Card:

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

Some big ideas/influences here that all seem to shore up ideas about Emotional Conflict being the result of too much unfocused Will. Sounds about right; I'm in a really good routine working on the new book, and it has occurred to me previously that when I'm at a creative spike, I become overly sensitive. 

There Is A Light in the Bottomless Pit That Never Goes Out

In a Smiths mood this morning. Sometimes Morrissey's biting observations and poetic turns of phrase just hit the spot intellectually, to say nothing of Marr, Rourke and Joyce's music, which transports me to a very specific place in my head, more feeling than thought. That's why this group worked so well for the time it did - Morrissey anchors you while the music compels the soul to soar. 

Of course, to enjoy any of this, I've had to maintain my ignorance of what an unbelievable twat Morrissey has become over the years. 

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Watch:

Browsing the Just Added on Shudder, I followed a hunch - a hunch that all Irish Horror Films are fantastic - and clicked on Billy O'Brien's 2005 Isolation. 

I could not find a serviceable trailer, and also,  I think the less you know about this one going in, the better you are. Believe me, however, when I tell you that my hunch continues to prove correct because Isolation is fantastic. A taut little creature feature with notes of The Thing and Alien, only set on an Irish farm.

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Read:

Completely off the cuff, I began re-reading Alan Campbell's brilliant Deepgate Codex trilogy over the weekend. About a third of the way through the first book, Scar Night (2006), these have a special place in my heart, and I am ashamed to say I never finished the trilogy by reading that final book. 

Back when I first moved to LaLaLand in 2006, I was working at a Borders bookstore as an inventory supervisor. Myspace was the thing at the time, and through its messaging, author Alan Campbell - then relatively unknown, as Scar Night was his first novel coming off the success of having helped write the Grand Theft Auto game - messaged me. Seeing that I was a pretty vocal champion of China Mieville's work at the time (still am), Campbell reached out to tell me about his book, which is set in the city of Deepgate - a city that hangs from chains suspended above a bottomless pit.

No way I wasn't going to read that!

I bought the book when it came out in Hardcover, and continued to buy Campbell's books as they were released in that manner. By the time book three came out, though, I was probably in the middle of something with a completely different tone, and it wasn't the time to reread the first two and go into number three. 

And the years lapsed...

Back around 2019, I picked up and plowed through the first two books of Campbell's subsequent series, The Gravedigger Chronicles. These were immediately among my favorite Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels ever - we're still waiting on that third book though, and from time to time the thought that we may never see it (the Author, who is not active on social media, has stated that the third book in the series is finished, however, the publishing deal he had went south and the book remains, well, suspended by metaphorical chains above the abyss that was once the publishing industry). That particular sadness darkened my door this past week, and thus, I grabbed the Deepgate Codex with the intention of loving it so much again that the power of that love might somehow aetherically find Mr. Campbell and transmute into a resolution for that final book. 

And yes, Scar Night is just as good as I remember. Maybe better. And no, aetherically is not a word. Well, not until now.

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Playlist:

Lustmord - The Others

Fvunerals - Let The Earth Be Silent

Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Wasteland

Karl Casey - XX

Battle Tapes - Sweatshop Boys EP

Final Light - Eponymous

Ager Sonus - Book of the Black Earth

Allegaeon - Apoptosis

Special Interest - Endure

Motörhead - Ace of Spades

Anthrax - Attack of the Killers B's

Aerosmith - Pump

Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me

Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments

Talking Heads - Fear of Music

Iron Maiden - Fear of the Dark

Made Out of Babies - The Ruiner

The Jesus Lizard - Goat

Thou - Rhea Sylvia

David Bowie - Black Tie White Noise

Silent - Modern Hate

Melvins & Lustmord - Pigs of the Roman Empire

Metallica - Hardwired... 

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Card:

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

A reminder that balance is what supports harmony, and balance is not achieved by the narratives about others we sometimes tell ourselves repeatedly. I've 100% done just this, and it's not without a breakthrough of Will that I will be able to smooth things over.