New Music from Cold Cave!

 

Cold Cave is pretty hit-or-miss with me. I adore 2011's Cherish the Light Years but haven't really clicked as hard with any of the other albums by the band that I've listened to. This new track makes me feel like the still unannounced record on the horizon could go either way. It just feels like the energy barely contained in the nine tracks on Light Years is perpetually contained inside that album. Nothing else I've heard from the band lives up to that. Still, this is a great new song, especially that coda!

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Watch:

Joko Anwar's Nightmares and Daydreams has landed on, of all places, Netflix. Time to dig in:

I really took a shine to Indonesian Horror back circa 2020 during the Pandemic. Long days spent after short shifts, laying on the couch falling deep down Shudder rabbit holes. The Indonesian one still resounds with an impressive eeriness, and Anwar's Impetigore and Satan's Slaves made an impact. I kind of dug The Forbidden Door when I finally caught it last year, but the ending disappointed me a bit. Still, compelling, and I was curious to see what Anwar would do with a shorter format.

Unfortunately, the first episode, Old House, starts very strong and, by the end, devolves into some pretty awful CGI that just tanked it for me. I still intend on watching more, but I'm pretty bummed by this opening. This is the same deal Netflix gave GDT for Cabinet of Curiosities, seven episodes that are really stand-alone, hour-long movies, so this first one is not necessarily a gage for what's coming. I just expected more.

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Read:

I finished Stephen Graham Jones' The Angel of Indian Lake last week. Man, what a fantastic ending to Jade's story. I will say that there's a sequence in here that felt a little... wrong, but nothing that would prevent me from giving this series a high recommendation. After Indian Lake? I headed straight into FantasticLand:

This one has been hyped quite a bit to me, but always by people whose taste I 100% trust. Which meant when it didn't quite click at first, I was a bit sad. After the opening set-up shifted into the actual interviews of survivors, however, I was hooked. About halfway through in two days, I'm finding it difficult to put this one down, and I really love how the story develops.

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Playlist:

Alice in Chains - Dirt

Alice in Chains - Eponymous

Alice in Chains - Live

Dillinger Escape Plan - Calculating Infinity

Mastodon - Once More Round the Sun

The Raveonettes - Lust Lust Lust

The Raveonettes - Raven in the Grave

Peeping Tom - Eponymous

Godflesh - Purge

Mars Red Sky - Eponymous

Tina Turner - What's Love Got To Do With It?

The Ravenonettes - Sing

Shellac - To All Trains

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Card:

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

• Five of Cups

• Four of Swords

• XX: Judgement

Emotional struggles that ultimately lead to a new stability, just remember - everything in its right place.

That's an off-the-cuff read with a little help from the Grimoire. I think it's referencing the ongoing mental issues I have concerning K's mother living with us. There's an unbelievably volatile amount of cognitive dissonance that I live with in my brain every day, and there are times when it feels as though it will drive me mad. Maybe things are getting better, though.

Watain - Reaping Death Live in Stolkholm, 2022

It only recently came to my attention over the weekend that Watain released a killer Live album last year, Die in Fire: Live in Hell Stockholm 2022. Here's Reaping Death, one of the stand-out tracks on a really great live album. Reminds me a bit of Slayer's Decade of Aggression.

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Watch:

Recently, I subscribed to a streaming channel on Prime called ScreenPix. This is a $2.99, bottom-of-the-barrel kind of streamer, however, there were a handful of flix that drew me in, and at $2.99, well, no real damage. Here's what I've watched on there so far:

 

This was the flick that brought me in. Missi and I recently interviewed Horror Author Extraordinaire Ivy Tholen on The Horror Vision, and as part of that episode, we asked her to pick one movie to talk about. Ivy picked Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers.

Next, I can remember I, Madman on the video shelf going way back (I often confuse it with Dr. Giggles - another flick I still need to see - for some reason. What I didn't know about I, Madman is it was directed by Tibor Takács, Director of The Gate. 

 

Finally, last night, I fired up Klaus Kinski as a peepin' Tom Nazi holdover in David Schmoeller's 1986 what-the-fuck-a-thon, Crawlspace.

Not nearly as 'great' as I wanted it to be, Crawlspace is still very much worth a watch just for Kinski.

 

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Read:

I am absolutely blazing through Stephen Graham Jones' The Angel of Indian Lake. ~250 pages in, this book is a clusterfuck Horror movie in prose; there's SO much going on, an enormous body count, and we still don't really know who or what is behind it all.

I've seen some blurbs with people calling this ' a consuming mess,' but I don't think it's that at all. There's a difference between someone who can juggle a lot of different objects at once and make it look easy and someone who can just barely keep them all in the air. This feels effortless in its complexity. I'm taking notes, believe you me.

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Playlist:

Shellac - To All Trains

The Raveonettes - Sing

The Raveonettes - Raven in the Grave

Sleep - Dopesmoker

Rodney Crowell - Tarpaper Sky

Frank Sinatra - Songs for Young Lovers

Blut Aus Nord - 777: Cosmosophy

Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Age

Blut Aus Nord - The Mythical Beast of Rebellion

The Used - Eponymous

Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta III: Saturnian Poetry

Watain - Die in Fire: Live in Hell (Stockholm 2022)

Burzum - Aske

Burzum - Filosofem

Sinéad O'Connor - The Lion and the Cobra

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Card:

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

• Eight of Swords 

• Ten of Wands

• XI - Justice

Transformation, Endings and Just deserts. I'm thinking this is a nod toward Black Gloves & Broken Hearts, which I've just come back around on to finish. 

The Besnard Lakes - She's an Icicle

 

Somehow, I totally missed that The Besnard Lakes released a three-song EP last year. The Besnard Lakes Are the Prayers For the Death of Fame EP is one of my favorite missives from the band in some time, and of its three perfect tracks, opener She's an Icicle is, to me, everything I love so much about the band: the swirling morass of guitars fx and keys, Bonham-esque beats and Jace's heavenly voice surrounded by layer upon layer of harmony, all combining to make a dirgey rock and roll ephemera. You can order this directly from the band HERE.

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NCBD:

Short and sweet this week. Here we go:

I love the fact that we still haven't seen all of the fallout from the events of this year's Hellfire Gala. Man! I'm still blown away by that issue. So much changed so fast. Based on this cover, I think we're going to start really feeling things with this issue.

I wasn't going to read this issue the same way I keep saying I'm dropping Ghost Rider's main monthly book, but they keep pulling me back in. The idea that there's a new Weapon X/Weapon Plus program coming, but one that utilizes the stolen powers of Hell just blows my mind. HIGHEST of concepts; let's hope they pull it off. 

 

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Brew:

I stumbled across this on Kickstarter recently (Thanks to an email from Unplugged, the beer tracking app), and I'm pretty tempted to get in on this one:

It's a lot of money, but seems like it would definitely pay for itself at some point. Or, it would just make me drink more. Hmm...

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Read:

I finished Stephen Graham Jones's Don't Fear the Reaper yesterday and am happy to report I was blown right the fuck away. Talk about one-upping the original. I'm not saying Reaper is better than Chainsaw, but to be as good, with even more stakes, well, damn. Just damn. Now we just have to wait until March 26, 2024, for the final installment, The Angel of Indian Lake. 

Now, of course, I need something new to read and I just don't know what can follow SGJ. I've had Grady Hendrix's We Sold Our Souls in my Kindle forever, but my friend Jesus sent me a physical copy a few months ago and it's on my nightstand, so I guess that's the winner by default. 

This one comes highly recommended by a lot of people; however, for whatever reason, I've been reluctant. I LOVED Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism back when I read it circa 2017, so much so that I actually bought something like half a dozen copies and sent them to a bunch of friends for their birthdays at the time. That experience left me feeling like I would read anything Hendrix wrote, then a funny thing happened. I watched Satanic Panic, which Hendrix wrote the screenplay for, and hated it so much that it turned me off instantly. If questioned, I no longer even remember what it was I disliked about that flick, and a good friend recently said he saw it and loved it, so I'm thinking if We Sold Our Souls goes over well, I may give that another go, too.

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Playlist:

Jeff Buckley - Grace

Alice Donut - Dry Humping the Cash Cow Live at CBGB

Metallica - 72 Seasons

Faetooth - Remnants of the Vessel

The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes Are the Prayers For the Death of Fame EP

††† - Invisible Hand (pre-release single)

††† - PERMANENT.RADIANT EP

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Card:

• Ace of Disks

• III The Empress

• Queen of Cups

Ace of Disks always reads as a monetary or 'Earthly' breakthrough, and combined with The Empressthe implied Motherly qualities of The Empress and the Emotional fortitude of the Queen of Cups, I'd say this is directly referring to my folks coming down here this weekend to house hunt. 

 

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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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