New Music From Ghost!!!

 

More new Ghost! I'm waiting to listen to this and anything else they drop between now and April 25th, when Skeletá releases. Pre-order HERE. 

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Watch:

I had a mini Lucio Fulci marathon yesterday that included two films I'd never seen before. First up, I caught the last third or so of The Beyond on Shudder.TV. This one is an old favorite (thanks, Anthony), and it inspired the marathon.

 

Next up, The New York Ripper. I'd caught a few scenes of this here and there over the years but never watched it in its entirety. Truthfully, I had this one on in the background while I edited the latest episode of The Horror Vision, one earbud in, but with how downright mean and sleazy Ripper is, I got the gist, and it was more than enough.

 

Is it just me, or is there an exorbitant number of scenes in this flick of two men walking and talking exposition? Fulci uses that device often, but here it was cranked to eleven. 

 Finally, A Cat in the Brain. Man, this might be the grossest film by the gore master I've seen yet. 

There's a kind of lackadaisical chill to some of the gore, and it did wonders for the creep factor. This was a late-night watch, so I passed out during parts and need to go back to fill in the gaps. Probably. This is not a great flick, but I'd like to sit through it at least once, even if just to see Fulci as the lead.

 

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Read:

Now that Jeff Lemore and Garbriel H. Walta's Phantom Road is back monthly, I took the opportunity to re-read volumes one and two in one sitting, plowing right on through to last week's issue #11. 

This book is up there with Tynion's SIKTC as one of the most readable books to come out since Kirkman's The Walking Dead. Every issue flies by but packs a whole lot of Mystery and Horror in its pages. I love the character development and how it's taking place, and there are just all kinds of threads to pull on and unravel.

Another thing - this book has so much Twin Peaks influence in it! It's not overt, but it's very much decipherable if you're a fan of Lynch and Frost's epic, only we've transported the weirdness from the forests of the Pacific Northwest to the desert roads of middle America. 

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Playlist:

Bedridden - Moths Strapped To Each Other's Backs

All Them Witches - Lightning At the Door

Marilyn Manson - The Pale Emperor

Dreamkid - Daggers

Slow Crush - Aurora

Deafheaven - Lonely People With Power

Yawning Balch - Volume Two

Miles Davis - Birth of the Blue

The Thirsty Crows - Hangman's Noose

AC/DC - Highway to Hell

Preoccupations - New Material

Preocccupations - Eponymous

Baroness - Stone

Beastie Boys - Check Your Head

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Card:

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

• XI: Justice

• Knight of Cups

• Nine of Swords

What does it say that Crowley turned XI Justice in Lust? Justice is certainly something people lust after in certain situations. My notes from way back talk about primordial forces underlying existence, and while I'd definitely mark Lust as one of those, I can't say my 49 years on Earth have proven to me that Justice is comparable.

Taken here as the first step on a path that advances to the Will of Emotion and culminates with a foundation of Intellect, I'd say the point to today's Pull is to remember to temper with the underlying push/pull of emotions connected to our view of the world with a healthy dose of Intellect. Not everything is as it seems, we know this, but knowing and abiding or using that knowledge is most definitely not the same thing. 

Jehnny Beth - I'm The Man

 

I have a very push/pull with this video. Two days ago my good friend Jacob sent me a link to Jehnny Beth's debut record, To Love is to Live. You may remember her from Savages, whose 2013 debut Silence Yourself still resounds as one of my favorite records of the previous decade. Savages' follow-up Adore Life came out in 2016 and just kind of left me flat. I go back to it every now and again, but the 'a-ha' moment has never come. Still, I hold out hope that one day it might. 

So too, my first couple of attempts at listening to To Love is to Live were completely unsuccessful. I put the record away, went about my business, and came back to it later for a fresh perspective. This time, I perused the track listing before jumping in from the beginning, as I am most often wont to do, and decided to start with the fifth track on the record, "A Place Above", simply because the listing said featuring Cillian Murphy, and I was curious what that would sound like. You can actually hear that track in the video above for track six, "I'm The Man", as it serves as something of a prologue to the song. I'm happy to report, from this track on, the album opened to me in a way that very much made me appreciate Ms. Beth in a way I don't think I have before. The video above, directed by Anthony Byrne, is gorgeously shot and lit, even if the theatrics themselves that comprise the narrative of the video's run time leave me a little harumphed. 

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Watch:

If you've listened to any of the recent episodes of The Horror Vision - we've been weekly for a month or two now - you'll have heard me talk about Eibon Press's four-issue comics expansion/adaptation of Lucio Fulci's The Beyond. I loved the book, and immediately ordered the trade paperback collection The Gates of Hell, which does for Fulci's City of the Living Dead what the aforementioned comic did for The Beyond. There's a big picture here, and it excites the F*CK out of me. One of the things that converted me to such a huge fan of Fulci's Gates of Hell Trilogy is the mythos, the larger picture that can be glimpsed beneath the films. It reminds me of HP Lovecraft's mythos, and I think Eibon Press is breaking serious ground by going in and fleshing it out. 

After talking about this on our show, Eibon Press founder Sean Lewis hit me up online. There will be an interview coming up down the road, but before that, some more reviews, as he sent review copies of a lot of other Eibon books with my Gates of Hell trade. 

First up was House By the Cemetery, three issues that further my favorite Fulci film in ways that directly connect it to the other two movies in the series. Next, that Gates of Hell trade is calling my name, so first, K and I re-watched City of the Living Dead last night.

Easily the poorest of the three films in this cycle, the comic will only be able to improve the story, for which there is only the barest hint of in the film. Don't get me wrong, I still dig it, but even that clipped, nightmare logic that makes The Beyond work so well kind of fails here, as we move from scene to scene with a pretty transparent disregard for anything but the gore and atmosphere. 

Interestingly, while this is the weakest of the three Gates of Hell flicks as far as story is concerned, City contains the best FX in any of these: Bob's drill-through-the-head death scene doesn't suffer from the usual tail-end let down present in most of these movies, where you can see how the actor is replaced by a close-up of the model. Below, compare Bob's death with the infamous 'gut-spewing' scene from this same movie, where you can clearly see the actress replaced by a dummy (again, not badmouthing here, just saying).

I should add, these are some especially gross-out clips (okay, really just the second one), so press play at your own risk:

 

 

Anyway, as I said, Eibon press's Gates of Hell comic can only improve on this one, so I can't wait to dig in later today.

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Playlist:

Michael Kiwanuka - KIWANUKA

Me and That Man - Songs of Love and Death

Queens of the Stone Age - ... Like Clockwork

Curtis Harding - Face Your Fear

Venue - One Without a Second

Deafheaven - 10 Years Gone

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Card:

Twos are often an indication of balance, I can't help feeling that is a spot-on assessment of the morning so far. 

Two's also indicate cycles, shorter cycles, and I feel a few loops closing in the near future. This is good, as I seem to constantly be opening more of them.

Isolation: Day 131 New Jaye Jayle!

Another track from the forthcoming album Prisyn, out August 7th on Sargent House. Pre-order HERE.

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I've had Fulci on the mind of late. Yesterday after work I threw on The Beyond, and my love of this flick - which is still pretty new, as previously I just did not get it at all - prompted me to go to Eibon Press and finally order one of their Fulci comics, specifically the first issue of The Beyond, the signature edition that comes with the premiere of the US version of the film's soundtrack by Mitch and Ira Yuspeh.



The edited, US version of the film, re-titled 7 Doors of Death, was the only one available here until Quentin Tarantino helped Grindhouse Releasing put out The Beyond in its original form in 1996. The 7 Doors of Death version eschewed Fabio Frizzi's soundtrack for one by the Yuspehs.

The comics Eibon Press makes all look fantastic. I've been curious about their Fulci stuff for a while, but I've been unsure if the books are simply adaptations of the films or extensions of them, the latter what I'd be interested, the former not so much. Either way, the inclusion of the score on this package - even if its not vinyl - is what ended up sealing the deal for me. And worse case scenario, I have a cool comic based on the film, too!

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Playlist:

Stereolab - Mars Audiac Quintet
The Smiths - The Queen is Dead
The Smiths - Louder Than Bombs
The Smiths - Meat is Murder
La Matos - Summer of '84 OST
M.I.A. - Arular
Baroness - Gold and Grey
La Hell Gang - Thru Me Again
House of Pain - Same As It Ever Was

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Card:

I get it. I've been tempted to tinker with the finished product. I've seen this card enough lately to know I should just leave it alone and concentrate on moving on.