Wednesday, November 2, 2022
Heart of Rust
Thursday, August 20, 2020
Isolation: Day 157
I love EVERY song on Hangman's Noose, The Thirsty Crows' debut album on Batcave Records (order HERE). But after living with it almost two years now, I have to say, I think this is my favorite song on the album.
Although that may change again. The whole thing is just so damn great.
**
I've been meaning to post this trailer for Netflix's upcoming The Devil All the Time. I never made it around to reading Donald Ray Pollock's 2011 novel of the same name, but it's been on my radar for a while (so I have no excuse other than the to-read list is large enough to put that island of plastic refuse in the Pacific look like it's no bigger than a bottle cap).
The movie adaptation, directed by Antonio Campos and starring, well, pretty much everybody, looks riveting and moody. The trailer oozes Southern Gothic suspense, and Robert Pattinson looks downright foreboding in his role as what appears to be a charlatan preacher. Mr. Pattinson really has turned out to be quite an actor.
**
Playlist:
The Thirsty Crows - Hangman's Noose
Santogold - Eponymous
Portico - Living Fields
The Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once
Atrium Carceri - Kapnobatai
Le Butcherettes - A Raw Youth
The Cramps - RockinnReelinInAucklandNewZealandXXX
The Cure - Pornography
Converge - The Dusk in Us
Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - Ancestral Recall (pre-release single)
Thou - Summit
**
Card:
to my original Thoth deck, where I find the Princess of Disks waiting
for me. My day may be a dragging, uphill trek through mundane, everyday
tasks.
One aspect of this card that always strikes me is the way the rock outcropping the Princess stands behind resembles both an altar - for tribute and focus - as well as a goat turning to look behind it. Also, the branches from the trees in the immediate background look not just they belong to the forest, but also to the the Princess and her altar-goat, too. This populates the card with nothing but Earth-bound textures, a key tip-off that this is one of the purest cards in the suite of Disks, from which not a lot of emotion, logic, or Will creeps through, suggesting labor. Which is exactly where I'm at in my process of re-entering the world of Kim and Jessie.
Saturday, January 4, 2020
January 4th, 2020 - New Video from The Thirsty Crows!
Fantastic! This, this is only part of the reason these guys made my "Favorite Albums of 2019" list last week. I love this with all my heart, and the time and detail spent on crafting a video for one of the best songs on an album with pretty much only best songs is appreciated and enjoyed!
**
I finally watched Adam Egypt Mortimer's latest film Daniel Isn't Real yesterday, and after viewing it once in the afternoon by myself, the moving left me feeling... vulnerable. A harrowing tale of mental illness that goes to places I absolutely did not see coming, this one rattled around in my head for hours after (still is). Later, K and I watched Enemy with Jake Gyllenhaal, a flick I loved when I saw it several years ago. The similarities between the two struck me as anything but a coincidence, and I followed Enemy up with another viewing of Daniel. I can't recommend this one - and Enemy, while I'm at it - enough. I will forever kick myself that I had to bail on it as the second half of the Spectrevision Double Feature at Beyondfest last year, where it played with Color Out of Space.
**
Oh. One day last week I re-watched Apocalypse Now for the first time in over twenty years. My suspicion is confirmed - might be the best film ever made. Hyperbolic statement? Sure, but that doesn't necessarily make it wrong.
I picked up the BR edition that has all three cuts - Theatrical, Redux, and Final. Having only ever seen the Theatrical, I listened to the director's recommendation in the introduction and chose the Final Cut, his favorite. I'd have to say, the French Plantation scenes didn't do much for me, and that makes me think the ideal version of this film for me is the Theatrical. That said, I intend on watching all versions in the coming weeks.
Playlist:
Talking Heads - Remain in Light
Boy Harsher - Careful
Boy Harsher - Lesser Man (Extended)
Plague Bringer - Life Songs in a Land of Death
Budos Band - V
Arab Strap - The Red Thread
Arab Strap - Elephant Shoe
**
Card:
Seems about right.
Saturday, December 28, 2019
My Favorite Albums of 2019
Beth Gibbons/Henry Gorecki - Symphony No. 3 - Admittedly, I'm a bit of a rube when it comes to orchestral/classical music. I know what I like, but I don't necessarily know how to find it. Imagine my surprise when I saw Beth Gibbons name attached to this one. Gibbons, along with legendary composer/conductor Krzysztof Penderecki and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra deliver a rendition of Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3 that makes my heart both swell and sing with all the force of a cinematic thunderhead. Also, fantastic writing music.
Sunn O))) - Life Metal - PERFECT writing music, but beyond that, Sunn O)))'s Life Music, produced by Analog hero Steve Albini, contains a lot of rewarding textures that only reveal themselves after in-depth and multiple - and I mean multiple - listens. Easily my favorite record Sunn O))) has put out since 2009's Monoliths and Dimensions.
Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell - A late entry, this album is as calming as it is strange. Of course, at first glance, the strange is less than apparent, buried behind the subtle, acoustic pop sensibilities on display in the making and arranging of this record. But there's some pretty strange choices here when compared to what you get at first glance, and without having much of a history with Ms. Del Rey's earlier works, this one began as a curiosity for me and quickly grew into a calming obsession.
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen - As much as I love Blut Aus Nord, I've come to terms with the fact that I don't love everything they put out. After a couple years of albums I've tried repeatedly to connect with and failed, Hallucinogen hit me from the opening chord and held me all the way through its runtime. My favorite thing they've released since 2012's 777 Cosmosophy.
The Thirsty Crow - Hangman's Noose - Yes, I am good friends with one of the members of The Thirsty Crows. Yes, I co-host two podcasts with him. Yes, I love his band. Do I love it because he's my friend? Yes, but that's not the only reason I love The Thirsty Crows. I also love them because they are A) Awesome live, and B) the only Rockabilly/Psychobilly band I have identified with since I was head over heels in love with The Reverend Horton Heat back in the mid/late 90s. That scene has broadened considerably, and while I dig a lot of it, I don't love any of it like I love the Crows. Their music is catchy AF, and dusty in a way that feels familiar and pleasing, like leaving the Joshua Tree Saloon at two in the morning hammered out of your skull and meeting people with drugs in the parking lot. "Drinking and drugging 'til six in the morning," yeah, I can't live that life anymore, but I can enjoy wicked ass thrashabilly songs about it.
Federale - No Justice - Another sun-drenched album, this one with enough cinematic flourish as to play like a Robert Altman flick from the 70s. No Justice is up there with my most listened to records this year, and it's been an absolute pleasure learning every nook and cranny of these songs.
Oh Baby - The Art of Sleeping Alone - What do you get when you have a band with a terrible name releasing an album with a fantastic name? Apparently, a hell of an album. Poppier than everything else represented here, this one scratched an itch that had lingered the last few years, a good dance/electro record with pop sensibilities and fantastic arranging, eschewing bubble gum for a kind of Neon Noir Dance Floor feeling.
Spotlights - Love and Decay - Beautiful beyond words from start to finish. Epic, haunted, brash, and polished, I absolutely love this album.
Boy Harsher - Careful - Dark LaLaLand electro that feels like old Revolting Cocks did the music for an alternate version of David Lynch's Lost Highway.
A dream, a lover's return, a haunted highway at night. Orbison, Lynch, Williams. Desert, tavern, danger. Pony is a place that I have always wanted to go to and now cannot stay away from for very long.
Monday, May 6, 2019
2019: May 6th The Thirsty Crows - Anchors Up
I have not talked enough about The Thirsty Crows new album in these pages. Hangman's Noose, available from Batcave Records, is easily going to slip into my top five albums of the year. Over the last week or so, it has become one of those records I put on and end up listening to three or four times in a row; at fourteen songs/thirty-nine minutes, it's a perfect amount and yet not quite enough, so that by the time I reach the cover of Dramarama's Anything, Anything that finishes out the album, I'm ready for another full go-through. There's something epic about the way these guys approach Rockabilly; there's some great moments where the band members' love of metal comes through, and it blends perfectly with the 'billy aesthetic, so we get something both classic and refreshing. The mark of a great record, to be sure.
**
I recently interrupted my read of Alan Campbell's The Art of Hunting to act as an HWA colleague's first reader on his debut novel from Cemetery Dance. I'll post more about that once the release is officially announced, but in the meantime, since finishing that book, I jumped back into the second installment of Alan Campbell's Ghostdigger Chronicles, and just like that, I've fallen in head over heels again.
I can't recommend these books enough; people who know my tastes in fantasy fiction know I have little tolerance for 'High Fantasy.' But Campbell's Gravedigger books take one of the major tropes of High Fantasy, the inclusion of Dragons, and ports it into a truly fascinating world. A world where an ancient, almost extinct and now imprisoned race of cosmic sorcerers long ago tainted the Oceans with a baffling poisonous agent known only as Brine, making it toxic to most life. Humans who are exposed to Brine stiffen and crack like stone; full submersion - 'the drowned' - stay alive indefinitely, but change in strange and horrifying ways. And the sea life mutate horribly as well, only coming to the surface fleetingly, so that all the new forms are not necessarily known or understood, enormous boogey men of the depths. Oh, and the dragons, those are humans the Entropic Sorcerers long ago twisted into these massive new forms. And they're all insane, as you would be after going through such a thing.
I'm really not giving you much about the books, but it would be very hard for me to do these novels justice in only a few short words. All I can say is The Art of Hunting is turning out to be thrilling, and insanely more imaginative than the first volume, Sea of Ghosts. I know a lot of other folks out there that have similar tastes to my own - and those who do like High Fantasy - would probably all love these books.
There's an Amazon Link to buy these HERE. However, they're out of print and pretty expensive, so if you need an easier option, try HERE.
**
Playlist from 5/05:
The Thirsty Crows - Hangman's Noose
White Zombie - Astro Creep 2000
James Brown - Black Cesar OST
**
Card of the day:
Moving forward. Which I am, by leaving two stories somewhat hanging and going full hilt on Ciazarn. So that feels good, to get validation from the cards.
Sunday, January 6, 2019
2019: January 6th
First available track from The Thirsty Crows' new album Hangman's Noose. My buddy Chris Saunders from The Horror Vision and Drinking with Comics is the Upright Bass player, and set me up with an advance copy of the album. It's fantastic. Read my review HERE on Joup, and pre-order what sounds to me like the first great album of 2019 from Batcave Records HERE.
Playlist from 1/05:
The Thirsty Crows - Hangman's Noose
Iggy Pop - The Idiot
The Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro
Tamaryn - The Waves
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Damn the Torpedoes
Nick Lowe - Jesus of Cool
Henry Mancini - Charade OST
Steely Dan - Aja
Billy Joel - The Stranger
James Brown Presents - Funky People Part 2
Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen
Card of the day:
Honing emotion with earthly concerns. To me, the cards still seem to be talking about saving money. Of course, if you've been reading these pages long enough, you'll notice I use my interpretations to support whatever is the issue of the moment, i.e. the way every pull for most of last year pertained to finishing the book. The book's now almost done (will today be the day? There'll still be editing, but to type the words "The End"...), and money is on my mind now, because in order to actually save it I will have to be 'full hilt,' so to speak. Frivolous spending is an emotional thing for me; the things I buy are movies, comics, books, records. Not buying them is not easy, but I apply my Earthly ideals and remember that while short term spending feels great, long term will be a longer lasting kind of joy.
Monday, May 7, 2018
2018: May 7th 7:41 AM
Now that my friend Chris's band The Thirsty Crows are on Bat Cave Records, he's been turning me on to all kinds of awesome music. Chief among this new influx of bands in my life is Neon Kross, the 80s-flavored second band of the singer for Rezurex. Darkness Falls is the first album I've sunk my teeth into from Neon Kross, and its fantastic start to finish. Wreckage particularly caught my ear with its homage to Flock of Seagulls' in the guitar parts.
Playlist from 5/06:
Alice in Chains - Facelift
Alkaline Trio - Crimson
Deafheaven - New Bermuda
2 new Ghost Songs via Metal Sucks (Faith and Dance Macbre)
Neon Kross - Darkness Falls
Card of the day:
The Emotional aspect of Will, read: temper your ambitions with emotional maturity and care.
Monday, January 4, 2016
Drinking w/ Comics #30 on Monday, January 18th...
...at 7:30 PM, streaming Live from Manhattan Beach's The Comic Bug, the best damn comic shop in So Cal! Our guests will be several of the cast of the Bug's recent live table read of Joss Whedon's Wonder Woman script. D w/C is excited to welcome Jennifer Wenger - to you that's Wonder Woman! - Curtis Fortier - aka Steve Trevor - and sound designer extraordinaire Chris Saunders (also upright bass player for the inimitable Thirsty Crows and the man who designed this beee-ooo-tiful flyer!)
If you haven't watched/heard the read you can watch it on youtube here or on iTunes. Steaming of Dw/C issue #30 will be available on the Dw/C youtube channel here, or like us on Facebook and watch for the live link to magically appear around 7:30 PM on Monday, January 18th.
Huzzah!