Big Sleep news. Matt Pike is out, replaced by Bubba Dupree of Void. Also, Dale Crover from Melvins on drums? This new track is interesting, but there's a lethargy here that feels a bit ominous. I'll have to wait for the full album. In the meantime, this is being released as a flexi disc along with a Sleep comic book, put out by Third Man Records. You can pre-order the comic HERE. The link to the bundle that includes the music comes up 404, so it's probably sold out.
Watch:
From Writer Robert Bolesto and Director Agnieszka Smoczyńska, the team that gave us the delightfully messed up film The Lure (which The Horror Vision and Projexploitation crossed over to cover in great depth HERE):
I can only hope this hits theatres by me, even if it means driving to The Nuart in Nashville. I love that this feels a bit like The Lure, but also strikes me as having similar DNA to Ryan Kruger's Street Trash! There's so much energy on screen, and again, we have someone at work making a trailer who knows how to show us enough to whip us into a frenzy of expectation, but give nothing away.
Read:
I finished the third book in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, The Wastelands. Still one of my favorites of the series, but it took me longer to read than I anticipated. Next up: Wizard and Glass, the last of the books in the series that I've previously read more than once.
Once we get past this one, it's all first-time re-reads and not since Wolves of Calla, Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower each released. This endeavor has been a long time coming, and I've still got a pretty good head of steam.
Playlist:
Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest
Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports
John Carpenter - Lost Themes IV: Noir
Perturbator - The Uncanny Valley
Tomahawk - Oddfellows
Melvins/Helms Alee
The Atlas Moth - Coma Noir
Boards of Canada - Inferno
Perturbator - Age of Aquarius
Final Light - Eponymous
Greg Puciato - Mirrorcell
Lard - The Last Temptation of Reid
All Them Witches - House of Mirrors
Converge - Hum of Hurt
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
* Seven of Wands
• Page of Cups
* Eight of Wands
Positive results are the result of good communication. That said, it can be difficult to say what needs to be said to achieve those positive results.
As is often the case, I'm not picking up what the cards are putting down at the moment, so this one will sit on my desk until morning, just as a reminder.
Well, thought I forgot about the whole "Seven Days of The Reverend Horton Heat," eh? That's because I 100% DID forget.
The one that started it all for me. True, Mr. Brown and I had seen the Rev years before opening for White Zombie on the Astrocreep tour (along with Melvins!), but it wasn't until 88.3 WXAV St. Xavier University played "It's Martini Time" that I fell in love with the Rev's guitar sound and overall aesthetic and bought an album.
I still think this track's guitar is among my favorites ever.
NCBD:
Great list today.
Continuing on as my favorite of the Energon Universe books, this cover to Transformers 33 sends shivers of great joy through my body. I still can't get over all the massive changes Kirkman has added to the book - Optimus giving over Prime leadership to Elita One, Thundercracker ditching the 'cons and becoming a 'bot, and hey, let's not forget, what the hell is going on with Megatron? Hopefully, we'll see this issue.
The finale of this fantastic adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's The Thing on the Doorstep. This story has gotten maybe more traction than any other HPL story in a while, so it's been interesting to see the different takes. Pretty sure Birks/Roberts is my favorite (though I can't help my forlorn wonder at what Richard Stanley's would have been like).
I have zero idea what is going on with this family reunion from the afterlife storyline in TMNT. I mean, I'm following the story just fine; I'm just not sure what this means for the series going forward. I guess one thing to keep in mind is, I don't think this was ever done before. For now, I'll hold my reservations close to my chest and trust in the creative team, as we're almost 170 issues into the relaunch continuity that began back in 2012, and the book has been fantastic for most of that run.
Once again, totally forgot this book was even out there. Going to need a full re-read before getting into this, and I'm wondering if I should just wait until this second chapter runs its course.
Will this actually come out today? This final chapter of Rafael Grampá's Gargoyle of Gotham has been pushed back so many times, I lost count. Still, these are unbelievably gorgeous books that must take a lot of Grampá's heart and soul to produce, so I'm not complaining.
The Energon Universe tightens its stranglehold on my wallet with another book! I never had any of the toys as a kid, but I was always intrigued then and am still now. I've loved the introduction of these characters in the other books, so this feels like a natural evolution.
Looking forward to more of this weird Snake Eyes conundrum. I love that they went all the way back to the first two years of ARAH to show us something Dr. Venom did that we never saw until now. That kind of callback really shows that Hama continues to function at the top of his game, even after 329 issues.
The first issue was solid, and I'm curious what this title will mean for the evolution of SIKTC.
Read:
I'm still working through Stephen King's third novel in The Dark Tower series, The Wastelands. This is my favorite book, so it's a bit amazing to me how long it's taking me to read. I sailed through up to the Doorkeeper in the house on Dutch Hill, where he crosses over into Roland's world. Amazing scene that sort of serves as an act break. After, it's been a bit slower going. Part of that is various other things grasping at my attention - lots of comics to read for DwC, etc. Part of it is also something I only just realized this morning, as I blew through the chapter where Gasher absconds with Jake, leading him into the detritus tunnels of east Lud. This entire post-Jake's section is where the evidence of Roland's world having moved on grows to include people.
Sure, in book one, The Gunslinger, we had the town of Tull, but this is early on in the saga, and Tull feels like a town in a Western, which is what that first book purports to be for it's early chapters, only slowly peeling back the curtain and revealing Roland's world is actually very similar to our own, only a thousand or so years down a timeline where we destroy ourselves with, what I've always assumed, was warfare.
"The ancient, rusty hulks of what had once surely been automobiles stood at intervals along both curbs... There were no tires on any of these eerie hulks; they either had been stolen or had rotted away to dust long since. And all the glass had been broken, as if the remaining denizens of this city abhorred anything which might show them their own reflections... beneath and between the abandoned cars, the gutters were filled with drifts of unidentifiable metal junk and bright glints of glass. Trees had been planted at intervals along the sidewalks in some long-gone, happier time, but they were now so emphatically dead that they looked like stark metal sculptures against the cloudy sky. Some of the warehouses had either been bombed or had collapsed on their own, and beyond the jumbled heaps of bricks..."
The passage above switched on a fairly bright lightbulb when I read it yesterday morning. This is our world. We're not quite there yet, but the fact that, over the intervening roughly two decades since I last read The Wastelands, our world has become an eerily identifiable 're-echo' of Roland's. The key 'tell' here is the fact that the deeper Gasher, Jake, Roland and Oy descend into East Lud and the Tick Tock Man's domain, the more we get a sense that the people who inhabit this land enjoy living amongst the ruins of the old world. That's the thing I always get hung up on when contemplating, "could we actually take things too far?" in our own world, the operative idea being that, at a certain point, all of our in-fighting and disassembling of the mores, conventions and general social reform is going to leave our world covered in detritus and despair and that no one wants that. Only, maybe some people do want that. Maybe some people, to quote Michael Caine's Alfred in Christopher Nolan's film The Dark Knight, "want to see the world burn." We know those people have always existed; however, maybe they're not fringe, ineffectual nothings who can only damage small portions of our society. Maybe they are the people in charge. The same way late-stage Capitalism has seen the advent of destruction economics, maybe there's a big-picture advantage for those in power in destroying everything we've built.
"He thought he was at last beginning to fully understand what that innocuous phrase - the world has moved on - really meant. What a breadth of ignorance and evil it covered."
Jesus Christ. No wonder King hates trump so much - literally the Ticktock man of our world, and he predicted him over thirty years ago.
Playlist:
Boards of Canada - Inferno
Blut Aus Nord - Ethereal Horizons
Ennio Morricone - The Thing OST
sunn O))) - Loser
Pilot Priest & Electric Youth - Come True OST
Gnarls Barkley - Atlanta
Boy Harsher - Careful
Blackbraid - Celestial Womb EP
Revocation - New Gods, New Masters
Sinoa Caves - Beyond the Black Rainbow OST
Melvins & Lustmord - Pigs of the Roman Empire
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• Six of Cups
• Queen of Pentacles
• Four of Pentacles
Emotional Balance takes a steady hand on Earthly concerns, something I'm struggling with at the moment, which makes feel isolated.
I think I first discovered Mascara via The Cinematic Void podcast, where, if I remember correctly, Nick Vance - whose band Double Life I adore - mentioned them in a year-end episode a few years back (maybe more than a few at this point). Anyway, I ended up with their 2025 album Going Postal on my phone, but couldn't remember how it got there. I gave a perfunctory listen a week or three back, but yesterday, holy shit. These guys HIT me. I blew through the album and a handful more of their releases (see below). All of them are fantastic.
Mascara's Bandcamp is HERE, so head on over and give 'em a listen. Great independent band that deserves as much support as we can rally.
Watch:
Tim Plester and Rob Curry's new documentary, The Archivist. I'm not entirely sure what this has to do with Weird Walk zine, but I came to the trailer via their YouTube channel, and I generally pay attention to everything they do. This is no exception.
Here's the solicitation blurb from the YouTube post:
"Following in a noble lineage of Great British nonconformists, David ‘Doc’ Rowe has spent the last 60 years tirelessly documenting the rich tapestry of mysterious folk customs that continue to thrive in forgotten corners of this Island Nation. THE ARCHIVIST follows this indefatigable man through the wheel of a year like no other; capturing not only his efforts to get back on the road despite health issues and Covid lockdowns, but also his crusade to find a permanent home for his one-of-a-kind collection."
This is making its world premiere at a film fest in Sheffield at the end of June, so not sure when we'll see it stateside, but I'll be watching for it from here out.
Read:
Back into my Stephen King reread this weekend with my favorite of the Dark Tower novels, Book Three: The Wastelands.
I'm not very far yet, but I'm both shocked and not shocked at how well I remember this one. Not shocked, because I carry quite a bit of it in the daily ether that comprises my 'surface' mind. You know, those books, songs, movies, comics, whatever that are so much a part of you, that made such an indelible impression upon first contact that bits float up apropos of nothing at any given time on any given day. That's this book. Shocked, because even though I've read this three times prior (Once when it came out, once during a reread before Book IV came out, and once before embarking on the full series reread I did when the final three books began to release), I still always blanket assume my memory is not as good as I think it is (for many things, it is not). But no, I fell right in the opening scene with Mir, the 18-story guardian of the woods, like I was rereading yesterday's material.
This very much excites me, because with this proof of memory, I'm eager for certain other key scenes in the book, especially Jake in the 'haunted' house.
Playlist:
Anthrax - Worship Music
Anthrax - For All Kings
Anthrax - We've Come for You All
Rock Burwell - Obsession OST
Abby Sage - Smoke Break (single)
Napalm Death - Resentment Is Always Seismic (A Final Throw of Throes)
Mascara - Hla-11Tf
Mascara - Cameo Blue Estate EP
Napalm Death - Apex Predator - Easy Meat
Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
Abby Sage - The Rot
AC/DC - For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Eldritch Lace Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• Ten of Wands
• Five of Cups
• Seven of Swords
Wasting time mulling over disappointing results is of no use. Take the negative and turn it into a positive. Or, to quote Alfred, "Why do we fall down Master Bruce? To pick ourselves back up."
