16 is new to me, but I'm digging their new albums Dream Squasher, just released on Relapse Records!
**
Saturday we ended up having an impromptu Danny Boyle double feature. It started with his latest film Yesterday, which is absolutely fantastic. I'm not a very big Beatles fan, but I can definitely recognize the impact they've had on the world, so the idea that their music would disappear is a pretty interesting one, especially when your main character is the only person on Earth who remembers it.
Once Yesterday, I followed up an itch I've been meaning to scratch for quite some time now, and put on Boyle's 2011 Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire. I hadn't seen this one since it was in the theaters:
Slumdog holds up 100%. Loved it.
**
Playlist:
Cypress Hill - Elephants on Acid
16 - Dream Squasher
Coheed and Cambria - The Aftermath: Ascension
Various - James Brown's Funky People Vol. III
Greg Dulli's new solo album Random Desire is out today, and as I sit here this morning listening to it, it's fantastic and will no doubt jump start a binge on his various projects. This is the first of Dulli's solo albums I've listened to, and I'm remedying that as well. 2005's Amber Headlights is cued up and ready to roll in just a little bit.
**
Last night while reading Chuck Wendig's Wanderers, the book jumped from a solid three to an all-out five. Page 392, just over the half-way point. Game-changing development I did not see coming. At all. This book is about so many things, such an intricately crafted puzzle that also, reads in an eerie harmonic with events unfolding in China. This real-life effect is a first for me with a novel, and it's adding a layer that is as disconcerting as it is riveting.
I am so utterly infatuated with this novel now and fully intend on reading more of Mr. Wendig's work.
**
Playlist:
Antemasque - Eponymous
The Mars Volta - De-loused in the Comatorium
Drab Majesty - Modern Mirror
Drab Majesty - Careless
Myrkur - M
**
Card:
Appropriate, yet a bit harrowing based on all the "Age of Horus" that comes up in a lot of the research I've been doing for Shadow Play Books 2 and 3, particularly ideas I'm playing with from Donald Tyson's essay, Enochian Apocalypse, which I first encountered in Disinformation's Modern Occult Tome Book of Lies, but which is readily available online HERE. I fully realize Tyson's work here is complicated in its presentation - read some valid critiques of it HERE - but the idea of Crowley cracking open the Watch Towers and poisoning humanity's collective unconscious just before the start of WWI is as chilling as it is fascinating.
Well, thanks to Mr. Brown, I found my album of the year. It's early, so this could conceivably change, but I pretty much always know my album of the year the moment I first hear it, and brothers and sisters - this is it! And to think, I'd never even heard of Spotlights before, a husband/wife duo whose new album Love & Decay is out now on Ipecac Records and can be streamed or purchased HERE.
Love & Decay feels a lot like the MBV album I wanted to hear when I ordered their loooong-awaited follow-up to Loveless back in 2013, the self-titled and unfortunately underwhelming eponymous record. I also hear Soundgarden, Deftones, and a lot of other bands I like in the sound of Spotlights, but never in a way that feels trite or repetitive. This leads me to declare for myself and like-minded music lovers a new classic and a band to follow and be excited for from here out! Always a great day when I can say that!
**
I've talked about Kristen Gorlitz's awesome horror comic The Empties in these pages before, and it's time to talk about it again because Kristen just launched the Kickstarter for issue #3! You can go to the Kickstarter page HERE to read more about it and support it; if you've read the first two issues of The Empties, you'll most likely be like me and not need any more convincing. So good!
**
I finally had the chance to watch the new Criterion Edition of David Lynch's Blue Velvet last night. Wow. Gorgeous transfer. This film never gets old for me; I enjoyed this viewing as much as or more than the countless others I've had since discovering this film back in the mid-90s. What I didn't expect last night was my reaction to the 53 minutes of deleted scenes included as extras on the disc. I watched a few and really had a sense of inspiration in editing. I mean, you look at all the extra stuff Lynch filmed and you can practically see how making Blue Velvet helped him grow as a filmmaker over the course of its creation; all the Jeffery-at-college and Jeffrey-comes-home stuff that got cut would have, if included, very much weakened the film. The elegance to the progression of events in the version that Lynch released and we all love is so much more apparent and enjoyable after seeing the scenes he cut. And after waiting 20+ years to see this stuff - scenes we never thought we'd see back in the Wrapped in Plastic days - I found I could only watch about twenty minutes of them before I grew exhausted and decided to save the rest for a later date.
**
Playlist from 6/06:
Man or Astro-Man - Intravenous Television Continuum
Spotlights - Love & Decay
Playlist from 6/07:
Man or Astro-Man - Intravenous Television Continuum
Spotlights - Love & Decay
Los Amigos Invisibles - The New Sound of the Venezuelan Gozadera
Pelican - Nighttime Stoties
Bloody Hammers - Under Satan's Sun
Primus - Antipop
Card of the day:
Paradigm shift! Just in time for the next project.
I was completely unfamiliar with Daughters before finding this in my youtube feed (which I have gone to GREAT lengths to heavily curate, as a lot of what youtube recommends is complete and total shite). I dig this; there is an obvious Jesus Lizard comparison right off the bat, but also, Thrall, and the tension makes me think of a great, sick, dying beast. Possibly a beached whale.
How's that for your bagel and cream cheese Friday, eh?
Planning on writing and watching this tonight, as it was just added to Shudder:
