80s Metal Week Day #3: Skid Row - Sweet Little Sister

 

I've written about Skid Row before, both here and back on Joup, and while I've pretty much always defended their sophomore record Slave to the Grind for being released the same summer as Metallica's Black Album and being heavier, my absolute love of their self-titled debut definitely disappeared for about a decade and some change after I deemed it too "hair rock" to partake in. 

Fuck that.

There's no denying some 80s Metal cringe here, and how that "dangerous kids on the street" zeitgeist that all these bands tapped into and sold hard in the 80s reached its absolute zenith on this record. But looking back- that's a great thing. This isn't slaughter or winger - this is a more real version of the act, if such a thing is possible. Maybe it was Bach's track record over the last few decades - certainly his appearance on Trailer Park Boys made me believe he was still exactly what he claimed to be on this first album. An album that's so perfect, even its ballad holds up. Throw in the iconic single 18 and Life, and you get the perfect soundtrack to suburban, middle-class high school punk kids (not Punk kids) in all their cheap whiskey swillin', stolen cigarette smokin', guitar center hangin' metal-dude voguing, and no one sings it better than Bach.

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Watch:

This. Now. Please:

 

Aw hell, they took my favorite Turtle and mixed him with equal parts my favorite Universal Monster? Just take my got-damned money, NECA. 

 

Look at those lightning bolt sais!

 

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Playlist:

Slayer - Reign in Blood

Alio Die and Lorenzo Montaná - The Threshold of Beauty

DeadMau5 - Catbread (single)

Van Halen - 1984

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Card:

Looking at the bigger gameboard. Seeing beyond the smaller machinations, and really attempting to construct a bigger picture. Too much Mr. Miyagi of late, or am I crystalizing my vision for 2022? Only time will tell.

New Beach House!!!

 

New Beach House to welcome us back to the land of the waking and working this Wednesday morning. I need it. The album Once Twice Melody drops... well, I don't know that I quite understand the release schedule for this one, so let me just post the pre-order link to the band's site HERE and copy and paste the itinerary directly from the video below: 

ONCE TWICE MELODY RELEASE SCHEDULE 

Chapter One: November 10, 2021 

Chapter Two: December 8, 2021 

Chapter Three: January 19, 2022 

Chapter Four: February 18, 2022 (LP, CD, and cassette available)

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Watch:

Holy F&*k, and that's all I have to say about this. 

I really hope none of this is red herring (I fish I don't particularly care for.)

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NCBD:

Another fantastic NCBD Wednesday. Short and sweet as far as the commentary this week, let me just mention how much I've grown to love Maw over the past two issues, and am very much looking forward to issue #3.

Oh yeah, and Primordial is just the bee's knees at this point. Andrea Sorrentino's art is next level. There are narrative mechanics at work even just in his layouts that represent enormous leaps forward for the medium - leaps I think it will be years before other people build upon. 

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Playlist:

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - The Helm of Sorrow

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

Ozzy Osbourne - Ordinary Man

Greg Puciato - Child Soldier: Creator of God

Emma Ruth Rundle - Engine of Hell

Mastodon - Hushed and Grim

Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch: Censor OST

Slayer - Show No Mercy

Code Orange - Underneath

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Card:

Another nod to completion, which leaves me slightly perplexed. That's half the fun, though. I always think of this card as an indication of balance - or at least a suggestion to strive for it. And truth be told, my balance is way out of whack right now. So maybe that's what I need to focus on right now. If it wasn't for this damn day job...

Type O Negative - Live

As of today, we are officially into my favorite time of the year (even though you'd never know it in LaLaLand)! Here's some live Type O Negative to start the season right.

 

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NCBD:

Once again, here we are - New Comic Book Day. Here's what I'll be picking up/probably picking up:

Not sure I'm picking this one up - I'm looking to shed some of the books I'm reading, and especially after reading this, seems like a good time to jump off. Not that I necessarily believe the veracity of this report, but with Disney running the Xenomorph show now, I don't necessarily think this is out of the question, either. Reading that the other night, I couldn't help picture a "Baby Xenomorph" phenomenon a few years from now. Ugh. I love me some Grogu, but wouldn't want to see anything like that - or any type of 'good guy' Xeno - in any capacity. 

Loving this series.

I've really been enjoying reading a Peter David-penned comic again. Between his epic, years-long run on The Incredible Hulk through the 80s and early 90s, and his creator-owned Fallen Angel series over at DC and then IDW in the 00s - I'll really have to talk about that here again soon because it's criminally unknown - David informed a large aspect of my comic taste, and reading his familiar style feels a bit like a snuggly blanket. 

This second arc of That Texas Blood has been a great mash-up of Texas Noir and spooky occultism, a combination that yields excellent results.

One issue left of The Last Ronin after this one. Such a great take on the kind of anti-utopian, out-of-retirement series first popularized by Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns back in the 80s. A lot of the books since that have applied similar approaches to mainstay characters have merely felt like they were checking the Dark Knight Returns boxes, following Miller's formula. And that works just fine, sometimes. But it's nice to get a book like The Last Ronin, which does not feel like that at all, and yet it still takes me back to what comics felt like when I was reading them 30+ years ago, back when all those dark approaches were first hitting characters that had formerly occupied a decidedly more upbeat or 'positive' approach. 

Still not 100% sold on how long I will follow this new X-Men series, but I'm staying due to that one throw-away shot of the High Evolutionary in issue #1. Here's to hoping he pops up soon, in a more involved capacity. The Evolutionary War remains one of my all-time favorite crossovers - probably because, besides that and the original Inferno, I don't much care for crossovers. Anyway, it isn't that I'm not enjoying this series. As my first window into the new, Jonathan Hickman-designed X-Verse, I'm curious and enjoy 'looking around,' trying to ascertain the new status quo and how it's changed the characters I've known for most of my life. That said, re-reading Grant Morrison's New X-Men a few months back, everything post-Chris Claremont about Mutant Books that isn't penned by Morrison feels a bit... anticlimactic? Is that the way I'd say it? Maybe.

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Playlist:

Type O Negative - October Rust

Type O Negative - Bloody Kisses (Digipak Version)

Plague Bringer (Chicago) - As the Ghosts Collect, The Corpses Rest

Danzig - Eponymous

Boris - No

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Card:

 Many voices, all of which combine to create a world. This is what I do.

New Deafheaven!!!

This hit yesterday, but I've been writing and scheduling these posts at least a day ahead to try and regain some sense of consistency. Wednesday was already a pretty good morning when Mr. Brown text me that Deafheaven dropped a new track and announced an album. As you can imagine, I FLEW to pre-order Infinite Granite HERE, then spent a good amount of time listening to "Great Mass of Color "over and over. So good. I guess all the black metal blow-hards can shut the fuck up, since the band has obviously now embraced integrating so many other elements. That's what the best of any genre does - refuses to be limited by the tropes of their chosen peers.

Infinite Granite lands August 20 on Sargent House.

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Watch:

Well, Marvel's Loki started last night, and after watching it, all I can say is... loved it. Not really sure where this is going, except I'm thinking we might be meeting a certain purple time traveler by the end of this series. Which would be pretty f*&kin' cool. 

One of the things that put me in the mood for this series was listening to the Marvel's Pull List podcast that dropped yesterday. I've become quite a fan of both this and the This Week in Marvel 'cast, and on this week's Pull List they interviewed Al Ewing, a writer whose name I've been seeing on the solicitations for a lot of Marvel books of the last few years, but who I haven't really read outside of an aborted attempt at Immortal Hulk (not the book's fault; I plan to get to this eventually, especially now that it's ending). Anyway, the interview kind of primed me for Loki because apparently, Al wrote a series called Loki: Agent of Asgard that I very vaguely remember seeing on the shelves back circa 2014, and he spoke at length about what an attachment he has to the character, and how he kind of ushered in a more 'fixed' take on the character. Really interesting stuff, so I just may read this series, too.

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Playlist:

Deafheaven - Great Mass of Color (pre-release single)

Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

Entropy - Liminal

Principles of Geometry - Lazare (Tommy, you are SO right on this one) 

Blanck Mass - Animated Violence Mild

NIN - Ghosts I-IV

John Carpenter - Lost Themes III: Alive After Death

Run the Jewels - RTJ4

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Card:

After drawing The Devil two days in a row, my good friend Missi - who made the Raven Deck - suggested that perhaps I needed to "turn the volume down on the real world a bit."

 Well Missi, I would say Your creation agrees with you. Here's me turning down the volume on the real world for a bit. 

Valkyrie - Feeling So Low

One of my favorite albums from my Relapse Records 30th Anniversary Golden Ticket is Valkyrie's Fear. Some call this Proto-Metal, and that fits pretty good for me, although straight-up Hard Rock probably also works, as long as that moniker doesn't diminish the band in any way. Because Valkyrie feels like a very tight four-piece making metal that doesn't slot into the modern broth a lot of the bands I dig sip from. There's a definite 'back-to-basics' with instrumentation, arranging, and vocals, so in that regard they remind me a bit of The Devil's Blood or Baroness. But these guys are their own thing, and I dig it.

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Watch:

I don't remember hearing about Director Chad Crawford Kinkle's new film Dementer before seeing this post on Bloody Disgusting recently, however, with Larry Fessenden's name on top of the video drew me in, so that as I was about to post this trailer last night, I realized Dementer released this very day, so I hit amazon and rented it for a paltry $4.99 - SO very worth it.

The trailer doesn't give anything away, so my elevator pitch would be, "Gummo meets Hereditary." If that sounds as intriguing to you as it does to me, rest assured that although Dementer takes a little bit of a laborious journey to achieve its destination, the destination is 100% worth it, the atmosphere alone inciting a pleasurable Horror movie anxiety the likes of which I haven't had in a while

As an aside, it's been a difficult couple weeks at work - the unprecedented weather in the south basically destroyed FedEx's operations out of their Memphis hub for a fortnight, and with it, made my life a living hell. One of the things that always helps me through a rough day at the office - other than the copious amount of music I listen to on my headphones - is browsing Bloody Disgusting for new movie news. But almost a year after the first major changes due to the COVID-19 virus, the film industry's shut down is finally hitting us in the form of what feels like a MAJOR drought. People just haven't been able to film, and we've run through a lot of what was already in the pipes pre-pandemic, so there's not a lot coming out. First-world problems, I know, but it doesn't change the world from feeling even bleaker at the moment. In contrast to this was my stumbling across Dementer last night and being able to click over and jump right in. 

 

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Playlist:

Jackie Wilson - Higher and Higher

Melvins - Working with God

The Raveonettes - In and Out of Control

Lynch Mob - Wicked Sensation

The Misfits - Earth A.D.

The Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis - Carnage

Blanck Mass - Animated Violence Mild

The Foundations - Build Me Up Buttercup (single)

The Foundations - Baby, Now That I Found You (single)

Various Artists - That Philly Sound Presents The Best of Northern Soul 

Wolves in the Throne Room - Two Hunters

Run the Jewels - RTJ4

Queensrÿche - Empire

Keiichi Okabe - NieR:Automata OST

Valkyrie - Fear

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Card: 

The Elevatred (or Macro) view is always the clearest when it comes to details on the horizon. 

Mastodon Covers Alice in Chains

One of my favorite current bands covering one of my all-time favorite band's best songs. Magic. After this and that Flaming Lips cover on last year's Medium Rarities record, Mastodon is one of the few bands I like hearing do covers, basically because I can't wait to see what they'll pick to do next.

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I recently found this super cool, animated reading of H.P. Lovecraft's Dagon that Patronoid Magazine published recently. Lost of cool stuff from these folks, check out their site HERE. 

  

I've had Stuart Gordon's Dagon in mind of late, and not being able to find my old DVD copy (I had two at some point, I love this one so much), is the perfect excuse to buy that gorgeous Blu Ray copy that the resurrected Vestron Video put out a few years back. Here's the trailer:

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Playlist:    

ISIS - In the Absence of Truth

Alice in Chains - Rainier Fog

Yellow Magic Orchestra - Solid State Survivor

Giraffe Tongue Orchestra - Broken Lines

The Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream

YOB - Our Raw Heart

Emma Ruth Rundle - Marked for Death

Jimi Hendrix - Electric Ladyland

Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey

Black Sabbath - Paranoid

The Beatles - The White Album

David Bowie - Heroes

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Card:

Back to the wonderful Raven Deck my good friend Missi made for me:

Whereas this would normally read Completion, and despite the fact that I don't normally recognize ill-dignified (read: upside down), I can't help that dopple-definition fits, because it tends to hinge on 'interruptions' or 'hesitating.' I'm stalled again at the moment, and need to push myself back into 'On' mode.