Eastside Bowl in Nashville is now easily my favorite venue near me. I was expecting Young Widows and Russian Circles to play on the tiny stage in the room off to the left when you walk in the door, the place where the Twin Peaks Day/David Lynch tribute was held back in February. And while that would have been nuts, instead I learned that Eastside Bowl is considerably larger than I thought. We were directed to the far end of the bowling alley, where an arrow pointing left denoted "Venue." One long, gently sloping, carpeted corridor later, we were standing before a stage in a room that reminded me a lot of a smaller Bottom Lounge. Needless to say, the show was fantastic; Young Widows KILLED it, and Russian Circles... wow. I'm not sure how I slept on these guys so long. I had a few tracks on a mix CD back in the early to mid-2000s, but that's it. Needless to say, I'm a fan now. Here's a favorite track off their most recent record Gnosis that sounded massive live in that room.
Watch:
Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride received a trailer a few days ago.
As is my habit of late, I only watched about twenty seconds of this before I shut this off. Don't want to risk overhype or overexposure, both very real threats to a pure theatrical experience in 2025. I can say, I've liked Maggie since Donnie Darko, and I'm super happy to see her in the Director's chair for this.
Read:
When I declared the remainder of my non-comic book reading for 2025, I knew there'd be a few minor exceptions. One of those came up the other day, when in preparation for an upcoming episode of The Horror Vision: Elements of Horror on The Company of Wolves, I picked up the beautiful 75th anniversary edition of Angela Carter's collection, The Bloody Chamber, which contains the story Carter and Director Neil Jordan adapted for the 1984 film.
First, Alex Konahin's cover art is magnificent. Second, I feel like I've just uncovered a missing link between old-school folk horror literature, such as Arthur Machen, and 80s authors like Robert Dunbar. I'm limiting myself to the pertinent story for the time being, but I can't wait to rip into more in a few months.
Playlist:
Deftones - private music
The Soft Moon - Criminal
Bohren and der Club of Gore - Sunset Mission
The Seatbelts - Cowboy Bebop OST
Mark Lanegan - Bubblegum
The Damage Manual - Special Edition
Russian Circles - Gnosis
Young Widows - Power Sucker
Pelican - Flickering Resonance
Hangman's Chair - Saddiction
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
And Grimm's Kickstarter for The Eldritch Lace Tarot deck is now live! You can go check it out and support it HERE.
• Four of Pentacles
• Ace of Swords
• Page of Wands
Stability seems to waver around me of late, and yeah, that feels about right. I'm constantly fighting back dark shit in my head about the future - my future, the world's future, et al. It definitely feels like a recent breakthrough of Will has me in a slightly better place than I was in a week ago, and the Page of Wands seems to suggest this isn't a fluke but a new beginning awash in inspiration. We'll see...
My friend Chris is in town and we're heading to Nashville's Eastside Bowl tonight to see Young Widows and Russian Circles. Here's a track from the Widows' new album, Power Sucker, which is currently on my best of list for the year.
You can check out more tour dates and merch for Young Widows on their Bandcamp HERE.
Also, Russian Circles' Bandcamp can be found HERE.
I'm relatively new to Russian Circles, but Young Widows I've been digging on since back when their debut Settle Down City landed in my mailbox.
NCBD:
I'm off today so I'll be heading into Rick's earlier than usual to pick up my books. Here's what's coming home with me for NCBD, September 24, 2025:
One issue remains after this month's Void Rivals before we are catapulted into the eagerly anticipated Quintesson War. Crossovers and Events are generally not my thing, but being that the entire Energon Universe is kind of one big crossover, I'm hoping Kirkman and company show the big two how to do these correctly. I've expressed my love of the Quintessons here before, so to have them up front for six issues is going to (hopefully) be a dream come true.
Now one of my most anticipated books each month, Zander Cannon's Sleep continues to keep me hanging on every issue.
I was just talking about this on a recent episode of The Horror Vision, so I'm overjoyed to see the second chapter of James Stokoe's Orphan and the Five Beasts finally hitting the stands. The art in Stokoe's pages must take an insane amount of time, so I'll be reading this one slowly, with a keen eye on all the details that make Stokoe's work so rewarding.
I'm behind on Condon and Alan Love's News From the Fall Out, but the first issue left quite the impression, so I'm looking forward to catching up this week and getting current.
Regarding this cover: As a life-long fan of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow with virtually no good adaptations of the source material or even just jaunts with the Headless Horseman, you have my attention, Mr. Spears. Please - the floor is yours.
As I mentioned in Monday's "Card" section of this page, I'm still putting off my Lazarus reread that is meant to be a welcome refresher before jumping into this final Lazarus series. This series just hits too close to home these days.
I started buying this Death of the Silver Surfer series for the covers, but the story is turning out to be pretty good, even if we all know there are no real stakes here. Still, even though I don't have much interest in most of what Marvel is doing at the moment, I always keep my eye out for mini-series, as there have been quite a few over the last five years or so that I really liked. The Death of Doctor Strange was incredibly good, and while this isn't that, it's keeping me hanging on from issue to issue.
Watch:
Last Saturday night I sat down and watched Brandon Christensen's latest flick, Night of the Reaper. Here's a trailer that won't spoil anything:
This one is a bit of style over substance, but not intentionally so, and it's pretty fun. That said, the "twist" did not feel earned at all, and I'm still a little bit confused as to whether the logistics actually work. Still, this would make a fun Friday night beer bottle flick for sure.
Playlist:
Young Widows - Power Sucker
Zeal & Ardor - Eponymous
Hellbender - Hellbender OST
Ozzy Osbourne - No More Tears
Young Widows - Settle Down City
Opeth - Blackwater Park
Drug Church - Prude
Led Zeppelin - Live EP
Roy Ayers - Ubiquity
Frank Black and the Catholics - One More Road for the Hit
Pastor T.L. Barrett and the Youth For Christ Choir - Like a Ship Without a Sail
Butthole Surfers - Rembrandt Pussyhorse
Joy Division - Still
Butthole Surfers - Locust Abortion Technician
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
Also, if you head over to Grimm's Kickstarter HERE you'll see his upcoming The Eldritch Lace Tarot Deck, you can hit the "notify upon launch" button and then you can get on this seriously unbelievably awesome deck.
• Queen of Cups
• Queen of Pentacles
• Nine of Swords
An abundance of feminine energy is never a bad thing; Coupled with the Nine of Swords, I take this as a "pay attention to what the women in your life are saying" connotation.
I walked 5 miles around Spokane yesterday, partially in the rain. It was fucking glorious. This city feels to me like the image of Seattle told through Everybody Loves Our Town, and all stories my mind made from the images put there by Nevermind and Houdini and Superfuzz BigMuff, back when listening to music was my only means of exploring a larger world (i.e. High School). Gentrification encroaches, slowly pushes out the artists and the addled, so that you see people in suits checking into hotels next door to which are convenience stores overrun by homeless criminals with backpacks full of poison for sale. The rain looks like it's falling even when it doesn't, and the damp is almost a caress. Stone and brick buildings everywhere, shuttered shops a genuine lack of strip malls and plazas (god I hate that word), and the city seems besieged by either trees or mountains, depending on which direction you look. All in all, it is an amazing place to fall in love with a new album, and this Sleepwalking Sailors record by Helms Alee is just doing it for me right now.
**
Apparently, Young Widows are at Roadburn Festival this year, performing Old Wounds in its entirety. Wow. There are no festivals I would like to attend on Earth except Roadburn. Check out this year's art. Love it like I do? Maarten Donders is your man! I can't wait until Jonathan Grimm does one of these. It's so going to happen.
Playlist from 4/08:
Young Widows - Old Wounds
Helm Alee - Sleepwalking Sailors
Card of the day:
Two big changes taking place at the moment - handing the book of to Missi and starting on Ciazarn, and spending a week working in Spokane, so I'll read this at a general, face value.
Well, it's been a few days. In fact, the interim between today's post and my previous one on Sunday is the longest I've gone without posting since I began the new format of this page shortly into 2018. This plague I have is no joke, and to top it off we're short at work, so I've had to go in the last few mornings. It's been half-sick days all week, which isn't bad, but half measures apparently are not going to give me the rest I need to beat this, so today I am just off, period.
I'm starting the day re-watching the above Emma Ruth Rundle documentary that Sargent Housedropped last week; makes me want to move back to the Midwest, if I'm being truthful. Although, if I'm being honest, many fleeting glances into other people's lives inspire that reaction in me; from visits home, to contemplation of friends who have beautiful homes and pay less in monthly mortgage payments by half than I pay to rent a small two-bedroom, to the idea of thunderstorms owning an entire season. The early scenes in this doc, those with everyone in the bar, even just the shot of the street outside the bar for that matter because there aren't bars in LA like that, these scenes make me homesick. Then again, I remind myself, it's only one aspect of myself that pines for these things, and as green as the faraway grass of Chicago, or Dayton, or Louisville looks from here in Los Angeles, I'm well aware I have a pretty awesome life set up here. Cost of living is a big check in the CON column, but there's a lot of PROs as well. This is the mental and emotional cost of daily life: the balancing act between all the wants and needs inside us. And I do a pretty good job, for the most part.
This doc also made me remember how much I like Young Widows. Been a while; you'll notice they begin to populate my daily listening again below.
**
Here's a shocker I just found out yesterday because I don't pay any attention to music award shows: High on Fire won a Grammy on Sunday. Holy shit; hell hath frozen over. And as much as I hate to solicit for a paradigm I detest, here's their acceptance footage, because even after watching it twice, I still can't believe it. That said, I feel like this is an Oscars-like, making-up-for-lost-time awarding, because although I dig Electric Messiah, I feel as though the band's truly groundbreaking and undeniable work is well behind them. Still, who'd have thought, eh? Better late than never...
Having now crested the half-way point in Ramsey Campbell's Alone with the Horrors, I've returned it to the shelf and decided to re-read a few of the stories in Thomas Ligotti's debut collections Songs of a Dead Dreamer/Grimscribe. There's a definite pedigree here; Ligotti is clearly influenced by Campbell, although not in an overly direct way. But there are some aesthetic through-lines I am interested in exploring here, and I'm enjoying this strange little path I've discovered for myself through some of the foundations of short-form modern Weird/Horror. It's definitely helping me understand tone and craft better.
I've watched quite a bit during my sick time. First up, Anthony from The Horror Vision recently gifted me a copy of Scream Factory's Scream Queens Double Feature: John Carpenter's The Fog, and Joe Dante's The Howling. It'd been a couple years since I'd seen The Howling, and I was curious to see the difference the transfer would make, so before watching it I did a quick A/B with my old DVD copy.
Wow. Folks, this is dangerous. Having only recently been converted to the merit of upgrading to Blu Ray - because I refuse to rebuy my collection on another format - I have to say, the difference is huge. So I watched The Howling and was enraptured by the clarity. I also did some reading about transfer technology and what not (Blu-Ray.com is a near limitless source for that), and I have to say, I won't be replacing everything, but some films for sure. Army of Darkness for instance, or at least the DVD copy I have of the Director's Cut, is a laughable transfer; seriously, this was one of the first films I noticed issues on, two years ago when I excitedly sat down to show K the original Evil Dead trilogy. We made it to the third installment and I realized the picture was so bad it looked like we were watching the film on a crappy old tv in 1978 during an electrical storm. I mean, it's garbage.
Army of Darkness isn't a film I can't live without; it's easily my least favorite of all Ash Williams vehicles, but it's an iconic gem and one I want in my collection. But not this terrible transfer. Because, the idea isn't about constantly upgrading and rebuying, it's about Film Preservation. And while I'm not sure if I have to nitpick over the differences between the $10 AOD Blu Ray that Scream Factory released and the $30 one, having all three versions of the film is important to me, so it's going to have to be the $30. But that purchase is down the road, perhaps when one of SF's sales comes up. I'm still trying like hell to save money, and doing a fairly good job doing it, which is precisely why all the information available about transfers and clarity is, as I said at the outset, dangerous.
After The Howling, I changed pace and watched Jim Jarmusch's Paterson. Wow. One of the best films I've seen in a while, and one of my favorite of Jarmusch's to date; he has such a sense of forgiveness, community, and humanity that comes through in his work, that I feel like this film actually helped heal some black, sticky stuff that was left inside me after a falling out I had back in August last year. So good. I'm not posting a trailer, because there's no way a trailer could tell you anything about this film. Just watch it; Paterson is an Amazon-funded film, and thus available on Prime for free.
Next, I finally got around to Werner Herzog's Nosferatu: The Vampyre. I don't always understand or gel with Herzog's style, but he has such a knack for balancing pragmatism with artistic flourish that I always enjoy his films, even if only after they've ended and I'm re-thinking them. That might be the case here. Let's stick with the poster thing, I'm starting to hate trailers:
Finally, with all these long stretches of time on my hands, I thought I'd get around to one of the longer flicks that has been on my list forever, namely, Derek Cianfrance's 2012 MASTERPIECE, The Place Beyond the Pines. This film was enormous to me; a familial crime epic that blew me away and capped my cinema for the day yesterday because, how the hell do you follow something that BIG? And hell, Mike Patton does the score, and I can say this not just as a fan of his but as a fan of cinema scores: fantastically done, Mr. Patton.
Playlists have been tiny, so instead of doing a day-by-day, I'm summate thusly:
Playlist from Sunday, 2/10-Tuesday, 2/12:
SQÜRL - Paterson OST
David Zinman, Dawn Upshaw & London Sinfonietta - Gorecki: Symphony #3, Op 36 "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs": I. Lento - Sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile
Young Widows - Settle Down City
Young Widows - Old Wounds
Talking Heads - Remain in Light
Windhand - Eternal Return
Morphine - The Night
Secret Chiefs 3 Traditionalists - Le Mani Destre Recise Degli Ultimi Uomini
Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch - An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil
John Carpenter - Lost Themes
Card of the day:
I'm hoping this is a reminder of the past few days, and not a harbinger of more oppressive illness to come.
So this is what I was staring at when I momentarily titled the previous post "New Young Liars Track Streams" by accident. The fifth issue of Drinking with Comics - which we shot three weeks ago but have not been able to align our schedules to edit yet - will feature our Sierra Nevada-ingesting interview with Young Liars/Stray Bullets creator David Lapham that took place when he signed recently at the best comic shop in Southern California, Manhattan Beach's The Comic Bug.
Now granted, I don't even think we mention Young Liars in what we recorded, as the return of Stray Bullets was practically all I could think about for most of March. However, Young Liars is a fantastic story in its own right and this particular art is one of my all time favorite comic book covers and it was one of the three books I brought to the event to have Mr. Lapham graciously sign.
As an interesting side bar, you'll see the image is a play on David Bowie's classic Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars record and the moment after Mr. Lapham signed my books that exact song began to jam from the Comic Bug's stereo!
Via the mighty Brooklyn Vegan's Heavy Low Down - a very special Heavy Lowdown, as this is Metal editor/contributor Doug Moore's final dispatch as he moves on to focus his energies on other creative endeavors (read all about it and see their great Doug w/ Cats tribute here). I've enjoyed these Heavy Lowdowns - as I do most everything on the site - so though I hadn't really put a name to them until now I wish Doug the best and will miss his writings on one of my favorite music sites.
Young Widows really mine some interestingly original territory with their sound. This reminds me a bit of Brand New, but not overtly. There's often a sick kind of stilted, foggy slink to their sound, and I dig it.
