New Music From PJ Harvey!

 

PJ Harvey released the second advance track from her upcoming record I Inside the Old Year Dying a few days ago, and after listening to that and first single "A Child's Question, August" a few times these last few days, I have gained quite the anticipation to hear the entire record. So far, this one strikes me as having as much not to do with her previous albums as it does incorporate a kind of sum-total of her entire oeuvre. Yeah, that's kind of a c-u-next-tuesday word for a music or film blogger to use; don't care. When you talk about Ms. Harvey, you gotta class the place up a bit. Pre-order the new album directly from the artist HERE.

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Watch:

The full trailer for Yorgos Lanthimos's new film Poor Things dropped earlier today, and despite my swearing off trailers, once I saw the still, I had to watch it (part of this decision was based on the fact that I find it doubtful the trailer for one of Lanthimos's films could ever betray its intentions. Judge for yourself, if you dare!

 

What the hell, right? A cast stacked with impeccable actors for a twisted twist on the Frankenstein story? I'm finding it difficult to formulate any opinion on what we see here, other than it will no doubt be as unique and engrossing as this director's other films. I now know where I will be on September 8th.

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Playlist:

Low - Trust

Slowspin - Talisman

Nabihah Iqbal - Dreamer

Drab Majesty - Modern Mirror

Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

PJ Harvey - I Inside the Old Year Dying (pre-release singles)

Ike and Tina Turner - Live? The World of Ike & Tina

Colter Wall - Imaginary Appalachia

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Gila Monster/Dragon (pre-release singles)

Bria - Cuntry Covers Volumes 1 & 2

White Lung - Paradise

Soft Play - Are You Satisfied

Steve Moore - Christmas, Bloody Christmas OST

The Plimsouls - Everywhere At Once

            

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

My first Pull since returning from my Chicago trip, and it's almost identical to one my good friend Missi asked me to help her read the day before. How's that for awesome?

•  On the Tree of Life, The Empress is the first Trump to connect two pillars, from Chokman to Binah, the act of transforming Knowledge into Understanding. Not always easy. This is a card that, while it does not touch the superstate of Kether - the white hot room, as Grant Morrison would say - does represent a process of making the intangible tangible, collating and processing information to produce a result. 

• Ace of Wands - Willfull Breakthrough

• Seven of Pentacles - Earthly victory; accomplishment. Completion and the exhale that follows.

When I string all this together, I see a message that suggests hard work, but not necessarily of the physical kind. In my own terms, this is telling me I have to do more conceptual work, more mental hammering of narrative logistics. This will produce results. 

 

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New Music from Drab Majesty!

 

From the forthcoming EP An Object in Motion, out August 25th on Dais Records. Pre-order HERE. I'm hoping this EP - DM's first release since 2019's Modern Mirror - herald's a full-length somewhere in the immediate future. For the moment though, I'll take what I can get. 

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NCBD:

Small Pull this week, and I won't be back in Clarksville to hit Rick's Comic City to grab it until the weekend, but I'm pretty psyched to read both these books:

The cover speaks volumes - Peter attacking Kitty? I haven't really followed any books with either of these two in decades, so I'm curious where they're at.

Do I love this cover? HOT DAMN, yes I do. Seeing Tony Stark's iconic armor visage applied to the anti-mutant Sentinels is... breathtaking. 
            

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Watch:

While I have grown to ignore trailers for movies I am anticipating and therefore have some general knowledge about, I'll still watch trailers for upcoming films I haven't heard of before. Thus was the case with Bruce Wemple's new film First Contact. Here's the trailer (which I only watched half of):

            

I posted about Wemple's previous film, Monstrous, here sometime last year. A flick I had a decent amount of expectation for, but which fell a bit short. Definitely cool enough to pique my interest for his next flick, which, after seeing about half this trailer, I have to say looks like it might be influenced by the writings of Laird Barron. This one popped up on VOD yesterday, and it's a $3.99 on Prime, so I'll definitely be giving it a go sometime soon.

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Playlist:

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Gila Monster/Dragon (pre-release singles)

Bria - Cuntry Covers Vol. 2

Black Sabbath - Eponymous

M83 - Fantasy

Drab Majesty - Vanity (single)

Corrosion of Conformity - Deliverance

Low Cut Connie - Sleeze Me On (single)

Various - Jonathan Grimm's Dark & Weird Bluegrass Playlist

Nirvana - Nevermind

Nothing - Downward Years to Come

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King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Dragon!

 

New King Gizzard and the Lizzard Wizard! Many thanks to my friend Josh who recently reminded me to check these guys out, as they'd been on my radar for quite some time and I still had not heard them. Loving the 2019's Infest the Rats' Nest record, and now both these new songs from the forthcoming album

Petrodragonic Apocalypse or Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of the Merciless Damnation, which you can pre-order directly from the band HERE.

This one starts out with a King Crimson-like intro and then turns into all-out thrash for most of the song, and boy does that combination work! Also, I love that both this and the previously released Gila Monster go right into one another. If the entire album has that 'one long track' feel, I think it will just up the overall power the band has set to capture and display with this record.

Oh, the video begins with a photosensative warning - do not take lightly; you may not want to watch this if you think there's a chance it could induce seizures. It is an unfortunate effect of awesomeness that it sometimes messes with our, ahem, lizard brains.

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Watch:

A new trailer for A24's Talk to Me dropped. As is my current custom, I'm posting it here but not watching it. Have heard some good things about this one, and favorable experiences watching A24's Bodies, Bodies, Bodies and Beau is Afraid have definitely staved off the burgeoning tendency to roll my eyes - temporarily at least - at the "Elevated Horror" assessment that fans have tirelessly attributed to the company (I recently saw someone wearing an A24 t-shirt). 

  

Out July 28th, pretty sure this one is going wide. Can't wait to see it, as early reports suggest directors Danny & Michael Philippou hit this one out of the park!!!

 

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Playlist:

Bria - Cuntry Covers Vol. 2

The Smiths - God Save the Queen

Phil Collins/Genesis - Collins. Phil Collins Playlist       

Ghost - Impera

Orville Peck - Bronco

Ganser - Odd Talk

Ghost Cop - End Credits

Spotlights - Seance EP

Nabihah Iqbal - Weighing of the Heart

Witchfinder - Forgotten Mansion

Low - Trust

Low - Poor Sucker (single)

M83 - Fantasy

Dorthis Cottrell - Death Folk Country

Les Discrets - Prédateurs

Prey - Iress

Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars

 

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X's For Eyes... And That's All

 

I have always carried a torch for a handful of songs from the Phil Collins/80s Genesis catalogue. I know, I know... I don't care. These songs are in my DNA from early life exposure. Also, weirdly enough, a lot of comic book memories are attached to some of them, this one in particular. Not necessarily specific issues, but eras.

The year Tonight, Tonight, Tonight came out - 1986 - was the year I first started reading comics on a regular basis with Larry Hama's G.I.Joe issue #49. The same year, this song appeared in a Michelob television commercial. Something about that commercial primed me to be both a Ministry fan and a Bret Easton Ellis fan, though it's difficult to explain the latter half of that statement. (Ministry's Everyday is Halloween would score a - get this - Old Style Dry commercial, just two years later. My memory so clearly stated it was a Bud Dry commercial that I would have put money on it. Also, who remembered that Old Style had a "Dry" beer? Not me, and probably not Dennis Farina, either. I mean, if he was still alive...)

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Play:

The New Puppet Combo game Stay Out of the House drops June 16th! I've already pre-ordered my copy for Switch. Why? Check out this gnarly trailer:

Oh man, I need to double-down on No One Lives Under the Lighthouse, which I played the hell out of for the first week and a half and then haven't really had time for since.             

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Read:

Blew through Laird Barron's third Isaiah Coleridge novel, Worse Angels and, exactly as instinct suggested, it went from a 4-star to a 5-star rating simply because I did not reread Black Mountain (Bk 2) first. Love this series, and it's put me in mind of tracing some of the recurring characters, so the instant I finished it, I picked up Barron's 2015 novella X's for Eyes.         

I've only read this particular Barron book once before when it first came out, and it's not a Coleridge novel, however, Tom Mandibole makes an appearance, and since he is a major force in Worse Angels, I really wanted to work backward on his character. The first memory I have of him is "More Dark," the closing story in Barron's 2013 The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All collection, where - in my mind at least - it's heavily implied he is a riff on author Thomas Ligotti. I read Barron's work as it's released, and in the past, I haven't kept notes, so I'm hazy on where and how often Mandibole has appeared. Hence the 'working backward.' At any rate, Mandibole shows up in the first two pages of X's For Eyes, as does Sword Industries, the Labrador family and who knows what else. So I'm in the right place until The Wind Began to Howl (Coleridge Bk 3.5) arrives.

 

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Playlist:

Lustmord - Berlin

Low - Double Negative

Ganser - Odd Talk

Les Discrets - Prédateurs

Godflesh - Post Self

Danzig - Danzig III: How the Gods Kill

Alice in Chains - Sap EP

Soundgarden - Superunknown

Huey Lewis and the News - Sports

Phil Collins/Genesis - Collins. Phil Collins. Playlist

Pastor T.L. Barrett & the Youth for Christ Choir - Like a Ship (Without a Sail)

Ministry - Moral Hygiene

Yeruselem - The Sublime

Pigface - Pigface Live 2019 vinyl

            

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Card:

Heading to Chicago today, so here's a card from Missi's Raven Deck to see me on my way and plot the course of the trip:

Things change; long-standing certainties switch polarity. Life is change, so embrace change. Kill. Your. Darlings.

 

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The Boogeyman

A few weeks ago, Mr. Brown asked me if I'd ever heard the Chicago band Ganser. I had not. I added a few records in Apple Music but didn't actually hit play on one until last week.

Instant adoration.

The album I'm currently obsessed with is 2018's Odd Talk, and the song on that album that gets the most play is also the first song on this live Audiotree session the band did in 2020, "Satsuma." Watching them play live is literally thrilling, especially guitarist Charlie Landsman. I love everything about this band, but I love Charlie's guitar the most, as it conjures White Lung, US Maple, Assembly Line People Program, and Erase Errata, to name a few bands I've carried on love affairs with in the past. 

Ganser is on the always fantastic Felte Records, and you can check them out on the label's site HERE or the band's Bandcamp HERE.

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Watch:

Last night K and I caught the first screening of Rob Savage's new film The Boogeyman. This is based on an adaptation of Stephen King's short story, "The Boogeyman," from his Night Shift collection. I've read the story, although I had no memory of it at the time of the screening, so I was free to judge the film simply as the film. In that context, and ultimately in any other, The Boogeyman is a damn solid monster movie. Here's the trailer:

          

What goes right with this flick? Pretty much everything. In many respects, this is a by-the-numbers Horror flick, but Savage - whose breakthrough was 2020's Host (the Zoom movie, which I love) - is showing himself to be an auteur at heart, so there are enough personal touches and 'aberrations' from the formula that while The Boogeyman feels familiar, it also feels different enough that you won't be bored. The third act really sealed the deal - it's fantastic.

Also, and this is the smallest of spoilers, if at all, but I found it very cool that actress Seylan Baxter, who played the Medium in Host appears in this film in a youtube video on Seances one of the characters watches. It's little touches like that I always appreciate in a filmmaker's work.

  

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Read:

After seeing the film The Boogeyman, I woke up this morning and re-read the story in Stephen King's Night Shift.

The story strictly follows Billings's visit to Dr. Harper's office, where he avails himself of his guilt. That's it. So the film is an adaptation and expansion of the story, and in that, it's pretty fantastic in what it accomplishes, using King's story as the seed for a larger world that's really only hinted at between the lines of the story.

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Playlist:

Radiohead - The Bends

Ganser - Odd Talk

Lustmord - Berlin

Boy Harsher - Burn it Down (single)

Boy Harsher - Careful

Code Orange - Grooming My Replacement/The Game (single)

Code Orange - Underneath

            

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Card:

From Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris's Thoth deck:

• Prince of Swords - The "Air" of Air, or doubling down on conflict

• 2 Change - The Ebb and Flow.

• Princess of Wands - Physical act or manifestation of Will

Cut and dry, once again. Of course, that's because it's all in the interpretation, and the interpretation is steeped in what's on your mind. I know exactly what's on my mind, and it's writing. Hence, why all of this week's Pulls have concerned my Art. 

I've had two decent days getting back in the saddle; nothing stellar, but that's the ebb and flow mentioned above - I have to take the good with the bad, especially when overcoming the inertia of having not written in a bit. It's easy to get discouraged, but you just have to apply your Will and fight that part of yourself that wants to be lazy, or is looking to be discouraged. Frustrations be damned, a breakthrough will come!!!

 

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New Music From The Mysterines!

 

 

The Mysterines dropped a new single yesterday, and I'm hoping it's the herald for a new album! 2022's Reeling easily made it into my ten favorite albums of that year, and as that was my jumping on point with the band, I'm anxious for more. In the meantime, hit their Bandcamp HERE.

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Watch:

Last night K and I had the extreme pleasure of watching Jon Wright's latest film, Unwelcome. Here's the trailer:

I'd only seen the director's 2012 film Grabbers, which is a riot, so I had no idea what to expect with Unwelcome. Well, this one shot to the top tier of my favorite flicks released so far in 2023. The characters are instantly likable and relatable - very important. Also, the effects are fantastic and the storyline really draws you in. Reminded me a bit of The Hallow, what with the rural Irish setting and use of Celtic Folklore. Unwelcome is a $3.99 rental on Amazon at the moment, and absolutely worth spending the dough on - highly recommended.

 

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Playlist:

Queens of the Stone Age - In Times New Roman (pre-release singles) 

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Infest the Rats' Nest 

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Gila Monster (single) 

Ganser - Odd Talk 

High on Fire - Snakes for the Divine 

High on Fire - Death Is This Communion 

Spotlights - Seance EP 

Spotlights - Love & Decay

Joan Jett - Album

Kaiser Chiefs - I Predict A Riot

 

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

 

•Ten of Swords - Completion of challenge

• Ace of Pentacles - Breakthrough in Earthly matters

• Ace of Wands - Breakthrough of Will or through Will, which is the case here, I think.

More cosmic writing advice, which is paying off. I went to my coffee shop to ice out the world and focus. I've begun writing at home quite a bit, but being I was stagnant for several days (almost a week), I needed to jump-start the old attention span. It worked, but only too well. 4.25 hours of sleep last night; I'd gotten used to close to 8 for the last few weeks. Thus, Breakthrough of Will.

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New Queens of the Stone Age - Carnavoyeur

 

More new music from next month's new Queens of the Stone Age record, Times New Roman, available for pre-order HERE.

My friend Josh alerted me to this one, and I have to say, his "I hear Bowie" observation is spot-on. Not necessarily in how the song sounds (although there's that), but more in the type of experimentation the band's doing. Really cool stuff.

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NCBD:

Nothing in my pull this week, however, issue #3 of Pat O'Malley's Popscars drops, and I'll definitely be picking that up and adding the book to my Pull.

Now published by Sumerian Comics - formerly Behemoth Comics, the fine folks who published Andy Leavy and Hugo Araujo's Osaka Mime, not to mention the Turbo Kid and Spare Parts tie-in books. I met Pat back in 2022 at The Comic Bug when he was in signing issues 1 and 2 of Popscars, then completely independently published. I bought those issues, LOVED them and was supposed to have him on A Most Horrible Library, but then, well, I don't think we've done an episode since. He reached out recently and I need to get back to him and extend an invite to come on my functioning show, The Horror Vision, so he can talk about the book.

Here's the solicitation description:

"Popscars is a gritty Hollywood revenge story about a vigilante badass in a pink ski mask and the famous Hollywood movie producer she is out to kill, who also happens to be her estranged father. In Hollywood revenge is best served in front of an audience. As our pink ski masked killer pushes her way through a Hollywood crowd, prepared to take her shot at her movie producer father, she's quickly swept into a brand new revenge plot orchestrated by her own unsuspecting target."

 

I love the imagery in the book, and the seedy nature of, well, all of it. An exploitation book about exploitation flicks is, by its very nature, a fantastic story.

 

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Read:

I surprised myself by putting off my re-read of Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart is a Chainsaw after I noticed that my copy of Laird Barron's The Wind Began to Howl is due to land any day, and that technically, this book is labeled as "Isaiah Coleridge Novel #3.5." 

Interesting... and also probably a shorter read than clocking through Chainsaw and its follow-up, Don't Fear the Reaper, both of which I'm dying to read. But I've also been chomping at the bit for more Coleridge, and more Laird Barron in general, so I started re-reading Isaiah #3, 2020's Worse Angels.

I've read Coleridge books 1 and 2 twice each, or actually three times on book one, Blood Standard, but Worse Angels just the once, so this is a welcome return to a book that kinda blew me away (like they all do). Also, I'm eager to read it without reading book 2 Black Mountain, in close proximity. I love the entire series, however, Black Mountain was just something else, and because of this, I feel like it warped my only experience with Angels so far. Not this time...

 

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Playlist:

QOTSA - Era Vulgaris

High On Fire - Snakes for the Divine

Decima Victima - Los Que Faltan

The Mysterines - Begin Again (single)

Killing Joke - Fire Dances

Tangerine Dream - Sorceror OST

            

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Card:

Had an inkling to pick the Raven Tarot Deck back up and pull a single card. Here we go:

Temperance, or "Art" in Crowley and Harris's Thoth deck. Another small goad to get my ass back in gear, as my lethargy has crept through the weekend and into the middle of the damn week now. We've had a steady stream of vendors out to the house for various reasons over the last few days, and that continues today. Also, I am once again completely enraptured by Laird Barron's Worse Angels. That said, I need to develop a curriculum. One thing I was pretty taken by in Ivy Tholen's Tastes Like Candy - I mean, besides the awesome Slasher story - was main character Violet's practice routine with her violin. It reminded me of the benefit of commitment to the craft. I've been wanting to work up a schedule that includes not only writing - and of course reading has to be in there - but also guitar, as I've felt a pull back to that after nearly a decade ignoring what used to be my muse. 

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Tastes Like Candy

For reasons that will be obvious to anyone who watched the Yellowjackets season two finale this past Friday. I've already posted The Horror Vision's discussion on youtube and all streaming platforms. Crazy good and this song was a perfect choice to end the episode and season. 

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Watch:

I finally watched Huesera: The Bone Woman the other day. Pretty solid flick. I ended up wanting a bit more in the story department, however, filmmakers rarely go wrong giving us less instead of more. This is the slowest of the slow burns but is peppered with some genuinely freaky moments and images, chief among them the giant Mary statue at the start of the film (you see a bit of it in the teaser below, but that doesn't quite do the scene justice).

 

Directed by Michelle Garza Cervera, Huesera: The Bone Woman is streaming on Shudder and well worth your time, when you're in the mood for a film that settles in and slowly turns up the heat. 

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Read:

Last week, I finished Chuck Palahniuk's The Invention of Sound. I would recommend this one to any old-school Palahniuk fan or new reader interested in his work. This is classic form Palahniuk - The Invention of Sound reads exactly the way I remember Choke, Lullaby, Diary reading when I first started seeking the author's work out in the late 90s/early 00s. That might be a bad thing if you've just recently read a bunch of his work, however, if you're like me and haven't read anything he's written in a while, this will remind you of what you loved about his older books. 

I've always thought the key to Palahniuk is not reading a bunch of his books in a row. Not an easy thing to do when they move so quick and have such propulsive style and ideas. However, there seems to be a law of diminishing returns if you binge his stuff, or at least there is for me and quite a few other fans I've spoken to about this over the years. Anyway, none of that should be taken as criticism; I love the man's work and I love this book.

After finishing that, I was set to go into a re-read of Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart is a Chainsaw as prep to then read the recently released sequel, Don't Fear the Reaper, however, something drew me to a novel my good friend Jesus had sent me quite some time ago, Ivy Tholen's Tastes Like Candy.

This book is fantastic! A slasher novel that revolves around a group of incoming Senior girls at a Texas High School who get picked off one-by-one in an closed carnival. I blew through Tastes Like Candy in four days, and it really only took me that long because I had friends in from out of town for the holiday weekend. My Goodreads review is HERE, however, suffice it to say here that this fit right in with all the other well-known authors I've been reading this year. Great stuff! The author's website is HERE if you want to check out her work.

         

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Playlist:

The Hives - Tyrannosaurus Hives

Dir En Grey - The Marrow of a Bone

Queens of the Stone Age - Emotion Sickness (pre-release single)

Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris

The Effigies - Remains Unknowable

David Bowie - Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks)

Ozzy Osbourne - Patient No. 9

X - Los Angeles

Blut Aud Nord - Disharmonium: Undreamable Abysses

Druids - Shadow Work

Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Age

Trombone Shorty - For True

            

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

 

• Knight of Cups - Controlling Emotion with Will

• Two of Pentacles - Earthly Partnership

• Three of Swords - Growth of conflict or complex relationship

As always, keep in mind the interpretations I lay down for individual cards are a combination of grimoire research strained through personal circumstance. That said, I'm fairly certain this is reminding me of my current project (again), which has been on the backburner over the long weekend while friends were in. I have a fairly complex legal/business relationship in the novel, and I really need to work that out before proceeding.

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New Music from Swans

 

More new music from the upcoming album The Beggar, out June 23rd on Young God Records/Mute. Pre-order HERE.

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Watch:

RIP Tina Turner. Here's a fun little clip of her on Letterman back in the day. The song is one from the era where she kind of followed Bowie and a lot of other aging 70s icons into a brief dalliance with what I'd call new age adult contemporary - not really my thing, but I'm not really posting it for that reason. Stick around to the end and watch Letterman go absolutely Ga-Ga for her before asking her to demonstrate how she taught Mick Jagger to dance.

There's a joy to Lettermen when he's in the presence of performers he really admires, and it shines here. Also, very cool to hear Tina Turner talk about her relationship with the Stones.            

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Read:

Kind of a NCBD addendum picked up a book I'd not expected to this past Wednesday, Damian Connelly's Blood, Love, Ghosts, and a Deadly Spell:

A very cool softcover collection of B&W Horror that puts me in mind of old Vertigo and Negative Burn comics. The first story in this, Helena, was my favorite, and it definitely has me interested in picking up Connelly's other books, You Promised Me Darkness and Follow Me Into Darkness. 

Blood, Love, Ghosts, and a Deadly Spell is published by Fairsquare Comics and Alien Books. If you can't find it in a shop, you can order from Fairsquare HERE. 

          

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Playlist:

Forhist - Eponymous

Yeruselem - The Sublime

The Sword - Warp Riders

The Ocean - Heliocentric

Ganser - Odd Talk

The Ravenonettes - Raven in the Grave

Blackbraid - Blackbraid I

High on Fire - Snakes of the Divine

The Dead Milkmen - The King in Yellow

Beach House - Become EP

Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars

CCR - Eponymous

Sleep - The Sciences

Ghost - Phantomime EP

The Hives - Tyrannosaurus Hives

Druids - Shadow Work

Soft Play - Sockets (single)

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Page of Cups - Princess in Thoth, this is the physical aspect of emotion

• Seven of Swords - Completion of Will, or perhaps more commonly, of conflict

• Six of Swords - Here, I think, Balance of conflict

This is one of the more difficult Pulls to read in quite some time. I definitely think this has to do with my current project, but I'm unclear how, exactly, so I'll do what I always do in situations such as this: leave the cards up on my desk where I can see them all day. Sometimes that's enough to trigger understanding.

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Druids - Shadow Work

 

 From Druids' 2022 Shadow Work, an album I just discovered and which is blowing me away. Released via The Ocean's Pelagic Records, these guys fit that aesthetic like a glove, although I'd say they're a bit closer in sound to super stoner group Shrinebuilder than the Post-Metal of The Ocean. Either way, this entire record is fabulous, so it was tough to choose a track to post. Luckily, Pelagic has a full stream up. You can order this one direct from the label's website HERE.

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NCBD:

Another short but sweet NCBD. Here are my picks:

Black Tape's fourth and final issue! I still haven't read three, so sometime soon I'll sit down and burn through the entire arc. Love that Shout At the Devil homage cover!

Still one of my favorite reads every month now that the status quo has resumed, Boss and Rosenberg's What's the Furthest Place From Here has to be the single most intriguing 'world' I've come across in a comic in a long time. 

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Play:

Here's a hilarious little commercial Puppet Combo made for their summer sale, which began yesterday!

 

I can't play any of this stuff on my computer, otherwise, the "Buy All" for $25 would be a total no-brainer! The direct link to the sale on Puppet Combo/Torture Star's website is HERE.

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Playlist:

The Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro

Spotlights - Alchemy for the Dead

Druids - Spirit Compass (single)

Druids - Shadow Work

Final Light - Eponymous

Nun Gun - Mondo Decay

Ganser - Just Look At That Sky

Ganser live Audiotree Session

          

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Eight of Pentacles (Disks) - Transformation of Earthly materials/goals

• 14 Temperance - Art in Thoth, this often denotes a mixing of two or more different ethos to create the desired result. In this case, I'd read it as branching out from a safe routine/style.

• 17 The Star - Totality and fulfillment. 

I think this is a direct reference to something I just started working on. I'm taking an old collaborative project from 2018 and stripping it of the ideas that were created jointly with someone else, trying to extract the prose and rework it into a High School Giallo I've been thinking about for at least as long. There's a lot of good prose that I wrote in this - the other party was involved conceptually and with story, but not with any of the actual writing. There's a good 100k words - a lot of it was the product of what I since learned was overzealous 'word stuffing,' but a lot of it is good. So why waste it? Why not transform that Art into a lucrative project?

 

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RIP Andy Rourke & Ray Stevenson

 

Almost let it slip by me that former bassist for The Smiths passed away last Friday. I love the entirety of The Smiths' catalog, and all of Andy's basslines, but this is one of my favorites.

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Watch:

Ray Stevenson passed away yesterday. Wow. I know he's come to the forefront of cultural discussion in the last two years with the success of RRR - a movie I have no interest in ever sitting through after my friend Shailesh 'streamlined' it for me months before it took the world by storm - but here's the trailer to possibly my favorite version of the Punisher to hit the screen (Bernthal is awesome, so it's a bit of a draw):

 

Punisher: Warzone is just a crazy fucking movie - from the opening with Stevenson using a broken pencil to fix his broken nose to the exploding gymnastic villains, this one took a moment upon first viewing to grasp its tone, but once I got there, I never looked back. 

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Playlist:

Brand New - Daisy

Ghost - Phantomime EP

The Ocean - Holocene

VOLA - Witness

The Ravenonettes - In and Out of Control

Peter Gabriel - So

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Card:

Fortunes change as the cosmic Wheel turns unrelenting, What will this bring me today? No idea, but I'll embrace it. 
 

 

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Deftones - Bloody Cape

 

Deftones's self-titled turn 20 this year. Not my favorite of theirs by any means. In fact, with its predecessor White Pony being my introduction to the band, the self-titled caused me to ascribe them a one-and-done status until friends sat me down and played me Saturday Night Wrist. From there, every album has only gotten better - well, nothing beat Koi No Yokan, but Gore and Ohms are fantastic in their own right - and I always thought I'd eventually go back and discover I'd misjudged the Eponymous, but that's never really happened. Anyway, even my least favorite Deftones records are standing on the shoulders of giants, so it's not as though I don't like them. I will be skipping the anniversary colored vinyl, however, if you go HERE you can order it!

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Watch:

Saturday night I showed K Brian De Palma's 1993 masterpiece Carlito's Way for the first time. I've loved this movie since I first saw it circa 1995, however, it's been at least a decade since the last time I revisited it. Surprise - it's even better than I remembered!   

Normally, I'd post a trailer, but the trailers I find give too much away. Here's a scene that I'm reticent to take out of context because, at first glance, it might invite the viewer to dismiss this film as another Gangster film. While it is that, on one level, my take has always been this is a love story first, and a tragic one at that. 

  

 When this flick comes up, I always mention how it leaves me teary-eyed. Saturday, though, it fucking leveled me emotionally. I'm talking full-on sobs. There are elements at play I'd never noticed before, most specifically that De Palma shot a lot of this film to look like classic Hollywood. There's Bogie and Bacall and a whole host of other visual references I'm not versed enough in 30s and 40s Hollywood to be able to accurately put a name to. But they're there: the scene with Charlie and Gail in the coffee shop, when she stands to leave and he hugs her in the middle of the room - the camera briefly encircles them and you get a taste of a love that surrounds every aspect of these two people's lives. All the alleyway scenes, the sets and the way they're created and shot - especially when in the rain. We've seen these before in other, legendary films even if we haven't seen those films. This stuff informs the business - or at least it did before technology changed the overall look of the industry (probably starting with The Matrix). 

Anyway, if you've never seen Carlito's Way, I can't recommend a film more. I have pretty low mileage for the Gangster genre, and like I said, this transcends it. If hard-pressed though, it's this and Goodfellas - I can leave everything else on the shelf.

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Read:

I finished Alan Campbell's God of Clocks and thus his Deepgate Codex series. I would be lying if I didn't say I felt the ending was a bit rushed, but I don't care - I loved it anyway. I've already revisited Book One Scar Night at least four times since it came out in 2007, and Book Two Iron Angel Twice now. I'll definitely come back to this series again at some point further down the tracks.

Next up - Chuck Palahniuk's newest novel, The Invention of Sound, which I have a nice signed hardcover copy of thanks to my friend and A Most Horrible Library cohost Chris Saunders!

I know nothing about this novel, and I'm only about thirty-five pages in so far, so there's not much I have to report about the plot except that it already feels very Palahniuk (not all his novels do), and I'm excited to take that 'ride' again - it's been quite some time since I read anything new by the man, with 2009's Pygmy probably being the last novel by him I read upon the time of release. Everything between that and this I've missed. 

One thing I noticed right off the bat about The Invention of Sound, though, is Palahniuk seems to be writing in a purposely strange, almost 'wrong' way when it comes to the actual syntax of some of his sentences. Here's an example:

"As if she a prizefighter was, and she'd pasted him a roundhouse punch to his glass jaw."

What the hell? I mean, that sentence is all kinds of awkward. That, of course, is no doubt the point - there have already been quite a few moments like this in the prose, and I'm curious if his earlier books have elements of this, too, and I just wasn't a practiced enough writer to notice them before. Or, I imagine it is extremely possible, he's trying to use a similar and considerably less overt method as he did in Pygmy, which is written in such a strange, Pidgeon English that it was near impossible to acclimate to for the first couple tries, then, once my brain rewired itself, became increasingly disorienting in the best possible way.

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Playlist:

Witchfinder - Forgotten Mansion

Boris & Merzbow - 2R0I2P0

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

Etta James - Second Time Around

Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings - Give the People What They Want

Deafheaven - 10 Years Gone

Ghost - Phantomime

Windhand - Eponymous

Steely Dan - Aja

Paul J. Zaza - My Blood Valentine OST

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

 

• Eight Pentacles - Transformation of Earthly Resources

• Ace of Pentacles - Breakthrough

• Seven of Cups - Completion 

To transform my situation, I need to finish what I'm working on. A bit of a no-brainer, but then Tarot readings usually are. The cards can't really tell you anything you don't already know, they just clarify and bring to the forefront what you otherwise might be ignoring/unable to see. I'm foggy on the specifics of this Pull, but I'll figure it out. 
 

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Spelljammer - Bellwether

 

Thursday morning and I happened to stumble upon this video for Spelljammer's "Bellwether." I'd not heard of these guys before, however, Riding Easy Records has a pretty gnarly track record when it comes to Doom/Stoner metal. So of course, it comes as no surprise that this track instantly put the band on my radar. From the album Abyssal Trip, available to order HERE.

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Watch:

Ted Geoghegan's We Are Still Here is one of my favorite flicks of the 10s. As such, I was pretty excited to see all the news surrounding the release of his new film, Brooklyn 45, June 9th on Shudder. Here's the trailer:

 

In keeping with my recent philosophy of avoiding trailers, I watched about 30 seconds of this and turned it off. I mean, Larry Fessenden's in it, what more do I need to know? 

Nothing. 100% sold on this. 

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Playlist:

Spotlights - Seance EP

Blut Aus Nord - The Work Which Transforms God

Blut Aus Nord - Thematic Emanations of Archetypal Multiplicity EP

Estrasphere - It's Understood

R.I.P. - Street Reaper

The Sword - Warp Riders

Lustmord - Berlin

Ghost - Phantomime EP (pre-release singles)

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

 

Still sick and I just do not have the energy for anything, hence why this is posting so late. Anyway, let's see if I have it in me to do a quick breakdown:

• Ace of Swords - Breakthough. I read this as Will honed to the point of perfection, obliterating an obstacle. Not sure what that applies to here, but maybe that will become clear as I go.

• Nine of Swords - Accomplishment

• Judgement - "Aeon" in Crowley and Harris's Thoth, this card indicates a pivotal point in the sequence. 

All this seems to add up to say a touch-up on my application of Willpower should provide a breakthrough in a project. I think the Will is going to come into play getting back into writing daily - I haven't been doing much more than working and watching movies while I've been sick. 

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New Music from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard!

 

New music from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, and it rules! I'll admit, I've never really made a serious attempt at getting into these guys. I'm not really sure why. That said, my friend Josh sang their praises in a conversation last week and Josh is one of those people whose opinion on music is very important to me. Coincidence or cosmic alignment, here we are with a new track from a new album, Petrodragonic Apocalypse or Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of the Merciless Damnation, which you can pre-order directly from the band HERE.

This track RULES, so I think this was my fated window into KGLW!!! Thanks, Josh!

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NCBD:

A nice and light NCBD this week, and although I will most likely not show up at the shop until later in the week when I feel better, this is what will be in my box:

Looks like I jumped on The Seasons Have Teeth just in time last week, as number two hits the shelves today. 

X-Men 23 - I was wondering when we'd get back to Orchis, and look - the gangs all here. Even MODOK stuck around! I find it interesting that coming out of Sins of Sinister, I'd completely forgotten that Orchis's Ally Dr. Stasis is a Sinister - my bet is he's the one that we saw in 616 all through the 80s and the architect of the original Mutant Massacre and original Inferno, who did have quite the flamboyant personality the Krakoa era Sinister does. Also, apparently, writer Gerry Duggan is now helming Iron Man as well, and he's had Feilong take over Stark Industries, so that's an interesting asset for Orchis to have in their arsenal.

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Watch:

Still hanging around the house, letting the last of this vile illness loosen its remaining tendrils on me, so I watched some more flicks after a half day of work. 

First up, Richard Stanley's Hardware. Instead of reposting the trailer, which I've probably posted on here a handful of times previously, here's a cool little segment I found on the film's composer Simon Boswell's youtube channel where he talks to Stanely about scoring the film:

Next up, I've been diving into that Severin boxset All the Haunts Be Ours that I bought last year. Yesterday's film was Kåre Bergstrøm's Lake of the Dead, which I could not find a trailer for, so here's a poster:

From 1958 Norway, this is a tight little thriller, kind of a Nordic Twilight Zone murder mystery that I really enjoyed. Best of all, I now realize this is currently on Shudder! Not exactly what we think of as Folk Horror today, which is good, because I'm beginning to feel the genre is amassing a checklist. You know, "Add a ram skull, a forest, and a farmer and you have a Folk Horror flick;" not the case exactly, but it tends to happen to recently popularized genres. This is NOT that.

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Playlist:

Ghost - Phantom of the Opera (pre-release single)

Ghost - Jesus He Knows Me (pre-release single)

Ghost - Opus Eponymous

David Lynch & Marek Zebrowski - Polish Night Music

SQÜRL - Silver Haze

Spotlights - Alchemy

The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night

Kermit Ruffins and the Rebirth Brass Band - Throwback

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Card:

Still not feeling super up to anything, so I thought I'd just pull one card from my trusty Thoth deck. When that one card is the 7 of Disks Failure, however, it's hard not to want some context:

Just a warning about a planned surprise I have slated for K's birthday tomorrow. Duly noted, Monsieur Universe. Duly Noted.

 

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Ghost Covers Iron Maiden!!!

 

From the forthcoming Phantomime EP, out this Friday! Pre-order HERE. 

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Watch:

I've been sick AF since Saturday, so I watched a lot of movies over the last few days. I'm not going to post trailers for everything, but there are a few I'd like to mention. First of those is Gary Busey in a Richard C. Sarafian film, Eye of the Tiger! This was probably my favorite viewing experience. I don't know, seeing Gary Busey kick the hell out of a gang of ruthless bikers. Here's a trailer:

   

I'd put this flick up against a lot of similar movies from the same year - 1986 - that feature box office candy like Stallone and Armold; Eye of the Tiger is really well-made, and Busey turns in a solid performance. 

Also of special note from what I watched over the weekend, 1994's The Guyver.

 

I have some vague memory of seeing the imagery from this film somewhere about the time it would have received release press. More recently, when Fangoria interviewed Steven Kostanski about his influences on Psycho Goreman (Fangoria Vol. 2 issue 10) he mentioned The Guyver, so it was in my peripheral. Then, I noticed that Darcy had uploaded the full movie in the old Monstervision presentation to the Lost Drive-In Patreon, and I figured, what better way to watch it, right? Cool flick; not exactly my cuppa, however, as usual watching pretty much anything with Joe Bob amplifies it. I've thought about this a lot, the idea that even a movie you hate can be made enjoyable (to a degree) when you have the proper context for it. That's something Joe Bob excels at providing, and I usually find myself better able to put myself in the movie's headspace. I'm sure there would be conditions under which this theory would break down; I doubt very much that even if Joe Bob hosted The Notebook I would get a kick out of it. Then again, who knows?

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Read:

I continued to make my way through Alan Campbell's final book in the Deepgate Codex series this weekend, but I also had the itch to read some old Spider-Man comics, so I dug out Web of Spider-Man 40-42, the "Cult of Love" storyline, only to realize I'm missing the fourth and final part.

Not really a big deal; I located issue 43 on eBay, so I'll get to read that in a few days. More important than the story was the general tone of the story. 80s comics are very much recognizable, especially Spidey. They reflect the New York of the time, but also the world and society of the time. The art and writing are a certain 'way' - again, a lot of that has to do with topics that haunted Western Society at the time. Vietnam was a big one, but in this case, echoes of the Tate/Labianca murders and the fear of 'cults' that crime inspired. I wasn't there to read through metaphors of societal trauma, though. No, I was there because the 80s was when I started reading comics and Spidey, while not a mainstay, every-week purchase, had three ongoing monthly titles that I cherry-picked from quite often, and it's always super cool to go back and re-experience those books. 

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Playlist:

Blut Aus Nord - The Work Which Transforms God

Nabihah Iqbal - Dreamer

Nirvana - Nevermind

Greg Puciato - Child Soldier: Creator of God

Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

Black Sabbath - Sabotage

Cartoonist Kayfabe - Havok/Wolverine Meltdown

The Beatles - Abbey Road

            

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Card:

Easing back into it with a single card Pull from Missi's Raven Deck:

As usual, this deck just knows. I'm abstaining from drinking any beer while I've been sick and thinking of carrying it on until the weekend, just to further give my body a break. My fever's gone, but I was up most of the night last night coughing, so I'm exhausted at the moment. Ginger Ale remains a close friend.

 

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Poor Things - Your Arse is on Fire

 

Looks like Mr. Bungle encored with "My Ass is on Fire" two nights ago in Pomona, CA. I don't have tickets for any of these shows (obviously; my best chance of seeing Bungle now is if they add a Chicago date), but I'm psyched to hear they pulled this one out of the toy box. I got to see them play it on the Disco Volante tour at the Chicago Metro back in, gasp, 1995! By the time they came around for the two California tours, they had a new, 'remixed' version I didn't particularly care for. Still, good to see them pulling out something from the first album, and hopefully the new lineup might be working up to a few more surprises down the road.

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Watch:

I have, to date, only seen one film by Yorgos Lanthimos, and that's Killing of a Sacred Deer. That film blew me away, and I really need to get on seeing the others. In the meantime, while I've been sitting on my hands as a potential fan, Mr. Lanthimos has constructed a new film:

 

Frankenstein? Well, obviously to some degree, but I'd wager there's a lot more going on here. Interesting to see the fantastic imagery here; almost reminds me of an LSD-laced version of Wes Anderson. 

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Read:

After seeing a friend post about it on social media, I went ahead and grabbed the first issue of Dan Watters and Sebastián Cabrol's The Seasons Have Teeth. Here's the photo my friend posted that convinced me:

Yeah, that's all I needed, too. The logline here is what if the Seasons manifested as beasts. This right here is Spring, and it's where we start our story, through the lens of a news photographer whose grief has him ready to risk his life to get the pictures that will show the world the Seasons' faces.

Dan Watters has really floored me over the last few years. Between Homesick Pilots and The Picture of Everything Else - which finally finishes with the release of issues 4 and 5 nxt month - I've now seen his name on an upcoming Marvel title or two. Let's celebrate his success by hoping he has enough time to continue to make these wonderful Creator-owned books, too.

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Playlist:

QOTSA - Emotion Sickness (pre-release single)

QOTSA - Villains

QOTSA - Era Vulgaris

The Hives - Tyrannosaurus Hives

White Lung - Paradise

White Lung - Premonition

White Lung - It's the Evil

White Lung - Full Performance KEXP

Slayer - Decade of Aggression

Trombone Shorty - Too True

Blanck Mass - In Ferneaux

           

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

I feel like I see the Seven of Swords a lot lately. Taken here with the Ten of Cups and The Moon, I'd say there's something hidden or obscured that's preventing me from achieving victory in regard to a monetary issue. 

 

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NEW MUSIC FROM QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE!!!

 From the forthcoming album Times New Roman, out June 16th. You can pre-order HERE. 

SUPER cool song - I hear T. Rex a lot in here, always a good thing. I'm also noticing the guitar sound on the verses has that super distorted "junkyard" feeling that I loved so much from Era Vulgaris, pushed back to the front. I've never been sure if that's a soft application of a ring modulator or a pitch shifter or both. Either way, loving it here.

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Watch:

From an article on Bloody Disgusting this morning (HERE), I give you the trailer for God is a Bullet:

 

Satanic Cult? I'm in! Also, Maika Monroe has been in some killer genre flicks over the last few years, and she's been great in all of them. 

  

Is it a bit weird that this film is directed by Nick Cassavetes, director of The Notebook? Not to judge the man - lots of people break in with what they can and then follow their passion (consider the case of Ryan Gosling, star of The Notebook), but there's also a track record of non-Horror folk 'hanging out in Horror' for a paycheck. Hopefully, that's not the case.

This one's getting a wide theatrical release - not sure if it will play by me; at first glance, I thought having the title God is a Bullet would stigmatize it right out of the local theatres here, then I realized having "bullet" in the title might actually push it in any way. After all, if there's one thing people seem to like more than god here, it's bullets.

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Playlist:

The Raveonettes - Raven in the Grave

The Raveonettes - In and Out of Control

The Hives - Tyrannosaurus Hives

Ghost Cop - End Credits

Ghost Cop - One Weird Trick

Screaming Females - Desire Pathway

Danko Jones - We Sweat Blood

Iress - Prey

Type O Negative - Origin of the Feces

Mars Red Sky - Eponymous

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