Perturbator - Satanic Rites

I've had a slow start on buying music since the turn of the new year, now an unbelievable almost seven months ago. Because of my continued work on Drinking with Comics I've spent much of the time and money I would usually put into music into comics. Couple this with the intense amount of work I've been pouring to my novel, ShadowPlay Book One: Kim and Jessie and my 40+ hours a week I spend in the Cryogenics Lab at my day job new music has just been hard for me to keep track of/partake in. If it wasn't for Heavenisanincubator, the installments my colleagues Grez, Chester and Tommy provide for Joup's Friday Album column, and of course the mighty Brooklyn Vegan and Bloody Disgusting, I would be fucking lost. In the digital age, if you stop to catch your breath for a moment everyone you've been trying to keep track of releases an album all at once!

Recently I began to remedy this. Within the last two or three weeks I've bought several of the records that have been on my list. The Afghan Whigs' return album Do To The Beast, Liars' Mess, Swans To Be Kind, In Slaughter Natives' Cannula Coma Legio and Perturbator's Dangerous Days. I won't say I like any one of the bunch better than the rest, they're all perfect examples of awesome for the particular moods they suit, however thus far I've definitely clocked the most miles with Dangerous Days. Satanic Rites is one of my favorite tracks on an album that consists entirely of favorite tracks.

Interested? You should be. GO HERE and name your price for the downloadable album or buy the JUST re-pressed digipak CD, which I missed getting by about a freakin' day. The art alone is worth it for the tactile copy.

The Children of Old Leech

image courtesy of WordHorde.com

News of The Children of Old Leech reached me about two weeks ago or so when Mr. Barron blogged about it and the news really made my day! A tribute to the mythos of Laird Barron (pre-order it HERE). Hot damn! Have I mentioned here, as I have repeatedly on Twitter, what a 'cosmic horror' phase I'm going through at the moment? It began with Nick Pizzolatto's True Detective, which in turn made me finally begin Robert Chambers The King in Yellow - a book that had been on my radar since acquiring the totally awesome coffee table book The Art of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos several years ago, the first place I heard of The King in Yellow. Laird Barron's work shares some of the DNA of these weird horror classics but it is very much it's own thing. Mr. Barron's skill with the short story is among the best I've encountered and every story I read by him is an absolute pleasure on the brain. He has several collections, not anthologies so much as what he so wonderfully calls mosaic novels. All of them are great. He also, thus far, has one novel and one novella. If you're unfamiliar with his work my suggestion is to just start at the beginning and work your way through it.

The Imago Sequence - mosaic novel
Occultation - mosaic novel
The Light is the Darkness - novella
The Croning - novel
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All - mosaic novel

The Empty Man... and Trees... and The Superannuated Man

image courtesy of ComicBookResources.com

... is the topic of today's Thee Comic Column over on Joup.

Come to think of it, I've been so busy I've not posted the last two links for my column here. Let's remedy that now because last week's was Warren Ellis and Jason Howard's awesome Trees:

image courtesy of BrokenFrontier.com

And the week before that was Ted McKeever's new book - which I am in love with - The Superannuated Man!

image courtesy of ImageComics.com

New In Slaughter Natives!!!

Thanks to my good friend Chris Widerstrom for the heads up on this one. Pre-ordered mine today. Can't wait - there is just no way to describe the ISN sound without using the words "Horror" and "Apocalypse".

Pre-order Cannula Coma Legio Here

Drinking with Comics Issue #7

We spent last Monday shooting the main part of the show and then Wednesday shooting the True Detective send up intro sequences. Edited all day Friday. I think it was worth it. I have a lot of other ideas on what to do with the show, starting down that road now that we essentially have the main formula down.

RIP Jay Lake

I'm late with this. My good friend and proprietor of my favorite Southbay bookstore The Book Frog Rebecca Glenn contacted me a week ago today to let me know that author Jay Lake had passed away. Several years ago, after wanting to read one of Mr. Lake's books for years I found myself in Berkley, California's Dark Carnival books and it was here that I acquired Pinion, which at the time I mistakenly took to be the first in Lake's Clockwork Earth series. Later I realized Pinion is actually the third book in the series, and it was Becky who ordered the first two, Mainspring and Escapement for me. They are wonderful books and although I only knew Jay Lake through his fiction I'm saddened by his passing. If he was any bit as grand as a human as he was as an imaginative author - which all personal accounts I've read in the past week confirm that he most definitely was - then the Earth lost a marvelous soul last Sunday.

As Kevin Smith would say, big bucket of win.

Brandon Cronenberg's Music Video

I am completely unfamiliar with Animalia's music but this video... wow. The young Cronenberg is definitely keeping his father's 'body horror' alive and well. Antiviral made my best-of films last year. And now this simply made, very effective video. Watching this now I realize that I would very much like a new film by Brandon Cronenberg soon. Please.