One of the bands that Jonathan Grimm turned me onto during his visit last month is Blackwater Holylight. I dug their sound the moment I heard it, but didn't get back around to giving them my full attention until yesterday, when I listened to BWHL's 2018 self-titled album about six times in a row. Fantastic record, kind of sounds like the mythical place where Black Rebel Motorcycle Club meets the Doom scene, if the ladies from Veruca Salt were on back-up vocals. This is one of those every-song-is-great records, so when you have a moment, check it out.
**
Gideon falls continues to blow my freakin' mind every month. I had not anticipated the scope of this book to incorporate anything that happened in this week's issue 13, least of all that the promise made by the cover would bear fruit. Subtle shades of Victoriana (it's not ostentation enough for me to call it full-on Steam Punk, but it has a hint of that delicious flavor, a flavor like most, best used sparingly):
Playlist from 5/15:
Godflesh - Streetcleaner
Faith No More - King for a Day
Beastmilk - Climax
Beastmilk - Use Your Deluge
Grave Pleasures - Dreamcrash
Blackwater Holylight - Eponymous
Atrium Carceri - Cellblock
Tennis System - Pain EP
Misfits - Earth A.D.
Uniform & The Body - Mental Wounds Not Healing
Somnium Nox - Apocrypha - EP
To continue the 'unsung' string I began the other day by posting FNM's Ugly in the Morning, I thought I'd start today with a track from Godflesh's 2001 final album (at the time) Hymns. I love this entire album; some purists disregard later Godflesh for the way Justin K. Broadrick begins to segue into the more ambient, pastoral sound of Jesu. For me, my love of Godflesh isn't about one album or another, but the overall arc. Which, by the way, continues to this day in fine form. Anyway, a great track from an outstanding album.
**
NCBD is a light one. Good deal; saves me some money and drops the latest issue of one of my favorite books in my hands. Win win.
Man, look at that cover! Gorgeous!
**
Playlist from Tuesday, 5/14:
Godflesh - Hymns
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Vol. 1
Blut Aus Nord - Odinist: The Destruction of Reason By Illumination
Blut Aus Nord - MoRT
Blut Aus Nord - 777 Sect(s)
Blut Aus Nord - 777 The Desanctification
Fenn - Dustwalker
Blut Aus Nord - The Work Which Transforms God
Jed Kurzel - The Babadook OST
**
Card of the day:
Okay, full disclosure: if you go back a few months, I pulled this card. I'd left it in the deck on purpose, thinking I may find a way to interpret it into my overall, personal theory of reading this deck as a singular quanta of information, instead of as a collection of individual cards. Does that make sense? Maybe not. This is kind of free-form, impromptu logic, but isn't that what Tarot and Divination supposed to be at least partially about? What good is it to memorize 'readings' and definitions for objects that are supposed to represent aspects of our collective and individual unconscious? Anyway, after the first time I pulled this card and logged it here, I didn't draw it again until recently. But now, I've pulled it three times in the last two weeks, and although I'd kind of reversed on logging it here until now, with this new draw, I feel I have to look deeper (I say that sometimes and then don't have time to do it). To begin with, I pulled two more cards after, to try and clarify:
Okay, so it's going to take all - or at least a lot - of my Will to discover something that has been occulted to me. After some digging, it looks as though I will be beginning HERE and, perhaps more interestingly, HERE.
I've had FNM on the brain of late, specifically King for a Day. Ugly in the Morning has always seemed a classic to me - well, every track on King is a classic, in my opinion at least - but it remains a bit unsung in my head, as in it's never a song I think or discuss first when talking about the band or the album. Contemplating this lead to the idea to post, and searching for the song on youtube this live version came up. Really cool to see this live from back in the day. There are currently conflicting reports of the band working on new music; Patton says they're not and the rest of the guys say they are, so who knows what may one day come down the pipes, if anything. I've recently begun to wonder if we might not see FNM with a different singer again at some point, or new band altogether, comprised of Bottom and Gould, at the very least.
**
Playlist from 5/13:
Godflesh - Pure
Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music
ACDC - Highway to Hell
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - The Night Creeper
Charles Bernstein - A Nightmare on Elm Street OST
Blut Aus Nord - The Odinist
**
Card of the day:
The marriage of two forces/ideas into one. I'll read this as a pat on the back for continuing to develop the different voice and ideas I'm applying to writing Ciazarn, which is wholly outside my comfort zone.
Soviet Soviet performing Fairy Tale, the lead track from their 2016 album Endless, live on KEXP!
**
Congratulations to all my HWA brothers and sisters who won awards last night at the Bram Stoker Awards! Mike Glyer has a list of the winners up on HERE, on his Fanlight Zone website. Check it out!
**
Kind of addicted to the A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night OST. I'd never seen the film before; despite countless recommendations it seemed to remain perpetually on the list. That changed this past Friday when Joe Bob Briggs showed it on The Last Drive-In. LOVED it. Loved it so much, but I need to have an immersive viewing, one without JBB's wonderful sidebars, which I love and can help ease the way for a movie like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but which impede the full effect of something like Ana Lily Amirpour's B&W, Arthouse Vampire masterpiece.
Also, the OST is chock full of unbelievable music, pretty much all from artists I am - for the moment - unfamiliar with. Lots of new music heading my way, which always makes me happy!
Playlist from 5/11:
Faith No More - King for a Day
Various Artists - A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night OST
Prince - Sign O' The Times
Lovett - The Wind OST
Playlist from 5/12:
Faith No More - King for a Day
L7 - Scatter the Rats
Blut Aus Nord - What Once Was
Godflesh - Pure
Card of the day:
The Fiery aspect of Fire - Pure Will. Which is what I will need to get through the day, I think. Long work weekend, followed by a rough Monday morning so far. I'll do what I always do - put my head down and charge through, stealing any moments I have along the way to work on Ciazarn, a growing obsession now that I've found the voice for it.
Yesterday I gushed for Emma Tammi's The Wind, today I'll gush for the score. I didn't know anything about Lovett, AKA Ben Lovett, but he's done quite a few scores, especially of late. You might know his music from The Ritual, The Wind, or I Trapped the Devil (which is one of the next movies on my to-watch list). The cool thing with this score though, is I've been working on this Ciazarn book with Jonathan Grimm, and I have a ton of research hours put in, an outline for the first issue/chapter, but I've been unable to find the voice for the actual prose. And a large part of the reason for that is I didn't have the right musical soundtrack to write it to. Music is essential to my writing process, and most of what I listen to evokes my usual tone, where let's say the stuff in A Collection of Desires is a nine on the darkness meter and Shadow Play is a four, and all of it is modern. Ciazarn is a completely different animal. It's 1930s Dustbowl, and it's dark, but it's told through the eyes of a ten-year-old, so that makes it less dark at times than most of my characters, and more dark other times, the hard part being able to tell where each is appropriate for the sake of the story. Anyway, with Lovett's OST for The Wind, I knocked out and polished a pretty fantastic opening paragraph yesterday, so I am excited!
**
Playlist from 5/10:
Black Sabbath - Master of Reality
Black Sabbath - Eponymous
The Black Queen - Infinite Games
Lovett - The Wind OST
Thought Gang - Eponymous
Vanessa Williams - Dreaming' (Single)
**
Card of the day:
Feels good, the sturdy symmetry of the Threes. Feels like where I'm standing right now. Of course, from Three you inevitably have to move to Four, which is a little less stable, but I'll enjoy the feeling of having both feet firmly on the ground for the moment.
Despite the holes in my memory that surround my viewing of Andy Muschietti's first chapter of IT, I'm excited as hell for the sequel. This trailer was an interesting choice, and I think I much prefer seeing what appears to be an almost full scene from the film instead of a three-minute montage that really just ends up showing us too much.
**
I'm working all weekend, so today is my day off. I've learned to look forward to these weekday mornings - I can wake up, read for a bit while I brew some coffee, then settle in with a movie. Two weeks ago my Friday morning movie was David Robert Mitchell's Under the Silver Lake, and I'm still humming from that one. For today, I'd previously set my sights on Emma Tammi's The Wind. Really good. I feel like my open air viewing on the tv in our bedroom - which is not hooked to a proper sound system, as the one in our living room is - cheated me of a more enriching sonic experience then I first realized. But the logistics of watching the flick in the better room were a toss-up since I'm not the only one home, so I opted for the more isolated room despite its subpar audio set-up. I can see where a theatrical viewing, or headphones perhaps even more so, could make this film an even more intense experience. That then, is what my eventual second viewing will be focused around (so sorry I missed this at Beyondfest last year).
And being that this is my day off, last night I stayed up and watched Pledge, a film that has already gained the reputation of being 'too much.' I loved the set-up, loved the camerawork, set design, everything. And although Pledge definitely dips a few toes into the 'torture porn' aesthetic, I ended up really enjoying it. As for the movie being, 'too much,' I know the exact scene that elicits this response from people. I'm pretty squeamish, however, if you've read and learned to love Bret Ellis' American Psycho like I have, you'll do fine. Incidentally, Ellis' work feels like it a very large influence on Pledge, which also added to my enjoyment of the viewing. Pledge is currently on HULU, which really kind of shocked me
**
These isolated mornings are when I normally get a hankering for some Black Sabbath. For being one of my favorite bands, Sabbath's music is an extremely personal experience for me, and thus usually best when experienced alone. So I don't clock nearly as many hours with the group that I used to. At this point however, their music is in my blood, and when I do get a few moments to give one of those first eight records my undivided attention, it always supercharges the music for me. After the movie this morning, I settled in with Master of Reality on my headphones, and today Sweet Leaf really did it for me.
**
Playlist from 5/09:
Mastodon - Emperor of Sand
The Atlas Moth - An Ache for the Distance
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue With the Stars
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta III (Saturnian Poetry)
Blut Aus Nord - What Once Was... Liber III EP
Hall & Oats - Apple Music Essentials
Melvins - Houdini
Soundgarden - Louder Than Love
Soundgarden - Superunknown
Earth - Cats on Briar (pre-release single)
Earth - The Color of Poison (pre-release single)
Blut Aus Nord - Deus Salutes Meae
Thought Gang - Eponymous
I totally missed that Laird Barron's new novel, Black Mountain, came out this past Tuesday. I cannot wait to read this. As the second in his new, hopefully ongoing, Isaiah Colerige series, this promises to be another fantastic read, just like last year's Blood Standard.
Mr. Barron's website is HERE, and you can buy the book from a local brick-n-mortar bookstore if you're lucky enough to still have one, or order it HERE.
**
Playlist from 5/08:
Various Artists - Singles OST
Angelo Badalamenti & David Lynch - Twin Peaks: FWWM OST
Bad Luck - Four
Atrium Carceri - Cellblock
Ghost - Prequelle
Ghost - Infestissumam
Mastodon - Emperor of Sand
Opeth - Blackwater Park
