The Filth and the Fury

 

Last night, I showed K Julien Temple's Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury for the first time. This was my third time seeing it, first in probably ten years. It reminded me just how much I love the Pistols, a love that wasn't always there, but came on strong after readng Tour Manager Noel Monk's tour bio Twelve Days on the Road, which I have now slotted up for a re-read sometime in the new year. Love them or hate them, Never Mind the Bollocks still stands as possibly the most pivotal 12 songs ever recorded.

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Along with The Filth and the Fury, this weekend we also watched Floria Sigismondi's film The Runaways, the 2010 biopic about the all-female rock band of the same name. I'd seen this one before, back when it first hit video. The Runaways was my first inclination that Kristen Stewart could act, and although the film still looks to me as though large chunks were edited out before release, it's a great story about an awesome band I don't listen to nearly enough. One of K's favorite groups, I've definitely picked them up more since we started dating, but I really need to dig in on my own.

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Playlist:

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Damn the Torpedoes

Dance with the Dead - B-Sides: Vol. 1

My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult - Confessions of a Knife

Death Valley Girls - Under the Spell of Joy

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicenter

Horseback  The Invisible Mountain

Curtis Harding - Face Your Fear

Cold Cave - Cherish the Light Years

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Card:

The cups runneth over. Let's hope so. 

New Melvins!

 

New Melvins? Yes, please!

Pre-order the new album HERE, out February 26 on Ipecac Records!

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Friday morning I woke up and rented Bryan Bertino's new film The Dark and The Wicked on Prime. Great flick. I didn't 100% connect with it the way I had hoped, however, I probably had some pretty unrealistic expectations. That said, it's a very well made film, even if I did kind of think all the atmosphere and tension didn't quite "pop" the way it tried to. Definitely worth supporting, though, and Bertino is one of the best modern filmmakers working in Horror, in my opinion. 

I also finally made it around to Benson and Moorhead's episode of this year's season of The Twilight Zone. "8" is great. I still don't dig the overall feel of the series, and as much as I dig Jordan Peele, he just doesn't have the same wry manner needed to fill Rod Serling's shoes, but I did like seeing an Octopus kill off a team of Arctic research scientists. 

Despite my misgivings on the series, I'm glad someone's doing it, because anthology shows like this help employ a lot of filmmakers, and whether I watch them or not, it makes me happy they exist.

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Playlist:

Opeth - Watershed 

Mr. Bungle - The Raging Wraith of the Easter Bunny 

Barry Adamson - As Above So Below 

Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To the Sky 

Miserable - Uncontrollable 

Anna Von Hausswolff - All Thoughts Fly

Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

Fen - The Dead Light

Hoseback - The Invisible Mountain

Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen

Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

Opeth - My Arms Your Hearse

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What I've been doing to myself again with writing. I did nail some important backstory in a scene yesterday, but I could have got a lot more done had I not kept flitting around, being distracted by menial tasks that totally could have waited. 

Sudden Death!

 

The first official video from Mr. Bungle's The Raging Wraith of the Easter Bunny, which coincidentally, I just got done listening to at work before I clicked over to youtube and discovered this. Loving the record so far.

 

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For some reason, I have Aliens/Prometheus on the brain today, and I realized I've never watched these deleted scenes.

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Playlist:

NIN - The Downward Spiral

Beck - Delay (Deluxe Edition)

Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery

Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun

Opeth - Watershed 

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Be careful, consider options, do not rush.

Sabbath Lads

For my fellow Sabbath Lads. Ozzy has never sounded so serene.

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The season opener of John Favre's The Mandalorian was so chocked full of goodness that I thought, for a moment, I might explode. Thankfully, someone is doing something cool with Star Wars.

Also, now that I've restarted my Disney + sub, I'm really looking forward to Wandavision. So much so, I think I'm going to start re-watching the MCU from the beginning, filling in those gaps I've missed along the way. What stoked my excitement?

I feel like I am about to very much re-engage with Marvel. 

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NCBD:

Pretty light week. 

A new series from Aftershock Comics, Miskatonic looks like it will pit J. Edgar Hoover's "Red Scare" against the seedy underground world of Lovecraftian Death Cults. How could I not want to read this?

The old reliable, every-month-is-better-than-the-last.

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Playlist:

Selim Lemouchi and His Enemies

Opeth Deliverance

I found an excellent podcast recently that has become increasingly important to the research aspect of writing Shadow Play Book II and spent some time listening yesterday. Mexico Unexplained is a series of quick but amalgam of informative historical facts and subsequent conjecture, and it's fascinating. Go to their site HERE. 

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Patient and stable. Also, coming out the other side of that solitude we started today's post off with. 

1996 Called

I'm not really a Beck fan. I mean, I harbor no ill will, and I say this in spite of the fact that I still stand by his 1996 collaboration with the Dust Brothers - Odelay - is in my mind one of the greatest records of the 90s. But other than that? Well, there's the odd track here or there that I'll catch somewhere and that makes me say, 'You know, let me give that guy's other albums another chance,' but it's always for naught. But Odelay. FUUUAAAAHHHHCKKK. It's still brilliant. I'm generally not in the headspace for it, but when I am, well, once 'Devil's Haircut' kicks in, it always seems like I'll be listening to it for days. But that doesn't ever happen. I guess that's kind of the bane of albums you know so well and love so much - they become such a part of you that it almost feels redundant to physically go back to them too often. Yesterday was one of those 'Odelay' days, but this time, I decided to give the 2008 Deluxe Edition a whirl. The track listing is more than double the number of tracks on the original album, and although that sometimes annoys me, yesterday I fell into a beautiful abyss of some of the weirdest shit I have ever heard on what will always, in my opinion, be a pop record. Tracks like 'Electric Music and the Summer People', 'American Wastland', and the ominous Aphex Twin remix 'Richard's Haircut' left me slack-jawed. That said, no track made me marvel more than Inferno. It's just... junkyard broken computer funk perfection. I might be listening to this one for a while...

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I've really been into Horror Short film lately. I started a new column on The Horror Vision where I'm posting some of what I'm finding, and metnioned a few here. Last night I found this one, and I thought it was extremely effective:  

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Playlist:

Low Cut Connie - Private Lives

David Bowie - Blackstar

Beck - Delay (Deluxe Edition)

Zeal and Ardor - Wake of a Nation

Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery

Molasses - Mourning Haze/Drops of Sunlight (single)

Selim Lemouchi and His Enemies - Earth Air Spirit Water Fire

Ritual Howls - Rendered Armor

Opeth - My Arms, Your Hearse 

 

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There's hidden assets here somewhere, but I'm not entirely sure how to find them. Lots of disks lately, and money has been on my mind. Really feeling the need to leave LA, to buy a home, to try and remove myself from the shit show. It's in my best interests to begin paying attention to things I normally ignore - might lead to a Cha-Ching. 

Pallbearer - Forgotten Days

 

Pallbearer is a band I've dabbled in a bit, but who have never clicked with me. Until this past Saturday morning. Up early despite my best intentions to stay in bed, I made a big 'ol pot of joe and sat down to do some writing, fired up my headphones and somehow wound up listening to the new album, Forgotten Days, two times in a row and thus, cementing an immediate bond.

Order Forgotten Days from Pallbearer's Bandcamp HERE or from Nuclear Blast records HERE.

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Holy smokes. Magnolia is releasing a Zappa documentary:   

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Playlist:

Pallbearer - Forgotten Days

Opeth - My Arms, Your Hearse

My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult - Confessions of a Knife

Carpenter Brut - Blood Machines OST

Paul Zaza - My Bloody Valentine OST

Orville Peck - Pony

Massive Attack - Blue Lines

Sir Neville Marriner and Academy of St. Martin in the Fields - Amadeus (OST)

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A new beginning you say? Not entirely, but I like the optimism. 

Sunday Bandcamp: The Dead Milkmen's Quarantine Album!

Thanks to Mr. Brown, one of the purchases I made on this most recent Bandcamp Friday was the newly released "Depends on the Horse..." album, recorded in quarantine. The records is probably the most ersatz of the Milkmen's, and feels a bit more like a B-side compilation. NOT A BAD THING. Dig the description from their site (use this link HERE. There's another Milkmen bandcamp page that keeps popping up when I enter their name): 

"Actually... this volume of songs is the soundtrack to the first 36 episodes of the weekly program "Big Questions with The Dead Milkmen" which can be seen on The Dead Milkmen's YouTube channel. The songs were inspired by and created in response to challenges the Dead Milkmen made to each other on the program. Songs 1 - 4 are from "The 4-Track Challenge" episode (September 26, 2020). Songs 5 - 9 are from the Cover Challenge episode (July 11, 2020). Songs 10 - 13 are from the Owner's Manual Challenge episode ("Read the Manual", August 15, 2020). Songs 14 - 17 are from the Genre Challenge episode (June 6, 2020). And song 18 is the theme song from the show, composed and recorded by Dean Sabatino."