New Crosses! No word that I see of a release date yet, but what a way to round out the year!
Favorite Horror Films of 2020
Over on The Horror Vision, we did our "Favorite Horror of 2020" episode this weekend, and as I type this the episode should be hitting all major streaming platforms. Here's an embed of the youtube, although this and the IGTV version are considerably truncated for time compared to what you can stream from Spotify and the like. Either way, here are our picks:
Watch:
This was one I had not even heard of until I watched it on Christmas Eve. HOLY cow. This one would make a fantastic double feature with Jeremy Saulnier's Hold the Dark (time for a rewatch!), there's such a stoic reverence for violence. Easily slid into my top ten of the year, as evidenced by the episode of The Horror Vision above. This is director Shawn Linden's third feature, and you can bet I'll be seeking out his first two films - The Good Lie, and Nobody - in short order.
Playlist:
Howard Shore - Crash OST
Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me
Vince Guaraldi Trio - A Charlie Brown Christmas
Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - Hollywood (pre-release single)
Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full
Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf
Electric Wizard - Dopethrone
Doves - The Universal Want
Nat "King" Cole - The Christmas Song
The Blueflowers - Relapse EP
✝︎✝︎✝︎ - The Beginning of The End (pre-release single)
Calexico - Seasonal Shift
Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy OST
Black Sabbath - Master of Reality
The Blueflowers - Relapse EP
Card:
Being that the standard reading of this card is the beginning of a new project, and I'm in the midst of wrapping one and finishing another, I'm not quite sure how to take this. There's also the "Big influences" reading, and although I'm not sure how to interpret that on a surface level, I suppose I should be on the lookout for inspiration.
Possibly my favorite track from an outstanding album, Dance With the Dead's 2016 The Shape.
Watch:
Last night, K and I watched Brian Duffield's Spontaneous. Wow. Just wow. Duffield - a writer on a bunch of stuff I love, like Underwater, The Babysitter, The Babysitter: Killer Queen (which, admittedly I haven't watched yet, but it's on the list and when the gang's back together, you can't go wrong, right???) - makes his directorial debut here and he KILLS IT. I mean, seriously kills. The Terminator shooting Linda Hamilton's roommate kills, if you know what I mean. Here's the trailer, but my suggestion is, just go pay $2.99 to rent it on Amazon. Best three bucks you're gonna spend all year.
Playlist:
Opeth - Deliverance
Worm - Gloomlord
Human Impact - Eponymous
Deftones - Ohms
Les Discrets - Septembre et ses derniéres pensées
Dance With the Dead - The Shape
Code Orange - Beneath
Perturbator - Dangerous Days
Fleetwood Mac - Greatest Hits
Card:
Balance will be tough to maintain over the next few days, but it will be a struggle well worth mastering.
I really can't say enough about Michael Kiwanuka's KIWANUKA album, except that it's made me a fan of his for life. The entire album is immaculate. This person song, though? This is the gateway drug that will lead to the rest. I'm so happy real Soul music appears to be back on the rise and striving.
NCBD:
I had my dates wrong last time. Today, it's here, the end of one of the staples of my comics reading for the past few years, Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's Gideon Falls:
My re-read on the entire series as a run-up to this stalled out before I even hit the first issue, so it'll be a bit before I actually read this one. That said, just to have it in my possession will feel like a pay-off. And that cover - good god. So ominous!
Also out this week:
I skipped the first issue of Sea of Sorrows but doubled back when Indie Comics Jones gave it high marks, and as usual, Mr. Jones was not wrong. The first issue set up some creepy AF Underwater Horror, and if this awesome cover art is any indication, we're about to get into it. Can't wait. Underwater Horror is a great subgenre that seems poised for a resurgence. This would make me insanely happy.
And this... well, a sequel/continuation of The Picture of Dorian Gray? I don't really know much about this book, but Vault has become my go-to company for new books, so I'm excited. And this cover art? Boy Howdy, that's just freakin' gorgeous in a very creepy way.
Playlist:
Deftones - Ohms
My Morning Jacket - Z
Spoon - Gimmie Fiction
Blut Aus Nord - The Work Which Transforms God
Dante Tomaselli - Out of Body Experience
Card:
Act fast - action is Futility's nemesis! Pretty relevant as I sit down and try to shift gears for the third time this year. I have today off and will be attempting to get back into a full re-read/final pass edit on Murder Virus. I have all my Beta Reader's notes, so between that and a fresh take after not looking at the manuscript since August, I'm hoping this last go-through further sharpens what I'm already feeling is my best novel to date (granted, it will only be my second published novel, but I have a few in various states of undress that are complete and will eventually see the light of day, just like this one, which I originally finished in 2008.)
Just from the opening strains of the keyboard, I want to listen to this song SO BAD. I mean - new Besnard Lakes! However, I already try to adhere to very limited ingestion of advance tracks from my favorite bands' records before I can hear the track in the context of the entire album, but with this new Lakes record that's dropping on The Besnard Lakes Are The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings - which according to the write-up on the band's Bandcamp is designed as one continuous cycle of songs - it's really hard. Because I want this one to wash over me as an entire expression.
From the Bandcamp:
"The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings honors the very essence of punk rock: the notion that a band needs only be relevant to itself. At last, the Besnard Lakes have crafted a continuous long-form suite: nine tracks that could be listened together as one, like Spiritualized's Lazer Guided Melodies or even Dark Side of the Moon, overflowing with melody and harmony, drone and dazzle, the group's own unique weather."
The digital is out out January 19th, and pre-order for the GORGEOUS physical album is at the Lake's Bandcamp HERE.
Also, I'm very pleased to see the return to form on the album's title. I know the band had previously expressed concern people would get sick of the format, but I for one, love it. However, it also makes me wonder if this is the final album from the Lakes. Let's hope not.
Watch:
I watched Bea Grant's 12 Hour Shift last night. WOW! Fantastic dark comedy. Go HERE for a short, spoiler-free Letterboxd review and the trailer. This is currently a $6.99 rental on Prime and absolutely worth your hard-earned money.
In the quiet moments of my day - which admittedly are fleeting - I am still entirely under the spell of Fleet Foxes' newest record Shore. While I've heard this band before - specifically, in 2009 my cousin Charles came out for a visit and introduced them to me with the previous year's Eponymous debut - I've never really listened to them in anything but a passive capacity. Why then, do I feel as though Robin Pecknold's voice hits me like that of an old friend? Someone I've really spent some time listening to, reflecting on, and being moved by? While my memory has absolutely proven to be complete shite the older I've got (who knew all those fears about constant and gratuitous pot use would actually yield these results?), and it's possible I spent more time in the late 00s listening to this band than I remember, it seems more likely that first trip Charles and I took around San Pedro's Portuguese Bend on a ridiculously peaceful and serene July day where he first played the band for me really cemented itself in my emotional epicentre. Although I'd moved from Chicago to LALALand three years prior at that point, when you consider how the momentum of daily life makes it pass in a blur, I remember I still felt like a relatively new transplant at that point, and the first visit from one of my favorite people on Earth no doubt combined with the music to make a photographic impression that is retriggered by the sound of Pecknold's voice here, over a decade down the road.
Pretty cool.
Watch:
I finally got around to watching Antonio Campos's cinematic adaptation of Donald Ray Pollock's novel The Devil All the Time. I really liked it. Instead of attempting to stuff Pollock's novel into a conventional three-act movie, Campos and his brother Paul, who wrote the screenplay, really allowed the film to go on a more literary journey.
The Devil All the Time sprawls over the course of two generations, weaving together multiple people's stories and how they all coalesce around the death and depravity of the twisted impulses of humanity as reflected through the misleading light of religion when not tempered with intelligence and common decency.
Yeah. The more things change...
Playlist:
Code Orange - Underneath
Willie Nelson and Leon Russell - One for the Road
Mr. Bungle - The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny
Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit Vol. 1
The Doves - The Universal Want
Anthrax - Spreading The Disease
Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars
Jehnny Beth - To Love is to Live
Michael Kiwanuka - KIWANUKA
Fleet Floxes - Shore
Card:
In a fairly superficial way, I find it interesting that the card I draw for this post is the 8 of Wands Swiftness when I post Fleet Foxes as the music and the first words of the second song on that album are "For Richard Swift."
As if I'm not completely overtaken by my love of Greg Puciato's debut solo album Child Soldier: Creator of God, the former lead singer of Dillinger Escape Plan has put out a new, multi-media package. Available from his own Federal Prisoner label HERE, Fuck Content is a video/audio release featuring a ten-song live set and five new studio tracks. I love Puciato's music, but I've also become quite a fan of his aesthetic. All the glitchy, seizuring graphics, the black and white digital abstractions that almost resemble some cyberpunk version of newsprint. It's all very fitting for the noisy/melodic mash-up that defines this first album's sound, so the idea that his follow-up release is an audio/visual thing really just makes sense. Also, not nearly enough musicians do this.
Read:
I finished my re-read of Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn. It'd been over ten years since I read this the first time and inspired by the film, I decided to revisit, not remembering a lot of specifics, except that the movie is very different. Still, I really enjoyed both.
After that, I picked up that new Brubaker/Phillips Hardcover Graphic Novel Reckless, expecting to read it in several sittings. Nope. I blew through Reckless non-stop, and even though I just got done telling everyone Pulp is their best, Reckless comes in ahead of that one by about 100 miles.
This book is the perfect iteration of these gentlemen's ongoing collaboration, and if this is the case, we have nowhere to go but up. Hot damn, go buy this and read it now; Reckless is FANTASTIC!
Watch:
The Mandalorian's second season ended last night and I am going to feel every day between now and season three. I am absolutely floored, not only at how fantastic this show is, but how John Favreau has completely undone my hatred of star wars - a hatred rooted in a betrayal, the complete undermining and convolution of something that should have been so simple, namely, making new star wars movies. This veritable disgust that I feel for the franchise began to sink deep into my blood three years ago, when I sat in a movie theatre in LaGrange, Illinois and watched the trainwreck that is The Last Jedi.
Disney + has really been a gamechanger for the fan-driven content previously only associated at such a high level with movies released in megaplexes. If you watch The Mando show, you're missing something great if you skip the end credits (especially on this last episode. Whewww! and on that, I will say no more). When you watch all those names and roles scroll up your screen and realize that these television shows Disney is producing are every bit as accomplished as major motion pictures. That in itself just blows me away, the fact that Disney is so big they can change the game this much (also, I secretly hope all the Marvel/Star Wars stuff will go this route and we can go back to having non-blockbuster movies in theatres in a year or four).
Anyway, Favreau really should be crowned king Geek for what he did for starting the MCU with Iron Man and now reinventing and, frankly, saving Star Wars from itself by taking it back to its roots. This final episode brought me to tears. Not just because of the story, but because finally, after twenty years of new star wars material, SOMEBODY GOT IT FUCKING RIGHT.
Playlist:
Four Stroke Baron - Planet Silver Screen
Opeth - Deliverance
Allegaeon - Apoptosis
The Plimsouls - Everywhere At Once
Preoccupations - Eponymous
XTC - Drums and Wires
Kevin Morby - Singing Saw
Calexico - Seasonal Shift
Squeeze - Argybargy
Slayer - Live Undead
Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery
Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun
Devo - Going Down (single)
Fleet Foxes - Shore
Greg Puciato - Child Soldier: Creator of God
Various Artists - Joe Begos's Bliss Spotify Playlist
Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full
Loathe - I Let It In and It Took Everything
Code Orange - Beneath
Card:
A solid foundation for a solid trilogy. That's what I've been thinking about as I approach a stopping point in Shadow Play Book Two. I have to wind this plot down just right by the end of this section of three sections, so after I do one last post-Beta Reader edit on Murder Virus and release it, I can hop back into Shadow Play and really make that third act SPRING.
