Somehow, I either missed or forgot that Human Impact released a single in September of last year. "Genetic" is a terse little fist to the throat, wrapped up tight in Human Impact's trademark, snarling severity. Hopefully, this is a sign of more new music to come.
READ:
I did a lot of catching up on current comics over my brief sabbatical from work earlier in the week. Here's what I read and my take:
I didn't realize The Boys: Dear Becky was ending with issue #8 until I read issue #7. Now that the whole thing is out, I re-read it all from the beginning and enjoyed it quite a bit. The Boys is a really uneven epic in my eyes, with moments of emotional brilliance surrounded by what I've come to think of as Garth Ennis just being Garth Ennis. It worked the best in Preacher, but as with the regular Boys series, Dear Becky tends to step back up into the sublime just as you start to feel jaded about the ridiculousness. Overall, if you only know the show, you probably don't need to go back to the source material - The Boys is possibly the best example of an adaptation-for-screen that has completely trumped its source material - however, if you know and dig the original comic series, Dear Becky will scratch the itch.
Having only just read Laura Marks and Kelley Jones's Daphne Byrne a few months ago, our Deep Dive into Hill House Comics on a recent episode of A Most Horrible Library made me want to revisit this stunning Gaslamp-era New York. It's soooo good. Kelley Jones really just brings the creep factor up to eleven here, and it makes for a really fun, pleasing story with all the fixings - widows betrothed to the Devil, ghastly visions, malevolent visitations, and surly, Hackney con artists using peoples' grief and the rise of spiritualism to take advantage of them.
This one came out in October, but I just read it, then kept it hanging around in the stack so I could read the short story and other backmatter stuff that rounds out every enormous issue of Greg Rucka and Michael Lark's Lazarus, an economy based dystopian world that I have become more and more convinced maybe the closest thing to what the world is going to look like by the end of my lifetime. Equal parts thrilling and intriguing, there's espionage, military strategy, human drama, and action.
I'm using the image for the upcoming HC collection of Hellblazer: Rise and Fall, but if you can find the single issues, that's the way to read this one. The Black Label, Magazine format is perfect for this story, possibly the first new Hellblazer story in years I've actually really liked. This is the 'softer' JC we've seen in recent years, without that trademark Vertigo edge, however, there's still edge to be had, there's homage to previous creators all over the place, and maybe I just really wanted to like A) a new JC story and B) really wanted to like one of these Black Label books, because I dug this one. Three issues, doesn't overstay its welcome, is pretty humorous at times, and still captures some of the Black Magick Heart of the character.
New instrumental album from Depeche Mode's Martin Gore dropped last Friday on Mute. This is the first I'm hearing about it, but I am digging it! Order HERE.
INTERVIEW:
As I mentioned last week, Chris Saunders and I recently had the chance to sit down with comics scribe and artist Jeremy Haun on The Horror Vision's A Most Horrible Library podcast. Available on all streaming platforms, our site, and youtube, it turned out to be a really interesting discussion:
Watch:
I've been off work since Saturday afternoon. K and I took a "mental health week," which I for one needed very badly. We've watched a lot of stuff in that time, which is all logged on my letterboxd. Two of the highlights were:
Much thanks to Mr. Brown on that one. Such a delightful film.
Terminal is a bit of a mess story-wise (although not enough to take away from the experience), but is absolutely gorgeous to look at. That usually isn't enough to get me on a film's side, but Simon Pegg goes a long way, and the obvious Guy Ritchie love helps more than it hurts. Ms. Robbie is pretty great in this one, too (as she usually is).
Playlist:
Let's do something different. Let me take you back to last February when I wrote in these pages how I'd received a Golden Ticket from Relapse Records. This was a random win, based on my pre-ordering of Steve Moore's OST for the 2019 Joe Begos film Bliss. The contest was held to commemorate Relapse Records' 30th Anniversary, so needless to say, there's been a ton of Relapse bands in my playlist of late, as I slowly work my way through all this glorious vinyl.
Razor - Armed and Dangerous
Genghis Tron - Board Up the House
Portishead - Dummy
Valkeyrie - Fear
Zombi - 2020
Boris and Merzbow - 2R0I2P0
Bangles - Different Light
16 - Dream Squasher
Nothing - The Great Dismal
Helmet - Meantime
Human Impact - Eponymous
Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full
Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction
Dream Division - The Devil Rides Out
Dream Division - Beyond the Mirror's Image
The Blueflowers - Relapse EP
The Blueflowers - Circus on Fire
Raspberry Bulbs - Before the Age of Mirrors
Card:
Such an appropriate card, as I will be returning to work this morning after five days off and, as management, need to deal with two employees in a considerably more severe disciplinary fashion than I am used to. Enforcing common sense makes me salty, so I will have to keep my more... robust approach to the language in check.
Wow. I haven't really checked in on Genghis Tron since 2005's Cloak of Love EP, when I fell in love with the track "Arms," putting it on a bunch of mixtapes (ie CDs) and playlists in the early days of iTunes. After only a handful of records in the 00s and nothing since 2008's Board Up the House, Tron is back and have a new record coming March 19, on Relapse Records! Pre-order Dream Weapon HERE.
Watch:
Okay. Wandavision was trying my patience up to and into the third episode, but as of last night's? SOLD.
The same way my favorite X-Men team will always be the Australian hide-out 8-piece of Storm, Havoc, Wolverine, Colossus, Rogue, Longshot, Dazzler, and pre-body shop Psylocke, the Avengers team that sticks in my head is from the same era:
It's not a stellar team, and I can't even say I was a huge fan of any of these characters at the time, but the impending 'End' of the team - very similar to Claremont's Dissolution and Rebirth arc in Uncanny X-Men at the time - coupled with the weird juxtaposition of knowing next to nothing about over half this team, made me interested as hell. Also, the fact that on the cover of Avengers 298 it appeared Dr. Druid was fighting Thor using a Zoid is what probably proved my impetus for picking the book up to begin with:
I digress, big time. However, that's the point. Seeing Monica Rambeau resurface in the hottest current Marvel franchise blows me away and just really makes me take a happy spiral down memory lane. Plus, Kat Dennings? YES PLEASE. Marvel, you have me really interested in seeing how this plays out.
Playlist:
The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes Are the Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings
CCR - Willy and the Poor Boys
Ministry - The Last Sucker
The Big Pink - Velvet (Single)
Mrs. Piss - Self Surgery
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Card:
I can't help but assume this is referring to the fact that we have had two days of glorious rain in LaLaLand and now that I will be off for the next five days, the sun will return and I will be unable to actually enjoy the weather. My folks back home will laugh at this, but the struggle for moisture and rain-soaked atmosphere is real.
Moments after finishing my first listen to Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou's entire new EP The Helm of Sorrow (I was holding out for my vinyl to arrive, but gave in), I log onto youtube and see the two Doom Goddess's have joined forces! Is Anhedonia a harbinger of a full-length to come?
I certainly hope so! In the meantime, I'll play the hell out of this track, because it rules.
A Most Horrible Library is the newest podcast under The Horror Vision umbrella, and my co-host Chris Saunders and I spent a good two hours last night on Zoom talking with comics writer/artist Jeremy Haun. Jeremy's recent book, The Red Mother, wrapped up with its twelfth issue, and I can tell you, it's fantastic. Especially if you're a Clive Barker or Dario Argento fan.
Jeremy is an extremely personable, and very interesting guy. He's a HUGE Horror fan - which endeared him to Chris and I immediately, and he has a bit of a mythology brewing that appears in a lot of what he writes. That mythology - the Four and Seven - also shows up in the short comic stories he publishes via his Patreon, which I subscribed to. Jeremy writes, draws, letters and inks these Haunthology books, and I'm super excited to read them because I'm a sucker for mythologies, and The Red Mother really made an impression on me.
Playlist:
Credence Clearwater Revival - Eponymous
Small Black - Best Blues
Tomahawk - Tonic Immobility (Pre-release single)
Tomahawk - Eponymous
Tomahawk - M.E.A.T. Single
The Jesus Lizard - Lash
The Jesus Lizard - Liar
The Soft Moon - Black Sabbath (Single)
The Soft Moon - Criminal
Dream Division - Beyond the Mirror's Image
Boy Harsher - Country Girl Uncut
Cocksure - K.K.E.P. EP
exhalants - Atonement
Gwar - Scumdogs of the Universe
The Replacements - Tim
Small Black - Duplex (Single)
Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - The Helm of Sorrow
The Bangles - A Different Light
Drab Majesty - Careless
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Card:
I'm writing this Thursday night and it's raining in LaLaLand. As you've no doubt heard me say before, that's pretty rare. I'm on New Retro New Wave tonight, splitting the decades between the 80s and the previous, jumping from The Bangles to Drab Majesty, to Deth Crux, all on vinyl. It's glorious, and I stop to have K try and take a photo of me standing in the rain with my Israeli Military issue gas mask, really just as an excuse to stand out in the rain for a while. When I come in, I draw this card.
I'm burned out from several insanely close COVID scares at work and all the stress that goes with them and the stupid fucking humans responsible. Luckily, by the time most of you read this, I'll be well into my Friday. Then I'll have a quick and painless (I hope) four hours on Saturday, and I'm off until Thursday. Five year anniversary with K on Monday, and three days to be even more of a Hermit than I already am. It will be glorious.
I had never heard Small Black before Heaven Is An Incubator posted about their upcoming album Cheap Dreams one day last week. Seeing the album cover, I KNEW this would be awesome, and it is. You can pre-order Cheap Dreams from Small Black's Bandcamp HERE; looks like there are a few copies of the 'Red Rain' variant left for the vinyl. "Tampa" is the B-side from lead single "Duplex", and both are killer tracks. And this album cover is haunting!
I just want to walk into that scene and disappear.
Watch:
We finished the first season of CBS's Evil on Netflix and here I am, thinking I can just subscribe to CBS All Access and see the second season, and WHOAH! Not out yet!
WTF?!?
For a procedural, this show is NUTS, and it has some genuinely scary AF moments and Michael Emerson gives Paul Reiser's Burke from Aliens a run for his money in the slimy scumf&ck department.
Playlist:
Chelsea Wolfe - Abyss
Genghis Tron - Dream Weapon (pre-release single)
Sleaford Mods - Spare Ribs
Small Black - Duplex Single
The Bangles - Different Light
Credence Clearwater Revival - Eponymous
Drab Majesty - Careless
Card:
Sudden change. I feel a touch hesitant about this.
While scrolling through instagram a few days ago, I stumbled upon the fact that there's a new album coming from Rob Zombie in March. I've posted my conflicted musings about Mr. Zombie in these pages before, and that more or less remains. Do I like this song? Well, here's the thing. This stuff is made to be played loud in a room with distractions. Other people at a party, or, since we can't do that at the moment, while you're cleaning. Just plugging in the headphones and focusing too much on Rob Zombie's songs make a lot of them disintegrate into the broad-stroke caricatures they are. Even this video feels lazy; notice there are no wide shots to place Zombie or his band on the stages or even in the same room that the brief, initial, establishing stage shots set up. Now, this is obviously due to COVID, so of course, I don't want to bag on them for being safe. It just could have used something else; most of RZ's vocals are delivered in Extreme Close Up shots with no context, and they're delivered with next to no energy. This robs the video, and subsequently the song, of the momentum the guitars and rhythm ride.
I'm really reading too much into this, aren't I?
Anyway, a new track drops in a few days, so we'll see how that is. I usually click into an RZ groove for a week or so every year or two, play the hell out of the White Zombie stuff I dig, then cycle through his solo albums (Or better yet, curated playlists of the standouts from those albums), and then move on.
Pre-order The Lunar Injection Kool Aid and Eclipse ConspiracyHERE from Nuclear Blast Records.
READ:
After burning through the entire 12-issue run of his The Red Mother comic from Boom! Studios, I sought out a copy of Jeremy Haun's 2007 graphic novel Narcoleptic Sunday:
About 70% through it, this one is great, too. A B&W Noir, Sunday kicks off with the "guy meets girl, guy sleeps with girl, guy wakes up and girl is dead" Noir trope and pretty much just steps on the gas from there. This is an especially interesting achievement in a story where the lead character has what appears to be a form of the titular sleep disorder, and as such falls asleep at random moments.
Playlist:
The Smashing Pumpkins - Gish
PM Dawn - Set Adrift on Memory Bliss (Single)
Small Black - Duplex (single)
The Cure - Disintegration
The Bangles - Different Light
The Jesus Lizard - Lady Shoes 45 single
The Jesus Lizard - Wheelchair Epidemic 45 single
Rob Zombie - The Triumph of King Freak (pre-release single)
Gwar - Scumdogs of the Universe
Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction
Human Impact - Eponymous
Ministry - The Last Sucker
Card:
Back to my full-size Thoth this morning:
Uncompromising honesty; Balance. I can't help read something like this as advice to stock my personal arsenal with altruistic accouterments for the day.
I've been beginning each day musically with PM Dawn's 1991 "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss".
Being that the track and video were in heavy rotation when I was 15 years old, this one resonates deep. I wouldn't say I was a huge fan of the song at that time, and honestly, I'm not even sure if I realized back then that the bulk of the music is lifted straight from Spandau Ballet's "True," another track that feels archetypal to me now, as I was absolutely aware of its pop-chart presence 8 years prior when I was 7 and had my ear pretty much constantly glued to a little blue, transistor radio that I would take to bed with me every night. Despite that, I don't have a memory of putting two and two together. This was probably because, at 15 in 1991, I'm not entirely sure I (or anyone other than the musicians doing it) knew what sampling was yet, or how it was being used by a lot of artists to craft new music beds for their beats and lyrics.
At fifteen, "Set Adrift" was definitely not in my wheelhouse, and yet, I can remember sitting on the ottoman in my parents' living room while Friday Night Videos (we didn't have cable) played PM Dawn's video. The tropical images flickering before me, I remember thinking there was something so calming about the song. I never sought out the album, but that memory has stayed tethered to me at a distance so that every great while I think of the song.
Last spring, without planning it, while writing the initial draft of Murder Virus, I came to a chapter that I automatically named after this song. I don't name all my chapters, and as I said, I hadn't planned this, but I guess days of hardcore writing had the soup in my head at full boil and that's what came out.
And it fit.
After, I went through an increasingly frustrating attempt to locate the song on Apple Music and could not. Then, two days ago, my Horror Vision co-host Ray Larragoitiy and I had a conversation on the phone that ended up moving around to PM Dawn, and I learned that Ray had gone through a similar search (Note: This song is most definitely in Ray's wheelhouse; he's also the one who, a few years ago, played me Al B Sure's "Night and Day" and subsequently led to my present on-again-off-again obsession with that song) and located the song and the reasons behind its current obscurity.
Rights. It comes down to the fact that "Set Adrift" on "Memory Bliss" contains samples from other bands (from what I see there are the Spandau Ballet and a Soul Searchers sample), or if it's another case of a pre-streaming artist who has been left out of payment rights from their music via streaming services and thus taken the label currently holding the license to court. Either way, Ray also cued me in on the fact that other than youtube, you can actually find the original Set Adrift on Memory Bliss on Apple Music (and not on Spotify, though) on the OST for the 2012 movie Seeking A Friend For the End of the World.
Watch:
Last night, K and I rented Steven Kostanskis's new flick Psycho Goreman on Amazon and set up that little Discord watch party with our friends that I mentioned a few days back. The party itself worked pretty good; there were definitely some issues with volume, but overall, it was cool to watch a flick like this with my long-time movie night friends. Of course, we all had to mute our microphones, so there wasn't the usual camaraderie during the flick, however, it was still a cool Quarantine experience, even if one I wouldn't repeat on a first-time viewing again.
So how was the flick? Fantastic! I think I've posted the most recent trailer here a couple times lately, so let's go back and revisit the original one, back from March of last year:
There's a definite perfunctory nature to a lot of the script, especially when it comes to character development and motivation. That said, look at those insane practical effects!
The writing is not bad in any respect, and if anything does itself a great service by quickly developing a kind of visual shorthand that moves you through exposition and development at a fast clip, because all this really does that one could pick at is creates a 'quick to get to a punchline without a proper set-up' feeling. But again, this isn't an issue that that will resonate negatively to anyone who is A) a fan of this kind of cinema, and B) is not a major publication new critic.
Playlist:
PM Dawn - Set Adrift on Memory Bliss
The Jesus Lizard - Wheelchair Epidemic 45
The Jesus Lizard - Puss 45
The Jesus Lizard - Lady Shoes 45
Mission to the Sun - Damaged (pre-release single)
Mission to the Sun - The Unbroken Sea (pre-release single)
Small Black - Best Blues
Small Black - Duplex Single
The Police - Synchronicity II (single)
Robert Fripp - Exposure
Queens of the Stone Age - Villains
The Black Keys - El Camino
The Jesus Lizard - Last EP
Jefre Cantu- Ledesma - Love's Refrain
The Jesus Lizard - Liar
Ministry - The Last Sucker
Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction
Dance with the Dead - B-Sides: Vol. 1
Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf
Card:
With the inauguration, the Tower definitely toppled this week. However, what also happened, is we kind of started a process whereby all the crazies come out of the woodwork and into the light, which is both good and bad. I had this happen to me this week - beyond the media streams all around us - when an old friend resurfaced on social media to show his ignorant worldview and it made me realize what this card is really communicating is something I think will ultimately be more insidious.
The war on education and the educated.
Have you noticed alt-right folks using the term 'indoctrination' to replace 'education?' This isn't something new, but I believe it's found a larger setting of influence in the wake of our previous administration, and it seems as though the idea of avoiding or actively badmouthing/undermining education is going to become a much bigger issue in the immediate future. Because, you know, why go learn facts if they conflict with what you want the world to be?
Make no mistake, this is a major campaign in the larger setting of the war on reality that I believe will undermine what we think of as real to the point that, in the next ten years, I believe the world and Reality will no longer look anything like what it does now. And that's true of the current moment, if you stop to compare your day to day in 2021 with your day to day of just a few years ago, however, if Reality takes a big enough hit, my guess is that the Science Fiction needle might move drastically enough that things really get strange, kind of like what March 2020 did.
