Dreams Come True

I'll admit, I love the song, but don't plan on watching the video. As she gets more clout behind her, and  Still, any new music from Meg Myers is a welcome, joyous thing these days. Her aesthetic, instrumentation, production, and of course, songwriting, are top-notch and always hit me super hard, reminds me a bit of how Garbage hit me the first time I snagged my kid really listened to them.

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After renting Come True on Prime last night, Anthony Scott Burns just became one of my favorite directors. I can't recommend this one enough - imagine Dreamscape married with Beyond the Black Rainbow and that will get you in the ballpark, but Burns' style is all his own, and it's fucking glorious. I just posted the trailer a day or so ago, so here's what will no doubt live on as an ICONIC track from the soundtrack by Electric Youth and Pilot Priest: 

Upon finishing the film, I immediately shot over to Waxwork Records and pre-ordered on gorgeous Cyan Blue with Red and Yellow Splatter vinyl:

I will be 100% shocked if Come True doesn't end up in my top five movies of 2021. I cannot wait to buy this film on Blu Ray.

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Playlist:

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Skeleton Tree

Radiohead - OK Computer

Meg Myers - Sorry

Mastodon - Once More 'Round The Sun

Ministry - Psalm 69

QOTSA - Villains

Sam Cooke - One Night Stand! Live At the Harlem Square Club, 1963

The Pogues - Rum Sodomy and the Lash

The Replacements - Tim

The Raveonettes -  In and Out of Control

SOD - Speak English or Die

Soul Coughing - Irresistible Bliss

Cake - Fashion Nugget

Electric Youth - Breathing OST (For a lost film)

Electric Youth - Come True OST

Dream Division - Beyond the Mirror's Image

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Three of Disks - Too much work of late, it's left me unable to function in my non-work life, so I'll take this as a nod that the hard times are over and things will even back out.

Godflesh - Mothra

As I mentioned the other day, that algorithm on Apple Music has sent me into a spiral with a band I love but haven't listened to in a while. I feel a full-on Godflesh bender on the horizon, and I welcome it with open arms.

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The trailer for Anthony Scott Burns' new flick Come True dropped recently, and it looks creepy as all hell.

 

Ah, you had me at "A Neon-Soaked Cinematic Nightmare." Burns' name is one I marked after his segment in the Horror Anthology Holidays, which seems to be perpetually available on Netflix if you haven't seen it. His "Father's Day" is great, as are most of the others (Kevin Smith's marked the first Smith project in a loooong time that I enjoyed.)

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Playlist:

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

Ghost of Vroom - Ghost of Vroom 2 (single)

Helmet - Meantime

Godflesh - Pure

Drab Majesty - Unarian Dances

Drab Majesty - Careless

Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh

Nothing - The Great Dismal

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Definitive rulings aren't easy, but they're better for everyone. I tend to want to take on a lot of work for other people, but that's not always good for them and usually not good for me. A friend asked me to edit the manuscript for her first novel, and what I found as I worked through the first chapter - roughly 4K words - was a simple edit wasn't possible without getting into re-writing. I dove in and then checked myself: that's not going to do either of us any good, especially her. She needs this experience because as tired of the novel as she probably is at the moment, reworking it will only make her better. This isn't something that easy to tell someone, however, after assuring her I'm in to help for the long haul, in any way I can, I think it's for the best.

The Irresistible Bliss of Jolene's Cake

I bought a new phone this past weekend. It was time. One of the new features on Apple Music that is cribbed from Spotify is when an album you're listening to ends, they throw a bunch of songs at you that the almighty algorithm finds based on what you just listened to. This is a little cool and a little lame. Lame, because Nick Cave dredged up a bunch of really bad stuff the other day, cool because after I spun through Soul Coughing's Irresistible Bliss this morning, Apple went into Cake's "Frank Sinatra". One taste of that track and there was no way I wasn't going all the way through Fashion Nugget, one of my favorite records from the 90s. Here's the thing though. I count myself a Cake fan because of how much I love this record, but I'm not really familiar with their other stuff. So when this particular version of Nugget ended with a live version of "Jolene", I was floored. This track is amazing. Anyway, I'll finally be digging into some more of Cake's discography after this, so I'm pretty excited. It's not every day I get to have a band from my past feel so new to me (I think that's why I play so coy with some bands in the first place).

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NCBD:

Only a few titles this week on NCBD, but that's fine. Last week was a killer.

The Autumnal has been a great Horror title so far, and I'm definitely anxious to see where it's going. Kind of a mash-up of Folk and Ancestral Horror, but with a decidedly more modern feel.

I picked up issue one of Night Hunters a few months back on a whim when I noticed the unmistakable art of Alexis Ziritt. You may know Ziritt's work from Black Mask's 2015 limited series Space Raiders. Hard to say what's going on in Night Hunters after only one issue, but whatever it is, I dig it. From Floating World comics, who are super indie, so give them the benefit of the doubt and pick this one up if you see it at your local comic shop.

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I caught David Keating's Cherry Tree on Shudder yesterday after work and enjoyed it quite a bit. Pretty cool little flick, but then these smaller, English/Irish films tend to be my jam.

 

The make-up at the climax has a definite Nightbreed-era Barker feel, which was cool and added to an already very cool atmosphere.

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Playlist:

Soul Coughing - Irresistible Bliss

Cake - Fashion Nugget

Der Butterwegge - Super Optimiert

Blut Aus Nord - 777 Cosmosophy

Blut Aus Nord - 777 The Desanctification

Godflesh - Pure

The Bangles - All Over the Place

Butthole Surfers - Rembrandt Pussyhorse

 

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 Rewards for creativity and perseverence.

The Bookhouse Boys

From the hallucinatory reverberations of the sax that opens this track, to the seething keyboards that close it, here's an entry from the original Twin Peaks series first OST that often gets taken for granted. Plus, the Bookhouse Boys!

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A few nights back, K and I finally got around to watching the copy of Criterion's 40th Anniversary, 4K restoration of David Lynch's The Elephant Man. This proved to be a deeply emotional experience, not just because of the movie itself, which is an emotional juggernaut, but also because of Criterion's loving restoration of the film and DP Freddie Francis' realization of Lynch's glorious Black and White vision.

This is one of Lynch's films I had only seen twice before: once just after High School, a few years after I got into Twin Peaks' original airing, and once when I bought the DVD released in the early 00s. Neither viewing proved super memorable to me at the time, and now, I can't imagine why that would be. 

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Playlist:

ACDC - Highway to Hell

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis - Carnage

Alan Vega - Saturn Strip

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Skeleton Tree

David Lynch and Marek Zebrowski - Polish Night Music

Aphex Twin - Syro

John Carpenter - Lost Themes III: Alive After Death

Ilsa - Preyer

Angelo Badalamenti - Twin Peaks OST

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As the Firey aspect of Fire, we're doubling down on activity, aka actually getting some shit done. The pre-sale for Murder Virus is underway (I officially announced it on social media last night), and I'm taking a bit of a breather by editing a friend's first novel. Meanwhile, I'm reading up on Hassan I Sabbah and the Assassins, as well as the Tetragrammaton, both subjects that will inform the next two books of the Shadow Play series.

As a side note, if you're reading this and you pre-ordered Murder Virus back when I originally announced it here, please allow me to ask a favor of you. Go back in, cancel that order, and then re-order the book. Due to a printing error with the proofs I was sent, the early pre-orders will be getting an inferior edit of the book, thus I'm trying to catch the few that may have gotten through and get those folks squared away with the definitive version.

After Hours on the Highway to Hell

 

Because it was the first song I heard after waking today. It's been a while since I sat down with some ACDC, so I threw on Highway to Hell and ripped through the first three tracks while getting ready for work. Now that's a fortifying breakfast!

 

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I watched several flicks over the weekend. One of them was Martin Scorsese's criminally under-rated 1985 comedy After Hours. Damn, I love this flick.

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Playlist:

Perturbator - Death of the Soul (pre-release single)
Perturbator - The Uncanny Valley

Alan Vega - Nike Soldier (pre-release single)

Sleaford Mods - Spare Ribs

Robots in Disguise - We're in the Music Biz

Grimes - Art Angels

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - The Night Creeper

Underworld - Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future

Deadmau5 - Random Album Title

Various Artists -  The Best of Northern Soul

The Raveonettes - In and Out of Control

The Raveonettes - Lust Lust Lust

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Damn the Torpedoes

Etta James - Second

The Raveonettes - Raven in the Grave

Ween - Quebec

Ween - Shinola, Vol. 1

The Used - Ocean of the Sky

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Fours are even keel, balance, things get done and we settle into roles/situations/projects. I'm not there yet, but I'm close, so this is encouraging at the moment.

NEW PERTURBATOR!!!

It's hard to believe it's been five years since 2016's The Uncanny Valley, the last album from Perturbator. It seems a lot longer. Sure, there's been an EP and two B-sides/remix discs, but to me, James Kent's Perturbator lives and breathes in the album format. Now, here's the first track of forth-coming Lustful Sacraments, out May 28th on CD and digital, June 25th on Vinyl. You can pre-order those from Blood Music HERE; I was lucky enough to catch one of only 125 of the picture discs!

Let's talk about the new track. I'm reminded of old Nitzer Ebb a bit, early 00s Miss Kitten and the Hacker, and of course, that danger-soaked, percolating blood percussion we all know and love from Kent's previous Perturbator releases, although here there's an underlying wash of 80s dark sparkle and seething industrial menace. In other words, as he promised, this record sounds like it most definitely will be unlike the others. 

Good. Let's push things forward...

 

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I caught Natasha Kermani and Brea Grant's new film on Shudder yesterday afternoon. Very good. Would make a good double-feature with Amy Seimetz's She Dies Tomorrow. 

I won't lie, there's a part of this new wave of existential Horror that makes me a little suspicious. The musings of films like She Dies and now Lucky reminds me a bit of those Existential comedies of the late 90s/early 00s. You know, that loose sub-genre or movement that began with Being John Malkovich - a film I can't say a bad word about - and continuing on into Michel Gondry's films and the wake of films that tried for the same tone. That particular movement reminds me a lot of new-age spiritualism, as it's more about the packaging than the actual philosophy. In other words, it's fun to look like we're contemplating philosophical conundrums and the like, but we're not really going through the work of actually contemplating them. I'd wager I'm probably wrong about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind because, despite the fact that I did not explicitly mention that film by name here, it springs to mind as the actual start of this Cosmetic Existential Genre, so to speak (I always give anything with Jim Carey a bad rap, just because I don't like Jim Carey). 

But I've really shifted from my original point, haven't I?

Lucky is a unique take on a Slasher flick, and I dig the mechanics of what Grant (writer/star) and Kermani (director) have set up for the film. It's a skosh reminiscent of the first Happy Death Day, but not in any way that feels uncouth. However, it's this how the filmmakers dress these mechanics and where it actually goes in the end that felt a little 'huh?' to me. Perhaps I am primarily preoccupied with trying to discern if the point of the film was all men are rapists/abusers. I hate that my mind went there immediately upon completion of the viewing, and it may not even be the film's fault, but that's definitely something that's still in the air, and it troubles me because, you know, I'm neither of those things. Nor are my male friends. 

Anyway, you can see by my train of thought that Lucky did exactly what a good film should do, and that's make you think. So hats off to Lucky, and really, between this and 12 Hour Shift, Brea Grant is definitely becoming one of my favorite new filmmakers. 

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Playlist:

David Bowie - Heroes

David Bowie - Hunky Dory

Opeth - Blackwater Park

PM Dawn - Set Adrift on Memory Bliss (single)

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Bayou Country

The Cure - Pornography

Blanck Mass - In Ferneaux

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Listen to what those who know more about things are trying to tell you, a reminder we can all use from time to time.

It's all Hunky Dory, Baby!!!

A little Bowie to start things off today, because I'm missing his presence in the world a great deal at the moment.

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Here's a great little interview with Nick Cave from last year. Really digging the new Nick Cave/Warren Ellis "solo" record, Carnage, which is great, because I didn't care for Ghosteen at all, as it felt too similar to Skeleton Tree.        

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Playlist:

Jackie Wilson - Higher and Higher

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - Going to a Go-Go (single)

Run the Jewels - RTJ4

Death Grips - Gmail and the Restraining Orders (single)

Death Grips - The Money Store

The Replacements - Tim

Sleaford Mods - Spare Ribs

Dream Division - Beyond the Mirror's Image

The Raveonettes - Lust Lust Lust

The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes Are the Last of the 

 

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 A recent imbalance definitely caused a miscommunication between myself and one of my fellow podcasters. This has postponed the long-planned Drinking with Comics reunion. I'll probably do a deeper pull later this week to try and figure out how to approach solving this issue.