Coda of the Dead

 

Probably the second Led Zeppelin song I ever heard, and possibly the first one I heard while seeking out the band's music (oh so long ago now), I still have a huge crush on "Ozone Baby". I feel a huge Zep binge coming on and I welcome it with open arms.

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While I won't be watching Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead tonight - it's Joe Bob night, of course - I will be checking this out at some point this weekend. I'm hoping for big, dumb fun but not really expecting to get even that. I really hope I'm wrong. 

 

Speaking of Netflix, here's a teaser the streaming giant just dropped for an upcoming flick that has me very intrigued. I hardly go to Netflix anymore for anything, however, that sometimes works against me. I have to try and remind myself that despite the ginormous size of the company and somewhat banal output, they did bring us flicks like Cam, Hold the Dark and even Stranger Things. So they are capable of really hitting the nail on the head. 

Love that red!

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Playlist:

Les Discrets - Prédateurs

Alice in Chains - Dirt

Iron Maiden - Fear of the Dark

The Mothers of Invention - Freak Out!

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

White Lung - Eponymous 

The Jesus Lizard - Liar

Jackie Wilson - Higher

Blanck Mass - Animated Violence Mild

Faith No More - The Real Thing

David Zinman, Dawn Upshaw & London Sinfonietta - Gorecki: Symphony No. 3

Dead Man's Bones - Eponymous

Led Zeppelin - Coda

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And now for something completely different...

I hung out with my good friend Keller yesterday (we're both vaxxed), and at the crux of our evening, he pulled a spread for me with his Marseille Deck. My question pertained to K and I looking for a house, and his answer was extremely helpful, even if it wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear.

The Associate

This track popped up in Rose Glass's Saint Maud - which we review and discuss on the newest episode of The Horror Vision Horror Podcast, and it made me immediately pull out Down and pop it into rotation. Of the classic Lizard triptych of essential records - Goat, Down and Liar - Down usually comes in third for me. That said, it's still among the greatest albums of the 90s in my opinion, and it's always a good feeling to reconnect with their music, especially after encountering it in a modern movie. 

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NCBD:

I'm LOVING that Marvel is taking so much of my money every month for Amazing Spider-Man. Nick Spencer's run has me hooked, and as of this issue, it looks like Bagley is back on the art!

The Autumnal is one of those rare, truly unnerving stories that feels like it could very easily be picked up and turned into an A24-ish movie. Let's hope that happens eventually, but in the meantime, issue 6 left us in a place that suggests this week's #7 will be crazy!

This series is riding at about a 65% approval rating with me at the moment, but I've apparently locked back into Marvel fan-boy gear for the first time since the MCU's Civil War broke it, so I'm enjoying the hell out of that 65%. Also, Dane's anthropomorphic black goat-headed butler is named Phillip. I can't love that enough.

This series. Whoah. Timely; a much-needed window into what other people go through to get into this country. 

I HAVE to have this cover. Love Stray Dogs, and issue #3's cliffhanger has had me on edge at the mere mention of the series since last month. 

Another book I also wanted to mention is Osaka Mime. I was lucky enough to have Behemoth Comics reach out to my podcast A Most Horrible Library a while back and send us an advance of Andy Leavy and Hugo Araujo's Osaka Mime graphic novel. I really dug this book and seeing its release slated for this week, suggest people pick it up.

A black and white Urban Horror story set in Japan, here's the solicitation:

"When a couple are found brutally murdered in the Dotonbori District in Osaka, Japan, two detectives from the Supernatural Unit of the Osaka PD must hunt down and apprehend a dangerous and murderous Mime, a shadowy shape-shifter which can take the form of the last person it ate. How do you catch something so dangerous, that can hide in plain sight?"

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This one snuck in under my radar, but looks fabulous! Featuring Raised by Wolves' Niamh Algar, the idea of setting a Horror story in the video nasty area already has me hooked, however, toss in the missing sister seen-in-a-movie bit that Ed Brubaker just played with in Friend of the Devil, and I'm super psyched for this one to drop on VOD June 18th!

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Playlist:

The Jesus Lizard - Down 

Soundgarden - Down On The Upside

Neverly Brothers - Dark Side of Everything

Ghost - Meliora

Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me

The Doors - LA Woman

 

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A good omen considering we have officially begun to settle back into a genuine sense of normalcy. K's birthday Dinner at Lazy Dog Cafe on the patio last night was the first time we'd eaten a meal in a restaurant in over a year. It felt nice to celebrate my Empress with such a marked occasion that signifies a return to life as we knew it B.C.

Snake Eyes

This came on in the car last night as K and I were driving back from our time at the track, and despite hearing the song in its entirety, I immediately came home and threw Zeppelin IV on the old record player just to hear the song the way it was meant to be heard. 

Glorious!

Is When the Levy Breaks the greatest rock song of all time? Well, a claim like that is an impossibility anyway. There is no 'greatest rock song.' Also, it would be hard to back up that claim when you think about all the other great songs just from the era of this album, alone, let alone before or after. That said, it's also a claim I would not contest if made in my presence. Because if Levy isn't the greatest, it's certainly one of them.

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The fact that Parmount dropped a GI JOE trailer this week is serendipitous because last week I actually bought a digital copy of GIJOE: Retaliation. I had not seen it since the theatre, and to quote a tweet I dropped during my re-watch:

#gijoeretaliation is a hot mess that has just enough fan service to make me not hate it, but enough contrivance to make me want to.

— Shawn C. Baker (@OpiniontdBastrd) May 9, 2021

This was K's first GIJOE anything, and she liked it about as much as I do. Anyway, the fact that Retaliation came closer to making me happy than Cobra Rises did felt like a good sign at the time the film came out, and I held out hope that a part three might continue that trend. However, cinematic tie-in properties and shared universes have come a long way since then, and here we are with a reboot.

 

I suppose I should explain that GI JOE is hallowed ground to me. Or at least Larry Hama's 80s comic continuity is. Despite the usual dalliance with comics in my very earliest days - from which all I remember is Thor and Uncle Scrooge - Hama's GI JOE was the book that made me a comics kid. I still remember issue 49, published July 1986. 

I wrote about this somewhere before, but I bought a tattered copy of this issue on the schoolyard from a total dick who actually charged me $0.25 over the cover price (!) while taking a summer school algebra class between 4th and 5th grade. I still have that copy. I must have read that comic 100 times, and when #50 came out, I began having my parents take me to the local comic shop every month so I could buy keep up. Then I began raiding back issue bins. My collection of what I'd consider Hama's essential run of Joe (issues 1-126, although by then the title was waning under the stress of Hasbro's demands that Hama help them save a sinking property) has never been complete, and I don't revisit them often. That said, because of all this, yeah, I want someone to adapt the book into a movie as good as Marvel has done with theirs. 

Hopeless? Maybe, but despite my love of Hama's work, the version of Joe I think would adapt the best to the big screen is the understated reboot that Mike Costa and Christopher N. Gage did in the 00s for IDW, specifically the Cobra book. There has been talk of that series getting the TV show treatment, but in the meantime, we're left with what you see above. Which looks like it might be a better big-budget take on Joe than what we got with the previous two films. I mean, I'm not sure how you kick off a franchise with a single-character origin film, but regardless, this will put my ass in a seat.

Yo Joe!

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Playlist:

The Jesus Lizard - Down

Balthazar - Fever

David Bowie - The Next Day

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

Christopher Young and Lustmord - The Empty Man OST

Zeal and Ardor - Stranger Fruit

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

Led Zeppelin - IV

Saint Maud and Her Zodiacal Light

There's a reason Sunn O))) named a song after Earth founder Dylan Carlson.  

I'm largely unfamiliar with Earth except for this album, which I picked up shortly after its release in 2014, and which became ingrained in my psyche in 2015 as I listened to it over the course of a year where my life imploded and then put itself back together (better). This song, in particular, and Rabia Shaheen Qazi's lyrics and delivery really resonated with me at that time. 

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Well look what finally found its way to a platform where most people can actually see it:

 

I've had a lot of misgivings about this flick and the interminably long build-up to its release. First, A24 makes great stuff, however, I've developed a growing awareness of the films they release that seems to have the express intent of being 'the next Hereditary.' Seeing the Saint Maud trailer for the first time a little over a year ago marked the beginning of this suspicion and the feeling has only escalated since. 

Next, to have bypassed the usual VOD platforms where the everyman fan can pay to rent the film, A24 instead made a deal with West Coast cable channel Epix, where the film has remained exclusive for the last several months. 

Really? Being that no one I know that doesn't live in California has ever even heard of epix, I don't know where - if anywhere - this film was available elsewhere in the country, but I consider this a frustrating manuever on A24's part. I mean, all is forgiven if this helped put the film and its writer/director Rose Glass in a good place in a world where movie releases have become increasingly uncertain and unprofitable. 

Anyway, regardless of these misgivings, I watched Saint Maud yesterday. My reaction?

Wow. 

When religious lunacy replaces addiction, bad things happen. That's all I'll say, other than I really dug Saint Maud, and although I don't really feel as though the way A24 handled its release was warranted, the film is definitely worth watching if you're a fan of the more psychological take A24 tends to curate for their release.

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Playlist:

Earth - Primitive and Deadly

High on Fire - Blessed Black Wings 

Type O Negative - Dead Again

Windhand - Eternal Return

Zeal and Ardor - Stranger Fruit

Algiers - The Underside of Power

Arctic Monkeys - AM

Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

Federale - No Justice

Madeleine Peyroux - Careless Love (single)

David Bowie - Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks)

The Dandy Warhols - Playlist

Cutting Crew - (I Just) Died in Your Arms

Cold Cave - Cherish the Light Years

Corniglia - Eponymous

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Yes. Perfect pull, as the paradigm of the past year died yesterday when, for the first time since early March, 2020, I walked to my coffee shop writing spot and put in a solid writing session. It felt awesome, and I'm going back today!

The Green Knight Full Trailer

More Type O from their final album, and if this isn't a case of the best goddamn final song for a band's career, I don't know what is. I still get chills every time I listen to it, and I've been listening to it a lot. 

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I feel like I may be the only person I know that didn't give very much of a toss about the teaser for David Lowery's The Green Knight that A24 released last year. Earlier this week the full trailer dropped and I have to say, I still don't know that the glimpses of the story that peek through are catching me, however, visually it looks as though we may finally have a companion to the ergot-infused witchery of Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army:

 

There's something so sublime about the imagery here and the narrative it suggests. I'm reminded of Ben Wheatley and John Boorman simultaneously. This may be a reason to head back into a theatre. Maybe.

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Playlist:

Type O Negative - Dead Again

Sampa the Great - The Return

Viet Cong - Eponymous

The Police - Outlandos d'Amour

Primus - Sailing the Seas of Cheese

The Smiths - Meat is Murder

Revolting Cocks - Beers, Steers + Queers 

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When you have all the bloody pieces but just can't get things to work out quite right, that is when Ruin threatens. Which feels more than a little accurate in terms of money and potential residences to be purchased. 

The Web Thread

 

From one of the finest albums ever made.

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NCBD: 

Anything Declan Shalvey has a hand in I will read. I'm stoked that the artist of one of my favorite series (Injection) is also a kick-ass writer!

Thus far, this alternate "What If?" book has my attention. I adore the OG spidey black costume, even before it became Venom, so this is cool to see.

YES! Summer camp slasher - 'nuff said!

I almost forgot about this series; I feel like its release has been a touch sporadic. No matter, three issues left after this one. Aquatic Horror never felt so good.

This series is gorgeous. Really digging it, and if I can get my hands on this variant cover, all the better. 

Loved issue #1, let's see how #2 is.

Marvel is really monetizing Spider-man these days, but I've become a sucker for Nick Spencer's take on the book, even if it is jam-packed with more plot than you can shoot a web at.

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Playlist:

Prédateurs - Les Discrets

Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen

Zeal and Ardor - Wake of a Nation

Christopher Young and Lustmord - The Empty Man OST

Various - The Void OST

Neil Young - Essentials

Dead Again

I missed posting for the anniversary of Peter Steele's death back last month, but the Drab Four have been on my mind. 

It's funny, over the last few years I've fallen into the habit of almost exclusively listening to Type O in the Autumn. Which is weird, because if I was forced to name a 'favorite band' it would probably be them (or Ozzy-era Sabbath). The reason for this weird confinement of their music is something I have been aware of, but not really analyzed.

Until yesterday.

In listening to Type O's final album, 2007's Dead Again, I realized the reason I largely reserve their music for Autumn is that out here in California, we do not have any of the recognizable features of my favorite season. October feels a lot like August, feels a lot like April, etc. After living the first thirty years of you life in the Midwest, the seasons become ingrained in you, in your thought processes and emotions and all kinds of other inner-working, hard-wired stuff. When I moved to the west coast about a year before Dead Again was released, I had to get used to the lack of burning leaves, thunderstorms, and a general sense of what I'll rather dramatically call 'the dying time.' Thus, I established early on a sort of "Internal Autumn" ideal, almost a mantra for my favorite time of year. This usually kicks in during the start of September and lasts through the first week of November. It's how I convince myself that I'm living in Autumn when I'm really not, an homage to the way I lived the years of my life that shaped me. This works, however, I think the inner autumn thing has become more difficult to sustain the longer I'm out here, that much further away from the experience of a real Autumn. Thus, I came up with this idea that if I reserved Type O - still the most Autumn band for my money - exclusively for that time of year, it would help sell this whole charade.

And as is often the case in psychoanalyzing yourself, now that I've picked this apartment, it feels freeing, because I WANT TO LISTEN TO TYPE O NEGATIVE ALL DAMN YEAR LONG.

So let's start here with Profit of Doom, the third - and possibly weirdest - track from Dead Again. 

Damn, Pete. We fucking miss you.

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One of the movies I've been waiting for this year is Maximiliano Contenti's Red Screening, AKA The Last Matinee. I don't know a lot about this one, but check out this bee-oootiful trailer:

I've become quite a sucker for Neo-Giallo, and Horror flicks that take place in movie theatres always work good for me, so I'm jazzed for this one, which will be in theatres on August 6th and VOD August 24th.

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Playlist:

Voyag3r - Doom Fortress

Lantlôs - Lake Fantasy (pre-release single)

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

Type O Negative - Dead Again

Anthrax - Among the Living

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 The 8 of Wands always feels like it's a premonition of good things to come, creatively. I need that right now; things have been slow and syrupy and I need to get myself moving again. The idea is in another week or so, since I am now fully vaxxed, I'll begin walking to my writing spot again. This should help me get back on track, so hopefully the card is a good omen.