A recent discovery about which I know very little other than the fact that I really dig this album. Black Mare's Bandcamp is HERE, and there still appear to be vinyl copies of her 2020 record Death Magick Mother.
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I saw two huge movies this weekend and the results are not what I expected at all. First up, David Lowery's The Green Knight
From my Letterbxd review:"Gorgeous. A must on a big screen. Andrew Droz Palermo deserves so many awards. There are some technical issues I had with the way it’s written and directed, as well as a few scenes that felt like missteps - to quote Peter Griffin, “the movie insists upon itself” - but overall this is a beautiful attempt at Pure Cinema, which can NEVER be a bad thing."
Next, James Gunn's The Suicide Squad, which I would have been perfectly content to - just like the first one - never watch until a confluence of events made me curious enough to try.
The result? Possibly my favorite comic book movie ever. Wow. Just wow.
Playlist:
Pilot Priest and Electric Youth - Come True OST
The Plimsouls - Everywhere At Once
King Woman - Celestial Blues
Bloodslide - How Glad I Am (single)
Yob- Clearing the Path to Ascend
Sacred Reich - Independent
College - Teenage Color EP
Polica - Give You the Ghost
David Lee Roth - Apple Music Essentials
Windhand - Soma
Droids Attack - Sci-Fi or Die
Black Mare - Field of the Host
Dead Milkmen - Welcome to the End of the World
The Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed
Card:
The Alchemical marriage - recognizing disparate and/or complementary elements and bringing them together to marry their strengths in a way that supports the great work. That's kind of a hoighty toighty, old school Aleister Crowley interpretation - High Magick and all that rigamarole, but it applies. I'm seeking to write an extremely short story for submission to an anthology. Brevity is definitely not where my overall strength in writing lies. However, I'm excellent at slicing and dicing in the edit. So... edit in the head, before the fingers hit the keys.
I'm not a fan of the Black album. In fact, everything that came after that album makes me not want to be a fan of this band at all. However, I could never turn my back on those first four records by Metallica, especially Master of Puppets.
However...
The almighty algorithm saw fit to send 'Sad But True' my way Monday when an Alice in Chains record I was listening to on Apple Music ended and I didn't choose another one quick enough. I heard those opening chords and lingered. Then, before I knew it, I was into my second go-round with the song, actually physically restarting it after its conclusion.
Dare I say it, but this is a good song.
Nothing about 'Sad But True' is what I like about the music from this band that I like, but divorcing the song from its creators for a moment, I found there is almost a Doom vibe to this one. Also, there are some haunting elements in the choruses - not sure if those are keyboards or a guitar effect. Either way, I doubt I'll be jamming the whole record any time soon, but I've already added it to a playlist.
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I finally got around to watching Ivan Kavanagh's Son on Monday night. Jesus, this one is a rough watch. A very good film, freaky as all hell, but also there's some pretty disturbing stuff just below the surface.
This won't be for everyone. There's an undercurrent of abuse - it's not front and center or showcased, but it's discussed as the motive for certain events in the film, and that lingers. That said, I'm pretty squeamish with anything like that, and although this stayed with me, I can't say it did so in an overtly, or in any kind of discomforting way. What the film did do right was be well made and quickly paced, as well as take those unpleasant ideas and weave them into a pretty compelling and effective Horror film.
NCBD:
I feel like this cover says it all: This series is BIG.
Maybe it was binging the recent MOTU sequel series that primed for this, but I LOVE this cover. Total Skeletor.
This is the 1:15 variant for Ed Piskor's Red Room #3. I'll most likely not be able to get my hands on this particular variant, but it's awesome as all hell.
The end to an amazing series. Can't wait to reread the entire run, start to finish in a nice, tight burst. Talk about great characters!
Casey Jones! These "Best of" TMNT books have been among my favorite comics in years, and I kind of expect this one to go right up alongside the Raphael one from a few months back as the best of the bunch.
I'm not actually certain I will buy this one, but I just love the fact that these two bizarre ass characters have their own book. Five-year-old me would be ecstatic!
The throwaway panel of the High Evolutionary and the promise his presence brings is what has me coming back for issue 2, although I will say, rereading Grant Morrison's New X-Men has me feeling some major love for the corner of the Marvel Universe I wrote off due to 'strip mining' the characters a few years ago. Let's see where this book goes.
Playlist:
Jerry Cantrell - Atone (pre-release single)
Alice in Chains - Eponymous
Alice in Chains - Rainier Fog
Not a lot of full album rotation today as I leaned into a new playlist for the upcoming second episode of the new Metal Podcast I'm doing with Anthony and Tori from The Horror Vision. We're recording the new episode this coming Saturday morning, so it should be up this coming Tuesday. The topic? Well, if the playlist doesn't make it obvious, it's Thrash Metal.
Card:
Reminding me to leave the old paradigms (and projects) behind in the face of reconciliation with previous collaborators.
One of my favorite tracks from what is - in my not-so-humble opinion - one of the finest records of the 1990s. I've had the Rev on my mind lately, and have been digging back through the records I played endlessly during my 20s. Primarily, that would be 1996's It's Martini Time, 93's Full-Custom Gospel Sounds, 94's Liquor in the Front, and 1998's Space Heater. Nothing against any of the records that followed those, but that's just kinda where I check out with the Rev.
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I love all the super weird body horror this new decade seems to be bringing us. Mosquito State looks like another mind-bending high concept film inspired by the long line of Body Horror that David Cronenberg's work inspired, and his son Brandon redefined for the modern age (Not that DC isn't modern. He's ultra-modern, and all signs point to his next film reminding us about that the same way his novel Consumed did a few years back). Either way, kudos once again for Shudder bringing us all this awesome body horror.
Playlist:
Cloud Cruiser - I: Capacity
Peter Gabriel - So
Jethro Tull - Benefit
Cindy Lauper - She's So Unusual
ZZ Top - Rhythmeen
Reverend Horton Heat - Liquor in the Front
Reverend Horton Heat - It's Martini Time
Droids Attack - Sci-Fi or Die
AC/DC - The Razors Edge
Alice in Chains - Rainier Fog
Beautiful Brutality Playlist for the week of August 2nd, 2021
Black Sabbath - 13
Space Burial - Mudtrout
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Compromise and the uniting of disparate elements. Not sure what this is pointing to, exactly, but it's pretty good, general day-to-day life advice.
The youtube algorithm surprised me Saturday night by throwing the new Jerry Cantrell single my way. I had no idea this album was on the horizon, and despite my hot/cold relationship with Mr. Cantrell's other solo albums - all of which I like, but none that have really stuck with me like, say, the previous AIC album did - I really liked this song. What's more, and this is extremely rare, the video really helped drive home how I felt about the song. I feel like Cantrell is aging both as a human and a songwriter in a very elegant manner, and that brings great joy to my heart. Alice in Chains was, after all, birthed in a pretty severe amount of trauma.
The album, Brighten, drops on December 17. You can pre-order it HERE, though all the vinyl appears to be sold out at this point.
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Rewatched a couple of movies this past week that I'd been wanting to for quite some time.
First, I finally picked up a copy of Dan O'Bannon's 1984 classic Return of the Living Dead on Blu-Ray. Despite my posting the Scream Factory trailer here, the version I purchased was the MGM release, simply because I didn't want to shell out $35 for it.
This film is a rarity to me: despite the comedic elements, RoTLD remains one of the most disturbing and frightening flicks I know. There's something to the starkness of the sets that creates an isolated feeling that permeates and really adds to the siege elements. Also, the entire idea that the dead are compelled to feast on the brains of the living because, as the torso-zombie lady says, "The pain of being dead," really disturbs me. Especially after Freddie dies and begins to repeatedly scream, "It hurts! It hurts!"
Next, a few months back when Severin announced they would be remastering and releasing Gabriel Bartalos's Skinned Deep, I pre-ordered it. This is one my friend Dennis gave me back in the day, part of the original Fangoria's "Gore Zone" three-pack that also included the Irish zombie film Dead Meat, and The Last Horror Movie. I sold most of these back when my life was imploding in 2014 and had pretty much assumed Skinned Deep was something I had to consign to the aethers of the post-physical media world.
Enter Severin.
This is an extremely bizarre take on the backwoods slasher film that transports the crazy family of killers to the plains of the Southwest (I think). Watching it Saturday night, there's a really unique, really heightened 'You're where you don't belong" feeling to the flick, to the point that, combined with the over-the-top characters, I felt an almost dream logic over the entire story. I ended up conking out near the end, so I have to go back this week and watch it again.
Playlist:
Metal Church - Blessing in Disguise
Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments
The Replacements - Tim
Zen Guerilla - Positronic Raygun
Peter Gabriel - So
The Maness Brothers - Tammie Jean (single)
Cloud Cruiser - I: Capacity
Card:
This card always tells me to stay stream-lined, keep my head down in the fray, and refuse to relinquish what I've set my sights on.
Jesus Christ, who didn't die last week? We lost three big names, and I wanted to pay some tribute here.
R.I.P. Dusty Hill:
Dusty Hill, founding member of ZZ Top. I never realized Dusty sang lead on Tush. What a band. I think my third ever CD when I was in early high school was the ZZ Top greatest hits album.
R.I.P Joey Jordinson:
Say what you want about Slipknot, but this is the song that broke my hate for the guys that I still insist totally ripped off Mr. Bungle. The drums on this song are amazing.
R.I.P. Mike Howe:
I haven't listened to Metal Church in a very long time, but there was a time when they were pretty important to me. My girlfriend in High School had their first couple of records, and I can remember laying stoned out of my mind listening to this song and feeling that intense thrill that the really epic 80s thrash stuff inspired in me at that age. I still feel that now, and it has a lot to do with Mike Howe's vocals. This song crushes.
Playlist:
ZZ Top - Rhythmeen
Metal Church - Blessing in Disguise
Metal Church - Eponymous
The Replacements - Tim
The Replacements - Let It Be
The Replacements - Sorry Ma, I Forgot to Take Out the Trash
Somehow, I completely missed that Philadelphia's Mannequin Pussy has a new EP out. You can pick up Perfect over on the group's Bandcamp. As I have come to expect, the five songs are perfect individually or taken as a whole. There's more of that 90s flavor they wear on their sleeve, but as with the band's other releases, this is not tribute or referential music. Mannequin Pussy is the real deal.
And I'm happy to have been able to write that last sentence.
NCBD:
One of the things I've realized as I delve back into the Spider-Man issues I grew up with is that the draw for me to Spidey was always weighed heavily on his rogue's gallery, most of which use visages straight out of Halloween or Horror Movies. I know for a fact that the first Spidey comic I ever bought, Amazing #289, was based on the Hobgoblin. Since then, Venom, Jack O' Lantern, Green Goblin and so many others that escape me at the moment all piqued my interest because of their macabre personas. And now we have Kindred, who is kind of a cross between the Hobgoblin and Doctor Octopus, except with giant millipedes instead of metal arms. Creepy A.F.
The final issue of what may be my favorite series of the year. Marvel, please give Daniel Warren Johnson his own monthly book with either Bill or one of your other, lesser-used cosmic characters.
Another fifth and final issue. I'm interested in seeing if this one is going where I think it's going.
Peter David's Symbiote Spider-Man returns, and this time, we're going into the Crossroads storyline that the criminally underrated Bill Mantlo penned for the Incredible Hulk title during his early 80s run on the title. I just completed my collection of and re-read that Hulk story a month or two ago, so I'm psyched at this book popping up and playing in that sandbox!
Last weekend, I re-read the first That Texas Blood storyline and found it's about a hundred times better than I remembered, and I remembered really liking it! One subsequent issue into the new arc left me wanting more, so here it comes.
These TMNT annuals are always pricey but also always worth the extra dough. Plus, I'm excited to see the Rat King again!
Playlist:
Plague Bringer - As the Ghosts Collect, the Corpses Rest
Adam Egypt Mortimer - The Obelisk
Mannequin Pussy - Perfect EP
Iress - Prey
Dead Milkman - Welcome to the End of the World
John Carpenter and Alan Howarth - Prince of Darkness OST
King Woman - Celestial Blues
Card:
Probably a good idea, as a newfound love of Session IPAs has precipitated an increased nightly beer count on my part. When I told my GP how many beers a night I drink (2-4, maybe as many as 8 on the weekend if we have company) during a recent physical, she did a bit of a double take. Annual routine bloodwork bears out my health, but this card reminds me it's never a good thing to tempt fate. Which is a figure of speech, as I don't believe in fate.
Fell back into Chicago's super underrated industrial grindcore masters Plague Bringer yesterday. This band should be so much more well-known in the metal/industrial community than they are. There's literally nothing I can think of that batters me like this album does. From the drawing of breath that opens the first track, I smile and prepare to be undone.
While looking around on their Bandcamp for any sign of recent activity (none), I discovered that in 2017 they released this "Lara Flynn Bringer' shirt and now I am extremely sad that it's sold out, there are none I could find on ebay or etsy, and I'm shit out of luck acquiring one.
Maybe Plague Bringer will resurface and do another run of it. Maybe. In the meantime, if you dig this kind of sonic madness, PB's Bandcamp is HERE.
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After hearing about Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz's 1973 underrated Horror film Messiah of Evil for the first time back on the old Shockwaves podcast a couple years ago, I started to look around for where to watch the film. The title alone had me, along with the fact that I couldn't remember ever hearing of it before. Back when I was cutting my teeth and really getting into the genre twenty years ago, the two friends who indoctrinated my interest and made it an obsession both had extensive film collections, so the fact that, between the two of them, I don't think either ever mentioned it surprised me. Turns out that's because the film wasn't released on DVD until 2009. That brief mention on Shockwaves sent me into a tizzy trying to track down a streaming service that featured the film. No dice, until two years ago I found it on Prime.
Score, I thought. Only no, no score at all. I started the film and turned it off after only a few minutes because, whatever source the streaming giant culled the film from, the picture quality was unwatchable. Maybe my relatively recent conversion to the Cult of Blu Ray at the time - something I swore for years I would never do - had spoiled me. I've become a bit of a stickler for clean picture transfers, and this one wasn't even what I'd call weak. It was awful. This prejudice is not a bad thing at all, I realize now, except that, for Messiah of Evil, it meant I would have to wait.
Fast forward to last week when I fired up Shudder and found that not only had they added Messiah of Evil, but the picture quality is gorgeous! So after a few false starts over the last five days or so, I finally watched the film last night. I was not disappointed.
First, I don't know if it's just the similarities between Phillan Bishops's electronic score for the film and Carl Zittrer's for another under-seen film from the 70s I adore, Bob Clark's inimitable Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, but Messiah of Evil's score made me warm to the film immediately. Add to that the fantastic settings - most especially our heroine Arletty's missing father's home on the beach, the design behind which was created by artists Jack Fisk and Joan Mocine, the former of which would go on to work with David Lynch on Mulholland Drive and Paul Thomas Anderson on There Will Be Blood and The Master, and I could not take my eyes off the screen. If you read this blog, you'll know how important both Lynch and PTA are to me, so you can imagine what a harmonic charge I felt realizing there was precedent here that fit with my own personal film aesthetic.
There is not a lot of information about Messiah of Evil out there on the internet. However, in regard to the design and look of the film, I found what I feel is the holy grail over on Dr. John Trafton's website. His article Messiah of Evil: Film and the Influence of L.A. Pop Art absolutely blew me away. Mr. Trafton's wealth of knowledge on not only Los Angeles' history, but Film, Pop Art and the overall social fabric of the City of Angeles post-1940 makes for fantastic reading. I can't recommend this enough, whether you want a deep-dive into Messiah of Evil, or just an interesting read that focuses on Art can influence Cinema; you can find the article HERE.
Messiah of Evil has a real work-with-what we have vibe; Katz and Huyck smartly use a lot of California's most attractive and, when shot right, surreal asset: the beach. The sound of the waves is nearly omnipresent here, and if you've ever stayed in a town where that is indeed the major sonic background, you'll know it makes for a heightened, slightly surreal experience. The constant sound of the ocean seems to work in contrast to the everyday world we humans have made for ourselves, especially here in LaLaLand where commerce is god. This makes sense when you think about it; the ocean has always been a transcendent experience for me because to sit on the beach and quietly listen to the waves, you're literally sitting on the edge of humanity's world, listening to the planet breathe. In other words, this is one of the few experiences available to us where humanity is dwarfed by the larger organism that birthed us: the Earth.
It's worth mentioning that this oceanic setting firmly establishes Messiah of Evil in a sub-genre I have recently become quite enamored with, the aptly named Seaside Horror. I guess I've always been mildly aware of the feel of this genre-within-a-genre, however, it wasn't until Joe Bob Briggs showed both Dead and Buried and Humanoids from the Deep on his Last Drive-In double feature this past season that I fell in love with both and gained an understanding of the Seaside Horror aesthetic as a style for which many filmmakers have contributed entries. The idea of a double or triple feature with Messiah and either or both of these films, or John Carpenter's The Fog or even Dan Gildark's Cthulhu makes me nearly giddy with excitement. Hell, perhaps I should look into organizing a Seaside Horror Marathon?
Finally, another aspect of this film I found fit its tone perfectly was the Night of the Living Dead references in regard to its ghouls. Messiah seems to split the difference between zombies and vampires, which is cool because I don't know how much of either creature I need to see again at the moment. Mr. Trafton talks at length about this in the piece I linked to above, so I'll just implore you to go read what he has to say, while I wrap up this rather lengthy post and get on with working on the sequel to Shadow Play.
Plague Bringer - As the Ghosts Collect, the Corpses Rest
Card:
In some respects, I have been listening to my own personal dogma and not to my intuition. This is a nice reminder to be aware of that. We all need help thinking outside the paradigms we draw up for ourselves.
