Every Loser

 

A few weeks back, I hadn't even realized Iggy Pop had a new record until Mr. Brown messaged me about Every Loser. After a couple listens, I'll say it's a pretty solid album. Then I heard it again this weekend and it really grabbed me.

I haven't been all that receptive to the stuff Mr. Pop has done in the last ten years or so. The album with QOTSA as his band was okay, and although I did dig 2013's Ready To Die and his work with Underworld, neither held my attention for very long. Probably not the music's fault. This record, however, has something different: Producer Andrew Watt, the man that made the two most recent Ozzy Osbourne records. As good as those are to Ozzy, this is to Iggy. 

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NCBD:

NCBD picks! 

Yeah, I know I'm cutting back on what I buy, but I can't pass up a new Tynion book. Especially one titled Blue Book.

I skipped last week's Nightcrawlers, but the first Storm and the Brotherhood entry in Sins of Sinister was good, so I'm definitely picking up Immoral X-Men #1. 

Saga brings me great joy. 

Phantasmagoria has proven to be a sleeper hit for me, and I've next to no doubt that, once this issue is out and the series is tied up, it will end up on my 'Best Of' list for 2023.

Cutter Vs. Erika? 

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Playlist:

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - Land of Sleeper

Various - Fight! Playlist

Portishead - Third

Beak> - Kosmik Musik

Abby Sage - Smoke Break (single)

Abby Sage - The Florist EP

Ozzy Osbourne - The Ultimate Sin

Perturbator - Dangerous Days

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Monetary conflicts that affect both K and myself at the moment. We're having issues getting our tax returns - which we did on the 8th - submitted due to some computer issues with the company we go to. I take this to mean hold steady and don't let it create conflict.

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - The Weatherman

 

I had not heard of the band Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs until Mr. Brown sent me something about their newest record Land of Sleeper, which dropped on Friday. I listened to this one on the way up to Indiana on Friday, and it's a fantastic Doom/Stoner Rock record. Favorite song so far? "The Weatherman." Really unique song that almost reminds me of a Robert Howard entry into the Cthulhu Mythos with its eerie chanting and whining guitar. Check it out, and the Seven Pigs Bandcamp is HERE.

 

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Watch:

I watched three movies yesterday. Here's the list in trailers:

 

Outstanding film! There are a few little acting hiccups with the kid leads, but not in any way that takes away from what's here. If you ever wanted to see what Reservation Dogs mashed up with The Thing would look like, find Slash/Back on Shudder and hit play.

   

I had not seen Red Dawn since it first hit VHS, so circa 84/85. This was homework for an upcoming episode of Elements of Horror, with the remake following tonight (remake I have never seen). I can't help wonder how much of the OG Red Dawn is propaganda, or if this was simply a case of, "Hey, these fears run rampant in our culture, let's play with what it would look like if it really happened."

The sad irony, of course, is that if you push this up to today and set it in Ukraine, well, it becomes a f*ckin' documentary.

This movie remains as wonderful and ridiculous as always. Hey Keith David - just put on the damn glasses already!

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Playlist:

Portishead - Third

Beak> - Kosmik Musik

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

I keep seeing that Empress coupled with Aces, which makes me feel like I'm flirting with some kind of breakthrough. This time, instead of an emotional nod, we see Will, and adding to that the Five of Cups, which speaks of Emotional conflict, I'm left wondering what am I not seeing? This doesn't appear tied to my writing endeavors, and the last five days have been a bit of a vacation from that, so I'm not sure how to interpret this. In cases like this, I've begun leaving the three-card Pull on my desk all day as I work, so the cards are always right in front of me. 

Slashing/Back to 1984

 

Driving back from Indiana yesterday was a pretty serene experience. After an amazing weekend with my best friends in the world, I hit Route 31 and dug into a deserted drive back to Tennessee, accompanied for the first few hours by a handful of great Rock n' Roll albums. First up - Bowie's Diamond Dogs. I wasn't high, but I swear, I heard things in this listen that I hadn't ever before and really came out the other side with a new appreciation. Of particular mention, 1984, the arranging and production of which inspired a considerably great appreciation than on previous listens. There's a mindset to this album that it takes a very strong concentration to crack; I'm not saying I didn't dig DD before, but I guess I'd never listened to this one in such a concentrated, uninterrupted session before.  Aside from Rebel Rebel - which would have originally been the opening track on side two, and thus strategically placed to be the first song heard after the album is stopped and physically flipped over and re-started, there is a sonic and conceptual vein that runs through this record that almost makes it flow like one long song. 

I'm re-posting this track from youtube user Mister Sussux's channel, which, if you're a Bowie fan, you might want to check out and subscribe to, as it has some really cool Bowie clips.

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Watch:

I missed the trailer on this back a few months ago, but after catching it this morning on accident, I have to say, Slash/Back goes to the top of my Shudder watch list:

One part Stranger Things/Reservation Dogs, one Part The Thing or Slither - I purposely stopped watching the trailer the moment it looked like they might reveal the monster - this looks fantastic. This is the first feature from Slash/Back Director/Co-writer Nyla Innuksuk, who I know nothing about but have a feeling will be getting a spot on my radar after this one. 

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Playlist:

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - Land of Sleeper

Telekinetic Yeti - Primordial

Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues

Cinematic Void Podcast - Episode 62

Trombone Shorty - Lifted

Television - Marquee Moon

Frank Black and the Catholics - Live at Melkweg March 24, 2001

David Bowie Diamond Dogs

The Police - Outlandos D'Amour

Dr. John - Locked Down

Beck - Odelay

David Bowie - PinUps

Various - Rocktober Blood Soundtrack

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Emotional recharge after letting go of the urge to try and control Earthly things we cannot. I'm not entirely sure what this is saying, but I have a feeling it ties into recent work/life stuff. 

Brainiac - Smothered Inside

 

Mr. Brown recently set me up with a vinyl copy of The Predator Nominate, a newly published "lost" demo from Dayton, Ohio legends Brainiac. If you don't know the Brainiac story, it's one of the saddest in 90s indie rock. A fantastic band cut down right as they began achieving the status they so greatly deserved when their vocalist/guitarist/keyboard/chief songwriter died in an automobile accident. Since the tragedy in 1997, members have gone on to start Enon, Model/Actress, Shesus, and probably about another dozen bands I'm forgetting at the moment. Recently, following the Transmissions after Zero documentary, those surviving members released a small cache of "Basement tapes," which appears to be book-ended by this, the EP that, if I understand it correctly, would have followed their final EP, Electroshock for President. Electroshock has always filled me with a great melancholy - hearing the direction the band was headed excites the mind to what would lie ahead. Now, we get a glimpse, and it's a pleasure to breeze through these nine tracks and think about how they might have heard if the band could have finished. 

 RIP Tim Taylor, alongside The Jesus Lizard, Brainiac was probably my favorite 90s band from that independent scene. 

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Watch:

Super bummed to have finally got around to watching Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese's 1899 on Netflix, only to find out the streaming service canceled it.

Perhaps not quite as riveting as the creators' previous Netflix show Dark, which is just about the best time travel narrative I've ever encountered, 1899 had a lot of elements recognizable as having come from the same minds as Dark, but with a pretty grandiose SciFi leverage at its core. Big cliffhanger and we're getting nothing else. Remember when Netflix first started the streaming revolution and they said they'd bring back any popular canceled show from the last few years? Well, now they seem to cancel at the drop of a hat. I'm hoping many Odar and Friese do what Mike Flanagan did after NF canceled his Midnight Club and exit the company in search of a better deal elsewhere. 

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Playlist:

Brainiac - The Predator Nominate

The Police - Outlandos D'Amour

Talking Heads - Fear of Music

Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues

Iress - Prey

Zeal and Ardor - Eponymous

Carpenter Brut - Leather Terror

Code Orange - Underneath

David Bowie - Diamond Dogs

David Bowie - PinUps

Metallica - Kill 'Em All

Fvnerals - Let The Earth Be Silent

Telekinetic Yeti - Primordial

Kermit Ruffins and the Rebirth Brass Band - Throwback

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

A slightly darker-than-normal shot, so apologies. In a bit of a hurry this morning as I pound black coffee and prepare to drive 6.5 hours up to a cabin in the woods where I will spend a blissfully intoxicated weekend with three of my oldest friends. Now, if one of them can just help me translate passages from this book I found at an old antique shop...

Truth Hits Everybody

 

I've been in the mood for The Police lately, and I can't think of a song I like more at the moment than Truth Hits Everybody from their absolutely perfect 1978 debut, Outlandos d'Amour. Talk about a track that will make you start bouncing your leg under the desk. 

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NCBD:

My picks for this week's NCBD:

Donny Cates is off this book, and Ryan Ottley is continuing what I can only assume is the story they conceived together, but this one only has a few more issues, and then Marvel is ending it and will no doubt begin a new Hulk book. I most likely won't be there for that - losing this one in the middle of what I thought was a pretty unique Hulk story is leaving a sour taste in my mouth. Still, until then, I'm still enjoying Hulk Planet. 

Holy sh*t! Do my eyes deceive me? Wow - only a year later. Part of me wants to ignore this just because it's been so long, but oh, what the hell. At this rate, we'll get the conclusion in issue three in 2024, so at least it's not a big financial commitment. Hahaha.

TMNT is kind of creeping back toward the fence for me. 137 issues is a long run; I've had this thought before, though, just after the book's 100th issue, and that lull really only lasted half a year tops and then things got great again, so I'll hang. I probably just have fatigue from this Armageddon Game event taking place that I'm reading this without paying attention to.

 

Boss is back on main art, so I'm happy and can finally go back and re-read everything preceding this to welcome him back. Again, no offense to the artists that filled in, but Boss's style is just so much of this book that having him take a break directly after a hiatus was not a good thing, in my opinion.

Jeez - there was already an X-Men roster vote that I missed? Has it already been a year? Wow. Well, Havoc's out after Dark Web, and big things are afoot, so we'll see. In the meantime, welcome back to The Brood!

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Watch:

After years on the outer regions of my peripheral awareness, I finally watched George Sluzier's Spoorloos, or The Vanishing. Wow.

I loved this. A lot, and I'm happy to be recording an episode of The Horror Vision Presents: Elements of Horror that will cover this next week.

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Playlist:

The Police - Outlandos d'Amour

The Police - Zenyatta Mondatta

The Police - Regatta de Blanc

Various - Joe Begos' Bliss Spotify Playlist

Karl Casey - White Bat XVIII EP
Deftones - White Pony

The Atlas Moth - Coma Noir

Kermit Ruffins w/ the Rebirth Brass Band - Throwback

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

There's conflict, Change and more emotion than you can shake a stick at. Those two 10s mean I'm way too grounded in Malkuth at the moment - Earthly matters battering the inside of my skull. 

Faetooth - Remnants of the Vessel

Not entirely sure how I came to have Faetooth's 2022 album Remnants of the Vessel in my Apple Music, but I stumbled across it there the other day, and it provided a pretty big leap in my mood. Really cool, doomy, deathy album that doesn't sacrifice the downtrodden mood when it goes full-on death-growl heavy. The band hail from "The depths of Los Angeles" (love that) and the album was voted Spin Magazine's #1 album of the year? I'm shocked Spin has such good taste.

 

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Read:

I blew through Alan Campbell's Scar Night over the last week and started book 2 of his Deepgate Codex series on Sunday. I'd read Iron Angel sometime around 2010, so there's not too much I remember. 

Fifty pages in and it's a perfect follow-up to book one, which really fleshes out the world and adds a host of new characters who really up the stakes. We're outside Deepgate and moving into a bigger world, and I'm just as enraptured by Mr. Campbell's prose here as I was in Scar Night. This really is one of the best Fantasy series I've ever read, with just the right amount of Steam Punk influence, without trying to tick all those "Write a Steam Punk Novel" boxes that, while I admit I sometimes have a soft spot for, began to feel endlessly tiring around 2012. 

Also, I think the last time I read these, I had not yet read Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy and reading the Deepgate books now, I can very much appreciate the influence Peake's seminal series had on Campbell. That said, the influence is in no way overzealous, but rather hard-coded into the prose, which makes the experience of re-reading these ever more pleasant than before. 

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Watch:

Speaking of Steam Punk Fantasy, check out this trailer Bloody Disgusting posted about a few days ago:

 

Moon Garden looks like a film that will harken back to the Fantasy epics of my 80s youth - The Neverending Story, Legend, Etc. Totally blown away by the first half of this trailer, and then I turned it off so as not to see too much. Ryan Stevens Harris' new film can't come soon enough.

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Playlist:

Trombone Shorty - For True

Odonis Odonis - Spectrums

Wolfpack - Lycanthro Punk

Metallica - ... And Justice For All

Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments

Deftones - White Pony

Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit Vol. 1

Fvnerals - Let The Earth Be Silent

Faetooth - Remnants of the Vessel

Feuerbahn - The Fire Dance EP

Television - Marquee Moon

Brainiac - The Predator Nominate

Kaiser Chiefs - I Predict A Riot

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Some big ideas/influences here that all seem to shore up ideas about Emotional Conflict being the result of too much unfocused Will. Sounds about right; I'm in a really good routine working on the new book, and it has occurred to me previously that when I'm at a creative spike, I become overly sensitive. 

Fuck Buttons Came From the Woods

 

A little Fuck Buttons to start the day. Been awhile since I jammed these guys. Still one of the best electronic shows I ever saw - circa 2010 at LA's Troubador.

 

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Watch:

Tell me this doesn't look like a bowl of fun:

 

Yeah, the 80s Summer Camp Slasher has been done to death, and maybe this won't work as well as the trailer suggests, but when done correctly, with a dash of something new, this genre still makes my blood sing. There's a full write-up over HERE on Bloody Disgusting.

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Playlist:

C-Building Kids - Shitting in the Urinal

Cocksure - Operation C.O.C.K.S.U.R.E.

Metallica - Hardwired

Karl Casey - XX EP

Fvnerals - Let The Earth Be Silent

Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

In order to transform, Understanding and Balance are required. This is kind of what I'm in the middle of at the moment - I've been on a tear working on Shadow Play Book Two, and it's transforming before my eyes. However, while wholly invigorating, the actual act of this Transformation can lead to an overzealous tendency toward flights of fancy. The writing must remain balanced and joined to the inherent understanding I'm developing - in other words, let the book talk through me, and don't get in its way.