Nico Vega

 

My girlfriend's obsession with Nico Vega is really rubbing off on me. I don't know much about them other than they have since broken up, but both the albums K has introduced me to are outstanding! This track is from their self-titled 2009 album, the entirety of which is fantastic.

 

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Watch:

This looks difficult to watch in the best possible way:

 

I have to say, I've been pretty impressed with Lachlan Watson's acting since being introduced to them via The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and this looks like an even more committed performance than we've seen previously. Also, Director Jeffery A. Brown impressed the hell out of me in 2019 with The Beach House, so I'm definitely game to follow him on a new journey.

 

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Read:

I finished Iron Angel yesterday, the second book in Alan Campbell's Deepgate Codex. Since I'm going to be in LaLaLand for two weeks and don't feel the need to carry a hardcover book with me, I'm going to hold off on Book Three: God of Clocks until I return, opting instead to deep-dive a bunch of books on Elizabethian England for Shadow Play Book Two research. Waiting to read this one is going to be tough, as is waiting to crack into Jeremy Haun's Haunthology, which I received via my Kickstarter pledge a few days ago and did an unboxing video for over the weekend:

 

Seriously, this book is gorgeous; can't wait to read!

 

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Playlist:

Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments

The Veils - ... And Out of the Void Came Love

The Jeff Healey Band - Full Circle: The Live Anthology

The Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro

Mastodon - Once More 'Round the Sun

Metallica - Hardwired

Nico Vega - Eponymous

Nothing - Guilty of Everything

Dr. John - Ske Dat De Dat

Leviathan the Feeling Serpent - Corpse Eater: Satanic Misery Live for the Dead

Jammes Luckett - May OST

Dexys Midnight Runners - It Was Like This
 

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Card:

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

Traveling today. Clarity and Will lead to the completion of an "Earthly" matter, i.e. something to do with our house, I'm pretty sure. A tornado nearly missed us this past Friday, and I've discovered some things that need fixing - not sure if these issues existed before the winds felt like they were going to pull my office from off the top of the garage, but they have to be taken care of. This is not my strong suit, but I'm trying to become someone who can handle issues without hiring out simple 'handyman' work. The skill is definitely in my blood - my Father can fix anything. I just have to double-down when I return from LaLaLand and focus.

Iress - Ricochet

 

New music from Iress! I just broke out 2019's Prey a week or so ago, so they've been on my mind and were actually one of the bands I checked to see if they had a show while I'll be in LaLaLand for the next two weeks. No dice, but at least we have this song. These guys continue to level up. You can purchase Ricochet on Iress's Bandcamp HERE.

 

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Watch:

I watched Andrew Davis's The Final Terror earlier tonight (I'm writing this at 12:53 Saturday, 3/04/23). 

 

A Full Five Fucking Stars! The movie ended two hours ago and I still just cannot stop thinking about it. The absolute pinnacle of the Backwoods Slasher subgenre, in my opinion (and I never thought anything would dethrone Just Before Dawn).

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Pre-Order Music:

New Godflesh this June!

PURGE! No new tracks posted yet, but I saw the announcement and pre-ordered the Silver vinyl from Plastic Head Megastore, evidently the only place you can grab this at the current moment. Here's the LINK, and a random, awesome photo of JKB I found searching for that album cover above, courtesy of Brave Worlds:

I Love this damn band and I have none of their stuff - no JKB stuff at all on vinyl. Some bands are just CD bands for me. Some of my favorites, too. But this, well, even with the UK shipping charge - which was much more reasonable than I've ever encountered before - I just couldn't pass this up.

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Playlist:

The Jeff Healy Band - Full Circle: The Live Anthology (Live Montreal Jazz Fest 1989)

Frank Black - Teenager of the Year

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - Viscerals

Sleaford Mods - Spare Ribs

Church of the Cosmic Skull - There Is No Time

Metallica - Hardwired

Karl Casey - White Bat XVIII EP

Odonis Odonis - Post Plague

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments

Iress - Ricochet (single)
 

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Card:

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

New ideas will lead to the completion of a process, but only if they are weighed carefully for merit and applied in the correct fashion. 100% this references a breakthrough I've had over the last two days' writing sessions on Shadow Play Book 2. Major changes but not in a way that requires a major overhaul. Lots of historical research, though, which is what the cards are confirming as the appropriate avenue. Time consuming but worth it.

Frank Black's Headache

 It's an early Frank Black kinda morning, so I fired up Teenager of the Year. Love this record!

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Watch:

Last night I watched Roadhouse for the first time.

This movie is Ridiculous! I would have turned up my nose and made fun of this even ten years ago, but really, I've come to see a lot of these 80s studio action movies as major studios doing exploitation flicks, and that's essentially what this tries to be. Now, I believe there's a DVD out there with Kevin Smith doing the commentary back like 20 years ago. I'd be pretty interested in checking that out.

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Playlist:

22-20s - Eponymous

Various - Up Above the Stars Spotify Playlist (culled from Barry Adamson's Biography)

T. Rex - The Slider

David Lynch & John Neff - BLUEBOB

Metallica - 72 Seasons (pre-release singles)

Lamp of Murmur - Saturnian Bloodstorm (pre-release singles)

Lustmord - The Others

Bohren & Der Club of Gore - Sunset Mission

Ozzy Osbourne - Patient No. 9

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Card:

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

Willed transformation will result in an energizing new endeavor/perspective. I know exactly what this is referencing. Time to dig out something I've had on the backburner and give it another once over in between working on Shadow Play Book 2.

25 Years of Darren Aronofsky's PI

Wow. Three for three on this new Metallica album. 

Going back to Hardwired, I've become a HUGE fan of this record, and I'm just kind of speechless that this is happening. You know, the idea that Metallica seems to no longer suck. They flirted with this back in '08 with the caricature Rick Rubin produced, but I have my own theories about that one, and it's better left alone. This new era that Hardwired kicked off, however, seems genuine (even if their album covers still blow). 

I think the thing that actually convinced me is, on the deluxe Hardwired, there's a live show from Rasputin's in San Francisco (great record store, glad to hear it still exists). During the show, the band play almost exclusively tracks from Kill 'Em All and a few from Ride the Lightning, and there's just this... ease at play. I mean, we all know these guys are tight as hell, that's never been in question. But the way they turned their back on what they helped create in SF in the 80s, and the frankly bizarre attempts at, I don't even know what to call their albums after the self-titled. Were they trying to market themselves? Were they confused by the music industry and how it was changing? Clearly, because Metallica didn't stop at incurring great swathes of ill-will from their former fans with bad music. Then there was that entire Napster thing. Ugh - talk about a bad look.

But let's forget all that embarrassing stuff. To me, the band I loved as a kid disappeared into an alternate dimension after Justice, but maybe that LHC did bring them back to our 616 and it just took another eight years for them to shake off the PTSD that would surely come from interdimensional displacement.

Now if they could just find Pushead and get the album covers straightened out (Don Brautigam passed away in 2008).

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Watch:

Two nights ago, we watched Moorhead and Benson's Someting in the Dirt. My second time seeing the film since it's West Coast Premiere at last year's Beyondfest, my first thought upon it ending was, "what an awesome double feature this would make with Darren Aronofsky's PI. I made a mental note to find my DVD, and then promptly forgot. Then, this morning I see this:

I will be in LaLaLand for the screening at TCL Chinese theatre, so I'm pretty sure this was 'meant to be.' Although I haven't watched PI in years, this is always going to be my favorite film by Aronofsky. The B&W is so saturated, it reminds me of James Whale's Frankenstein. PI's release also dovetailed with my then-burgeoning interest in the Occult, so this film imprinted on me hard. Now, I get to see it on the best Imax screen in the world.

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Playlist:

The Police - Outlandos D'Amour

Various - Wolfpack Fight Together Spotify Playlist (Thanks Missi!!!)

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Card:

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

Sidestepping preconceived notions lead to new opportunities that might bring about the culmination of older ideas/projects. Not sure what this is referencing, but that's not unusual of late, because I've been out of tune with the cards. I go through these periods where my id really pushes against anything spiritual, and I'm seeing that right now as excitement and anxiety build up around my two-week trip to LaLaLand. Pack it with as much goodness and friendship as I can, it still feels weird being away from K for that long, especially because this time, I'm in a hotel and without a car the entire time. I'll survive, and I'll thrive, but the expectations are completely frying my mental stability and that's affecting these daily reading, my yoga, my meditation - all of it. 

Love Songs from the Phantom Road

 

Why not? The oddest and to some, a throwaway track from Alice in Chains' 1992 acoustic EP Sap. I love this one, and have long marveled at just how weird AIC could be when hardly trying. 

 

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NCBD:

A damn quiet NCBD, if I say so myself:

I didn't know about this new Jeff Lemire series until I happened to look in my email and see a missive from his newsletter. Sounds pretty badass; from the solicitation on League of Geeks:

"Dom is a long-haul truck driver attempting to stay ahead of his tragic past. When he stops one night to assist Birdie, who has been in a massive car crash, they pull an artifact from the wreckage that throws their lives into fifth gear. Suddenly, a typical midnight run has become a frantic journey through a surreal world where Dom and Birdie find themselves the quarry of strange and impossible monsters. It's grindhouse horror meeting high-concept supernatural fantasy..."

So yeah, short week, which is fine. I'll be in L.A. for the next two NCBDs and plan to make it out to The Comic Bug at some point, so I'll pick up some of the books I read that I don't have on my pull at Rick's here in Clarksville. 

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Playlist:

22-20s - Eponymous

Various - Fight!!! Spotify Playlist

The Smiths - Strangeways, Here We Come

Helmet - Size

Alice in Chains - Sap

The Mysterines - Reeling

David Bowie - Reality

Mastodon - Once More 'Round the Sun

Faetooth - Remnants of the Vessel

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Card:

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

To affect change, an equal force of Will and Renumeration may be required. 

The Wind Began to Howl

A lot of new music coming up lately, although some of it is only new to me. Case in point: that recent viewing of Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla was my first since the advent of Shazam (or since I started using it, anyway), and it was through that film I found the 22-20s, whose entire 2004 self-titled record rules. This is currently my favorite track on the album.

 

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Watch:

Yellowjackets returns in March!

On March 24 - my birthday, no less! To say K and I are excited would be an understatement of extreme measure.

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Read:

I try to severely limit my exposure to social media these days, so I'm late to the game but nonetheless overjoyed to see that Author Laird Barron is home from the hospital and in recovery AND the pre-order is up for the fourth book in his Isaiah Coleridge series. 

Wow, what a cover, eh? This is exciting because, with The Wind Began To Howl releasing from Bad Hand Books in late Spring, I have plenty of time to slot in re-reads of the previous three entries in the series. These are PURE PLEASURE for me, and every time a new entry comes up for pre-order, I go back and re-read the previous ones. 

Pre-order your copy from Bad Hand Books HERE. Also, if you do it within the first 30 days since the announcement (which I believe was last week), ALL proceeds go directly to the author, who is recovering at home from his recent health scare (Laird is tweeting about it on his account), and thus, still racking up medical expenses.

Pre-ordering the new Laird Barron reminded me I still had not ordered my signed copy of Stephen Graham Jones' sequel to 2021's My Heart is a Chainsaw from Boulder Books. 

Don't Fear the Reaper dropped a few weeks ago, the second in a planned trilogy; I can't wait to read this one. Chainsaw rocked my world and I'm looking forward to re-reading that as well.

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Playlist:

22-20s - Eponymous

Clouds Taste Satanic - Tales of Demonic Possession

Fvnerals - Let the Earth be Silent

Karl Casey - XX EP

White Hex - Gold Nights

Myrkur - Folkesange

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Card:

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

It will require a lot of Will to successfully complete a current project. 

The Getaway

 

A couple years ago, Mr. Brown clued me into the greatness of Dr. John when he sent Gris Gris my way for Halloween. Since, every so often, he'll recommend an album. Two weekends ago he introduced me to 2012's Locked Down, where The Black Keys are his band. 

This is the same treatment the Keys have done for other aging icons, but combined with Dr. John, Locked Down struck me immediately. A perfect combination, this, and The Getaway is my favorite song (so far). The coda on this one is fantastic; one of the best guitar solos I've heard in some time.

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Watch:

Watching this final season of Servant has finally made me dig out my DVD copy of Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla to show K Toby Kebbler's first break-out role (that I was aware of, anyway).

 

This one does not disappoint. Face-paced and twisty in that way Guy Ritchie's flicks are when he's on, I put this one right under Snatch as my favorite. And Kebbell is awesome- that pencil scene at the Subways gig! Oh man, I feel that every time I watch this.

 

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Read:

I did a full, deep-dive, note-taking re-read of James Tynion IV's Department of Truth this weekend, and I can definitively tell you that no comic has stirred me up like this since first reading Grant Morrison's Invisibles back around the turn of the century. 

The ideas in this book are massive; Tynion has found a way to wrap everything from Alt-Right Conspiracy to Big Foot into an insanely compelling package that feels a lot like things we've seen before and loved cut with something brand new. My elevator pitch would be "Grant Morrison writes the X-Files" and there is zero hyperbole in that. Conspiracy Theories are fun, but ultimately I've never been a person who cannot refuse them just on some innate mental survival instinct; yes, I think 911 was probably an inside job, or some facet of our own government pulled the trigger on JFK, but it would do me no good to obsess over it, so I do not. This book is a super-intelligent way of working with a lot of that stuff in a fictional environment. 

Also, Martin Simmonds's art is absolutely breathtaking and helps the book feel a lot like the old-school Vertigo titles I love so much.

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Playlist:

Dr. John - Locked Down

Pixies - Surfer Rosa

Pixies - Doggerel

Metallica - Hardwired

Faetooth - Remnants of the Vessel

Clouds Taste Satanic - Tales of Demonic Possession

Ghostland Observatory - Paparazzi Lightning

Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues

White Hex - Gold Nights

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Card:

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

Think things through and don't be distracted by splendor.