The apparently unreleased video for "Slow Burn," track four on 2002's Heathen. Such a great song; I'm not the only one to specifically call this one out here in our little music blog community.
Thursday, January 9, 2025
Wednesday, January 8, 2025
David Bowie - Black Star
Released 9 years ago today. It was a Friday, and no one realized that in three days David Bowie would be called back to his ancestors in the cold, black void of space. I'm wondering if this video is modeled after his home planet?
NCBD:
Oh man, I am psyched for this week's books! Let's get into it!!
Watch:
Rejoice! Vinegar Syndrome announced the Blue Ray for Ryan Kruger's Street Trash!
I pre-ordered mine as soon as I saw the announcement; this SEQUEL to the 1987 original came in at number six on my Top Ten Favorite Horror Films of 2024, which can be heard over on the latest episode of The Horror Vision.
Here's the VS order link.
Playlist:
Nothing - Guilty of Everything
Nothing - The Great Dismal
Chelsea Wolfe - She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She
Chrystabell & David Lynch - Cellophane Memories
David Bowie - Heathen
David Bowie - Black Star
The Jesus Lizard - Rack
Hall and Oats - Greatest Hits
Card:
Today's card is the Knight of Wands:
"The moral qualities appropriate to this figure are activity, generosity, fierceness, impetuosity, pride, impulsiveness, swiftness in unpredictable actions."
This card implies a quickening and might warn about going off half-cocked. Things have to get done, but be careful how to do them. Impetuous actions don't often work out well, and impulsiveness can be a good thing, but it can also lead to a bad end.
Tuesday, January 7, 2025
Mogwai - Fanzine Made of Flesh
Another new Mogwai track from their upcoming album The Bad Fire, out January 24th. Pre-order HERE.
PLEASE let it turn out that Brandon Cronenberg is a Mogwai fan and already optioned the title of this song for a future film!
Monday, January 6, 2025
Ask the Rust About The Last of Us
You know, I never really gave Nothing's 2020 album, The Great Dismal, the chance it deserved. I wouldn't say I didn't like it, but before recently, I'd never bonded with this one like I did some of their others. That's changed, and this song resonates as a perfect album closer. Very MBV, but not, if you know what I mean.
Here's Nothing's Bandcamp HERE or their site (which is really well-made) HERE.
Watch:
F*ck. Not sure I'm ready to go back to this world...
Well, we have until April. Gonna have to look at A LOT of cat pictures to prep.
Read:
Now that issue three of Rafael Grampa's Batman: The Gargoyle of Gotham is out, I sat down over the weekend and read all three. Holy smokes. This is seriously one of the best Batman series I've read, and even though I don't read all that many Bat-Books, I've read my share of the classics. I think this will sit amongst them. One of the reasons for that? The villains.
Playlist:
Windhand - Split E.P.
Windhand - Eternal Return
Sleep - Dopesmoker
Nothing - The Great Dismal
Nothing - Guilty of Everything
Laylow - .Raw
Hangman's Chair - Saddiction (pre-release singles)
Hangman's Chair - A Loner
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• Page (Princess) of Swords
• XVI - The Tower
• II - High Priestess
The Earth of Air, the Earthly realms of intellect. In other words, you can be as smart as you like, and it won't mean spit if you're not street smart. The Tower tells me I'm not as smart as I think, and High Priestess suggests nurturing, so I'm reading this as a direct rebuttal to the nearly crippling self-doubt and imposter syndrome that's been hammering on the inside of my skull for the last few days. I'm not as smart as I think - meaning I've misread everything and should chuck all that baggage in the bin.
Sunday, January 5, 2025
Dreamkid - Street Lights
I have to say, while holding Dreamkid's retro 80s synthwave sound at arm's length for well over a year, I think I've finally succumbed to full-on fan. Yes, there's definitely a chessiness at play here, but it doesn't matter. Dreamkid's music has a very genuine soul, which is weird to say about something with so much facade, but that's part of music, right? A ton of Metal is facade, so why not neon and glitter instead of Satan and blood?
From last year's Daggers album, which I've been listening to in late-night writing sessions for a few days now.
Watch:
In the past seven days, K and I have watched two and a half seasons of Apple TV's Slow Horses. This is a show based on Mick Herron's Slough House novels, none of which I have had the pleasure of reading.
That's the opening of the first episode. Slow Horses follows MI5 agent River Cartwright who is reassigned to Slough House after the debacle depicted in the Sneak Peek above. Slough House is where British Secret Service assigns their fuck-ups, and we meet a lovely cast who all suffer under the profanity-spewing, Curry-farting, Single-Malt-drinking Jackson Lamb, a right old bastard as played by Gary Oldman. Lamb was a legend but made a lot of enemies and got sent to Slough House to 'run out the clock.'
Lamb reminds me of two very different characters I've met before. On the one hand, Oldman invokes Jackie Flannery from State of Grace in all his whiskey-swilling, unwashed glory. The character also conjures more than a little comparison to an aged John Constantine, and I have to wonder if that's canon from the novels or if the show's creative team is showing its influence. Either way, Oldman is a delight every moment he's on screen.
So are all the other characters, too. Even the ones you despise. As the clip shows, this is a fast-moving series and, honestly, the best "spy" story I've come across.
Read:
I guess re-reading Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey's Injection is, at the very least, an annual appointment for me now. I woke up Saturday and re-read the first volume and experienced nothing short of total comic book ecstasy.
Especially when you consider that this is among the best of the 'wide-screen' format series, so it reads quick. Rereading is easy, as opposed to the voluminous experience of rereading the other two. That's not without its merit, of course, but I can find far more time to read Injection, and it affects my brain in a different way.
Playlist:
Aidan Baker & Dead Neanderthals - Cast Down and Hunted
Aidan Baker & Gareth Davis - Invisible Cities
Zombi - Shape Shift
Lantlôs - Neon
Windhand - Split
Windhand - Eponymous
Telekinetic Yeti - Primordial
Ruin of Romantics - Velvet Dawn
Hangman's Chair - Saddiction (pre-release singles)
Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments
Dreamkid - Daggers
Dreamkid - Eponymous
Soft Sun - Daylight in the Dark
Dreamkid - All Thriller, No Filler
Jim Williams - Possessor OST
David Lynch & Mark Zebrowski - Polish Night Music
Thursday, January 2, 2025
Dr. Colossus - I'm a Stupid Moron With an Ugly Face and A Big Butt and my Butt Smells and I Like to Kiss My Own Butt
This had me both laughing out loud and thrashing at my desk all afternoon yesterday. Focusing your band around The Simpsons is a quick way to get dismissed as a gimmick, but take a listen and you'll see - Dr. Colossus fucking rules!
Watch:
Rewatched Adam Green's original Hatchet two nights ago and hot damn! I love this flick, but I always forget how much I love it until I actually sit down and rewatch it.
This is an obvious 'skin' of F13; however, I think by moving the 'Cabin in the woods' trope to the Louisiana swamps, effectively making it 'Cabin in the Swamp,' Green really breathes fresh life into the Slasher genre (always loved the tag: Old School American Horror). The cast is great and doesn't die in the order you'd imagine, and as annoying or vapid as some of them are, I actually don't want to see them die. That's usually not the case in modern slashers.
Playlist:
Aidan Baker & Dead Neanderthals - Cast Down and Haunted
Aidan Baker & Tim Hecker - Fantasma Parastasie
Aidan Baker & Gareth Davis - Invisible Cities
Beth Gibbons, The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra & Krzysztof Penderecki - Henryk Górecki: Symphony N. 3
Windhand - Split
Dr. Colossus -
I'm a Stupid Moron With an Ugly Face and A Big Butt and My Butt Smells and I Like to Kiss My Own Butt
David Bowie - Hunky Dory
David Bowie - Heathen
Card:
First Tarot Pull of 2025, I have to make it a single card from Missi's Raven Deck:
Always one of my favorite cards in any deck; this reminds me to look at things beyond surface capacity. No surprise I'm turning forty-nine in three months because that's what we do as we get older - we gloss over things. Part of it is, I think, when we're younger we have way more of a perceptual filter. We're only aware of our own world and small increments beyond. Aging opens that up, and by the time you're in your forties, you're aware of so much that you look for shortcuts. When you consider the internet and smartphones and all the stimuli and information that flow through us every day, my theory gets an update - kids are aware of so much more than I was when I was younger. Now, what's that due to adults that have that widened awareness?
In some cases, in a lot of cases I'd say, it shuts it down completely. We look at the world only as we want to see it. And the almighty algorithms just exacerbate that by creating these endless feedback loops that just cycle our own thoughts back through our head. So in 2025, I'm going to try and remember, every day, to look deeper. I've even made a note on my desk to remind myself.
Wednesday, January 1, 2025
New Years Day + One = The Damned
Day late, but it's still poignant. Holy shit - we made it to 2025!!!
Watch:
I saw this pop up on my local Regal's calendar and went from thinking I'd never heard of it to swearing I had posted the trailer on here previously. Not the case, but now that this is on my radar, I'm kind of dying to see it.
I feel like the release timing for this one was perfectly staged - people who saw Nosteratu and want more historical Horror can plop their arse in the theatre again and see what looks like a wicked combination of The Witch and Cold Skin.
NCBD:
Short week. Here we go:
Nice to have a short week at the moment. I've got a lot of other reading to do.
Playlist:
Witchfinder - Hazy Rites
L.A. Witch - Eponymous
Ruin of Romantics - Velvet Dawn
Dreamkid - Daggers
Small Black - Cheap Dreams
Nothing - Guilty of Everything
Nothing - The Great Dismal
Dead Neanderthals - Other Worlds
Final Light - Eponymous
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