Opeth Covers Alice In Chains

Being that I'm a fairly big fan of both these bands, I'm not sure how I never came across Opeth's cover of Alice in Chains' "Would?" Now that I have, I have mixed feelings. It's an excellent cover, don't get me wrong. That said, it reminded me just how awesome the AIC original is, and kind of just left me wanting to listen to that on repeat, over and over again.

But I don't listen to Would? or anything else on Dirt on repeat. This is a special album that is very personal to me, and with something like this, I'd be afraid of robbing even just a little bit of its power. 

---

---

---

Watch:

Last Thursday, K and I took in a screening of Justin Tipping's new film HIM. Produced by Jordan Peele, this one is getting a lot of negative critical reaction. For myself, someone who holds pretty much nothing but disdain for both American football and modern hip-hop aesthetic - two factors that weigh heavily in this one - I absolutely loved it.

I still think this is one of the best trailers I've seen in recent years. It really whets the appetite without giving any actual plot away (though, I would argue, they should have held back some of the imagery divulged herein).

There's a lot about this film that makes me think it's essentially a skin of The Substance, but HIM is dressed in so much surreal, stylized imagery specific to Tipping's vision that it definitely stands on its own. 

---

---

---

Playlist:

Fabio Frizzi - The Beyond OST

Dean Hurley - Flower: Tales From the Occult Library

Hellbender - Hellbender OST

Deftones - private music

Deftones - Ohms

Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings - Give the People What They Want

INXS - Kick

The Bangles - All Over the Place

Billy Joel - The Stranger

Steely Dan - Aja

Deicide - Eponymous

Deicide -  Legion

Russian Circles - Gnosis

Hall & Oats - Do What You Want, Be What You Are (Disc 3)

Kate Bush - Hounds of Love

Chris Isaak - Heart Shaped World

Young Widows - Power Sucker

Kane Parsons - Backrooms OST

Siouxsie & The Banshees - Tinderbox

Ritual Howls - Turkish Leather

---

---

---

Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Also, if you head over to Grimm's Kickstarter HERE you'll see his upcoming The Eldritch Lace Tarot Deck, you can hit the "notify upon launch" button and then you can get on this seriously unbelievably awesome deck. 

• King of Pentacles

• Five of Swords

• X: Wheel of Fortune

Abundance, conflict and the inevitability of change. Not liking the sound of that at the moment. I suddenly know A LOT of people who have lost their jobs after working for their respective companies for years. I feel like Alien: Earth has really exacerbated my fears of Corporate life in this world, and now massive layoffs make it hard to dismiss those fears as nonsense. Pushing off that Lazarus re-read for a while longer, too. Don't need any more paranoia than I already have. 

Annihilator - Sixes and Sevens

Some old school Canadian Thrash from Annihilator to punch us in the face and remind us it's Friday! From the 1990 album Never, Neverland. This one takes me back to the days of dubbing random tracks off 88.3 WXAV, St. Xavier University's radio show. So many great musical discoveries.

---

---

---

Watch:

Wow - I did not expect to find a trailer for Deathgasm II today! 

Really interesting setup for a sequel. I like the Ghostbusters II, "Nothing worked out for us after we saved the world," angle. And the idea of having an undead, flesh-eating zombie in your metal band is, well, how did no one ever think of that before? 

Not sure if this one is going to be in theatres or not, but one can hope. 

---

---

---

NCBD Addendum:

Walking into Rick's Comic City yesterday, I had zero idea that David and Maria Lapham had a new series from Image hitting the shelves this week. 

A crime comic with a small-town scope, the first issue of Good As Dead sets a pretty mean stage. We meet the Valade Family, who run the local criminal enterprises and own the bridge that puts the small border town of Port Lindon on the map. In the other corner, we meet Sheriff Calhoun, who wants nothing more than to put down the Valades. We get the intimation that the Calhouns and Valades are two of the town's founding families, with something of a Haffield/McCoy history between them. After a couple of catastrophic events play out, Sheriff Calhoun doubles down on getting justice, especially when a pretty severe turn of events leaves him with little more than a week to live...

So yeah, this is going to be great! 

This has that Lapham, modern Southwest Noir flavor BIG TIME, and was a joy to read. There can sometimes be a bit of a disconnect with the Laphams' story compression techniques, but their stuff always wins me over in the end, so here's to at least two more issues (hopefully more, that's all that has been solicited thus far).

---

---

---

Playlist:

Jim Williams - Possessor OST

Jim Williams - Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched OST

The Divine Comedy - Promenade

Alice in Chains - Eponymous

The Soft Moon - Eponymous

Night Sins - Portrait in Silver

Joy Division - Substance

Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures

Joy Division - Closer

Joy Division - Still

Inter Arma - Garbers Days Revisited

Ilsa - Preyer

Prince and the Revolution - Purple Rain

Deftones - private music

Annihilator - Never, Neverland

---

---

---

Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE. 

Also, if you head over to Grimm's Kickstarter HERE you'll see his upcoming The Eldritch Lace Tarot Deck, you can hit the "notify upon launch" button and then you can get on this seriously unbelievably awesome deck. 

• Four of Swords

• Five of Cups

• Queen of Swords

Rest and recuperate after a major disappointment. Doing so may force honesty where before there was none. 

Not vague at all. I don't really want to go into it, but I'm reading the 'rest' as holding off on sending a pretty sensitive email until tomorrow morning, when I was going to send it tonight. Never really a good idea to send a sensitive email in the middle of the night with a couple beers in you. 

Netherlands - Deathling

 

I randomly stumbled across the Netherlands on Apple Music a few days ago, and they immediately became a driving force in my musical day-to-day. This album ROCKS! Check out Netherlands' Bandcamp HERE and their physical media HERE.

---

---

---

NCBD:

Hot damn! It's NCBD! Let's see what I'm bringing home from Rick's Comic City tonight:

Batman: First Knight proved to be one of my favorite titles of the last few years, so I was excited to see we're getting a sequel. I love the oversized format and the 1930s, no-tech approach to Batman. What we get is a wonderfully lush period piece, dripping in Noir. 

You know, Major Bludd has long been a favorite of mine. As a kid, I loved the original figure, but it wore out and never really got a proper update while I was still collecting, so it got pushed to the back burner by other favorites. And while there were some memorable moments with the character in Hama's comics, those too were early on, and ol' Sebastian Bludd didn't really exert a presence again until his failed attempt to impersonate Destro and take over his Scottish empire. Recently, I acquired the latest Classified version of Blud's figure, and I must say, the nice juxtaposition of receiving that figure and seeing this cover has me excited. He's been an integral part of the building of Cobra in this series, and I'm pretty happy with how much 'screen time' he's received. That might all implode this issue, as I'm wondering if he's going to make it out of this skirmish with The Baroness and Cover Girl alive. 

Still really digging this book. Obviously, at least partially inspired by Rob Zombie's 31 - of which I seem to become more a fan of every October upon viewing - Exquisite Corpses differs in one big way. For a book about a bunch of competing homicidal maniacs dropped into a small town for a game of mass murder, this book is FUN! That's right, I said it. FUN! There's a palpable sense of dread at times, but it's often undercut with some pretty amusing peeks behind the curtain of the game and its players.  

Anthology Horror at its finest, Oni's rejuvenation of EC Comics continues to thrill me each and every month. 

---

---

---

Watch:

Honestly, all I needed to see of Yannis Veslemes and Dimitris Emmanouilidis's She Loved Blossoms More was the still image on the trailer's thumb, and I was sold. 

No reason to risk ruining any surprises this one may have in store - I have a feeling there are many.

---

---

---

Playlist:

Hellbender - Hellbender OST

Sleep - Sleep's Holy Mountain

The Jesus Lizard - Rack

Deadguy - Near-Death Travel Services

Netherlands - Vapors

Alice in Chains - Eponymous

Blood Incantation - Absolute Everywhere

Blood Incantation - Hidden History of the Human Race

Deftones - private music

Comic Tropes - Robert Kirkman Interview 

Testament - Shadow People (pre-release single)

USSA - The Spoils

Hall & Oats - Do What You Want, Be What You Are (Disc 3)

Ozzy Osbourne - Diary of a Madman

Will Haven - Carpe Diem

---

---

---

Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Also, if you head over to Grimm's Kickstarter HERE you'll see his upcoming The Eldritch Lace Tarot Deck you can hit the "notify upon launch" button and then you can get on this seriously unbelievably awesome deck. 

• Eight of Pentacles

• King of Wands

• III: The Empress

Concentration. Yeah, it's at a premium these last few days. From the Grimoire: The purest manifestation of Fire in the deck, thus strong. Unchecked can be imbalanced. That's the concentration key. Imbalance. Now, let's try and tie those two cards to III: The Empress. Also from the Grimoire: " She is the inferior Garden of Eden, the Earthly Paradise, all that is symbolized by the visible house of man" - A.E. Waite.

How do I reconcile this? My problem at the moment? Too much social media. Luckily for me, it's like fast food - I don't use it much, so even a little can be too much. But I'm fairly certain that's what's killing my concentration. Remember all those epiphanies to start meditating again? Yeah, never happened. Would probably help. 

New Music From Alabama Shakes!

When I say new, I should specify I am way behind on this one - looks like it dropped two weeks ago! Funny, as I just listened to Sound & Color for the first time in a while last week and had a moment of forlorn reflection that it's been ten years since that album was released. I don't know if this new track heralds an upcoming album, but I sure hope so. 

---

---

---

Watch:

Where K and I would normally have seen The Long Walk on opening night this past Thursday, we had the opportunity to see John Carpenter's The Thing on the big screen (our second time) during Regal's Cine: A Month of Masterpieces. This series has me in awe: We're seeing Sunset Blvd tonight (also a second time on the big screen for us), I'm going to try like hell to see GDT's Pan's Labyrinth on Wednesday, then we have Psycho on Friday. And we're still in the second week of the month!!!

However, it's Francis Lawrence's The Long Walk I want to talk about right now. Adapted from a Richard Bachman - aka Stephen King - novella of the same name, with the adapted screenplay coming to us from JT Mollner, the Writer/Director of one of 2024's best films (Strange Darling), The Long Walk feels, in this moment, like the best adaptation of King's work to date. Ten years ago, that might have been a no-brainer until you stop to consider The Shawshank Redemption or Stand By Me (I've always heard The Green Mile is up there as well, but I haven't seen that one). But we've had a spate of pretty good adaptations over the last decade, top among them Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep and Gerald's Game. In the Tall Grass, and while I don't love the Andy Muschietti IT films, they're better than the original. Castle Rock - while not officially an adaptation of any one King story, is a super solid amalgam of his work. So we're light-years from the days of Langoliers and Needful Things. But The Long Walk feels like it has all of them beat.

I'm largely unfamiliar with Francis Lawrence's work as a Director. Yes, I've seen Constantine, and it puts me in a tough spot, as if they had not based that on John Constantine: Hellblazer, I would have loved it. Some fantastic images and ideas, but it just doesn't work with Reeves as JC and Chas being anyone but a hulking ex-Football hooligan. Other than that, though, looking at Lawrence's IMDB, I see he is mostly known for working with Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. I tried and couldn't get twenty pages into the first book, so I didn't even bother with the films, partially because the entire thing feels like a watered-down version of The Long Walk and Battle Royale. His history doesn't matter, though, because this film is excellent. A complete gut-punch in the best possible way, and King's knack for male camaraderie and how it can be a shortcut to major life epiphanies really shines through in this film. The characters are fantastic, and it hurts to see what happens to them. Cooper Hoffman confirms he is an excellent actor, following in his late father's footsteps, but David Jonsson - wow! In two movies (the other being Alien: Romulus, where he plays Andy, Rain's synthetic "brother"), he has demonstrated charisma and range that have me watching for his next film, genre or not.  

I'd recommend catching this one in the theater. If you want to hear more, hit the widget at the upper right-hand side of this page for The Horror Vision's new episode, where we start with a spoiler-free review, then give ample warning before veering into a full-spoiler comparison between the book and the film. Also available on YouTube HERE. 

---

---

---

Playlist:

Sleep - Sleep's Holy Mountain

Hellbender - Hellbender OST

HEALTH - Ordinary Loss (pre-release single)

HEALTH - Rat Wars

David Bowie - Outside

Double Life - Indifferent Stars

Entropy - Dharmakāya

Deftones - private music

Godflesh - Streetcleaner

Blut Aus Nord - Shadows Breathe First (pre-release single)

Blut Aus Nord - Disharmoniu - Nahab

Dreamkid - Daggers

Faetooth - Labyrinthe

Alabama Shakes - Another Life (single)

Netherlands - Vapor

---

---

---

Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Also, if you head over to Grimm's Kickstarter HERE you'll see his upcoming The Eldritch Lace Tarot Deck you can hit the "notify upon launch" button and then you can get on this seriously unbelievably awesome deck. 

• Queen of Swords

• Six of Wands

• Page of Wands

A major creative period is happening, but it will take clear judgment to navigate. 

I love when these are so spot on. I've been working pretty diligently on Shadow Play Book Two, and there are SO many ideas at play right now. So many historical themes to tie into this century-spanning saga, so it's an immense creative rush, but I have to keep asking myself, "How much is too much?"

Drug Church Live in Dublin!!!

In 2001 I saw one of my favorite shows ever at Whelans, possibly because I had just flown in to Dublin that morning and was running on adrenaline and lust for the Irish girl I'd flown across the world to visit. Not everything worked out great, but I got to see Damien Frost, New Prayer Breakfast, and another band I'm blanking on at the moment at one of the coolest venues I've been to. To find this Drug Church show posted from there was a blast, and it really just made me remember, A) how much I want to go back to Ireland and, B) how much I want to see Drug Church live.

---

---

---

Watch:

Last night, K and I got to see John Carpenter's The Thing on the big screen for the second time. This is a film that never fails to fill me with inspiration, to blow me away, to remind me just how amazing cinema can be. Also, how the greatest works of art are often not appreciated at first. The Thing bombed upon release; reflecting on that now, it seems unbelievable, but it's a fact. Kinda gives me a little hope. 

Anyway, whenever I watch The Thing, I follow it up with Simon Gesrel's video for Zombie Zombie's Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free. It's almost as impressive as Carpenter's film (in a totally different way).

---

---

---

Playlist:

Sleep - Sleep's Holy Mountain

Blackbraid - Blackbraid III

Joy Division - Still

Mastodon - Leviathan

The Soft Moon - Criminal

Dreamkid - Daggers

Nabihah Iqbal - Weighing of the Heart

Gram Rabbit - Music To Start A Cult To

Mastodon - Once More 'Round the Sun

Sterolab - Oscillations From the Anti-Sun (disc 3)

The Jesus Lizard - Down

The Jesus Lizard - Rack

Cibo Matto - Viva! La Woman

Type O Negative - Life Is Killing Me

---

---

---

Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE. Grimm's newest deck looks maybe even more awesome than The Hand of Doom (hard to believe, but I said it). Head over to his Kickstarter page for the upcoming The Eldritch Lace Tarot Deck and hit "Notify me upon launch." This looks amazing! 

• Page of Wands

• Six of Pentacles

• Ten of Wands

Lots of Will being distracted by a perfect earthly set up. Seems like money getting in the way, like it always does.

Interesting. I found out yesterday the yahoos in the payroll department of the corporation that I work for neglected to set up the health care benefits I signed up for in 2025. Correction - they started taking the money out in January, then stopped in February. Now I owe over 1500. This fact has destabilized me with anger, and I'm fairly cetain that's what this pull is referencing. 

Seal's Crazy About Bryan Fuller's Dust Bunny and So Am I!!!

I've been hearing this track a lot on my Peloton lately, and I really dig it. I have very little knowledge of Seal other than I dig the Rose song that became the ubiquitous Homecoming track in the '90s. My good friend Dave is a pretty big fan, and we share a lot of common music - everything from Cynic and Dillinger to Timberlake's first record. I may need to look a little harder at Seal. 

Also, the lyrics really prove prescient to 2025, and this track was released in 1991. Damn!

---

---

---

NCBD:

Daniel Warren Johnson's final issue as writer of Transformers, and Skybound is making a hell of a big claim in the solicitation:

"This is it. And the new era of TRANSFORMERS begins with the most shocking ending to ANY comic book this year!"

I've already seen the cover they solicited for Transformers 25, and Optimus is on it. That said, if we look back at how Kirkman  - who is taking over writing duties as of 25 - handled the end of The Walking Dead, we see that he's not adverse to soliciting fake covers to keep a mystery! I, for one, support that level of misdirection in the age of spoilers, and cannot wait to read DWJ's outro! What a fantastic run this has been!

CalExit returned last month after a nearly 8-year absence. It took me a few days to dig out my copies of the original series, and while I have them slated for a re-read soon, I haven't gotten around to that yet. Looks like next month's issue #3 is the final for this new series, so we'll see where it goes from there. I gotta say, I miss seeing Black Mask comics on the shelf. Let's hope this is the start of something. 

The final issue of Blood Type. Can't wait to see how this shakes out - and what EC might have in store for us next!

---

---

---

Watch:

Bryan Fuller makes his Directorial debut this December 3rd with Dust Bunny.

I can tell you, I only watched the opening few seconds of this and I didn't need to watch any more. It's got that softly lit Bryan Fuller look, and that's enough for me. 

---

---

---

Playlist:

Bell Witch - Mirror Reaper

Type O Negative - Bloody Kisses

Type O Negative - Origin of the Feces

Tones on Tail - Everything (Disc 2)

Windhand - Eponymous

Chasms - On the Legs of Love Purified

Perturbator - Age of Acquarius (pre-release singles)

Joy Division - Still

Year of No Light - Ausserwelt

Drab Majesty - An Object In Motion

Drab Majesty - Modern Mirror

Mastodon - Leviathan

Deafheaven - New Bermuda

Crystal Castles - II

---

---

---

Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Six of Swords

• King of Swords

• King of Pentacles

Choose between Science and Money.

Some really tough, specfically vague readings lately.

Blackbraid - God of Black Blood

From the ripping new album Blackbraid III, which is destined to be in my top ten of the year. Awesome video to boot - not too often I can say that. Order your copy of the album HERE.

---

---

---

Watch:

Somehow, it's probably been close to 20 years since I last watched my DVD copy of Caro and Jeunet's The City of Lost Children. It's amazing how, just like I wrote about rediscovering Man Man's Life Fantastic last summer, something I once loved so much could slip to the wayside and go so long without a viewing. 

This film is still every bit as magical as it was the first time I saw it, circa the early 2000s. Released in 1995, the internet show the original, Sony Pictures Classics' DVD was first released in 1999, and I did not acquire my first DVD player until somewhere either near the end of 2000 or the beginning of 2001. This was one of the first DVDs I ever purchased, as the film had been covered in the Wrapped in Plastic David Lynch/Twin Peaks magazine due to Angelo Badalamenti providing the film's score, and all the stills and the write-up had me ravenous to see this film. Ron Perlman is fantastic as One, and all of the children are grand. What really steals the show, though, is the set design. This is a Steampunk Fantasy world unlike anything realized on film at the time. I'd argue that Caro and Jeunet's film is still one of the most unique visions I've had the pleasure of beholding, and I can only hope that, since this December marks the 30th anniversary of its original release, someone might hold a retrospective screening at one of the theatres in Chicago (cuz it ain't gonna play in Tennessee). 

---

---

---

Read:

I am, frankly, all over the damn place with my reading at the moment. 

While I've dedicated the remainder of my year for the written word to all the research I need to do for Shadow Play Book Two, I'm leaving comics/graphic novels as an outlet for pleasure reading. In 2024 I began a Sandman re-read that got me through the first three volumes, and now, since finishing Netflix's second season adaptation, I've knocked out Season of Mists and, this past weekend, A Game of You.

I'm fairly certain this is only the second time I've read this fifth collected volume of Sandman, so while I did remember it as I went along, Barbie and the cuckoo's story is nowhere near as familiar to me as the first three or four volumes of the series. One of the strengths of this series is its supporting cast, and that is on full display here, as Morpheus only appears twice, for a considerably shorter time than one might imagine for a book that carries his name. 

Barbie's story was an interesting one to continue, a thread pulled from back in The Doll's House, where we first met her living with Ken in the house where she and several other memorable characters acted as roommates to Rose during her search for her brother. 

Of particular note here is Wanda's story. Although Netflix did use this character, they eschewed all of A Game of You, lifting her instead as a character in what would ultimately come from the "Dream and Delirium" road trip story from Volume 7: Brief Lives. I had zero problems with this change, and in fact, found Indya Moore's portrayal of the Wanda character quite affecting. It's important to note the different cultural contexts that distinguish the two versions of Wanda. In the comic, the character first appeared in The Sandman issue #32, published in September, 1991. The character is far more masculine here, despite their Transsexual disposition. That makes sense; the creators were no doubt playing off a cultural zeitgeist of the time, where trans people had a much harder time identifying in public and transitioning (not that they necessarily have it easy now, but I would think '91 would seem like the Dark Ages compared to cultural awareness today). Juxtapose that with Wanda in the show, who, in present-day New York, would have a considerably more established and possibly even 'mainstream' support network than the Wanda of 1991 would have ever had. 

---

---

---

Playlist:

Deftones - private music

Blut Aus Nord - Shadows Breathe First (pre-release single)

Blut Aus Nord - Debermur Morti

Blut Aus Nord - 777: Cosmosophy

Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen

Revocation - New Gods, New Masters (pre-release singles)

Chris Connelly - White Phosphorus (Chris Connelly Plays Throbbing Gristle)

Ruelle - Emerge

bunsenburner - Reverie

Russian Circles - Gnosis

The Cars - Eponymous

Godflesh - Post Self

Giraffe Tongue Orchestra - Broken Lines

Frank Sinatra - In the Wee Small Hours

---

---

---

Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Three of Swords

• Ten of Pentacles

• IX: The Hermit

Introspection leads to unhappiness, but that unhappiness leads to long-term security.

Well now, that's a pickle, but it seems like something I should try and figure out, now doesn't it?