This... this is the best video I've seen since Liars stopped making great videos circa 2013. This is just... unreal. Normally, if there's an age restriction on a video and it's only accessible on YouTube, I won't bother to post it. But this? This has to be added to my page.
From the forthcoming album Muuntautuja, which you can bet your sweet ass I just pre-ordered HERE. Out October 11th on Nuclear Blast Records.
These guys have become a staple this past year. I still have so much of their music to dive into, but the Live at Roadburn 2017 album is now irreplaceable in my life. NOTHING sounds like Oranssi Pazuzu.
Watch:
One of the major aspects of the second Terrifier movie I dug was the final girl, played by Lauren LaVera. Bloody Disgusting posted an article about a new film she's in, and honestly, although The Well doesn't look spectacular, the article's headline includes the words "Bloody" and "Italian" and I think I see what the filmmaker is going for. Here, take a look for yourself:
Is it just me, or does this have Michele Soavi written all over it? Based on that, when this drops on September 3rd, I'll probably check it out. You can read the full article on Bloody Disgusting HERE.
Playlist:
Black Sabbath - Vol. 4
Japandroids - Celebration Rock
Tim Hecker - Infnity Pool OST
Metropolis - The Darkest Side of the Night (single)
Valkyrie - Fear
Library of the Occult: Dream Division - Wolf
Opeth - §1 (pre-release single)
Oranssi Pazuzu - Valotus (pre-release single)
Ozzy Osbourne - The Ultimate Sin
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE. Also, starting today for the next 30, Grimm's Kickstarter for the Hand of Doom Tarot Art Book is up. Check it out HERE.
As the comments on this video repeatedly declare, The Music may be the most underrated band of all time. These guys were a powerhouse, and I believe this is a great example of when the industry started to dissolve. If their eponymous debut had been released five, hell maybe even three years prior, this would have been a HUGE record. That, sadly, was not the case. Digging back into their albums yesterday, I was reminded just how much I love them, and this song - man, the guitar on this song reminds me so much of the music for the Nintendo Game Ninja Gaiden it crosses all kinds of wires in my head.
Watch:
Two days ago, Bloody Disgusting ran an article about an upcoming sequel to J. Lee Thompson's 1983 sleazy action flick 10 to Midnight. The sequel, 12 to Midnight, comes 41 years after that original and 21 years after 10 to Midnight's star Charles Bronson passed away at age 81. Here's the news that I have been unable to stop thinking about since first seeing this article - the new film stars a Charles Bronson lookalike named Robert Bronzi as the main character. This is an "unofficial" sequel, so they've swapped out Bronson's Leo Kessler for Toth, but goddamnit! Look at this guy! He is the spitting image of Bronson:
I loved Charles Bronson's action flicks as a kid in the 80s, but I'm pretty sure my folks never let me watch 10 to Midnight. It's grimy as all hell—the killer is a naked man who kills couples out in public in the dead of night. Think The Town That Dreaded Sundown but directed by Andrea Bianchi.
Oh, wait. Did I forget to mention that 12 to Midnight takes a totally different route with their killer and goes all-in for a werewolf? Cuz, yeah, this flick has all kinds of reasons for me to be so all-in on it.
But I really can't get over how much Bronzi looks like Bronson. It's uncanny. I mean, if you spot a Channing Tatum lookalike, no big deal, right? But Charles Bronson was one of the most unique-looking dudes to ever grace the silver screen, so this is just blowing my mind.
12 to Midnight hits VOD today and you can bet your sweet arse I'm watching it ASAP. Also, 10 to Midnight is currently included with Prime. I had a viewing a few weeks back, the night of my first MaXXXine viewing, to be exact. My friend Chris was in and in talking about the influences we saw in Ti West's latest film, I brought up Midnight.
Read:
My good friend and cohost on The Horror Vision, Professor John Trafton, posted a new article on his website about mapping The Dude's Los Angeles in Joel and Ethan Cohen's The Big Lebowski.
It's a fascinating read. I can't recommend it enough. Read the article on John's website HERE. I met John after I found his article on Messiah of Evil. I'd just watched the film for the first time and went looking for something to read about it. Turns out I could find no critical writing except John's, which was fine because he nailed it. I'm always happy to see a new article, especially for a movie I love.
Playlist:
The Music - Eponymous
The Music - Welcome to the North
The Ocean - Precambrian: Proterozoic
The Ocean - Precambrian: Hadean/Archaean
Melvins - (A) Senile Animal
The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs - OST
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
Mannequin Pussy - I Got Heaven
Metropolis - The Darkest Side of the Night (single)
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE. Also, starting today for the next 30, Grimm's Kickstarter for the Hand of Doom Tarot Art Book is up. Check it out HERE.
• Page of Swords
• II: High Priestess
• Five of Wands
Page of Swords, or the Earthly aspect of the Intellect, flanked by the High Priestess, literally the Will that takes the spark of creativity and gives it form and the five of Wands, quite literally the Conflict of my own self-defeatism.
Helmet's Monochrome is an album that I've recently spent some time reassessing. When this came out in 2007, I had just moved to L.A. two months prior and was still VERY high on the band's 2004 album Size Matters, which was and still is my favorite of their records. So Monochrome's vocal shift to a considerably more affected style from Paige Hamilton didn't quite sit right with me at the time. I've gone back and dug this one out a few times over the past - shit - eighteen years since its release, and it's never really done anything for me. I always kind of figured that one day it might, though, and that day has come!
The shift from the more melodic vitriol of Size Matters and Aftertaste back to the absolute savagery from the first album threw me at the time, but right here in 2024, it fits like a glove. Album highlights (so far) upon reassessing are the above track, as well as the album closer, "Goodbye."
NCBD:
Nice and easy week for the wallet.
Saga returns again! I feel like this one is being drawn waaaay the hell out now, and I'd really like to see it hit a monthly cycle and hold it for at least the better part of a year. Either way, though, I'm still just as invested as I was at the beginning, and I'm here for whatever.
When Department of Truth returned from hiatus last month, it marked the first time since I'd come to the book that I got to buy an issue day of release. I wasn't sure how that was going to play; having read the entire first four volumes in a few days last year, was I going to have to go back and re-read everything to remember where we are? Nope. This one is just such a pleasure to fall into that the only drawback reading single issues monthly is it's just not enough!
Watch:
Although the Adams family's Where the Devil Roams still hasn't been released, the trailer for their next film, Hell Hole, dropped yesterday.
These folks make some awesome indie flicks, and this looks right in line with everything I love about Hellbender and The Deeper You Dig.
Playlist:
QOTSA - In Times New Roman
Les Claypool - Of Wales and Woe
Les Claypool - Highball with the Devil
Pigface - A New High In Low (Low Disc)
The Raveonettes - Chain Gang of Love
Odonis Odonis - Post Plague
Odonis Odonis - Spectrums
Interpol - Antics
Amigo the Devil - Yours Until the War is Over
Metropolis - The Darkest Side of the Night (single)
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE. Also, starting today for the next 30, Grimm's Kickstarter for the Hand of Doom Tarot Art Book is up. Check it out HERE.
• Four of Pentacles
• Knight of Pentacles
• IX: The Hermit
Four of Pentacles is stability in Earthly matters, arrived at through no small exertion of Will as applied to Earthly desires/concerns after a period of contemplation.
From the forthcoming album The Night the Zombies Came Out, dropping October 26th. Pre-order HERE.
Post-reunion Pixies has been a mixed bag for me. I LOVE Indie Cindy, but everything since has felt anticlimactic. Sure, I'll lean into Head Carrier and its brethren, but they don't put me in quite the same place. Plus, I've always been a bigger fan of the music Frank Black (or Black Francis) made after the Pixies' first breakup, so to see him essentially jettison those musical endeavors for the last ten years has been disappointing, to say the least. I'm hoping his upcoming Teenager of the Year anniversary tour early next year means maybe he will start dividing his time between Pixies and other bands (Catholics!). We'll see. In the meantime, I still love the Pixies, so I'm looking forward to hearing the new record come Halloween time.
Watch:
The filmmaking collective of François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell - largely referred to as RKSS - is responsible for one of my favorite films of the last ten years: Summer of '84. Of course, they've also done Turbo Kid, which is fantastic in its own right. Not many films in recent memory have affected me like Summer of '84, though, so after that one, I'll follow RKSS to hell and back. And funny enough, it looks like that's where their next film will be taking us.
Streaming everywhere on August 13th, We Are Zombies is based on Jerry Frissen and Guy Davis' comic series called The Zombies That Ate the World. I'm not familiar with that series, but like I said, I'd follow these filmmakers anywhere they want to take me, so based on the trailer, buckle up.
Read:
Over this past weekend, I sat down and re-read Ram V and Dan Watters' The One Hand and The Six Fingers as one complete story.
This one is definitely going to be near the top of my year-end list. I read these all monthly, and re-read most of the series before the final two installments dropped, and I can say that when I finished the final issue last week, I was a little hesitant. I wasn't quite sure these guys had pulled off what they'd set up.
Boy was I wrong.
The key to 'getting' these books is reading them as one story because each issue of each book contains serious overlap, where we see the same events from both the Detective and the Killer's perspective. Not necessarily the most novel idea, except when you place the story in the context of a Blade Runner-esque Cyberpunk city like Neo Novena.
Calling this Cyberpunk is a bit of a misnomer, but I can't really think of anything else that quite gets the tone across. With visual and tonal references to everything from the aforementioned Ridley Scott classic to Métal Hurlant, the atmosphere is thick enough to cloud the reader's perceptions. Something about the inevitability of these futuristic worlds makes them so real to me, and the creators use a mystery involving androids to pontificate on the human condition in a manner I've never quite seen before. I don't know. All I can say is there's a collected edition coming out in December, and I'm definitely going to recommend it to everyone who I think might dig this.
Hopefully, this did well enough that both creators will return to Neo Novena at some point in the near future. Preferably before our world comes to resemble theirs any more than it already does.
Playlist:
T. Rex - The Slider
Liars - Drum's Not Dead
Jerry Cantrell - Brighten
Japandroids - Celebration Rock
Queens of the Stone Age - In Times New Roman
Helmet - Monochrome
16 Horsepower - Hoarse
Liars - Sisterworld
Mr. Bungle - California
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE. Also, starting today for the next 30, Grimm's Kickstarter for the Hand of Doom Tarot Art Book is up. Check it out HERE.
• Two of Wands
• XVI: The Tower
• Seven of Swords
Collaboration of Will leads to a change in pre-existing paradigms - not an easy thing, but a good thing for those with the intellect to recognize the advantages of a system overhaul.
This has to be work-related. Not sure if that's good or bad.
From the forthcoming album, I Want Blood, out October 18th. You can pre-order a copy HERE.
Jerry Cantrell kind of blows me away these days. I can't say I'm the biggest fan of his first two solo records - though I do like them, despite their somewhat uneven listening experience - and although I'm all for Alice in Chains continuing with James Duval, it doesn't always work for me. But between AIC's Rainier Fog, Cantrell's previous solo album Brighten (how has it been three years?), and now this 11th-hour announcement of I Want Blood, I feel the man is unpredictable in the best possible way. Aging musicians from bands that lost a key member over twenty years ago just don't act like this, and I LOVE it!!!
Watch:
Yesterday, K and I finally started Evil's long-awaited fourth and final season.
A) This might be the best show ever (minus Twin Peaks), and B) the writers have definitely been reading Laird Barron. The first episode of Season Four deals with strange happenings at a particle accelerator on the East Coast, and the second has a robot guard dog attacking innocent people. In a way, both of those are right out of Barren's third Isiah Coleridge, Worse Angels, although in the book, it's a robot sentry that attacks Coleridge while he's exploring an abandoned particle accelerator in upstate New York, but the influence is there.
And that's not to say all Evil's charms are limited to homage. This show has been a wild ride, a totally new take on a procedural crossed with X-Files, a demon-of-the-week that strictly adheres to a larger arc. The characters are among my favorites ever in a show like this, and the actual production... the lighting! This is THE BEST television lighting EVER. No joke. It works hand in hand with the set design to create this extremely relatable yet also liminal space the characters live and move within. And the practical FX! Also, Katja Herbers, Mike Colter and Ben Shakir are just fabulous.
Playlist:
Big Black - Lungs
Jim Williams - Possessor OST
Ennio Morricone - Black Belly of the Tarantula OST
Jeff Grace - The House of the Devil OST
Cocksure - TVMALSV
Liars - Drum's Not Dead
Deadguy - Fixation on a Coworker
Mörmaid - Pearlescent Dark
Fvnerals - Let the Earth Be Silent
The Church - Starfish
Mr. Bungle - Eponymous
Suicidal Tendencies - Controlled By Hatred/Feel Like Shit... Déjá-vu
Loathe - I Let It In and It Took Everything
Loathe - The Things They Believe
Mirar - Mare E.P.
Black Sabbath - Master of Reality
Alice in Chains - Jar of Flies E.P.
The Dillinger Escape Plan - Calculating Infinity
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• Ten of Cups
• Eight of Swords
• Ten of Wands
Earthly completion, a profound use of intellect (problem-solving) and completion of that which thou has Willed.
Okay, first, funky 70s lighting courtesy of a late-night photo in my office. Might play around with different lighting for these photos down the road. The aesthetic fits Grimm's Hand of Doom Deck. Which, by the way, there's a coffee table art book Kickstarter starting tomorrow. I'll post here.
As for this morning's cards, it's another nod toward finishing both the free Vol. 4 collection that should drop tomorrow (I think; I still have to iron out some last-minute copyright stuff today) and Black Gloves & Broken Hearts, which I wrote the final sentence of yesterday. I've had the ending for months, I just had to finesse the final chapters to get there. That appears to be where I am now, and I should just need to sort out the epilogue and then go through for a reading edit on two fronts - me and my constant beta reader, Missi.
I'm not certain I actually dig this song—not that I think it's 'bad' per se, just not sure it's my cuppa—but this video is insane. This is my first exposure to Mörmaid, and after seeing it, I put their new album Pearlescent Dark on my Apple Music to give the entire thing a go. You can download the album from Mörmaid's Bandcamp HERE.
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I love Steven Kostanski. After helping bring us one of the greatest Horror films of the past twenty years (The Void, Co-Written and Directed with Jeremy Gillespie) and Writing/Directing one of my favorite films of all time (Psycho Goreman), photos of him hard at work on a remake of Roger Corman's Deathdealer surfaced earlier this year. Then, he goes and drops a teaser for an entirley different film, one much more in line with PG than Deathdealer:
Did I mention Kostanski also headed the FX team that brought us the yoga kill in this year's In A Violent Nature? I mean, his team did all the FX, but really, that's the one everyone's still talking about, whether you liked or disliked the film. All this, and he's still had time to finish what looks like a veritable practical FX bonanza called Frankie Freako? Steve baby, you are amazing, and I'm here for anything you have to drop on us.
Plastic:
I'm having a tough time not ordering these new NECA recreations of the Universal Monsters as originally released by Burger King. I remember these from the 80s!
Honestly, I really could just settle for The Creature, but it's a set. Read all about it over on the mighty Bloody Disgusting HERE.
Playlist:
Dead Milkmen - Quaker City Quiet Pills
Horrendous - Ontological Mysterium
Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy OST
Frank Black - Teenager of the Year
JD McPherson - Undivided Heart & Soul
Deadguy - Fixation on a Coworker
Mr. Bungle - Eponymous
Jim Williams - Possessor OST
Nothing - The Great Dismal
The Pixies - Surfer Rosa
Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom
Deadguy - Work Ethic
Big Black - Lungs EP
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• Knight of Swords
• Seven of Wands
• Knight of Pentacles
That's a lot of Will. We have a concentrated effort of intellect that brings about creative completion (that's an announcement I'll be making next week), and a concentrated effort - what I'm reading as - to not spend the money on those Universal Figures I posted above. Okay, thank you Hand of Doom Tarot Deck, for putting a face to the inner voice I was set to ignore (really, that's all the cards do).
If you've seen Longlegs, you'll probably be on the same page. I've been a T. Rex fan for years, but my exposure to the band never moved beyond Electric Warrior and my personal favorite of their records (that I'm familiar with), The Slider, which really helped get me through a tough month in LA last January.
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Bloody Disgusting ran an article recently that introduced me to the Popcorn Fright Film Fest. Both a live event taking place in Fort Lauderdale, FL, and a virtual event, the fest runs from August 8th through the 18th and is stacked with awesome films. I'm seriously considering purchasing a virtual pass, and I'm looking through the trailers to try and assemble a priority list. Here's one that caught me right away:
Both Kyle Gallner and Willa Fitzgerald look awesome in what little of this trailer I watched. While I have not seen Writer/Director JT Mollner's debut feature, 2016's Outlaws and Angels, I'm very interested in it now. Also, Giovani Ribisi is credited as the Cinematographer on Strange Darling. How cool is that?
The Popcorn Frights Fest's website is HERE. Grab some tickets and maybe we can, I don't know, hang out in a virtual movie theatre.
NCBD:
So, you'll notice I broke down and picked up one of the books I previously announced I was done with. Which one? NOT an X-book, I'll tell you that. Let's get into today's pull from Rick's Comic City in Clarksville:
A consistently delightful sequel to both the Army of Darkness Theatrical and Director's cuts, which in and of itself is a great reason to read.
Finally! I'm going to hunker down and re-read The Nice House on the Lake before I jump into this new, sequel series.
The Neo Novena saga comes to an end. I'm really hoping there will be more stories set in this world.
Road Stories continues. Last issue was fantastic; interested to see where we go with Erika this time.
Yep, this is the one. I've decided to hang on and give this new Turtles book a chance. I'm just so invested in the continuity they built over the last 150 issues, it is difficult to abandon it now.
More Springer! You know, I think my Drinking with Comics cohost Mike Shinabargar was on to something when he said that, working in a comic shop, he sees that sales on Void Rivals could use a regular dose of a character from one of the Energon Universe's more well-known properties. I think that's fine - whatever Kirkman and his team need to do to keep this book coming because I LOVE Void Rivals. I think this 100% stands on its own, however, if we need a regular dose of Springer or any other Transformer, no problem. Especially Springer - for some reason, I've always felt he was a bit left-of-center and a great fit for a deep space, non-Earth storyline.
Playlist:
USSA - The Spoils
Alice in Chains - Dirt
Shellac - To All Trains
Tim Hecker - Infinity Pool OST
High on Fire - Cometh the Storm
Man Man - Carrot on Strings
Black Sabbath - Eponymous
Horrendous - Ontological Mysterium
Deafheaven - Sunbather
Zeal & Ardor - GREIF (pre-release singles)
The Dillinger Escape Plan - Option Paralysis
Genghis Tron - Board Up the House
Mr. Bungle - Eponymous
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• Two of Pentacles
• XXI: The World
• 0: The Fool
Collaboration, as opposed to opposition, leads to what comes next, which is a new journey in and of itself.
Sometimes the cards are so eerily straight forward, it's effortless to read them.
