New World Inferno (Via Brooklyn Vegan)

World Inferno Friendship Society have a new one coming out. This is another one of the great bands my wife turned me onto when we first met. I'd be lying if I said I'd kept up with everything they've done, but they're a great band and any new music by a great band is worth promoting as much as possible!

Read more on Brooklyn Vegan here.

Thee Comic Column #63 - Peter David's Fallen Angel

image courtesy of fantasticfiction.co.uk

Yep, Lee and her take-no-prisoners approach to redemption is the topic of discussion this week in Thee Comic Column over on Joup (here).

It's funny, I'm traveling this week, hanging out in Florida for the first time and I brought all of the volumes of the book I discuss with me on the trip, only to realize that DC never released a trade collecting the final volume of their original Fallen Angel run. This has left me unable to read the series as I'd planned - I'm stuck on a raft between DC vol. #2 and IDW vol. #1. Also as I talk about in the column I have all the DC in original issue format, however when I get home tomorrow I'm now going to have to really dig through my long boxes to find them.

Crap.

Still, the payoff will most definitely be worth the effort, as Fallen Angel is just one fantastic book!!!

CJ & Co. We Got Our Own Thing

Originally I dismissed this, but stick with it til the end and it gets good.

Chester Whelks Interviews Gloom Balloon on Joup

Chester Whelks conducts a fantastic interview with Patrick Tape Fleming of Gloom Cookie on Joup here.

Buy the Gloom Cookie record You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Disaster/Fix the Sunshine Parts 1-7 on their bandcamp here.

New Cynic!

As a high school metal head interestingly enough I pretty much avoided death metal at all costs. Sure, because of my girlfriend at the time I saw Deicide two or three times but into them? Not so much (awkward teenage sex to Dead by Dawn is NOT a good thing). Anyway...

Fast forward years later and Cynic's Focus (specifically the track "Textures") was my introduction to the idea that there were good bands that employed the gnarly 'Ghhhhaaaa' vocals. It's all about not relying on it but using it where appropriate. Patton did this and Cynic definitely did this on Focus, where the vocals ranged between the haunting female vocals, the vocodor-ed vocals I always thought of as representing some form of celestial entity and the snarling, spitting vocals more associated with death metal. These techniques fit perfectly over instrumental passages that - while I'm not a huge fan of the very solid-state sounding distorted tone on the guitars - move poignantly between sophisticated jazz, complex rhythmic prog and intricate metal.

And now there's some new Cynic.

Nothing - Dig

This new track by Nothing dropped in August and I missed it!!! Buy it on their bandcamp for .99 here.

Cibo Matto - MFN

Why did this band break-up in the first place? Viva! La Woman was fantastic and then Stereo Type A - I'll never forget when that album came out and we all just sat around floored at the maturation Yuka and Miho had achieved 3 years. I mean, Viva is fun, but Stereo Type is viable as one of the top ten best albums of the 90's in my opinion. Moonchild? Come on...

Anyway, Mr. Brown sent me the link to this video recently with a reminder that Cibo Matto's new record, Hotel Valentine, will be out on, appropriately enough, on Valentine's day 2014.

Nice.