Drinking with Comics Issue #8

The issue that puts the "drinking" back in Drinking with Comics! Special guests Robin Thorsen of The Guild and Havenhurst creator Tanya Bjork!

White Zombie - Blur the Technicolor

I tend to listen to a lot of metal at work. It helps keep me moving and awake - important when you wake up at 4:30AM. Recently I dug out White Zombie's Astro-Creep:2000 and put it on my iPod. I've probably played fifty times since, sometimes multiple times in a row.

In my opinion, while Zombie's solo career has always been mediocre at best, this record and especially this particular song still sound as damn good today as they did what? Twenty years ago when they were released?

That wah guitar sound is out of this world.

Savages - Fucker

New Fucker/Dream Baby Dream 7"! See what you miss when you drop out for a few? I had no idea this was released back in May. Gonna order this now (HERE), as Savage's 2013 debut Silence Yourself is still one of my 'go-to' records on a weekly or even sometimes daily basis. Dark, jagged British post-punk.

Wait a minute, didn't even realize it at first. The Dream Baby Dream is a cover of the Suicide song! Awesome.

Frank Booth's What's That Smell

What's That Smell" by mindexpands

How have I never known this existed? Many great and hallowed thanks to my good friend Ray for turning me on to this.

Perturbator - Satanic Rites

I've had a slow start on buying music since the turn of the new year, now an unbelievable almost seven months ago. Because of my continued work on Drinking with Comics I've spent much of the time and money I would usually put into music into comics. Couple this with the intense amount of work I've been pouring to my novel, ShadowPlay Book One: Kim and Jessie and my 40+ hours a week I spend in the Cryogenics Lab at my day job new music has just been hard for me to keep track of/partake in. If it wasn't for Heavenisanincubator, the installments my colleagues Grez, Chester and Tommy provide for Joup's Friday Album column, and of course the mighty Brooklyn Vegan and Bloody Disgusting, I would be fucking lost. In the digital age, if you stop to catch your breath for a moment everyone you've been trying to keep track of releases an album all at once!

Recently I began to remedy this. Within the last two or three weeks I've bought several of the records that have been on my list. The Afghan Whigs' return album Do To The Beast, Liars' Mess, Swans To Be Kind, In Slaughter Natives' Cannula Coma Legio and Perturbator's Dangerous Days. I won't say I like any one of the bunch better than the rest, they're all perfect examples of awesome for the particular moods they suit, however thus far I've definitely clocked the most miles with Dangerous Days. Satanic Rites is one of my favorite tracks on an album that consists entirely of favorite tracks.

Interested? You should be. GO HERE and name your price for the downloadable album or buy the JUST re-pressed digipak CD, which I missed getting by about a freakin' day. The art alone is worth it for the tactile copy.

The Children of Old Leech

image courtesy of WordHorde.com

News of The Children of Old Leech reached me about two weeks ago or so when Mr. Barron blogged about it and the news really made my day! A tribute to the mythos of Laird Barron (pre-order it HERE). Hot damn! Have I mentioned here, as I have repeatedly on Twitter, what a 'cosmic horror' phase I'm going through at the moment? It began with Nick Pizzolatto's True Detective, which in turn made me finally begin Robert Chambers The King in Yellow - a book that had been on my radar since acquiring the totally awesome coffee table book The Art of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos several years ago, the first place I heard of The King in Yellow. Laird Barron's work shares some of the DNA of these weird horror classics but it is very much it's own thing. Mr. Barron's skill with the short story is among the best I've encountered and every story I read by him is an absolute pleasure on the brain. He has several collections, not anthologies so much as what he so wonderfully calls mosaic novels. All of them are great. He also, thus far, has one novel and one novella. If you're unfamiliar with his work my suggestion is to just start at the beginning and work your way through it.

The Imago Sequence - mosaic novel
Occultation - mosaic novel
The Light is the Darkness - novella
The Croning - novel
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All - mosaic novel

The Empty Man... and Trees... and The Superannuated Man

image courtesy of ComicBookResources.com

... is the topic of today's Thee Comic Column over on Joup.

Come to think of it, I've been so busy I've not posted the last two links for my column here. Let's remedy that now because last week's was Warren Ellis and Jason Howard's awesome Trees:

image courtesy of BrokenFrontier.com

And the week before that was Ted McKeever's new book - which I am in love with - The Superannuated Man!

image courtesy of ImageComics.com