Blackened Metal Hero

My follow Horror Vision host Tori recently turned me on to Bölzer. This album is fantastic! A Black/Extreme Metal band, I was floored to discover Bölzer is a two-piece! This record is fantastic, and mixing/mastering/recording engineers Victor Santura, Michael Zech, and the enigmatic D.G. really knew how to steer the band into a sonic space that more than makes up for any 'missing' instrumentation. I'd say the sound of this album, which really knows how to use an ample but still tasteful amount of reverb, is one of the fullest metal band sounds I've heard in a while. There's a definite 'space' to this recording, and it's big and dark and bold.  

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Podcast

 

A new episode of The Horror Vision went up last week. I've recently moved beyond just the audio component of the show, and started making extremely rudimentary 'videos' for each episode. The plan is to eventually make a more involved video, or - gasp - do something similar to DwC, but with that show slowly creeping back toward reappearance, where I'll find the time remains to be seen. Until then, enjoy us talking about the genre we love, and if you dig it, leave a comment and let's talk Horror!

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Watch:

Tuesday after work I rented Jeremy Gardner's new film After Midnight. Produced by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead - Benson has a small supporting role in the film - Gardner wrote and co-directed this one, as well as starring in it. As it stands now, After Midnight will almost definitely finish 2020 as my favorite film of the year.

 

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Playlist:

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

Lake Street Dive - Making Do (Single)

Bölzer - Hero

Zombi - Shape Shift

Zola Jesus - Stridulum

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Card:

Back on track, big time.

Nobody Wants to Party with Us, says Mrs. Piss

 

I did not find out about Chelsea Wolfe and Jess Gowrie's new band Mrs Piss until a week or two ago, and since, their debut Self-Surgery has become a record I simply cannot turn off. Available on the always great Sargent House, you can order the record HERE.

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Having just seen the original Castle Freak for the first time within the last year or two (Thanks, Joe Bob!), I'd read about Barbara Crampton's work producing a remake and became immediately interested. It's not often one of the original cast members in a seminal film take on such a labor of love, and the fact that the cast member in question is possibly the greatest Scream Queen of all time only adds to my interest. Why remake this film? I can only assume Ms. Crampton has good reason to throw her hat into the project, and judging by the trailer, we should have a new iteration of Stuart Gordon's somewhat odd modern take on the H.P. Lovecraft classic in just a few short weeks.

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NCBD

First, the return of Rick Remender and Jerome Opena's dark fantasy epic has become even more exciting now that they've announced Seven to Eternity will be ending in just three short issues. I love this book, and I've missed it incredibly.

We Live is an Aftershock book getting a lot of press. On a whim I grabbed the first issue last month, dug it quite a bit, and now I'm hooked. Love this cover on issue two. 

A 'zombie book' that is very much not about zombies, Dead Day continues to make me smile.

Die! Die! Die! may be a book I've continued to read out of inertia, but that doesn't mean I'm not still enjoying it. "GI Joe but totally nuts" is really the only way to describe this one.

I mistakenly never added Jason Howard's Big Girls to either one of my pulls at Atomic Basement or The Comic Bug, and as such, it has been a pain in the arse to find since I picked up the first issue. If I hadn't stumbled across a copy of #3 last week, I would have probably given up and waited for trade, but since I'm only missing #2 now, I'm making the attempt to go monthly again, just to support Howard, whose art I adore.

And finally, this is a new one I'm considering picking up. A sequel to Vault Comics' Fearscape, which I did not read but keep hearing good things about, I thought I might grab the first issue of A Dark Interlude and the Fearscape trade. 

This is definitely the biggest NCBD is a while. I still have storage concerns, but they've kind of taken a back seat to 'the passion' again.

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Playlist:

Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery

The Clash - London Calling

The Bronx - Eponymous (I)

Fleet Foxes - Shore

The Foxies - Anti Socialite (single)

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

Greg Puciato - Child Soldier: Creator of God

Steve Moore - Bliss OST

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Card:

Really, not necessarily a new journey or undertaking, as a direct indictment of how fucking lazy I have been of late. I just can't seem to get my discipline with writing back online at the moment; it's been a struggle now for the last few months, and I really need to do something about it

The Filth and the Fury

 

Last night, I showed K Julien Temple's Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury for the first time. This was my third time seeing it, first in probably ten years. It reminded me just how much I love the Pistols, a love that wasn't always there, but came on strong after readng Tour Manager Noel Monk's tour bio Twelve Days on the Road, which I have now slotted up for a re-read sometime in the new year. Love them or hate them, Never Mind the Bollocks still stands as possibly the most pivotal 12 songs ever recorded.

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Watch:

 

Along with The Filth and the Fury, this weekend we also watched Floria Sigismondi's film The Runaways, the 2010 biopic about the all-female rock band of the same name. I'd seen this one before, back when it first hit video. The Runaways was my first inclination that Kristen Stewart could act, and although the film still looks to me as though large chunks were edited out before release, it's a great story about an awesome band I don't listen to nearly enough. One of K's favorite groups, I've definitely picked them up more since we started dating, but I really need to dig in on my own.

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Playlist:

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Damn the Torpedoes

Dance with the Dead - B-Sides: Vol. 1

My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult - Confessions of a Knife

Death Valley Girls - Under the Spell of Joy

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicenter

Horseback  The Invisible Mountain

Curtis Harding - Face Your Fear

Cold Cave - Cherish the Light Years

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Card:

The cups runneth over. Let's hope so. 

New Melvins!

 

New Melvins? Yes, please!

Pre-order the new album HERE, out February 26 on Ipecac Records!

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Watch:

Friday morning I woke up and rented Bryan Bertino's new film The Dark and The Wicked on Prime. Great flick. I didn't 100% connect with it the way I had hoped, however, I probably had some pretty unrealistic expectations. That said, it's a very well made film, even if I did kind of think all the atmosphere and tension didn't quite "pop" the way it tried to. Definitely worth supporting, though, and Bertino is one of the best modern filmmakers working in Horror, in my opinion. 

I also finally made it around to Benson and Moorhead's episode of this year's season of The Twilight Zone. "8" is great. I still don't dig the overall feel of the series, and as much as I dig Jordan Peele, he just doesn't have the same wry manner needed to fill Rod Serling's shoes, but I did like seeing an Octopus kill off a team of Arctic research scientists. 

Despite my misgivings on the series, I'm glad someone's doing it, because anthology shows like this help employ a lot of filmmakers, and whether I watch them or not, it makes me happy they exist.

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Playlist:

Opeth - Watershed 

Mr. Bungle - The Raging Wraith of the Easter Bunny 

Barry Adamson - As Above So Below 

Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To the Sky 

Miserable - Uncontrollable 

Anna Von Hausswolff - All Thoughts Fly

Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

Fen - The Dead Light

Hoseback - The Invisible Mountain

Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen

Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

Opeth - My Arms Your Hearse

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Card:

What I've been doing to myself again with writing. I did nail some important backstory in a scene yesterday, but I could have got a lot more done had I not kept flitting around, being distracted by menial tasks that totally could have waited. 

Sudden Death!

 

The first official video from Mr. Bungle's The Raging Wraith of the Easter Bunny, which coincidentally, I just got done listening to at work before I clicked over to youtube and discovered this. Loving the record so far.

 

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For some reason, I have Aliens/Prometheus on the brain today, and I realized I've never watched these deleted scenes.

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Playlist:

NIN - The Downward Spiral

Beck - Delay (Deluxe Edition)

Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery

Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun

Opeth - Watershed 

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Card:

Be careful, consider options, do not rush.

Sabbath Lads

For my fellow Sabbath Lads. Ozzy has never sounded so serene.

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The season opener of John Favre's The Mandalorian was so chocked full of goodness that I thought, for a moment, I might explode. Thankfully, someone is doing something cool with Star Wars.

Also, now that I've restarted my Disney + sub, I'm really looking forward to Wandavision. So much so, I think I'm going to start re-watching the MCU from the beginning, filling in those gaps I've missed along the way. What stoked my excitement?

I feel like I am about to very much re-engage with Marvel. 

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NCBD:

Pretty light week. 

A new series from Aftershock Comics, Miskatonic looks like it will pit J. Edgar Hoover's "Red Scare" against the seedy underground world of Lovecraftian Death Cults. How could I not want to read this?

The old reliable, every-month-is-better-than-the-last.

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Playlist:

Selim Lemouchi and His Enemies

Opeth Deliverance

I found an excellent podcast recently that has become increasingly important to the research aspect of writing Shadow Play Book II and spent some time listening yesterday. Mexico Unexplained is a series of quick but amalgam of informative historical facts and subsequent conjecture, and it's fascinating. Go to their site HERE. 

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Card:

Patient and stable. Also, coming out the other side of that solitude we started today's post off with. 

1996 Called

I'm not really a Beck fan. I mean, I harbor no ill will, and I say this in spite of the fact that I still stand by his 1996 collaboration with the Dust Brothers - Odelay - is in my mind one of the greatest records of the 90s. But other than that? Well, there's the odd track here or there that I'll catch somewhere and that makes me say, 'You know, let me give that guy's other albums another chance,' but it's always for naught. But Odelay. FUUUAAAAHHHHCKKK. It's still brilliant. I'm generally not in the headspace for it, but when I am, well, once 'Devil's Haircut' kicks in, it always seems like I'll be listening to it for days. But that doesn't ever happen. I guess that's kind of the bane of albums you know so well and love so much - they become such a part of you that it almost feels redundant to physically go back to them too often. Yesterday was one of those 'Odelay' days, but this time, I decided to give the 2008 Deluxe Edition a whirl. The track listing is more than double the number of tracks on the original album, and although that sometimes annoys me, yesterday I fell into a beautiful abyss of some of the weirdest shit I have ever heard on what will always, in my opinion, be a pop record. Tracks like 'Electric Music and the Summer People', 'American Wastland', and the ominous Aphex Twin remix 'Richard's Haircut' left me slack-jawed. That said, no track made me marvel more than Inferno. It's just... junkyard broken computer funk perfection. I might be listening to this one for a while...

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Watch:

I've really been into Horror Short film lately. I started a new column on The Horror Vision where I'm posting some of what I'm finding, and metnioned a few here. Last night I found this one, and I thought it was extremely effective:  

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Playlist:

Low Cut Connie - Private Lives

David Bowie - Blackstar

Beck - Delay (Deluxe Edition)

Zeal and Ardor - Wake of a Nation

Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery

Molasses - Mourning Haze/Drops of Sunlight (single)

Selim Lemouchi and His Enemies - Earth Air Spirit Water Fire

Ritual Howls - Rendered Armor

Opeth - My Arms, Your Hearse 

 

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There's hidden assets here somewhere, but I'm not entirely sure how to find them. Lots of disks lately, and money has been on my mind. Really feeling the need to leave LA, to buy a home, to try and remove myself from the shit show. It's in my best interests to begin paying attention to things I normally ignore - might lead to a Cha-Ching.