A month or two back, one of my guys at work turned me onto Molchat Doma, a Belarusian post-punk band from Minsk, formed in 2017, whose newest album Monument, was released this year on Sacred Bones Records. Probably because of introducing them into my youtube algorithm, yesterday afternoon I stumbled across a thumbnail for a post titled "1 Hour of Melancholic SovietWave" (HERE). Sovietwave? I immediately clicked on this, and the track I've posted above was the lead-in track, which in turn sent me looking for more by this band, Воскресная площадка, which so far I have been unable to find a translation for. In listening, so far, I'm fascinated, so I intend to explore this a bit more over the coming days (and nights; this music is perfect for after the sun sets).
Watch:
Friday night I finally got around to watching Edward Norton's Adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn. Wow. Fantastic film.
It's been at least ten years since I read Mr. Lethem's novel, and being that I finished my re-read of William Sloane's To Walk the Night yesterday, I moved directly into round two with Brooklyn. In cases like this, where I've read the book but not in a while, I'm never sure if I should watch the film first or re-read the book first, so once again, I'm just going to play it by ear. Either way, both are fantastic.
Of special note, the music for Mr. Norton's adaptation was done by Composer Daniel Pemberton, with contributions from Wynton Marsalis and Thom York, to name a few (although, as always, I feel like Mr. Yorke's voice is somewhat of an unwelcome sonic element in film scoring and composition, as it is so distinct and unmusical, it usually takes me out of the story immediately).
Playlist:
Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full
Oliver Nelson - The Blues and the Abstract Truth
Ornette Coleman - The Shape of Jazz to Come
Ella Fiztgerald - The Best of Ella Fitzgerald Vol. II
Talk about an album that defines a year in my life. INXS's Kick was everywhere in 1987. I was eleven. I remember some stroke popular kid in my 4th grade class telling me in gym class how his father brought him home, 'the album all the college kids are listening to,' and brandishing the cassette. I assumed it was something stupid because this kid was my antithesis. However, I was wrong, it wasn't stupid at all. To this day, Kick and U2's The Joshua Tree still sound to me the way I physically felt at that time in my life, which is a really cool and kind of spooky thing, like my cells rearrange to some pre-recorded configuration when those sounds are re-introduced to my brain. No where is that more true than on this particular song.
Watch:
Keola Racela's Porno dropped on Shudder this past week. This is one I'd been waiting on for a while; I almost went to a screening at some point, pre-COVID (I think - that seems so long ago now, it's like some hazy, undiscovered country). Anyway, I'll be reviewing this one later today on a new episode of The Horror Vision, which will go up Monday, however, let me just say - I really liked this flick, and it had one of the hardest to watch scenes EVER.
Playlist:
Jenny Lewis and The Watson Twins - Rabbit Fur Coat
Jenny Lewis - The Voyager
The Dillinger Escape Plan - Dissociation
Nabihah Iqbal - Weighing of the Heart
Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full
Bölzer - Hero
The Ocean - Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic I Cenozoic
Sir Neville Mariner & Academy of St. Martin in the Fields - Amadeus (Complete Soundtrack Recordings)
Opeth - Deliverance
Dance with the Dead - B-Sides: Vol. 1
Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit Vol. 1
The Seatbelts - Cowboy Bebop OST
INXS - Kick
Iggy and the Stooges - Raw Power (1973 Bowie Mix)
David Bowie - Diamond Dogs
I also spent an entire morning at work yesterday diving into The Black Tapes podcast. Can't recommend this one enough. I hooked.
Set up in a wonderful homage to Serial's first season, The Black Tapes deals with Paranormal Research and all the familiar hijinx - ghosts, demons, portals to hell. But the story is told through an NPR/This American Life kind of lens and because of that, it resonates in a very different way.
Card:
Threes and Swords - looks bad on the surface, but really, this is the cutting away of baggage in order to clarify and establish a firm foundation (fours). I've had two intensely productive days of writing and am clearing away a lot of the mental detritus that has had me clogged up these last couple months - fall out from world events, obviously - and am ready to end the year on the same mega-productive note that carried me through the first six months of it.
My cousin Charles is a huge Fleet Foxes fan, and although I've liked everything I have previously heard by the band, A) my most recent previous listen was quite some time ago, and B) they long ago fell off my radar. Until Charles messaged me about how much he loved the newest record, Shore. I gave this one a spin last week, liked it, and then did not return to it until yesterday, when Shore absolutely blew me away.
First, the way this record is recorded is gorgeous. There's some real craft here, especially with the vocals and the mixing. Robin Pecknold's voice is handled in a way that makes it feel enormous and intimate at the same time, no easy feat. The instrumentation and arranging is full but organic in a way that gives the depths of most songs a very layered, aquatic feel, so that the music washes over and submerges you. Given the title and cover art, this is most definitely intentional, and very much appreciated. I've always loved aquatic themes and 'flavors' in music, and that goes especially well with the songwriting on this record.
Watch
Holy smokes. Run, which should have been in theaters this past Mother's Day weekend, is on HULU now. I knew nothing about this one other than Sarah Paulson is in it - always a good thing - until my friend Jonathan Grimm texted me about how much he liked it. An hour and a half and some change later, I couldn't agree more. Don't watch any trailers, don't read anything, just WATCH IT! Wow. Co-writer/Director Aneesh Chaganty is definitely someone who I will be watching like a hawk for whatever he does next.
NCBD:
Isn't it nice when, every November, NCBD falls the day before a holiday made for eating too much and laying around reading? Yeah, it is.
So far, I adore this series, so let's continue on. I'm loving all the Autumn-tinted Horror in comics this year, three of them with new installments today!
The Plot is back and I am HAPPY! More dark, Ancestral Horror is exactly what this holiday season needed.
The Best of Raphael book from a few months ago remains one of my favorite comics since I was a kid - something about this oversized format. So of course, I'll be buying them all...
This last one is The Unkindness of Ravens #3. I'm digging this Sabrina-esque story, and realizing today that there's only one more issue, I'm unsure how this is going to wrap in a satisfactory manner.
Playlist:
Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chamber Be Full
Nabihah Iqbal released a new single last month, and as anyone who has become as enamored with her debut (post Throwing Shade), 2017's brilliant Weighing of the Heart, would expect, it's pretty damn great. Airy, emotive, and a touch mysterious, with that raw bedroom quality Ms. Iqbal brings to her music, "Is This Where it Ends" was actually released a month before the bandcamp release Blue Magic Gentle Magic, which is all that is left of a second album she had been recording when her studio was burgled. ALL tracks were lost, with only barebones 'work in progress' tracks kept on the cloud, that can not be manipulated. Read about it and support Nabihah Iqbal on her bandcamp by double-tapping the widget.
Let's help this amazing artist find her muse in the face of this extremely crappy setback.
Watch:
I finally took my good friend Missi's advice and checked out Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein's Freaks on Netflix. Pretty damn god. Freaks isn't something you haven't seen before, but the way it doles out information, and how it starts cold and leaves you hanging, makes the film feel different, as though it's using tropes and a rather tired formula to do something with a bit more heart. Great performances all around, ESPECIALLY from Bruce Dern.
Playlist:
Yob - Clearing the Path to Ascend
Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins - Rabbit Fur Coat
Jucifer - نظم
Crippled Black Phoenix - Ellengæst
Pallbearer - Forgotten Days
Death Crux - Mutant Flesh
Card:
A recurring cycle for me these past few months - I touch optimization with sevens, then become weighed down by what the accomplishments - no matter how small - add to the process. Eights are imperfection personified, and distractions - welcome or not - are part of that.
From the new Crippled Black Phoenix record, Ellengæst, which dropped October 9th on Seasons of Mist. You can order the record HERE. Full disclosure: I haven't even heard this record yet. I have a bit of an interested/not interested relationship with this band, and I completely forgot this was coming out.
Watch:
I had the absolute joy of watching Josh Boone's New Mutants on Friday, and I have to say, I LOVED it. I talk about it on the latest episode of The Horror Vision, which will be on all streaming platforms, youtube, IGTV, and the little widget in the top righthand corner of this blog by the time you read this. In a nutshell - see it.
Playlist:
Zeal and Ardor - Wake of a Nation
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
White Lung - Eponymous
Young Widows - Old Wounds
Yob - Clearing the Path to Ascend
Fleetwood Mac - Greatest Hits
Anna Von Hausswolff - All Thoughts Fly
Trust Obey - Fear and Bullets
Windhand - Eternal Return
Corrosion of Conformity - Deliverance
System of a Down - Eponymous
The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night
Etta James - Third Album
Card:
Completion. Full power. I realized on Saturday that, despite my mental lapses and sagging work ethic, I am very nearly complete with nearly half of the second book in the Shadow Play trilogy. The image from this card is a perfect representation of how I feel when I reflect upon that.
Glint, the first release from Deafheaven's Ten Years Gone live album , out December 4th on Sargent House. Order HERE.
READ:
For Halloween I did an impromptu re-read of Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park, which has become a book I read every couple of Octobers and never tire of. From there, I'd planned to begin Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse, a book my good friend and fellow co-host from Drinking w/ Comics and The Horror Vision gifted me a copy of a few months back. However, something steered me into another impromptu re-read, this time of William Sloane's To Walk the Night. I first read this one back in 2016, and found I already was chomping at the bit to get back into it. 75 pages or so in, it's every bit as great as I remember. Also, the narrator speaks a lot like Hunter S. Thompson - which I attribute era and region - and that familiarity adds a entirely new level of pleasure to the prose.
To Walk the Night was originally published in 1937, and as such, there are many editions of the book that have been published in the intervening years. The most recent I know of, and the edition I have, is in a volume titled The Rim of Morning, published by NYRB Classics in 2015.
The volume also contains the novel The Edge of Running Water, another fantastically dark, cosmic tale of restrained but utterly creepy Horror.
Playlist:
Naked Eyes - Promises, Promises (Single)
Tamaryn - The Waves
The Stone Roses - Eponymous
Stevie Nicks - Stand Back (Single)
Run the Jewels - RTJ4
Bölzer - Hero
Steve Morse - Bliss OST
Card:
The 5 of Wands always leaves me scratching my head a bit - there are things about this card that suggest a level of discomfort or discontent with authority to me, and I wonder if that has to do with my recent re-engagement with world news (imagine that, throw out the clown and the news no longer feels like a sideshow). However, there's also something militant about this card, and it makes me wonder if perhaps that might not bode well for the coming restrictions civic leaders are no doubt going to have to impose as the population of entitled cunts that apparently make up a sizable portion of this country's population continue to act like spoiled children.
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.
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!
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.
Playlist:
Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full
