Jesus Christ, who didn't die last week? We lost three big names, and I wanted to pay some tribute here.
R.I.P. Dusty Hill:
Dusty Hill, founding member of ZZ Top. I never realized Dusty sang lead on Tush. What a band. I think my third ever CD when I was in early high school was the ZZ Top greatest hits album.
R.I.P Joey Jordinson:
Say what you want about Slipknot, but this is the song that broke my hate for the guys that I still insist totally ripped off Mr. Bungle. The drums on this song are amazing.
R.I.P. Mike Howe:
I haven't listened to Metal Church in a very long time, but there was a time when they were pretty important to me. My girlfriend in High School had their first couple of records, and I can remember laying stoned out of my mind listening to this song and feeling that intense thrill that the really epic 80s thrash stuff inspired in me at that age. I still feel that now, and it has a lot to do with Mike Howe's vocals. This song crushes.
Playlist:
ZZ Top - Rhythmeen
Metal Church - Blessing in Disguise
Metal Church - Eponymous
The Replacements - Tim
The Replacements - Let It Be
The Replacements - Sorry Ma, I Forgot to Take Out the Trash
Somehow, I completely missed that Philadelphia's Mannequin Pussy has a new EP out. You can pick up Perfect over on the group's Bandcamp. As I have come to expect, the five songs are perfect individually or taken as a whole. There's more of that 90s flavor they wear on their sleeve, but as with the band's other releases, this is not tribute or referential music. Mannequin Pussy is the real deal.
And I'm happy to have been able to write that last sentence.
NCBD:
One of the things I've realized as I delve back into the Spider-Man issues I grew up with is that the draw for me to Spidey was always weighed heavily on his rogue's gallery, most of which use visages straight out of Halloween or Horror Movies. I know for a fact that the first Spidey comic I ever bought, Amazing #289, was based on the Hobgoblin. Since then, Venom, Jack O' Lantern, Green Goblin and so many others that escape me at the moment all piqued my interest because of their macabre personas. And now we have Kindred, who is kind of a cross between the Hobgoblin and Doctor Octopus, except with giant millipedes instead of metal arms. Creepy A.F.
The final issue of what may be my favorite series of the year. Marvel, please give Daniel Warren Johnson his own monthly book with either Bill or one of your other, lesser-used cosmic characters.
Another fifth and final issue. I'm interested in seeing if this one is going where I think it's going.
Peter David's Symbiote Spider-Man returns, and this time, we're going into the Crossroads storyline that the criminally underrated Bill Mantlo penned for the Incredible Hulk title during his early 80s run on the title. I just completed my collection of and re-read that Hulk story a month or two ago, so I'm psyched at this book popping up and playing in that sandbox!
Last weekend, I re-read the first That Texas Blood storyline and found it's about a hundred times better than I remembered, and I remembered really liking it! One subsequent issue into the new arc left me wanting more, so here it comes.
These TMNT annuals are always pricey but also always worth the extra dough. Plus, I'm excited to see the Rat King again!
Playlist:
Plague Bringer - As the Ghosts Collect, the Corpses Rest
Adam Egypt Mortimer - The Obelisk
Mannequin Pussy - Perfect EP
Iress - Prey
Dead Milkman - Welcome to the End of the World
John Carpenter and Alan Howarth - Prince of Darkness OST
King Woman - Celestial Blues
Card:
Probably a good idea, as a newfound love of Session IPAs has precipitated an increased nightly beer count on my part. When I told my GP how many beers a night I drink (2-4, maybe as many as 8 on the weekend if we have company) during a recent physical, she did a bit of a double take. Annual routine bloodwork bears out my health, but this card reminds me it's never a good thing to tempt fate. Which is a figure of speech, as I don't believe in fate.
Fell back into Chicago's super underrated industrial grindcore masters Plague Bringer yesterday. This band should be so much more well-known in the metal/industrial community than they are. There's literally nothing I can think of that batters me like this album does. From the drawing of breath that opens the first track, I smile and prepare to be undone.
While looking around on their Bandcamp for any sign of recent activity (none), I discovered that in 2017 they released this "Lara Flynn Bringer' shirt and now I am extremely sad that it's sold out, there are none I could find on ebay or etsy, and I'm shit out of luck acquiring one.
Maybe Plague Bringer will resurface and do another run of it. Maybe. In the meantime, if you dig this kind of sonic madness, PB's Bandcamp is HERE.
Watch:
After hearing about Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz's 1973 underrated Horror film Messiah of Evil for the first time back on the old Shockwaves podcast a couple years ago, I started to look around for where to watch the film. The title alone had me, along with the fact that I couldn't remember ever hearing of it before. Back when I was cutting my teeth and really getting into the genre twenty years ago, the two friends who indoctrinated my interest and made it an obsession both had extensive film collections, so the fact that, between the two of them, I don't think either ever mentioned it surprised me. Turns out that's because the film wasn't released on DVD until 2009. That brief mention on Shockwaves sent me into a tizzy trying to track down a streaming service that featured the film. No dice, until two years ago I found it on Prime.
Score, I thought. Only no, no score at all. I started the film and turned it off after only a few minutes because, whatever source the streaming giant culled the film from, the picture quality was unwatchable. Maybe my relatively recent conversion to the Cult of Blu Ray at the time - something I swore for years I would never do - had spoiled me. I've become a bit of a stickler for clean picture transfers, and this one wasn't even what I'd call weak. It was awful. This prejudice is not a bad thing at all, I realize now, except that, for Messiah of Evil, it meant I would have to wait.
Fast forward to last week when I fired up Shudder and found that not only had they added Messiah of Evil, but the picture quality is gorgeous! So after a few false starts over the last five days or so, I finally watched the film last night. I was not disappointed.
First, I don't know if it's just the similarities between Phillan Bishops's electronic score for the film and Carl Zittrer's for another under-seen film from the 70s I adore, Bob Clark's inimitable Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, but Messiah of Evil's score made me warm to the film immediately. Add to that the fantastic settings - most especially our heroine Arletty's missing father's home on the beach, the design behind which was created by artists Jack Fisk and Joan Mocine, the former of which would go on to work with David Lynch on Mulholland Drive and Paul Thomas Anderson on There Will Be Blood and The Master, and I could not take my eyes off the screen. If you read this blog, you'll know how important both Lynch and PTA are to me, so you can imagine what a harmonic charge I felt realizing there was precedent here that fit with my own personal film aesthetic.
There is not a lot of information about Messiah of Evil out there on the internet. However, in regard to the design and look of the film, I found what I feel is the holy grail over on Dr. John Trafton's website. His article Messiah of Evil: Film and the Influence of L.A. Pop Art absolutely blew me away. Mr. Trafton's wealth of knowledge on not only Los Angeles' history, but Film, Pop Art and the overall social fabric of the City of Angeles post-1940 makes for fantastic reading. I can't recommend this enough, whether you want a deep-dive into Messiah of Evil, or just an interesting read that focuses on Art can influence Cinema; you can find the article HERE.
Messiah of Evil has a real work-with-what we have vibe; Katz and Huyck smartly use a lot of California's most attractive and, when shot right, surreal asset: the beach. The sound of the waves is nearly omnipresent here, and if you've ever stayed in a town where that is indeed the major sonic background, you'll know it makes for a heightened, slightly surreal experience. The constant sound of the ocean seems to work in contrast to the everyday world we humans have made for ourselves, especially here in LaLaLand where commerce is god. This makes sense when you think about it; the ocean has always been a transcendent experience for me because to sit on the beach and quietly listen to the waves, you're literally sitting on the edge of humanity's world, listening to the planet breathe. In other words, this is one of the few experiences available to us where humanity is dwarfed by the larger organism that birthed us: the Earth.
It's worth mentioning that this oceanic setting firmly establishes Messiah of Evil in a sub-genre I have recently become quite enamored with, the aptly named Seaside Horror. I guess I've always been mildly aware of the feel of this genre-within-a-genre, however, it wasn't until Joe Bob Briggs showed both Dead and Buried and Humanoids from the Deep on his Last Drive-In double feature this past season that I fell in love with both and gained an understanding of the Seaside Horror aesthetic as a style for which many filmmakers have contributed entries. The idea of a double or triple feature with Messiah and either or both of these films, or John Carpenter's The Fog or even Dan Gildark's Cthulhu makes me nearly giddy with excitement. Hell, perhaps I should look into organizing a Seaside Horror Marathon?
Finally, another aspect of this film I found fit its tone perfectly was the Night of the Living Dead references in regard to its ghouls. Messiah seems to split the difference between zombies and vampires, which is cool because I don't know how much of either creature I need to see again at the moment. Mr. Trafton talks at length about this in the piece I linked to above, so I'll just implore you to go read what he has to say, while I wrap up this rather lengthy post and get on with working on the sequel to Shadow Play.
Plague Bringer - As the Ghosts Collect, the Corpses Rest
Card:
In some respects, I have been listening to my own personal dogma and not to my intuition. This is a nice reminder to be aware of that. We all need help thinking outside the paradigms we draw up for ourselves.
How long do we have to wait until this new Zeal and Ardor album drops? The correct answer is too f*&king long!
READ:
This has been a strange year, because over halfway through, and I've read very few actual novels. Instead, all my reading time is spent reading comics. Not a bad thing, and this certainly isn't the first time this has happened, but between starting the A Most Horrible Library podcast, and the brief resurrection of Drinking with Comics, I've fallen back in love with the medium in a way I haven't felt in years, specifically Marvel Comics, which I thought I'd left behind me after the 2015 Secret Wars event tapped us old-timer Marvel Zombies on the shoulders and whispered, "The old continuity you cling to is gone. Rest easy, this is for a younger generation now."
I've been digging in back issue bins for the first time in at least 15 years. I've also been seeking stuff out on eBay, both in attempts to fill in long-forgotten gaps in series I'd thought I'd given up on. It's made me realize I've come to regret giving away or selling back so many comics over the years. And I've been re-reading a bunch of old-school series as I acquire these missing pieces.
I remember seeing a full-page ad for this book back when I was a kid and thinking it looked troubling. A mutant kid killing one of his friends/teammates? Wow. I only read New Mutants here and there as a kid, so a lot of the character development was lost on me when I did pick up the book, and I never quite understood how Fallen Angels fit into the overall continuity of the ongoing Mutant Books, most penned by my beloved Chris Claremont still at that time. Now I know.
Fallen Angels was a New Mutants spin-off mini-series that ran back in 1987. A couple years ago I found issues 5-8 somewhere and picked them up, but it wasn't until two weeks ago I tracked down 1-4, and now completed, I've finally been reading this weird little adventure that features Roberta DaCosta AKA Sunspot and Warlock - always a character that made me go "WTF?" when I was a kid. Like a lot of comics from this era, this is a bit over-written, however, once you adjust to the difference in style, it's pretty fun.
This is a more recent title. A five-issue series by Jason Latour, Robbie Rodriguez and colorist Rico Renzi. Robbie and Rico are the visual team responsible for the short-lived but fantastic Vertigo series FBP, aka Collider. I fell in love with their style on that book, and when they came up with the initial design for Spider-Gwen - a character I shouldn't have really cared about at all at the time based on my reading habits - I gushed.
I love this character's design.
At the time of the series, and when it came out, I bought issues 1 and 2 and then stopped. Recently, I found 3-5 in the bins at The Comic Bug and started reading through it. Pretty cool alternate universe set-up, where Peter Parker is dead, Gwen was bitten by the radioactive spider, and Frank Castle is a cop! Also, MJ and Gwen play in a band called, what else? The Mary Janes, and have a hit song called "Face it, Tiger."
I don't know that I'll go back and read anything after this small series, but these five issues are bringing me great joy at the moment, so who knows?
With my recently reestablished love of Spider-Man, I've been going back in and just snatching rando issues from the three 80s series I would read off and on, and which I'm realizing I am missing so many issues I once had. In particular, I've been finding quite a few issues of Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, most issues in the 130s and 140s. Here's a recent acquisition that ties together several other disparate issues I had, so I can now read a short little stint. Remember: back in the 80s and before, trade collections were next to non-existent, so the editorial edict for these books wasn't for the creators to do 5-issue arcs. What we'd get is one-offs, larger threads that played out amidst the monthly stand-alones, and, in Spidey's case, arcs that ran across all three of his titles at the time (Web, Spectacular, and of course, Amazing).
The good news is, almost all of these books run between $2.99 and $3.99, so it's not like I'm breaking the bank. And sifting through the back issue bins has been a strangely calming routine. I can get all stressed out at work, stop by the bug and spend 30 minutes flipping through issues, and all that bad shit is gone when I walk out the door.
Also, motivated by the "Book Club" section on the latest episode of the Marvel's Pull List podcast, I decided it was finally time to re-read Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, so I dusted off the first of my three hardcovers and blew through the first arc E is for Extinction, as well as the 2001 annual that introduced Xorn. Oh, reading this is making me remember just how much I love Morrison's take on the X-Men.
Playlist:
Anthrax - Among the Living
Dio - Holy Diver
Chicago - 25 or 6 to 4 (single)
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
King Woman - Celestial Blues (pre-release singles)
Jethro Tull - Benefit
Ministry - Animositisomina
Godflesh - New Flesh in Dub Vol 1
Zeal and Ardor - Stranger Fruit
Mastodon - Crack the Skye
Card:
I'm back on the journey into Shadow Play, Book Two, and for the first time since last year about this time, I am IN! The book is occupying a lot of my thoughts and time, and what's more, I finally found the voice for a new element I'm adding. Also, there is way more written than I thought, and it's way better than I remembered. So while I'm still letting a new nosleep series idea percolate, my main focus has finally shifted back to where I need it to be!
Wednesday means it's New Comic Book Day, so let's see what I'll be picking up, shall we?
Although I have enjoyed this first arc of Marvel's Alien, as well as last week's Alien: Aftermath, I think after this one, I'll be stepping off. I need to trim some of my comic intake.
The last two issues of Deadly Class have blown me away. Let's see if #47 follows suit.
The finale. This book is crazy touching; a really unique way to tell the kind of story it's telling.
Not gonna lie, I'm stoked for this new Moon Knight book. Let's see how it goes.
Also not gonna lie, I couldn't care less about this book. That said, issue five is the final of the arc, so I'm picking that up just for completion's sake.
Playlist:
Cyndi Lauper - She's So Unusual
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
David Bowie - Hunky Dory
ZZ Top - Rhythmeen
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Uniform & The Body - Mental Wounds Not Healing
Nothing - Downward Years to Come
Black Sabbath Paranoid
Odonis Odonis - Shadowplay (single)
Dio - Holy Diver
Dio - Dream Evil
Card:
Sometimes, you just know when you're done with something. That's how I feel at the moment about LaLaLand and my career at the Biorepository. I'm developing an exit strategy on the former, but actually feel like I may need to have one for the latter sooner. Which will be tricky. Gonna have to play this one cool, because not doing so could definitely lead to Ruin.
Had this one in my head all day yesterday, finally had a chance to put it on the turntable later in the evening, as K and I sat outside and enjoyed the cooling night air. Dead of Night seemed appropriate, as by that time, I was up way past my usual Sunday night bedtime.
Watch:
I absolutely loved the first, two-part storyline in the new AHS spin-off anthology, American Horror Stories. It was great to return to Murder House, great to see some familiar frights, and the casting for this one was fantastic. As Lizard in Joe Begos's VFW, Sierra McCormick impressed the hell out of me, and that was definitely held up by her performance in Andrew Patterson's Vast of Night, which I watched about a year ago (maybe; time has lost all meaning). As Scarlett in AHS, McCormick turns in another great performance, and I'm betting in a year or two, she's going to be a pretty formidable star.
Playlist:
The albums I've been listening to the most are Cyndi Lauper's seminal She's So Unusual, Let it Bleed, and Paranoid. I've been hitting these super hard, and they're really shaping my recent days. It's pretty cool; I've become quite fond of rolling directly from Yeah Yeah, the final song on She's So Unusual, directly in to War Pigs. I don't know what it is about the juxtaposition of sonic textures there, but it really puts a smile on my face.
David Bowie - Hunky Dory
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
Cyndi Lauper - She's So Unusual
An Autumn for Crippled Children - The Long Goodbye
Deafheaven - New Bermuda
King Woman - Celestial Blues (pre-release singles)
King Woman - Doubt EP
Charles Mingus - Blues & Roots
John Carpenter - Lost Themes
Megadeth - Rust in Peace
Queens of the Stone Age - Rated R
The Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed
Chuck Berry - Berry on Top
Iggy and the Stooges - Raw Power
Orville Peck - Pony
Card:
This was definitely the watchword earlier today, however, I've moved past it and emerged into a state of mind that robbed my anxieties of their ammunition. As a result, I'm feeling pretty good.
Not gonna lie, at first listen to this latest track off Deafheaven's forthcoming album Infinite Granite, I was left pretty underwhelmed. It's nothing to do with the clean vocals - I loved Great Mass of Color from the first time I heard it, but this one felt a bit boring. That was in the car last night on the way to a backyard (second) viewing of Cody Calahan's new flick Vicious Fun - which incidentally is even better the second time through. Today, however, I strapped in the headphones and fired The Gnashing up for a second time, and I have to say, I dig the hell out of this track. I think it will play even better in the context of the entire album, but for now, I'm in.
I LOVE that George has embraced clean vocals. I mean, I'm hoping there will still be fierce, growling moments on the album, but in the meantime, it takes some serious stones for these guys to put themselves out there with these two singles, and I applaud their fearlessness, creativity, and choice of producers in Justin Meldal-Johnsen.
Watch:
To borrow a term from Dr. Rebekah McKendry, Here's a Bold Horror Statement: I think Fear Street: 1978 is in my all-time favorite Summer Camp Slashers, right behind Robert Hiltzik's original Sleepaway Camp and Tony Maylam's inimitable The Burning! Goddamn, are these flicks BRUTAL!
1978 starts slow, but man, it takes the body count to places that I don't know if any 80s slasher did. No one is safe, the ax hacks and knife stabbings are prolonged and fully visible on-camera (somehow without feeling icky mean), and the thing in the cave... I mean, that's totally new territory for a slasher, as far as I know.
Next week will bring the final chapter, and I can't wait. After that, I'm very curious to see what else Director Leigh Janiak has in store for us.
Playlist:
Etta James - The Second Time Around
Paul Zaza - My Bloody Valentine OST
Frank Black and the Catholics - Dog in the Sand
Deafheaven - The Gnashing
Reverend Horton Heat - Liquor in the Front
Lindsey Buckingham - Gift of Screws
White Zombie - La Sexorcisto
Sunken - Livslede
Numenorean - Adore
Card:
Definitely in need of the illumination this suggests is around the corner.
