I'll be totally honest - I totally forgot this record came out. Loading it into Apple Music and going to hit it later tonight, but if the production on "The Company" is any indication, this one is stunning. ERR's voice already has an ethereal quality to it, but this really raw, up-close feeling makes listening to her sing almost voyeuristic.
Watch:
Just last week I was talking here about everything releasing on November 19th, but it wasn't until about an hour ago that I realized, HOLY COW - that's in three days! That means Cowboy Bebop is in THREE DAYS!!!
Here's musical genius Yoko Kanno going behind the scenes on the music for the show, which is the best music from any show ever.
Wow. I know what I'm doing Friday.
Playlist:
Odonis Odonis - Post Plague
NIN - With Teeth
Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments
DEADLIFE - City of Eternal Rain
Bnny - Everything
Mastodon - Hushed and Grim
Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
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Well being. Completion. These things are normally very abstract concepts in my readings, as I tend to interpret everything as being about my writing. However, writing has suffered, what with this insane work schedule, the massive open loop of the move looming, and the often debilitating exhaustion that has come with both of these. I get down about this, and that adds to the weight of things, but then I draw a card like this and realize I'm in control of how much these things affect me. I don't have to stay ten hours at work. I don't have to obsess over the move. I can fight back and clear some time and headspace for myself.
Heaven is an Incubator recently posted about the upcoming From Without EP that drops in January (pre-order HERE). I'd never heard of the band, and when I clicked over and heard the 1-2 of Life Melts Away that opens From Within, well, I was totally sold.
Watch:
So I made it through Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass. Not an easy task until the last three episodes, which ended up really coming through and making the rest of the show worthwhile. Not that it's terrible, but a lot of the 'aging' make-up used is pretty bad, and the lead character is just pointless and annoying. I mean, really. He ultimately serves no purpose that could not have been collapsed into another character. Ah well, in the end, I really dug the juxtaposition of religion and the supernatural, so it's a recommendation, although I can pretty safely say I'll never watch this one again.
Next? Castle Rock! I've been meaning to watch this for, well, years now, and I'm finally doing it. Three episodes into Season One and I'm digging it. Fantastic cast. Here's the trailer:
I've read a pretty fair amount of Stephen King, but not enough to deftly spot every reference in this one, so I'm gingerly taking mental notes and will look up all the references afterward. The obvious one here is Shawshank Prison, which I didn't realize played such a big part in this first season's story. Very cool.
Playlist:
Anthrax - Among the Living
Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments
Bnny - Everything
Hotel Decor - Could It Take Me Any Longer EP
The Fixx - Reach the Beach
Slayer - Decade of Aggression
Boz Scaggs - Silk Degrees
Zetra - From Within
Card:
A reminder that methodical approaches to projects and problems are the way to go. Timely, as I have one big, open-loop issue in my life right now - the eventual move - and on any given day, it feels over-fucking-whelming.
I'm a couple days late with this but talk about shitty news. Here's to your fuck, Ben.
Watch:
I'd never seen William Malone's 1985 Creature, but I grew up seeing the VHS box cover art on the wall at the local video story and been curious as a kid.
Somewhere in the intervening years I completely forgot about this one, until Vinegar Syndrome announced a new, restored version they're releasing at the end of this month. Pre-orders are closed - I didn't act fast enough while I tried to figure out if it was worth spending the money on when I'm still really limiting my frivolous expenses in preparation for moving across the country - but I believe will go live again for VS's Black Friday sale.
So is Creature worth it? Well, as I stated in my quickie Letterbxd review, this film isn't great and it's not even really good, however, I feel like there are echoes within echoes that lead me back to this one. Probably the best of those 80s Sci-Fi Monster-in-Space Horror flicks that ballooned overnight as a response to the success of Ridley Scott's Alien, Creature reeks of the B-Movie, down-n-dirty pulp atmosphere that a low budget required filmmakers excel at in order to make up for the otherwise lack of expensive sets/props/production value. And from this era, that's not a bad thing in my book. Well, not in this case, anyway. Creature is a pinnacle of the zeitgeist landslide of cheap and fast Sci-Fi that created a zeitgeist in the 80s, one that washed up on the shores of comics, role-playing, and all kinds of other geek-centric mediums. Watching it for the first time at 45, Creature felt like a well-spent hour and forty-odd minutes that triggered all kinds of peripheral genre memories, or as I've come to think of them, PGMs. So yeah, I'll probably plunk down the $$$ for this one. Would make a fantastic double feature with Richard Stanley's Hardware.
Playlist:
Pilot Priest and Electric Youth - Come True OST
Dream Division - Beyond the Mirror's Image
Mastodon - Hushed and Grim
Soviet Soviet - Fate
Motörhead - Ace of Spades
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Shake the Sheets
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Let Love In
The Who - Live at Leeds
Odonis Odonis - Spectrums
Odonis Odonis - Post Plague
Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments
The Fixx - Reach the Beach
Card:
Keeping a keen eye out for portents and omens today.
This album is really one of my recent stalwarts. I've come to love every song, but it's an intense journey and often, I don't make it all the way to the final song. The last two days I've really had to knuckle down on the physical side of work, and using this record really helps me conquer exhaustion. When I hit "Apoptosis" this morning, it felt like a revelation, so I wanted to share it here.
NCBD:
Jeff Lemire's Mazebook has really become one of the main books I look forward to. Pretty cool, considering I almost skipped it altogether.
I guess I jumped the gun on Venom #1 last week. Or it was delayed? I'm not sure. Either way, I'm still not going to be lucky enough to snag this variant, but with a gazillion covers to choose from, I'm sure I'll find something good.
I know nothing about What's The Furthest Place From Here except the pedigree of the creators. That's enough to have me pretty freakin' excited.
Watch:
It's looking like come November 19th there is going to be a serious lag on Netflix. First Cowboy Bebop premieres, now a new Horror tv show from Train to Busan creator Yeon Sang-ho:
This trailer runs the gamut from what looks like a home invasion thriller to a fight scene with creatures that look like they'd be right at home in a Marvel movie. Cowboy Bebop takes precedence, but I'm pretty curious about this one.
Now, all we have to do is catch up and watch Midnight Mass, Doom Patrol Seasons 2 and 3, Squid Games, Castle Rock 1 and 2 (finally!), plus have a full Stranger Things rewatch, before.... oh fuck it. This one will end up on the list.
Playlist:
Small Black - Cheap Dreams
Motörhead - Ace of Spades
Arctic Monkeys - AM
Blood Red Shoes - Get Tragic
QOTSA - Era Vulgaris
Allegaeon - Apoptosis
Anthrax - Among the Living
Dream Division - Beyond the Mirror's Image
Card:
I'm not entirely sure how to interpret this at the moment, so we'll just have to see.
Some friends recently saw High on Fire at a small venue in Chicago and hearing them talk about how awesome it was really made me miss seeing this band live. Over the years, I've seen Matt Pike and crew several times, one of which was at the Viper Room in Hollywood - a venue that felt waaay to small to contain a sound as big as theirs. Thinking on this, I decided to dig back into their music, only this time, I started with their most recent records and began working my way backward. 2018's Electric Messiah is an album I have not spent nearly enough time with, and running through it the other day, I realized that while I definitely think it's the weakest of the band's six albums, it still contains some absolutely devasting tracks. This is one of them.
Watch:
Another Stranger Things teaser for Season four!
I really can't wait for this next season of Stranger Things. K and I need to start that rewatch of 1-3 soon.
It's been a minute since I've kept up with Odonis Odonis. Back in 2016, their album Post Plague was a constant in my ears and on my turntable, however, the band's subsequent releases, while good, didn't quite live up to the same high regard I'd assigned them after what I still feel not only sums up a small era of my life but is one of my favorite records of that decade. So I guess that disconnect explains why I totally missed the fact that they dropped a new record back in October, and what's more, it's FANTASTIC. Special thanks - as always - to Heaven Is An Incubator for posting a track from this and alerting me to it. If you dig, you can order one of the thirteen remaining copies (fourteen until I ordered mine) of Spectrums over on their Bandcamp or from the always marvelous Felte Records.
It goes without saying I'd developed an affinity for this particular song, as it shares a title with the series of novels I've been working on for several years now.
Time Machine GO!!! 1991:
In this past Wednesday's NCBD section, I casually mentioned an idea that kind of occurred to me on the spot but didn't really sink in as to what a profound self-insight I'd inadvertently made, the idea that my reversion to a fairly rabid Marvel Zombie/comic collector had more to do with a return to the things that had made the tumultuous task of navigating adolescent as an unconscious way to deal with the equally rocky navigation of Middle Age. This started with an out-of-the-blue interest in following the last year of Nick Spencer's run on Amazing Spider-Man but has pushed me not only back into following some of the modern X-titles (really, just one and a few mini-series), but a nearly inexplicable longing to rebuy and reread a bunch of the post-Claremont X-men stories, first with 1994's The Phalanx Covenant and now, of all things, the original Onslaught opus.
I want to point out here that these are books that I do not in any way shape or form consider 'good.' Conceptually, perhaps, but writing-wise, not at all. And while Fabien Nicieza had some pretty good chops, when we get into Scott Lobdell territory, well, I just consider that era of X-Men pretty mediocre-to-downright-awful stuff. And yet, here I am, combing the back issue bins at the Comic Bug and reading some of this stuff. And that off-the-cuff comment about reaching back into my past to reconnect with touchstones of my adolescence as a coping mechanism for the Horrors of aging in an era of little compassion and perhaps less tolerance really strikes me now as another instance of how our minds will do what they need to do to cope and survive, even if our personalities are completely unaware of those tragedies. So with that in mind, let me resurrect a moniker from my old Chud days to you about what I'm reading from the past, what I think of it now, and how it holds up.
Okay, granted this 1991's Muir Island Saga is still protected as awesome in my book because it's penned by Chris Claremont, however, it's Claremont's final entry and thus, the gateway to the end of his continuity, or rather the way he approached continuity, so I've always kind of held a grudge against both this series and it's villain, the Shadow King, who for whatever reason, I just could not care less about. That's my 'historical' perspective of this small, four-issue 'saga' that really doesn't feel like a saga at all. A bit short and to the point to be a saga. That said, in this instance, the brevity is good, and unlike the full-blown crossovers and X-Events that began to clog the continuity after the near-perfect triumph of Inferno, Uncanny X-Men 279-280 and X-Factor 69-70 feel like a pretty good story that lines 'em up and knocks 'em down, reworking all the allegiances Claremont had, up to this point, used to divvy up the characters and keep things interesting, paving the way for the 'Blue' and 'Gold' teams that would surface in Jim Lee's X-Men #1 and Uncanny 281, which realigned all the original X-characters like Scott and Jean with the Xavier camp and made X-Factor the new equivalent of Freedom Force, under Valerie Cooper - a character I had completely forgotten about.
Playlist:
The Neverly Boys - The Dark Side of Everything
Lower Dens - Escape From Evil
TVOTR - Return to Cookie Mountain
The Bronx - The Bronx (IV)
Motörhead - Ace of Spades
Motörhead - Overkill
Converge and Chelsea Wolfe - Bloodmoon: I (pre-release singles)
I'd completely forgotten about Future Islands until Julia Ducournea's Titane put them back in my head by using "Light House", from their 2014 4AD release Singles.
Play:
A couple years ago, I totally missed out on Mixtape Massacre. Now, the creators of that have a new game on Kickstarter, and by the looks of it, this one is a definite for me:
I'm really trying not to spend $$ on stuff like this, so there's a bit of a tug-o-war going on as I watch this. We'll see. Either way, I wanted to spread the word.
Playlist:
Allegaeon - Into Embers (pre-release single)
Allegaeon - Apoptosis
Allegaeon -Proponent for Sentience
Megadeth - Rust in Peace
Converge and Chelsea Wolfe - Blood Moon I (pre-release singles)
The Besnard Lakes - A Coliseum Complex Museum
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - The Good Son
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - Abattoir Blues
Lower Dens - Escape From Evil
The Neverly Boys - The Dark Side of Everything
TVOTR - Return to Cookie Mountain
Card:
Two days in a row, I receive positive reinforcement for a series of investments.
