Lake Street Dive

Wow. My friend Michael just showed me this. Reminded of Erika Wennerstrom from Heartless Bastards, Otis Redding and yeah, a little Amy Winehouse.

The Raveonettes have a new album out!

Funny, just the other day I found myself thinking that there had to be a new Raveonettes on the way - they tend to release a record a year. And lo and behold, PE'AHI came out July 22nd. This is the first video - and yes, be careful of the strobe. It didn't affect me the way the NIN Came Back Haunted video by David Lynch did, but just be careful.

The Afghan Whigs Cover The Police

And it is freakin' awesome! Listen to those intro drums - like a fist coming out of a bouquet of flowers. Dulli owns on this track - his vocals match the guitars, the vulnerability laced with menace and a hint of defeat. And such a crystal clear mix - focus on the hi hat, let it ride up on top of the mix in your perception. It's, well, it's magic.

8 Bit Twin Peaks Credit Sequence

Do I even have to say how awesome this is?

Special thanks to Ali Troubadour for sending me this. Thank you Ali!!! And to the folks at Filthy Frackers, I say well done!

Pulp Karaoke Contest Winner is... 9?

This is awesome. Via Brooklyn Vegan. I'll admit I checked out after about half the song and really just had to go put on the actual Pulp track, but this is worth some attention if for no other reason than it's really a bit surreal.

Drinking with Comics Issue #11

Drinking with Comics issue #11 is up! Our guests are Aspen Comics' Vince Hernandez and Siya Oum, talking about there new books - respectively - Damsels in Excess and LOLA XOXO, as well as SDCC 2014, variant covers, gas masks and, um, beer.

Of course.

Dark Day: RIP Robin Williams

I just received a text message from my good friend Dave - it brought with it terrible news. No, I did not know Robin Williams, I didn't even see all his movies. I always felt like I was as selective in watching what he is as he was apparently un-selective in choosing what to star in. That's not a judgement - if doing some of the work that he did that seems, to me, subpar it enabled Mr. Williams to take some of the gargantuan roles that he left tattooed across my memory, than more power. If you know me well enough to have ever really talked movies with me you know doubt know that often touted Mr. Williams as both one of the greatest dramatic actors of our time as well as one of the funniest.

Now he's gone and we'll never get another World's Greatest Dad, The Fisher King or Dead Poets Society.

Fuck.

Along with the powerhouses listed above some of my favorites - big or small - were Insomnia, Death to Smoochy, One Hour Photo, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Dead Again.

KITTYGATO

I saw this band tonight at the release party for Guns A'Blazin! #2. Great set.

Feuerbahn - The Fire Dance

I first heard this about a year and a half ago via Heavenisanincubator. I fell in love immediately. However this was at a time when I was so steeped in finding new music that an awful lot of bands I discovered ended up getting pushed off the plate by a constantly expanding wave of newer stuff. And newer stuff. And newer stuff...

Well, this popped up into my head again today, I spent about fifteen minutes searching through the incubator and once again found Feuerbahn's bandcamp.

Of particular note, I think, it track four, "Triumphwagen". Kind of Seventeen Seconds era Cure meets Fen. Kind'a.

Surreal Sermons - Laird Barron Interview

I have not had time to listen to this yet but I can't wait. I'm in the process of re-reading Laird's book Occultation and I'm planning on making something of a character map of it and his other books. There's a lot of overlap and I thought it'd be fun to kind of diagram out who recurs and what connections lay beneath the surface. I'd never heard Jeremy Maddux's Surreal Sermons before but am now planning on making it one of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis. Here's the page, give it a listen and if you dig there's plenty more episodes.

Rob Zombie Talks 31

One more I'm referencing from Bloody Disgusting today. Interesting news on the new Zombie movie 31, including a description that sounds awesome! Remember Chris Claremont's Uncanny X-Men, Arcade's Murder World? Well...

Go here to read about more about 31, watch and listen to a whole lot more information on the project and, if it suits your fancy, back it!

New Opeth Track

Via the mighty Bloody Disgusting, a new track from the forthcoming Pale Communion LP. I have not loved some of the music Opeth has made since they have become a quasi prog band circa 2006' Ghost Reveries. However, I recognize that this is entirely based on the fact that Mikael Akerfeldt wants to keep the project ever moving forward. The band still makes - quality wise - some of the greatest metal music in history and simply because of the pure beautiful majesty of Blackwater Park they always get the benefit of the doubt and the utmost respect from me no matter how I take to their newer material.

Guardians of the Galaxy...

...is the topic of discussion in this week's edition of Thee Comic Column on Joup. However, this is not a review of the film, so much as an exploration of what this movie means to comics and how time and technology have, specifically in the case of Sci Fi, affected the way we interpret Story.

Kevin Smith's Tusk Gets a Trailer

And it looks better than I imagined. Oh I do love Michael Parks...

One thing of note here is that during Smith's two episode stint on Bret Easton Ellis' podcast back around the beginning of the year the two talked about the Stanley Kubrick conspiracy doc Room 237 and Smith told Ellis that the idea of Kubrick's visual symmetry in his films was something he actively took away from the documentary and applied to Tusk. I dare say you really see it in this trailer.

Finally! Joe Hill's HORNS Has a Trailer

Get More: 

Movie Trailers, Celebrity News

Horns was the first book by Joe Hill I read, back when I worked for the book store and stumbled into an advanced reader copy. It was great and it led me to read his first novel, Heart Shaped Box which was even better. Since then I routinely keep up with everything the mad does. Just based on the source material alone this movie should be fantastic, and although I don't always love what director Alexander Aja does, he has a lot of talent.

Drinking with Comics Issue #10

Issue #10 of Drinking with Comics just went up! A return to basics. Of particular note is the sketch that leads things off. Had a blast doing this one!

Old News: Watch the Constantine Pilot

This isn't breaking news or anything, I've only just gotten around to finding the time to watch the Constantine pilot and thought I'd share it in case there are any other stragglers out there like me.

Suburban Gothic Trailer

Via Bloody Disgusting. This looks fantastic. The tone the lighting alone conveys is worth the price of admission - or VOD if it doesn't make it into wide release. And really, you had me at "Ray Wise" but John Waters doing a cameo? FAN-tastic!

RIP Tommy Ramone

RIP Tommy Ramone, last original member. NOW it truly is the end of the century, adjust your calendars accordingly.

Cocksure - Klusterfuck Kulture

Recently my good friend Chris turned me on to the fact that Chris Connelly has a new band with Jason Novak of Acuman Nation. The band is called Cocksure and their debut EP Klusterfuck Kulture is available for a mere $3.99 at the bandcamp linked above. This is easily my most listened to new music of the year, and I've only had the thing for about a week (Thanks again Chris!). It's fantastic - a perfect synthesis of everything great about old school industrial but without feeling like a throwback or re-hashed ground. I spent the week in the cryo-lab with this spinning over and over on my ipod, six, seven listens in a row, each time finding something new to love about it.

I read this somewhere however now I can't find the confirmation, but I believe the full album is apparently due next month in August on, of all labels... WAX TRAX! Now that is fucking awesome. Both Touch and Go and Wax Trax pressing new music for the first time in years this year? Awesome.

CORRECTION: The single was on Wax Trax, the album, out August 12th, can be pre-ordered now on Metropolis Records.
.........
* I love most incarnations of Ministry but Connelly-era is my favorite

Nick Cave and 20,000 Days on Earth

image courtesy of meltcomics.com

Last night my wife and I attended the premiere of the new film 20,000 Days on Earth. It is a fictional documentary about Mr. Cave, and probably my favorite film of 2014 (definitely up until this point it is). Read about it on Joup here, where I've also posted Mr. Cave and his Bad Seed's masterpiece And No More Shall We Part as my entry into this week's The Joup Friday Album column.

Drinking with Comics Issue #9

PodCrashed by Chris Gore! Recasting the Avengers, Batffleck, Saranac White IPA and the worst comic book cover gimmicks of the 1990's (Chromium). Plus, a whole lot more!

Crystal Castles - Year of Silence

Working on the novel to this right now. LOVE Crystal Castles II. The other two records... not so much.

Horror and Kelley Jones' The Hammer...

image courtesy of readingbypublight.blogspot.com

... are the topics of discussion in this week's Thee Comic Column on Joup.

HOLY!!! NEW FAITH NO MORE

One of two new Faith No More songs performed earlier at Hyde Park in London on July 4th, 2014. Thanks to Bloody Disgusting for posting about this. And thanks to youtube user Felipe Faúndez for having the best audio on one of these I've found yet. 

Don't know the name of this song yet. I've seen a bunch of guesstimates but that's napster-era 
crap. The band will name it when they're ready to name it.

Big Black - Bad Penny

Big Black's Songs About Fucking came out in 1987. Ministry's Twitch came out in 1986 and their follow-up The Land of Rape and Honey came out in 1988. I'm a massive Ministry fan, especially their late 80's period, so this is not meant to be a critical or derogative observation. My theory has always been that the change in Ministry's sound during this era, while not directly obvious in terms of sonic texture, was definitely influenced by Big Black's drum machine-driven sound. Bad Penny is possibly my favorite song on an album where I adore every track.

Ti West's The Sacrament

image courtesy of wikipedia.org

It has definitely been hard for me to find time to post things here, so allow me to play a bit of catch-up on this wonderful three-day weekend.

I first encountered Ti West when my good friend Dennis showed me The Roost. Now, The Roost isn't an amazing film, but it's good and fun and it really left a lasting impression on me. Treated so that it plays on your screen as though you're watching it late at night in 1986 on a UHF station The Roost is creepy and visually fuzzy and features a wrap-around that seals the deal in my opinion. After that it was a very long wait from the time Mr. West's follow-up The House of the Devil was announced to the time it was actually released. I'd had something like two or three years to stoke my anticipation for The House of the Devil and when it finally played at the one theatre in Los Angeles that it did I took my friend Michael and we were both blown away. This is still one of favorite horror films of all time and I wrote an open letter to Mr. West on my then-stomping ground CHUD.com telling him how much I appreciated someone making a movie of this calibre - let's face it, at that time horror was in perhaps the worst era it'd been in for a while, with a lot of promising films stalled or fighting for distribution (ie Satan Hates You, off the top of my head) and a lot of shite being bandied about by major studios.

I went back and brushed up on the one Ti West film I'd missed, Trigger Man, and found it to be an exercise in efficient indie film making. Trigger Man is a very low-budget but very effective film about very real horror - several friends on a hunting trip in Upstate New York are pinned down by a sniper and slowly picked off one by one. Not as immersive as The House of the Devil - but then not a lot is - Trigger Man stayed with me for a long time after I watched it and served as a nice appetizer as I awaited West's next film, The Innkeepers.

Again, I don't love The Innkeepers as much as I do THOD, but as an entry into the timeline of a director I've long thought will evolve into one of the best of this era it's an important piece. The words slow burn, usually associated with Ti West's films, is appropriate here, however in The Innkeepers Mr. West plays with the idea and consistency of the film's tone in a way that, while it doesn't completely land, made the film interesting and enjoyable in unexpected if uneven ways and no doubt served to strengthen his overall approach/style.

West's entry into the original V/H/S is one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen in a cinema.

Now, The Sacrament. Holy cow, this film just blew me away.

I don't want to say too much, but The Sacrament had me from the opening text. The modern media framework for the story is a fantastic storytelling device and the story itself is both fascinating and horrifying, especially as it takes its cues from a real-life incident. And the acting is top notch. Joe Swanberg and AJ Bowen are becoming must-watch players in the indie realm for me. Gene Jones deserves to at the very least be nominated for an oscar for his performance and Kentucker Audley's portrayal of the character Patrick is, at his end, so chillingly realistic as to engrain his name in my psyche for all time.

The Sacrament is on VOD right now and it's worth every fucking penny. My suggestion? A pair of good headphones to make the immersion complete.

New Shellac Record Dude Incredibe...

...will be released on Touch and Go Records on September, 16th. You can pre-order the record, which is a paltry $21 for 180 gram vinyl that also includes a CD, on Touch and Go's site HERE.

I am extremely excited for this record. It's been seven years since Shellac's last record, Excellent Italian Greyhound was released. Dude Incredible was, as all Shellac records are, recorded in full analog glory. If you should know anything about guitarist/vocalist Steve Albini it's that he's an analog loyalist. If you go back to one of Mr. Albini's earlier bands, Big Black, specifically their 1987 seminal record Songs About Fucking you'll find that the back cover harbors the famous quote, "The Future Belongs to the Analog Loyalists, Fuck Digital". Mr. Albini is known to record on two inch tape (glory!) and of course he takes it one step further. While there are a handful of bands and artists that still use the analog recording medium, far fewer of those few actually take it a step further and master their records in the analog realm:

"Audio quality is paramount, as always, with Shellac. The LP was mastered entirely in the analog domain, using the DMM (Direct Metal Mastering) process. The LPs are being manufactured at RTI in Camarillo, CA using their HQ-180 system. The pressings are 180 gram audiophile quality."

-quoted from the above-linked pre-order page at Touch and Go Records.com

La Volt Streaming Live In Moments!

image courtesy of the band's Facebook

WORLD TIMES for La Volt Live Stream but if you don't catch it, it will be archived! 
LIVE FEED LINK: http://gigity.tv/event/80452/
10PM EASTERN
9PM CENTRAL
8PM MOUNTAIN
7PM PACIFIC 
12 NOON (Saturday) - Melbourne, AUS... See More

Pacific Rim 2 Announced!

YES! I absolutely loved the first one.

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

New In Slaughter Natives!!!

Thanks to my good friend Chris Widerstrom for the heads up on this one. Pre-ordered mine today. Can't wait - there is just no way to describe the ISN sound without using the words "Horror" and "Apocalypse".

Pre-order Cannula Coma Legio Here

Drinking with Comics Issue #7

We spent last Monday shooting the main part of the show and then Wednesday shooting the True Detective send up intro sequences. Edited all day Friday. I think it was worth it. I have a lot of other ideas on what to do with the show, starting down that road now that we essentially have the main formula down.

RIP Jay Lake

I'm late with this. My good friend and proprietor of my favorite Southbay bookstore The Book Frog Rebecca Glenn contacted me a week ago today to let me know that author Jay Lake had passed away. Several years ago, after wanting to read one of Mr. Lake's books for years I found myself in Berkley, California's Dark Carnival books and it was here that I acquired Pinion, which at the time I mistakenly took to be the first in Lake's Clockwork Earth series. Later I realized Pinion is actually the third book in the series, and it was Becky who ordered the first two, Mainspring and Escapement for me. They are wonderful books and although I only knew Jay Lake through his fiction I'm saddened by his passing. If he was any bit as grand as a human as he was as an imaginative author - which all personal accounts I've read in the past week confirm that he most definitely was - then the Earth lost a marvelous soul last Sunday.

As Kevin Smith would say, big bucket of win.

Brandon Cronenberg's Music Video

I am completely unfamiliar with Animalia's music but this video... wow. The young Cronenberg is definitely keeping his father's 'body horror' alive and well. Antiviral made my best-of films last year. And now this simply made, very effective video. Watching this now I realize that I would very much like a new film by Brandon Cronenberg soon. Please.

Full Live Set: Thee Oh Sees

Thanks to Brooklyn Vegan for posting this. Thee Oh Sees live at LA's wonderful Echoplex last week. Within the first minute and a half of this video you can see just how much fun this show would have been to be at.

Bob Mould - I Don't Know You Anymore

This song/video actually made me cry. Well, not great racking sobs, but it got me a bit teary-eyed. Part of this is recent nostalgic reflection on my own part of the loss of the record store, and part of it is Bob Mould's tone here - so much like the tone on one of my all-time favorite records, Mould's Sugar: Copper Blue - really hits me in the emotional breadbasket.

I can still remember the first time I heard Copper Blue, or any of Mould's music for that matter. It was 1993 and on the way home from an Anthrax/White Zombie show at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom, tired and sore and stoned, Mr. Brown put on Sugar's Copper Blue to detox us from an all-out metal assault. It was perfect, and it's engrained that particle night, practically floating home on Lake Shore Drive at sometime after midnight, Brown driving his maroon red station wagon at a comfortable fifty-five miles an hour, Mould's emotionally provocative hooks etching into my heart and making me feel as though all is right in the world. Mould's 2013 record, Silver Age, was a return to this kind of sound, and now it appears that his just-released-today Beauty & Ruin is as well. You can order the new record directly from Mr. Mould on his website here. Thanks to Mr. Brown for sending me the link to this video and always keeping me in the loop on new Mould.

Here's to ten more albums at least Mr. Mould!

Stream New Godflesh EP Decline and Fall

Released via Avalanche, inc. earlier today. Buy it on the Godflesh's Bandcamp here.

Perturbator - She is Young, She is Beautiful, She is Next

Via Bloody Disgusting. This is just fantastic. Also, the upcoming record this is taken from, Dangerous Days, has one of my favorite album covers in recent memory.

image courtesy of Blood Music

Mini Doc on Selim Lemouchi's Art and Inspiration

Fascinating.

Watain - Waters of Ain

Several years ago my good friend and Metal Curator extraordinaire Tori lent me Watain's Lawless Darkness. After a few precursory listens the album fell back into the ever churning void of music that lays just beyond my reach in this internet age of "everything available all the time". In the throws of one new release or another I'd essentially completely forgotten about Watain, even as my appreciation for certain crevices within the Black Metal dimension has deepened. Then, earlier today - much after the fact - I learned that Selim Lemouchi, the founder and main driving force of The Devil's Blood died in March. There is a wonderful tribute to Selim on Metal Sucks. If you were a fan read it, as it will give you a very multi-faceted look into this fascinating artist. The remembrance links or mentions several peripheral Selim appearances and this Watain song - on which Selim performs the outro guitar solo - is chief among them. Sitting here listening to Waters of Ain and marveling at the power of it I quickly dug Lawless Darkness back out of the virtual banks on an old mac and have begun to get better acquainted with it. Good stuff, when you're in the mood.


I hope Selim found what he was looking forward after he slipped through the gates of the silver key...

Mastodon - Chimes at Midnight

I don't totally love this track yet, but I like it, and Mastodon has proven to be a band whose music really filters in through the nooks and crannies only after I can sit and really absorb an entire album over the course of several sittings. The A and B parts of this song are both awesome, but I'm drawn much more at the moment to the slower, melodic guitar of the B sections. It has a cosmic feel to it, a distance that is not relatable by human language or emotion. And I like that. It makes it feel enigmatic and magical, to a degree.

Very much looking forward to Once More 'Round the Sun on June 24th. And honestly, I've never contemplated paying $69.99 for a vinyl no matter what it came with before, but if you follow that link and see those lithographs of the artwork by Skinner, well, if I have the money I just might. Hanging that on the wall in my home seems as though it might turn said wall into a doorway to Cykranosh.

Ghost B.C. Papaganda Episode 2

Published almost two months ago I'm not sure how I missed this one. Well, actually yes I am. I've been so consumed with the end stages of writing my novel that I've not really paid attention to anything else. Well, besides comics.

At any rate, Infestissumam remains in regular rotation on my record player and the more of these guys I see the more I genuinely like them. Usually this much 'behind the scenes' would have a negative impact on a band so 'steeped in mystery' but I really think Ghost are musical and marketing geniuses, or at least the employee one of the latter.

The Doom That Came to Gotham...

image courtesy of lovecraftzine.com

...is the topic of discussion in this week's edition of Thee Comic Column, on Joup.