Friday, June 27, 2014

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

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

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!

Monday, June 23, 2014

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.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

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.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

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



Wednesday, June 18, 2014

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

Sunday, June 8, 2014

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.


Thursday, June 5, 2014

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.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

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.