Sunday, May 31, 2015

New GHOST in August


And you can download the first track for free on their website right now! Head over to Heaven is an Incubator to listen to that track - named Cirice - now!

Wolf Moon



Type O Negative. One of my favorite bands of all time. Lead singer/bassist Peter Steele's death is one of only two rock n roll deaths from my era that actually affected me - the other being Layne Stayley's. I don't listen to Type O all the time - favorite or not their music affects me so strongly that I have to be in a very particular state of mind to fully revel in it. And that state of mind really only comes around two or three times a year - Spring and Autumn definitely and maybe once at some other point. And when it hits me, I go into that headspace and their music super hard.

I've been in that headspace recently, and ironically my friend Tommy has too because he posted about it in his awesome Joup column Endless Loop.

I've posted this track before - I have TONS of baggage associated with it. I'm posting it again but wanted to do a different version, namely something live that does it justice, like this version from the band's Symphony for the Devil video does.

Monday, May 25, 2015

Kitty LaRoar



LOVE this! One of those amazing serendipitous finds via networking on twitter. THIS is what social media is for. And there's a lot more great music on Ms. LaRoar's Soundcloud page.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Sadist Art Designs


Another rabbit hole Perturbator has sent me spiraling down. You know that awesome "Satan is a Computer"poster design that I posted along with the new album teaser? It was done by Sadist Art Designs. Intrigued I set out googling said Sadist and found that their website is filled with awesome stuff: poster designs for some very retro, 80s looking independent horror flicks, a Halloween nod and holy full circle - Sadist Art did a poster for Don't Move, the amazing horror short from Bloody Cuts Films that I posted last year.

Slick Moranis - Another Sleepless Night Perturbator Remix



I just can't seem to get enough Perturbator lately. This has sent me down several rabbit holes. Slick Moranis is one of those. Here's the original.

UPDATE:

Yeah, just linking to the original won't do. It's too damn awesome:

Twin Peaks Intro... Done with Paper!



Saw this on Bloodydisgusting earlier in the week. Very cool. The opening notes of this theme song always have a calming influence on me, and if I make it all the way through I usually get a little choked up from nostalgia.




New Perturbator Record Teaser

Man how I wish I'd gotten this sold-out poster from his bandcamp!
I caught sight of this a few weeks ago and promptly forgot about it - with constant access anywhere, anytime the internet has become something of a roiling sea to me, and I've essentially become the nautical disaster survivor, swimming from one piece of detritus to another, never looking back, always treading water. So much content I find slips through the cracks and disappears. While I write this I stumble to try and remember various tidbits or big announcements that I've encountered in the last few days and nothing comes up.

That's alright - news of a new Perturbator record on the way is more than enough to carry me through the day. Here's a taste.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Other Lives



I just discovered the group Other Lives via Mxdwn's Raymond Float and his twitter. I clicked a link, saw the word "phantasmagorical" and immediately fell in love with what I heard. This track reminds me of Calexico if they had a little more Bela Lugosi and a little less Robert Rodriguez (not a dis - I love Calexico). That's an analogy that only goes so far though; as I move through other material by the band I'm finding they are actually quite unlike anything else that I have heard before. Rituals, the band's new album, just came out on May 4th via Play It Again Sam, so I'm going to have to acquire a copy of that ASAP.

Cocteau Twins - Grail Overfloweth



From one of the darkest albums this side of The Cure's Pornography. Totally sounds like 80s Vertigo comics to me, probably because all those British Invasion creators were steeped in their Cocteau Twins.

Always Watching




I am fairly uninitiated in the Slender Man mythos, however I will admit to harboring a very remote interest in it for the last few years. Something about the idea that we have our first urban legend born on the internet really intrigues me, as does some of the imagery that tends to surround it. Any time I've attempted to research it however most of what I find online is very 'in-on-the-joke', biased and not informative at all, often being suffering from extremely poor, Junior High School level grammar/spelling/etc. The most un-biased and informative, no bullshit article I've found about the Slender Man to date. There's also a wiki devoted entirely to the legend, however it quickly becomes a rabbit hole, as there are leagues of internet jargon used therein that I have no frame of reference for and thus, end up spending an exorbitant amount of time on tangents.

As morbid as it is I will say my interest in the Slender Man jumped a bit more when about a year ago two twelve-year-old girls stabbed a third in order to appease Slender Man, who they believed had threatened them into doing the deed. The crime is atrocious, but what interests me here is the way fiction has bled over into reality and affected it. That is always worth taking note of because incidents like that wear down the walls between the worlds of fact and fiction and leave our world a little bit more susceptible to becoming... something else.



Last night my interest peaked a little. A bunch of us had gone to see David Lynch's Mulholland Drive at Cinespia (amazing!) and when we came out a flyer with the above image was under my friend Ray's windshield wiper. Intrigued I spent about an hour at the end of the night watching the first thirteen or so entries in the Marble Hornets series. I can't attest to quality of story yet because I'm not nearly far enough along, however I'm definitely still intrigued, more so that the creators apparently parlayed it into a feature length. Always Watching is playing for a week - starting this past Friday May 15th - and although I'll probably not have the chance to drive up to the one cinema that has it in LA, I'll definitely be watching for it to hit Netflix, the place where indie horror flix like this really seem to live the strongest these days.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

New High on Fire!



Jesus Christ - what is this, Christmas? First a new Brand New, now new High on Fire? And while we can only chomp our nails and wait with bated breath for the announcement of the new album to follow Brand New's first track in six years you can pre-order the new High On Fire - titled Luminiferous - now! Or, you can wait and go to a local record shop and grab it June 23rd.

Also, I've seen HOF several times and I can't stress this enough: if you get the chance see them live. These are three men that, on stage, create a sound so enormous it's like an army of Orcs storming a castle.

Here's Matt Pike's explanation of the lyrics to this track:

"It's about aliens abducting people and manipulating our past, present and future. It's about the top of the pyramid, so to speak," Pike says. "And it's also about alien hybrids, and how we've been immersed amongst this culture of E.T.s for thousands of years, and how no one has woken up to it until recently."

FINALLY - New Song From Brand New



YESYESYES! Six years since Daisy and hopefully this will be followed by a new album very soon! Brand New - I miss you!

Scott Snyder and Jock's Wytches...


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

Friday, May 15, 2015

David Lynch Back on Twin Peaks!




... and all is right with the world.

True Detective Season 2- First Full Trailer?



Well, I thought the first full trailer was what dropped last month. At any rate, I'm breaking my 'don't watch more than one trailer rule' with this one. Just because.

#wegettheworldwedeserve

Rick and Morty Kill The Simpsons



LOVE this. Thanks be to Mr. Brown for making me a Rick and Morty fan, that first season is nuts. Second season begins in July.

Faith No More on the Tonight Show



Okay, I was trying very hard not to listen to any songs off of next Tuesdays' FNM record Sol Invictus but I'll admit I've slipped. Now, as of a few days ago the album is streaming in its entirety on NPR - I've managed to resist that because I've really been looking forward to making this a "Day it's released" record store trip to Fingerprints in Long Beach. Day of acquisitions aren't the easiest events to plan and pull off these days, what with the internet being our dread overlord and master, however I've always been one to cherish the experience of first hearing a new album by a band I love as a whole entity and not fragmented songs, so I sometimes have to fight pretty hard against the net and myself in this age of media frenzy. Spoilers, early releases and bootlegs wait around every corner of our increasingly virtual world. And because of this that fight for a perfect first listen has increasingly required me to do things that are sometimes baffling to others, i.e. driving around with QOTSA's ... Like Clockwork for almost a day without ever listening to it in the spring of 2013, or running from a room at work when the lead single off of NIN's Hesitation Marks dropped that same year. That said, when the first song off Faith's first album in 18 years dropped last November I couldn't help myself - I jumped on it right away. I mean, 18 years.

18 YEARS. Shessh.

Since Motherfucker though, I've tried to avoid all the subsequent tracks as they've surfaced, officially (Superhero) or unofficially (any of the live performances captured by concertgoers that have been appearing in varying degrees of quality for about the last year). Then a few weeks ago my co-host on Drinking with Comics Mike Wellman and I saw Faith at LA's Wiltern Theatre and afterward, pumped from the show and hammered from an endless quaff of ale, Mike played me a leak of the entire album. I protested and he ignored - as I said we'd been drinking so I was crashing at his pad and thus, I really didn't have a choice. I mean, I guess I could have left the room but we still had a few bottles of Sierra Nevada we'd picked up as a night cap and the fridge was in listening distance of his stereo so you know, what could I do?

In the end I remember next to nothing of this first, premature experience with Sol Invictus except that I liked what I heard and likened it to the next logical step after 1997's Album of the Year; like Bauhaus in 2006 or The Pixies in 2014 FNM seems to have perfectly picked back up where they left off. And although I've had moments of weakness, due to a pretty memorable night - or not memorable I guess - I've kind of been granted a second chance for that uninterrupted, environment-controlled first listen I'll get to have next Tuesday when the first album in 18 years from one of my all-time favorite bands - a band I really didn't think we'd ever get another album from - drops.

Life is good. And to prove it, here's Faith on the Tonight Show a couple days ago. The Tonight Show? Did they ever score that gig back in the day?