Yesterday marked the 22nd anniversary of Type O Negative's World Coming Down. I can still remember driving to Threshold Music in Tinley Park to pick it up that first day, smoking up before driving home with it blasting in my minivan. It still haunts me today, as it did then, that my friend Jake did not live to hear the follow-up to October Rust.
The title track will always be my favorite among WCD's 13 tracks (if you count Skip it, and we are); this one is an emotional jackhammer.
Watch:
Current obsession:
This show just gets Chicago perfectly.
Read:
Currently splitting my time between two short story collections that couldn't be more different:
First, Irvine Welsh's The Acid House. I started this with my third-ever reading of "A Smart Cunt", the novella that rounds out this collection. This was the first story by Welsh I ever read, back in the 90s. It made an enormous impression on me then, and still does now. From there I cherry picked a few other stories: "Snuff," "Snowman Building Parts for Rico the Squirrel,""Sport For All," "The Granton Star Cause," and the Eponymous story, "The Acid House." I am very much enjoying this return to Welsh's writing, and can't wait to dip back into this for more.
Then this morning, inspired by the encroaching Halloween season, I went looking for my Ramsey Campbell Alone With the Horrors trade paperback I have, but couldn't find it. I haven't bought bookshelves for the new house yet, so a lot of my books are still in boxes. I gave a perfunctory search, but when I stumbled across Nathan Ballingrud's Wounds:
As I've related here previously, although I have the original, softcover novella The Visible Filth - the novella Babak Anvari's film Wounds is based on, I picked this new volume up as soon as it hit the shelves in tandem with the release of the film. I've read The Visible Filth at least three times, but the other stories packaged with it in this particular volume have all only received one go-through. Until now, that is. So yesterday I started my day with The Atlas of Hell, a story that feels so much like Clive Barker to me, yet still stands tall on its own thanks to the clean and precise ton of Mr. Ballingrud's prose. I plan on picking through this one a story at a time over the coming month, and maybe going back and re-reading the stories in Ballingrud's first collection, North American Lake Monsters as well, if I can get around to finally watching the rest of the series based on that book HULU did a few years ago. Previously, I'd only watched two episodes of Monsterland (produced by Anvari), not because they weren't great, but maybe because the two I saw were ultra disturbing. In a good way, but also in a real way. Which is the goal, however, sometimes you have to work up to that sort of thing.
Playlist:
Ozzy Osbourne - Patient Number 9
The Cramps - Stay Sick
The Dead Milkmen - Beelzebubba
Misfits - Static Age
Type O Negative - World Coming Down
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
The center and left card go along with the rejection notice I received this morning for a short story I submitted to a Horror Anthology last week. I'm having trouble figuring out the Queen though... or maybe I'm not.
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.
Playlist:
Zeal and Ardor - Eponymous (pre-release singles)
Exposé - Greatest Hits
Chicago - 25 or 6 to 4 (single)
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
Black Sabbath - Eponymous
Jethro Tull - Benefit
The Smiths - The Queen is Dead
Peter Gabriel - So
Slope - Street Heat
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Windhand - Soma
Van Halen - Eponymous
U2 - War
Talking Heads - Fear of Music
Mannequin Pussy - Perfect EP
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.
A couple of night ago in the Southwest Suburbs of Chicago, some dear friends hosted a party in mine and K's honor. During this event, I saw a youtube clip that, well, dropped my jaw.
The context, besides liquor, was that Mr. Celentano is quite an interesting fellow when you read about him; he is credited as having introduced Rock n Roll to Italy. All my friend Amy told me as this song began was, to quote Celentano's wikipedia page, "...was written to mimic the way English sounds to non-English speakers despite being almost entirely nonsense."
Sold.
I love everything about this, especially the colors and, um, the fit of Celentano's pants. From someone who was born over half a decade after the 60s ended, this is as much my broad stroke impression of that era as "Prisencolinensinainciusol" is a broad stroke of English. Reminds me a bit of an Italian, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," although I can't quite put my finger on why that is.
**
If you've followed these pages for the last few years, you know I'm a fan of Kristen Gorlitz's Relationship/Horror comic The Empties. The new Kickstarter just went up a few days ago for the final, collected volume of the book. Support it if you can - this is a fantastic indie comic, and something I think will eventually make a killer movie.
**
NCBD:
A typically light week, although I find myself in the mood to read some comics. I may pick something up on Kindle, depending what's on sale:
**
Playlist:
Black Sabbath - Children of the Grave (Cassette)
Black Sabbath - Sabotage
Boards of Canada - In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country EP
Bohren and Der Club of Gore - Patchouli Blue
Metatron Omega - Evangelikon
Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest
Blut Aus Nord - 777 Cosmosophy
Edu Comelles and Rafa Ramos Sania - Botanica De Balcon
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - In Summer EP
Stevie Wonder - Greatest Hits
Slayer - Live Undead
Testament - The Gathering
The Great Old Ones - Cosmicism
**
Card of the day:
You spend a couple of days off laying out a perfectly functioning brain and emotional state, then you return to work and someone puts two blades straight through everything you worked so hard to shore up.
Deer Valley Lodge, Wisconsin. Woke up at roughly 8:00 AM and was moved to put this song on. I've posted Synchroncity II here before, and I'm sure I'll post it here again. Not just my favorite song by the Police, but one of my favorite songs of all time.
I'm playing this off my old iPod, the one that's not linked to my Apple Music account. Playing this device is always interesting, because it's kind of a time capsule. Since subscribing to Apple Music, I keep this iPod separate and synched to my original library, so I only have access to music I manually ripped myself or acquired through iTunes/Bandcamp/Amazon. And after deleting a bunch of tunes from the library on that Mac, I'm actually afraid to even sync this again, so the last sync is kind of a permanent thing at this point, thus, it's like looking into my head a year and a half ago.
Playlist from 12/13:
Black Sabbath - Vol. 4
Grimes - Oblivion
Foster the People - Torches
Saturday, December 15th:
Black Sabbath, Vol. 4 has not only been a constant companion throughout most of my life, it's also been a constant companion on this trip, being that it's the only cassette I could find to play in my Dad's truck when I borrow it. And really, Vol. 4 is probably a 'desert island' album for me, anyway, so no complaints here.
I am exhausted. My trips home always end up being hectic, because I try so hard to see everyone as much as I can. And there's always a lot of people I want to see, and some people that I don't see or fail to spend as much time with as I would like. Today is going to be mellow. I think.
House on the Rock in Wisconsin is an unbelievable adventure, a veritable sensual smorgasbord of tchotchke insanity spread out and displayed over an architectural mind-fuck that might even trump the Winchester house, which I visited circa 2007, the Hearst Castle - also 2007- or the Barnum home in Florida, which I saw in 2012. I guess I've been collecting these kinds of experiences for years and didn't even notice it. House on the Rock? Probably my favorite, and it's led me to want to re-read and watch Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which I read back when it was first published and so, hardly remember.
Issue #1 of my comic collaboration with artist Jonathan Grimm is fully mocked up and ready for the final touches. We used scissors, tape, and plastic page protectors to figure out the exact placing of the word bubbles, now John can finish the gray washing, digitally add the words, and wha-lah! We start issue #2, which is written (1st draft), sketched and somewhat laid out. While working last night, John provided the tunes to set the mood. He's a big swamp/southern/doom rock guy, so we used his selections to provide the appropriate soundtrack. He may have made me a Down fan, which I did not expect to ever type, considering my disdain for Phil Anselmo.
Playlist from 12/14:
Lots of 1st Wave on XM radio during our road trip. I'm going to assemble a playlist and post it here at some point.
CCR - Green River
COC - No Cross No Crown
Down - NOLA
Black Label Society - Sonic Brew
Card for the day:
That I'm not seeing everyone I want to? On. The. Nose.
After a conversation with a friend, I'm really re-assessing this year's return of the band Daughters. Here's some live footage I watched in the middle of the night last night (that's now! I'm all messed up on time this trip).
The weather in Chicago is COLD, and I've taken a bit of a hit. Or, my day of feeling like shit was reaction to another fairly heavy drinking late night, the after-show for the Drinking with Comics On the Road Special: Chicago, which just went up on Apple, Spotify, and Google Play.
Read the first two trades of Warren Ellis and Jon Davis-Hunt's Wildstorm reboot last night in between editing the audio for the new episode. THEY ARE INCREDIBLE, and have surely set me off an an Ellis-jag as soon as I return home and get to my bookshelves. First up? Planetary, the last issue or trade or whatever was delayed for years back in the day, I have still never read.
Playlist from 12/10 was non-existent.
Playlist from 12/09:
Black Sabbath - Children of the Grave (Vol. 4 import)
Arab Strap - The Red Thread
Tom Waits - Rain Dogs
I'm doing Thursday's post on Wednesday night because I'm up and off to LAX early in the morning to fly to Chicago! Yay!
A couple months ago I posted about Perturbator's side project, L'Enfant De La Fôret. Well, that record fell right the heck off my radar, and it wasn't until I saw Heaven Is An Incubator post this GORGEOUS track that I remembered how much I'd been looking forward to it. And Tommy hit the nail right on the head - this track reeks of Lynch/Badalamenti, which, of course, immediately endears it to me. I can't wait to ingest this entire record during my trip. Name your price and buy it HERE.
Playlist from 12/05:
The Veils - Total Depravity
Grimes - Art Angels
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Hallelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
The Body - I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer.
Gil Scott Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Single)
Scroobious Pip vs. Dan Le Sac - Thou Shalt Always Kill (Single)
Algiers - Eponymous
Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy OST
David Lynch & Alan Splatt - Eraserhead OST
Card of the day:
"Insatiable hunger for life and endless, powerful energies." Well, that definitely is the standard definition for how I roll in Chicago. It'll be interesting to see if this year is any different? Well, I've hit a point where I just don't have the energy I previously had. I knock out during movies at home ALL the time now on weekends. I feel a general, low-grade exhaustion on a daily basis. Part of it is I'm 42, and part of it is my first alarm rings at 4:07 AM, five days a week. Normally, I hit Chicago and hook up with my lifelong friends and I can hang out all night, drinking beer and talking music, movies, comics, whatever. Will that be the case with this trip? Well, the card seems to imply it will, so we'll see.
How do you get me to be excited about Sabrina, the Teenage Witch? One word:
SATAN!!!
Defying ALL fucking logic, I absolutely loved the first half of season one, and was pleased as a goat's paunch to hear there's a second half coming on April 5th. The severity of Sabrina's actions in the 8th episode especially sold me, and
I head back home to Chicago for a little over a week tomorrow. VERY excited. This year it is twelve years since I moved, and previously I have only ever gone home in October. Last year when my Uncle Phil passed away I flew home for about a week right after Christmas and realized I actually enjoyed being home in the winter. I wouldn't want to make a yearly habit of it, but there was one night that really made an impact on me. A Sunday, I drove up to the North Side of the city to see my sister and her boyfriend's new apartment. From the South Suburbs where I grew up and my parents still live, that's Lagrange Road to I-55 to the Dan Ryan 90/94. It had just snowed and the trip was stark, desolate and beautiful. I loved the empty trees, the way their branches crosshatch the sky, and the moon irradiates the clouds. I realized I missed winter, in a small way, and when K said she wanted to experience it I was only too happy to book this year's visit in December.
Along with the general vibe I'm interested in exploring in a winter setting, the trip also gives me the opportunity to do something I have wanted to do for years now, namely, film a Drinking with Comics in my old Chicago comic shop, Amazing Fantasy, with two of my best friends, two fellows that, unbeknownst to them, helped me conceive the concept of the show, just by always being the guys who stand around at gatherings with me, drink beer and talk comics. So Sunday, 12/09 we're planning on streaming live to Facebook from Amazing Fantasy in Modena, IL, with Mike Shinabargar and John "The Viking" Bickness. Can NOT wait.
NCBToo many comics out today to go into great detail. Here's my list:
If this is the return of Negan, I will be SO very happy!
Playlist from 12/04:
Opeth - Watershed
David Bowie - Station to Station
Ghost Cop - One Weird Trick
Emma Ruth Rundle - Marked for Death
The Veils - Total Depravity
The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night
Jim Reeves - The Best of Jim Reeves
One of the best songs of the 90s, hands down. I unexpectedly realized I still had one more 33 1/3 that Brown lent me to finish before my trek home to Chicago in two weeks, so last night I started Gina Arnold's entry into the 33 1/3 series, a kind of contextualization of Liz Phair's seminal indie rock album, Exile in Guyville. More the story of the fictitious Guyville (not so fictitious) and the gender politics of the early 90s indie rock scene than the story of the album, and that's good. So far this is a fascinating read. Also, digging back into the era that surrounds this record made me reconnect with Never Said and Guyville in general, a song I've loved and an album I dig for a long time now, but one that hasn't received any recent rotation space in my audio life.
Joe Bob Briggs returns to Shudder tonight with Dinners of Death! I have to work early tomorrow, so I don't know how much I'll see tonight, but hopefully this will remain on Shudder in perpetuity, much like The Last Drive In has since back in the spring.
Last night I watched three-quarters of the Shudder original Dead Wax. LOVE this. Written and directed by Graham Reznick, whose name anyone familiar with Larry Fessenden's Glass Eye Pix will recognize as most often helming audio departments on films. Great debut that's essentially a movie chopped into 10-18 minute episodes, Dead Wax is about a legendary record that does strange things to reality when played and the people who have sought it through the years. Think John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns, but the world of rare record collecting instead of film collecting and you'll be in the ballpark.
Playlist from 11/21:
David Bowie - Low
Frankie Valli - Can't Take My Eyes Off of You (single)
Deaf Heaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
Bell Witch - Longing
Testament - Demonic
Boy Harsher - Face the Fire (pre-release single)
Boy Harsher - Lesser Man
Chasms - On the Legs of Love Purified
Card of the day:
This is a direct response something outside of writing, so I'll take the advisement in silence.
Haunted by this song the last two days. It feels amazing to have something like this happen in the age of Apple Music, everything available right now, all the time. Bear with me a bit and I'll explain.
Saturday was a long work day in the midst of 12 days of work in a row. I did about 10 hours and then drove home. We made dinner and then watched Veronica on Netflix. Not bad. Reticent to forfeit the opportunity for a late night I pushed on to another flick, even as K fell asleep on the couch beside me. I'd been trying to watch the Silent Hill adaptation for a few weeks but never finding the time, so I figured this was perfect. I had a pretty good buzz and felt fatigue move through my muscles, so I popped the top on another can of Sierra Nevada and attempted to follow the characters down the rabbit hole into a creepy West Virginia mining town...
I made it through about half the flick and then woke up just as the ending credits began to roll. the Song above immediately caught my ear; at first I thought it was simply because it has that almost ineffable, defeated sound that a lot of songs in the 00's had - a sort of sonic malaise that I believe rolled in on the tide of the first wave of popular musicians and producers raised on prescription 'mood' altering drugs. I sat up and used shazm to identify it, then realized that there was another, stronger and more direct connection to the song. See, back in the early 00s I was still a bartender in Chicago, and every Wednesday night my friend's Brown and Chris would come up and hang out at the bar until I got off. At about 1:30 AM I'd head over to Chris's and we'd continue drinking, Brown would normally start in on some making some food (the man is a divine chef) and Chris and I would usually spend an hour or two playing Dance Dance Revolution. I know - it's weird that in my late 20s, as a Southside of Chicago musician in a metal band, I spent at least one night a week, every week, playing DDR. What can I say? I loved it.
A lot of the music on the game is poppy J- or Euro Dance. Not really my thing, but I could always find some songs that I liked on each of the games. Sitting there on the couch Saturday night, hearing this song for the first time in well over ten years I was immediately thrown back to the way that I felt in the 00s - which probably not through coincidence was my own tired, malaise. I've since tried to locate this one on Apple Music, but despite there being several Silent Hill Soundtracks, this song is vacant.
So it's haunting me. Where normally when I become stuck on/obsessed with a song I just listen to it over and over for a few days, with this I can only listen to it on youtube, so it's creating scarcity, and that scarcity is making the song an event.
It's nice; nostalgic in a way, a throw-back to the days when music was not as easy to come by, when I had to save up the money to go out and buy the album, then listen to it when I had the Tape/CD player available.
Playlist from yesterday:
Shrinebuilder - eponymous
High On Fire - Luminiferous
Deee-Lite - Dewdrops in the Garden
Godflesh - In All Language (disc 2)
Card of the day:
Ace of Cups: Good news later today? I'll let you know.
My friend Lee is in this movie. I haven't seen it yet, just heard about it tonight. Watched the trailer. It freaked me out.
That's a gooood thing.
From the youtube description, which reads like goddamn poetry:
"After years of rotting in Joliet, Les, a wrongfully imprisoned street legend known as "The Ghoul", is released into a mad search through Chicago's back alleys for the man who slaughtered his mother and robbed him of his soul. Aided by enigmatic benefactors, he must delve beneath the city into a modern labyrinth of gutters whose tendrils have grown deep while he was gone. What unfolds is a desperate tale of brute force tragedy set in the supernatural underworld of Chicago, where heroes are reduced to horror-shows, villains dream of their own demise, and good and evil prove to be antiquated concepts."
I've been meaning to post this for a couple weeks now. MAN! When you're a musician there's nothing like the love and joy that can come from being in a band. You sling it out with three or four other guys, saddle all your hopes and dreams together and try to shoot an arrow into the side of the world that actually sticks. It's hard; it takes a level of commitment and determination that is not easy and can drive some folks apart. But other folks, well, it makes you bond as strong or stronger than family. That's always been the case with the guys I slung it out with my former bands in Chicago. I've known Sonny Vee since forever. He was in Wink Lombardi and the Constellations with me ("which one'a youse guys is Wink?") on through the short-lived Second Attention, he slung it out for a while in Infinite Vision and that's where we met and added Joe Grez to the cabal of maniacs - which included Mr. Brown and Monsieur Viderstrom - who ended up forming Schlitz Family Robinson. Anyway, that was a long time ago. More recently, and I use that word loosely here for sure, Joe and Sonny and I were in The Yellow House. We came pretty close to... something. But the industry was kicking and screaming as the internet, MP3s and Napster all took over and in just a little over a year and a half (fact check Joe - I'm bad at quantifying the passage of time) that slipped away too. But not before we recorded and self-released one full length and two e.p., all of which I am still enormously proud of. Anyway, Joe and Sonny are back in a new band, The Walk Slow and hearing them, seeing this video, it makes me so incredibly happy that I just can barely even think straight. These guys are the real deal - back in '01 Grez used to say, "next to no one in music knows how to be cool anymore" and sometimes I feel like that too. But when I hear something like this, well, I know that's just the scarred side of the otherwise brilliant coin.
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
Heading out to LA's Echoplex to see Author & Punisher, Corrections House and Wrekmeister Harmonies in a little while. I had never heard of Wrekmeister before, and it was by sheer luck I happened to remember that there was a third band on tonight's bill and, you know, I should probably do a little research before heading out so I knew what I was in store for.
Man am I glad I did that research. I would hate to think that I could have missed this, Chicago's J.R. Robinson's installation-like project you can read all about on Invisible Oranges here (great article by Brad Sanders, btw).
You can buy this wonderful piece of music from Thrilljockey here and there's a great live performance on member/contributer Chris Brokaw's bandcamp.
Ahhh Jucifer... I discovered them when I heard the track Amplifier on Chicago's St Xavier University radio station (that's 88.3 if you're licking) back in the early oughts. Amplifier is irresistible 90's pop rock that kinda plays like the girls from Veruca Salt* singing for Nirvana. (though it came out in 2002). Here, in case you haven't heard it, take a moment to indulge:
Anyway, I picked up that record, I Name You Destroyer and the entire thing is just great. Very eclectic approach for a two-piece. Next came a copy of their first record, Calling All cars on the Vegas Strip.
image courtesy of spirit-of-metal.com
I talked them up to a bunch of friends and took them to see the band at Chicago's Bottom Lounge (in its old location as since I've lived there I believe they've moved). What we saw was totally different then the record. It was... metal. I mean, three-fingers-up-and-two-down rock lock metal. This was totally different then the recorded material I'd heard thus far.
Then I bought the E.P. Lambs and I began to understand.
Since then Jucifer's sound has congealed into a more coherent whole that synthesizes their 'live' sound and the benefits of multi-tracking in the studio. And because of this it's gotten better. Then a brief departure in 2010 with Throned in Blood which, from my few listens to it, stands as an amazing testament to old school, nineties metal. It's good, and once again it's hard to imagine that much sound comes from just two people. Then again, when you see their stage set-up, it begins to make sense.
image courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan
Anyway, Brooklyn Vegan ran an article about the forthcoming next album by the band, released next week and entitled за волгой для нас земли нетand I'm excited. Go to the Vegan here to read the full article and see the bizarre album trailer as well.
..........
*Not totally into what the 'Salt did, however their voices combined in a way that was very, very hot.
Thanks to the infallible Mr. Brown for alerting me to this with an AVCLUB article you can read here. I Love Serengeti's stuff. I interviewed him a couple years ago (read that here and here).
There's a bunch of homemade "drug" videos for this on the youtubes, but really, nothing you can put visually to this does the hellish sonic landscape that they create with the music on this one justice.
This came out of nowhere, not even sure what the impetus for this is, but apparently the flavor of this Saturday night is the taste of metal filings - Industrial mix.
I don't remember most of the specific details for the show where I saw Zen Guerrilla the first time. They were probably playing with Cash Money (later Cash Audio) and maybe the Quadrajets as well. Probably at the Empty Bottle in Chicago. Somewhere around the hazy aethers of 1998. Whatever night it was Zen Guerrilla made an immediate impression on my friends and I. It was common at that time for us to stop by the merch booth on the way out and plunk down money for a disc or 7" (still do when I go to shows, but unfortunately it's not as common these days). One of us must have done so (my money's on Mr. Brown) because soon after Positronic Raygun was in very heavy rotation amidst our little group. It is a fantastic record and while it didn't completely capture the sonic explosion of the group's live performance, engineers Scott Herzog and Matt Kelley helped the band come pretty close. It's blues-flavored RocknRoll Hendrix style - dipped in the sheer cosmic slop of cranked-up reverb and distant radio signals. Even the outro, an almost three-minute loop of a single bar of music dubbed "Frequency Out" has such a strange, otherworldly sound that I have been known to put it on repeat and listen to it for hours on end, often because I don't want the tone the band sets to end.
I was able to see the group one other time, sometime in 2000 I think at the Bottle opening for Nebula. Once again they were magnificent. Hadn't lost a step. And at both gigs their show-stopping set closer, a balls-out cover of Iron Maiden's The Trooper, was really just a smash in the teeth (almost literally for one of us, as the second time the singer Marcus dove off the stage at directly at my friend Hawk who had but a single instant to move before being crushed by the much-larger man. I felt bad that Marcus had ended up landing pretty much face-first on the beer-soaked floor, but I was glad I didn't have to drive my friend to the Hospital).
