New Deafheaven track - The Gnashing

Not gonna lie, at first listen to this latest track off Deafheaven's forthcoming album Infinite Granite, I was left pretty underwhelmed. It's nothing to do with the clean vocals - I loved Great Mass of Color from the first time I heard it, but this one felt a bit boring. That was in the car last night on the way to a backyard (second) viewing of Cody Calahan's new flick Vicious Fun - which incidentally is even better the second time through. Today, however, I strapped in the headphones and fired The Gnashing up for a second time, and I have to say, I dig the hell out of this track. I think it will play even better in the context of the entire album, but for now, I'm in.

I LOVE that George has embraced clean vocals. I mean, I'm hoping there will still be fierce, growling moments on the album, but in the meantime, it takes some serious stones for these guys to put themselves out there with these two singles, and I applaud their fearlessness, creativity, and choice of producers in Justin Meldal-Johnsen.

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Watch:

To borrow a term from Dr. Rebekah McKendry, Here's a Bold Horror Statement: I think Fear Street: 1978 is in my all-time favorite Summer Camp Slashers, right behind Robert Hiltzik's original Sleepaway Camp and Tony Maylam's inimitable The Burning! Goddamn, are these flicks BRUTAL!

 

1978 starts slow, but man, it takes the body count to places that I don't know if any 80s slasher did. No one is safe, the ax hacks and knife stabbings are prolonged and fully visible on-camera (somehow without feeling icky mean), and the thing in the cave... I mean, that's totally new territory for a slasher, as far as I know. 

Next week will bring the final chapter, and I can't wait. After that, I'm very curious to see what else Director Leigh Janiak has in store for us.

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Playlist:

Etta James - The Second Time Around

Paul Zaza - My Bloody Valentine OST

Frank Black and the Catholics - Dog in the Sand

Deafheaven - The Gnashing

Reverend Horton Heat - Liquor in the Front

Lindsey Buckingham - Gift of Screws

White Zombie - La Sexorcisto

Sunken - Livslede

Numenorean - Adore

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Card:

 

Definitely in need of the illumination this suggests is around the corner.

New Deafheaven!!!

This hit yesterday, but I've been writing and scheduling these posts at least a day ahead to try and regain some sense of consistency. Wednesday was already a pretty good morning when Mr. Brown text me that Deafheaven dropped a new track and announced an album. As you can imagine, I FLEW to pre-order Infinite Granite HERE, then spent a good amount of time listening to "Great Mass of Color "over and over. So good. I guess all the black metal blow-hards can shut the fuck up, since the band has obviously now embraced integrating so many other elements. That's what the best of any genre does - refuses to be limited by the tropes of their chosen peers.

Infinite Granite lands August 20 on Sargent House.

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Watch:

Well, Marvel's Loki started last night, and after watching it, all I can say is... loved it. Not really sure where this is going, except I'm thinking we might be meeting a certain purple time traveler by the end of this series. Which would be pretty f*&kin' cool. 

One of the things that put me in the mood for this series was listening to the Marvel's Pull List podcast that dropped yesterday. I've become quite a fan of both this and the This Week in Marvel 'cast, and on this week's Pull List they interviewed Al Ewing, a writer whose name I've been seeing on the solicitations for a lot of Marvel books of the last few years, but who I haven't really read outside of an aborted attempt at Immortal Hulk (not the book's fault; I plan to get to this eventually, especially now that it's ending). Anyway, the interview kind of primed me for Loki because apparently, Al wrote a series called Loki: Agent of Asgard that I very vaguely remember seeing on the shelves back circa 2014, and he spoke at length about what an attachment he has to the character, and how he kind of ushered in a more 'fixed' take on the character. Really interesting stuff, so I just may read this series, too.

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Playlist:

Deafheaven - Great Mass of Color (pre-release single)

Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

Entropy - Liminal

Principles of Geometry - Lazare (Tommy, you are SO right on this one) 

Blanck Mass - Animated Violence Mild

NIN - Ghosts I-IV

John Carpenter - Lost Themes III: Alive After Death

Run the Jewels - RTJ4

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Card:

After drawing The Devil two days in a row, my good friend Missi - who made the Raven Deck - suggested that perhaps I needed to "turn the volume down on the real world a bit."

 Well Missi, I would say Your creation agrees with you. Here's me turning down the volume on the real world for a bit. 

To Walk the Night

 

Glint, the first release from Deafheaven's Ten Years Gone live album , out December 4th on Sargent House. Order HERE.

 

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READ:

For Halloween I did an impromptu re-read of Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park, which has become a book I read every couple of Octobers and never tire of. From there, I'd planned to begin Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse, a book my good friend and fellow co-host from Drinking w/ Comics and The Horror Vision gifted me a copy of a few months back. However, something steered me into another impromptu re-read, this time of William Sloane's To Walk the Night. I first read this one back in 2016, and found I already was chomping at the bit to get back into it. 75 pages or so in, it's every bit as great as I remember. Also, the narrator speaks a lot like Hunter S. Thompson - which I attribute era and region - and that familiarity adds a entirely new level of pleasure to the prose.

To Walk the Night was originally published in 1937, and as such, there are many editions of the book that have been published in the intervening years. The most recent I know of, and the edition I have, is in a volume titled The Rim of Morning, published by NYRB Classics in 2015.

The volume also contains the novel The Edge of Running Water, another fantastically dark, cosmic tale of restrained but utterly creepy Horror. 

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Playlist:

Naked Eyes - Promises, Promises (Single)

Tamaryn - The Waves

The Stone Roses - Eponymous

Stevie Nicks - Stand Back (Single)

Run the Jewels - RTJ4

Bölzer - Hero

Steve Morse - Bliss OST

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Card:

The 5 of Wands always leaves me scratching my head a bit - there are things about this card that suggest a level of discomfort or discontent with authority to me, and I wonder if that has to do with my recent re-engagement with world news (imagine that, throw out the clown and the news no longer feels like a sideshow). However, there's also something militant about this card, and it makes me wonder if perhaps that might not bode well for the coming restrictions civic leaders are no doubt going to have to impose as the population of entitled cunts that apparently make up a sizable portion of this country's population continue to act like spoiled children.

This is why we can't have nice things, America.

9 Days 'til Halloween - Deafheaven Live Daedalus

New, live Deafheaven from the forthcoming double-live album Ten-Years Gone, out December 4th on Sargent House. Pre-order HERE. 

I ordered mine along with a nifty long-sleeve shirt back in March (I think it was March). I received the shirt shortly after, and only just recently remembered the good news that there was Deafheaven vinyl on the horizon.

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31 Days of Halloween:

Believe it or not, I'd never seen the original The Omen in its entirety. I fixed that last night, however... not a fan. It has a few moments, and I enjoyed David Warner, but overall, this one just feels like it's a bunch of Hollywood types 'hanging out in horror' because it was seen as a lucrative career move after the success of The Exorcist. I'm not saying I'm right, but that's how it felt to me.

1) Tales of Halloween: Sweet Tooth/The Wolf Man (1941)

2) From Beyond/Monsterland: "Port Fourchon, Louisiana"/Tales of Halloween: "The Night Billy Raised Hell" & "Trick"

3) Mulholland Drive/Creepshow (1982): "The Crate"

4) Waxwork

5) Synchronic/Bad Hair

6) Dolls

7) Lovecraft Country Ep. 8/Tales of Halloween: "The Weak and the Wicked" & "The Grim Grinning Ghost"

8) 976-Evil

9) Repo! The Genetic Opera

10) Firestarter/George A. Romero's Bruiser

11) The Haunting of Bly Manor episodes 1 & 2/Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

12) The Haunting of Bly Manor episodes 3, 4, and 5/House of 1000 Corpses

13) Masque of the Red Death/Creepshow (2019) Episode 7/Creepshow (1982)

14) The Haunting of Bly Manor episodes 6 and 7

15) The Haunting of Bly Manor episodes 8 and 9/Roseanne (88) season 2 and 3 Halloween Episodes

16) The Mortuary Collection/Roseanne (88) season 4 Halloween Episode

17) Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning

18) Lovecraft Country episode 9/The Haunting/Roseanne (88) season 5 Halloween Episode

19) Lovecraft Country episode 10/Tales From the Crypt season 1 ep. 5 "Lover Come Hack to Me"

20) George A. Romero's Season of the Witch

21) The Omen

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Playlist:

John Carpenter - Lost Themes

Fields of the Nephilim - Elizium

I took a break from the Halloween vibe today and whipped up a Spotify playlist based on a lot of stuff I was listening to ten years ago or so. Here it is:

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Card:

Undertaking an arduous working will tax the Will. This is an indication to replenish it, which I'm looking at my month-long Sam Hain celebration as a battery-charging exercise for.

Isolation: Day 3 - Seefeel Fracture

Caught this on Michael Stock's Part Time Punks on KXLU this past Thursday (there's a link via KXLU that archives the playlist for all Michael's shows HERE). Love it. Fracture is from the Fracture/Tied single on Warp Records. You can also find and support Seefeel through other releases available on their Bandcamp.

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Seven episodes into HBO's The Outsider, and it has a hold of me good. Fantastic show that very much scratches the itch left over from True Detective Season One.



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As more and more public events are cancelled, it was inevitable the upcoming Deafheaven tour got postponed. Mr. Brown pointed me HERE, where the band is selling what was supposed to be their tour merch, as well as taking pre-orders for the double live album that was supposed to be recorded over two nights in Chicago, but will now be recorded live in-studio. As the craziness increases, you're going to see a lot of messages from independent artists about helping to support them and/or others like them. Take this seriously. I've always considered myself a 'patron' of the arts, especially as we've moved into such a decentralized paradigm for creating and distributing said arts. Now with this, bands who would have made the bulk of their income touring - because even a band like Deafheaven isn't being supported by their label enough for its individual members to actually exist in the real world - are going to be effectively cut off at the knees. You can't support everyone, but please, support those you can.

Here's one of the older Deafheaven songs I'm hoping ends up on the double live, which titled 10 Years Gone, I'm assuming is a career-to-this-point retrospective:



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Playlist:

Human Impact - Eponymous
Seefeel - Fracture/Tied (Single)
Various Artists - The Void OST
Beach Slang - The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City
Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
Deafheaven - Roads to Judah

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Card:

That's a bit disturbing in light of recent events. Or, I can interpret it as the hot streak I'm using all the media induced 'pandemic' paranoia to fuel re-writing something I will be releasing in a few months.

2019: February 28th - New Deafheaven Track!

Fuck yes! Stoked to hear this.

Rick Remender's Deadly Class on SyFy continues to blow me away. I seriously think this might be my favorite and possibly even what I would now consider the best comic book adaptation yet. And I love the way they do the flashback sequences for the characters in Wes Craig's animation. Here's Maria's story from last week's episode #6, aptly titled after one of my favorite Bauhaus songs, Stigmata Martyr.



Playlist from 2/27:

Glass Candy - B/E/A/T/B/O/X
Chromatics - Camera
Ghost - Opus Eponymous
Daughters - You Won't Get What You Want
Ghost - Infestissumam

Card of the day:

Breakthrough! This refers to two events: One, that I've begun using the Zoom H4N Pro that I record The Horror Vision with to record myself reading the finished product of Shadow Play, so I can add it to my iPod and listen to it. I can't express enough how reading my writing out loud helps me make it better. It's a 100% game changer. Previously, I've read everything out loud to K and my close friend Keller, but now, reading it for myself, it's even more profound. Especially since I can go over it on my headphones the next day. Breakthrough indeed!

Two, I found out I'm going to Spokane, WA for a week in mid April for work. Nothing like a couple of lonely nights in a hotel room to kickstart new short stories! Breakthrough!

2018: August 19th

Because I never posted this.

I skipped out on the Deafheaven/Drab Majesty/Uniform concert. Not easy to do, but yesterday was a tough day at work and I ended up exhausted and worn pretty thin. Plus, I'm seeing Drab Majesty in two weeks at my beloved Echoplex and hold out hope that, being an LA band, Deafheaven will play the 'plex or another local venue of relatively the same size. I saw them open for Ghost at the Wiltern a few years ago and the size of the room just didn't fit.

Playlist from Saturday, 8/18:

Chris Connelly - The Night of Your Life
Chris Connelly - The Tide Stripped Bare
Ministry - The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste
Lantlos - .neon
Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
Chelsea Wolfe - Abyss

Card of the day:

Continuing to pull a second one just because it's still tripping me out that Victory is sticking so close. The Journey The Fool refers to is a new writing project.

2018: July 16th

I know I just posted the full album stream that Deafheaven's record label Anti- put up last Friday, however, I'm still ingesting the album and while it is chock full of wonderful surprises, this song hit me the hardest. Gorgeous. And look, there's Chelsea Wolfe, who I appear to be inadvertently stalking here on my blog.

Playlist from yesterday:

John Carpenter's Lost Themes II

Yep. That's it. One album. We spent the day cleaning and organizing our garage, which has enough storage to essentially be a storage unit, so there wasn't a lot of time for music. Ended the night by viewing my new Scream Factory Blu Ray of John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, my favorite Carpenter film (not his best film, but my favorite). I had a hard time deciding on the collector's edition or the steelbook, as the latter comes with an awesome lithograph. I went with this one because it is my all-time favorite cover art for a dvd/br, artist Justin Osbourne:

If anyone knows where I can get a poster of this, please let me know. I've looked online but found nothing and apparently this edition was originally released with one.

No card today, but let's do the Prince of Darkness trailer to round things out:

2018: Happy Friday 13th! New Deafheaven Streaming via Anti-

Well, it's 12:27 AM. I've officially called out from work tomorrow. Mental Health day. AND the new Deafheaven just dropped! and their awesome label Anti- is streaming Ordinary Corrupt Human Love in it's entirety. I'm a little pissed that the vinyl copy I pre-orderd the day the album was announced has not shipped yet (or King's Road Merch/Anti- hasn't updated the order status on their website), but I've got it digitally and now I've got all night and all day to listen to it!



There's a Drinking w/ Comics live streaming on our Facebook page tonight at 9:00 PM Pacific Time. Check it out - we've got Karen Kunawicz as a guest. She's the entertainment columnist for the Manilla times and a good friend of Mike's so I'm psyched to talk geek shop with her.

And a BIG Also, Joe Bob Briggs is hosting a 24 hour horror marathon on Shudder starting at 6:00 PM Pacific (that's 9:00 PM Eastern Standard) and other than listening to Deafheaven and doing my show, I'll be watching that.

Comics I will (Try) to talk about tomorrow:

Earlier this evening I watched a flick on Shudder I'd not heard of before. Described as a modern Giallo, Cold Hell defied ALL of my expectations and proved to be a fabulous film. A Giallo that is not content to just hail the flags of the genre, Cold Hell is a story of violence, but more over it is a story of the human heart. That might sound a bit heavy handed, but it's not. Absolutely, positively recommended:



Followed that up with this classic:



Card of the day:

Balance. Kind of feel like that's what I'm doing now, by not going to work tomorrow. Sometimes you have to do that; call it a mental health day.

2018: June 13th - More New Deafheaven

After having our new bed delivered and waiting all night to sleep on something my feet don't hang off the end of, I knocked out for a paltry 3 hours and 57 minutes, only to lay awake until finally calling a fail and getting up for the day at just before 2:00 AM.

Sucks, right?

Well, I've been rewarded by a nice morning writing, some strong coffee (much more of that to come today) and... new Deafheaven!



I haven't listened to this one yet - the album is out in just 1 month on Anti- so I'm debating on whether or not to save Canary Yellow for within the context of the entirety of the new album, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love. Gonna be really hard to wait, though...

New issue of Garth Ennis and Goran Sudzuka's A Walk Through Hell today:

Finally finished Ash Vs. Evil Dead season 2 yesterday (I know, I know. What took me so long? I bought the fucker on Blu Ray the day it came out last year, watched a few episodes and then I don't know what happened. Anyway, started a rewatch last week, loved every second of it).

I'm plowing through Laird Barron's first Crime Novel, Blood Standard. I love all of this man's work - he's become my favorite working author. And Blood Standard is no exception - it is a fantastic romp through the fringes of the detective genre. Mr. Barron has all the nuts and bolts of what's expected down, so it's not that he's reinventing the wheel. But he maneuvers the tropes in a way that lays a solid claim to them. I'm not the most versed in the genre - my friend Joe knows a hell of a lot more than I do, but in our conversations, and in being a fairly wide-read person in other regards, I know the Ps and Qs of the detective story. Mr. Barron gobbles them up and spits them back out in such a surefire, staccato fashion that the book is an absolute joy to read, especially with such an interesting setting (Upstate NY by-way-of Alaska) and such a joyously violent protagonist (Isaiah Coleridge), who while a man well-versed in destructive forces, generally avoids them by being an unbelievably well-rounded and, thus real character. When Isaiah does snap though, wow.

Playlist from 6/12/18:

Sys Exe - Downride
Lebanon Hanover - Let Them Be Alien
Chris Connelly - The Tide Stripped Bare
Junior Jr. - Obligatory Demo
Rammstein - Herzeleid
Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night
Deftones - Koi No Yokan
Zombi - Shape Shift

Card for the day:

The completion of potential. The last card in the deck, so to speak, so a form of completion. Also, it'd be nice if the same literal interpretation that happened with Luxury yesterday happened with this one today.

2018: April 19th 7:26 AM

That new Deafheaven yesterday made my week! Also, the fact that tix go on sale Friday to see them in August - and Drab Majesty is opening!!! Couldn't be more ecstatic. Now I need to look into the other opener, Uniform, who I am totally unfamiliar with.

With the release of Honeycomb, I've finally got a good number of one-off tracks by the band to make a nice playlist from their split 7" material and E.P.'s. Looks like this:

From the Kettle Onto the Coil
Honeycomb
Punk Rock/Cody

And come to think of it, I may add their Demo E.P. from 2010 to that as well.

Playlist from yesterday:

Aphex Twin - I Care Because You Do
Windhand - Soma
Boy Harsher - Country Girl
Deafheaven - HoneyComb
Blur - Eponymous
Deafheaven - Playlist (see above)

Card for the day:

Again with this guy! Interesting. I'm heading into Hollywood tonight for a business meeting, let's see what kind of journey that takes me on (I know there are other interpretations, the journey just seems to always fit where I'm at - always moving).

2018: February 21st, 4:23 AM

More Bowie in my head upon waking. It's a wonderful way to open your eyes:



Playlist yesterday:

TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
Darkness Brings the Cold - Devil Swank Vol. #1
Somnium Nox - Apocrypha
The Knife - Shaking the Habitual
Somnium Nox -
David Bowie - Dollar Days*
Deafheaven - Sunbather
Roy Ayers - Ubiquity
Playlist: K**

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* I had been thinking about listening to David Bowie's Blackstar to start off my writing session but was tired and a little out of sorts so I figured I should stick with the music I know works for these sessions, i.e. lately Deafheaven. However, before I could choose one of their albums, my iTunes jumped into random and picked Dollar Days. I treated this as something of a sonic Tarot pull and listened to the song. Lyrics for it are HERE - I'm not sure how these pertain to my life at the moment, rather hope they don't. It's a great song, one of the saddest deliveries on a final album filled with sad deliveries. I'm going to re-engage with the album today, as my original impetus for almost picking it yesterday was realizing it'd been quite a long time since I had, preferring for the last year or two to stick to Bowie's older material and also some of his more obscure, probably because as awesome as Black Star is, it's an emotional tour de force.

** The second or third CD I made for K after we started dating. The part of the playlist we made it through before dinner looks like this:

Card of the day:

Interesting interpretation when I juxtapose this card resurfacing with the 8 of Swords almost popping out of the deck as I shuffled (I always shuffle three times - unless I'm around a lot of people I know, like at work, and want to avoid being super ostentatious - and cut once). The 8 of Swords is, of course, Interference, and in keeping with that we are poised to move but have a sudden setback. The 2 of Disks coming up confirms putting our heads down and plowing through.

Deafheaven - Gifts From the Earth

Fuck yeah! I really have to give Sunbather another chance, because ever since Mr. Brown sent me New Bermuda for my Birthday back in March, I have become increasingly infatuated with it.