2019: June 8th Spotlights - Mountains Are Forever

Well, thanks to Mr. Brown, I found my album of the year. It's early, so this could conceivably change, but I pretty much always know my album of the year the moment I first hear it, and brothers and sisters - this is it! And to think, I'd never even heard of Spotlights before, a husband/wife duo whose new album Love & Decay is out now on Ipecac Records and can be streamed or purchased HERE.

Love & Decay feels a lot like the MBV album I wanted to hear when I ordered their loooong-awaited follow-up to Loveless back in 2013, the self-titled and unfortunately underwhelming eponymous record. I also hear Soundgarden, Deftones, and a lot of other bands I like in the sound of Spotlights, but never in a way that feels trite or repetitive. This leads me to declare for myself and like-minded music lovers a new classic and a band to follow and be excited for from here out! Always a great day when I can say that!

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I've talked about Kristen Gorlitz's awesome horror comic The Empties in these pages before, and it's time to talk about it again because Kristen just launched the Kickstarter for issue #3! You can go to the Kickstarter page HERE to read more about it and support it; if you've read the first two issues of The Empties, you'll most likely be like me and not need any more convincing. So good!



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I finally had the chance to watch the new Criterion Edition of David Lynch's Blue Velvet last night. Wow. Gorgeous transfer. This film never gets old for me; I enjoyed this viewing as much as or more than the countless others I've had since discovering this film back in the mid-90s. What I didn't expect  last night was my reaction to the 53 minutes of deleted scenes included as extras on the disc. I watched a few and really had a sense of inspiration in editing. I mean, you look at all the extra stuff Lynch filmed and you can practically see how making Blue Velvet helped him grow as a filmmaker over the course of its creation; all the Jeffery-at-college and Jeffrey-comes-home stuff that got cut would have, if included, very much weakened the film. The elegance to the progression of events in the version that Lynch released and we all love is so much more apparent and enjoyable after seeing the scenes he cut. And after waiting 20+ years to see this stuff - scenes we never thought we'd see back in the Wrapped in Plastic days - I found I could only watch about twenty minutes of them before I grew exhausted and decided to save the rest for a later date.



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Playlist from 6/06:

Man or Astro-Man - Intravenous Television Continuum
Spotlights - Love & Decay

Playlist from 6/07:

Man or Astro-Man - Intravenous Television Continuum
Spotlights - Love & Decay
Los Amigos Invisibles - The New Sound of the Venezuelan Gozadera
Pelican - Nighttime Stoties
Bloody Hammers - Under Satan's Sun
Primus - Antipop

Card of the day:

Paradigm shift! Just in time for the next project.

Ned's Atomic Dustbin - Kill Your Television

STILL waiting for my vinyl copy of MBV's first album in twenty-something years. STILL haven't listened to the digital tracks yet, as I'm holding out for my first listen to be an analog experience given that the band went so far out of their way to avoid digital (obviously you can't fully avoid digital, but you can read about it here). In the interim I ration my exposure to Loveless, but today I just had to get a spin on that one through. And at some point it made me think of Neds. Man, I miss Neds. Great, great band

My Conundrum with the New MBV

image courtesy of walrusmusicblog.com

So I just ordered the vinyl package for the new My Bloody Valentine album. Said package came with the 180 gram vinyl, CD and the digital DL. So the tracks are in my possession, and I'm dying to listen to them, HOWEVER, here's my conundrum.

From the MBV website:

"This vinyl album has been recorded as an analogue album. It was recorded on 2 inch 24 track analogue tape and mixed onto half inch analogue tape and mastered with no digital processing involved. The vinyl is a true analogue cut, i.e. it hasn't been put through a digital process during the cutting process unlike over 90% of all vinyl available today."

Okay, so do I go ahead and listen to the tracks as digital entities, or do I wait (the vinyl/CD's aren't being shipped until the 22nd due to manufacturing) and let such a beautiful and meticulous record find my ears the first time the way it was meant to? It's been fairly easy avoiding the tracks thus far on youtube and pitchfork and whatnot (which is why I've nto posted any here), but now that they're on my computer?

I'm going to attempt to wait, but brothers and sisters, as they say in hell, it ain't gonna be easy!