The Last Temptation of Read

From Lard's 1990 album The Last Temptation of Reid. Pretty sure the titular Reid - the co-owner of Chicago Trax who recorded the band's first EP - came into the pizza place where Mr. Brown and I worked in High School. Weird anecdote, but one I can't help but think of whenever I throw this record on.

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NCBD:

Speaking of Temptations to Read, this is my biggest NCBD Pull in some time. Let's get into what I'm bringing home:

I'm going to be dropping off Ghost Rider fairly soon. I don't know, this one just isn't doing for me what it did about half the time at the onset. I can really feel Marvel building up their Midnight Sons line, introducing a lot of new characters, bringing back older iterations, and building out the world of monsters that lurks in its underbelly. You'd think that as a Horror fan, that would work for me, but I just feel like it's a sanitized Horror, and that's disappointing. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'll read to the end of this current storyline and realize they're building something great, but all the books over the last year that have contributed to that - Moon Knight, that Crypt of Shadows one shot, the crap they did with Man-Thing a few years ago, none of it feels substantive.

I'm definitely digging this deeper dive into the Last Ronin world. 

So, after reading the first 'season' of Red Room, not reading the second, and then picking up the first issue of the third, I'm still digging this book. My pass on that second installment had more to do with trimming the Pull List and diverging from the fairly disturbing subject matter - which, as I've pointed out here previously, is very much offset by Piskor's Ed Crumb-like art style - and not due to any perceived failure on the book's part. Quite the contrary - each issue continues to seduce me with the social mystery that surrounds this strange, underground world of dark web murder rooms, cryptocurrency, and psychopaths. Of particular note this week, this homage cover to Charles Burns's Black Hole comic just blows me away.

I feel like it's been months since I read the first two issues of The Seasons Have Teeth, even though it's only been a few weeks. Can't wait to see where this is going. The anthropomorphizing of the actual seasons into monsters is just too damn cool to miss, especially when those monsters are rendered as visually strange and beautiful as series artist Sebastián Cabrol has made them.

The third and final one shot to welcome in the Fall of X era, the first two books - Sons of X and First Strike both constituted a huge letdown. We're talking Trial of Magneto level bad. Being that those books were not written by current X-scribes and this one is, I'm holding out hope this one justifies reading.

 

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Playlist:

Blut Aus Nord - The Work Which Transforms God

Rein - Reincarnated

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction

Lard - The Last Temptation of Reid

The Jesus Lizard - Liar

Cocksure - Be Rich

Lustmord - Dark Matter

Godflesh - Post Self

God is LSD - Spirit of Suicide

Anthrax - Persistence of Time

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Damn the Torpedoes

        

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Card:

• 9 of Disks: Gain - Yesod again, so imagination and reflection, and enjoying the satisfaction that comes with that. Worded in the grimoire as "Self Satisfaction," which automatically puts me in mind of hubris, the obvious point of the Pull when you take the following two cards in.

• 3 of Swords: Sorrow - Directly from the Grimoire, "Paired with Disks can point to problems w/ work;" "Let thing develop before making another one;" "Intense passion to create but doing so is problematic."

• 7 of Disks: Failure - A difficult period in Earthy life

Well, what a cheery Pull for today! Seriously, this obviously warns against a sneaky inclination I've experienced to try to deviate one or two days a week to work on another languishing project. I'm so close to a final first draft on the current one, best not to deviate. Head on to the finish line!

 

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Duration:

Better.

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Cocksure - Klusterfuck Kulture

Recently my good friend Chris turned me on to the fact that Chris Connelly has a new band with Jason Novak of Acuman Nation. The band is called Cocksure and their debut EP Klusterfuck Kulture is available for a mere $3.99 at the bandcamp linked above. This is easily my most listened to new music of the year, and I've only had the thing for about a week (Thanks again Chris!). It's fantastic - a perfect synthesis of everything great about old school industrial but without feeling like a throwback or re-hashed ground. I spent the week in the cryo-lab with this spinning over and over on my ipod, six, seven listens in a row, each time finding something new to love about it.

I read this somewhere however now I can't find the confirmation, but I believe the full album is apparently due next month in August on, of all labels... WAX TRAX! Now that is fucking awesome. Both Touch and Go and Wax Trax pressing new music for the first time in years this year? Awesome.

CORRECTION: The single was on Wax Trax, the album, out August 12th, can be pre-ordered now on Metropolis Records.
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* I love most incarnations of Ministry but Connelly-era is my favorite

Groovie Mann + William Tucker = Darling Kandie

While working on my review of the new Ministry record From Beer to Eternity for Joup I've been drudging up a lot of old school Chicago connections I'd either not known about or totally forgotten.

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - A Daisy Chain for Satan (Acid & Flowers Mix)

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.