2018: December 20th

I've never been a very big MC5 fan. I've always labored under the idea that the right time/place just never hit me with them, despite several of my best friends being huge fans well back into the 90s. Mr. Brown saw them live recently, and alerted me to the fact that the new band is, for me, something I simply can NOT ignore. Original guitarist Wayne Kramer is joined on this current tour by:

Billy Gould - Faith No More
Kim Thayil - Soundgarden
Brandon Canty - Fugazi
And one of the best live vocalists I've ever seen, still to this day probably fifteen years after last time seeing him with one of my favorite bands, from Zen Guerrilla, Marcus Durant. I missed the show in LaLaLand, and I'll have to live with that, but thanks to KEXP and their wonderful Live on KEXP series, I at least have this.

Tangent: REJOICE - Heaven is an Incubator has released his albums of the year; read all about them HERE. Mine's coming eventually...

I really intended on posting the new Hellboy trailer that dropped yesterday. I love the two Hellboy flicks GDT did, especially Hellboy: The Golden Army, which I always thought felt like the first movie if someone gave it a Mandy-sized dose of LSD. I was sad to see that run of Hellboy end, but with Harbour as the red-skinned pulp hero, Ian McShane as Bruttenholm, and Neil "Dog Soldiers" Marshall directing, I'm all in. Even though I HATE the first trailer. After having a momentary panic, I did some digging and my encroaching suspicion seems to be confirmed: this trailer was edited in a slightly dishonest way, so as to push a bunch of humor to the front and give the film a more "Guardians of the Galaxy" type vibe. This of course makes perfect marketing sense marketing wise, so I'm willing to forgive that, especially when a Deadline interview with creator Mike Mignola includes this quote: "Neil is a horror director so the idea then was to make a darker film." Read the full interview HERE. Yeah, the interview is three months old, but I feel like Mignola's words are more poignant now that we have a trailer that, hopefully, is at least a touch misleading.

Playlist from 12/19:

Cash Money (Audio) - The Green Bullet
Kevin Morby - Singing Saw
The Police - Synchronicity
Billie Ellish - Party Favor (Single)
Billie Ellish - When the Party's Over
Kavinsky - Night Call (Single)
Corrosion of Conformity - No Cross No Crown
The Atlas Moth - Coma Noir
The Damage Manual - >1 Remix EP
The Damage Manual - Eponymous
NIN - Bad Witch

Card of the day:

The Earthy aspect of Air. My initial impetus is to translate this as herald of a possible external or internal conflict today, however in looking at the nifty little reference book that came with the beautiful mini Thoth deck my good friend Missi gifted me while I was in Chicago, I read this: "A young woman, stern and revengeful, with destructive logic, firm and aggressive, skilled in practical affairs," and I realize this is EXACTLY one of the characters I am writing in the book at the moment, one of the ones that brings everything around to the book's conclusion. Cassandra Tenorio is very skilled, motivated solely by vengeance, and maybe should act a little more like it. Gloves = off!

Thanks again Missi!

2018: January 30th 6:26 AM

I once again began the day in silent contemplation of my current writing project and I am happy to say, after a vexing and truncated writing session last night I smashed my problems this morning. Used the Olympus - let's call her Diane from now on, for obvious reasons - to record it all and now I'll transcribe it, let it stew for a few hours and try and map it on lunch. To reward myself I spent the later half of my commute listening to my two favorite tracks off Zen Guerilla's Positronic Raygun album from 1997, the second because I always lust for this track when Spring kicks in, and in truly baffling Southern California fashion, it's spring ladies and gentlemen. The first because I wanted something to zone out to in order to pull my thoughts out of the 'writing soup' they'd been in:





To get the full effect of Frequency Out you really need to do Healing in the Water, 2000 Watts over the South Side and then Frequency Out, but I figured two tracks as an intro here was already a bit cumbersome. The entire album is online and I can't recommend it or Zen Guerrilla in general enough;  these guys were one of the best live bands I've ever seen - and I've seen a lot of bands live. Miss these guys. Miss the people Healing in the Water reminds me of, too. That's a different post though, one that I may have already put on here somewhere in the murky aeythers of the past.


Card of the day:

I've got nothing on this card in my Thoth Grimoire and I'm thinking now maybe that's why I have money but no gain - I don't know it, I haven't spent the time getting to know what it is to truly Gain. Or maybe that's a little new age. Not sure. More coffee please.

Yesterday's playlist looks like this:

The Knife - Shaking the Habitual
Teenage Wrist - Chrome Neon Jesus (just the three pre-release tracks currently available)
Teenage Wrist - Dazed EP
The Casket Lottery - Real Fear
Viet Cong - Eponymous
Sleigh Bells - Kid Kruschev
Ministry - Animositisomina
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Wrong Creatures
Deafheaven - Sunbather

A little Roxy Music off their debut in there somewhere too.

Teenage Wrist is a band my good friend Jacob told me about. They are Incredible:



The Casket Lottery are an Los Angeles band the sound guy at The Love Song bar told me about last week - I added their album Real Fear that night so I wouldn't forget it but didn't have a chance to listen to it until yesterday. They are also fantastic and not at all what I expected based on the context of the conversation they were originally brought up in and what the name/cover image might suggest. Let's all say thank you for artists still willing to defy expectations.

What You Can Find When You're Not Looking...

As good as I can be burrowing in and finding obscure music in the worlds of Rock, electro, Metal and Avant Garde, the two areas of music I dig that I have trouble finding a foot in the door with is the more obscure, rootsy Soul and Gospel music of mid-twentieth century America. I always get a twinge of jealousy when I hear something in a movie or find it mentioned in a book, find it and then realize that other than that particular piece or artist, I'm stumped. A lot of this is just a facet of inkling and time, as I'm sure if I really burrowed into a group like the Del Fonics - who I was formerly introduced to in Quentin Tarantino's film Jackie Brown - falling into the associated chains of wikipedia pages associated with them and their producers, etcetera, I'd probably come up with some more artists to sate my thirst for dusty old Soul. That hasn't happened though; I'm overly self conscious in these areas and I tend to require gatekeepers. Irvine Welsh's novel Skag Boys turned me onto the tradition of Northern Soul - which previously had simply been the name of my favorite album by The Verve - and newer artists like Jamie Lidell, Charles Bradley and Alabama Shakes make access to the genre's evolution easier than digging, but it's just not the same thing, finding a new artist or finding an obscure, older artist. And really, I'm not even addressing Gospel here, as so much of that isn't easily accessible. In the 60s and 70s almost anyone can and did press records - you see evidence of this in thrift stores all the time - but today? Well, today we have youtube, which I am seriously beginning to believe is the collective consciousness of the human race made accessible. 'Cuz everything is on it. Case in point, Pastor T. L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir. Listen to this, it's awesome! But how did I find the music of a neighborhood Chicago Pastor and his Choir? How did I pull that from the din?

I found this via a gatekeeper: the cool, hazy sample that ends the Algiers record? It's from this. I love the way that sample ends the record; it has a cosmic, time-machine flavored influence that reminds me a lot of the looped sample that ends Zen Guerilla's cosmic masterpiece Positronic Raygun.

And then once I started researching off the Algiers sample I found that, of course, this is another case of the absolutely amazing Light in the Attic Records has put out some of this man's music.

Yes, that's Isaac freakin' Hayes w/ Barrett. ISAAC HAYES!!!

I need to remember that: Light in the Attic. Always check back in with them. Get on their mailing list (why didn't I do that right after the first Black Angels E.P.? Or after the Louvin Bros. Or the Donnie and Joe Emerson record?

(Pause while I actually go do that...)

Then it gets even weirder. Go to the short bio for Pastor Barrett on LITA's site, right here. Being from the South Side of Chicago I remember when these pyramid schemes were big news. Crazy how something like my favorite album of the year so far - that immaculate Algiers eponymous - can bring something from so long ago back around again.