Dawnless Dreams

So, we’re pretty realistic about the fact that maybe like four people on earth actually listen to our music. Like seriously, there’s four. I can name them. But man… Those four people are gonna shit when the new tracks hit bandcamp and they realize we’ve turned into a hulking mutated gene splice of early SWANS, White Mice, and Impetuous Ritual.

And that’s about all the preamble I’ve got today.

Oh yeah, one other thing worth mentioning, I’m gonna start writing about movies now too. I don’t always have time to watch one every day, but when I do I’ll make a quick note of it.

-

Muzak:

Eyes of Fire - So, I saw these guys with Trivium, Danzig and Kataklysm ages ago. 2004 maybe? Or was it 2005? The exact date is now lost to the grey fog that is slowly consuming my mind, but what I do remember is that I wasn’t feeling all that well that day (recovering from a severe bout of food poisoning the night before), and my then-girlfriend dumped me in the car during the drive to the show.

Turns out she was cheating with some meth-head Juggalo dude she met through her online gaming guild and decided that she was gonna move to Nebraska to live in a trailer he had recently inherited from his parents.

She was 23. He was 46. Fucking yikes.

Needless to say I wasn’t in a real good mood by the time we rolled up to the venue… Like, to the point I wound up kind of holding a grudge against all the bands that played that night and spent the next decade completely refusing to listen to any of them.

Only found out a couple years ago that the opening band I was too sullen and fucked-off to be impressed by was ex-members of one of my favorite bands of all time.

So yeah… Joke was on me twice that night.

-

Minsk - Tribal/ Psychedelic sludge from Chicago. Does the Neurosis thing but makes cool use of swirling synth textures and I honestly might like dig this album a bit more than the most recent Neurosis.

-

Portal - Basically the DM equivalent of  “the face that launched a thousand ships.” Except here the face has tentacles and a bag over its head. Swarth and Outre are probably my pound for pound favorites, but pretty much all their albums are great.

-

Binah - UK death metal with that nasty, sludgy, “old school” edge everyone is gaga over these days. I must have got this CD as a freebie with an order at some point because it was on one of my shelves but I honestly don’t remember ever buying it… At any rate, I’ve been throwing it in the rotation over the past couple weeks and it’s definitely pretty enjoyable.

-

Ghastly - I think there has been this weird notion that I don’t listen to or like heavy music anymore, which is weird because I definitely do…

I think what probably happened is that, back in 2016 when shit hit the wall and I said “fuck this I’m done” people interpreted it as me being done for good.

What really happened was that I took a few months completely “off” to move cross country and sort through some other real life shit, during which time we realized there was a lot of stuff that we really wanted to do musically that would require us to dig in and learn to play a bunch of new instruments.

Easy for DD. Much harder for me because I'm a self-taught musician.

So that became 99% of my time for the next couple years, which made “keeping up with the scene” way less important than just practicing day in/ day out learning to play guitar and drums.

But at the end of the day, I still read webzines, I still hear about the “cool” shit that people wind up talking about, and some of it still excites me even if some of it doesn’t excite me quite as much as it used to.

Which brings me to my point: These guys and their weirdly slow-burning dissonant/ melodic Portal meets Pestilence meets Death (FL) old school tech spew really fucking excite me.

-

Movies:

Uzumaki - This flick doesn’t seem to be all that well liked but I think it rules. Definitely a slow burn and sort of strangely acted but I think a lot of that is because they were trying to make the film feel as much like a comic book as possible. There’s a couple moments of shitty/ goofy CGI, but the overall vibe here is atmospheric and unsettling, almost like if Hausu was directed by Thomas Ligotti.

Up on Prime for free and worth a look if you haven’t seen it.

-