Wolf's Week #1

Nov 06, 2023

Hello! Welcome to another writing venture I'll probably end up abandoning as soon as I reliably overbook my professional/personal life. The inspiration for this post's (hopefully) recurring weekly format is Lamniformes Cuneiform's "Five & Five on Friday," and let me tell you, I already know Ian Cory, the more talented of the Ians, does this kind of post better and more consistently. If you're not subbed to Cory's Substack, get on that, pronto. Otherwise, Wolf's Week is an exercise in getting me to write faster, edit less, and publish more while I chip away at longer, more substantial projects. And yes, the June Refill is coming soon. I can't get it out of my stupid drafts fast enough. It's like 10k words. It's awful. Anyway, I'm going to try to run one of these every Tuesday until I hate myself more than I do right now.

Music

"Original artwork by Grant Hart (and then ruined by Dave Watt)"

Citric Dummies - Zen and the Arcade of Beating Your Ass (Feel It Records)
From: Minneapolis, MN
Genre: punk

First off, yes, let's all admire the album art and title. And yes, there are some absolutely choice song titles contained within: "Being Male is Embarrassing," "My True Love is Depression," and a transmission straight from Bill Laimbeer's id, "I'm Gonna Punch Larry Bird." But, thankfully, Citric Dummies' music also rules. The trio plays piledriving punk. Imagine if some lost '80s angel dust enthusiasts were too raucous to make it onto a Killed By Death comp, or maybe if Naked Raygun played at Land Speed Record's pace and had a touch of Poison Idea's freewheeling psychosis. I needed this.

Fracture - All of the Massive (self-released)
From: London, UK
Genre: jungle

Fracture's 0860 project has been a blast. The intention is to time-travel us back to the '90s pirate radio jungle/drum and bass experience, but even if you have no nostalgia for that era, these songs smoke. All of the Massive, a new EP, isolates one of the unreleased standouts of the 0860 mixtape and kicks in three more tracks that run the gamut from airy Logical Progression-ready material ("What a Rush") to scuzzy bass thumpers ("Graveyard Slot").

Final Eclipse - The Dark World (Ixiol Productions)
From: parts unknown
Genre: black metal

The band that everyone assumes is an extension of Death Fortress is back with another album that proves the aforementioned New Jersey rippers had unfinished business. Where last year's Interminable Darkness gave Ukrainian-style black metal a more deathly, austere workout, The Dark World feels significantly more windswept in the atmospheric sense, building up peregrinating cuts that march towards classic standing-atop-the-mountain reveries.

Potion - Split w/ Failure Addict (self-released)
From: California, USA
Genre: grind / jazz / extremely hard bop

Hunter (guitar, bass, keys) and Faustino (vocals) from Trichomoniasis are joined by drummer Quade Ross on this bracing split of intense WTF that's over before you can get your bearings. Once again, like 2020's Cemetary, the drums were recorded years ago, in this case, November 10, 2018. What Hunter and Faustino have piled on top of those crashing, blasting rhythms is like everyone on a G3 bill taking ayahuasca and puking their guts out.

Florid Ekstasis - Trepanning (self-released)
From: New York, NY
Genre: death metal

Fascinating experimental stuff from Calder Hannan, of Metal Music Theory fame, and drummer Christian Moehring. Florid Ekstasis spent two years woodshedding Trepanning, a 48-minute composition split into four parts, and it shows. It's heady material that anyone into the Total Dissonance Worship side of metal should spin, especially if they are interested in exploring the fringes of what this kind of death metal can be. If you liked the more outre bands I've covered in the past, such as Monochromatic Residua, spend a few plays with Florid Ekstasis. Trust me. The way "Let the Visions In" smears, like taking a sponge suffused with acetone and dragging it across an oil painting, is so cool.

Other music stuff:

The Chequers - "Get Up, Stand Up"

Way back in a bygone era called 2010, I used to frequent a bunch of different online DJ collectives. My goal was to build my database of sick tunes for my own sets. Great in theory, flawed in practice. Turns out, in my podunk town, no one except chronic nerds cares to dance to obscure bangers they've never heard before. My DJ career quickly went up in flames, but at least I had a pretty dope repository of music that I scraped off of other, more talented people. Fast-forward a decade, and I decided to drop all that stuff onto a USB drive, lightly normalizing the volume (shout out to mp3gain), so I could shuffle it while doing chores. Long set-up, but that's how I became reacquainted with The Chequers, a UK group from Aylesbury, UK, that started out playing reggae in the early '70s and then transitioned to the stomping, symphonically euphoric sound coming out of then-contemporary Philadelphia in the middle of the decade. "Get Up, Stand Up," a Bob Marley cover, catches The Chequers between those two phases, and the results are super cool. The more revolutionary bent of the theme turns the dance track into a simmering roller that's as pensive as it is funky.

I started compiling new-to-me stuff in monthly Spotify playlists. (I know, I know.) October 2023 is up now. It includes tracks from The Teardrop Explodes, Bill Nelson, ZAZEN BOYS, and more. It also closes out with a dynamite hour-long Umm Kulthum track because of course it does. It's my playlist.
I posted five "favorite artists/bands I found this year" on Twitter. I included five more because I couldn't help myself. You may find something of interest in there.

Find me on Bandcamp until Ampwall goes live.

Reading

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

I picked up a Rabelais compendium because Gentle Giant, my favorite band, used the bawdy tales of the titular giants as song source material. Glad I did. Due to the episodic nature of the writing, it's actually a killer between-things read, allowing you to burn up the dead space that buffers life's appointments. It's also outrageous in a way that I think still lands for a modern audience. To wit, this is from the Gutenberg Press translation of book two's "Chapter 2.XVI.—Of the qualities and conditions of Panurge," translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty and Peter Antony Motteux and prepared for eBook by Sue Asscher:

In another, he had a good deal of needles and thread, wherewith he did a thousand little devilish pranks. One time, at the entry of the palace unto the great hall, where a certain grey friar or cordelier was to say mass to the counsellors, he did help to apparel him and put on his vestments, but in the accoutring of him he sewed on his alb, surplice, or stole, to his gown and shirt, and then withdrew himself when the said lords of the court or counsellors came to hear the said mass; but when it came to the Ite, missa est, that the poor frater would have laid by his stole or surplice, as the fashion then was, he plucked off withal both his frock and shirt, which were well sewed together, and thereby stripping himself up to the very shoulders showed his bel vedere to all the world, together with his Don Cypriano, which was no small one, as you may imagine. And the friar still kept haling, but so much the more did he discover himself and lay open his back parts, till one of the lords of the court said, How now! what's the matter? Will this fair father make us here an offering of his tail to kiss it? Nay, St. Anthony's fire kiss it for us! From thenceforth it was ordained that the poor fathers should never disrobe themselves any more before the world, but in their vestry-room, or sextry, as they call it; especially in the presence of women, lest it should tempt them to the sin of longing and disordinate desire. The people then asked why it was the friars had so long and large genitories? The said Panurge resolved the problem very neatly, saying, That which makes asses to have such great ears is that their dams did put no biggins on their heads, as Alliaco mentioneth in his Suppositions. By the like reason, that which makes the genitories or generation-tools of those so fair fraters so long is, for that they wear no bottomed breeches, and therefore their jolly member, having no impediment, hangeth dangling at liberty as far as it can reach, with a wiggle-waggle down to their knees, as women carry their paternoster beads. and the cause wherefore they have it so correspondently great is, that in this constant wig-wagging the humours of the body descend into the said member. For, according to the Legists, agitation and continual motion is cause of attraction.

So, yeah, there you go. Free-ball it and your jolly member will get bigger. Look, Rabelais was a doctor. He knows what's up. (For the record, I like the translation I'm reading better. I'll update y'all next week with the details.)

Elsewhere:

I enjoyed this episode of Defector's Dan McQuade and David Roth exploring a mall. This is basically what I want out of the internet: two smart writers writing about a mall.
I'm a sucker for Stephen Thomas Erlewine, so catching him in the LA Times fleshing out the new Beatles song, "Now and Then," was worth the read.
Rennie dropped another killer newsletter that makes me wonder why I bother doing this.

Movies

I didn't watch *Time After Time* this week, but the poster is so sick I had to repost it.

Blade (1998)

Man, if this only had more practical effects. Still, even though the CGI doesn't hold up, I appreciate how gonzo some of the gore ended up being. It was a nice contrast to Wesley Snipes and Kris Kristofferson's locked-in performances. 3.5/5

Doctor Sleep (2019)

Way more King than Kubrick, so the movie naturally felt baggy as hell. Despite the digressive derp, I still found it oddly engrossing. 2/5

Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

Pure Hammer shlock. Loses some of its charm when it goes full-vampire and ditches the swingin' London stuff. Still, you get to see frail-ass Peter Cushing giving a younger vampire stud a beatdown. 2.5/5

The Fly (1986)

As my friend put it, Cronenberg movies take off when you get a charismatic actor who can navigate the stiff dialogue. That's definitely Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. 4/5

Green Room (2015)

Taut, nasty little ripper that was able to cram in some realistic life-on-the-road tour stuff. Don't know if I would've liked it as much if I wasn't embedded in the music scene. 3.5/5

The Hurt Locker (2008)

I'm there for the nihilism, less there for Kathryn Bigelow's quirk of making these movies feel like a weird recruitment pitch. 3/5

Soylent Green (1973)

It's an overused descriptor, but it applies here: transportative. Also, Heston's delivery of "If I'd had the time, I would've asked for it": Whew! That's a whole damn movie itself. Wish I knew how this one ended. I slept through it. I'm assuming Soylent Green is plankton? Seemed fine. Also, if someone could remake this with Eric Adams as the governor, that would rule. 3.5/5

Check out my Letterboxd if you're bored.

Show Report

SPEEDY ORTIZ / BATHS / GRACIEHORSE - 11/2/2023

GracieHorse kicked off the night in front of a small but spirited crowd that, like me, showed up early to see them. The LA country quartet played a good chunk of their new album, LA Shit, and it still didn't feel like they had enough time. The highlight was a smoldering rendition of "What I'm Missing." Gracie flexed her vocal chops, and the band gave extra space for the pedal steel to shine. There's something so soul-nourishing about hearing pedal steel in the flesh.

This night was a home show for Baths and the last stop on tour for Will Wiesenfeld. As such, I feel like Baths dialed it up a notch. While my favorite Wiesenfeld project remains Geotic, it was something to hear these songs live, with the talented musician pouring everything into the performance. (It's not that I dislike Baths; some of the material comes off as "I'm writing a journal entry about YOU," and the theater-kid aspect of that can be a tough hang for me.) It's wild that Obsidian is 10 years old.

The last time I checked in with Speedy Ortiz was Major Arcana, which is, my god, also 10 years old. Due to my unfamiliarity with the new material, I wasn't expecting much. Give me something that sounds vaguely like Juliana Hatfield, and we're good, I thought. But the new material from the recently released Rabbit Rabbit sounded great live, to the point where I preferred it to the stuff I knew. Singer/guitarist Sadie Dupuis admitted that the new songs were more challenging to play: "Whose fault was that?" she quipped. We also got a live debut of one track that the band set up by self-deprecatingly suppressing expectations. When the members played it flawlessly, guitarist Andy Molholt enthused, "Yeah, we play that one all the time!" Fun set. Speedy Ortiz's merch table was also packed with pamphlets on a range of topics, including Palestine, and the band asked everyone to call their representatives. It's nice to see them still engaging with that side.

THIS IS THE KIT / ROZI PLAIN - 11/4/2023

Rozi Plain opened with This is the Kit as her backing band. The focus was on Plain's excellent The Prize, which took the quiet rhythmic ingenuity of What a Boost into an even more atmospheric direction. (I called her work in a previous post "British bossa nova" for how it serenely layers polys and bouncy rhythms. I don't think it's a great comparison, but I guess I'm sticking with it.) I was kind of hoping for her cover of Sun Ra's "When There is No Sun," which is transcendent, but the set we got was top-to-bottom excellent, and considering how much her work has meant to me, it was supremely gratifying to see her live finally.

This is the Kit was the surprise of the night. Previously, I haven't liked Kate Stables' material that much on record. (I'll admit "This Is What You Did" bangs no matter where/when it's playing.) But she ruled live. I guess my hang-up must be how those albums are mixed because I was super into all of these songs with louder/warmer bass, more powerful drumming, and Plain's backup vocals and harmonies up in the mix. Stables' stage banter was also an absolute hoot, and she charmed the audience while almost braining two patrons by tossing an oversized grapefruit into the crowd twice. Kate, please holster your grapefruits. I'll relent. I guess I'm due for a reappraisal.

Quick note on the venue: The show was held in a Masonic lodge. It beat the pants off the unitarian churches younger me used to catch all-ages shows in. Cue the Stonecutters theme. Sign me up.

Other Stuff

Season 2 of Bingo Brawlers wrapped up on Saturday. The final pitted Catalystz against NuclearPastaTom, and once again unveiled a bunch of brand new Elden Ring tech, including a genuinely wild Lannseax cheese that turned that heinous fight into trivial content. Shout out to Captain_Domo for putting this event on. I love it. Elden Ring but sports? Extremely my stuff. I can't wait to see where it goes. Also, please, Gino, return for season 3. You can catch a VOD of the finals here.

Upcoming Stuff

The hilariously pixelated Acid Mothers Temple logo.

This week is packed with shows. Monday, I'm catching the Ancient Enemy boys.

Wednesday is Messa.

Thursday is Altın Gün.

Friday is, holy heck, Acid Mothers Temple.

If you're around, drop by and say hey. I'm thinking about trying to sneak Vulnificus and Kerry Chandler in there, too.

Check for the next Plauge Rages newsletter very soon.
The last recorded Runout Grooves podcast will be posted this month.
I need to update the Best Metal: 2023 RateYourMusic list. I'll also be overhauling Black Market's Big Dumb List of Underappreciated Metal Albums.