Hello there. My heart is racing. I have sworn to never-again defend late-era Metallica to anybody ever forever and recent events are trying the steel of my resolve. I must resist—I will resist—and move on. As always, Crook finds a way to get the water boiling with his fantastic Choice is Yours. For the record: I have made the same promise to myself regarding Trent Reznor and Primus. You either like them or you don’t, and I am fine with either.

Let me tell you what I’m not fine with. I am not fine with you not thinking that the currently hanging ‘This Fear You May Know‘ show by Sacramento’s very own Skinner Davis is anything but an epic and brutal odyssey through the pulsing bowels of all that is awesome and unholy in all this wretched land. Forever.

I had chance to check this show out a week ago, and my mind is still blown. I am reading this through a brainstain on my monitor. That is how blown my mind is. My business partner and I were so shocked and fucking awed, that we—for some reason—decided to send Skinner this text from the gallery floor. He has it. Probably pinned to his bedroom wall. With all the others:

Skinner is no newcomer to the Mishkaverse…as a matter of fact, a fantastic painting of his hangs in the Echo Park store, last I checked. He is awesome. And we all know that. But this…this is something….else.

The colors. The lines. The scope. The fucking IDEAS that are present in this man’s work are just. fucking. incredible. I feel so lucky to have gotten my nose as close as possible to these paintings without touching them, and if you’re anywhere near San Francisco, I would highly recommend that you go check this amazing show out. It is at Whitewalls. (here are more tight-crop detail shots from me)

What else does this week bring us? As if that’s not enough. Oh nothing…just the hugely colossally epic release of Gargamel’s standard-size Deathra. Gargamel often takes it on the nose for being too ‘cute’; their idea of kaiju does just happen to be more streamlined and polished than many other companies out there. That said, this thing is terrifying. Never mind the all-seeing eye of Zolnak. Never mind the leathery bat wings of the night. This thing has two thumbs on each hand.

Two Thumbs. Just like the little one. And the teeth. OMG the teeth.

I am so excited about this toy…so excited that I’m doing my best to look at it as little as possible. I want it to terrify me. I want to walk by it and be completely grossed out. I want it to give me goosebumps. And it is. It is.

Last but not least, I spent this weekend huffing dog farts and putting together this little video for you. Well, I actaully made it for Skinner and laid it’s bloody carcass at his swollen feet in hopes that he would be pleased. A token of my thanks for making such hideously righteous scarescapes. But! I figured I’d share it with you too…he’s sucked all the magic out of it…the soul is gone, sorry…but you are of course free to sit here for a few minutes and chew on the fat that’s left over.

Until.

There’s a god damn heatwave afoot here in New England. The sun scorching us nerds, casting us back into the dungeons from whence we came. What the fuck is a fanboy supposed to do in the face of such unrelenting Sun Hate? Easy, yo. Check out Near Mint Condition! Shameless plug, ahoy. Welcome to the weekly column where I give the weekly rundown of what I’m looking forward to in the world of comic books. Or more than likely, watch as I grouse like a bitch about the same five things I dislike in the comic book world.

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Scarlet #2
Scarlet’s subtitle should be “See motherfucker, Brian Michael Bendis can still write.” The first issue came out a couple of months ago, and the combined effort of Bendis and Maleev was nothing short of a boner-inducing wunderkind. There was a stretch of time when Brian Michael Bendis owned my nerd soul. Between Goldfish, his bullshit on Sam & Twitch, Daredevil, Powers, and Ultimate Spidey, I would fawn over him with unreserved enthusiasm. Eventually though, his strongest assest, his god damn writing ability, became (to me, alright?) his undoing. Some straight up Oedipal shit.

Why?

‘Cause the dude got something barely short of thrown into control of the entire Marvel Universe. That’s probably a wildly inaccurate claim. Whatever. And all that talent got diluted across ninety titles, and like his talent, my love for him was slowly diluted until it faded away.

Scarlet reminds me of why I love the guy.
And when he’s on his game, he’s better than roughly 95% of us wannabe writers.

Synergy. The retardedly cool concept that something can come together to become better than the sum of its parts. That’s fucking Scarlet. The story itself is cool, though perhaps a bit rote. The world’s fucked up, only one hot alt-chick can save it. The art itself is fucking gorgeous. The dialogue is beyond what feels like the Stock Campy Bullshit that Bendis pumps into the thirty-three Avengers titles he writes. You mash the Hot Chick With Guns and the Gorgeous Artwork and the Witty But Not Pressing Dialogue together, and you have a comic that I am genuinely, genuinely excited to read.

Even if you’re super-duper dissatisfied with Bendis, if you ever loved the dude at all, this is going to be an express trip in the wayback machine.

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Shadowland #3
Speaking of Bendis, one of the characters he used to lull my weeping fanboy heart into his clutches was Daredevil. I know I’ve rode Matty Murdock’s bedeviled jock throughout many a column here, but I can’t help it. Who doesn’t love watching someone as they’ve swooned into terminal descent? We’re all standing near the point of impact, hoping to get some existential guts splattered across that.

You can’t do better than Murdock’s crushed-soul.

I have to say this though, I prefer mainland Daredevil way over Shadowland. And while I dig on Shadowland, it loses a bit of the interpersonal edge that I’ve dug about Daredevil. It’s an action movie, not a detective story. And that’s cool, freal. It’s a preference thing.

But kick it over to Shadowland to watch as a man who has been pushed over the railing and into his own darkness finally combusts. The only sadness I feel is that I know whatever sort of fate Murdock meets will ultimately be mitigated by the engines of the industry. Someday he’ll be reformed, back, ready to rock. Push that out of mind and watch as shit gets real, if you can.

It’s an action movie starring one of the best characters Marvel has had to offer. Unblemished by what I would argue are editorial mandates to fit into movies, and other bullshit, a list of All-Star writers have orchestrated the collapse of the Man Without Fear.

Here’s our chance to watch him splat.

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Soft Metals - The Cold World Melts EP (2010) [Captured Tracks] // Grade: B+

Soft Metals have garnered quite a bit of hype and love from the internet recently, even here, on this very blog. Now with their first official release, the debut EP The Cold War Melts sees the duo try to live up to that blog pressure with five tracks that run through a dark club land of Italo disco and cold wave to brooding late night dance floors and housey synth fueled nostalgia for a night out at club that never really existed.

The Cold War Melts starts with the brilliant “Love or Music”, a track full of grooving drum machine claps and slow achingly retro synths stances, when the vocal hits it’s drenched in all that echo and reverb you’d expect from an Italo disco track from ’83 but it’s got a surprising dynamism that stops it from being too spacey and brings the pop element in with a vengeance, properly nice. To go from there would take something impressive and track two manages it with the EPs title track which bursts into life with dark and throbbing synths that beat out a rhythm that the Predator would stalk you to, it’s a great dance floor tune all acid squelches, posing in the dark, lasers painting lines though smoke and after work execs chatting on phones the size of bricks.

By the third track the late night, trip out on the dance floor vibe is firmly established and you can settle into the pop hooks and epic female vocals drifting serenely over everything. Then we hit up what I find most annoying on albums (and especially EPs), the instrumental track. And sure it’s nice enough and would maybe be fine on a release with more songs but I just can’t help feel instrumentals are included as filler, especially when the rest of the songs have such a pop sensibility about them. The final track “Another Goodbye” brings things back with a glacial New Order via Patrick Cowley feel, slow and seductive with vocals like a valium dosed 1983 Madonna.

This is the sort of release that can be enjoyed via headphones on a rain soaked day as much as on the dance floor of a smoke filled club. The EP’s heavy Italo sound will I’m sure draw obvious comparisons to Johnny Jewel’s recent work. But what sets this apart from Glass Candy, Chromatics and Desire is that Jewel has never worked with a vocalist as confidant as Patricia Furpurse nor released 5 tracks quite as dancefloor ready as these.

Fans familiar with Soft Metals will have no doubt heard these five tracks via their soundcloud and Myspace page for quite some time now but they’re a band that’s very much deserving a wider audience and an official vinyl release. So while I enjoyed this EP quite a bit, I’m at the point where I’m dying to hear newer material my ears haven’t yet fully devoured. But for the rest of you who will undoubtedly first be introduced to Soft Metals via this EP you’ll find a dark, imposing and even epic release that once over will have you where I’m already at… eagerly awaiting what’s next.

Metallica – The Black Album (1991)

Vs.

Queens of the Stone Age – Songs For the Deaf (2002)

The Game is simple… if only one could exist which would it be? What’s more important… personal relevance, cultural significance, or simply being the better album all other things aside? Choice is yours…

Oofa! So let me preface this by saying that I’m a pretty big Eli Roth fan. I think he’s one of the sharpest minds making Horror today. And while he hasn’t really directed anything since the  merely “OK” Hostel 2, the man knows what it takes to make not only great but campy horror… so I went into The Last Exorcism, which he produced (his first as a producer), hoping it would be an extension of the witty, blood-soaked and tongue-in-cheek style he not only helped resurrect, but take to the next level.

Roth has been tweeting endlessly about the film and crowd reactions to its numerous festival screenings, reputed gorehound sites were singing its praises, and it had a clever viral campaign a week or so prior to its national debut. So you know, I had a pretty good feeling that this film would deliver a few solid thrills, some chuckles, and gore, gore and more gore. Oofa! Was I ever wrong.

I’ll give the film its due in how it cleverly revamped the tired exorcism model into something that could have been a great premise. Cotton Marcus has been groomed to be a reverend since he was a child, eventually taking over for his father preaching sermons and performing exorcisms. Problem is that Cotton is a great showman, and all of this is just a fun little act. For him, being a reverend is not about faith, but simply telling people what they want to hear to get past their problems. When Cotton reads about an autistic child who dies at the hands of another reverend during an exorcism, he has a crisis of conscious and decides that it’s time to expose exorcisms for the ruse that they really are. He teams up with a film crew who sets out to document every aspect of the preparation and staging of what will hopefully be the last exorcism ever.

Cotton and the crew head down to Louisiana to the Sweetzer farm after receiving a letter from Louis Sweetzer to come help his daughter, Nell, who is supposedly possessed and slaughtering livestock in her sleep. Cotton obviously doesn’t believe in demons and for him, the whole production of an “exorcism” is a sort of shock therapy for people move past some psychological baggage that they’re carrying. So Cotton does his whole exorcism shtick and proclaims young Nell cured. But funny thing is that later that night, Nell shows up in Cotton’s hotel room acting creepy as all fuck. From then on, the film shifts to Cotton trying to figure out what the underlying cause of her “demonic” behavior is, as the audience is left guessing if Nell is actually crazy or possessed all the way until the end.

Before I tear into the film, I would like to single out both Patrick Fabian (Cotton) and Ashley Bell (Nell) for their acting… actually the acting in The Last Exorcism is, overall, pretty damn good. It’s the directing and the plot that leave a lot to be desired. The whole film is shot from the perspective of the film crew’s cameraman, except none of it whatsoever looks like it was shot from one camera by a guy documenting something. It’s over-directed and so strategically shot and paced that you can’t help but wonder why the film couldn’t just have been about a film crew documenting the exorcism  rather than the supposed “real” film. This fault is very hard to get past, like speaking with someone with a bad toupee. Try as you might to get past it, you just keep wondering “how do they not know how bad this looks?” instead of actually concentrating on the conversation… or movie in this case.

The guessing game of what’s at the root of Nell’s “possession” is also pretty tedious and predictable — a melodramatic see-saw back and forth centered around family trauma that just makes you want to scream, “Ok, we get it! Show us more blood and creepy contortion shit!”, most of which had already been used for the trailers. After dragging on and on, at the very end you’re gifted with a bungled yet clever twist (right before sputtering into either a poor homage or comically bad rip of The Blair Witch Project) that just leaves you contemplating “why couldn’t this more just have been more of this?”. Those 5 minutes at the end are some of the films most interesting and it’s only suspenseful moment. It’s a shame they weren’t fleshed out more.

Maybe I expected too much from something Eli Roth would put his name and money behind, and that’s probably my fault because horror is horror and even the greats produce their fair share of crap. The Last Exorcism is about on par with the Horror movies that get dumped at 1am on Showtime 2, and that’s probably when and where you should catch it… preferably from the middlepoint on, after stumbling home half-soused.

RxRy - VAEIOUWLS (2010) [Self-Released] // Grade: B+

These 12 songs, all named as vowel variations (“AIUIA” or “EUIEE”), mark the bedroom arranger RxRy’s most focused and inclusive effort yet. Whereas the curative eight-song debut took just six days from start to finish, the 40-minute VAEIOUWLS took closer to two months to complete and upon first listen, you’re given a layered invitation into lurking the space just below the water’s surface and only faintly hearing the noises above you.

It was originally thought that the player behind the RxRy tag was Panda Bear’s Noah Lennox and that the debut, self-titled batch of 8 songs were “unreleased joints” from the Animal Collective member’s Tomboy sessions. Fending off the case of mistaken identity, rumors were discredited after RxRy posted an image on their MySpace page, saying simply that he/she/it was “not Noah.” The sonic similarities are largely a stretch as the music on both VAEIOUWLS and RxRy remain planted in the realm of murmuring electronic ambience and many steps away from the Wilson-soaked, hazy harmonic luminosity of Lennox.

VAEIOUWLS is a pervasively discrete collection of digitized pulsations swabbed over barely-there washes, buzzing ambiance and soothing landscape (and genre) nods. It’s easy to tick off immediate similarities to the likes of Aphex Twin, Eluvium, Loscil or Nathan Fake while placing the songs under the overused mark of IDM alongside lesser parts of Dub, Dark Ambient and House flourishes.

RxRy’s debut was made while its creator was ill. Starting in December of last year, the  sonic space spawned as an in-the-moment restorative measure— “Rx” is the prescription and “Ry” represents rays extending outward— and soon became a cure for routine. The musician describes daily life: “Wake up, drive to school, float aimlessly, drive home, get lost in sounds, repeat” like a perfect subtitle for the creation. Getting lost in VAEIOUWLS’ runtime is of effortless appeal.

What you’ll notice is just how much RxRy’s sophomore release skims the fat from other contemporary background maestros; this is a record that’s deep, though concise, and glowingly ear-to-ear agile. Starting with waving synths and building percussive clunks, VAEIOUWLS’ opener, “AIUIA” is over before you have a real chance to fall anywhere near it’s bottom. “UUAII” is spiced with orchestral weight and a low-toned bass hum, though it plays more like a refrain of sorts, checking to see if it’s listener is still there.

Starting to pick up pace, VAEIOUWLS’ legs are well and stretched by the time “EIIOA” hits and we move through jumping bass prods that bolster an almost electro lead before the album’s opus “AAIEI” blows in with multi-layered sophistication.

The person behind RxRy represents a growing number of boutique artists that exist solely on bandwidth buzz and viral value. RxRy says on their blog, “I want people to have free music, unrestrained and broadly available to every person who can download it,” They support the ubiquitous goal by continuing to offer music like VEAIOUWLS, at no cost. Though they “would love” to release physical formats, all RxRy releases— 2 LPs and EPs as well as a few singles— have all been free, direct Mediafire links. VEAIOUWLS is well worth a listen- so snag a copy down below.

Download RxRy’s VAEIOUWLS for FREE! (Click Here)

No, I’m not talking about The Social Network, I said the “other” Facebook movie. This past Friday before enduring through The Last Exorcism (more on that tomorrow) I was treated to the trailer for Catfish, who prior to this I hadn’t heard, read or seen  jack shit about.

For the first minute and a half of this trailer my girlfriend, Yüng Chow and myself sat giggling over what we thought was some sappy mockumentary  style, feel-good, romantic comedy about finding love via Facebook until out of nowhere SHIT GETS REAL FUCKIN’ CREEPY! Watch it! It’s a really good trailer and has me amped on seeing this. I really hope this delivers because I can haz one good internetz horror movie?

Hipster Youth - Teenage Elders (2010) [Self-Released] // Grade: B-

Love or loathe Crystal Castles, their use of chiptune samples sort of repositioned the genre, illustrating how 8-bit beats could sound as one element of a larger, hi-fidelity composition. But as good as those samples sound within their work, severing them from the context in which they’re generally created loses much of the specialness of the sound. 19-year-old Aidan Wall (who also releases music as Porn on Vinyl) produces gritty, off-kilter 8-bit bedroom dance under the name Hipster Youth on album Teenage Elders.

With track titles bearing names like “Pop Song For Those With Short Attention Spans”, “I Lost My Corpse Paint” and “Super Fun Hipster Suicide Party”, Wall  brings a observational humor to his tracks. They feel lighthearted, approachable but also carry with them a measure of loner self-doubt. Aidan Wall is that kid with the messy hair in the back of class inking out a graphic novel when he should be taking notes. Teenage Elders embodies that notion of creative escape from the mundaneness of reality, and for anyone who’s ever built a world within their own head and decided to live there awhile, Wall is easily identifiable as a kindred spirit.

As a whole, the album possesses little continuity. Some tracks are barely over a minute (“Interlude [Yes, I did drink too much. I must get out of here]“, “Things I Should Say”) while “I Lost My Corpse Paint” clocks in at nearly nine. Stylistically, Wall leaps between sounds which does nothing to help the album’s flow, but establishes an environment of wild unpredictability that is energizing. “Pop Song For Those With Short Attention Spans” pairs far-off, light typewriter-sounding beats with woozy vocals then jars you out of dreaming and into “Little Lost Bear” which sounds like an synth organ-led final boss showdown. “Myself Or Something” emulates gritty reverb with digital static while both “Super Fun Hipster Suicide Party” and “Things I Should Say” kick up the pace offering speaker-blown 8-bit dance parties to the mix.

The sound quality overall is amateur at best. The collection of tracks don’t transition well, with volume level discrepancies that are often jarring jumps. But neither polish nor high production values are the point. Teenage Elders is exciting. You are never sure what will fly into your ears next, but you can count on it being highly creative, and, fun.

You can download Teenage Elders for FREE at Hipster Youth’s Bandcamp or by using the player below.

Dear Eric Northman, if you die, I will be inconsolable. Somehow, I haven’t tired of your brooding nature, or your staccato bursts of malaise. Nor your continuous pining for Sookie Stackhouse, despite the fact that you’re far too good for her hillbilly ass. No seriously, if you are reduced to cinders and eulogies next episode, I am going to be one seriously sad dudebro.

And so the writers of True Blood have me hooked like it’s the good ole days. Yeah, you know, back in 2008. When I loved True Blood. I know I do a lot of hatin’ about True Blood, but it’s based out of pure emotional response and not some sort of agenda. So I can say I was pretty stoked with last night’s episode.

For the first time since the middle of season two, I was totally aggravated that the show was over. I have to wait two goddamn weeks to find out what happens to my beloved Eric? Fucking Labor Day! Do you know what I’ll be doing next Sunday? Probably sitting on my fat ass! Why can’t I do that while watchin’ the season finale? Son of a bitch.

But it’s a good aggravation, the sort of interest that stems from wanting to know what happens next. This is in contrast to almost this entire season, where my mind was a river of profanity and hate following an episode. I was a river of confusion, wondering what the fuck I loved about the show so much in the first place, and how it had run so far off course.

Last night reminded me.

Bill and Sookie In: Of Mice And Men
A good portion of the episode was dedicated to Bill and Sookie cruisin’ the swamp-ass roads of Louisiana, dreaming of what their life would be like if they could start over. Just to prove that I’m not just fickle, but also an overly emotional dude, I actually dug on those scenes. It was all Of Mice & Men & Vampires & Fairies, as they detailed the impossibilities they’d love to indulge in.

Plus, with those gap-teeth and that tendency to embark on the hopelessly stupid, Sookie can totally be the Bon Temps’ version of Lennie.

It was enjoyable though, to see the couple actually interacting for almost like three minutes without someone’s life at stake. Sure it goes to shit pretty quickly, but before Russell totally upends their dumb car, they actually come off like the rest of us couples; fucked up, trying to make it work, and hopelessly in love with the idea of their relationship.

Jason In: No Country For Old Stackhouse
Leave it to True Blood to drag in some commentary on the state of modern sports. Poor Jason Stackhouse strives to legitimize his career in the face of his spiritual successor as the High School Jock Top Shit. Motherfuckers.

Jason’s always been one of my favorite characters, because of his hopelessly retarded antics. But underneath all that bullshit, I’ve enjoyed the times when they’ve attempted to humanize him. Give him a few flourishes to go alone with his boneheaded statements and his nintety-three pack abs.

I feel for the dude. Stuck in a back road town, one of his only claims to fame seemingly about to be obliterated by a cheater, it’s got to be depressing as fuck for the guy. Even more so since I think Jason feels that there’s a good chance this kid will make it.

There’s probably some ethical dilemma here for more people, but I hope Jason blasts that kid’s stupid arm off with a shotgun and then dances in his blood.

Jason actually comes off like the rest of us humans; fearful of being outmoded in the face of newer, superior versions of ourselves. Quicker, faster, their potential not yet wasted, or withered, or perhaps worst of all, close to being actually actualized.

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So think of this as a “release party” of sorts for the Fall 2010, Actual Pain collection called Mystery Faith. Tees, Tanks, Crews, Hats… all that Satanic goodness you’ve come to expect and love from Actual Pain is alive and well in the newest collection. As with all Actual Pain collection, we have a limited stock and the brand has a pretty die-hard fan base. This shit will not stick around for too long in-store. You can expect an online drop sometime later this week.

And while the graphics are amazing and evil as always you should really take a look through the Mystery Faith lookbook which is pretty awesome in it’s own right! Keep scrolling to the right to see the entire thing.

And the icing on the cake is that King Dude, AKA T.J. Cowgill who is “Actual Pain” will be doing a very special in-store performance later this evening at our shop. T.J. strips down to his voice and acoustic guitar and channels some dark and haunting neo-folk with a heavy focus on knowledge and faith. Luciferian light and spirituality beyond the confines of a strict monotheistic reasoning are just some of the heady topics.

The show will run from 7-8pm and we ask that you arrive on time as space is limited. If you’d like to attend, please RSVP to rsvp@mishkanyc.com. Please note that entry will work on a first come first served basis via the RSVP list. We also welcome you to take pictures, shoot video and/or record the show for your blogs/sites. We simply ask that you inform one of our employees that you will be doing such before hand.

Head here for more details. We look forward to seeing you and hail the black triangle!

Monday August 30th, 7pm-8pm
Мишка
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
718-388-1725

J/M/Z to Marcy Ave
G to Broadway
L to Lorimer