It's kind of funny that, in his new book It Rose from the Tomb, Peter Normanton expresses surprise that TwoMorrows was interested in publishing a book on the history of horror comics, considering that this would not be the first horror-centric book that comics-centric publisher has published (if you have not checked out Mark Voger's Monster Mash, you need to get it together, Daddy-O!) and that horror is so integral to comics history. It's the main reason why kids devoured funny books in the fifties and why the comics code shut them down. Marvel and DC were known to dabble in horror, and it was the life's blood of E.C. and Warren. And because even the chintziest horror comics were outlandishly visual and vivid, horror comics is the perfect theme for one of TwoMorrows' visual and vivid volumes.
Monday, March 18, 2024
Saturday, March 16, 2024
Review- Alice in Chains' 'Jar of Flies' 30th Anniversary Vinyl
The Alice in Chains guys took a little longer to achieve the right balance between their sound and songs, but they were dropping some pretty strong ones by the time they put out Dirt in late 1992. However, it was 1994's groundbreaking Jar of Flies EP on which Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell's writing fully matured. As a lyricist, Staley had already been laser focused, specifically on the heroin addiction that was wracking his body and mind, but the subtler approach to his problem he took on Jar of Flies served his songs particularly well.
Saturday, March 9, 2024
Review: Vinyl Reissues of Nico's 'The Marble Index' and 'Desertshore'
Nico had little control over the beginning of her music career, when she sang a couple of pop songs for Andrew Oldham's Immediate label. Another Andy gave her a shotgun marriage to The Velvet Underground, with which she had nearly no creative input despite being the comely commercial face of the band. Nevertheless, her unforgettable turns on the few songs she got to sing were definitely steps in a more natural direction for Nico and her avant garde sensibilities.
When she got to make her first solo LP a few months after The Velvet Underground & Nico was released, members of the VU (as well as future MOR superstar Jackson Browne, of all people) still provided most of the songs and instrumentation, and she ultimately expressed a distaste for the prettiness of it all. The one song Nico co-wrote on Chelsea Girl, "It was a Pleasure Then", gave a taste of her true ambitions: uncompromisingly dark, borderline queasy music seemingly designed to give her listeners a severe case of the heebie jeebies. Plus, harmonium. Lots and lots of harmonium.
Friday, March 1, 2024
Review: The Rolling Stones' 'Live at the Wiltern'
2003 was a big year for The Rolling Stones. That was when the group turned forty, released their very first career-spanning greatest hits album, and went on an international tour that became the second most profitable one in history at the time (The most profitable? Their own Voodoo Lounge tour of eight years earlier).
Monday, February 26, 2024
Review: 'Teenage Wasteland: The Who at Winterland, 1968 and 1976'
Thursday, February 22, 2024
Review: 'The Rolling Stones Singles 1966 - 1971'
*It's been twenty months since the release of The Rolling Stones Singles 1963 - 1966, and though that set's press release promised the inevitable sequel would arrive in 2023, vinyl reissues of the Stones' U.S. LPs were apparently ABKCO's main concern that year. In 2024, the label has wasted little time in finally making good on that 2022 promise.
Thursday, February 8, 2024
Review: Wings' 'Band on the Run' 50th Anniversary Set
Monday, January 29, 2024
Psychobabble's Favorite (and Not So Favorite) Monkees Songs...161 of Them Ranked!
A list of The Monkees' best-loved songs will inevitably be a cartload of the obvious topped with the usual suspects. "Daydream Believer". "I'm a Believer". "Last Train to Believer". Etcetera. That is not what follows.
The Monkees were the first band I fell in love with, but it was not the big hits that caught my attention. It was the group's pervasive weirdness, which tends to get steamrolled in discussions of how cute, sweet, bubblegum, and ersatz they were. If The Monkees were the unadventurous, pre-fab, teeny-bopper bait they'd been accused of being for much of their career, I would never have paid them much mind. But that image is bullshit, although it does seemingly hold true for some of the songs that appear down at the bottom of this list, which is limited to their first-phase work (I refuse to ever listen to Pool It, if only out of respect for the band).
These are very personal choices, hence the title of this post, and I'll do my best to express my reasoning, which will likely cause Believers to smash a piano with a sledgehammer while Nes, dressed as Zappa, conducts.
Here they come...
Sunday, January 28, 2024
Review: 'The Terror'/'The Little Shop of Horrors' Blu-ray
Jack Nicholson is a lieutenant in Napoleon’s army who tracks ghostly Sandra Knight to Boris Karloff’s decrepit castle.
It took two writers to compose a script that clearly just instructed, “Jack walks down hall and opens door” for pages and pages on end. Roger Corman commissioned that script for no other reason than to get his every penny’s worth from the sets he used for The Raven and take advantage of the three extra days Karloff agreed to make himself available.