Bad Dream
Black Blizzard b/w 1134
Self-Released

Listening to Brooklyn trio Bad Dream is like being picked up on the side of the road by a bunch of bleary-eyed strangers in a black van who just stare at you the whole hazy ride, numb to their new friend, while you’re gripping your jeans, mistaking the flash of passing headlights for the glint of a hunting knife. It’s a heavy kind of nervous energy, a fuzzy psych-doom that spins thick webs in your head, and each of the songs on this 7″ drip with sacrificial wax. Side A’s “Black Blizzard” is a carry over from their Demonstration EP, but it sounds considerably more evil this time around, while side B’s “1134″ tortures you with its medieval riffs. Bad Dream might be a tad more psychedelic than Electric Wizard but they come from the same soul-frying school, that’s for sure, and will no doubt please all the dope fiends and (bad) dreamers out there.

Note: That’s not exactly the proper cover; there’s all sorts of different coloured covers, which you can see here. I got myself the purple swirl cover on white vinyl, number 129/300. Oh, one more thing about Bad Dream…they have the best prices for merch. I got this 7″, a poster, a t-shirt, and some patches all for like $15. And that included shipping. You’d be crazy not to send ‘em some money.

Listen to “Black Blizzard”! This is actually the version from the Demonstration EP because it was all I could find, but you get the idea.

Electric Wizard
Black Masses
Rise Above Records

Those inevitable three year gaps that Electric Wizard puts between albums are always a heavy burden, man. There are very few bands I crave mind, beard, and soul, and England’s preeminent merchants of DOOM are one of ‘em, so when that seemingly infinite wait finally comes to an end, it’s a crushing exaltation. Thus Black Masses, the band’s seventh, has been received, and it doesn’t waste any time ripping into your psyche with the hyper-fuzzed “Black Mass” and Venus in Furs” before slowing down on “The Nightchild” to feast on what’s left of your mangled being. The rest of the album continues on in this relentlessly ritualistic, utterly dope, serpentine fashion, all while Jus Oborn faithfully wails away from some mid-level purgatory wasteland while tortured souls claw at his throat. It’s a brutally weird and noisy ensemble at times, punctuated by the unusually acid-fried “Turn Off Your Mind” and the thematic interplay with 2007’s Witchcult Today, courtesy of the album’s longest, most menacing song, “Satyr IX” (see “Saturnine”), and the stormy, brooding, frenzied feedback of “Crypt of Drugula” (see “Satanic Rites of Drugula”). It feels awfully good to be in the deathly embrace of the Wizard riff once again.

Listen to “The Nightchild” from Black Massses!

The most buzzed about movie in the last year or so has to be The Human Centipede (First Sequence). Of course, you won’t find it at your local Blockbuster, so the wife finally managed to track it down on the Internet just so we could find out why this movie made people wretch and squirm and turn their head away in pure disgust (if you believe what you read in cyberspace, some people were so turned off by this movie that they walked out of test screenings). So, what’s the big deal then? Ass-to-mouth, that’s what, but not the porno version. More of a literal, torturous version. There’s no doubt that writer/director Tom Six has a twisted mind (again, if you believe what you read in cyberspace the idea for this movie stems from a joke he made about punishing child molesters by sewing their mouths to a trucker’s ass) because the nature of this movie falls right off the scale, and it is indeed stomach-turning, but I wasn’t as shocked by the gratuity of this film as much as others seem to have been. Maybe it was all the hype, but I was let down by its sicko factor.

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