:::: Films of 2024 ::::

TOP FILMS OF 2024 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
-----------------------------------------------------------
George Miller  "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga"  (United States)
Sean Baker  "Anora"  (United States)
Julia Loktev  "My Undesirable Friends: Last Air in Moscow"  (United States)
Dimitris Athyridis  “exergue - on Documenta 14”  (Greece)
Albert Serra  "Afternoons of Solitude"  (Spain)
Jia Zhang-ke  "Caught by the Tides"  (China)
Brady Corbet  "The Brutalist"  (United States)
Miguel Gomes  "Grand Tour"  (Portugal)
Catherine Breillat  "Last Summer"  (France)
Brothers Quay  "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass"  (United Kingdom)
Agnieszke Holland  "Green Border"  (Poland)
Mike Leigh  "Hard Truths"  (United Kingdom)
RaMell Ross  "Nickel Boys"  (United States)
Mohammad Rasoulof  "The Seed of the Sacred Fig"  (Iran)
Lisandro Alonso  "Eureka"  (Portugal)
Nicolás Pereda  "Lázaro at Night"  (Mexico)
Lou Ye  "An Unfinished Film"  (China)
Francis Ford Coppola  "One for the Heart: Reprise"  Restored Rereleased  (United States)
Emilio Fernandez  "Victims of Sin" Restored Rereleased (Mexico)
Hiroshi Shimizu  "Children of the Beehive"  Restored Rereleased  (Japan)
Edward Yang  "A Confucian Confusion"  Restored Rereleased  (Taiwan)
Gary Hustwit  "Eno"  (United States)
Steve McQueen  "Occupied City"  (United Kingdom)
Sergei Loznitsa  "The Invasion"  (Ukraine)
Johan Grimonprez  "Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat"  (Belgium)
Kevin Macdonald  "High & Low: John Galliano"  (United Kingdom)
Peter Zaillian & Patricia Highsmith  "Ripley"  (United States)
Peter Kosminsky & Peter Straughan  "Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light"  (United Kingdom)

Again, this annual overview will be a shorter and more terse assessment than in years past, of cities traveled to, arts seen, music heard, and festivals attended. No other event of 2024 was or will be more consequential to arts and culture in the United States as the results of this past fall's election. Of which, the data now clearly supports what the New York Times stated at the time; “Voters in liberal strongholds across the country, from city centers to suburban stretches, failed to show up to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris at the levels they had for Joseph R. Biden Jr. four years earlier, contributing significantly to her defeat by Donald J. Trump". Which poses the question, “Why Was There a Broad Drop-Off in Democratic Turnout in 2024?”. The Times continues in "How Democrats Lost Their Base and Their Message", by providing substantial evidence supporting the observation that the 2024 conservative populist pitch bumped Democrats off their traditional place in American politics. In doing so, establishing the fact that; "The overarching pattern is clear. In election after election, Democrats underperformed among traditional Democratic constituencies during the Trump era. Sometimes, it was merely a failure to capitalize on his unpopularity. Other times, it was a staggering decline in support. Together, it has shattered Democratic dreams of building a new majority with the rise of a new generation of young and nonwhite voters. It tapped into many of the issues and themes that once made these voters Democrats. This overarching pattern requires an overarching explanation: Mr. Trump’s populist conservatism corroded the foundations of the Democratic Party’s appeal."

In other news of the year, with the global pandemic now decidedly in the rearview, one would assume that the continuance of the regional venues and cultural opportunities would be returning in an assertive manner. Yet here in the urban northwest, the effects of the pandemic on cultural and social life are still manifesting themselves in a pervasive manner. Businesses and cultural venues continue to have limited hours, close early on weekday and weekend nights, and program with a reduced scale and truncated durations over what we saw as recent as four years prior. Some of which have even reduced hours more since their initial reopening in 2021. The once essential component of urban social life in the northwest, the espresso cafe, has been particularly hard hit. With many of them no longer offering evening hours of any variety. Correspondingly, and almost unheard-of before the pandemic, our independent theaters like that of SIFF Cinema, now rarely have screenings past the hour of 8pm. Yet it should be championed that SIFF’s major achievement of recent years was in acquired the historic institution of the Seattle Cinerama, where it was announced, "SIFF buys Cinerama, Plans Reopening of Shuttered Cinema Palace".

Many of the other regional arts institutions and venues are in a state of flux, transition, and relocation. Where it was Seattle Art Museum's loss when "Museum’s Longtime Film Curator of SAM Film Series Laid Off", it has been SIFF's gain. As Greg Olson has continued his programming work renting theaters from SIFF for his successful film noir, italian cinema series, and Powell & Pressburger retrospective. In the University District, the one-of-a-kind 150,000 title resource that is Scarecrow Video has begun a Save Our Scarecrow campaign, wherein the last video store and film archive of its kind in the world is at a pivotal point, "Scarecrow Video Needs to Raise $1.8M or Face Possible Closure". Their sister organization, The Grand Illusion Cinema is also in a state of flux as their building is up for sale, and imminently to be development into high-cost housing, "After 53 years, Seattle Theater Maintains its Grand Illusion … for Now, and as such they are in search of a new location. Across the city on Capitol Hill, after seeing years of diminished programming, and subsequently reduced attendance, Northwest Film Forum now faces a fiscal and cultural crisis, and in response, "Northwest Film Forum Laid Off Nearly Half its Staff".

A number of other hard-hitting losses to the cultural landscape of the city came at the end of last year. The first of which was the recently launched visual art and community space, Museum of Museums, and the second not soon after its opening and inception for, XO Seattle in the space of the historic Coliseum Theater. Even Seattle's longstanding and prestigious literary arts mecca finds itself in uncharted water, due to a recent turn of events, "Seattle's Hugo House Faces an Uncertain Future". The year also saw the announcement of the, "Closing of both Linda Hodges and James Harris Galleries" and all the while, the gutted void-space of downtown has seen a few vacant storefronts become creative arts venues, including the massive retail space once occupied by Bed Bath & Beyond. In a lengthy discussion with NPR's Libby Denkmann and Mike Davis, Museum of Museums founder Greg Lundgren addresses the reality of, "Is Seattle's Arts Infrastructure Crumbling?". Yet, into that same space have manifested three major new gallery and studio developments, the week of Seattle Art Fair saw the second activation of the Coliseum Theatre by its new stewarts Actualize AiR. Over the course of the spring and summer, "Belltown Has a New Gallery, with Another on the Way", in the downtown gallery spaces opened by Base Camp Studio. These made possible by Seattle Restored, an arts and culture subsidized campaign from the Office of Economic Development.

Breaking from annual tradition, this year saw a deviation from attending the international film festival in the month of May. Insead, the middle of the month was spent in New York City for music, film, dance and cinema premieres. Foremost among these, the Metropolitan Opera's presentation of “John Adams’s ‘El Niño’ Arriving in Lush Glory”. Concurrently, the New York City Ballet assembled their yearly showcase of "Contemporary Choreography", featuring the highlight of "Glass Pieces' Drawing Us into its World". No time in New York would be complete without theatre, so I was in attendance at Chekhov's “Uncle Vanya”, in a new translation at Lincoln Center Theatre. It is also elementary that a day was dedicated to The Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection on view on the fourth and fifth floors, and while there, experiencing Joan Jonas' "Out Takes". Similarly, an afternoon was occupied at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the unmissable array of 12th to 17th century paintings on display, as well as the classic 19th and early 20th century wings on offer in the Robert Lehman Collection. The day was also complemented by the current exhibitions on, "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion", and "Before Yesterday We Could Fly" an Afrofuturist overview. Being in the big city, galleries are a must. Chelsea delivered two notables in Delcy Morelos' "El abrazo" at Dia: Chelsea, and Lucas Arruda's "Assum Preto", at David Zwirner. Across the way in Midtown, Japan Society was in the midst of a major two-part overview of "Tomorrow There will be Fine Weather: A Hiroshi Shimizu Retrospective". And unlike Seattle, no day in New York concluded before midnight, with most nights coming to a close in the AM hours to the tune of late-night sets at Midtown's Tomi Jazz.

:::: Albums of 2024 ::::

TOP ALBUMS OF 2024 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
-----------------------------------------------------------
The Cure  "Songs of a Lost World"  (Polydor)
Chelsea Wolfe  "She Reaches Out To She"  (Loma Vista)
Cindy Lee  "Diamond Jubilee"  (W.25th)
Moin  "You Never End"  (AD 93)
Black Rain  "Neuromancer"  (Room 40)
Painkiller   "Samsara"  (Tzadik)
Tord Gustavsen Trio  "Seeing"  (ECM)
Einstürzende Neubauten  "Rampen"  (Potomak)
Honour  "Àlááfíà"  (PAN)
Rafael Toral  "Spectral Evolution"  (Moikai)
Alva Noto  “Xerrox Vol.5"  (Noton)
Blood Incantation  "Absolute Elsewhere"  (Century Media)
SUMAC  “The Healer"  (Thrill Jockey)
Ahmed  "Giant Beauty"  (Fönstret)
Jeff Parker & ETA IVtet  "The Way Out of Easy"  (International Anthem)
Xiu Xiu  "13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips"  (Polyvinyl)
Tristwch y Fenywod  "Tristwch y Fenywod"  (Night School)
Midwife  “No Depression In Heaven”  (Flenser)
The Bug  "Machines I-V"  (Relapse)
Linda Catlin Smith  "Flowers of Emptiness"  (Another Timbre)
Roland Kayn  “The Ortho-Project”  Expanded Reissue (Frozen Reeds)
Daniel Blumberg  “The Brutalist - Soundtrack"  (Milan)
Aphex Twin “Selected Ambient Works Volume II”  Expanded Reissue  (Warp)
Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Guebrou  “Souvenirs”  Reissue (Mississippi Records)
Alice Coltrane  “The Carnegie Hall Concert” Expanded Reissue (Impulse!)
Various Artists  "No Songs Tomorrow: Darkwave, Ethereal Rock & Coldwave 1981–1990"  (Cherry Red)
Still House Plants  "If I Don’t Make It, I Love U"  (Bison)
Dialect  "Atlas Of Green"  (RVNG) 

Again, this annual overview will be a shorter and more terse assessment than in years past, of cities traveled to, arts seen, music heard, and festivals attended. No other event of 2024 was or will be more consequential to arts and culture in the United States as the results of this past fall's election. Of which, the data now clearly supports what the New York Times stated at the time; “Voters in liberal strongholds across the country, from city centers to suburban stretches, failed to show up to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris at the levels they had for Joseph R. Biden Jr. four years earlier, contributing significantly to her defeat by Donald J. Trump". Which poses the question, “Why Was There a Broad Drop-Off in Democratic Turnout in 2024?”. The Times continues in "How Democrats Lost Their Base and Their Message", by providing substantial evidence supporting the observation that the 2024 conservative populist pitch bumped Democrats off their traditional place in American politics. In doing so, establishing the fact that; "The overarching pattern is clear. In election after election, Democrats underperformed among traditional Democratic constituencies during the Trump era. Sometimes, it was merely a failure to capitalize on his unpopularity. Other times, it was a staggering decline in support. Together, it has shattered Democratic dreams of building a new majority with the rise of a new generation of young and nonwhite voters. It tapped into many of the issues and themes that once made these voters Democrats. This overarching pattern requires an overarching explanation: Mr. Trump’s populist conservatism corroded the foundations of the Democratic Party’s appeal."

In other news of the year, with the global pandemic now decidedly in the rearview, one would assume that the continuance of the regional venues and cultural opportunities would be returning in an assertive manner. Yet here in the urban northwest, the effects of the pandemic on cultural and social life are still manifesting themselves in a pervasive manner. Businesses and cultural venues continue to have limited hours, close early on weekday and weekend nights, and program with a reduced scale and truncated durations over what we saw as recent as four years prior. Some of which have even reduced hours more since their initial reopening in 2021. The once essential component of urban social life in the northwest, the espresso cafe, has been particularly hard hit. With many of them no longer offering evening hours of any variety. Correspondingly, and almost unheard-of before the pandemic, our independent theaters like that of SIFF Cinema, now rarely have screenings past the hour of 8pm. Yet it should be championed that SIFF’s major achievement of recent years was in acquired the historic institution of the Seattle Cinerama, where it was announced, "SIFF buys Cinerama, Plans Reopening of Shuttered Cinema Palace".

Many of the other regional arts institutions and venues are in a state of flux, transition, and relocation. Where it was Seattle Art Museum's loss when "Museum’s Longtime Film Curator of SAM Film Series Laid Off", it has been SIFF's gain. As Greg Olson has continued his programming work renting theaters from SIFF for his successful film noir, italian cinema series, and Powell & Pressburger retrospective. In the University District, the one-of-a-kind 150,000 title resource that is Scarecrow Video has begun a Save Our Scarecrow campaign, wherein the last video store and film archive of its kind in the world is at a pivotal point, "Scarecrow Video Needs to Raise $1.8M or Face Possible Closure". Their sister organization, The Grand Illusion Cinema is also in a state of flux as their building is up for sale, and imminently to be development into high-cost housing, "After 53 years, Seattle Theater Maintains its Grand Illusion … for Now, and as such they are in search of a new location. Across the city on Capitol Hill, after seeing years of diminished programming, and subsequently reduced attendance, Northwest Film Forum now faces a fiscal and cultural crisis, and in response, "Northwest Film Forum Laid Off Nearly Half its Staff".

A number of other hard-hitting losses to the cultural landscape of the city came at the end of last year. The first of which was the recently launched visual art and community space, Museum of Museums, and the second not soon after its opening and inception for, XO Seattle in the space of the historic Coliseum Theater. Even Seattle's longstanding and prestigious literary arts mecca finds itself in uncharted water, due to a recent turn of events, "Seattle's Hugo House Faces an Uncertain Future". The year also saw the announcement of the, "Closing of both Linda Hodges and James Harris Galleries" and all the while, the gutted void-space of downtown has seen a few vacant storefronts become creative arts venues, including the massive retail space once occupied by Bed Bath & Beyond. In a lengthy discussion with NPR's Libby Denkmann and Mike Davis, Museum of Museums founder Greg Lundgren addresses the reality of, "Is Seattle's Arts Infrastructure Crumbling?". Yet, into that same space have manifested three major new gallery and studio developments, the week of Seattle Art Fair saw the second activation of the Coliseum Theatre by its new stewarts Actualize AiR. Over the course of the spring and summer, "Belltown Has a New Gallery, with Another on the Way", in the downtown gallery spaces opened by Base Camp Studio. These made possible by Seattle Restored, an arts and culture subsidized campaign from the Office of Economic Development.

Breaking from annual tradition, this year saw a deviation from attending the international film festival in the month of May. Insead, the middle of the month was spent in New York City for music, film, dance and cinema premieres. Foremost among these, the Metropolitan Opera's presentation of “John Adams’s ‘El Niño’ Arriving in Lush Glory”. Concurrently, the New York City Ballet assembled their yearly showcase of "Contemporary Choreography", featuring the highlight of "Glass Pieces' Drawing Us into its World". No time in New York would be complete without theatre, so I was in attendance at Chekhov's “Uncle Vanya”, in a new translation at Lincoln Center Theatre. It is also elementary that a day was dedicated to The Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection on view on the fourth and fifth floors, and while there, experiencing Joan Jonas' "Out Takes". Similarly, an afternoon was occupied at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the unmissable array of 12th to 17th century paintings on display, as well as the classic 19th and early 20th century wings on offer in the Robert Lehman Collection. The day was also complemented by the current exhibitions on, "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion", and "Before Yesterday We Could Fly" an Afrofuturist overview. Being in the big city, galleries are a must. Chelsea delivered two notables in Delcy Morelos' "El abrazo" at Dia: Chelsea, and Lucas Arruda's "Assum Preto", at David Zwirner. Across the way in Midtown, Japan Society was in the midst of a major two-part overview of "Tomorrow There will be Fine Weather: A Hiroshi Shimizu Retrospective". And unlike Seattle, no day in New York concluded before midnight, with most nights coming to a close in the AM hours to the tune of late-night sets at Midtown's Tomi Jazz.

Zeal & Ardor's "Greif" and North American Tour with Gaerea: Nov 29 - Dec 18

As reviewed in The Quietus, Manuel Gagneux’s singular marrying of American spirituals, gospel, and devotional music with back metal announced itself with one of the most strikingly original debut's in experimental metal with 2016's "Devil is Fine". In the ensuing years since, his Zeal & Ardor project has grown into a fully-fledged touring band, and with it, new directions for the sound of the project. The initial releases boundary-pushing fusion of disparately unrelated genres has given way to a blues rock occasionally spiritual music inflection, with their black metal origins drifting further away. Yet Gagneux’s vision, a hybridization of strands of American black music and black metal, seems to posit the question; what if rather than Christian devotionals, the American south was the birthplace of devotionals for Lucifer Morningstar. In the process, it is inevitable that this music investigation would unsettle and inspire outrage, as much as it would gain followers. Speaking with The Quietus in their, "Be Your Own God: An Interview with Zeal & Ardor", Gagneux addresses the often polar reactions in the metal community, which have either dismissed Zeal & Ardor as a gimmick of dilution of the genre, or have leveled accusations of cultural appropriation, skeptical of just how genuine a regard Gagneux offers the source material from the American south.

In conversation with The Guardian, "Zeal & Ardor: Meet the Black Metal Bluesman", he explores the components of their "Greif", comprised of blastbeats, squalling guitars and Gagneux’s self-penned spirituals, modelled after the American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s field recordings, through forceful assertion of a bluesy approach to his songs of praise. Now on tour of North America alongside Portugal's Gaerea with a date at The Showbox Seattle, "Avant-garde Metallers Zeal & Ardor Unleash their Adventurous Side on the Excellent 'Greif'". Few artists have taken the edict of experimental black metal's voracious absorption of genres into its corpus further than Gagneux and his band. Yet Zeal & Ardor are just one of the numerous outfits which have broken free from the constraints in traditional sounds that have been regarded as metal. Many of these bands have now come to encompass melodicism and atmospheres lifted from shoegaze and spacerock, eruptions of heavy psych rock, industrial drumming, synth exploration and electronic atmospheres, and pure experimental noise. The voluminous body of which is detailed in Brad Sanders' essential overview, "Untrue And International: Living in a Post-Black Metal World", with complimentary curation from this sphere found in the excellent selections of The Quietus' Columnus Metallicus. These articles sound the deep expanse of these movements, which are sourced from labels like, Hydrahead, Neurot, Ipecac, Deathwish, 20 Buck Spin, Dark Descent, Sargent House, Profound Lore, Season of Mist, Roadburn, Century Media, Relapse, and The Flenser.

TR/ST's "Performance" & US Tour with Provoker: Oct 31 - Nov 23 | Modernwav Festival at Music Box San Diego: Nov 22 - 23

While a relatively narrow aspect of the bandwidth of music within the goth and early electro-industrial sounds of the 1980s and 1990s, darkwave and synthwave express novel variations and nuance to its particulars. An overview of these concurrent, interrelated, and offshoot genres, and their contemporary revival was mapped by Vice in their, "A Brief History of Musical Waves from New to Next". Compilations like the now-classic, “The Minimal Wave Tapes: Volume One” focused on the coldwave and minimal wave strains, while the recent “No Songs Tomorrow: Darkwave, Ethereal Rock, and Coldwave 1981-1990”, present an all-inclusive cornucopia of variables within the subgenre. Taken together, these compilations offer an overarching map of a sound that was born of the settling dust of the tumult of post-punk's upending of the topography of rock and noise music. Utilizing technology which would become a central component of the concurrent new wave movement, these artists applied the rhythmic dance structures and synthesizer-focused songwriting to a knowingly distant, colder aesthetic. While much of the transitional state of post-punk toward new wave began to be focused around commercially-minded outsider pop, a darker undercurrent did survive. Expressed through a more uneasy, existential, often edgier and sexually charged sound than their more commercial compatriots, darkwave retained its post-punk values while utilizing the same technology, and dancier, more upbeat tempos of new wave.

Inspired by this era, and the balancing act of its particular brand of starkly minimal, angular, existential electronic dance pop of alienation and heartbreak, a new generation of producers have come to the fore, presented by The Guardian in, “‘The Body was the Drums, the Brain was the Synthesiser’: Darkwave, the Gothic Genre Lighting up Pop”. A cross-section of artists within this subgenre, Molchat Doma, The KVB, She Wants Revenge, Xeno & Oaklander, The Soft Moon, Twin Tribes, She Past Away, Drab Majesty, TR/ST, and Boy Harsher, express a spectrum of variations on an aesthetic of darkly romantic, sexually fetishistic, and imperially fatalistic thematic concerns. In describing Boy Harsher's sound as a "moving choker-collar muscle-mash" which "contains a dark power, an atavistic pull", the music press has rightly depicted the central components from which the variables pivot and deviate around. One of the more distinct deviations of the sound can be found in the fiery synthwave of Robert Alfons' TR/ST. Initially working as a duo with Maya Postepski of Austra on a series of albums for Arts & Crafts, Alfons' project is now largely a solo enterprise. This series of changes he explored with Interview Magazine, and in conversation with the San Francisco Chronicle, "TR/ST Pushes Past Fear to Create New Atmospheric Soundscapes". Now with his new home of shared compatriots on the Dais label, “Performance” brings the sound Pitchfork described as, "the sonic equivalent of a fashion show put on by depressive pill abusers; malevolent, but mightily sexy" on tour across the country with the Bay Area's Provoker. Following a date in Seattle, the tour's final destination will be at Modernwav the "Two-Day Industrial Darkwave Event in San Diego", an all-inclusive showcase of darkwave, synthwave, dark gothic and post-punk electronic club music.

The Cure's "Songs of a Lost World" & Livestream from The Troxy London: Nov 1

The Cure are quite possibly the most notable entity to emerge from the whole of the UK gothic rock countercultural microcosm of the late 1970s and early 1980s. No other band from this scene ascended to the heights of both UK and American charts, while fluidly bridging the the concurrent movements of post-punk, gothic rock, and new wave to the extent achieved by (the initial trio of) Robert Smith, Michael Dempsey, Lol Tolhurst, (and later) Simon Gallup, Porl Thompson, Boris Williams and Roger O'Donnell. Working in a sound that spanned these concurrent interrelated subgenres, The Cure rose to the top of the underground British acts that defined the cultural moment and associated musical scene. Within a decade of forming, they reached audiences far above and beyond their contemporaries at the time, proceeding the tsunami of alternative and college rock of the mid-1990s with the massive genre and audience crossing hits of 1992's "Wish", and the widely-regarded masterpiece of three years before in 1989's "Disintegration". Unlike the albums before it, "Disintegration" bore a single mood, that of a kind of epic, depressive solitude and it revelled in doing so, at times with a majestic grandeur. For an album of such deep introspection, eccentric production qualities and muted dynamics, many now recognize "The Cure's 'Disintegration': An Oddly Comforting Masterpiece" as Jason Heller does for The Atlantic on the eve of the album's 30th anniversary tour. Though Smith later admitted “it was never our intention to become as big as this,” the Prayer tour which followed the album saw The Cure graduating to stadiums and playing marathon, career-spanning sets and in the process, the band found that they had transformed into one of the biggest alternative rock acts on the planet.

In recent years, these massive shows and career-spanning setlists have produced a string of memorable events, highlighted in "The Cure Capture 40th Anniversary Gigs with Concert Films". Waxing lyrical with Rolling Stone about the following set of tours which focused explicitly on the 1989 album, "The Cure’s Robert Smith Talks 30 Years of ‘Disintegration’: ‘The Whole Atmosphere was Somber’". In the interview, Smith cast light on the new material the band constructed in its wake; "At the same time we were rehearsing for the 30th anniversary of Disintegration, we were running through songs for the new album that we’re recording this year. I think that helped the band It’s certainly helped me light the way. It helped me to see how it was constructed. So it wasn’t done in a purposeful way, but that informed the recording of the new album". Last year with the release seeming imminent, The Cure began a world tour with the surprise return of guitarist and keyboardist Perry Bamonte, who rejoined the band for the first time in nearly two decades. Over the course of  the 2023 tour, they premiered five songs from the upcoming album, which included; “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” “A Fragile Thing”, “And Nothing Is Forever”, “Endsong”, and “Alone”. Speaking with the press ahead of the NME Awards, Smith said the 8-song album was nearly finished, with the aim of releasing it in that coming fall. He characterized the music on this forthcoming album "Songs of a Lost World", as "relentlessly doom and gloom", and elaborated with NME, stating that, "The Darkness of Recent Years has Inspired their 'Merciless' New Album". We had a preview of the album framed by another of their discography-spanning setlists, in a series of North American shows including Seattle, in which "The Cure Live Review: Top Goths Tease their Bleak but Beautiful New Album". A year later, after a series of reworks and refinements of the material honed through live performance, "The Cure Deliver the Power-Doom Epic We’ve Been Waiting For". The resulting album is, "As Promised, ‘Very, Very Doom and Gloom’", yet features a bruising existential yearning, and plea for a life unlived and dreams unfulfilled, it is without reservation, "Dark, Personal, and their Best Since 'Disintegration'"

This week, Robert Smith spoke with the New York Times on, "How The Cure Became Rock’s Most Dogged Activist" and with NPR in their, "‘How it Will End is How it Will End,’ but The Cure isn’t Over, Yet" on the working of the material which became the album, born of personal loss, and a sense of the times, they produced an abundance of work, which was repeatedly delayed in its release. Smith states; "I think the mistake I made was I was trying to get 30 songs all finished together, so they all somehow hung together. And I realized at the start of this year that that really wasn't going to happen. So I reduced it down to 20, and then I reduced it down 10, and then I finally emerged with 8 that I thought worked together best. But I have left behind quite a few of my favorite songs, weirdly enough". The resulting eight tracks have finally arrived as a deluxe CD and Blu-Ray Audio, and half-speed mastering double LP, with the release of "Songs of a Lost World". A brief album for the band, coming in at just under 50 minutes, its composite songs variously find Smith and the band exploring mourning, the passing of time and mortality, and reflecting on youth, life, and love lost and spent. All the while yearning for a sense of that lived past, that feels somehow out of reach, in the baleful and divisive cultural and political atmosphere of the present day. Encapsulated by Smith in one of many such lyrical turns featured on the album; “my weary dance with age and resignation moves me slow towards a dark and empty stage”. Matching the emotional impact of the lyrical themes, the instrumentation of "Songs of a Lost World", is more direct and purposeful than much of their discography, delivered in tracks that move forward with gradual and inevitable bruising impact, while also devoid of the kind of excess volume of their later albums, where quantity and quality got confused. This is Robert Smith, Simon Gallup, Jason Cooper, Reeves Gabrels, and Roger O'Donnell's weighty, spare, and concise statement on our times. Concurrent with the album's release on Friday, November 1, “The Cure Announce London Show to Launch New Album”, convening at Troxy, London, which was presented in a global livestream. This performance, in which ”Songs of Innocence and Experience Combined Spectacularly in Intimate Setting” has been archived and remains on the band's video page for all to see and be enticed into the embrace of their Lost World.

Blood Incantation's "Absolute Elsewhere" & North American Tour with Midwife: Nov 7 - Dec 5

For many, the first awareness of Blood Incantation came with their 2019 Albums of the Year charting, "Hidden History Of The Human Race". This assembly of tracks took their sound into truly progressive, inventive death metal with intermittent passages of song structures and a haunting intergalactic bent to the lyrical themes. Technical and occasionally delirious in its precision, the performances are precise without being flashy, and occasionally ornate in their psychedelia without the encumbrances of gaudiness. Tangents are taken into doom and meditative synth workouts, which then return to death metal riffs and unexpected structural shifts, all executed with assurance. All of the above are considered in their exploration of influences and newly formed manifestations of form by The Quietus, in their "Expanding the Circle: Blood Incantation Interviewed". In recent years with the advent of their "Timewave Zero", the band have leaned harder into the realms of progressive rock and German kosmische which they had previously only hinted at, delivering a work of unadulterated cosmic synthesizer workouts with last year's, "Luminescent Bridge". These sounds have now come into a fully realized synergy with the death metal and technical proficiency of their earlier work, producing in "Absolute Elsewhere", a maximal music and culmination of all of their broadly heterogeneous styles and forms. This masterful feat of genre-fusion found great praise in the pages of The Quietus, and in a rare moment of unrestrained ebullience, The Wire proclaimed; "It belongs on the shelf alongside Pestilence’s "Testimony of The Ancients and Spheres", The Orb’s "UFOrb", and Pink Floyd’s "Wish You Were Here". It’s a goddamn masterpiece.".

The above making Blood Incantation a prime representative of the voracious genre-expansive developments currently flowing through experimental metal. These sounds have now come to encompass melodicism and atmospheres lifted from shoegaze and spacerock, eruptions of heavy psych rock, industrial drumming, synth exploration and electronic atmospheres, and pure experimental noise. The voluminous body of which is detailed in Brad Sanders' essential overview, "Untrue And International: Living in a Post-Black Metal World", with complimentary curation from this sphere found in the excellent selections of The Quietus' Columnus Metallicus. These articles sound the deep expanse of these movements, which are sourced from labels like, Hydrahead, Neurot, Ipecac, Deathwish, 20 Buck Spin, Dark Descent, Sargent House, Profound Lore, Season of Mist, Roadburn, Century Media, Relapse, and The Flenser. Having passed the milestone of its tenth anniversary, The Flenser's founder Jonathan Tuite, described its ethos to New Noise magazine, which could be surmised as, "The Flenser Is a One-Man Pursuit of Quality Doom". In one the aesthetic fringes of the label, resides the hushed slowcore of Madeline Johnston’s Midwife project. This shadowy corner of existence is expressed in her "ability to wrench ecstasy from devastation, to make romance out of abject pain, and to transmute specific feelings into an ineffable longing", as heard on "Luminol", and the even moreso on the inward-looking "No Depression in Heaven". Together, the two bands will be bringing audiences into their fold at Seattle's Substation, transporting venues across North America into the absolute-elsewhere-space of their tour this fall.

All Monsters Attack at The Grand Illusion Cinema: Oct 1 - 31 | The Month of Scarecrowber at SIFF Cinema: Oct 2 - 30 | Scarecrow Video's "Save Our Scarecrow" Campaign

The season of Halloween genre film and its disorienting frights, crepuscular surrealism, and discomfiting atmospheres has arrived once again. A nucleus for genre film in the Northwest, Scarecrow Video annually steps up with their curated Halloween section of domestic and international horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and psychotronic selections. The Psychotronic Challenge also returns in its ninth installment, challenging viewers to select a new theme category for every day in October from the deep trivia of the cues on offer. While we're here, let's talk the incomparable one-of-a-kind resource that is Scarecrow Video. For horror and genre aficionados, there is no other resource in North America like that offered by Scarecrow and their abundant catalog of obscure, foreign releases, out of print, and ultra-rare editions, and with 160,000 films on offer, no singular online streaming resource can compare. To state it simply; if you live in the Northwest and are an appreciator of cinema, it's your personal obligation to ensure their doors stay open for business. Now more than ever this participation ethos applies. A Save Our Scarecrow funding campaign has been launched, as the last video store and film archive of its kind in the United States is at a pivotal point, wherein "Scarecrow Video Needs to Raise $1.8M or Face Possible Closure". Their sister organization, The Grand Illusion Cinema also has a narrowing timeline, their building is up for sale and imminently to be development into high-cost housing, "After 53 years, Seattle Theater Maintains its Grand Illusion … for Now, and as such they are in search of a new location. Across town, the month of "Scarecrowber" has been designated for Scarecrow Video's programming of the SIFF Cinema calendar. The sixteen films on offer span classic black and white French thrillers like Georges Franju's "Eyes Without a Face", technicolor mid-century adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft, in Daniel Haller's "The Dunwich Horror", the high style and fetishistic theatrics of Dario Argento's "Opera", the unease of 1970s B-movie slashers like John Hancock's "Let’s Scare Jessica to Death", a set of career-defining films from John Carpenter in "Halloween" and, "Christine", as well as two of the greatest horror films ever made. George Romero's genre-birthing "Night of the Living Dead", and the unwavering, indelible terror of the "Symphony for the Devil" this is Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre".

In addition to a set of season-specific genre films at Northwest Film Forum, and The Beacon, the longest running, and most consistently satisfying of the local Halloween series has been The Grand Illusion Cinema's All Monsters Attack showcase. This monthlong slate of horror, creature features, classic thrillers, sci-fi, and cult cinema, includes new and returning genre classics and recent releases, both in new digital restorations, 35mm and 16mm celluloid, a triple-feature pizza party, and a night exclusively presented on VHS. A highlight from previous editions returns with a memorial night for Seattle's most dedicated cinephile, music lover, and man-about-town, William Kennedy. Before his passing in 2021, Bill wished for nothing more than his friends and cultural compatriots to join together for a screening of the director's cut of David Cronenberg's classic body-horror techno thriller, “Videodrome”. Unclassifiable genre-elusive cult films are represented by the eccentric smut of Curt McDowell's "Thundercrack!", and a VHS midnight movie-era restoration of Bruce Toscano's "Charon" with the director in attendance. Two nights of obscurities on 16mm will be hosted by the Sprocket Society with Ted V. Mikels' absurdist gross-out, "The Corpse Grinders", and a triple bill of pre-Code horror classics and period shorts in their Secret Vault of Horror. Among the films on offer on 35mm, the lineup includes such memorable 1990s entries as Antonia Bird's "Ravenous", Clive Barker's first directorial effort in adapting his own "The Hellbound Heart" into the major studio production of "Hellraiser", and quality franchise films like Guillermo del Toro's "Blade II", and Ernest R. Dickerson Tales from the Crypt entry, "Demon Knight". There's also rare Asian horror on offer with Sisworo Gautama Putra's "Satan's Slave", and no Halloween season series would be complete without a selection from the explosive abundance of 1980s horror and genre films issuing from the United States. Anne Billson's feature in "The Other Side of 80s America" issue of Sight & Sound plumbs the deeper realms of the decade's more assertively subversive low-to-medium budget genre fare often “unburdened by notions of good taste". These manic explorations of class conflict, Cold War dread, ecological disaster, and suburban paranoia are represented here by the first entry in Wes Craven's quintessentially 1980s franchise, "A Nightmare on Elm Street".