* Box Brown is starting a Kickstarter-funded line of pamphlet-format alternative comic books called Retrofit, by an array of names you’ll recognize. I increasingly feel that the real competition for this sort of work isn’t graphic novels but the Internet, but either way, it’s a worthwhile endeavor.

* Matt Zoller Seitz proclaims Game of Thrones Season One one of the best first seasons of television of all time. As a fanboy of both entities, I was almost inappropriately delighted to read this. I think Seitz is likely right that the show will improve on repeat viewing once you’ve seen the whole run so far.

* I think that if you’ve read interviews with comparable figures from the superhero comics industry, you may have a better sense of why I appreciate Tom Brevoort’s interviews as much as I do. This one focuses on how Marvel goes about crafting new series: whether they stem from a niche that needs filling or an idea that grows organically, whether they’re generated from within by editorial, from outside by a writer with a pitch, or from some combination thereof.

* If you ever wanted to read Michael DeForge’s excellent comic Spotting Deer online for free, well, now you can.

* Kristy Valenti reviews Jess Fink’s sexy sex comic Chester 5000 XYV, which in addition to being fun was a comic I found surprisingly provocative in an unexpected way.

* Hey, Kate Beaton works blue!

* Speaking of naked lady drawings, I assure you you want to click through and see this entire Hellen Jo illustration. She’s a talent.

* The cover for Esperanza, the latest Jaime Hernandez Love and Rockets digest, is one of the series’ most appealing so far.

* Go buy some original art from Paul Pope! I’ll wait.

* The Beast of Busco has long been once of my favorite cryptids.

King Missile – Happy Hour

The other day my wife told me how glad she was to have come of age, culturally speaking, in the early to mid ’90s. We’ve had this discussion several times, because every time it becomes apparent how easy it was to have really terrific music placed right in front of you by the paltry-by-today’s-standards number of outlets geared toward putting music in front of teenagers, by god, it’s worth talking about. A case in point for me is this, the concluding and title track to the album that “Detachable Penis” came from. I still think “Detachable Penis” is very funny (“He wanted twenty bucks, but I talked him down to seventeen”). But what I couldn’t have known when I brought home the CD in its giant cardboard longbox from Tower Records was that the album that surrounded that novelty classic was stuffed with really first-rate alternative-rock musicianship. Some of it was pastiche of genres I really didn’t have any experience with yet (“VulvaVoid” is shoegaze! “Trapped” is mid-period time-to-rock-happily R.E.M.!), some of it was spoken-word weirdness and wordplay draped atop roiling hard rock I had no problem appreciating (“Sink,” “Ed”), and a lot of it is just crushingly morose songs about complete failure. “I’m Sorry” and “Heaven,” the third-to-last and penultimate tracks, contain lots of imagery of crushed birds and breaking things that can’t be repaired, all delivered with John S. Hall’s twerpy speak-singing to undercut the heaviness. No such undercutting takes place in “Happy Hour,” a dirge I put on to this day when I want to feel unremittingly awful. Funereal organ, some kind of electronic reverse-tape effect that sounds like something shuffling into a grave, lyrics that conclude with the lines “While the flesh fell off our bodies and we lost our limbs,” so fuzzy and distorted you can’t make it out without the lyric sheet, and on top of it all a melancholy, briefly beautiful piano chords and, finally, a guitar that sounds like it’s bleeding to death. Back then you could stumble bass-ackwards into shit like this all day long. You had it so easy you weren’t prepared for a time when you’d need a song like this.

Jessica Farm (January 2008-April 2011)
Josh Simmons, writer/artist
self-published, June 2011
40 pages
$8 (including shipping)
Buy it from Josh Simmons

If there’s a cartoonist working today who more reliably, ruthlessly, and relentlessly exploits his own strengths with each new release than Josh Simmons, I’ve yet to encounter him. Witness this self-published slice of Jessica Farm, a 600-page graphic novel Simmons is drawing one page a month for a projected fifty years. Volume One was published by Fantagraphics in April 2008, (the back cover of this minicomic installment reads “Volume 2 coming 2016”), and already the contrast with the involving but formless original is striking. Instead of taking us on sort of “It’s a Small World” ride through various disconnected images of dreamlike horror and weirdness, Simmons here uses his rubric of a teenage girl meeting strange invaders and residents on the sprawling family estate to keep us rooted to the same two places: a bare room where a trio of goat-people called the Smiths are brutalizing a boogeyman akin to the one that Jessica encountered in Vol. 1, and the field outside where they eventually do battle with an army of the creatures. The book feels much more focused for the lack of literal wandering. Moreover, within these established confines, Simmons can get much more mileage out of his astutely choreographed action sequences. In the first half of the book, two dramatic attacks are dependent on our feel for how large the room is and how long it takes characters to get from one side to the other, and Simmons crafts that space so well that you can practically hear the scrambling footfalls. A later sequence involves charging horses and bounding beasts, depicted in a succession of widescreen panels that keep the action dead center in each one, a restrained presentation of very visceral material.

And I don’t know how it’s possible, but the pacing is remarkable for a book drawn with thirty days between each page. It’s reversal after reversal: These Smiths are scary, no wait, they’re friendly; they’ve got the upper hand on their captive, no wait, it’s got the upper hand on them, no wait, I was right the first time; they’re attacking a couple of monsters, no wait, they’re outnumbered a hundred to one, so what, they’re still going to win. It has a propulsive feel to it that Vol. 1 lacked.

Simmons’s usual talents are in evidence here as well. From the title creatures in “Night of the Jibblers” and “Jesus Christ” to the witches and ogres of “Cockbone” to the Godzilla-sized pink slug in The White Rhinoceros, he’s developing one of the best bestiaries in comics, and the “skrats” at the center of this story fit right into that menagerie. They come in black and white varieties here, and in great numbers by book’s end, allowing Simmons’s ever smoother inks (reproduced beautifully here, by the way) to evoke everything from Spy vs. Spy to David B. to that Escher drawing with the fish and the birds. And like most of Simmons’s monsters, they’re a discomfiting combination of flesh and fangs that makes you feel that being attacked by one of them would be not just deadly but grotesquely intimate, like being mauled by a giant scrotum studded with razor blades. The characters we meet are similarly creepy, using Simmons’s standard and still unnerving combination of over-the-top aw-shucks friendliness and violent, obscene threats and exclamations, like a beloved uncle you suddenly realize you don’t want to be alone with anymore. Lovely cartooning, icky horror, and a battle scene that’ll likely top anything else you see this year, for eight dollars total? No way you should wait till 2016.

I contributed an essay recommending A Song of Ice and Fire for the latest issue of The Lifted Brow, the fine Australian arts magazine. To put on my other nerd hat for a moment, there’s also comics and art from the likes of Blaise Larmee, Lane Milburn, Noel Freibert, Lisa Hanwalt, and Eddie Campbell. You should check it out.

Also, my weekly Game of Thrones chat with Megan Morse is up at The Cool Kids Table. This one ends on a high note.

Gang Gang Dance – Sacer

Because we absolutely, positively need more art-pop that sounds like T’Pau’s “Heart and Soul.” It took me forever to place what I was hearing in this standout track from Gang Gang Dance’s engrossing, energetic new album Eye Contact but even before I struck upon what I think is the most direct influence, this song’s project of rehabilitating big sky’s-the-limit mostly English alternative pop sounds from the ’80s had my full support. Everything about it makes me feel like I’m sitting in some teenage bedroom I never had, playing it at full volume and sharing some secret delirious joy with myself. That stop-start beat, with its synth stabs and big flat reverbbing drums, is just made to dance to in your mirror, awkward and uncaring, while Lizzi Bougatsos’ vocals run the impenenetrability of Liz Fraser (another icon of rhapsodic interiority) through a strange Bollywood filter. Which works perfectly, because to me the appeal of all the Big ’80s bands was just how far away their world felt from mine, like these were transmissions of heartache and happiness and emotions too intense to filter down to me as anything but pure excitement, in a secret language of adult glamour I was lucky enough to understand for three or four minutes at a time.

Cindy and Biscuit
Dan White, writer/artist
Milk the Cat, 2011
24 pages
£2.50
Buy it from Milk the Cat

What a pleasant surprise this turned out to be. Created by Dan White, aka The Beast Must Die from the Mindless Ones blog, Cindy and Biscuit has a look that at first glance might tempt you into thinking it’s one of those try-too-hard “bang! pow! comics aren’t just for grown-ups anymore!” all-ages things that grown-ups on the Internet really like — but only at the very first and most cursory glance. Take a closer look at that cover: It’s not just a spunky-lookin’ little girl and her plucky canine companion, it’s also a mountain of skulls and a board with a nail through it. Things never get quite that grim inside, but it still comes as something as a shock when our dynamic duo spots an alien landing crew and, instead of having some zany spooky adventure, Cindy leaps through the air and brings her board down on an alien’s head with full force, shattering the helmet into tiny safety-glass fragments and smashing the head to a pancake with a KKRUNNT! (Great sound effect, by the way.) That’s the moment where it becomes apparent that White will be bringing to the surface all of the unpleasantly unrestrained id lurking beneath fondly remembered all-ages entertainments from Calvin & Hobbes to Bone. In addition to going Game of Thrones on those aliens, the three stories collected here see Cindy stumbling across a savage, slavering werewolf only to be patted on the head by the beast, who’s seemingly acknowledging a kindred spirit, and recounting a dream in which she floats to the Moon and tosses a rock at the Earth, blowing it up. White realizes that the danger we crave as kids is a projection of the dangerous sensations called up by our own anger and frustration with a world we’re quickly learning is unfair. The best thing about Cindy and Biscuit, though, is that it really could be an all-ages comic, and an excellent one at that. White’s thick line has a candy-like quality to it, wavy and chunky and almost chewy, and which gives his rather impeccable action shots real heft and momentum. He draws Cindy as a bounding presence whose feet stay a solid foot and a half in the air when she runs, but she doesn’t come across as weightless or effortless, but rather as a physical thing that’s got so much energy behind her she’s propelling herself off the ground. Biscuit’s a good design too, like an arrow in dog form. It’s solid enough in terms of figurework and depiction of action to put me in mind of a less claustrophobic Brian Ralph, while the use of a genuinely fun adventure-comic look and tone to say something melancholy about youth is reminiscent of sweet-and-sour “new action” books from Street Angel to Cold Heat. It’s easy to imagine a big color collection of these with a few more uncompromising little stories added in really knocking people for a loop. It’s well worth a look as is — an intriguing array of visuals and ideas from a talented off-the-radar cartoonist.

* JK Parkin’s summary of the creative changes behind DC’s relaunch is the most comprehensive you’ll find, I think.

* Tom Spurgeon’s annual guide to the San Diego Comic-Con is probably my single favorite thing on the comics internet every year. Take a long lunchbreak and just soak in it.

* I used Dan Harmon’s big AV Club interview as a springboard for a post on why diversity in comics is fun, easy, and profitable for everyone.

* Matt Maxwell and I think superhero movies lack a certain je ne sais quoi.

* Hey, Jim Woodring’s new Frank book Congress of the Animals is out! I bet it’s good.

* Hey, Tom Neely’s new book The Wolf is on its way! I know this one’s good, from experience.

* Fun interview with Batman Incorporated artist Chris Burnham over at the Mindless Ones.

* Dustin Harbin recommends some recent releases.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates unearths a lengthy and deeply awful series of interview responses from avuncular Civil War historian Shelby Foote that will pretty much break your heart if you watched and enjoyed Foote in Ken Burns’ documentary on the subject. The comments from Cynic are worth reading in the thread below, too.

* Pleasure will always be the enemy for some.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS – if you haven’t read the books, you can still read this . Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

* That was tough to watch. Who knew? Maybe months of anticipating what would happen in this episode were enough to recreate a week of wondering what would happen in this episode. By that final scene my pulse was racing, and I had that elevator-dropped-out feeling in my stomach I’d grown familiar with from The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost, shows that at one point or another had me convinced that anyone, literally anyone, might not make it to the end of a given episode. Only this time, I knew, and still got that feeling.

* It was the show’s best scene as filmmaking, certainly. Sweeping camera movements to create a sense of immersion and environment, intelligent sound design that highlighted or dropped this or that element to hyperfocus our attention, terrific performances from Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams and Sean Bean. Even little details, like how Joffrey was framed when he ordered the execution, or the way Ser Ilyn Payne just materialized out of nowhere, slapped on his mask, and brought the sword down, delivered.

* You’re primed to think the big question is “Will Ned sacrifice his honor or die?”, not “Will Ned sacrifice his honor and die?” The misdirection goes well beyond “they’ll never kill the main character…will they?” and into how the whole back half of the season/book is constructed.

* Jeez, the Hound is huge. Did you see him holding Ned on the steps when Ned got beaned by the crowd? He towered over Sean Bean.

* And speaking of sound design, the sounds from Drogo’s tent…woof, that was good stuff. I actually think this was a more frightening way to approach it than the scary shadows of the book. It’s actually more of a challenge to make a tent feel like a mouth into hell in broad daylight, but those horrible bellows and screams were more than enough. I wouldn’t have gone in there.

* I’m glad to see Varys’s motives being revealed and treated as sincere. Even Ned seems to get that. Conleth Hill was especially good in that scene, every bit the practiced liar finally letting his guard down and delivering some real talk.

* Michelle Fairley continues to improve as Catelyn. Her anger and frustration with Walder Frey’s pettiness and her tears of joy upon seeing Robb return from battle were her two most human displays in the whole series. Catelyn’s our main character now, for all intents and purposes, and this episode made me a lot more optimistic about that prospect.

* Tyrion’s sleepover party with Bronn and Shae was a blast. You’ve got to hand it to Jerome Flynn and Sibel Kikelli, who took two characters we barely know, including one we just met, sat them alongside a main character played by a beloved actor, and made it feel like yeah, absolutely these three people would stay up into the wee hours drinking and goofing around together. I’m a softie, so I’m happy anytime characters in fiction about how hard the world is manage to respect and befriend one another.

* Just a lot of fine moments sprinkled throughout the whole episode, actually. Sticking Tyrion on the dolly for that shot as he comes to was inspired, just as discombobulating as you’d imagine it was for Tyrion. Maester Aemon comes out of nowhere to reveal that he’s one of the most important people in the world. Jon’s fellow grunts flip out over his sword like the teenage boys they are, while Rast and his fellow raper sit in the corner glowering. It was a really, really good hour of television, good enough to get me too keyed up to sleep properly.

* I’ve long said it’s a mug’s game for people like me to try to speak for viewers who’ve never read the books, but I do wonder what they made of this episode’s two major battles taking place off-screen. Since I’ve been following the production of the show from day one, I was aware that budget limitations constrained them from going too crazy in the battle department, but I did expect that they’d get at least one in before the season was over, and it stood to reason that Tyrion riding into battle at the front of a horde of screaming tribesmen was going to be the one. Instead he got clocked on the head and slept through the battle. While this was certainly true to the material’s penchant for puncturing the glory balloon and letting all the air seep out, it also felt like what it was — a way to save money. Ditto Robb’s victory in the Whispering Wood, despite it being presented in much the same off-screen way it was in the book. Since the show isn’t wedded to the book’s POV-character structure, it’s show itself to be perfectly capable of showing us what was going on when our POVs were elsewhere. Robb Stark’s direwolf-aided sneak attack on Jaime Lannister would be a logical choice in that regard, you’d think. It’s a testament to the filmmakers that this episode felt as epic and portentous as it did even though both battles were presented as a fait accompli.

* And boy, there’s nothing quite like feeling disappointed about the lack of battle scenes to make you question if you’ve truly internalized A Song of Ice and Fire’s anti-war message as much as you’d thought. I think I’m okay with my desire to see a good battle scene despite my growing (and ASoIaF-aided!) pacifism — after all, it is okay to enjoy things in art you’d never enjoy in real life. Certainly someone as apt to freak out over animal cruelty as I am had to come to grips with that fact if I were to watch the show at all. But more than that — and here I credit Maureen Ryan, who’s been something of a killjoy about the show, for the insight — A Song of Ice and Fire is a series about war, and it’s tough to be about war without showing war. I still think the message gets through thanks to all the other horrible killings we’ve seen, but seasons down the line, things like Septon Meribald’s monologue about broken men are going to have less of an impact if we’ve never seen why men might break. Or maybe I just want some exciting and thrilling carnage. Maybe it’s both.

* Grant Morrison is writing the relaunched Superman series Action Comics, with Rags Morales as artist. It looks to be a continuity-light account of Superman’s earliest days as the Earth’s first superhero. (In DC’s soon-to-be-scrapped continuity, many of Superman’s real-life Golden Age of Comics contemporaries were active during that period in the in-story world, but Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman didn’t come along till a few years ago, which leads to this weird phenomenon where dozens of people were flying through the air shooting lasers at Hitler, then they all disappeared for sixty years, then Superman came along and for some reason he’s a bigger deal than people who were fighting in World War II, then came back through the magic of time-travel through an alternate reality or something like that and are fighting side by side with the newcomers in the 21st century. Superman really oughta be the DC Universe’s first famous superhero, even if that means no superheroes fought Hitler anymore.)

* Absolutely killer piece by Ken Parille on Chester Brown’s Paying For It for The comics Journal, constructed as a conversation between a neutral interviewer and three imaginary people with different points of view on the book. This way, instead of having to deal with the inherent equivocation of “on the one hand/on the other hand” takes on the material — whether drawing all the prostitutes in basically the same faceless brunette way is the understandable attempt to hide their identity he says it is or itself an act of dehumanizing sexism, say — he can articulate both of them forcefully. I wish he’d tackled the rushed, book-ending revelation that Chester’s been exclusive and in love with with the same prostitute for years now — that’s the richest thing in there and it’s completely blown past; it’s the book’s biggest shortcoming as a narrative, quite aside from critiques of Brown’s conduct or political program — but other than that, terrific work.

* Another great TCJ piece, this one a visual essay on the aggressively unremarkable face of Silver Age Superman by John Hilgart. Says Hilgart of the Superman/Clark Kent dichotomy, “He is the world’s most generic man, unidentifiable as himself.”

* Frank Quitely draws Alan Moore. That’s channeling some Drew Friedman shit right there.

* Lately Jordan Crane has been updating his comic Keeping Two, which is now almost a decade in the making, on his webcomics site What Things Do. It’s a masterpiece, that’s all I can say. I reread the whole thing so far just now, and cried. There’s a panel…ah, I can’t even say.

Prison for Bitches
Ryan Sands, Hellen Jo, Calivn Wong, Anthony Ha, Makkinoso, Gea, Sophia Foster-Dimino, Chris Kuzma, Johnny Ryan, Sophie Yanow, Chris “Elio” Eliopoulos, Michael Kupperman, Adam Bronson, An Nguyen, Mickey Zacchilli, Lisa Hanawalt, Anthony Wu, Evan Hadyen, Leslie Predy, Monika Uchiyama, y16o, Ryan Germick, Saicoink, Angie Wang, Tony Tulathimutte, Andre Syzmanowicz, Raymond Sohn, Michael DeForge, Mia Shwartz, Patrick Kyle, Derek Yu, Jordyn Bochon, Seibei, Ginette Lapalme, Nick Gazin, Harvey James, Zejian Shen, Robert Dayton, Aaron Mew, writers/artists
Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, editors
self-published, 2010
64 pages
$12
Buy it and see an extensive preview at PrisonForBitches.com

The wonderful thing about recruiting a galaxy of underground comics and illustration stars to make a Lady Gaga fanzine is that no matter what kind of extravagant weirdness they concoct, there’s a better-than-even chance that at any moment the Lady herself could come along and comfortably out-weird them all. Nearly to a piece, the art, comics, photography, interviews, and essays assembled here by the Thickness team of Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge appear to have been created with a healthy appreciation for their own potential obsolescence in mind, and admiration and awe for the relentlessly and exuberantly creative young woman who’d make it happen. How else to explain the number of contributions that portray Gaga as godlike? In the hands of the Prison for Bitches team, Gaga is a queen seated on a giant telephone throwing trinkets to the huddled masses (Foster-Dimino); a vision appearing in dreams to espouse Anarcho-Gagaism to her supplicants (Yanow); a Big Brother-style disembodied head whose kohl-rimmed eyes stare at the viewer with a totalitarian sex-death gaze like something out of Metropolis (Kupperman); a She-Ra/ELA-esque figure riding through space atop a crystalline Battle-cat (Hayden); a Ray-Ban-wearing Baphomet (Predy); a giant sea goddess towering over the bodies of the drowned (Wang); an empress who lives to be 110 years old (DeForge); a severed head whose tongue, hair, and blood vessels are Cthulhoid tentacles (Aaron Mew). She is seen as supernatural, both a Delphic oracle of fabulousness and a Ring-claiming Galadriel proclaiming “All shall love me and despair.”

On the “love me” point, only a handful of the contributors work with the fact that she’s a very attractive person, but they’re among my favorites: André Syzmanowicz lovingly depicts the curves of her stomach, her breasts, her armpits, even as a werewolf creature gropes her from behind; a strip from Robert Dayton sees an ostensible fan complain about her mediocre music and ripped-off style, finally responding to the question “What do you like about her then?” with “Her navel—I want to lick her navel”; and right between the staples in the centerfold spread that anchors the book’s central full-color section, Mickey Zacchilli sticks the singer’s famously fit rear end.

Still other contributors take advantage of Gaga’s graphic potential for maximum maximalist imagemaking — artist after artist (Jo, Wang, Gazin, Yu, Bochon, Foster-Dimino) have a ton of fun with her hair, culminating in a spectacular caricature of her Coke-can curlers from the “Telephone” video by Harvey James. An Nguyen and the team of Hellen Jo & Calvin Wong provide concert reportage, the former with photos of her cosplaying fans, the latter with comics about the on- and off-stage spectacle of the concert experience.

A trio of prose pieces appear in what seems like ascending order of skepticism; in descending order, Adam Bronson has a funny piece that uses Deleuze and Hegel to analyze the relative potential of Gaga’s “Let’s Dance” and Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” to provoke violence in Filipino karaoke bars; Anthony Ha interviews Vanessa Grigoriadis, author of New York magazine’s seminal profile of Gaga’s origins and rise to fame, that’s best summed up by its title – “I’m a Total Fan of Hers, I Just Am Not a Huge Fan of Her Music”; editor Sands kicks the whole thing off with an utterly sincere and descriptively, persuasively argued “UNDISPUTED TOP 5 LADY GAGA SONGS,” featuring genuine gems like “[‘Alejandro’] sounds like ABBA’s ‘Fernando’ rubbing lotion all over Ace of Base’s ‘Don’t Turn Around’ while bathing nude on ‘La Isla Bonita'” and “[‘So Happy I Could Die’ is] really just a simple song about being convinced you are the hottest and most desirable person on the earth, and that this can be the best of all possible worlds if we allow ourselves the pleasure.” Taken in tandem, they’re like a debate between different modes of Gaga fandom, from arch irony to measured respect for a pop-culture needle-mover to downright love for someone who makes awesome songs to dance to.

The whole zine works like this, basically. Whatever it is you get out of Gaga — a pop-art deity, a gorgeous girl, an eye-inspiring spectacle, a thinkpiece generator, a hitmaker — by all means share that fun with a world that doesn’t have enough of it. This book is a snapshot of the Gaga conversation, post-“Telephone” video 2010; it’s a testament to the contributors and their subject alike that even now that the specifics of that conversation have now been rendered moot by an album full of pinball music and Clarence Clemons sax solos with a cover that reads “BORN THIS WAY” over a picture of the artist as a motorcycle with a human head, I’d love to hear them have it all over again. Prison for Bitches is a Little Monster must-have for any Gaga fan.

Community is the only current sitcom I’m watching, and I really like it; it’s a show that feels like it’s constantly learning about itself and improving from that learning — like, noticeably so, from one episode to the next (with some stumbles) — because it finds itself to be fascinating and a rich subject of study. So it doesn’t surprise me that creator Dan Harmon, who no doubt has studied the show more than anyone, has a ton of insightful things to say about it, as he does in this massive Onion AV Club interview with Todd Van Der Werff, in which Harmon comments on every single episode from Community Season Two: part one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Nor does it come as a shock that there’s a fine line between insightful and insufferable. But somehow that just makes it even more entertaining and fascinating. It’s very funny and rewarding to imagine this interview as a continuous monologue issued by an prodigiously coked-up but actually really smart and creative dude who’s cornered you at a party after you simply asked him “So how’s the show going?”, where there’s no escape but you don’t really even want to escape, you just wanna hear where it’s all headed, and years later you still think about the four hours you spent listening to this guy. I think it’s making a lot of people uncomfortable, this interview — at times it made me uncomfortable — because we want artists to be Goldilocks and put just the right amount of care and effort and obsession and self-doubt into what they’re doing, or at least show us just the right amount. Harmon blows right past that like Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. He goes way, way, way, way out there in this. Reading it is a truly singular experience.

King Crimson- Lark's Tongues in Aspic Part !!

I’m a sucker for supervillain team-ups, but I’m particular about them as well. Conventional wisdom holds that supervillains’ villainy will always undermine their collaboration in the end: Megalomaniacal master-planner types will spend as much time maneuvering against one another as against their mutual enemies, the more dignified types will clash with the real wild ones, and before long the team-up’s either in pieces or at each other’s throats. Fie, I say. Reality is little more than a constant stream of examples of horrible people working together quite effectively to advance their agendas, and I see no reason to believe that evil men and women of sufficient means and motivation couldn’t pool their resources and crush the resistance of their do-gooding rivals, scattering broken Avengers across the Eastern seaboard and erecting enormous matching statues of Doctor Doom in New York Harbor and Magneto in the San Francisco Bay.

This is the feeling I get when I listen to this live version of a ’70s King Crimson instrumental, performed by the band’s “double trio” incarnation twenty-odd years later. Robert Fripp’s the mad scientist in this model, bespectacled and seated quietly on a stool as he makes his guitar sound like it’s actually capable of biting your head off with those first few notes. His fellow avant-guitar legend and collaborator-with-everyone-interesting Adrian Belew is a jaunty Joker-like presence by comparison, bouncing around as he draws out soaring, piercing sounds from his instrument. Two drummers pound away, laying down a suppressing fire of time-signature changes, percussive miscellany, and ear-smacking loudness; they include math-rock monster Bill Bruford (late of Yes) and session guy Pat Mastelotto (late of everyone from Mr. Mister to …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – he’s kind of like the jobber who gets tapped by one of the big boys and surpasses everyone’s expectations) . Every good supervillain team needs a bald guy, so there’s Tony Levin, supplying the low end for one of the band’s bass-heaviest compositions, and teaming up with Trey Gunn, who compliments Fripp’s already science-fictional-sounding Frippertronics by playing instruments with names like the Warr Guitar and the Chapman Stick. The song itself is like an assault — impossibly loud from the start, like many King Crimson tracks it relies on repetition, crescendo, and melodic lines that rise ever higher in pitch to create the impression that it’s somehow getting louder and more urgent still. The constant rhythmical shifts, nearly impossible to predict unless you’ve heard the song a million times, make the riffs feel like they’re jumping out of the grooves to try to get to you as fast as they can. It’s just a sinister, angry-sounding song, and it ends with the band basically burning it to the ground, the sonic ashes a monument to their triumph. Everyone worked together to make something awful and awe-ful.

* Recently on Robot 6, I ran down seven things we know (and don’t) about the DC relaunch, circa yesterday.

* I also rounded up some political pundit reaction to X-Men: First Class, mostly focusing on race and gender.

* Elsewhere, I did my weekly chat about Game of Thrones with newbie viewer Megan Morse.

* A new CF “art book” (Dan Nadel’s quotes, not mine) called Sediment is due out this fall, featuring “lotsa color,” which is exciting. I also like how much the cover looks like it could have come from the liner notes for Pigface’s Gub.

* Fuck, I’m gonna miss liner notes now that I’m not buying CDs anymore.

* Wow, this is really some cover for Kevin Huizenga’s Ganges #4.

* Speaking of Huizenga, today at the Comics Grid, Greice Schneider takes on one of Huizenga’s high points, “Balloon” from Kramers Ergot 7.

* Drawn & Quarterly has a strong Fall release slate on the way, with books from Daniel Clowes, Marc Bell, Anders Nilsen, Kate Beaton, and Brian Ralph that I’m looking forward to.

* The latest Michael DeForge strip up at What Things Do is “Dogs,” a forerunner to the main story from Lose #3.

* Oh look, it’s an “abandoned project” by Uno Moralez that’s better than most finished projects.

* My word, Jillian Tamaki’s illustrations of Irish myths and legends make me proud of my people. (Via Douglas Wolk.)

* I really hope I’m not too late to link you to Closed Caption Comics stalwart Mr. Noel Freibert’s “Name Your Price” art/print sale, which will help him move.

Thickness #1
Katie Skelly, Jonny Negron, Zejian Shen, Derek Ballard, True Chubbo, writers/artists
Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, editors
self-published, May 2011
48 pages
$12
Buy it from the Thickness website

The great altcomix fuckfest continues! Of the recent releases I’ve read that pass smut through the same art-comics filter that science fiction, fantasy, action, and horror have all recently traversed, Thickness is the book that seems most concerned with creating out-and-out pornography. Chalk that up primarily to the anthology’s centerpiece and unquestionable standout, “Grandaddy Purple, Erotic Gameshow,” by cover artist Jonny Negron. “Dreamlike” is an adjective that gets tossed around a lot, by me not least of all, but that’s absolutely the right way to describe the plot of this thing, which starts with two sinister gangster-type figures falling victim to a rooftop assassination, then follows the assassin as he’s rewarded with a Let’s Make a Deal selection of prizes hidden behind three numbered doors, then shows him claiming his prize — a beautiful woman — in explicit detail, and ends with his post-climax black-widow murder. Negron can’t seem to contain his glee during the sex scene: The woman shouts out no-fuckin’-around, let’s-have-fun-with-our-bathing-suit-area exclamations like “Mmm, let’s see how much I can fit in my mouth!” and “Fuck! We’re goin’ to have fun with this cock!”, while Negron frequently breaks down his large panels into sub-grids of as many as nine, 10, or 11 panels, using the layout language of Acme Novelty Library to cram in as many of the deliciously dirty details of the characters’ liaison as possible before running out of room on the page. To quote Maude Lebowski, sex in Negron’s hands is a zesty enterprise. But it’s just one of the arrows in his quiver: His story also features angular artificial environments and M.U.S.C.L.E.S.-style character designs that, when combined with his women’s King magazine physiques and his bad guys’ skinny-suit-and-shades-sporting comportment, makes him come across like a happy marriage of Yuichi Yokoyama and Benjamin Marra. His depiction of action is really a marvel, too: It can be dynamically staged as all get-out, but then he does something off-kilter, like showing a falling man’s impact with the floor and his subsequent post-mortem prostration in a fashion that totally flattens the moment, calls attention to its ludicrousness, and yet somehow makes it feel all the more brutal and unpleasant for that. Ditto the final image, which I won’t spoil.

By comparison the other contributions can’t help but feel slight. Katie Skelly’s “cute-sexy floppy-eared lady has sex with plants in a sci-fi paradise that suggests Vaughan Bode mated with Georgia O’Keefe” entry “Breeding Season” is covering well-worn territory for SF erotica, though her thick rounded inks are nice to look at and she has a knack for capturing certain visual details that entice, like the gap between the fabric of the heroine’s suspender-like bathing suit and her breast and torso when viewed from the side. Zejian Shen’s “Pearl Divers” wrings an amusing dual joke out of its title’s double entendre by anthorpomorphizing both the oysters captured by the titular fisherwomen and their clitorises as they celebrate their catch with some beachside tribadism. Derek Ballard’s “Trap Shadez” is another sci-fi story whose sexual content is actually relatively minimal; for my taste it overelies on angular ’80s-tinged figurework and design that can’t quite overcome storytelling that’s deliberately but still unsuccessfully unclear. The True Chubbo comic that closes out the collection is a solid example of that strip’s unusual charm (it’s more charming than funny), wherein the love between creators Ray Sohn and his anonymous wife comes through all the clearer the worse their ridiculously violent sexual violations of one another get. Sands and DeForge’s high-quality production, including risograph printing that gives each story a fitting primary color ink, certainly elevates each contributor — the murky purple selected for Negron makes that particular freakout even seedier, somehow. He’s worth the price of admission all by himself, and hey, a home run after four singles still puts a lot of runs on the scoreboard.

“THERE IS A FREEDOM IN VIOLENCE THAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND! AND LIKE I’VE NEVER FELT BEFOOOOOOORRRRRRRREE!!!!!” And with that top-of-her-lungs chant from singer/songwriter Merrill Garbus…it’s samba time! For all of about twenty seconds, that is, before “Riotriot” resumes the twitchy, nervous-sounding, quiet minor key groove it occupies for the bulk of its duration. I don’t want to give the impression that the song isn’t interesting up until that dramatic point — not at all. Something about its timid swing and Garbus’s hushed vocals suggests that it’s being delivered on tiptoes, looking over her shoulder to see if anyone’s listening. And that’s fitting given that Garbus is singing about seeing a riot cop in action from her window and having a sexual fantasy about him. But deep into the song things start getting a little buzzier, a little crackier and more urgent, and Garbus’s vocals start crescendoing, and then BLAM! this huge, huge moment hidden like an Easter egg at the 2:47 mark. Garbus does this sort of thing on all three of the highlight tracks from Tune-Yards’ excellent second album Whokill: there’s also the ecstatic horn section that comes from out of nowhere in “Bizness,” and the sections that involves shouting “MY MAN LIKES ME FROM BEHIND!” (every word delivered like a punch) and gorgeous woo-ooh-ooh high notes respectively in “Powa,” I feel rewarded by songs like that — it feels like their creators did something extra to make each part interesting and unpredictable, and gave me a payoff for sticking around that a traditional verse-chorus-repeat structure just wouldn’t deliver. I suppose it’s the same sort of thing I like about “Liar”‘s genuinely dangerous-sounding transitions between rest and aggression, “End Come Too Soon”‘s magnificently miserable ending, “Long Distance Runaround”‘s flipped switch between jaunty piano piece and forward-leaning math-funk. And though I hate to be the guy who takes something he likes and then says “unlike all that other shit,” fuck it: Surely Garbus’s attention to things like dynamics and song structure are what help put Tune-Yards head and shoulders above so much of indie rock’s unimaginative, amorphously strummed same-iness, where within fifteen seconds you’ve heard every trick up a given song’s sleeve, while her ability to take a sentiment as disturbing as finding freedom in violence and slam convincingly it into a “Fool in the Rain”-style party interlude is roughly twelve bajillion times more interesting, entertaining, insightful, and listenable a treatment of violence in art than some trollish shithead putting out two albums’ worth of rape jokes and daring you not to get them.

* DC’s line-wide relaunch/day-and-date digital push has dominated industry news since its announcement last week. A few links of note:

* The line will get a new flagship title in the form of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee’s Justice League. That should sell like gangbusters.

* DC’s mostly taking an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to its two most successful franchises: The creative teams behind both the Green Lantern and Batman lines stay more or less the same, though several of them trade titles.

* Marvel’s Tom Brevoort emerged as one of the move’s most persistent and persuasive defenders — I mean, he’s not cheerleading the thing, but he’s not lambasting it or laughing it off, and is defending it against some fans who are doing so. One caveat: He said this stuff before the creative-team announcements started rolling out.

* Some of the better reaction/analysis pieces I’ve seen: Tim Hodler, Tom Spurgeon.

* Finally, Kiel Phegley rounds up retailer reaction; any such piece that includes such divers hands as Floating World’s Jason Leivian, DCBService.com’s Cameron Merkler, and Midtown Comics’ Gerry Gladston is well worth your time.

* If you’ve been wondering how Michael DeForge manages to be so prolific, his first entry in the Comics Journal’s Cartoonist’s Diary column has your answer: 16-hour workdays. And if you’ve been worried, here’s how he’s been keeping busy lately.

* He’s also got a strip of his usual excellence called “Teen Wolf” up at What Things Do. It’s almost like a riff on Dave Kiersh.

* Bow before the might and majesty of Gary Groth’s interview with Joe Sacco for The Comics Journal #301.

* Dan Nadel talks about differing approaches to reprinting old comics. If you’re familiar with Dan’s approach you’ll know what side he comes down on, but he’s quite fair with and accepting of several different styles, and notes the difference between reprinting comics and reprinting comics art.

* The Comics Grid’s Esther Claudio takes a look at a page from Craig Thompson’s Good-bye, Chunky Rice; the Comics Grid’s customary high-quality close reading ensues. I’m certainly stealing the phrase mise en page.

* I used some new Spider-Man comics as an excuse to link to every single superhero comic Kate Beaton has done. I think the Kraven piece for Strange Tales 2 is the best of the bunch.

* This is one of Kevin Huizenga’s better Fight or Run strips.

* This Moebius drawing is like the Rosetta stone for Uno Moralez. Via Shit Comics, an inspiring altcomix tumblr.

* Speaking of inspiring altcomix tumblrs, I spotted this image from Panayiotis Terzis’ new book Time Tunnels at Same Hat!

* Wow, Ron Regé Jr. sure can draw cats! All of his commissions look well worth the cash, actually.

* Always glad to see new comics from my friend and collaborator Isaac Moylan.

* I fully support Jillian Crowther’s concept of “pinball music”: shiny, slightly overcooked rock pop circa 1979-1981, a la “Ah! Leah.” It reminds me of my own personal place-based subgenres, centered on my memories of the defunct Long Island roller rink Laces (freestyle, electro) and the heterosexual side of Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach (Steve Perry, things that sound like “Edge of Glory” by Lady Gaga, which of course would also work on the gay side of Rehoboth Beach).

* George R.R. Martin certainly keeps busy. I can’t imagine his detractors will be super happy about the order of items on his to-do list.

* I’m extremely happy my “Happiness Is a Focused Totality of My Psychic Powers” gag made it into the latest Marvel Super Heroes What The–?! video, featuring Professor X and Magneto’s madcap ’60s adventures.

* This supercut of the 100 Greatest Movie Threats is hilarious, not gonna lie to you. Still, I’m disappointed it doesn’t include “Let her go, or I’ll fill your guts so full of lead you’ll be using your dick for a pencil” from The Three Amigos or the bit from Casino where Nicky Santoro explains to the banker what it is he does. (Via Ed Gonzalez.)

Sock
Chris Day, Conor Stechschulte, Mr. Freibert, Matthew Thurber, Neal Reinalda, Molly O’Connell, Emily Johnson, C.F., Zach Hazard Vaupen, Sam Gaskin, Ben Stiegler, Erin Womack, writers/artists
Conor Stechschulte, editor
Crepuscular Archives, May 2011
40 pages
$6
Buy it from Closed Caption Comics

In which the Closed Caption Comics crew and selected associates get freaky. Billed on the cover as a collection of “ADULT STORIES AND IMAGERY,” Sock proceeds in the mighty CCC manner, albeit a pornographic variant thereof. Editor Conor Stechschulte and Noel Freibert go in their customary horror direction, with Stechschulte employing a less dense than usual style for an Evil Dead referencing story of a woman sliding down a hill while being taken advantage of by the flora, and Freibert using his customary in-your-face explicit dialogue (“I’m just experimenting with the corpses, running tests”) and gutterless panel layouts for a “straight forward sex-death comic” that relies equally on puns (holes, bones, and boxes figure prominently) and dream logic to conflate the two impulses. The flipside to their ugliness is elegance, and here’ it’s provided by Chris Day’s almost rebus-like typography and decontextualized presentation of sexual imagery (a whip, a boot, a big black circle, the legs and crotch of a woman in black underwear and garters); one of C.F.’s always convincingly delivered portraits of women in bondage, all thin lines, bound breasts, tile floors, and lovingly delineated spit; and a wordless, benday-day dotted strip from Erin Womack, which convincingly uses corn cobs and ropes and fountains in tandem with drawings of figures in embrace and ecstasy as stand-ins for the more explicit stuff found elsewhere in the anthology. Zach Hazard Vaupen even gets a good gag strip out of the idea of anal sex, which you’d think would be impossible in our assfucking-fatigued society. None of this is a turn-on per se — erotica it may be, but pornography, then, not so much. However, its most effective contributions earn that honor by coming across as genuine transmissions from artists about what they consider sexy, from Day and Womack and C.F.’s poetically understated images to a simple, funny pin-up from Neal Reinalda that simply puts a photo of Nicki Minaj and her cartoonish physique back(side)-to-back with a drawing of Jessica Rabbit. A wise woman once asked, “What do you consider fun?”; when it works, Sock answers.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS – If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

* Goodness, but George R.R. Martin sure carved himself a big slice of cake by choosing (?) to handle this episode! He said on his blog that the material with Tyrion and Bronn and Shagga early on was a holdover from a previous episode written by the showrunners that was moved here during editing, but that aside, he still had to handle the massacre of all the Winterfell staff in King’s Landing; Syrio’s standoff and Arya’s escape; Sansa’s capture and attempts to ingratiate herself with/blackmail by the Lannisters; Barristan’s firing; the Dothraki raid on the Lamb People, Dany’s defense of their women, Drogo’s wounding, and the introduction of Mirri Maz Duur; Jon’s insubordination against Thorne, the wight attack, burning his hand while saving the Lord Commander, finding out about Robert and Ned; Tyrion’s arrival at Camp Lannister with the tribesmen and their subsequent arrangement with Tywin; the scenes with Varys and Ned; Catelyn’s rejection by Lysa; some Bran business; and Robb’s entire march to war. That is a lot of ground to cover. I don’t really wanna use the word seamless, but, well, there you have it.

* The bloody business at the beginning was quite effectively staged. After the on-screen gore of the initial sneak attack on unarmed Northmen by the Lannister goons, the rest is all implied, which somehow makes it even worse by making the viewer complicit with the deaths we don’t see — since we don’t see them, only infer them, we’re the ones cutting the throats of Syrio Forel and Septa Mordane. And the scene in which Arya flees from Syrio’s standoff only to stop short as she hears the screams and sees the shadows of the combat raging what had been her home that very morning was somehow the most brutal bit of all. You can’t go home again.

* Good for the show for giving Septa Mordane a moment of bravery. In the book she’s just a foolish old woman with a bug up her ass — you imagine this coming to her as a total shock to her conception of proper behavior, an affront to her sensibilities. Here she seems like someone who knows how the world works, knows what’s happening and what’s about to happen, and faces it anyway. I like this Septa Mordane better!

* I didn’t see this coming: The Stark daughters’ most unpleasant actions during the downfall of their father were both significantly altered. Arya’s killing of the stableboy was changed from a clumsy but still deliberate act to an accident, and Sansa didn’t narc on her father’s plans to send her back to Winterfell. I actually don’t think I have a problem with either of these. In Arya’s case, for both her and the stableboy I think the outcome is pretty much the same. In Sansa’s, I think the audience would have had a really, really hard time not just forgiving her, but even watching her scenes from then on out. (I worried about that before the show premiered.) But moreover, I couldn’t figure out how the timing would have worked out. The way it’s all conveyed in the show, it seems clear that Cersei springs into action the moment Ned tells her he knows about her and Jaime and warns her to leave before Robert returns. Sansa’s snitching would have been not just unnecessary but confusing unless the show took time it probably didn’t have to explain the precise timing. Heck, I just read through the relevant chapters and even in the book I can’t quite understand why the Lannisters saw Sansa spilling the beans as the just-in-the-nick-of-time intervention that saved their collective bacon, what with Ned going directly to Cersei and Littlefinger’s susbequent doublecross.

* Zombies need a pop-cultural season of rest worse than any other monster, so kudos to the show for figuring out a way to still make one unpleasant and uncanny and dangerous. I’m glad he was fast, and I’m glad that he moved a bit like an automaton, a terminator. Jon’s lamp toss was well-played as well.

* You’re going to lose some of the visual impact of the younger characters by aging them up, and that’s certainly true of Robb, who seems young but not a high-school sophomore suddenly placed in charge of a war. But his physical appearance still manages to work in his favor, with actor Richard Madden’s big brown eyes constantly widened with emotion — fear, anger, uncertainty, grief, whatever. He looks like someone who’s new to all this, doing his best but still very very new to it.

* Greatjon’s fingers — great stuff. That was the “What do you mean I’m funny?” of Game of Thrones.

* Every once in a while, the Monty Python-ness of it all hits me in an amusing way. The Greatjon sounds like one of John Cleese’s broader accents, while Shagga looks like Tim the Enchanter. And obviously, the Holy Grail rule of being able to tell who the King is because “he’s the only one who hasn’t got shit all over him” is very much in effect.

* It’s unfortunate that we haven’t seen enough of the Westerosi way of war yet to realize that the depredations of the Dothraki aren’t a mark of their intrinsic savagery, but a mark of everyone’s intrinsic savagery. Generally speaking, that’s a problem the show is going to have throughout due to its decision to sort of half-ass its depiction of Dothraki culture relative to Westerosi culture. These kids of comparisons are just gonna be harder to make when one of the two cultures being compared is more sketched than drawn.

* Michelle Fairley as Catelyn….aaallllllmost won me over in this episode. It had to be her turn for the hardass that did it, I guess. The performance is still too one-note and Catelyn’s still too mother-hen, but being a mother hen by urging your chicks to launch themselves at bigger meaner birds is finally the complicating character trait that TV-Catelyn needed.

* I didn’t doubt Varys’s sincerity about serving the realm because “someone has to.” That really sounds about right.

* I have to admit, I get a kick out of Tywin’s acceptance of the tribesmen. Even though I knew better, I still expected him to reject these savages out of hand, but one of the things that make Tywin such an effective leader is that he’ll act against type if the means are justified by the ends. In this case, as pathetic as he finds Tyrion and loathsome as he probably finds his low-born new friends, he also recognizes effective (and useful) warriors when he sees them, and I don’t doubt that his compliments to their prowess are sincere as well.

* This episode had some of the show’s strongest images so far. Winterfell’s entire flock of ravens being sent out to all the bannerman was beautifully done, and something I wouldn’t have thought to show at all, sort of like how the lighting of the beacons in The Return of the King went from a throwaway event to one of the most talked-about sequences in the whole series of films because Peter Jackson came up with an interesting way to shoot it — well, because he chose to shoot it at all. But I think my favorite image was of Sansa kneeling before the throne, her sleeves and gown pooling down around her like silk chains. She looked sad and little and deflated. And that was a nice little visual pun right at the end, closing an episode called “The Pointy End” by having one of the points of the Iron Throne slowly swallow the screen.

* Rickon’s scene was sad and creepy. It reminded me of Newt at the beginning of Aliens: “It won’t make any difference.”

Too Dark to See
Julia Gfrörer, writer/artist
Thuban Press, May 2011
32 pages
$5
Buy it from Julia Gfrörer
Buy it from Sparkplug

“I just need your cum. Give it to me and I’ll go away.” Well, hello, sailor! In the vanguard of a burgeoning mini-movement of alternative comics dealing frankly and explicitly with/in sex, Too Dark to See centers on a liaison between a sleepy (or possibly sleeping) young man and a spectral shadow woman, the bluntly transactional nature of which is no doubt hot to some, cold to others. It’s tough to figure out how to feel about it, actually, and that’s what makes it a fine catalyst for the story, which is primarily about the real live human couple of which the guy is a part. His girlfriend, our protagonist through the bulk of the story, is introduced to us as either she or he (it’s not clear who; I’m not sure it matters) says “No one has ever loved anyone more than I love you” as they embrace in bed, but before long she’s being cuckolded by a shadow creature. We next see her sitting on the toilet, naked from the waist down, awkwardly asking the guy if he remembers jerking off in his sleep. She’s at a disadvantage throughout: She thinks her boyfriend might be cheating on her and her suspicion is greeted with angry dismissal, she fails to pick up on cues he thinks are screamingly obvious and interrupts him as he works on writing “the first good idea I’ve had in ages,” she suspects a customer at the coffee shop where she works of coming in solely to judge her, she’s worried about a black spot that could be an STD but which we can gather from our experience with the shadow person is likely something far more sinister, she self-mutilates, she struggles to even be heard at one point while lying under the covers when her boyfriend returns after storming off, and even supernatural entities make fun of her. Factor in Gfrörer’s shaky, wiry line, really perfect for capturing both the undermployed bohemian demimonde and the veal-calf physicality of young skinny naked people, and the feeling that emerges is one of almost overwhelming vulnerability — a woman who feels at the mercy of love, sex, money, class, and her own body, to the point where the addition of dark forces from beyond feels not just appropriate but almost inevitable. It’s an ugly feeling, and it takes a special sort of beauty to capture it as well as this disarming little comic does.

Wonderful though the trimmed-down video version may be, I’m posting the full-length album version of this song instead. It’s in this version, with its leisurely intro and extra lines and lacerating instrumental section before the third verse, that you get the full effect. It’s a different feeling than the usual “quite verse/LOUD CHORUS/quiet verse” altrock model, mind you; it’s not so binary, so on/off. Each time the loping groove nears the end of a verse, it kind of shakes out and tightens up and only then turns up the volume — it grows into the loud chorus, and you feel that potential contained within the rest of the song. Overall it radiates a sense of lazy coiled menace, like a big dangerous animal dozing in warm weather that suddenly opens its eye when you get too close. I like a song that can surprise you like that, a song that does its thing for a while but eventually says “alright, fuck it” and rears up and punches you right in the face.