Phazm—Antebellum Death n’ Roll (Omose/The End)
It’s a bold move, naming your sophomore album after your chosen sub-genre. Seeing “death n’ roll” had me expecting an Entombed-style battering, but the “Children of the Grave” shuffle beat and honkin’ harmonica on album opener “How to Become a God” reveals a whole new wrinkle to the sound. These guys really could "play some Skynyrd, man" if they felt like it. Phazm are a weird French quartet (possibly now a trio, according to their website) whom I first noticed on the Osmose video compilation Noisymotions. Their song “Loneliness” featured visuals straight out of a cult Japanese gore flick, with the band members getting impaled and mutilated by sinister women. What’s wrong with being sexy? This new album comes with a DVD on the flip side (unfortunately not pressed on my promo copy), so some additional intense viewing awaits those who pick up the full package. Phazm’s sound here veers more towards the cosmic dissonance of Voivod and Enslaved than towards Entombed. The vocals especially have that catatonic snarl that Voivod’s Snake perfected a few albums into their career. “Hunger” is nearly as loopy as the opening track—not every band would have the nerve to pull off a slide guitar solo overtop blackened blastbeats. After “Black ‘n’ Roll,” another swingin’ number with another outburst of mouth harp, the album occasionally abandons its original premise for tracks like the strange and plodding “So White, So Blue, So Cold,” the sparse and creepy “Damballah,” and “Sabbath,” a jaunty acoustic instrumental. Overall, though, Phazm sticks to their mandate pretty well. This is twisted and heavy, thrill-a-minute stuff, with action-packed songwriting that avoids disorienting the listener with nonsensical technicality. Phazm succeed by knowing how to rock with imagination and grisly bucketloads of style.

Checking out the back cover of the Georgia Straight is a weekly ritual. For years, the paper has run a full-page A&B Sound ad there, where you can find out what's new in this week. It's a glorious 11 x 17 spread of thumbnail album covers and at least a couple substantial lists of newish stuff on sale for dirt cheap.

The ad's gone missing for the last few weeks. It's been replaced by a campaign for some new vapourware Yaletown "residences and Cityhomes"*. I can't find an A&B ad inside the paper either, though this week there's an HMV full-pager on the inside front cover (for the new Norah Jones album).

So is this it? I remember my pal Shawn from Zuckuss [MySpace] assuring me that things were still going strong at A&B. I believed it at the time, but subsequent visits have shown that they just aren't bringing new stuff in. I've had to buy things like The Decemberists' The Crane Wife and Blood Mountain by Mastodon at HMV—not because they were cheaper, but because they were simply in stock. Maybe A&B's well and truly done for. The whole act of buying CDs at a store, or even buying CDs at all, seems kind of quaint nowadays.

Or maybe the Straight's dropping me a hint to quit blowing my cash on music and instead drop my wad on one of those Cityhomes.

*The registration form at the web site has a field saying "I can't wait to..." and offers the choices "Move in" and "Add to my investment portfolio." I love this town!

Louder Than Listenable
The Guardian weighs in on modern CD mastering practices. The infamous Vapor Trails is singled out once again.

My favourite quote: "What might suit Whitehouse or Merzbow might not be right for Norah Jones."

See also this article (Chicago Tribune, via PopMatters), which is not about CD mastering per se, but highlights one of the reasons why bad sound is allowed to thrive these days. “We will integrate an iPod into a home stereo, but why would you want to do that? ... Less than one-tenth of the (music) information is available when you listen.”

Titan—A Raining Sun of Light and Love For You and You and You (TeePee)
Titan play progressive rock stripped of all niceties and prissiness. While bands like Spock’s Beard and The Flower Kings have done their bit to keep the genre alive, their mega-polished albums and tidy chops obscure the fact that progressive rock was once underground music made on a shoestring by starving, spotty-faced lads. Where’s the scuzz? Where’s the musty cottage intrigue? Where's that creaky, overdriven sound that John Anthony got for Genesis and Van der Graaf Generator during their peak years? Titan have hitched themselves to that spirit and are plowing a wide, fetid swath across the prog landscape with it. The album opens with a short acoustic passage and a verse of warbling vocals before accelerating full-throttle into the song proper (titled "Annals of the Former World"), sounding like Black Sabbath jamming on the heaviest parts of “The Knife” or “The Musical Box.” Charge! The pace picks up and the sound's not a million miles away from the swirling, sustained freakouts that Comets On Fire reveled in on Blue Cathedral. The approach isn't overly mathy, but the band does execute some tricky runs and changeups. The second track recalls ELP at their nastiest (I'm thinking Trilogy-nasty, not Love Beach-nasty) along with the gnarly approach of Tony Williams Lifetime. The digipak sticker also references Mahavishnu, which I didn't hear initially, but it's present on this track for sure. Guitarist Josh Anzano excels with his noisemaking, but really the whole band is almost constantly going for it. They can play, no question. Dan Bates' bass tone alone is a frightening thing, and when combined with Kris D'Agostino's haunted, overdriven organ and Dave Liebowitz's drums, the chaos is beautiful to witness. There's no letup until the second track's spacey, ominous denouement. Track three begins with feedback and what sounds like throat-singing or didgeridoo before rocking out on a Hawkwind kind of feel under a blanket of phase shift. A quick gear change into a frantic 3/4 bulldoze and we're in danger of being ground up beneath the treads. Thankfully that lets up and we can remember how to breathe during the ensuing synth interlude and the segue into the final track, an insistent Can groove against a pulsing synth drone. Titan are a refreshingly rowdy take on '70s prog and its various offshoots—space rock, Kraut rock, and so on. You could probably throw in the entire Vertigo Records catalogue while you're at it. Like Zombi and Guapo, their enthusiasm for the more obscure tangents of the genre, coupled with pure instrumental bluster, has produced an album that pays homage to the past yet sounds cutting edge in this self-conscious and hidebound world.

When I bump into people I haven't seen for a few years, they often ask if I'm still playing in a band. That's a tough question to answer because I'm doing several "things" right now, but I wouldn't really call them bands. I kind of like it that way. Every time a thing gets to the point where gigs have to be played and studio time is booked, that's when it all goes pear-shaped and I have to step back. It's self-sabotage, I guess.

Now I just mess around every weekend and get frustrated when I have nothing to show for all that banging away. But when I weigh that frustration against the utter shame and deflation of playing live and under the scrutiny of bandmates in the recording studio, I reckon I've got a good thing going right now.

And I've got friends like Greg in Edmonton, who's done up a MySpace page for DCR (stands for Dead City Radio or Dead City Rodents or Dead City Roadway or Dead City Radishes), which is the nearest thing to a band I've done in the last few years. Hearing our stuff this way is a pleasantly validating experience.

So, for everyone who's asked me if I'm on MySpace, there I am. Won't you be our friend?

21 Tandem Repeats—Never Wanted to be Anyone (Canada Lynx)
In his efforts to promote the band, I think Super Robertson used to get frustrated trying to nail down a tidy description for 21 Tandem Repeats. What genre did they fit into? His old band, Roadbed, used to mix jazz with indie rock; now with a revamped band that includes Roadbed drummer Two Sticks Hobbs, Willingdon Black, and Alvaro Rojas, he’s injected a little folk into the mix. But is it folky enough for folkies; does it rock hard enough for rockers? In the end, he found the perfect outlet for the band: 7:30 to 8:30 every Wednesday night at the Railway Club, with the occasional “away” gig to mix things up and get in front of a new crowd. It’s good early-evening music—easy on the ears and good for any soul battered by the working day. If I had to call their music anything, I’d arm myself with a huge grain of very salty salt and suggest “tree planter rock”—amiable, groove-focused, head-bobbin’ stuff. I can hear it on a song like “Wishing Machine”—just a couple chords and a groove and a line that goes, “I’m here to get down.” Sounds like not much, I know, but Super’s scattershot sense of lyrical phrasing and the guitar touches of his latest foil, Willingdon Black, make it more than a blissed-out 4:20 jam band nodfest.

Never Wanted to be Anyone is a little slow out of the gate, with a mellow half dozen tracks highlighted by “Jupiter,” a lovely song in a novel 6/4 groove, written by Dave Hind, one of Robertson’s musical mentors. The next song, “Fuse Lit Bombs,” originally appeared in more ethereal form on 21 TR’s debut home job release the ocean is life. This version is far more “produced,” with abrupt changes in drum beats that actually make it less folky than the original. It’s still a strong number, although it’s nothing like the version you’ll hear on the previous release or at the Railway Club. “Blue Skies” is dedicated to Super’s daughter and, as befits its “hope for the future” sentiments, incorporates the sweet stylings of guest vocalist Land of Deborah.

The second half of the album is definitely more exuberant, starting with the deliberate & driving title track, on which WB asserts his presence via a lead guitar duel with himself during the song’s lengthy run-out. “Failure” really takes things into rockland, where SR’s self-deprecating lyrics butt against WB’s feisty lead guitar. Everything works here—this is how the band sounds live—as it does on “Dish Pig,” another Dave Hind song with lyrics by the late Steve Waller (to whom tribute is paid in the superbly presented liner notes). The album bows out with “Maiden,” a mold-breaking number that abandons the usual groove formula in favour of stringing together some cool parts. Top it off with vocals by Sim Special of SuperSimian fame, and it almost sounds like a different band. It’s a welcome deviation in the songwriting approach and a strong number to go out on. This album lives up to its title. 21 Tandem Repeats don’t want to be anyone (other than themselves). They’re tight, smart, and completely free of attitude or pretension. They’re through being cool. I wonder what they’re doing in the music business.

Merry Christmas, everybody.
I hope your 2007 is filled with music and mirth. Enjoy! I got a hot mug o' Baileys and coffee going; now it's time to check out that present (plus some others that Santa dropped off last night).

Burn to Black—Mach 666 (Urgent Music)
Toronto’s Burn To Black are here to celebrate the fact that metal is awesome. It's awesome when vocalist Rob Ouellette yells lines like “See the fuckin' violence!” or when he urges us and his bandmates along with "Let's rock! Come on!" on “The Vanishing.” Drummer Evan Johnston has the taste and judgment to know that laying it down four-on-the-floor like Phil Rudd on crack is just as awesome as your requisite death metal blasts and double kicks. Guitarists Paul Harrington and Mike Krestel have done an awesome job of honing their tone to a hyper-saturated state of serrated savagery. And bassist Sam Dunn is so convinced of metal’s awesomeness that he made a damn feature film about it. Burn to Black play a most pestilent, caustic form of thrash, with toxic traces of Swedish death, tight and speedy at times like At the Gates. As befits such enthusiastic connoisseurs of the art, their style is pure, free from niceties like keyboards and vocals that do anything but rasp and snarl in the nastiest of ways. I don't hear too much leeway in their sound, nor much to choose between the 11 tracks (plus one awesome Celtic Frost cover), but they do throw up some strong songs, like the superbly titled "Winter Rancid Skies," opener "Hellspell," and album closer "Microcosmic/Broken Lands," which delivers one of the best choruses on the album. I wouldn't mind hearing more variety in the material, with different musical shades within songs and between songs—it's not until the last half of "Microcosmic/Broken Lands" that we're granted relief from the hack & slash ripride of the previous 10 songs—but I can appreciate the excitement of a band intent on making their initial recorded statement as ferocious as humanly possible. With massive production and precise performances, the whole thing adds up to an awesome statement of “more metal than thou.” Even the title, Mach666, throws you a wink before unleashing exactly what it promises—Satan beyond the speed of sound, thrashing anything within range of the shock waves. Burn to Black have released a beer-fueled master-class in metal...and a pretty awesome debut album.

Considah yourself one of the family!
A Christmas card arrives from fancy's aunt and uncle in Ontario. The salutation reads, "Jennifer, Cypress, ??"

Oh well. I appreciate the glad tidings, if not the fact-checking.












The Mule entertains at a family gathering in Fulton

Steve Tyler, eat your heart out.

Neurosis, November 25 at El Corazon (Seattle)
I've been willfully ignorant of Seattle concerts during my lifetime. While other Vancouverites head down there regularly for shows, I try to not to notice the fact that, say, Porcupine Tree might be playing there in a couple weeks. Friends of mine have their stories of going down to see King Diamond or Black Sabbath or Dream Theater, while I take in whatever shows I can see here and feel grateful that I don't live in Flin Flon (which, admittedly, is the City Built on Rock). But now that I have a passport burning a hole in my pocket and a belting travelling companion in fancylady, the idea of going to a gig in Seattle seemed not so risky and far-fetched. The news that Neurosis would be playing on a Saturday night in November put everything in motion. Conditions were perfect. We were going south.

Neurosis used to tour regularly. Smash and I saw them twice up here on the Through Silver in Blood and Times of Grace tours. Shortly after that, they semi-retired from touring to concentrate on their day jobs and raising their kids. In the meantime the band we went to see on a whim at the Town Pump (only to have our heads caved in) became one of the most influential bands in heavy music. As fearless pioneers who steered crusty hardcore towards territory claimed by Slint and Pink Floyd, they showed the way for dozens of bands fighting it out there today, from the majestic Isis to heavy-hitters like Mastodon.

Despite the decreased roadwork, the albums kept coming—A Sun That Never Sets (2001) and The Eye of Every Storm (2004) were both mammoth statements of slow-burning intensity. Clearly their retreat from the full-time rock life hadn't watered down their approach at all. The thought of them performing material from those two great albums was another powerful lure for me.

On this tour, they'd be playing just two shows in the Northwest (Seattle and Portland) before heading into the studio to record the next album. Neurot labelmates Grails opened for them at El Corazon with a set of instrumentals that used a lot of interesting Middle-Eastern sounding intervals and a good dose of twang. In fact, some of their material sounded like a rocked-up take on Earth's deathly & dessicated C&W style from their Hex... album. They also swapped instruments throughout their set; something I get a kick out of seeing. Good stuff, and they went over well.

When Neurosis play it's not so much a rock concert as a high-minded, gut-level cathartic ritual. Their songs have so much gravity; you can imagine them sweating over every nuance during their conception. Their live approach has the same ultra-premeditated feel. Every second is accounted for, and assigned a sound or visual for maximum impact. When songs end, prerecorded segues fill the space while the band retune. The projections behind the band show footage of wolf packs running in slow motion, time-lapse flowers blooming then rotting, or dead animals decaying. Gone are the days when their visuals guy used to set up his custom scaffold for the slide and film projectors and do everything "live"—now the images are all on DVD. "The Tide" opened the set, a song that nicely sums up the Neurosis aesthetic over the last decade with its sparse opening and slow buildup to the inevitable explosion of relentless riffage. "The Doorway" (from Times of Grace) followed immediately, upping the levels of chaos and unleashing one of the heaviest riffs in their catalogue—if you've heard the song you know the one. Pure devastation. The set included a couple new songs that fit right in with the likes of "Crawl Back In," "Left to Wander" and "From Where the Roots Run." As fancy noted, the club was way overcrowded (oversold?) and hot. This added to the intensity of the show, though. The band—by all accounts very nice guys—were utterly rabid. Scott Kelly, a man given to punctuating his vocals by headbutting the mike, was bleeding from the forehead by the end. There was no encore. The whole idea of Neurosis coming back onstage to perform some crowd-pleasing "hit" is laughable. That's the kind of ritual you get at any other show.

Fancy and I were all set to see The Decemberists last Sunday night when I stumbled across the news (at another blog) that the gig was postponed until—appropriately enough—December. Too bad, but at least it gives Fancy a chance to get over her cold, and me some more opportunities to listen to The Crane Wife, a fine, fine album that gets a lot of play around here when I'm away at the office. I managed to sneak it out of the house a few weeks ago and add it to my iTunes at work.

Robert Altman, RIP
My favourite of his movies is the mind-bendingly odd and brilliant Three Women (which I first chanced upon on Bravo! many years ago...gotta rent that Criterion edition again) followed by Nashville (which I first saw in a film class at UBC). They don't make them like that anymore. Trivia note, six degrees of separation-style: my former boss, an old hand in the BC film industry, played a corpse in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

It's been a wet November around here, and after various sewer backups, floods and water-shed landslides, we've been advised to boil our water for the past few days. Still, anyone who says, "I feel like we're living in a third-world country" (as I heard on the radio this morning) should f**k right off...and actually try living in a third-world country.

"Things are pretty quiet on the Difficult Music, eh, Mule?" said Super Robertson after I intercepted him and Kaiya walking up to the IGA yesterday. Very true. Thing is, it's never quiet anywhere else with me. If I could translate just a fraction of the noise I subject myself to every day onto this page, I'd be happy.

So where have I been?

1. Edmonton—While fancylady was away on her book tour, I went to visit my friend Greg (Dead City Radio) and his family and had a long weekend jamfest out in his Sherwood Park studio. His entomology summer student Brock joined us on bass (bringing along most of the riffage), and we got a fair amount recorded for future tweaking and overdubs.

2. In front of this computer—Finishing up the next Unrestrained! My stuff came together at the last minute as always. I should have four stories in this issue: Estradasphere (a fantastically uncategorizable Santa Cruz instrumental band), Noway's White Willow (another great email interview with Jacob Holm-Lupo), Antiquus (a local band who've just released an impressive album, Eleutheria, through Cruz del Sur), and Toronto writer Yashin Blake, of Titanium Punch fame. I was especially happy to get Yashin in the mag, because I've wanted to interview him for years now and never had the right forum until I got my Media Blitz column. He delivered one of the best email interviews I've ever received. It worked so well, I decided to present it as a straightforward Q & A. I barely had to touch it.

3. Blind Guardian at the Commodore—I barely know this band's material at all (in fact, "Into the Storm" is the only song I recognized, and they opened with it!), but I had a great time. They drew a good crowd of metalheads, most of whom knew every word. I would have never guessed there were so many BG fans here, but I suppose any band that's been around for close to 20 years and released eight albums is going to pick up a following. I thought they had a definite charm. Hansi Kursch is a gruff-but-lovable singer—definitely not the usual power metal castrato—and the rest of the band were rock solid. With the full-on staging, slides and projections, it was the closest thing to a mini-Wacken or Dynamo Festival I'll ever experience.

4. At the movies—Well, a movie. We went to see For Your Consideration Saturday night. Never mind the middling reviews, this is brilliant and hilarious. I'll admit that Christopher Guest's premise—egos flare up during the filming of a humble family drama after a rumour gets out that the lead actress (Catherine O'Hara) might get an Oscar nomination—isn't the most outrageous, nor are the characters as precisely drawn as they were in Waiting For Guffman or Best In Show, but overall the movie hit its (rather broad) targets effortlessly. I think of Guest's movies, with their humane-yet-pointed humour and the presence of O'Hara and Eugene Levy, as the continuation of the spirit of SCTV, and as such, I'll always be there to watch whenever that cast gets together. Also, Fred Willard gets a decent amount of screen time here, and he's completely out of control. To me, he's one of the funniest people on the planet. When's Fernwood 2Night coming out on DVD? Do I have to go look it up on YouTube?

Geez, look at this article, which draws parallels between Fernwood 2Night and Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, which I was just watching this evening. On that bombshell of synchronicity, I'd better get to bed.

By the way, you Canadians might enjoy Canada Week over at Heavy Metal Time Machine. Check it out; the inimitable Metal Mark has selected an interesting trio of albums to review, and added some edumacational comments from a couple Canuck bloggers about the Canadian music industry and metal scene.

The Top 15 Albums of 2006 (Unrestrained! magazine version)
With deadlines approaching for the year-end issue, I had to come up with a top 15 for the year. I wouldn't mind having another few weeks to mull this over...maybe give that Celtic Frost album another listen, or find out if that Gathering album had any staying power. But the best thing to do is not to think about it too hard, sort out a list that looks valid as of tonight, and fire it off. Here's what I submitted.


1. Comets On Fire—Avatar (Sub Pop)
2. Six Organs Of Admittance—The Sun Awakens (Drag City)
3. Devin Townsend Band—Synchestra (InsideOut)
4. Napalm Death—Smear Campaign (Century Media)


5. The Brought Low—Right On Time (Small Stone)
6. Mastodon—Blood Mountain (Warner Brothers)
7. Zombi—Surface To Air (Relapse)
8. Kayo Dot—Dowsing Anemone With Copper Tongue (Robotic Empire)
9. Voivod—Katorz (The End)
10. Estradasphere—Palace Of Mirrors (The End)
11. Dysrhythmia—Barriers And Passages (Relapse)


12. Tragedy—Nerve Damage (Tragedy)
13. OSI—Free (InsideOut)
14. Anata—The Conductor’s Departure (Wicked World)
15. Madder Mortem—Desiderata (Peaceville)

They also served: Enslaved—Ruun, Katatonia—The Great Cold Distance, Agalloch—Ashes Against The Grain, The Gathering—Home, Melvins—A Senile Animal, Mogwai—Mr. Beast, Pearls and Brass—The Indian Tower

PJ Harvey—The Peel Sessions (Island)
It’s PJ Harvey freakout time again, with a release that I’ve hoped to hear for a long time now. The Peel Sessions rounds up a dozen tracks from 1991 to 2004 as Polly's way of saying thank you to her long-time supporter John Peel (RIP). “John’s opinion mattered to me,” she writes in the booklet. “More than I would ever care to admit, for fear of embarrassment on both sides.” The sessions appear in chronological order, starting with four songs from 1991. “Oh My Lover” is raw and anguished, “Victory” and “Sheela-Na-Gig” are fiercely rendered, and while “Water” was never one of my favourite songs off Dry, it stands out on its own here with its stutter beat and spartan yet dynamic presentation. Stephen Vaughan's steely bass lines in particular take this song over the top. The ’93 session (presumably round the time of Rid of Me) features two tracks that never made it onto an album—the riotous “Naked Cousin” and a cover of Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle,” which is just completely salacious. I’ve wanted to hear this track for ages. I think it came out as a b-side back in the day, but I was too slack to track it down at the time. (PJH has always put out great b-sides.) In 1996 she recorded—along with John Parish, her partner for that year’s Dance Hall at Louse Point—another obscurity, "Losing Ground" (dig that throaty Telecaster sound…it must be a Telecaster), "Snake" (sounding just as caustic as the original 4-Track Demo), and “That Was My Veil,” pretty much the first time the album eases off the throttle. “This Wicked Tongue” and “Beautiful Feeling” follow from 2000, and the album closes with “You Come Through” from the John Peel Tribute Concert in 2004. As I said, I’ve wished for a PJ Harvey Peel Sessions album for years. There’s a lot of love in these songs’ presentation, and as a thank you and tribute to a fine gentleman and an important figure in music, it’s perfect.

Nothing to be too ashamed of here. Pour yourself a cup of tea and join us in the basement.

Thanks to Smash, who shot and edited.

Bob Drake—What Day Is It? (Ad Hoc Records)
Bob Drake is definitely hero material. Why? He’s created a ton of fascinating music with the 5UU’s and Thinking Plague (two long-running American RIO outfits) and by himself on a number of solo albums, the first of which, 1994’s What Day Is It?, was reissued last year. Drake has also produced, engineered, and mastered a bunch of other artists’ work, underlining his status as a kingpin of the worldwide avant-prog scene, such as it is. He lives in France.

In the booklet, Drake notes that the original album was limited to around 300 copies. The grunt work involved, both in hand-making each CD package and in marketing a self-released album, limited the record’s initial lifespan and kept it from reaching as many people as it could have. For this edition, Drake’s reworked the booklet art only—the music is exactly as it was presented in 1994. And it’s fantastically peculiar, kind of a homespun progressive rock full of unpredictable segues and diversions. I find it more accessible and immediately enjoyable than his other bands’ work, though no less complex and rigorously conceived. The songs, which rarely break the four-minute mark, are like detailed little curios, etchings of mysterious scenes evoking dark nostalgia. Experiencing the album is like discovering an abandoned manor and clambering through the overgrown garden, then peering through the windows at the shrouded furnishings inside. You half expect each dust cover to rise up as a ghost and fly at you.

And hey, the opening track, a ramshackle thing called “The House,” talks of such an empty place where the narrator “went down into the cellar/and saw something on a table/it was surrounded by strange tools/I thought it moved./Now I hear wings.” Hearing this in Drake’s keening voice (which a lot of reviewers rightly liken to Jon Anderson) lends a gleeful eeriness to it. The instrumental “Weeds” blows the dust off with its hoedown-paced slew of tricky picking, handclaps, breakdowns and general backcountry joie de vivre. This kind of feel is repeated for parts of “Spiders” (before that track takes a turn for the ethereal), but the rest of the album resides in a hairy-scary cloister where occasional glimmers of cheerfully warped pop leak through (“The Drawing” and “The 13th Animal”) before being shut out by shady lurkers like might-as-well-be-an-Opeth-excerpt “Death Valley” and “The Cemetery Trees,” which ends in the kind of macabre sing-song that Drake fully explored on The Skull Mailbox, an amazing album that’ll give you goosebumps on your goosebumps, as Count Floyd once said. Having only heard The Skull Mailbox before, I was hesitant to taint its precious uniqueness by risking another Bob Drake purchase. What if his other stuff wasn’t up to the same level of inspiration? I shouldn’t have worried; he's had the goods from day one.

Jack Lord Tarmac
 
Here's one for Mr. Willingdon Black, as seen at the Honolulu Airport.