WIP Wednesday

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What have you been working on this week, Eerie fans? Now's the time to spread the word about any fannish treats you've got cooking: a line of dialogue from an upcoming fic, linework for your latest art piece, the yarn colours for a new toy. Let us know in the comments!

Evidence Locker Key necklace pics with Retainer screenshot of Marshall for comparison

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In case any of you were wondering how the one on Etsy compared to the one Mars wears in the show...

Sputnik Music reviews Oblivians: Sympathy Sessions

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Even though the review comes off a bit like poking fun, the references to Eerie and Carnivale still kinda make me want to hear the album...

La Scala-quality Sopranos they aren’t, but this brand of gutter rock hardly calls for it. “Sympathy Sessions” is the sound of a band hell-bent on Breaking Bad, a Flying Circus of false starts, crazed solos and twitchy menace. These are not the sound of the Hart of Dixie, or some Smallville in Dallas, Eerie, Indiana or even Gotham. It is southern comfort that ditched the good book for some Black Books instead. Rather than adorn songs with unnecessarily lofty instrumentation, the band choose instead to Halt and Catch Fire, sending electric impulses wobbling through The Wire of your brain synapses.

That nihilistic distortion runs through their Bloodline, making all previous constructivist ideas of how rock music is to be played fall apart like a House of Cards, familiar and yet beautifully odd, a formerly pure sound reflected through a Black Mirror. It’s a fair question to ask whether one is Justified in heaping so much hyperbolic praise onto a band whose very ideology seems to lean toward obscure underachievement, and that the listener should perhaps feel the pressure to Curb Your Enthusiasm, as the band won’t be reigning over popular charts anytime soon. But acknowledgement is hardly a potent stimulus for a group of musicians whose sole purpose is to M*A*S*H rock n’ roll into a buzzing cluster, stripping songs of all excess fat, the way a tree does with Deadwood.

The band shatter and squeal like Mad Men, or a Banshee caught in the Twilight Zone, a hallucination from the land of Oz, and Jack Oblivian’s unearthly scream, buried Six Feet Under a skittish wall of warped feedback, is a wickedly stirring Carnivale of strident apathy, while his fictive brother-in-arms Greg Oblivian pleads for a woman to Rescue Me from the previous woman. These songs are roiling immediate, and don’t keep you waiting, sometimes lashing out two cracking solos in less than two minutes of runtime, the creaking crescendos almost terrifying in speed and weight, like a breaker with Twin Peaks.

Aside from Jack Daniels and Elvis Presley, this music just may be the best Tennessee export around, a worthy tribute to their Homeland, enough to forever be absolved from the long grim list of rock history’s Leftovers.

This music’s evil intellect, carefully camouflaged, resembles the subtle ways of Dr. No, the first proper villain of the James Bond franchise. Dr. Who? you may ask. Your parents will explain.

For all its simplicity and supposed renunciation, “Sympathy Sessions” is a record of purpose, deliberately placing indulgent 80’s rock’s guitar showmanship into a state of Arrested Development, and infusing the songs with a giddy anxiety, the way Socrates would have felt if tossed into a Hemlock Grove. And everyone can find some scrap of light in these Tales from a Crypt. Jocks, art students, do-gooders, nogoodniks, Freaks & Geeks and all your good Friends are all welcome to this frenzied sonic feast from the Masters of Sex and drugs and rock n’ roll.

The band has found new life several times, as garage rock fluctuated in and out of fashion, bolstered by waves of revival, and Oblivians may one day rise again, who knows, Stranger Things have happened. For now, they’ll be Pushing Daisies on our airwaves, if not our hearts. And if they ever are completely forgotten, it’ll be something that generations of future scrappy young guitar-wielding kids will forever try to Rectify.

Eerie, Indiana drabble: Foghorn

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The foghorn had been hooting since the early hours, and by the time the alarm clock rang Marshall was ready to personally re-murder every crew member of every ghost ship that had ever ploughed the waves of Eerie’s sporadically-appearing ocean.

“Why’d they need warning about a bunch of dumb rocks for anyway?” he mumbled into a mug of black coffee almost the size of his head. “They’re dead. Their ships pass right through physical objects.”

“Yes,” said Simon, pushing the sugar bowl across the table. “But the foghorn is to warn them about ghost-rocks.”

“I hate this town,” said Marshall.

( Read the rest of the Trusted Associates verse here )

90’s TV Shows Were Scary: What's Your Damage Heather reviews Eerie, Indiana

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In the 1990’s television was a twisted place. Elvis was on your paper round, every lighthouse was haunted by a toilet ghost, and a dose of brainwashing easily accompanied sex education in High Schools. We remember finding it common place to be mildly freaked out by strange televisual goings on, as we ate our post school snack of weetabix doused in crunchy sugar.

So after coming across an Eerie Indiana boxset this weekend, we got all nostalgic for those romantic days of unsettling programming.

Eerie Indiana

This remains one of the greatest TV shows ever made. A hugely ridiculous statement, but I stand by it, my feet firmly cemented into the ground of “stupid and wholly unfounded opinions that can’t possibly be true (haven’t you seen the Wire?!)”. It starred the hottest 13 year old since Culkin – Omri Katz. Who came complete with the full post-grunge heart-throb kit: floppy curtains, battered denim jacket, and mild hints of paranoia. HELLO DREAMBOAT.

Basically, any show that combines fat twins sleeping in life size Tupperware, Satan as a salesman (with catchy jingle on his very own Fantasia/psychadelic-elephants- in-Dumbo-style TV advert), and a weird grey haired teenager with plus and minus signs tattooed on the back of his hands = WIN.

Best Episode: The finale, when Marshall Teller (the main character) breaks out of filming and goes behind the scenes – discovering that his mum is an actress with tattooed breasts dressed in black leather, and his dad is a camp English thespian. Then in a piece of miraculous meta writing Marshall meets the creator of the show, who talks to him as Omri. Fucking. Brilliant.

April themes from 31 Days

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31_days just posted their April prompts:

1. Strange, that some of us with quick attentive vision, see beyond our infatuation
2. "If you believe in the invisible deity, why can't you believe in the desperation of humans?"
3. There is nobody left to forgive us.
4. "No one wants the small stories."
5. "Inside her heart, the innermost chamber was lined with frost."
6. "There is no sorrow that lasts a thousand years."
7. "There is no love that lasts a thousand years."
8. "Did you forget I can hear your thoughts?"
9. "You have the same book you had nine years ago."
10. "All God does is ask questions."
11. "I've even given you a chance to die."
12. "Fate is the question that I throw out."
13. "My philosophy is that worrying means you suffer twice."
14. She didn't want a world of trees and she didn't want a world of stones.
15. "Where does the road end and the beach begin?"
16. "She grows grasshoppers quicker than flowers."
17. "the old house was like a shell"
18. "dreams are here before you sleep"
19. "a shipwreck is a tall shore of humanity"
20. "the wind blew vast rings of shadow"
21. "They leave a ruin; and they meet / A ruin in return"
22. "Find the child and we'll all be free."
23. There were the smeared plates, and the empty wine glasses.
24. "Does a man with a harpoon go hungry?"
25. "I think your personal assistant is the dragon"
26. "Not so many people are half-reptile"
27. Outside, the fairies waited.
28. Near-fluorescent green fields, smeared with rain
29. "My face looks like this all the time!"
30. Their wings were unrelieved black.

Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: Woozy

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( Read the rest of the Microwave verse here )