News

Gatecreeper have announced their new album, Dark Superstition, and shared the first single “The Black Curtain” ahead of the LP’s May 17th release date.

The Arizona band has made its name with grinding death metal up to this point, but “The Black Curtain” points in a more accessible, melodic direction.

The low-end remains thick and goopy, but the lean chord progression and driving groove of the track isn’t far removed from Lamb of God or Alice in Chains’ more alt-metal moments. The guttural vocals of Chase H. Mason, however, remain steeped in the recognizable aesthetics of death metal.

“It’s about being trapped between living and dying,” Mason said of the track via a press release. “A soul trapped in purgatory begging to be brought back by a supernatural force.”

Regarding the rest of the album, Mason added: “Many of the songs incorporate supernatural ideas with my own experiences.

It was more than a little heartening to see Roger Corman paid tribute by Quentin Tarantino at Cannes’ closing night. By now the director-producer-mogul’s imprint on cinema is understood to eclipse, rough estimate, 99.5% of anybody who’s touched the medium, but on a night for celebrating what’s new, trend-following, and manicured it could’ve hardly been more necessary. Thus I’m further heartened seeing the Criterion Channel will host a retrospective of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations running eight films and aptly titled “Grindhouse Gothic,” though I might save the selections for October.

Centerpiece, though, is a hip hop series including Bill Duke’s superb Deep Cover, Ghost Dog, and numerous documentaries––among them Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, making Michael Rapaport a Criterion-approved auteur. Ten films starring Kay Francis and 21 Eurothrillers round out series; streaming premieres include the Dardenne brothers’ Tori and Lokita,...