Who Watches The Watchmen? ( ...and who listens to them?)

About three years ago - and more or less by circumstance - I did an interesting experiment. More or less simultaneously I entered not once but twice that most perilious of adventures - a sequel to Alan Moore's comic book classic Watchmen. Unlike some other lauded revisionist superhero comics of the era (here's looking at you, The Dark Knight Returns) Watchmen has held up exceptionally well. Moore's mastery of form and storytelling, as well as a knack for giving these somewhat abstract characters complicated inner lives is so complete, that usually once per year I reread bits of Watchmen, not the entire thing letter to letter, but passages I like or get sucked into. 

For years the idea of doing a sequel to Moore's lauded (and loaded) requiem for the supehero seemed an impossible task. Who would be courageous or foolish enough to try and match Moore's masterwork? The first shots were of course fired by DC, corporate greed and all that. They story of how they screwed Moore out of ownership of Watchmen is well-known, and after about two decades they decided that now it was time to do something about that old yet valuable IP. So was born a Watchmen project that included a half-dozen Before Watchmen prequel series, only to then culminate in a huge maxiseries called Doomsday Clock. Which is what I read, along with the TV sequel series called Watchmen by - oh my - one of the guys who fucked up Lost. 

Results were mixed, but not necessarily in the way I expected. Doomsday Clock had its strong points, starting with artist Gary Frank whose detailled, semi-realist pencil work I have always loved and whose work here is boss all the way through. It also has its  moments: I had fun with the new Marionette and Mime characters in the early chapters (which unfortunately build to vey little in the end), and individual characters and scenes, like Moth Man and his fate, were surprisingly moving. But there's no denying that Doomsday Clock also was kind of a slog to read. I read the trade paperback, so I could just plow on, but I imagine how frustrating it must've been to read this slow-moving series in monthly installments (not to mention that in between schedule-shifting and pushing back of issues, the series which was supposed to run its 12 issues in less than a year took two to complete!). In Watchmen, Moore designed every chapter around a character, but every chapter moved the bigger mystery further. Each chapter was both a satisfying, complete read in itself, and an important part of the puzzle. This elegance of design is something that author Geoff Johns can not imitate.

It's not for lack of trying. The imitation, that is. Doomsday Clock slavishly imitates some of Moore's storytelling devices. These installments are, like Moore's original series, 32 pages long, for no other reason than to mimic the original, much like Moore's and Dave Gibboons' famous nine-panel grids. As said, the plotting isn't up to par, though, confused and confusing, losing sights of some of its early seeming lead characters and finally ends up as everyone thought it would: a rather underwhelming confrontation between Superman and Doctor Manhattan. Doomsday Clock is beautifully drawn and presented, but a complete muddle of a story, and finally a sign of what's wrong with DC's revival of the Watchmen brand: It's pure IP management, treating the original with reverence, but itself becoming a musuem piece with nothing much to say, or add to the original, really. Par of the course, in a way, uperheroes and less than super heroes forever trapped in ember. 

Watchmen, the series, was something else, though. Damon Lindelof went about this without the staid reverence of Doomsday Clock, telling its own stand-alone story in the universe of the Watchmen. This can, especially at the beginning, seem odd. The series wastes no time establishing racial conflict as the story ctalyst, set against the backdrop of the Watchmen universe some thirty years later. It's a storytelling device that lands with astounding predictive power, considering the George Floyd protests and the subsequent Black Lives Matter-movement were just months away from the broadcast of the series. Some of the aspects of this - a white supremacist group taking Rohrschach and his at times borderline fascist behavior as their idol and patron saint - are intelligent extensions of the original text. Which really summarizes the series as a whole. Lindeloff called it a 'remix' set in the Watchmen universe, and he's right, but most of the extra material he brings in is well thought out and makes sense. But more importantly: it all feels vital.

If there is a big difference in sense and sensibility between Doomsday Clock and the Watchmen TV show, it's because one feels slavishly retro and static, while the other is constantly interesting and moving. One can argue that not all of it lands - I found some of the stuff involving a certain Asian character a little too much 'out there' - but man, is Lindelof taking big swings with this one, and there are way more hits than misses. But the difference to Doomsday Clock is right there: Where the comic book, as comic books and their publishers are wont to do, basically takes a veryl ong tour to maintain the status quo, Lindeloff rattles a bunch of foundations of the Watchmen universe to find new uestions and new answers. I'll leave it at that to not spoil, because if you haven't seen the Watchmen tv series, be sure to do so, it is without exagerration one of the best tv shows of the last years. Beware that you should have at least working knowledge of the Watchmen comic (not Zack Snyder's half-impressive half-ridiculous film) because Lindeloff bases his series on that. Otherwise the squid rain machine will leave you puzzled (...or even more puzzled!). 

All of this is a very longwinded way to get to the One Buck Record of the day, but there is some music coming, I promise! Because one part of the Watchmen tv series' vitality is its propulsive soundtrack courtesy of Mr. Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor and partner in crime Atticus Ross. These two have collaborated on a number of soundtracks - from The Social Network to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - and as usual, this is a fully electronic affair. It's also really good stuff! But stuff that wasn't originally presented very well. Reznor and Ross issued the soundtrack as three records, but there seemed to be no real guiding principle or thought put into the tracklist and sequencing. Some of the tracks didn't feature in the series, none of them were chronologically arranged and really it felt like 'here's some cool music from the show' rather than a designed soundtrack. 

Enter the One Buck Guy. I wanted to give the score by Mrs. Reznor & Ross its due, while also highlighting some of the at times great needle drops the series provides. So, mixed in with the score you will find artists as diverse as Orville Peck, Devo, Howard Jones, Desmond Dekker, Irma Thomas, Sturgill Simpson, Hall & Oates, Zambian rock band WITCH, Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton, Spooky Tooth, and, uh, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I also kept and mixed in some of the little sound bites and series dialogue issued on the soundtracks for maximum immersion in the show. The other big thing is that I present this music as a number of suites, one for every episode of the show. Some are longer, some are shorter, some have a number of needle drops, some just one (and the opening track "Summer, No Ice" none). The music is presented as chronologically as possible, and also imitates the show's use of musical themes and leitmotive, so some bits will come up several times, such as the theme of series protagonist Angela Abar a.k.a.Sister Midnight. 

The great intelligence and eye for detail extends to the musical choices of the show. Just one example: In the mid-seson episode "Little Fear Of Lightning" cop Wade Templeman a.k.a. Looking Glass (a really great Tim Blake Nelson) goes into a redneck roadside bar to hook up with a lady (but not all is what it seems) and as a soundtrack for that bar scene, any ol' country tune would have worked. But the powers that be chose Sturgill Simpson's "Turtles All The Way Down" (very recently featured in a bluegrass version on my Americana compilation) with its line about "reptile aliens made of light", which perfectly captures Tillman's defining feature, post traumatic stress syndrome after the giant Alien Squid attack he witnessed and thus his panicked fear of other alien attacks. 

If you have seen Watchmen the tv series, these nine suites will hopefully transport you back into the series. And if you haven't, they will hopefully inspire you to check that series out. And you are winning either way, because there is some very fine music in here, both from Reznor & Ross and from the illustruous group dropping in. 

So, who watches the Watchmen? Hopefully you, soon. And who listens to the Watchmen? Hopefully, you too, soon. 

Mom! Tim and his friends are picking on Neil (Young) again!

Something funny interesting happened on my journey to assemble cover versions for the recently started We've Got You Covered series on David Bowie: Finding a bluegrass cover of "Under Pressure" I stumbled on the (in)famous Pickin' On series, that has graced Walmart and truck stop check out racks for the better part of thirty years. I vaguely remember seeing a volume or two of those more than twenty years ago, and I dismissively figured them for exactly what they were: A cheap way to produce content for undiscerning music listeners ho'd grab that on their way to pay for their snacks or groceries. What I didn't know was that the series and its endeavors have evolved since their tentative start in 1993. 

Not only has that series grown to encompass hundreds of volumes on all kinds of artists, from Aerosmith to Modest Mouse. But they also upped their game in the early 2000s. The surprise success of 2003 Metallica cover album Fade To Bluegrass by Kenyuckian bluegrass vets Iron Horse led the series to reinvent itself: Instead of giving anonymous studio cracks some instrumental bluegrass versions of known hits to play, they got real bands to do these albums and would now propose fully sung and played albums on current and less current stars from the rock, pop and country world. This isn't a PR blurb, though, so let's cut straight to the chase: I got immersed in the whole Pickin' On deal and came out with a couple of prospective albums, the first of which is our One Buck Record of the day. 

Does this look like a person to pick on? Surprisingly...yes!

The idea to cover Neil Young in a bluegrass idiom is not particularly far-fetched. After all, when Uncle Neil isn't going eletric with Crazy Horse (or, in the last decade, Promise Of The Real), he is most often armed with an acoustic guitar and a set of down-home songs that live between folk and country. So the through line to buegrass is way more obvious than for some of the more surprising acts in the Pickin' On series. Unsurprisingly, the set list covers a healthy number of songs from Harvest (and don't forget to check out Harvest Time, by far the most popular album on this blog) and generally focuses on the early albums of Young's career. 

This album is drawn from two albums from the Pickin On' series. All vocal tracks are by Tim May from an album called A Bluegrass Tribute To Neil Young, while the instrumental tracks are done by a bunch of studio cracks led by multiinstrumentalist David West from, well, Pickin' On Neil Young or the much better alternative title Gettin' High On Neil Young. 

May I?

Tim May has been flatpicking in  Nashville for a quarter century, has toured with Patty Loveless and recorded with Charlie Daniels, and has played in groups Crucial Smith and Plaidgrass, while also maintaining some duos and session work in the capital of country music.West has led bluegrass group The Dead Strings for about a decade and is nowadays mainly producing and doing session work. 

So, what about the music, you say? Well, it's lovely. The songs are, if safe choices, well-chosen and well-played (the only slightly left-field choice is probably On The Beach's "For The Turnstiles"), as far as the instrumentals go, I'm especially fond of opener "Till The Morning Comes" (actually the closing reprise on the original album), on which West plays relatively unsual instruments like a dulcimer and a tabla, which give the song quite a distinctive and atractive sound. 

Go West, Young Man...

Even if the place of origin for the album might be a little iffy for the self-respecting music fan, the music within is not, so go and spend some time with Tim and his friends while they pick on Neil Young...who is helpless, helpless, helpless...(alright, alright, I'll see myself out...)

Edit: The Harvest Time download link has now been updated. [Frankenstein voice: It's aliiiiiiiiive!]

...To Son: It's Shooter! (...and OBG helps with a little the aim...)

The eagle-eyed among you have seen that the title to tuesday's post was a bit odd, but that was of course to set up part two of Jennings week here at One Buck Records. After daddy Waylon (the only one who'll walk the line) here's son Shooter, carrying the coutry rock outlaw torch into the 21st Century. Or so I thought. I picked up The Wolf for a couple of bucks mainly on the strength of the cover art. Seriously, that is a bad ass cover right there, indicating that there is some bad ass music within. Take a look at the back cover picture (below): four rowdy-looking dudes, ready to cause a ruckus. Men, lock away your daughters (and wives?!) when these bad motherfuckers come to town. And cover your ears, for there is surely some bad ass  countryfied rock'n'roll in here. 

Or so I thought. And it starts out that way, with opener "This Ol' Wheel", where Shooter raps over a countryrock beat like he is a more authentic Kid Rock. Things slow down a little for the breezy "Tangled Up Roses", then there's a really cool cover of "Walk Of Life" which happens to be my favorite Dire Straits song. So far, so good. But then the album ran in trouble. Other than "Slow Train", a lovely and lively number featuring The Oak Ridge Boys, the next four numbers were all slow numbers, bringing the groove of the album to a grinding halt. And after another slightly more lively section, the album goes out on another stretch of slow-ish or too poppish numbers. In other words, The Wolf needed some help. 

One was a re-sequencing that would spread out the slower numbers more evenly and try to get a better, sustainable flow. I also decided to ditch a couple of numbers, then looked for replacements. I checked Missed The Boat: Demos And Rarities for some more bad ass tunes that could take their place. The demos for The Wolf numbers didn't match their album equivalents, but I found two outakes from around the time frame of the album, then decided to turn these into the new opening numbers of side one and two of The Wolf. The first, "A Rejected Television Theme Song", sees Shooter and the boys be more of the bad motherfuckers I imagined when buying the album. And "A Classic Television Theme Song" is exactly that, and one you'll be very familiar with. 

The rest was figuring every number's place, while I also wanted to leave the sections that worked relatively intact. Thus, "Tangled Up Roses", "Walk Of Life" and "Slow Train" stayed more or less in place, and the second half trio of "Higher", "Blood From A Stone" and "Last Time I Let You Down" got shuffled a bit, but stayed more or less in place. The new opening let me push ""This Ol' Wheel" to the beginning of the second side to lively it up. And while I'm not a huge fan of mariachi instrumentation, I'll let that slide for "Old Friend", 'cause the song is nice, it was just misplaced on the original album, and as the new album closer I can let it ride out on that mariachi groove. 

So, uh, that was probably once more a lot more info on my whole alternate album machinations than you needed or wanted, but there you go. The end result is, I think, a real improvement on the original album.  So, fire up The Wolf and see what kind of ruckus Shooter Jennings & The Three Fifty Sevens can comeup with...

From Father...: It's Good Ol' Waylon

Folks around here know that I am a fiend of all things country rock of the 70s, as well as the Alt Country movement of the 90s onwards that most recently was featured on the Americana disc I compiled. But of course I also like some of the genre forefathers, like rockabilly-turned-outlaw country star Waylon Jennings. Out of the famous Outlaw movement I have a clear favorite, and it's ol' Waylon. Willie is fine, has some very fine songs, but he also has a voice that can become a bit grating at times. Waylon's mighty, booming baritone, however? I'll take that all day every day. Well, maybe not quite as often, but you catch my drift. 

The One Buck record of the day is a live recording from 1984, recorded for the Silver Eagle radio program (though I added out the Silver Eagle commercial break announcements and such). It's a pretty good set list and a pretty good performance, especially considering that by 1984 Waylon was entering his purple phase as a performer. I am fond of Waylon's last album from his classic era I've Always Been Crazy, which my dad had on vinyl, together with Waylon & Willie from the same year, Willie's classic Red Headed Stranger and the Wanted! The Outlaws album from a couple of years earlier. For years my Outlaw country was a comp I made out of those albums, and I still have that and listen to it from time to time. 

The set list has a number of my favorites, not only classics like the Willie-and-Waylon warhorses "Good Hearted Woman" and "Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys", but also Crazy's "Don't You Think This Outlaw Bit Has Done Got Out Of Hand", a story-song about his run-ins with the law in the mid-to late 70s: "Someone called us outlaws in some old magazine / New York sent a posse down like I ain't never seen..."

And speaking of outlaws: It also has my very first brush with Waylon Jennings, the "Theme From The Dukes Of Hazzard", which was a show that I first saw years after it came out when the magic of private television brought us kids all the low-brow tv shows the state-owned channels wouldn't touch: The A-Team, Knight Rider and The Dukes of Hazzard, among others. Other highlights here: the classics "I Ain't Living Long Like This" and "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way". The band is steadily ticking along behind ol' Waylon and gives these songs the raw, muscular sound that originally separated Waylon from the (Nashville) pack and started the whole Outlaw thing in the first place.

So, 15 fine tracks from the finest of the old school country outlaws...so, folks, are you ready for some country with the only daddy that'll walk the line..?

A trip through the golden years of Mr. David Bowie...

So, time to wrap up my "What I did during my summer holidays", here meaning summer holidays 2023, which was mainly spent fidgeting around with bits and pieces of David Bowie, almost literally. I did the first three David Bowie mixtapes, which worked for some, and didn't for others, and I pieced together lots of bits and pieces to make the alternate album/imagined sequel 2. Downtown. So, this is the fourth and last of the mixtapes, entitled Golden Years because I specifically wanted to make a mixtape that covers his commercial heydays of the early to mid-80s. 

Bowie's pop star work from 1982 to 1987 is often considered a huge misstep, with Bowie selling out to sell records again and going for the lowest common denominator. Which, to be fair, is true. Let's Dance, from hiring Nile Rodgers as producer and musical director to the song material and arrangements chosen was specifically designed to bring Bowie in the charts again, and it did so, and then some. Tonight was a lazy follow-up with minimal songwriting from Bowie, and Never Let Me Down, which I will still stan for and did an alternate album of, was let down my awful production and some weak songs, though it's better than general opinion has it. But, yeah, it's a difficult period to love unconditionally, only bested by the folowing Tin Machine-era for least loved Bowie. 

But not all was bad, and maybe Golden Years will remind you of that. Or not, but it'll valiantly try. As usual, the idea was to not use the original hit versions, but use lesser known versions of the songs, so you'll get, among other things, live versions of "Heroes", "Fame" and "China Girl", the TOKiMONSTA remix of "Golden Years", the dub mix of "Absolute Beginners", the vocal dance mix of "Tonight" and another snatch of the Moonage Daydream version of "Modern Love", all of course in longer or shorter snippets, as per usual. And there are a couple of other little surprises, which I will let you discover for yourself, if you feel so inclined. 

Golden Years lets the blond-dyed David Bowie of the 80's (and a bit of the 70s and 90s) back in your life, if only for a short while (literally, as this is the shortest of the four mixes). So, let him in, and see if you can't swing a little bit with the thin white duke platin-blonde popster...

More Black, More Market, more Placebo for your buck...

And here's part twoof the two-part Placebo project covering their Black Market Music period. Black Market Blood is a six-track EP that assembles the rest of the worthwhile material from the sessions: The two tracks I axed from the original album get reinstated. They were counterproductive in the newly assembled version of the album, but fulfill a definitive need here.  Since almost everything else is slow or midtempo, "Days Before You Came" and "Taste Of Men"are needed here for variety. I still couldn't stomach the stupid, clanging 'hey, we also like Nine Inch Nails' industrial passage of the latter, so that had to go. Yup, house rules here at One Buck Records are sometimes harsh that way. 

The rest of the line-up includes the original album’s hidden track (hey, remember those?), "Black Market Blood", and three B-sides (hey, remember those?). Of those, "Leni", seemingly an ode to a Eastern European prostitute (?!) and "Bubble Gun" are quite good, moody pieces, though I can see how they would have slowed Black Market Music down too much, and maybe that's why they got relegated to b-side duty. And then Black Market Blood closes with an alternate, slowed down version of "Slave Of The Wage", subtitled "End Of The Race" by yours truly in reference to the memorable "it's a race for rats to die" line of the song. That song also amusingly - and improbably - quotes Bob Dylan, of all people: "Sick and tired of Maggie's Farm / she's a bitch with broken arms to wave your worries and cares goodbye". 

All this is good stuff. Not quite as good as Black Market Music, but still plenty good. Stumbling upon Placebo, among others, which caused me to write my little State Of The Onion Adress on modern rock radio, reminded me both to post these two Black Market Music projects and to listen more often to Brian Molko and his crew as well. Here's a placebo you can trust to have the desired effect, so take some more of your pills with Black Market Blood and keep on rockin', folks...

Open wide and say "aaaah"...O.k., you're suffering from a severe case of lack of rock'n'roll, here's a Placebo for you...

 

There’s a couple of ways you can be reminded of a record that you really liked but haven’t played in a good long while. Like, say, pick up a record from the same band at the library and think “Hey, you really should pull out that other record from them that was great the other day”. There’s also a number of ways you can find out, that it’s really been a long fuckin’ time. Like listening to the disc, seeing that it skips, check the damn thing and find some fuckin’ soot on it. Soot. From a house fire. More than a decade ago. Jesus. Besides the fact that I will be swiping of soot from my stuff seemingly for the rest of my life (“Oh, you I haven’t played in 25 years, apparently”), it also tells me that some records I don’t really play nearly often enough.

In the case of this record, Placebo’s Black Market Music, there’s a good reason for that. As most of you will agree, every record has a time in your life, and as your life changes, so do not only your musical tastes, but also the place a record can occupy in it. Who hasn’t listened back to some records, that seemed to be the hippest, or the most urgent, or ones that really talked to you when you were, say, a teenager, or young adult, and when you play them back all these years later, you go “eh...” or “meh...” or “what was all the fuss about again…?!”. I don’t do this for this album, because it is a great album, but I also see why I didn’t feel the urgency to listen to it in over a decade. 

Placebo’s mix of crunchy guitars and post-adolescent angst is young people’s music. I loved that album when it came out, coming up on 25 years ago (Damn!). But I was a young man back then, and so the mix of uncertainty, confusion, anger and despair in Placebo’s music talked to me as it should to someone in their eraly 20s who was, respectively uncertain, confused, angry and very, very desperate. It’s the sound and sentiment of this music that talked to me then, rather than, say the lyrics and song topics. Because, well, most songs circle around using too much drugs and sleeping around with too many dudes in the London underground nightclub scene. Topics I know exactly fuck all about. But there’s a timelessness and quality to these songs that make it almost completely unimportant, what kind of gay debauchery Brian Molko is singing about.

I knew very little about Placebo when I picked up that album. I had heard “Every You, Every Me” on the “Cruel Intentions” soundtrack a year before and really liked that song. And I had read a fabulous review that culminated with a line that went something like “Brian Molko here is our Holden Caulfield and our Edward Scissorhands and that’s all we need right now”, or something to that effect. And the reviewer was right! We did. I did.

And this album still works like gangbusters. I remembered most melodies right away, and some I couldn’t stop humming or singing to myself in the weeks following my rediscovery of thisfabulous record. And it brings back memories of what it was like to be young, and uncertain, and lost, and angry. To want to be loved. So. So. Badly. Take the ballad-double climax of “Narcoleptic” and “Peeping Tom”, where all of the protagonist’s and by proxy the listener’s despair pour out while the music pushes towards the sky - “I’m just a peeping tom/on my own for far too long” intones Molko, and which teenager/young adult hasn’t felt like that, being left out again while seemingly every one else around him/her has found a romantic partner, or at least someone to sleep with for a night.

Molko takes aim at other targets, a little more outside of his wheelhouse, commenting on appropriation of Black music in “Blue American” (“But now ebonics rule our song”) and then full on tackles racism in “Haemoglobin”. He casts himself as an Emmet Till for the 21th Century, singing “I was hanging from a tree/unaccustomed to such violence”, before realizing “Haemoglobin is the key/to a healthy heartbeat”.

But even is the subject matter is a little more specifically gay, he gives it a spin that lets the song out of its specific niche. Take, “Commercial for Levi”, for example, probably my favorite from the album. What a lovely, bouncy, memorable melody, that will also make you overlook the salacious subject matter. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the most misplaced sing-a-long since people sang along about “giving head” with that Top-Of-The-Pops chart topper Lou Reed or sang along loudly and proudly with Zappa’s “Bobby Brown Goes Down” because most of the song’s..uhm...details got lost in translation. So, sing along then, even lines like “You’re the one who’s always choking Trojan/you’re the one whose shower’s always golden/ spunk and bestiality, well, it’s an Assisi lie / it’s ahead of me / you should close your fly”. Molko himself said it well enough: “I love that song because musically it’s like a really sweet lullaby and lyrically it’s quite a filthy number. It puts a smile on your face”. It does. Well, a crooked one, maybe.

And when, to that very same bouncy beat, he pleads: “Don’t die, don’t die/please, don’t die”, you understand that this is a very disturbed young man sending a warning to himself. The multiple warnings about drug dependency and the price of debauchery, whether it’s mindless anonymous sex or a sniff or twelve of cocaine – weave like a thread throughout the album. Molko stated his liking for the album at the time, citing the balance between heavy rockers and more introspective, slower numbers. Nowadays, it’s his least favorite album. As for the listeners, every album is a time capsule for the artist, and I’m not sure Molko liked who he was and the places he was in in 1999 and 2000. The recording also seems to have been a bit of a drag, literally, as they took nine months to finish it, way longer than any other album before or since. So Molko’d rather move on, but we shouldn’t. I picked up a bunch of Placebo records afterwards, but it wasn’t the same. The magic wasn’t there. But for that one moment, in 2000, Placebo’s music was perfect: “It seemed / a place for us to dream”.

Placebo always liked to open their records by making some noise, usually programming a couple of pedal-to-the-metal numbers. Unfortunately, most often it was a lot of sound and fury signifying little, and that was also true in the case of Black Market Music. So the first two tracks got axed from this new, improved and resequenced version of the album. What's left is ten tracks, forty minutes, all killer, no filler rock' n' roll. Just what the doctor ordered, baby. So, open wide, and take your Placebo.

If you experience other side effects, like a strong sense of deja vu, that's because this piece originally appeared on False Memory Loss Foam Island a couple of years ago. It's also part one of a two-part project, so be back in a day or two for more Black Market Placebo.