Playlist Saturday #1

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Playlist Title: "Rumpelstilksin"** – A name evoking fever-dream trickery, alchemy, and the fine print on a Faustian deal. Lou Toad—our enigmatic DJ—presides over this 46-minute odyssey of unearthed electricity.  

1. **"We Need It - 2025 Remaster" - Gary Numan**  

   Cybernetic synthlord reanimates his past with fresh chrome plating. The robots still dream, but now they’ve got WiFi and a subscription to their own obsolescence.  

2. **"Why Do You Bother" - Faith No More**  

   The punk-funk nihilists before they wore suits and got ironic. A full-force sneer that flirts with the apocalypse but still finds time to pogo on the wreckage.  

3. **"Pictures of Home - 2024 Remix" - Deep Purple, Dweezil Zappa**  

   Richie Blackmore's phantom fingers reach through time, now shaking hands with Dweezil—Zappa’s own spectral offspring—who refuels the dragon-fire solos. Nostalgia as a muscle car with nitrous.  

4. **"Close to the Edge: i. The Solid Time of Change" - Yes**  

   Prog’s golden calf, still worshipped, still standing. A labyrinthine cathedral built from impossible chord progressions and lyrical riddles, where capes flutter and enlightenment is 17 minutes away.  

5. **"Two Into One - Studio Demo - Remastered" - Sweet**  

   Bubblegum dipped in gutter oil. A back-alley T. Rex, sugared-up and sneering, still clinging to its fangs despite decades of remastering.  

6. **"Beyond The Rising Sun - Unused Stereo Mix" - Marc Bolan**  

   The ghost of glam, exhumed and given stereo vision. Bolan’s cosmic boogie rattles the ether, twinkling like a sequined revenant.  

7. **"Alive, Not Dead" - Art**  

   Obscurity’s revenge. Art—pre-Spooky Tooth—jangles through the graveyard of lost psych relics, flicking peace signs at oblivion.  

8. **"Forbidden Planet (2024 Remaster)" - Dan Lacksman**  

   Space-age bachelor-pad paranoia. Sci-fi synth burbles that soundtrack the moment when the Martian cocktail hits and the walls start whispering.  

**Verdict:**  

A mutant pastiche of retro-futurism, glam wreckage, and high-concept rock dementia. It’s a fevered mash note to the idea that rock 'n' roll is a time machine powered by delusion and volume. Lou Toad, wherever you are—raise a glass to the electric ghosts.

Lou Toad: The Guitar Prophet You've Never Heard Of

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In a world that’s been saturated with both bleary-eyed antiheroes and technicolor dreamers, Lou Toad might just be the rock ‘n’ roll messiah we didn’t know we needed. Born in 1986, yes, you read that right—his origins belong to a future we can’t quite grasp—but the way he plays his guitar, you’d swear he’s channeling the ghosts of rock’s past with a wild-eyed reverence. Think Velvet Underground’s brooding drones meet Venom’s feral energy, sprinkled with an Ornette Coleman sense of chaos and liberation. Toad isn’t just playing music; he’s *sculpting* it, shredding time itself like a man possessed.

His guitar licks are angular and sharp, but they have a pulse—like a battered soul trying to find salvation in a string of minor chords. Half incendiary, half gospel—there’s something pure about his dissonance. It’s like Lester Bangs gave up his typewriter and picked up a six-string, howling at the moon while simultaneously preaching a sermon of raw emotion. He slashes through the airwaves with jagged lines of noise, yet there’s this strange undercurrent of grace, as though he’s singing through the static. It’s a gospel, sure, but not the one you’re thinking of. This is a salvation for the misfits, the outsiders, and the broken hearts.

But it’s the tension in Toad’s music that really grabs you. It’s more than a riff or a melody—it’s a battle. His guitar doesn’t just wail; it fights. You can feel the sweat, the desperation, the struggle to break free from the chains of mediocrity. It’s not pretty, but it’s real. It’s as though Lou Toad is telling the world that rock ‘n’ roll isn’t about playing it safe; it’s about tearing down every wall that stands between you and your soul.

There’s a sense of theatricality in his approach—his riffs seem like declarations, his solos are dramatic, and his presence on stage commands attention. It’s clear that Toad’s not in it for the fame or the dollars, but for the transformation. He’s the rock star who’s not afraid to burn out—*or* to find redemption on the other side of the flame.

If there’s one thing to take away from Lou Toad, it’s this: Rock is far from dead. It’s been reborn, and it’s ready to crack the sky open again. We’re not talking about the stale, formulaic sounds that have flooded the airwaves. This is the kind of music that dares to leave scars. It’s grimy. It’s loud. It’s salvation through destruction. And Lou Toad is the unlikely prophet leading us there, his guitar the instrument of our collective, glorious demise.

You won’t hear anything like him again. The world isn’t ready for Lou Toad, but it’s about time it was.

Midnight Reverie in Blue Light

Coffee and Klonopin and indica on a Saturday night at your mother’s house, where the air smells faintly of old upholstery and the ghost of meals cooked decades ago. She’s nearly 80 now, her mind like a tide that goes out further each time, taking pieces of her with it, leaving behind strange collections of seashell memories—some bright, some broken, some that don’t seem to belong to her at all. You watch her like a lighthouse keeper, making sure she doesn’t drift too far into the fog.  

The television mutters its endless forensic dirge, *CSI* reruns rolling through the screen like an old jukebox playing only one song. You wonder if it makes her feel like it’s 2003 again, like she’ll blink and the years will snap back into place, the dead staying dead, the lost un-lost. Maybe it helps. Maybe it’s just noise. But for a little while, she’s settled, her hands folded in her lap like a schoolgirl waiting to be called on.  

You make your art here, in the margins of the night, in the dull blue glow of a TV that’s seen more deaths than most coroners. The old desk in the corner is cluttered with your scraps—half-formed ideas, sketches that might become something, words scrawled in a fit of inspiration or exhaustion, who knows which. The coffee in your cup is bitter, the Klonopin hums under your skin, the weed wraps around your ribs like an old, lazy cat. No more booze—not since you saw too many nights dissolve into black water, waking up feeling like a piece of driftwood washed up on a shore you didn’t recognize.  

Midnight comes soft-footed, stretching itself across the floor like a long shadow. Your brain is both heavy and electric, pulling in every sound, every flicker of light, every whisper of memory in the room. Maybe you’re some kind of millennial Burroughs, stitching together moments with caffeine and pharmaceuticals, weaving the strange, sad, beautiful mess of it all into something worth holding onto. Or maybe it’s just another night, long and slow and vanishing before you can get your hands around it.  

Who cares?

genuine what, exactly?

Late Night Deep Cuts: Kamikaze 1989 (1982) Rumpelstiltskin (1995), and Plain Clothes (1988)

Kamikaze ‘89 (1982)

Imagine a world where the dystopian future is more of a fashion statement than a warning. *Kamikaze '89* is a Day-Glo fever dream, a West German cyberpunk oddity where everyone dresses like they're in a Kraftwerk music video, and police investigations feel like performance art. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, looking like a punk rock Columbo in his leopard-print suit, stumbles through a world where media conglomerates control everything, but nobody seems all that upset about it. It’s part satire, part noir, part avant-garde experiment, and somehow all held together by Tangerine Dream-style synths. Think *Blade Runner* if *Blade Runner* was made for $20 and didn't care if you "got it" or not.  

Rumpelstiltskin (1995)

If the ‘90s had a weird fever dream about *Leprechaun*, this would be it. *Rumpelstiltskin* is a fairy tale filtered through a greasy, straight-to-VHS horror lens, where the titular creature looks like he crawled out of a GWAR music video and talks like he just left a stand-up gig at a biker bar. It’s campy, grotesque, and filled with dialogue that sounds like it was written by a screenwriter who lost a bet. But here’s the thing—if you grew up on late-night cable horror marathons, this is the kind of schlock you *love* even as you cringe. It’s loud, obnoxious, and borderline nonsensical, but in a way that makes you want to rewind and watch it again.  

Plain Clothes (1988)

A forgotten relic of the ‘80s, *Plain Clothes* is what happens when Hollywood tries to make a detective comedy and accidentally stumbles into an undercover high school flick. Imagine *21 Jump Street* before *21 Jump Street* knew what it was supposed to be, but instead of cool cops, you get an offbeat detective in his late 20s pretending to be a teenager—and somehow nobody questions it. It’s got that weird blend of sincerity and absurdity that ‘80s movies excelled at, like it’s not sure if it wants to be a crime thriller or a teen rom-com. The result? A bizarre, slightly surreal mix of detective noir and after-school special, held together by sheer charm.   

Final Verdict 

These three movies exist in their own strange little universes, where logic takes a backseat to style, weirdness, and the unshakable belief that movies should *feel* like something, even if that something is “a fever dream on VHS at 2 AM.” They’re messy, offbeat, and wildly different—but that’s exactly why they deserve a spot in the cult classic hall of fame.